Harry Turtledove: Advance and Retreat

Brigadier Patrick mournfully clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Mighty fine does this sound, your Generalship, sir, but are you sure there’s sense to it? For won’t the southrons, may they find themselves in the hells or ever the gods know they’re dead, the scuts, won’t they be mustering and resupplying faster nor we could ever hope to? If I was in charge of this army, now, I’d-”

That was too much for Lieutenant General Bell’s always fragile patience. “You are not in command of this army, Brigadier,” he said in a voice like winter. “Nor are you ever likely to be. And you know why, too.”

“I do that.” Patrick matched him glare for glare. “I’m not in good odor in stinking Nonesuch, is why, the reason being I was man enough to tell King Geoffrey the plain truth, the which he cared to hear not a bit.”

“Put pikes and crossbows in the hands of our blond serfs?” Bell shook his head. “We can’t win the war with such so-called soldiers.”

“The gods-damned southrons use ’em, and too many of our own brave lads dead in the dirt they’ve stretched,” Patrick said. “You tell me we can’t win the war with such soldiers? Well, I tell you this, Lieutenant General Bell, the which is the gods’ own truth: we can’t win the war without ’em. And that said, your Excellency, gods give you a good day.” He bowed stiffly and stomped out.

“Miserable bog-trotting hothead,” Lieutenant General Bell muttered. No, it was no wonder at all that Patrick the Cleaver would never enjoy a higher command.

Bell reached for his crutches. He got one under his good shoulder and used it to help lever himself upright. Then he put the other one under his bad arm. That shoulder still hurt despite the laudanum. Making it bear some small part of his weight only made it hurt worse, too. If he hadn’t been a man who could stand pain, he would long since have cut his own throat or fallen on a sword.

Moving like an inchworm, one hitching step at a time, he made his way out of his pavilion. His sentries, surprised to see him outside, stiffened to attention. He ignored them. He wanted to look at the encampment. It didn’t look much different from others he’d seen: a place full of tents and soldiers and lines of tethered unicorns. The woods of southern Dothan blazed with autumn colors around the campground. The day was bright and clear and crisp, without a cloud in the sky.

But he could see the differences when he looked for them. As he’d told Patrick the Cleaver, too many of his men wore gray pantaloons and sometimes even tunics captured from the southrons. That didn’t just mean they couldn’t get enough uniforms of the proper color, though they couldn’t. It also meant that, in battle, the rest of his soldiers might start shooting at the wrong men.

That was why he’d issued an order that captured pantaloons and especially tunics had to be dyed King Geoffrey’s indigo blue. A couple of kettles boiled and bubbled in the camps, with men taking out their newly dyed garments with sticks. Bell nodded in somber, leonine approval.

Here came some of Ned of the Forest’s unicorn-riders. Bell eyed them.

Unicorn-riders in the Army of Southern Parthenia were aristocrats one and all, their mounts the finest they could provide. They took pride in grooming the beasts, not just to keep them clean and healthy but to make them look as smart as possible before going into battle.

By contrast, Ned’s men looked like so many teamsters. Their uniforms were even shabbier than those of Bell’s crossbowmen and pikemen. Slouch hats held the sun and rain out of their eyes. Their unicorns were in good enough condition, but nothing special. They didn’t look like men who’d been able to keep all of eastern Franklin and Cloviston in an uproar behind southron lines, or like men who’d routed a southron army three times the size of their own in Great River Province. But they had. No matter what they looked like, they could fight. Bell had to respect that.

Overhead, a hawk flew south. Bell took it for a good omen, hoping it meant the Army of Franklin would succeed when it did move south. He would have been more nearly certain had the beast been a dragon. The dragon was Detina’s emblematic animal, the kingdom flying on its banners a gold dragon on red. To difference his men from those of Avram, Geoffrey had chosen a red dragon on gold.

But dragons had been rare in western Detina even when the colonists from across the Western Ocean used iron and unicorns and sorcery to seize the land from the blonds then inhabiting it. A few of the great beasts were still said to survive west of the Great River, but Bell had never seen one. In the lands far to the east, in the Stony Mountains beyond the steppes, dragons not only survived but flourished. That did Bell no good with the omens, though.

He shrugged a one-shouldered shrug. Even that hurt. But then, what didn’t? Omens or no, he-and the Army of Franklin-would march south.

Corporal Rollant liked garrison duty. He’d spent a lot of time putting himself in positions where strangers could kill him: at the battle by the River of Death, storming up Proselytizers’ Rise, and all through the campaign from the southern border of Peachtree Province up to Marthasville. No, he didn’t mind being back here in Ramblerton, well away from the fighting, at all.

Most of all, he enjoyed strolling-or rather, swaggering-along the streets of Ramblerton in his gray uniform with the two stripes on his sleeve showing off his rank. Northerners, men and women who would gladly have left the Kingdom of Detina when Grand Duke Geoffrey proclaimed himself king in the north, had to get out of his way in a hurry, for along with the uniform he wore a shortsword on his hip and sometimes a crossbow slung on his back.

They got out of his way as they would have for any ordinary Detinan soldier. If they hadn’t, he and his comrades would have made them sorry for it. He was one of King Avram’s soldiers, yes, but not an ordinary Detinan. Ordinary Detinans were swarthy, with dark eyes, dark hair, and, on the men, dark beards. Rollant was a blond, an escaped serf from Palmetto Province who’d fled south to New Eborac and made a good living as a carpenter till taking service with others from his city, from his province, to help liberate all the serfs in the north from their bonds to the land and to their feudal overlords.

That would have been bad enough for the Detinans of Ramblerton. Serfs in arms had been their nightmare ever since their ancestors overthrew the blond kingdoms of the north. Because they’d easily won those wars, they professed to believe blonds couldn’t fight. The gray uniform on Rollant’s back argued against that.

But the stripes on his sleeve were what really made the locals shudder. One of those locals called, “You there!”-not to Rollant, but to his friend Smitty, a common soldier walking at his side.

“You talking to me?” Smitty asked. He was as ordinary a Detinan as any ever born, but for a silly streak.

“Well, who else would I be talking to?” the Ramblertonian demanded.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Smitty donned an expression of exaggerated idiocy. “You might be talking to my corporal there. He’s got more rank than I do. He’s the company standard-bearer, and I’m not.”

The man from Ramblerton shuddered. “He’s a blond!”

Smitty looked at Rollant as if he’d never seen him before. “Why, by the gods! So he is!”

“By the gods is right! It’s against nature, that’s what it is,” the local said. “What do you do when he gives you an order?”

After grave consideration, Smitty answered, “Well, most of the time I say, ‘Yes, Corporal,’ and I go off and do it. Isn’t that right, your Corporalship?”