Harry Turtledove - Advance and Retreat

He went back to sewing the stripes onto his sleeve. Rollant returned to adding the sergeant’s stripe. Joram came up to the fire with a shiny new lieutenant’s epaulet on the left shoulder of his old, faded gray tunic. The only place the tunic still displayed its original color was where the underofficer’s chevrons he’d just cut off had protected the wool from sun and rain.

When Rollant and Smitty jumped to their feet and saluted, Joram grimaced. “As you were,” he said, and then, “I’m not used to this-not even close. I never wanted to be an officer.”

“I never wanted to be a corporal, either,” Smitty muttered.

“Shall I tear those stripes off before you finish putting ’em on, then?” Joram asked. Smitty hastily shook his head. Lieutenant Joram nodded in something approaching satisfaction.

Rollant couldn’t say he hadn’t wanted his promotion. He hadn’t counted on it; he hadn’t even particularly expected it. But he’d craved it, just as he’d craved corporal’s rank after giving himself the chance to earn it. Rank meant the Detinans had to recognize what he’d done. It would vanish at the end of the war, but what it meant would remain inside him forever.

“Is all well here?” Joram asked, plainly serious about meeting his new responsibilities.

“Yes, sir,” Rollant and Smitty chorused.

“Good.” The new company commander went off to another campfire.

The troopers Smitty had sent out came back with the water bottles. They started to dump them at the new corporal’s feet. Rollant shook his head. “You know that’s not how you do it. Take each one to the man it belongs to and give it to him. To begin with, you can give me mine.”

He took it from one of the soldiers. He’d delivered plenty of water bottles before he got promoted. Now that was someone else’s worry. Rollant didn’t miss it, or cutting firewood, or digging latrine trenches, or any of the other duties common soldiers got stuck with because they were so common.

Smitty unrolled his blanket and started wrapping himself in it. “We ought to grab whatever shuteye we can,” he said. “Come morning, they’ll try and march the legs off us again.”

He wasn’t wrong, as Rollant knew too well. His own legs were weary, too; he could feel just how much marching he’d done. But he said, “As long as we’ve got the traitors on the run, I’ll keep going. I’d chase that serfcatching son of a bitch of a Ned of the Forest all the way up into Shell Bay if I could.”

“He came after you when you ran away?” Smitty asked, a strange blend of sympathy and curiosity in his voice.

“Not him-he’s always worked here in the east,” Rollant answered. “But there are plenty more like him over by the Western Ocean. I hate ’em all. I know every trick there is for shaking hounds off a trail, and I needed most of them, too.”

“And you did all that so you could come down to New Eborac and get yourself three stripes?” Smitty said. “You ask me, it was more trouble than it was worth.”

Rollant also spread out his blanket. He knew Smitty was pulling his leg. Some jokes were easier to take than others, though. “Maybe it looks that way to you,” the blond said. “To me, though, these three stripes mean a hells of a lot. They mean I can give orders-I don’t have to take ’em my whole life long.”

Smitty eyed him as he cocooned himself in the thick wool blanket. “You may be a blond, your Sergeantly Magnificence,” he said, “but I swear by all the gods you talk more like a Detinan every day.”

“It’s rubbed off on me-like the itch,” Rollant answered, and fell asleep.

“Up! Up! Up!” Lieutenant Joram shouted at some ungodsly hour of the morning. All Rollant knew when his eyes came open was that it was still dark. He groaned and unwrapped himself and relieved his own misery by booting out of their bedrolls the men who’d managed to ignore the racket Joram was making.

After hot, strong tea and oatmeal thick and sweet and sticky with molasses, the soldiers started after the Army of Franklin again. Rollant had had to get used to the idea of eating oatmeal when he came down to New Eborac. In Palmetto Province, oats fed asses and unicorns, not people. Right now, though, he would have eaten anything that didn’t eat him. Marching and fighting took fuel, and lots of it.

The northerners had also abandoned their encampments, a few miles north of those of Doubting George’s army. But they’d left Ned of the Forest’s unicorn-riders and a small force of footsoldiers behind to slow down the retreating southrons. The troopers and crossbowmen would take cover, fight till they were on the point of being outflanked, and then fall back to do it again somewhere else. They weren’t fighting to win, only to delay their foes. That, they managed to do.

Even though the rear guard kept the southrons from falling on the Army of Franklin one last time and destroying it, Bell’s army kept falling to pieces on its own from the hard pursuit. More and more men in blue tunics and pantaloons gave up, stopped running, and raised their hands when King Avram’s soldiers came upon them. Most went off into captivity. A few-those who came out of hiding too suddenly, or those who just ran into southrons with grudges-met unfortunate and untimely ends. Such things weren’t supposed to happen. They did, all the time, on both sides.

Even after surrendering, northerners stared at Rollant. “What is this world coming to, when blonds can lord it over Detinans?” one of them exclaimed.

“It’s simple,” Rollant said. “I wasn’t stupid enough to pick the losing side. You were. Now get moving.”

The prisoner looked from one ordinary Detinan in gray to the next. “You fellows going to let him talk to me like that?” he demanded indignantly.

“We have to,” Smitty answered, his voice grave.

“What do you mean, you have to?” the prisoner said. “He’s a blond. You’re supposed to tell him what to do.”

“Can’t,” Smitty said. “He’s the sergeant. We tell him off, he gives us the nastiest duty he can find, just like a regular Detinan would.”

“I think you people have all gone crazy,” said the man from the Army of Franklin, setting his hands on his hips.

“Maybe we are crazy,” Rollant said. “But we’re winning. If we can win while we’re crazy, what does that make you traitors?”

“ I’m not a traitor.” The northerner got irate all over again. “It’s you people who let blonds do things the gods didn’t mean to have ’em do- you’re the traitors, you and that gods-damned son of a bitch of a King Avram.”

“If the gods didn’t want me to do something, they’d keep me from doing it, wouldn’t they?” Rollant said. “If they don’t keep me from doing it, that must mean they know I can do it, right? And since you traitors are losing the war, that means the gods don’t want you to win it, right?”

His comrades in gray laughed and whooped. “Listen to him!” Smitty said. “He ought to be a priest, not a sergeant.”

And Rollant saw he’d troubled the captured northerner. The man said nothing more, but he looked worried. He hadn’t before. He’d looked angry that the southrons had taken him prisoner, and at the same time relieved that he wouldn’t be killed. Now, his brow furrowed, he seemed to be examining the reasons for which he’d gone to war in the first place.

Rollant jerked a thumb toward the south. “Take him away. I’d like to give him just what I think he deserves, but I have to follow orders, too.”

Off went the prisoner, still looking worried. From not far away, Lieutenant Joram boomed out an order Rollant had heard a great many times since joining the army, but one he’d come to enjoy the past few days: “Forward!”