Harry Turtledove - Advance and Retreat

“Talk Detinan,” he told them in that language. It was the conquerors’ tongue, but the only one they had in common. “What do you want?”

They looked disappointed he couldn’t follow them. He’d expected that. One of them, visibly plucking up his courage, asked, “You are really a sergeant, sir?”

“Yes, I’m a sergeant,” Rollant answered. “And you don’t call me sir . You call officers sir . They’re the ones with epaulets.” He saw the blond laborers didn’t know what epaulets were, so he tapped his shoulder. “The fancy ornaments they wear here. You men haven’t been with the army long, have you?”

“No, sir,” another of them said. The laborer who’d spoken first poked him with an elbow. He tried again: “Uh, no, Sergeant.”

Yet another blond asked, “How did you get to be a sergeant, sir?” Force of habit died hard in them. The man added, “How did they let you be a sergeant?”

“They made me a corporal when I took the company standard after the standard-bearer got killed,” Rollant replied. “I charged at the northerners and I was lucky-they didn’t shoot me. Then, when the lieutenant who commanded this company got shot at Ramblerton, they made our sergeant a lieutenant, and they made me a sergeant.”

“A sergeant. A blond sergeant.” The laborer who spoke might have been talking about a black unicorn or some other prodigy of nature.

The blond who’d called to Rollant in the language that wasn’t Detinan asked, “And when you give an order, do the Detinans obey?”

All the blonds leaned forward, eagerly hanging on the answer. They all sighed ecstatically when he nodded. He couldn’t blame them. What blond trapped in serfdom in the north didn’t dream of turning the tables on his liege lord? Rollant knew he had, back when he was bound to Baron Ormerod’s estate outside of Karlsburg.

“They do now ,” he told them.

“Now?” They all echoed that. A big, burly blond in rags asked, “Why didn’t they before?”

Rollant wished the man hadn’t asked that question. Reluctantly, he gave back the truth: “Because I had to beat up one of them to convince them I deserved to wear my stripes.”

“Ahhh!” They all said that together, too.

“Wait!” Rollant held up a hand. With desperate urgency, he said, “Do you know what’ll happen if you try to beat up Detinans?” The blond laborers shook their heads. “They’ll give you stripes-stripes on your backs,” he told them. “Or they may nail you to crosses. Don’t try. You can’t get away with it.”

They frowned. The burly one asked, “Why could you, then? That’s not right.”

“Why could I?” Now Rollant was the one doing the echoing. “I’ll tell you why. Because I’ve killed northerners. All the men in my company knew I could do that. They’d seen me do it. They’d seen I could fight and didn’t run away. The only question left was whether I was tough enough to lick them, and I showed them I could do that, too, when one of our Detinans wouldn’t obey me. If you haven’t done all the other things, don’t try this, or you’ll be sorrier than you ever imagined you could be, and no one will help you.”

He wondered if they were really listening, or if one of them would try to hit a Detinan overseer he didn’t like right in the eye. He hoped they wouldn’t be so stupid, but you never could tell.

Maybe they would just try to strip off their colorless clothes and get the Detinans to give them gray tunics and pantaloons instead. They might even succeed; King Avram’s armies seemed permanently hungry for men. But if the blonds expected promotion to be easy or quick, they were doomed to disappointment. It was probably easier for them to end up dead than to end up as corporals, let alone sergeants. Rollant shrugged. Still, if they wanted to try, why shouldn’t they?

He looked across the Franklin again. Ned’s unicorn-riders kept right on patrolling the north bank. They probably kept right on being convinced that Geoffrey was the rightful King of Detina, too, and that blonds were serfs by nature. But, as far as the larger scheme of things went, what Ned of the Forest’s troopers were convinced of mattered less and less with each passing day.

“Lollygagging around again, are you?” a deep voice rumbled behind Rollant.

He turned and saluted. “Oh, yes, sir, Lieutenant Joram,” he replied. “You know all blonds are shiftless and lazy, same as you know all blonds are a pack of dirty, yellow cowards.”

Joram opened his mouth to answer that, then closed it again. Before saying anything, the newly commissioned officer rumbled laughter. Only after he’d got it out of his system did he remark, “Gods damn it, Rollant, there are still plenty of Detinans who do know that, or think they do.”

“Yes, sir.” Rollant nodded. “But are you one of them?”

“Well, that depends,” Joram said judiciously. “There’s a difference, you know, between whether you were lollygagging around on account of you’re a shiftless, cowardly blond and whether you were lollygagging around just in a general sort of way.”

“Oh, yes, sir.” Rollant nodded again. “That’s the truth. There is that difference. The Detinans you were talking about, though, they can’t see it.”

“Before you rubbed my nose in it, I would have had trouble seeing it myself,” Joram said. “Some blonds are shiftless cowards.”

“That’s true, too, sir. So are some Detinans.”

Joram grunted. Detinans prided themselves on being a warrior race. After a moment, Joram’s big head bobbed up and down. “And that’s the truth. So, Sergeant… in a general sort of way, were you lollygagging around?”

If Rollant had admitted it while still a common soldier, his reward would have been extra duty of some sort: chopping wood or digging a latrine trench or filling canteens. As a sergeant, he was supposed to be immune to such little oppressions. But he’d been a common soldier longer than he’d been an underofficer. “Sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said blandly.

“I’ll bet you don’t!” Joram laughed again, a laugh so big and booming, Rollant wondered if the riders on the far side of the Franklin could hear it. But they just kept on riding. The company commander said, “Blond or not, you’re sure as hells an old soldier, aren’t you?”

Rollant shrugged. “I’ve been doing this a while now,” he said, “but any serf would tell you how much of a fool you have to be before you admit anything that puts you in trouble.”

“You don’t need to be a serf to learn that-though I don’t suppose it hurts,” Joram said.

“Now that you’re an officer, sir, have you heard anything about whether we’ll cross the Franklin and finish the traitors once and for all?” Rollant asked.

That made Joram laugh yet again, but this time without much in the way of amusement in his voice. “Just because they gave me one epaulet doesn’t mean they tell me anything,” he answered. “If I had my way, we’d already be pushing those bastards out of Honey-I hear that’s where they finally went and ran to. But even though I’m a lieutenant, I don’t have my way.”

“For whatever it may be worth to you, I’d do the same,” Rollant said. “Of course, I’m only a sergeant and I’m only a blond, so I really don’t have my way.”

“No, I don’t suppose you do,” Joram agreed. “But tell me this-when the war started, before you joined the army, did you ever think you’d say something like, ‘I’m only a sergeant’?”

“No, sir, can’t say that I did,” Rollant admitted. “What I wonder now is how things will be for my children, and for their children. I don’t want them to have to go through a lot of the things I’ve had to put up with because of the way I look.”