Harry Turtledove - Advance and Retreat

“Yes, Sergeant, we do. They’re waiting for us in the hall.” By the respect in Smitty’s voice, Rollant might have been Marshal Bart. That must have irked the bouncers, who were doubtless men from Peachtree Province. It didn’t irk them quite enough to make them do anything but glower, though, which was lucky-for them. After the worst false King Geoffrey’s soldiers could do to him, Rollant didn’t fear a couple of whorehouse toughs.

He and Smitty led the unsatisfied customers from the brothel back to the glideway terminal. The men in gray climbed up onto the carpets, some resigned to leaving, others glum. An hour passed, and nothing happened. “Gods damn it, Sergeant, we could’ve had our fun,” one of the frustrated soldiers complained.

“I had my orders,” Rollant said with a shrug. “You’re not happy, take it up with Lieutenant Joram.” The soldier stopped grumbling. Nobody wanted to complain to Joram. He’d been a sergeant too long; the men knew what sort of firepot would burst if they pushed him too far.

Sooner or later, they may start thinking that way about me . Rollant liked the idea. He didn’t think it was all that likely to come true, though. Joram could roar like the Thunderer come down to earth. That had never been Rollant’s way. In the north, blonds who roared at Detinans ended up gruesomely dead, and the lesson had stuck. He seemed to manage just the same.

The glideway carpet started west and south. Rollant settled himself against the motion. Palmetto Province ahead. He’d left a fugitive serf. He was coming back a conqueror. “And a sergeant,” he said softly. Yes, he’d already won a lot of battles. The carpet picked up speed.

“Tell it to me again,” Ned of the Forest said. “I want to make sure I’ve got it straight.”

“All right, Lord Ned.” The man who’d come north from southern Dothan nodded. He looked weary. He had the right to look that way, too: he’d traveled hard, and dodged the southrons’ patrols till he finally reached country King Geoffrey’s men ruled. “I seen them southron sons of bitches ride out. They ain’t that far in back of me, neither. If they wasn’t looping around to hit you some funny way or other, reckon they would’ve got here ahead of me.”

“Hard-Riding Jimmy’s men, you’re talking about,” Ned said, to nail it down tight. “ All of Hard-Riding Jimmy’s men.”

“That’s about the size of it.” The fellow who’d brought the news nodded again. “Hells of a lot of bastards in gray uniforms, every gods-damned one of ’em riding a white unicorn.” He didn’t even seem to notice his accidental near-rhyme.

Ned of the Forest wasn’t inclined to play literary critic, either. “That’s not good news,” he said-an understatement if ever there was one. Hard-Riding Jimmy’s force of unicorn-riders badly outnumbered his own. To make things worse, every southron carried one of those quick-shooting crossbows that made him much more deadly than anyone with an ordinary weapon. Ned plucked at his chin beard, then asked, “They have any footsoldiers with ’em?”

“I don’t know for certain,” the man from Dothan replied. “Only thing I can tell you is, I didn’t see none. Just riders-lots and lots of riders.”

“Lots and lots of riders,” Ned echoed unhappily. “They were heading for the Franklin River? Aiming to cross it and get farther up into Dothan?”

“Can’t tell you for certain,” the other man said. “All I know for certain is, them buggers is on the move. If you don’t stop ’em, Lord Ned, who the hells is going to?”

“Nobody,” Ned answered with a mournful sigh. “Nobody at all.” He nodded to the informant. “I do thank you for bringing me the news.” He wished the news hadn’t happened, so the other man wouldn’t have needed to bring it. Such wishes, though, were written in water. Ned took a certain not quite modest pride in realizing as much. Hard-Riding Jimmy’s move was real. Now Ned had to find some way to stop it.

He knew where Jimmy would be heading: toward the manufactories in Hayek and the other nearby towns. If the southrons could seize them or wreck them, where would King Geoffrey’s men in this part of the realm get the crossbows and quarrels and engines and firepots they needed to carry on the fight against the southrons? We won’t get ’em anywhere, in that case , Ned thought. And if we don’t, then it’s really all over .

By noon the next day, his own force of unicorn-riders was hurrying west out of Great River Province. Richard the Haberdasher had promised to send footsoldiers after them. Ned had thanked him without believing a word of it. For one thing, Ned doubted the crossbowmen and pikemen who’d survived the advance to Ramblerton and the retreat from it were in any sort of fighting shape even now. For another, they were bound to get to Dothan too late to do much good.

Ned wondered if he would get to Dothan too late to do much good. In winter, roads turned into quagmires. That worked a hardship on both sides, for it also slowed Hard-Riding Jimmy. But streaming away from Hayek and the other towns full of manufactories was a great flood of refugees who clogged the roads even worse than the mud did. The people of Dothan knew Jimmy was coming, and didn’t want to get in his way.

“Bastard’s burning everything in his path, same as that other bugger done did over in Peachtree,” one man said. Others fleeing the southrons nodded, adding their own tales of horror.

Being who and what he was, Ned of the Forest needed longer than he might have to notice one thing about the flood of refugees: they were almost all Detinans, with hardly any blonds. This part of Dothan, though, held about as many blonds as it did ordinary Detinans. Ned wondered what that meant, but not for long. It meant the serfs were either staying put and waiting on the land for Jimmy to sever their ties to their liege lords, or else they were fleeing toward Jimmy and not toward Ned.

Attached to his command, he had a wagon train staffed by several dozen serfs. They’d been with him since the earliest days of the war. Some of the blonds were men Ned had caught, but who’d appealed to him because of the way they’d escaped or the way they handled themselves. Others had sought him out: men who wanted an overlord, perhaps, but not the one they’d got by custom.

They’d done a lot of things for Ned: carried supplies, doctored, foraged, and even occasionally picked up a crossbow and taken a few potshots at the southrons. He’d promised to cut their bonds to the land and to him when the war ended. “Well, boys,” he said now, “we’ve been through a lot together these past four years, haven’t we?”

“Sure have, Lord Ned,” Darry rumbled. Ned of the Forest was a big man. Darry stood half a head taller, and was broader through the shoulders. The blond had not an ounce of fat on him anywhere; he was hard as a boulder. Several other men nodded.

“You know I promised you I’d set you up as yeoman farmers when the war was done if you stuck with me till then,” Ned went on. Before the war, blond yeomen had been exceedingly rare in the north, but there had been a few.

His crew of blonds nodded again, this time more or less in unison. They weren’t his serfs, not in any formal sense of the word. He had no noble blood; he owned no estates to which serfs were tied. But for all practical purposes, he was their liege lord, and they gave him more loyalty than most real nobles ever got. They could have fled or betrayed him to the southrons countless times. They could have, but they hadn’t.

Clever Arris raised an eyebrow. Ned nodded for him to speak. Arris was only about half Darry’s size, but had twice his brains. If he’d been born a Detinan, he might have made a general himself. Instead, he worried about unicorns and asses and scrounging-and about feathering his own nest, which he’d done quite nicely. Now he said, “If you grant us land, Lord Ned, will the grant be good?”