Harry Turtledove - Marching Through Peachtree

That left Rollant’s cheeks hotter than the water, which had begun to boil. He took the saucepan away from the flames and poured its contents first into Smitty’s mug and then into his own. Both had ground tea leaves and sugar waiting for the hot water. Stirring the tea gave Rollant an excuse not to do anything else for the next minute or two. At last, he asked, “How did you get to be such a nuisance?”

“I work hard at it,” Smitty said, not without pride. “Just ask my father and my mother and my two older sisters and my older brother. If my other older brother was still alive, you could ask him, too.” He held up a hasty hand. “I didn’t have anything to do with him dying, though. It was the coughing fever.”

Rollant gallantly tried to get back to talking about what he wanted to talk about: “We ought to push the traitors harder. If they go all the way back into Marthasville, we ought to lay siege to ’em. If they don’t, we ought to make ’em stand and fight instead of sneaking away again.”

“Didn’t your mama ever rap you on the knuckles for being an impatient little brat?” Smitty said. “We’re just now getting the whole army, not just part of Doubting George’s Wing, over the Hoocheecoochee. Joseph the Gamecock wrecked all the bridges. We’ve especially got to get one for glideway carpets across the river. Once that happens, I expect we may fight a bit.”

“I suppose so,” Rollant said. “But the more time we spend getting ready, the more time the traitors have to dig more trenches of their own. Whenever we come at the ones they’ve dug in, they make us pay for it.” He also ground his teeth when he thought of blond serfs doing the digging for the northern soldiers.

“That’s part of the game,” Smitty answered. “The idea is to get around the bastards’ flanks and hit ’em where they aren’t dug in, or else to make them try to hit us when we are dug in instead.”

“It would be nice,” Rollant said wistfully. “It doesn’t seem to happen very often, though, does it?” He swigged at his tea. It would have been better with some spirits poured into it, but pried his eyes open even as things were.

Sergeant Joram happened to be walking by. He glowered down at Rollant. “Are you suggesting, Corporal, that the traitors have better officers than we do?”

Would he ask me a question like that if I weren’t a blond? Such thoughts were never far from Rollant’s mind. He looked up at Joram and nodded. “Sometimes, Sergeant. Otherwise, we would’ve licked ’em already, don’t you suppose? And sometimes we’re better than they are.” But not often enough, gods damn it .

He waited for Joram to burst like a flung firepot and spill flames everywhere. But the sergeant only grunted and kept walking. Smitty whistled. “You got away with it,” he said. “And I know why.”

“It’s not because Joram loves blonds any too well,” Rollant said.

“No, of course not,” Smitty agreed, as if the idea that anyone-anyone Detinan, that is-could love blonds too well was too ridiculous to contemplate… and so it probably was. The farmer’s son went on, “You got away with it on account of you’re a corporal now. If an ordinary soldier-me, for instance-said something like that, old Joram’d run over him like a herd of unicorns.”

On account of you’re a corporal now . All his life, Rollant had been on the outside looking in as far as status was concerned. Being born blond would do that in the Kingdom of Detina. Joining King Avram’s army hadn’t improved things much. A blond who was also a common soldier was at the bottom of two different hierarchies.

But now he was off the bottom of one of them. He had stripes on his sleeve. He was the only blond in the whole regiment who did. Had Joram given him the same courtesy he would have given a Detinan corporal, a corporal whose skin was respectably swarthy, whose hair was respectably black?

“By the gods, maybe he did,” Rollant said softly.

“No maybes about it,” Smitty declared. “You’re a corporal, so you’ve got it easy. You get to tell people to cut firewood and fill canteens. You don’t have to do it yourself. And you don’t get the heat people like me do. You’d have to really make a botch of things to get chewed out.”

“Maybe,” Rollant said. But he wasn’t entirely convinced. If he made a mistake, he suspected-no, he was as sure as made no difference-he would lose his rank and become a common soldier again faster than a Detinan committing the same blunder.

“Standard-bearer!” Lieutenant Griff called. “Get the flag! We’re going to move out in a few minutes.”

“Coming, sir!” Rollant scrambled to his feet, poured the last of the tea down his throat, and hurried over to the company’s banner. He saluted it and put a pinch of earth at the base of the staff as he picked it up. It wasn’t quite an object of veneration in its own right, but it wasn’t far removed from being one. Who could tell for certain, after all, what was divine and what wasn’t?

Having gone through the ritual, he took hold of the flag. Carrying it made him feel stronger and braver than he really was. Of course, carrying it also made him a target. Were that not true, he wouldn’t have gained the job. Since that’s the way things work, I’d better be as strong and brave as I can .

Colonel Nahath’s regiment-and several others-started moving north a few minutes later. The traitors had fled back of Goober Creek, a miserable little stream about halfway between the Hoocheecoochee River and Marthasville itself. Joseph the Gamecock’s men also had unicorn-riders and raiders afoot still loose in the region between the Hoocheecoochee and Goober Creek. They would snipe at General Hesmucet’s men whenever they got a chance. The southrons’ column advanced with scouts on both wings.

Rollant knew that was so, but couldn’t have proved it himself. He couldn’t see the front of the column or the rear, and he couldn’t see very far off to the sides. That was partly because Nahath’s regiment was in the middle of the long file of men in gray and partly because of the choking clouds of red dust the men in front of him had already kicked up. The dust got in his eyes. It got in his nose and made him sneeze. It got in his mouth, leaving his teeth and tongue coated in grit. It turned his tunic and pantaloons a color halfway between rust and blood. It turned his skin the same shade, except where rills of sweat ran through and showed what color he was supposed to be.

Lieutenant Griff looked as much like a man made of red dust as did Rollant. When he spat, his spittle was brick-red. He was sweating even harder than Rollant, but was pretty red under the sweat, too. “Lion God’s tail tuft, it’s hot,” he said. “How does anybody stand this horrible weather year after year?”

“Sir, when I first came down to New Eborac from Palmetto Province, I thought I’d freeze to death every winter,” Rollant answered. “It’s all what you’re used to, I expect.” He’d done harder work than marching in hotter, stickier weather than this; Karlsburg took a back seat to nobody for dreadful summers.

“Gods-damned bugs.” Griff slapped at himself, but did nothing except raise a puff of dust from his tunic. “This is a horrible place.”

“Looks like pretty good farming country to me, sir, you don’t mind my saying so.” Rollant had had to learn how to contradict Detinans. As a serf in Palmetto Province, he never would have dared do any such thing. As a carpenter in New Eborac City, he had to. If he didn’t, everyone would have cheated him unmercifully.

Even in the army, a good many Detinans didn’t want to hear a blond telling them they were wrong. Griff took it pretty well. He said, “You’d have to have a leather hide and iron muscles to do a proper job of working it.”