Harry Turtledove: Marching Through Peachtree

Sing he did himself, loudly, enthusiastically, and probably not very well. He lived in New Eborac, with his wife and little boy. He made a good enough living as a carpenter, or had in peacetime. Thus far, he seemed a typical enough Detinan himself.

Thus far-and no further. He wore gray tunic and pantaloons like Smitty, like everyone else around him. There their resemblance ended. Rollant was fair-skinned and blue-eyed, with hair and beard yellow as butter. He’d grown up on a feudal estate in Palmetto Province, not far outside Karlsburg-and had fled the land to which he was legally bound, fled south to New Eborac, where serfdom had long been extinct, about ten years before. His wife was born in the south, and had never known a liege lord’s exactions. Thanks to Norina, Rollant had his letters.

Smitty said, “Suppose I tell you to shut the hells up or I’ll pop you one.”

“Talk is cheap,” Rollant answered. “You want to try and do something about it after march today, you come right ahead and see what kind of welcome you get.”

Smitty was his friend, or as close to a friend as a blond could have among Detinans. They’d fought shoulder to shoulder. They’d saved each other a couple of times. But Rollant didn’t dare take a challenge like that lightly, and he wasn’t sure whether or how much Smitty was joking.

I have to be twice as good, twice as tough, as an ordinary Detinan to get myself reckoned half as good, half as tough . Rollant had had that thought so many times, it hardly sparked resentment in him any more. It was part of what being a blond in a black-haired land meant.

A lot of Detinans thought blonds couldn’t, wouldn’t, fight for beans. The Detinans’ ancestors had crossed the Western Ocean centuries before, and promptly subjected the kingdoms full of blonds they found in the north of this new land-and the more scattered hunters and farmers who lived farther south. The campaigns were monotonously one-sided, from which the Detinans inferred that blonds were and always would be a pack of spineless cowards.

They had iron weapons. We had bronze. They rode unicorns. We’d never seen them before-we had ass-drawn chariots. They knew how to make fancy siege engines. We didn’t. Their mages were stronger than ours. Their gods were stronger than ours. No wonder we went down like barley under the scythe .

Like almost all blonds in the Kingdom of Detina these days, Rollant reverenced the Thunderer and the Lion God and the rest of the Detinan pantheon. He knew the names of the gods his own ancestors had worshipped-or of some of them, anyhow. He still believed in those gods. He believed in them, but he didn’t reverence them. What point to that? The blonds’ gods had been as thoroughly beaten as their former votaries.

“Never mind,” Smitty said, and started blatting out the royal hymn himself.

Rollant howled like a wolf. “You’re worse than I am-to the seven hells with me if you’re not.”

“To the seven hells with you anyway,” Smitty said cheerfully. He kept on singing.

Sergeant Joram winced. “Lion God’s hairy ears, Smitty, stuff a sock in it. You couldn’t carry a tune in a knapsack.”

“Sergeant!” Smitty said reproachfully, but he did quiet down.

“ I told you you couldn’t sing, too,” Rollant said. “Would you listen to me?”

“I wouldn’t listen to Joram if he weren’t my sergeant,” Smitty answered. “That’s what being a free Detinan is all about: the only person you have to listen to is yourself, most of the time.”

“By the gods, I know that ,” Rollant said. “Why do you think I ran away from my liege lord’s estate? I got sick of having somebody else tell me what to do all the time. Wouldn’t you?”

Before Smitty could answer, Joram went on, “And you, Rollant, you sound like a cat just after its tail got stepped on.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” Rollant said sweetly. Under his breath, he said something else, something less polite. Smitty guffawed. Sergeant Joram sent them both suspicious looks, then went off to harass somebody else.

Smitty said, “I’ll tell you something. Back before the war, I didn’t have any idea what being a serf was like. We haven’t had anybody tied to the land since before my pa was born, not in New Eborac we haven’t. But this whole business of soldiering, of having somebody telling you what to do just on account of he’s got himself a higher rank than yours-it sticks in the craw, it surely does.”

Rollant didn’t particularly like taking orders, either, not when he’d run away from Baron Ormerod to escape them. By the mad fortune of war, Ormerod had almost killed him in the skirmishing before the battle by the River of Death, and he had killed his former liege lord not long after gaining the top of Proselytizers’ Rise. He couldn’t think of many things of which he was more proud.

Still, Smitty needed an answer. Rollant did his best to give him one: “It’s not the same. There are rules here. Liege lords, the only rules they have are the ones they make up. If you lose a trowel and your liege lord decides to flay the hide off your back with a whip for it, who’s to say he can’t? Nobody. If you give him a sour look afterwards and he whips you again, who’ll stop him? Nobody. He’ll say he reckoned you were plotting an uprising, and he doesn’t have to say anything past that. Or if he thinks your sister is pretty, or your wife…”

“They really do that?” Smitty said.

“Of course they really do that,” Rollant said. “Baron Ormerod, he was a regular tomcat amongst the serf huts. Why not? If your mother was a serf, you’re a serf, too, even if you do look like your liege lord.”

“That’s a pretty filthy business, all right,” Smitty said.

With a shrug, Rollant answered, “Whoever’s on top is going to give it to whoever’s on the bottom.” He used a gesture that showed exactly what he meant by give it to . Smitty clucked in delicious horror. Rollant went on, “If we’d licked you Detinans a long time ago, you’d’ve ended up slaving for us. But that’s not what the gods had in mind, and so it didn’t happen.”

Smitty grunted. He plainly didn’t like thinking about might-have-beens. But then he wagged a finger at Rollant. “You’ve got no business talking about `you Detinans.’ If you’re not one yourself, then what’s King Avram been fussing and fuming about all this time? If you’re not one yourself, what are you?”

“What am I?” Rollant echoed. It was a good question. He spoke Detinan. He followed Detinan gods. Avram did want to free his people from their ties to the land and make the law look at them the same way it looked at every other Detinan. And yet, the question had a dreadfully obvious answer. “What am I? Just a gods-damned blond, that’s all. And there’s plenty of southrons who’d say it along with the traitors in the north.”

He wondered if Smitty had ever said such a thing. Probably. By everything he’d seen and heard, there weren’t a whole lot of Detinans-ordinary, gods-fearing Detinans, they would surely call themselves-who didn’t say such things in places where they didn’t think blonds could hear. But Smitty didn’t mock blonds when Rollant could hear him, which put him up on a lot of his countrymen.

What Smitty said now was, “You aren’t the only blond in King Avram’s army, Rollant. When we get done licking the northerners with them helping, folks’ll have a lot harder time saying blonds can’t fight. And if a man can do a proper job of fighting, he’s on his way to being a real Detinan.”

If a man can stand up to a Detinan was part of what he meant. The Detinans had spent centuries forcing blonds down, and then wondered that they didn’t leap to their feet at once when no longer held down by laws. Rollant said, “Well, there’s Hagen, or there was.”