Harry Turtledove - Marching Through Peachtree

The sun was setting, but enough light remained to let Roast-Beef William take a long look to the north. No sign of Hesmucet’s force at the moment. Maybe the Army of Franklin could keep on outrunning the southrons, but how much good would that do overall? Not a great deal, as far as William could see.

“Halt!” an alert sentry called. “Advance and be recognized.”

“I’m Lieutenant General William,” William said, moving slowly to keep from alarming the man and perhaps ending up with a crossbow quarrel between the ribs. “Do you recognize me?”

“Uh, yes, sir,” the sentry said. “Sorry, sir.”

“Don’t be,” Roast-Beef William said. “You should stay alert.”

“Well, yes, sir,” the man said. “But I shouldn’t come close to putting a hole in one of our generals, either. That wouldn’t be so good.”

“If you think I’m going to quarrel with you, soldier, you’d better think again,” William said, and the sentry laughed. William wasn’t so sure it was funny. For one thing, both sides had lost officers because their own men had shot them. For another, he couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that the Army of Franklin might be improved if a couple of its officers suffered such accidents. Thoughts like that bordered on mutiny. They were not the sort of ideas that should have been going through the mind of a man known as Old Reliable.

Roast-Beef William couldn’t drive them out of his head even so. If that wasn’t a telling measure of the state to which the Army of Franklin had fallen, he couldn’t imagine what would be. Maybe I should start writing letters. Anywhere would be better than here .

“Where will we be going now, sir?” the sentry asked.

“South, for the army as a whole,” William answered. “My wing will serve as rear guard.”

“Can the southrons catch up to us?” The sentry sounded interested and curious, not anxious and afraid.

That only shows he doesn’t understand the state we’re in, Roast-Beef William thought. As wing commander, he himself understood it altogether too well. If only King Geoffrey had put me in Joseph the Gamecock’s place once he decided he couldn’t stand leaving Joseph in command. By all the gods and goddesses, I couldn’t have done worse thanBell did .

But Bell looked like the Lion God and fought like a tiger, always hitting the enemy with everything he had. In Geoffrey’s eyes, those attributes counted for more than reliability. And so I kept right on being a wing commander, and so we lost a third of the army, and we lost Marthasville, and we took a couple of long steps toward losing the war .

“We’ll lick ’em, won’t we, sir?” The sentry sounded as if he had no doubt of it.

“We’re doing everything we can,” William answered. “If we can get astride the glideway line and cut it, the southrons may yet come to grief.”

“We’ll do it,” the sentry said.

And, more than a little to Roast-Beef William’s surprise, they did do it a couple of days later. A few miles south of Fat Mama, the Army of Franklin swarmed athwart the glideway line. William formed up his men facing north, to hold off Hesmucet’s southrons while mages disrupted the delicate spells without which glideway carpets would have done just as well in somebody’s parlor.

With no sign of the southrons anywhere close by, Roast-Beef William rode back perhaps a quarter of a mile to watch the wizards at work. The men in blue robes looked as weary as the soldiers guarding them. Almost, Roast-Beef William wished Thraxton the Braggart were back with the army. Almost. It wasn’t so much that Thraxton, like Bell, had led the Army of Franklin into disasters. That Thraxton was so gods-damned disagreeable while doing it counted for more. He’d proved that being a powerful mage wasn’t the same as being a successful one-proved it over and over, in fact.

The wizards chanted and made their passes and danced back and forth across the glideway line. They looked a lot like a holiday gathering at the Sweet One’s shrine. As soon as that thought crossed William’s mind, he wished it hadn’t. He had to fight the giggles for the rest of the incantation.

A line on the ground-presumably, the one tracing the path of the glideway line-began to glow red. The mages chanted harder than ever, and the glow got brighter and brighter. Before long, William was squinting at it through half-shut eyes. Even then, tears ran down his cheeks till at last he turned away.

With a sound as sharp and fierce as a bursting firepot, the spell ended. The assembled wizards cried out in triumph. Roast-Beef William turned back. The glideway line wasn’t glowing any more, but the air still quivered above it, showing the heat the mages had released.

“Well done!” William clapped his hands. “That should hold up the southrons a good long while, wouldn’t you say?”

“I hope so,” one of the mages answered answered. Roast-Beef William coughed. “Uh-I hope so, sir,” the mage amended. “We killed the glideway power dead as shoe leather, sure as hells we did.” His colleagues nodded.

“Well, then, the next time Hesmucet’s men try to use the line, they’ll get a nasty surprise,” William said. “Or am I misunderstanding something?”

“No, sir, you’re right about that,” the wizard said. “Question is, though, how long does it take ’em to repair what we just did?”

“How long would it take you ?” Roast-Beef William asked.

Before answering, the man in the blue robe and his comrades put their heads together. At last, he said, “We’d probably be held up for a week, easy. We did a proper job here, we did.”

“That’s not bad,” Roast-Beef William said. It was almost as much as he’d hoped for, which, considering the way the war had been going lately, came close to a miracle straight from the gods.

But now the wizard coughed. “Uh, sir, you’ve got to remember, the southrons are better than we are at this kind of sorcery, same as we’re better than they are at battle magic.”

Roast-Beef William cursed softly. The fellow was bound to be right. Everything William had seen in the war pointed that way. He said, “All right, then, I’ll ask a different question: how long do you think the southrons will need to fix what you just did to the glideway line?”

The sorcerers huddled again. When they broke apart, the fellow who did the talking said, “A couple of days, if we’re lucky. A couple of hours, if we’re not.”

“A couple of days? A couple of hours ?” Roast-Beef William clapped a hand to his forehead in astonished dismay and disbelief. “And it would stop you for a week ? I knew we were behind them in that sort of sorcery. Thunderer’s prong, though-I never imagined we were so far behind.”

“Sorry, sir,” the wizard said. “That’s how it is.”

“In that case…” William plucked at his beard. “In that case, let’s see what we can do about it.”

Being the commander of the rear guard, he was supposed to hang back and resist the southrons anyhow. He posted a regiment in the pine woods near the glideway line with some very specific orders. He stayed behind himself, too; he wasn’t willing to order the men to try anything he wouldn’t do himself. He told the colonel, “If this doesn’t work out the way we want it to, we’ll just pull back. I’m not out for us to get stuck with an attack that hasn’t got a chance of working.”

“No, eh?” the colonel said. “You’d better not tell Bell that, or else he’ll throw you out of this gods-damned army.”

Roast-Beef William cleared his throat. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“Go ahead,” the colonel told him. “Won’t make any difference one way or the other. You can hear or not. Bell won’t.” As William had with the mage, he cleared his throat again. The colonel refused to be cowed. He said, “I’m a free Detinan, sir, and I’ll gods-damned well say what I please. Somebody ought to, don’t you think?”