Harry Turtledove - Sentry Peak

And he had more reason for being unhappy than that. His left leg pained him, as it always did these days when he had to march hard. He’d taken a crossbow quarrel right through the meat of his calf in the frigid fight at Reillyburgh. The wound hadn’t mortified, so he supposed he was lucky. But he had two great puckered scars on the leg, and less meat than he’d had before he was hit. Hard marching hurt.

“Come on, boys,” he called to the footsoldiers in the company he commanded. “Keep it moving. Those southron bastards aren’t chasing us, by the gods. We showed ’em we’ve still got teeth.”

He put the best face he could on retreat. He’d had practice retreating, more practice than he’d wanted, more practiced than he’d ever thought he would get. Like so many northern nobles, he’d joined King Geoffrey’s levy as soon as war broke out: indeed, Palmetto Province had been the first to reject Avram and proclaim Geoffrey Detina’s rightful king.

Baron Ormerod wondered what kind of an indigo harvest his wife and the serfs would get from his estate when he wasn’t there to keep an eye on things. Bianca’s letters were all resolutely cheerful, but Bianca herself was resolutely cheerful, too. What all wasn’t she telling him? How many serfs had run off these past few months? How many of the blonds still on the land dogged it instead of working?

His first lieutenant came up to him, making him think of something besides his estate. “Sir?” the man asked.

“What is it, Gremio?” Ormerod asked. “By your sour look, something’s gone wrong somewhere.”

“With this whole campaign, sir,” Gremio burst out. “Truly the gods must hate us, if they watch us bungle so but do nothing to help… Why are you laughing, sir?” He sent Ormerod a resentful stare.

“Because if I did anything else, I’d start to wail, and I don’t care to wash my face with tears,” Ormerod said. “And speaking of faces, what would they say if they saw yours in the Karlsburg law courts looking the way you do?”

“Sir, they would say I’ve been serving my sovereign and my kingdom,” Gremio answered stiffly. He had no noble blood, but had had enough money to buy himself an officer’s commission: he was one of the leading barristers in Palmetto Province’s chief town.

And now, no matter what he was, he looked like a teamster who’d had a hard time of it: filthy, scrawny, weary, in plain blue tunic and pantaloons that were all over patches, with black marching boots down at the heels and split at the front so his toes peeped out. Ormerod would have twitted him harder, save that his own condition was no more elegant.

And the footsoldiers they led were worse off than they were. The company-the whole regiment-had come out of Karlsburg and the surrounding baronies full of fight, full of confidence that they would boot the southrons back over the border and then go home and go on about their business. They were still full of fight. They still had their crossbows and quivers full of quarrels. They had very little else. They were all of them lean as so many hunting hounds, leaner than Ormerod, leaner than Gremio.

Sensing Ormerod’s eye on him, a sergeant named Tybalt grinned a grin that showed a missing front tooth. “Don’t you worry about a thing, sir,” he said. “We’ll give those whipworthy bastards what they deserve yet, see if we don’t.” Some of the men trudging along beside him nodded.

“Of course we will,” Ormerod answered, and did his best to sound as if he meant it. The men he led had little farms on the lands near his estate. None of them had serfs to help plant and bring in a crop: only wives and kinsfolk. They’d given up more than Ormerod had to take service with King Geoffrey and fight the invaders, and had less personal stake in how the war turned out. The least he could give them was optimism.

Unfortunately, optimism was also the most he could give them. In the third year of a war he’d hoped would be short, in retreat in the third year of that war, even optimism came hard.

Lieutenant Gremio asked, “What do you know that I don’t, your Excellency?” He made Ormerod’s title of nobility a title of reproach. “ How are we going to give the southrons what they deserve?”

Though he spoke with a barrister’s fussy precision, he did at least have the sense to keep his voice low so the troopers couldn’t hear his questions. Ormerod replied in similar low tones: “What do I know? I know that, if the men start believing they can’t give Avram’s armies the kick in the arse they ought to get, they’ll all go home-and what will King Geoffrey do then? Besides take ship and flee overseas, I mean.”

He watched Gremio chew on that and reluctantly nod. “Appearances do matter,” Gremio admitted, “here as in the lawcourts. Very well-I’m with you.”

Earl Florizel, the colonel of the regiment, rode up on unicornback. He waved to Ormerod. Back home in Palmetto Province, they were neighbors. Ormerod kept hoping Florizel would look his way when their children reached marriageable age. The earl said, “You fought your company well back there, Captain-as well as could possibly be expected, considering how outnumbered we were.”

“For which I thank you, sir,” Ormerod replied. “I hoped for rather more from the mages, and I’d be lying if I said otherwise.”

“We usually hope for more from the mages than we get,” Florizel said with a sour smile. He was in his late thirties, and a good deal lighter and trimmer after a couple of years in the field than he had been on his estate, where he’d let himself run to fat. “The trouble is, those bastards who fight for Avram the Just” -he turned the nickname into a sneer- “have mages, too.”

“Ours are better,” Ormerod said stoutly.

“No doubt, or our hopes would already be shattered,” Florizel said. “But they have more. Many little weights in one pan will balance a few big ones in the other. That leaves it to the fellows who go out and hack one another for a living.”

“King Avram’s got more soldiers, too,” Lieutenant Gremio said.

Ormerod and Florizel both pursed their lips and looked away from him, as if he’d broken wind at a fancy banquet. It wasn’t so much that Gremio was wrong-he was right. But saying it out loud, bringing it out in the open where people had to notice it was there… The warriors who fought under King Geoffrey’s banner rarely did that, as it led to gloomy contemplations.

To avoid such gloomy contemplations, Ormerod asked, “Colonel, where are we stopping tonight?”

“Rising Rock,” Florizel answered, which gave rise to other gloomy contemplations. “And take a good look around while you’re there, too.”

“Why’s that?” Ormerod asked.

Lieutenant Gremio was quicker on the uptake. “Because we’re not bloody likely to see it again any time soon, that’s why,” he said.

“Oh.” One mournful word expressed an ocean of Ormerod’s frustration.

“He’s right.” Florizel sounded no more delighted than Ormerod felt. “We’ll be some of the last men into Rising Rock, too, and it looks like we’ll be some of the last ones out as well.” Out meant retreating to the northwest. Colonel Florizel pointed in that direction. Sure enough, Ormerod could see the dust men and unicorns by the thousands raised as they marched along the road through the gap between Sentry Peak and Proselytizers’ Rise, the gap that led up into Peachtree Province.

Closer, Rising Rock itself looked deceptively normal. The sun played up the blood-red of the painted spires on the Lion God’s temples, and glinted from the silver lightning bolts atop the Thunderer’s shrines. Ormerod sighed. The southrons worshiped the same gods he did, but they would send the local priests into exile for speaking out against the perverse belief that serfs were as good as true Detinans.