Sentry Peak (32 page)

“You’re looking
forward
to this!” George exclaimed.

“You bet I am,” General Bart replied. “George, you know it as well as I do—the northerners have got no business tearing this kingdom apart. If you thought different, you’d be fighting for Geoffrey, not Avram.”

“So I would—a lot of men from Parthenia are,” George said. “Brave men, too, most of them.”

“Brave men don’t make a bad cause good by fighting for it, and they’re fighting for a bad cause—a couple of bad causes, in fact,” Bart said. “Making their living from the sweat of serfs is a nasty business, nothing else but.” He paused. “I don’t mean that personally, of course.”

“Of course,” Doubting George said dryly. “I have no serfs, not any more—Geoffrey confiscated my lands when I declared for Avram.”

“Yes, I’d heard that.” Bart did something George had rarely seen him do: he hesitated. At last, he asked, “Does it bother you?”

“Having my property confiscated? Of course it does,” George answered. “I don’t imagine Duke Edward is very pleased with King Avram for doing the same thing to him.” He eyed his superior. “Or did you mean, does it bother me that I have no serfs any more?”

“The latter,” Bart replied. “Forgive me if the question troubles you. But there are few men who were liege lords serving in King Avram’s army, for in the south the serfs have been unbound from the land for a couple of generations. If my curiosity strikes you as impertinent, do not hesitate to say so.”

“By no means, sir.” George had had other southron officers ask him similar questions, though few with Bart’s diffidence—and Bart, being his commander, had the least need for diffidence. George went on, “I would sooner this were only a fight to hold the kingdom together, that everything else could stay the same. But I see it is not so, and cannot be so, and that the nobles in the north are using their serfs in every way they can short of putting crossbows in their hands to further the war against our rightful king. That being so, I see we have to strike a blow not just against Geoffrey but also against the serfdom that upholds him. But the kingdom will not be the same afterwards.”

He waited to see how General Bart would take that. The commanding general stroked his close-cropped beard. “I have judged from how you have conducted yourself in the fights you’ve led that you were a man of uncommon common sense, if you take my meaning. What you said just now has done nothing to change my opinion.”

“Thank you very much, sir.” Doubting George did not have his nickname for nothing; he’d been born with a cynical cast of mind. He was surprised at how much the commanding general’s praise pleased him—a telling measure of how much Bart himself had impressed him. “Do you know, sir, there’s a great deal more to you than meets the eye.”

“Is there?” Bart said, and George nodded emphatically. The commanding general shrugged in a self-deprecating way. “There could hardly be less, you know.”

Even in the north, he would never have been a liege lord. Everything he was, he owed to Detina’s army. Without his training at the officers’ collegium, he might have ended up a tanner himself. When he’d left the army before King Avram’s accession, he’d failed at everything he tried. People said he’d dived down the neck of a bottle. Maybe it was true; something in his eyes suggested to George that it was: a certain hardness, perhaps. But Guildenstern drank to excess in the middle of a battle, and George doubted General Bart would ever do such a thing. Bart had been through that fire, and come out the other side.

Now the commanding general shook his head slightly, as if to divert the conversation away from himself. “Once we have the road to Bridgeton secured,” he said, “once we make certain we shall not be starved out of this place, and once all our reinforcements have arrived, I believe we can lick Count Thraxton clean out of his boots. Don’t you agree?”

“Do you know, sir, I think I do.” With General Guildenstern in command, George would have had his doubts. With General Bart . . . “I don’t care how good a wizard Thraxton is. I don’t think his spells would faze you a bit.”

“Well, I hope not,” Bart said. “In the long run, wizardry strikes me as being like most other things—it will even out.”

“May the gods prove you right, sir,” George said. That was in large measure his view of things, too, though a good many southron generals had a different opinion. As a general working rule, the mages who backed King Geoffrey were stronger than those who’d stayed loyal to King Avram. Thraxton the Braggart, for instance, had more power than any one southron mage George could think of.

But Bart said, “If wizards were so much of a much, the traitors would be over the Highlow River in the east and pressing down toward New Eborac in the west. They may have fancier mages than we do, but we’ve got more of them, the same as we’ve got more soldiers and more manufactories. We can use that to our advantage. We
have
used that to our advantage—otherwise, we wouldn’t be up here on the northern border of Franklin. We haven’t done everything we might, but things aren’t so very bad.”

“If we’d done everything we might, we’d be marching up toward Marthasville today, not penned here in Rising Rock,” George replied.

“That’s true.” Bart nodded. “But we can do more. We will do more. When Thraxton beat us there by the River of Death, he showed us we needed to do more. And we can—it’s as plain as the nose on your face that we can. Thraxton won’t get any more soldiers: where would they come from? But we’ve already reinforced this army, and we’ve got lots more men on the way. Once they’re here, we’ll take care of business the right and proper way.”

George studied him. Bart didn’t shout and bluster, as General Guildenstern had been so fond of doing. But the new commanding general’s quiet confidence made him more believable, not less. When he said his army would be able to do something, he left little room for doubt in the mind of anyone who heard him. He might have been a builder talking about a house he intended to put up. How could you doubt a builder when he said the walls would stand so, the doors would be there and there, and the windows would have shutters in the latest style?

Thoughtfully, George said, “I do believe you’re right.”

“I hope so. I wouldn’t be trying it if I didn’t think I was.” Bart might have been saying,
Yes, this house will stand up to a storm
. He raised a forefinger. “Oh, I almost forgot. I’ve taken the liberty of attaching a couple of your regiments to the force Bill the Bald will lead. They were conveniently situated, and could join in his movements without drawing the northerners’ notice.”

“Whatever you think best, of course,” Doubting George replied. Had Guildenstern done such a thing without telling him, it would have irked him. He found himself meaning what he’d said to General Bart.

“I’m glad it’s all right with you.” Bart sounded genuinely relieved. As if explaining why he’d used stone instead of brick, he went on, “When I strike a blow, I always try to strike the hardest one I can.”

“Good!” George said. “That was what cost us so much not long ago. We were spread out over the whole landscape, and could hardly strike at all.”

“I suspect that wasn’t your idea.” Before George could answer, Bart held up a hand. “Never mind, Lieutenant General; never mind. I don’t need to know every gory incident, and General Guildenstern isn’t around any more to give his side of things.” His eyes twinkled, just for a moment. “Can’t say I’m sorry about that. I expect I would have heard about it in
great
detail.”

King Avram’s army was full of backbiting. So was King Geoffrey’s. So, no doubt, was every army back to the beginning of time, or perhaps before that—the gods were supposed to squabble among themselves, too. Rarely, though, had George heard such a good-natured snide remark.

Just for a moment, he even stopped doubting and said, “If we can keep on like this, sir, I think we’ll do fine. One of the things we need to do is believe in ourselves, and you make us do that.”

“I don’t
make
us do a solitary thing except for what I order,” Bart said.

Now George laughed. “Oh, I doubt that, sir.”

But General Bart ignored the joke—which he’d hardly even heard before—and went on as if George hadn’t spoken: “I do believe a united kingdom is stronger than a divided one can hope to be. That may give us an edge against the traitors. I hope it does. But what good is an edge unless you go out and take advantage of it? None, not that I can see.”

That was nothing but good, hard common sense. Good, hard common sense had been in moderately short supply in this camp lately: one more thing about which even Doubting George entertained no doubts. He came to stiff attention and saluted. “With you in charge in these parts, I think we’ll grab every edge we can find.”

“No, no,” Bart said mildly. “You don’t grab the edge. You grab the hilt and give the enemy the edge.” He chuckled.

So did George, rather dutifully.
He’s fond of foolish jokes
, he thought, and then decided it didn’t matter much. He’d known worse commanders with habits much more obnoxious than that.

Out in the street, a newly arrived regiment of Avram’s soldiers tramped by, band blaring and thumping at their head. “More reinforcements,” George said happily. “Even with the roads as bad as they are, even with the traitors where they are, we’re bringing in what we need.”

“So we are,” Bart agreed. After some hesitation, he inquired, “Ah . . . what tune are they playing there?”

Now Doubting George doubted he’d heard correctly. “Why, the Battle Psalm of the Kingdom, of course,” he replied.

“Oh.” General Bart let out another chuckle, this one aimed at himself. “I only know two tunes, you see. One’s the Royal Hymn, and the other one—the other one isn’t.”

Another foolish joke. George laughed again, too. Then, seeing the wistful look on the commanding general’s face, he wondered if Bart had been joking.

Rollant yawned enormously. He’d been doing that ever since Sergeant Joram gave him a boot in the backside and got him out of his bedroll. Beside him, Smitty was yawning, too. They weren’t the only ones unhappy at having to make a night march. Everyone in the whole regiment seemed no better than half awake.

“This had better work,” Smitty grumbled. “If they made me lose sleep on account of some gods-damned brainless noble’s brainstorm, I’m really going to be hot.”

Such talk still faintly scandalized Rollant, even though the former serf had been living in the free and easygoing south for some years. Back in Palmetto Province, no one—and especially no blond—would have mocked the nobility so. He tried to hide his feelings with raillery of his own: “I’m sure all the dukes and counts and barons are trembling in their boots, Smitty.”

“They’d better be.” Smitty sounded as if he meant it. “It’s us commoners who do most of the work and make most of the money, and the bluebloods don’t remember it nearly often enough.”

That scandalized Rollant, too, and more than a little. He took the nobles and their privileges for granted; he was just glad to be out from under Baron Ormerod. “How would we run things if there weren’t any nobles?” he asked.

“I don’t know, but I expect we’d manage,” Smitty said. “Free Detinans can do whatever we set our minds to do.”

He did mean it. Rollant didn’t know whether he was right or wrong, but he did mean it. Most Detinans thought that way. They were convinced they were going somewhere important, and they all seemed eager for the journey. Rollant, now, Rollant had his doubts. But he’d grown up on an estate where the only place he could go was where Baron Ormerod told him to. That made a big difference. Nobody had an easy time telling free Detinans what to do. Even here in the army, they talked back to their sergeants and officers, and tried to come up with better ideas than the ones the generals had.

“Let’s go!” Sergeant Joram bellowed. “Come on! We can do it! We’re gods-damned well going to do it.”

No one talked back to him then. Rollant felt like it. Marching through the middle of the night wasn’t his idea of fun. But nobody asked what his idea of fun was. People just told him to do things and expected him to do them. He didn’t usually have too hard a time with that; he’d had practice obeying on Ormerod’s estate. Tonight, though, he was very tired.

Tired or not, he marched. So did everybody else—the army treated flat-out disobedience from soldiers even more ruthlessly than northern liege lords rooted it out among their serfs. “Watch where you’re putting your feet,” somebody not far from Rollant grumbled—in the darkness, he couldn’t see who.

“How can I watch?” somebody else said—maybe the offender, maybe not. “I can’t see the nose in front of my face.”

“It ain’t
that
dark, Lionel,” yet another soldier said, “and you’ve got yourself a cursed big nose.” Lionel expressed loud resentment of this opinion. Several other people spoke in support of it.

Rollant thought Lionel had a big nose, too. He thought most Detinans had pretty good-sized beaks. He didn’t join the debate, though. The Detinans were willing to let blonds fight for them. They were much less willing to hear what blonds had to say. That didn’t strike him as fair, but a lot of things didn’t strike him as fair.

Then somebody stepped on his heel, almost stripping the boot from his foot. “Careful, there,” he said.

“Sorry.” Whoever was marching along behind him didn’t sound very sorry, but he didn’t step on Rollant any more, either.

They tramped east. It was, Rollant realized little by little, a large column. Whatever he was part of—nobody’d bothered explaining it to him—looked to be something important. He didn’t suppose they would have sent out the column on a night march if it weren’t important. He hoped they wouldn’t, anyhow.

Somebody rode by on a unicorn. “Keep going, men,” he called. “When we get to the river, we’ll give the traitors a surprise.” He raised his hat. Starlight gleamed from his shiny crown.

“That’s Bill the Bald!” Smitty exclaimed. “He must be in charge of this whole move.”

“I’d like it better if we had Doubting George in charge of us,” Rollant said. “If he kept us from getting licked by the River of Death, I expect he can do just about anything.” Smitty didn’t argue with him.