Sentry Peak (37 page)

He almost threw that in Smitty’s face, too. Almost, but not quite. A blond who pushed too hard only ended up pounding his head against a wall. And most of Smitty’s heart was in the right place. If not quite all of it was, when had the world ever been perfect?

Sergeant Joram strode by. He nodded to Rollant. “Nice day, isn’t it?” he remarked.

Incautiously, Rollant answered, “If you ask me, it’s chilly.”

Sergeant Joram beamed. “Then you need some work to warm you up, don’t you? Draw yourself an axe and chop firewood.”

“Sergeant!” Rollant said, cursing having grown up in the milder autumns that prevailed down in Palmetto Province. He didn’t think Joram was picking on him because he was a blond. Joram picked on people because he was a sergeant, and that was all sergeants were good for—or so things seemed to common soldiers, at any rate.

Incautiously, Smitty laughed at Rollant’s fate. Joram beamed at him, too. “Misery loves company,” the sergeant observed. “You can chop wood, too.”

“Have a heart, Sergeant!” Smitty howled. Joram went on his merry way. For a heartless man, he walked very well. Even the blond warriors who’d fought against Smitty’s ancestors had surely known hearts were in short supply among underofficers.

“Misery loves company,” Rollant repeated spitefully. What Smitty said to him was a good deal more pungent than
have a heart
. Smitty didn’t have to waste politeness on a common soldier who was a blond to boot.

Mist shrouded the top of Sentry Peak and turned Proselytizers’ Rise, off to the west, into a vague dark gray shape hardly visible against the lighter gray of the sky. Smitty, still grumbling at everything, said, “This stinking fog means we can’t see what Thraxton the Braggart’s up to.”

“He can’t see what we’re up to, either,” Rollant pointed out as his axe thudded into a log. “Which counts for more?”

“I don’t know,” Smitty answered. “But after what that old he-witch did to us there by the River of Death, I want to keep an eye on him every gods-damned minute of the day and night.” He attacked the log in front of him as if it were Count Thraxton.

Rollant grunted with effort as he swung his own long-handled axe. Smitty had a point, perhaps a better one than he realized. To Detinans, magic was just another craft, just another skill. A man could be a fine mage in the same way as he could be a good cook. Rollant lived in that world, but wasn’t altogether of it. Among his people, magic was more personal, more dangerous. He dreaded a man like Count Thraxton in a way Smitty didn’t.

But when our magecraft met theirs, they smashed ours again and again
, he thought.
That must mean they’re right, or closer to right than we were, mustn’t it?
However little he liked the idea, he supposed it had to be true.

He’d been sure Joram would come by to see how they were doing. The sergeant smiled sweetly. “Feeling warmer now?” he inquired.

“Just fine,” Smitty said. Rollant didn’t say anything. Joram might have turned whatever passed his lips into an excuse to pile more work onto his shoulders. Of course, if Joram was looking for an excuse to pile more work onto his shoulders, he could always just invent one.

But he said, “All right, boys, that will do for now. Get Hagen to haul it off to the cooks.” He raised his voice to a shout: “Hey, Hagen! Got a job for you.”

“What do you need, Sergeant, sir?” The serf treated Joram as if the underofficer were his liege lord. “You tell me what to do, I do it.” He grinned. “Not only that, you even pay me to do it.” He liked money. And Sergeant Joram had never bothered his wife—if Corliss was bothered.

“Take this firewood to the cooks,” Joram said.

“Yes, sir, Sergeant, sir,” Hagen said. Joram grinned, enjoying every word of that. Rollant did his best not to grin, too. His amusement sprang from rather different sources. He’d laid flattery on with a trowel a few times himself, or perhaps rather more than a few. He remembered getting out of trouble with Baron Ormerod more than once by pretending Ormerod was just this side of a god. The Detinan noble had eaten it up. What man wouldn’t?

As the blond whom Rollant had brought in to the company picked up a big armload of wood, Rollant and Smitty quietly got out of Joram’s sight, lest the sergeant find them something else to do. They were gone before Joram bothered to look for them. He could have yelled and called them back, but he didn’t bother. He could pick on any common soldier in the company; he didn’t need to concentrate on the two of them.

“He’s not a bad sergeant,” Rollant said.

“There are worse,” Smitty allowed. “But there are better ones, too. Some of those bastards only want to sit around and get fat, and they don’t make their men work any harder than they do themselves.”

“I think you’re dreaming,” Rollant told him. “Serfs still tell the story of a kingdom out in the east someplace, where the blonds rule everything and they make the Detinans grow things and make things for them. It isn’t real. I think most of the blonds who tell the story know it isn’t real. But they tell it anyway, because it makes them feel good.”

“Turning the tables, eh?” Smitty said, and Rollant nodded. Smitty pointed. “Who’s the fancy new tent for? That wasn’t here last night.”

“Captain Cephas wasn’t here last night, either—he was back in Rising Rock,” Rollant pointed out, adding, “And you people say blonds are dumb.”

Smitty thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, as if to proclaim himself an idiot to the world at large. “Got to keep the captain feeling good,” he said.

Someone came out of the fancy tent: Corliss, Hagen’s wife. She looked as if someone—presumably Captain Cephas—had just made her feel good; Rollant had seen that slightly slack smile on his own wife’s face too many times after they made love to mistake it on another woman’s.

Corliss hurried away, back toward her own, smaller, tent. Smitty pursed his lips to whistle, but no sound came out. That might have been just as well. He turned toward Rollant. “She’s not trying to hide it, is she?”

“No.” Rollant felt . . . He didn’t know what he felt. How many blond women had had to lie down with Detinans since the invaders came over the Western Ocean? How many half-breed serfs remained tied to their noble fathers’ lands? More than any man, blond or dark, could easily reckon.

He didn’t think Cephas had forced himself on Corliss. He had no reason to think that. By all the signs, she’d been as eager as the officer. That should have made a difference. It did—and yet, it didn’t. What Rollant knew to be true had very little to do with what he felt.

As he had before, he said, “There’s going to be trouble.”

This time, Smitty picked his words with a little more care: “You worry too much, I think.”

“Well, let’s hope you’re right,” Rollant answered, which didn’t mean he agreed with the other soldier. He wished he knew what to do. He wished he thought anyone could do anything.

X

“
A
re we ready?” Lieutenant General Hesmucet demanded. General Bart shook his head. “Not quite yet,” he answered.

“What in the hells are we waiting for, then?” Hesmucet asked. “I’m here. Fighting Joseph is here. We’ve got unicorn-riders here all the way from Georgetown. What more do we need, sir? A fancy invitation from Thraxton the Braggart?” He was a hot-tempered man, and wanted nothing more than the chance to close with the traitors and beat them.

But Bart shook his head. “We’re still light on rations. Harvest is done, and there’s no foraging to speak of. I don’t want to move without being sure we won’t bog down because we’re too hungry to go forward.”

“Oh, very well,” Hesmucet said testily. “How long do you think we’ll need to build up the stores you want?”

“A couple of weeks more, unless Thraxton the Braggart pulls a sorcerous rabbit out of his hat,” Bart replied. “And I want to keep an eye on what’s happening off to the southwest. I may have to send out a detachment to help Whiskery Ambrose against Earl James. I hope I don’t, but you never can tell.” He sighed.

“Something wrong, sir?” Hesmucet asked. A sigh from General Bart often had more weight than a tantrum from a man with a spikier disposition.

“Only that I’d really rather not be fighting James,” the commanding general answered. “Back in the old army, back in the days when there was just one army, we were the best of friends.”

“That sort of thing
will
happen in a civil war, sir,” Hesmucet said. “I have plenty of friends among the traitors, too. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to lick them.”

“It doesn’t mean I don’t want to lick them, either, as you ought to know by now,” Bart said—a sharper comeback than he usually made. “It only means I wish I didn’t have to fight James. That’s all I said, and that’s all I meant.”

“Yes, sir,” Hesmucet replied, accepting the rebuke.

Bart chuckled. “I know you’re not a reporter or anyone else who claims he can read minds.”

“Ha!” Hesmucet’s answered smile was savage. “That would be funny, if only you were joking. You read what people have to say in the papers, they know what you’ll be up to six months from now.”

“Oh, I read them all the time,” Bart said. “I read them—I just make sure I don’t believe them.”

Hesmucet laughed out loud. Bart had a deadpan way of being funny he’d never met in another man. Here, though, the commanding general gave him a quizzical stare. He might have been funny, but he didn’t seem to have intended to. Hesmucet said, “When we do move, we’ll whip ’em.”

“That’s the idea,” Bart agreed. “Not much point to moving unless you move intending to whip the other fellow and then keep after him. I don’t know why so many generals have trouble with that notion, but they seem to.”

He made it sound so simple. When he fought, he made it look simple, too. Maybe it was, to him. Hesmucet felt the same way, and also tried to fight the same way. Bart was right: a lot of officers on both sides either wouldn’t move at all or moved for the sake of moving. And when they fought . . .

“If Thraxton had known what to do next after he beat Guildenstern by the River of Death, this army would have been in a lot more trouble than it was,” Hesmucet said.

“Well, I can’t tell you you’re wrong, because I think you’re right,” General Bart said. “When you’ve got somebody in trouble, you’d better go after him immediately.” He pronounced the word
immejetly
; aside from an eastern twang, it was one of the very few quirks his speech had. He nodded, as if to emphasize the point to Hesmucet. “If you don’t go after him, he’ll come after you sooner than you’d like.”

“That’s the truth,” Hesmucet said. “That’s the gods’ truth, and we’re going to prove it to the Braggart. And now, if you excuse me, I aim to make sure we’re good and ready to do just that.”

“Good.” Bart waved a hand in genial dismissal.

For the rest of the day, Hesmucet prowled through the force he’d brought west from along the Great River. He made sure the men had plenty of food and the unicorns and asses plenty of fodder. Considering the state Rising Rock had been in before the supply line back to Ramblerton opened up, victuals were his most urgent concern. As he’d expected and hoped, everything there was as it should have been.

But he didn’t stop with smoked meat and hard biscuits and hay. He spent a lot of time with the armorers, checking to be certain his men had enough crossbow bolts to fight a battle, and that the siege engines had more than enough darts and firepots.

“We’ll be fine, sir,” an armorer assured him. “Don’t you worry about a thing—we’ll be just fine.”

“If I didn’t worry, we might not be fine,” Hesmucet answered, which left the armorer scratching his head in bemusement.

And Hesmucet conferred with his mages. He knew from experience that magecraft got short shrift in most southron armies, sometimes including his own. The south was a land where artificers earned more respect than wizards, and a good many southron generals reckoned that having enough munitions would get them through almost any fight. Sometimes they were right. But sometimes they were wrong—and when they were wrong, they were disastrously wrong.

Hesmucet was not that sort of southron general. Maybe that was because he’d spent some time teaching at a northern military collegium, and seen how important sorcery was to the serf-keeping nobility of the north. If the traitors used it as an effective weapon of war—and they did, over and over again—he was cursed if he wouldn’t do the same.

One of his mages said, “You do realize, sir, that we are not fully a match for our northern counterparts. I am embarrassed to admit that, but I would be lying were I to deny it.”

A good many southron generals would have thrown their hands in the air at hearing such a thing. Again, Hesmucet was not that sort of southron general. He said, “Don’t worry about it.”

“Sir?” the mage said. His colleagues, especially those newly attached to Hesmucet’s command, looked startled, too.

“Don’t worry about it,” Hesmucet repeated. “I don’t ask you to beat Thraxton the Braggart all by yourselves with your magecraft. I ask you to make the son of a bitch work hard to get anything past
you
. If we can hold the traitors anywhere close to even when it comes to magic, we ought to whip them, because we’re stronger than they are every other way.”

Again, the mages—especially the new ones—gaped. “What a refreshing attitude,” said the one who’d spoken before.

“I wish more officers had it,” another added wistfully.

“Don’t fall down on the job, now,” Hesmucet warned. “We can’t afford to let the traitors ride roughshod over us.”

“Of course not, sir,” a mage said, as if northern wizards hadn’t ridden roughshod over their southron counterparts too many times.

But Hesmucet couldn’t rub the sorcerers’ noses in that. He was trying to build them up, not to tear them down. He said, “I’m sure you’ll all give your best for the king and for Detina.”

One of the mages, a youngish fellow with an eager gleam in his eye, stuck up a hand as Hesmucet was about to leave. When Hesmucet nodded to him, he said, “Sir, would it be useful to keep these clouds and this mist around for a while longer?”

“Useful? I should say so,” Hesmucet answered. “With the traitors peering down on us from Sentry Peak and Proselytizers’ Rise, the more bad weather, the better. But can you do anything about that? By what I’ve heard, weather magic is a nasty business.”

“It is, sir, if you try to make it sunny in the middle of a rainstorm or to bring snow in the summertime,” the sorcerer said. “But it’s a lot easier to ride the unicorn in the direction he’s already going—that’s what the proverb says, anyhow, and I think it’s true. This time of year, low-hanging clouds and fogs and mist happen all the time around Rising Rock.”

“So you can keep them happening?” Hesmucet said, and the mage nodded. Hesmucet stabbed out a finger at him. “But can you keep them happening
and
keep Thraxton the Braggart from noticing you’re doing it?”

“I think so, sir,” the wizard replied. “He might notice, he or his mages, if they really set their minds to investigating—but why would they? They know the weather around Rising Rock as well as we do—better than we do, in fact. Chances are, they’d just grumble and go on about their business.”

“I like the way you think,” Hesmucet said. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Alva, sir.”

“Well, Alva, you just talked yourself into a good deal of work, I’d say,” Hesmucet told him. “What happens if Thraxton decides to try a spell to lighten things up around these parts?”

“For one thing, sir, he’s working against the way the unicorn’s going,” Alva answered. “He’s a mighty mage, but he could try a spell like that and have it rain for a week afterwards—and he knows it, too. For another, even if he did try his spell and had it work, he probably wouldn’t notice mine. And even if he did notice mine, how are we worse off for trying?”

There was a question to warm Hesmucet’s heart. “We aren’t, by the gods,” he said. “Go ahead and take a shot at it, Alva. And you’re right—Thraxton’s spells have a way of going wrong just when he needs them most.”

Some of the other sorcerers congratulated Alva. Rather more of them looked jealous. That surprised Hesmucet not at all. People who wanted to get out there and do things, from all he’d seen, were more likely to draw people trying to hold them back than people trying to push them ahead.

He thought about warning the wizards. In the end, he held his tongue. Again, he was trying not to put pressure on them.
I wouldn’t treat my brigadiers so tenderly
, he thought. But mages weren’t brigadiers. If you tried to treat a tiger like a unicorn, you’d be sorry.

And if you treat southrons like men of no account and don’t believe they’ll do as they said and fight to keep the kingdom one, you’ll be sorry
. Hesmucet looked toward Thraxton’s headquarters on Proselytizers’ Rise and nodded. Thraxton couldn’t see or hear him, of course, but he didn’t care.

Full of restless energy, Hesmucet hurried back to General Bart and told him what Alva had in mind. Bart nodded. “That’s worth a try,” he said. “It’ll be good, if he can bring it off.”

“Just what I thought, sir,” Hesmucet said.

Bart nodded again. “And even if it doesn’t work, it’ll give Thraxton and the other northerners something new to flabble about. Having ’em run every which way after something we’re trying is a lot better than letting ’em plan their own mischief and making us pitch a fit.”

“That’s . . . true.” Hesmucet gave the commanding general a thoughtful look. “That’s very true, as a matter of fact, and I hadn’t thought of it.”

“You don’t want to make things too complicated,” Bart said. “If you push first, the other fellow has a harder time pushing back. And if you’ve known the other fellow for years, you’ve already got a pretty good notion of what he’ll do and what he won’t do. We went to the same military collegium as the traitors’ generals. We fought alongside ’em before they tried to pull out of Detina. We know who’s smart and who’s a fool. We know who’s brave and who isn’t, and who gets drunk when he shouldn’t.”

Was he talking about himself? Even more than General Guildenstern, before the war he’d had a reputation as a hard-drinking man. But Guildenstern had kept right on tippling, while Hesmucet couldn’t recall seeing General Bart with a glass of brandy or even wine in his hand since the fight against Grand Duke Geoffrey started.

Bart went on, “And, by the gods, we know who can get along with people and get the most of out of them and who can’t, don’t we?”

At that, Hesmucet threw back his head and laughed out loud. “Now who could you be talking about, sir? The chap who changes his wing commanders the way a dandy changes his pantaloons?”

“Count Thraxton is a fellow with a little bit of a temper on him,” Bart said, “and since we know that, we ought to take advantage of it, don’t you think?”

He did make things sound simple, simpler than they’d seemed to Hesmucet. He made good sense, too. Hesmucet could see that. He ran a hand along his closely trimmed beard. Maybe, as Bart said, the simple ability to see and to do all the obvious and important things—and to realize they
were
obvious and important—was what set fine generals apart from their less successful counterparts.

In that case
, Hesmucet thought,
we’re in pretty good shape here in Rising Rock
.

“No, no, no,” Doubting George said, not for the first time. “I don’t mind in the least. This is one of the things that happen in a war.”

Absalom the Bear shook his big, shaggy head back and forth, as if he were indeed the great beast that gave him his ekename. “It’s not fair, sir,” the burly brigadier said. “It’s not right. This ought to be your army now. You’re the one who made sure it’d still
be
an army.”

“It wasn’t my army when I did that—not that I did so much,” Lieutenant General George replied. “It was General Guildenstern’s.”

“So it was.” Absalom snorted. “And a whole great whacking lot of good
he
did with it, too.”

“What should I do—raise a rebellion?” George asked. “If I do, how am I different from Geoffrey?”

After that, Absalom looked like a flustered bear. “I certainly didn’t mean you should do anything of the sort, sir.”

“I doubted that you did,” George said dryly. “If you don’t want me leading my soldiers against General Bart and Lieutenant General Hesmucet, what
do
you want?”

“I want you to get the credit you deserve for saving this army,” Absalom said stubbornly. “You did that, and everybody knows it. You ought to be commanding here—you and nobody else.”

“No, no, no,” Doubting George said yet again. He was more flattered than angry, but he knew he had to look more angry than flattered, and he did.

“But why not?” Absalom the Bear demanded. “You saved the army, and—”

“Enough,” George broke in. Now he really was starting to get angry. “For one thing, I’m a long way from the only one who’s done something like that, you know. Bart saved King Avram’s army at Pottstown Pier, sure as sure he did, and that was an even bigger fight than the one by the River of Death.”