Sentry Peak (7 page)

“You know what it is, your Grace?” James asked.

“I don’t know, no, but from your countenance I should guess his Majesty has chosen to send your soldiers east,” Duke Edward replied.

“He has.” Earl James of Broadpath bowed to his commanding officer. “And I am in your debt, sir, for your generous endorsement.”

“Hard times require hard measures,” the duke said. “I am not certain this action will answer, but I am certain inaction will not answer. Go east, then, and may the gods go with you. I trust your men are ready to move at short notice?”

“Yes, sir,” James said. “All we need do is break camp, march to the glideway port at Lemon’s Justiciary, and off we go eastward.”

“Not quite so simple as that, I fear,” Edward said, “for it is reported the southrons have lately wrested from us the most direct glideway path leading eastward. But the wizards in charge of such things do assure me a way from here to Count Thraxton’s army does remain open: only it is not so direct a way as we might wish.”

“Then I’d best leave without any more delay, hadn’t I, your Grace?” Without waiting for Duke Edward’s reply—although Edward might not have had one; he approved of men who took things into their own hands and moved fast—James bowed, spun on his heel in a smart about-face, and hurried back toward his own pavilion.

As he neared it, he shouted for the trumpeters who served him. They came at the run, long, straight brass horns gleaming in their hands. “Command us, sir!” one of them cried.

Command them James of Broadpath did: “Blow
assembly
. Summon my whole army to the broad pasture.”

The trumpeters saluted. As they raised the horns to their lips, one of them asked, “Your Excellency, does this mean we’re heading east, to whip the stinking, lousy, gods-detested southrons out of Franklin?” Rumor had swirled through the army for days.

Getting King Geoffrey’s army back
into
Franklin would be a good first step toward getting the southrons out. But James just waggled a finger at the trumpeter and said, “You’ll hear when everyone else does. I haven’t the time to waste—the kingdom hasn’t the time for me to waste—telling things over twice.”

Martial music rang out—the call for Earl James’ army to gather together. As the trumpeters played, they eyed James reproachfully. He knew why; Count Thraxton’s army wouldn’t have fallen to pieces had James given them the news before anyone else got it. He wagged his finger at them again. One of them missed a note. That made the others eye their comrade reproachfully. They took pride in what they did. James nodded at that; anything worth doing was worth doing well.

Soldiers in blue tunics and pantaloons—and some in blue tunics and in gray pantaloons taken from southrons who didn’t need them any more—hurried from their tents and huts to the meadow where they gathered to hear such announcements as their commander chose to give them. They formed by squads, by companies, by regiments, by brigades, by divisions. At the head of one of the three divisions stood Brigadier Bell, a fierce smile brightening his pain-wracked face. Unlike the trumpeters, he had a pretty good notion of what James would say.

James strode out in front of the crossbowmen, the pikemen, and the unicorn-riders he commanded. As he ascended to a little wooden platform, he was very conscious of the thousands of eyes upon him. That sort of scrutiny made most men quail. Whatever else James was, he wasn’t modest. He relished the attention.

When he held up a hand, complete and instant silence fell. Into it, General James boomed, “Soldiers of the Army of Southern Parthenia, soldiers of my wing, King Geoffrey has given us the duty of coming to the rescue of our beset comrades in the east. As you will know, Count Thraxton has been forced from Rising Rock, forced from Franklin altogether. He is—the kingdom is—counting on us to come to his aid, to help him drive the invaders from our sister province. The Army of Southern Parthenia is the finest force of fighters in Detina—in all the world. When we go east, shall we show Thraxton—shall we show General Guildenstern, may the gods curse him—how soldiers who know their business make war?”

“Aye!” his troopers roared, a great blast of sound.

“Good,” James said. “Tomorrow morning, then, at dawn, we march to the glideway port at Lemon’s Justiciary. From there, we fare forth to Peachtree Province, and from
there
we help Count Thraxton bring Franklin back to its proper allegiance. Is it good?”

“Aye!” the men in blue roared again.

Earl James saluted them as if they were his superiors, which made them cheer louder than ever. But when he raised his right hand, the cheers cut off as if at a swordstroke.
They’re fine men
, he thought.
No commander could ask for better. More, perhaps, but not better
. “Dismissed!” he called to them. “Be ready to move when your officers and underofficers give the word.”

As the soldiers streamed back toward their encampment, Brigadier Bell came up to James. The lines of agony from Bell’s crippled arm would probably never leave his face, but his eyes shone. “A new chance,” he breathed. “A chance to strike the southrons the blow we’ve been looking to strike since the war began.”

“A new chance,” James of Broadpath agreed. “Maybe our best chance.”

“Yes!” Bell said. “We have never shifted men from the Army of Southern Parthenia to the east. Guildenstern won’t expect it.” His lip curled. “Guildenstern hasn’t the mother wit to expect much.”

“Maybe our best chance,” Earl James repeated. His spirit wanted to soar. Bell’s eagerness and the way the men responded to the transfer order tried to make it soar. But the war—the war he, like so many of Geoffrey’s followers, had gaily assumed would be won in weeks—had ground into its third year with no end in sight. And so, instead of scaling his hat through the air in glee, he added, “Maybe our last chance, too.”

The divisional commander stared at him. “Your Excellency, this is your scheme,” Bell reminded him. “Have you no faith in it?”

“With the way the war has gone, my view at this stage of things is that any man who has faith in anything but the gods is a fool,” James answered. “What I have is hope, a more delicate, more fragile flower.”

He might as well have started speaking the language of the camel-riding desert barbarians of the western continent, for all the sense he made to Brigadier Bell. Well, that was the advantage of being a superior officer. Bell didn’t have to see the sense in his words. All he had to do was obey. And he could be relied upon for that.

Getting James’ effects ready to move took some doing: he had a great many more effects than his troopers did. Even with some serfs from Broadpath helping knock down the pavilion and load it and its contents into a couple of wagons, he felt rushed and harried. But he couldn’t very well require of the men what he did not match himself. And so, mounted on his big-boned unicorn, he led the march out of camp at sunrise the next morning.

Lemon’s Justiciary was named after the stone fortress where an early Count Lemon had had his courthouse. A little town had grown up around the fortress after the local blonds were subdued, a little town that had got bigger when the glideway went through and the port was built a stone’s throw from that frowning stone keep.

For ages, men had dreamt of flying. Those camel-riding desert barbarians had tales of flying carpets. But that was all they were: tales. Modern mages in Detina and in the kindred kingdoms back across the Western Ocean had finally persuaded carpets to rise a couple of feet off the ground and travel along certain sorcerously defined glideways at about the speed of a galloping unicorn. It wasn’t what poets and storytellers had imagined—but then, the real world rarely matched poems and stories. It was a great deal better than nothing.

Or it would have been, had any carpets waited at the Lemon’s Justiciary glideway port. James and his men were there. Their conveyances?

James set hands on hips and roared at the portmaster: “Where are they, you worthless, stinking clot?”

“Don’t blame me, your Excellency,” the portmaster answered. “By the gods, you can’t blame me. Something must have got buggered up somewheres further north—in Nonesuch its ownself, or up in Pierreville north of there. I can’t give you what I don’t got.” He spread his hands. He went further than that: he pulled out the pockets of his pantaloons to show he had no traveling carpets hidden there.

Cursing did no good. James cursed anyway. Setting his hand on the hilt of his sword did no good, either. That didn’t stop him from half drawing the blade. He said, “I can’t travel on what I haven’t got, either. And if I can’t travel, I can’t save the kingdom. The longer I have to wait here twiddling my thumbs, the longer the army has to wait here twiddling
its
thumbs, the greater the risk the war in the east will be lost past fixing. Well, sirrah, what do you say to
that
?”

With a shrug, the portmaster answered, “Only one thing I can say, your Excellency: I can’t do nothing about it.”

The fleet of carpets finally glided into Lemon’s Justiciary nearer to noon than to sunrise. By then, James of Broadpath was about ready to murder the mages who piloted it. But that would only have made him later still getting to the northern border of Peachtree Province. And those mages, once he got a good look at them, proved plainly weary unto death. The southrons, being tradesmen ever ready to ship their goods now here, now there, had gone into the war with far more glideways and far more wizards able to exploit them than was true in the provinces that had declared for King Geoffrey. They’d got good use from them, too. Till he had to do it, Earl James hadn’t really worried about how hard it was to move and feed large numbers of soldiers. Glideways and their mages helped.

A few days before, he could have got to Peachtree Province by a relatively straight route through eastern Parthenia. But, as Duke Edward had said, one of Avram’s armies now bestrode that glideway path, which meant James’ men had a far more roundabout road to go. Once all his troopers—and their animals, and their catapults, and the fodder for the beasts and the darts and firepots for the engines—were finally aboard the carpets, they had to travel north through Parthenia, through Croatoan (which was supposed to mean something filthy in the language of the blond tribes that had dwelt by the shore of the Western Ocean when the Detinans first came from overseas), and into Palmetto Province before finally swinging east toward Marthasville in Peachtree Province . . . from which they would finally be able to go south toward the border and Count Thraxton’s waiting army.

The journey would have tried the patience of a saint. James doubted whether even Duke Edward could have stayed calm through its beginnings—especially through the half-day delay occasioned by ferrying men and beasts and impedimenta over a river whose bridge had collapsed for no visible reason save perhaps the malignity of the gods. James didn’t try. He bellowed. He cursed. He fumed. He consigned whoever had made that bridge to some of the less desirable real estate in the seven hells.

“Will we be in time, your Excellency?” Brigadier Bell asked once they got moving again.

“We’d better be,” Earl James of Broadpath growled. “In spite of everything, I think we will be. And when we get there on time, we’re going to make a lot of southron soldiers late.” He rubbed his beefy hands together in anticipation.

A gold dragon on red flew in front of every company as General Guildenstern’s army triumphally entered Rising Rock. “Show these traitors why they lost,” Captain Cephas told Rollant’s company. “March so you’d make King Avram proud of you.” He couldn’t have found a better way to make Rollant do his best. Serfs and ex-serfs cared more for Avram than did most free men.

Sergeant Joram added, “March so you’ll make
me
proud of you, or you’ll end up wishing you’d never been born.” Hearing that, Rollant changed his mind. Keeping his sergeant happy was ever so much more important than pleasing King Avram. The king was far away, in the Black Palace in Georgetown. He would never have anything directly to do with Rollant. Joram, by contrast . . .

At the head of General Guildenstern’s army, a band struck up the royal hymn. Beside Rollant in the ranks, Smitty murmured, “That’s pretty stupid. Grand Duke Geoffrey uses the same air as Avram.”

“Silence in the ranks!” Sergeant Joram shouted. The end of his pointed black beard twitched in indignation. “Rollant, you can haul water for the squad tonight for running your mouth.”

“But—” Rollant began. Then he bit down on whatever he’d been about to say. He wouldn’t make Joram change his mind, and he would make his squadmates hate him. Being a blond in a dark-haired world wasn’t easy. He had to keep swallowing injustice, and he never got the chance to give any out.

“Forward—march!” Captain Cephas called as the motion of the column finally reached his company. Off the soldiers went, always beginning with the left foot. Rollant hadn’t had an easy time learning that; it was the opposite of what he’d been used to doing on Baron Ormerod’s estate. Beginning with the right foot was the serfs’ way of doing things throughout northern Detina; nobles and strawbosses hadn’t bothered trying to change it. But Detinans themselves began with the left, and King Avram’s army was profoundly Detinan even if it included some blond soldiers.

“Left—right! Left, right, left, right!” Sergeant Joram’s cadence count underscored the difference.

Behind the kingdom’s banner—the banner whose colors the northern traitors reversed—Rollant strode into Rising Rock. Back in the days when he was a serf, this collection of clapboard and brick buildings, some of the latter rising four or even five stories high, would have awed him. He remembered how astonished he’d been when he sneaked through northern towns on his way south after fleeing Ormerod’s estate. Now he put on a fine southron sneer. You could drop Rising Rock in the middle of New Eborac and it would vanish without a trace. Even the gray stone keep by the river wasn’t so much of a much, not when set against the southron city’s temples and secular buildings that seemed to scrape the sky.

Up ahead, the band switched to the kingdom’s battle hymn. Rollant’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a fierce grin. The northerners hadn’t kept that one; they had their own martial music. The battle hymn of the kingdom belonged to King Avram alone, to him and to the serfs he was freeing from their longstanding ties to the land.