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their army off from its supplies, or Geoffrey's badly wounded."
"You . . . don't usually talk like that, sir," Gremio said.
And the last time I talked like that, you came as near as near can be to
calling me a coward. I had to try to get myself killed to make you change your
mind
.
"I'm not blind," Florizel answered. "I know we needed to hold Marthasville. I
know we didn't do it. I'm not stupid, either, no matter what a highfalutin'
barrister might think."
"Sir, I've never said anything of the sort," Gremio insisted.
"I know you didn't. I never said you did," Florizel told him. "I said what you
were thinking, and I wasn't wrong, was I?"
He used words as precisely as if he were a barrister himself. Gremio said, "I
don't know what you're talking about, sir. You've led this regiment well, and
I've never thought otherwise." That was the truth, too, even if it wasn't
altogether responsive.
"You wouldn't be breathing if you had run your mouth," Florizel replied.
Gremio looked for an answer to that, found none, and decided it might have
been just as well.
As he'd expected, the Army of Franklin swung back toward the southeast, the
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direction of the glideway line that kept General Hesmucet and the southrons
fed. The
Army of Franklin was for the time being making do without a glideway line; the
countryside was rich and fertile, and the soldiers had no trouble keeping
themselves fed.
Juices sizzled as a fowl a fowl that had probably belonged to a loyal northern
farmer cooked over a fire. Turning the stick that spitted the bird, Sergeant
Thisbe said, "If we can feed ourselves off the country here, why can't the
southrons do the same?"
Gremio started to give that a flip answer, but stopped with the words
unspoken.
"Good question," he said after a pause. "The only thing I can think of is,
there are a lot more of them than there are of us. Of course, they also have a
proper baggage train, and we don't."
"We burned ours in Marthasville," Thisbe said.
"We can move faster without it." Gremio put the best face on things he could.
"Yes, and we can start starving faster, too." But Thisbe lifted the fowl from
the flames. He blew on it, then drew his knife from its sheath and started
carving. Handing
Gremio a leg, he said, "You fancy the dark meat, don't you?"
"Right now, I fancy anything that'll keep my stomach from bumping up against
the notches on my backbone," Gremio answered. He ate the hot flesh, savoring
the grease from the skin. Somebody else had a pot full of turnips boiling over
another fire. Gremio
got a tin plate piled high with them. He ate and ate, then blissfully thumped
his belly. "Do you know what, Sergeant?"
"No, sir. What?" Thisbe spoke with his mouth full: he was still demolishing
his plateload.
"Those turnips needed salt
," Gremio declared.
"You're right," Thisbe agreed. "But I'm still better with 'em than I would be
without
'em."
"Can't quarrel with that," Gremio said. "Can't quarrel with anything, not any
more."
He yawned. "Can't do anything much right now except roll over and go to
sleep." He wrapped himself in his blanket much more to hold mosquitoes at bay
than to keep him warm and did just that.
When the army started marching again the next morning, it kept on going
southeast.
Without a baggage train to delay it, it did move faster than the southron
force. General
Hesmucet didn't seem much interested in pursuit, anyhow; maybe Marthasville
was
enough to satisfy him. Gremio hoped so. He'd had enough fighting against long
odds to suit him for a while for the next hundred years, come to that.
Bell passed well south of Marthasville on his way east. Gremio knew at once
when the Army of Franklin returned to land that had seen war already this
campaigning season.
How long would the swath of war, the gouge of the Lion God's claws, scar
Peachtree
Province? If not for generations, he would have been astonished.
He was astonished when Bell passed over the glideway line with no more than a
few hasty spells from the sorcerers. "What's the point of that?" he asked
anyone who would listen to him. "Even southrons can put things to rights in a
hurry."
But Colonel Florizel, for once, had an answer that satisfied him: "I hear
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we're heading east into Dothan to rest and refit, and then we'll come back and
hit the southrons a proper lick."
"Gods know we could use rest and refit," Gremio said, and the regimental
commander nodded. Gremio asked, "Will we get any reinforcements? We could use
them, too." They could use them to replace the men Lieutenant General Bell had
thrown away in one futile attack after another. Gremio saw no point to saying
that, but he thought it very loudly.
Florizel only shook his head. "No reinforcements I've heard about, Captain. If
we'd had more men handy, don't you suppose they would have come into
Marthasville a long time ago?"
"You're probably right," Gremio admitted. "But the southrons keep getting
fresh men whenever they need them. It would be nice if we didn't have to
depend on the soldiers who started the war."
That was an exaggeration, but not an enormous one. Florizel's answering
grimace showed a broken front tooth. That tooth hadn't been broken when the
war was new;
Gremio would have taken oath on it. Little by little, the fighting wore the
men down in all sorts of ways.
Here, though, marching was easy. Hesmucet mounted no real chase of the Army of
Franklin. Maybe Marthasville had been his target all along. Or maybe . . .
"Maybe he doesn't think we can hurt him any more," Gremio said once the
battered army entered the province of Dothan.
"If he doesn't, he'll get himself a nasty surprise," Sergeant Thisbe declared.
"We've still got teeth, by the gods."
Gremio nodded. Man for man, northern soldiers remained at least as formidable
as their southron counterparts. Teeth, as Thisbe had said. But how strong were
the jaws that held those teeth? The more Gremio thought about the state of the
Army of Franklin, the closer he came to despair.
* * *
"Corporal, take up the company standard!" Lieutenant Griff commanded.
"Yes, sir
!" Rollant said, and he did. Pride swelled in him till he felt about to float
away like an inflated pig's bladder. The more he thought about the state of
General
Hesmucet's army, about how far they'd come and how much they'd done, the more
he imagined he was on the point of floating away.
That must have shown on his face, for Smitty, grinning, asked him, "You happy,
your Corporalship, sir?"
"Oh, just a little," Rollant answered. "Yes, just a little."
"Form up for parade," Griff called to his men. "I don't want anybody missing a
step, not a single step, when we go through town today. Marthasville is ours,
and fairly won, as
General Hesmucet said in his order of the day. And I want those traitor
bastards to know we aren't just good enough to lick 'em we can be fancier than
they are, too." Rollant nodded vigorously. He wanted to show up, to show off
before, the people who had once bound him to the land.
Treat me like a cow with hands, will you? You'll see!
Horns blared. Griff started shouting again. Colonel Nahath's order carried
farther:
"Forward march!"
Forward Rollant went, holding the gold dragon on red high. The standard
fluttered in the breeze. Griff nodded. "That's good. That's very good,
Corporal. Let the folk of
Marthasville see the kingdom's true flag. They've looked at the reversed
banner too long."
Rollant shook the standard to display the dragon better still. He wanted the
Detinans in Marthasville to get a good look at it and at him. He strutted. He
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swaggered. He displayed the stripes on his left arm as best he could, so the
people who'd called themselves liege lords would see what a blond could do
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