Reinstatement he would not get now. That was plain. He’d commanded his last army for King Geoffrey. “Well, it’s Geoffrey’s loss, gods damn him,” Bell muttered. He remained convinced he’d done everything he could-he remained convinced he’d done everything anyone could-to serve the north well. If things hadn’t always gone quite the way he would have wished… Well, if they hadn’t, that couldn’t possibly have been his fault. His subordinate commanders had botched too many fights the Army of Franklin should have, would have, won if only they’d followed his clear orders.
If they weren’t a pack of blundering fools, he thought, why did so many of them end up dead at Poor Richard? They got what they deserved, by the Thunderer’s hairy fist!
And one of these days-one of these days before too long, too-King Geoffrey would also get what he deserved. Bell could see that plainly now. Anyone coming into Nonesuch after long absence could see the kingdom was dying on its feet. Only someone who stayed here nearly all the time, like Geoffrey, could have any possible doubts on that score. We’ll all be stuck with Avram, and we’ll all be stuck with blonds.
Hating the idea but not knowing what he could do about it, Bell took his little bottle of laudanum off his belt. He yanked out the stopper and swigged. Healers sometimes gasped and turned pale when he told them how much laudanum he took every day. He didn’t care. He needed the drug. It held physical torment at something close to arm’s length. A good stiff dose also helped him avoid dwelling on any of the many things he didn’t care to contemplate.
He caressed the smooth glass curve of the laudanum bottle as if it were the curve of a lover’s breast. Till he was wounded, he’d never known how marvelous a drug could be. He tried to imagine his life these days without laudanum-tried and, shuddering, failed. Without laudanum, he wasn’t truly alive.
“And I never would have known if I hadn’t been wounded,” he murmured. “I would have missed all-this.” He caressed the bottle again. Laudanum made him real. Laudanum made him clever. As long as he had laudanum, everything that had happened to him, every single bit of it, was all worthwhile.
Captain Gremio had seen more in the way of warfare than he’d ever wanted. Now, in his own home province, he saw the final ruin to which the hopes of the north had come. Colonel Florizel’s soldiers had joined with the forlorn handful of men Count Joseph the Gamecock was using to try to hold back the great flood tide of General Hesmucet’s advance. With the addition of Florizel’s veterans, Joseph the Gamecock now had a forlorn double handful of men.
Handful or double handful, what Joseph didn’t have was enough men.
Hesmucet’s soldiers ranged through Palmetto Province almost as they pleased. Joseph had hoped the swamps and marshes in the north near Veldt would slow the southrons down as they swarmed south toward Parthenia. Building roads through the trackless wilderness, the southrons had broken through the difficult country faster than Joseph or any other northerner imagined possible.
Now Karlsburg, where the War Between the Provinces began and where Gremio lived, was lost. It wasn’t that Hesmucet’s men had captured the place. They hadn’t. They’d simply passed it by, heading for Hail, the provincial capital, and leaving a trail of devastation in their wake. Karlsburg would belong to Avram’s men as soon as they bothered to occupy it. At the moment, they were showing it the ultimate contempt: they weren’t even wasting their time to conquer it.
As a regimental commander, Gremio could hope to get answers to questions that would have kept his men guessing. When Count Joseph’s men camped outside of Hail one chilly night that made the place seem to live up to its name, he asked Colonel Florizel, “Sir, is there any chance we can hold them out of this city?”
Florizel looked at him for a long time before shaking his head. “No, Captain. We couldn’t hold them out if we had twice our men and they had half of theirs. We are ruined. We are finished. We are through.”
That would have hit Gremio harder if he hadn’t already expected it. “What can we do, sir?” he asked.
“Fall back through Hail. Destroy whatever’s in there that the gods-damned southrons might be able to use. Stop on the south bank of the next river we come to. Pray to the gods that we can delay Hesmucet for a few hours. If we’re very, very lucky, maybe we can even delay him for a whole day. Then we fall back to the river after that and pray to the gods again.” Florizel, who’d carried so much on his broad, sturdy shoulders for so long, sounded like a man altogether bereft of hope.
Gremio had been without hope for a long time. He’d hoped to borrow a little from his strong-hearted superior. Finding none, he gave Florizel his best salute and went back to his regiment. “What’s the news, sir?” Sergeant Thisbe asked, perhaps hoping to borrow some from him.
“The news is… bad, Sergeant,” Gremio answered, and relayed what Colonel Florizel had said.
Thisbe frowned. “You’re right, sir. That doesn’t sound good. If we can’t hang on to Hail, what’s the point of going on with the war?”
“You would do better to ask that of King Geoffrey than of me,” Gremio said. “His Majesty might be able to answer it. I, on the other hand, have no idea.”
“All right, sir,” the underofficer said. “I won’t give you any more trouble about it, then. Seems to me we’ve got trouble enough.”
“Seems to me you’re right,” Gremio said. “I wish you weren’t, but you are.”
If they had tried to fight in Hail, they would have been quickly surrounded and destroyed. That was obvious. Like Doubting George’s army after the fight in front of Ramblerton, General Hesmucet’s force kept extending tentacles of soldiers, hoping to trap its foes. As Joseph the Gamecock had in Peachtree Province, he traded space for time. The difference here was, he really couldn’t afford to lose any more space at all, and he-along with the north-was fast running out of time.
Old men and boys and women cursed Joseph’s soldiers as they marched south through Hail. A white-bearded fellow pointed to the governor’s palace and shouted at Gremio, who stood out perhaps because of his epaulets: “That’s where we started! That’s where we said we wouldn’t be part of Detina any more, not if gods-damned Avram was going to take our serfs off the land where they belong. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“It means a great deal to me, sir,” Gremio answered stiffly.
“Then why the hells are you running away instead of fighting to save it?” the old man howled.
“Why? Because we can’t save it,” Gremio said. “If we try, we’ll lose the palace and we’ll lose this army, too. This way, the army lives to fight” — or to run, he thought- “another day.”
He didn’t convince the man with the white beard. He hadn’t thought he would. The local kept right on yammering complaints and protests. That, of course, did him no good at all. Meanwhile, Joseph the Gamecock’s army went about wrecking everything in Hail that might have been of some use to General Hesmucet. They set the arsenal ablaze: it had more sheaves of crossbow quarrels and more squat, deadly firepots than the soldiers could take with them. Up in flames they went, to keep the southrons from seizing them and flinging them at Joseph’s men.
Bolt after bolt of indigo-dyed wool and cotton cloth burned, too. Hesmucet’s men might dye it gray and turn it into their tunics and pantaloons. Better they didn’t have the chance. So said Joseph, and no one disobeyed. More fires rose up to the heavens.
Joseph had almost waited too long. His little army was just pulling out of Hail at sunset as the vanguard of Hesmucet’s much bigger army entered the provincial capital. Gremio’s regiment stopped for the night a few miles south of town, when it got too dark to march any farther. Campfires flickered to life.