The men all knew that. Most of them also probably knew, or knew of, someone who’d broken a foot or an ankle or a leg against a rock or a tree trunk that happened to lie too close to a glideway line. Detinans were stubborn people who delighted in flouting rules, no matter how sensible those rules might be.
Silently, smoothly, the carpets slid west along the glideway. The silence persisted. The smoothness? No. The spells on the glideway line badly needed refurbishing. No mages seemed to have bothered doing that essential work. The wizards the north had were all busy doing even more essential work: trying to keep the southrons from pushing deeper into King Geoffrey’s tottering realm. They weren’t doing any too well at that, but they were trying.
Great River Province and Dothan had suffered relatively little from the war. Even in those provinces, though, everything had a shabby, rundown look to it, as if no one had bothered taking care of anything that wasn’t vital since the war began. Gremio saw a lot of women working in the fields, sometimes alongside blond serfs, sometimes by themselves. No Detinan men who didn’t have white beards were there to help them. If they didn’t take care of things themselves, who would? Nobody.
A measure of how little the war had touched Great River Province and Dothan was that serfs were working in the fields. Down in Franklin, most of the blonds had fled their liege lords’ holdings, choosing with their feet liberation from feudal ties. Northern nobles had long proclaimed that blonds preferred the security of being tied to the land. The evidence looked to be against them.
Here and there, the path the soldiers detached from the Army of Franklin took twisted like a drunken earthworm. Even here, so far north, southron raiders had sometimes penetrated. Their wizards had dethaumatized stretches of the glideway. On those stretches, the carpets might as well have lain on the floor of some duke’s dining hall, for all the inclination toward flight they displayed. The soldiers had to roll them up and carry them along till they reached a working stretch of glideway once more.
And then, more slowly than they should have, the glideway carpets reached Peachtree Province. They had to skirt Marthasville, which had been the hub of all glideway routes. It still lay in the southrons’ hands, and the garrison there was far too strong for this ragtag force to hope to overcome. Instead, Florizel’s men and those led by Benjamin the Heated Ham went west and then north. They passed through the swath of destruction Hesmucet’s army had left a couple of months before, marching west from Marthasville to the Western Ocean.
That swath was a good forty miles wide. The southrons had ruined the glideways along with everything else. The men who’d set out from Honey had to march across it, and they got hungry on the way. Hesmucet’s men had burned every farm and castle they came upon. They’d ravaged fields, cut down fruit trees, and slaughtered every animal they caught. Skeletons with bits of hide and flesh still clinging to them dotted the landscape. Vultures still rose from the bones, though the carrion birds had long since battened on most of the bounty presented them. The stench of death lingered.
No blonds remained here. They’d run off with the southrons by the thousands.
“How could Hesmucet’s men do such a thing?” Thisbe wondered.
“How? Simple,” Gremio answered grimly. “They were strong enough, and we couldn’t stop them.”
Everyone was grim by the time the detachment reached the far edge of that strip of devastation torn across Peachtree Province. It had to run all the way from Marthasville to the ocean. Had Geoffrey’s kingdom been strong, Hesmucet’s men never could have done such a thing. Since they had…
Colonel Florizel wasn’t far from despair by the time his men got to unravaged soil. He came up to Gremio, asking, “How can I ask even the bravest soldiers to give their lives for King Geoffrey’s realm when everything is falling into ruin here at the heart of it?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Gremio answered. “How much more can we take before… before we go under?” Before the disaster in front of Ramblerton, he wouldn’t have dared ask his superior such a question. Florizel would have called him a defeatist, maybe even a traitor. Now not even Florizel could believe the north’s prospects were good.
He looked at Gremio for a long time before he shook his head and said, “I don’t know, either, Captain. By the Thunderer’s strong right arm, though, we’d better find out soon.” He stumped away without waiting for a reply.
Later that evening, Gremio and Thisbe sprawled wearily in front of a campfire. Gremio said, “I think even the colonel is losing hope.” He told Thisbe what had passed between Florizel and him.
“What do you think, sir?” Thisbe asked, staring into the yellow flames as if they were a crystal ball. “Is it all over? Shall we go home when we get to Palmetto Province, or do we still have a chance if we still keep fighting?”
“I’ll fight as long as you will, Sergeant.” Gremio had thought that before, but now he amplified it: “If you decide you’ve had enough, I won’t say a word.”
Thisbe swung around to face him. “That’s not fair, sir-putting it all on me, I mean.”
“I’m sorry, Sergeant,” Gremio said. “I just thought-”
“You didn’t think, sir,” Thisbe said with a shake of the head. “You’re the officer, so it’s really up to you. You said so yourself, when we were getting on the glideway carpet at Honey.”
“I do believe I’ve just been hoist with my own petard.” Gremio mimed taking a deadly wound.
Although Thisbe laughed, the underofficer’s face remained serious. “If it is up to you, sir, what will you do?”
“I’ll see how things look when we get into Palmetto Province, and I’ll make up my mind then,” Gremio answered. “What will you do?”
“Follow you,” Thisbe said without hesitation. “I know you’ll come up with the right thing to do. You always have.”
“Thank you. I only wish it were true.”
Before they could say any more, a rider came up from the southwest. “Are you the men coming to the aid of Joseph the Gamecock?” he asked tensely, looking ready to gallop away in a hurry if the answer were no.
But Gremio said, “That’s right. How are things in Palmetto Province these days? A lot of us are from there.”
“Been a lot of rain,” the unicorn-rider answered. “Plenty of what would be roads most of the year are underwater now. That ought to slow down the gods-damned southrons. If it doesn’t, we’re in a hells of a lot of trouble, on account of those fornicating bastards outnumber us about five to one.”
Gremio and Sergeant Thisbe looked at each other. That was what had happened to Lieutenant General Bell. Once you came to a certain point, bravery stopped mattering much. No matter how brave you were, you’d get hammered if you were outnumbered badly enough.
One of Gremio’s soldiers said, “Well, it ain’t so bad any more, on account of now you’ve got us.”
The unicorn-rider managed a nod, but the look on his face was pained. Gremio didn’t, couldn’t, blame him for that. A good many farmers who put on Geoffrey’s blue tunic and pantaloons had hardly more education than blond serfs. The men who’d come from Bell’s shattered army to the one Joseph the Gamecock was trying to build might mean his force was outnumbered only four to one. How much would that help him when he tried to hold back Hesmucet? The answer seemed obvious to Gremio, if not to the common soldier.
“What do we do now, sir?” Thisbe asked.
It wasn’t a question about how they should proceed on the next day’s travel. Gremio knew it wasn’t, and wished it were. It would have been much easier to deal with as that sort of question. He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know, Sergeant. I just don’t know.”
XI
Sergeant Rollant looked across the Franklin River. On the north bank, Ned of the Forest’s unicorn-riders trotted up and down on endless patrol. Rollant reached for his crossbow, but arrested the motion before it got very far. What was the point? The Franklin was a lot more than a bowshot wide.