King Geoffrey still made bold speeches. To listen to him, victory lay right around the corner. To look around in Nonesuch was to know Geoffrey was whistling in the dark. Everyone’s eyes fearfully went to the north, where Duke Edward and the Army of Southern Parthenia had ever more trouble holding Marshal Bart and his men in gray away from the last couple of glideway lines that fed the city-and, not so incidentally, the army. If Bart seized those glideways, Nonesuch-and Duke Edward-would commence to starve.
And even if Bart didn’t seize the glideways, how much would it matter in the end? Everything was scarce. Everything was expensive. Prices had been bad in Great River Province. They were worse here, much worse. Almost everything cost ten or twenty times what it had before the war began. Bell understood why, too, for the coins Geoffrey put out these days, though called silver, were copper thinly washed with the more precious metal. Bell didn’t like using them, either.
If a man had King Avram’s silver money, he could buy whatever he pleased, and at a civilized price. That also said too much about how the war was going.
For the time being, King Geoffrey was still feeding and housing Bell. Even if Bell had renounced command of the Army of Franklin, he remained a lieutenant general in his chosen sovereign’s service. How much Geoffrey welcomed that service at the moment was an open question. He did not publicly renounce it, though.
Not publicly renouncing Bell’s service and feeding and housing him were as far as Geoffrey went. Time after time, Bell tried to secure an audience with the king. Time after time, he found himself rebuffed. At length, his temper fraying, he growled to a flunky, “I don’t believe his Majesty wants to talk to me.”
The flunky, who remained as toplofty as if Geoffrey’s armies had overrun New Eborac City, looked at him from hooded eyes. “What ever could have given you that impression, Lieutenant General?”
Bell glowered back. “I’m having trouble believing the king has all this many meetings and such-like things.”
“Are you? What a pity,” the servitor murmured. “Some people will believe anything.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bell asked.
“Why, what it said, of course,” the other man replied.
He refused to be pushed. He was as agile with words as a dueling master with sabers. After a while, Bell gave up and went away. That that might have been what King Geoffrey’s secretary had in mind never occurred to him.
But Bell, almost by accident, figured out a response to Geoffrey’s evasions. Since the king would not see him, since the king would not hear him, he started telling his story to anyone else who might listen. That included his fellow officers in Geoffrey’s capital, the nobles who thronged into Nonesuch to be near the king, and the merchants and gamblers who kept trying to get rich when everyone else got poorer and hungrier by the day. Bell talked-and talked, and talked.
After several days of this, everybody in Nonesuch was talking about what had happened in front of Ramblerton-and talking about Bell’s version of what had happened there. That version, perhaps not surprisingly, gave Bell as much credit as could be salvaged from what had befallen the north.
The rumors Bell had started soon reached King Geoffrey’s ears. And Geoffrey, who’d spent much of the war trying to strangle rumors, was naturally unenthusiastic about having more start. He didn’t summon Bell to him to discuss the officer’s reinstatement: he summoned him to try to get him to shut his mouth.
To Lieutenant General Bell, the difference in the two possible reasons for the summons was academic. That Geoffrey had summoned him to the citadel of Nonesuch was all that mattered. Bell was earnest, Bell was aggressive, but Bell had the political sense of a watermelon. Worse, he was completely unaware he had the political sense of a watermelon. As far as he was concerned, the summons represented a vindication of sorts.
Grim-faced guards in blue stood outside the citadel in Geoffrey’s capital. For the life of him, Bell couldn’t figure out why they looked so grim. They were here on ceremonial duty, weren’t they? If they’d been in the trenches of Pierreville with the Army of Southern Parthenia facing Marshal Bart’s army, they would have had some excuse for long faces. As things were? Not likely!
Well fortified with laudanum, Bell hitched along on crutches past the guards and into the citadel. King Geoffrey’s throne resembled nothing so much as a gilded dining-room chair. Well, how much does Geoffrey resemble a king? Bell asked himself. But the answer to that formed in his mind at once: more than Avram does, by the Lion God’s fangs!
Had Bell not been mutilated, he would have had to bow low before his sovereign. As things were, he contented himself with a nod and a murmured, “Your Majesty.”
“Lieutenant General,” Geoffrey replied, his voice colder than winter.
Bell waited for the king to order a blond servitor to bring him a chair. The king did no such thing. As Bell stood there, taking weight on his left leg and right crutch, Geoffrey glowered down at him from that cheap-looking throne. That was when the general began to suspect how angry at him the king really was. Bell should have been sure of that from the moment the second day’s fighting in front of Ramblerton went wrong. He should have, but he hadn’t, in spite of General Peegeetee’s warning. After the wounds he’d taken, though, the prospect of facing down a king fazed him not in the least.
“Considering what you did to my kingdom, Lieutenant General, you have gall and to spare, complaining of your treatment at my hands,” Geoffrey said at last.
“You named me commander of the Army of Franklin to fight,” Bell said, “or so I inferred, at any rate. Since the moment I replaced Joseph the Gamecock, that is what I endeavored to do.”
“I named you commander of the Army of Franklin to fight and to win,” King Geoffrey said. “Instead, you threw your men away, so that the Army of Franklin exists no more. I do not thank you for that, or for misliking the fact that I accepted your resignation the instant you tendered it.”
“I served the north proudly, and the best I knew how,” Bell said. “I faced our foes, and fought them in my own person. The wounds I bear prove it… your Majesty.”
“No one has ever questioned your courage, Lieutenant General,” Geoffrey answered. “Your wisdom and your judgment, on the other hand…”
“You knew what sort of man I was when you placed me in command, or so I must believe,” Bell said. “If you did not expect me to challenge the foe wherever I found him, you should have chosen another.”
“I not only expected you to challenge the enemy, I expected you to destroy his armies,” King Geoffrey said. “I did not expect you to destroy your own.”
“No one can make war without suffering losses. Anyone who thinks he can is a fool,” Bell said. “The enemy had more men, more siege engines, and, in the last fight, more quick-shooting crossbows than we did. He was better fed and better shod. We fought with the greatest of courage. We hurt him badly. In the end, we did not achieve quite the success I would have desired.”
By then, Lieutenant General Bell had considerable practice in making disasters sound palatable. Not quite the success I would have desired seemed bloodless enough, especially if whoever was listening didn’t know what had followed from that so-called incomplete success. King Geoffrey, unfortunately, knew in intimate detail. “Gods help us if you’d been defeated, then!” he exclaimed. “The eastern provinces probably would have fallen right off the map.”
“Your Majesty, I resent the imputation,” Bell said stiffly.
“Lieutenant General, I don’t care,” Geoffrey answered. “I have no army worth the name left between the Green Ridge Mountains and the Great River. Marthasville has fallen. Hesmucet has torn the living heart out of Peachtree Province, as if he were a blond priest sacrificing a bloody goat. Franklin and Cloviston will likely never see my soldiers again. And whom do I have to thank for these accomplishments, which must surely make King Avram grateful? You, Lieutenant General, you and no one else.”