Had Bell won great victories, he would have wanted to share credit with no one else. He was more inclined to be generous about sharing blame. “No one else?” he rumbled. “What about the officers who could not get me grain or shoes or crossbow bolts? What about the officers who could not get me reinforcements when I needed them so desperately? What about the subordinate commanders who let me down again and again? I could not fight the southrons all by myself, though often it seemed I had to try.”
“What good would reinforcements have done you?” King Geoffrey asked poisonously. “You would only have thrown them away along with the rest of your men.”
“I am so very sorry, your Majesty,” Bell said with just as much venom. “You have been such a perfect paragon of leadership, a paladin of proficiency, all through our struggle. If not for your blunders-”
“You were my worst blunder!” the King screamed. “Next to you, even Joseph the Gamecock looks like a soldier.”
“Next to you, even Avram looks like a king,” Bell retorted, a true measure of how disgusted he was.
They stared at each other in perfect mutual loathing. “You are dismissed,” Geoffrey said in a voice clotted with fury. “Get out of my sight. If you ever come into my sight again, I shall not answer for the consequences.”
“You already have plenty of consequences to answer for,” Bell jeered. “And if you crucify me, how long will you last before Avram crucifies you?”
Geoffrey turned pale, not from fear but from fury. “I am going to win this war,” he insisted. “I shall yet rule a great kingdom.”
“Oh, yes. Indeed, your Majesty. And I am going to win the mile run at the Great Games next year.” Bell cursed his mutilation not because he wouldn’t win that race but because he couldn’t turn and stomp out of King Geoffrey’s throne room. The slow progress he made on crutches wasn’t the same.
He wondered if he’d pushed Geoffrey too far. If the king decided to have him seized and crucified to encourage the others, what could he do about it? Not much was the obvious answer. A one-armed, one-legged swordsman was not an object to strike fear into the hearts of palace guards.
But for the click of Bell’s crutch tips on the stone floor and the thump of his shoe, all was silence absolute. Maybe Geoffrey’s had an apoplexy and fallen over dead, Bell thought hopefully. He didn’t turn around to look. For one thing, turning around on crutches was commonly more trouble than it was worth. For another, he was all too liable to fall victim to disappointment if he did turn. And so he didn’t.
He got out of the throne room. He got out of the citadel. He made his hitching way back to his hostel. Only when he’d sat down in his room did he remember he’d come to Nonesuch not to give Geoffrey a piece of his mind (he didn’t have that many pieces to spare) but to seek reinstatement.
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.