Would the desertions stop? How much difference would it make if they did? Would Doubting George or Hard-Riding Jimmy try to push past the Franklin River and finish off the remnants of the Army of Franklin here in Honey? If they did, what could Ned’s unicorn-riders do to stop them? Anything at all?
We’ve got to keep trying, Ned thought. If we don’t, then this war will end, and sooner, not later. The serfs’ll be off the land forever, and the southrons’ll go around telling ’em they’re just as good as real Detinans. Ned squared his broad shoulders and shook his fist toward the south in stubborn defiance. Can’t have that, gods damn it.
Marthasville again. Rollant hadn’t expected to see the biggest city in Peachtree Province again, not till John the Lister’s men got the order to move west and rejoin General Hesmucet’s army. Even after boarding the glideway carpet in northern Franklin, Rollant hadn’t expected to stop in Marthasville for very long. But here he was, cooling his heels in the town for a second day now. Too many glideway carpets had come into the city all at once, from east and west and north and south, and the officers in charge of such things were still untangling the snarl.
Before the war-and even during it, as long as false King Geoffrey’s men held the place-Marthasville had had pretensions of being a big city. Those pretensions made Rollant, who lived in New Eborac City, the metropolis of Detina, laugh. More than half the streets here were nothing but red dirt-red mud, at this season of the year. Cobblestones would have done wonders to improve them, but nobody’d bothered with-or been able to afford-cobblestones here. That by itself would have been plenty to take Marthasville out of the big-city class, as far as Rollant was concerned.
And Marthasville now wasn’t what it had been before Hesmucet captured it from the traitors. Hesmucet had burned it before setting out on his march across Peachtree to Veldt, and his siege engines had had their way with it even before it fell into his hands. Blackened ruins lined the muddy streets.
Here and there, people were already rebuilding. Elegant homes and fancy shops might have perished in the flames, but shacks built from salvaged lumber and tents sprouted everywhere. A forest fire burned oaks and maples, but toadstools and poison sumac sprang up where they’d stood. The shabby new structures catered to soldiers: they were saloons and brothels and gambling dens, all designed to separate southrons from silver as swiftly as they could.
Provost marshals patrolled the streets, but they could do only so much, especially now with the glideway snarl. Men in gray tunics and pantaloons wanted what the northerners were selling. If some of them ended up poisoned by bad spirits, or poxed or rolled in the brothels, or fleeced in the gambling dens, they didn’t seem to care. Every bit of it was part of having a good time.
Nobody in Marthasville knew what to make of Rollant. A blond with sergeant’s stripes? Northerners stared. Some of the Detinans from Marthasville glared. Rollant smiled back. Why not? He had the power of King Avram’s army behind him, and King Avram’s army had proved itself mightier than anything in the north.
The blonds who lived and worked in Marthasville stared at Rollant-and at the stripes on his sleeve-too. But they didn’t glare. He always collected a caravan of little blond boys who followed him through the streets. They did their best to imitate his marching stride, a best that was usually pretty funny. Blond men doffed their hats and bowed as if he were a marquis. And the smiles some of the blond women sent his way acutely reminded him of how long ago he’d left Norina.
Not for the first time, Smitty teased him about that: “If you don’t want ’em, by the Sweet One’s sweet place, steer some of ’em my way. That one little sweetie back there…” His hands shaped an hourglass in the air.
Rollant knew exactly which girl Smitty meant. He’d noticed her, too. He hadn’t fooled around on his wife, but he wasn’t blind. He said, “I’m not stopping you from chasing her.” Even that took a certain effort. Detinans in the north had taken advantage of blond women too freely for too long to let him feel easy about encouraging any Detinan man to make advances to a woman of his people.
He knew more than a little relief when Smitty shook his head. “She didn’t even see me,” his comrade said mournfully. “But you… she looked like she wanted to have you for breakfast.”
“Don’t talk that way,” Rollant said. When Smitty did, he felt the urges he was trying to ignore, and all the more acutely, too.
“How shall I talk? Like this?” Smitty put on what he imagined to be a northern accent. Still using it, he went into lascivious detail about what he would have liked to do with the pretty blond girl. Rollant wanted to clout him over the head with a rock. That seemed to be the only way to make him shut up.
“I never thought I’d be glad to get back on the glideway carpet and away from this place,” Rollant said at last.
“It won’t make any difference,” Smitty said. “Wherever we go in the north, blonds look at you like you’re the Thunderer come to earth.” He held up a hand. “I take it back. I expect it’ll make some difference, on account of gods only know when we’ll see another girl that fine.”
“If you need a woman so bad, wait your turn at a brothel,” Rollant said.
Smitty shrugged. “I’ve done it now and again, but a willing girl’s more fun than one you’ve got to pay. That way, she wants it, too. She’s not just… just going through the motions, you might say.”
“All right. I won’t argue with you about that,” Rollant said. “It’s one of the reasons I steer clear of these women. They don’t care much about me. If I weren’t a sergeant, they wouldn’t look twice. They care about the stripes.”
“Well, so do you,” Smitty said.
Rollant grunted. That crossbow quarrel had hit the target, sure enough. He was proud of the sergeant’s stripes not least because they showed what he’d done in a Detinan-dominated world. How could he be surprised if other blonds saw them the same way?
“Yaaa! You stinking blond!” The shout came from an upstairs window. “You don’t know who your father was!”
When Rollant looked up, he saw no one in the window. Whoever had yelled at him lacked the courage of his convictions. “Of course I do,” Rollant shouted back. “He’s the fellow who paid your mother three coppers. She’d remember-it’s twice her going rate.”
That set Smitty giggling. Rollant wondered if an enraged northerner would come boiling out of the false-fronted wooden building, ready to do or die for his mother’s honor, if any. But everything stayed quiet after the initial jeer. Smitty said, “Well, I guess your old man got his money’s worth.”
“Right.” Rollant’s answering smile was tight. For centuries, Detinans had made free with blond women. But if a blond man presumed to look at a Detinan woman, let alone to touch her, dreadful things were liable-no, were sure-to happen to him. Back in Palmetto Province, Baron Ormerod’s wife had been a famous beauty. Whenever Rollant was anywhere near her, he’d kept his eyes to the ground to make sure he didn’t anger her or his liege lord. So had every other male serf with an ounce of brains in his head. Ormerod hadn’t been a particularly nasty overlord. With some things, though, no one dared take chances.
Even in New Eborac City, Rollant treated Detinan women with exaggerated deference. He paid attention to them as customers, not as women. That wasn’t just because he was a married man. He’d found some of them attractive. Some of them, by the looks and gestures they’d given him, found him attractive, too. But he’d never had the nerve to do anything about it, even if it would have helped pay back debts hundreds of years old. If it went wrong, if he guessed wrong, or if a woman just changed her mind or felt vindictive… He would have been lucky to last long enough to be crucified. A mob might have pulled him out of prison and taken care of matters on the spot.