“They probably won’t,” Gremio answered. “But I don’t think Hesmucet cares. Do you?”
“Do I care?” Florizel said-whether sardonic or obtuse, Gremio couldn’t tell. “Gods-damned right I care. This is my kingdom. Of course I care what happens to it. It’s that son of a bitch of a Hesmucet who doesn’t care.”
“Yes, sir,” Gremio said resignedly. He looked back over his shoulder at the great columns of smoke still rising from Marthasville. Either a few soldiers remained behind setting still more fires or the ones already set had spread from abandoned supplies to the city itself. Gremio wondered how hard the southrons would try to put those fires out. Not very, unless he missed his guess.
“Where do you suppose we’ll go, sir?” Sergeant Thisbe asked after they’d marched for a while.
“South, I suppose,” Gremio replied. “I don’t know just when, but I’d think we’re going to have to do that. If we strike at Hesmucet’s glideway line, maybe his army will starve and break up.”
“That would be a splendid victory,” Thisbe said.
“So it would.” Gremio didn’t tell the sergeant he found it unlikely. He found any hope of victory unlikely. Saying as much would have discouraged those who might be more optimistic, though, and so he held back. The men had enough trouble keeping their spirits up as things were.
Well before noon, southron unicorn-riders began dogging the Army of Franklin. They didn’t attack; they just hung close. Gremio waited for the aggressive Bell to order his own riders to drive them away. Those orders didn’t come. What does that mean? he wondered. Did Bell think his unicorn-riders couldn’t drive back the southrons? Or was he so desperate to get away from Marthasville that he didn’t want to waste time fighting? Whichever the answer, Gremio didn’t think it boded well for his force.
When he cautiously remarked on that, Florizel said, “I doubt the southrons will bother us much for a little while. They’ll be too busy with Marthasville, don’t you think?”
Gremio clicked his tongue between his teeth, considering. “You could well be right, sir,” he said.
“We’ve given ’em a present,” the regimental commander said. “They’ll take it. Why wouldn’t they? It’s sitting there for ’em, all sweet and juicy as a blond wench with her legs open.”
“And losing it hurts us,” Gremio added.
Colonel Florizel nodded. “And losing it hurts us,” he agreed. “We’d better cut their army off from its supplies, or Geoffrey’s badly wounded.”
“You… don’t usually talk like that, sir,” Gremio said. And the last time I talked like that, you came as near as near can be to calling me a coward. I had to try to get myself killed to make you change your mind.
“I’m not blind,” Florizel answered. “I know we needed to hold Marthasville. I know we didn’t do it. I’m not stupid, either, no matter what a highfalutin’ barrister might think.”
“Sir, I’ve never said anything of the sort,” Gremio insisted.
“I know you didn’t. I never said you did,” Florizel told him. “I said what you were thinking, and I wasn’t wrong, was I?”
He used words as precisely as if he were a barrister himself. Gremio said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir. You’ve led this regiment well, and I’ve never thought otherwise.” That was the truth, too, even if it wasn’t altogether responsive.
“You wouldn’t be breathing if you had run your mouth,” Florizel replied. Gremio looked for an answer to that, found none, and decided it might have been just as well.
As he’d expected, the Army of Franklin swung back toward the southeast, the direction of the glideway line that kept General Hesmucet and the southrons fed. The Army of Franklin was for the time being making do without a glideway line; the countryside was rich and fertile, and the soldiers had no trouble keeping themselves fed.
Juices sizzled as a fowl-a fowl that had probably belonged to a loyal northern farmer-cooked over a fire. Turning the stick that spitted the bird, Sergeant Thisbe said, “If we can feed ourselves off the country here, why can’t the southrons do the same?”
Gremio started to give that a flip answer, but stopped with the words unspoken. “Good question,” he said after a pause. “The only thing I can think of is, there are a lot more of them than there are of us. Of course, they also have a proper baggage train, and we don’t.”
“We burned ours in Marthasville,” Thisbe said.
“We can move faster without it.” Gremio put the best face on things he could.
“Yes, and we can start starving faster, too.” But Thisbe lifted the fowl from the flames. He blew on it, then drew his knife from its sheath and started carving. Handing Gremio a leg, he said, “You fancy the dark meat, don’t you?”
“Right now, I fancy anything that’ll keep my stomach from bumping up against the notches on my backbone,” Gremio answered. He ate the hot flesh, savoring the grease from the skin. Somebody else had a pot full of turnips boiling over another fire. Gremio got a tin plate piled high with them. He ate and ate, then blissfully thumped his belly. “Do you know what, Sergeant?”
“No, sir. What?” Thisbe spoke with his mouth fulclass="underline" he was still demolishing his plateload.
“Those turnips needed salt,” Gremio declared.
“You’re right,” Thisbe agreed. “But I’m still better with ’em than I would be without ’em.”
“Can’t quarrel with that,” Gremio said. “Can’t quarrel with anything, not any more.” He yawned. “Can’t do anything much right now except roll over and go to sleep.” He wrapped himself in his blanket-much more to hold mosquitoes at bay than to keep him warm-and did just that.
When the army started marching again the next morning, it kept on going southeast. Without a baggage train to delay it, it did move faster than the southron force. General Hesmucet didn’t seem much interested in pursuit, anyhow; maybe Marthasville was enough to satisfy him. Gremio hoped so. He’d had enough fighting against long odds to suit him for a while-for the next hundred years, come to that.
Bell passed well south of Marthasville on his way east. Gremio knew at once when the Army of Franklin returned to land that had seen war already this campaigning season. How long would the swath of war, the gouge of the Lion God’s claws, scar Peachtree Province? If not for generations, he would have been astonished.
He was astonished when Bell passed over the glideway line with no more than a few hasty spells from the sorcerers. “What’s the point of that?” he asked anyone who would listen to him. “Even southrons can put things to rights in a hurry.”
But Colonel Florizel, for once, had an answer that satisfied him: “I hear we’re heading east into Dothan to rest and refit, and then we’ll come back and hit the southrons a proper lick.”
“Gods know we could use rest and refit,” Gremio said, and the regimental commander nodded. Gremio asked, “Will we get any reinforcements? We could use them, too.” They could use them to replace the men Lieutenant General Bell had thrown away in one futile attack after another. Gremio saw no point to saying that, but he thought it very loudly.
Florizel only shook his head. “No reinforcements I’ve heard about, Captain. If we’d had more men handy, don’t you suppose they would have come into Marthasville a long time ago?”
“You’re probably right,” Gremio admitted. “But the southrons keep getting fresh men whenever they need them. It would be nice if we didn’t have to depend on the soldiers who started the war.”
That was an exaggeration, but not an enormous one. Florizel’s answering grimace showed a broken front tooth. That tooth hadn’t been broken when the war was new; Gremio would have taken oath on it. Little by little, the fighting wore the men down in all sorts of ways.
Here, though, marching was easy. Hesmucet mounted no real chase of the Army of Franklin. Maybe Marthasville had been his target all along. Or maybe… “Maybe he doesn’t think we can hurt him any more,” Gremio said once the battered army entered the province of Dothan.