“What do free Detinans ever do but complain?” Rollant returned. “And if I’m not a free Detinan, what am I?”
That, of course, was the question of the War Between the Provinces. If a blond wasn’t a free Detinan, what was he? Northerners insisted he was a serf, and could never be anything else. King Avram disagreed with that, and had the southrons on his side. But even Avram didn’t seem convinced blonds would become ordinary Detinans the instant the north gave up the fight.
Joram’s heavy-featured face-the gods might have made him on purpose to be a sergeant-clouded up. But he had an answer that applied to Rollant, even if it didn’t to blonds in generaclass="underline" “What are you? By the Thunderer’s balls, you’re a corporal-and I’m a sergeant. If I tell you to swallow your bellyaching, you’d better swallow it, on account of I’ve got the right to tell you to. Have you got that?”
“Yes, Sergeant,” Rollant said-the only answer he could give. Joram recognized his right to be a corporal. As soon as that right was recognized, as soon as a blond’s right to pick up a crossbow or a pike and go fight the northerners was recognized, everything else would follow. And if Grand Duke Geoffrey wanted to deny it and call himself king in the north… too bad for him. He had left only the Army of Southern Parthenia and the Army of Franklin. Marshal Bart had one by the throat, while the other waited here for whatever Doubting George would do to it.
“When we do whip Lieutenant General Bell, what will Geoffrey have left here in the east?” Rollant wondered aloud. “Nothing I can see.”
“That’s the idea,” Joram said. “The son of a bitch is a traitor. When he’s done losing, he ought to go up on a cross. The buzzards can peck out his eyes, for all I care. We’re going to smash those bastards, smash ’em good. Don’t you worry about that, not even a little bit. It’ll happen. Nobody knows when yet, but it will.” He thumped Rollant on the back, hard enough to stagger him, then trudged on down the trench line.
“Boy,” Smitty said, “if I gave him half that hard a time, he’d have my guts for garters.”
“And you’d deserve it, too,” Rollant said. “I thought you went off to cut firewood.”
“So did Joram,” Smitty answered. “I just went into the little jog in the trench where we ease ourselves. That’s one good thing about cold weather, anyhow-the little jog doesn’t stink the way it would in summer. Hardly any flies, either.”
“Button yours,” Rollant said.
Smitty looked down. Rollant snickered. That was the sort of joke schoolboys played on each other-not that he’d ever been a schoolboy. “Think you’re pretty gods-damned funny, don’t you?” Smitty said indignantly.
“What I think is, you’d better go cut that wood before Joram sees you’re still around,” Rollant said. “He’s right-I let you get away with all kinds of things. But he won’t, and you know it.”
Nodding gloomily, Smitty went off to do his work. Rollant looked out at the northerners’ lines again. They weren’t within crossbow range, or even within range of the stone- and dart-throwers that could outshoot any hand-held weapon. They had their own fortified positions on the hills in front of Ramblerton, a couple of miles north of Doubting George’s outworks.
All right. They’re there. Now what the hells do they do? Rollant wondered. What would I do, if I were Bell? One answer to that question immediately came to mind: I’d go somewhere high and jump off. Could Bell jump with only one leg? One more thing Rollant didn’t know. But he wouldn’t have wanted to go around leaving pieces of himself on different battlefields, as the northern general commanding had done.
Tiny as ants in the distance, blue-clad traitors went about their business. As soldiers, they weren’t much different from their southron counterparts. As men… as men, they were welcome to the hottest firepits in the seven hells, as far as Rollant was concerned. He knew they wished him the same, and would do their best to send him there. If he’d cared about what northern Detinans thought, he never would have run away from Baron Ormerod’s plantation.
Night fell early this time of year. Before long, all Rollant could see of the enemy was the light from his campfires. Over there, common soldiers were also grumbling because their underofficers made them chop firewood. One thing was different over there, though. None of the northerners’ underofficers was a blond.
Lieutenant Griff came up the line. “Everything all right, Corporal?” he asked. He spoke thickly; up at Poor Richard, a shortsword had laid one cheek open. The black stitches the healers had put in to close the wound made him look like an outlaw or a pirate instead of the mild-mannered fellow he’d seemed before. Even when they came out, he’d be scarred for the rest of his days.
“Everything’s fine, sir,” Rollant answered. “How are you?” He hadn’t expected to sound so anxious. Griff had made a better company commander than most of his men thought he would after Captain Cephas got killed. His voice still broke now and again, but he had plenty of nerve, and he looked out for his soldiers the way a good officer would.
Now he managed a mostly one-sided grin. “I’ll do,” he said. “No sign of fever in the wound-it’s healing, not festering. That was my biggest worry. I’m not what you’d call fond of soaking a rag in spirits and pressing it on the cut-”
“Ow!” Rollant said sympathetically. “Does that really do any good? Seems like a lot of hurt for not much help.”
“Some of them say it does, so I’m doing it,” Griff replied. “I asked one of them if he’d do it himself, and he showed me a clean scar and said he had done it. Not much I could say to that.”
Rollant thought of raw spirits on raw flesh. “I don’t know, sir. I think I’d almost rather have the fever.”
Lieutenant Griff shook his head. “No. That can kill. This just hurts. I’ll get through it.” Unlike a lot of Detinans, he didn’t brag or bluster about his bravery. He just displayed it. Pointing to the fires north of Ramblerton, he said, “I wish Lieutenant General George would turn us loose against the traitors.”
“I’ve been saying the same thing. Why won’t he, do you think?” Rollant asked.
Griff shrugged. “How can I say? I’m not Doubting George. I’m not going to go back into Ramblerton and ask him. Not even Colonel Nahath could get away with that. George would throw him out on his ear. Maybe he’s waiting for more men-I hear another wing may be coming from the far side of the Great River.”
“Why does he need them?” Rollant asked. “We stopped the Army of Franklin all by ourselves, and George has a lot of soldiers here who didn’t go north with John the Lister. We ought to be able to ride roughshod over the traitors.”
Smiling-again, lopsidedly-Griff said, “Well, Rollant, no one who listened to you would ever get the idea that blonds are shy about mixing it up.”
He means that for praise, Rollant reminded himself. And he’s my company commander. If I bop him over the head with something, it will only land me in trouble.
“You do have to remember, though, attacking a position is a lot harder than defending one,” Griff went on, cheerfully oblivious to the way he’d angered Rollant. “We would have to pay the price of winkling the northerners out of their trenches.”
“Mm, yes, sir, that’s true.” Even if Rollant was annoyed with Griff, he couldn’t deny the officer made sense. “Still and all, we’ve already got a whole lot more men than the traitors do.”
“Corporal, if you want to go petition the general commanding for an immediate attack, you have my permission to do so,” Griff said.
Rollant tried to imagine himself marching into Doubting George’s headquarters and doing just that. It wasn’t that George didn’t know who he was. George did: he was the man who’d ultimately approved Rollant’s promotion to corporal up in Peachtree Province. But that made things worse, not better. It was only likely to mean he’d come down on Rollant harder than he would have otherwise.