“Well, you’ve flattered me and you’ve intrigued me,” Doubting George said. “Now you’d better ask your question, don’t you think?”
“Yes, sir,” Nahath said. “I have a man in my regiment-in Lieutenant Griff’s company-who, up on Commissioner Mountain, took the company standard when the standard-bearer was hit, who brought it forward through everything the traitors could shoot at him, and who was the last man to leave the field. My question is, should I promote him to corporal?”
“Lion God’s claws, Colonel, if you promoted him to lieutenant you’d get no argument from me,” George said. “Why do you even feel you need to ask?”
“He’s a blond, sir,” Nahath replied. “Fellow named Rollant, escaped serf from Palmetto Province.”
“Oh.” George kicked at the mud under his right boot. Every so often, his being a northerner by birth would up and bite him. That a blond might do such a thing had never crossed his mind. He plucked at his beard as he thought. At last, he asked, “If you did promote him, would the men obey him?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Colonel Nahath said. “That would be one of the things I’d have to find out. I know I don’t need your permission, precisely: there are other blond underofficers, though not a great many. But I did want your view on the matter before I acted.”
“I appreciate that.” Doubting George plucked at his beard again. At last, with a sigh, he said, “Promote him, Colonel. See what happens. If he does the job, well and good. If not… he deserves the chance to fail, wouldn’t you say? I rather think he will, but he does deserve a chance.”
“Deserves the chance to fail,” Nahath echoed. “That’s well put, sir. All right, then. I’ll do it, and we’ll see how it goes.”
“Seems only fair,” George said. “After all, it’s not as if he’s an officer, or anything of the sort.”
“There is a blond officer, you know,” Nahath said. Doubting George and Colonel Andy both exclaimed in astonishment, but the New Eboracer nodded. “By the gods, gentlemen, there is: he’s a major among the healers in the west.”
“What will the kingdom be like if King Avram turns blonds into Detinans?” Colonel Andy asked.
“It will be different,” George said. “It will be very different. Of that, there can be no doubt. But I will say this, and of it there can also be no doubt: Detina will be one kingdom. And that is how the gods intended it to be, and to remain.” His adjutant and Colonel Nahath both nodded.
Colonel Florizel said, “A great pity Leonidas the Priest got killed. We were lucky to have a wing commander on such good terms with the gods.”
“If you say so, sir,” Captain Gremio replied. He wouldn’t argue with the leader of his regiment, but his own view of the situation was that a wing commander with an actual functioning brain would be a pleasant novelty. Piety, to him, went only so far as a military virtue.
Florizel gave what was probably intended for an indulgent chuckle. “Ah, you barristers,” he said. “A lot of freethinkers among you.”
“I believe in the gods, your Excellency,” Gremio protested. “There are days, I admit, when I have trouble believing the gods believe in me.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew he should have left them unsaid. The first sentence was fine. Not even Florizel could complain about that. The second… No, he should have thought it and kept his mouth shut. “The gods believe,” the regimental commander said firmly. “And they have ways of showing people exactly what they believe.” He eyed Gremio, as if to say the gods were likely to believe he’d made a jackass of himself.
At the moment, he believed that, too. Muttering excuses under his breath, he walked down the trench line, in theory to see how the men of his company were positioned but in fact to get away from Colonel Florizel. After he’d made good his escape, he started really doing what he’d pretended to do when he left. Florizel’s regiment had the bad luck to be holding the stretch of line where the southrons had forced their way across Snouts Stream. That meant his men, along with everyone else in the regiment, had to stay especially alert, lest the enemy come swarming at them in great numbers.
Cautiously, Gremio stuck his head up above the parapet and peered east toward the southrons’ bridgehead. A hundred yards away, a southron officer’s head popped up above his parapet at the same time. Each man saw the motion from the other. Both men ducked. A moment later, feeling foolish, Gremio looked up again. So did the southron. Gremio waved: he despised southrons in general, but had nothing against specific southrons in particular. After a brief hesitation, the enemy officer waved back.
He must feel the same about me as I feel about him, Gremio thought. It was an odd notion. More often than not, southrons were simply the enemy to him. How could they be human beings? They were fighting him and everything he held dear. Every once in a while, in spite of everything, one of them insisted on reminding Gremio of his humanity.
In the end, though, how much did that matter? Not a great deal. If he comes at me, I’m going to try to kill him regardless of what I think about him. Battlefield reality could be very simple.
A little farther east, behind the southrons’ entrenchments, they’d thrown a couple of bridges across Snouts Stream. Gremio didn’t like that at all. It meant Hesmucet’s men could reinforce their bridgehead whenever they pleased. He wondered where Joseph the Gamecock would find reinforcements in case the northerners needed more men in a hurry. He didn’t know. He hoped Joseph did.
“Anything unusual, sir?” Sergeant Thisbe asked him.
“Nothing much,” he answered. “A southron and I were playing peekaboo with each other for a little bit, you might say.”
“Peekaboo?” Thisbe echoed.
Gremio mimed sticking his head up, looking, ducking down, and then looking again. The sergeant laughed. “Peekaboo,” Gremio repeated. “That bastard in gray was doing just the same thing.”
“All right.” But Thisbe’s smile slipped. “Do you think we can throw the southrons back across the stream?”
“No,” Gremio said bluntly. “We’ve tried a couple of times, and paid the price for it. The ball’s in their court now. We’re just going to have to hold them back as best we can. We ought to be able to do that.”
“Oh, too bad,” Thisbe said. “I thought the same thing myself, and I was hoping you would tell me I was wrong.”
“I wish I could,” Gremio answered. He had the feeling that Colonel Florizel still believed they could throw the southrons back. That worried him; if the colonel, or those above him, tried to act on that belief, a lot of good northern men were going to end up dead-and, worse yet, dead for no good purpose. Gremio himself, he knew, might easily end up among their number. He disapproved of that idea with all his orderly soul. He was, to some degree, willing to die for his kingdom, but only if his death would actually do the kingdom some good. Dying in a fight foredoomed from the start struck him as wasteful.
Thisbe said, “I wish the southrons hadn’t got this bridgehead.”
“So do I,” Gremio replied. “We were all so pleased when we threw them back from Commissioner Mountain. And we should have been-that thrust would have killed us had it gone home. But this bridgehead…” He scowled. “It’s like an ulcer, or a wound that festers instead of getting better. We can die from this, too, even if it takes longer.”
“That’s how my father died,” Thisbe said quietly. “He laid his leg open with an axe, and it never healed up the right way no matter how the healers and the mages tried to fix it. The flesh just melted off him, and after a while he couldn’t live any more.”
“Things like that happen,” Gremio agreed. “My mother and father are well, gods be praised, or they were last time I heard from them, but I know you can’t count on anything. If I didn’t know that beforehand, this gods-damned war would have taught me plenty.”