Joseph the Gamecock had the nerve to be proud of himself. Of all the disgrace and embarrassment attached to the retreat from Commissioner Mountain, that galled Lieutenant General Bell more than anything else. As they rode north, Joseph turned to him and said, “We haven’t left them anything they can use, not a single, solitary thing. One of the cleanest escapes ever, if I do say so myself.”
“Huzzah,” Bell said sourly. “How many more retreats can we make before we go clean past Marthasville?”
That got home. Joseph flushed and scowled. He said, “I still intend to hold Marthasville. Holding Marthasville is the point of this campaign.”
“Really?” Bell raised an eyebrow. “I hadn’t noticed that it had any point at all, except perhaps giving ground. In the name of the gods, when do we get to fight back instead of running away?”
“Lieutenant General, you are grossly insubordinate,” Joseph the Gamecock snapped.
“If I am, sir”-Bell larded the commanding general’s title of respect with as much scorn as he could pack into it- “I’d say it’s about time somebody was. Now we’ve gone and lost Hiltonia and Ephesus, too, and how are we going to hold the line of the Hoocheecoochee River against the southrons? We have to hold it, wouldn’t you say, seeing as it’s the last line in front of Marthasville?”
He’d hoped to whip Joseph into a greater anger than that which already gripped him. Maybe the general commanding would do something unforgivable. Considering how little faith King Geoffrey had in Joseph the Gamecock, it might not take much.
But Joseph, instead of igniting, smiled a smile so superior, it made Lieutenant General Bell’s own temper kindle. “How will we hold the line of the Hoocheecoochee?” Joseph echoed. “I’ll tell you how: with some of the finest field works ever made, that’s how. I’ve had serfs digging for weeks. If you’d been paying attention, even a little, I daresay you might have found out. But that would be too much to hope for, wouldn’t it?”
Bell glared blackly. And he had a comeback ready: “Field works, is it? How many lines of field works have the southrons already turned? I’ve lost track of just how many, but there isn’t one they haven’t turned. I know that for a fact.”
“Sooner or later, they may push us back over the river,” Joseph the Gamecock allowed. “But we also have good positions on the other side.”
“How lucky for us,” Bell said, acid in his voice. “And what happens when the southrons flank us out of those, too?”
Joseph the Gamecock exhaled in exasperation. “They won’t, by the gods. We can hold the line of the Hoocheecoochee, and we will.” He didn’t wait for Bell’s next contradiction, but spurred his unicorn forward and away.
Although Lieutenant General Bell could have ridden in pursuit of the commanding general, he didn’t. For one thing, riding fast hurt even more than riding at a regular pace. For another, Joseph knew his opinions quite well enough already. And, for a third, Bell didn’t want to give too much away. If Joseph the Gamecock got a little more suspicious of him…
Well, how much difference would it make? How much was left to save here in Peachtree Province? Did the northerners have enough of an army here to save it? Of course we do, Bell thought, provided we have a man in charge who’s not afraid to use it.
When the army started filing into the trenches covering the approaches to the Hoocheecoochee and the bridges over it, Bell discovered, to his surprise and not a little to his dismay, that Joseph the Gamecock had known whereof he spoke. The field fortifications in front of the river were formidable, and wouldn’t be easy to force. Marthasville and the vital glideway routes east that ran through it remained protected.
But for how much longer? Bell wondered. What will go wrong? Something always has. We’ve been retreating for two months now. We can’t fall back much farther, because we’ve nowhere to fall back to.
While he scowled and fumed, Major Zibeon found him a farmhouse behind the line in which he could make his headquarters. His aide-de-camp said, “Sorry it isn’t anything fancier, sir.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Bell answered. “Help me down from this beast, if you’d be so kind.” His head buzzed with laudanum; riding was hard on him. Zibeon undid the ties that kept him on the unicorn and steadied him while he positioned his crutches. “Thank you kindly,” Bell said, though the pain of the crutch in his left armpit was hardly less than he’d known while riding. Plant, swing forward; plant, swing forward. He made his way into the farmhouse.
The farmer had already fled north, for which Bell was duly grateful; he didn’t feel like having to be sociable. A couple of serfs’ huts stood by the main house. Maybe the fellow who’d lived here had been a petty baronet, or maybe he’d just been a yeoman who’d come into the land to which the serfs were attached. The huts stood dark and empty now, with no naked blond children playing around them. The serfs had fled, too, though odds were they hadn’t fled north.
“Is everything to your liking, sir?” Major Zibeon asked after he went inside.
“If everything were to my liking, Major, we’d be fighting a good many miles south of this place,” Bell answered. His aide-de-camp grunted and gave him a reproachful look. He relented: “Seeing as we are here, this house will do well enough.”
“Thank you, sir,” Zibeon said. “That is what I had in mind-as I think you knew well enough.”
Few men were bold enough to reproach Lieutenant General Bell to his face. Joseph the Gamecock did it, but that hardly counted. Zibeon had the nerve to speak his mind. Because he did, Bell treated him with more respect than he would have otherwise. “Well, maybe I did,” he admitted.
From up in the trenches, someone shouted, “Here comes the head of the southron army, out of the hills we just left.”
“We should never have left them,” Bell muttered, more to himself than to anybody else. Then, grudgingly, he spoke aloud: “I’d better go out and have a look, don’t you think, Major?”
“Might be a good idea, sir,” his aide-de-camp replied. Zibeon softened that; Bell could tell. What it meant in plain Detinan was, You’d have to be an idiot if you didn’t. Bell made his slow, painful way out of the farmhouse once more and, shading his eyes with the palm of his hand, peered south.
Sure enough, the reddish dust hanging in the air above the hills was the sign of an army on the march. Through the dust came sparkles of sunlight on spearpoints and metal-shod unicorn horns. Bell wished for more rain, which would have laid the dust and slowed the southrons’ movements. Now, though, the sun blazed down on the Army of Franklin as fiercely as if the Sun God were angry at the north.
How can we win, if even the gods turn against us? Bell thought. But he shook his big, leonine head. The gods surely fought for King Geoffrey. How could it be otherwise, when they’d subjected and bound the blonds’ gods just as the Detinans themselves had subjected the natives of this land and bound them to the soil?
Pointing, Major Zibeon said, “Looks like the stinking southrons are going into line of battle.”
“They always tap at our lines, thinking we’ll run,” Bell said. “It’s because we do run when Joseph the Gamecock tells us to. They take us for cowards, may they suffer in the seven hells for all eternity.”
“We’ll make a few of them suffer now, unless I’m wrong,” Zibeon said. “They can’t hope to shift us when we’re in earthworks and they’re not.”
“Earthworks make men cowards,” Bell declared. He was far from the only general on either side to sing that song, but sang it louder and more stridently than most. “If this were my army, we would come out and fight. We wouldn’t shelter behind walls of mud, the way we do now.”