Something like wonder in his voice, Thisbe said, “The colonel’s having a good time.”
“Well, why not?” said Gremio, who was having a good time himself. “Doesn’t this take you back to the days when you were a boy, starting fires and raising hells for the sport of it?”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Thisbe admitted.
“You’re too responsible now, that’s why,” Gremio said. “You’re far and away the best sergeant I’ve ever known. If you’d let me put you up for a-”
“Sir, I don’t want a promotion,” Thisbe said firmly, and Gremio had to give it up again.
His long, thin face lit by the hellsish glare of burning supplies, Brigadier Alexander the Steward stalked among the men of his wing. “Hurry it up there!” Old Straight called to the soldiers. “Set the fires and then form up to move out of Marthasville. We’ve still got a hells of a lot of fighting ahead of us.”
Alexander’s tone went further to reassure Captain Gremio than any of the orders Lieutenant General Bell had given lately. Those orders, as Florizel had read them out, seemed an odd mixture of defiance and desperation. Gremio had trouble figuring out whom Bell was defying, the enemy or the gods themselves. The cause for the desperation, however, seemed obvious enough.
“Douse torches!” Colonel Florizel shouted. “Form up!”
Instead of dousing his torch, Gremio threw it onto a fire already burning. Sergeant Thisbe’s joined it a moment later. Officer and underofficer grinned at each other. Gremio called, “My company-form up!”
“Get moving!” Thisbe echoed. “You know what needs doing. Do it and don’t make a fuss about it.”
As the sun rose, the Army of Franklin marched out of Marthasville to the northwest, the only gap remaining in the line the southrons were throwing around the city. Gremio didn’t know how many men General Hesmucet had close by. That worried him. But the southrons evidently doubted they had enough for a successful attack on Bell’s army, for it escaped without incident.
Seeing land that hadn’t been fought over was something of a relief. “Pretty good country,” Colonel Florizel allowed. “Not so nice as around Karlsburg, back in Palmetto Province, but pretty good even so.”
“Yes, sir.” Gremio nodded. “But do you see how many of the serfs’ huts are standing empty? Most of the blonds have run off to the southrons.”
“Gods damn them, and gods damn that wretch of a King Avram,” Florizel said. “How are the lords around these parts going to make a crop now?”
“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.