“James of Broadpath’s, from out of the west,” George answered. “Do you know him well?” Almost all the officers from Detina’s old army knew each other to one degree or another.
“I should hope I do,” Bart replied. “He was a groomsman at my wedding.” He reined in and dismounted, continuing, “The rest of you kindly stay back here. I should like to go up to the creek alone, so as to get my observations without drawing the enemy’s notice.”
Like one of King Avram’s common soldiers, he wore a plain gray tunic. But, as he made his slow, painful way forward with the aid of his sticks, a sentry in gray spotted his epaulets and called, “Turn out the guard-commanding general!” The other pickets in gray shouldered their crossbows and saluted.
And then, across the creek, one of King Geoffrey’s blue-clad soldiers, a wag, heard the call and raised one of his own: “Turn out the guard-General Bart!” Grins on their faces, the traitors saluted him, too.
Bart acknowledged them by lifting his hat. “Dismissed!” he called to them, and limped back to his unicorn. As he remounted, he remarked, “I knew we were fighting a civil war, but that was more civility than I expected.” He and George and Colonel Horace rode on down along the creek.
Doubting George studied the map with General Bart. “The road we have to the east is bad, but will serve us tolerably well as long as the weather stays dry,” he said. “When the winter rains start, though, we’ll starve if we have to depend on it. Rations are too low as things stand.”
“Well, then, we’ve got to do something about it,” Bart replied.
“What have you got in mind, sir?” Doubting George asked. He was particularly dubious here. General Guildenstern had been splendid at proposing this, that, or the other scheme to get Rising Rock out of its fix. He’d proposed all sorts of things, but done nothing. Bart had made a different sort of name for himself in the fighting farther east, but George wanted to see him in action before judging.
Bart’s finger came down on the little hamlet of Bridgeton, about twenty-five miles east of Rising Rock. “If we can get a secure road from Bridgeton to here, we’re safe as houses.”
“Yes, sir,” George agreed. “If we can do that, we’re fine. Looks like a pretty good if to me.”
“Shouldn’t be,” Bart said. “I’ve got a solid division under Fighting Joseph in Bridgeton right now; they were starting to come into Adlai, a little east of there, when I left Adlai for Rising Rock here. If they can move up to the Brownsville Ferry here” -he pointed again, this time only about eight miles east of town- “while we send men out that far, we’ll hold either the river or a good road all the way from Bridgeton to here.”
George studied the map. “That’s not a bad notion,” he said at last. “It might be worth trying.” Fighting Joseph was a pretty good division commander, though he’d failed as head of an army in the west.
“Glad you agree,” Bart said. “I’ve already given the orders. Joseph will move out today, and Brigadier Bill the Bald goes out of here tonight under cover of darkness with all the bridging equipment he needs to span the Franklin at Brownsville. He’s a good officer and a pretty good soldier. He shouldn’t have any trouble at all.”
“You’ve… already given the orders?” George said.
“That’s right.” Bart nodded. “I don’t see any point to wasting time. Do you?”
“When you put it that way, no sir,” George answered in some bemusement. General Guildenstern would have spent endless hours bickering in councils of war, and would have ended up sitting on his haunches while Rising Rock starved. That was what Count Thraxton hoped would happen.
“All right, then,” Bart said. “I already told you-if we’re going to set about fixing things, we’d better fix them.”
“True enough.” Doubting George studied the new commanding general. “I don’t think enough people know what to expect from you, sir.”
“If they don’t, they’ll find out,” Bart said. “If the traitors we’re up against don’t find out quite soon enough, that won’t break my heart.” He laughed briefly. “James of Broadpath’s men are holding that stretch of line. Nothing like giving my old groomsman a little surprise.”
“You’re looking forward to this!” George exclaimed.
“You bet I am,” General Bart replied. “George, you know it as well as I do-the northerners have got no business tearing this kingdom apart. If you thought different, you’d be fighting for Geoffrey, not Avram.”
“So I would-a lot of men from Parthenia are,” George said. “Brave men, too, most of them.”
“Brave men don’t make a bad cause good by fighting for it, and they’re fighting for a bad cause-a couple of bad causes, in fact,” Bart said. “Making their living from the sweat of serfs is a nasty business, nothing else but.” He paused. “I don’t mean that personally, of course.”
“Of course,” Doubting George said dryly. “I have no serfs, not any more-Geoffrey confiscated my lands when I declared for Avram.”
“Yes, I’d heard that.” Bart did something George had rarely seen him do: he hesitated. At last, he asked, “Does it bother you?”
“Having my property confiscated? Of course it does,” George answered. “I don’t imagine Duke Edward is very pleased with King Avram for doing the same thing to him.” He eyed his superior. “Or did you mean, does it bother me that I have no serfs any more?”
“The latter,” Bart replied. “Forgive me if the question troubles you. But there are few men who were liege lords serving in King Avram’s army, for in the south the serfs have been unbound from the land for a couple of generations. If my curiosity strikes you as impertinent, do not hesitate to say so.”
“By no means, sir.” George had had other southron officers ask him similar questions, though few with Bart’s diffidence-and Bart, being his commander, had the least need for diffidence. George went on, “I would sooner this were only a fight to hold the kingdom together, that everything else could stay the same. But I see it is not so, and cannot be so, and that the nobles in the north are using their serfs in every way they can short of putting crossbows in their hands to further the war against our rightful king. That being so, I see we have to strike a blow not just against Geoffrey but also against the serfdom that upholds him. But the kingdom will not be the same afterwards.”
He waited to see how General Bart would take that. The commanding general stroked his close-cropped beard. “I have judged from how you have conducted yourself in the fights you’ve led that you were a man of uncommon common sense, if you take my meaning. What you said just now has done nothing to change my opinion.”
“Thank you very much, sir.” Doubting George did not have his nickname for nothing; he’d been born with a cynical cast of mind. He was surprised at how much the commanding general’s praise pleased him-a telling measure of how much Bart himself had impressed him. “Do you know, sir, there’s a great deal more to you than meets the eye.”
“Is there?” Bart said, and George nodded emphatically. The commanding general shrugged in a self-deprecating way. “There could hardly be less, you know.”
Even in the north, he would never have been a liege lord. Everything he was, he owed to Detina’s army. Without his training at the officers’ collegium, he might have ended up a tanner himself. When he’d left the army before King Avram’s accession, he’d failed at everything he tried. People said he’d dived down the neck of a bottle. Maybe it was true; something in his eyes suggested to George that it was: a certain hardness, perhaps. But Guildenstern drank to excess in the middle of a battle, and George doubted General Bart would ever do such a thing. Bart had been through that fire, and come out the other side.