He did mean it. Rollant didn’t know whether he was right or wrong, but he did mean it. Most Detinans thought that way. They were convinced they were going somewhere important, and they all seemed eager for the journey. Rollant, now, Rollant had his doubts. But he’d grown up on an estate where the only place he could go was where Baron Ormerod told him to. That made a big difference. Nobody had an easy time telling free Detinans what to do. Even here in the army, they talked back to their sergeants and officers, and tried to come up with better ideas than the ones the generals had.
“Let’s go!” Sergeant Joram bellowed. “Come on! We can do it! We’re gods-damned well going to do it.”
No one talked back to him then. Rollant felt like it. Marching through the middle of the night wasn’t his idea of fun. But nobody asked what his idea of fun was. People just told him to do things and expected him to do them. He didn’t usually have too hard a time with that; he’d had practice obeying on Ormerod’s estate. Tonight, though, he was very tired.
Tired or not, he marched. So did everybody else-the army treated flat-out disobedience from soldiers even more ruthlessly than northern liege lords rooted it out among their serfs. “Watch where you’re putting your feet,” somebody not far from Rollant grumbled-in the darkness, he couldn’t see who.
“How can I watch?” somebody else said-maybe the offender, maybe not. “I can’t see the nose in front of my face.”
“It ain’t that dark, Lionel,” yet another soldier said, “and you’ve got yourself a cursed big nose.” Lionel expressed loud resentment of this opinion. Several other people spoke in support of it.
Rollant thought Lionel had a big nose, too. He thought most Detinans had pretty good-sized beaks. He didn’t join the debate, though. The Detinans were willing to let blonds fight for them. They were much less willing to hear what blonds had to say. That didn’t strike him as fair, but a lot of things didn’t strike him as fair.
Then somebody stepped on his heel, almost stripping the boot from his foot. “Careful, there,” he said.
“Sorry.” Whoever was marching along behind him didn’t sound very sorry, but he didn’t step on Rollant any more, either.
They tramped east. It was, Rollant realized little by little, a large column. Whatever he was part of-nobody’d bothered explaining it to him-looked to be something important. He didn’t suppose they would have sent out the column on a night march if it weren’t important. He hoped they wouldn’t, anyhow.
Somebody rode by on a unicorn. “Keep going, men,” he called. “When we get to the river, we’ll give the traitors a surprise.” He raised his hat. Starlight gleamed from his shiny crown.
“That’s Bill the Bald!” Smitty exclaimed. “He must be in charge of this whole move.”
“I’d like it better if we had Doubting George in charge of us,” Rollant said. “If he kept us from getting licked by the River of Death, I expect he can do just about anything.” Smitty didn’t argue with him.
Dawn began turning the eastern sky gray and then pink. Rollant started to be able to see where he was putting his feet. He tried to see more than that, to see where the enemy was. He couldn’t, not yet.
Smitty said, “Next thing we’ve got to find out is if the pontoons make it to where they’re supposed to be when we make it to where we’re supposed to be. If we can’t cross the river, we sure as hells can’t do the fighting we’re supposed to do.”
“Cross the river?” Rollant said. “Nobody ever tells me anything.”
“I’m telling you now, aren’t I?” Smitty said. Rollant nodded, but he still meant what he’d said. He always got rumors more slowly than most of the others in the company. He knew why, too: he was a blond. He’d mostly given up complaining about it. Complaining didn’t make people talk to him any more, and it did make them think he was a whiner. He didn’t think so, but one of the lessons of serfdom and the army alike was that hardly anybody cared what he thought.
Lieutenant Griff still led the regiment; Captain Cephas wasn’t fit to march or fight. Griff pointed ahead, toward the Franklin River. “That’s Brownsville Ferry, where we’re going,” he called to the company. He actually sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. “We’ve got more men coming, I hear. Between them and us, we’ll drive the traitors back and open up a proper supply route.”
“Why didn’t he tell us all that before we started marching?” Rollant asked.
“He probably didn’t know himself,” Smitty answered. “How much you want to bet somebody briefed him while we were on the road here?”
Rollant thought about it. It didn’t take much thought. He nodded. “That sounds right.” As the company commander had, he pointed. “Look at those big wooden boxy things floating in the river.”
“Those are the pontoons.” Smitty’s voice cracked with excitement. “And see? We’ve got the wizards in place to do what needs doing with ’em. By the gods, that didn’t always happen when General Guildenstern was in charge of things.”
Sure enough, the mages on this bank of the Franklin were busy incanting-and the northerners on the far bank of the river didn’t seem to have any sorcerers in place to challenge their spells. Under their wizardry, the pontoons formed a line straight across the Franklin River. More mages-and some down-to-earth, unmagical artificers, too-spiked planks on the pontoons to form a makeshift bridge. The blue-clad traitors did have a few soldiers in place on the far side of the river. They started shooting at the artificers as soon as they got within range. They hit some of them, too, but not enough to keep the bridge from getting finished. Rollant whooped, even though that completed bridge meant he was going into danger. He wasn’t the only one cheering, either-far from it.
Trumpets blared. Gray-clad soldiers swarmed onto the bridge and charged toward the enemy: unicorn-riders first, then pikemen, then crossbowmen like Rollant and his comrades. “We are to drive back the enemy wherever we find him,” Lieutenant Griff said grandly.
Rollant set a quarrel in the groove of his crossbow and cocked the weapon. The rest of the soldiers in his company did the same. They couldn’t do much in the way of driving unless they could shoot. More and more of King Avram’s men flooded over the bridge. By now, the sun had risen. Rollant saw the men who followed King Geoffrey running away, some of them pausing every now and then to shoot at his comrades and him. It wasn’t that they weren’t brave; he knew too well that they were. But General Bart’s sudden, strong move to seize this river crossing had caught them by surprise, and they didn’t have enough troopers close by to stop it.
Then his own feet were thudding on the timbers of the pontoon bridge. “King Avram!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “King Avram and freedom!”
He didn’t hear anyone yelling for King Geoffrey and provincial prerogative. His boots squelched in the mud on the far riverbank. He looked around wildly for somebody to kill.
But there weren’t that many northerners around. The men who’d gone over the pontoon bridge ahead of Rollant had killed some of them, while others had run away, seeing themselves so outnumbered. Rollant shot at one traitor who’d decided to run a little later than his comrades. His bolt caught the enemy soldier right in the seat of the pantaloons. The fellow let out a howl Rollant could clearly hear and ran faster than ever, one hand clapped to the wound.
“Nice shot!” Smitty said, laughing. “He’ll remember you every time he sits down for the next year.” He waved to Sergeant Joram. “Put it in the report, Sergeant-Trooper Rollant has made himself a pain in the arse to the enemy.”
“What are you talking about?” Joram demanded-he hadn’t seen the shot. Smitty explained. The sergeant condescended to chuckle. “All right, that’s not bad. But our job is to kill the whoresons, not just stick pins in their backsides.”