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wherever they happen to live?"
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"Not much, sir, I'm afraid. Maybe things will go better, or at least seem
better, once we get to Palmetto Province. If they do, the men will be less
likely to want to run away, don't you think?"
"Maybe. I hope so." Colonel Florizel still sounded profoundly dubious.
Shaking his head, he went on down the line of glideway carpets. Gremio
wondered whether he doubted things would go better in Palmetto Province or
that it would make any difference to the men if they did or maybe both.
Gremio could have given Florizel even more to worry about. Being convinced
the war was lost and not just going badly, he'd begun to think about deserting
himself. No one in Karlsburg would have anything much to say if he returned
before the fighting formally finished. He was sure of that. He could resume
his career as a barrister easily enough.
He felt Sergeant Thisbe's eyes on his back. Sure enough, when he turned he
found the underofficer looking at him. Thisbe quickly turned away, as if
embarrassed at getting caught.
Gremio quietly cursed. He wasn't cursing Thisbe far from it. He was cursing
himself. He knew he wasn't going to desert as long as the sergeant kept
fighting for King Geoffrey. He couldn't stand the idea of losing Thisbe's good
opinion of him.
And if Hesmucet storms up through Palmetto Province with every southron in
the world at his back? Gremio shrugged. If you get killed because you're too
stupid or too gods-damned stubborn to leave while you still have the chance?
He shrugged again. Even then.
It wasn't anything he hadn't already known, and known for months. Now,
though, he'd spelled it out to himself. He felt none of the fear he'd thought
he might. He simply liked having everything in order in his own mind.
"Well, Sergeant, our men seem to be aboard the carpets," he said to Thisbe.
"Shall we get on ourselves?"
"Yes, sir," Thisbe said. "After you, sir."
"No, after you," Gremio answered. "I'm still the captain of this ship: last
on, last off."
Thisbe tried to argue, but Gremio had both rank and tradition on his side.
Clucking, the sergeant climbed up onto the closest carpet and sat crosslegged
at the edge. Gremio followed. He found a place by Thisbe; soldiers crowded
together to make a little more room for them.
A man in a glideway conductor's black uniform came by. "No feet over the
edges of the carpet," he warned. "Bad things will happen if you break that
rule."
The men all knew that. Most of them also probably knew, or knew of, someone
who'd broken a foot or an ankle or a leg against a rock or a tree trunk that
happened to lie too close to a glideway line. Detinans were stubborn people
who delighted in flouting rules, no matter how sensible those rules might be.
Silently, smoothly, the carpets slid west along the glideway. The silence
persisted. The smoothness? No. The spells on the glideway line badly needed
refurbishing. No mages seemed to have bothered doing that essential work. The
wizards the north had were all busy doing even more essential work: trying to
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keep the southrons from pushing deeper into King Geoffrey's tottering realm.
They weren't doing any too well at that, but they were trying.
Great River Province and Dothan had suffered relatively little from the war.
Even in those provinces, though, everything had a shabby, rundown look to it,
as if no one had bothered taking care of anything that wasn't vital since the
war began. Gremio saw a lot of women working in the fields, sometimes
alongside blond serfs, sometimes by themselves. No Detinan men who didn't have
white beards were there to help them. If they didn't take care of things
themselves, who would? Nobody.
A measure of how little the war had touched Great River Province and Dothan
was that serfswere working in the fields. Down in Franklin, most of the blonds
had fled their liege lords' holdings, choosing with their feet liberation from
feudal ties. Northern nobles had long proclaimed that blonds preferred the
security of being tied to the land. The evidence looked to be against them.
Here and there, the path the soldiers detached from the Army of Franklin took
twisted like a drunken earthworm. Even here, so far north, southron raiders
had sometimes penetrated. Their wizards had dethaumatized stretches of the
glideway. On those stretches, the carpets might as well have lain on the floor
of some duke's dining hall, for all the inclination toward flight they
displayed. The soldiers had to roll them up and carry them along till they
reached a working stretch of glideway once more.
And then, more slowly than they should have, the glideway carpets reached
Peachtree Province. They had to skirt Marthasville, which had been the hub of
all glideway routes. It still lay in the southrons' hands, and the garrison
there was far too strong for this ragtag force to hope to overcome. Instead,
Florizel's men and those led by Benjamin the Heated Ham went west and then
north. They passed through the swath of destruction Hesmucet's army had left a
couple of months before, marching west from Marthasville to the Western Ocean.
That swath was a good forty miles wide. The southrons had ruined the
glideways along with everything else. The men who'd set out from Honey had to
march across it, and they got hungry on the way. Hesmucet's men had burned [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]