The journey would have tried the patience of a saint. James doubted whether even Duke Edward could have stayed calm through its beginnings-especially through the half-day delay occasioned by ferrying men and beasts and impedimenta over a river whose bridge had collapsed for no visible reason save perhaps the malignity of the gods. James didn’t try. He bellowed. He cursed. He fumed. He consigned whoever had made that bridge to some of the less desirable real estate in the seven hells.
“Will we be in time, your Excellency?” Brigadier Bell asked once they got moving again.
“We’d better be,” Earl James of Broadpath growled. “In spite of everything, I think we will be. And when we get there on time, we’re going to make a lot of southron soldiers late.” He rubbed his beefy hands together in anticipation.
A gold dragon on red flew in front of every company as General Guildenstern’s army triumphally entered Rising Rock. “Show these traitors why they lost,” Captain Cephas told Rollant’s company. “March so you’d make King Avram proud of you.” He couldn’t have found a better way to make Rollant do his best. Serfs and ex-serfs cared more for Avram than did most free men.
Sergeant Joram added, “March so you’ll make me proud of you, or you’ll end up wishing you’d never been born.” Hearing that, Rollant changed his mind. Keeping his sergeant happy was ever so much more important than pleasing King Avram. The king was far away, in the Black Palace in Georgetown. He would never have anything directly to do with Rollant. Joram, by contrast…
At the head of General Guildenstern’s army, a band struck up the royal hymn. Beside Rollant in the ranks, Smitty murmured, “That’s pretty stupid. Grand Duke Geoffrey uses the same air as Avram.”
“Silence in the ranks!” Sergeant Joram shouted. The end of his pointed black beard twitched in indignation. “Rollant, you can haul water for the squad tonight for running your mouth.”
“But-” Rollant began. Then he bit down on whatever he’d been about to say. He wouldn’t make Joram change his mind, and he would make his squadmates hate him. Being a blond in a dark-haired world wasn’t easy. He had to keep swallowing injustice, and he never got the chance to give any out.
“Forward-march!” Captain Cephas called as the motion of the column finally reached his company. Off the soldiers went, always beginning with the left foot. Rollant hadn’t had an easy time learning that; it was the opposite of what he’d been used to doing on Baron Ormerod’s estate. Beginning with the right foot was the serfs’ way of doing things throughout northern Detina; nobles and strawbosses hadn’t bothered trying to change it. But Detinans themselves began with the left, and King Avram’s army was profoundly Detinan even if it included some blond soldiers.
“Left-right! Left, right, left, right!” Sergeant Joram’s cadence count underscored the difference.
Behind the kingdom’s banner-the banner whose colors the northern traitors reversed-Rollant strode into Rising Rock. Back in the days when he was a serf, this collection of clapboard and brick buildings, some of the latter rising four or even five stories high, would have awed him. He remembered how astonished he’d been when he sneaked through northern towns on his way south after fleeing Ormerod’s estate. Now he put on a fine southron sneer. You could drop Rising Rock in the middle of New Eborac and it would vanish without a trace. Even the gray stone keep by the river wasn’t so much of a much, not when set against the southron city’s temples and secular buildings that seemed to scrape the sky.
Up ahead, the band switched to the kingdom’s battle hymn. Rollant’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a fierce grin. The northerners hadn’t kept that one; they had their own martial music. The battle hymn of the kingdom belonged to King Avram alone, to him and to the serfs he was freeing from their longstanding ties to the land.
A lot of the people lining the streets to watch Avram’s soldiers go by were blonds. They were the ones who whooped and cheered and clapped their hands. They cheered hardest, too, when they saw fair heads among the brunet Detinan majority. A very pretty girl of his own people caught Rollant’s eye and ran her tongue over her lips in what would have been a promise if he hadn’t swept out of sight of her forever a few seconds later. He sighed, partly for the missed chance and partly because he missed his wife.
The dark-haired Detinans who’d come out to look over General Guildenstern’s army looked less happy. “Did you ever see such a lot of vinegar phizzes in all your born days?” Smitty asked. “They never reckoned we’d get all the way up here. Shows what they knew when they backed Geoffrey the traitor.”
“What do you want to bet some of ’em’ll sneak off to tell Count Thraxton everything they can about us?” Rollant answered. Smitty scowled, but nodded.
“Silence in the ranks!” Sergeant Joram boomed again, and then, “At the beat, we shall sing the battle hymn of the kingdom.”
“How can we do both of those at once?” Smitty asked, which struck Rollant as a reasonable question.
It struck Joram rather differently. “You, Smitty-water duty tonight,” the sergeant snapped. He checked himself: “No, wait. I already gave that to Rollant. You can dig the latrine trench for the squad, and cover it over tomorrow morning.”
Smitty winced. He didn’t sing the battle hymn with any notable enthusiasm. Rollant did. Some sergeants would have put Smitty on water duty and handed him the nastier latrine detail. Even in the south, not everybody gave blonds a fair shake-not even close. Rollant tried not to fret about that. Compared to being bound to the land, with even less hope of getting off the land than an ox or an ass-which might be sold-the life of a carpenter in New Eborac wasn’t bad at all.
“To the seven hells with King Avram!” somebody in the crowd shouted.
“Hurrah for good King Geoffrey!” someone else cried.
“Arrest those men!” Half a dozen officers and sergeants from the Detinan army yelled the same thing at the same time.
Soldiers went into the crowd to do just that, but came back emptyhanded. They couldn’t tell who had shouted, and no one pointed a finger at the guilty men. No blonds must have seen them, Rollant thought. A moment later, he shrugged. That was not necessarily so. Maybe some of his people had seen, but were keeping quiet because they would have to go on living in Rising Rock along with the Detinans. A man who opened his mouth at the wrong time was liable to have something unfortunate happen to him, even if King Avram’s troopers did occupy his home town.
When the leading regiments of General Guildenstern’s army marched out of Rising Rock heading west, the troops at the tail end of the column hadn’t yet reached the east side of town. That said something about the size of the army. It also said something about the size of Rising Rock. Sure enough, the place could fall into New Eborac and never get noticed.
The field to which Captain Cephas led his men had plainly been used as a campground by Thraxton the Braggart’s army not long before. The grass was trampled flat. Black patches showed where fires had burned. A lingering stench suggested that the northerners hadn’t been careful about covering all their latrine trenches.
“Smitty!” Sergeant Joram pointed. “You dig a fresh trench there, among the old ones.”
“Have a heart, Sergeant,” Smitty said pitifully.
Asking a sergeant to have a heart was like asking a stone to smile. You could ask, but asking didn’t mean you’d get what you wanted. Joram didn’t even bother shaking his head. All he said was, “Get a shovel.” He turned to Rollant. “Gather up the squad’s water bottles. Looks like the ground slopes down over behind those bushes. Probably a creek somewhere over there. Go find it.”