“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.
Now the commanding general shook his head slightly, as if to divert the conversation away from himself. “Once we have the road to Bridgeton secured,” he said, “once we make certain we shall not be starved out of this place, and once all our reinforcements have arrived, I believe we can lick Count Thraxton clean out of his boots. Don’t you agree?”
“Do you know, sir, I think I do.” With General Guildenstern in command, George would have had his doubts. With General Bart… “I don’t care how good a wizard Thraxton is. I don’t think his spells would faze you a bit.”
“Well, I hope not,” Bart said. “In the long run, wizardry strikes me as being like most other things-it will even out.”
“May the gods prove you right, sir,” George said. That was in large measure his view of things, too, though a good many southron generals had a different opinion. As a general working rule, the mages who backed King Geoffrey were stronger than those who’d stayed loyal to King Avram. Thraxton the Braggart, for instance, had more power than any one southron mage George could think of.
But Bart said, “If wizards were so much of a much, the traitors would be over the Highlow River in the east and pressing down toward New Eborac in the west. They may have fancier mages than we do, but we’ve got more of them, the same as we’ve got more soldiers and more manufactories. We can use that to our advantage. We have used that to our advantage-otherwise, we wouldn’t be up here on the northern border of Franklin. We haven’t done everything we might, but things aren’t so very bad.”
“If we’d done everything we might, we’d be marching up toward Marthasville today, not penned here in Rising Rock,” George replied.
“That’s true.” Bart nodded. “But we can do more. We will do more. When Thraxton beat us there by the River of Death, he showed us we needed to do more. And we can-it’s as plain as the nose on your face that we can. Thraxton won’t get any more soldiers: where would they come from? But we’ve already reinforced this army, and we’ve got lots more men on the way. Once they’re here, we’ll take care of business the right and proper way.”
George studied him. Bart didn’t shout and bluster, as General Guildenstern had been so fond of doing. But the new commanding general’s quiet confidence made him more believable, not less. When he said his army would be able to do something, he left little room for doubt in the mind of anyone who heard him. He might have been a builder talking about a house he intended to put up. How could you doubt a builder when he said the walls would stand so, the doors would be there and there, and the windows would have shutters in the latest style?
Thoughtfully, George said, “I do believe you’re right.”
“I hope so. I wouldn’t be trying it if I didn’t think I was.” Bart might have been saying, Yes, this house will stand up to a storm. He raised a forefinger. “Oh, I almost forgot. I’ve taken the liberty of attaching a couple of your regiments to the force Bill the Bald will lead. They were conveniently situated, and could join in his movements without drawing the northerners’ notice.”