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this is more a northern town than one full of southrons."
John had heard that. He hadn't wanted to believe it. Evidently, it was true no
matter what he wanted. He said, "They ought to clean out all those traitors,
and crucify the worst of 'em."
Now Marshal Bart gave him an odd look. "I said something not much different
from that when I first got here, too, Brigadier. But King Avram would not will
not hear of it. He says victory will cure what ails them. After we whip false
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King Geoffrey, we will all be Detinans together again, and we will have
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to live with one another. When you look at it that way, it is hard to say he
is wrong."
"Maybe." But John the Lister cocked his head to one side and listened to young
Barre a little longer. "To the hells with me, though, if I think that mouthy
son of a bitch has any business running loose."
"Well, I would be harder than Avram is myself," Bart allowed. "But he the
King of Detina. We have is fought this whole war to show the northerners that
that is what he is. If he gives an order to let people like that alone, what
can we do but leave them alone? Without turning into traitors ourselves, I
mean?"
John thought that over. With a scowl, he said, "You know what, sir? I'm
gods-damned glad I'm just a soldier. I don't have to worry about things like
that."
"Some soldiers do," Bart said. "When Fighting Joseph was head general here, he
talked about seizing the throne after he won some victories."
"It's a wonder Avram didn't take his head," John said.
"Avram heard about it, but he only laughed," Bart replied. "He said that if
Fighting Joseph gave him the victories, he would take his chances with the
usurpation. Then Duke Edward whipped the stuffing out of
Joseph at Viziersville, and that was the end of that kind of talk. Our job is
to make sure the traitors do not pull off any more little stunts like
Viziersville, and we are strong enough to do it. That is why I
brought your wing west. We will manage."
We will manage
. It wasn't a flashy motto, nothing for soldiers to cry as they charged into
battle. But it was a belief that Marshal Bart had turned into a truth, and a
truth none of King Avram's other generals had ever been able to find. John the
Lister nodded. "Yes, sir," he said.
* * *
However much Lieutenant General Bell didn't want to admit it even to
himself perhaps especially to himself General Peegeetee had been right about
how things were in Nonesuch. Like most Detinans
(and all the more because he was a healer's son), Bell had spent time in
sickrooms that held people who were going to die. Walk into such a room and
you could see death brooding there, sometimes even before the bedridden
patient knew the end drew near. Nonesuch was like that now.
King Geoffrey still made bold speeches. To listen to him, victory lay right
around the corner. To look around in Nonesuch was to know Geoffrey was
whistling in the dark. Everyone's eyes fearfully went to the north, where Duke
Edward and the Army of Southern Parthenia had ever more trouble holding
Marshal Bart and his men in gray away from the last couple of glideway lines
that fed the city and, not so incidentally, the army. If Bart seized those
glideways, Nonesuch and Duke Edward would commence to starve.
And even if Bart didn't seize the glideways, how much would it matter in the
end? Everything was scarce. Everything was expensive. Prices had been bad in
Great River Province. They were worse here, much worse. Almost everything cost
ten or twenty times what it had before the war began. Bell understood why,
too, for the coins Geoffrey put out these days, though called silver, were
copper thinly washed with the more precious metal. Bell didn't like using
them, either.
If a man had King Avram's silver money, he could buy whatever he pleased, and
at a civilized price.
That also said too much about how the war was going.
For the time being, King Geoffrey was still feeding and housing Bell. Even if
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Bell had renounced command of the Army of Franklin, he remained a lieutenant
general in his chosen sovereign's service.
How much Geoffrey welcomed that service at the moment was an open question. He
did not publicly renounce it, though.
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Not publicly renouncing Bell's service and feeding and housing him were as far
as Geoffrey went. Time after time, Bell tried to secure an audience with the
king. Time after time, he found himself rebuffed. At length, his temper
fraying, he growled to a flunky, "I don't believe his Majesty wants to talk to
me."
The flunky, who remained as toplofty as if Geoffrey's armies had overrun New
Eborac City, looked at him from hooded eyes. "What ever could have given you
that impression, Lieutenant General?"
Bell glowered back. "I'm having trouble believing the king has all this many
meetings and such-like things."
"Are you? What a pity," the servitor murmured. "Some people will believe
anything."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Bell asked.
"Why, what it said, of course," the other man replied.
He refused to be pushed. He was as agile with words as a dueling master with
sabers. After a while, Bell gave up and went away. That that might have been
what King Geoffrey's secretary had in mind never occurred to him.
But Bell, almost by accident, figured out a response to Geoffrey's evasions.
Since the king would not see him, since the king would not hear him, he
started telling his story to anyone else who might listen. That included his
fellow officers in Geoffrey's capital, the nobles who thronged into Nonesuch
to be near the king, and the merchants and gamblers who kept trying to get
rich when everyone else got poorer and hungrier by the day. Bell talked and
talked, and talked.
After several days of this, everybody in Nonesuch was talking about what had
happened in front of
Ramblerton and talking about Bell's version of what had happened there. That
version, perhaps not surprisingly, gave Bell as much credit as could be
salvaged from what had befallen the north.
The rumors Bell had started soon reached King Geoffrey's ears. And Geoffrey,
who'd spent much of the war trying to strangle rumors, was naturally
unenthusiastic about having more start. He didn't summon
Bell to him to discuss the officer's reinstatement: he summoned him to try to
get him to shut his mouth.
To Lieutenant General Bell, the difference in the two possible reasons for the
summons was academic.
That Geoffrey had summoned him to the citadel of Nonesuch was all that
mattered. Bell was earnest, Bell was aggressive, but Bell had the political
sense of a watermelon. Worse, he was completely unaware he had the political
sense of a watermelon. As far as he was concerned, the summons represented a
vindication of sorts.
Grim-faced guards in blue stood outside the citadel in Geoffrey's capital. For
the life of him, Bell couldn't figure out why they looked so grim. They were
here on ceremonial duty, weren't they? If they'd been in the trenches of
Pierreville with the Army of Southern Parthenia facing Marshal Bart's army,
they would have had some excuse for long faces. As things were? Not likely!
Well fortified with laudanum, Bell hitched along on crutches past the guards
and into the citadel. King
Geoffrey's throne resembled nothing so much as a gilded dining-room chair.
Well, how much does
Geoffrey resemble a king?
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