Read Online Sentry Peak by Harry Turtledove - Free Book Online

us, if they watch us bungle so but do nothing to help. . . . Why are you laughing, sir?” He sent Ormerod a resentful stare.
    “Because if I did anything else, I’d start to wail, and I don’t care to wash my face with tears,” Ormerod said. “And speaking of faces, what would they say if they saw yours in the Karlsburg law courts looking the way you do?”
    “Sir, they would say I’ve been serving my sovereign and my kingdom,” Gremio answered stiffly. He had no noble blood, but had had enough money to buy himself an officer’s commission: he was one of the leading barristers in Palmetto Province’s chief town.
    And now, no matter what he was, he looked like a teamster who’d had a hard time of it: filthy, scrawny, weary, in plain blue tunic and pantaloons that were all over patches, with black marching boots down at the heels and split at the front so his toes peeped out. Ormerod would have twitted him harder, save that his own condition was no more elegant.
    And the footsoldiers they led were worse off than they were. The company—the whole regiment—had come out of Karlsburg and the surrounding baronies full of fight, full of confidence that they would boot the southrons back over the border and then go home and go on about their business. They were still full of fight. They still had their crossbows and quivers full of quarrels. They had very little else. They were all of them lean as so many hunting hounds, leaner than Ormerod, leaner than Gremio.
    Sensing Ormerod’s eye on him, a sergeant named Tybalt grinned a grin that showed a missing front tooth. “Don’t you worry about a thing, sir,” he said. “We’ll give those whipworthy bastards what they deserve yet, see if we don’t.” Some of the men trudging along beside him nodded.
    “Of course we will,” Ormerod answered, and did his best to sound as if he meant it. The men he led had little farms on the lands near his estate. None of them had serfs to help plant and bring in a crop: only wives and kinsfolk. They’d given up more than Ormerod had to take service with King Geoffrey and fight the invaders, and had less personal stake in how the war turned out. The least he could give them was optimism.
    Unfortunately, optimism was also the most he could give them. In the third year of a war he’d hoped would be short, in retreat in the third year of that war, even optimism came hard.
    Lieutenant Gremio asked, “What do you know that I don’t, your Excellency?” He made Ormerod’s title of nobility a title of reproach. “ How are we going to give the southrons what they deserve?”
    Though he spoke with a barrister’s fussy precision, he did at least have the sense to keep his voice low so the troopers couldn’t hear his questions. Ormerod replied in similar low tones: “What do I know? I know that, if the men start believing they can’t give Avram’s armies the kick in the arse they ought to get, they’ll all go home—and what will King Geoffrey do then? Besides take ship and flee overseas, I mean.”
    He watched Gremio chew on that and reluctantly nod. “Appearances do matter,” Gremio admitted, “here as in the lawcourts. Very well—I’m with you.”
    Earl Florizel, the colonel of the regiment, rode up on unicornback. He waved to Ormerod. Back home in Palmetto Province, they were neighbors. Ormerod kept hoping Florizel would look his way when their children reached marriageable age. The earl said, “You fought your company well back there, Captain—as well as could possibly be expected, considering how outnumbered we were.”
    “For which I thank you, sir,” Ormerod replied. “I hoped for rather more from the mages, and I’d be lying if I said otherwise.”
    “We usually hope for more from the mages than we get,” Florizel said with a sour smile. He was in his late thirties, and a good deal lighter and trimmer after a couple of years in the field than he had been on his estate, where he’d let himself run to fat.