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Stream. That meant his men, along with everyone else in the regiment, had to
stay especially alert, lest the enemy come swarming at them in great numbers.
Cautiously, Gremio stuck his head up above the parapet and peered east toward
the southrons' bridgehead. A hundred yards away, a southron officer's head
popped up above his parapet at the same time. Each man saw the motion from the
other. Both men ducked.
A moment later, feeling foolish, Gremio looked up again. So did the southron.
Gremio waved: he despised southrons in general, but had nothing against
specific southrons in particular. After a brief hesitation, the enemy officer
waved back.
He must feel the same about me as I feel about him, Gremio thought. It was an
odd notion. More often than not, southrons were simply the enemy to him. How
could they be human beings? They were fighting him and everything he held
dear. Every once in a while, in spite of everything, one of them insisted on
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reminding Gremio of his humanity.
In the end, though, how much did that matter? Not a great deal.
If he comes at me, I'm going to try to kill him regardless of what I think
about him
. Battlefield reality could be very simple.
A little farther east, behind the southrons' entrenchments, they'd thrown a
couple of bridges across Snouts Stream. Gremio didn't like that at all. It
meant Hesmucet's men could reinforce their bridgehead whenever they pleased.
He wondered where Joseph the
Gamecock would find reinforcements in case the northerners needed more men in
a hurry. He didn't know. He hoped Joseph did.
"Anything unusual, sir?" Sergeant Thisbe asked him.
"Nothing much," he answered. "A southron and I were playing peekaboo with each
other for a little bit, you might say."
"Peekaboo?" Thisbe echoed.
Gremio mimed sticking his head up, looking, ducking down, and then looking
again.
The sergeant laughed. "Peekaboo," Gremio repeated. "That bastard in gray was
doing just the same thing."
"All right." But Thisbe's smile slipped. "Do you think we can throw the
southrons back across the stream?"
"No," Gremio said bluntly. "We've tried a couple of times, and paid the price
for it.
The ball's in their court now. We're just going to have to hold them back as
best we can.
We ought to be able to do that."
"Oh, too bad," Thisbe said. "I thought the same thing myself, and I was hoping
you would tell me I was wrong."
"I wish I could," Gremio answered. He had the feeling that Colonel Florizel
still believed they could throw the southrons back. That worried him; if the
colonel, or those above him, tried to act on that belief, a lot of good
northern men were going to end up dead and, worse yet, dead for no good
purpose. Gremio himself, he knew, might easily end up among their number. He
disapproved of that idea with all his orderly soul. He was, to some degree,
willing to die for his kingdom, but only if his death would actually do the
kingdom some good. Dying in a fight foredoomed from the start struck him as
wasteful.
Thisbe said, "I wish the southrons hadn't got this bridgehead."
"So do I," Gremio replied. "We were all so pleased when we threw them back
from
Commissioner Mountain. And we should have been that thrust would have killed
us had it gone home. But this bridgehead . . ." He scowled. "It's like an
ulcer, or a wound that festers instead of getting better. We can die from
this, too, even if it takes longer."
"That's how my father died," Thisbe said quietly. "He laid his leg open with
an axe, and it never healed up the right way no matter how the healers and the
mages tried to fix it. The flesh just melted off him, and after a while he
couldn't live any more."
"Things like that happen," Gremio agreed. "My mother and father are well, gods
be praised, or they were last time I heard from them, but I know you can't
count on anything.
If I didn't know that beforehand, this gods-damned war would have taught me
plenty."
"Yes, sir," Thisbe said. "If I were the southron general, I'd either try to
find a way through with those men already on this side of Snouts Stream, or
else I'd use them to keep us busy here while I did my mischief somewhere
else."
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"Sergeant, you ought to be an officer," Gremio said with unfeigned admiration.
"That's as neat a summing-up as I could do in a lawcourt, and how much do you
want to bet that the people set over us haven't got their thoughts together
half so straight?"
"I don't know anything about that," Thisbe replied. "What I do know is, I
don't want to be an officer." He wagged a finger at Gremio. "I really and
truly mean that, sir. You've got a `let's promote somebody to lieutenant' look
in your eye, and I won't take the post even if you try to give it to me."
Gremio could hardly help believing Thisbe's sincerity. "But why?" he asked,
perplexed. "The company would be better for it. You know as well as I do that
there's a lieutenant's slot open. You could do the job. You could do it better
than anyone I can think of."
"I don't want it," Thisbe declared. "I've got enough things to worry about
being a sergeant. Being a lieutenant would just complicate my life to the
hells and gone. All I
ever wanted to do was be a soldier. You're not hardly a soldier when you're an
officer
no offense to you, sir."
What he said held some truth. Officers worried more about paperwork even than
sergeants, while common soldiers didn't have to worry about it at all (a good
thing, too, since so many of them lacked their letters). But Thisbe capably
handled the paperwork he had. More shouldn't faze him. Something else lay
behind his refusal, but Gremio couldn't see what. He tried wheedling: "You'd
make more money."
"I don't care." Now the sergeant was visibly getting angry. "I don't want it,
sir, and that's flat."
"All right. All right." Gremio made a placating gesture. One thing years in
the lawcourts had taught him was when to back off. For whatever reasons,
Thisbe really didn't want to become an officer. That puzzled Gremio, who was
always in the habit of grabbing for whatever came his way. However puzzled he
was, though, he could see he wouldn't change the sergeant's mind.
Later that day, as he'd feared, the southrons started bringing more men some
footsoldiers, others unicorn-riders like the ones who'd come in under cover of
darkness the night before into their bridgehead on the west bank of Snouts
Stream. They also started bringing catapults over the bridges spanning the
stream. Colonel Florizel ordered the regiment up to full alert. The other
regiments in Alexander the Steward's wing also put more men up on the shooting
steps of their trenches.
"Can we do anything more than that, sir?" Gremio asked Florizel. By we he
didn't mean the regiment, but the Army of Franklin as a whole. "Can we bring
more men up to this part of the line? Can we bring more engines here? The
gods-damned southrons will pound us flat unless we can hit back."
He waited for Colonel Florizel to get angry. He'd long since seen the
regimental commander would have preferred a different sort of man as company
commander: a noble, a serfholder, all the things Gremio wasn't and wished he
were. But Florizel sighed and said, "I've been screaming for that, Captain.
It's done no good. We're stretched as thin as can be. To strengthen this
stretch means weakening ourselves somewhere else. We have nothing to spare."
"The southrons do," Gremio said.
"I know," Florizel replied.
Then the war is lost, Gremio thought.
If they can stretch us till we break and stay unbroken themselves, the war is
lost beyond repair
. He didn't want to dwell on that. In fact, he refused to dwell on it. He
said, "We'd better weaken ourselves somewhere else, sir, or they're going to
tear a hole right through this stretch of line."
"I'm not going to argue with you, because I think you're right," Colonel
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