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have any possible doubts on that score.We'll all be stuck with Avram, and
we'll all be stuck with blonds .
Hating the idea but not knowing what he could do about it, Bell took his
little bottle of laudanum off his belt. He yanked out the stopper and swigged.
Healers sometimes gasped and turned pale when he told them how much laudanum
he took every day. He didn't care. He needed the drug. It held physical
torment at something close to arm's length. A good stiff dose also helped him
avoid dwelling on any of the many things he didn't care to contemplate.
He caressed the smooth glass curve of the laudanum bottle as if it were the
curve of a lover's breast. Till he was wounded, he'd never known how marvelous
a drug could be. He tried to imagine his life these days without
laudanum tried and, shuddering, failed. Without laudanum, he wasn't truly
alive.
"And I never would have known if I hadn't been wounded," he murmured. "I
would have missed all this." He caressed the bottle again. Laudanum made him
real. Laudanum made him clever. As long as he had laudanum, everything that
had happened to him, every single bit of it, was all worthwhile.
* * *
Captain Gremio had seen more in the way of warfare than he'd ever wanted. Now,
in his own home province, he saw the final ruin to which the hopes of the
north had come. Colonel Florizel's soldiers had joined with the forlorn
handful of men Count Joseph the Gamecock was using to try to hold back the
great flood tide of General Hesmucet's advance. With the addition of
Florizel's veterans, Joseph the Gamecock now had a forlorn double handful of
men.
Handful or double handful, what Joseph didn't have was enough men.
Hesmucet's soldiers ranged through Palmetto Province almost as they pleased.
Joseph had hoped the swamps and marshes in the north near Veldt would slow the
southrons down as they swarmed south toward Parthenia. Building roads through
the trackless wilderness, the southrons had broken through the difficult
country faster than Joseph or any other northerner imagined possible.
Now Karlsburg, where the War Between the Provinces began and where Gremio
lived, was lost. It wasn't that Hesmucet's men had captured the place. They
hadn't. They'd simply passed it by, heading for Hail, the provincial capital,
and leaving a trail of devastation in their wake. Karlsburg would belong to
Avram's men as soon as they bothered to occupy it. At the moment, they were
showing it the ultimate contempt: they weren't even wasting their time to
conquer it.
As a regimental commander, Gremio could hope to get answers to questions that
would have kept his men guessing. When Count Joseph's men camped outside of
Hail one chilly night that made the place seem to live up to its name, he
asked Colonel Florizel, "Sir, is there any chance we can hold them out of this
city?"
Florizel looked at him for a long time before shaking his head. "No, Captain.
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We couldn't hold them out if we had twice our men and they had half of theirs.
We are ruined. We are finished. We are through."
That would have hit Gremio harder if he hadn't already expected it. "Whatcan
we do, sir?" he asked.
"Fall back through Hail. Destroy whatever's in there that the gods-damned
southrons might be able to use. Stop on the south bank of the next river we
come to. Pray to the gods that we can delay Hesmucet for a few hours. If we're
very, very lucky, maybe we can even delay him for a whole day. Then we fall
back to the river after that and pray to the gods again." Florizel, who'd
carried so much on his broad, sturdy shoulders for so long, sounded like a man
altogether bereft of hope.
Gremio had been without hope for a long time. He'd hoped to borrow a little
from his strong-hearted superior. Finding none, he gave Florizel his best
salute and went back to his regiment. "What's the news, sir?" Sergeant Thisbe
asked, perhaps hoping to borrow some from him.
"The news is . . . bad, Sergeant," Gremio answered, and relayed what Colonel
Florizel had said.
Thisbe frowned. "You're right, sir. That doesn't sound good. If we can't hang
on to Hail, what's the point of going on with the war?"
"You would do better to ask that of King Geoffrey than of me," Gremio said.
"His Majesty might be able to answer it. I, on the other hand, have no idea."
"All right, sir," the underofficer said. "I won't give you any more trouble
about it, then. Seems to me we've got trouble enough."
"Seems to me you're right," Gremio said. "I wish you weren't, but you are."
If they had tried to fight in Hail, they would have been quickly surrounded
and destroyed. That was obvious. Like Doubting George's army after the fight
in front of Ramblerton, General Hesmucet's force kept extending tentacles of
soldiers, hoping to trap its foes. As Joseph the Gamecock had in Peachtree
Province, he traded space for time. The difference here was, he really
couldn't afford to lose any more space at all, and he along with the north was
fast running out of time.
Old men and boys and women cursed Joseph's soldiers as they marched south
through Hail. A white-bearded fellow pointed to the governor's palace and
shouted at Gremio, who stood out perhaps because of his epaulets: "That's
where we started! That's where we said we wouldn't be part of Detina any more,
not if gods-damned Avram was going to take our serfs off the land where they
belong. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"
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