Camp. It’s a tight fit. The Cousins never tried to put even half a thousand people in any of their camping places. Slow’s instructions to the survey saw bridges put in and camps expanded various places Below the Edge. Nothing big, nothing fancy, just bare rock with consistent drainage. Etch weeds, subtly and quietly, flits around and fusses. We’re snug into the western foot of a scraggly lump of a former island. It does for a mountain now.
D-Day Minus 3
Year of Peace 547, Messidor, Ninth Day (Early Summer)
Standard of the Fifth
The Creeks armoury can house many more people than it does. As a regular matter, you concentrate as tightly as you can. Minimizing the contained volume wastes the least ward strength.
Attention to orders. Orders in the standard feel less grim than Captain Hank’s regular spoken voice.
Drop the north-east bridge.
Narrow and implausible, it falls as a rain of chill sand.
Drop the canal bridge.
The locks are shut, six kilometres to the west. The armoury’s great canal-gates are shut. Both will be held shut by the weight of water above or inside them as the canal bridge and its running arches fall in a widening roar of neatly cubic gravel.
The next order is verbal, passed by runners down each of three stairwells. Raise the wall-wards.
None of those who activate the wall-wards could create them or explain them, but there is enough Power in the wreaking teams to keep the walls active until the food runs out months from now. The active wall-wards through the substance of the canal-gates shut them as things which cannot move and never once were open.
Scarlet and Ochre batteries have emplaced on Artillery Tower Four, where the roof has emplacements for the six batteries of a battalion. The artillery towers are taller than the others; even when artillery isn’t shooting flat, everyone wants the ‘over’ part of ‘overhead’ to have some structural reinforcement.
D-Day Minus 1
Year of Peace 547, Messidor, Eleventh Day (Early Summer)
Duckling
We take the wretched trail as soon as there’s any light around the mountain. We need to make our easting. We need to stay low. Below The Edge don’t look to be terrain you could do that, but the Cousins had five thousand years. We had sorcerer-surveyors and independent cartographers. We’ve got accurate maps. The Second hasn’t done the whole route, but we’ve been over this mountain-saddle.
Etch protested most of breakfast. Slow noted any exercise of sorcery on the eastern side of the Fifth Range must be observed. The bug charms aren’t sorcery, not when active. No one has turned theirs off since the standard was cased. The wild kine stick to the forests and the turtles stick to the watercourses and we’re not going those places.
To start with, we’re going where you have to drag the wheelbarrows. The path goes round by the north, and it’s steep and ugly and awkward and there’s two spots irredeemably muddy. Better than a lot of places Slow routes training marches. Much better than Meek’s joyous recognition that the Edifice is full of stairs. Nervous-making, because the north side’s exposed; there’s a sight-line to the River of Mists. Not a close one, there’s trees and distance and the light’s from them to us.
We’re going where we have to plain pick the wheelbarrows up, one file per wheelbarrow, and step careful over the cobbles. Below the Edge tipped after it drained. There’s old watercourse various places. Most of it’s swamp today. Some of it’s full of cobbles or gravel off the Fifth Range. It’s a way down, and it’s a way down screened by the old banks. Three-four places there’s a something, miasma’d be thinner than this is, leaning in. It never gets close. Six hundred files worth of individual orders from beyond the world saying we’re not food today.
The River of Mists erodes its course. It’s had time to make itself a valley. It never had much height to work with. The ridge line there’s so low it’s hard to see. We’re going south of the peak rise and north of the slightly higher land south of it. The ridge is flat sedimentary rock that cracked along an east-west line when the land bent. It’s eight and ten metres higher than the River of Mists at most, but it’s fifty kilometres wide north-south. Headward erosion fought it out from north and south into the broken middle. The middle got hollowed out until there wasn’t the slope for more erosion. The whole middle’s wet and sludgy, but there’s the rising edge north and south, all rippled with stream-entries as the rain made it. There’s a trail down the approximate middle of the north edge. Surprisingly straight; made straight. Fill and causeway the way you get when everybody chucks a couple rocks in every time they come past, and you keep it up for a thousand years.
It’s not obvious; we didn’t see it, from a slanting look down. Not anything you’d call obvious contour even without the coiling mists. Not under any trees, it’s too wet or bare rock, but the dark wear on the trail looks like the dark and tangled water right nearby. Bushes, reeds, the swamp grows stuff, but not close. Only enough width. No places we’ll need to ford. Surveyors like fording less than the Line does even without those turtles. Slab bridges have a lot to recommend them.
Sixteen-kilometer column of files isn’t as loud as you think it ought to be. We’re low, we’re rasping along on hard ground halfway to the idea of road, and we’ve got a dim day and mist and a little rain. A steady thump of boots doesn’t carry as much as you think; you hear your feet through your bones, but the world doesn’t. Slow’s got the Second’s Colour Party up front with Two-Fierce; Meek’s got the middle and Brisket’s trailing, for movement. Every three hours, halt in place and eat standing.
D-Day
Year of Peace 547, Messidor, Twelfth Day (Early Summer)
Duckling
The River of Mist cuts the flat ridge where it turns south. Twenty kilometres west of the turn in the river, the ridge has a gap. I’d guess it’s more erosional than seismic but the survey didn’t care which. The north end of the gap gets close to the river; the survey piled stuff up there back of the riverbank greenery. It keeps the gap screened for a kilometre or so back from the northern peak in the ridge-line. It’s not deep, it’s barely three metres; somebody up a mast on the river who can see through the dark and the mist could spot us.
We pack into the gap by banners. Tighter we are forward, the less risk from alert lookouts. Slow figured nobody wants to move on an unfamiliar river in the dark, and this ain’t the part of the River of Mists that’s reliable deep and straight. We make no lights anyway.
Stop number six. Eighteen hours from our start. Twenty by the time everyone’s packed in. When Two-Keen clumps up at the end of the column, Ninny’s had two hours. Colour parties are fed, watered, have wiped down and changed their socks and smalls. Nobody fell in a latrine. Anybody abraded’s been slathered. All the jars are distinct shapes; there’s been dark before. Second round of water. One dose of restorative. Even split between fits of wiggles to keep blood moving and leaning together to nap.
Current issue restorative’s a cube of gelatine about six centimetres on a side, large enough you have to chew. Takes some chewing. Nobody agrees on anything about the flavour. Don’t feel like it does anything.
No expanse of lilies here, blooming in the dark.
Two-Keen gets an hour.
“Pass the word,” Slow says, directly to Meek from half-a-metre and quiet for the distance. “Don armour.”
The word goes out. I’ve already got it. Pass it formal anyway, Ninny first and out by files. Everybody puts the armour bags back careful; you’re expressing a belief you’re going to need yours again. The pointy sticks get re-arranged from march order into ease-of-grabbing. File closers get strict about full canteens and everyone balances the water tanks on the wheelbarrows back out.
Three each side; two empty, one half-full.
It’d be easier if it was less misty. There’s enough sky glow you can see silhouettes of things, especially if you hold them up. Anything moving shows. Still have to trust your hands, and the mist makes everything cold and a bit
slippy.
Slow’s fished a watch out. Don’t know how they’re reading it.
Slow holds it up, beside my left ear. Something makes it tick, counting in four distinct pitches. Have to concentrate to hear it. That first flat pitch has to be zero.
“Twenty minutes,” Slow says.
“Sergeant-Major.” It’s only a little louder, but Meek’s head turns. “Pass the word. All to face south-west. When you see your shadow, latch to the standard.”
I walk around with Ninny and check everybody. The files are standing arms-over-shoulders, echeloned from our front to face south-west. I count them. I count the wheel-barrows. Two-Fierce has got their shields up high on their left shoulders. No shields in a Colour Party.
The word works its way back up from Brisket in the rear of the column. Everybody’s facing south-west.
D-Day, H-Hour Minus 1.0
Year of Peace 547, Messidor, Twelfth Day (Early Summer)
Standard of the Fifth
Full-Captain Hank disapproves of the crews sleeping beside their artillery tubes. Cots inevitably get in the way; sleeping on the ground is never wise. This is not, quite, in the field; it is on operations, but in the armoury, and the Commonweal has never had anything like it before.
The roof of Artillery Tower Four is broad and flat and impervious. Almost everyone is sleeping. The armourers have the tubes, and the drovers with no bronze-bulls to care for have the watch. That leaves sixteen of the nineteen files for each tube, the active crew that will rise and fight. A hundred and twenty-eight people settle into twenty-four metres by sixteen, low lumpy shapes. No cots; mattresses hauled up from the barracks, behind the rows of shot-racks trailing inward from each tube. Twenty-four by sixteen is spaced wide; there’s clear lanes to run.
The caissons aren’t here; the tubes and limbers are, and the ramps to roll them up would take caissons without difficulty, but Hank does not see the point. There will be no switch to an advance, not with the bridges down, and the shot-racks hold more than the caissons would.
Racks hold many more pointy sticks than a mobile battery could expect to transport. The battalion Colour Party is ten files, the size of a Wapentake platoon. Sticks from racks is not something the Fifth’s Colour Party has drilled. Their colour-sergeant has had racks with demon sticks put down both outside edges of a U-shape of racks. Two files of the Colour Party are asleep in the U-shape, the others behind it.
With most ilks of fellow regulars, Hank would expect the battery commanders to sleep; the full-captain is up, and the command team should try to keep its average weariness low.
Captain Eugenia is of Regular Six antecedent, and an independent. Without being an independent, they’d have five times Hank’s stamina with regard to sleep and alertness. They’ve had their nightly two-hour nap out of sheer propriety, and are up now, writing a letter fluidly in the black dark of a cloudy night. Captain Eugenia’s helmet and one gauntlet are off; they’re otherwise in armour.
Captain Blossom’s asleep beside Scarlet Battery’s special-shot shot-rack. Hank almost smiles.
A timer chimes in the standard. Each tube’s supports start moving, waking gunners and small-gunners, and running each individual artillery tube through checks. All six tubes in a battery aren’t necessarily going to work, but these are new, and emplaced on the facility which built them. There’s a cradle with a spare tube behind each special-shot shot-rack; the battalion has three spare mounts up here on the roof if it needs them, already fitted to carriages.
The wall-ward runs through two floors below the roof; there’s no going below that level with the wall-wards up and active. The top two floors are built to house and feed a full battalion. Mattresses vanish below; the crews eat by odds and evens, food heated with battery banners as they would in camp. Scarlet is a Creek unit and drinks wood-lettuce-root tea; Ochre is Regulars and Typicals and drinks coffee. All mutter, pass through the latrines, splash water on their faces, and emerge orderly in armour.
Attention to orders.
Evening teams on the focus. Morning teams on the tubes. Ochre has the bubble. Scarlet has the periphery. Battalion has front.
There’s a squishy, sliding feeling in the focus as it settles. Not full output, but active. The battery banners are contributing half their output to a ward-bubble maintained by the standard. Battalion executive rests with Hank, and the battalion would seem a single thing externally.
Prep Schedule One.
Prep Schedule Two.
D-Day, H-Hour
Year of Peace 547, Messidor, Twelfth Day (Early Summer)
Duckling
The flash’s stark and sudden, shadows harsh and dark and fanned. The close few high shot ain’t got intervening cloud.
Latch goes fast and startled. Everything into the bubble. Slow has no doubts about what layers in what order.
Listen up. Fifth Battalion put twenty-four six-red into the north-south section of the River of Mists. Meek’s entirely calm. There’s some five-red that’ll be coming down in the east-west stretch of the river.
Maneuver to cut their line of retreat. Ain’t something I decided to think. Sounds like the Captain.
The focus makes some formless gesticulation to itself before it settles out and the push goes smooth. The River of Mists is three hundred metres north of our forward files.
The five-red come down and the wind from the close high six-red twenty kilometres away gets to us about the same time. The bubble shrugs it. Wouldn’t want to get hit with five-red, but it comes down as planned. We’re in the middle of two high-low pairs, one into the river, one detonating twenty-six hundred metres up.
It gets bright out there. A few files take a knee. Sensible primal desire, getting your head down.
Attention to orders.
Slow sounds like Slow with less doubt.
Bug charms. Hold at arm’s length. Off.
Slow demonstrates. The lace slithers out of Slow’s hair with a bit of tugging; the stitches pop when Slow pushes the charm against the thread. The little aluminium tag gets tossed lightly up, and the focus shows everybody the aluminium burning, bright and brief, as the charm switches off.
Every sergeant and sergeant-major in both battalions says By files, by your numbers, count! like we practiced this. Slow’s face twitches halfway to a smile; Meek looks angry, Brisket, back with One-Uniform, looks rueful. It hangs up until the file-closers can get their laces detached, longer than it feels. Little falling stars burn down in bitter smells of hot metal and a quiet chant that’s mumbling with variety until it hits the file position, mumble-mumble-ONE! mumble-mumble-TWO! and with mumble-mumble-EIGHT! they’re all gone.
Advance by banners to your designated position. The focus pushes the map. Prepare to advance in haste.
One-Fierce is Knives. You can feel the grin, because Knives has noticed we’re going across the bare rock of what was the broad bed of the river. Ain’t crossing, ain’t fording; right through the boiling water.
The Line will advance.
The banners drop off the standard. Opposed river crossing’s always risky, but the Sea People ought to be feeling surprised. Thirty-six five-red shot in the stacked trajectories of the second volley. Thirty-four detonated. Failures right next to each other, one high-low pair. Flinch’s fed it into the focus, I tap it to the banner-captains. Forty kilometres west.
We’re just close enough to the traditional anchorage if the first volley didn’t work. Feed has all four six-red functioning. Two high, two in the water. No ships showing.
One-Fierce sprints for the river. The gap’s clear where the river-water splashed back off the bubble and dragged the piled heap of gravel screen with it.
Two-Fierce is Weasel. Weasel’s attention’s ticking through the focus for where you can push down on the bubble. Four ways to do it, and I can feel Two-Fierce’s bubble going low and flat before they’re even in the water.
Slow’s handed the standard’s focus to Meek to manage movement. Two colour parties, almost-one-banner
for files, banner for push, they all know it.
The river bed’s plowed up with the two closest impacts. There’s bare hot rock across the bottom of the western crater where the roiling water’s still flowing back in. Trying to flow back in; there’s steam explosions great and small. We get the river closing over the bubble five times while we’re crossing. Dead things in the water and eerie silence in the bubble. You can see it’s noisy out there, but nothing in here but your comrades, breath and boots and the odd creak from a wheelbarrow.
We’re inland on the far bank, three, three, three, and two by banners, as compact as we can get.
Banners latch the standard.
Slow’s gone strange to excitement.
Puddle has the bubble, Two-Uniform, Two-Thorn, Two-Ogive.
Lolly has the periphery, One-Uniform, Two-Fierce, Two-Robust.
Suppress Sea People pickets.
I hand the observers sectors, here and here and here with the focus. Farmer’s distant observer files start taking high looks.
Battalion movement by direction of the sergeant-majors.
Everybody’s getting an overlay through the focus: where we’re going, where their banner is going, where their platoon is going, where their file is going. File arrow’s shortest and darkest if you’re a trooper. Everybody gets which banner which sergeant-major has; Meek’s got the left, Brisket’s got the right, it’s not split by First and Second.
Knives has Left Front, One-Fierce, One-Robust. Dancer has Right Front, One-Ogive One-Thorn.
Knives? Slow’s personal voice ain’t distinct from orders. The standard lets you know.
Yeah, yeah, kill’em like we like’em. Knives ain’t displeased.
Signaller to direct operations.
Breathe, because of sudden need. The focus shifts, more compact and more nuanced and wider, all together. Not meat-brain geometry, ignore it. How Slow planned to fight.
A Mist of Grit and Splinters Page 26