by John F. Carr
“I don’t need an exact answer, Chancellor. A good guess will do.”
“Two hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand men, women and children!”
There was the sound of indrawn breath from among the assembled nobles.
Chartiphon, oblivious to the reaction of his words, continued. “The refugees are strung out behind us for two hundred and fifty marches. Many more are just arriving from Sask, Nostor, Sashta, Ulthor and even Kyblos. A Saski party of two hundred and fifty soldiers arrived yesterday with ten times that amount of civilians, by way of Glarth. They told tales of brigandage and starvation that would melt even Styphon’s gold heart.”
For about the hundredth time in the last month, Kalvan wondered if it wouldn’t have been better for everyone if he’d just stayed where he belonged in his own world. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. What’s done is done, damn-it; now get back to the job at hand.
“Then we will be running out of food even faster than I had thought. Uncle Wolf Tharses, We are going to put you in charge of victuals as well as medicine.”
“But, Your Majesty--”
“Tharses, there is no one else. You are the only person everyone trusts. Starting tomorrow, everyone--including Ourselves--will be going on half-rations. Also, We want you to double the number of hunting parties. And continue to burn anything and everything we cannot take with us, including crops and orchards. This is total war and anything that we cannot use we will kill, destroy or torch!”
The majority of the assembled councilors and Princes drew back in horror, while many drew the circle of Dralm upon their breasts. It was time to give his allies the unvarnished truth; they were going to need it if they were to survive.
“Now, Captain-General Hestophes will give us a report on the active status of the Army of Hos-Hostigos. General.”
Hestophes stood up stiffly from too many days on horseback. Despite his youth, Hestophes was a first-rate field general as well as chief of staff. These days he and Prince Phrames were the strongest shoulders Kalvan had to lean on now that Harmakros was gone.
“As of this morning, our muster book shows thirty-one thousand, five hundred and sixty-two active soldiers, including those wounded expected to return to active duty. About twenty-six thousand of these are on the muster rolls of the Royal Army of Hos-Hostigos. The remaining soldiers are members of Princely retinues or mercenaries. Many are short on armor and helmets, but all have weapons and at least one firearm. Our supply of fireseed is adequate and we have ample supplies of shot and lead for casting.”
“How many of these are mercenaries?”
Hestophes winced. “Many of the mercenaries have deserted. We are still carrying over two thousand.”
“We cannot afford to feed unreliable troops. Give them a choice: either they join the Royal Army or we muster them out.”
“What about back-pay?”
“Pay them whatever we owe, not a phenig more.” The treasury of Hos-Hostigos was in a small baggage train of fourteen wagons. They were not impoverished, not yet, but that gold could disappear faster than an ice cream cone on a hot day if he wasn’t careful. However, it was important to maintain the reputation of a King who always paid his debts.
The big question was: what to do next? He was faced with an alarming number of choices: he could return to the vacant Princedom of Nyklos and attempt to hold off the Grand Host until winter when the change of seasons would provide some breathing room. Of course, by that token, it would have been smarter to try to hold Tarr-Hostigos and wait the Styphoni out. But, with the Princedom occupied by hostile troops, he would have been unable to care for or feed his people. Moving lock, stock and barrel into Nyklos would only postpone the inevitable.
Or, he could make nice with King Theovacar and hope that he needed a vassal punished or removed. In other words, sell the army to the highest bidder, knowing that Styphon’s Grand Host would think twice about going up against Hos-Hostigos and Greffa, or Dorg. Unfortunately, that was another temporary solution to a permanent problem. As Tortha had pointed out in their talk last night, during their discussion about sending Tortha to Greffa to open diplomatic negotiations with King Theovacar, it still would not provide Kalvan and his people with a home base from which to operate.
He hoped Tortha and Theovacar, between themselves, could come up with a better solution because right now Kalvan was fresh out of ideas. At least when Napoleon was exiled to Elba he didn’t have a quarter of a million mouths to feed.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Ptosphes was leading a cavalry charge at the climax of a great battle. The guns thundered and something else was growling like a whole forestful of hungry bears.
He looked down again. He wasn’t riding a horse, but standing on top of one of Great King Truman’s wagons with its strange gun. Except that the wagon wasn’t quite as Kalvan had described it--it had the head and tail of a horse, the mane flying into his face. As they rode downhill toward the lines of an enemy flying the colors of Styphon’s Red Hand, the wagon-horse turned its head to look at Ptosphes.
Its eyes glowed a sinister green, and he knew he was riding a creature possessed by demons.
He clawed for reins he couldn’t find, trying to turn the creature so he wouldn’t have to look into those eyes. No matter how desperately he groped, he couldn’t find the reins. At last his fingers closed on something that felt like woolen cloth, which was a strange thing to make reins out of--
“Prince Ptosphes! Prince Ptosphes! Wake up!”
Nobody should be telling him to wake up in a dream and this was still a dream. He could still hear the thunder of guns, even if he couldn’t hear the bear-like growling of the iron wagon.
“Prince Ptosphes! The Grand Host is coming!”
“Hu-rrrupppp!” Ptosphes lurched into a sitting position before he realized that he was awake and clutching his blanket.
He heard guns thundering and someone shouted in his ear that the Styphoni were attacking. The window showed gray instead of black. Two men ran toward it, carrying heavy rifled muskets, nearly tripping over Ptosphes as they came.
Ptosphes threw off the blanket and stood. The air of the keep already held a sodden heat. He felt obscurely resentful that so many men should have to fight their last battle on a miserably hot day.
Someone was pushing a cup of sassafras tea into his hands. He emptied it in three gulps and held it out again for more. The second cupful was half Ermut’s brandy. He set the cup down on the nearest chest, retrieved his sword and buckled it on.
Harmakros was sitting in the chair of state, wide-awake and barking orders. His stump was propped up on a pillow-padded stool and two pistols hung from the arm of the chair.
“Good luck, Prince.”
“The same to you, old son.”
That was all the speech Ptosphes allowed himself, even if it was probably the last time he would see Harmakros. If the riflemen were taking position before the arrow slits, there was hardly time to talk.
Chroniclers a hundred years from now will probably make up fine farewell speeches for both of us. Tutors will torment children by forcing them to learn those speeches.
As Ptosphes passed through the keep door to the outer stairs, the gun-roar doubled, then doubled again. The mortars had opened fire. Whatever was coming at Tarr-Hostigos was now within their range.
Ptosphes hurried down the stairs as fast as he could without appearing uneasy. At the bottom he saw that the guards who saluted him were also busily piling tar-soaked brushwood under the timbers of the stairs. One torch and the easy way into the keep would go up in flames, making another line of defense for the last of the garrison.
From the tower over the gate between the courtyards, Ptosphes could see everywhere except directly behind the keep. In the last attack, they had given the Styphoni dogs heavy casualties with caseshot and supporting rifle fire, but in the end he had ordered the last of his command back to the keep in the inner bailey, where they could maximize the firepower of Tarr-Hostigos’ smal
l garrison. He hadn’t the heart to call muster, but a lot of familiar faces, like Vurth’s, were missing.
Three large storming parties were advancing, one toward the breach made by the siege guns, one by the main gate, and one holding well back on the northeastern side. At a single glance, Ptosphes knew that nearly half the Grand Host must be hurling itself at the castle.
The northeastern column was in fact so far away that Ptosphes wondered if they were the reserves, until he saw what was slowing them down. They had last night’s mysterious wagons with them, except that they weren’t wagons. They were stout-timbered wooden platforms mounted on immense solid wheels, each pushed by a hundred men with poles and pulled by hundreds more with ropes.
Except some of the ‘men’ wore skirts, and some were too small. Men, women and children from Hostigos Town, forced to haul the platforms forward until they reached the moat. The platforms would fill the moat most handily, offering a firm base for ladders. Of course the castle’s defenders wouldn’t fire on their own people to keep the platforms from reaching their destination. . .
This had to be the Arch-Butcher Roxthar’s work! Behind the platforms marched a large body of infantry with pikes, halberds and glaives, leading ten bands of musketeers, each a thousand strong or more--the last, a Temple Band of Styphon’s Red Hand, held aloft the Guard’s black pinion with a red sun-wheel. Scores of two and three-man teams carried scaling ladders, while others carried coils of rope. Once the wooden platforms were in place, the Styphoni would pour into the castle like a mountain stream swollen by floodwaters.
Ptosphes used the name of every god he’d ever heard of but couldn’t find words to describe the habits of Soton and Roxthar in this world or the fate he wished for them in another. To set women and children as targets--and to fight behind their skirts!
He started to add Phidestros to the cursing, then halted. After all, one does not swear at the whip when it strikes, but at the hand wielding it.
Ptosphes gripped the railing until his nails gouged the wood, and then shouted, “Gunners! Open fire on those platforms! Round shot, and aim at the wheels.” Styphon himself couldn’t start those landbound rafts moving again once their wheels were wrecked.
The gunners looked at each other, then at their Prince. They’d seen who was out there in front of their guns, maybe even seen their own kin. Thaimoth shouted, “Better clean Hostigi cannonballs than the Investigator’s rack!” Then they began slewing the guns around. Ptosphes heard most of them cursing and praying, one or two weeping.
Three siege guns were now firing from the Host’s battery in front of the main gate, over the heads of the column marching to the gate. Big guns, too. Ptosphes saw half the main gate flung backward off its hinges into the portcullis, which bent ominously.
A less well-aimed shot ploughed through the infantry of the storming column. They halted, giving the guns and riflemen and musketeers on the gate towers an even better target. Their firing sounded like a single volley, and they fired three more times before the enemy column moved again. It moved more slowly now, leaving behind a trail of writhing, bloody bodies, like a dying animal dragging its guts behind as it sought to close with the hunter.
The column coming at the breach was taking the most punishment from the mortars, whose crews were firing much too fast to be concerned with safety. Ptosphes saw one man knocked down and crushed as a mortar shifted on its base, and a shell with a fuse cut too short blew up just above the walls. A dozen defenders went down. The ones who rose again shook their fists at the mortar crews.
Now the guns beside Ptosphes were shooting at the wheeled platforms. The first shot flew high, glancing off the heavy timbers and soaring over the heads of the Harphaxi infantry directly behind the platform. Another regiment was coming into sight behind the first one--armored men in blackened armor, marching under a black banner with a silver sun-wheel. Soton’s Knights were fighting on foot today.
The second shot bowled into the prisoners hauling the platform. The third chewed splinters from its edge. Before a fourth could hit, the people in front of the platform dropped their ropes and ran.
The infantry charged forward, though the gaps between the platforms. The fourth shot smashed the head of a company of arquebusiers, halting it. The rest of the company reached open ground. The pikemen picked up the fallen ropes, while others leveled musketoons, arquebuses and pistols, firing at the fleeing Hostigi rushing towards Tarr-Hostigos. A few of the townspeople tried to run back behind the platforms, but were cut down by the swords and maces of the advancing Knights.
Ptosphes had long given up hope of adequately cursing Styphon or his servants. He merely shouted, “Change to case shot!” Those platforms weren’t going to be smashed or stopped, but they could be made useless by killing enough of the Grand Host ready to pull them into place and climb from them up on to the walls.
Forget the Hostigi prisoners. They were doomed.
So was the garrison of Tarr-Hostigos. Not that there’d been much doubt about this, since they’d refused Soton’s latest offer of terms. (And what terms--death for all the captains and the rest to be at the mercy of Roxthar’s Investigators!) The last quarter-candle had just made an existing certainty more certain still. Men who stormed a castle after this kind of punishment would be half-mad and totally deaf to requests for quarter, which they wouldn’t give anyway.
The siege guns aimed at the main gate were firing higher now, trying to silence the guns in the gate tower. One of them was disabled, but the other two were still hurling case shot straight into the column, inflicting hideous losses. Guns from the other towers were now hammering at the column as well, scything down entire companies like farmers harvesting wheat.
Smoke gushed up from the enemy battery, more than one could expect from the discharge of even the largest gun. Ptosphes saw men flying into the air and others running with their clothing on fire. He heard the thump of an explosion--someone careless with fireseed--as the rate of fire increased.
More Hostigi case shot tore into the column then, suddenly, it was breaking up and the men were running back down the draw in a futile effort to find shelter, some of their officers beating at them with halberds and swords, others joining the rout. From the walls of Tarr-Hostigos, cheers joined the gunfire.
Ptosphes had a moment of thinking that perhaps their doom wasn’t so certain after all. One column broken, its men looking as if they would be hard to rally for another attack. If the defenders could do the same with the other two columns, the mercenary captains might have the same second thoughts they’d had during the first storming attempt. If they had second thoughts and let Styphon’s House know them, the False God himself couldn’t keep the Archpriests from having to listen. And if the Archpriests chose to turn the Red Hand loose on the mercenaries, the Grand Host’s war against Hostigos would become a civil war within its own ranks--
Ptosphes’ moment of hope ended as he saw the column approaching the breach suddenly sprout scaling ladders. They were going to get in or at least close; the heavy mortars had fired off all their shells and round shot wouldn’t do so well even against packed men--
The twelve-pounder on top of the barricade let fly with a triple charge of musket balls. “I told you it wouldn’t blow!” Thalmoth cried. Like a volley from a massed regiment, it smashed into the column. Already ragged from climbing the slope, the column now barely deserved the name.
Hard on the twelve pounder’s heels came point-blank musketry that melted away more of the column. Every musketeer within range had six or seven loaded weapons ready to hand for just this moment. For a brief space, they could fire as fast as the rifles of Great King Truman’s host with their ‘magazines’ of eight rounds.
These foes had their blood up though, or maybe better captains. Then Ptosphes saw blue and orange colors and recognized the Sacred Squares of Hos-Ktemnos, the reputed ‘best’ infantry in the Seven Kingdoms. They rose across the rubble before the breach like a blue wave, with clumps of musketeers on the fla
nks firing over the heads of the storming parties to keep down Hostigi fire. The crews of the useless heavy mortars drew swords and pistols and joined the mass of men struggling in the breach. Ptosphes drew his own sword, ready to join them if they showed signs of flagging.
Two of the three platforms were still closing the walls, a third had put one wheel through the roof of a sinkhole and was defying all efforts of the men on its ropes to get it moving again. Around the others was a mob of Hostigi prisoners, Zarthani Knights and mercenary infantry being hit every minute by case shot and rifle bullets but coming on nonetheless--
One of the overheated four-pounders beside Ptosphes recoiled so violently that it snapped its breechings and knocked down Thalmoth. He lay with his thigh a mass of blood, white bone shining through the torn flesh, cursing the gun crew for not remembering what he taught them and asking for a pistol. Ptosphes gave him one of his own pistols.
The first platform rumbled up the last few paces of the slope and crashed across the moat, which ran some ten rods wide and eight rods deep. Soldiers on the top of the platforms began to hoist ladders. The Hostigi riflemen firing inside the castle’s towers thinned their ranks.
The first ladder rose up on the platform, and then flew to pieces as a shot from nowhere split it from top to bottom. At least it came from what seemed like nowhere to Ptosphes, although he knew that the part of the battle he could see and hear must be rapidly shrinking. This storming of Tarr-Hostigos was already making every other battle he’d fought sound like a mother’s lullaby.
Off to the left of the platform, Soton’s guns were finally coming into action. One was firing from an incline, with dead gunners around it showing that the Hostigi riflemen hadn’t overlooked this new target. The other guns were being emplaced on the open hillside by men working in frantic haste, obviously eager to start shooting before the battle ended and they lost their share of glory. Ptosphes wondered what share of glory they would have if they hit more of their own men than the enemy’s. Their share of broken bones and heads, more likely.