Safehold 10 Through Fiery Trials

by David Weber

  OCTOBER YEAR OF GOD 907

  .I.

  Pauton-Quijang High Road and City of Zhynkau, Boisseau Province, United Provinces, North Harchong.

  Lieutenant Yausung Ryndau, United Provinces Provisional Militia, stood on the hilltop and watched with cautious satisfaction as his platoon’s lead squads moved forward through the chilly autumn afternoon.

  Most of the crops were in, but the wind rattled the dry cornstalks still standing in the fields that lined the narrow farm track and sighed in the scrub conifers around his hilltop. In the distance, he heard the high-pitched wail of an automotive’s whistle as it thundered along the Rwanzhi-Pauton Line behind him, but the sound was no longer startling. The United Provinces’ steadily expanding rail net reached as far north as Chalfor in Cheshire and as far east as Tiangshi. There was even talk of expanding the United Provinces protection as far as the ruins of Shang-mi and extending the Tiangshi Line the additional hundred miles or so to the capital. Indeed, there was even some talk about reaching beyond Shang-mi all the way to the far side of the Chiang-wu Mountains, another eight hundred miles—for a wyvern, not a landbound mortal; it was a hell of a lot farther by high road—beyond the old capital. There were a lot of theoretical arguments in favor, given the mountains’ defensive strength. Ryndau understood that, but personally, he thought that would be reaching a bit too far.

  Of course, the decision wasn’t up to him.

  He ignored the whistle and raised the Charisian-manufactured double-glass. He peered through it, adjusting the focusing wheel with one forefinger, and concentrated on his platoon as its squads leapfrogged along the farm track. His vantage point was high enough to look down on the sunken lane over the dry corn tassels, and the double-glass brought Sergeant Zheng’s squad into razor-sharp focus. The lieutenant had had the double-glass long enough now that it had become merely marvelous, no longer an outright miracle, and he swung his gaze back to Platoon Sergeant Yingkan Fuzhow, then nodded approval as Fuzhow waved for Zheng’s squad to halt in place while Sergeant Chwaiyn’s squad took over the lead. Visibility down on the road bed was limited, but Fuzhow was aware of that and Chwaiyn’s squad filtered forward while Zheng’s held position in what their Charisian instructors called “overwatch.”

  The western side of the dirt road was bordered by a wall of piled, dry-laid stone that was slightly better than waist high, but there was only a well-weathered split rail fence on the east. Some of the rails were badly warped—Ryndau doubted it would actually have been up to the task of keeping the occasional wandering cow out of the corn—but it defined the farm road’s borders. Unlike the stone wall, however, it was no barrier to the human eye and the visibility was far better to the east. The stone wall limited what could be seen in the other direction, especially if someone had chosen to hide behind it. In fact, the platoon sergeant had one of 4th Platoon’s sections sweeping up the far side of the stone wall just in case someone had decided to do exactly that. It was hard going through the dried corn, and although he couldn’t hear it from his own position, Ryndau knew they were making Shan-wei’s own racket as they forced their way through the brittle stalks.

  Sergeant Chwaiyn’s lead section paused as they approached a bend where the road turned sharply west. They spread a bit wider, positioning themselves so that the man at the eastern end of their line could see around the bend. He dropped and crawled under the lowest rail of the fence to get a better angle and his gaze swept the next stretch carefully. Then he raised his left hand to signal the all-clear and Corporal Naiow started forward with his section. They turned the corner and—

  CRAAAACK!

  Ryndau twitched. In fact, he barely managed to avoid jumping in astonishment as the rifle shot crashed across the afternoon’s chill. His head whipped around, and he swore as two or three dozen more rifles thundered from the cornfield to the east. An instant later, fifty men came charging out of the corn behind the high, piercing howl of the battle cry the Imperial Charisian Army had appropriated from the old Royal Charisian Marines.

  Platoon Sergeant Fuzhow’s head snapped around in the same direction. He was too far away for Ryndau to hear what he was shouting, but despite the totality of the surprise, his astounded squads wheeled towards the oncoming Charisians. Chwaiyn’s men tried to scramble into a firing line of some sort, but Zheng’s vaulted over the stone wall and spread out on the farther side, leveling their rifles across the improvised parapet.

  The Charisians went to ground, flattening among the skeletal cornstalks rather than charge into Zheng’s rifles. As they did, one of the Charisian noncoms distributed among the UPPM’s squads began whacking Chwaiyn’s men with his baton, designating casualties. Virtually Naiow’s entire section sat down in disgust as the baton thwacked the backs of their helmets. The rest of Chwaiyn’s men went prone in whatever cover they could find and began firing back.

  More blank cartridges began to crackle as Zheng’s riflemen fired back at the Charisians, as well. The attackers—like Chwaiyn’s survivors—had the advantage of being prone in excellent concealment, but cornstalks wouldn’t have stopped real bullets whereas Zheng’s men had the advantage of the stone wall’s solid protection, and Ryndau stopped swearing. If Zheng and what was left of Chwaiyn’s squad could hold the Charisians in play until Fuzhow swung his other two squads out on their flank, they might still—

  KABOOM!

  An entire chain of thunderous explosions roared from the western side of the stone wall, directly behind Sergeant Zheng’s men, and Ryndau’s jaw clamped as whistles began to shrill. They were loud enough to cut through the crackle of rifles, and Ryndau managed—somehow—not to start swearing all over again as the umpires signaled the ignominious end of the training exercise. Instead, he drew a deep, deep breath and turned to the brown-haired man standing beside him.

  “You even warned me it was an ambush exercise,” he said in a tone of profound self-disgust.

  “Well, yes,” Lieutenant Bhradfyrd agreed in a pronounced Tarotisian accent, and shrugged. “I think the problem is that Yingkan thought he had better visibility to the east than he really did.”

  Ryndau nodded glumly, watching as the Charisian ambushers stood and waded out of the cornfield and clambered over the rail fence. They mingled with the Harchongians, laughing and smacking their discomfited students on the back like the winning team in a baseball game. Their camouflage-pattern uniforms would have blended into the dense rows of dead corn anyway, but they’d taken a page from the ICA’s scout snipers and fastened additional foliage to their helmets, breaking up any betraying outlines.

  A petulant part of the lieutenant tried to convince himself that that was the only reason they’d gotten away with it.

  The rest of him knew better.

  “You’re right,” he sighed. “And your people counted on that, didn’t they?”

  “To some extent.” Bhradfyrd shrugged. “Visibility was better to the east than trying to look directly over the stone wall, after all. But ‘better’ isn’t the same thing as ‘good,’ and we counted on your people being preoccupied with the worse blind spots on their left. And—” he allowed himself a grin “—we also figured you’d do exactly what Zheng did and go over the wall to use it for cover when we hit you from the right.”

  Ryndau nodded again, glumly.

  “I suppose I need to have a little talk with Platoon Sergeant Fuzhow and Sergeant Zheng about following doctrine,” he growled.

  “Probably.” Bhradfyrd nodded. “But I wouldn’t go too hard on them, Yausung.” Ryndau raised an eyebrow, and Bhradfyrd shrugged again. “Yes, standard doctrine in an ambush scenario is to go to ground and return fire in place while you assess, because the other fellows are likely to have thought three or four steps ahead of you. In this case, Fuzhow—or maybe Zheng, on his own initiative—let himself be rushed into jumping the fence without thinking about the possibility that we’d done just that and planted Kau-yungs on the other side of it. And that got Zheng’s entire squad ‘killed.’ But it’s
like General Gahrvai and Duke Serabor always say—‘doctrine is a guide, not a shackle.’” Ryndau grimaced as the Charisian quoted the training manual to him. “In this case, Fuzhow—or Zheng—made the wrong choice, and you need to point that out to both of them. But you don’t want to kill their willingness to improvise. They’d have done better to follow doctrine this time, and that will usually be the case, but you want your noncoms to think for themselves, especially when they get dropped into the shitter. So the trick is to find a way to kick them in the arse for screwing up while simultaneously patting them on the back for how quickly they responded. And they did respond quickly, Yausung. Quite a bit more quickly than we’d anticipated, really.”

  Ryndau nodded, then inhaled deeply.

  “I suppose I’d better get down there and get my licks in while the lesson’s still fresh. Care to come along and help kick?”

  * * *

  “Overall, your men are doing a lot better, Hauzhwo,” Sir Koryn Gahrvai said as he settled into the armchair in front of the crackling hearth. He and Brigadier Zhanma—the United Provinces had adopted Charisian ranks for its militia officers—had discussed Lieutenant Bhradfyrd’s report of the latest training exercises over a comfortable dinner, and he listened appreciatively to the wind roaring softly around the eaves as Zhanma took the armchair facing him. October nights in West Harchong made the roaring fire more than merely welcome to a boy from Corisande even without the wind-roar, and Gahrvai stretched out his booted ankles to enjoy the warmth.

  “For a bunch of peasants and serfs with manure still caking their boots and ‘officers’ who are still reading the rulebook as we go along, I guess we are, Sir.” Hauzhwo Zhanma sounded a bit sour.

  “Actually, there’s some truth to that,” Gahrvai said with a smile. “Especially that bit about still reading the rulebook. Your people haven’t been doing this very long, and it takes time to get really sneaky. Or to be ready for the other side to pull sneaky shit on you. I don’t even want to talk about what Emperor Cayleb and his Marines did to us when they invaded Corisande!” He shook his head. “Your boys’ learning curve isn’t quite as sharp as ours was, but that’s because the ones who screw up aren’t actually getting killed. Trust me, it makes a difference!”

  Zhanma snorted in sour amusement.

  “I imagine that’s true, Sir,” he conceded. “And better to be handed our heads in training exercises by people who are on our own side.”

  “Absolutely.” Gahrvai’s tone was much more serious than it had been.

  “And the truth is, I’ve got at least as much to learn as lieutenants like Ryndau,” Zhanma added. He shook his head. “If you’d told me four years ago what I’d be doing today, I’d have told you you were crazy!”

  “Been a lot of that going around for the last ten, twenty years,” Gahrvai said, and Zhanma snorted again, harder.

  Gahrvai smiled, then raised his beer stein and sipped. In Corisande, they would have been treating themselves to brandy about now, but Harchong made amazingly good beer and he’d never really been that fond of brandy. Whiskey, now—

  He suppressed a chuckle he didn’t really want to explain to his host and gazed into the fire’s incandescent heart while he contemplated how his own life had changed over the last couple of decades. And the truth was, that Zhanma and his Harchongian peasant-troopers and shopkeeper-officers were doing at least as well as the professional Royal Corisandian Army had managed when Cayleb Ahrmahk and his Marines swept through it like a hurricane.

  Zhanma himself was a case in point. No one would have described the pre-Rebellion captain of horse as an intellectual, but he was no fool, either. And he had a surprising amount of moral integrity. He’d enjoyed his own pecuniary arrangements with the port authorities in Zhynkau, but for a typical Harchongese officer in his position, he’d been a paragon of incorruptible honesty. More than that, he’d had the courage to accept Baron Star Rising’s leadership and take command of the provisional militia the United Provinces had raised after the Rebellion despite the fact that he knew exactly how the Emperor would reward his actions if and when the imperial authority was restored in West Harchong. Some of Star Rising’s supporters had signed on because they expected to do very well for themselves out of it. Gahrvai knew that, and as his wife had pointed out when he grumbled about that point with her, expecting anything else out of human beings would have been both unrealistic and unreasonable. But that wasn’t why Zhanma had given the baron not just his support but his loyalty. Oh, he was going to do well out of it, assuming everyone involved got to keep his or her head, but that wasn’t his primary motivator. Gahrvai couldn’t work as closely with him as he had without realizing that.

  “To be honest,” he said now, lowering his stein, “I think it’s probably time to start considering that expansion we’ve talked about.” He waved the stein. “Most of your people are making the mistakes trained troops make now, not the kind mobs of civilians make. Between my people and the training cadre we can stand up out of the Militia, I think we’ve got the capacity to handle the expansion now. And with winter coming up, we can take more men out of the fields and give them some intensive drill over the next few months.”

  “Do you really think we’re ready for that?”

  It was a serious question, and Gahrvai frowned into the fire as he considered how best to respond.

  “No,” he said finally. “But the thing is, nobody’s ever truly ‘ready’ for something like this. Or, to put it another way, if you wait until you’re completely confident you are ‘ready,’ you’ve usually waited too long.”

  Zhanma looked at him for a long, silent moment, then nodded.

  “You’re thinking about that last imperial proclamation, aren’t you?”

  “I think you could safely assume it’s one of the factors in my opinion.”

  Gahrvai’s tone was dry, and Zhanma chuckled with very little amusement.

  Zhyou-Zhwo’s attitude towards the United Provinces had not grown noticeably warmer. In fact, his most recent proclamation had declared Boisseau, Cheshire, and the newly affiliated Omar in open rebellion, which could mean only one thing for Star Rising, the members of his Parliament, and anyone who supported them. That was unlikely to come as a surprise to any of those supporters, but the fact that he’d made it official suggested several unpleasant possibilities. The most likely was that he’d been moved by Bedard’s decision to become the third of the United Provinces and reports that Omar was very seriously considering becoming the fourth. It could simply reflect an effort to frighten Omar and Pasquale into staying the hell out of any association with Zhynkau. Another, more worrisome possibility, however was that his timing reflected a growing confidence in his ability to do something about the situation.

  “Do you think he’s actually ready to move against us?” the brigadier asked now, and Gahrvai made a rude noise.

  “I think he may think he’s ready to move against you, but he isn’t,” the Charisian said. “Oh, I’m sure he’s got a lot more men than we do here in the United Provinces, but they’re not as well-equipped, they don’t have as much training, and they’re on the wrong damned side of the Gulf of Dohlar … with the Imperial Charisian Navy between them and here. I don’t think he could be wildly enthusiastic about venturing out to sea against Earl Sarmouth’s cruisers. And even if he is, Earl Snow Peak definitely isn’t.”

  Zhanma considered that for a moment, then cocked his head.

  “It would be nice of them to be that stupid, wouldn’t it?” he said almost wistfully.

  “Personally, I’d prefer for them to be smart enough to just stay home,” Gahrvai replied a bit more grimly. “Failing that, then, yes. It would be nice for them to be stupid enough to piss away their army while it tried to learn how to breathe water.

  “That’s not going to happen, though, so I’m not worried about what we’re hearing out of him. I’m thinking more about what we’re hearing from your own Parliament. If it’s serious about backing Crystal Fountain’s pr
oposal, you’ll need more warm bodies come spring. And what I’m saying is that I think between your own people and my people we’re in a position to start training those warm bodies now.” Gahrvai shrugged. “If you don’t need them, we can release them come planting time. If you do need them, waiting until spring to start training them could be … a less than ideal option, shall we say?”

  Zhanma nodded as he chewed on the truth of that observation.

  So far, Baron Crystal Fountain’s proposal was only a proposal, but support for it was growing steadily. As the man who would be ultimately responsible for the military aspects of it, Zhanma was decidedly of two minds about the entire idea. It made sense to expand the United Provinces’ authority at least to the eastern boundaries of the provinces in question. At the moment, they controlled virtually all of Cheshire, all of Bedard, and all of Omar west of the de Castro Mountains, but only about the western two-thirds of Boisseau. Crystal Fountain was right that they needed to secure control of the rest of Boisseau at a minimum. Omar’s population was sparse enough that occupying the rest of its territory was secondary, but Boisseau was the most populous of the United Provinces, and a lot of those living under Parliament’s protection had fled from homes and farms in the eastern part of the province.

  Their new government owed those refugees the security to return home. In fact, they really needed to extend their grasp into Tiegelkamp and secure the western edge of that province. The Chiang-wu Mountains would form a formidable rampart against any attack from the east, and there were rumors that the warlords in Central Harchong were growing stronger. Some of them had proclaimed their intention of restoring the Emperor’s authority, although everyone knew that was no more than an effort to legitimize the power they were busy seizing for themselves. But if they continued to grow, they’d pose a genuine threat to the United Provinces. And the ruins of Shang-mi would exert a natural attraction. Shang-mi had been the capital of Harchong since the Creation. Control of the city, even in its ruined state, would bolster any warlord’s authority significantly.