by David Drake
A dozen troopers and an NCO were close behind him; the rest of the detachment were circling ’round behind the building, or returning fire on the roof and upper story from behind watering-troughs, treetrunks, overturned carts or their own crouching dogs. Bullets spanged and sparked off the stone overhead, and sulfur-smelling gunsmoke drifted down the street past the trampled flowers and discarded hats that the crowds had been waving a moment before.
Idiots, he thought. Sniping from a bell-tower; downward shots were difficult at best, and stood no chance of hitting another man behind your target.
“One, two, three!” he said.
Two of the troopers blasted the lock; metal whined across the colored tile of the portico, and someone shouted with pain. Foley ignored him, ignored everything but the tight focus that pulled everything into crystalline clarity in a tunnel ahead of him. They smashed through the tall olivewood doors of the barbarian church. He’d closed his eyes for just a second, and the gloom inside didn’t blind him. A long room with wooden benches and a central aisle, leading up to an altar with the blue-and-white globe that the heretics substituted for the rayed Star of the true faith. Reliquaries along the walls under small high windows, holding the bones of saints or holy computer equipment from before the Fall.
And men coming down the stairs at either far corner of the room; evidently somebody had had a rush of intelligence to the head, a few minutes too late. Ten men, the leader in the blue jumpsuit and ear-to-ear tonsure of the Earth Spiritist clergy.
Foley took stance with his left arm tucked into the small of his back and the coach gun leveled like a huge pistol. Whump, and the hate-filled face of the Brigadero priest disappeared backward in a blur of red that spattered over the whitewashed walls. Buckshot shattered glass and peened off silver and gold around the altar; the Earth-Sphere tumbled in fragments to the floor. The massive recoil jarred at his leather-strapped wrist, and he let it carry the weapon high before gravity dropped it back on target. Two of the enemy returned the fire, the only ones with loaded muskets; one had been reloading, and his shot sent the iron ramrod he’d forgotten to remove spearing across the church to lance into a bench like a giant arrow. Neither hit anything, not surprising since they were snapshooting in a darkened room. The bullet thudded into wood.
Another man leaping over the dead priest, charging down the aisle with clubbed musket. Careful, a corner of Foley’s mind thought. Long musket, big man. Three-meter swing. He waited, you were never too close to miss, and fired the left barrel of the coach gun into his belly. Whump again, and the man folded backward a meter, sprawling in a puddle of thrashing limbs and blood and intestines that spilled out through the hole the buckshot ripped. A swordsman leaped forward with his long single-edged broadsword raised; Foley threw the coach gun between his feet, and the man tripped—as much on the body fluids that coated the slick marble floor as the weapon. His blade clanged off the young officer’s hook; then he spasmed and died as he tried to rise, the point of the hook going thock into the back of his skull.
Muzzle flashes strobed from around Foley, the troopers with him firing aimed rounds toward the stairwells. The last Brigadero tumbled, the revolvers falling from his hands before he could shoot.
Foley put a boot on the shoulder of the dead man before him and freed his hook with a grunt of effort. Overhead, on the second floor, came another crash of Armory rifles; screams, a spatter of individual rounds, then Torridez’s shout:
“Second story and tower clear, sir!”
Foley took a long breath, and another; a band seemed to be locked around his chest. His throat was raw, but he knew from experience that taking a drink from his canteen would make him nauseous if he did it before his muscles stopped their subliminal quivering. The air stank of violent death, shit and the seaweed smell of blood and wet chopped meat, all underlain by decades of incense and beeswax from the church. It was a peculiarly repulsive variation on the usual battlefield stench.
Join the Army and see the world; then burn it down and blow it up, he thought with weary disgust. His aide picked up the coach gun and wiped it clean with his bandana.
“Cease fire!” Foley called out the door as he flicked the weapon open and reloaded from the shells in his jacket pocket; that was a knack, but you learned knacks for doing things if you lost a hand. “Cease fire!”
Soldiering wasn’t a safe profession, but he didn’t intend to die from a Civil Government bullet fired by accident. The plaza had the empty, tumbled look of a place abandoned in a hurry—although, incredibly, some civilians were drifting back already, even with the last whiffs of powder smoke still rising from the gun muzzles.
“Torridez?”
“Sir,” the voice called down from overhead. “I’ve got men on the roofs, the whole area’s under observation. Looks like it was only these barbs . . . their families are in the back rooms up here. Couple of men prisoner.”
“Keep them under guard, Lieutenant,” Foley called back. “Post lookouts at vantage points from here to the town wall. Sergeant, get me the halcalde and town councilors back here, and—”
A man came running down the arcade before the town hall, with several others chasing him. He was a Brigadero by the beard and short jacket; the pursuers looked like prosperous townsmen, in sashes and ruffled shirts and knee-breeches with buckled shoes. All of them had probably been standing side by side to greet him fifteen minutes ago.
“You! You there!” he called sharply, and signed to a squad seeing to their dogs.
The would-be lynch mob skidded to a halt on the slick brown tiles of the covered sidewalk as crossed rifles swung down in their path and the dogs growled like millstones deep in their chests; the Brigadero halted panting behind them. He blanched a little as Foley came up, and the young man holstered his coach gun over his shoulder and began dabbing at his blood-speckled face with his handkerchief.
“You’ve nothing to fear,” he said, cutting off the man’s terrified gabble. “Corporal,” he went on, “my compliments to Senior Lieutenant Morrsyn at the gate, and I want redoubled guards on all Brigadero houses; they’re to fire warning shots if mobs approach, and to kill if they persist.”
He glanced around; the woman he’d handed off the child to was still pressed tightly into the reverse of her pillar, standing with the girl between her and the stone to protect the child from both sides.
Sensible, Foley thought. “You know her family?” he said.
“My cousins,” the woman said quietly.
Foley followed her well enough, the Spanjol of the western provinces was closely related to his native Sponglish, unlike the Namerique of the barbarians . . . although he spoke that as well, and Old Namerique and fair Arabic.
“Take her home. You, trooper—escort these Messas.” He stepped over the back of his crouching dog, and the animal rose beneath him. “Now, where the Dark are those—”
The halcalde—Mayor, the word was alcalle in Spanjol—and the councilors came walking gingerly back into the plaza a few minutes later, as if it were unfamiliar territory. They shied from the bodies laid out before the Brigade church, and the huddle of prisoners.
As they watched, troopers of the 5th were shaking loose the lariats most of them carried at their saddlebows and tossing them over limbs of the trees that fringed the plaza. Others pushed the adult males among the prisoners under the nooses; most of them were silent, one or two weeping. One youngster in his mid-teens began to scream as the braided leather touched his neck. Foley chopped his hand downward. The troopers snubbed their lariats to their saddlehorns and backed their dogs; the men rose into the air jerking and kicking. Nobody had bothered to tie their hands. One managed to get a grip on the rawhide rope that was strangling him, until two of the soldiers grabbed his ankles and pulled. Others tied off the ropes to hitching-posts.
Foley waited until the bodies had twitched into stillness before turning his eyes on the town notables. His dog bared its teeth, nervous from the smell of blood and taking its cue from its rider
’s scent; he ran a soothing hand down its neck. An irritable snap from a beast with half-meter jaws was no joke, and war-dogs were bred for aggression.
“Messers,” he said. “You realize that by the laws of war I’d be justified in turning this town over to my troops to sack? I have a man dead and four badly wounded, after you yielded on terms.”
The halcalde was still wearing the noose around his neck; he touched it, a brave man’s act when a dozen men swung with bulging eyes and protruding tongues not a dozen meters from where he stood.
“The responsibility is mine, seynor,” he said, in the lisping western tongue. “I did not think even Karl Makermine would be so foolish . . . but let my life alone answer for it.”
Foley nodded with chill respect. “My prisoners—” he began; a long scream echoed from the church, as if on cue. “My prisoners tell me this was the work of the heretic priest and his closest followers. Accordingly, I’m inclined to be merciful. Their property is forfeit, of course, along with their lives, and their families will be sold. The rest of you, civilian and Brigaderos, will have the same terms as before—except that I now require hostages from every one of the fifty most prominent families, and the Brigaderos of Perino are to pay a fine of one thousand gold FedCreds within twenty-four hours. On pain of forfeiture of all landed property.”
Some of the heretics winced, but the swinging bodies were a powerful argument; so were the Descotter troopers sitting their dogs with their rifles in the crook of their arms, or standing on the rooftops around the square.
“Furthermore, I’m in a hurry, messers. The supplies I specified—” to be paid for with chits drawn on the Civil Government, and you could decide for yourself how much they were really worth “—had better be loaded and ready to go in six hours, or I won’t answer for the consequences. Is that clear?”
He watched them walk away before he rinsed out his mouth and then drank, the water tart with the vinegar he’d added. Another old soldier’s trick.
“I should have gone into the theatre,” he muttered.
“Tum-ta-dum,” Antin M’lewis hummed to himself, raising the binoculars again. The air was hot and smelled of dust and rock, coating his mouth. He spat brownly and squinted; with the wind in their favor, there wasn’t much chance of being scented by the enemy’s dogs.
There wasn’t much ground cover here, in the center of the island. The orchards and vineyards that clothed the narrow coastal plain to the north, the olive groves further inland, had given way to a high rolling plateau. In the distant past it had probably been thinly forested with native trees; a few Terran cork-oaks were scattered here and there, each an event for the eyes in the endless bleakness. Most of it was benchlands where thin crops of barley and wheat were already heading out, interspersed with erosion-gullies. There were no permanent watercourses, and the riverbeds were strings of pools now that the winter rains were over.
The manor houses which dotted the coastlands were absent too; nobody lived here except the peon serfs huddled into big villages around the infrequent springs and wells. Like the grain, the profits would be hauled out down the roads to the port towns, to support pleasant lives in pleasant places far away from here. Flowing downhill, like the water and topsoil and hope.
Pleasant places like Wager Bay, which was where the long column ahead of him was heading, southeast down the road and spilling over onto the fields on either side in milling confusion. Dust smoked up from it, from the hooves of oxen and the feet of dogs and servants, and from the wheels of wagons and carriages.
“There goes t’ barb gentry,” M’lewis muttered to himself, adjusting the focusing screw.
Images sprang out at him; the heraldic crest on the door of a carriage drawn by six pedigree wolfhounds, household goods heaped high on an ox-wagon. Armed men on good dogs, in liveries that were variations on a basic gray-green jacket and black trousers; some were armored lancers, others with no protection save lobster-tail helmets, and all were armed to the teeth. He saw one with rifle-musket, sword, mace, lance and two cap-and-ball revolvers on his belt, two more thrust into his high boots, and another pair on the saddle. He made an estimate, scribbled notes—he had been a literate watch-stander even before he met Raj Whitehall and managed to hitch his fortunes to that ascending star.
Behind him, a man whispered. One of the Forty Thieves, a new recruit from back home.
“D’ye think we’ll git a chanst at t’women?”
A soft chuckle answered him. “Chanst at t’gold an’ siller, loik.”
M’lewis leopard-crawled backward, careful not to let the morning sun catch the lenses of his binoculars. The metalwork on the rifle slung across his elbows had been browned long ago and kept that way.
“Ye’ll git me boot upside yer head iff’n ye spook’s ’em.,” he said with quiet menace.
“Ser,” the man whispered, and shut up.
M’lewis’s snaggled, tobacco-stained teeth showed; he might not be messer-born, but by the Spirit he could make this collection of gallows-bait obey. Not least because the veterans had spent the voyage vividly describing all the booze, cooze and plunder they’d gotten in the last campaign to the recruits. He looked along the northeast-trending ridge that hid most of his command. The dogs hidden in the gully behind him were difficult to spot amid the tangled scrub, even knowing where to look. Most of the men were invisible even to him, spread out with nearly a hundred meters between each pair. He slid down to the brown dusty pebbles of the gully bottom; a little water glinted as his feet touched.
“Cut-nose, Talker,” he called, very softly. There was a trick to pitching your voice so it carried just so far and no further. One of the many skills his father had lessoned him in, with a heavy belt for encouragement.
Two other men crawled backward out of a thicket, then stepped down from rock to rock, raising no dust. Cut-nose had lost most of his to a knife when he tried to sell a saddle-dog back to the man he stole it from, which was an example of the unwisdom of drinking in bad company; he was a second cousin of M’lewis, and looked enough like him to be a brother. Talker was huge, taller than a Squadrone and broad with it. A bit touched, perhaps— he’d pass up lifting a skirt or a purse to kill—but he knew his business.
And he was devoted to Raj, in his way. Where Messer Raj led, death followed.
“Here. Git thisshere t’ the Messer, an’ tell him. Quiet an’ fast.”
* * *
“Is this report completely reliable, sir?” Ludwig Bellamy asked.
Raj and Gerrin Staenbridge looked at him, blinking with almost identical expressions of surprise. Raj held out a hand to stop Gerrin from speaking, asking himself:
“Why would you doubt it?”
“Ahh—” Bellamy cleared his throat. “Well, this man M’lewis, he was a bandit. A man like that—how can we be sure he didn’t take the easy way out and go nowhere near the enemy? Men steal because it’s easier than working, after all.”
Both the older men grinned, not unkindly. Raj gripped him companionably on the shoulder for an instant; Gerrin forbore, since he’d noticed his touch made the ex-Squadrone nervous.
“Oh, M’lewis was a bandit, all right—it’s virtually hereditary, where he comes from,” Raj explained. “It’s just . . . well, he was a bandit in my home County.”
Gerrin chuckled. “And if you think stealing sheep from Descotters is an easy living, Major . . . let’s put it this way, I don’t know any better preparation for hostile-country reconnaissance.”
Bellamy smiled back. “If you say so, sir.” He turned his attention to the map. “What are your plans, General?”
Raj looked up. Four companies of the 5th Descott, only half the unit since it was at nearly double strength, the whole of the 2nd Cruisers, and four guns; the dogs were crouched resting, and the men mostly squatting beside them. A few were watering their animals, drinking from their own canteens, or enjoying a cigarette. There was little shelter on this scorched plain, none at the dusty crossroads where they had halted. Nearl
y a thousand men, more than enough . . .
“Let me hear your plan, Major Bellamy,” he said formally.
The younger man halted in mid-swallow, lowering the canteen and looking up sharply. Raj met his gaze with bland impassiveness, and Ludwig nodded once.
“Sir.” He traced the line of the road with his finger. “Two thousand fighting men, according to the report. Say six thousand people in all, proceeding at foot pace. Hmmm . . . we don’t summon them to surrender?”
Raj shook his head. Most of these were from the western end of the island, around the towns of Perino and Sala. He’d sent out flying columns to round up those willing to give in without a fight, promising to spare the lives, personal liberty and one-third of the landed wealth of anyone on the Brigade rolls who’d swear allegiance to the Civil Government. These Brigaderos ahead had heard the terms and decided to make for Wager Bay and the illusory security of its walls instead. Showing too much mercy was as bad as too little; he didn’t need Center to show him the endless revolts he would face behind his lines, if men thought they could defy him and get amnesty for it. He had seventeen thousand troops to conquer a country of half a million square kilometers, full of fortified cities and warlike men. Best to begin as he meant to go on.
“They’ve had their chance,” he said.
“Well, then,” Bellamy nodded. “We don’t want any of the men to get away even as scattered individuals; they might make it to Wager Bay. That column has to go here. They’re not going to get wheeled vehicles across this ravine without using the bridge. We could—”
Henrik Carstens looked back over his shoulder. The dust-clouds were growing larger, three of them—one to either side of the road, one on it. About four, maybe five clicks, he decided, and a couple of hundred mounted men each at least. Distances were deceptive in these bare uplands, what with the dry air and heat-shimmer. Coming up fast, too; they were going to reach the column of refugees well before they crossed the bridge. Nothing it could be but enemy cavalry. He cursed tiredly and blinked against the grit in his bloodshot blue eyes, fanning himself with his floppy leather hat. Sweat cooled for a second in the thinning reddish hair of his scalp, then the sun burned at his skin and he put it back on. The helmet could wait for a moment, he needed his brains functioning and not in a stewpot.