by David Drake
Foley smiled and raised his hook. “Messer, that term grisuh is impolite, not to mention inappropriate. The last man to use it to me was one of Curtis Auburn’s house-troops, and he came to a bad end.” Sudden doubt washed over Makman’s face.
“Seyor,” the platoon commander said. Sir.
Foley turned his head; a group of men was double-timing up the grassy slope to the right. In bits and pieces of hastily-donned uniform, but all carrying rifles and wearing their swords. They checked at the sight of the mounted men, then came on again at a more measured pace.
The young captain nodded. The lieutenant barked an order, and half the platoon turned their dogs with a touch of the foot. Another, and the animals crouched; the men stepped forward with their rifles at port
“Slope arms! Fix bayonets!” Smooth precision as butts thumped and hands slapped the hilts, not parade-ground stiffness but the natural flow of actions performed as part of a way of living, a trade practiced daily. The bayonets came out, bright and long as a man’s forearm, and rattled as they clipped to the ring-and-bar fasteners. “Shoulder arms—front rank, kneel—ready—present—pick your targets—prepare for volley fire. On the word of command!”
Hands slapped iron and the long Armory rifles jerked up to shoulders. Behind the kneeling riflemen the second file drew their sabers and sloped them back, resting on their shoulders. The dogs barred their teeth and growled like boulders churning in a flooded river, long strings of slaver running from their opened half-meter mouths.
Makman surprised Foley; he spoke quietly. “You came under a flag of truce.”
Bartin Foley’s face had been delicately pretty once; it was still slim-lined and handsome in an ascetic fashion. Black eyes met blue, and the Brigade nobleman’s narrowed in memory. From the battered look of his thick-fingered hands he had seen action enough once; enough to recognize the look of a man poised on the edge of killing violence.
“Messer, I also once saw an officer murdered under flag of truce by the barbarians of the Squadron,” the young man said.
Makman snatched the handkerchief from his shirt and half-turned. “Siegfrond!” he snapped. “Ground arms, you fool.”
The Brigadero troopers had formed a ragged firing line. Now their muzzles came down; there were about thirty of them, with more straggling up from the barracks by ones and twos, like crystals accreting in a solution.
“And somebody stop that damned bell.”
A servant from the crowd around the Brigade nobleman scampered away, and the bronze clanging faded away to silence.
A woman came out onto the broad verandah of the fortified manor; she was in her twenties, in a long white dress with a yoke of pearls, and a child of four or five was by her side.
“Grandfather,” she began, “what’s—oh!” She swept the child behind her and put one hand to her throat.
Makman was studying the soldiers before his house, seeing them for the first time, Foley suspected. “Gubernio Civil, right enough,” he said, and looked up at their officer. “Is this some sort of raid? You’ve a good deal of brass, young man, coming this far inland with less than forty men.”
“This is the vanguard of General Raj Whitehall’s army,” Foley said, with a coldly beautiful smile. The woman gasped, and Makman’s ruddy face paled.
“He’s on Stern Isle,” he whispered.
“Was,” Foley corrected. “The Sword of the Spirit of Man is swift. And in case you doubt that there are more of us here—”
He drew his saber and turned in the saddle, waving the blade slowly overhead. Downslope of the house gardens was an open field, full of black-coated cattle grazing. Beyond that was cultivated land, with a scattering of small half-timbered thatched cottages, and a line of trees. Red light winked from the edge of the forest. Half a second later the flat poumpf of a seventy-five-millimeters field-gun came, and the ripping wail. A tall bottle-shape of dirt fountained out of the pasture; cattle were running and bawling, except for three that lay mangled, blood red and intestines pink against their black hides. Steel twinkled all along the distant field edge as five hundred men stepped into the open and the sun caught their bayonets. A frantic voice called from the tower that more were in sight behind the manor, among the peon village.
2nd Residence, right on time, Foley thought.
“What . . .” Makman rasped. “What are your terms?”
“General Whitehall’s terms are these: you are to take oath of obedience to the Civil Government and cooperate fully with all its officers and administrators in furnishing supplies and war levies. All arms and armed men to be surrendered; soldiers to be sent to East Residence for induction into our army. You personally will accompany our troops to encourage surrender among your military vassals and neighbors. In return your life and liberty, and one-third of your real property, are spared.”
“One-third!”
“It’s a great deal more than you’d enjoy in the grave, Messer. Because my orders are that if you refuse this place will be sacked and any survivors sold as slaves.” He looked up at the young woman. “I doubt your granddaughter would find life as a whore in a dockside crib in East Residence very pleasant.” He cut off the beginnings of a roar. “I’ve seen it, Messer. I’ve done it. Believe me.”
The old man slumped. Foley’s voice went on inexorably. “You will also deliver a hostage of your immediate family as surety for your good behavior.”
“Who?” Makman said, scrubbing a hand over his face. “My son is ten years dead, my daughters with their own husbands, and my grandson holds a commission with the Makman Mounted in Carson Barracks—” He halted, frowning.
The young woman turned white and glared at Foley, and Makman’s great age-spotted hands clenched. The young man almost laughed, but managed to keep his face grave. Things were not quite out of the woods yet; these were barbarians, after all.
“Your granddaughter-in-law and great-grandson will be under the protection of Lady Suzette Whitehall,” he soothed. “She may take one maidservant and a suitable chaperone, and since you’ll have to come in to swear allegiance with General Whitehall, you may deliver her to Lady Whitehall yourself. And rest assured, on my word as a gentleman and officer, that her honor is safe with me.”
If you only knew how very safe, he thought.
“Upyarz! Upyarz!”
The Brigaderos roared as they fought. Clerett’s Life Guards used their sabers with bleak skill; the Governor had carefully picked the men to send to war with his heir. Steel crashed on steel across the fields, pistols banged, dogs howled and men shrieked in sudden agony too great for flesh to bear. The failing light of sundown was blood-red, but the true red of blood was turning to black despite the flames from the burning farmhouse on the north side of it. The wagons the refugees had tried to draw into a circle for defense burned too. Powder-smoke drifted pink-tinged over the heads and thrashing blades of four hundred men. The air smelled of sulphur and feces, the wet-iron stink of blood, and burning thatch.
Cabot Clerett watched narrowly. His hand chopped down, and his heels clapped to his dog’s ribs; with a hundred men behind him he swept out of the timber and put his mount at the rail fence. The big mastiff gathered itself and soared as its rider leaned forward in the saddle. The banner of the 1st Residence Life Guards streamed at his side, and all around him the blades of the sabers snapped down in unison to lie along the necks of the dogs, point toward the enemy. They were turning to meet him, a lancepoint flashed by, trannggg and a breastplate shed the point of his Kolobassian blade and nearly dragged him out of the saddle. The Civil Government line smashed into the melee.
A dismounted trooper was before him, backing with sword working while a Brigadero lancer probed for his life and another kept the soldier’s dog at bay.
Cabot spurred forward again. This time the enemy warrior could not turn in time, the inertia of his lance too much for his arm. The young officer poised his hilt over his head and stabbed, down into the neck past the collarbone to avoid the armor. The resis
tance was crisp and then heavy-soft; he wrenched the blade free and the barbarian reeled away on a bolting dog, coughing blood in sheets down his breastplate. The loose Life Guard’s dog snapped, its neck extending like a snake and closing on the lance-shaft below the steel lappets. Ashwood crunched and the Brigadero was backing and cursing as he drew his sword. Cabot let him escape, dropped his reins, and clamped the bloody saber to his side while he drew his pistol and tossed it to his left hand.
“Thankee, ser!” the trooper yelled, straddling his dog as the animal crouched for him to mount.
Cabot flourished the saber with a grin. I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid! he realized exultantly. A sword flickered in the corner of his eye; he blocked the blow with his own near the hilt. The force of it slugged him to one side, leaning far over; he pointed the revolver under his own armpit and fired into the Brigadero’s torso. The enemy dog locked jaws with his dog’s, both animals slamming at each other’s legs with clawed paws the size of plates. Cabot heaved himself back erect and leaned forward to fire again with the muzzle half an inch from the other dog’s eye. It collapsed in mid-growl, falling with a thump that made his own mount jump backwards.
The HQ group had caught up with him, stabbing and shooting; the enemy were recoiling under the weight of the flank charge, but they still had numbers and weight of metal on their side. He signaled the trumpeter and the brassy notes rang out over the lessening clamor. Almost as one man the Civil Government troops turned and fled in a rout, pouring across the meadow and into the narrow road that spiked into the forest on the south.
The Brigaderos, household guards and part of a dragoon garrison regiment, scrambled after them four hundred strong. Here the lighter gear of the easterners was their advantage; the big Airedales and Newfoundlands were fast enough, but slower off the mark than the rangy Descotter farmbreds and Colonial-style Banzenjis the invaders rode. Slather flew from the mouths of the dogs as they lunged for the shadowing trees. The narrow wedge of open land at the road’s mouth squeezed the larger Brigade force harder than their quarry, and for a moment the whole mass of men and dogs slowed as the warriors on the outside pressed inward.
Four hundred riflemen volley-fired from the edge of the woods into the clumped Brigade troops. In the dusk the muzzle-flashes were long and regular, like spearheads of fire along an endless phalanx. Crisp orders sounded, pitched high to carry. Platoon volleys slammed out like a crackle of very loud single shots, each one a comb of flame licking toward the enemy. Bullets hammered into dogs and men; a few spanged off armor, red sparks flicking up into the gathering night, but the range was close—and for this campaign, half of the standard-issue hollowpoints had been replaced with rounds carrying a pointed brass cap. Four companies of trained men with Armory rifles could put over three thousand rounds in a single minute. None of the Brigaderos was more than a hundred meters from the forest edge when the firing started, and the barricade of burning buildings and wagons was less than six hundred meters away. At that distance a bullet aimed level would strike a mounted man anywhere along its flight path.
The trumpet rang again in darkness, behind the firefly glimmer of the crossfire raking the Brigade men from two sides of a triangle. Panting dogs and cursing men sorted themselves into ranks. Snarls and snaps like wet coffin-lids falling punctuated the jostling, until men soothed their mounts to obedience.
“Damned if it didn’t work, sir,” the Senior Captain of the 2nd said in Cabot’s ear.
He jumped slightly, glad of the darkness; he could feel the glassy stare of his eyes. His hands were steady as he reloaded.
“I rather thought it would, Captain Fikaros,” the Governor’s nephew said hoarsely. “I rather thought it would.”
Both moons were up, enough to see a few survivors scattering across the meadow. Few made it past the burning buildings on the other side, although a number of riderless dogs with jouncing stirrups did.
“Let’s collect our wounded and head for the river,” Cabot said. “This bunch were a little too numerous for my taste.”
“Sir!”
The men cheered as he rode past with the unit banner and the trumpeter.
Wait until Uncle hears about this, he thought. Wait until Suzette hears.
Glory!
CHAPTER TWELVE
Major Ehwardo Poplanich looked up at the row of shackles that rattled along the stone wall of the courthouse, below a bricked-in sign reading runaway in Spanjol and Namerique. The cuffs hung at about two meters off the ground. A meter and a half below each set the stucco was scored with a half-moon of smooth wear from flailing feet. A man hung by his hands with no support beneath cannot draw air into his lungs if he lets his full weight fall on his wrists; his chest crushes the diaphragm with the weight of his lower body. He must haul himself up at least a little with every breath. Once fatigue sets in, suffocation follows—a slow, gradual suffocation, as each despairing effort brings less oxygen and burns more.
“Well, that’s one way to make sure a serf regrets it if he leaves the estate,” he said mildly.
The set smile of the Brigadero magistrate did not alter; he bobbed his head in agreement, as he would have to anything Poplanich said at that moment. A big burly man, he was a noble by courtesy under Brigade law because he was on the muster rolls, but most of the native members of the town council had owned more land than he. Town marshall was not a rank true nobles, the brazaz officer class of the Brigade, aspired to. Now the councilors owned much more, and what had been a substantial farm if not an estate for the magistrate would shrink to a small holding as soon as the new administration produced a cadastral survey.
With a battalion of Poplanich’s Own in town, he wasn’t going to object very forcefully. A few had tried, and their bodies hung from the portico of the This Earth church as a warning.
Ehwardo looked at the fetters again. A strong man, or a light wiry one, could probably live quite a few hours hanging there. I shouldn’t be upset, he told himself. Serfdom—debt-peonage—was close to a universal institution around the Midworld Basin; back home a runaway who couldn’t pay his impossible, hereditary debts would be flogged and turned back to his master. That had started long ago to prevent peasants from absconding from their tax obligations; and Spirit knew there didn’t seem to be any other way to keep civilization going in the Fallen world. Not that anyone had told him, at least . . . but there was nothing like this on the Poplanich estates. A landlord who was willing to stand between his people and the tax farmers didn’t have to flog much to keep order.
And where was that damned infantryman? He had better things to do than stand here talking to a gang of provincial boobies. He was supposed to be turning everything over to an infantry battalion so he could move on south, and it was taking a cursed long time.
In normal times he supposed Maoachin was a pleasant enough little place, a market town for the farms and estates roundabout. There was a large, gaudily decorated church for the This Earth cultists, and a more modest one for the Star Spirit worshippers; a few fine houses behind walls, a few streets of modest ones mixed with shops and artisan crafts, cottages on the outskirts. No fountain in the plaza, but the streets were cobbled and lined with trees.
Now the streets were jammed solid. With oxcarts full of grain in sacks and flour and cornmeal in barrels, and sides of bacon and dried beef and turnips and beans. Furniture and silverware too, and tools; many, many wagons of swords and rifle-muskets and shotguns and revolvers, ammunition, kegs of powder and ingots of lead. Riding dogs on leading chains, muzzled with steel-wire cages over their jaws and driven frantic by stress, and palfreys for the hostages. Hundreds of prisoners, Brigaderos fighting men going back to be packed into transports and shipped across the Midworld and inducted into the Civil Government’s army. They walked with their eyes down, avoiding looking at the smaller groups, battered and bloody and in chains, who’d tried to fight. They and their families were headed for slave markets.
The noise and dust, the howls of dogs and sobbing o
f children, were beyond belief; the harsh noon sun beat down without mercy.
He looked back down at the magistrate standing at his stirrup, and the town councilors. Most of them were natives, Spanjol-speaking followers of the orthodox faith they shared with the Civil Government. More than a few of them were smiling at the magistrate’s discomfort. They had kept two-thirds of their land, and had pleasure of seeing the bottom rail put on top, as well. When the confiscated Brigade estates came on the market, they would be positioned to expand their holdings in a way that would more than make up for the initial loss.
“But, ah, with respect—” the bearded judge-gendarme said, his Sponglish clumsy and full of misplaced Spanjol endings “—you then leave me at all no armed men, how do I under put native risings?”
A councilor did laugh at that. The magistrate whirled on him, frustration breaking through in a scream as he dropped back into Spanjol. Ehwardo could follow that well enough. Out of sheer inertia the Civil Government had maintained it as a second official language all these centuries, and he had been trained to public service.
“Iytiote!” he screamed. Fool. “Do your peons love you because you have the same priest and demand your rent in the same tongue? How many have I scourged back to their plows for you? If they taste a master’s blood and he is a Brigade noble, won’t they want yours?”
The councilors’ smiles disappeared, to be replaced with thoughtful expressions.
“Don’t worry, Messers,” Ehwardo said. “The Civil Government will keep order.”
It had to. Unless the peasants paid their landlords a share of their crop and forced labor, they would eat everything they produced. How could the armies and cities be supported then? Not to mention the fact that landlords were the ruling class at home, as they were everywhere. Still . . .
“Did you know,” he went on in the local language, “that my great-uncle was Governor in East Residence?” They hadn’t, and breath sucked in; he waved away their bows. “Listen carefully, then, to a story Governor Poplanich told my father, and my father to me.