by David Drake
Mitchi met Fatima’s eyes over the child’s head, then lifted her into her lap. “Shhh, little one,” she said, holding her close.
“They’re not coming back, are they?” Jaine asked solemnly. Fatima shook her head. The child sighed.
“I didn’t think they were, really,” she said. Her face twitched. “Then the Skinner came. I thought Skinners only came and got bad children, but I wasn’t bad. I stayed real quiet like Da said. Honest I did.” Tears began to leak out of the corners of the blue eyes.
Allah—Spirit of Man—why now? Fatima thought. Or maybe it was a good time. Gerrin wasn’t out of the city yet. Men were watching for the embassy to reach safety, that was the signal. Raj and Gerrin were in there in disguise, among the enemy. Anything was better than waiting with nothing else to think of.
The child went on: “He didn’t skin me and eat me the way Skinners are supposed to eat bad children. He tried to get up on top of me as if I were a big grown-up lady.” Her voice was still quiet, but a little shrill. “He hurt me.”
“Nobody can hurt you here, little sparrow,” Fatima said, stroking the girl’s face.
“I know,” Jaine nodded. “Master Gruder came in and shot him.” Her face relaxed slightly. “Then he kicked him off and shot him lots more times.”
The two adults exchanged another glance; nobody had told them that.
The noise of the camp was subdued, but the roar from the city was like distant surf. Fatima shivered again, remembering the sound when the 5th broke into El Djem like water over a crumbling dam. It had been dawn then, just the start of another day like every other. The day when everything changed.
A few minutes passed and then Jaine spoke again, smearing the half-dried tears off her face with the heels of hands: “Are you slaves?” she said, and raised her hand to touch her neck. Mitchi understood the gesture: Brigade law required chattel slaves to wear metal collars.
“Yes, I am—we don’t have to wear collars in the Gubernio Civil,” she said. “Fatima used to be a slave, but she’s a freedwoman now.”
The girl frowned. “Am I a slave now too?” she said. “Da—Da used to hit the slaves sometimes.”
Mitchi hesitated. Fatima nodded and spoke soothingly. “You belong to Messer Gruder, but don’t worry, little one. He’s a very kind man. If you’re a good girl and do what Mitchi and Messer Gruder tell you, you’ll be fine.”
Out through the entrance flap of the big tent, she could see a rocket arch into the night. It burst with a loud pop and a red spark.
“Mitchi, take Jaine over to the children’s area,” Fatima said tightly. It has begun.
The child began a pout; Fatima forestalled it. “I want you to help look after little Bartin and baby Suzette, all right?” she said.
Jaine nodded, and put her hand in Mitchi’s.
From beyond the encampment’s trench, man-made thunder boomed. Something in Fatima’s stomach clenched as she recognized the sound, but her primary emotion was relief. Gerrin would be safely beyond range; that had been the signal.
“Let’s go, men!” Colonel Jorg Menyez called. “Show the dog-boys what you’re made of. Forward the 17th!”
The six hundred men of the 17th Kelden County Foot rose from the ground and roared, dashing forward to the bugle’s call. They kept their alignment, running in a pounding lockstep; the lines wavered but didn’t break up into clots as untrained men might have. The colonel ran with them, under the flapping banner. Ahead, the southside walls of Lion City gleamed pale under the moons. Even in the dark of night, it had been a major accomplishment to get so many men so close to the defenses without attracting attention. Even militiamen, however, weren’t going to overlook two battalions of men running full-tilt toward them. Not even with the surf-roar of the assembly-cum-riot still sounding through the night.
A ladder passed him, on the shoulders of the grunting, panting men who bore it. Their boots struck the ground in unison, free hands pumping in rhythm. The stolid peon faces were set in grimaces of effort, the rictus of men who are pacing themselves strictly by the task in hand. The colonel was only a little over thirty and in hard condition, but it was far from easy to keep up with his men.
Spirit, he thought. He’d seen men run less eagerly toward a barrel of free wine.
* * *
Major Hadolfo Zahpata swung his saber forward. “Dehfenzo Lighon!” he called. Defend the Faith. The motto of the 18th Komar Borderers.
“Aur! Aur!” his men screamed, as they advanced at the run. “Despert Staahl!” It was the ancient war-cry of the southern borders of the Civil Government: Awake the iron!
Zahpata grinned as he ran, feeling the chainmail neck-guard of his helmet beat on his shoulders. Jorg’s idea had been a good one; he could hear officers and noncoms shouting to the men:
“Will you let infantry reach the wall ahead of you?”
The ladders they carried were ten meters long and broad enough for two men abreast to climb. Hasty training had taught the men to relieve the squads bearing the burden of the clumsy, heavy things while at full speed. That way they could be carried all the way to the wall at a running pace, despite their weight.
Zahpata grinned again, this time a baring of the teeth that had nothing to do with amusement. Two battalions of grown men were racing toward guns stuffed with grapeshot and exposing their defenseless bodies to enemies protected by a stone wall, for the honor of seeing who would put a cloth flag on top of that wall first.
Faith is a wonderful thing, he thought, legs pumping. I have faith in you, Dinnalsyn. Do not disappoint me.
“Now!” Grammeck Dinnalsyn said, and clapped heels to his dog.
Thirty guns sprang forward; they had approached at a slow walk, with muffled wheels and brightwork covered by rags. Now they pounded forward at a lunging gallop, the crews leaning forward in the saddle. At twelve hundred meters from the walls they halted and swung into battery. Teams wheeled, so sharply that they were just short of turning the guns over in a disastrous spin. Sparks shot out into the night as the men on the caissons pulled brake levers. Dogs squatted on their haunches to shed momentum as soon as the muzzles turned; there was a man on the last dog in each team as well as the first, and he pulled the cotter pin linking the chain traces to the caisson. The teams trotted forward another five meters, enough to be out of the way but close enough for a quick getaway, then crouched to the ground in their traces.
The gunners jumped down and flung themselves at their weapons; an iron clangor filled the air as they unlocked and pulled the locking rod and lifted each trail off its limber. This time they did not let the ends of the trails thump to the ground. The caissons each carried two iron triangles tonight, with one side curved inward. They hammered them home with stakes, one in front of each wheel, and then hauled the wheels upward and held them to the top of the curve. Others swung hasty picks and shovels behind, digging pits for the end of the pole trails. When the trails dropped into the holes, the guns could not run backward down the iron surfaces. Breachblocks clanged and rang as the loaders shoved home rounds and levers pushed the blocking wedges behind them.
Dinnalsyn winced as he cursed his men to speed. This was one way to get extra range or elevation out of field-guns, whose normal job required long flat trajectories. It also subjected the frames to wracking stresses, because they weren’t able to recoil backwards in the usual fashion. We ought to have more howitzers, light ones, he thought. The stubby high-elevation weapons were officially considered useful mainly for siege work, and built heavy in large calibres.
Other gunners were setting up heavy carbide lamps on tripods, with curved mirrors behind them; signalling equipment in normal times, but modified for tonight. The beams came on with a hiss and sputter and chemical stink, bathing the ramparts in harsh yellow-white light. It shone eerily on the backs of hundreds of Skinners who were loping their dogs past the artillery, then dismounting and ramming their cross-topped shooting sticks into the dirt.
Similar floodlights were openin
g up on the city walls, amid a chaotic noise of drums and horns and hand-wound sirens. A cannon boomed with a long white puff of smoke, and a solid iron ball ploughed into the ground a few dozen meters in front of the foremost troops. Dinnalsyn swept his saber downward.
“Fire,” he shouted.
A huge POUMPF, thirty times repeated. Shells ripped out over the heads of the troops—contact fused, nobody was in a mood for accidents tonight. Some sailed over the wall, to raise flickering crashes in the city beyond. Others plowed short, gouting up poplar-shapes of dirt and rock. Most hit the wall; the explosive charges did no more than scar it, but they would shake the men on the firing platforms above. A few struck exactly where aimed, along the row of gunports and the crenellations of the wall itself. One was uncannily lucky, and punched right through a gunport just as the cannon there was about to fire. A giant belch of yellow flame shot out through the port as the piled ammunition beside the gun went up, and chunks of stone flew skyward. Bits and pieces of the crew did as well; the cast-iron barrel probably went out backwards off the wall.
Some of the gunners cheered. “Man your fucking guns,” Dinnalsyn screamed, trotting his dog down the gunline. “That was a fucking miracle.”
Cottony clouds of brimstone-stinking gunsmoke drifted around the position. The first few ranging shots were critical, because after that you were often firing blind into your own smoke.
“Mark the fall of shot, it’s right in front of you. Battery three—you’re all short. Elevation, elevation, Spirit eat your eyes!”
The crews in question spun the elevating screws beneath their weapons. Their next salvo was high, screeching at head-level over the crenellations and into the city. The guns bucked wildly on the pivot-lever formed by the trail, swinging nearly upright with the muzzles pointing at the sky, then slamming back down with an earsplitting anvil chorus of iron-shod wheels on iron frames. Every time he heard it, Dinnalsyn felt his hand clench involuntarily on the hilt of his saber, waiting for the loud unmusical twang-crunch of a trail breaking, a wheel shattering or—Spirit forbid—a trunnion cracking and sending the barrel pinwheeling off the carriage and into the crew. Every one of those rounds was taking more off the service life of the gun than fifty normal firings.
More cannon were firing from the wall. Solid shot, many of them, and aimed at him. That was the plan. He had a fair degree of respect for town-militia gunners; they practiced on fixed pieces with a single range of ground before their muzzles, and they could get to know both quite well. They didn’t have the wide range of skills and adaptability that the full-time professionals in his crews did, but they didn’t need them. Still, they were amateurs and their instinct would be to strike at the weapons that were firing at them, not at the far more dangerous infantry. He couldn’t possibly win a counter-battery shoot with the guns on the walls: they were protected by stone, and his men were as naked as so many table-dancers in a dockside bar.
He was a sacrificial goat, by the Spirit.
Ahead of him the Skinners opened fire; not a volley, but the two-meter rifles were all firing at a steady four or five rounds a minute. The long muzzle flashes of the giant sauroid rifles were crimson and white spears through the night; within seconds, every searchlight on the walls and towers ahead had died. Then the nomad mercenaries shifted their aim to the firing-slits and gunports; they began drifting forward to keep out of their own gunsmoke, firing every dozen paces. The stone sparked and spalled around the targets, but not very often. Most of the shots were going through, peening off the metal of cannon, ricocheting on stone, ripping through flesh and shattering bone.
Cannon still boomed from the ramparts. Some of them were firing round shells whose crude fuses traced red lines through the night until they burst and showered the ground with splinters. A roundshot smashed into one of the Civil Government’s field-pieces with a giant clung sound; the noise of men screaming came a minute later, as the smashed cannon and the pieces of the roundshot scythed through the crew. Stretcher-parties were running forward . . .
“Come on,” he whispered to himself. “Move. Damn you, move.” Another field-piece was out of action, canted off the triangular braces with a cracked trail, toppling backward as the crew dove out of the way.
The first ladder went up against the wall.
“Maximum elevation,” Dinnalsyn called, loud but calm. The battery commanders repeated it. “Maximum elevation, three-quarter charge.” They’d made up the charges for that earlier today. Just enough to lob the shells over the wall and into the cleared space beyond.
* * *
“Come on, lads, keep it moving!” Jorg Menyez shouted.
Grapeshot plowed through the ranks near him, near enough to hear the malignant wasp-whine of the lead balls. Men flopped, shredded by dozens of hits. Others staggered at the edge, called out in pain, toppled or kept moving forward. A roundshot hit just short of a file carrying a ladder and skipped forward along the ground, knocking the men over like bowling-pins . . . except that it shattered legs and ripped them off at the knee, ten men down and their comrades on the other side of the ladder untouched except for the torque that slapped the wood out of their hands. An officer raised his sword to wave his men forward; an instant later he was staring in disbelief at the stump of his arm, the ragged humerus showing pink for an instant before the welling blood covered it.
Shit and blood and sulfur, it’s always the same, Jorg thought. He stood with the saber sloped over his shoulder and the banner of the 17th beside him, watching up and down the line. There would be a first foothold, and there . . .
“Up with it, up with it!”
They were below the walls now. A ladder started to rise. Hand-thrown bombs fell sputtering, one at the foot of the ladder; it burst and the wood exploded out in splinters. Sickly yellow light mixed with the red glare of cannon to pick out eyeballs, bared teeth, the edges of the long bayonets. The cannon above fired continuously, amid the whirring crash of the Civil Government shells hammering the wall and then lifting over it. The Skinners were firing all along their support line, heedless of anything but their aiming points—heedless of the ricochets that rebounded into the Civil Government soldiers below. Men were shrieking, in pain or raw terror or a perverse exultation.
“Volley fire. Fire.”
More and more ladders were going up against the wall. The men not lofting them stood and fired upward, aiming for the slits in the parapet where defenders were leaning over to fire rifles and big siege-shotguns down into the storming parties. The ladders rattled on the stone, braced far out at the base. Men in fanciful militia uniforms leaned over with hooked poles to try and push them down, and toppled from the wall as Skinner or infantry bullets struck them. The carbide searchlights played over their faces, blinding them but lightening the darkness for the attackers. More hand-bombs arched over; one exploded in midair as a Skinner struck it in flight in a miracle of marksmanship. Most landed below. An explosion on the parapet sent a dozen men somersaulting through the air, as a grenadier was brain-shot as he drew his arm back to throw and the missile landed beneath his crumpling body.
“Come on, 17th!” a captain called, scrambling up a ladder.
His trumpeter stood at its foot, sounding charge over and over. A roar, and the burly peons-in-uniform were following him, climbing with both feet and one hand and holding their rifles in the other, a wave of blue coats and bowl helmets and steel points. Up to the top, and the officer was falling backwards, time enough to twist head-over-heels before he struck the ground. The men following him were on the top rungs, shooting and then exchanging bayonet-thrusts with men on the parapet—gunners there too, swinging their rammers like giant clubs. Men in the second rank on the ladders were firing past their comrades, and he hoped to hell they were picking their targets. A lieutenant shouldered his way up, emptied his revolver into the press and jumped up . . . over the parapet and down onto the fighting platform, by the Spirit, and the company pennant waving over him!
Not so bad for the b
loody infantry, Menyez thought, grinning like a shark.
He looked left and right. Three quarters of the ladders were up, in his sector. About the same to his right, where Zahpata’s 18th Komar were making their tooth-gritting yelping screech and climbing up even as bodies fell down past them.
Menyez looked up again. Men were still climbing up the ladder beside him, the pennant was still waving from the ramparts . . . and he could see shoulders and rifle-butts above the crenellations as they struggled to expand their foothold.
He took a deep breath. “We’re going to plant the 17th Kelden’s banner on the walls,” he shouted, and drew his pistol. The bark of the rough pine logs that made up the ladder was rough and sticky under his hand. “Follow me!”
* * *
“Sir!”
Raj was still in his noncom’s tunic, but the staff, signallers and couriers were accreting around him like coral around a shell as he pulled up Horace behind the gun-line that supported the escalade against the city wall. He stood in the stirrups and levelled his binoculars.
“That’s a battalion flag on the ramparts, by the Spirit of Man!” he said exultantly. “The 17th . . . Hadolfo’s got the 18th Komar up there too!”
“Shall I send in the reserve battalions?” someone asked behind him. One of Jorg’s subordinates . . .
“No, of course not,” Raj said, controlling his desire to turn and clout the man over the head with the glasses. “There’s no room until they get a foothold over the wall.” And absolutely no point in cramming men into a killing zone without room to deploy, either.
A dispatch rider reined in. “Ser. Major Gruder says sally-ports’re openin’ on t’main gate ’n t’north gate both, ser. Sally in battalion force from each, he says, er mebbe more.”
Scramento! Raj thought. Close under the protection of the wall and its guns, the Brigaderos dragoons could mass and then try to strike at the flanks of his attack. Not successfully, but . . .