by David Drake
“High Colonel Strezman thinks entirely too fast,” he said grimly. “Gerrin. The 5th and the 7th, and see them off.”
Now it all depended on what happened on the wall. The flame-shot darkness stretched out ahead of him; there were still enemy cannon firing from the towers and from the wall to the left and right of his salient. The frustration was unbearable, the desire to get out there and lead . . . but if he put his banner on that wall nothing could prevent the whole army from following him. A milling mass of flesh for the enemy to shoot into. No.
no, Center agreed. defeat followed by destruction of the expeditionary force probability of 79% ±3 in that eventuality.
“Get me a beachhead over the wall, Jorg,” Raj said softly. “Give me room.”
* * *
Jorg Menyez ducked behind the cannon on the fighting platform of the city wall. Bullets went crack-tinng off the scorching-hot metal, and it put him right next to the face of the dead militia gunner lying over it. He looked around the breach; another squad was trying to get the satchel charge to the iron-faced door of the tower that dominated this stretch of wall. A man fell, but another hurdled him and snatched it up. Tongues of fire licked out from the loopholes around the door, and infantrymen outside fired back from the cover of the guns or from behind bodies. The ricochets were probably as much danger to the running man as the riflemen within. He jerked, hit once, then again, went to his knees, pitched the bundle of gunpowder sacks the last two meters.
CRUMP. Most of the explosion was outward, in the line of least resistance. Enough of it hit the door to smash the sheet-iron and thick wood behind into a splintered wreck . . . that was still not enough ajar to admit a man. Hand-bombs arched down from the tower summit, and small-arms crackled from the firing slits. Civil Government infantry rushed up to the shattered door, firing through the wreckage—
“Back!” Menyez shouted. Too late, or the huge racket of battle overrode his voice.
Above them the stream of burning tallow cascaded down from the tower-top. It struck and clung like superheated glue; even in the middle of the melee, the screams of men who leaped from the wall burning were loud.
Menyez’s head turned to the city. Between the wall and the houses was a clear strip fifty meters wide. Until recently it had been built over in patches, with flimsy hutments and corrals that could be passed off as temporary. Now the area was clear, and the rubbish and scrap lumber from the demolished shacks was piled up along the inner edge, a chest-high barricade. Beyond that were the streets; he could see mounted men there, a column of them. Shells were falling and fires burning in the cleared space, in the edge of housing beyond it. The column halted and dismounted, running forward to form up behind the barricade. The firelight shone on their helmets; General’s Dragoons, not town militia.
He looked left and right. Men down, men firing at the towers, or at the approaching dragoons. The problem wasn’t manpower, it was the towers and the lack of cover on the parapets from the rear—designed in for situations just like this. If he tried to send men down on ropes, they’d be vulnerable to the towers and the dragoons; he couldn’t feed them in fast enough through this narrow lodgement. Not fast enough to do anything but the piecemeal the way they were doing now.
Tears cut runnels through the powder-smoke on his face. Of grief, and pure rage.
“Ser.”
The runner from the 17th Kelden Foot was clutching his left arm with his right, to try to stop the bleeding.
“Ser, Colonel Menyez says, can’t get a lodgement past the wall. Brigaderos dragoons behind barricade, too many of ’em. Can’t take the towers either, not just from the parapet.”
Raj sat silent for a moment, watching the flickering muzzle flashes on the parapet, like fireflies in spring.
“Go get that treated, soldier,” he said. Then: “Sound retreat. Colonel Dinnalsyn, prepare to open up on the parapet again; I want their heads down while we pull our people out.”
The soldier arched up off the operating table with a cry of pain that drove a spray of blood from scorched lips.
“Hold him, damn you,” the doctor snapped.
Fatima grabbed the arm and weighed it down through the padding she clutched in both hands. Mitchi refastened the strap, her natural milk-white complexion gone to a grave-pallor that made her freckles stand out as if they were burning. The opium wasn’t doing this patient much good at all; the mixture of burning pitch and tallow had caught him across most of his torso, with spatters up and down from there. One had turned his whole forehead into a blister that had burst and shed a glistening sheet of lymph across his face. The doctor was using a scalpel to separate the remains of the tunic from the skin and cooked meat to which it had been melded by the fire—this one had been a marginal, nearly triaged into the terminal section.
The doctor’s hands moved with infinite deftness, swift and sure, although sweat ran down his cleric’s shaven scalp into the linen of his face mask.
“More carbolic,” he said.
Fatima seized the moment and slipped a leather pad into the soldier’s mouth to replace the one he’d screamed out. When the antiseptic struck the burned surfaces, the young man on the table went into an arch that left him supported only by heels and the back of his head. Muscles stood out like iron rods in his cheeks, and he might well have splintered teeth or bitten out his tongue without the pad.
He fainted. “Good,” the doctor said. “More carbolic. Wet him down here. Now the scissors. Spirit. We’ll have to cut this tissue, debride down to living flesh.”
On the next table, the grating sound of a bone saw hammered at her ears. A pulsing shriek rose further down the big tent, and a sobbing that was harder to bear.
The smell was what made her swallow a rush of sick spit. Fatima had managed to make herself eat roast pork, since she’d converted to the Star faith. She didn’t think she could ever do that again.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Damn, damn,” Jorg Menyez said. It might have been the pain of his shoulder, dislocated when he went back down the ladder, but Raj doubted it.
“Sit still,” Raj replied.
I hate the hospitals, he thought. Visiting the wounded was about the worst chore there was; and it bewildered him a little that the men liked it—seeing the author of their pain. Perhaps it gives them a focus. Something to concentrate the will on.
It was a smoky dawn in the command tent; there was still a bit of noise from the hospital pavilion across the plaza commanante, but most of the severely wounded had either died or been doped to unconsciousness by now. The burn victims were the very worst, the pain seemed to be so bad that even opium couldn’t do much.
“Damn,” Menyez said again.
Hadolfo Zahpata was in the hospital tent himself, with two broken legs. Clean fractures of the femur, likely to heal well, but he was in plaster casts and suddenly primary contender for commander of Crown garrison forces when the rest of the Expeditionary Force moved on.
“I lost a hundred, hundred and twenty men—and we were so close, if we’d gotten up just a little sooner—”
Raj made a chopping motion with his hand, as he stood at the head of the table looking out the opening.
“If’s the most futile word in Sponglish,” he said. “There was nothing wrong with the execution of the plan, Jorg—the plan was wrong, and that’s my responsibility. You pulled out at the right moment; if you hadn’t, you and Hadolfo would have lost your battalions.”
“A broader attack—”
“—would have repeated the same failure on a larger scale.” He sighed wearily. “The fact of the matter is, I was relying too much on the militia being disorganized by the town meeting. Maybe a lot of them wanted to open the gates, but they didn’t want our men coming over the wall with blood in their eyes, not with their families behind it.
“And Strezman was waiting for us—a force ready to sally and another in central reserve to punch back anyone who got to the top of the walls. High bloody Colonel bloody Strezman i
s just too good to bamboozle easily—we’ve been fighting dumb barbs too long. I underestimated him.”
He quirked a smile and lit two cigarettes, handing the other to Menyez. “If it’s any consolation”—which it wasn’t, he knew—“the force that sallied against our flank got cut up pretty badly before they made it back to cover. Good work, by the way, Gerrin.”
Staenbridge shrugged; his eyes were red-rimmed by exhaustion as well. “Standard little affray,” he said. “Incidentally, I was right back on Stern Isle. Their regular army is a different proposition from the landholders’ retainers. A bit slow to deploy, though, too reluctant to get out of the saddle.”
“As to what we do next—” Raj began.
observe, Center said.
This time the vision was of Lion City before the Fall. He hadn’t known there was a city here back that far. Low colorful buildings, a few towers, streets of greenery with vehicles floating through on air cushions. More such advanced craft at the docks behind the same adamantine breakwaters as today, and others that had sails in bright primary shades and seemed to serve no purpose but pleasure. Yet there were so many of them, as if the city held hundreds of nobles wealthy enough to maintain a yacht. People strolling along the tree-shaded avenues, richly dressed in alien fashions, all healthy and well-fed and unconcerned, none bearing arms save a hunter with the head of a carnosauroid floating behind him on a robot platform. People bathing nude in the harbor itself, away from the docks, in water that was crystal clear and free of downdraggers. How could harbor water not stink and attract scavengers?
The view stabilized overhead and then flashed to a schematic of the city’s hydraulic system. Water flowed in through pipes from the sea, flashed into vapor in a processing plant, flowed out through distributor pipes to every house, however humble. Even while he focused his attention on the overall view Raj marvelled at that. The lowliest peasant with hot and cold water running in any room he chose, like a great lord! With no need to send his wife to the public fountain for water or with the slops bucket to a sewer inlet—and only wealthy, civilized towns in these Fallen times had even so much. Waste water collected in a giant pipe that struck north to a mysterious factory that seemed to do nothing but sterilize the water, even though the whole ocean was nearby for dumping.
The Fall came. Most of the bright airy structures fell swiftly, to fire or hammered apart as salvage; they were uninhabitable for folk with nothing but fire to heat with, and they had been built of perishable materials. For generations only a small farming and fishing village stood on the site of Lion City. Rich land and a fine self-scouring harbor with a lighthouse brought growth. When men were numerous enough for their wastes to be a problem, a long ditch was built and connected to the storm-drains that flowed at low tide through the adamantine seawall; rainwater flushed it, now and then. A later generation covered the ditch with brick arches and built drains down individual streets connecting to it. The old sewer outlet was forgotten, deep underground. When men built the city wall, they built it over the pipe, to defend a smaller, more densely-packed settlement.
A final vision: the outlet pipe ending in a gully north of the town, with a projection of Raj standing next to it.
* * *
1.5 meters in diameter, Center said.
For a moment all Raj could feel was incandescent anger. You let my men die when there was a better way? he thought. Not even the Spirit—
i am not god, Center said. the pipe may be blocked, is probably blocked where the weight of the wall rests on it. or the inlet may not connect to the surface within lion city. in any case, “supernatural” interventions such as this increase the amount of noise in the system and reduce the reliability of my predictive function. nor did i select you to be the puppet of my tactical direction.
“Raj?” Suzette said with concern.
He shook back to himself. The Companions were used to his moments of introspection, but not to one accompanied by the expression he could still feel twisting his face.
furthermore the attention of the garrison will now be firmly riveted on the walls.
Shut—up, he thought savagely. Perhaps that was reckless disrespect to an angel, but at the moment he didn’t much care.
Raj looked up at the walls of Lion City. “They’re really going to regret burning my men,” he said softly.
Jorg Menyez was normally a mild and considerate man. At that moment his battered face resembled the surface of an upraised maul—also battered, but poised to smash anything in its path, stone and iron included. It matched his commander’s expression quite closely.
“Oh, my oath, yes,” Gerrin Staenbridge, almost whispering. A rustle of carnivore alertness went through the circle of commanders.
“Ehwardo,” Raj began. “Move the cavalry around outside the walls—make it look as if you’re setting up dispersed camps.” An essential step in keeping dogs healthy over a long stay in a confined spot. “Jorg, starting at dawn, give the best imitation you can of a man starting massive siege works; parallels, the whole show.”
“I gather it’s a ruse, Whitehall?” Gerrin Staenbridge said.
“Correct. The rest of you are to prepare for a general assault—if and only if something I . . . have in mind succeeds. Colonel Dinnalsyn, get those damned armored cars ready, too. If you’ll excuse me, Messers? And Gerrin,” he went on, “send me M’lewis.”
Antin M’lewis usually blessed the fate that had thrown him into Raj Whitehall’s path. Since then life had never been boring, and it had been lucrative—if not beyond his wildest dreams, then beyond all reasonable expectation. Particularly after he happened to be one of the two men with Raj when he put down the botched coup attempt that used Des Poplanich as its front-man. Governor Barholm had been hysterical when he promised to make the two Companions present the richest lords in the Civil Government if they saved him. He’d remembered enough afterwards to translate one Antin M’lewis, free commoner and soldier of watch-stander rank, into the Messer class and to deed him a thousand hectares of land—and not in stony, desolate Descott County, either. Good fat riverside fields, near the capital. Yes, usually he blessed the day then-Major Raj Whitehall had hauled him up on charges for stealing a shoat.
Then again, there were times when he wished he’d let the peons keep their damned pig.
The pipe was tall enough for him to stand in if he stooped a bit. The greasy-smooth material it was made of was like nothing he’d ever seen outside a shrine, and it led downward into the earth—into the Starless Dark, the freezing hell of the orthodox. Where the Spirit of Man of the Stars cast the unregenerate souls not worthy even of lowly rebirth, dumping their core programs into chaos.
Good thing me ma were a witch, he thought. This might be a real problem for a pious respectable yeoman, but everyone in the M’lewis family accounted themselves probably damned anyway and certainly hung if found out. So were the Forty Thieves, but even they looked queasy at the arguably supernatural and definitely menacing passageway into the earth.
They watched him silently as he stripped off his uniform jacket and boots; unlike most enlisted men, who preferred sleeveless vests of unbleached cotton beneath in summertime, he wore a shirt. Unlike most officers, his was dyed rusty black. Through the back of his belt he tucked a sheathed skinning knife, and tested that the wooden toggles of his garotte were ready to his hand for the quick snatch-and-toss. Then he tied a plain brown bandana over his hair and palmed mud over his cheeks.
“Yer nivver goin’ t’leave yer gun, ser?” one of the men whispered.
It was the young recruit; M’lewis remembered him from the action on Stern Isle, where he’d wondered if he’d have a chance at the women in the refugee convoy.
“Son—” M’lewis began. Which was just possible; they were certainly cousins, and he’d been friendly with that branch of the family as a lad. “—whin yer sneakin’, yer sneaks quiet. With t’gun, all I could do ’d be ter bring four thousand barbs down on me head. Jist noise an’ temptation, onna sneak
loik this.”
Spirit. Then again, he’d probably have drunk and fucked himself into an early grave by now if he’d retired to rusticate on the new estate. Certainly the other Messers wouldn’t accept him socially there, a stranger of common birth. His sons, probably, when he got around to having them, but not him. And it would be dull.
Raj stepped up and gripped forearms. “Careful and slow, M’lewis,” he said. “Don’t let them hear you.”
The snaggled teeth showed in a grin, and he offered a fist to slap—a trifle familiar perhaps, but then, what could you do to a man on a suicide mission?
“Nao clumpin’ barb’ll hear this mither’s chile, ser,” he said.
His bare feet were noiseless on the plastic. The soft cold of it was like nothing he’d ever touched as he walked forward and down, crouching.
Raj Whitehall was motionless beside his dog. Less bound by need than the man, Horace shifted uneasily from foot to foot to foot, whining slightly. His hand soothed the animal automatically, gauntleted fingers scritching in the slight ruff at the back of the neck, just forward of the saddlebow. Other dogs shifted and murfled in the darkness, two kilometers from the main gates of Lion City. Fifteen thousand men waited, gripping their rifles or the ladders, wondering if the next hour would bring a ladle of burning pitch in the face, a limb lost, eyes, genitals, whatever their particular dread might be. The air was full of the smell of rank sweat and dog, men and animals both full of knowledgeable fear and suppressed eagerness.
Everyone thought it was payback time. Everyone, Spirit help them, thought Messer Raj would pull another miracle out of the hat.
It was full dark; neither moon would be up for another hour. Watchlights burned on the walls of Lion City, but experience had taught them that Skinners could shoot out any reflector-backed searchlight from a comfortable range . . . and the men manning it.