by David Drake
A solid pulse of noise bounced through the gate towers: men and dogs howling. Raj stiffened, gripping the stone sill and craning to see. He could just make out the opened inner gate. Red flashes came through it, and then a sudden sullen wash of fire—handbombs and burning pitch being poured into the roadway. Not as much as there would have been if the gate towers were fully manned, but too much, too much. Some of the first men through were reeling with wounds, and others rode dogs with burning fur that streaked off across the plaza or rolled whether their riders jumped free in time or not.
Yet the troops were in hand, not panicking. Those hale enough spilled through and then formed on either side of the gate in three-deep lines, then trotted-cantered-galloped into the plaza in response to trumpet calls. Split into two rectangles of men and dogs and bright swords, and charged for the flanks of the 2nd Cruisers, where the Brigaderos lapped around them like waves eroding sand at high tide. The enemy were unformed, focused on the single task of driving toward the gates. They had no chance of forming to receive a mounted charge; and when they saw the line of saber-points and snarling wardogs coming out of the darkness and firelight their will broke. Screaming, they turned and ran back for the shelter of the buildings, running across the hundreds of their dead.
“The 5th, by the Spirit,” Raj said softly. His voice was hoarse from the smoke. Mostly from the smoke.
More men were riding through the gate-mouth, in pulses like water pouring through a hole in the hull of a sinking ship. They dismounted, the dogs peeling off as the handlers led them, the men fixing bayonets. Trumpet calls and shouted orders sent them forward at the double, with a long ripple down their line as the files closed around the places of absent men. An armored car followed with a mechanical pig-grunt from its engines that racketed back off the stone; a splatgun jutted from the bow, in place of the usual light cannon. The brass hubs of the tall wire-spoked wheels shone as it rattled off across the uneven pavement in the gap between two companies of the 5th Descott. Seconds later the rolling crash of a full battalion’s platoon volley-firing echoed back from the plaza, and the savage braaaaaaap of the new weapon. The cannonade from the walls had stopped. A moment later an explosion somewhere deep in the gate towers punished his eardrums and made the stonework shudder under his feet. The flash of handbombs from the murder holes stopped; to either side of the towers, he could see pennants waving as the assault force gained the walls, and some were already sliding down ropes to the inner side. A column of men on foot broke out of the gate below him, and then a pair of guns rumbling along behind their dog-teams.
The firing was dying away, but lights were going on all across the town amid a bee-hum of civilian panic; down by the harbor, ships were casting loose from the docks to try their chances with the steam rams outside the breakwater—they must have been ready and waiting for the signs. With a roar like heavy surf collapsing a breakwater in a storm, the army of the Civil Government broke over the walls and flowed in to the helpless city behind.
“This’s as far as it’s safe,” Gruder said.
All the other towers had surrendered quickly enough, when Civil Government troops came calling at the back entrance with field-guns for doorknockers. Some of them were empty even before the soldiers arrived, their militia defenders tearing off their uniforms and running back towards their homes. All except those here on the northeast quadrant, where the men holding them had hauled down the Lion City banner of a rampant cat and left their own flag of white crescent on a green field flying defiantly.
“Hate to waste men on the rag-heads,” Gruder said, scratching at a half-formed scab on his neck.
Raj’s smile was bleak as the dawn still six hours away. “I don’t think that will be necessary,” he said quietly. “I’ve sent—ah.”
Juluk rode up, his pipe between his teeth. His men ambled behind him, their dogs wuffing with interest at the smells on the night air.
“Hey, sojer-man, you do wheetigo trick, fly over walls, eh?”
“I didn’t want to stay home scratching my fleas with you sluggards,” Raj replied. Horace and the Skinner chief’s dog eyed each other.
He pointed at the towers ahead. “Know who’s there?” he said.
Juluk stretched and belched, knocking the dottle out of his pipe against one bare horn-calloused heel. “Wear-breechclout-on-heads,” he replied.
The Skinners’ home range touched on the Colony’s northeast border. That was their name for the Arabs; they called the people of the Civil Government the sneaks, and the western barbarians long-hairs. Or they just used their generic term of contempt, farmer.
“They think they’re heroes,” Raj said. “I say that if any of them are alive when the sun comes up, your women will laugh you out of the camps when you go home. They’ll offer you skirts and birthing-stools.”
Juluk’s giggle broke into a hoot. He turned to his followers: “L’gran wheetigo konai nus! Eel doni l’bun mut!”
The big devil knows us! He’s given us the good word!
“And that,” Raj said as the nomad mercenaries pounded by, screeching like powered saws in stone, “takes care of that.”
“Further resistance is hopeless,” Raj called up toward the second-story window. “Colonel Strezman, don’t sacrifice brave men without need.” Not least because the Civil Government can use them, he thought. Whatever happened here in the west, there would be war with the Colony again within two years.
His skin prickled. He was quiet sure High Colonel Strezman wouldn’t order him shot down under a flag of truce. He wasn’t at all sure that one of his men might not do it anyway.
The last of the Brigaderos regulars had holed up in several mansions not far from the plaza. Like most rich men’s homes throughout the Midworld basin they were courtyard-centered dwellings with few openings out to the world; their lives were bent inward, away from noise, dust, thieves and tax-assessors. Their thick stone walls would turn rifle bullets, and the iron grills over the windows might make them forts in time of riot. How little they resembled real forts was shown by the smashed courtyard gate and the rubble beside it, where a single shell from the field-gun back down the road had landed. Most of the windows were dark, but there was enough moonlight for the riflemen crouching there to see the street quite well; also a building was burning not too far away.
A long silence followed. The street-door of the central house creaked open, and Strezman walked out surrounded by a knot of his senior officers.
“My congratulations on a brilliant ruse of war,” he called, stopping ten meters away. “Your reputation proceeded you, Messer Whitehall, and now I see that it is justified.”
He spoke loudly, a little more loudly than the distance called for. There was blood on the armor covering his right arm, and on the blade of his single-edged broadsword. He wore no helmet, and his long white hair fluttered around an eagle’s face in the hot wind from the fire. Torchlight painted it red, despite his pallor.
“My congratulations, High Colonel, on a most skillful and resolute defense,” Raj said sincerely.
Given the cards he was dealt, Strezman had played them about as well as he could—as well as anyone could without Center whispering in their ear.
“Will you surrender your remaining men?” Raj asked formally. “Your wounded will be cared for, and the troopers and junior officers given honorable terms of enlistment in the Civil Government forces on another front. Senior officers will be detained pending the conclusion of the war, but in a manner fitting to their rank and breeding.”
Strezman swallowed, and spoke again. Still louder, as if for a larger audience.
“My orders from His Mightiness are to resist to the last man,” he declaimed. “Therefore I must decline your gracious offer, Messer Whitehall, although no further military purpose is served by resistance. To honor the truce, I hereby warn you of my intention to attack.”
Their eyes met. The hostages, Raj knew. The lives of these mens’ families were forfeit, if they surrendered . . . or if th
ey were known to have surrendered. Even though a stand to the death here accomplished nothing, not even much delay.
The officers with Strezman drew their swords and threw away the scabbards. They raised the blades and began to walk forward, heads up and eyes staring over the massed rifles facing them.
Raj chopped his hand down. Smoke covered the scene for an instant as a hundred rifles barked; when it cleared every man in the Brigaderos party was down, hit half a dozen times. The High Colonel was on his knees; blood pulsed through teeth clenched in a rictus of effort and he collapsed forward. The tip of his sword struck sparks as it left his hand and spun on the cobbles, a red and silver circle on the stones.
Raj flung up his hand to halt the fire. In a voice as loud as the Brigadero colonel’s a moment before, he called:
“Let the bodies of High Colonel Strezman and his officers be returned to their households—” the servants who followed their masters to war “—to be delivered to their prince, in recognition of how their men—how all their men—died with them in obedience to General Forker’s orders.”
The vicious little sod, he added silently. He hoped the Brigade didn’t depose Forker any time soon; the man was worth five battalions of cavalry to the Civil Government all by himself. If shame didn’t keep him from harming the garrison’s families, fear of his other commanders probably would, after Strezman’s final gesture. Although if there was any justice in this Fallen world, the Brigade would chop him, and soon.
“Gerrin,” he went on in a normal voice. The other man’s torso was bound with bandages over ribs that might only be cracked, but he was still mobile.
“Get the rest of them out; there must be eight hundred or so. Down to the docks before daylight, suitable guards, and onto those two merchantmen Grammeck commandeered. Have someone reliable, Bartin say, handle it. The ships can pick up pilots and a deck officer apiece from the rams, they’ve come into the harbor. I want them sailing east by dawn, understood?”
No need for a decimation, Raj thought grimly. The 5th Descott had lost more than that, running the gauntlet of the murder-holes of the gatehouse and in the headlong charge that cleared the plaza for the men behind them.
He looked down once more from the podium around the fountain; only a day and a night since the town meeting gathered here . . . now the square was filled with soldiers. The 5th and the 2nd Cruisers still in neat ranks before him; many of the others mixed by the surge over the walls and the brief street-fighting that followed. Many missing, already off among the houses. The only firing came from the sector of wall still held by the Colonial merchants, the burbling of their repeater carbines and jezails as an undertone to the savage hammering of Skinner long rifles. He didn’t think that would take long; he could see one of the towers from here, and squat figures made stick-tiny by distance capered and danced on its summit, firing their monstrous weapons into the air.
Every once and a while, a figure in Colonist robes would be launched off the parapet to flutter in a brief arc through the air. Some of the screams were audible this far away.
“Fellow soldiers,” Raj said. “Well done.” A cheer rippled across the plaza, tired but good-natured. “A donative of six months’ pay will be issued.” The next cheer had plenty of energy. “I won’t keep you, lads; just remember we need this place standing tomorrow, not burnt to the ground. You’ve done your jobs, now the city—and all in it—is yours until an hour past dawn. All units dismissed!”
Behind them the gate-tower he’d stormed was fully involved, a pillar of flame within the round stone chimney of the building. With luck it wouldn’t go beyond that . . .
The 5th Descott still stood in ranks before him, immobile as stone. Certain things had to be done by the forms. He nodded, and spoke again:
“Colonel Staenbridge.”
“Sir.”
“I have need of trustworthy men to guard key locations and apprehend certain persons tonight.”
Thus missing the sack, one of the rare pleasures of a common soldiers’s hard, meagre and usually boring life. Most of the troopers would think of it as a far worse punishment than being the lead element through the gate—which Kaltin Gruder had assigned the 5th on the unanimous insistence of officers and men.
“Are the 5th Descott Guards ready to undertake this duty?”
“Mi heneral, the 5th is always ready to do its duty.” The sound that came from the ranks was not a cheer; more like a short crashing bark.
“Excellent, Colonel.” He paused. “I see that the 5th’s banner is absent. Please see that it is returned to its proper place immediately.”
“Mi heneral!”
Mitchi sat and held up the hand-mirror and preened, throwing a hand behind her tousled mass of red hair and arching her back. The necklace of gold and emeralds glittered in the lamplight between her full pink-tipped breasts. The tent was a warm cave in the night, light strong panels of tanned and dyed titanosauroid gut on a framework of skeelwood and bronze. All the furniture was similar, including the bed she and Kaltin Gruder shared, expensive and tough and very portable.
“You’re vain as a cat,” Gruder said, running a hand up her back. He was lying with one arm beneath his head. She shivered slightly at the calloused, rock-hard touch. “Aren’t you ever going to take the damned thing off?” There were red pressure-marks beneath it.
“I may be vain, but you stink of dog and gunpowder, Kaltin,” she said tartly. “Mmmmm.” He began kneading the base of her slender neck between thumb and forefinger.
“Well,” he said reasonably, “I fought a murthering great assault action last night, did some hard looting, then worked my arse off all day keeping the city from burning down and getting the men back in hand. A busy man doesn’t smell like a rose.”
“Not too busy to find this,” she said, turning and lying on his chest. She propped her chin on her elbows, and the jewels swung between them. “Or that little dog you found for Jaine.”
“Or a good deal else,” he agreed, chuckling. “Professional soldier’s instincts. She’ll need a riding dog on the march . . . How’s she settling?”
“Jaine? Very well; she’s got neat hands with my hair and clothes, she’s clean and biddable. Sweet little thing, too, everyone likes her.” She moved a leg over his hips and giggled. “You’re not settled at all. I’d have thought you’d be worn out on the town matrons.”
“I like my women smiling and running toward me, not screaming and running away,” he said, putting his hands around her narrow waist and lifting her astride him. Her breath caught as she sank back on her heels and began to move.
“Besides,” he went on, running his hands up and gripping her breasts, “as the wog saying goes: Stolen goods are never sold at a loss. Hard loot looked like a better way to spend the time, with fifteen thousand men inside the walls and running loose. Lineups.”
Mitchi gave a complex shudder and threw back her head, stroking the hands that caressed her. “What’s that sound?” she asked.
“That?” Gruder said.
A roar like angry surf was coming from Lion City. Louder than the town meeting had been, since all the gates were open. “That’s a rarity, wench—some people getting what they deserve. Now shut up.”
Syndic Placeedo Anarenz looked as if he was going to survive the wound the throwing-axe had put in his back, although the left arm might never be as strong again. Right now it was strapped to his chest by the Army priest-doctor’s bandages. He stood as straight as that allowed, meeting Raj’s eyes. The general’s face might have been a Base Area idol rough-carved out of old wood, his eyes rimmed and red with fatigue.
“Your tame prince certainly predicted our fate accurately, heneralissimo supremo,” Anarenz said bitterly.
Raj rubbed his chin; sword-callous rasped on blue-black stubble. “I don’t think many infants were tossed on bayonets,” he said mildly.
Or that many silver-haired elders got their brains beaten out, he thought. Not unless they were foolish enough to get between a sold
ier and something he fancied.
Lion City was orderly now, with infantry in guardia armbands on every corner seeing that their comrades went nowhere but to authorized taverns and knocking shops. Little remained from the previous night of rape, pillage and slaughter but the occasional gutted building, and not many of those. Guards had kept the major warehouses from damage, and the shipyards and other critical facilities; the rest of the town was missing most of its liquid wealth and small valuables, and several hundred young women smuggled out to the camp. They would probably be sold in a few days, at knock-down prices along with the households of the Colonial merchants and the magnates he’d put under proscription.
“Also,” he went on, “I saw how your own guild reacted to my warning.”
Placeedo Anarenz started slightly, and stared for a moment. “You,” he breathed. “You were one of the guards?”
Raj nodded. “This—” he indicated the podium and the plaza “—is something of a reunion. Even the syndics are here.”
They were standing under guard in front of the assembled citizens. It was a larger crowd than the town meeting, most of the adult population of Lion City. Much quieter as well, ringed with troops holding their bayoneted rifles as barricades; battered-looking men, many in remnants of militia uniform. Equally battered-looking women, in ripped and stained clothing hastily repaired or still gaping. Torches on poles lit their upturned faces, staring at him with dread.
Another building-block in the reputation of Raj Whitehall, he thought bitterly.
“I was a syndic,” Anarez said. “Why aren’t I down there with them?”
“Because you argued for opening the gates,” Raj pointed out. “Also you’re the next Mayor.”
Anarenz grunted in shock, staggering until the two burly sailmakers at his side steadied him. Pain-sweat glistened on his forehead from the jostling that gave his wound.