by David Drake
“—volley fire—”
He exhaled and let his forefinger curl slightly, taking up the trigger slack. The strap of the rifle was wound round his left hand twice, held taunt with the forestock resting on the knuckles. He might not know who’d fucked up in the tunnel, but at least he was going to get to kill somebody today.
“Fire!”
Bullets went overhead with an unpleasant wrack sound. Down the line from the command group a trooper slumped backward with his helmet spinning free to land in the mud and the top taken off of his head. He’d been holding two rounds in his lips like cigarettes, with the bases out ready to hand; they followed the helmet, a dull glint of brass through the rain.
Gerrin Staenbridge looked back and forth down the sunken lane. Stretcher-bearers—military servants—were hauling men back, crouching to carry them without exposing themselves over the higher northern lip of the laneway. Other bearers and soldiers were carrying forward ammunition boxes, ripping the loosened tops off and distributing handfuls to the troopers on the firing line. Ahead the Brigaderos were advancing again, one line running forward and taking cover while the second fired and stood to charge their clumsy muzzle-loading rifle muskets. He checked; yes, the company and platoon commanders were dividing their fire, keeping both segments under fire and not letting the men waste bullets on prone targets.
“Hot work,” Bartin Foley said beside him. He gave the—literal—lie to his words by shaking his head and casting a scatter of cold rain from his helmet and chainmail neck-flap.
“Bloody hell,” Staenbridge replied, raising his voice slightly. “Fight in the desert, and you want rain. Fight in the rain and you want the sun. Some people are never satisfied.”
He lit two cigarettes and passed one to the young captain. A lot of the enemy rifle-muskets were misfiring; percussion caps were immune to rain, but paper cartridges were not. Another line of the Brigaderos rose to advance, and a crashing stutter of half-platoon volleys met them. At three hundred meters more shots hit than missed, but the remnants came on and stood to fire a return volley of their own. Wounded men screamed and cursed down the lines of the 5th and the Life Guards; but they were protected, all but their heads and shoulders. The enemy were naked. The Civil Government’s rifle was a single shot breechloader; not the least of its blessings was that it could be loaded lying down.
Off to the east the firing line was thinner, where Company C had been detached; the 5th was still overstrength, but not so much so since Lion City. The splatgun there gave its braaaaak sound, thirty-five rifle barrels clamped together and fired by a crank. A Brigaderos column was caught six hundred meters out, as it began the ponderous countermarch they used to get from marching column into fighting line. Seconds later two field-gun shells arrived at the same target, contact-fused; they plowed up gouts of mud and toppled men with blast and heavy casing fragments. Staenbridge stepped off his crouching dog and walked down behind the line, the banner by his side. It had a few more bulletholes, but the bannerman kept it aloft in the gathering rain.
“Ser, would ye mind inspirin’ ussn where ye won’t draw fire?” a sergeant called back to him.
“Inspiration be damned, I’m checking that your leatherwork is polished,” Staenbridge said.
A harsh chuckle followed as he strolled back to the center. Spirit, the things one says under stress, he thought.
A runner squelched up, a Life Guardsman. “Ser,” he said to Cabot Clerett. “Barb movement in t’woods. Mounted loik.”
Staenbridge nodded at the Governor’s nephew’s glance. “We’re holding here,” he said. “Take a company . . . and the other two splatguns.”
“Whitehall’s toys,” Clerett said.
“Useful toys. Take them, and use them.”
Clerett nodded and turned, calling out orders. He straddled his dog and the animal rose, dripping; the rain was coming down harder now, a steady drizzle. Water sizzled on the barrels of the splatguns, and the gunners left their breeches locked open as they hitched the trails to the limbers and wheeled. Men on the far right of the 2nd Life Guard’s section of the line fired one more volley and fell in behind him, reloading as they jogged. There was a slapping sound, and the 2nd’s bannerman gave a deep grunt and slumped in the saddle. Cabot reached out and took the staff, resting the butt on his stirrup-iron as the other man toppled.
“See to him,” he said. “You men, follow me.” He kept the dog to a steady quick walk as they moved in squelching unison behind him.
“Spread it out there,” Foley said sharply. The rightmost company of the 5th and the leftmost of the 2nd shifted to fill in the gap, ducking as they moved to keep under cover.
“He’s got nerve,” Staenbridge murmured. “Still, I’m happier seeing his back than his glowering face.”
“I could resent that remark,” Foley said, sotto voce. Aloud: “Lieutenant, they’re clumping to your left. Direct the fire, if you please.”
“Fire!”
M’Telgez straightened from his crouch and fired. The Armory rifle punished his shoulder, the barrel fouled from all the rounds he’d put through it this afternoon. This was the fifth charge, and looked to be the worst yet. A hundred yards to the front dogs went over and men died; they were close enough that he could hear the flat smacking of bullets hitting flesh and the sharper ptung of impacts on armor. He worked the lever and snatched a round he was holding between the fingers of his left hand, thumbing it home.
“Here they come!” he snarled.
The Brigaderos were getting smarter; they’d dismounted some of their men behind the ridge over there to use their rifles for a base of fire. The commander of Company C had backed his troopers half a dozen paces, so that they could load crouching and pop up to fire, but they were still losing men. The enemy were also still trying to charge home; expensive, but although they might win a firefight, they couldn’t win it in time to affect the main action half a klick away—and the lancers had been supposed to sweep down on the flank of the 5th’s position.
Below in the slight swale between the low ridges the lancers came on in clumps and as stragglers. Their dogs’ feet were balls of sticky mud, and the cornstalks there had been trampled into a slippery mass that sent some riders skidding in disastrous flailing tumbles even if the bullets missed them. More came on, though, laboring up the slope.
“Fire!”
The corporal fired again. A ragged volley crashed out around him, the muzzle-blasts deafening—particularly the one from the man behind, whose muzzle was nearly in his ear.
“Watch yer dressin’, ye dickead!” he screamed, jerking at his lever, and the man shuffled a few steps right. At least the rifle wasn’t jamming; there was some benefit to the cold rain that was hissing down into his eyes.
He could see the dogs snarling, and the men behind their visors. Mud flew chest-high on the dogs as they came closer at a lumbering gallop.
“Fire!”
More died and half a dozen turned back, some as their dogs bolted to the rear despite sawing hands on the reins and the pressure of bridle-levers on their cheeks. The rest came on, those who still had lances leveling them. The shafts were tapered and smooth, save for a grapefruit-sized wooden ball just in front of the handgrip; the heads were straight-sided knives a foot long, honed and deadly, with steel lappets another two feet down the shaft on either side. M’Telgez’s fingers had to hunt for a second to find a cartridge in his bandolier; the upper rows were empty. He clicked it home just as the straggling charge reached the Civil Government line.
The lieutenant pirouetted aside from a point like a matador in the arena. His saber slashed down on the shaft behind the protective steel splints that ran back from the head, and the razor edges tumbled. He let the motion spin him in place, and shot the rider in the back point-blank with the revolver in his left hand.
M’Telgez had lost interest in any lance but the one pointed at his chest. His lever clicked home when it was only a couple of meters away; the corporal threw himself on his back in
blind instinct, falling with a thump as the steel dipped. It passed a hand’s breadth over his head and he shot with the butt of his rifle pressed to the earth by his side. The bullet creased the Newfoundland’s neck, cutting a red streak through the muddy black fur. The animal reared and then lunged, the huge jaws gaping for his face in a graveyard reek of rotting meat. M’Telgez screamed and flung up his rifle; the dog shrieked too, when its jaws closed on two feet of bayonet. The weapon jerked out of the Descotter’s hands and the mud sucked at his back. The Brigadero was standing in his stirrups, shouting as he shortened the lance to stab straight down from his rearing mount.
The young trooper M’Telgez had disciplined for misloading stepped up on the other side and fired with his bayonet touching the Brigadero’s armored torso. It didn’t matter what he had up the spout at that range. The lancer pitched out of the saddle as the bullet punched in under his short ribs. The armor served only to flatten it before it buzzsawed up through liver, lungs and heart to lodge under his opposite shoulder. Blood shot out of his nose and mouth. He was dead before his corpse hit the ground with a clank of steel.
The dog was very much alive. Its huge paws stamped down on either side of the recumbent Descotter; they were furnished with claws and pads rather than a grazing animal’s hoof, but they would still smash his ribs out through his spine if they landed. The great loose-jowled jaws were open as the beast shook its head in agony, splattering rainwater and blood from its cut tongue. The trooper shouted and drove his bayonet toward its neck as the fangs turned toward the man on the ground. The human’s attack turned into a stumbling retreat as the dog whirled and snapped, the sound of its jaws like wood slapping on wood.
M’Telgez remembered his pistol. Most of the troopers had strapped the new weapons to holsters at their saddlebows—they were supposed to be for mounted melees. He’d stuffed his down the top of his riding boot when they dismounted, on impulse. Now he snatched it free and blazed away at the furry body above him, into the belly rear of the saddle’s girth. The dog hunched up in the middle and ran, its rear paws just missing him as it staggered a dozen paces and fell thrashing.
“Fastardos!” he wheezed, picking up a dead man’s rifle and loading as he rolled erect.
The Brigaderos were retreating across the swale, many of them on foot—dogs were bigger targets than men.
“Bastards!” M’Telgez fired, reloaded, fired again. “Bastards!”
Shots crackled out all down Company C’s line, then the beginnings of volley-fire. It slammed into the retreating men, killing nearly as many as had died in the attack before they made it back to the dead ground behind their starting-point. The field gun elevated and began dropping shells behind the ridge, the gunners and half a dozen troopers as well slipping and sliding in the muck as they ran it back up the slight rise until the muzzle showed.
Return fire was coming in as well; retreat unmasked the Civil Government line to the Brigaderos across the swale. M’Telgez went back to one knee as the minié bullets crackled overhead and jerked the trooper beside him by the tail of his jacket.
“Git yer head down, ye fool,” he growled, looking around.
Not far away a man writhed with a broken-off lance through his gut, whimpering and pulling at the shaft. It jerked, but the steel was lodged in his pelvis far beyond the strength of blood-slippery hands to extract. Another fumbled at his belt for a cord to make a tourniquet; his arm was off above the elbow. The blood jetted more slowly as the man toppled over. M’Telgez knew there was nothing anyone could do for either of the poor bastards. When it was your time, it was time . . . and he was very glad it hadn’t been his.
“Kid,” he went on, as the young man obediently dropped to one knee and looked at him apprehensively. “Kid, yer all right.”
“Will theyuns be back then, corp?” he asked.
M’Telgez wiped rain and blood out of his eyes—none of the blood his, thank the Spirit.
“Nao,” he rasped.
The low ground ahead of him was thick with corpses of armored men and dogs. Particularly in front of the Company pennant; the Brigaderos had clumped there, driving for the center—and also for the gun, meeting point-blank blasts of case shot.
“Nao, they won’t be back.” He looked up and down the line. “Dressin’!” he barked sharply. What was left of his section moved to maintain their line.
M’Telgez grinned, an expression much like that the lancer’s dog had worn when it lunged for his life. “Hoi, barbs!” he shouted at the distant enemy. “Got any messages fer yer wives? We’ll be seein’ ’em. afore ye do!”
Cabot Clerett caught the bayonet on his sword. It was a socket bayonet, offset from a sleeve around the muzzle so that the musket could be loaded and rammed while it was fixed. Metal grated on metal; he fired into the Brigadero’s body beneath their linked arms. The man pitched backward as the H-shaped wadcutter bullet put a small hole in his stomach and a much larger one in his back.
“Forward!” the governor’s nephew said. “Vihtoria O Muwerti!” The motto of the Life Guards. Or victory and death, but nothing came free.
Braaaaap. The splatgun fired from not far behind, to his right. Bullets sprayed down the aisles between the trees; this was a planted oakwood, regular as a chessboard. About sixty or seventy years old, from the size of the trees, and regularly thinned as they grew. Water dripped down from the bare branches. Dim figures in gray-and-black uniforms were running back. A few paused to reload behind trees, but they were only protected from directly ahead. Life Guardsmen strung out to either side picked them off, mostly before they could complete the cumbersome process.
Men flanked him as he walked forward, the new bannerman holding the battalion flag. The company commander was out on the right flank with the other splatgun. He could hear it firing, trundled forward like the one with him to support the advance. Men walked on either side of him, reloading as they dodged the trees. They were cheering as they shot; the platoon commanders turned and flung out arms and swords to remind them to keep their line.
“Runner,” Cabot said. “To Colonel Staenbridge; enemy were advancing in column on our right flank. I’ve driven them back and will shortly take them in enfilade all the way back to their original startline.”
The splatguns were useful. It took less than ten seconds to replace each iron plate with thirty-five rounds in it, better than three hundred rounds a minute. With them and a hundred-odd riflemen, he would shortly be in a position to rake the front of the Brigaderos firing line from the right side and chop up any reserves they still held in the orchard.
Let that marhicon see how a Clerett managed a battle, by the Spirit!
“So we moved forward and caught them on the other side of the orchard as they tried to break contact,” Staenbridge said. “Cut them up nicely, then pursued mounted, stopping occasionally to shoot them up again. They retreated to a large fortified manor house, which burned quite spectacularly when we shelled it, rain or no. The outbuildings had some very useful supplies, which will be arriving shortly at ox-wagon pace along with the noncombatants.
“Major Clerett,” he went on, “led the right wing with skill and dash.”
Raj nodded to the younger officer. “The supplies will be useful,” he said. “Difficult to get enough in, when we’re moving at speed.”
He inclined his head downslope. Most of the troops were trudging by with their rifles slung muzzle-down; their boots had churned the fields on either side of the road into glutinous masses. Some of them were wearing local peasant moccasins; the thick mud rotted the thread out of issue boots and sucked off the soles. Further out the cavalry plodded on, stopping occasionally to scrape balls of mud off their mount’s feet; the dogs whined and dragged, wanting to stop and groom. On the roadway itself men—infantry and military servants, with gunners acting as foremen—labored in mud even deeper, laying a corduroy surface of logs and beams. As the officers watched a gun-team came up with its draught chain looped around a hitch of fresh-cut logs. They rumble
d down the slope to general curses as men dodged the timber.
“I hope,” Raj went on, “that you kept me some Brigaderos prisoners of rank. We need more information about what’s happening at Carson Barracks.”
CHAPTER THREE
A hereditary officer from just west of the Waladavir River was speaking:
“. . . a dozen farms and a village burned, my manor looted—only by the grace of the Spirit of Man of This Earth and the intervention of the Merciful Avatars did I and my household escape the devil Whitehall. What does His Mightiness intend to do about it?”
The Hall of Audience was lit by scores of tapers in iron sconces, above the racked battle lasers of antiquity. They cast unrestful shadow across the crowd that packed it, nearly a thousand men. Light glittered restlessly from swordhilts, from the jeweled hairclasp of one lord or the platinum beads on the jacket-fringe of another. The air was cold and dank with the autumn rains that fell outside, but it smelled powerfully of sauroid-fat candles and male sweat. An inarticulate growl rose from the crowd; these were each powerful men in their own right, nobles who commanded broad acres and hundreds of household troops.
Their like crowded Carson Barracks, filling housing blocks that usually echoed emptily at this time of year; the petty-squires and military vassals and freeholders who had come as well camped in the streets. Right now they filled the vast parade square outside the Palace. Crowd noise came through the stone walls like an angry hum, occasionally breaking into a chant:
“Fight! Fight! Fight!”
General Forker rose from the Seat to reply. The light glittered coldly on the engraved silver of his ceremonial armor, and on the vestments of the Sysups and councilors grouped around his throne.