by David Drake
Naked, Ingreid’s paunch and graying body hair were more obvious, but that simply emphasized the troll strength of his blocky shoulders. His body was seamed with scars, particularly down the left side and on the lower arms and legs. Puckered bullet wounds, long white fissures from swords, a deep gouge on one thigh where a lancepoint had taken out a chunk of meat when it hammered through the tasset. Neck and hip and joints were calloused where his armor rested, and there was a groove across his forehead from the lining of a helmet. Strong teeth showed yellow as he smiled at her and raised a decanter from the bedside table.
“Drink?” he said. Marie remained silent, staring at the ceiling.
“Well, then I will,” he said, splashing the brandy into a glass. The ends of his long hair stuck to his glistening shoulders, and his sweat smelled sourly of wine and beer.
He wiped himself on a corner of the satin sheets and got up, moving about restlessly, picking up objects and putting them down. After a moment he turned back to the bed.
“Not so bad, eh? You’ll get better when you’re used to it.”
Marie’s head turned and looked at him silently. The eyes were as empty of expression as her face. Ingreid flushed.
“You’d better,” he said, gulping down the brandy. “I was supposed to marry a woman, not a corpse.”
Marie spoke, her voice remote. “You got what you bargained for. That’s all you’re getting.”
“Is it, girlie?” Ingreid’s flush went deeper, turning his face red-purple under the weathering. “We’ll see about that.”
He threw the glass aside to bounce and roll on the carpets, then jerked her head up by her hair. His hand went crack against her face, the palm hard as a board. She jerked and rolled to the edge of the bed, her long blond hair hiding her face. Then her head came up, the green eyes holding the same flat expression despite the red handmark blazing on her cheek.
“I’ve got better things to do than teach you manners, bitch,” Ingreid snarled. “For now. When the war’s won, I’ll have time.”
He threw on a robe. Marie waited until he had slammed out the door until she stood as well, moving carefully against the pain of pulled muscles and the pain between her legs. A servant would come if she pulled one of the cords, but right now even such a faceless nonentity would be more than she could face. She walked into the bathroom and turned up the lamp by the door, looking at herself in the full-length mirror without blinking, then opened the taps to fill the seashell-shaped bath of marble and gold. Hot water steamed; the General’s quarters had all the luxuries. It wasn’t until the bath was full and foaming with scented bubble soap that she realized it was the same tub that her mother had been drowned in.
She managed to make it to the toilet before she started vomiting. When her stomach was empty she wiped her face and stepped into the bath anyway. She would need all her strength in the days ahead.
“That was too easy,” Raj said, resting his helmet on his saddlebow. And for once, it isn’t raining. The breath of men and dogs showed in frosty clouds, but the sun was bright in a morning sky.
The little town of Pozadas lay at the junction of the chalk downs and the lower clay plain; it had no wall, although the church and a few of the larger houses would have done as refuges against bandits or raiders. So would some of the mills along the river. They were built of soft gold-colored limestone; napping and scutching mills and dye-works for woolen cloth, mostly. The town had many cottages where weavers worked hand-looms and leatherworkers made boots and harness. Wisely, the citizens had offered no resistance, but they were sullen even though the Civil Government had paid in looted gold for most of what it took.
It was a prosperous town for its size; the town hall was new and quite modern, with large glass windows below and an open balcony on the second story, overlooking the roofs of the other buildings.
“Glum-looking bastards,” Cabot said, rising in the saddle to look over Raj’s shoulder.
Few were on the streets—the troops and the huge herds of livestock they were driving through the main road took up too much room—but there were scowls on the faces peering from windows and doorways.
“Not surprising,” Raj said.
He nodded to a vast bleating mat of gray-and-white sheep churning up the chalky flint-studded dirt of the street; it moved like a shaggy blanket, with an occasional individual popping up, struggling for a few steps across its neighbors’ backs, and then dropping back into the press. There was a heavy barnyard odor, overwhelming the usual outhouse and chemical reek of a cloth-making town.
“We’re taking their livelihood,” the general went on. “It’ll take years for the herds back there—” he inclined his head back toward the downland they’d just finished sweeping “—to breed back up again. That’s assuming that things don’t get so disrupted the carnosauroids finish off the breeding stock we left. In the meantime, what’ll they do for wool and hides?”
A large army was like a moving suction-machine; his was travelling fast enough that it wouldn’t leave famine in its wake, but nobody else would be able to move troops along the same route anytime soon.
“I still wonder where all those men went,” Raj said meditatively.
Cabot drew his pistol and pointed it. Raj threw himself flat in the saddle, and the bullet cracked where he had been.
Horace whirled in less than his own length, paws skidding slightly on the sheep-dung-coated mud of the street. The Brigadero who’d been behind him pitched backward with a third hole in line with his eyebrows, his floppy-brimmed hat spinning off. There were a dozen more behind him, some still charging out of the opened doors of the town hall courtyard, and more on foot behind them. Still more on balconies and rooftops, rising to fire. Shots crackled through the streets and men screamed, dogs howled, and the bleating of berserk sheep was even louder as the near-witless animals scattered in all directions into alleys and squares and through open doors and windows.
“Thanks!” Raj shouted. Now I know where the herdsmen went.
The man behind him had a sword raised for a sweeping overarm cut. Raj dodged under it as Horace bounced forward, his saber up and back along his spine; the swords met with an unmusical crash and skirl, and he uncoiled, slashing a third Brigadero across the face. Then his personal escort had faced about and met the rest, shooting and stabbing in a melee around Raj and Cabot and their bannermen. More Brigaderos were charging out of the mills. Raj scanned the housetops. A couple hundred enemy, and they’d found the best way to hide the scent of their dogs; in the middle of a textile town, with thousands of livestock jamming through it.
Bloody Starless Dark, he thought disgustedly. Another cock-up because he hadn’t enough troops to nail things down.
The problem with relying on speed and intimidation was that some people just didn’t intimidate worth a damn.
“Rally south of town,” he shouted to Cabot Clerett. “Spread out, don’t let them get back into the hills. Pin them against the river as you come in.”
“They’ll swim the stream and scatter,” the younger man replied.
Raj gave a feral grin. “Not for long,” he said. “Get moving!”
The major jerked a nod, wheeling his dog and waving his pistol forward. His bannerman fell in beside him, and the trumpeter sounded retreat-rally as they pounded south, toward the spot where the Civil Government column had entered the town. Men fought free of the herds and plunder-wagons and joined him in clumps and units. Some fell, but everyone understood the need to break contact until they could rally and unite. If they stood, the prepared enemy would cut them up into penny packets and slaughter them.
“Follow me!” Raj barked.
His escort had taken care of the first Brigaderos to attack, but even as he spoke he saw a man and a dog go down. A bullet cracked by his head with an unpleasant puff of wind against his cheek, which was entirely too close. He had a full platoon of the 5th Descott with him, beside messengers and aides. That ought to be enough.
He pointed his sabe
r at the town hall and clapped his heels to Horaces flanks. The hound took off from bunched hindquarters, travelling across the muddy sheep-littered plaza in a series of bounds that put them at chest-height from the ground half a dozen times. As he’d expected, that threw off the marksmen; they’d been expecting the troops they ambushed to mill around, or try to return fire from street level. Never do what they expect.
Thirty dogs pounded up the stairs to the arcaded verandah of the hall. A final crackle—too ragged to be a volley—at point-blank range knocked another six down. Smoke puffed into their faces, blinding them for an instant. Then they were scrabbling across the smooth tile of the portico and crashing through tall windows in showers of glass and the yelping of cut dogs. Horace reared and struck the big double doors with his forepaws. A jolt went through Raj’s body, and he felt his teeth clack once like castanets; something seemed to snap behind his eyes.
The doors boomed open, crushing bone and tearing men off their feet. Horace’s jaws closed over the face of another; the inch-long fangs sank in, and the hound made a rat-killing flip that sent the body pinwheeling back in a spray of blood. There were thirty or forty Brigaderos in the big reception hall that backed the portico; from their looks, he’d found the missing herdsmen. With another twenty-five riding dogs, the place was crowded, too crowded for the enemy to recharge their muzzle-loaders. Some of them clubbed muskets, but most drew swords or fighting-knives. Raj’s men emptied their revolvers into the press and swept out their sabers. The dogs stamped on men trying to roll under their bellies and cut, snapped with fangs and hammered with their forepaws.
A Brigadero dodged in and cut at Raj’s left thigh, always vulnerable in a mounted man. Horace spun on one leg, and Raj stabbed down over the saddle. The blow was at an awkward angle, but it sank into the bicep of the man’s sword-arm. His weapon flew free as Raj jerked his steel free of the ripped muscle; then a Descotter wardog closed its jaws in his back and threw him over its shoulder with a snap. Raj lashed back to his right with a backhand cut across the neck of a man trying to come in on his bannerman’s rear. The man with the flag had a revolver in his right hand; he was keeping his mount stock-still with a toe-to-foreleg signal and picking his targets carefully.
A last shot barked out. Powder-smoke was drifting to the ceiling; a few more men in blue jackets and maroon pants ran in, troopers whose dogs had been hit outside. As always, the melee was over with shocking suddenness. One instant there were shots and screams and the blacksmith chorus of steel on steel, the next only the moans of the wounded and the quick butcher’s-cleaver sounds of troopers finishing off the enemy fallen.
“Dismount!” Raj barked. “Dogs on guard.”
Horace pricked up his floppy ears at the word. So did the other mounts as the men slid to the ground, drawing their rifles from the saddle scabbards. Anyone trying to get into the ground floor was going to have a very nasty surprise.
“Walking wounded cover the front entrance,” Raj went on. They could bandage themselves and the more severely hurt as well. “The rest of you, fix bayonets and follow me.”
He switched his saber for an instant, juggled weapons to put his revolver in his left hand, and led the rush up his half of the curving double staircase with the lieutenant of the escort platoon on the other. Marksmen dropped out halfway up to cover the top of the stairs, firing over their comrades’ heads. Hobnails and heel-plates clamored and sparked on the limestone. Center’s aiming-grid dropped over his sight . . . which was a bad sign, because that only happened in desperate situations. No time for thought, only a quick, fluid feeling of total awareness. Everyone crouched as they neared the top of the stairs; he signed right and left to the men whose bayonet-tips he could see on either side.
“Now!”
The bannerman dropped flat two steps down, jerking the flag erect and waving it back and forth. The Brigaderos waiting in the upper hallway behind an improvised barricade of tables reacted exactly the way Raj had expected. The pole jumped in the bannerman’s hands as a bullet took a piece out of the ebony staff and others plucked through the heavy silk of the banner itself. Raj and the leading riflemen crouched below the lip of the stairs as minié bullets and pistol rounds blasted at the top step. Time seemed to slow as he raised his head and left hand.
Green light strobed around a man with a revolver, aiming between the slats of a chair. Maximum priority. Crack. He pitched backward with a bullet through the neck, his scrabbling spraying body fouling several others. Raj fired as quickly as his wrist could move the dot of the aimpoint to the next glowing target, emptying the five-shot cylinder in less time than it took to take a deep breath. Much more of this and he’d get a reputation as a pistol-expert on top of everything else. As he dropped back under the topmost step four men levelled their rifles over it and fired. The heavy 11-millimeter bullets hammered right through the barricade; the four ducked back down to reload, and another set a few steps lower down stood to fire over their heads. The sound echoed back off the close stone walls, thunder-loud.
Not a maneuver in the drill-book, but these were veterans. He shook the spent brass out of the revolver and reloaded, judging the volume of return fire.
“Once more and at ’em,” he said. “Now.”
They stood to charge. A man beside Raj took a bullet through the belly, folding over with an oof and falling backward to tumble and cartwheel down the stairs. Troopers behind him shouldered forward; all the Brigaderos behind the improvised barricade were badly wounded, but that didn’t mean none of them could fight. There was a brief scurry of point-blank shots and bayonet thrusts.
Raj stood thinking as the soldiers searched the rooms on either side of the corridor, swift but cautious. No more shots . . . except from outside, where the steady crackle was building up again. His eyes fell on an unlit lamp. It was one of a series in brackets along the wall. Much like one back home; a globular glass reservoir below for the coal-oil, and a coiled flat-woven wick of cotton inside adjusted by a small brass screw, with a blown-glass chimney above.
“Sergeant,” Raj called, stepping over a dead Brigadero.
The blood pooled around the enemy fallen stained his bootsoles, so that he left tacky footprints on the parquet of the hallway. Light fell in from rose-shaped windows at either end of the hallway.
“Get those lamps, all of them,” he said.
“Ser?” The noncom gaped.
“All of them, and there should be more in a storage cupboard somewhere near. Distribute them to the windows. Quickly!” The trooper dashed off; the order made no sense, but he’d see it was obeyed, quickly and efficiently.
“Lieutenant,” Raj went on. The young man looked up from tying off a rough bandage around his calf.
“Mi heneral?”
“A squad to each of the main windows, if you please. Send someone for extra ammunition from the saddlebags.”
“Sir.”
“And check how many men able to shoot there are below. Send some troopers to help them barricade the doors and windows.”
“Ci, mi heneral.”
He led his own small group of messengers and bannerman through the room opposite the staircase. It looked to be some sort of meeting chamber, with a long table and chairs, and crossed banners on the wall. One was the crimson-and-black double thunderbolt of the Brigade, the other a local blazon.
“Get the table,” he said. “Follow me out.”
The balcony outside ran the length of the front of the building, wrought-iron work on a stone base. The signallers came out grunting under the weight of the heavy oak table, and dropped it with a crash on its side and up against the railings. They dropped behind it with grateful speed, as riflemen in windows and rooftops across from them opened fire. Luckily, nothing overlooked the town hall except the tower of the church, and it was too open to make a good marksman’s stand. Other squads were bringing out furniture of their own, some from the Brigaderos’ own barricade at the head of the stairs.
“Keep them busy, lads,” Raj
said.
A steady crackle of aimed shots broke out; along the balcony, from the windows at either end of the hallway behind, and from the smaller windows on the rear side of the town hall. Raj took out his binoculars. A cold smile bent his lips; the enemy seemed to be coming out into the streets and milling around in surprise, mostly—even a few townspeople joining them.
Amateurs, he thought.
Tough ones, good individual fighters, but whoever was commanding them didn’t have the organization to switch plans quickly when the first one went sour. That was the problem with a good plan—and it had been a cunningly conceived ambush—it tended to hypnotize you. If you didn’t have anything ready for its miscarriage, you lost time. And time was the most precious thing of all.
South of the town the Life Guards were deploying, just out of rifle range. Dogs to the rear, extended double line, one company in the saddle for quick reaction; right out of the manuals. Also the guns. Four of them, and the first was getting ready to—
POUMPF. The shell went overhead with a whirring moan and crashed into one of the mills. Black smoke and bits of tile and roofing-timber flew up. More smoke followed; there must have been something like tallow or lanolin stored there.
“Sir.” It was the lieutenant and his platoon-sergeant.
The latter carried a dozen of the coal-oil lamps and led men carrying more, with still others piled high on a janitors wheeled wooden cart.
“Sir,” the young officer went on, “there’s ten men downstairs fit to fight, if they don’t have to move much. We’ve barred the back entrance; it’s strong, and they won’t get through without a ram. The front’s another story, we’ve done what we can, but . . .”
Raj nodded and took a package of cigarettes out of his jacket, handing two to the other men.
“Right,” he began, and spoke over his shoulder. “Signaller, two red rockets.” Turning his attention back to the other men:
“In about five minutes,” he said, waving the tip of his saber at the town, “the barbs are going to realize that with us sitting here they can’t even defend the town against the Life Guards—we can suppress their rooftop snipers too effectively from here.