by David Drake
“So they’ll try rushing us. There’s only two ways they can come; in the back, and in the front the same way we did. We don’t have enough guns to stop them, not and keep the snipers down too. And once they’re close to the walls, we won’t be able to rise and fire down from up here without exposing ourselves.”
They nodded. Raj took one of the lamps and turned the wick high, lighting it with his cigarette. The flame was pale and wavering in the bright morning sunlight, but it burned steadily.
“They’ll have to bunch under the walls—by the doors, for example.” Raj tossed the lamp up and down. “I really don’t think they’ll like it when we chuck these over on them.”
The two officers and the noncom smiled at each other. “What about the front?” the sergeant asked. “There’s this—” he stamped a heel on the balcony’s deck “—over the portico.”
“That,” Raj went on, “is where you’ll take the keg.” He nodded at the clay barrel of coal-oil on the cart, with a dozen lamps clinking against it. “And hang it like a pihnyata from one of the brackets.”
“Roit ye are, ser,” the sergeant said, grinning like a shark. “Roit where she’ll shower ’em wit coal-juice as they come chargin’ up t’ steps, loik.”
He took the heavy container and heaved it onto his shoulder with a lift-and-jerk. “Ye, Belgez, foller me.”
“A hundred thousand men?” Ingreid asked.
Teodore Welf nodded encouragingly. “That’s counting all the regular garrisons we’ve been able to withdraw, Your Mightiness, and the levies of the first class—all organized, and all between eighteen and forty.”
Ingreid’s lips moved and he looked at his fingers. “How many is that in regiments?”
Howyrd Carstens looked around the council chamber. It was fairly large, but plain; whitewashed walls, and tall narrow windows. The three of them were alone except for servants and civilian accountants—nonentities. Good. He liked Ingreid, and respected him, but there was no denying that large numbers were just not real to the older nobleman. For that matter, a hundred thousand men was a difficult number for him to grasp, and he was a modern-minded man who could both read and write and do arithmetic, including long division. He had enough scars, and enough duelling kills, that nobody would call it unmanly.
Teodore spoke first. “Standard regiments?” A thousand to twelve hundred men each. “A hundred, hundred and ten regiments. Not counting followers and so forth, of course.”
Ingreid grunted and knocked back the last of his kave, snapping his fingers for more.
“And the enemy?”
Carstens shrugged. “Twenty thousand men—but more than half of those are infantry.”
The Military Governments didn’t have foot infantry in their armies, and he wondered why the Civil Government bothered.
“Of mounted troops, real fighting men? Seven, perhaps eight regiments. They have a lot of field artillery, though—and from what I’ve heard, it’s effective.”
Ingreid shook his head. “Seven regiments against a hundred. Madness! What does Whitehall think he can accomplish?”
“I don’t know, Your Mightiness,” Teodore Welf said. The older men looked up at the note in his voice. “And that’s what worries me.”
Burning men scrambled back from the portico of the town hall. A few of them had caught a full splash of the fuel, and they dropped and rolled in the wet dirt of the square. More leaped and howled and beat at the flames that singed their boots and trousers. The bullets that tore at them from the windows were much more deadly—but every man has his fear, and for many that fear is fire. The smell of scorched stone and burning wool and hair billowed up from the portico, up in front of the overhanging balcony in a billow of heat and smoke. From the ground floor the dogs howled and barked, loud enough to make the floor shiver slightly under his feet. The men along the balcony above shot and reloaded and shot, their attention drawn by the helpless targets.
“Watch the bloody roofs,” Raj snapped, hearing the command echoed by the noncoms.
The Brigaderos began to clump for another rush at the portico, as the flames died down a little . . . although there was an ominous crackle below the balcony floor, from the roof-beams that ran from the arches to the building wall and supported it. Another shower of glass lanterns full of coal-oil set puddles of fire on the ground and broke the rush, sending them running back across the plaza to shelter in the other buildings.
Raj looked left and south. Cabot’s Life Guards were advancing, with the battery of field guns firing over their heads. The gunners had the range, and the buildings edging the town there were coming apart under the hammer of their five-kilo shells.
“Messer Raj.” The platoon sergeant duckwalked up to Raj’s position, keeping the heaped wooden furniture along the balustrade between him and any Brigadero rifleman’s sights.
“We singed ’em good, ser,” the noncom said. His own eyebrows looked as if they’d taken combat damage as well. “Only t’ damned roof is burnin’, loik. We’nz gonna have t’move soon.”
“The barbs will move before we roast, sergeant,” Raj said. I hope, he thought. He also hoped the warmth in the floor-tiles under his hand was an illusion.
The enemy should run. Pozadas had helped set up the ambush—something its citizens were going to regret—but the Brigaderos were countrymen. Caught between two fires, their instinct would be to head for open ground, out of the buildings that were protection but felt like traps.
He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket and brought the binoculars up. Yes. Groups of men pouring out of the houses, pouring out of the mills—most of those were burning now, from the shellfire. On foot and dogback they streamed north to the river, crowding the single narrow stone bridge or swimming their dogs across. The battery commander was alert; he raised his muzzles immediately. The ripping-sail sound of shells passed overhead. One landed beyond the bridge; the next fell short, pounding a hole in the roadway leading to it—and scattering men and dogs and parts of both up with the gout of whitish-gray dirt. The next one clipped the side of the bridge itself, and the whole battery opened up. Shells airburst over the river, dimpling circles into the water, like dishes pockmarked with the splash-marks of shrapnel.
“Out, everybody out,” Raj said.
The Life Guards were charging, cheering as they came. The mounted company rocked into a gallop ahead of them.
“Check every room,” he went on. Someone might be wounded in one of them, unable to move. “Move it!”
The lieutenant came in from the back, hobbling on his ripped leg and grinning like a sicklefoot. “Bugged out,” he said. “All but the ones we burned or shot while they tried to open the back door with a tree-trunk.”
“Good work,” Raj said.
He threw an arm around the young officer’s waist to support his weight and they went down the stairs quickly; the lower story was already emptying out. The dogs wuffled and danced nervously as they crossed the hot tile of the portico. Puddles of flame still burned on the cracked flooring, and the thick beams of the ceiling above were covered in tongues of scarlet.
Guess I didn’t imagine the floor was getting hot after all, Raj thought. The coal-oil had been an effective solution to the problem of Brigaderos storming the building . . . but it might have presented some serious long-term problems.
Of course, you had to survive the short-term for the long-term to be very important.
Horace snuffed him over carefully in the plaza, then sneezed when he was satisfied Raj hadn’t been injured. The mounted company of the Life Guards streamed through, already drawing their rifles. Two guns followed them, limbered up and at the trot. Raj looked south: the dismounted companies were fanning out to surround the town and close in from three sides.
Cabot Clerett pulled up before the general, swinging his saber up to salute. Raj returned the gesture fist-to-chest.
The younger man stood in the saddle. “Damn it, a lot of them are going to get away,” he said. The measured crash of
volley-fire was coming from the direction of the bridge, and the slightly-dulled sound of cannon firing case-shot at point-blank range.
Beside Raj, his bannerman stiffened slightly at the younger officer’s tone. Clerett grew conscious of the stares.
“Sir,” he added.
Raj was looking in the same direction. The land on the other side of the river was flat drained fields for a thousand meters or so. Brigaderos were running all across it, those with the fastest dogs who’d been closest to the river. Bodies were floating down with the current, now. Not many who’d still been in the water or on the bridge when the troops arrived would make it over; as he watched a clump toppled back from the far bank.
“Oh, I don’t think so, Major Clerett,” he said calmly. Horace crouched and he straddled the saddle.
Beyond the cleared fields was a forest of coppiced poplar trees, probably maintained as a fuel-source for the handicrafts and fireplaces of Pozadas. The glint of metal was just perceptible as men rode out of the woods, pausing to dress ranks. The trumpets were unheard at this distance, but the way the swords flashed free in unison and the men swept forward was unmistakable.
Clerett looked at him blank-faced. A murmur went through the men nearest, and whispers as they repeated the conversation to those further away.
“You expected the ambush, sir?” he said carefully.
“Not specifically. I thought we could use some help with all that livestock . . . and that everything had been too easy.”
“If you’d told me, sir, we might have arranged a more . . . elegant solution without extra troops.”
Raj sighed, looking around. The civilians were still indoors, apart from a few who’d tried to follow the Brigaderos over the river, and died with them. The fires were burning sullenly, smoke pillaring straight up in the calm chill air. He reached into a saddle bag and pulled out a walnut, one of a bag Suzette had tucked in for him.
“Major,” he said, “this is an elegant way to crack a walnut.”
He squeezed one carefully between thumb and forefinger of his sword hand. The shells parted, and he extracted the meat and flicked it into his mouth.
“And it can work. However.” He put another in the palm of his left hand, raised his right fist and smashed it down. The nut shattered, and he shook the pieces to the ground. “This way always works. Very few operations have ever failed because too many troops were used. Use whatever you’ve got.”
Cabot nodded thoughtfully. “What are your orders, sir?” he asked. “Concerning the town, that is.”
The wounded were being laid out on the ground before the town hall. Raj nodded toward them.
“We’ll bivouac here tonight, your battalion and the Slashers,” he said. “Get the fires out or under control—roust out the civilians to help with that. Round up the stock we were driving. Send out scouting parties to see none of the enemy escaped or are lying up around here; no prisoners, by the way.”
“The town and the civilians?” Clerett asked.
Raj looked around; Pozadas had yielded on terms and then violated them.
“We’ll loot it bare of everything useful, and burn it down when we leave tomorrow. Shoot all the adult males, turn the women over to the troops, then march them and the children back to the column for sale.”
Clerett nodded. “Altogether a small but tidy victory, sir,” he said.
“Is it, Major?” Raj asked somberly. “We lost what . . . twenty men today?”
The Governor’s nephew raised his brows. “We killed hundreds,” he said. “And we hold the field.”
“Major, the Brigade can replace hundreds more easily than I can replace twenty veteran cavalry troopers. If all the barbarians stood in a line for my men to cut their throats, they could slash until their arms fell off with weariness and there would still be Brigaderos. Yes, we hold the field—until we leave. With less than twenty thousand men, I’d be hard-pressed to garrison a single district, much less the Western Territories as a whole. We can only conquer if men obey us without a detachment pointing guns every moment.”
Raj tapped his knuckles thoughtfully on the pommel of his saddle. “It isn’t enough to defeat them in battle. I have to shatter them—break their will to resist, make them give up. They won’t surrender to a few battalions of cavalry. So we have to find something they can surrender to.”
He gathered his reins. “I’m heading back to the main column. Follow as quickly as possible.”
Abdullah al’-Aziz spread the carpet with a flourish.
“Finest Al Kebir work, my lady,” he said, in Spanjol with a careful leavening of Arabic accent—it was his native tongue, but he could speak half a dozen with faultless purity. He was a slight olive-skinned man, like millions around the Midworld Sea, or further east in the Colonial dominions. Dress and more subtle clues both marked him as a well-to-do Muslim trader of Al Kebir, and he could change the motions of hands and face and body as easily as the long tunic, baggy pantaloons and turban.
This morning room of the General’s palace was warm with hangings and the log fire in one hearth, but the everlasting dank chill of a Carson Barracks winter still lingered in the mind, if nowhere else. Abdullah was dispelling a little of it with his goods. Bright carpets of thousand-knot silk and gold thread, velvets and torofib, spices and chocolate and lapis lazuli. Since the Zanj Wars, when Tewfik of Al Kebir broke the monopoly of the southern city-states, a few daring Colonial traders had made the year-long voyage around the Southern Continent to the Brigade-held ports of Tembarton and Rohka. If you survived the sea monsters and storms and the savages it could be very profitable. The Civil Government lay athwart the overland routes from the Colony, and its tariffs quintupled prices.
Marie Manfrond straightened in her chair. “This is beautiful work,” she said, running a hand down a length of torofib embroidered with peacocks and prancing Afghan wolfhounds carrying men in turbans to the hunt.
“All of you,” she went on, “leave me. Except you, Katrini.”
Several of the court matrons sniffed resentfully as they swept out; attendance on the General’s Lady was a hereditary right of the spouses of certain high officers of state. Marie’s cold gray gaze hurried them past the door. Men in Guard uniforms stood outside, ceremonial guards and real jailers. Abdullah looked aside at Katrini. She went to stand beside the door, in a position to give them a few seconds if someone burst through.
“Katrini’s been with me since we were girls,” Marie said. “I trust her with my life.”
Abdullah shrugged. “Inshallah. You know, then, from whom I come?”
His long silk coat and jewel-clasped turban were perfectly authentic, made in Al Kebir as their appearance suggested.
“Raj Whitehall,” Marie said flatly. “The Colonial traders don’t come to Tembarton this time of year; the winds are wrong.”
“Ah, my lady is observant,” Abdullah said. Marie nodded; not one Brigade noble in a thousand would have known that.
“But I do not come from General Whitehall . . . not directly. Rather from his wife, Lady Suzette. If Messer Raj’s sword is the Companions who fight for him, she is his dagger, just as deadly.”
“What difference does it make?” Marie asked. “Why shouldn’t I turn you over to my husband’s men immediately?”
Abdullah smiled at the implied threat, that he would be turned over later if not now. The subtlety was pleasing. He owed Suzette Whitehall his freedom and life and that of his family, but he served her most of all because it gave him full scope for his talents. He could retire on his savings if he wished, but life would be as savorless as meat without salt.
“Forgive me if I presume, my lady, but my lady Suzette has told me that your interests and those of General Ingreid are not . . . how shall I say . . . not always exactly the same.”
“That’s no secret even in Carson Barracks,” Marie said. Not a month after the wedding, with a fading black eye imperfectly disguised with cosmetics. “But Ingreid Manfrond is General, and my people are a
t war. Do you think I would betray the 591st Provisional Brigade and its heritage for my own spite?”
“Ah, no, by no means,” Abdullah said soothingly, spreading his hands with a charming gesture.
“Lady Suzette is moved by sisterly compassion—and the conviction that General Ingreid will do the Brigade all the harm a traitor could, through his incompetence. Also the Spirit of Man—I would say the Hand of God—is stretched over her lord. He is invincible. Lady Suzette’s concern is that you yourself might suffer needlessly from Ingreid’s anger.”
“And I can believe as much or as little of that as I choose,” Marie said.
Silence weighed the warm air of the room for a moment; outside fog and soft raindrops clung to the walls and covered the swamps.
“Is it true,” the young woman went on in a neutral voice, “that she rides by his side?”
Abdullah bowed again, a hand pressed to his breast. “She rides with his military household,” he said. “And sits in all his councils. At El Djem her carbine brought down a Colonial whose sword was raised above Messer Raj’s head.”
Marie rested an elbow on the carved arm of her chair and her chin on her fist. “What help can she be to me?”
“Has not General Ingreid said, in public for all to hear, that as soon as you are delivered of an heir he has no use for you?”
The words had been rather more blunt than that. Marie nodded. Once Ingreid had an heir of her undoubted Amalson blood, he would not need their marriage to make his eligibility for the Seat incontestable. She had been throwing up regularly for a week, now.
Abdullah opened a small rosewood case. “Here are ayzed and beyam,” he said, smiling with hooded eyes. “The one for the problem I see my lady has now. The other in case she comes to see that General Ingreid is no shield for the Brigade, but rather a millstone dragging it down to doom.”