by David Drake
They heeled their dogs forward, the heavy paws splashing in the mud.
Antin M’lewis whistled silently to himself through his teeth and sang under his breath:
When from house t’house yer huntin’,
ye must allays work in pairs—
Half t’gain, but twice t’safety ye’ll find—
For a single man gits bottled
on them twisty-wisty stairs,
An’ a woman comes n’ cobs him from be’ind.
Whin ye’ve turned ’em inside out,
n’ it seems beyond a doubt
As there warn’t enough to dust a flute,
Befer ye sling yer hook, at t’ housetops take a look,
Fer ’tis unnerneath t’ tiles they hide t’ loot—
The forest ahead was dripping-wet, and the leaf-mould slippery as only slimy-rotten vegetation could be. M’lewis noted proudly how difficult it was to see his men, and how well the gray cloaks blended in with the vegetation and shattered rock. He made a chittering noise with tongue and teeth—much like the cry of any of the smaller sauroids—and twenty soldiers of the Scout Troop rose and moved forward with him, flitting from trunk to trunk. They halted at his gesture, among broken rocks and wirelike native scrub. Every one of them was a relative or neighbor of his, back in Bufford Parish. Every one of them a bandit, sheeplifter and dogstealer by hereditary vocation. Following those trades demanded high skill and steady nerves in not-very-lawful Descott County, where every vakaro and yeoman-tenant carried a rifle and knew how to use it.
He had no doubt of their abilities. Nor of their obedience. Antin M’lewis had risen from trooper to officer and the Messer class by hitching his star to that of Messer Raj . . . after nearly being flogged for theft at their first meeting. The Scouts—unofficially known as the Forty Thieves—had a superstitious reverence for a man that lucky. They also had a well-founded respect for his garotte and skinning knife.
Visibility was limited; rain, and ground-mist. He could see the railway track disappearing downward toward the river, switching back and forth to the southwest. On the tracks and the road beside them marched mounted men, in columns of fours. Heading toward him, which meant toward Old Residence.
“Message to Messer Raj,” he said over his shoulder. “Two . . . make that four hunnert men ’n column approachin’. Will withdraw an’ keep ’em unner observation.”
“Couldn’t tell who theuns wuz, Messer Raj,” the messenger said. “Jist they’z marchin’ in column, ser.”
observe, Center said.
The fort on the north side of the railway bridge was a simple earthwork square with a timber palisade. White water foamed just west of it, where the stone pilings of the bridge supported the heavy timberwork arches. Mist filled the surface of the water, turning and writhing with the current beneath. A column of Brigaderos cavalry had ridden onto the southern approaches; more stretched back into the rain, a huge steel-glistening gray column vanishing out of sight. The ironshod wheels of guns thundered on the railway crossties, light brass muzzle-loading fieldpieces.
The Stalwarts within the fort were boiling to the walls; asleep or drunk or huddled in their huts against the chill for far too long. They’d probably had scouts out on the south side of the river, and the scouts had equally probably simply decamped when the Brigade host thundered down on them.
A rocket soared up from the fort. The smoke-trail vanished into the low cloud; the pop of the explosion could be heard, but the colored light was invisible even from directly below. As if that had been a signal, hundreds of figures boiled down over the wall and to the skiffs and rowboats tied to a pier below the bridge. They wore the striped tunics of Stalwart warriors under their sheepskin jackets. Equally national were the light one-handed axes they pulled out to chop at the painters tying the light boats to the shore. Chopping at each other as well, as panicked hordes fought for places in the boats. Some of the craft floated downstream empty as would-be passengers hacked and stabbed on the dock, others upside down with men clinging to them, still others crowded nearly to sinking. Arcs of spray rose into the air as those hacked down with oars on the heads of men trying to cling to the gunwales.
Still more Stalwarts tore up the track toward Raj’s vantage-point, their eyes and mouths round O’s of effort. They scattered into the woods on either side of the track. There were barrels of gunpowder braced under the bridge, with trains of waxed matchcord linking them. Nobody so much as looked at them.
The viewpoint switched to the fort itself. An older man climbed down the wall facing the bridge and began to trudge toward the Brigaderos. His graying hair was shaved behind up to a line drawn between his ears; he had long drooping mustache, a net of bronze rings sewn to the front of his tunic and cut-down shotguns in holsters along each thigh. Raj recognized him. Clo Reicht, chieftain of the Stalwart mercenaries serving with the Expeditionary force.
“Marcy, varsh!” he called, as he came up to the leading enemy, a lancer officer in richly-inlaid armor. Mercy, brother-warriors, in Namerique.
Points dropped, jabbing close past the snarling muzzles of the war-dogs. Reicht smiled broadly, his little blue eyes twinkling with friendliness and sincerity. His hands were high and open.
“I know lots about Raj-man,” he said. “He tells Clo Reicht all about his plans. Worth a lot. Take me to your leader.”
Shit, Raj thought, pounding a fist into the pommel of his saddle.
He’d taken one more gamble with his inadequate forces. This time it hadn’t paid off.
Raj blinked back to the outer world, to the weight of wet wool across his shoulders and the smell of wet dog. Ehwardo and M’lewis were staring at him, waiting wide-eyed for the solution. The Governor shouldn’t send us to make bricks without straw, that’s the solution, he thought. With enough men . . .
“The Stalwarts bugged out,” he said crisply.
He looked from side to side. There were laneways on either side of the low embankment of the railway, and cleared land a little way up the slopes of the hills. The ground grew more rugged ahead, but nowhere impassible; behind him it opened out into the rolling plain around the city itself.
“The Brigaderos vanguard is over the bridge and coming straight at us. Courier to the city, please.” A rider took off rearward in a spatter of mud and gravel.
“Retreat?” Ehwardo asked. M’lewis was nodding in unconscious agreement.
Raj shook his head. “Too far,” he said. “If we run for it we’ll lose cohesion and they can pursue without deploying, at top speed, and chop us up. Therefore—”
“—we attack, mi heneral,” Ehwardo said. He took off his helmet for a second, and the thinning hair on his pate stuck wetly to the scalp as he scratched it. “If we can push them back on the bridge . . .”
Raj nodded. He could turn it into a killing zone, men crammed together with no chance to use their weapons or deploy.
“Two companies forward, deployed by platoon columns for movement,” he said. Tight formation, but he’d need all the firepower possible. “Three in reserve, guns in the middle.”
He stood in the saddle and shouted in Paytoiz: “Juluk! You worthless clown, are you drunk or just afraid?”
The Skinner chief slid his hound down the hillside out of the forest and pulled up beside Raj. “Long-hairs come,” he said succinctly. “You run away, sojer-man?”
“We fight,” he said. “You keep your men to the sides and forward.”
The nomad mercenary gave a huge grin and a nod and galloped off, screeching orders of his own. Around Raj, Poplanich’s Own split its dense formation into a looser advance by four columns of platoon strength, spaced across the open way. A brief snarl of trumpets, and the men drew the rifles out of the scabbards to rest the butts on their thighs. Dogs bristled and growled in the sudden tension, and the pace picked up to a fast walk. What breeze there was was in their faces, so there shouldn’t be any warning to the enemy from that.
Good scouting meant the five-minute difference betwe
en being surprised and doing the surprising.
“Walk-march, trot.”
They pushed forward, a massed thudding of paws and the rumble of the guns. Over a lip in the ground, and a clear view down through the hills to the white-gray mist along the river, with the bridge rising out of it like magic. The railroad right-of-way between was black with men and dogs, dully gleaming with lanceheads and banners. The double-lightning flash of the Brigade was already flying over the little fort as the host streamed by, together with a personal blazon—a running wardog, red on black, with a huge silver W. The house of Welf; intelligence said Teodore Welf led the enemy vanguard. The Brigadero column was thick, men bunched stirrup to stirrup across all the open space. Young Teodore was risking everything to get forces forward quickly, up out of the hills and onto the plain.
Precisely the right thing to do; unfortunately for the enemy, even a justified risk was still risky.
The trumpet sounded. The platoon columns halted and the dogs crouched. Men stepped free and double-timed forward, spreading out like the wings of a stooping hawk. Before the enemy a few hundred meters ahead had time to do more than begin to recoil and mill, the order rang out:
“Company—”
“Platoon—”
“Front rank, volley fire, fire.”
BAM. Two hundred men in a single shot, the red muzzle-flashes spearing out into the rain like a horizontal comb.
The rear rank walked through the first. Before the echoes of the initial shout of fwego had died, the next rank fired—by half-platoons, eighteen men at a time, in a rapid stuttering crash.
BAM. BAM. BAM. BAM.
The field-guns came up between the units. “If they break—” Ehwardo said. The troopers advanced and fired, advanced and fired. The commanders followed them, leading their dogs.
“If,” Raj replied.
The guns fired case-shot, the loads spreading to maximum effect in the confined space. Merciful smoke hid the result for an instant, and then the rain drummed it out of the air. For fifty meters back from the head of the column the Brigaderos and their dogs were a carpet of flesh that heaved and screamed. A man with no face staggered toward the Civil Government line, ululating in a wordless trill of agony. The next volley smashed him backward to rest in the tangled pink-gray intestines of a dog. The animal still whimpered and twitched.
Men have a lot of life in them, Raj thought. Men and dogs. Sometimes they just died, and sometimes they got cut in half and hung on for minutes, even hours.
The advancing force had gotten far enough downslope that the reserve platoon and the second battery of guns could fire over their heads. Shock-waves from the shells passing overhead slapped at the back of their helmets like pillows of displaced air. Most of the head of the Brigaderos column was trying to run away, but the railroad right-of-way was too narrow and the press behind them too massive. Men spilled upslope toward the forested hills. Just then the Skinners opened up themselves with their two-meter sauroid-killing rifles. Driving downhill on a level slope, their fifteen-millimeter bullets went through three or four men at a time. A huge sound came from the locked crowd of enemy troops, half-wail and half-roar. Some were getting out their rifles and trying to return fire, standing or taking cover behind mounds of dead. Lead slugs went by overhead, and not two paces from him a trooper went unh! as if belly-punched, then to his knees and then flat.
The rest of his unit walked past, reloading. Spent brass tinkled down around the body lying on the railroad tracks, bouncing from the black iron strapping on the wooden stringers.
Raj whistled sharply, and Horace came forward and crouched. Got to see what’s going on, he thought, straddling the saddle and levelling his binoculars as the hound rose.
Then: damn.
Hard to see through smoke and mist, but there was activity down by the fort. Men with banners galloping out amid a great whirring of kettledrums. The enemy column had been bulging naturally, where advancing ranks met retreating. The party from the fort was getting them into order, groups of riding dogs being led back and men in dragoon uniforms jogging left and right into the woods. A trio of shells from the second battery ploughed into the knot of Brigaderos, raising plumes of dirt and rock, rail-iron and body parts. When those cleared the movement continued, and the Welf banner still stood. Raj focused his glasses on the fort’s ramparts; Center put a square across his vision and magnified, filling in data from estimation. A man in inlaid lancer armor with a high commander’s plumes. Another with a halter around his neck and two men standing behind him, the points of their broadswords hovering near his kidneys. Clo Reicht, pointing . . .
Pointing at me. A man might not be recognized at this distance by unaided eyes, but Horace could.
The press on the bridge behind the fort had halted. Two low turtle-shaped vehicles were coming over it, slowly, men and animals rippling aside to let them pass. Steam and smoke vomited from low smokestacks; the Brigade wasn’t up to even the asthmatic gas engines the Colony and Civil Government used for armored cars, but steam would do at a pinch. Another curse drifted through his mind. Someone had had a rush of intelligence to the head. The cars were running on flanged wheels that fitted the tracks. Sections of broader tire were lashed to their decks. A few minutes work to bolt them onto the iron hubs, and they’d be road-capable. Now that was clever.
“Ehwardo!” Raj shouted.
“No joy?” the Companion said.
“No. They began to stampede, but whoever’s in charge down there is starting to get them sorted out.”
A lancer regiment was extracting itself from the tangle and forming up. Guns went thump from the fort, and a roundshot came whirrr-crash, bouncing up into the air again halfway between the lead spray of enemy dead and the Civil Government’s line. More and more riflemen were returning fire, some of them in organized units. The Brigaderos troops were brave men, and mostly trained soldiers. They didn’t want to panic, and they knew the real slaughter started when one side or the other bugged out. Once somebody started giving orders, they must have been relieved beyond words.
“If that’s Teodore Welf, Ingreid Manfrond had better look to his Seat later,” Ehwardo said.
“And we’d better look to our collective arse right now,” Raj said.
He glanced at the sky, and called up memories of what the terrain was like. More bullets cracked by, and a cannonball hit a tree upslope from him and nearly abreast. The long slender trunk of the whipstick tree exploded in splinters at breast height, then sagged slowly away from the track, held up by its neighbors.
“He’s got enough brains to reverse their standard tactic,” Raj said. “Those dragoons will try and work around our flanks, and the lancers will charge or threaten to to keep us pinned.”
“Rearguard?” Ehwardo asked.
It was obviously impossible to stay. There had been a chance of rushing the bridge if the enemy ran, but if they didn’t the brutal arithmetic of combat took over. There were just too many of the other side in this broken ground. Their flanks weren’t impassible to men on foot, and the ground there provided plenty of cover.
“I’ll do it, with the guns and the Skinners.” He held up a hand. “That’s an order, major. Take them back at a trot, no more, and a company or so saddled up just inside the gate. We’ll see what happens. M’lewis, get your dog-robbers together. Courier to Juluk—” the Skinner chieftain “—and tell him I need him now. Captain Harritch!”
The artilleryman in charge of the two batteries heeled his dog over.
“Captain Harritch, put a couple of rounds into the railbed now, if you please”—because he did not want those armored cars zipping up at railroad speeds on smooth track—“and then prepare to limber up. Here’s what we’ll do . . .”
Everyone here looked relieved to hear orders, as well. Now, if only there was someone to tell him what to do.
“Now!” the battery-lieutenant said.
Sergeant-Driver Rihardo Terraza—his job was riding the left-hand lead dog in the gun�
��s team—heaved at the trail of the gun. The rest of the crew pushed likewise, or strained against the spokes of the wheels. The field-gun bounced forward over the little rise in the road.
Spiritmercifulavatarssaveus, but the barbs were close this time. Not four hundred meters away, dragoons and lancers and a couple of their miserable muzzle-loading field-guns pounding up the road in the rain, which was getting worse. They had just time enough to check a little as the black muzzles of the guns rose over the ridge, appearing out of nowhere. There were other Brigaderos crossing the rolling fields, but they were much further back, held up by stone walls and vineyards tripping at their dogs.
The breechblocks clanged. Everyone leapt out of the path of the recoil, opening their mouths to spare their ears.
POUMF. POUMF. POUMF. POUMF.
Instantaneous-fused shells burst in front of the Brigaderos. Juicy, Terraza thought with vindictive satisfaction. He’d been with this battery for five years, since the El Djem campaign, when they only brought one gun of four out of the desert. He knew what cannister did to a massed target like that.
“Keep your distance, fastardos,” he muttered under his breath as he threw himself at the gun again.
Back into battery; he could feel his thigh-muscles quivering with the strain of repeated effort, of heaving this two-ton weight of wood and iron back again and again. The rain washed and diluted his sweat; he licked at his lips, dry-mouthed. Raw sulfur-smelling smoke made him cough. A bullet went tunnnggg off the gun-barrel not an arm’s length from his head, flattening into a lead pancake like a miniature frisbee and bouncing wheet-wheet-wheet off into the air.
Their own barbs were opening up, Skinners who stood behind their shooting-sticks and fired with the metronome regularity of jackhammers. Something big blew up over toward the enemy, one of their caissons probably. That might be the Skinners, or the battery’s own fire. No time to waste looking and Spirit bless whatever had done it; it gave the barbs something to worry about except trying to give Rihardo Terraza an edged-metal enema.