by David Drake
“It’s straight out of Obregon’s Siege Operations,” Raj said. “Siting, spacing and outer lines—although the street layout inside isn’t regular. But digging is servant’s work, to Brigaderos. They’ve got some competent officers, but it isn’t institutionalized, with them.”
He squinted at the distant earthworks. The air was raw and chill, but the iron-gray clouds were holding off on rain, for once.
“I suspect they’ll dig faster soon,” he went on.
Junpawl the Skinner moved another half-inch, sliding on his belly through the slick mud. It was deep black, the second hour after midnight with clouds over the stars and both moons down. The Long Hair camp was mostly silent about him, and the nearest light was ten minutes walk away—only the great chiefs had enough firewood to spare for all-night blazes. He drew the long knife strapped to his bare thigh; he’d stripped down to his breechclout for this work, and smeared himself all over with mud, even taking the brass ring off his scalplock. Cold wind touched his back; good, the dogs for this tent were upwind ten meters away . . . and he’d held ox-dung under his armpits, a sure disguise for man-scent.
The canvas back of the tent parted under the edge of the knife, a softer sound than the guylines flapping in the breeze. The Skinner stuck his head through, flaring his nostrils, letting smell and hearing do the work of eyes. Four men, two snoring. Fast asleep, as if they were at home with their women—faster asleep than any Real Man ever slept, even dead drunk. He grinned in the darkness, eeling through the meter-long slit, careful not to let it gape. A breeze could wake a man, even a Long Hair. Inside, his bare feet touched pine-boughs; that was why the enemy rustled when they turned in their sleep.
His fingers moved, feather-light as he touched bodies to confirm positions. The Long Hairs slept huddled together for warmth, wrapped in many rich wool blankets like a chief’s women, pinning their own arms. Their swords and rifles were stacked at the door of the tent—out of reach. These were indeed men who ate grass, like sheep. Only Skinners lived as Real Men should, on the steppe with their families in tents on wagons, following the herds of grazing sauroids. Hunting and war were a Real Man’s work.
Slowly, moving a fraction of an inch at a time, Junpawl’s left hand crept toward a face. Warm breath touched his palm. Fingers and thumb clamped down with brutal suddenness across nose and lips, pinning them closed; the blackened knife in his right hand drove down at an angle. It was heavy steel, just sharp enough—not so sharp that bone would turn the edge. It made nothing of the muscle and cartilage of the Long Hair’s neck, grating home in the spine. The body flopped once, and blood poured up his forearms, but the massive wound bled the Long Hair out almost at once. The beardless face went flaccid under his hand; it must be a young man, barely old enough to ride with the war-host.
Junpawl waited, knife poised, ready to slash and dive out of the tent. The man next to the corpse turned over, muttered in his sleep and began to snore again. The nomad mercenary sliced off one of the dead man’s ears and tucked it in the pouch at his waist; one silver piece per left ear, that was what the Big Devil Whitehall would pay. Ah, that one was a frai hum, a Real Man in his spirit! You could buy a lot of burn-head-water with a silver piece, many fat women, lots of chocolate or ammunition.
He stepped over the sleeping man and squatted down near the second pair, carefully wiping his hands on a corner of the blanket so the next victim wouldn’t feel blood dripping on his face.
He’d kill only two of the four in the tent. Cadaw d’nwit, a night-gift for the Long Hairs to wake up to. His giggle was utterly soundless.
The joke was worth missing the other two silver pieces. Besides, he’d stop in one more tent tonight on his way out of camp.
Delicate as a maiden’s kiss, the Skinner’s hand sank toward the sleeping Brigadero’s face.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I suspect we’re going to get very sick of this view before spring,” Raj said. It’s only a couple of weeks since the Brigaderos arrived and I’m sick of it already. The strategic arguments for standing on the defensive were strong. He still didn’t like it.
He bent to the eyepiece of the brass-and-iron tripod-mounted binoculars. The gun-redoubt the enemy were building—slowly, since they’d gotten reluctant to move outside their walls at night—was mostly complete. Walls of wicker baskets full of earth, loopholed for the heavy siege guns. The guns themselves were rolling out of the nearest of the fortified camps, soda-bottle shaped things on four-wheeled carriages, drawn by multiple yokes of oxen.
The chanting of the morning prayer had barely died; the breaths of the command group on the tower were puffs of white, although there had been no hard frost. Bells rang from the hundreds of cathedrons and churches throughout the city. Silvery fog lay on the surface of the river behind the roof-crowned hills of Old Residence. Steam rose from the kave mugs most of the officers held.
Kaltin Gruder took a bite out of a pastry. “If one has to fight in winter,” he said, “this is actually not bad. Clean sheets, hot meals, running water, women. As long as the food holds out, of course.”
Muzzaf Kerpatik nodded. “Two ships came in last night under tow,” he said. “Eight hundred tons of provisions, and another two hundred thousand rounds of 11-millimeters from Lion City.”
Raj glanced up at the black-uniformed naval commander. The sailor cleared his throat:
“Their batteries on the south shore aren’t much, at night,” he said. “The channel’s fairly deep on the north side, we just steam up and they try to hit the sound of our engines. Which is difficult enough if you’re used to dealing with sound on water.”
Tonhio Lopeyz, Raj reminded himself.
“Good work, Messer Commodore Lopeyz,” he said, nodding.
Provisions aren’t tight yet, he thought. Plenty of beans and bullets, but he needed men. What he could do with another five or six thousand veteran cavalry . . .
“What sort of rate of fire do you think they can get with those siege pieces, Grammeck?” he asked.
Dinnalsyn looked up from his plotting table. “Oh, not more than one shot per half hour per gun, mi heneral,” he said. “Their crews look like amateurs, mostly—I think they keep those guns in storage between wars. Probably only a few real gunners per tube. Still, a day or so and six guns firing those forty-kilo round-shot would bring any hundred meters of wall down, even with the earthwork backing we’ve put in. Curtain walls like this—” he stamped a foot “—just can’t take the racking stress.” Which was why they’d been replaced with low earth-backed walls sunk behind moats, in the Civil Government and Colony. The western Midworld was considerably behind the times.
There was a rattling bang from the rear of the tower. The Y-beams creaked as the platform came level with the parapet, and the crew manhandled a seventy-five-millimeters field-gun forward onto the flagstones. A gunner waved a flag from beside it, and the platform sank as oxen on the ground below heaved at their traces and compensated for the pull of the counterweights. The timber platform bumped rhythmically against the stones of the tower’s inner wall as it went down. The gun-crew trundled the weapon into position on the wooden disk that waited for it. Behind the wheels were long curving ramps; ahead of them rope-buffered blocks. The gunners slid marlinspikes through iron brackets sunk into the circular wooden disk and heaved experimentally. There was a grating sound from the “lubricating” sand beneath the planks, and the weapon pivoted, the muzzle just clearing the crenellations of the parapet.
“Will the structure take it?” Raj asked.
“I think so,” Dinnalsyn said cautiously. “We’ve got the floors below this braced with heavy timbers.” He looked at the Brigaderos. “Amateurs. Hasn’t it occurred to them to check trajectories? Height is distance.”
No, Raj thought. But then, it wouldn’t have occurred to me unless Center had pointed it out.
The second gun slid into position. Dinnalsyn looked to the towers left and right of his position; the guns there were ready too.
; He touched off a smoke rocket. The little firework sizzled off northward, its plume drifting through the cold morning air. Center looked out through Raj’s eyes at the smoke. Glowing lines traced vectors across his vision.
“Colonel,” Raj said quietly. “Bring that gun around another two degrees, and you’ll make better practice, I think.”
Dinnalsyn relayed the order. “We lost a great cannon-cocker when you were born to the nobility, mi heneral,” he said cheerfully, bending his eyes to the binoculars. Then: “Fwego!”
The gunner jerked his lanyard. The gun slammed backwards, rising up the tracks behind its wheels, paused for a second as mass fought momentum, then slid downward with a rush to clang against the chocks. Bitter smoke drifted with the wind into the eyes of the officers at the side of the tower. They blinked, and a spot of red fire flashed for an instant in the center of a blot of black smoke over the Brigadero redoubt. A second later one of the enemy siege cannon fired, a longer duller booom and cloud of smoke. Almost at the same instant there was a splintering crash from far below, and the stone of the tower trembled beneath their feet.
A brass shell casing clanged dully on timber as the crew of the field gun levered open the breech of their weapon.
None of the men on the tower commented on the enemy hit. Dinnalsyn turned to the battery commander at the plotting table. “Triangulate,” he said.
The captain moved his parallel setsteels across the paper, consulted a printed table and worked his sliderule. The solution was simple, time-to-target over set ranges to a fixed location. Center could have solved the problem to the limit of the accuracy of the Civil Government guns in a fraction of a second—but that would start looking excessively odd. Besides, he didn’t want men who needed a crutch. Come to that, neither did Center.
The captain called out elevations and bearing for each gun in the ten tasked with this mission. A heliograph signaller clicked it out in both directions, sunlight on a mirror behind a slotted cover.
“Ranging fire, in succession,” Dinnalsyn said.
From east to west along the wall guns spoke, each allowing just enough time to observe the fall of shot. Raj trained his own field glasses. Oxen were bellowing and running in the open center of the Brigadero redoubt, some of them with trails of pink intestine tangling their hooves. Men staggered to the rear, or were dragged by their comrades. More were still heaving at the massive siege guns, hauling in gangs of two dozen or more at the block-and-tackle rigs that moved them into and out of position.
“Five-round stonk,” Dinnalsyn’s voice said, cool and dispassionate. “Shrapnel, fire for effect, rapid fire. Fire.”
This time the four towers erupted in smoke and flame, each gun firing as soon as its mate had run back into battery and was being loaded. The rate of fire was much higher than the guns could have achieved firing from level ground; in less than a minute forty shells burst over the enemy position, a continuous rolling flicker. Smoke drifted back from the towers, and covered the target. A rending clap and ball of yellow flame marked a secondary explosion as one of the siege-gun caissons went up. Four more explosions followed at half-second intervals, and the huge barrel of one of the siege guns flipped up out of the dust and smoke. When the debris cleared the Brigaderos position looked like a freshly-spaded garden mixed with a wrecker’s yard.
Raj bent to the binoculars. Nothing moved in the field of vision for a few long seconds. Then dirt stirred, and a man rose to his feet. He had his hands pressed over his ears, and from the gape of his mouth he was probably screaming. Tears ran down his dirt-caked cheeks, and he blundered out over the mound of earth and into the zone between the bastion—the former bastion—and the city. Still screaming and sobbing as he lurched forward, until a rifle spoke from the wall. Raj could see the puff of dust from the front of his jacket as the bullet struck.
“Five-round stonk, contact-fused HE,” Dinnalsyn said. “Standard fire, fire.”
The guns opened up again, the steady three rounds a minute that preserved barrels and broke armies. Most of the shells tossed up dirt already chewed by the explosion of the stacked ammunition. Several knocked aside the heavy siege guns themselves, ripping them off their iron-framed fortress mounts. Whoops and cheers rang out from the Old Residence wall as troops and militiamen jeered and laughed at every hit. The noise continued until Raj turned his head and bit out an order that sent a courier running down the interior stairs to the wall.
“Nothing to cheer in brave men being butchered by an imbecile’s orders,” he said.
“Better theirs than ours, mi heneral,” Kaltin said.
Silence fell. The gunners took the opportunity to swab out the bores of their weapons, clearing the fouling before it bound tightly to the metal. A mounted man with a white pennant on his lance rode out from the central Brigaderos camp. That would be a herald asking permission to remove the dead and wounded, formal admission of defeat in this . . . he couldn’t quite decide what to call it. “Battle” was completely inappropriate.
“True, Kaltin,” Raj said. “However, remember that every time you fight someone, you teach them something, if they’re willing to learn. Somebody over there will be willing to learn. Play chess long enough with good players and you get good.”
Somebody over there had read Obregon’s Siege Operations, at least. Not the supreme commander, or they wouldn’t have committed this fiasco.
“Our army is already pretty good. We have to work hard to improve. All the enemy has to do is learn a few basics and it would double their combat power.”
It would be a race between his abilities and the enemy’s learning curve.
He remembered Cannae again. The perfect battle . . . but even Hannibal had needed Tarentius Varro commanding on the other side.
“Long may you live and reign, Ingreid Manfrond,” Raj whispered.
Some of the other officers looked at him. He explained: “There are four types of commander. Brilliant and energetic; brilliant and lazy; stupid and lazy; and stupid and energetic. With the first three, you can do something. With the last, nothing but disaster can result. I think Ingreid Manfrond has shown us which category he belongs to. Let’s just hope he’s energetic enough to hang on to power.”
“I told you that would happen!” Howyrd Carstens shouted.
“Watch your mouth!” Ingreid roared back.
“I told you that would happen, Lord of Men,” Carstens said with heavy sarcasm.
A sharp gasp came from the cot between them. Both men stepped back. Teodore Welf lay on it, a leather strap between his teeth. A priest-doctor with the front-to-back tonsure of a This Earth cleric gripped the end of a long iron splinter with tongs and pulled steadily. The metal stuck out of the young man’s thigh at a neat forty-five-degree angle. For a second it resisted the doctor’s muscles, then came free with a gush of blood.
“Let it bleed for a second,” the doctor said. The flow slowed, and he swabbed the wound with a ball of cotton dipped in alcohol, then palpated the area and probed for fragments and bits of cloth. “Looks clean, and it all came out,” he said. “As long as the bone doesn’t mortify, you should be up and around in a while. Stay off it till then or you’ll limp for years.”
He passed his amulet over the puncture and then cleaned it with blessed iodine. The patient grunted again as it touched him, then stared as the bandage was strapped on.
“This will ease you.”
Teodore shook his head. “No poppy. I need my wits.” He glared up at the two older men, sweat pouring down his face, but he waited until the doctor was gone before speaking.
“You’re both right,” he said. “Carstens, we fucked up. You were right. Lord of Men, you’re right—we’re pressed for time.”
“I suppose you’ve got a suggestion?” Ingreid said, stroking his beard.
The boy was a puppy, but he was brave and had his wits about him—and he was a Welf. That meant a wise General would give him respectful attention, because the Welfs still had many followers. It also meant a se
nsible General should allow him full rein for his bravery. An honorably dead Welf would be much less inconvenient after the war than a live, heroic one. He scowled, and his hand clenched. Damn the wench for miscarrying, just when he was too busy to plow her again. Her hips were good enough and she looked healthy; what had gone wrong? A son of his and hers would unite the branches and be unassailable, an obvious choice for election when he grew too old to hold power. His older sons would be ready to step in to the high offices around the Seat.
“All right,” he said. “What’s your idea?” He held up a hand. “No more about detaching troops to guard our rear. If I let regiments go, the whole host will start to unravel, screaming for a garrison here and a detachment there. I need them here, under my eye—too many can’t understand that this war is more important than raids on the border.”
“Lord of Men, the Civvies just showed us that you can throw a rock harder from a hill.” Teodore jerked his chin at the map across the tent room. “Here’s what I propose—”
An hour or so later, Ingreid nodded slowly. “That sounds like it will work,” he said.
“It had better work,” Howyrd Carstens said. “Unless you like the taste of dog-meat.”
Now I know why our ancestors left the Base Area, Ludwig Bellamy thought. It was that or freeze to death. They were between Old Residence and Carson Barracks; away from the sea, the winters were harder. Frost every night now, and the rains were half-sleet. His men slept huddled next to their dogs for warmth, dreaming of the orange groves and date-palms of the Southern Territories. And the Base Area up north was even colder than this. No wonder each succeeding wave of invaders was more barbaric—their brains had had longer to freeze in the dark.
He smiled to himself, noticing he’d shaped the thought in Sponglish. When he fought with his own hands or took a woman, or prayed to the Spirit, Namerique still came first to him. For subtle wit or pondering strategy, Sponglish was more natural.