by David Drake
“Treachery!” he groaned, trying to get up.
His knee wasn’t working, and he slumped back to the roadway. Behind him the regiment was piling up in howling, cursing confusion, men sawing at the reins as dogs yelped off across the fields. Some of them were running three-legged, one paw held up against their chests. Others were down, biting frantically at their paws or flanks. Dismounted men came running forward; riding boots had tough soles, and they had little to fear from the caltrops. Two of them helped him up.
The gates were less than a hundred meters away. They did not open, but two new-cut squares in them did, at about chest height from the ground. The black muzzles that poked through were only seventy-five millimeters, he knew—but they looked big enough to swallow him whole. He could even see the lands, the spiral grooves curving back into the barrels. Drawing his sword he lurched forward cursing. There was just enough time to see a thousand riflemen rise to the crenellations of the wall before the cannon fired point-blank canister into the tangled mass of men and dogs halted before them.
“Here dey come,” Gharsia said.
Rifleman Minatelli squinted over the sights of his rifle. His mouth was dry again, but he needed to pee. The rubble out where the city wall had been was nearly flat, but the cannonade had lifted. The first line of Brigaderos appeared like magic as they toiled up the ramp the fallen stone made and over the stumps of the wall. His finger tightened on the trigger.
“Wait for it!” the lieutenant barked.
Poles had been planted in the rubble to give the defenders exact ranges. Minatelli tried to remember everything he’d been told and shown, all at once. Tuck the butt firmly but not too tight into the shoulder. Let the left eye fall closed. Pick your target.
He selected a man. The first rank of the Brigaderos were carrying ladders, ladders tall enough to reach his position.
He’d seen the heretics riding through the streets occasionally all his life. Once a child had thrown an apple at one, in the avenue near his parent’s street. The big fair man had drawn his sword and sliced it in half before the rotten fruit could strike, booming laughter as the urchin ran. The motion had been too quick to see, a blur of bright metal and a shuck as it parted the apple in halves.
When were they going to get the order?
A rocket hissed up into the air. Pop.
“Company—”
“Platoon—”
“Fire!”
He squeezed the trigger. BAM. Loud enough to hurt his ears as two thousand rifles spoke. Smoke erupted all around the semicircle of the inner wall. The rifle whacked him on the shoulder, still painful despite all the firing-range practice he’d had. His hand seemed to be acting on its own as it pushed down the lever and reached back to his bandolier. His eyes were fixed and wide, hurting already from the harsh smoke. It blew back over his head, and the Brigaderos were still coming. The next round clattered against the groove atop the bolt. He thumbed it home and tried to aim again. Another wave of Brigaderos topped the rubble, and another one behind them—they were all wearing breastplates. The muzzle of his rifle shook.
“Pick your targets,” the officer said behind him.
He swallowed against a tight throat and picked out a man—bearded and tall, carrying his rifle-musket across his chest. Tiny as a doll at eight hundred meters.
“Fire.”
He aimed at the ground just below the little stick-figure and squeezed again. This time the recoil was a surprise. Did the man fall? Impossible to tell, when the smoke hid his vision for a second. Men were falling. Dozens—it must be hundreds, the enemy were packed shoulder to shoulder in the breach, running forward, and another line behind them. How many waves was that?
“Keep aiming for the ones coming over the wall,” the officer said again. “The men downstairs are firing at the ones closer. Pick your targets.”
“Fire.”
Again. “Independent fire, rapid fire, fire.”
He started shooting as fast as he could, muzzle hopping from target to target. A foot nudged him sharply, bringing him back to himself with a start.
“Slow down, lad,” the older man said. He fired himself, levered open the action and blew into the chamber, reloaded, raised the rifle. Without looking around he went on: “Steady, er de cross-eyed ol’ bitch’ll jam on yu, for shore.”
Minatelli copied him, blowing into the breech. The heat of the steel was palpable on his lips, shocking when the air was so cold. He reloaded and braced the forestock against the stone, firing again, and forced himself to load once more in time with the man beside him. It was steady as a metronome; lever, blow, hand back to the bandolier, round in, pick a target—fleeting glimpse through the smoke—fire. Clots of powder-smoke were drifting over the rubble. Fresh puffs came from down among the tumbled stone; some of the barbs were firing back at them. He felt a sudden huge rage at them, stronger than fear.
“Fuckers,” he muttered, reaching back again.
His fingers scrabbled; the upper layer of loops was empty. Twenty-five? he thought, surprised. How could he have fired twenty-five rounds already? There was an open crate of ammunition not far from him on the parapet; when he needed to he could always grab a handful and dump them into his bandolier loose.
“Fuckers,” he said again, snarling this time. His shoulder hurt. “Where are the fucking cavalry?”
He’d spoken in Spanjol, but the men on either side laughed.
“Who ever see a dead dog-boy?” one asked.
“Dey fukkin’ off, as usual,” Gharsia said, spitting out the loophole again. “Dog-boys out ready to get dere balls shot off chargin’, glory-os. I built dis wall, gonna use it an’ that suit me fine. Dis de easy life, boy.”
Bullets spattered against the stone near Minatelli’s face. He fought not to jerk back, leaned forward further instead. Another wave of Brigaderos was coming through the gap, a banner waving among them. He aimed at it and shot as it passed a ranging-post. The banner jerked and fell, the men around it folding up like puppets. A lot of people must have had the same idea. He felt just as scared, but not alone any more.
“Come on, you fuckers!” he shouted. This time he pulled out three bullets and put the tips between his lips.
* * *
“Determined buggers,” Jorg Menyez said.
Another group of Brigaderos snatched up their ladders and ran forward. A platoon along the loopholes to either side of the commanders brought their rifles up and fired; the volley was almost lost in the continuous rolling crash of musketry from the wall and of return fire from the Brigaderos outside. The group with the ladder staggered. The ladder wavered and fell as most of the men carrying it were punched down by the heavy eleven-millimeter bullets from the Armory rifles. The survivors rolled for cover, unlimbering the muskets slung over their backs.
Raj peered through the smoke. “There must be ten thousand of them crammed in there,” he said.
Bullets from the ground-level loopholes were driving through two and three men. All over the rubble-strewn killing ground, rounds were sparking and ricocheting off the ground where they did not strike flesh. A great wailing roar was rising from the Brigaderos crowded into the D-shaped space, a compound of pain and fear and frustrated rage.
“They’re not sending in another wave,” Menyez said.
He looked about; the men holding this sector were his own 17th Kelden Foot. They fired with a steady, mechanical regularity. Every minute or so one would lurch backward as the huge but diffuse enemy firepower scored a lucky hit on a firing slit. Stretcher-bearers dragged off the wounded or the dead, and a man from the reserve platoon of that company would step forward to take the place of the fallen. Cartridge cases rolled and tinkled on the stone, lying in brass snowdrifts about the boots of the fighting men.
Raj nodded slowly. He turned and caught the eye of an artillery lieutenant who stood next to a tall wooden box. An iron crank extended from one side, and copper-cored wires ran from the top into a cellar trapdoor next to it. Raj raised a clen
ched fist and pumped it down twice. The young gunnery officer grinned and spun the crank on the side of the box. It went slowly at first, then gathered speed with a whine. The corporal beside him waited until he stepped back panting, then threw a scissor-switch on the box’s other side. Fat blue sparks leapt from it, and from the clamps on top where the cables rested.
For a moment, rifleman Minatelli thought the wall under him was going to fall as the city’s ramparts had. The noise was too loud for his ravaged ears to hear; instead it thudded in his chest and diaphragm. He flung up a hand against the wave of dust and grit that billowed toward his firing slit, and coughed at the thick brickdust stink of it as it billowed over him. The explosions ran from left to right across the D-shaped space before him, earth and rock gouting skyward as the massive gunpowder charges concealed in the cellars of the wrecked houses went off one after another. The Brigaderos on top of the charges simply disappeared—although for a moment he thought his squinting eyes caught a human form silhouetted against the sky.
Silence fell for a second afterwards, ringing with the painful sound that was inside his ears. His mouth gaped open at the massive craters that spread across the open space, and at the thousands of figures that staggered or crawled or screamed and ran away from them. Then the big barrels of pitch and naphtha and coal-oil buried all around the perimeter went off as well, the small bursting charges beneath them spraying inflammable liquid over hundreds of square meters, vomiting the color of hell. Wood scattered through the rubble of destroyed buildings caught fire. Men burned too, running with their hair and uniforms ablaze. Men were running all over the killing zone, running to the rear.
They’re running away! Minatelli thought exultantly. The lords of the Brigade were running away from him, the stonecutter’s son.
He caught up his rifle and fired, again and again. Then, grinning, he turned to the villainous old sweat who’d been telling him what to do.
The veteran lay on his back, one leg crumpled under him. The bullet that killed him had punched through his breastbone and out through his spine; the body lay in a pool of blood turning sticky at the edges, and more ran out of the older man’s mouth and nose. Dry eyeballs looked up at the iron-colored sky; his helmet had fallen off, and the cropped hair beneath was thin and more gray than black.
“But we won,” he whispered to himself. His mouth filled with sick spit.
A hand clouted him on the back of his helmet. “Face front, soljer,” the corporal snarled.
Minatelli started, as if waking from a deep sleep. “Yessir,” he mumbled. His fingers trembled as they worked the lever of his weapon.
“Happens,” the corporal went on. He bent and heaved the body closer to the wall, to clear space on the parapet, and leaned the dead man’s fallen rifle beside the loophole. “I towt de ol’ fassaro’d live for’ver, but it happens.”
“Yessir.”
“I ain’t no sir. An’ watch watcha shootin’, boy.”
Rihardo Terraza grinned as he helped manhandle the gun forward. He could see through the firing slit ahead of them; the gun was mounted at the very edge of the new wall, where it met the intact section of the original city fortifications.
The Brigaderos were trying to fall back now, but they weren’t doing it in the neat lines in which they attacked. They were all trying to get out at once—all of them who could still walk, and many of them were carrying or dragging wounded comrades with them. That meant a pile-up, as they scrambled over the jagged remains of the city wall. The ones closest were only about fifty meters away, when the muzzle of the gun showed through the letterbox hole in the inner wall. Some of them noticed it.
PAMMM. Firing case-shot. Everyone in the crew skipped out of the way as the gun caromed backward and came to a halt against rope braces.
“One for Pochita, you fastardos,” Rihardo shouted, leaping back to the wheel.
Four other guns fired down the line; the other battery at the opposite end of the breech in the city wall opened fire at the same moment. The crowds of Brigaderos trying to get out halted as the murderous crossfire slashed into them, while the massed rifles hammered at their backs.
Best bitch I ever trained, Rihardo thought, coughing in the sulfur stink of the gunsmoke. His eyes were stinging from it too.
PAMMM.
“One for Halvaro!”
Gerrin Staenbridge gave Bartin’s shoulder a squeeze. They were waiting in the saddle, riding thigh-to-thigh.
The younger man flashed him a smile. Then the massive thudding detonations of the mines came; they could see the pillars of earth and smoke, distant across the intervening rooftops. The gates creaked, the ten-meter-high portals swinging open as men cranked the winches. This was the river gate, the furthest south and west in Old Residence you could get. The bulk of the anchoring redoubt loomed on their left, and beyond it the river wall. Behind them was one of the long radial avenues of the city, stretching in a twisting curve north and east to the great central plaza. It was packed solid with men and dogs, four battalions of cavalry and twenty guns.
The gates boomed against their rests. Gerrin snapped his arm forward and down. Trumpets blared, and the 5th Descott rocked into a gallop at his heels. The gate swept by and they were out in the open, heading west along the river road. Cold wind cuffed at his face, and the sound of thousands of paws striking the gravel road was an endless thudding scuff. The ragged-looking entrenchments of the Brigade siege batteries were model-tiny ahead and to the right. And directly to the right the plain was covered with men, marching or running or riding, a huge clot of them around the gaping wound in the city’s wall where the guns had knocked it down. Almost to the railway gate and that was opening too. . . .
He clamped his legs around the barrel of his dog and swung to the bounding rhythm of the gallop; his saber beat an iron counterpoint to it, clanking against the stirrup-iron. Distance . . . now. A touch of the rein to the neck and his dog wheeled right and came to a halt, with the bannerman by his side and a score of signallers and runners. The column behind him continued to snake its way out of the gate; the ground shook under their paws, the air sounded with the clank of their harness. Riding eight men deep, each battalion spaced at a hundred yards on either side of two batteries of guns. His head went back and forth.
Smooth, very smooth, he thought. Especially since there hadn’t been time or space to drill for this in particular. They’d decided to keep each battalion stationary until the one in front was in full gallop, and that seemed to have worked. . . .
The time it took a dog to run a kilometer and a half passed.
“Now,” he said.
Trumpets sang, and the great bar of men and dogs came to a halt—tail-end first, as the last battalion out of the gate stopped with their rear rank barely clear of the portals. Another demanding call, picked up and echoed by every commander’s buglers. He turned in his saddle to see it; he was roughly in the middle of the long column, as it snaked and undulated over the uneven surface of the road. It moved and writhed, every man turning in place, with the commanders out in front like a regular fringe before a belt. Spaces opened up, and the whole unit was in platoon columns. A third signal, and they started forward at right angles to the road, front-on to the shapeless mass of the Brigaderos force.
It looked as if the enemy had ridden most of the way to the wall, then dismounted for the assault. Now the great herd of riderless dogs was fouling any attempt to get the men who hadn’t been committed to face about. More harsh brassy music sounded behind him, discordant, multiplied four times. The platoon columns shook themselves out, sliding forward and sideways to leave the men riding in a double line abreast toward the enemy. And . . . yes, the most difficult part. The men to his right, near the gate, were holding their mounts in check. To his left the outer battalions were swinging in, the whole formation slantwise to the wall with the left wing advanced as they moved north.
Too far to see what Kaltin was doing, as he deployed out of the railway gate to the north of the brea
ch. Presumably the same thing, and that was his problem, his and Raj’s. He could rely on them to do their parts, just as he could rely on Bartin to keep the left wing moving at precisely the speed they’d planned.
The mass of Brigaderos ahead of him was growing with shocking speed. That was the whole point, hit them before they could recover from the shock of the disaster in the breach—and before the vastly larger bulk of their forces could intervene.
He heeled his dog into a slightly faster canter, to put himself in plain view. “Bannerman, trumpeter,” he said, pulling his dog up to a walking pace. “Signal dismount and advance.”
The long line did not halt exactly in unison—that was neither possible nor necessary with a force this size, and the command lagged unevenly as it relayed down to the companies and platoons—but there wasn’t more than thirty seconds’ difference between the first man stepping off the saddle of his crouching dog and the last. There was a complex ripple down the line as each unit took its dressing from the standard, and the battalion commanders and bannermen adjusted to their preplanned positions. Then the four battalions were walking forward in a staggered double line with rifles at port arms.
The guns stopped and turned to present their muzzles to the enemy a thousand meters away. All except the splatguns; they were out on the left wing, insurance in case the enemy reacted more quickly than anticipated. Metallic clanging and barked orders sounded. A series of POUMF sounds thudded down the line, sharpening to CRACK! behind him and to the right from the muzzle blast of the nearest guns. The first shells hammered into the enemy. The first fire came from them; he could hear the bullets going by overhead, not much menace even to a mounted man at this range. Unless you were unlucky. The cannon were settling down into a steady rhythm. Dogs milled about ahead of them, some shooting off across the rolling flatland in panic. More and more rifle-muskets thudded from the enemy, tiny puffs of dirty smoke. Here and there a man fell in the Civil Government line, silent or shouting out his pain. The ranks advanced at the same brisk walk, closing to fill in the gaps.