Hope Rearmed

by David Drake

  Probably the women would be up, getting breakfast for the men; his mind’s eye showed them all around the wooden table, spooning down the porridge and soured milk.

  Ma and Halsandro’s wife and his sisters, they’d spend the day mostly indoors, spinning and weaving and doing chores around the farmyard. The water furrow for the garden would need digging out, it always did this time of year, so Halsandro would be at that with the two hired men. He’d send Peydro and Marhinz, the younger M’Telgez boys, down to the valley pens to guide the sheep and the family’s half-dozen cattle out for the day. They’d be sitting their dogs, shivering a little in their fleece jackets, with their rifles across their thighs. Talking about hunting, or girls, or whether they’d go for a soldier like their brother Robbi . . .

  “Hey, Corp,” someone called from the stable door. He looked up. “Turnout, an’ double-quick loik, t’El-T says.”

  M’Telgez nodded and gave the currycomb a final swipe before hanging it on the stable partition. Tonita whined and rose as well, sniffing at him and rattling the chain lead that held her bridle to the iron staple driven into the wall.

  “Down, girl,” M’Telgez said, shrugging into his jacket. He picked up his rifle and turned, away from the plaintive whining. “Nothin’ happ’nin’.”

  You couldn’t lie to a dog. They smelled it on you.

  “Everything is ready?” Suzette asked.

  The Renunciate nodded stiffly. Her face might have been carved from oak, but there was a sheen of sweat on her upper lip. Around them the church bustled; the regular benches had been carried out, and tables brought in instead to fill the great echoing space under the dome. Doctors were setting up, pulling their bundles of instruments out of vats of boiling iodine-water and scrubbing down. The wax-and-dust smell of a church was overlaid with the sharp carbolic stink of blessed water.

  “Down to the stretchers and bandages,” the nun replied. “For once, there is no shortage.”

  Suzette nodded and turned away. They’d commandeered a dozen buildings along the streets leading off from the plaza, and all the city’s remaining hansom-cabs for ambulances. Plenty of priest-doctors as well, although the Expeditionary Force’s own medics would direct everything, having the experience with trauma. Time between injury and treatment was the most crucial single factor, though. More of the wounded would live . . . provided Raj won.

  He will, she told herself. A twinge in her belly made her grimace a little. Fatima put a hand under her elbow.

  “I’m fine,” she said, conscious that she was still pale. The pain was much less, and the hemorrhaging had stopped. Almost stopped.

  “You shouldn’t have,” Fatima whispered in her ear.

  “I couldn’t take the chance,” Suzette said, as softly. “I couldn’t be sure whose . . . there will be time.”

  She straightened and nodded to her escort at the door. They were looking a little uneasy at the preparations. It was odd, even the bravest soldier didn’t like looking at an aid station or the bone-saws being set out.

  “Back to headquarters,” she said.

  “Kaltin, you and the 7th Descott are the only reserve on the whole west section of the walls,” Raj said.

  They stood around the map, watching his finger move and cradling their kave mugs. I’m trying to fill a dozen holes with six corks, he thought. Another shoestring operation . . . He went on:

  “Ludwig can watch the east with the bulk of the cavalry until it’s time. Gerrin and I are up here in the north with the 5th and nine battalions of regular infantry, but you’re it over there—you and the militia. They’re not that steady, and even a fairly light attack will spook them. Keep them facing the right way.”

  “Count on it,” the scar-faced man said, slapping fists.

  “I am. Waya con Ispirito de Hom.”

  Raj straightened and sighed as Gruder left. “Well, at least we’re getting good fighting weather,” he said.

  The windows showed the ghostly glimmer of false dawn, but the sky was still bright with stars. Yesterday’s rain was gone, although the ground outside the walls would still be muddy. Nothing would limit visibility today, though.

  “I hope you messers are all aware how narrow our margins are, here,” Raj said. “The blocking force has to hold.” He nodded at the infantry commanders. “And the rest of you, when the time comes, move.”

  “It seems simple enough,” one said.

  Raj nodded grimly. “But in war, the simplest things become extremely difficult. Dismissed.”

  The men filed out, leaving only him and Suzette in the big room. “You’d be more useful back at the aid station,” he said. “Safer, too. This is too cursed close to the walls for comfort.”

  Suzette shook her head. “East Residence would be safe, my love. I’ll be here,” she said.

  “Mamma, an’ ye’ll nivver see the loik of that comin’ down t’ road from Blayberry Fair,” one of the Descotter troopers on the tower murmured.

  The rolling northern horizon was black across an arc five kilometers wide. The Brigade was coming, deployed into fighting formation; the front ten ranks carried ladders and the blocks behind had their muskets on their shoulders and bayonets fixed. The sun was just up, and the light ran like a spark in grass from east to west across the formation as it hove into view, flashing on fifty thousand steel points. They chanted as they marched, a vast burred thunder, timed to the beating of a thousand drums. Between the huge blocks of men came guns, heavy siege models and lighter brass field-pieces, hauled by oxen and dogs and yet more columns of Brigaderos warriors.

  “Now, this isn’t particularly clever,” Raj said lightly.

  To himself he added: But it just may work. Brute force often did, although it was also likely to have side-effects. Even if Ingreid won this one, he was going to lose every fifth fighting man in the Brigade’s whole population doing it.

  “Counterbattery?” Dinnalsyn asked.

  “By all means,” Raj said.

  “Lancers to the fore,” Gerrin Staenbridge noted.

  The dull sheen of armor marked the forward ranks; they’d left the polearms behind, of course. Muskets were slung over their backs.

  “Those lobster shells will give them some protection,” Raj said. “From fragments and glancing shots, at least.”

  The gunners’ signal-lantern clattered. The chanting of the Brigaderos was much louder, rolling back from walls and hills:

  “Upyarz! Upyarz!”

  Raj swallowed the last of his kave and handed the cup to the orderly; he shook out his shoulders with a slight unconscious gesture, settling himself to the task.

  “Since I’m handling the towers,” Gerrin said, “I’d appreciate it if you could be ready to move the reserves sharpish, Whitehall,” he went on dryly.

  “I’ll do my best,” Raj replied with a slight bow.

  They grinned at each other and slapped fists, back of the gauntlet and then wrist to wrist.

  “Right, lads,” Raj said, raising his voice slightly.

  Pillars of smoke were rising into the cold bright dawn air from the towers, stretching right and left in a shallow curve to the edge of sight. Gunsmoke, from the field-pieces emplaced on them—the infantry on the walls hadn’t started shooting yet. The POUMPF . . . POUMPF of the cannonade was continuous, a thudding rumble in the background. Behind it the sharper crack sound of the shells bursting was muffled by the walls. As he spoke a huge BRACK and burst of smoke came from one tower far to the west, where a heavy enemy shell had scored a lucky hit. Another came over the wall with a sound like a ship’s sails ripping in a storm and gouted up a cone of black dirt from the cleared space inside the walls. The sulphur smell of powder smoke drifted to them, like a foretaste of hell to come.

  “The whole Brigade’s coming this way,” Raj went on. “Most of our infantry went out upriver to take them in the flank. Pretty well all the cavalry’s going to go out the west gate and take them in that flank.

  “The problem is,” he went on, rising slightl
y onto his toes and sinking back, “is that all that’s left to hold them while that happens is us . . . and the rest of the infantry on the walls, of course.”

  He raised one hand and pointed at the north gate towers, his left resting on the hilt of his saber. “Colonel Staenbridge and Captain Foley each hold a side of the gate, with a company of the 5th. The rest of you—and me—have to stop whatever gets over the walls. If we do, it’s victory. If we don’t . . .”

  He paused, hands clasped behind his back, and grinned at the semicircle of hard dark faces. Things were serious enough, but it was also almost like old times . . . five years ago, when he’d commanded the 5th and nothing more.

  “You boys ready to do a man’s work today?”

  The answer was a wordless growl.

  “Hell or plunder, dog-brothers.”

  “Switch to antipersonnel,” Bartin Foley said briskly.

  The front line of the Brigaderos host was only three thousand meters away. The rolling ground had broken up their alignment a little, but the numbers were stunning; worse than facing the Squadron charge in the Southern Territories, because these barbs were coming on in most unbarbarian good order. The forward line gleamed and flickered; evidently they’d taken the time to polish their armor. It coiled over the low rises like a giant metallic snake. Fifty meters behind it came the dragoons, tramping with their bayoneted rifles sloped. He could make out individual faces and the markings on unit flags now, with the binoculars. Most of the heavy guns were far behind, smashed by the field-pieces mounted on the towers or stranded when the shelling killed the draught-oxen pulling them. Also further back were columns of mounted men, maybe ten thousand of them—ready to move forward quickly and exploit a breach anywhere along the front of the Brigade attack.

  Terrible as a host with banners, he thought—it was a fragment from the Fall Codices, a bit of Old Namerique rhetoric. The banners of the enemy flapped out before them in the breeze from the north. Hundreds of kettledrums beat among them, a thuttering roar like blood hammering in your ears.

  POUMPF. The gun on his tower fired again. The smoke drifted straight back; Foley could see the shell burst over the forward line of Brigaderos troopers and hear the sharp spiteful crack. Men fell, and more airbursts slashed at the front of the enemy formation. Guns fired all along the line, but not as many as there might have been. Half the 75’s had been kept back to support the cavalry. The duller sound of smoothbores followed as the brass and cast-iron cannon salvaged from storage all over Old Residence cut loose, firing iron roundshot. He turned the glasses and followed one that landed short, skipped up into the air and then trundled through the enemy line. Men tried to slap aside or dodge, but the ranks were too close-packed. Half a dozen went down, with shattered legs or feet ripped off at the ankle.

  The ranks closed again and came forward without pause; the fallen ladders were snatched up once more. The smoothbores were much less effective than the Civil Government field-guns, and slower to load—but there were several hundred of them on the walls. Their gunners were the only militiamen in this sector, but they ought to be reliable enough with the bayonets of the Regulars near their kidneys . . . The defenders’ artillery fired continuously now, lofting a plume of dirty white smoke over the wall and back towards the city. A few of the Brigaderos siege guns had set up and were firing over the heads of their troops; more of their light three-kilo brass pieces were wheeling about to support from close range.

  Foley ignored them; he’d developed a profound respect for the Brigade’s troopers, but their artillery was like breaking your neck in the bath—it could happen, but it wasn’t something you worried about.

  They must have lost two, three thousand men already, Foley thought.

  “Spirit, they really want to make our acquaintance,” he said. “I knew I was handsome, but this is ridiculous.” The lieutenant beside him laughed a little nervously.

  Rifles bristled along the forward edge of the tower. More would be levelling in the chambers below his feet, and along the wall to either side. The city cannon were firing grapeshot now, bundles of heavy iron balls in rope nets. It slashed through the enemy, and they picked up the pace to a ponderous trot. Approaching the outermost marker, a fine of waist-high pyramids of whitewashed stones—apparently ranging posts weren’t a trick the Brigade was familiar with. One thousand meters.

  “Wait for it,” he whispered, the sound lost under the rolling thunder of the cannonade.

  The Brigaderos broke into a run. Foley forced his teeth to stop grinding; he touched the stock of the cut-down shotgun over his back, and loosened the pistol in his holster. At all costs the Brigade mustn’t take the gate, that was why there were companies of the 5th in the towers on either side. Gerrin was in overall command of the wall, all he had to worry about was this one tower and the hundred and fifty odd men in it. The troopers were kneeling at the parapets, and boxes of ammunition and hand-bombs waited open at intervals. Nothing else he could do . . .

  “UPYARZ! UPYARZ!”

  The front rank of dismounted lancers pounded past the whitewashed stone markers. A rocket soared up from the tower on the other side of the gate and popped in a puff of green smoke.

  “Now!”

  Along the wall, hundreds of officers screamed fwego in antiphonal chorus. Four thousand rifles fired, a huge echoing BAAAMMMMM louder even than the guns. The advancing ranks of armored men wavered, suddenly looking tattered as hundreds fell. Limply dead, or screaming and thrashing, and flags went down as well. Foley caught his breath; if they cracked . . .

  “UPYARZ! UPYARZ!”

  They came on, into the teeth of a continuous slamming of platoon volleys. And behind them, the first line of dragoons halted. The long rifle-muskets came up to their shoulders with a jerk, like a centipede rippling along the line. Their ranks were three deep, and there were thirty thousand of them.

  “For what we are about to receive—”

  Everyone on the tower top ducked. Foley didn’t bother—he was standing directly behind one of the merlons, with only his head showing.

  Ten thousand rounds, he thought. The front rank of the dragoons disappeared as each musket vomited a meter-long plume of whitish smoke. Even so you’d have to be dead lucky—

  Something went crack through the air above his head. Something else whanged off the barrel of the cannon as it recoiled up the timber ramp and went bzzz-bzzz-bzzz as it sliced through a gunner’s upper arm. The man whirled in place, arterial blood spouting.

  “Tourniquet,” Foley snapped over his shoulder. “Stretcher-bearers.”

  The next rank of Brigaderos dragoons trotted through the smoke, halted, fired. Then the third. By that time the first rank had reloaded.

  “Lieutenant,” Foley said, raising his voice slightly—the noise level kept going up, it always did, old soldiers were usually slightly deaf—“see that the men keep their sights on the forward elements.”

  It’s going to be close. I wish Gerrin were here.

  “Damn,” Raj said mildly, reading the heliograph signal.

  “Ser?” Antin M’lewis asked.

  He was looking a little more furtive than usual, a stand-up fight was not the Forty Thieves’ common line of work, but needs must when the demons drove.

  “They’ve put together a real reserve,” Raj said meditatively.

  Somebody over there had enough authority to control the honor-obsessed hotheads, and enough sense to keep back a strong force to exploit a breakthrough. Gunsmoke drifted back from the walls in clouds. He wished the walls were higher, now—even with the moat, they weren’t much more than ten or fifteen meters in most places. Height mattered, in an escalade attack. He grew conscious of M’lewis waiting.

  “I can’t send Ludwig out until they’ve committed their reserve,” Raj explained. M’lewis wasn’t an educated man, but he was far from stupid. “Twenty thousand held back is too many of them, and too mobile by half. Got to get them locked up in action before we can hit them from behind.”

&n
bsp; M’lewis sucked at his teeth. “Tricky timin’, ser,” he said.

  Raj nodded. “Five minutes is the difference between a hero and a goat,” he agreed.

  A runner trotted up and leaned over to hand Raj a dispatch.

  Current stronger than anticipated, he read. Infantry attack will be delayed. Will advance as rapidly as possible with forces in bridgehead. Jorg Menyez, Colonel.

  “How truly good,” Raj muttered. He tucked the dispatch into his jacket; the last thing the men needed was to see the supreme commander throwing messages to the ground and stamping on them. “How truly wonderful.”

  “We’ll proceed as planned,” Jorg Menyez said firmly.

  “Sir—” one of the infantry battalion commanders began.

  “I know, Major Huarez,” Jorg said.

  He nodded down towards the river. The last of Huarez’s battalion was scrambling out of their boats, but that gave them only six battalions ashore—less than five thousand men. The rest were scattered along the river with the sailors and marines laboring at the oars.

  “Commodore Lopeyz,” Menyez said. “I’m leaving you in command here. Send the steamboats back for the remainder of the force.” Rowing had turned out to be less practical than they’d thought from tests conducted with small groups. Speeds were just too uneven. “Assemble them here. As soon as three-quarters are landed, the remainder is to advance at the double to support me. Emphasize to the officers commanding that no excuses will be accepted.”

  Translation: anyone who hangs back goes to the wall. Of course, if the scheme failed they were all dead anyway, but it didn’t hurt to be absolutely clear.

  He took a deep breath of the cold dawn air. Off a kilometer or so to the east the walls of Old Residence were hidden, but they could hear the massed rifles and cannon-fire well enough. A hazy cloud was lifting, as if the city was already burning. . . . Below him were what he had. A few thousand infantrymen, second-line troops officially. Peons in uniform, commanded by the failed younger sons of very minor gentry. Ahead was better than four score thousand Brigade warriors.