by David Drake
They were probably a mix-and-mash from dozens of units, he decided, and no senior officers had made it over the defenses yet. Plenty of aggression—you’d expect that from men who’d kept on coming through the killing zone and the moat and the wall—but nobody directing them.
That changed as he watched. A new banner went up on the wall, and he could hear the roar from the Brigaderos. A running wardog, red on black, over a silver W. Teodore Welf’s blazon.
What they should be doing is enlarging their breach and taking the gate from the rear, he thought. Once they had a gate, the city was doomed. Welf’s clever. On the other hand, he’s also young. . . .
“Get my personal banner,” he snapped over his shoulder. He reached around to take the staff, then blinked as he saw it was Suzette handing it to him.
“I put the bannerman on the firing line,” she said.
The carbine slung from her shoulder clacked on the polished wood of the staff. Raj swallowed and nodded, before he braced the pole out the forward window of the parlor and shook the heavy silk free. It slithered and hissed, snapping in the wind and chiming—a flying sauroid picked out in gold scales on the scarlet silk, with a silver Starburst behind it all.
The stiff breeze swung it back and forth, then streamed it out sideways. Raj ducked down and pulled Suzette with him as bullets pocked the limestone ashlars around the window.
“I don’t think the Whitehalls are all that popular around here,” he said.
“Provincials,” Suzette replied, rounding out her vowels with a crisp East Residence tone. “What can one expect?”
“I’m a monkey from the wilds myself,” Raj answered her grin, pushing away the knowledge of what the heavy bone-smasher bullets from the enemy rifle-muskets could do to a human body. Hers, for example.
Instead he duckwalked below the line of the windows to one in the corner and looked out. The amorphous mob of the Brigade vanguard was turning into something like a formation. Welf’s banner was down among them now, and he and his sworn men—probably a cross between a warband and a real staff—were pushing the remnants and individual survivors of the storming party and the 5th’s greeting into line and behind what cover there was, even if only the heaped bodies scattered in clumps across the broad C-shaped arc of the cleared zone they held. As soon as that was done they started forward . . . right towards his HQ.
Perils of a reputation, he thought dryly. Teodore had a personal mad on with him; also he was probably apprehensive about leaving Raj in his rear.
“Runner,” he said sharply. “Compliments to Captain Heronimo, and shift all splatguns to the front immediately.” Suzette handed him a glass and sank down beside him, back to the wall; he drank the water thirstily.
“Young Teodore is a clever lad,” he said absently. The fire directed at the houses was thickening up, growing more regular. “But he’s making a mistake. He should leave a blocking force and peel back more of the wall, go for the gates.”
Suzette touched him lightly on the knee. “Can we stop them?”
“Not for long,” he said. “Not for very long at all.”
“Your Mightiness,” the courier said, as he spat the reins out of his teeth.
One hand held a pistol, the other a folded dispatch. His dog stood with trembling legs, head down and washcloth-sized tongue lolling as it panted.
“Report,” Ingreid Manfrond said. Howyrd Carstens took the paper.
“Lord of Men,” the dispatch rider said, “High Brigadier Asmoto reports we couldn’t break their square—it’s advancing, slowly. More infantry coming up from the river, marching in square, about as many again but strung out in half a dozen clumps. The High Brigadier requests more troops.”
“No!” Manfrond roared. “Tell him to stop them. They’re only foot-soldiers, by the Spirit. Go!”
The man blinked at him out of a dirt-splashed face and hauled his dog’s head around, thumping his spurred heels into its ribs. The beast gave a long whine and shambled into a trot.
Another rider galloped up and reined in, his mount sinking down on its haunches to break. “Lord of Men,” he said. “From Hereditary Colonel Fleker, at the eastern gate. Sally.”
“How many?” Manfrond barked.
“Still coming out, Your Mightiness. Thousands, mounted troops only—and guns, lots of guns. They punched right through us.”
The Brigade’s ruler sank back in the saddle, grunting as if belly-punched. Beside him Howyrd Carstens unlimbered his telescope and peered to the southeast. They were on a rise a kilometer north of the point where the assault had carried the defenses; the action over to the west was mostly hidden except for the rising palls of powder-smoke, but they could see the northeast corner of the city walls.
“I told you the wall was too fucking easy,” he rasped. “Here they come, guns and all.”
Ingreid snatched the instrument, twisting the focus with an intensity that dimpled the thin brass under his thick-fingered grip. The first thing he saw was Brigade troops scattering, a thin screen of mounted dragoons. Some of them were firing backward with their revolvers. Then the head of a column of enemy troops came into view, loping along in perfect alignment at a slow gallop. A half-regiment or so came into view—a battalion, they called it—and then a battery of four guns, then more troops . . .
“Get the message off to Teodore to withdraw now,” Carstens said. “I’ll get the flank organized.”
“Withdraw?” The telescope crumpled in his hands, and the weathered red of his face went purple. “Withdraw, when we’ve won?”
“Won what?” Carstens roared. “We’ve got our forces split three ways, thousands of them on the other side of the bloody wall, no gate, and eight thousand of the enemy coming out to corn-cob us while we look the other way!”
“Shut up or I’ll have you cut down where you stand!” Ingreid roared. “Get down there and hold them off while Welf finishes Whitehall.”
Carstens stared at him incredulously, then looked down the hill. The bulk of the Brigade force—sixty or seventy thousand men—was jammed up against the face of the Old Residence northern wall, what he could see of it through the smoke. Most of the men were firing at the walls and the towers, the ones who weren’t dying in the moat. Artillery ripped at them, and thousands of rifles. A section of the wall a thousand meters long was quiet, in Brigade hands . . . except that the towers were still mostly holding out. The north gate was a colossal scrimmage, the moat full of bodies. He looked over at the enemy force. Already cutting in west, their lead element was north of the main Brigade force under the walls. Carstens could play through what happened next without even trying; the guns—must be fifty of them—pulling into line and the Civvie cavalry curving in like a scythe.
“Get Teodore out of there, you fool,” he said. “I’ll try and slow down the retreat.”
“UPYARZ!”
Raj rose and shot the Brigadero in the face. He toppled backward off the ladder, but the one below him raised his musket one-handed through the window, poking up from below the frame. Raj felt time freeze as he struggled to turn the weapon in his left hand around. He could see the barbarian’s finger tightening on the trigger, when something burned along the ribs on his right side. Suzette’s carbine, firing from so close behind him that the powder scorched his jacket.
The Brigadero screamed; his convulsive recoil sent the bullet wild, whtaanngg off the hard stone of the wall. Suzette stepped forward, her face calm and set. She leaned out and fired six times, pumping the lever of the repeating carbine with smooth economy. Behind her the Master Sergeant was pulling the friction-fuse tab on a handbomb; he shouldered her aside without ceremony as the last shot blasted the helmet off a dragoon climbing up toward the Whitehall banner. The bomb arched down and exploded at the base of the ladder. Men screamed, but the heavy timbers remained, braced well out from the wall. Raj and the noncom set the points of their sabers against the uprights and heaved with a shout of effort. Steel sank into wood, and the ladder tilted sideways with a ga
thering rush.
“Stairs!” someone shouted.
Raj left Suzette thumbing rounds into the tube magazine of her Colonial weapon and led a rush to the head of the stairs. There were three rounds left in his revolver; Center’s aiming-grid slid down over his vision, and he killed the first three men to burst up the stairwell. The fourth stumbled over their bodies because he refused to release the rifle-musket in his hands. Raj kicked him in the face with a full-force swing of his leg. Bones crumpled under the toe of his riding boot, feeling and sounding like kicking in thin slats in a wooden box. The man after that swung a basket-hilted sword at Raj’s knees. Raj hopped over it, stamped on the barbarian’s wrist as he landed, and thrust down between neck and collarbone. Muscle clamped on the blade, almost dragging it from his hand; then half a dozen troopers were shooting down the stairway on either side of him, or thrusting with their long bayonets.
“Watch where yer shootin’, fer fuck’s soik!” a Descotter voice shouted up to them.
Muzzle-flash showed crimson in the murk from below, and the flat crash of steel on steel sounded for an instant.
“Watch who ye lets in t’fuckin’ door, ye hoor’s son,” the Master Sergeant shouted back.
Raj dragged breath back into his lungs; powder-smoke lay in wisps through the shattered furniture of the parlor. We’re not going to stop the next one, he thought with sudden cold clarity.
“Raj.” Suzette’s voice was raised just enough to cut through the background roar. “Who are those men?”
He stepped to the side window. Just visible to the left—the west—were troops marching down the cleared zone behind the walls. They wore Civil Government uniforms, but there weren’t any troops in that direction except the infantry holding the north wall, who had all they could cope with and more right now. And none of the Regulars in his command marched that sloppily. They weren’t marching at all, not double-timing, they were running. Running like men fleeing a battle, except that they were running straight into one.
Raj was fairly sure Teodore Welf was still alive, from the speed of the reaction. A block of Brigaderos peeled off from the stream coming over the wall and swung out to confront the—
Militia, Raj realized. It’s the local militia.
The confused-looking group halted and gave fire; too ragged to be a real volley, a long staccato flurry. The Brigaderos heading for them returned it, but they didn’t bother to stop. They charged, while the militiamen fumbled with ramrods and percussion caps. Raj gave a silent whistle of amazement; the city troops didn’t disintegrate in panic. Some did, running back along the way they’d come, but most stood to meet the gray-and-black tide. They were going to be slaughtered when it came to hand-to-hand, but they were trying, at least.
“Ser,” the Master Sergeant said at his elbow. “Got a bunch’ve t’locals comin’ up behind us, say they wants t’help, loik.”
The seamed, scarred face of the noncom looked deeply skeptical.
“Bring them forward, Sergeant,” Raj said. “By all means. Beggars can’t be choosers.”
Ludwig Bellamy reined in. “Cease fire!” he shouted, and the trumpets echoed it. The last of the enemy ahead were hoisting reversed weapons, or helmets on the muzzles of their rifles. “Get these men under guard.”
Silence fell, comparative silence after the roar he’d grown accustomed to over the last two hours. He waved his bannerman forward, and they rode past the last Brigaderos holdouts within the walls of Old Residence and down the wall toward Messer Raj’s command post.
Bellamy looked around. “Spirit of Man,” he swore.
The carnage around the gate had been bad. Probably more bodies than here. It had taken a fair amount of time to get the way unblocked. But this looked every bit as bad; smelled as bad, as far as he could tell through a nose already stunned into oblivion today. The whole two-hundred-meter width of cleared ground inside the wall was carpeted with bodies, no matter how far they rode; black-and-gray uniformed Brigaderos dragoons, armored lancers, men in the blue and maroon of the Civil Government. Stretcher-bearers had to step on the dead to get at the wounded, and there were thousands. More bodies hung from the walls, or carpeted the earth ramp where the enemy had tried to retreat when they realized what was happening outside. Occasionally a patch of living Brigaderos sat with their hands behind their heads, or putting field-dressings on their own wounded.
He stopped at a mound of dead gathered more thickly around a banner of a running wardog; the pole still canted up from the earth, but the bodies were two and three deep in a circle around it. Armor rattled.
“Stretcher-bearers!” he called sharply, reigning aside. A pair trotted over. “This one’s alive.”
“Sir. Orders are for our wounded first.”
“This is an exception,” Ludwig bit out. The man’s armor was silver-chased and there had been plumes in his helmet. “Get him to the aid station, now.” Although from the amount of blood and the number of bullet holes, it might be futile.
The three-barred visor was up, and the face inside it was enough like Ludwig Bellamy’s that they might have been brothers. It was something far more practical that prompted his action, though. If that was Teodore Welf, he had two presents for Messer Raj today.
He swore again when they finally pulled up in front of the forward HQ building. The stone facing looked as if it had been chewed. Men were sitting in the windows, or leaning against the walls, looking a little lost. Another stood in the main entranceway. A tall man, his face black as a Zanjian’s with powder-smoke. Suzette Whitehall stood beside him with her arm around his waist.
Ludwig Bellamy drew rein and saluted. “Mi heneral,” he said.
Raj grinned, a ghastly expression in the sooty expanse of his face. When he removed his helmet, there was a lighter streak along the upper part of his forehead.
“Took you long enough,” he said.
Bellamy motioned a man forward; he dismounted and laid a flag at Raj’s feet. “It’s the flag of Howyrd Carstens, Grand Constable of the Brigade,” he said. “We would have brought the head, but . . .” Ludwig shrugged. A seventy-five-millimeter shell had landed close enough to Carstens that there really wasn’t much left besides the signet ring they’d identified him with.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“It seems a good deal of trouble to go to, to hang me healthy,” Teodore Welf said; his voice was low, because it hurt to breathe deeply.
He was sitting propped up in the big four-poster bed, swathed in bandages from neck to waist, one arm immobilized in splints. A priest-doctor in the ear-to-ear tonsure of a Spirit of Man of This Earth cleric stood by the bedside, glaring at Raj and Suzette and the Companions; he was of the Brigade nobleman’s own household, allowed in during the after-battle truce. It was a cold spring night, and rain beat at the diamond-pane windows, but a kerosene lamp and a cheerful fire kept the bedroom warm. The flames lit the inlaid furniture and tapestries; also the hard faces of the fighting men behind Raj.
“I’m a thrifty man,” Raj said, in Namerique almost as good as Teodore’s Sponglish. “I’ve no intention of hanging you, or anything else unpleasant.”
“Excellent, Your Excellency; I’ve had a surfeit of unpleasantness just lately,” the young nobleman said. “Did you take Howyrd, too?”
“The Grand Constable? I’m afraid he died holding the rearguard.”
Welf sighed. “Spirit have mercy on the Brigade,” he said.
“I doubt that the Spirit will, just now, since the Spirit has tasked me with reuniting civilization and you’re trying to stop me,” Raj said.
The young Brigade noble looked at him; his eyes went a little wider when he saw the flat sincerity in Raj’s.
“Particularly since the Spirit has given you Ingreid Manfrond for a ruler,” Raj concluded.
Teodore was a young man, and still shaken by the wounds and the drugs the surgeons had given him. His agreement almost slipped out.
Raj nodded. “We’ll talk more when you’re feeling better,” he
said, and raised a brow at the priest.
The cleric bowed his head grudgingly. “Lord Welf will live,” he said. “Fractured ribs, broken arm and collarbone, and tissue damage. Much blood loss, but he will walk in a month. The arm, longer.”
A servant came in with a tray bearing tea and a steaming bowl of broth, dodging with a squeak as she met the high-ranking party going out through the same entranceway. Nothing spilled on the tray despite her skittering sideways, a feat which required considerable dexterity and some risk of dumping the hot liquids on her own head. Raj absently nodded approval as they tramped down the corridor. It wasn’t far to his own quarters; Teodore Welf was one ace he intended to keep quite close to his chest.
“I suppose you’ve got some use for him?” Gerrin Staenbridge said, as they seated themselves around the table. Orderlies set out a cold meal and withdrew. “Apart from making sure that Ingreid doesn’t have the use of him, that is.”
Raj nodded. “Any number of uses. For one thing, while he’s here he can’t replace Manfrond—which would be a very bad bargain for us.”
Staenbridge laughed, then winced; there was a bandage around his own head. “I imagine he’s not too charitably inclined toward the Lord of Men right now,” he said. “About as much we were toward our good Colonel Osterville down in the Southern Territories.”
Kaltin Gruder drew the edge of his palm across his neck with an appropriate sound. Gerrin nodded.
“I might have done that, if we’d had a war down there after you left,” he said to Raj. “He’d have gotten us all killed.”
Raj nodded. “Young Teodore probably does feel like that,” he said judiciously. “Something we can make use of later, perhaps. Now, to business.”