by David Drake
Jorg Menyez opened a file. “Ten percent casualties. Fifteen if you count wounded who’ll be unfit-for-service for a month or more. Unevenly distributed, of course—some of the infantry battalions that held the north wall are down to company size or less.”
“The 5th’s got five hundred effectives,” Staenbridge said grimly.
Raj nodded thoughtfully. “Ingreid lost . . . at least twenty-five thousand,” he said.
“Plus five thousand prisoners,” Ludwig interjected, around a mouthful of sandwich. “From their rearguard, mostly—they fought long enough to let the rest get back to their camps, but we had them surrounded by then. None of them surrendered until Carstens died, by the way.”
“All of which leaves us with about seventeen thousand effectives, and Ingreid with nearly sixty thousand,” Raj said. If the Brigade hadn’t had fortified camps to retreat to he would have pursued in the hope of harrying them into rout. He certainly wasn’t going to throw away a victory by assaulting their earthworks and palisades.
“Still long odds, but their morale can’t be very good. What I propose—”
A challenge and response came from the guards outside the door, and then a knock. Raj looked up in surprise.
“Message from Colonel Clerett, mi heneral,” the lieutenant in charge of the guard detail said.
“Well, bring it in,” Raj said. He’d left standing instructions to have anything from Cabot Clerett brought to him at once.
“Ah—” the young officer cleared his throat. “It’s addressed to Messa Whitehall.”
“Well, then give it to her,” Raj said calmly. He kept his face under careful control; there was no point in frightening the lieutenant.
The younger man handed the letter to Raj’s wife with a bow and left with thankful speed. Suzette turned the square of heavy paper over in her fingers, raising one slim brow. It was a standard dispatch envelope, sealed by folding and winding a thread around two metal studs set in the paper, then dropping hot wax on the junction and stamping it with the sender’s seal. Silently she dropped it to the table, put one finger on it and slid it over the mahogany toward Raj.
A bleak smile lit his face as he drew his dagger and flicked the thin edge of Al Kebir steel under the wax. The paper crackled as he opened it. There was nothing relevant in the first paragraphs . . . the others looked up at his grunt of interest.
“Our dashing Cabot fought an action outside Las Plumhas,” he said. A sketch-map accompanied the description. “He’s got the four thousand cavalry with him, and twenty-seven guns. Met about ten thousand of the Brigaderos, and thrashed them soundly.”
Nice job of work, he thought critically. Got them attacking with a feigned retreat—barbs usually fell for that—and then rolled them up when they stalled against his gun line. Our boy has been to school.
“What!”
The roar of anger brought the others bolt upright in surprise; Raj was normally a calm man. His fist crashed down, making the cutlery dance and jingle.
“The little fastardo! The clot-brained, arrogant, purblind little snot!” Raj’s voice choked off; there were no words adequate for his feelings.
Suzette’s fingers touched his wrist; the contact was like cool water on the red-hot heat of his anger. He drew a deep breath and continued reading, lips pulled tight over his teeth.
“Our good Colonel Clerett,” he said at last, throwing down the paper—Suzette scooped it up and tucked it into a file of her papers—“has decided that it’s pointless to join us here. Instead he’s going to head straight southwest across the Brigade heartland, wasting the land, and head for Carson Barracks to draw off Ingreid’s main force and free up the situation.”
The shocked silence held for a full minute. Then Gerrin Staenbridge spoke: “You know, mi heneral, that might just work.”
Raj gulped water and spoke, his voice hoarse. “It might work if I was leading the detachment. I might’ve told you to do that if you were leading it. Cabot Clerett—”
observe, Center said.
* * *
Reality faded, to be replaced by a battlefield. He had an overhead view, of three hills held by ragged squares of Civil Government soldiers. Columns of smoke rose from each, as rifles and cannon fired down into a surging mass of Brigaderos that lapped around like water around crumbling sandcastles. As he watched the wave surged up over one of the squares, and the neat linear formation dissolved into a melee. That lasted less than a minute before nobody but the barbarians was left alive on the hilltop. Those men turned and slid down the slope in a charge like an avalanche to join the assault on the next formation.
A flick, and he saw Cabot Clerett standing next to his bannerman. A dozen or so men were still on their feet around him. Cabot’s face was contorted in a snarl that would have done credit to a carnosauroid. He lunged forward and drove the point of his saber through a barbarian’s chest. Six inches of metal poked out through the back of the Brigadero’s leather coat. The blade was expertly held, flat parallel to the ground so that it wouldn’t stick in the ribs. It still took a moment to withdraw, and a broadsword came down on his wrist. The sword was sharp and heavy, with a strong man behind it. The young noble’s hand sprang free; he pivoted screaming, with arterial blood spouting a meter high from the stump. The bannerman behind him drove the ornamental bronze spike on the head of the staff into the chest of the swordsman who’d killed Clerett, then went down under a dozen blades. The Starburst trailed in blood and dirt as it fell.
probability 57% ±10, Center went on dispassionately.
Raj blinked back to reality, feeling the others staring at him.
“Well,” he said calmly, “the way I figure it, there’s about an even chance or a little more he’ll get himself killed and his force wiped out.”
Kaltin filled his wineglass. “You’ve taken the odd risk yourself, now and then,” he pointed out.
Raj shrugged, loosening the tense muscles of his shoulders. “Only when it’s justified. We don’t need to take risks now. With those four thousand men, I can wrap this war up in a year or two. The Western Territories have waited six hundred years for the reconquest, a year won’t make any difference.”
Kaltin’s right, he thought. A couple of years ago I’d have done the same thing myself. For a moment he felt Center’s icy presence at the back of his mind, wordless.
“Anyway,” Ludwig said thoughtfully, “they’ll have to detach a pretty big force to deal with Cabot. That should give us an opportunity.”
“Expensive if it costs four thousand of the Civil Government’s elite troops,” Raj said. He shrugged. “Let’s deal with the situation as it is. Bartin, bring the map easel over here, would you?”
“Most Excellent Mistress, there’s been a terrible disaster!”
Marie looked up from the pile of samples the merchant was showing her.
“News from the front?” she said tonelessly.
The steward shook his head and continued in his Spanjol-accented Namerique. “No, the main granaries down by the canal, mistress.”
He wrung his hands; Marie stood and swept out of the room, up the grand curving staircase to the rooftop terrace. It was a clear spring night in Carson Barracks, smelling as usual faintly of swamp. Some previous General had bought an astronomical telescope. Marie had ordered it brought out of storage and set up here, on the highest spot in the city; she wasn’t allowed out of the palace much, but she could see the whole town. When she put her eye to the lens the squat round towers of the grain storage leapt out at her. Smoke was billowing out of their conical rooftops, red-lit by the flames underneath. The warehouses were stone block, but the framing and interior partitions and roofs were timber . . . and grain itself will burn in a hot enough flame.
One of the towers disintegrated in a globe of orange fire that swelled up a hundred meters above the rooftops. Burning debris rained down on the surrounding district, and on the barges and rail-cars in the basins and switching-yards near the end of the causeway.
Fl
our will not only burn: when mixed with air, as in a half-empty bulk storage bin, it is a fairly effective explosive.
“Manhwel,” she said crisply to the steward, standing and drawing her shawl about her bare shoulders against the slight damp chill. The ladies-in-waiting were twittering and pointing about her. “Send all the Palace staff but the most essential down to help fight the flames.”
“At once, Most Excellent Mistress,” he said.
“The rest of you, back to your work. Don’t stand there gaping like peasants.”
All of them surged away, except Dolors and Katrini. And Abdullah, bowing with hand touching brows and lips and heart, a slight smile showing teeth white in his dark beard. He didn’t say a word: none was necessary. Thanks to a few gallons of kerosene and a few loyal Welf followers, and the Arab’s timing devices, Carson Barracks was now in no state to stand a siege. With harvest four months off, the central provinces around the rail line to Old Residence devastated, and every city short of food as winter stocks dwindled, it would probably be impossible to resupply to any meaningful degree.
“And Manhwel, send my personal condolences immediately to General Manfrond.”
There was a fairly good courier service between the capital and the forces in the field. Her lip curled. Good enough for her to learn how that fool Ingreid Manfrond was wasting his fighting men. Every second family in the Brigade was in mourning for a father, a son, a husband. With Teodore prisoner and Howyrd Carstens dead, he’d be even worse.
We cannot win this war, she told herself. And if Manfrond remains General, he will destroy the Brigade trying to.
The flames were mounting higher, and the red glow was beginning to spread as timbers from the explosion caught elsewhere, for thousands of meters around. Bells clanged and ox-horn trumpets hooted, but Carson Barracks was a city of women and old men and servants now.
Ingreid Manfrond must go . . . and there would be revenge for her mother and for the House of Welf. The servant shivered as he watched her smile.
She motioned Abdullah closer as the steward left. The guards at the corners of the terrace were well out of earshot.
“I suppose you’ll be reporting as well,” she said. He shrugged expressively. “Those devices you showed us worked well.”
“They are of proven worth, my lady,” he murmured, bowing again.
“Everything I’ve done has been my own decision,” Marie said after a moment, looking at his bland expression. “Why do I get this feeling that you’re behind it?”
“I merely offer advice, my lady,” he said.
“We’re like children to you, aren’t we?” she said slowly.
He must be conscious that the guards would hack him in pieces at her word, but there was a cat’s ease in the way he spread his hands.
“There is much to be said for the energy of youth, Lady Welf,” he said.
“Send my regards to Teodore,” she went on. “Tell him I was right about Manfrond.”
“He’s definitely pulling out,” Raj said.
The windows of the conference room were open to the mild spring day; the air smelled fresh and surprisingly clean for a city. Buds showed on the trees around the main plaza—those that hadn’t been cut for firewood during the siege—and a fresh breeze ruffled the broad estuary of the White River, past the rooftops of the city. A three-master was standing downstream, sails shining in billowing curves of white canvas as she heeled and struck wings of foam from her bows. Pillars of smoke marked the Brigade camps on the distant southern shore, where excess supplies and gun-rafts burned.
“Cautiously,” Jorg Menyez said. “The troops on the south shore are guarding his line of retreat southwest of here, along the rail line.” He traced a finger on the map. “And north of the city he’s withdrawing from the eastern encampments first.”
Kaltin Gruder rubbed the scarred side of his face. “We could try and snap up moving columns,” he said.
Raj shook his head. “No, we want to speed the parting guest,” he said. “From the latest dispatches, Clerett is ripping through everything ahead of him.”
A few of the Companions looked embarrassed; the dispatches were all addressed to Lady Whitehall.
Raj cleared his throat. “I’d say our good friend Ingreid ‘Blind Bull’ Manfrond isn’t retreating, to his way of thinking—he’s charging in another direction. Right back toward his home pasture at Carson Barracks, against an opponent he thinks he can get at in the open field.”
And very well may, if Center’s right, Raj thought. It was so tempting . . .
“You plan to let him withdraw scot-free?” Tejan M’Brust looked unhappy, his narrow dark face bent over the map, tapping at choke-points along the Brigade’s probable line of retreat.
“Did I say that?” Raj replied, with a carnosaur grin. “Did I? Commodore Lopeyz, here’s what I want you to do . . .”
They’re holding hard, Raj thought.
The terrain narrowed down here, a sloping wedge where the railway embankment cut through a ridge and down to the river. A kilometer on either side of him hills rose, not very high but rugged, loess soil over rock. Trees covered them, native whipstick with red and yellow spring foliage, oaks and beeches in tender green like the flower-starred grass beneath. The air smelled intensely fresh, beneath the sulfur stink of gunpowder.
Just then the battery to his left cut loose; some of the aides and messengers around him had to quiet their dogs. Horace ignored the sound with a veteran’s stolid indifference; in fact, he tried to sit down again.
“Up, you son of a bitch,” Raj said, with a warning pressure on the bridle.
Three shells burst over the Brigaderos line ahead of him, two thousand meters away. They were three deep across the open space, with blocks of mounted troops in support and a huge mob of dogs on leading lines further back, their own mounts. He trained his binoculars; the forward line of the enemy fired—by troops, about ninety men at a time—turned, and walked through the ranks behind them. Fifty paces back they halted and began to reload, while the rank revealed by their countermarch fired in turn and then did the same. His own men were in a thinner two-rank formation about a thousand yards closer, giving independent fire from prone-and-kneeling and advancing by companies as the barbarians retreated. It gave their formation a saw-toothed look; once or twice the mounted lancers behind the dragoons had tried to charge, but the guns broke them up.
The enemy were suffering badly, paying for their stubborn courage. Neither side’s weapons were very accurate at a thousand meters, but the Civil Government troops didn’t have to stand upright and stock-still to reload. Still, a steady trickle of wounded came back, born by stretcher-bearers and then transferred to dog-drawn ambulances. Their moaning could be heard occasionally, from the road that wound by the hillock he’d selected to oversee this phase.
Cost of doing business, he told himself. He’d not have paid this sort of butcher’s bill just to hustle the enemy on their way, though.
More firing came from the wooded hills on either side, an irregular crackling rather than the slamming volleys of open-field combat. That was bad country, tangled gullies overgrown with brush, steep hillsides and fallen timber. Jorg’s infantry were pressing forward on either flank, but it was slow work. Up close and personal, as the men put it.
Antin M’lewis pulled up. “Ser,” he said. “Barbs gettin’ tight-packed back terwards t’bridge. Them fish-eaters is in position.”
Raj nodded. An aide puffed on his cigarette and walked over to touch it to the paper fuse of a signal rocket; quite a large one, as tall as a small man with its supporting stick. The missile lit with a dragon’s hiss and a shower of sparks and smoke that sent the aide skipping back and the dogs to wurfling and sneezing in protest. Their eyes followed it, faces turning up like sauroid chicks in a nest when the mother returned. At a thousand meters height it popped into a ball of lesser streamers, a huge dandelion-fluff that held for a moment and then drifted northward with the breeze, losing definition as it went.
“That’s it,” Lopeyz said, from the conning tower of the first steamboat. “Slip the cables.”
The reddish smoke of the rocket drifted away. A wailing screech from the whistle of his craft echoed back from the bluffs, and the three mortar-boats chuffed into the current. Here the river was tending as much north as west, and the water ran faster. Their converted locomotive engines wheezed and clanged; he looked down between his feet and saw the sweat-gleaming bodies of the black gang as they shoveled the coal into the improvised brick hearths around the firedoors. To his right on the north bank of the river he could hear the firefight going on in the woods, and see the drifting smoke of it. A little further on, and the river narrowed. The banks were black with men and dogs, the rail bridge swarming with them like a moving carpet of ants—he could see that even a kilometer away.
Panic broke out at the sight of the Civil Government riverboats, shouts and screams and a vast formless heaving. The bridge locked solid as men tried to stampede to the south bank and safety. Bullets began to sparkle off the wrought-iron armor of the three boats, some of them punching through the thinner metal of the smokestacks with a distinctive ptunggg sound. He swung a metal plate across the opening, leaving only a narrow slit for vision, and shouted down the hatchway.
“Reduce speed to two knots!”
The central channel was deep here, but narrow, and there were sandbanks and snagheads all around. He looked back; the other two craft were following in line, the black coal-smoke pouring from their stacks and the river frothing in the wake of their paddles. Just then a monstrous tchunggg made the interior of the gunboat ring like a bell. Lopeyz clutched for a handhold and looked around.
“Four-kilo shot,” his first mate shouted over the engine noise. The helmsman hunched his shoulders and kept his eyes firmly ahead.
Lopeyz nodded. Light field piece firing roundshot, no menace to the gunboats . . . unless they got really lucky and took off a smokestack, in which case the furnaces wouldn’t draw and he’d lose steam. The danger was less unpleasant than the thought of how it would foul up the mission. I have been around Raj Whitehall too long, he thought.