by David Weber
“Okay, boys, saddle up,” Tamman said, and grinning dragoons filtered back towards their mounts. Their commander waited a moment longer, and his own grin faded as he watched the road. A handful of wounded crawled along it, their agony plain to his enhanced eyes, while others writhed where they’d fallen, and even unenhanced ears could have heard their screams and sobs.
He shivered and turned away, hating himself just a little because not even his horror made him feel one bit less satisfied.
* * *
Lord Marshal Rokas glowered at the map in the lamplight, but his glare couldn’t change it, and the reports were just as disturbing now as they’d been when they were fresh.
He scowled. The first ambush had cost him seventy-one men, and that at a range Under-Captain Turalk swore was two hundred paces if it was a span. The second and third had been worse. The Host’s total losses were over four hundred, and they were concentrated in his cavalry—which he wasn’t over-supplied with in the first place.
His scouts would be more than human if what had happened today didn’t make them cautious tomorrow, which was bad enough, but how had the heretics done it? Where had they gotten that many dragoons? Or hidden them? He wouldn’t have believed more than a hundred men could be concealed in any of those ambush sites, but his casualties argued for three or four times that many—with malagors, at that—in each.
He poured a goblet of wine and sank into a folding chair. How they’d done it mattered less than that they had, but ambushes wouldn’t save them. Unless they wanted to lose any chance to bottle him up in the mountains, they had to stand and fight; when they did, he would crush them.
He’d better, for two-thirds of Mother Church’s own artillery and muskets and half her armor and pikeheads had come from Malagor’s foundries. Rokas had never liked being so dependent on a single source, yet what they faced now was worse than his worst nightmare, for every foundry Mother Church had lost, the heretics had gained.
Rokas knew to the last pike and pistol how many weapons had lain in the Guard’s armories in Malagor. His figures were less accurate for the secular arsenals but still enough for a decent guess, and even if the heretics had them all, they could field little more than a hundred thousand men. Yet given time, Malagor’s artisans could arm every man in the princedom, and if that happened, the cost of invading that mountain-guarded land would become almost unbearable.
He’d finally managed to convince the Circle of that simple, self-evident fact; if he hadn’t, the prelates would have delayed the Host until first snow “strengthening their souls against heresy.”
But High Priest Vroxhan had listened at last, and now Rokas brooded down at the map tokens representing a hundred and twenty thousand men—the picked flower of the Guard from eastern North Hylar. His force was really too large for the constricted terrain, but, as he’d told the high priest, strategy and maneuver were of scant use in this situation.
He stared unhappily at the blue line of the Mortan River and sipped his wine. An infant could divine his only possible path, and Tibold was no infant, curse him! He was a seldahk, with all the speed and cunning of the breed; a seldahk who’d offended a high-captain and been banished to the most miserable post that high-captain could find. Tibold would know precisely what Rokas planned … and how to make the most of whatever force he had.
The marshal chewed his mustache at the thought. Mother Church’s last true challenge had been the conquest of barbarian Herdaana six generations ago, and even that had been far short of what this could become. If the heresy wasn’t crushed soon, it might turn into another nightmare like the Schismatic Wars, which had laid half of North Hylar waste, and the thought chilled him.
* * *
Sean MacIntyre stood on the walls of the city of Yortown and stared down at the fires of his men. His men. The thought was terrifying, for there were fifty-eight thousand people down there, and their lives depended on him.
He folded his hands behind him and considered the odds once more. Worse than two-to-one, and they’d have been higher if the Church had chosen to squeeze more troops into the valley. He’d rather hoped they might do just that, but this Lord Marshal Rokas knew better than to crowd himself—unfortunately.
He gnawed his lip and wished he weren’t so far out of his own time, or that the Academy’s military history hadn’t tended to emphasize strategy and skimp on the military nuts and bolts of earlier eras. Half of what they’d introduced to the Malagorans had been dredged up from remembered conversations with Uncle Hector. The rest had been extrapolated from that or gleaned from Israel’s limited (and infuriatingly nonspecific) military history records, and he intended to have a severe talk with Aunt Adrienne about her curriculum.
He paced slowly, brooding in the night wind. The pike was the true mankiller of Pardal, and most armies had at least three of them for every musket. The Temple Guard certainly did, and Tibold had explained how it used its phalanx-like formations to pin an enemy under threat of attack, “prepared” him with artillery and small arms, and finally charged home with cold steel. Yet for all their horrific shock power, those massive pike blocks were unwieldy; he suspected traditional Malagoran tactics would have given Rokas problems even without the “angels” and their innovations.
The Malagorans’ polearms reminded him of Earth’s Swiss pikemen, but with fewer pikes and more bills which, in the absence of any heavy cavalry threat, were shorter, handier melee weapons than those of Earth. Tactically, they were far more agile than the Guard, relying on shallower pike formations to hold an enemy in play while billmen swept out around his flanks, and Sean’s modifications should make them even deadlier … assuming they were ready.
If only he’d had more time! He’d let Tibold handle training, and the tough old captain made Baron von Steuben look like a Cub Scout, but they’d had barely two months. Their army had incredible esprit and a hard core of militia (Malagor’s self-governing towns and villages raised their own troops in the absence of feudal grandees), and over eight thousand Guardsmen had defected to the rebels, but fusing them into a single force and teaching them a whole new tactical doctrine in two months had been a nightmare.
Worse, none of his own training had taught him how to lead troops with so little command and control. He was used to instant, high-tech communication, and he suspected his most pessimistic estimates fell far short of just how bad this was going to be. His men looked good at drill, but would they hang together in battle when the whole world went crazy about them? He didn’t know, but he knew too many battles in Earth’s history had been lost when one side lost its cohesion and fell apart in confusion.
Still, he told himself firmly, if they did hold together, the Guard was in trouble. Normally, its phalanxes would have had the edge at Yortown, where flanks could be secured by terrain and mass and momentum were what counted, but that was where the contributions of Israel’s crew came in. They hadn’t gotten the volume of their troops’ fire up to anything approaching a modern level, but it was far heavier than Pardal had ever seen … and pike blocks made big targets. If he could get the Guard stuck, it was going to learn what the bear did to the buckwheat, and he thought—hoped—he’d found the place to bog it down. The Keldark Valley narrowed to a little more than six kilometers of open terrain at Yortown, and if Lord Rokas was as good a student of military history as Tibold said…
He sighed and shook free of the thoughts wearing grooves in his brain, then stretched, glanced up at the alien stars, and took himself off to bed, wondering if he’d sleep a wink.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Lord Marshal Rokas climbed the hill and opened his spyglass with a click. The morning mist had lifted, though tendrils still clung to the line of the Mortan, and his mouth tightened as he studied the terrain. He’d expected—feared—from the start that Tibold would offer battle here, for more than one invading army had been broken against Yortown.
The town stood on the bluffs beyond the river. Its walls had been razed after the Schismatic W
ars, but the heretics were building new ones. Not that they were really needed. The Mortan ran all the way to the Eastern Ocean, twisting down the Keldark Valley to escape the Shalokars, and it coiled like a hateful serpent about Yortown’s feet. The river swooped from the northern edge of the valley to the southern cliffs before it turned east once more, and like many a Malagoran before him, Tibold had drawn up beyond that icy natural moat.
Rokas’s glass lingered on the Yortown bridges with wistful longing, but the demolitions had been too thorough. The broken spans had been dropped into water too deep to ford even across their rubble, and he smothered a curse. If the Circle hadn’t hesitated so long, he could have been past Yortown and into Malagor’s heart before the heretics got themselves organized!
He turned further south. No position was impregnable, but his mouth tightened anew as he considered the fords the blown bridges had made the key to this one. They lay southeast of Yortown, where the river broadened, and raw earthworks reared on the western bank. He saw the glint of pikes and gleam of artillery, and his heart sank. Those fords were over a hundred paces wide and more than waist deep; the wounded would be doomed even without armor. With it—
He turned back to the north to glare at the dense forest which sprawled down from the valley wall almost to his hilltop vantage point. It offered his right flank a natural protection—God knew no pikeman could get through that tangle!—but it was a guard against nothing. The river was too deep to bridge, much less ford, north of Yortown, and no captain as canny as Tibold would put men in a trap from which they could not withdraw.
He closed his glass. No, Tibold knew what he was about … and so did Rokas. Too many battles had been fought at Yortown; defender and attacker alike knew all the moves, and if the cost would be high, it was one he could pay. It would trouble too many dreams in years to come, but he could pay it.
“I see no need to alter our plans,” he told his officers. “Captain Vrikadan,” he met the high-captain’s eyes, “you will advance.”
* * *
“God, look at them!” Tamman muttered over his com implant, and Sean nodded jerkily, forgetting his friend couldn’t see him. No sensor image could have prepared him for seeing that army uncoiling in the flesh, and he braced himself in the tree’s high fork, peering through its leaves while the Host deployed towards the fords. Musketeers screened massive columns of pikes, and nioharq-drawn artillery moved steadily between the columns. Armor flashed, pikeheads were a glittering forest above, and the marching legs below made the columns look like horrible caterpillars of steel.
“I see them,” he replied after a moment, “and I wish to hell we had the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch!”
Tamman chuckled at the feeble joke, and Sean’s dry mouth quirked. He wished he—or Tibold, at least—could be at the fords with Tamman. He knew he couldn’t, and he needed Tibold here in case something happened to him, but he’d felt far more confident before he saw the Host with his own eyes.
He sighed, then slithered down the tree. Tibold stood with Folmak, the miller who commanded Sean’s headquarters company, and Sean met their eyes.
“They’re doing it.”
“I see.” Tibold plucked at his lower lip. “And their scouts?”
“You were right about them, too. There’s a screen of dragoons covering their right flank, but they’re not getting too far out.”
“Aye.” Tibold nodded. “Rokas didn’t become Lord Marshal by being careless even of unlikely threats. But—” his teeth flashed in a tight grin “—it seems Lord Tamman did indeed teach his men caution yesterday.”
“So it seems,” Sean agreed, and peered into the green shadows where twenty thousand men lay hidden amid undergrowth as dense as anything Grant had faced at The Wilderness. They wore dull green and brown, their rifle barrels had been browned to prevent any betraying gleam, and they made a sadly scruffy sight beside the crimson and steel of the Guard, but they were also almost totally invisible.
He flicked his neural feed to the stealthed cutter above the valley, exchanging a brief, wordless caress with an anxious Sandy, then plugged into Brashan’s arrays through the cutter’s com. The Host was closing up, packing tighter behind the assault elements. With a little luck…
He shifted his attention to the pontoon bridges north of Yortown, hidden behind the woods. Pontoons were new to Pardal, and they’d been trickier to erect than he’d hoped, but they seemed to be holding. He hoped so. If it all came apart, those bridges were the only way home for a third of his army.
* * *
Stomald watched the Angel Harry make another small adjustment on the situation map. She was intent upon her work, yet he saw a tiny tremble in her slender fingers and wanted to slip an arm about her to comfort her. But she was an angel, he reminded himself again, and gripped his starburst, instead, trying to share the army’s mood.
The men were confident, filled with near idolatry for the angels’ champions. Indeed, they were more than confident. They no longer looked to simply defending themselves, but to smashing their enemies, despite the odds, and if they’d prayed dutifully for mercy, their fervor was reserved for prayers for strength, victory, and—especially—Malagoran independence.
Now he listened to the steady cadence of the Guard’s drums and sweat dotted his brow as he prayed silently—not for himself, but for the men he’d led to this. A surgeon began to hone his knives and saws, and he watched the shining steel with appalled eyes, unable to look away.
A hand touched his shoulder, startling despite its lightness, and he looked up with a gasp. The Angel Harry squeezed gently, and her remaining eye was soft and understanding. He reached up and covered her hand with his own, marveling at his own audacity in touching her holy flesh, and she smiled.
* * *
High-Captain Vrikadan’s branahlk jibed and fretted as ten thousand voices rose to join the thunder of the drums, and he turned in the saddle to study his men. The mighty hymn swelled around him, strong and deep, but the leading pike companies were tight-faced as they roared the words.
Vrikadan urged the branahlk closer to a battery of arlaks, creaking along between the columns. Even the stolid nioharqs were uneasy, tossing their tusks and lowing, and a gray-bearded artillery captain looked up and met his eye with a grim smile.
* * *
Tamman stood on the fighting step and watched the juggernaut of steel and flesh roll towards him. The rumble of its singing was a morale weapon whose potency he hadn’t really appreciated, but at least the Host was performing exactly as Tibold had predicted. So far.
Twenty thousand men marched towards the fords. As many more followed to exploit any success, and he felt very small and young. Worse, he sensed his men’s disquiet. It wasn’t even close to panic, but that hymn-roaring monster was enough to shake anyone, and he turned to his second-in-command.
“Let’s have a little music of our own, Lornar,” he suggested, and High-Captain Lornar grinned.
“At once, Lord Tamman!” He beckoned to a teenaged messenger, and the lad dashed back to the rear of the redoubt. There was a moment of muttered consultation, and then a high-pitched skirling. The Malagorans had invented the bagpipe, and Tamman’s troops looked at one another with bared teeth as the defiant wail of the pipes rose to meet the Guard.
* * *
God, I never realized how long it took! Sean made himself stand still, listening to the music swelling from the redoubts to answer the Guard’s singing, and felt sick and hollow, nerves stretched by the deliberation with which thousands of men marched towards death. This wasn’t like Israel’s frantic struggle against the quarantine system. This was slow and agonizing.
The range dropped inexorably, and he bit his lip as the first gouts of smoke erupted from the redoubts. Round shot ripped through the Guard’s ranks, dismembering and disemboweling, and his enhanced vision made the carnage too clear. He swallowed bile, but even as the guns fired the music of the pipes changed. It took on a new, fiercer rhythm, and he looked at Tibold.<
br />
“I haven’t heard that hymn before.”
“That’s no hymn,” Tibold said, and Sean raised an eyebrow. “That’s ‘Malagor the Free,’ Lord Sean,” the ex-Guardsman said softly.
* * *
Vrikadan heard the high, shivering seldahk’s howl of the Malagoran war cry—a terrifying sound which, like the music shrilling beneath it, had been proscribed on pain of death for almost two Pardalian centuries—but he had other things to worry about, and he fought his mount as a salvo of shot shrieked through his men. And another. Another! Dear God, where had they gotten all those guns?
A cyclone howled, and he kicked free of his stirrups as a round shot took his branahlk’s head. The beast dropped and its blood fountained over him, but he rolled upright and drew his sword. The range was too great for his own guns to affect earthworks, but he grabbed at the knee of a mounted aide.
“Unlimber the guns!” he snapped. “Get them into action now!”
* * *
Tamman coughed, watching one of his arlak crews as the reeking smoke rolled over him. A bagged charge slid down the muzzle while the captain stopped the vent with a leather thumbstall. The eight-kilo round shot followed, and the wad, and the crew heaved the piece back to battery as the captain cocked the lock and drove a priming quill down the vent to pierce the bag. The gun vomited flame and lurched back, a dripping sponge hissed into its maw, quenching the embers of the last shot, and a fresh charge was waiting.
He turned away, dazed by the bellow and roar and insane keening of the pipes, and his hands clenched on the earthen rampart as the lines of Guard musketeers parted to reveal the pikes and their own unlimbering guns.