“Could be, sir,” Graff said.
“Let’s assume not.”
Winter looked up at the boat Folsom had dragged into place. There was room for only eight or nine men to stand across the quay, shoulder to shoulder. That wasn’t a lot of fire, even with a good supply of loaded weapons. On the other hand, the enemy would be similarly restricted, and they wouldn’t have anything to hide behind.
“If they come, they’re going to get a kicking,” Graff said, echoing her thoughts. “I wouldn’t like to try attacking up this way.”
“Let’s hope they’ll be just as reluctant.”
• • •
As it turned out, they were not.
It was a further half an hour before the enemy commander decided the village was clear and marched his men in. All four companies, or what was left of them, formed up in the town square. They were three or four hundred yards from the edge of the quay, and twenty more from the barricade. Close enough for the Vordanai to shout and make insulting hand gestures, but too far for anything but an extremely lucky shot to carry.
There was one man ahorse just in front of the enemy ranks, who Winter assumed was the commanding officer. She hoped he’d display the same lead-from-the-front mentality that his lieutenant had shown earlier, but no such luck. When the brown-and-tan column lurched into motion, the mounted man stayed well to the rear. Winter signaled for her own men to make ready. Nine of them, chosen by general acclamation to be the best shots in the company, were crouching against the barricade. The rest of the rankers waited nervously behind them, spread out across the quay, sitting or on their knees to avoid showing their heads over the top of the boat.
The Auxiliaries were in a company column, forty men wide and a dozen or so deep. Their drummers quickened the pace as they approached, from the languid march rhythm to the pulse-fast beat of the attack. Winter’s men waited, bayonets already fixed on their muskets, until the column was a hundred yards out—still well away from the base of the quay but clear of the last few houses in the village.
At a gesture from Winter, the men on the barricade opened fire. The crash of nine muskets at once, in the echoing confines of the boat-crowded quay, sounded more like a battalion volley. Smoke billowed along the barricade, and here and there in the front rank of the approaching formation men twitched and went down, or dropped out of line and stumbled off to the sides. A hundred yards was still a long shot for a musket, but the target was wide and packed shoulder to shoulder, so some balls inevitably struck home.
As soon as they’d fired, the men on the barricade turned and handed their weapons to soldiers waiting behind them, accepting fresh ones in return. Winter watched the exchange with a touch of pride. For something she’d improvised on the spot, they handled it nicely. Another volley crashed out, more ragged than the first as the individual men fired as quickly as they could mark a target. More Auxiliaries went down. The brown-and-tan column closed up around the casualties, its ranks swallowing the fallen like some amorphous multibodied creature. Winter could hear the shouts of the Khandarai sergeants pushing their men to keep the line straight in spite of the losses.
Another volley, and another, until all cohesion was lost and there was simply a steady rattle of shots. New muskets were handed up as quickly as they were fired, while the balance of the company worked on reloading. The tread of the Auxiliaries’ boots was audible under the intermittent cracks of the shots and the fast beat of the drums. Winter watched the remorseless advance of the column with rising dread.
Come on, she thought at them. You don’t like this, do you? Break off—
The drums stopped, and then the footsteps.
“Down!” Winter shouted.
A moment later, the first two ranks of the column cut loose. The roar of musketry drowned the sound of the balls striking the boat, but Winter could feel the barricade shiver and jump under the impact. More shots zipped and whistled overhead.
“Fire!” she called, and the men who’d ducked behind their makeshift breastwork popped back up and continued their withering barrage. At fifty yards, nearly every ball told. The few that didn’t hit the dirt in front of the Auxiliaries, throwing up little fountains of mud.
Another volley from the Khandarai made the boat shake and splinter. Once again, the Vordanai ducked, which rendered the shots mostly ineffective. The Auxiliaries’ fire-discipline was breaking under the stress and excitement of battle, as it always did once soldiers were hotly engaged. The next volley was ragged, with shots continuing to sound a considerable time after the main blast, and from that point on the shooting dissolved into a general racket on both sides as men fired, loaded, and fired again as fast as they were able.
One of Winter’s nine leapt back from the barricade, cursing and clutching the bloody mess of his left hand. Graff gestured and one of the loaders took his place, taking up the fallen musket and firing into the gathering smoke. It was becoming difficult to see, but judging from the pinkish yellow muzzle flashes the Auxiliaries were still out at fifty yards, some distance from the base of the quay.
Winter could well imagine their commander’s consternation. Only his first two ranks could fire, but that still gave him eighty muskets engaged to her nine. On the other hand, Winter’s men were getting off three or four shots for every one the Khandarai loosed, and they were protected by the barricade.
Moreover, he had few options for rectifying the situation. The closer he got to the quay, the more the barges lining the sides would restrict his visibility, until he was reduced to the same nine-man front. The only other option was to charge and hope to carry the barricade with bayonets, but the tactics manual said that a bayonet charge would be effective only against an enemy already shaken or routed by fire, and the defenders here were clearly anything but shaken.
Winter hoped like hell the man stuck to the tactics manual. The Auxiliaries had plenty of bodies in the rear ranks to replace those that fell, she knew, but how long would they stand it? No matter how well trained, there was a limit, and no soldier liked to stand in a position where he was obviously getting the worst of it.
One of the men in blue flopped backward from the barricade, thrashing on the quay like a landed fish. Winter glanced in his direction and then looked away with a shudder; the ball had carried away a quarter of his skull, and he’d splashed the stones with blood and bits of slime when he fell. Graff sent another man up the barricade and detailed two more to drag the dead man to the rear and out of view.
She turned back to the battle, only to find it dying away at last. Either panic had triumphed over discipline or the enemy commander had recognized the futility of his position and backed away voluntarily. Whatever the case, there were no more muzzle flashes in the smoke, and no skirl of advancing drums. The men on the barricade fired a few more shots on general principle, then let out a cheer to hurry the Khandarai on their way.
It wasn’t until the cheering became general that Winter noticed that one of the soldiers leaning on the boat wasn’t joining in. She had a couple of men pull him away, and they found he’d taken a ball in the chest and died in place, painting the woodwork red with gouts of arterial blood. In the confusion of battle, no one had noticed.
That dampened the atmosphere somewhat. Winter stared out into the swirling smoke while Graff conducted the poor dead boy to the end of the pier. Her apprehension increased by degrees, until by the time he returned she was certain something was wrong.
“They’re not gone,” she told him. “We’d have heard them shouting if they’d really broken.” She looked around at her own men. “Quiet! Graff, get them to be quiet.”
“Quiet!” said Graff, and Folsom took up the cry at a bellow. One by one the men fell silent, all looking toward the barricade, and hands tightened around weapons. Finally, all that could be heard was the gentle creaks and scrapes of the boats riding against the quay, a little splashing from the river, and—quiet conversations, close at hand. Too low to hear the words, but Winter didn’t need to. A horri
ble picture had sprung full-formed into her mind.
“They’re not gone,” she said. “They split up and spread out along the shore, behind the boats.” While the wall of high-riding barges protected the defenders from enfilading fire from attackers on the riverbank, it also mostly concealed the bank from view. There was only one reason to take up such a position. “They’re going to try to storm us.”
Graff spat a vile curse and turned to the men. “Fix bayonets! Helgoland, you’re on the wall. The rest of you form up—no, stay on your knees! Two ranks, loaded weapons, hold fire until my command!”
“Sir,” Bobby said by Winter’s elbow, “we’d better move back.”
That rankled, but she could see the logic in it. There was no sense in being in the line of fire, where she might prove an impediment to her own men. She and the corporal threaded their way through the double line of kneeling men that Graff was organizing, and took a position beside Folsom and the remaining dozen men of the company, who were still loading muskets as fast as they could ram home powder and ball.
Graff joined them, and just in time. A shout from the men at the barricade warned that the Khandarai were approaching, boiling out of the smoke at a run. There was no careful drum-timed advance this time, just a swarm of brown uniforms and the wicked gleam of fixed bayonets.
The Colonials at the barricade needed no encouragement. They fired at once. At less than twenty yards, the volley had a dreadful impact, bowling men completely off their feet and spraying blood across those who came behind them. The charge had too much momentum to stop, however, and the Auxiliaries came on like maddened hornets, trampling the bodies of their comrades in the narrow confines of the pier.
They reached the boat and started to clamber over, stumbling a little on the still-wet surface. One man lost his footing and crashed back into his fellows, but more made it to the top. For a moment, they were silhouetted against the afternoon sky, brown on blue.
“First rank, fire!”
Graff timed it nicely. The men on the barricade had thrown themselves flat after firing their volley, and with the range barely over ten yards the Colonials had a target any game hunter would have envied. The roar of the volley was louder than thunder, and the men standing on the boat jerked or spun away, sliding off the curved wood to land bonelessly on the pier.
There were more behind them, though, pressed forward by the tight confines and the momentum of the rear ranks still pouring onto the quay. Graff waited until a few had gotten their footing before calling for the second rank’s volley, which cut them down like wheat. More tried coming over on their bellies, slithering across on the slick undersurface of the upturned boat, but the men who’d crouched in the shadow of the barricade grabbed these brave souls as they emerged and dragged them to the ground to apply their bayonets.
More dangerous were the shots that were starting to come from the Auxiliaries packed against the barricade. Cover worked both ways, after all—now it was Winter’s men who were exposed on the naked stones of the quay, while the Khandarai had the boat to hide behind. A man in the second line jerked backward with a screech, toppling against one of the barges. The rest, having retrieved loaded muskets from the fast-diminishing stock, fired back in an effort to force the Auxiliaries to keep their heads down.
That’s it, Winter thought. I’m out of tricks. Her men wouldn’t flee—couldn’t, really, with their backs literally against a wall—but at this rate they’d be wiped out. She looked at the tight-packed mob of soldiers on the other side of the boat and wished, absurdly, for a cannon—a single load of canister would have cleared the quay. Of course, if we could have gotten any guns across the river we wouldn’t be having this problem—
She blinked in disbelief. The mob was breaking up. Auxiliaries were starting to run, first those at the rear, then the men closer to the front as the pressure from behind started to ease. The rest of the Colonials saw it, too. Cheers started to rise again, louder and louder.
But—they finally had us! Why . . .
It wasn’t until Graff let out a satisfied sigh that Winter finally turned around. The end of the quay—the only space through which she’d been able to get a view of the river—was now blocked by one of the high-sided grain barges. The front hinged down to make a ramp, and men in blue were pushing past the cheering defenders, weapons at the ready. As the fighting faded, Winter could hear firing elsewhere along the riverbank.
Behind the first wave of fresh troops came a neat figure in dress blues, eagles glittering on his shoulders. His deep gray eyes took in the scene on the quay for a few moments, and then he turned to Winter and smiled. Winter, only partly recovered from her shock, managed a hesitant salute.
“Well done, Lieutenant,” said Colonel Vhalnich. “Very well done indeed.”
Chapter Eleven
MARCUS
“—Then he’d dragged a boat across the pier, to make a sort of breastwork,” Janus said, cheerful as a kid with a new toy. “You really ought to have seen it, Captain, it was a neat piece of work. Brown uniforms lying on the other side as far as the eye could see, and not even two dozen of ours so much as hurt.”
“That’s why you put them there, wasn’t it?” Marcus said.
“I expected them to have to keep off a few raiders. It was pure bad luck there happened to be four companies within an hour’s march. Most commanders would have packed their men onto the boats and rowed for it when they saw the odds.” He paused. “Most sensible commanders, anyway.”
Marcus could have done without the reminder that they’d nearly forfeited the campaign before they’d begun, just because a few hundred Auxiliaries had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. A symptom of inadequate intelligence gathering, of course. The lack of cavalry for reconnaissance had been a handicap from the beginning, but it made Marcus more nervous the closer they got to Ashe-Katarion.
“It may not have the sweep of Noratavelt or the romantic pageantry of Ilstadt, but if you ask me, there’s as much artistry in a well-executed skirmish as any proper battle. Or in any painting or sculpture, if it comes to that.” He cocked his head. “Another monograph, when I get the free time. ‘War as Art.’ I think the general’s job is harder than the painter’s; canvas doesn’t fight back, after all.”
Art had never been Marcus’ strong point. “Have you thought about what you’re going to say to the prince?”
“I’m going to tell him to look under his loincloth and figure out if he’s a man or a eunuch,” Janus said. “And if he does find a pair of balls, I’m going to suggest that he learn to use them.”
Marcus stopped in his tracks, so that the colonel walked a few paces farther before turning. Janus sighed at the expression he saw.
“No,” Janus said. “Not really. Has anyone ever told you, Captain, that you need to work on your sense of humor?”
“I’m not used to needing one around senior officers,” Marcus muttered. Janus, who had very good hearing, chuckled broadly.
The rigors of the march had reduced the prince’s ability to keep up his accustomed style, though his entourage made the best effort they could. He had an enormous tent, sewn together from four of the regulation army tents, but the exterior was plain blue canvas and the inside not much better ornamented. Much of what the royal household had been able to carry away from Ashe-Katarion had been loaded onto the fleet at Fort Valor. A few furs and some silk cushions were all the luxury the rightful occupant of the Vermillion Throne could manage.
Razzan-dan-Xopta was on hand to greet the two officers, but much of the rest of the entourage had been left behind, including the Heavenly Guard. Marcus approved—nothing slowed down an army like useless impedimenta—but he doubted the prince shared his reasons. He got the feeling the Khandarai ruler was skeptical about their chances.
Perhaps still stung from his last audience with Janus, the prince dispensed with the formalities. He barked out a question, and Razzan translated, for Marcus’ benefit if not the colonel’s.
“His
Grace is concerned,” the minister said. “He wishes to know how you propose to defend him from his enemies when your army is on the other side of the river.”
“I must admit that I cannot,” Janus said. “Please tell His Grace that I would feel much more assured about his safety if he were to cross with us.”
The prince said something petulant. Razzan said, “The Chosen of Heaven points out that, on the other side of the river, escape would be impossible in the event that you are defeated.”
Marcus eyed Prince Exopter with distaste. The nobleman had made his preferences clear through an endless stream of “polite” missives, directing Janus to appear before him to “receive guidance on the direction of the campaign.” What that amounted to, apparently, was retreat. In spite of the victory over the Redeemer army, the prince wanted to flee to Vordan with his gold. But the fleet would not sail without orders from Janus, and Janus had simply ignored the messages.
And this is who we’re fighting to keep on the throne? Marcus wondered again who, exactly, would be hurt if they just let Exopter scuttle away, if he wanted to so badly. The Khandarai certainly don’t want him back. In the end, though, it was the honor of the King of Vordan that was at stake, and implicitly the worthiness of a pledge of support from the House of Orboan. Not to mention the small matter of the screaming fanatics who want to burn us alive, prince or no prince.
Among the things that had been left behind was the royal makeup artist. The elaborate red-and-white powder that had been the prince’s mask was nowhere in evidence. Underneath it was a rather ordinary face, with sagging jowls and thick, pouting lips. A thin fuzz of hair was just beginning to sprout around the crown of his head, but a patch on top remained bare.
“If we are defeated, Your Grace . . .” Janus paused. “You may tell His Grace that if we are defeated, all hope of regaining his throne falls with us, and so I regard it as my duty to press the campaign to the utmost.”
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