“Stand up straight, you goddamn cowards!” Folsom roared, battle loosening his tongue. “You think leaning a little is going to get you out of the way of a cannonball?”
Similar admonitions were handed out by sergeants up and down the line. The advance paused only briefly. The drums picked up again, going from the ordinary pace to the quickstep, and the march continued.
The range was still long, even given the advantage of height. Most of the balls went overhead, passing with a whine or a weird warbling trill. Others fell short, raising small explosions of dust and soil where they bounced or plowed into a furrow. She watched one shot jump three or four times off the rocky ground, puffs rising at steadily decreasing intervals, like a stone expertly skipped across the surface of a pond.
Winter saw the first hit, on the Third Battalion. The ball hit the ground just beside the rearmost company, raising a cloud of dust and chips of rock, and skipped off at a low angle. It passed diagonally through the block of marching men as though they were nothing more than a thick mist, leaving nothing but wreckage in its wake. The first screams rose, along with the shouts of the sergeants to close up the ranks. The march went on, leaving the little patch of blue and red behind.
The Preacher’s guns were still limbered, pushing forward as fast as their teams could drive them. At least six guns were in action now just below the crest of the ridge, and Winter could see the Auxiliary infantry, too, a solid line of brown and tan waiting behind their artillery at the hill’s highest point. They looked solid and unshakable, a dense block of men waiting to receive the fragile Vordanai columns with fire and bayonets, and she felt a sudden thrill of fear. Flags flew above each of the Khandarai battalions, crude white things daubed with the rising-flames symbol of the Redemption.
The Khandarai gunners were firing as fast as they could load their pieces, and as the Colonials closed the range the shots became more accurate. Roundshot screamed overhead, cracked and shivered off the rocky ground, and plunged among the marching blue-coated columns. One shot caught three men from the company ahead of hers, snatching them suddenly out of line as though they’d been grabbed by an invisible giant. Winter fixed her eyes dead ahead as her company marched over the corpses, and tried not to think about what might be underfoot.
The lead companies were taking the brunt of the punishment, and it was some time before the Seventh was hit. Even that was an accident; a ball caromed off a buried rock and came down at a high angle, plunging in among her men before bouncing merrily out again. It was as sudden as a thunderbolt from on high. A blast of dust and splinters of rock, screams and curses, and a gap in the ranks.
“Close up!” Folsom shouted, and the other corporals echoed him. Winter added her own voice, hoping no one could hear the trembling. “Close up! Close up!”
Movement at the edges of the line caught her eye. The Auxiliaries were in motion, and at first she couldn’t understand why; then she saw blue-coated figures on horseback around both ends of the line, and she realized they were forming square. They did it with enviable precision, going through the evolutions as neatly as a parade, until two-thirds of the Khandarai line had transformed into diamond shapes bristling with bayonets. Even Give-Em-Hell knew better than to charge home against that with his handful of men, and the cavalry broke off well before contact. Even so, smoke puffed from one face of the square, and Winter saw a few horsemen tumble from their saddles.
A heavy roar, closer to her, returned her attention to more immediate matters. The Vordanai guns had finally unlimbered and turned about, and there were scattered cheers from the infantry as someone hit back at their tormentors. The deep-throated boom of friendly guns blended with the more distant rumble of the enemy pieces into a solid wall of noise, like a thunderstorm that never ended. The Preacher’s artillerymen, firing uphill, had a harder shot than their Khandarai counterparts, but the Auxiliaries had presented them with a near-perfect target—the squares were combat masses, outlined against the midmorning sky. Soon gaps began to appear in the brown-coated line as well, and to close just as quickly as Khandarai sergeants shoved their men sideways.
The drums changed their tempo again, and Winter recognized the intermittent beats of a command. It was reinforced a moment later by a messenger on horseback, shouting over the tumult. She caught only a piece of what he said, but that was enough.
“Halt!” she shouted. “Form line!”
This, at least, they had practiced on the drill field. The lead company halted in place, while those behind marched sideways, then forward, until they came up alongside their fellows to form a solid three-rank line. That was the theory, in any case. Doing it now, with roundshot whistling overhead and occasionally plowing through the ranks, while the drums were drowned out by the roaring of their own guns, was a bit more difficult. Winter had to leave her place in the ranks when her company came up beside the Fifth, to disentangle Bobby’s end of the line where it had accidentally overlapped with the other.
The boy saluted as she hurried over, and between them they managed to get the men pushed sideways into their proper places. Winter was glad to see the corporal was unharmed, for the moment. His face was pale as milk, but his expression seemed determined. She wondered, briefly, about her own complexion. Her stomach churned with acid, and her heart beat faster than the drums.
Bobby opened his mouth to say something, but a blast from one of the Preacher’s guns drowned the words. Winter shook her head and clapped the boy on the shoulder, then hurried back to the center of the line. She got there just in time. The drums thrilled again, then settled back into the quickstep, and the whole long formation lurched into motion. At the center of each battalion, the Vordanai colors were unfurled, the golden eagle of Vordan on a blue field and the king’s diving falcon. They made for wonderful targets, and Winter sent up a silent prayer of thanks that her company was not expected to carry one.
Occasional rattles of musketry indicated that the Vordanai cavalry were still playing a deadly game of tag with the ends of the Khandarai line, spurring in close when they gave any sign of weakening their square formation and then turning away when the lines of bayonets firmed up. The Preacher’s guns were all in action now, throwing their shot through the gaps in the advancing line of blue. The Auxiliaries seemed to be standing the fire at least as well as the Colonials.
As the Vordanai line drew closer, the rumbles of the guns died away. Winter could see the Khandarai gunners hastily swabbing out their pieces and ramming a new round home, but the next shot didn’t come. It felt like a reprieve, until she realized why, and then her breath seemed to freeze in her throat.
Canister. The next round would be the last, unless the gunners planned to load their weapons under fire, and they meant to make it count. That last shot would be a canister load, more effective at close range, and so they were waiting.
It seemed to Winter that one of the guns was pointed directly at her. She could practically look down the barrel, a tiny black hole that seemed to expand until it filled her entire world. She felt as though she could see all the way down it to where the tin of shot waited, balanced atop its load of powder.
She knew, suddenly, that she was going to die. It wasn’t fear—she’d gone beyond that, somehow, and come out the other side. Just a cold, icy certainty that one of the balls in that cannon had her name carved on the side, that some invisible string of fate would draw it to her unerringly like iron to a magnet. Her legs moved automatically, one step and then another, matching the pace of the drum. If she tripped, she thought that she’d keep going through the motions, legs pumping stupidly in the dust like a windup toy. There was no room in her world for anything else, just the drums and the ground and the distant, deadly mouth of the cannon.
When the blast finally came, there wasn’t even time to flinch. The guns erupted with a flash and a billow of thick gray smoke and a crump like a collapsing building. Instead of the whistle of solid shot there was a pitpitpit like soft rain, the zip of balls passing overhead, a
nd the horrible thock when they found flesh.
Winter kept marching. She wanted to run, to hide, to scream. Most of all she wanted to search every inch of her body until she found where the ball had caught her. She hadn’t felt it, but that didn’t mean anything. She didn’t dare look down, for fear of seeing her own guts hanging around her ankles, or one arm shot clean away.
Beside her, a ranker—George, she recalled, and wished she could remember his family name—groaned and collapsed into the dust. The man behind him stepped past without looking down, and the ranks of blue closed around him, like a pond closing over a dropped rock.
The Seventh had been spared the worst of the volley. Two companies down, the main force of one of the blasts had gone through all three ranks and punched a dozen men off their feet, with more limping or rolling away clutching their wounds. Up ahead, in the smoke, the gunners were falling back, leaving their pieces behind to retreat to the safety of the main Khandarai line. That line, visible now through the drifting gunsmoke, stood firm in spite of the Vordanai artillery still slamming away at long range. Bayonets bristled up and down the ranks as the brown-coated soldiers stood at attention. All at once, at an unheard command from their officers, they brought their muskets to their shoulders.
Looking left and right, Winter thought for a moment she could see the battle the way Colonel Vhalnich must see it. Only one battalion of Khandarai was still in line, all its muskets available to deliver a single deadly volley, and that was the one facing the First and Second. On the flanks, the threat of a cavalry charge had forced the Auxiliaries to take shelter in protective squares, and they’d wasted their initial volleys trying to drive Give-Em-Hell and his men away. The Third and Fourth Battalions would face much less fire than they could deliver, and if the Auxiliaries tried to re-form now, there was every chance the Vordanai could charge home in the confusion.
That was small comfort to her, though. The forest of muskets in front of her seemed to stretch on forever. The men of the first rank knelt, allowing the second rank’s weapons to sight over their shoulders. It seemed impossible that anything would survive, let alone enough men to mount an effective attack, but the drums behind her beat on unconcerned, driving her forward like a clockwork automaton.
The volley exploded around them like a lightning strike, the flash of a thousand muskets going off at once almost immediately obscured by a billow of gunsmoke. Balls twittered and zinged past, and men screamed and cursed all around her. For an instant Winter expected to take her next step forward alone, every other soldier cut to ribbons by the deadly fire, but in fact only a dozen that she could see fell out of place in the front rank. They slumped over silently or with a shout, or fell backward, or dropped to their knees and crawled away. Around them, the march went on, driven by the relentless drums.
Somewhere in the cloud of smoke, the Khandarai were reloading. She wondered how long it would take them. She wondered what would happen when they had marched all the way, when they were so close the Auxiliaries could hardly miss.
“Close up!” Folsom was shouting, and Graff along with him. “Close up!”
Bobby. She couldn’t hear him. Winter looked frantically in his direction, but the line was solid now, and she couldn’t tell if the boy was still in place or not.
The drums trilled, stopped, and picked out a different rhythm. Winter stumbled onward a half step before she registered the change, and had to shuffle backward to rejoin the line. Her legs burned as though they’d been dipped in oil and set alight.
“Ready!”
She wasn’t sure if she gave the shout or not, but it echoed up and down the line, and the men obeyed. Winter knelt in place with the rest of the first rank, though she had no musket to shoulder. A pair of barrels swung into place over her head.
“Level!” This time she was shouting with the rest, in time to the drums.
“Fire!”
The world flashed white, as though lightning had struck a foot from her face, and then boiling gray gunsmoke washed over her. The smell of it, dense and acrid, drilled through her nostrils and into the back of her skull.
“Fix bayonets!”
The drums must have beat that order, too, but she could no longer hear them. The cry passed up and down the line, from one officer to another, and the long triangular blades came out of their sheaths and snapped into place.
Then, at last, the drums broke through, with a heavy fast beat that was the simplest order of all. Winter, throat scraped raw, couldn’t hear her own voice.
“Charge!”
The order was drowned by a roar from the men, a growling cry that grew to a scream. They threw themselves into a run, bayonet-tipped muskets leveled at the waist like spears, churning the drifting smoke into boiling vortices as they passed through. Winter ran with them, only belatedly remembering to draw the sword at her belt. They’d given her one from the stores—lieutenants had to carry a sword, after all—and the grip felt slick and uncertain in her hand. The blade still gleamed with factory polish.
Damn stupid thing, she had time to think, bringing a sword to a musket duel—
Plunging out of the smoke of their own volley, the Colonials broke momentarily into the open. Ahead loomed the abandoned Khandarai guns, and behind them the vague, menacing shapes of the Auxiliary line, shrouded in a haze of their own. Muskets started to flash along that line, not as a volley but individually. Winter heard the zip and twang of balls, and saw men fall, but the impetus of the charge was not so easily stopped. After the long, painful march, the Colonials had the enemy in their grasp, and they would not be denied.
She expected a collision—two lines slamming against each other, bayonets crossed in a vicious scrum—but it never happened. By the time the leading Vordanai were a dozen yards away, the Auxiliaries started to waver. First in ones and twos, then all at once, they turned and ran for the rear. The neat line of brown and tan dissolved into a chaos of running, shoving, shouting men, with here and there an officer trying to restore order.
The Colonials fell on those who were slow, or who’d gotten jammed up with their fellows. Winter stumbled to a halt, sword still raised, and the blue tide washed past her. She watched as brown-coated figures fell, run through from behind, stabbed while trying to crawl away, clubbed down with fists or musket butts. In seconds, there was no one still standing within sight. The rush of men had moved on, chasing the fleeing Khandarai, out the other side of the smoke and across the hill.
Someone grabbed Winter by the shoulder. She spun, sword still in hand, and Graff had to duck to avoid losing an ear.
“Sir!” he said, sounding distant and tinny. “It’s me, sir!”
“Sorry,” she mumbled. Her mouth felt clotted with grit, and she could taste the salty tang of powder. Mechanically, she tried to sheathe her sword, and managed it on the third attempt.
“Are you all right, sir?” When she only looked at him blankly, he raised his voice and said, “Sergeant! Are you all right?”
Some light was beginning to break through the clouds that had enveloped Winter’s brain. She shook her head, trying to clear it, and then at Graff’s look of alarm she raised a hand and said, “Fine. I’m fine.”
Graff grinned and clapped her on the shoulder. “We did it!”
We did? She looked around, blinking. Brown-uniformed bodies carpeted the ground, broken here and there by a splotch of blue. Out in the smoke, the now-silent guns loomed like distant ruins.
“Grayskins look pretty enough, but they haven’t got much of a taste for steel,” Graff said, sounding satisfied.
“Bobby,” Winter said, suddenly remembering. The Lord Above loves irony. “Have you seen Bobby?”
Graff shook his head. “I was at the other end of the line. He’ll be up there with the rest, I’d wager. The young ones always get a little hot-blooded.”
Winter stared into the smoke, in the direction they’d come. The slope they’d climbed was littered with human wreckage. Graff, following her gaze, shifted uncomfortab
ly.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to re-form. This may not be over.”
• • •
But it was. The First and Second Battalions, as Winter had guessed, had had by far the hardest climb. On the flanks, the Khandarai had broken at the first volley, trapped as they were in ineffective squares. Give-Em-Hell’s pursuing horsemen had reaped a rich harvest, and whole companies had thrown down their weapons and surrendered. The survivors—which, they’d learned from prisoners, included General Khtoba himself—showed no sign of halting anywhere short of the city gates. The colonel sent the cavalry to harry them as best they could, and set the rest of the troops to collecting the wounded and preparing the dead for burial.
The boasting and cheers of the men had died away as they clambered down the slope and began the bloody business. Those of the wounded who could still walk, or even crawl, had already made their way back toward the Vordanai camp, so those that remained were either unconscious, dead, or too badly hurt to move. Pairs of soldiers with stretchers came and went nonstop, carrying the badly wounded toward the growing hospital, while other details dragged or carried the dead to be laid neatly at the base of the hill. Still others collected salvageable detritus—muskets, ammunition, canteens, and spare flints. It was a long way to the nearest Vordanai depot, and the colonel had ordered that nothing was to be wasted.
Winter went straight to the spot where she thought Bobby had fallen, but there were so many bodies in blue. It was Folsom who found the boy in the end, curled up like a baby, hands pressed against his stomach. His face was so pale that Winter thought he must be dead, but when Folsom and Graff rolled him onto his back he gave a low groan and his eyelids fluttered. His hands fell limp to his sides, exposing a gory patch on his midriff, his bloody uniform now caked with sticky dirt.
“Hell,” Graff said softly. “Poor kid.” He looked up at Winter, then shook his head. “Better call for a stretcher. Get him to a cutter—”
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