“Sorry, sir. I told my boys to pull out. We’ve had a dozen men hit already, and one of the new guns is down with a cracked axle—”
Marcus waved him into silence. Once it became clear that the Vordanai guns were no longer replying, the howitzers had turned their attention to the waterfront. Fires were once again burning through the sad little town, and each exploding shell was accompanied by a fountain of debris and burning thatch. Marcus glanced at the sky. The sun had not even reached the meridian, and the southern horizon remained empty.
“Archer,” he said, “get your guns back to the temple and start digging in. Get that shoulder seen to while you’re at it.”
“Yessir. But—”
Marcus was already turning away. “Runner!”
“Here, sir!” said a nearby ranker, a keen-looking young man with a crisp salute.
“Get down to Lieutenant Goldsworth.” That was Val’s second-in-command, now in charge of the forces along the waterfront. “Tell him he’s to grin and bear it until they reach musket range, then give them a volley and fall back. I’ll be waiting for him with the First, and we’ll drive them back into the river. Got all that? Go.” He gestured another man forward. “You, find Captain Roston. Last I saw he was up on the roof here. Tell him he’s got the reserve until I get back.”
On the other side of the river, the great mass of brown-and-tan infantry was stirring. Neat columns filed between the still-booming naval guns, re-formed, and headed for the ford.
• • •
The village wasn’t large enough for Marcus’ entire command to defend at once. He’d left the Second Battalion—the three companies of it that he had, at any rate—to hold the waterfront, and held the other three units in reserve around the rear of the temple, where they’d be reasonably sheltered from enemy artillery. Of these, his own First Battalion was the largest, more than four hundred men in four companies.
He found the four company commanders waiting for him in a sort of huddle. The sight of them made him wish for Fitz. These were all Old Colonials, which meant they were the dregs of the Royal Army officer corps. Lieutenant Vence was a former cavalryman who’d fallen off his horse and onto his head, which left him with a fragile constitution and recurring bouts of fever. Davis was a fat bully and a blowhard who was rumored to have been sent to Khandar for his part in the fatal beating of a ranker. Lieutenant Thorpe was a man after Adrecht’s mold, all lace shirts and fancy living, but with none of the captain’s redeeming qualities. And Strache might have been the oldest lieutenant in the service, at close to fifty. His crime, as far as Marcus had been able to make out, had been refusing to retire when he was supposed to.
None of them were the men he would have chosen, but they were what he had to work with. They sprang to attention as he approached. Two of them did, anyway, while Lieutenant Strache moved slowly to spare his back and Davis took his time heaving his bulk into line.
“We’re going in,” Marcus told them. “Up the hill to the front of the temple. I’ll meet you there.”
“Yes, sir!” they chorused, and hurried off as best they were able. Marcus spared another glance for the south, but there was still no sign of approaching relief. He looked up at the looming bulk of the temple and caught Adrecht’s face peering over the side. Marcus gave the other captain a cheeky wave and trotted back up the hill to meet his men.
By the time the First was in position, the Auxiliaries were nearly over the ford. As Marcus had hoped, their artillery had tailed off. Neither the naval guns nor the howitzers were accurate enough to fire in close support of the infantry without serious risk of friendly casualties. Thatch fires were still burning throughout the town, filling the streets with sweet black smoke that mixed with the acrid gray stuff from the guns and bursting shells. The damage was worst close to the waterfront, where scarcely a building was left standing. Marcus could see a few blue-uniformed bodies lying in the rubble, and other soldiers still working on the improvised barricades.
He turned to his men. They made for a motley picture, uniformed in a catch-as-catch-can mess of army issue and Khandarai fabrics that were only Royal Army blue in broad average. He saw a lot of worried faces, too, which made him uneasy. For all that they’d been through the bloody business before, the Old Colonials had never specialized in fighting opponents on anything like equal terms.
“I’ve told Goldsworth and the Second to fall back,” he told them, “as soon as the Auxies get close. They’ll have to break up to come forward, and that’s when we’ll hit them. Fix bayonets and keep moving, and we’ll push the bastards right back into the river. And stay close to them, or else you’ll end up wearing a howitzer shell for a hat. Ready?”
They gave a shout. It was less than enthusiastic, but better than nothing. Marcus turned back to the battle. The front ranks of the incoming Auxiliary battalion had reached the near shore, neat lines turned ragged by the challenge of marching through thigh-high water. As they formed up, shots started to issue from the twisted mass of wreckage that was all that remained of the waterfront houses, proving that not all of the Second had been flattened by the howitzers. The bombardment had stopped, and in the relative silence each shot sounded like a distant handclap, accompanied by a puff of smoke. The Auxiliaries ignored the harassing fire, taking a few moments to organize under cover of the embankment and then pushing forward over the top. Marcus could see blue-uniformed figures running in front of them, hunched low and moving from cover to cover.
“Follow me!” He waved down the hill and set off at a trot.
It was not the best-formed advance in the history of military tactics. A body of thirty or forty men came down the road behind Marcus, maintaining a loose order to avoid the broken bits of clay and timber the bombardment had torn loose from the houses. The rest of the rankers had to pick their way around the various obstacles in the town itself as best they could. But the Khandarai were in a similar state—pursuing the retreating men of the Second Battalion, they’d gotten spread out and lost any semblance of formation.
The first brown-uniformed soldier that the advancing First encountered gave a squawk of surprise, fired wildly to no effect, and took to his heels. The next pair, surprised coming around a corner, were the recipients of a dozen musket blasts and dropped in their tracks. Marcus waved the men onward, letting them get up to a run, and they drove the Redeemers back in front of them. Here and there, a few Auxiliaries in a good position put up a determined resistance, but without organization it was easy for the Vordanai to get around behind them and flush them out with muskets or the bayonet.
Marcus kept an eye out for Lieutenant Goldsworth, but never caught sight of him. There were men of the Second all around, though, and some of them decided there was more safety to be had with Marcus than following their own commander. The blue-uniformed mob grew as it advanced, pushing the Auxiliaries into headlong flight, until the Colonials regained their initial position at the top of the embankment.
The rearguard of the enemy battalion was still forming there, two or three companies in good order. The next battalion had just begun its crossing. If we’re going to break them, here’s our chance. He threw himself over the last obstacle, a makeshift wall built by the Second, and waved the men behind him forward. Barely twenty yards ahead, the neat line of brown and tan erupted into flames.
Being part of an attack was a strange thing, Marcus had always thought. It was like being a component in a larger organism, something that could live or die, stand or flee, all on its own and independent of the will of the men who made it up. Sometimes it drove you onward, into the face of what seemed like certain death, in spite of every instinct screaming for flight. Other times, you could feel it falling apart, turning at bay like a whipped dog, hunkering down or turning tail to run.
It was apparent almost immediately that this was going to be one of the latter occasions. The Vordanai broke from cover in dribs and drabs, as fast as each man’s legs could carry him, with no more order than a rioting mob. The first v
olley from the Auxiliaries slammed out as they crested the embankment, and men fell backward or tumbled into the ditch. The second round of fire, still aiming high, went over the heads of those who’d made it down the slope and cut down the ones who followed. Scattered fire from the Colonials opened temporary gaps in the brown-coated line, but they closed up neatly, two ranks loading while the third waited with leveled weapons. Bayonets gleamed like a steel-tipped picket fence.
Almost as one man, the advancing Colonials decided they would rather not be at the bottom of the slope when the next volley thundered after them. Those still coming down the hill flopped into the best cover they could find and opened fire, while those who’d cleared the embankment scrambled back up it, vaulting over the bodies of the dead and wounded in their haste to regain some kind of protection.
Marcus couldn’t recall the exact moment at which he, personally, had turned around. It hadn’t been a conscious decision, any more than any particular cow makes a decision to run when a herd stampedes. The overriding imperative to stay with the group reached down into the base of the brain and flipped all the switches, without consulting any of the higher functions. In his next rational moment, he was huddled behind the wall the Second had built, struggling to load his musket in spite of the protruding spike of the bayonet.
The semicircle of fire and smoke concentrating on the Auxiliaries was getting thicker by the minute, as more men of the First and some of the Second worked their way into range and found positions. The Auxiliaries fired another volley, but with no obvious targets the effect was only to patter musket balls off the barricade like hard rain. Then, at either an officer’s urging or an individual soldier’s good sense, they broke ranks as well and ran for the cover of the embankment, which provided a natural breastwork. Before long the rattle of musketry had risen to a continuous roar.
“Davis!” Marcus spotted the fat sergeant and gestured him over. “Hold here, you understand? I’m going to find Adrecht and see about getting us some support!”
Davis nodded, looking distinctly pale. Marcus left his musket, got to his feet, and hurried back up the hill, bent double to avoid presenting a neat target to the Khandarai below. Once he’d gone fifty yards, he risked a look back. The second Khandarai battalion was crossing the river now, a thousand fresh troops to oppose the four or five hundred he’d left behind. He broke into a run.
• • •
“For Karis’ sake,” Adrecht swore. “Can’t you be a little more gentle? You’re not pulling teeth.”
“You want me to go and get Rawhide, do you?”
Adrecht sighed and pressed his face into the pillow. “I’ll be good.”
The sun had set an hour or so past, and with the fading of the last glimmers of light the fighting had finally sputtered to a halt, trailing off as though by mutual consent. As far as Marcus was concerned, darkness had come none too soon.
He’d sent the Third Battalion to the front, just in time to stabilize the line as it bulged under the onslaught of fresh Auxiliaries. The enemy attacks started off strong, while their troops were still formed and in good order, but discipline quickly broke down amidst the narrow alleys and blasted houses of what had been the village of Weltae. The Colonials learned to give ground before the initial rush, then push back hard when the Khandarai lost their momentum, as often as not driving them back to the ground from which they’d started. This seesaw of a battle took its toll in dead and wounded. Brown-uniformed corpses littered the alleys beside the blue, but the Auxiliaries had more men to draw on, and fresh troops to begin each assault.
The worst of it had been just before sunset, when the third Khandarai battalion had gotten across the river and launched a mass assault right up the main street. They’d broken through the thinning cordon of Vordanai and looked set to split the line in two. Fortunately for Marcus, Lieutenant Archer and his remaining gunners had gotten set up at the top of the hill, and the relatively clear slope of the road gave them a wonderful field of fire. A few loads of canister had fractured the leading Auxiliary company, and Marcus had finally turned Adrecht loose with the Fourth in a mad charge that pushed the enemy all the way back to the waterfront.
Adrecht, unlike Marcus, hadn’t been quite mad enough to try to get to the river. The narrow strip of clear ground by the shore was now occupied in force, and the Auxiliaries had managed to drag two of their little Gesthemels across the ford and set them to blasting away at the Colonial barricades. Under the circumstances, pressing the enemy back across the ford was out of the question. Instead, Adrecht had hung on like grim death until nightfall, even when the Khandarai commander had once again turned his howitzers loose on the town.
It was during this period that the Fourth Battalion captain had been a little too close to a bursting shell. Fortunately, an intervening wall had absorbed most of the blast, but it had left him with a shredded uniform and a back full of clay splinters. Since Adrecht shared with Marcus a distrust of cutters in general and the aptly nicknamed Fourth Battalion surgeon Rawhide in particular, he’d generously declared that his wound wasn’t serious enough to distract a medical man from the more serious cases, and Marcus had agreed to do his best with a needle and tweezers.
There were certainly enough serious cases. Marcus wondered at how quickly he’d become inured to loss and death. He remembered the guilt of looking at the hospital after the battle on the coast road, but now all he could feel was tired. Something like a quarter of the men he’d brought to the village had been hit, to one degree or another. Goldsworth was dead, shot in the leg and bayoneted by Redeemers in the first attack. His replacement in the Second was a sergeant named Toksin whom Marcus hardly knew. Among his own men, Vence had been badly cut by a shell fragment and was confined to the hospital, while Davis was down with a “small” wound Marcus half suspected was imaginary.
He and Adrecht were in one of the little rooms on the second floor of the temple, which had once been quarters for the priests or nuns or whoever had dwelt here. There was little evidence left of them. The Redeemers had thoroughly wrecked the place before the Colonials had even arrived, and what few furnishings remained had been cannibalized by Marcus’ men for bandages and firewood. Adrecht lay on his bedroll, stripped of his coat and bloody undershirt, with his face pressed into a thin army-issue pillow. Marcus sat cross-legged beside him, with a damp cloth to wipe away the blood and a pair of tweezers he’d begged off one of the cutters.
“Almost done,” Marcus said.
“About damn time. If only they’d have got me from the front I could have done it myself.”
Marcus gave one of the remaining fragments a prod, and Adrecht winced. “Quit squirming.”
“The hell of it is,” Adrecht muttered, “I left all my liquor behind. ‘Won’t be needing that anymore,’ I thought. What I wouldn’t give for a bit of that sweet Gherai rum about now.”
“Rawhide would probably have commandeered it,” Marcus said. “He said he didn’t have enough brandy for the ones who were going to make it, let alone the dying.”
That silenced Adrecht for a moment. Marcus took the opportunity to get a good hold on the long sliver of clay and yank. It came out in one piece, thankfully, one end dripping blood. Adrecht gave a shudder but didn’t cry out, and Marcus went to work on the last splinter.
“There,” he said, when he’d dropped it on the little pile of bloody fragments. “Not much left but grit. You’ll have some scars, I expect.”
“Scars on my back don’t worry me,” Adrecht said. “Actually, I’ve always thought I needed one on my face. Not a big one, just a little nick. To give me that air of mystery, you know?”
“On your back is even better. Tell the girl you’ve been in the wars, and when she asks to see your scars you’ve got to take off your shirt and you’re already halfway there.”
Adrecht laughed, sat up, and winced. Marcus wiped up a few new trickles of blood with the cloth, as gently as he could manage.
“It hardly seems fair that you come through
without a scratch,” Adrecht said jovially. As soon as the words had passed his lips, his expression went contrite, as if he wished he could stuff them back in. “Sorry. I meant since you led that attack—that was a damned mad thing to do—not because . . . I mean . . .”
“I know what you meant,” Marcus said.
There was a long, awkward silence. Adrecht held up his tattered, bloodstained shirt, cursed softly, and tossed it aside.
“Give that to the bandage pile, I guess.” He sighed. “I had those shirts tailored for me in Ashe-Katarion. Only half an eagle for the dozen, would you believe that? The Khandarai were always mad for Vordanai coin.”
“Probably because a Vordanai eagle still has more gold in it than lead.”
“I always figured they were just fond of King Farus’ face.” Adrecht smiled, and shrugged into his uniform coat without a shirt. “All right. I think it’s time you let me in on the plan.”
“What plan?”
“The plan, meaning what the hell we do now.” Adrecht grinned crookedly. “It may have escaped your attention, but our relief column hasn’t arrived.”
“I know.” The southern horizon had remained obstinately empty all day. Marcus had left sentries looking in that direction, with orders to report to him as soon as they made contact.
“So we have to fall back,” Adrecht continued briskly. “Once the cutters have finished with the wounded, we withdraw out onto the plain. Leave a rear guard to confuse the Auxies, make them deploy for attack, and then run for it before they get here. With any luck we can break contact and head south.”
“Leaving them free to maneuver,” Marcus said. “If the colonel is still engaged with the enemy, and they take him from behind, it’ll be slaughter.”
“You want to stay here, don’t you?” Adrecht said, his voice flat. “Try to hang on.”
“Ja—the colonel said he was coming. If he’s been delayed, we’ve just got to give him a little more time.”
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