by David Drake
Unless he committed his only reserve battalion of regular cavalry. . but the roll call of battles won by the last man to commit his reserves stretched back beyond recorded history. Here's where I start cursing sending Kaltin and Gerrin both, he thought. Then: It was the right decision. We can't have them catching us like a pinyata between two sticks.
"Suzette?" he called. She came through the curtain in her riding costume, holding the Colonial repeater carbine and thumbing a last round into the tube magazine through the gate above the lever. "Sorry, darling-you're staying behind this time. Officer of the guard!"
"Get me Colonel Menyez." Cavalry snobbery be damned; Menyez would have to hold the fort, and send the two columns south. Poplanich would be his second. . and if I'm ever in a position to do it, we're going to have a regular table of ranks and establish permanent brigades, he decided. Damn the political risks. We need formations that are used to working together.
Chapter Nine
Four men are just right for this, Raj thought.
Not a squadron of Poplanich's to clank and clatter in the night, though they were shaping to be good battlefield soldiers. Just himself and da Cruz and two of the Scouts, for quiet work in the dark. One was a cousin of M'lewis's, a little rat-faced man everyone called Cut-Nose, because most of his had been removed with something sharp; the other was a silent hulking brute called Talker from the northeast border of Descott, on the mountainous fringe of Asuaria County. The battalion rolls listed their former occupations as vakaro and sauroid hunter; offhand, he judged Cut-Nose for a sheep-stealer. Talker had the eyes of someone who just liked to kill-people by preference, though sauroids would do at a pinch. If either had come calling back home he'd have had the vakaros whip them off, or hang them for the County's peace. Both rode with an easy slouching seat, reins knotted on their pommels and eyes never still; their rifles they cradled in their arms, and both weapons had rawhide sleeves shrunk onto the forestocks.
And Spirit, but it's good to be doing something myself for a change, he thought.
It was very quiet in the hour before dawn, somehow blacker than deep night. Dew beaded the dogs' coats to the breast as they pushed through a rustling cornfield, chill on the soaked cloth of trouser-legs. Their way led through the last of the coastal plain, foothills heavy with fruit-orchards where springs welled up at the foot of the escarpment. Water rippled in stone-lined ditches beside the road.
Da Cruz reined in beside the general. "'Tis thissaway, ser," he said quietly, nodding at a rutted cart-track that led up the face of the limestone ridge that loomed at a sixty-degree angle on their west.
"This way's quicker."
The holographic map hovered over his vision at every turning, and beneath it he picked out the trail better than his eyesight could have done; somehow Center looked through the darkness even though It had only his vision to use. He remembered the visions It had shown him, of the floating satellites that had been Its eyes before the Fall. They could have looked through absolute darkness or deepest cloud. . Not for the first time, he wondered how an angel came to be condemned to the cislunary sphere of Fallen corruption.
The hillsides ran upward in steep scree-clad illex and whipthorn, then leveled off into a plateau; once a herd of wild grazing sauroids fled in honking, hissing confusion and a little later a wild boar held the way against them for an instant.
One of the troopers hissed a little through his teeth at the commander's certainty, and Raj smiled silently to himself. "That way," he said, cutting his palm over the fields.
There are advantages to having a legend, he thought.
* * *
"Cowards!"
Raj let his voice roar out over the patio, as the dogs picked their way in among the broken glass and rubble of the Squadron manor's courtyard. Horace stepped delicately over a Skinner facedown in a pool of vomit, and up the steps, not even looking aside when two Skinner hounds growled and raised their hackles at him. A human leg was hanging by a cord around its ankle from the wrought-iron balcony above the main entrance; judging from the bits and pieces scattered around, they'd hung whoever it was off alive and then used him for target practice until the body fell apart.
"You cowards hide like old women!" Raj shouted again. "Your ancestors die again with shame to see you run from battle!"
Roars and grunts answered him as troll-figures stirred amid the doors and shrubberies. A squat shape appeared on the balcony and jumped down, long gun over one shoulder.
"Eh, sojer-man! Neck-stretcher!" The banter was less friendly than usual. "What you want, eh? Tu peti lahpan hilai kouri ahvent nus coup, you little rabbit, run away before we get skin-mebbe we skin you now, eh?"
"I want you to fight, Juluk," Raj said, leaning over. "Or is killing farmers and drinking all Skinners can do?"
The chief grunted. "No Squadron men here-all run away," he said a little defensively.
Raj lifted one hand from the pommel of the saddle to point behind and to the left, southwest. "There are two thousand Squadron troops there, moving fast to the east-no more than three kilometers away. I ask you again, Shef Juluk Peypan-will you fight, or just sit here drinking while better men do battle?"
The Skinner chief grunted again and leaned on his long rifle, making a motion with one hand. Three of his men leaped to dogback and pounded out of the courtyard; others were moving about, readying gear and kicking their dogs to wakefulness. Then they gathered around the little group of Descotters, staring with the steady hungry gaze feral dogs gave guard-hounds. Barely half an hour passed before the scouts returned, shouting in Paytoiz. An exultant yell went up from the assembled warriors, and a deafening chorus of howls from their hounds. Juluk had been standing with a hunter's patience, both hands on the rifle and one foot crooked behind the opposite knee; now he straightened and unhooked a flask from his belt.
"Today we doan' skin you, sojer-man," he said, holding it up.
Raj took the ceremonial drink, fighting not to cough.
Gah. Juluk had really done him honor; not looted wine or brandy but arak, the date gin spiked with red pepper and gunpowder that was the Skinners' own favorite drink.
"I'll piss out this sauroid-gall on your grave," he replied politely. "Now, can you keep the Squadron troops off my men's flank, while we fight our battle?"
"Hoya-hey!" The chieftain laughed, and the others joined him in a barking chorus. "Six hundred Real Men against only two tens of hundreds of long-hairs?" he chortled, using the Skinner's slang term for any of the western barbarians of the Military Governments. "We chew their bones! We kill them all, take their dogs and cattle and guns, fuck their women, burn their houses! Hoya-hey, it is a good day to die!"
He pulled at one long drooping mustache, leering up at the Civil Government commander. "You come with us, kill long-hairs?" he said. "You got balls enough to fight like Real Man, sojer-boy?"
Raj looked up at the eastern horizon; the sky was paling slightly behind the distant mountains. On the other hand, I can kiss goodbye to any chance of controlling these wild men if I don't, he thought.
"Can you girls fight like me?" he said.
Juluk swung onto his hound. "Fray hums!" he shouted, shaking his rifle in the air. "Hoya-hey, it is a good day to die! Let's go fight!"
Yipping and howling, they poured out of the gate at his heels. Raj and his men heeled their dogs into the same loping stride.
"When we make contact, I'll send you back with the news," Raj said to the senior noncom. They swerved apart a little to avoid a cork-oak tree in the middle of a pasture, then set their mounts at a thorn-hedge beyond, leaning forward into the saddle. Their dogs soared, wurfing slightly and lashing their tails to match the pack-excitement of the Skinners' dogs.
"No ser," da Cruz said in the same stolid tone, as they landed and continued stirrup to stirrup.
Raj looked around at him in surprise. Da Cruz was a long-service man, only two years short of the thirty-five maximum, steady to a fault. He'd bought Casanegri Farm from Squire Dorton
back in the County on his last leave, the property he'd thought to retire to as yeoman-tenant. Bought it free and clear and stocked it well, with the prize-money and plunder from the campaign against the Colony, and married a sensible woman of middling years who was managing it until he returned. That had been his private dream, to be a well-respected yeoman freeholder with a good farm.
"Didn't figure you for a fire-eater, Top," he said with deceptive mildness.
"Ser," da Cruz replied; the slick surface of the massive scars on his face caught at the starlight. "Them barbs run me off. Not goin' ter let them see me turn tail again, beggin' yer pardon. Nor leave yer wit' nothin' but those two at yer back."
He jerked a thumb over one shoulder at the two Scout troopers. Raj looked behind him; the two soldiers were a half-dozen meters back. Cut-Nose looked nervously alert as they rode to battle, but Talker. . his face was still basalt-still, but there was the edge of a smile in his eyes.
"I take your point," he said.
* * *
"Gittem, Gittem!"
The Squadron battle cry sounded over the dry valley. It would have been difficult for Raj to estimate their numbers, if he had not known; they came in clots and bunches, each under the flag of some chief of note and his principal henchmen. They paused as they topped the low ridge and saw the Skinners ambling toward them on the opposite slope, grouping together into larger clumps. Then the clumps slid down into the valley, gathering speed. They howled, shaking their swords or muskets in the air, and they glittered in the dawn sun with metal and jewelry. Raj drew his pistol and pulled back the hammer; from the looks of it they would keep corning right to close quarters.
It was three thousand meters from one side of the valley to the other; reaped wheatfields flanked it, but the slopes were too rocky to be tilled. Even the dusty-gray olive trees that spotted it were few and straggly, although the remnants of tumbled stone terraces hinted that cultivation had been more intensive once. The morning sun cast broad shadows from every tree, every low native brush, throwing a blushing pink shade that seemed to foreshadow the blood to come. It was almost a relief to have only himself to fear for, at the beginning of an action; the dry tightness of his stomach and the brittle clarity of sight were less terrible than the knowledge of thousands of other lives dependent on him making the right decisions.
Juluk Peypan knocked the dottle out of his pipe and shouted. Men began sliding out of the saddle in the long loose line of the Skinner warband, scores of them. Their dogs dropped flat, and the warriors stuck the iron butt-spikes of their shooting sticks into the ground. The rest continued on their way at a brisk walk, holding their weapons across their laps with an ease that belied the ponderous weight of iron and brass and wood.
CRACK. The first 15mm rifle spoke, in a long gout of flame and puff of off-white smoke. A Squadron officer dropped fifteen hundred meters away, next to the main banner. Raj leveled his binoculars in time to see the round take off the skull at eye height and the man's head splash away from the lead.
"GITTEM, GITTEM!"
This time a full two thousand throats roared it out, and the whole Squadron host rocked into a gallop, big men on long-limbed dogs pounding through a fresh-raised cloud of dust. More of the huge sauroid-killer guns spoke, and when the dismounted Skinners fired, a man died at every shot. More than died-the thumb-sized bullets ripped off limbs, drove fist-width holes through men's bodies, and splashed their comrades with blood and bone-chips and pulverized flesh. Dead men were torn out of the saddle, and when the bullets struck dogs the big Ridgebacks and Banzenjis went spinning head over heels as if struck by invisible sledgehammers in the hands of giants. The Skinners around Raj hooted and giggled at the sight, grinning and jostling each other like little boys on an outing.
When the Squadron charge reached six hundred meters every Skinner opened fire from the saddle. The noise was stunning, loud as artillery, and a dense bank of smoke hid the front for a moment.
Spirit of Man, Raj swore to himself as the brisk wind tore it away.
The whole great block of Squadron warriors seemed to shudder in mid-step; it was like watching a sandbank eroding under a high-pressure hose. Where two or three in the front rank went down together, the men behind had to leap their dogs over the head-high obstacle or collide and join the writhing tons of man and dogflesh. War cries and the bellowing of dogs on the attack were suddenly swamped by screams of human and canine agony. The Skinners were not quite so accurate firing from the back of a moving dog, but with a massed target, even rounds that missed their first mark often went home. Yet the Squadron men kept the charge coming for a full hundred meters more.
One dismounted giant came forward at a lumbering run, whirling his long sword over his head. A Skinner thumped heels to his dog and rode out to meet him. The first shot smashed the steel out of his hands, sending it pinwheeling end-over-end into the sky in a blurring circle. The Squadron fighter stood stock-still for an instant, looking incredulously at his numb and ringing hands, then leveled the big blunderbuss slung over his back, fumbling with the hammers. Laughing, the Skinner went down on the opposite side of his dog, holding the pommel of the saddle with one foot. Lead balls hummed through the space where he had been, and he bounced back to his seat as if pulled by rubber bands. Then he was at arm's length; something bright flashed as he rode by, and the Squadrone toppled like a felled tree, a sheet of blood running from his throat beneath hairy clutching hands. The Skinner swooped far over and came erect waving a string of silver medallions the dead Squadron warrior had been wearing around his neck, whooping as he rode back.
Spirit, withdraw for the Spirit's sake, Raj thought; but the Squadron men had more courage than sense, it seemed-or perhaps just no command structure to tell them to get out. Instead they were dismounting and going to cover behind dead dogs or rocks or olive trees and bushes, trying to return fire. Skinners darted forward in twos and threes, sometimes firing point-blank; he saw many lope up and spring out of the saddle with knives in both hands, screeching like a powered saw going through rock. But at close range the shotgun blasts of lead balls from the Squadron smoothbores were taking effect. A Skinner ahead of Raj took one such in the face and slumped backward off his dog, his head a mass of red meat and shattered yellow bone. The others ambled on, the good cheer in their voices undiminished, their long guns bellowing with the regularity of triphammers.
Those Squadron barbarians could be good soldiers if they had training and decent weapons, he thought. This was a victory, of sorts, but it offended his sense of workmanship to see first-rate material wasted.
The advance continued at a brisk walk; Skinners were dismounting to loot the hundreds of Squadron corpses and to slit throats. A few were taking heads or scalps, ignoring the men firing at them from less than a hundred meters away. At this range the 15mm bullets blasted right through tree trunks to kill the men behind them. . Raj heard the sharper crack of Armory rifles from his rear and glanced over a shoulder; Cut-Nose and Talker were firing from the saddle. Ahead a Squadronite slumped down and lay draped across the low branch of the olive tree. Another leaped up from behind a low stone terrace-wall and turned to run. Talker fired again and the barbarian seemed to leap forward with a red splotch on the leather between his shoulder-blades.
Smoke hung over the battlefield like a drifting pall, heavy with the scent of burnt sulfur. A third warrior rose from behind the rocks, leveling his musket. They were close now, close enough to see the pockmarks on the man's face, the polished bronze scales sewn to his leather jacket. . and for both barrels to be circles, tunnels to hell. The battle had been curiously detached until then, but now Raj felt a raw stab of scrotum-tightening personal fear. He leveled the revolver and fired. The big weapon kicked in his grip, and he let the weight bring the muzzle back down onto the target. Da Cruz was firing beside him; bullets pocked the stone around the kneeling man. The hammers of his flintlock snapped forward. There was a dreamlike slowness to it, a flash of sparks as the flints struck the steel, a
puff of smoke from the firing pan, then a world-waiting pause until the gun fired, a jet of sullen red flame and smoke.
TUUNNNgggggg. A slapping blow snapped Raj's head around, throwing him back against the cantle of his saddle, and the chinstrap of his helmet broke. Savage pain lanced down his neck as the vertebrae grated together. Blood spurted from his nose. Whack, and something icy-hot coursed the length of his forearm. A second later two Armory rifles barked behind him and the Squadrone flipped backward, the blunderbuss arching from his outflung hands. Raj reeled in the saddle and forced himself erect; his helmet fell off and he grabbed it by reflex with his free hand, almost dropping it again as the metal bit at his palm. A gouge of bright steel and smeared lead showed across one side of the black enamel, where the bullet had struck glancingly. His arm was untouched, but the sleeve of his uniform tunic floated open almost to the elbow, cut as neatly as though with shears.
"Hunnh."
It was da Cruz. He was slumped over the pommel of his saddle, clutching at his belly; then his eyes rolled back in his head and blood came out of his mouth and nose. Raj reached for his shoulder, but he fell with a boneless finality that told its own story. His dog bent itself in a circle, trying to support the body with its muzzle, then sniffing frantically at the dead man. It flattened to the ground an arm's length away, whimpering.
"Oh, bloody hell," Raj whispered. Da Cruz had been a County man of the old school, and a first-rate professional. . and he should have died at home on his own land, among his sons. "The bullet doesn't care if you're ready," he repeated to himself, the ancient Army motto.
It had taken only a few seconds for da Cruz to die, but when Raj looked up the battle was over. Such as it was, he thought. The only living Squadron men visible were lashing their dogs into a gallop, or stirring weakly on the ground.