The Rose Sea

by S. M. Stirling

  The watching officers took notes, or used little prespelled eidolons to record the images as the Tseldene forces tramped through the suburbs of An Tiram and out into the fields.

  "I make that… fifty thousand, thirty thousand foot, twenty thousand mounted, one hundred light guns, fifty heavy," Brigadier Multin said. "They outnumber us by about a quarter, but we've got the edge in artillery."

  Willek nodded decisively. "We'll await them here," she said, looking up.

  The Tykissian host was deployed in a north-south line just behind the crest of a ridge; the land was nearly flat, with only scattered trees and rocky limestone soil sparsely covered in lion-colored grass. A few thousand yards to the west, with almost shocking suddenness, the rich flat soil of the Tiram delta opened out. Trees edged the irrigation canals there, and there were orchards and groves and thick-scattered villages; besides which, the ground was fluffy-soft alluvium, a deadly trap for the heavier northern horses. The highway ran from the high ground down onto the delta and continued on a built-up causeway, surfaced with granite blocks.

  "We'll meet them here," she said again. "Best ground for it, and the fleet can secure our right flank."

  More nods. Willek fought back a grin. Perfect. Everything was going perfectly. And the troublesome Bren Morkaarin was very dead, along with his odd companions. Dead and at the bottom of the sea in Kevo's cold embrace. Not even their spirits could return to haunt her; the blood-mirror's prophecy had been averted.

  The wizard-priest gave a wailing cry and collapsed, blood running from nose and mouth and in red tears down his cheeks. A second later the acolyte toppled forward and landed in an impossible arc with only heels and head touching the ground Healer-priests rushed forward; one cried out in the ancient tongue and struck the surface of the crystal with a ceremonial whip. The image in the clear hard substance rippled like water and vanished, leaving only a pool of brownish red with eyes opening and closing. The priest struck again and again, until that faded and left inert blankness.

  "Counterspell," she said then, wiping the sweat from her face. "Very powerful, very evil—the wizard who cast it drew on the strength of the One."

  "Surprised we got that much," a general said.

  "The Tseldenes are strong in technique, but they don't have many gifted born among them," the priest said absently. "Too many generations of intrigue, killing off their best before they could breed."

  The Tykissians all nodded; that was one reason the Old Empire had fallen. Its rulers had all been wizards, and so prime targets in its internal wars. Their own ancestors had been wiser; all those with the talent were devoted to the service of the Three, and priests of the Three had to have children by holy law, although they were raised by others.

  "To your units," Willek said, mounting the horse an aide held for her.

  She was a competent if undistinguished rider, and the mount superbly trained. It barely shied at the lumbering six-hitch coach where the stiff, immobile figure of Shemro sat. It did start a little when a war-priest came loping up, a wand held loosely in one hand. Willek recognized him instantly: one of her Inner Circle

  , the loyal traitor. From his expression, he'd realized she didn't mean to throw the battle to Darkist after all.

  Her hand darted to her neck and she pulled a talisman free, a common phallic fertility symbol in appearance. She crushed it, twisting it savagely in one steel-gloved hand. Willek had gotten to know the priest well over the years; on one occasion, far better than she'd really wanted to. The result was worthwhile, though: like calls to like. The priest stopped, his face opening in a soundless scream of agony. Both hands clutched his groin, but they couldn't stop the spouting flow of blood. He dropped, kicked, and died, in less time than it took for Willek to toss the talisman aside into the dust and confusion of the ground.

  "Quickly, someone take that up," she said. "Enemy war magic struck him."

  Now, to move those cavalry forward. It never hurt to anticipate a move…

  "We'll be before the gates of An Tiram before week's end," she said. The soldiers around her cheered as she spurred forward.

  "What's that?" Karah asked.

  It was a peculiar sound, like a very large door being slammed shut with a thud, somewhere in the distance. The whole party were marching down a road heading north by northeast, and the date groves on either side made it hard to judge where the sound was coming from. The shade was welcome; the day was hot enough to make her think nostalgically about Derkin's weather. No breath of wind disturbed the water in the irrigation canals at the foot of the tall palms. Sunlight glittered fiercely on it, where beams came down through the long serrated leaves; otherwise there was blue-tinted gloom at ground level. Dust and gravel crunched under the horses' hooves, and under the hobnailed boots of the column behind her.

  Glad I'm not wearing that armor, she thought, slapping at a mosquito: they'd only recovered a few sets from the wreckage, and none of them fit her. Sweat soaked her jacket and rasped at her skin with salt crystals. Some of the others, the ones from the northern provinces, were turning boiled-lobster red even with their hats on. For once, she blessed the natural olive of her complexion.

  Bren pulled his horse in beside her—it snorted and rolled its eyes at the strength of his pull. She'd noticed that the Tseldene mounts were trained to very light aids, as light as a Grenlaarin horse.

  "Lighter on the rein there, captain," she said automatically.

  "These southron horses don't like being shouted at." Again: "What is that?" The sound was repeated, more and more thuds, with a muffled popping beneath it this time.

  "Guns," Bren said, standing in the stirrups and shading his eyes. "That's artillery. Quite a bit of it, and not too far away."

  They cantered out of the date grove and into fields of cotton, just opening their bolls. Pickers' baskets lay abandoned between the rows, full of the white fluffy fiber, startling against the dusty black of the alluvial soil. The road ran arrow-straight before them, crossing canals on round-arched brick bridges. Beyond the cottonfields were squares of maize and durra and wheat, and beyond those more trees; oranges, she thought. And beyond those, dirty-white smoke was rising in straight columns into the aching blue of the southern sky.

  "And muskets," Bren added. He turned in the saddle: "Sergeant Ddrad! Troops to drink and fill their waterbottles, then advance at the quickstep!" Under his breath: "Let's see how our great and good Grand Admiral is screwing up."

  The sun was like a club on her head in the open field, but suddenly Karah remembered her armor with a good deal more affection.

  "A skirmish?" she asked.

  "Battle," Bren said shortly, deep in thought. "From the smoke and the noise, a fairly big one, too." He looked at her, opened his mouth, paused as if reluctant, then glanced past her to Amourgin: "Take the scouts forward, corporal." Unwillingly, he added to the three of them, "Be careful."

  He watched them go for a moment, then shook his head. Part of the job, sending comrades into danger, he thought. Although Karah was perhaps a little more than a comrade… He shook his head again.

  Father Solmin came up with a sack full of the cotton bolls. "Packing for bandages," he said. "We'll need it before the day's done," he went on, cocking an experienced ear at the sound of firing. "You might detail the law-speaker to help me with the wounded, captain, when he gets back."

  "Amourgin?" Bren said in surprise.

  "He's had a little training," Solmin said, adding delphically, "Perhaps more than he should."

  "What is that?" Karah asked.

  I'm getting sick of saying that, she thought. Whatever-it-was was huge, and had four legs, and two tails—one in front, one in back—and it bled as it lay on the trampled field. Windrush kept trying to back away from it. Eowlie sighed and licked her lips.

  "Mammoth," Amourgin said, calming his nervous horse. It was not as well trained as Windrush, but being Tseldene it was more used to the scent.

  Dead humans sprawled around the beast. Tykissian musket
eers and pikemen, and Tseldenes thrown from the steel box on top when the giant animal toppled.

  "I thought mammoths were white and furry and lived up around the Ice Sea," Karah said. The old songs were full of mammoth hunts.

  "Those are ice mammoths. This is the southern savannah breed, bigger than the northern variety, less fur, different coloring," Amourgin replied.

  "Bet you read that in a book."

  "True nevertheless. And there are two in the Imperial menagerie in Olmya. We'd better check around."

  Karah took her horse out into the fields at a slow trot, back east along the trail of crushed crops and torn-up trees the mammoth had left. There was nobody directly in view, nobody alive, but the noise of battle was loud a little to the north. She found bodies lying amid the corn; the stalks were up to her waist in the saddle, where they still stood. Most of the dead seemed to be Tseldene spearmen and arquebusiers, with narrow stab wounds from pikes, or the massive ragged holes the thumb-sized Imperial musket bullets made. There were a scattering of dead Tykissians too, Imperial regular infantry.

  The dead lay in clumps and windrows where the lines had stood or broken, gaping at the sky, already beginning to swell and smell in the fierce muggy heat. Insects swarmed around them, busy at wounds and lips and eyes. A few weren't quite dead yet, lying with blackened tongues, moaning faintly. She recognized the Tseldene words for mother and water.

  They don't mention this in the songs, Karah thought, swallowing.

  She and Amourgin and Eowlie cantered back to the road to meet Bren and the little column of the XIXths survivors. Amourgin reported.

  Bren listened with burning-eyed intensity, looking over the ground. "The Tseldenes are moving back sharpish," he said. "The fight started east of here—out on the savannah. I'd say a couple of hours ago, not long after dawn."

  "We're winning?" Karah asked eagerly.

  "Not necessarily. We're pushing them back, and that's not exactly the same thing, something I hope Willek understands. Ddrad, get what you need from the dead out there and then fall in in extended order." All the survivors were carrying muskets, but many lacked bandoliers or other equipment. "Hurry."

  "Y'heard the man, move!" the sergeant bellowed.

  Karah stayed beside Bren; he stared north, biting at his lower lip thoughtfully until the infantry drew up behind them. "Lets go."

  She felt her heart beat less quickly as they advanced, holding the horses to a walk. Strength seemed to radiate from the man beside her, soothing the thought of what lead and steel could do to her. Sergeant Ddrad handed her up a helmet.

  "Think this'll fit, miss," he said.

  It did, although the sponge lining was damp with something she didn't want to know about. She put it on anyway, fastening the chin strap with a tug. Bren drew his sword; she pulled out the Tseldene saddle bow she'd captured and nocked an arrow, letting the knotted reins fall on Windrush's neck. He pricked up his ears at that, knowing it meant fancy work. Karah blinked thankfully in the shade of the brim, straining her eyes against the brightness to see over the tall crops around them.

  The bodies lay more thickly as they advanced, more of them wounded. A lone figure came down the road, staggering. Closer and they saw it was an Imperial in pikesoldier's armor, clutching at an arm that dripped blood Her head was bare except for a blond thatch, and her face beet-red and wandering-eyed with shock or heatstroke or both.

  "What unit, soldier?" Bren asked. "What's ahead?"

  "XXVIIth Foot," the trooper mumbled in a yokel drawl. "Sor," she added vaguely, because the questioner was mounted and carried a gold-hilted sword.

  "What's ahead?"

  "One-lovin' southrons," the wounded soldier said. Her legs buckled, and she sat in the white dust of the roadway in a clatter of steel. "Swordsmen, spearmen, gunmen—t'ousands of 'em. One-lover cut me. You got any water?"

  Bren signed with one hand. Ddrad and two of the musketeers pulled the wounded soldier off the road and into the shade of some bushes. She mumbled and struggled feebly as they stripped off the armor and Father Solmin bound her arm in her neckerchief; anyone who wore a breastplate had one of those, to keep the steel from chafing. Ddrad held a canteen to her lips, the other ham-sized hand regulating the gulping until she was conscious enough not to breathe the water. The priest busied himself with an anti-infection spell, backup to the amulet. Open wounds in contact with the soil were vulnerable to the gangrene demons and needed special care.

  "Easy, comrade," he said "Easy." His touch drew the pain, and her eyes fluttered closed.

  Ddrad added to Bren: "Not a good day fer fightin', sor. Too damn hot fer lobsterbacks." He kicked at the breastplate and thigh guards of blackened steel they'd taken off the soldier.

  "You fight when you have to," Bren said.

  "She didn't seem to know much," Karah added as they advanced.

  "You never do, not if you're in the fighting line," Bren said "And—"

  They passed through a line of big blue-gum trees. A field gun lay on its side in the pasture beyond, one wheel still spinning, the six horses that had drawn it mostly dead except for one that pawed the air and screamed. Fighting swirled around it, cavalry chopping at each other. Some of them were Imperial lancers in three-quarter armor, but more were Tseldenes in light chain-mail shirts and spiked helmets, whirling about shooting with powerful recurved bows or dashing in to slash at mount and rider with their scimitars. Usually they got free again on their light, nimble horses, but she saw one hooked right out of the saddle by the curved spike on the reverse of a Tykissian war hammer. The Imperial trooper jerked it loose and brought the serrated hammerhead down on the man's spine before he landed.

  And several score of the Tseldenes were peeling off from the melee and turning to look at the little party of the XIXth less than a thousand yards away.

  "Deploy!" Bren snapped. Under his breath, so quietly that only Karah could hear, he added: "All thirty of you, Three help us."

  The musketeers trotted past their officer and the mounted scouts, spreading out in a line two deep across the roadway and into the fields on either side. It was knee-deep alfalfa, not much hindrance.

  "Fire will be by ranks, reload without countermarch," Bren said, in a voice that carried without shouting. "On the word. Range three hundred. Don't forget to adjust for the second shot, and aim low."

  Ddrad went down the line to make sure all the musketeers had clicked forward the grooved ramp under their rear sights; it was a new procedure, introduced a few years ago with rifling and hollowbase bullets. Before then infantry had just pointed their weapons in the general direction of the targets and hoped, and never from beyond about a hundred yards.

  "Check your firelocks!" Ddrad bellowed.

  The rank of musketeers brought their weapons to their lips and blew on the slowmatches smoldering in the serpentines.

  "Level!"

  The two staggered rows planted the points of their musket rests in the dirt and let the long barrels fall into the U-shaped rests on top. "Present your firelocks!"

  The butts were snuggled against shoulders. Karah spat to moisten her lips and glanced to either side. Amourgin was winding his carbine. Eowlie was snarling—quite an alarming sight—and holding hers ready. Bren sat motionless and calm as a waiting cat, sword down and the blade tapping at his stirrup iron.

  "Wait for it," he said in that iron-calm voice. "The Three are with us."

  The Tseldenes seemed to think their One was with them. They came on at a hard gallop, a hundred or more of them, riding with short stirrups, crouched almost like jockeys in their high-peaked saddles. The ground shook under their horses' hooves, the round red nostrils of the mounts gaping.

  "Gurah! Gurah!" the enemy shouted. The spiked helmets bowed toward her, the curved swords raised.

  Closer and closer, almost in arrow-shot. Karah locked thumb and forefinger around the shaft on her string. A few of the enemy cavalry were loosing already, black- and scarlet-fletched arrows landing in the soil in front of th
e musketeers, quivering in the sunlight.

  "Front rank—" Ddrad's voice echoed Bren's.

  "Fire."

  BAMMM. White-grey smoke rose up in front of her, and the horse sidestepped a pace. When it cleared, she saw that half a dozen of the enemy were down, horses kicking on the ground or dashing riderless. And the rest had stopped. Not quite pulling up; more as if the horses were spooked, plunging and sinking onto their hindquarters and squealing and pig-jumping.

  "Front rank, reload in nine times. Second rank fire."

  BAMMM. More smoke; through it she could see the first fifteen musketeers frantically unscrewing the tops of cartridge flasks, dumping the powder down the long barrels, dropping in bullets—a lot of them were holding two or three in their teeth—ramming, priming. The iron ramrods clattered frantically, and then came the dry clicking sounds of the springs that drove the serpentines being cocked.

  BAMMM. BAMMM. BAMMM. The enemy were coming on again now, but they'd stayed bunched up while three volleys drove into them. Karah drew the bow to her ear, shot, again and again. The light carbines of her fellow scouts banged next to her ears; then Bren was firing a pistol left-handed over his horse's head. A musketeer fell with an arrow through his throat, heels drumming at the ground.

  The oncoming line of Tseldenes seemed to gather themselves, and then something gleamed behind them. Whatever it was struck, and the enemy cavalry scattered before it like droplets of mercury on ice. The XIXth's soldiers had been clubbing their muskets, or sticking the hilts of their daggers down the muzzles to make them into improvised spears; they stopped in midaction, incredulous, then cheered wildly and began to reload once more.

  The Imperial lancers were in the midst of the Tseldenes. A few of them had kept their fifteen-foot lances, long slender weapons with a ball guard before the hand. They stabbed them into the backs of the fleeing enemy. Others were lashing about them with war hammers and heavy single-edged broadswords. Crammed between the musketeers and the lancers, the light-armed Tseldenes went down, or fled if they could without stopping to look back. The musketeers took slow aimed shots after them, jeering and whooping when a horseman went down.