The Regiment-A Trilogy

by John Dalmas

  There was no chance to run. Pross crouched till the first one was virtually on him, hoping to clutch its mane and pull himself onto its back, but its clumsy gait foiled him. It struck him with a shoulder, knocking him down, and the horses behind it trampled him to rags.

  * * *

  Kelmer Faronya listened to the staccato of machine guns, the rumbling of hooves, and felt a distancing, a separation of himself from the event. Looking out from the forest's edge, he could see the oncoming horse herd. They were nearing, but also, hobbled as they were, slowing. At a hundred yards, Jerym's hand clapped his shoulder.

  "This offensive's been running on borrowed time and borrowed energy," he murmured. "Now it's time to foreclose the mortgage."

  Tired, and confronting the dark forest, the foremost horses slowed to a hobbled walk, the momentum and energy of those behind insufficient to force them. At about thirty yards, Jerym whistled a command, and A Company trotted out in a line, armed for this mission with grenades and submachine guns. They began a butchering, while Kelmer, neither frightened nor excited, recorded it all. Tired as they were, it took time for the horses to turn around and flee again. There was a great squealing and dying before those behind got turned around. Then slowly, heavily, the survivors began to run again, back the way they'd come.

  It seemed to Kelmer that they should not show this cubeage.

  45

  It had been raining for a day and a half, and rivulets of cold water trickled down Colonel Renvil's slicker as he watched his brigade straggle by. He wore no insignia of rank. He'd cut them off after a sniper had killed Brigadier Lord Willing, leaving him in charge.

  Commanding officer! He grunted. Spectator was the word. The brigade had been misused, the men overspent. Willing had known it, and had argued on the radio with Rumaros, to no avail. Now the mortgage had been foreclosed. (If he'd known that a mercenary officer had used the same metaphor, two nights ago, he'd have thought it a fitting irony.)

  At the beginning, Willing had tried to make it a fighting retreat, though mostly the men had lacked the energy for it. Then the downpour had begun, no transient summer convection storm, but a slow-moving, pre-autumnal cold front undercutting warm moist air. All fighting response had dissolved in it, and the men rode soddenly southward, hoping the snipers would sight on someone else.

  Where the land was suitable, stretches of the road were flanked by narrow fields, mostly no more than two hundred yards wide. The fields were glacial till. Generations of farm boys had picked rocks in them, and each year frost heaving provided a new crop, to be piled as fences along the edges of the field, especially along the back edge, the forest margin. It was there that sniping was the worst, especially when the rain thinned a bit, for the Smoleni could shoot in safety.

  More often, though, the forest came up to the ditches, and the sniping was much less heavy there.

  The men were desperate for sleep, and if they'd been on foot, it would have been worse. Many more would have lain down beside the road, rain or not.

  As it was, they still had to walk from time to time to rest the horses. Rather often, in fact, for they were short on horses. They'd lost enough, that first night, that they'd started back with many carrying two men. And some of the snipers seemed to target horses; even indifferent marksmen could easily hit them. (It never occurred to Renvil that the Smoleni looked at his horses as food, to be smoked and stored for winter.) Doubling up became more common, almost the rule. Men had broken discipline, cutting artillery horses free to ride them, leaving the caissons and guns in the ditches for the Smoleni. In the rain, the caissons wouldn't even burn readily.

  Troops afoot sometimes took cover in the shelter of a roadside fence, mostly not to shoot back, but for a reprieve and a nap. Willing had forbidden it. The column had to keep moving, and once a man fell asleep, even on that cold wet ground, it was nearly impossible to wake him. Sometimes, enticed beyond resistance by the shelter of a roadside stone fence, they lay down despite orders and threats. At one stretch, the Smoleni had violated such a shelter with mortar fire, throwing the column into confusion, and causing more concentrated casualties than sniping did.

  Men slept on horseback, but that wasn't really effective. Occasionally one fell out of the saddle without being shot; some didn't even wake up when they hit the ground. Some who'd lain down and refused to get up, Willing had had shot, and the problem had abated somewhat till nightfall. When daylight came, they were hundreds of men short. Much of this was certainly due to night ambushes by submachine gunners, who struck, then quickly withdrew, but as certainly, many had simply gone back in the woods a bit and lain down to sleep.

  He had no doubt that the Smoleni had made that sleep permanent; they had no facilities for prisoners.

  The night before, they'd passed the remains of the supply column—corpses and broken wagons. With the heavy cloud cover, it had been necessary to use battle lamps to stay out of the ditch, and by their light, it seemed the fighting had been heavy there. That might have been the Smoleni's major effort, with supplies the incentive and prize. He hoped they'd paid heavily for them.

  He'd never believed in Yomal; educated people didn't. But just in case, he prayed they'd meet a relief column before night fell again.

  46

  Major Jillard Brossling commanded the White T'swa's 2nd Battalion, his office a squad tent shared with his E.O. and Master Sergeant Hors. Hors, once a platoon sergeant, had had a knee smashed on Terfreya by a shell fragment. Even after repairs it hampered him, and he'd been given an administrative job. His desk faced the entrance.

  Brossling was not long back from "the south"; 2nd Battalion and its ranger trainees had been part of the gauntlet along Road 45, and the scourging of the Komarsi 6th Mounted Infantry Brigade.

  A large man in Smoleni uniform looked in. "Sergeant Gull Kro reporting," the man said. "At the major's request."

  Hors motioned him in. Brossling had looked up at Kro's words, and gestured toward a folding chair across from his own. There was no salute. Kro had learned that the mercs had no rules about saluting. They saluted when they felt like it, and most often as an acknowledgement and conclusion, seldom as a greeting. Even in form it was different: They touched their cap instead of clapping hand to heart.

  "Kro," said the major, "your cadre keeps saying good things about you: how quickly and how well you learn, about your talents as a ranger and your abilities as a platoon leader . . . and how well you operated down south last week." He paused, examining Kro's aura. It showed little reaction; the man handled praise easily. "They've also told me you tended at first to be overbearing toward your men, and learned to tone it down. Anything you'd care to say about that?"

  These last several weeks, Kro, still young himself, had grown used to officers above him who were little or no older. "Yessir," he said. "My old outfit was mostly from towns. They needed pushin' sometimes, and some would try to get away with things. These rangers are different; got different attitudes. They need to be handled different. And I seen how you people operate."

  The major grinned. Kro still wasn't entirely used to how often the mercs grinned, or at what. "Good," said Brossling. "The reason I called you in is to give you a conditional promotion. I'm trying you out as trainee company commander, starting tomorrow. If at some point I decide to give someone else a chance at it, it won't mean you're not measuring up. We might just want to see how he does. If one of us thinks you're fucking up, we'll tell you about it."

  He stood, and the two shook hands. Then Kro saluted and left, thinking again what hard damned hands the mercs all had. Brossling, he thought, was as strong as he was, pound for pound.

  47

  It was not the usual War Council meeting. There were guests: the ambassadors from Krentorf and Oselbent, and an envoy from The Archipelago. They'd come for a summary report of the Komarsi offensive, its accomplishments and defeat, and for a status report. Meanwhile, quiet orderlies entered at intervals, replenishing their cups of "war joma," and the cookies delib
erately made with "bark flour"—actually three parts wheat flour mixed with one part bark flour. The refreshments were almost the only purely PR act, to demonstrate the make-do resourcefulness of their hosts.

  The battle summary began with a map showing the launch points of the two Komarsi strike forces, the location of Smoleni supply depots, the rates of Komarsi advances, and the sites of major fights.

  Video cubeage was shown of people, mostly women, old men, and adolescents, laboring furiously to transfer a supply depot. It gave the diplomats the sense of an entire people united in resistance to an invader. They saw the night assault on the Road 40 spearhead, the decimation of its horse herd, and the hundred-mile gauntlet the 3rd Brigade had suffered through. For the two brigades combined, the count of dead Komarsi was 5,437, almost half their total strength! It was hard to imagine.

  They also saw the butchering, the wholesale cutting up of dead Komarsi horses; the smoking of horse meat on hundreds of improvised racks; the salvaging of Komarsi supplies, of ammunition from the belts of dead Komarsi soldiers, and the boots from their feet. Little was wasted.

  Kelmer Faronya hadn't gotten a whole lot more sleep than the Komarsi soldiers.

  The diplomats weren't shown Komarsi prisoners. There were only a few hundred of them. The Smoleni troops were inclined to shoot anyone wearing Komarsi brown, especially the severely wounded, because facilities and medical personnel, like supplies and food, were seriously short. The prisoners who were taken were stripped of clothes, all but their boots, and a shallow x was cut on their foreheads to leave a scar. An oath was required that they not again serve against Smolen. With the understanding that if they broke it and were captured, the scar on their forehead would be a death sentence. Then they were herded south on foot.

  The overall strategy and battle plan had been Belser's. The tactic of attacking the horse herds had been Romlar's.

  There was no exultation, least of all by President Lanks, whose face was grave. Belser had a satisfied look, which was new to him, but that was all. Romlar was calm and matter-of-fact as always.

  Vestur Marlim summarized the overall military situation, which actually hadn't changed much. The Komarsi still had far more power, but an all-out Komarsi offensive would be risky. The north was too big, too wild, and the Smoleni could not be pinned down. While on Komars's southern and western borders, Selmar and Krentorf remembered old wrongs. At the same time, however, the Komarsi could not be driven from the Leas or the coast, where their army could see and target the enemy, and maneuver its large forces more or less freely.

  And the Smoleni supply situation, while eased a bit now, was still poor. By winter's end, unless supplies were brought in, there'd be serious hunger among the people, and next summer would see it worsen despite some limited acreage of crops. Unless events intervened, a second winter would bring wholesale deaths from the combination of hunger and sickness.

  Elyas Fossur gave an intelligence summary then. His new material was more political than military. There was widespread, if generally subdued, discontent in Komars with the war. People of every class were unhappy with one or more aspects of it: cost, taxes, shortages including labor shortages, overwork, and the increased disobedience, even insolence, of the laboring classes, which went with the labor shortage. If the discontent was to worsen substantially, pressure by the nobility and merchants might well result in a Komarsi offer of terms.

  "What terms would Smolen consider?" asked the envoy from The Archipelago.

  Fossur turned to the president, who answered. "During this emergency, I rule Smolen, subject to impeachment by popular referendum. But I would not sign a peace without its approval by my Council of Ministers. I can say this much unequivocally, however: All Komarsi forces would have to withdraw south of the legal boundary—the Komar River. We would not, I think, demand reparations, but I would probably want a trade agreement as well as a treaty of peace."

  The ambassadors from Krentorf and Oselbent contemplated the president's strong words. Only the Archipelagon seemed to take them without discomfort. After a moment the Oselbenti said, "Mr. President, Engwar would never accept that. He is too proud."

  Heber Lanks answered mildly. "Proud? I would have said 'arrogant.' But if his nobles and merchants are sufficiently unhappy with the war, his power may be diluted against his will. There are few kings on Maragor with power as nearly absolute as his. Yet almost every kingdom whose people enjoy a decent constitution was once as his is. And until the time came, it no doubt seemed inconceivable that they would change.

  "Indeed, it may be that in attacking Smolen, Engwar has set in motion the downfall of his power. His merchants and nobles may trim his wings, or even depose him."

  The president paused, his expression not entirely clear. To the envoy from The Archipelago it seemed somewhere between reflective and glum, but with an underlying doggedness. He would listen closely to this Heber Lanks. Even if his own government decided not to involve itself as Smolen's covert supplier, there'd be food for thought in this man's words.

  "For that to happen, though," Lanks went on, "we here in Smolen must survive and fight on. Many of us will never surrender. We will eat what we can find, and fight with bows if need be. But we cannot be effective eating bark and fighting with sticks. If it comes to that, and we die, it will stand as a reproach to the rest of Maragor."

  He sat back then. It would have been an effective note to close with, but the ambassador from Oselbent cleared his throat and spoke almost apologetically. "Mr. President, have you heard that Engwar has contracted for a regiment of T'swa?"

  "I've heard he was trying to."

  "Our ambassador to Komars was recently invited to meet with Engwar's Minister of War, who showed him a signed contract with the Lodge of Kootosh-Lan. A regiment will arrive in—" He frowned, calculating mentally. "In about six weeks."

  Lanks knew the mystique of the T'swa. These diplomats and their governments might well consider that with T'swa in the equation, Smolen could not last long. And that to help a hopeless cause was both dangerous and wasteful. "Colonel Romlar knows the T'swa intimately," he said. "For six years, he and his regiment were trained by them. He's engaged in maneuvers with them. Colonel, what effect do you think a regiment of T'swa will have in this war?"

  Romlar stood to speak. "Less than you might suppose. They're as good as you've heard, but there will be only between about eight hundred and seventeen hundred of them. And they will fight only soldiers, not civilians, unless the civilians take arms against them.

  "Against the Komarsi or any usual army, they would be a major element. But here they will not dominate as they usually do. The Smoleni are much better suited than most to fight them, especially the Smoleni ranger battalions we've been training. Many of the Smoleni troops are woodsmen and sharpshooters, self-reliant and self-assured. All of the rangers are. And the tactics the rangers are being trained in are well-suited to fighting either Komarsi or T'swa in the wild country. You'll hear more of these rangers. They do not hesitate to act, do not fear to act, and they act skillfully. And like the T'swa, and like ourselves, they hit what they shoot at."

  He shook his head. "The T'swa are better; you need to know them to know how good they are. But the Smoleni, especially the rangers, will make them pay in blood. When the T'swa survivors return to Tyss, they will tell stories about the Smoleni and their fighting skills."

  He sat down then, and when he was seated, the envoy from The Archipelago spoke. "And you, Colonel, you and your men—how do you compare with the T'swa?"

  "Ask again a year from now. We've never fought them. We've beaten them in maneuvers, but those were maneuvers, however realistic. We're as good as they could make us, as good as we can be. They're the ones who named us the 'White T'swa.'

  "I guarantee, though, that here in the north, in these forests, our advantage over Komarsi troops is much greater than the T'swa advantage over Smoleni troops."

  * * *

  The president followed Romlar's commentary by h
aving Kelmer show cubeage of the mercenaries' own training routines, and of rangers in training. He then ended the meeting by reminding the diplomats of the cubeage they'd seen at the start of the meeting, of the devastation along Road 40. He didn't want them to leave with the T'swa on their minds.

  * * *

  With his training and the Ostrak Procedures, anxiety had become foreign to Romlar, but he'd felt a pang of it when the T'swa were mentioned, and it was still there, a deep psychic bruise. And with it a thought: He was in danger of wasting his regiment! But a regiment of warriors lost in battle wasn't wasted; not if seen from a neutral viewpoint. Not if winning or losing was unimportant, and warplay itself the purpose.

  Yet it seemed to him he was basically neutral regarding the outcome of this war. He would use his skills to the utmost for the Smoleni not because of his liking for them, but because it was part of the T'sel. He did like the Smoleni, liked and admired them and wished them well, but if they lost, he would not grieve. The past was past. The spirit ensouled a body to experience, to learn. When the spirit was released and the body left behind, soon enough it would ensoul another.

  So why the anxiety? He hadn't felt it on Terfreya. He hadn't felt it the first weeks here. The T'swa seemed the key. When T'swa regiments fought on opposing sides, sooner or later they'd fight each other. It wasn't so uncommon. And when they did, their casualties were often heavy: over several engagements they could chew each other up.

  Of course, it was customary for warriors to be chewed up sooner or later, if they were fulfilling their warrior nature. And the prospect of death—his or others—didn't feel like the key to his problem.

  No. The problem was, it felt to him that he'd need his regiment for some other purpose. Then was there some purpose, waiting in the future, about which he did not feel neutral? He examined the thought, consulted his feelings, and decided that that wasn't it either.