The Forge

by S. M. Stirling

  "Your—sir?"

  "The Minister of Barbarians' agents have been as—" to the Minister of War, "I said, wait. Where… ah, yes. Jamal, the Settler himself, is going to invade us instead, with the whole Colonial field force; the Army of the North, and Tewfik's veterans from Hammamet as well." He nodded at Raj's expression. "Yes, right up the Drangosh Valley, it's the only practicable route … Tewfik will be in effective command, of course." He clapped Raj on the shoulder. "Don't worry, you've got eight months, and I'm giving you carte blanche."

  Observe.

  * * *

  "Ahh, I did wish to see the face of this so-valiant opponent," the one-eyed man was saying. The one eye was brown, and the face was remarkable enough to make you forget the eyepatch with the Seal of Solomon. "Take him away, then. We will see if he dies as well as he fought."

  The crimson-robed guards dragged Raj away, his chains galling sores that wept puss.

  Chapter Twelve

  "Well, fuck me," the trooper on the observation platform of the heliograph tower said, lifting the helmet from his head and drawing a sleeve across his face.

  "Not whiles there's goats in' t' world, Saynchez," the duty corporal said from below. "Keep yer eyes open, I wants to know when the El-Tee's gettin' back."

  Fuck yer, too, Hallersen M'kintok, Trooper Billi Saynchez thought silently, settling the infinite weight of hot metal and leather-backed chain mail on his head again and pacing the two steps that took him to the other side of the heliograph tower. Them stripes has gone right to yer arse and pizened yer brain. Only early spring, and the days were already as hot as high summer back home… and what miserable grass there was had already burnt brown, sometimes in a crust across pits of salt mud.

  Hell of a place, he thought. To the west, nothing but desert that grew flatter and more desolate the further you went. To the east the scarred bluffs above the Drangosh, and then the dense carob and legbiter bush that grew in the narrow floodplain. Across the river was the higher east bank, raghead country, and they'd love to slip across one night and bring back a Descott County boy's balls… the water had looked inviting the first week here; in the second it was a taunting, teasing reminder of coolness. Nothing but the tower, and the thatched shelters for the dogs, mostly empty now that the bulk of Third Company was out on patrol. Barges on the water now and then, sometimes a steamboat churning upriver towards Sandoral.

  "Jine the glorious 7th Descott Rangers an' get travel, adventure, plunder, an' girls," he muttered softly to himself, leaning the rifle against the mud-and-twig wall of the platform.

  The only cooze he'd seen out of this was old man M'aylez's daughter; who liked a uniform. And he'd been so drunk on his enlistment bonus all he remembered was waking up in her bed with her father whaling away at them with his dogwhip, he'd had to run barearse naked half a klick through the snow before he lost him; the other recruits had spread it through the battalion and they were still riding him about it. Then a snow-season march over the central plateau and the Oxheads; Sandoral would have been all right, plenty fancy enough for a country boy, if there hadn't been fifteen thousand other soldiers trying to get into the same bars and knocking-shops, with prices so high the only hookers he could afford were bag-on-the-head ugly and poxed to boot.

  And field drill six days a week. And those arsemouth bastards in the 5th throwing their siller around an lettin' us all know how they'd run through a dozen harem girls each last year. Got their butts kicked good and hard after that, didn't they?

  "Talkin' t' yerself agin, Snow-Balls?" Not the corporal; one of the other six drowsy soldiers taking advantage of the crowded shade below. "Talk to me: tell me why yer ain't a beautiful hoor."

  He yanked open the wicker trapdoor. "Loik yer mother?" he snarled.

  The corporal came to his feet. "Next arsemouth farts out gets t' water the dogs all next week!" he shouted. "Yer mouth cain get yer killed, place like this." Outpost duty saw more than its share of fights. "An' Saynchez, yer supposed t' be a lookout, so keep lookin'."

  Beer, Saynchez thought, hunching sullenly against the parapet. I could be at Moggorsford tavern right now, puttin' back a beer.

  With that barmaid swinging her hips at him… Or he could have done another year as a vakaro for Squire Hobbez, sitting his dog under the edge of the pines, rifle across his knees, watching the beefalo and sheep grazing their way across the meadows, grass rippling in the wind off the volcanoes … He adjusted his sword belt again, trying vainly for a spot that did not chafe the raw spots on his hips, feeling the salt-stiff cloth of his jacket grating at the skin under his armpits and at his neck.

  Something thin and hard whirled around his neck. His hands flashed back toward the man who must be behind him, but there was a knee in his back and the world was fading black

  * * *

  Raj wiped his face with the red-and-black checked neckerchief; there had been a warehouse full of them in El Djem, and they had become a point of pride with the veterans of the 5th. He glanced at the trooper at the right of the squad braced to attention beneath the temporary heliograph tower, the one with the circular bruise around his neck.

  "Stand easy," he said. The men relaxed, except for the corporal, who stood braced with a blank expression that undoubtedly hid a mind frantically willing its own vital functions to cease, as it had been since the 5th's troopers had stuck their rifles through the tower slits with a cheery bang, yer dead, girls. "I said, stand easy, Corporal M'kintok. No records, no pack drill.

  "And Warrant Officer M'lewis, perhaps you were just a little too rough on Saynchez there? You can cough, trooper."

  "Beggin' yer pardon, Messer Brigadier ser, but 'e didn't even have 'is rifle slung. Powerful difficult 'tis to get the wire round the neck of a man what has his rifle next to it." A smile that shone with gold teeth. "Don't think the ragheads would'a stopped when I did, nohow, ser."

  True enough. "All right, lads, just a lesson… now, you're Descotters, not peons, so you should be able to think. Why do you think I've got you out here in the first place, putting up these towers and spending your days in the desert? Besides my reputation as Brigadier Brass Ass, that is?"

  A long moment's silence. The corporal spoke, "Keep a close eye on the ragheads, ser?" Hesitation, then, "And to keep us from spendin' too much time fukkin' off in town, ser?"

  "Right on both counts, soldier. Look, we're not here for the scenery. Or the beer." A relieved chuckle from the squad; the quality of the local brew was a favorite grumble for troops from north of the Oxheads. "We're here because a bloody great wog army is coming, in a little while or so. Corporal, you were a quarryman back home, weren't you?"

  "Yis, ser."

  It was a safe enough bet, with those shoulders. "Ever see a man killed for not looking where he was going?"

  "Summat often, ser. Rope allays breaks if yer turns arse on it."

  "It's the same in this trade, lads: sweat saves blood. Habits keep you alive or get you killed, so when you're bored, think of today." The slight smile left his face, and he saw them stiffen. "Now, if we have to launch out"—the common euphemism for dying—"to get the mission the Governor assigned done, then we do. But I will not let any of you get your asses killed unnecessarily, not if I have to work you all to death to prevent it!"

  Raj touched his foot to Horace's leg, and the dog crouched. He stepped across the saddle, feet finding stirrups as the hound came erect. "Dismissed to duties," he said, as the men of the 5th fell in behind him. "Oh, and your Company is being rotated back next week. A detached Company of the Novy Haifa Dragoons is coming in, and they need a tour of the beauty-spots."

  * * *

  Jorg Menyez sneezed.

  "Sorry," Raj said, and maneuvered Horace around to the other, downwind side of the Kelden County officer. Menyez was mounted on one of the long-legged riding steers some of the nomads north of Pierson's Sea used, bridled with a ring through its nose; the great forward-sloping horns were tipped with steel, and it rolled its eye at the hound.

/>   "Muuuuuuh," it said warningly.

  "Werf?" Horace's head went down towards its ankles; Raj freed a foot from the stirrup and thumped the dog on the side of the jaw with it.

  "Not bad at all," Raj said, as they finished their tour of the field fortifications Menyez's men had been working on for most of the morning.

  Two battalions digging, and two making a route-march through the scrubby wadi-and-gully country to the west, to simulate an attack. The trenches were neatly aligned at the bottom of a low ridge, fronted with cloth sacks full of the dirt. Good idea, Raj thought. Bloody good idea. Menyez had thought of it, back in the fall when the mud had been too soft to keep its shape as the men shoveled. They'd bought the cloth wholesale in Sandoral and put the camp followers and peasant women for fifty kilometers around to sewing them. Reusable, with a slip knot to fasten them, and the foot soldiers could hump them around by the hundreds when they were empty. More up on the crest of the hill, semicircular waist-high positions where the field guns could be pushed up to fire and then recoil out of sight for reloading.

  "All right, let's get on to the next bit," Raj said. They trotted in across the field of fire, past rows of straw figures on stakes, woven to roughly human shape and given sticks for rifles. There were clay jugs full of water in the stomach of each. Up to the low parapet of the trenchline, with the helmets of the troops below, waiting to step up onto the firing platform. As the two officers walked their mounts across a board bridgeway that spanned the trench, a soldier somewhere down the line called out:

  "General salute for the King of Spades!"

  "Silence in the ranks!" an officer or noncom shouted; Menyez saluted.

  The men had thrown up a low observation platform behind the trenches; Raj and Menyez took their positions there, beside the infantry commander's personal guard and standard, and the lounging figures of a 5th Descott squad around Raj's banner.

  "Proceed," Menyez called.

  Drums and bugles sounded, and orders relayed down the long trench. The men stepped up onto the firing platform; their heads were still below the top level of sandbags, but regularly-spaced gaps had been left below that, and the rifles slanted through. Raj looked over his shoulder; the barrels of the 75's were sliding out.

  POUMP. POUMP. POUMP. Shells whirred by overhead, their ten-kilo bursting charges raising poplar tree-shaped plumes of dirt three thousand meters downrange. POUMP. POUMP. POUMP. In a prepared position like this you could build sloping ramps behind the guns. They recoiled up the slope, gravity killing momentum, then slid down nearly into battery again, ready to be reloaded and pushed the final meter or two; it saved a good deal of time. POUMP. POUMP. POUMP. Barked orders, and a quivering of the rifle muzzles as the soldiers pushed at the stepped wedges under the rear sights of their weapons, setting them for maximum range.

  "Prepare for volley fire," Menyez said. Repetitions like echoes, down to the platoon sergeants. POUMP. POUMP. POUMP. This series on the outermost row of straw figures; fragments and pieces of wooden pole spun up into the air.

  "Fire."

  The slamming ripple of massed rifles ran along the line, and the staggered rows of targets began to disintegrate; leg-thick poles sagged and fell, and water jugs sent out spectacular fountains of clear liquid to glitter in the late-morning sun.

  "Aim low, aim low!" Shouts along the firing line, as shots kicked up dust-spurts beyond the target. There were not too many of them, far fewer than there had been six months ago. Raj listened carefully; the volleys came fast and crisp, none of the telltale stutter between. Thick grayish gunsmoke pooled before the muzzles. Officers with binoculars were standing behind each unit's section of trench, ready to run out and assess the results; drummer boys and corpsmen and stretcher-bearers were stepping up with dippers of water from the buckets they carried, not for the men but to dash over the barrels and breeches of the weapons. It hissed and sizzled as it struck the hot metal; more maintenance work afterward, but it cut down on extraction jams and the even more disastrous occasional cook-off, rounds exploding as the thumb pushed them into contact with an overheated chamber.

  "Cease firing!" A long bugle call. "Battalions will pass in review, by the left!"

  "Shaping nicely," Raj said to Menyez. "They don't tire as fast, they're starting to hit what they shoot at, and they're starting to act as if they believed they were soldiers, too."

  "It helps that they know they're not getting fucked over by the people in charge," Menyez replied, cold anger mixed with satisfaction in his tone.

  Half the infantry battalion commanders had been transferred or retired since they arrived to join the Army of the Upper Drangosh, and a good third of the Company Senior Lieutenants. For everything from age and incapacity, through persistent absenteeism —several had not seen their putative commands in years—to selling their ammunition allotments.

  "You tell people long enough that they're shit," the brown-haired man continued, "that they're not fit for anything but to suck mud in front of the paws of anyone who rides by on dogback, and they believe it and act like it." His pale eyes watched as the thousand men of the two battalions mustered in a row of columns of fours. "They're still nowhere near as steady as I'd like, except for the Ausarians. And my Kelden County Foot."

  "Tewfik's going to outnumber us badly, and if I can I'm going to make him come to us," Raj answered. I'd better; if I can't manage to force the enemy to assume the tactical offensive when they are invading us, then I'd better just get circumcised and be done with it. "I think they'll hold, in field entrenchments."

  There was a roll of martial music, as the fife-and-drum unit behind each battalion standard struck up; they had rifles slung over their shoulders, but Raj had seen to it that every outfit produced a band. The officers had bought the instruments out of their own pockets; a "suggestion" from Raj relayed through Menyez and backed by his writ of extraordinary authority from Barholm. Some of the infantry outfits hadn't even had standards; he had made the men contribute to those themselves, then had the ArchSysup of the Southeastern Diocese bless them in as impressive a ceremony as the cleric and he could come up with together. That sort of thing was almost as important as prompt pay and sound boots and seeing that the sutlers kept their cheating within bounds …

  "Pass in review!"

  Tramp of marching feet, the whole line moving like a uniform centipede with a blue body and red legs; sunlight glittered on flags and bayonets and polished brightwork.

  "Eyes… right." He and Menyez saluted; behind him the standard of the 5th dipped in answer to the flourish of the infantry banners as each passed. The men's arms swung briskly, their shouldered rifles in perfect alignment; officers and noncoms whirled their swords in flourishes. Perfectly useful skills…

  "Purty," one of the cavalry troopers behind him muttered.

  … not least because they reminded the foot soldiers that they were something other than men who had the bad luck to be visible when the press gang came around, and too poor to bribe their way out. His Descotters and the other cavalry units were mostly here because they'd wanted to be, or their families had… or at worst, because a father had come after them with compulsory weddings in his eyes and a loaded gun in his hands. They didn't need as much prompting to think of themselves as fighting men rather than victims.

  Of course, it was debatable whose perception was more accurate.

  The column had passed down to the end of the trenchline, wheeled and marched back. This time as the midpoint passed the mount, different orders rang out:

  "Halt. Ay-bout face," A wheel and stamp, and they were facing him and Menyez. "Ground… arms." The rifle butts thumped the ground, held rigidly between left arm and flank; the tips of the bayonets were shoulder-high. "Stand at… ease." Each right foot moved out to shoulder-width from the left, while the rifles swung in to rest slanted across the body and held at the muzzle in the folded hands; it was an easy posture to maintain, where the rigid attention would produce a crop of men fainting, under a sun like this. Many of
the men before him were from the northwestern provinces, as naturally pale-skinned as the officer beside him

  Menyez's leather-lunged Master Sergeant bellowed, "All units, attention to orders! Stand by for address by the Honorable Messer Brigadier Raj Whitehall, Commander of the Army of the Upper Drangosh."

  Raj leaned forward, pommel under his palms. "Right, fellow soldiers," he said, his voice pitched to carry. There was no other sound besides the soughing of the wind through the banner behind him, and a distant hissing from a flock of dactosauroids flying toward the river.

  "Today you've shown that you can march, dig, and shoot," he continued. "All good preparation for your real work, which is to kill the enemy." An almost imperceptible rustle of uneasiness; that enemy would outnumber them badly—Sandoral traded across the river into the Colony, rumor abounded, and it had exaggerated what was coming up from Al-Kebir even beyond the unpleasant probable truth.

  "Before they get a chance to kill you." No harm in reminding them of the unfair but inescapable fact that in the event of defeat cavalry had some chance of getting away, and infantry none at all. "Just remember this: men aren't any more bulletproof than those scarecrows you just blew the hell out of. Put a bullet through a man, and he falls down and dies. Messer or cropper, raghead or believer, the bullet doesn't care. And if he's on a dog—" Raj slapped Horace's neck, which twitched "—it just makes him a bigger target. Spirit of Man of the Stars firm your aim, for the restoration of the Holy Federation!"

  "Endfile," the soldiers murmured in unison.

  "Carry on."

  Menyez nodded. "Carry on, Top," he said to the senior noncom.

  "Attention to orders! 17th Kelden County Foot, Fifth Company, second platoon, is hereby judged best unit of today's exercise, and will be issued a 24-hour pass to Sandoral, effective from 12:00 hours tomorrow! 21st Olgez County Rifles, First Company, first platoon, is low-ranked and will do double fatigues for the next week. Dismissed to duties!"