by David Drake
Another shot struck near the engineer, this one close enough to cause Landry to dance a skip-step. He hurriedly climbed back into the wagon and moved to the base of the cannon.
Abel’s lucifer struck. The cannon fuse lit and sizzled.
The cannon blasted.
Abel snapped his gaze downrange just as the gateway door blew to pieces.
The attack plan was more orderly this time. The company commanders had learned their lessons at Tamarak. Rather than swarm en masse, skirmishers moved forward first. A few of the men who had been on the parapet when it collapsed were still alive in the rubble. One pulled himself from the rubble, raised a rifle to shoot.
A skirmisher bayonetted him.
The men, led by Fowlett’s company, followed the skirmishers at a trot. They were organized into squads, and the sergeants made sure each went forward with a gap between them and the squad in front of them.
Curiously, the remaining Progarmen on the section of wall that had not fallen ceased to fire. In fact, there was a general silence from the fort. Even those around the side of the mountain firing down into the valley at the Corps seemed to have stopped shooting.
What the cold hell is going on?
With just bayonets opposing them, it only took a couple of company’s worth of men to overcome the opposition. Soon one of Abel’s attack force stepped outside. He hesitated for a moment, fiddling with something tied around his waist. It appeared to be a linen belt of some sort. With the help of another he got it off. The two men stretched it out, and the first man began to wave it back and forth.
It was the gold and indigo banner of the Third Battalion.
With the cannon to prepare the way, the upper fort was taken.
As Abel had requested to enter, Timon came to him from inside the fortress. Timon, brave as always, had entered with the vanguard. Abel had let him.
“This place is immense, Colonel,” he said. “There are passageways that look like they go down to the base of the mountain, and shafts a man might fall into that seem bottomless. A lot of those hallways are filled with stores. I’d suggest sending a party down to take care of any Progarmen who have taken refuge there.”
“Good idea,” Abel said. “See to it, will you?”
“We have all the prisoners under guard in two of those tunnels. I haven’t done a count yet, but we must have a thousand men in there,” Timon continued.
“Very good, Major.”
“And another thing, sir,” said Timon. “You may have noticed that the enemy fire broke off after a time.”
“I did,” Abel said. “And a good thing for us.”
“When my men were securing arms and cartridge boxes from our prisoners, we saw that all of the cartridge boxes were empty, or nearly so.”
“Empty? I thought you said this place was filled with stores.”
“It is, and it has a mighty ammunition magazine,” Timon said. “But they kept it near the exterior here in a huge storeroom at the end of a short tunnel that slopes down into the mountain.” Timon tried to suppress a smile, but couldn’t help himself. The resulting grin was rather gruesome. “At least it used to be a storeroom. Now it’s a lake.”
“The water tower,” Abel said. “It soaked the gunpowder.”
“Right over the magazine,” replied Timon. “When it came down, it flooded the storeroom. It appears the Progar militia used up what ammunition they had, but there were no replacement cartridges that weren’t wet and useless.”
“So that’s why their muskets fell silent.”
“Yes, sir. It would seem so, sir.”
Abel laughed. “Two shots,” he said. “Two shots by Landry, and he takes out the fort’s supplies. Everything else we did was cleanup.”
“I would say that is a plausible interpretation of the situation, sir.”
But the fort was not taken. Not entirely.
There were still the riflemen in the redoubt fifty elbs below the fort proper to deal with. These were the men who had risen seemingly from nowhere and surprised and dismayed Kanagawa’s cavalry charge.
There was a switchbacked corridor at least ten elbs wide that led from the upper fort down to the redoubt. Without his commanding it, a large group of men, mostly Wednesday Company, charged down the corridor. Within minutes they had overrun the redoubt. Unfortunately, most of them had not paused to reload. When they found their muskets wouldn’t fire, they resorted to bayonets. Abel hurried below, but not in time to stop the general carnage. Gutted bodies lay strewn everywhere. There was not a single Progar militia man left alive in the redoubt.
Within half a watch, Fort Sentinel was his. He turned to Timon—coolly hovering nearby—and ordered him to personally strike the Progar colors and run up the gold and indigo.
This brought the first smile to Timon’s face that Abel had seen in some time. “Yes, Colonel,” he replied. “My pleasure.”
Once the flag was flying, an audible cry rose up from the Valley.
A good two-thirds of the Second Brigade had been held back due to lack of firm ground at the battlefield. Then the fire from the Sentinel redoubt had forced them farther back still, effectively keeping them from forming a reserve. They could only run the gauntlet of fire a few men at a time. Now, with no harassing fire, the whole force was freed up.
What a vantage point I have!
Abel watched the battle unfold below. With two battalions surging forward, the ragged line of the enemy wavered.
Still, it managed to hold.
“Major Hoster, come here and examine the seams on these guns!” Abel called out. “We aren’t yet done for the day!”
* * *
They turned the fort’s three cannons to the north. The Progar army might be out of musket range, but they were not beyond the reach of cannonballs.
Landry found two of the cannons welded to his satisfaction. After a mighty effort, he brought them to the west side of the fort. With powder ferried from Tamarack, he and his artillerymen rained hell down on Progar for a watch and a half.
Abel was watching when the Progar militia broke.
It pulled back fighting until it ran into the marshy ground that its leaders had used so effectively to stymie the Goldies. A battling retreat continued, but there was no room on the Road, and the militia rearguard had no time to stop and reload. Those men were soon overrun by Goldies. But the action had given the main army enough time to run without taking a musket ball in the back.
There was nowhere for the Progarmen to go but back north along the Road. Von Hoff set off in quick pursuit, but it was already dusk. He called his exhausted men to a halt. It was time to feed the living and bury the dead.
For the moment, the Progar militia had slipped away.
PART SEVEN
The Tinder
One year previously
1
Cascade District
475 Post Tercium
Usually, Abel came to Mahaut when she was visiting Bruneberg. Partly, this was because of logistics. His quarters at the garrison were spacious enough—he was district military commander, after all—but getting into the compound was a complicated process, for which Abel was partly to blame. He’d instituted constant guard duty, complete with a change of personnel each watch, bolted gates, and rotating passwords. At first, the Regulars had thought this was a joke. Then irritation had set in. Finally, they’d come to not only accept the new rigors, but to appreciate them. A strong perimeter was a sign of serious purpose. And as Abel’s other changes trickled through ranks, they saw the fear and contempt the townspeople had formerly held for them turn to respect, and often into full admiration.
“Just following orders, sir,” they could now truthfully answer when challenged at the gates. When you could refer to real regulations, you didn’t get personally blamed when you turned away a local grandee looking to curry favor and arrange for the kind of special treatment that had greased the wheels of Bruneberg mercantilism for decades.
So it wouldn’t do to make the la
nd-heiress and chief consort of House Jacobson in Lindron an exception to this rule. Much better for Abel to walk to the River, and to the Jacobson compound that was built on a wharf overhanging the bank. Plus, Mahaut was usually busy as well. Her visits to Bruneberg, or Garangipore, where he occasionally also met her, were working trips, and not mere excuses to see him—although they were that, too. It had taken him a while to get used to the idea that her job was as important as his to as many people, although he should have expected this could happen when he’d seen her turn the Treville Regulars Women’s Auxiliary into a deadly fighting force all those years ago.
Mahaut’s personal quarters were the House Jacobson visitor’s suite. They were at the far end of the wharf, most of which was a warehouse. The living quarters had a bay window overlooking the River below with a view of the western reaches of Cascade District. The Bruneberg Riverfront was built out over the River in such a way for many marches up and down the eastern bank. An enormous complex of scaffolding and pier posts extended the buildings over the water as much as a fieldmarch, almost to the main current in some cases, and beyond the usual reach of the River carnadons. So if you happened to fall out a window, you would probably drown before you were eaten.
Although he only saw her a few times a year, he considered the past three years some of the happiest in his life. He’d spent his four years in the Academy seeing Mahaut only six times total. In the meantime, he hadn’t slept with anyone else, not even one of the amazingly beautiful whores near the Tabernacle, whose origins and types ran from Redland barbarian women to First Family second and third daughters. It had been a frustrating time.
Now Mahaut travelled to Bruneberg at least once a ninety-day three moon, coming upriver on a towed barge delivering grain, papyrus, and the fine pottery of Lindron, and returning on another transport laden with gunpowder, obsidian, skins from the north, and the everyday clay ware and plain linen that Bruneberg turned out in such prodigious quantities. She usually managed to stay a week, with her niece, Loreilei, in tow to babysit.
In a room nearby was the boy, the one who always travelled with her. She’d named him Abram, after the man who had been the Jacobson factor in Lindron before her. The boy was a toddler, and Loreilei and a wet nurse were attending him in his quarters. That hadn’t stopped Mahaut from getting up in the middle of the night to check in on him.
Abel liked the boy well enough, and since Mahaut clearly considered Abram near to an adopted son, he supposed he would learn to love the lad. At the moment, he was glad the child wasn’t old enough to come wandering in after a nightmare to crawl into bed between the two of them.
A breeze through the open window fluttered a vermilion colored linen drape. Abel brushed it aside and gazed out over the River. He had awakened before dawn, as he usually did, and was now watching Churchill set. The sky was growing lighter, so the sun must be cresting the eastern horizon, although he couldn’t see it, facing west as he was.
Mahaut stirred, sat up in her bed. “What are you looking at?”
“Moonlight on the River,” Abel replied. “Nearly done now.”
“Let me guess . . . Levot?” Mahaut didn’t know the three moon phases very well. Abel, on the other hand, knew them almost instinctively. He’d spent a good part of his life sleeping outside and planning night attacks, reconnaissance patrols, and ambushes according to the amount of light available.
“Churchill,” he said. Abel turned away from the window, stepped back to her bed, and lay down beside her. Both of them were naked, their clothes and weapons a jumbled pile at the foot of the bed.
“Do you have somewhere to be?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he replied. “Talbot is handling the morning turnout.” Abel had arranged his schedule for the week around Mahaut’s visit.
“Good for Talbot,” she said. “Yes, I’m thinking of giving him Montag if and when command rotates.”
“Work, work, work.”
“You’re one to talk.”
She put a hand on his chest and rolled him onto his back, and in the same motion climbed on top of him. He put his hands on her sides and brushed his fingers along the large scar that covered most of her hip and pelvis on the right side of her body. She had long since ceased to worry that he found it unattractive. Clearly it didn’t deter him from seeking what he wanted.
“The scar is how I know you in the dark. That and those breasts,” he’d once told her. “I wouldn’t have you any other way.”
Of course the same bullet that had caused the scar had torn into her womb, leaving her unable to have children—although Center had once said that in a society with more advanced medical technology, such damage would be reparable.
He was sometimes bothered by Center and Raj’s presence during times like this, especially when he was unable to shake off the feeling of being watched, yet he knew they would remain silent and never interfere. Still, he’d often considered what it would be like to be with a woman without their presence in his mind.
Abel lifted Mahaut up slightly, and she reached down, found him, and helped him enter her. She straddled him, put her hands on Abel’s chest, and moved to the rhythm of his breathing. Often their lovemaking took the form of a battle, complete with advances, retreats, victories, and surrender. But it was nice to wake in the aftermath of the night’s twisted sheets and signs of struggle and make use of the indolence of morning.
Mahaut smiled wickedly, and swiped her nails across his chest, hard enough to leave red traces, but not deep enough to draw blood.
That hurt!
She was smiling as if to say, “Oh yes, it did, you complacent bastard.”
He growled and turned Mahaut over, pinning her arms in the process, or attempting to. The struggle began again.
When it was over, light through the window signaled the dawn had truly arrived. Abel lay beside her, breathing hard.
“Now I do have to go,” he said.
“Yes.”
She propped herself up on an arm, looked down on him. “Tell me what a planet is again,” she said.
He’d explained to her about his inner voices, even named Center and Raj, a year ago during one of her visits. Center had commented that this would hardly come as a surprise to her at this point.
She is coming to know you quite intimately, inside and out.
She’d wanted to know more, and he found himself spilling all he knew. The planets, the stars, all of it. It was so good to get it out, make it seem more than his own silent delusion.
He sat up, pointed at the window.
“A planet? We’re on one right now. The dawn, the sunrise, is not Zentrum’s relighting the fire of the world every day,” he said. “Zentrum has nothing to do with it. Duisberg rotates. The sun isn’t dying and rising again, we are just turning around and around to face away from it then to face it again.”
“Because we’re sticking to a ball?”
“Yes, a turning ball. A planet named Duisberg.”
“And at night the stars are other suns?”
“They are.”
“Where do they go during the day?”
“They’re still there. The sun drowns them out with its light.”
She nodded. “Ridiculous.”
He shook his head. “Seems that way to me sometimes.”
A moment of silence, then she spoke again, softly. “And Zentrum is not God?”
“No,” Abel replied firmly. “Zentrum is a nishterlaub machine.”
“Broken.”
“Not exactly. Limited.”
Mahaut nodded. “This I can see. This I can believe from the world I know.”
“You and I understand the world better than him.”
“Better than God?”
“Zentrum is not God. Center isn’t even sure Zentrum is a conscious being. Not every Mark XV got the upgrade to full self-awareness, especially on outlying planets like Duisberg. Zentrum can simulate a personality well enough—hell, I’ve had conversations with him, something that I’d r
ather not repeat—but as to whether Zentrum really knows who he is the way you and I do . . . it could be that he does not.”
Mahaut waved a hand in front of her face as if to disperse the cloud of nonsense Abel was spouting.
And it must seem so strange to her, Abel thought. Mark XV computers. Rotating planets. Recreating a near-magical civilization. After all, why couldn’t the sun just as easily be Zentrum’s fire? Didn’t believing as much make life easier, more simple? Couldn’t that be enough?
No.
Knowing how the universe worked explained so many other things, things of which the Laws and Edicts were silent.
Yet could it really be a fact that he was right, and every other human being in the Land and the Redlands beyond was wrong? It was very hard to keep the truth before his eyes sometimes. The truth was so completely different from the way everyone around him thought.
Everyone except Mahaut. Depending on how you looked at it, he’d either freed her from superstition—or drawn her deep into his own lunacy.
At least somebody is here with me, he thought.
“So tell me this,” said Mahaut. “Since you know all this science and history is so, and Zentrum is some kind of sophisticated . . . thinking irrigation system . . . then why don’t you fix him? You claim to be the one with the godlike knowledge, after all.”
Abel sighed, leaned back against the cool stucco wall behind him. He wished he had thought to bring his pipe along. He would really like a puff of pipeweed at the moment.
“Because I don’t know how,” he said. “Center and Raj believe they do, and I trust them. For the moment, I do what I can. If my father keeps Treville strong and I clean up this cesspool in Bruneberg, maybe we can hold the Blood Winds at bay for another generation. Maybe that will give us time to get the boost we need, the momentum toward change and progress. That’s something I understand, at least.”
Mahaut chuckled. “Land and Law, if anyone hears us talking like this we’ll burn at the stake.”
“Just as likely crucified,” Abel responded glumly. “Or stoned.”