The March North

by Graydon Saunders

  Part-Captain repair to the standard. If we need to move, getting the artillery back out of there is likely to be the hard part.

  Blossom starts walking, headed toward where the first clear section of palisade is getting stairs. Blossom’s maybe ten metres from tube one when the Master Gunner makes a round-the-head wave. Blossom nods, and the tube teams start moving well away from tube one, the Master Gunner making one-handed chivvying motions at them.

  Blossom goes on striding forward without pause, but makes a crisp circle-round-the-head gesture, one that means something, and pushes that hand at the twisted carriage of tube one.

  There’s a crack and a flash and a splash of molten steel from a patch of the mangled carriage, which sags into an increasingly less functional shape. Blossom’s hair has lost its mess of sparks.

  In five minutes, it will be five o’clock in the morning.

  Chapter 27

  Not dropping that anti-demon ward while passing people over it is tricky. It takes another half hour to get everyone back into the camp.

  One of the down guys on stretchers died, coming back, and the other doesn’t last much more than an hour.

  It makes the medics a bit crazy, but there’s a real limit to what skill or art can do when someone’s got that many demon claw holes clean through them.

  Halt would have been able to help, but I have to keep that couple of thousand Reems infantry on the other side of the pass. The company’s done and the battery isn’t doing any better. None of the three serviceable tubes have more than three hale files left in their teams. So they can shoot, or run the gun shields, or contribute to the main focus through the standard, but it’s pick one.

  A couple of drovers and the battery blacksmith have got some heaters set out, and food heating. The food might help all the guys in Three who got stuck with venomous spines. Haven’t lost any, they’re not getting worse, they can stand and walk if they weren’t spined in the legs or the lower back, all of them but the one who got a spine to the face can talk, but the medics aren’t optimistic about their prospects for a full recovery. They’re certainly not well now.

  Blossom’s pyrographing new names on the barrels, a Part-Captain’s proper dignity doing fine until a quiet dead voice asked for its nickname instead of the much-disliked name on the rolls.

  Three has two functional files; Two as reconstituted came back a file down, so eight. Four in the colour party. One long platoon fit for service, and they’re getting wobbly round the edges. We’re past where a tradition of canal marches will get you. Going to be something to build on if I can get them home sane.

  The Master Gunner borrows two files from Radish, and sends them along with about half the remaining battery support guys to climb up and get dead and down from the observers on the ridge. They’ve got two alive up there, out of the original sixteen. The guy still relaying a view southward should be down; shy an arm and a foot and starting to rave. Very bitey demons these Reems sorcerers are fond of using.

  The other live one isn’t hurt that you can see, beyond a tiny forehead burn, but is totally unresponsive. Something sorcerous.

  They get them all back down, mostly with ropes; it’s a steep slope. Half a file of hale gunners stay up there with the two company files. Have to keep up the watch.

  The battery goes through a big shot-shifting exercise; Blossom frowns a little at some of their storage choices, but they get five of the twelve regular caissons empty of shot. That gives a caisson to carry tube one — the carriage is gone, but Blossom doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with the tube itself, and even if there is, Blossom wants the quarter tonne of samarium — and four available to transport casualties.

  At twelve stretchers per, and with what we’ve eaten, that gets us away from needing to dump food for waggon space. Since we’ve got, best case, a couple hundred kilometres of Northern Hills to get across, not dumping food is good.

  The medics think anybody still breathing will keep on doing so, at least for today. Not necessarily with all their original limbs or eyes or integument, but alive.

  Everybody eats by files, the watch gets rotated, and there’s not really anything to do but convert our dead to ashes.

  The walking heave themselves upright to bear witness, everyone not on watch comes and stands and looks some mix of grim and shaky and solemn, and the lids go back on. Sliding through the focus there’s a joke about how many people it would take to actually fill the barrels, and the snickers come from the dead.

  Chapter 28

  The yellow-green cloud of despair over the Reems fortress is thinning out.

  The battery’s got tube one off the wreck of its carriage and loaded on an emptied caisson; the carriage-wreck gets a battalion toss. Considering the battalion’s present state, the six hundred metre distance will do.

  Strapping the tube down turns out to be something the battery practises; a tonne and a half of tube versus four tonnes of shot means the caisson is fine for the mass, but shot goes in racks. The tube, smooth except for its trunnions, apparently inherits from all its ancestors a vile tendency to slide out on a slope, and the few means certain to work at preventing this are preserved lore among artillerists.

  Tube one’s dead gunners remain with us. They have a somewhat existential debate over the utility of flipping a coin while in the keeping of the standard, and rock-paper-scissors for which files go to which active tube. The newly dead gunners look at that, shrug, and sort themselves out to keep the numbers even.

  The battery in as much like serviceable shape as it will get, Blossom stops indulging the Master Gunner. Hank’s off to the medics and down.

  Tube three gets hitched to its caisson, and pulled out of the firing line. The battery hasn’t got enough live gunners left to use three tubes. The dead drive shot fine, but they can’t run it from the caissons.

  Blossom puts tube four on the fortress and leaves tube two aimed over the ridge line.

  Battery, Captain.

  Captain, Battery. Concur with shot choice.

  I get a tiny flash of that metal-bending grin, and a wave. It’s not like I can’t read the shot codes, or notice which caisson.

  We’re in no shape to fight; anything we have to shoot at, might as well give it the hot long reds and hope we can handle the shock wave.

  We might. We for-sure won’t handle another major attack.

  All the glass jars of demon parts get picked up in tongs, checked for any damage to the glass, set back down, dripped on with neat alcohol by people holding damp rags in different tongs and leaning way back, and, in the cases that don’t go up with a whoosh and a roar, filled and lidded, carefully, and loaded, more carefully, into the battery commander’s waggon.

  I don’t know what you preserve demon parts with, but Blossom brought fifty litre kegs of it.

  It’s not much more than enough.

  Tongs or no tongs, the line of gunners go off to wash; Blossom gets the small silver flask out, measures carefully, and does indeed make faces. Blossom’s not looking especially tired, but then again Blossom usually looks as though now might be a good time to go for a run.

  Part-Captain; any sense in passing the vigour and cranberries around?

  You can get a doubtful look through the standard, if you try.

  Probably not enough left for two files.

  Not enough to matter, just now. Things are getting done. Slowly, at a greater cost in effort, but done.

  Adding vigour is a safe replacement for a first rest, when you’re starting fresh. It’ll expend anybody who is just too tired.

  And I’ll just bet there’s only one way to tell who’s too tired.

  Not a help.

  Something rueful comes back through the focus from Blossom.

  There’s a general settling. The medics keep getting the various spine-poisoned to get up and walk; the spine-poisoned keep trying to act like this is just fussing, then they stagger a bit.

  There’s a mass grab at the focus when a demon lands on the
hillside to the south, where the sorcerers Blossom was fighting were. It keeps a wary eye on us as it starts picking through the meadow.

  Picking very, very slowly through a small part of the meadow.

  After awhile, the consensus is that it’s trying to get at least one finely divided head back into a single location. Blossom gets nearly a fey look when two files of gunners float an empty ten-litre can out to it. Whatever remnant rhubarb preserves persist in the can are hardly going to contaminate a head picked, particle by particle, off meadow plants.

  If the demon doesn’t hurry it’s going to have to recover most of the bits from inside ants.

  Demons aren’t known to display gratitude floats out gently from Blossom, a point of information made available to the whole of the focus rather than a specific rebuke.

  Doesn’t mean I want to watch it suffer floats back, with more than one value of “I”.

  A lot of watching the demon do something takes place.

  Twitch expresses worry that no example of the critters with the spines was preserved; the medics have some of the spines, but no one wanted to try getting a cross between a venomous porcupine and a wolverine into a biscuit box, however dead it seemed. I mostly agree with Twitch, but prefer “no new cases of being stuck with spines” as a risk management choice. At least three of the walking got stuck right clean through the vambrace; those spines are sharp.

  Another round of eating by files, just after noon. The food’s still boiled, but a little more evenly and it’s certainly hot.

  By mid-afternoon, the observers up on the ridge are feeding everybody a view of total howling chaos over the pass to the south. It had started pretty quiet; I had been worried about a visit from formed troops through much of the morning.

  At a guess, most of the stronger Reems sorcerers were with the army, not in the fortress. I don’t think either Halt or Rust would be willing to interpret “avoid risk” as “see how much fun you can have terrifying these Reems guys to death”. So they’re having to work at it; it’s been nearly seven hours, now, and many of the Reems guys are still functional, but what started as a hastily assembled but cohesive block of troops around an ordered group of sorcerers sharing ward maintenance has come apart into small group or individual best effort.

  The demons Halt commanded seem to be in on it, too, busy trying to collect heads. And it’s not clear that the Reems guys are totally out of demons of their own; the big enchantment breaking obviously freed most of them, but either the demons are having a bad case of “My head! mine!” over particular sorcerers or it’s multi-sided in there.

  You can feel Blossom’s attention reaching out through the focus, for the better view of distance, and returning.

  Maybe another hour. Most of the second tier are dead, and the first tier’s getting panicky.

  Most of the walking are watching the fight, and a number of drovers and the battery support guys. Those in the Line not on watch, and sticking rigidly to their assigned arc, are racked right out.

  There are lots of lights and colours showing over the ridge and you can unquestionably hear it, entirely without the focus.

  With the focus, there’s one especially vivid bit, back down the mountain-slope from the battery guys with telescopes, of a Reems sorcerer going all-out to hold off three demons, and doing it well. All three demons fling themselves back, and there’s this half-second where you can see the sorcerer believe in victory when an arachnid shape about people-tall and apparently made out of the souls of angry knives shreds them.

  Two of the demons grab substantial portions of the head; the third seems to be scrabbling for bits of spine, fitting vertebrae back together to count up toward the base of the skull and be sure it’s got the last bit of head.

  It’s a lot more work if they don’t start to panic and go off on their own like that.

  Blossom’s scholarly voice, empty of feeling. Talking to me and Twitch and the Master Gunner, not to the remnant battalion as a whole.

  They’re not infinitely powerful, not even Halt. Blossom doesn’t usually do wry.

  A one-on-one fight with most of these guys would be over before it started, but hammering through the mass of them wouldn’t work. It’s a problem of attention; you only have so much to spare when you have to be ready to deal with it when a bunch of them, or all of them, decide to chuck something at you to see what gets through.

  But you’re always faster yourself than co-ordinating a group can be; get them trying to stay on balance and eventually — I get the feeling of Blossom’s chin lifting, pointing over the ridge.

  Sorcery is just like any other fight.

  Rust has been winning fights like that most of what recorded history we’ve got; Halt has been winning fights like that for much longer, and the terror of them will not be diminished if the Reems guys don’t know who they are fighting.

  There’s a definite attempt at a face shape looking up out of that empty ten litre can. The demon is trying to reassemble the sorcerer’s eyes, tiny damp bit by tiny damp bit, and there’s about half of the right one left to go. Several gunners and a whole file of Two drop out of the focus to stop looking at that.

  I go get a cup of coffee myself; there’s a big camp pot of it on, beside a fifty litre cauldron of lettuce root tea.

  If there’s time to get coffee, things aren’t too bad. Just to the Part-Captain. Blossom’s walking over, and makes the traditional offering wave at me with the same small silver flask.

  Why not.

  I get maybe fifteen millilitres. Blossom gets about twice that, which is not at all in keeping with our relative degrees of talent.

  Though if it were to be in keeping, Blossom’d need to drink a couple barrels. At least.

  “What is it?”

  “Talent equivalent of putting lemon juice and salt and mashed fruit and some extra sugar in barley water. Helps avoid cramps.”

  Which is more what it does than what it is, but sometimes it’s best to rely on the Commonweal’s ethics rules. If any of it is made from woodchuck spleens, they’ll be humanely obtained woodchuck spleens.

  Even massively outnumbered and surrounded by coffee, it tastes like being hurled into cold water with no warning.

  We walk off a little to one side, and are given space. It would be unkind to suppose that the Creeks like standing downwind of the boiling lettuce-roots, and are happy to leave the inferior upwind places for captains and their awful foreign coffee.

  “What’s next?” Blossom’s still got the officer face, smiling and calm and unconcerned, down cold. Can’t keep all the real concern out of the voice tone, but the inflection is fine, and the Part-Captain’s certainly being quiet.

  “Halt and Rust are due back an hour before sunset.”

  “Halt’s demons are to bring heads here by nightfall. Based on the one up in the meadow, the demons involved are determined to do that.”

  Shouldn’t generalise from one demon.

  “Starting a night march surrounded by demons and whatever scattered Reems infantry manage to get back over the pass seems like a bad plan. Not likely we’ll get a better defensive position than this.”

  A slow nod, nearly reluctant. Saying “without the surprise” is something Senior School hammers out of you; what you had best be able to say is “it was good enough to hold”.

  It was good enough to hold, despite venomous critters and a simultaneous attack by sorcerers, demons, and about seventy files of infantry. It needed to hold because the artillery sited there was an existential threat to an army, a threat it made good on during the active attack.

  Halt thinks Blossom’s existence is an argument in the Commonweal’s favour.

  I think Blossom’s substantial distress at not somehow being good enough to avoid casualties doing that job on no warning is the better argument.

  “Presuming the host of demons go away, and presuming we don’t have a significant Reems force to deal with, come dawn we start marching for the Commonweal at our best sustained rate.”
Getting a proper hastening march with baggage going while relying on the dead for push in the focus is different, and not something you practise.

  “The drayage is intact.” Blossom has a thinking-out-loud voice.

  “Two hundred kilometres is one long day at a hastening rate of advance.” Still thoughtful, but by no means convinced.

  “In principle. The walking may not do well without actually walking, rather than lying; that might lower our rate of movement. So might getting lost.” Or just running into an inconvenient mountain range; there’s no guarantee of a pass where we need it.

  Blossom makes a tiny, understated, perhaps-not wave. That gauntlet, both gauntlets, are several horrible colours from being doused with demon-ichor. “Getting Rust and Halt lost at the same time would be tricky. Plus the terrane has got the blood of what must be ten thousand Reems guys soaking into it or buried in it by now, even if we don’t count half because of how they died. It won’t be any kind of hungry.”

  I nod. The terrane could well be happy with us.

  “I would like to get home in one march. I need to get the remaining battalion home.”

  Blossom nods in reply, whether in agreement or recognising that I’ve made a decision it’s hard to say.

  “Battalion?”

  My turn for the understated wave. “Scratch battalion. Time was, a battalion was one infantry company and four of artillery.”

  Blossom’s head tips at me, expression entirely mild and entirely unreadable. “When artillery meant archers.”

  For maybe thirty years in the first days of the Commonweal. If you can shoot out and they can’t shoot in and have no idea what the focus even is, archers were a bad thing for them to be dealing with.

  “Doesn’t mean it’s a bad precedent.”

  Blossom takes a moment to digest that. “Two and four?”

  “One and three, I think. Run the infantry platoons at ten files.”

  I get a head tip and a half a thinking sort of smile. “Nines could do with another file per tube.” The smile wavers and settles, stiffer.

  Blossom started with extra; the eighteen files and two spare that go with six tubes, across four, and the battery’s down to a reconstituted six and change in the tube teams.