Forged in Fire (Destiny's Crucible Book 4)

by Olan Thorensen

  To his front, he thought he saw the right-side defenders weakening. The flashes from muskets seemed fewer, and from his slight elevation he thought he could see gaps in what had been a solid wall of islanders. A flash of sunlight caught Avan’s eye. The clans were setting up a new line of cannon—6-pounders, from their looks—at the same position where fifteen minutes earlier he’d ordered an engineering company carrying charges to silence 12-pounders at all costs. They had succeeded but vanished, and now even more cannon were moving up.

  We’re going to lose if we don’t move forward, Avan thought with certainty. It was a mistake to put everything into this one breakthrough. We should have kept up the assault along the entire original front. It would have worked if we’d kept moving, deepening and widening the breach, but the islanders responded too quickly. Now, we’re tied down with them on three sides of us, and we can’t bring all our men to bear on them at once. Nor is there any way to bring into action the few remaining regiments still on the other side of the berm.

  The thousand cavalry held for exploiting the breakthrough were finally coming across, but they had no time to assemble. He had to throw them into battle as soon as each company crossed. Nor could he wait for more cannon. They, too, were finally crossing, and the first batteries of Narthani 12-pounders were just setting up to his right.

  He turned to his aides. “Every cavalry company is to charge straight at the gap developing to our right front. The next infantry regiment is to charge the new cannon being set up and then try to roll up their line to the north. All cannon that get across are to focus two canister salvos at those new islander cannon, if our infantry is clear. Otherwise, concentrate on the same section that appears to be weakening. Everyone else, keep attacking. The horses and men will be stepping on bodies, but there’s no helping it. We’re getting slaughtered. We have to make room and get more of our men into action. As it is, we’re just feeding them into a trap.”

  Elac Kemescu and Munmar Kellen

  The last clansmen on this section of the berm defenses had pulled back or were dead—except one man. Elac Kemescu threw potato-masher grenades over the berm, until he reached down for one more and the wooden box that had been full was empty. Then he fought hand to hand as Narthani began pouring over the top of the berm. Men he knew and strangers fell under the wave, accompanied by as many Narthani, until the ramparts and the gun pits filled with bodies. While engaged with a Narthani his own size, almost simultaneously, he felt a searing pain in his side. That same moment, a friend of Kemescu’s clubbed the Narthani from behind. The friend reached for him, then fell forward, a Narthani bayonet protruding through his chest. Kemescu fell to his knees, clutching his side and feeling warm blood. Another Narthani fell from the top of the berm across Kemescu’s calves, and the two men twisted and grappled.

  To his surprise, Munmar Kellen had survived the first assault on the islander berm, only to be reassigned to another unit, which once more put him among the lead attackers. He wasn’t a pious believer in Narth, but he couldn’t squelch bitterness at the God, if he existed, for sparing him once, only to send him back for another chance to die. To his relief, crossing the same open ground as before was easier than expected, because another regiment had already crossed the berm.

  Kellen’s optimism vanished when his new unit joined the savage fighting to secure the berm. His participation was short-lived. He paused only momentarily, as he crested the berm, to take in the fighting along the berm and the Narthani pushing on. Then the edges of a canister cone caught him with four of the balls. He was hit on a bicep, twice on his right leg, and a fourth hit broke a clavicle and ricocheted away. Although he didn’t know it, the fourth hit was fortunate. The bone protected an artery where a hit would have been fatal within moments.

  He fell across the back of the legs of a wounded islander, and the two of them grappled, their blood mixing as they rolled together. More Narthani jumped down off the top of the berm. Kemescu lay under Kellen, both men exhausted, weak from blood loss. One man tried to pull Kellen away and pulled a knife to finish Kemescu, when an officer yelled at him to keep moving.

  Kellen’s arms refused his orders to move. Even a final infusion of adrenaline failed to energize his exhausted muscles. His weight kept the islander immobile for the moment, but he didn’t think he had anything left to fight with.

  Kemescu was glad to have the Narthani on top of him. It kept him from being stepped on or noticed by the continuous stream of men passing over and beside them.

  Neither man spoke the other’s language, but it was unnecessary. They both released whatever grip they had on the other and pulled themselves into a recess in the rampart. There, an unknown islander had stashed extra clothes, a sack of hardtack and cheese, a water jug, and a well-worn copy of The Word. All those items were replaced by two exhausted, bloody bodies that leaned against each other and waited for whatever happened next.

  Filtin Fuller

  His four gun crews were a mixture of shopkeepers and craftsmen working on Yozef’s various projects, men incapable of riding horses, and brothers from St. Tomo’s abbey in Caernford. Their 25-pounder carronades were the last guns cast before Caernford’s citizens left for either the Dillagon redoubt or Orosz City.

  The short-barreled carronades weighed the same as regular 12-pounders but had a more limited range, which wouldn’t be an issue, because the Narthani were so close. Filtin and the crews had trained for only three days, using a single carronade. The other three guns finished cooling and mounting on carriages only the day before they left Caernford, and two carronades had never been test-fired.

  He was too conscious that his battery had a commander with no previous military command experience, men barely trained, carronades inadequately tested, and now they’d been pushed to the front against what seemed to be a never-ending tide of Narthani.

  A man to his right suddenly jerked backward when a musket round struck his forehead. A man and a woman he didn’t recognize appeared from nowhere and dragged the body away. The dead man was replaced by a teenage boy who worked in the Caernford kerosene refinery. The boy picked up the dead man’s sponger, the wooden pole with a cloth sponge to swab out the barrel after firing and to tamp any sparks before reloading.

  Filtin ran back and forth, screaming at the men to work faster—as if they weren’t already working faster than anyone thought possible. A line of men with bayonetted muskets stood with the guns, fighting off Narthani infantry. Behind them were more men, reloading, then stepping forward to fire through openings in the front rank. Four women and a girl no more than eleven years old appeared and pulled wounded and dead to the rear.

  Yozef

  He stood twenty yards behind Filtin’s battery, watching the gun crews frantically set up and the men protect the guns firing and reloading when the Narthani were yards away and resort to bayonets when the Narthani came close.

  Thank God, or thank me, thought Yozef, impiously, for remembering about socket bayonets. The clansmen could reload without removing their bayonets, whereas the Narthani plug bayonets let them do only one thing at a time, because the bayonet handle slid down the barrel. It gave the defenders an advantage they sorely needed.

  And thank God for the chaos so that the Narthani come at us as a mob, instead of with disciplined attacks.

  No sooner had the last thought run through Yozef’s mind than a half-dozen Narthani broke through the guns’ defenders and fell on a 6-pounder crew adjacent to Filtin’s position. The crew, intent on getting their gun ready, vanished under the sudden onslaught. More clansmen, waiting their turn at the defensive line, engaged the Narthani. Then even more Narthani forced their way into the battery, and a general melee broke out, threatening to engulf that entire battery and spreading to Filtin’s.

  “Oh shit,” Yozef said, while thinking, Why does this always happen to me? He held a musket he was not supposed to use, being guarded by three of the most dangerous men on the field, when yards away the batteries were in danger. There was
no calculation in his mind. His decision was automatic. Carnigan, Kales, and Reese wouldn’t leave him, even if he ordered them to help repel the Narthani. And even if they would, he couldn’t do it and stay out of the fight.

  He pulled the bayonet he wasn’t supposed to use out of its scabbard and twisted it in place on the end of the barrel of the musket he also wasn’t supposed to use. When he looked up, Kales and Reese had done the same. Carnigan had two braces of the horse pistols he favored, but he also carried a metal shield and a battle ax. The shield seemed smaller than the one he’d used against the Buldorians at St. Sidyrn’s abbey, but the ax appeared to be the same one. It flashed through Yozef’s mind that there couldn’t be two such large axes on the island.

  They had no need for discussion. As a shoulder-to-shoulder front, they hit the Narthani surging through the gap. To Yozef’s left, Carnigan’s ax hardly slowed as a diagonal swipe passed through significant parts of two Narthani bodies. A third Narthani had ducked but found himself impaled on Yozef’s bayonet when he straightened up. The four of them had no time or room to watch anything except what happened to their front as they moved forward into the Narthani. Shocked at the focused counterattack, the Narthani lost momentum. More clansmen engaged and once more cleared the guns of Narthani, although several dozen bodies lay scattered amid the carriages and limbers.

  “All right!” yelled Carnigan, “now get your ass back behind the guns.”

  Carnigan had to help Gowlin Reese move. Braithe’s husband had taken a bayonet in a thigh. The bleeding didn’t spurt, so no artery was cut. When the four of them were once more behind Filtin’s battery, Wyfor tied a cloth around Reese’s thigh. He wouldn’t be running, but he insisted he could stand, reload, and fire.

  Avan

  The new islanders’ cannon batteries setting up to the Narthani’s right had been delayed but not stopped. Twice Avan’s men had got into the right-most battery, but both times the islanders had beaten them back. That battery seemed to have only one gun in action. Yet the farther two batteries had laid down withering canister fire at the flank of his cavalry and infantry flowing to the northwest corner of the arc that Avan was trying to break out of. Despite the Narthani’s losses, they had pushed back the islanders with each renewed attack.

  One more good push and we’re through, thought Avan. As the salient grew, another regiment, then another, reinforced those fighting in the forefront. To his side, Avan could see another regiment flowing over the berm. The last three cavalry companies he had been assigned were preparing to throw themselves at the islanders’ weak point. Across the trench, an entire division, four regiments, waited their turn. They were the last men Avan had at his disposal. The rest of the cavalry and three infantry regiments were holding off islander horsemen attacking the Narthani rear.

  Avant turned to a signal officer. “Message to Marshal Gullar. We’re about to break into the open. Time for him to come forward and the rear guard to follow.”

  Denes

  He read the short message. The rider’s horse had collapsed as soon as its rider dismounted and stumbled to Denes’s bunker. The man was no shape for the answer that needed to go back.

  “Akryn,” Denes barked. An Adrisian stepped forward from the knot of men awaiting instructions. “Grab three other men, and all of you deliver a message. At least one of you has to get through. Kill the horses.”

  Bekir Uzcil

  The mission to kill the Keelan hetman had failed, but no fault had been assigned to Captain Bekir Uzcil, or so General Akuyun had assured him. Still, the failure and the loss of most of his men ate at Uzcil. He had requested and been approved to transfer to the Twenty-Ninth Corps as soon as he heard Akuyun’s units would not participate in the next campaign. He felt as if his honor had been stained, and he needed to make amends against the islanders.

  With a solid recommendation from both Akuyun and Assessor Hizer, he had been given command of a cavalry company in the Third Division, Twenty-Ninth Corps. The division’s cavalry commander was not pleased to be assigned a new officer just before a campaign, but the colonel quickly came to appreciate a superior officer to the one being replaced.

  Uzcil felt elated when his company rode through the last islanders standing between the army and wide-open terrain. Two more cavalry companies followed suit. Uzcil and his company wheeled left to attack the rear of the islanders’ defense. The Narthani forced more and more clansmen to divert from the fight against Narthani infantry, and the entire islander line began to collapse.

  So intent was Uzcil in directing his company against the islanders’ rear, he didn’t notice the owner of the pistol whose ball struck him in the back of the skull.

  Yozef

  Carnigan, being several inches taller than anyone else in the vicinity, was the first to see the bad news. Yet even he had to use the spokes of a carronade to stand another two feet higher, despite nearly continuous whizzes of passing musket balls. “The bastards are through our line! I can see our people starting to run!”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Yozef screamed. “As many as we’ve killed, there’s still a shitpot lot of them! No matter what we do on these flanks of theirs, they’ll get way too many to open ground where they can form up. Our losses have been so great that I don’t know if all this has gained us any advantage!”

  “Wait,” said Carnigan. “Something’s happening.”

  “Well, get your big ass down from there before your luck runs out,” exhorted Yozef.

  Fighting continued until Yozef had trouble remembering a time when it hadn’t. Twice more, the Narthani nearly overran the carronade batteries, and twice more Yozef and now two companions joined in pushing the Narthani back. Carnigan bled from half a dozen wounds, none serious. Wyfor limped, though Yozef couldn’t see from what, and the wiry man held against his side the hand that had lost two fingers during the attack on the Kolsko house. Yozef had a few scratches but was otherwise unscathed, even if drained from exertion and adrenaline overload.

  “Am I imagining it?” Reese called out. He stood behind them, reloading their muskets and pistols, his pant leg covered in dried blood from the wound that had quit bleeding. “Or are there fewer Narthani than before?”

  Yozef hadn’t registered more than what was directly in front of him. He now corrected that lack. Life-and-death fighting still went on, but not as frenzied as before. In some isolated pockets, clansmen had no one directly engaging them. Some clansmen, finding themselves with no one to fight, moved to where the Narthani remained. Other clansmen, stupefied, just stood in a daze.

  He began to see Narthani drop muskets and kneel or lie on the ground. The Narthani were broken. Dead, dying, and wounded Narthani lay two and three deep in mounds interspersed with bare ground. Scattered individuals or small knots of men stood as if frozen, with nowhere to go and no one commanding them what to do. The islanders had recovered the portions of the earthworks the attackers had occupied and continued to fire at those Narthani still standing and anyone who, by movement, indicated he was still alive. To the south, the firing around the point of the main Narthani attack had dwindled.

  The islanders had held. The carronade battery had lost half of its men, and only two of the guns were still in commission, but those two continued to load and fire canister at the carpeted ground to their front. Yozef couldn’t see Filtin. The islanders gave no pretense of coordination, and their rate of fire had slowed from exhaustion, but the crews by now functioned like automatons. Yozef saw one carronade fire canister at a single Narthani not fifty yards away, yet somehow the hundreds of balls missed, and the forlorn man stood amid the carnage and stared at nothing.

  Enough, Yozef thought sickly. “For God’s sake, enough,” he yelled, but in English.

  The crew of the second cannon didn’t hear, didn’t understand, or didn’t care as they finished loading another canister round. He stumbled over debris and bodies to stop this obscenity and barely touched the barrel of the first carronade. He yelped and jerked his hand back. The bro
nze was hot enough to have caused a serious burn if he’d leaned on it harder. These were untested barrels, he remembered.

  A crewman of the carronade raised an ignition wand to the barrel pointing at the same forlorn Narthani.

  Yozef yelled, “Stop! It’s over!” He was either too late, or the crew ignored him as the ember end touched the primer vent.

  Yozef’s world flared in yellows and blacks, and he felt himself airborne and then . . . nothing.

  Chapter 49: Anyone Can Fall

  Come Quickly

  Maera sat with her back against the earthwork rampart, where she had stationed herself during the battle. From there, the earthworks tapered off to be covered by cannon fire from the city’s south wall. That morning, on the way to the defensive line, her cousin Riona Klofyn had joined her, carrying a musket.

  “Word came last night. Pynmer is dead,” Riona said, her face haggard.

  Maera hadn’t known Riona’s son well but knew he was with Stent’s dragoon force. There was nothing to say. Both women were going to the line to defend the clans and, in Riona’s case more than Maera’s, not passing up the opportunity to personally kill Narthani.

  The Narthani had made a brief attempt to storm their section, but the islanders beat them off easily. More serious were the major infantry assaults to the south and the cavalry engagements still ongoing to the east. Her section of the line fired obliquely to support the defenders closer to the points of the Narthani assault. She had used her position as Yozef’s wife to commandeer a musket, something Yozef would have been angry at, both her being there and using him to get her way. But he wasn’t there, so he didn’t know yet.