Lee's brows rose. At least the order was decisive- ambiguous, but not vague. "I repeat, sir: Which guns? The enemy has a good many batteries in this vicinity."
The messenger flung out a hand. "There, sir. There are your guns."
Lee's face settled into a mask of marbled politeness. "Very well, Captain. You may assure Lord Raglan that the Brigade will endeavor to fulfill his command."
Whatever it means, he added to himself. He looked north. Up the valley, with massive batteries on either side of it swarming with Russian troops, more guns and earthworks at the head of it, and huge formations of Russian cavalry and infantry in support. Then his eyes swung back to the Sapoune Heights before him, running east and west from the mouth of the valley.
"Messenger," he snapped, scribbling on his order pad as he gave the verbal equivalent. "Here. To Sir Colin, with the Highland Brigade: I request that he be ready to move rapidly in support." The man saluted and spurred his mount into a gallop. "Captain Byrd, the Brigade will deploy in line, with the 22nd Maryland in reserve. Immediately, if you please. The horse artillery battery will accompany us this time."
The regiments shook out to either side of him; he reached out, trying to feel their temper. It reassured him. The men had beaten a superior force that morning; they had a tradition of victory. If men believe they will conquer, they are more than halfway to doing so.
This time they were going to need every scrap of confidence they could wring out of their souls. He looked left and right, drew his saber again, and sloped it back against his shoulder.
"Brigade will advance at the trot," he said quietly.
Bugles rang, shrill and brassy. The long line of the formation broke into movement, shaking itself out with the long ripple of adjustment that marked veteran troops. Ahead lay the long valley, and the first ranging shots from the Russian batteries on either side came through the air with a ripping-canvas sound—old-fashioned guns, but heavy, twenty-four and thirty-two pounders. Shot plowed the turf, and shells burst in puffs of dirty-black smoke with a vicious red snap at their hearts. One landed not twenty yards to his right, and a section of the orderly front rank of the 1st Virginia was smashed into a bubble of chaos: writhing, thrashing horses screaming like women in labor but heartrendingly loud; men down, one staggering on foot with his face a mask of red and an arm dangling by a shred.
"Steady there, steady."
The voice of a troop commander, sounding so very young. The troopers opened their files to pass the obstacle and then closed again, adjusting their dressing to the regulation arm's length.
"Not up the valley, for Christ's sake!" That was the British colonel.
"Of course not," Lee snapped, letting his irritation out for a moment. Did the man think he was a complete idiot?
"Brigade will wheel to the right," Lee went on. Gallopers fanned out, and bugles sounded. That was a complex maneuver, with so many men in motion. "Right, wheel."
To his left, the 1st Virginia and the Lexington Hussars rocked into a canter. To his right, the Charleston Dragoons reined in, checking their pace. Smooth and swift, the whole formation pivoted until it was facing the junction of the valley with the Sapoune Heights—where neither the Russian batteries nor the captured British guns could fully bear on the North Americans.
Not fully was a long way from not bearing at all, and as the Russian gunners perceived their target he could see muzzle flashes from the heights ahead, and from the batteries behind him came the wailing screech of shells fired at extreme range. Time to get us across the killing field, he thought, consciously relaxing his shoulders and keeping his spine straight and easy in the saddle.
"Charge!" he said.
The bugles cried it, high and shrill. This time there would be no retreat, and every man in the Brigade knew it. The troopers were raising their screeching cheer again, a savage saw-edged ululation through the rising thunder of thousands of hooves and the continuous rolling bellow of the Russian barrage. Men leaned forward with their sabers poised, or gripped the reins in their teeth and readied a revolver in either hand. The enemy were closer now; he could see the figures of men as they sweated at their guns. Closer, and they were loading with grapeshot. His face was impassive as he steadied Journeyman with knees and hands; the iron rain would not turn aside if he crouched or screamed. A riderless horse went by, eyes wild and blood on its neck from a graze that had cut the reins.
The grape blasted great swaths through the attackers, and the long war-scream took on an edge that was pain and fear and fury combined. Blades and glaring faces edged up around him, and then they were among the guns. Lee saw a man splash away from the very muzzle of a fieldpiece, and then he was urging his mount up and over in a fox hunter's leap, over the limber of a cannon. A gunner struck at him with a long ramrod, glaring, an Orthodox cross hanging on his naked hairy chest. He threw up his arms with a yell as Lee cut backhanded at him, and then the commander was through. He reined in sharply, wheeling the horse in its own length. Byrd and his other aides drew up around him . . . no, Carter was gone, and Rolfe was white-faced and clutching a shattered arm.
"See to him," Lee said. The wind was blowing the smoke of the barrage away. "To the regimental commanders—" or their successors, he thought, the losses apparent as the struggle around the guns died down tore at him "—dismount the 1st Virginia, the Hussars, the Dragoons and prepare to hold this position until relieved. I expect a counterattack soon. The Maryland Lights to remain mounted in reserve. At once, gentlemen!"
This was a good position. If the Highlanders arrived in time . . .
The Englishman beside him began to speak. There was a crack, and under it a distinct thudding sound. "By God, sir, I think I've been killed," he said with wonder in his voice, pressing his hand over a welling redness on his chest.
"By God, sir, I think you have," Lee blurted. The British colonel slumped to the ground.
Too many good men have died today, Lee thought grimly, and began to position his dismounted troopers. I hope there was a reason why.
"Get those guns set up," he snapped. "You"—he pointed at the captain in charge of the field guns—"split up your crews, use volunteers, and see if you can turn some of these pieces around. We can expect a counterattack far too soon."
"By God, Sir Robert," the white-bearded man in the kilt said, removing his bearskin in awe. "Ye've held harrrd, nae doot o' it."
Dead men gaped around smashed cannon; fallen horses were bloating already, adding to the sulfur stink of gunpowder.
"We are most heartily glad to see you, Sir Colin," Lee said hoarsely. He looked northward. The Russians were streaming back as the thin red line of the Highland Brigade advanced. What was left of the 1st North Americans stood about, too stunned to react as yet. Stretcher bearers were carrying men back towards the waiting horse-drawn ambulances.
"Aye, we'll no have trouble takin' the valley now. We enfilade their whole position, d'ye see. 'Twould hae been nae possible if ye'r men hadna taken an' held this position. A direct attack—" He nodded to the open V of the valley. "'Twould hae been a Valley of Death."
The bagpipes squealed out; the sound of glory and of tears.
"It is well that war is so terrible," Lee whispered. "Or we would grow too fond of it."
Something for Yew
Halfway through the twenty-first century," Detective-Inspector Ingmar Rutherston said, his breath showing as white puffs in the raw, chill air.
It was the fifteenth of January in this year of Grace 2050 a.d., and a thin drizzle drifted down from a dark-gray sky to bead on the oilskin outer layer of their anoraks.
"Hurrah. Sir." replied Detective-Constable Joseph Bramble, with a distinct pause between the words. "'Alfway through? I can't wait to get out the other side, if the rest of it's going to be like this."
They looked out from the entrance of the railway station over the rain-slick docks of Portsmouth amid the smells of silt and fish and wet cobbles and smoke, horse manure and pumped-out bilges. The bowsprits o
f scores of ships tied up at the quays speared into the dimness overhead, and masts and spars reached up into the mist like a spiky, leafless winter forest amid the tracery of rigging. Behind them the other passengers were scattering in a flurry of umbrellas, and the streamlined light-metal pedalcar they'd arrived on from Winchester was hitched to a team of British Rail Percherons and drawn away in a crunch of hooves on gravel.
Gaslights glowed through the increasing murk of the winter's early evening, blurred into smears of light by the wet, and nobody paid two more travelers much attention. The two detectives were in plain clothes. Rutherston had six feet of lean height, with a narrow, clean-shaven beaky face and yellow hair worn rather short, and level gray eyes. Bramble was the same height but stocky and with a longbowman's thick shoulders; he was also very dark for an Englishman, blunt tan features and a mop of curly black hair.
That might have made him stand out anywhere but a polyglot seaport like this . . . or in the Buckinghamshire parish he came from, where everyone knew the Brambles of Jamaica Farm who'd been there since the resettlement.
"Detective-Inspector Rutherston?"
Rutherston turned. A woman in blue police uniform stood there, with a rain-cloak around her shoulders. She was four inches shorter than him, somewhat older than his thirty-two, and had that look of bone-deep tiredness that took at least a week of inadequate sleep combined with hard work.
"For my sins," he answered, nodding. "Superintendent Arnarsson?" he asked, and went on to introduce Bramble.
"Correct. Mary Arnarsson—"
She pronounced it Arnson, changing the Icelandic patronymic into an English family name as many did. The process was often helped along by the second and third generations' desire to fit in; from the slight emphasis she put on it he thought that was the case here, and adjusted his mental file. She went on:
"—general dogsbody and chief lion-tamer to this tide-water zoo, for my sins."
They shook hands all 'round; Rutherston offered the superintendent his cigarette case; she accepted one of the Embiricos cigarillos and he lit for both of them.
"Partial to rum, I see," she said, looking at the product of Barbados with respect; the tobacco was flavored with it.
"Just doing my bit to support the resettlement program over there," Rutherston said.
The local went on: "Let's get you out of the wet. What'll it be first, the Scottish corpse or dinner with a garnish of paperwork? Our medical examiner should be along to the murder site soon—delayed by his other hat as a GP."
"Alas, duty calls," Rutherston said.
"Like a crying brat you can't ignore," Bramble sighed. "I could fancy a bite, right now."
The pedalcar was the fastest form of land transport in the world, but British Rail charged extra if you didn't do your share of the pumping at the pedals, and Chief Constable Tillbury in Winchester was notoriously unreasonable about travel-chits which showed you'd gotten your feet up for the trip. That was thirty-four miles of hard labor, and combined with the weather it was enough to give anyone an appetite. Rutherston's lips moved in a quirk of agreement.
Arnson gave a quick nod of approval at their choice, whistled sharply for a porter to carry their bags off to the hostelry, and led the way towards the scene of the crime. The rain was still drizzling down, and it was just cold enough to make cobblestones and paving blocks slippery with a thin film of half-ice. They walked as quickly as they could, the hobnails of their boots grating and their left hands on their sword-hilts, but they still had to be careful. It wasn't very late yet—not more than seven—but winter's early night had fallen hard, with cloud hiding moon and stars.
The gaslights cast enormous flickering shadows on the upper stories of the buildings, and left the masts of the docked vessels to vanish into the misty darkness above; shipyards and workshops and the little factories and foundries had closed, and most of the retail trades, but the taverns and pubs and "pubs" with a suspicious excess of scantily clad barmaids were still doing a roaring business.
"What was that?" Rutherston said quickly, stopping and turning on one heel.
Bramble turned too, and a handspan of steel showed as his right hand closed on the hilt of his blade in the reflex of a soldier, which was what he'd been until last summer.
"Didn't catch it, sir," he said quietly, his dark eyes scanning the alleyway to their right.
"What are you going on about?" Arnson called over her shoulder.
"Thought I saw something," Rutherston said.
He didn't add that what he thought he'd seen was someone leaping across the gap between two roofs. That was impossible, in this weather.
"It's a busy part of town," Arnson said as they went forward again.
"I didn't see anything," Bramble said. "But I've got that nasty someone-is-watching feeling, roit enough."
Rutherston nodded. Though it was busy; dockers were still at work, too, a fresh shift coming off the horse-drawn tramcars, and carts rumbling to and from the warehouses. Portsmouth's trade had been expanding fast of late, faster than piers could be refurbished and modernized. That meant berths were too expensive to sit idle merely because it was dark and dangerous to work; the navigation lanterns of ships waiting their turn glittered dimly from out on the surface of the Portsmouth Water.
"Times like this, I wish I'd taken me mustering-out grant in land. Down Bordeaux way, or Provence, or in Spain, like those lucky sods," Bramble said.
He nodded at the colonists walking up the gangplank of an emigrant ship carrying bundles and children and leading toddlers by the hand. The brig had Cadiz Merchant on its stern, and sailors were chanting at the capstan as cargo-nets went by overhead.
"Didn't you say you took me up on joining the police because being a farmer was far too much like hard work?" Rutherston said.
"Roit, sir, but those bastards will get to do it with orange trees an' olive groves."
He grinned as he went on: "And I could tan better than the lot of 'em together, thanks to my granddad Rasta Bob. They'll be sorry they can't, when they're digging and reaping and sizzling and roasting up-country from Lisbon or Cadiz or Casablanca come July, the poor pink buggers."
"True enough," Rutherston said; they both knew the power of the unmerciful southern sun from their Army days.
Rutherston noted the awe on the fresh country faces of the emigrants as they gazed about at their first and last glimpse of Portsmouth.
Probably they've never been out of sight of the steeple of their parish churches before, he thought.
"Meanwhile, here comes another shipload of them," Bramble went on, in a half-serious grumble.
He nodded towards the Prinsessan Birgitta. The banner that dripped at her stern was yellow with a horizontal red cross, the flag of the friendly and civilized realm of Norland; probably out of the Åland Isles in the Gulf of Bothnia. The people coming down the ramp were fair enough, but not Scandinavians. Sheepskin coats and caps and baggy black trousers, calf-high felt boots or wrapped leggings, kerchiefs on the women's heads and a general pungent odor of damp wool, garlic and old sweat—Poles, at a guess, they'd been trickling in for twenty years or more to take up hard-and-dirty jobs.
"They do jobs in coal mines and clearing squads that Englishmen won't, Constable," Rutherston said, looking at the immigrants charitably; his mother's parents had been immigrants, though that had been in the great influx from Iceland and fifty-one years ago. "And it's not as if we're crowded."
"Easy enough for you to say, Inspector," Arnson said, coming out of her brown study. "They make half my work, even when it's just getting homesick and drinking that vile potato gin and knifing each other. Or they break windows and heads over having to use Anglican Rite churches, as if they were more Catholic than the Holy Father. Not to mention every sodding other type of foreigner we get, all with something that gets them hot, bothered and bloody. Thank God they don't let Moors settle here to live, and damn the . . . other party!"
Bramble grinned and Rutherston hid a smile. Officially
the police were neutral in politics; in fact, not many were Whigs, even in seaports where the current Opposition's anything-for-the-sake-of-trade platform usually got a lot of votes.
They turned into a narrow road lined by warehouses, dodging loaded carts pulled by damp, discouraged-looking horses, and handcarts and a long line of men wrestling with a huge roll of canvas from a sail-loft. There was a uniformed policeman standing outside the third building in line, and he was leaning on the haft of a billhook—a rarity for the police, issued to signal the gravity of the crime within. The broad steel head glittered wetly above his head in the gaslight, a chopping rectangle drawn out to a spike at the top and a cruel hook at the rear.
On the wall over the doors was a sign: Vadalà And Sons, Wholesale Merchants.
"And Sons?" Rutherston enquired. "One of the sons, in charge of their branch here? The report mentioned he was Italian."
Arnson nodded: "Well-established firm, and profitable—we check the books of foreign merchants regularly. No trouble on taxes."
"Superintendent," the man on guard said, straightening up and rapping the butt of his polearm on the pavement in salute.
"How is he, Angus?" she replied.
"Still dead, ma'am, if you mean the kiltie. But Vadalà showed up just a minute ago, and his secretary, and Jock."
"What a happy chance." To the two detectives: "Vadalà's the owner; he lives two streets north, him and his family and clerks and so forth. The secretary actually found the body. We took the initial statements and asked them to drop by later for you. Jock McTavish is our medic, and doubles for forensics work."
They dropped the stubs of their cigarillos, ground them out and went in through one of the great wagon-sized double doors that was open slightly. The interior didn't have gaslight, but the Portsmouth police had lit some of the big alcohol lanterns that hung from rope-and-pulley arrangements on the ceiling. That was high up, iron support beams resting on concrete pillars shaped like giant golf tees, both left over from the old days and reused here.
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