by David Weber
General Rychtyr had fought hard to hold that line, the last strong position before the Dohlaran border, but the heretic engineers had blown a path through the obstacles directly along the canal bed under cover of their damnable artillery. Then a Siddarmarkian assault had carried the breach while a simultaneous flanking attack by mounted Charisian infantry and a regiment of Siddarmarkian dragoons curled around Atlyn. With its front broken and its right flank crumbling, the Army of the Seridahn had been forced to give ground yet again, falling back for forty miles into the Duchy of Thorast—onto Dohlaran soil for the first time in the Jihad—until it had managed to stand once more.
It would have helped if the new “line” offered better defensive terrain, but the need to hold the connection between the high roads into Bryxtyn and Waymeet left the general no option but to hold here. If the heretics took the two fortresses, they could advance up either high road far more readily than they could using country roads like the one 2nd Company was charged with protecting. They’d be out of the straitjacket to which the Army of the Seridahn’s slow, stubborn retreat had so far confined them, with all sorts of maneuver advantages they hadn’t had before.
That would be … bad.
But however well Mahkgyl and Mylyndyz grasped the reasons they were stuck on their miserable hill, it struck them as grossly unfair that the detail struggling up its steepest side couldn’t use the road they were guarding. It would have offered a much easier ascent, but the heretic snipers still floating about in the scrubby, tangled trees to the east had shown a nasty tendency to take the road under fire at unpredictable intervals. True, the light wasn’t very good, even for heretic snipers, and it was getting worse rapidly. There hadn’t been any firing anywhere along 2nd Company’s line for the last couple of hours, for that matter, and Mahkgyl and Mylyndyz had watched a mounted courier gallop by without drawing so much as a single shot less than thirty minutes ago. Maybe the harassing artillery fire was actually working for a change. On the other hand, the fact that they weren’t firing at the moment didn’t mean they weren’t lying there, watching the road over their rifle sights, waiting for a richer prize … like a group the size of the one picking its way up from the west.
It took the eight-man detail over twenty-five minutes to climb what wasn’t a particularly high hill, but only partly because of its steepness. The four large, covered kettles suspended from the shoulder-carried poles at the center of the detail accounted for most of the delay. And given what they were almost certain those kettles contained, Mahkgyl and Mylyndyz approved wholeheartedly of their fellows’ disinclination to spill them.
The sun had disappeared below the horizon and dusk was setting in by the time they reached the top of the hill, crossed its highest point, and clambered cautiously down to 1st Section’s lizardholes. The first pale stars showed in the eastern sky, but the sky to the west still glowed, and Mahkgyl was careful not to silhouette himself against it as he greeted the man at the small column’s head.
“When you said you were gonna see about some food, I thought you meant more of this crap, Sarge,” he said, waving his gnawed-at bit of hardtack at the kilted giant. “I didn’t realize you meant like … well, like food food!”
“Listen, boyo,” Brahdryk Clahrksyn, 4th Platoon’s senior noncom, had the deep, rolling accent to go with his kilt, “I’m a man of my word. Remember when you saved my life last five-day? Well, I swore I’d pay you back, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you did.” Mahkgyl loosened the retaining clip on one of the kettles, lifted the lid, and inhaled deeply. “Oh, Sondheim, that smells good!” He replaced the lid as carefully as he’d loosened it and looked back at Clahrksyn. “Sarge, you’ve done a hell of a lot more’n just pay me back! Not quite ready to take a bullet fer you, but I might take a chance on throwing back a hand-bomb for you!”
Clahrksyn grinned.
“Hah! I expect this gratitude’ll last just about until the next time I need someone to dig latrines.”
“Maybe even four or five minutes longer,” Mahkgyl said solemnly.
“I’m deeply touched,” Clahrksyn told him, then nodded to the members of his detail, who were still breathing heavily after their climb. “Take it on to the CP and start organizing a chow line,” he told them. “I’ll be along in a minute.”
“Gotcha, Sarge,” a corporal Mahkgyl and Mylyndyz didn’t know, with a quartermaster’s armband, replied. “And don’t forget, I need these kettles back!” He chuckled. “If I don’t get them back, it’s gonna take a lot more’n one bottle of booze to make Lieutenant Tuhtyl happy with us!”
“Complaints, complaints!” Clahrksyn shook his head. “First, it was good booze. And, second, I promised we’d get your kettles back. What’s the matter, you don’t trust m—”
The 4.5” mortar bomb which burst almost directly above Clahrksyn’s head had a lethal zone ninety feet in diameter. Mylyndyz and two of the quartermaster detail actually survived it.
* * *
Captain Hovsep Zohannsyn slid his watch back into his pocket and cocked the flare pistol’s hammer. Fourth Company’s platoons had been briefed to follow the short, savage mortar bombardment as closely as possible, but he’d commanded the company for almost two years now. None of his men were going to charge into that holocaust until Hovsep Zohannsyn was certain it was over. If the support companies were their usual, efficient selves, the bombardment would end exactly when it was supposed to. That didn’t always happen, though, and the captain watched the explosions walking back and forth across the hilltop.
The last light in the western sky was fading quickly, and he grimaced in mingled satisfaction and unhappiness. Night attacks were a perfect recipe for confusion, chaos, and loss of tactical control, which accounted for his unhappiness. That was true for the defender, as well as the attacker, however, and the Imperial Charisian Army—and, especially, the Army of Thesmar—had made night attacks a specialty, with a tactical doctrine far better suited to that sort of chaotic encounter than almost anyone else’s. Fourth Company’s attempt to take the hill in daylight had failed painfully, but the Dohlarans dug in along its military crest hadn’t yet had time to do the sort of thorough job the Army of Thesmar had come to dread, and Zhohannsyn was fully in favor of not giving them that time. If this worked half as well as Major Edmyndsyn expected it to—or said he expected it to, anyway—then—
The torrent of explosions and air bursts stopped abruptly. Not instantly, of course. A half-dozen tardy antipersonnel bombs burst in midair, pounding the hilltop with a final downpour of shrapnel. But then there was silence while the vast pall of dust and smoke spilled upwards to blot away the newborn stars.
Zhohannsyn counted slowly to ten, waiting to see if any additional laggards would happen along. Then he squeezed the trigger.
* * *
“Where the hell is Clahrksyn?!” Lieutenant Ahmbrohs Tyrnyr shouted, trying to make himself heard through the rolling thunder as he crouched in his command post trench.
His CP was on the hill’s reverse slope, the far side of its crest, and most of the heretic angle-gun bombs were landing on its eastern slopes. Despite that, dirt and debris pelted down all around him, and deeper, angrier explosions thundered behind him as the heretics far heavier angle-guns laid the lash of their fire across the Dohlaran angles which had been harassing the woods in 4th Platoon’s front. He felt some of the airborne trash bouncing from his steel helmet, and he coughed harshly as the dust and smoke caught at the back of his throat.
“What?!” Sergeant Ahntohnyo Bahndairo shouted back, leaning closer until his mouth was barely a foot from Tyrnyr’s ear.
“I said, where the hell is—” Tyrnyr bawled, using his cupped hands as a megaphone. And then, almost as abruptly as it had begun, the bombardment stopped.
“—Clahrksyn?!” he finished.
Bahndairo flinched a bit from the shout in his ear, and the sudden quiet was almost more frightening than the explosions had been. It wasn’t a silence, however. Bits and pieces of d
ebris continued to patter down for a good five seconds, and the screams of wounded men could be heard only too clearly. Most of those screaming men were Tyrnyr’s, and a pain that had nothing to do with physical hurt went through the youthful lieutenant. But there were other screams, as well, fainter, perhaps, but just as shrill and coming from the flanks of the hill, where the company’s other platoons had been hammered almost as brutally.
“Dunno where he is, Sir,” Bahndairo said against that backdrop of wailing anguish. The sergeant was 4th Platoon’s standard bearer, its second ranking noncom. He and Brahdryk Clahrksyn were extremely close, and his voice was harsh as he pulled back the hammer on his rifle and capped the lock. “Said he was going to arrange some hot chow for the boys. Last I saw of him, he was headed off to discuss that with Lieutenant Tuthyl.” Despite his tension, Bahndairo actually twitched a smile. “Took my last bottle of rotgut with him when he went. Told me to tell you he’d be back in time for supper. I think he figured if you didn’t know what he was up to, you’d be able to tell the Captain you didn’t know a thing about any quartermaster bribes if it happened as how he asked.”
Tyrnyr snorted harshly. That sounded like the platoon sergeant. Clahrksyn was the one who’d taught an ignorant young lieutenant how important hot food really was, especially for men facing the energy-devouring terror of combat. And, in many ways, those “little comforts” civilians took for granted meant even more between bouts of combat for the same reason food was a traditional part of wakes and funerals. The simple act of eating was a sort of promise that life went on.
But now a much older and bitterly wiser lieutenant’s face was stone as he listened to those screams and wondered how many more of his men had just discovered the falsity of that promise under the savage pounding of the heretics’ portable angle-guns.
“Go find Captain Ahndairsyn,” he told Bahndairo. “Tell him we got hit hard and we’re damned well going to need reinforcement if the heretics follow up.”
“You go, Sir,” Bahndairo disagreed. “I’ll take Hainz and go sort out—”
“You’ll damned well go where I told you to go, Sergeant!” Tyrnyr snapped. “I need somebody I can count on to get it straight. And someone the Captain’ll know knows what he’s talking about! Besides, they may not even—”
A crimson flare burst in solitary splendor above the scrub woods on the far side of the road and Tyrnyr punched the sergeant savagely on the shoulder.
“Go, damn it!” he shouted.
Bahndairo looked back at him for a moment. The lieutenant could scarcely see him—the darkness was all but complete now, and the smoke and dust didn’t help—but he knew what he’d have seen in the standard bearer’s eyes if the light had been better. Bahndairo hesitated for one anguished second longer, listening to the pain sounds of the men of Tyrnyr’s platoon. Then he nodded viciously.
“Yes, Sir,” he grated, his voice ugly.
“Now!” the lieutenant snapped, and the noncom vaulted out of the trench and went racing towards the company CP.
Tyrnyr watched him go and smiled crookedly. He knew why Bahndairo’s tone had been so harsh, because he’d learned the same illogical lesson.
He gazed after the sergeant he’d very probably just ordered to survive, then climbed out of the trench himself and beckoned to Corporal Hainz Dyrwynt. The fourteen men of Dyrwynt’s section had been due to relieve Mahkgyl’s in another four hours. Now it looked like they’d be doing that a bit earlier than scheduled.
“Let’s go,” Tyrnyr said flatly, and Dyrwynt’s men climbed out of their individual lizardholes and started up and over the crest at his heels.
* * *
Lieutenant Pyaitroh Ahldyrs came to his feet as Captain Zohannsyn’s flare blossomed overhead. The men of his 1st Platoon had filtered very quietly forward through the stunted trees and scrubby undergrowth to the very edge of the Cahrswyl’s Farm Road two hours earlier. They’d taken a half-dozen casualties in the process, but blind harassing fire was never as effective as it might look to the casual observer, and the fact that Dohlaran fuses remained less than fully reliable meant their antipersonnel air bursts tended to explode too high—or too low, after they’d already hit the ground. That had made it no less nerve-racking, however, and the signal flare came as a distinct relief. First Platoon was a veteran outfit. Its men weren’t stupid enough to look forward to close combat, but if they had it to do, they’d just as soon get it done. Now, as their lieutenant stood, they climbed to their feet, as well, and Ahldyrs heard the quiet whisper of clicks as rifle safeties were released all around him. He drew his revolver, swung out the cylinder, and slid a cartridge into the chamber which normally rode empty under the hammer, and nodded to Platoon Sergeant Sahbahtyno.
“Let’s go, Zhulyo,” he said grimly.
* * *
Rohsyndo Mylyndyz pushed his face up out of the dirt at the bottom of his lizardhole and made himself climb to his feet. He’d seen Mahkgyl go down, and he’d seen enough dead men over the last year to know he was now in charge of whatever remained of 1st Section.
That wasn’t going to be a lot of men … and they weren’t going to be alone on Seventy-Foot Hill for long.
“Stand to!” His voice sounded faint and frail even to his own ears after the cacophony of portable angle-gun bombs. “Count off and stand to!”
* * *
Lieutenant Tyrnyr scrambled towards the crest of the hill, cursing the dark—and the dust and smoke—as he stumbled across the uneven terrain. There were lizardholes for his entire platoon on the eastern face of the hill, but they’d never been meant for permanent occupancy. Heretic infantry could call down portable angle-gun fire on any target it could see with hellish accuracy and the Royal Dohlaran Army had learned not to offer up any more targets to heretic artillery than it had to. He’d needed a picket on the east side of the crest line, far enough down the hill to be able to see the terrain at its base—and to avoid silhouetting itself against the sky—but the rest of the platoon had been safely dug in beyond the crest, waiting to come forward only when an actual attack was imminent.
His deployment had worked well against the three previous attacks. The section with the picket duty had been able to alert his reserve section and call it up to reinforce the defensive line well before the heretics had been able to cross the dead ground between the hill and the woodlot.
So you damned well should’ve expected them to try something different next time! he told himself savagely. The one thing the heretics aren’t is stupid!
“Straight for your holes, boys!” he shouted to the troopers panting their way up and over the top with him. “Straight for your holes!”
Somebody actually gasped out an acknowledgment, and Tyrnyr grunted in satisfaction. They would have done that anyway, he knew. Each man had his own assigned lizardhole, the specific spot Tyrnyr and Clahrksyn had selected as part of their defense’s mosaic, and they’d practiced getting to their positions until Clahrksyn had been satisfied they could do it in the dark, blindfolded. But they’d practiced without the screams and moans from 1st Section’s wounded and dying men. The human need to stop to help ripped and torn comrades was a distraction they couldn’t afford tonight.
Something inside the lieutenant cringed as he used the term “distraction,” even if only in the privacy of his thoughts, but he went right on scrambling, steeling his own heart against what he knew he’d see on the way to his own lizardhole.
* * *
First Platoon went up the hill like a silent, murderous tide. There was a time and a place for the Charisian warcry; this wasn’t it.
Lieutenant Ahldyrs nodded in satisfaction as the first illuminating rounds plopped to brilliant light above the hill. He glanced to his left. Lieutenant Phylyp Claityn’s 3rd Platoon had that flank of the attack, and he could just see Claityn’s extreme right. Third Platoon was angling slightly away, bearing farther south to interpose between the base of Seventy-Foot Hill and Cahrswyl’s Farm to intercept any counterattacks from the Doh
laran infantry dug in around the big stone farmhouse and its outbuildings. On the extreme right, Lieutenant Faidryko Vahalhkys’ 4th Platoon was supposed to be cutting between Seventy-Foot Hill and Hundred-Foot Hill, three miles farther to the northwest. And Lieutenant Dahnahtelo Dragonsbane’s 2nd Platoon, on Ahldyrs’ immediate right, was already climbing up the hill as quickly and purposefully as his own men.
The scout snipers said there was only a single Dohlaran platoon on the hilltop itself, although there were what looked like two or three more platoons deployed to cover its base, especially to the north, where the road headed towards the Saiksyn Farm. That was 4th Platoon’s worry at the moment, though, Ahldyrs’ concern was the hilltop itself, and its defenders had handled the three previous attacks harshly.
Should’ve taken time to organize them properly, Ahldyrs thought, trying to make sure he didn’t put his foot into a rabbit hole in the dark. Bastards had time to get set before we hit ’em and we damned well know what dug-in riflemen perched on a frigging hill can do to anyone stupid enough to come up it after them!
He was right … and he knew Aikymohto Mahkgavysk’s 3rd Company had had no choice but to launch those attacks anyway. The Army of the Seridahn was finally out in the open, forced to give ground in dry weather and terrain that favored the ICA’s mobility. The last thing Earl Hanth needed was to let Sir Fahstyr Rychtyr regain his balance, settle back into prepared defenses. Keeping him on the move, denying that chance to catch his breath, was worth taking a few chances … or losing a few men, however much it hurt.