by David Weber
But then he thought better of it. Harchongese corruption was so endemic they seldom knew exactly what state they were in, and their aristocracy’s one true skill was a legendary ability to hide and obfuscate unfortunate realities. In fact, this time they’d managed to deceive even Clyntahn, although that was probably only because the Grand Inquisitor had wanted so badly to believe them.
“They really do have close to two million infantry and cavalry, as nearly as I can tell,” the Treasurer continued. “That’s based on reports from my own transportation personnel and the number of rations they’re devouring. But I’ve got my own people looking at their manufactory records now—the real records—and I’ll be astonished if they’ve got as many as eighty thousand rifles to arm them … and fifteen or twenty thousand of those are in the hands of their Military Police, not combat units. And whether Zhaspahr wants to hear it or not, their officers are barely competent, at best.”
Maigwair looked like a man who’d just been shot, and Duchairn shrugged.
“Unless you want to simply use them as human shields to soak up the heretics’ fire so our own troops can get close enough to engage the enemy, we’ve got to improve their quality before we commit them to action. And let’s be honest here. Given the way Harchongese serfs are treated back home, expecting them to have anything like your regiments’ discipline is totally unrealistic. If you add that to the sort of casualties they’re likely to take, you’ve got a guaranteed recipe for troops who’re going to be almost as destructive to Mother Church’s loyal sons and daughters—especially her daughters—as to the heretics.”
The two vicars’ eyes met across the table, and Duchairn shrugged.
“Since we can’t move them up and feed them anyway, this is our one opportunity to give them the training—and the discipline—that might actually make them effective soldiers and not Shan-wei’s own scourge upon the Faithful as well as the apostate. I’ll come up with the food, the lumber and nails and tools to build their barracks, and some way to provide them with at least some rifles instead of arbalests, bows, and pikes. I’ve got some ideas on that subject, but I guarantee you their senior officers are going to shriek like dying dragons when they hear what I have in mind, and you don’t even want to think about what the Border States’re going to have to say about it! Shan-wei—I think this time I may manage to piss everybody off, and I know Zhaspahr’s not going to like it. But they lied to him, too, this time. I think he’s probably going to be … determined enough to back me on this if you and I can convince him it’ll work. But if I can come up with the weapons for them, you have to come up with the officers to train them, because without that, we might as well just drop any rifles we can give them into Hsing-wu’s Passage, instead. And, frankly, you need to find a way to put Army of God officers into their battalions when they move up. You’ve got to, Allayn, and you know it.”
Their eyes held across the map, and then, slowly, Maigwair nodded.
“You’re right,” he said softly. “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’ve got to … and I will.”
.III.
Sylmahn Gap, Republic of Siddarmark
Kynt Clareyk, Baron of Green Valley and commanding officer, 2nd Brigade (reinforced), Imperial Charisian Army, swung up into the saddle of his favorite mount. Wood smoke from cookfires, the sound of distant orders and morning work details, the murmur of hundreds of private conversations, the ringing of a blacksmith’s hammer, the whistling of draft dragons roused to labor, and all the other early-morning bustle of an encamped field army swirled about them, and the gelding shifted under him, impatient to be off and doing. He chuckled as he leaned forward and patted the big gray’s shoulder.
“Patience, Traveler. I know—I know! Some people can be a little slow and grumpy if they don’t get their morning chocolate on time.”
Lieutenant Slokym looked up with a moderately reproachful expression, then shook his head and climbed into the saddle of a neat, well-coupled bay mare.
“Some people,” he said, addressing the mare’s alert, sharply pricked ears and matching his general’s tone almost perfectly, “would’ve had their morning chocolate on time if they hadn’t been required to get someone else his morning chocolate first.”
The orderly who’d been holding their horses blanched, awaiting the thunderbolt of wrath, but Green Valley only sighed heavily.
“Alas, it is ever my fate to be surrounded by people who seize every possible petty excuse for their tardiness. Besides, the chocolate was cold.”
“With all due respect, Sir,” Slokym said gravely, a twinkle lurking in his blue eyes, “mine was hot enough to burn my tongue when it came out of the same carafe five minutes after yours.”
“A mere bagatelle!”
Green Valley waved his hand airily, smiled at his aide, and touched Traveler with his heels. The gelding stepped off eagerly and Slokym’s bay had to move quickly to keep up as the two officers trotted up the high road towards 2nd Brigade’s forward positions.
Mountain wyverns swept in lazy circles overhead, white puffball clouds drifted against a polished blue sky, and a brisk breeze blew into their faces. Despite the baron’s comments, the time was not many hours past dawn, and the morning was still cool, especially here in the shadows of the Sylmahn Gap. By midday, the sun would be directly overhead and the Gap’s depths would be uncomfortably warm by Lieutenant Slokym’s Chisholmian standards and still a bit on the chilly side by Green Valley’s Old Charisian standards.
The nature of a perfect compromise, the baron reflected dryly. Neither one of us is going to be completely satisfied.
“You do have Brigadier Traigair’s dispatches and my map case, I trust?” he said in a worried tone.
“Yes, My Lord. I almost forgot them, but I remembered in time,” Slokym reassured him gravely, and the baron chuckled. The youngster was as commonly born as Green Valley himself, but he was going to make an excellent senior officer someday.
“Good,” the general said in a considerably more serious tone. “And have you had any thoughts about his suggestion?”
Bryahn Slokym considered the query. He respected Green Valley more than almost anyone else in the entire world, and he knew the general wasn’t asking the question simply to wile away the ride. He had no doubt Green Valley had already made up his own mind about Brigadier Wylsynn Traigair’s proposal, but Slokym often thought the general ought to have been a teacher somewhere. Although, to be fair, he was a teacher, and a damned good one, the sort who viewed the military education of his aides as one of his primary responsibilities. He didn’t use them simply as messengers to be sent galloping off with dispatches or hands to fetch something he’d forgotten. He saw them as future commanders of men who it was his duty to train to command those men well, and his question was entirely serious.
“I understand what the Brigadier’s saying, My Lord,” the lieutenant said. “I think I understand why he’s saying it, as well. But I don’t think his idea … fits neatly into your plans.”
“Ah?” Green Valley quirked an eyebrow at him. “I have plans, Bryahn?”
“You always have plans, My Lord. It’s just that sometimes you haven’t gotten around to explaining them to anyone else. I’m sure it’s just one of those minor matters which occasionally slip your mind. Only because there’s so much else going on inside it, of course.”
“I see.” Green Valley’s lips quivered and he returned his attention to the high road before them and the wide stretch of the flooded canal reaching away to their right to lap the feet of the Moon Thorn Mountains. “And why would the good Brigadier’s suggestion interfere with my nefarious plans?”
“Because I think you’re perfectly happy with the cork you have in the bottle, My Lord.” Slokym’s fair hair stirred on the breeze blowing down the Gap, and his voice was completely serious. “I think you see our present lines as a perfect opportunity to conserve manpower for, ah, other employment.”
“Very good, Bryahn.” Green Valley gave his ai
de a look of approval. “And do you have any suggestions as to what that ‘other employment’ ought to be?”
“No, My Lord.” Slokym shook his head with a wry smile. “I can think of several possibilities, but they’re all a little too vague for me to trot out for you to decapitate. With your permission, I’d like to think about them a while longer before I make any serious suggestions and risk altering the entire strategic concept of your campaign.”
“An officer should always strive to be the soul of tact when pointing out his commander’s strategic lapses,” Green Valley approved affably, and Slokym chuckled.
The baron gave him another smile and they rode along in silence while Green Valley considered his own thoughts on that very subject.
Young Bryahn was correct that Brigadier Traigair’s suggestion was a poor fit for the possibilities taking form within his own mind. Not that he faulted Traigair for a moment. Indeed, under other circumstances, he might have been very tempted to take the brigadier’s idea and run with it. But Bryahn was also right that 2nd Brigade’s current position on the southern shore of Wyvern Lake was just about perfect from a defensive perspective. Of course, the flipside of that was that Bishop Militant Bahrnabai Wyrshym’s position on the lake’s northern shore was equally strong. The two of them had rather different options for what they might do with that security, however.
Brigadier Wylsynn Traigair commanded the Imperial Charisian Army’s 3rd Brigade, whose two regiments had been split up to reinforce 1st Brigade and 2nd Brigade when they were dispatched to the front. Traigair had stayed with Colonel Zhon Tompsyn’s 2nd Regiment, which had been assigned to reinforce Green Valley, and functioned as 2nd Brigade (reinforced)’s third-in-command. Like many senior Chisholmian officers, he was of common birth—bald, broad-shouldered, and a bit paunchy, with blue eyes and broad cheekbones—and unshakably loyal to the Crown. He was also a solid, somewhat stolid sort, not given to wild flights of imagination but absolutely reliable. And without the ego involvement which might have made another officer of his seniority resent having his brigade split to reinforce someone else’s.
At the moment, 2nd Regiment was responsible for holding 2nd Brigade’s forty-eight-mile front. That would have been a daunting task for fewer than forty-five hundred men under normal circumstances, but Wyvern Lake made the task far easier. Admittedly, the lake’s shoreline, with its innumerable small inlets and the long peninsula thrusting into it from the southwest, offered a multitude of places where an audacious, offense-minded opponent might use boats to effect a landing. But the Army of the Sylmahn, unfortunately for Mother Church, was neither audacious nor offense-minded at the moment. Wyrshym was a tough-minded and resilient sort, which meant that lack of audacity was subject to change, but for now he was firmly back on his heels, reeling from the catastrophic destruction of his logistic network.
And that doesn’t even consider how he’s going to react when he gets his latest dispatches from Zion, Green Valley thought with grim satisfaction. He may’ve known things weren’t going well on the Daivyn, but he doesn’t have a clue yet of just how badly Kaitswyrth’s been hammered.
Neither did anyone in 2nd Brigade, officially at least. They had Eastshare’s initial dispatches via semaphore, yet the duke himself was still assessing things. He knew he’d won a major victory, but he had yet to realize just how major it actually was. Green Valley, however, did know. He’d watched much of the Battle of the Glacierheart Gap through Owl’s SNARCs, and he’d tracked every mile of Eastshare’s counterattack, as well.
Much of that imagery had been recorded, but he’d watched Kaitswyrth’s blind, headlong attack in real time, and he felt a warm glow of pride in Ruhsyl Thairis’ performance. Eastshare retained a few blind spots of his own, most stemming from his ingrained sense of aristocratic superiority. Unlike far too many of the nobly born, however, he seldom allowed them to interfere with the clarity of his thinking. Nor, unlike certain other officers Green Valley could have named, did he ever allow contempt for an enemy to distort his thinking. His was a cool, calculating mind, unlikely to erupt in spasms of sudden enthusiasm and completely immune to anything approaching panic.
Even so, I have to admit he surprised me, the baron admitted. Outnumbered by almost twelve to one and he decides to take the offensive? And without any of the SNARC advantages I have, either!
Eastshare had demonstrated not simply an astonishing ability to calculate odds to a hair but also the sort of instinctive feel for the pulse and flow of battle that no amount of mere training could provide. His sense of the Army of Glacierheart’s parlous morale following the catastrophic repulse of its frontal attack had been perfect, and the audacity of his own riposte up the river after Kaitswyrth’s left flank crumbled had come within an eyelash of completely cutting off a third of Kaitswyrth’s entire army. Of course, if he’d succeeded, he would have “trapped” an opponent who still outnumbered his entire strength by almost four to one, which could have had interesting repercussions—the old tale about the hunting hound who caught the slash lizard came to mind—but it had still forced the whole Army of Glacierheart into headlong retreat. He’d pushed it back a hundred miles; killed, wounded, or captured twenty-nine thousand of its men; and halted his own advance with impeccable timing along the western edge of the Ahstynwood which had become a place of terror for the Army of God. Given what had happened to it under the shadows of those trees, the Army of Glacierheart would be a long time finding the fortitude to venture back into that woodland to test 1st Brigade’s positions.
And the bastards don’t have as many Inquisitors to help encourage that fortitude, either.
Green Valley’s thought was harsh with vindictive approval as he reflected upon the Inquisitors who’d been returned—in part, at least—to the Army of Glacierheart. Colonel Makyn’s scout snipers had filtered out into what had been dubbed—with no input at all from Merlin Athrawes or himself, so far as Green Valley could determine—“no-man’s-land” between the two armies in the middle of the night. The rising sun had shown the Army of Glacierheart’s sentries the long row of stakes, no more than fifty yards in front of their lines, each bearing an Inquisitor’s head.
The sight had not been calculated to improve that army’s morale. More particularly, it had delivered an unmistakable message to Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s representatives, and it would be interesting to see how they responded.
Those Inquisitors had been spared the sorts of deaths they would have happily meted out to any of Eastshare’s men. That wasn’t to say all of them had died painlessly or even survived long enough to be taken prisoner and brought before Eastshare for condemnation. The ICA knew Cayleb and Sharleyan’s policy where Inquisitors were concerned, and its men were far from immune to the hatred the Inquisition had spawned. Some of them were bound to conclude that if the Inquisitors were to die anyway, they might as well pay a little on Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s account first. But by and large, they’d been executed with a minimum of the sort of horror the Army of God had handed out under their orders.
Nor had they been the only ones to pay the price for that horror. There’d been a few instances in which other Army of God personnel had not been allowed to surrender, either, despite the duke’s firm orders on that subject. Given what had happened to Mahrtyn Taisyn’s Marines and seamen, not to mention General Stahntyn’s Aivahnstyn garrison, that had been as inevitable as sunrise. Casualties among surrendering AOG officers had been higher than among their enlisted ranks, but they’d been even higher among the Siddarmarkian Temple Loyalists serving with Kaitswyrth. Although Eastshare was in the process of dealing sternly with the two or three cases of outright massacre of which he’d learned, he obviously realized as well as Green Valley himself that they’d actually been unreasonably fortunate in the restraint 1st Brigade had exercised.
In addition to well over fifteen thousand prisoners (many of them wounded), Eastshare’s force had captured twenty-eight twelve-pounder field guns, almost eight thousand perfectly serviceable cavalry moun
ts (along with over five thousand saddles whose owners no longer required them), almost a hundred first-quality draft dragons, sixty freight wagons, thirty-two canal barges full of supplies the Army of Glacierheart wasn’t going to be using, three hundred tons of gunpowder, and almost nineteen thousand rifles. The rifles were muzzle-loading flintlocks, far inferior to the ICA’s Mahndrayns, but nineteen thousand rifles were still nineteen thousand rifles. Especially combined with the roughly four thousand Dohlaran rifles the Earl of Hanth had captured at the Battle of Thesmar and the nine thousand Green Valley’s own brigade had captured in the process of pushing Wyrshym’s Army of the Sylmahn back from Serabor. All told, those thirty-two thousand rifles would equip fourteen more of the new Siddarmarkian rifle regiments as soon as they could be shipped back to Siddar City or issued to General Fyguera’s garrison troops in Thesmar. And between the guns 2nd Brigade had captured in the Sylmahn Gap and those 1st Brigade had captured along the Daivyn, the Republic of Siddarmark Army would also find itself with two full artillery battalions, courtesy of the Army of God. The Royal Dohlaran Army’s rather more modest contribution to the Allies’ artillery park had been incorporated into the landward defenses of Thesmar.