The Thousand Names Part 24

She could hear a ragged chorus of laughter from the closest buildings. Bobby hurried to fall in behind her, still carrying his weapon, and Winter walked out into the center of the field. Smoke lay as dense as a blanket, drifting only sluggishly in the calm air. The smell of it a.s.saulted her nostrils, an acrid, salty tang with an occasional undercurrent of blood or offal. There was no sign of any upright Khandarai.

Winter turned sharply when a pair of figures loomed through the smoke, but it was only Graff and Folsom. The rest of the company was beginning to emerge. As the realization of what they'd done sank in, here and there they sent up a ragged cheer.

Graff looked over the field of corpses with professional satisfaction. "They won't forget that in a hurry," he said. "Those that got away, anyhow."

Winter gave a weary nod. All the Auxiliaries she could see were either dead or obviously nearly so. The retreating Khandarai had taken the more lightly wounded with them, for which she was grateful. The Colonials could hardly have spared the time to care for them.

"Right," she said, more or less to herself. Then again. "Right. We've probably got a little while before they figure things out. Folsom, collect all our people and find out what we lost. Graff, take a detail and go over the field. The Auxies use the same muskets we do, so gather them all up, along with all the ammunition you can find. If there's anyone out there who looks like they might make it, bring them along. Once that's done, back to the river."

"We're not staying here?" Graff said. "We bloodied their noses-no reason why we can't do it again."

"We can't do it again because they'll be ready for us," Winter said. "Someone out there isn't an utter fool. They won't come in dumb next time. Either they'll break out and come at us in loose order, like they should have in the first place, or else they'll skirt the village entirely and go straight for the boats." She thought for a moment. "More likely the latter. So we fall back to the quay."

"If you don't mind my saying," Graff said quietly, "is that a good idea? We'll have no cover at all. The lads are willing, but we won't last if we have to go volley for volley with four companies."

Winter nodded. "Bobby, you're with me. We're going to see what we can do about that."

a a a "Pull!" Folsom shouted, his deep voice echoing off the barges. "Wait, two, three, pull!"

He demonstrated with a ma.s.sive effort on his own part, muscles standing out in his arms like corded ropes. Two dozen men behind him added their strength to the line, and the barge groaned and jolted another foot up onto the quay. The rear end was out of the water now, dripping brown mud into the river.

Winter stood with the casualties at the far end of the stone pier. There had been four of these: one ranker who'd taken an unlucky shot through a doorway and lost the top of his head, two men wounded by b.a.l.l.s that had punched through their protective walls, and an unfortunate recruit who'd accidentally double-loaded his weapon after failing to notice a misfire. Packed with twice the normal load of powder, the musket had exploded, leaving the side of his face a lacerated ruin.

The dead man was covered by a tarp, while Graff did his best for the three wounded. They hadn't done a precise count of the Khandarai dead, but Winter guessed there'd been more than eighty, plus however many they'd dragged away. For fifty men against two hundred, that was no poor result, militarily speaking, but standing beside the boy with the torn face Winter couldn't help but feel like a failure.

She focused on the river instead. The sun was well up by now, and the morning haze had burned away, but if there were barges on their way back across Winter couldn't see them. Bobby, standing at her shoulder, correctly interpreted her thoughts.

"It'll be at least another hour, sir," the boy said.

Winter nodded and looked away. Her gaze fell on the man who'd taken a ball in the arm. Graff had torn his shirt off and wrapped it round the wound as a makeshift bandage, winding a sc.r.a.p of wood in the linen to keep it tight. Bobby, following Winter's eyes, gave a little shudder.

"Are you sure you're all right?" Winter said. A flying splinter of clay had given the boy a cut on the shoulder. Winter hadn't noticed the damp patch on his uniform until after the fighting was over.

"It's nothing, sir. Honestly."

Graff stood and came over to them. "Perkins will be all right, but Zeitman will probably lose the arm once we get him back to the cutters. Finn-" He glanced at the boy with the mutilated face. "That needs cleaning out, but he screams if I so much as touch him. He needs a proper surgeon."

"You've done what you could," Winter said. "Go take over loading detail." The weapons they'd gleaned from the Auxiliaries lay in neat rows on the quay, all bright wax and polish. A group of Colonials was methodically cleaning the barrels and loading them, one after another, from a pile of captured ammunition.

There was a great crash from farther up the pier as Folsom's team flipped the barge end over end, so that its flat, dripping bottom was exposed to the sky. Resting lengthwise, it overhung the quay by a few feet on either end. She'd chosen one that was four or five feet high and made of st.u.r.dy-looking wood. The sides would probably stop a ball, at least at long range, and it would take a few moments for any attacker who wanted to use his bayonet to scramble over. Combined with the boats tied to the dock on all sides, it would provide a reasonable degree of shelter from fire from the sh.o.r.e. It was the best she could hope for under the circ.u.mstances.

Finn touched his face where the metal shards had torn it and gave a little screech. Bobby jumped visibly. Winter laid a hand on his shoulder and conducted him away from the impromptu hospital, back toward the barricade.

"Sir?" Bobby's voice was hesitant. "I don't mean to be . . . that is . . . can I ask you a favor?"

"A favor?"

Bobby stopped. His voice was low enough that only Winter could hear. "If I ever get-hit, you know, and-"

"Stop," Winter said. "Everyone knows that talking like that is the next best thing to asking for it. The Lord Above loves irony."

Bobby winced. "Sorry, sir. But this is important. If-you know-can you promise me something?"

"Maybe," Winter said.

"Don't let them take me to a cutter," Bobby said urgently. "Please. Take care of me yourself."

"I'm not much of a surgeon."

"Then . . . Graff, or someone you trust. But no cutters." He looked up at Winter, and his soft face was full of desperation. "Please?"

Winter would usually have given her word at once, and then broken it just as easily when the need arose. A lot of soldiers had that sort of feeling about surgeons. It was only natural, if you'd spent any time in a hospital or watched the men hobble out short an arm or a leg. Winter wasn't fond of the medical men herself. But when it really came down to it, she suspected she'd rather live as a cripple than die a slow, agonizing death from a festering wound.

Under ordinary circ.u.mstances, she would have put this down to pre-battle jitters, the sort of thing Bobby would forget about tomorrow morning. But there was something disturbingly sincere in the corporal's eyes, so Winter chose her words carefully.

"Graff isn't a surgeon, either." She watched the boy's expression. "Let's be clear about this. If it's a choice between going to the cutter or into the ground-"

"I'd rather die," Bobby said immediately. "Promise me."

After a moment of hesitation, Winter nodded. "I promise, then. But you'd better not get yourself hurt, or I'll have a h.e.l.l of a time explaining myself to Folsom and Graff afterward."

Bobby gave a weak chuckle. Winter tried to think of a way to dispel the grim mood that had descended, but was spared the necessity. There was a shot from the barricade, and a cry of "Auxies!" The quay was suddenly a chaos of rushing men. Winter heard Folsom's voice rising above the din, shouting soldiers into line.

She patted Bobby's shoulder again and pushed her way forward, until she was up against the sloping wall of the upside-down boat. It rose slightly toward the center, forming a shallow keel, but the top was still flat enough to see over. She saw Graff upbraiding a man carrying a smoking musket.

The situation wasn't as bad as she'd feared, then. Looking up the quay, between the wall of boats on each side and into the village, she couldn't see any obvious sign of the enemy. She pulled Graff away and asked for a report.

"Sorry about that, sir. He shouldn't have fired."

"False alarm?" Winter said hopefully. Every minute the Auxiliaries delayed was a minute less they'd have to wait for reinforcements.

"They were there, right enough, but only a couple. I saw three men, but there may have been a few more. Back amidst the houses, sort of skulking, like. Ferstein took a potshot and they all started running."

"Scouts, then." Winter chewed her lip. "He knows we're not in the village, and that we're barricaded in here. Maybe he doesn't know that we're waiting for the rest of the regiment to cross. Could be he's waiting for reinforcements of his own."

"Could be, sir," Graff said.

"Let's a.s.sume not."

Winter looked up at the boat Folsom had dragged into place. There was room for only eight or nine men to stand across the quay, shoulder to shoulder. That wasn't a lot of fire, even with a good supply of loaded weapons. On the other hand, the enemy would be similarly restricted, and they wouldn't have anything to hide behind.

"If they come, they're going to get a kicking," Graff said, echoing her thoughts. "I wouldn't like to try attacking up this way."

"Let's hope they'll be just as reluctant."

a a a As it turned out, they were not.

It was a further half an hour before the enemy commander decided the village was clear and marched his men in. All four companies, or what was left of them, formed up in the town square. They were three or four hundred yards from the edge of the quay, and twenty more from the barricade. Close enough for the Vordanai to shout and make insulting hand gestures, but too far for anything but an extremely lucky shot to carry.

There was one man ahorse just in front of the enemy ranks, who Winter a.s.sumed was the commanding officer. She hoped he'd display the same lead-from-the-front mentality that his lieutenant had shown earlier, but no such luck. When the brown-and-tan column lurched into motion, the mounted man stayed well to the rear. Winter signaled for her own men to make ready. Nine of them, chosen by general acclamation to be the best shots in the company, were crouching against the barricade. The rest of the rankers waited nervously behind them, spread out across the quay, sitting or on their knees to avoid showing their heads over the top of the boat.

The Auxiliaries were in a company column, forty men wide and a dozen or so deep. Their drummers quickened the pace as they approached, from the languid march rhythm to the pulse-fast beat of the attack. Winter's men waited, bayonets already fixed on their muskets, until the column was a hundred yards out-still well away from the base of the quay but clear of the last few houses in the village.

At a gesture from Winter, the men on the barricade opened fire. The crash of nine muskets at once, in the echoing confines of the boat-crowded quay, sounded more like a battalion volley. Smoke billowed along the barricade, and here and there in the front rank of the approaching formation men twitched and went down, or dropped out of line and stumbled off to the sides. A hundred yards was still a long shot for a musket, but the target was wide and packed shoulder to shoulder, so some b.a.l.l.s inevitably struck home.

As soon as they'd fired, the men on the barricade turned and handed their weapons to soldiers waiting behind them, accepting fresh ones in return. Winter watched the exchange with a touch of pride. For something she'd improvised on the spot, they handled it nicely. Another volley crashed out, more ragged than the first as the individual men fired as quickly as they could mark a target. More Auxiliaries went down. The brown-and-tan column closed up around the casualties, its ranks swallowing the fallen like some amorphous multibodied creature. Winter could hear the shouts of the Khandarai sergeants pushing their men to keep the line straight in spite of the losses.

Another volley, and another, until all cohesion was lost and there was simply a steady rattle of shots. New muskets were handed up as quickly as they were fired, while the balance of the company worked on reloading. The tread of the Auxiliaries' boots was audible under the intermittent cracks of the shots and the fast beat of the drums. Winter watched the remorseless advance of the column with rising dread.

Come on, she thought at them. You don't like this, do you? Break off- The drums stopped, and then the footsteps.

"Down!" Winter shouted.

A moment later, the first two ranks of the column cut loose. The roar of musketry drowned the sound of the b.a.l.l.s striking the boat, but Winter could feel the barricade shiver and jump under the impact. More shots zipped and whistled overhead.

"Fire!" she called, and the men who'd ducked behind their makeshift breastwork popped back up and continued their withering barrage. At fifty yards, nearly every ball told. The few that didn't hit the dirt in front of the Auxiliaries, throwing up little fountains of mud.

Another volley from the Khandarai made the boat shake and splinter. Once again, the Vordanai ducked, which rendered the shots mostly ineffective. The Auxiliaries' fire-discipline was breaking under the stress and excitement of battle, as it always did once soldiers were hotly engaged. The next volley was ragged, with shots continuing to sound a considerable time after the main blast, and from that point on the shooting dissolved into a general racket on both sides as men fired, loaded, and fired again as fast as they were able.

One of Winter's nine leapt back from the barricade, cursing and clutching the b.l.o.o.d.y mess of his left hand. Graff gestured and one of the loaders took his place, taking up the fallen musket and firing into the gathering smoke. It was becoming difficult to see, but judging from the pinkish yellow muzzle flashes the Auxiliaries were still out at fifty yards, some distance from the base of the quay.

Winter could well imagine their commander's consternation. Only his first two ranks could fire, but that still gave him eighty muskets engaged to her nine. On the other hand, Winter's men were getting off three or four shots for every one the Khandarai loosed, and they were protected by the barricade.

Moreover, he had few options for rectifying the situation. The closer he got to the quay, the more the barges lining the sides would restrict his visibility, until he was reduced to the same nine-man front. The only other option was to charge and hope to carry the barricade with bayonets, but the tactics manual said that a bayonet charge would be effective only against an enemy already shaken or routed by fire, and the defenders here were clearly anything but shaken.

Winter hoped like h.e.l.l the man stuck to the tactics manual. The Auxiliaries had plenty of bodies in the rear ranks to replace those that fell, she knew, but how long would they stand it? No matter how well trained, there was a limit, and no soldier liked to stand in a position where he was obviously getting the worst of it.

One of the men in blue flopped backward from the barricade, thrashing on the quay like a landed fish. Winter glanced in his direction and then looked away with a shudder; the ball had carried away a quarter of his skull, and he'd splashed the stones with blood and bits of slime when he fell. Graff sent another man up the barricade and detailed two more to drag the dead man to the rear and out of view.

She turned back to the battle, only to find it dying away at last. Either panic had triumphed over discipline or the enemy commander had recognized the futility of his position and backed away voluntarily. Whatever the case, there were no more muzzle flashes in the smoke, and no skirl of advancing drums. The men on the barricade fired a few more shots on general principle, then let out a cheer to hurry the Khandarai on their way.

It wasn't until the cheering became general that Winter noticed that one of the soldiers leaning on the boat wasn't joining in. She had a couple of men pull him away, and they found he'd taken a ball in the chest and died in place, painting the woodwork red with gouts of arterial blood. In the confusion of battle, no one had noticed.

That dampened the atmosphere somewhat. Winter stared out into the swirling smoke while Graff conducted the poor dead boy to the end of the pier. Her apprehension increased by degrees, until by the time he returned she was certain something was wrong.

"They're not gone," she told him. "We'd have heard them shouting if they'd really broken." She looked around at her own men. "Quiet! Graff, get them to be quiet."

"Quiet!" said Graff, and Folsom took up the cry at a bellow. One by one the men fell silent, all looking toward the barricade, and hands tightened around weapons. Finally, all that could be heard was the gentle creaks and sc.r.a.pes of the boats riding against the quay, a little splashing from the river, and-quiet conversations, close at hand. Too low to hear the words, but Winter didn't need to. A horrible picture had sprung full-formed into her mind.

"They're not gone," she said. "They split up and spread out along the sh.o.r.e, behind the boats." While the wall of high-riding barges protected the defenders from enfilading fire from attackers on the riverbank, it also mostly concealed the bank from view. There was only one reason to take up such a position. "They're going to try to storm us."

Graff spat a vile curse and turned to the men. "Fix bayonets! Helgoland, you're on the wall. The rest of you form up-no, stay on your knees! Two ranks, loaded weapons, hold fire until my command!"

"Sir," Bobby said by Winter's elbow, "we'd better move back."

That rankled, but she could see the logic in it. There was no sense in being in the line of fire, where she might prove an impediment to her own men. She and the corporal threaded their way through the double line of kneeling men that Graff was organizing, and took a position beside Folsom and the remaining dozen men of the company, who were still loading muskets as fast as they could ram home powder and ball.

Graff joined them, and just in time. A shout from the men at the barricade warned that the Khandarai were approaching, boiling out of the smoke at a run. There was no careful drum-timed advance this time, just a swarm of brown uniforms and the wicked gleam of fixed bayonets.

The Colonials at the barricade needed no encouragement. They fired at once. At less than twenty yards, the volley had a dreadful impact, bowling men completely off their feet and spraying blood across those who came behind them. The charge had too much momentum to stop, however, and the Auxiliaries came on like maddened hornets, trampling the bodies of their comrades in the narrow confines of the pier.

They reached the boat and started to clamber over, stumbling a little on the still-wet surface. One man lost his footing and crashed back into his fellows, but more made it to the top. For a moment, they were silhouetted against the afternoon sky, brown on blue.

"First rank, fire!"

Graff timed it nicely. The men on the barricade had thrown themselves flat after firing their volley, and with the range barely over ten yards the Colonials had a target any game hunter would have envied. The roar of the volley was louder than thunder, and the men standing on the boat jerked or spun away, sliding off the curved wood to land bonelessly on the pier.

There were more behind them, though, pressed forward by the tight confines and the momentum of the rear ranks still pouring onto the quay. Graff waited until a few had gotten their footing before calling for the second rank's volley, which cut them down like wheat. More tried coming over on their bellies, slithering across on the slick undersurface of the upturned boat, but the men who'd crouched in the shadow of the barricade grabbed these brave souls as they emerged and dragged them to the ground to apply their bayonets.

More dangerous were the shots that were starting to come from the Auxiliaries packed against the barricade. Cover worked both ways, after all-now it was Winter's men who were exposed on the naked stones of the quay, while the Khandarai had the boat to hide behind. A man in the second line jerked backward with a screech, toppling against one of the barges. The rest, having retrieved loaded muskets from the fast-diminishing stock, fired back in an effort to force the Auxiliaries to keep their heads down.

That's it, Winter thought. I'm out of tricks. Her men wouldn't flee-couldn't, really, with their backs literally against a wall-but at this rate they'd be wiped out. She looked at the tight-packed mob of soldiers on the other side of the boat and wished, absurdly, for a cannon-a single load of canister would have cleared the quay. Of course, if we could have gotten any guns across the river we wouldn't be having this problem- She blinked in disbelief. The mob was breaking up. Auxiliaries were starting to run, first those at the rear, then the men closer to the front as the pressure from behind started to ease. The rest of the Colonials saw it, too. Cheers started to rise again, louder and louder.

But-they finally had us! Why . . .

It wasn't until Graff let out a satisfied sigh that Winter finally turned around. The end of the quay-the only s.p.a.ce through which she'd been able to get a view of the river-was now blocked by one of the high-sided grain barges. The front hinged down to make a ramp, and men in blue were pushing past the cheering defenders, weapons at the ready. As the fighting faded, Winter could hear firing elsewhere along the riverbank.

Behind the first wave of fresh troops came a neat figure in dress blues, eagles glittering on his shoulders. His deep gray eyes took in the scene on the quay for a few moments, and then he turned to Winter and smiled. Winter, only partly recovered from her shock, managed a hesitant salute.

"Well done, Lieutenant," said Colonel Vhalnich. "Very well done indeed."

Chapter Eleven.

MARCUS.

"-Then he'd dragged a boat across the pier, to make a sort of breastwork," Ja.n.u.s said, cheerful as a kid with a new toy. "You really ought to have seen it, Captain, it was a neat piece of work. Brown uniforms lying on the other side as far as the eye could see, and not even two dozen of ours so much as hurt."

"That's why you put them there, wasn't it?" Marcus said.

"I expected them to have to keep off a few raiders. It was pure bad luck there happened to be four companies within an hour's march. Most commanders would have packed their men onto the boats and rowed for it when they saw the odds." He paused. "Most sensible commanders, anyway."

Marcus could have done without the reminder that they'd nearly forfeited the campaign before they'd begun, just because a few hundred Auxiliaries had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. A symptom of inadequate intelligence gathering, of course. The lack of cavalry for reconnaissance had been a handicap from the beginning, but it made Marcus more nervous the closer they got to Ashe-Katarion.

"It may not have the sweep of Noratavelt or the romantic pageantry of Ilstadt, but if you ask me, there's as much artistry in a well-executed skirmish as any proper battle. Or in any painting or sculpture, if it comes to that." He c.o.c.ked his head. "Another monograph, when I get the free time. *War as Art.' I think the general's job is harder than the painter's; canvas doesn't fight back, after all."

Art had never been Marcus' strong point. "Have you thought about what you're going to say to the prince?"

"I'm going to tell him to look under his loincloth and figure out if he's a man or a eunuch," Ja.n.u.s said. "And if he does find a pair of b.a.l.l.s, I'm going to suggest that he learn to use them."

Marcus stopped in his tracks, so that the colonel walked a few paces farther before turning. Ja.n.u.s sighed at the expression he saw.