Conqueror (119 page)

The last of the cavalry battalions on special duty were sitting by the wall, finishing their evening meal: beans and pigmeat and onions, dished out from kettles over camp fires and scooped up with tortillas. It was the 5th Descott. They were professionals enough to concentrate on eating, but he could feel the tension crackling off them. He walked over and made a beckoning gesture. They crowded around him and crouched or sat at his hand signal; only about three hundred fifty left—and the battalion had been at double strength when he took it west to fight the Brigade.

"All right, dog-brothers," he said quietly. That forced them to listen carefully and lean closer; it also made each man feel as if he was talking to that one alone, as an individual. "You've guessed that something's up. Two hours after sundown—"

The sun was just touching the western horizon.

"—the guns are going to cut loose with a five-round stonk. The second the last gun fires—but not before—you give the wogs five rounds rapid. Then you come back down from the wall, ride your dogs to the docks, get on the rafts and off we go."

He paused a moment. "You're all fighting men and all Descotters," he went on. "My father and grandfather and great-grandfather fought the wogs, and so did yours."

Nods; Descotter
rancheros
held their land on military tenure, paying their tax in men rather than money. Fathers and sons and brothers followed each other into the same battalions time out of mind; comrades were neighbors at home, officers the squire's sons.

"There's a lot of Descotter blood and bone buried around here. Now we have a chance to end it." That caused a rustle, men coming forward in their crouch and leaning on their rifles. "If we win this one, we break them—not just push them back, but wreck them for all time. If we lose . . ." He grinned. "Well, we haven't done much losing while we've been together, you and I, have we?"

A low snarl of agreement. "Everything depends on the wogs thinking we're still here, at least for a while. You'll move back to the docks quickly and you'll do it quietly, and with no foul-ups. Understood?"

Gerrin Staenbridge stepped forward. "You can count on us,
mi heneral,
" he said solemnly. Another growl from the ranks.

"Keep it quiet, keep it quiet," Ensign Minatelli said.

There were only fifteen men left in his platoon, now—several of them lightly wounded—so it wasn't very different from running his squad. The star on the front of his helmet still felt like a weight of lead to his spirit, though. They formed up outside their bivouac, in the forecourt of what had been a nobleman's house. Minatelli walked down his platoon, giving everything a final check. The men's haversacks were full, three days' rations—smoked pork and hardtack, dried apricots and figs—and extra ammunition in their blanket rolls.

"Company G, fall in."

The men found their places by instinct, in column of twos back from the company pennant. It was
dark
outside: the city gaslights were out, of course—nobody left to shovel coal and tend the tank-farms—and all torches and fires had been forbidden.

Just as well,
he thought. It was frightening how few of them were left; the main Colonial attack had come right over their sector of the wall yesterday. Forty men in the company, barely a full platoon.

The battalion colors came by, and Major Felasquez carrying a shuttered bull's-eye light. His one eye gleamed a little as he turned, stopped for a brief murmur with Captain Pinya and stepped closer to the men.

"All right, lads," he said, a little louder.

Don't expect the wogs could hear even if we shouted, Minatelli thought. On the other hand, it gets everyone thinking quiet. 

"We've had enough from the towel-heads; now we're going to give it back, the way the monkey gave it to the miller's wife, by surprise and from the rear. Mind your orders, do it right, and with the Spirit's help and Messer Raj's plan, we'll whip them." He stepped back. "24th Valencia Foot—
Waymanos!
"

The column moved forward jerkily; it was strange to the point of being dizzying not to step off to the beat of the drum, and the troops had been told not to march in step. The uniform clash of hobnails on stone pavement was like nothing else on earth, and it carried. Instead they walked, with an occasional quiet curse as somebody stepped on the heels of the man ahead. Guides stood at intersections, their lanterns the only light in the deserted city. Minatelli kept his hand on the hilt of his new sword and ignored the eerie quietness.

Through the river gate the darkness lifted a little; a one-quarter Miniluna and the stars reflected off the rippled surface of the water. Gravel crunched, then planks boomed a little under their boots. The column halted.

"24th Valencia?" someone asked ahead, a dim figure against the water. "
This
way."

They waited; the men ahead melted away company by company. "Company G, this way."

The men scrambled through the knee-high water and into the barge; it was one of the boxlike constructs he'd helped to cobble together out of wood salvaged from wrecked houses. A long steering-oar marked the notional stern, and there were men standing to the sweeps on either side, six to a flank. They had only a single shuttered lantern to work with, but despite the darkness and the crowding only an occasional thump and oath marked someone tripping as they clambered down from the planking to the hold of the crude vessel.

"You'll be pulling the outermost raft," Captain Pinya said.

"That one, sir?" Minatelli said, pointing.

"That's right, Ensign."

Ensign. Spirit. My folks will never believe it. 

He shook himself back to the present. There were so many more ways to fuck
up
at a higher rank. Right now, that could get
everyone
killed.

He saluted and climbed down himself, a little awkward with no rifle on his shoulder and a sword and pistol at his belt. He turned around as soon as he was at the bow, making sure everyone's equipment was blacked as ordered.
Right. Nothing showing but eyeballs.
 

"Cast off," he said quietly.

The ropes were undone and the barge began to drift. "That way," he said, pointing.

The rowers were from the Sandoral District garrison; they'd all had some experience moving these damned things around. They dug their clumsy oars into the water and heaved, grunting. One step forward, lower the oar, haul it one step back. Minatelli thumped the boards beside him softly to keep the beat, peering ahead to his target. It was almost invisible until they were on top of it, two sections of the pontoon bridge decking with some timbers in between.

"Halto,"
he said.

Hands and poles on the raft fended them off and turned the barge around. Ropes were made fast to both sides of the stern, and then the barge released to drift slowly downstream. It halted with a slight jerk, held by the cables that anchored the row of rafts. Minatelli looked back along them, back to the shore and the black silhouette of the city wall. The sun had been down at least an hour and a half. More and more of the pontoon barges and every other type of boat available on the Sandoral docks—the ones that hadn't had a chance to get upstream when the news of the invasion got here—put out into the darkening water, anchoring or sculling up to the rafts. The docks were a moving carpet of men, helmets and furled banners and the muzzles of slung rifles.

Not long now.

"Rest easy, boys," he said. "Rest a bit."

"Gently, gently," Suzette whispered.

The infantrymen assigned as stretcher bearers were well-meaning but clumsy. There were enough of them to manhandle the stretchers into the bottom of the barge and fit them into the crude racks the carpenters had made, turning them into improvised bunk beds. The wounded were dosed heavily with opium to dull the pain of movement, but now and then a man would moan in his delirium. The Renunciates and priest-doctors moved quickly among them, checking pulses.

"Spirit have mercy, this one's dead," a nun said.

"Leave him be," Suzette replied.
Damn.
 

The final load came from the carriages and handcarts they'd pressed into service as ambulances.

She looked west, towards the ramparts.

"Drop it in, don't throw it!" Jorg Menyez hissed.

An officer relayed the order. Endless files of infantrymen passed sacks of hardtack and crates of dried meat and fruit from hand to hand, out from the wagons to the end of the pier. Once there, they knelt and let their burdens drop into the water. The current caught them, the hardtack floating for a few minutes before waterlogging dragged it down with a scatter of bubbles, the pierced casks and boxes sinking faster.

A good thing this is fresh water.
There would be downdraggers in a feeding-frenzy if they tried this in a harbor. Doubtless the plesiosauroids out in the deeper water would be feeding full tonight, as it was.

"Colonel. Major Tormidero sends 'is compliments, and is 'e to load tha wine?"

"No," Menyez said, biting off the
damned fool
with an effort. "Tell him Ali's men may drown their sorrows as they wish, if they don't fear Allah's wrath."

But not a scrap of food will they find in Sandoral,
he thought with hard glee. He sneezed into his handkerchief, not too badly; there weren't any dogs in the immediate neighborhood. It was pitch black. He looked anxiously over the river to the Colonial fortlet planted where the pontoon bridge had been. Evidently
they
hadn't seen anything unusual, either.
It's a siege. They don't
expect
anything to happen.
 

"Spirit, but this is a madman's gamble," he whispered to himself, lips barely moving. The only chance at victory . . . but what a chance.

"And what a story to tell the grandchildren, if we pull it off!"

If they didn't . . .

Ali ibn'Jamal took another handful of rice and grilled lamb, belching politely. It was surprisingly good, considering what the cooks had to work with; the army was on preserved rations wagoned up from the bridgehead. His own cook had priority on what little the foragers were bringing in, of course. The bunker had been made quite homelike: silk tapestries and silk-and-gold thread Al Kebir carpets, embroidered cushions about low tables of chiseled brass, incense in crescent-shaped burners on tripods about the walls. The lamplight had been turned down to a civilized level, and zebec and zither played melodiously from behind a screen in one corner. Ali ate, and held out his hands for the slave to wash with rosewater and towel dry.

"Your appetite should be better, Tewfik my brother," he said, and belched again. "Think of how the
kaphar
pigs within Sandoral's walls would drool and slaver at the sight of such a feast!"

Tewfik turned from a low-voiced conversation with his officers. "Indeed, Settler of the House of Peace," he said. "They are very short of supplies. That is why I fear some new trick of this Shaitan's-seed Whitehall."

Ali scowled for a moment, then gestured expansively. "Whitehall is trapped," he said. "He cannot sortie—our men outnumber his and are strongly entrenched; our rear, even, is protected by great works, even though no relieving force of any numbers can approach. He cannot build his bridge of boats again, with your fort and its guns covering the opposite bank. What can he do but starve?"

"Commander of the Faithful, I do not
know
what he can do. And that is what—"

"My lord." One of the duty officers of the Settler's guard came up to Tewfik and bowed. "You commanded that we notify you: the infidel have launched a signal rocket from the walls. One blue starburst."

A gun boomed in the distance. They all ignored it; the Colonial artillery was lobbing a steady round every twenty minutes into Sandoral, to keep the infidels from sleeping easily.

Another boom, and another; and the explosion of a shell, far too close. Another junior officer dashed down the stairs into the bunker.

"From the walls!" he shouted. "Lords,
all
the
kaphar
guns are firing from—"

"Fwego!"

Grammeck Dinnalsyn swept his saber downward. POUMPH. The first of the field guns vomited a long tongue of red flame into the night, backlighting the cloud of smoke that swirled away from the muzzle. Like a ripple, the line of explosions swept down the row of guns, repeated fifty-eight times. The noise was deafening, shock-waves echoing back from the high flat surface of the city wall like pillows of hot air smacking into face and chest. Already the stairways were showing running men, the militia gunners; one per gun on the walls, each to pull the lanyard on a weapon pre-laid on its target.