Warlord (35 page)

—night, and the patrol was jogging south. Raj could recognize the time from the position of the stars and moons; a little before dawn, thirty or so hours ago. Again it was as if he were standing a little behind his own eyes, this time as he glanced west over Horace's neck, into the tangled country nearer the river. A casual look, but it froze in place as if it were a painting or an ordnance expert's perspective drawing. Networks of lines snaked over it to mark contours, and the painting turned three-dimensional and rotated to form a map.

Raj shook himself, and looked over his right shoulder again. The bright daylight seemed robbed of heat for a moment, cold and distant as a vision, until the smell of dust and sweat returned.

"Will we beat them to the ferry?" he said.

by a very little. A pause, very probably. 

"Dust cloud coming, Captain!" the gunnery observer perched on the engine housing said. "Two. Coming fast."

The officer grunted, and moved to the two shrouded lumps that stood on either side of the ramp. The little Colonist hamlet was deserted, not so much as a chicken had moved all day while they sat there on enemy territory with the great wooden tongue of the ramp down on the dirt. . . .

"Messa Whitehall," he said. "You should get back to the engine house, under cover." Your pretty butt should be back on the other shore, and if you get launched I might as well put my pistol in my mouth.

"No, thank you, Captain," she said expressionlessly, puffing on a cigarette that had gone out some time ago.

"The ferry's there!" one of the troopers shouted. "We made it!"

They were still two hundred meters ahead of the first Colonists, riding bent over to present as small a target as possible; carbines cracked and spat, but you would have to be
dead
lucky to hit a moving target from a galloping dog. Anyone you hit would be simply dead, of course, but the roadway prevented the pursuers from spreading out into the broad firing-line that would have brought their numbers to bear. Of course, once the platoon were bunched on the slow-moving ferry, nothing would prevent the better than three hundred pursuers from deploying and shooting their quarry to ribbons long before they moved out of range.

Not to mention the pompom that was bouncing along behind the Colonial cavalry; one reason the Settler's armies preferred the light quick-firers was that they really could keep up with cavalry. The quarter-kilo shells would be more than enough to deal with the ferry even without the carbines of the riders.

All of which was evident to the more experienced of the squad, as well. "Shut yer gob, dickhead!" the enthusiastic trooper's corporal shouted.

"Rifles out and take what cover you can as soon as we get on board," Foley was shouting, as he dropped back along the column of galloping dogs. "Try and take out the pompom crew."

He dropped into place beside Raj, twisting in his saddle to look at the nearest of the shouting bearded faces behind him.

"Well, I always wanted to be a social hit, and be chased after," he said. Their dogs had fallen into step. "But this is a bit much . . . one thing I forgot to tell you."

"What?" Raj said, drawing his pistol.
Not yet, that's even more ridiculous than trying a carbine
.
Similar bullets, but the longer barrel gave a higher velocity.

"We wanted you to stand Starparent to the baby," Foley said.

"I'm flattered," Raj replied.

The buildings were blurring by, adobe and pole frames. The ferry bulked larger and larger, but the four-meter gap of the loading ramp was a small enough target for thirty-odd men on dogback, even without the vaguely rectangular sheeted bulks on either side. Raj grinned to himself as he thought of galloping toward it
without
pursuit; it would be terrifying. Collisions, dogs falling, men being trampled or thrown against wood and machinery with bone-snapping force. It was wonderful, how circumstances redefined the term "danger."

The chase had lasted all day, lasted until some portion of Raj's mind was ready to believe it would never end. The hollow thunder of the leading mount's paws on timber jarred him into realization, and he threw his weight back in the saddle. Horace slowed, just enough to avoid the massive pile up at the far end of the ferry; the big flat-bottomed craft was rocking and bobbing as tonne-weights of bone and muscle skidded and twisted on the planks of the hull. Dogs slammed and ricocheted of one another, twisting and scrambling to stay erect on the tilting surface, yelping shrilly in protest. A human screamed almost as loud, leg jammed against the railing at the end with axe force, but most had had enough sense to pull their feet out of the collision zone. The whistle shrieked from the enginehouse, and the paddle wheels thrashed at the water, whipping it into froth as they tried to drag the ferry out into the current.

Raj twisted in the saddle again, feeling his belly muscles tauten as they waited for the bullets. The Colonists were not even slowing; the lead element must be planning to leap whatever gap grew between gangway and ramp. There was no time to act, only to watch as Suzette—
Suzette—
stood on the walkway and chopped her hand downward in signal.

There were figures in blue jackets beneath the tarpaulins on either side of the rampway. A half-dozen at each, enough to snatch the canvas away and toss it backward. They were city men, like most gunners; it was one of the few branches of the military with a significant number of recruits from urban areas. Most of them had spent time in the bleachers of the bullrings, and they shouted the ancient cry as the cloth revealed the twin fieldpieces.

"Holay!"

PAMM. PAMM
.
Tongues of flame, pale in the sunlight; jets of smoke, dispersing. Twin cannister rounds, and at sixty meters the shot cones were just reaching maximum effectiveness. Every dog and man in the first four rows went down as if the ground had been jerked out from under them. Hundreds more were following at a flat gallop, closely spaced, none willing to miss the kill after the frustration of the chase. Some managed to twist themselves out of the column, riders and mounts skidding and turning with desperate skill. Some leapt the barricade of thrashing shredded meat, their dogs soaring in arcs that landed with their feet sinking into the mud of the riverbank. Many more added to that barricade, tumbling dogs and riders thrown a dozen yards or more to bounce and splinter their bones on the hard-packed dirt.

A sound over head like ripping canvas; for a moment Raj thought it was just that, as hysterical dogs behind him shredded the sailcloth that had landed on them. A black tree of mud and water blasted out of the shore, close enough to throw spray and gobbets of mud on the ferry's bow. Then another shell landed with deadly precision ten meters further inland, and another,
wham-wham-wham
,
a row of towering black-grey dirt geysers. The steam winch grated, and the ramp swung erect to hide the shore; the shells pumped by steadily overhead as the ferry gained speed.

He looked up to meet Suzette's eyes; they crinkled at him in that slight quirk-lipped smile, so different from the learned charm of her public gestures. Gravely courteous, he took her outstretched hand and bowed over it as he raised it to his lips.

"Three cheers fer Messer Whitehall an' the Messa!"

The men began to whoop, helmets going up on the muzzles of rifles, gunners pounding their handspikes on the deckplanks; even the civilian crew of the ferry shouted and threw up their knit caps.

"Shut up! Silence in ranks!" Raj kept his wife's hand in his; the slender fingers drew caressingly across the heavy calluses of rein and saber hilt. "We got away from Tewfik again; and that's no cause for celebration. I'm sick of getting away from
him; I
want
him
to have to get away from me!" He grinned. "Cheer my wife as much as you like!"

"Gentlemen," Raj said. "That's the situation. Your Reverence."

With that he bowed to the Sysup-Suffragen of Sandoral, whose presence was obligatory. It was notable that the County Legate was absent; the head of the County's clergy and Wenner Reed were the only nonregulars present. Aside from the two Skinner chieftains halfway down the table; one of
them
had his vest before him, hunting lice and popping them into his mouth, and the other was digging at the inlays in the ancient satiny wood with the point of his knife. The battalion commanders were present, none of whom could be slighted—some of the cavalry units felt offended that their infantry counterparts were there at all—and the Companions. And Suzette, of course; after what had happened at the ferry this afternoon, no one had quite had the gall to object.

Raj watched the faces for a moment. Expecting an invasion all winter, preparing for one, was not quite the same thing as knowing the Settler's army would arrive in three days. Even now in this high cool room it seemed remote, unreal beside the glow of sunset and the blinking yellow of Sandoral's lanterns as they showed in the windows of the streets below.

Three days if they were lucky.

"My children," the Sysup said, touching the Star medallion on her chest, "I am not a soldier. The temples of the city have been cleared, and my healer-priests are ready. With the assistance of the army's noncombatants, ably organized by the Messa Whitehall." A nod of the lined, fine-featured head. "For the rest, we will pray."

"Messer Reed?" A soft-looking man, if you only noticed the body and face and not the eyes.

"Sandoral was founded as a fortress-city," Reed said. "So long as Sandoral holds, the frontier holds, and we deny the Upper Drangosh to the enemy as a route of attack. Our defenses are the strongest in the Civil Government, outside the capital itself; let Jamal and Tewfik sit in front of them, until they starve and their army rots away from disease."

There were murmurs of approval; the local authorities here had been spending continuously since the last sack, three long generations ago. Sandoral had more than walls; concrete pillboxes studded the approaches, miles of ditch filled with razor-edged angle iron, massive covered redoubts filled with obsolescent but very functional muzzle-loading guns. The Skinners looked around them, bewildered: one stood and began reciting his deeds and those of his ancestors, starting with the last man he had killed. It took a moment to restore order, and Raj felt the eyes on him like the wave-front of an explosion, crushing and twisting.

observe: 
 

—and the Oxheads were close on the northern horizon. A long earth barrage stood across the valley mouth, with a lake backed behind it; on the hill beside, Jamal's banner stood. This day it fluttered merrily, crackling like thunder beneath a clear blue sky scattered with puffball clouds, the beards and robes of the men who stood beneath cuffing and fluttering as well. They seemed in high good humor; to the south stretched a vast flat plain, laced with the silver glimmer of irrigation canals, patchworked with crops and orchards. Pillars of smoke were spotted across it, bending before the northerly breeze; singular and emphatic where villages and manors burned, smaller trickles from the woodwork of water-lifting wheels, more diffuse where orchards and ripe grain smoldered.

Jamal clapped his hands together with a shout; he was a stout man in later middle age, dressed in a burnouse and ha'aik of classical simplicity, black and white Azanian silk, wearing no weapon but the jeweled dagger whose curved sheath was thrust through his belt. He was almost ostentatiously plain, compared to the peacock splendor of the amirs and generals ranked behind him, the glowing colors of the carpets on which they stood; plumes nodded from turbans clasped with rubies and opalescene, and servants held aloft parasols whose canopies were intricately worked with Koranic verses in pearl and lapis.

"So many fires!" the Settler laughed. "We have been careless, my sons. It is only courteous we should do what we can to put them out."

Two younger men in gorgeously embroidered robes nodded and laughed with their father; Ali, slight and nervous-faced with a twitch at the corner of one eye, Akbar fingering his goatee with a plump hand. One-eyed Tewfik stood a little apart in the blood-red uniform of his troops, his face held like a clenched fist, but it was he who signalled to the uniformed engineers. An imam knelt and prayed toward Sinar, and the engineer whirled a crank. Spouts of rock and dirt punched out from the middle of the dam's face, in the center curve where it bent against the huge weight of water pressing down from the mountains. Thunder rumbled back from the stony walls, the ground shook. Then the first spouts of water arched out, beautiful and deadly as their spray cast rainbows across the gorge.

The dam crumbled like a child's sand castle beneath their power.

—and a cart trundled noisily over the cobbles of darkened Sandoral, pulled by men in head-to-foot robes; nothing showed but a slit above their eyes, and they stopped to rest often, although there were only a few bodies in the vehicle behind. "Bring out your dead!" one called, whirling a wooden noisemaker. "Bring out your dead!"

Artillery flickered and rumbled, the flashes visible over the roofs of the buildings, because no other light showed; nothing but the orange smudge of a building that had burned down to its foundations. The men pulling the cart ignored it; so did the folk who shuffled from an opened door, carrying a small bundle between them.

"Bring out your dead!"

—and a man lay in a roadside ditch. It was spring, and flowering vines grew across the stumps of trees; thin grass sprouted on bare clay in the fields beyond. The man had been very thin when he died; whoever had hacked the meat from his arms and legs had had to haggle chips into the bone to get a worthwhile amount. From the look of it, after a while they had lost patience and started chewing.

Raj blinked, the faces returning to focus before him. Smiles from a few of the Companions, sneers or doubtful mutual glances from some of the other battalion commanders, who had heard of his fits of introspection. He shuddered slightly; Spirit knew, a vision of a battlefield was bad enough
. . .