By Heresies Distressed (38 page)

“
Commence firing!
” Major Dahryn Bryndyn shouted on the heels of Lieutenant Hathym's snipers' volley. The one real drawback to the snipers' specialized weapons was that they were long and clumsy. That made it unlikely they would have time to reload before their targets took cover, so it was up to
his
men now, and a solid wall of smoke erupted as the twelve field guns of his two batteries bellowed.

At five hundred and fifty yards, they were a good hundred yards outside what would have been effective canister range for his twelve-pounders. At five degrees of elevation, they could throw a solid shot almost seventeen hundred yards, but maximum canister range was no more than a quarter of that.

Grapeshot
, now, though . . . that was another matter entirely. Instead of the thirty one-inch-diameter balls of a canister round, a stand of grape consisted of only nine miniature round shot. But each of those shot was
two
inches in diameter and weighed almost eight times as much as a ball of canister. And
they
could carry five hundred and fifty yards quite handily from one of Baron Seamount's twelve-pounders.

Doyal was still trying to come to grips with the preposterous accuracy and range of the Charisian musketry when the enemy gun line vanished behind its own muzzle smoke and the first patterns of grapeshot came screaming into his position.

Some of his subordinates had thought he was taking caution to the point of timidity when he'd insisted they dig proper gun pits. They'd known they had the Charisian guns outnumbered by a factor of almost three-to-one, after all. But despite some grumbling, they'd carried out his orders, digging each gun into its own individual pit so that its muzzle just cleared the shallow wall of spoil thrown up on the side towards the enemy by the excavators' spades.

The Charisian snipers' brutally unexpected harvest had driven his uninjured personnel back into those pits in the instant before the twelve-pounders fired, which meant Doyal's “timidity” had just saved quite a few of those subordinates' lives.

For now, at least.

The sound as the grapeshot came slashing in was like wind rushing through leaves. A sort of sibilant, many-voiced hissing that ended in the heavy thuds, like a vast fist, punching the ground, of the shot plowing into their targets.

Some of those targets were
not
the low earth berms protecting the gun pits, and fresh screams started.

In actual fact, the Charisian gunners' accuracy was considerably less than pinpoint. Unlike a specialized sniper rifle, grapeshot was an inherently inaccurate projectile, and even for the longer-barreled Charisian guns, five hundred and fifty yards was a stretch. But grapeshot also had the advantage of buckshot; someone firing it didn't really need pinpoint accuracy to achieve lethal results.

Most of the individual shot buried themselves harmlessly in the dirt. Of those which didn't, only two actually hit human beings. One man's head simply disappeared; the other jerked to his feet, screaming as he stared at the shattered, spurting ruin of his left arm. But horses and draft dragons were much larger targets than human beings, and Doyal realized instantly that he hadn't had them moved far enough to the rear when he deployed his own guns.

At least half a dozen horses went down in the first salvo, most of them shrieking like tortured women at the sudden unexpected agony they had absolutely no way to understand. The sound twisted a man's nerves like pincers, yet the dragons were worse. The high-pitched, agonized howl of a wounded dragon was indescribable. The whistling, ululating screams seemed to fill the universe, and injured beasts lunged frantically against their pickets.

Doyal shoved his notepad into his pocket and came slithering down the tree in a shower of bark splinters. He hit the ground already running, charging into the battery's central gun pit.

“Draw the charges!
Draw the charges!
” he bellowed. “Load with round shot! Load with round shot, damn your eyes!”

Some of his surviving division officers and gun captains had already anticipated his instructions. He'd ordered
his
guns loaded with grapeshot because musketeers would have to come into his effective range if they were going to be any threat to his battery. Despite his own insistence on digging the guns in properly, he hadn't really expected the Charisians to embark upon an artillery duel, unsupported by infantry, when they had barely a third as many guns as he did. Grapeshot and canister were the most effective anti-infantry ammunition any artillery piece had, and he'd never imagined that any infantry in the world could engage effectively from outside
grapeshot
range. Now, even as he cursed and goaded his men into reloading, he made a mental note for the artillerists' manual he was still drafting. Rule Number One:
Never
load your weapons until you know—positively
know
—what type of ammunition is going to be required.

Oh, shit!
he thought suddenly.
What the
hell
am I doing wasting time
drawing
charges? Why didn't I just order them to
fire
the damn grapeshot to clear the guns?!

Because, he realized, he was experiencing his own version of panic as he registered just how badly the Charisians outranged his own guns. That wasn't going to help anyone, and so he made himself pause and suck in a deep, steadying breath, even as the second and third salvos of grapeshot came hissing, whistling, and thudding into his position.

Slow down, Charlz! At least you've got the right idea, but slow
down.
Good ideas are fine, but you've
got
to think long enough to make the right
decisions,
as well!

Still more sniper bullets were hidden inside the artillery storm, and they continued to reap their own grim harvest from any man who exposed himself incautiously. Doyal couldn't pick the snipers' victims out of the general chaos, but he was harshly aware that he was losing men in steady twos and threes, despite the protection of their gun pits. One of the unseen bullets clipped the tip off the feathered officer's cockade on his own hat, and he started to duck down behind his gun pit's sheltering berm. He stopped himself barely in time, not because he was feeling especially heroic, but because of his awareness of his men's wavering morale. So instead of withdrawing into cover like a sane man, he played the lunatic role his command responsibilities required of him. He took off his hat to examine the cropped cockade, then looked at the men around him and waved it over his head.

“All right, boys!” he shouted. “They've gone and ruined my hat, and that's really pissed me off! I don't know if we can mark the bastards from here or not—but I damned well intend to find out! How about you?”

More than thirty of his gunners were down by now, at least half of them dead, but the others responded with echoes of his own fierce grin, and gun captains' hands rose as their crews finished extracting the charges of grape and reloading with round shot.

“Fire!”

Dahryn Bryndyn watched the sudden eruption of smoke from the Corisandian guns. Its sheer volume was intimidating, and he held his breath as the twenty-six-pound round shot sliced through the air towards him.

Unfortunately for Charlz Doyal's gunners, they simply didn't have the range to reach Bryndyn's guns. The round shot thudded into the earth well short of the Charisian officer's batteries, and he'd been right about how soft the ground was. The Corisandian shot were the next best thing to six inches in diameter, but the rich, damp, well-watered topsoil was almost four feet deep, and it simply swallowed them down. Some of them plowed channels across the wheat fields before they finally stopped, and clods of dirt spattered outward, yet not a man or a draft animal was even wounded, and Bryndyn smiled grimly.

“All right! Let's put it to the bastards!” he shouted.

Doyal jumped up onto the edge of the gun pit, exposing himself recklessly as he tried to see through the smoke of his own fire. Some small, very fast-moving object went by his right ear with a sizzling sound, and he realized that his new position went beyond anything that could be justified on the basis of encouraging his men. But he stayed where he was long enough for the breeze to roll away the battery's smoke, and his jaw tightened painfully.

So far as he could tell, not a single one of his shot had reached the enemy. He could see rips and gouges in the deep, even green of the wheat fields which must have been left by his fire, but none of them even came close to the Charisians.

He jumped back down into the gun pit, his heart like lead. His men were doing a better job of staying under cover while they served their weapons now—the slow learners were probably all already dead or wounded—but they
had
to expose themselves to work the guns. And because they did, they continued to go down, in a bloody, brutal erosion of his strength, and they couldn't even
reach
the men killing them.

It's time to withdraw
, he thought, astonished that he could have accepted defeat so rapidly, yet unable to think of any other alternative.
I've got to get these guns out of here while I still have the animals to move them and the men to man them. Koryn will just have to under
—

His thoughts broke off abruptly in a stupendous, far louder explosion of musketry.

Gahrvai's steeple perch let him see the entire panorama of his chosen battleground, but only until the clouds of smoke streaking the heavens started obscuring parts of it.
Critical
parts, he realized as the opposing batteries wrapped themselves in gunsmoke his spyglass couldn't penetrate.

Unaware of the deadly sniper fire sizzling in on Doyal's position, or of the fact that his own guns couldn't even reach the Charisian artillery's exposed position, he had no idea of how one-sided that confrontation was turning out to be. Instead, he felt a cautious stir of optimism that the enemy wasn't having it all his own way. And that sense of optimism grew stronger as Barcor and Mancora finally resumed their interrupted advance.