The Guns of Empire (10 page)

It was, as promised, an excellent view. The Ytolin winked and glittered off to the left, and Winter could see the roofs of the town of Gilphaite. Clouds of smoke were visible there, the whitish billows of powder smoke and the black columns that rose from burning buildings. The artillery was still clearly audible, along with an occasional distant crash as solid shot plowed into a wall.

The all-important bridge was not visible, however, because the ground to the north of the river rose into a hill and blocked her view. It was more of a gentle roll in the ground than a steep height, fenced pastures green with new grass and fields still mostly brown and muddy. As Erdine had said, there were a dozen guns deployed on its crest, arranged in three-gun half batteries separated by several hundred yards.

Between the ridge on which they stood and the hill was a long, flat stretch, perhaps a mile and a half across. At the moment it was occupied only by scattered
groups of cavalry, some still ahorse, others dismounted and crouching behind isolated trees or hedgerows. Puffs of musket smoke, like tiny balls of cotton, showed when each man fired his weapon, followed moments later by the distant
crack
of the shot. On the lower slopes of the hill, someone was firing back. Winter brought up her spyglass and saw figures in muddy red uniforms, similarly hunkered into cover.

For all the energy the cavalry and skirmishers put into the long-range firefight, the inaccuracy of their weapons at distance meant that this was the kind of combat that could be kept up all day without more than a few hits on either side. Winter counted the shots from the hill and tried to estimate the number of enemy skirmishers.
A couple of hundred, maybe?
Unlike the Hamveltai, who'd been repeatedly thrown off by the loose-order tactics of the Vordanai volunteers, the Borelgai army had been well schooled in such matters by endless brushfire conflicts in its colonies south of Khandar and had developed its own doctrines to counter them.
It's not going to matter, though, if they haven't got a lot more men back there.

“I'll stay here,” she said. In the training camp, Janus had repeatedly impressed on her the importance of senior officers not leading from the front. “Cyte, go back to Abby and tell her to send me up a dozen runners. She's to take the Girls' Own over the ridge and push that skirmish line back, right over the top of the hill if she can.” She pointed to the road, which emerged from the woods at the north end of the rocky ridge and crossed the open space toward Gilphaite. “The Sixth Division should deploy astride the road, with the rest of the Second behind. Push forward to a mile or so from their line.” That would be extreme range for the Borelgai guns.

“Sir!” Cyte saluted and vanished into the underbrush. Winter turned to Erdine.

“Colonel, you've done well. As soon as Abby gets in place, pull your men back and get them re-formed. Then ride around the north end of the enemy line, past the hill. The map says there's another road there, heading for the coast. Get sight of it if you can and tell me if anything starts moving in either direction.”

“Of course, sir.” Erdine saluted, then swept off his hat and bowed. Winter rolled her eyes as he turned away and went back to her spyglass.

A quarter of an hour passed, and the skirmishers in the valley kept up their long-range dispute. A rustle in the brush behind Winter turned into a loose column from the Girls' Own, muskets shouldered as they pressed through the undergrowth. One of them shouted at the sight of Winter, and they all saluted
as they went past. Winter acknowledged them with a nod, and found Abby bringing up the rear, as usual preferring to stay on foot.

“Sir,” Abby said, gesturing to a small crowd of young women who came up behind her. “The messengers you wanted.”

“Thanks,” Winter said. She waved at the panorama. “What do you think?”

Abby frowned momentarily. “I think they'd better have something up their sleeves, or else we're going to be presenting those guns to Janus by sundown.”

Winter smiled. “Go and get them. But don't push too hard if it turns out not to be that easy. I'll send Ibsly in behind you.”

“Tell him to hurry up, or there won't be anything left for him to do,” Abby said, and followed her soldiers, crashing down through the underbrush.

Winter looked over her messengers. Most of them were
very
young—some of the girls couldn't be older than fourteen or fifteen. The Girls' Own's policy of accepting recruits without asking too many questions meant they got their share of women who weren't big enough to handle a long-barreled musket, but Abby had become good at finding uses for everyone. Fear and determination looked back at Winter from every face, along with quite a bit of acne.

“Form a queue,” she told them. “Whoever's at the front, start running as soon as I've finished the message, no questions. Understand?”

They chorused assent and set to organizing themselves. Commanding a battle like this, watching from a distant vantage point, was a new experience for Winter. She'd always been down in the action, close enough to smell the powder smoke and hear the whine of bullets. Two divisions was too big a force to control that way, though, and she forced herself to ignore the tiny voice at the back of her mind that told her staying at such a far remove seemed cowardly.

It's not your job to risk your life,
Janus had told her.
That's what the rankers are there for. I know that sounds callous, but it's an inevitable truth. Think of it like this—there's nine thousand of them and only one division-general. You have to be able to see the battle as a whole and be the calm voice when everything goes to hell.

The Girls' Own pushed out of the woods, across the flat ground. They formed a “line” only in the loosest sense, operating in pairs separated by ten or twenty yards, so they covered a very broad front. Erdine's horsemen were withdrawing in good order, returning to their mounts and forming up in the rear, while the Girls' Own walked past them and took up the fight with the Borelgai skirmishers on the hill. One woman in each pair would drop to one knee, aim, and fire, and then reload while the other repeated the procedure.

Unlike Erdine, Abby wasn't content to bang away at long range. Her small
units leapfrogged from cover to cover, keeping up a steady fire as they advanced. The closer they got, the more accurate their fire became, and red-coated figures on the hill began to fall. The return fire grew more dangerous as well, of course, and the Borels had the advantage of height. Blue-uniformed bodies dribbled out behind the advance, some lying still, others walking or crawling to the rear. Casualty teams, made up of more of the girls too young to shoulder a weapon, rushed from place to place, leaving some where they'd fallen and hoisting others up for removal to safety.

From this distance, Winter thought, it looked like war as she'd always pictured it before her arrival in Khandar. The sky was a brilliant blue, and a light breeze slowly shredded the clouds of drifting smoke. The battlefield looked like a painting or a woodcut in a broadsheet. The screams of the dying, the smell of powder and shit and blood, none of it reached her up here. It felt a little like being a god looking down on hapless, warring mortals.

The Borelgai skirmishers were retreating as the pressure mounted, abandoning their cover and pulling back up the slope. A hundred yards in front of the line of guns, they stopped, and the firefight became deadlier as the two sides came together. Then, all at once, the crest of the hill was swarming with red uniforms, hundreds more men, coming up from hidden positions on the reverse slope.

The Borel commander didn't fancy losing his guns after all.
Now it was Abby's turn to fall back, the distant musket shots merging into a steady roar like slowly rising applause. Blue and red were both dropping at a steady rate, mingled on the slope that the Girls' Own was grudgingly yielding to their opponents. Winter turned to her runners.

“Find Ibsly and tell him to go in,” she said. “Sevran and the rest of the Second halt outside of cannon-shot and wait for orders.”

“Sir!” A gangly teenaged girl saluted and took off down the slope, arms windmilling wildly. Somewhere at the base of the hill, Abby would have left a string of horses, but even at a gallop it would still take minutes before Ibsly received the orders and longer before he could act on them. Winter wished she had one of Janus' flik-fliks, to flash her words instantly across the field, but trained signalmen were still too few for them to be widely available.
It wouldn't help Ibsly march any faster anyway.

Fortunately, the Borelgai didn't press on past the base of the hill, and the situation stabilized into another long-range exchange of potshots. Cyte returned from her errand, out of breath, and took a seat on the rock beside Winter, who handed her the spyglass.

“Abby's showing admirable restraint,” Winter said.

Cyte nodded, shifting the lens to the north. “Here comes Ibsly.”

Winter shaded her eyes—the sun was starting to slip down to the west, in the direction of the Borelgai position—and saw the long blue lines swinging out from around the edge of the woods, flags at the head of each battalion snapping in the breeze. Another disadvantage of watching the battle from afar, she reflected. What seemed to go quickly when you were in the thick of it took ages; it was like watching ants wander across a tabletop. It was nearly half an hour before Ibsly had gathered his battalions into combat formations and sent them forward, while the Second Division deployed behind him.

The Borelgai guns on the hill opened fire. Until now they'd been silent, the cannoneers huddling in the shelter of their pieces as they waited for a target more promising than a cloud of skirmishers to present itself. Now they'd found one, and they went after it with everything they had, each half battery firing in a one-two-three blast like a truncated drumroll. The flash and smoke went off in eerie silence, with the dull boom of the shot arriving four or five seconds later. Winter could see the spray of grass and dirt where the cannonballs struck the ground, rebounding into the air to land in another spray and then another, like rocks skipped across the surface of a pond. At this range, most of the shots were wild, but when one of those skips intersected a formation, the ball tore through everything in its path.

Each of the Sixth Division's eight battalions was formed in a column of companies: the first company, deployed in a line forty men wide and three deep, was followed after an interval of open ground by the second company, then the third, and so on, making a fat “column” that was really more of a rectangle. A column like that was relatively quick and maneuverable, able to snake around obstacles, but obviously only the first company in line could shoot effectively, drastically reducing the battalion's firepower. It also made them excellent targets for the descending fire of the cannons. Winter winced as one of the guns scored a direct hit, landing its ball right in front of one of the columns so it bounced through the ranks, sending broken bodies pinwheeling away from its path. The formation closed up around the wound, leaving men to lie still or thrash feebly in its wake, like a vast beast dripping blue blood.

Devastating as hits like that were, they weren't going to be enough. The blue columns swallowed cannonballs like the sea and kept on coming. The Girls' Own skirmishers were pushing forward again, too, and once more the Borelgai fell back, sniping at the columns as they went but not willing to stand against
the formed division's concentrated firepower. As the Sixth reached the bottom of the hill, the artillerymen switched to canister, great tin cans full of musket balls that made the cannons into giant shotguns. They sprayed into the leading companies with deadly effect, men falling in clumps and rows, and still the columns came on.

“There they go,” Cyte said, peering through the spyglass.

She handed it back to Winter, who trained it on the cannons. The Girls' Own skirmishers had pushed forward, keeping ahead of the Sixth's columns, and as they came into musket range of the guns, the cannoneers started dropping. The teams fired one last round of canister, witheringly effective at a hundred and fifty yards, and then fled, falling back amid their own skirmishers over the top of the hill. A few of Abby's most daring women followed them, out of Winter's line of sight. Soon after, a couple of them came running back, and Winter saw them heading for the knot of riders that had to be General Ibsly and his staff.

“They've got something on the other side of the hill,” Winter said.

She swept the glass past the now-silent guns, squinting as though she could change the contours of the earth by will alone. Whatever information the skirmishers had passed on had caused a flurry of activity, and soon the columns came to a halt. They began to maneuver, companies peeling out to either side to deploy from column into line.

The Borelgai seemed to appear between blinks, as though they'd sprung out of the earth. One moment the hill was empty, and the next it was packed solid with soldiers, standing shoulder to shoulder, stepping with absolute precision to the beat of an inaudible drum. At least four battalion flags were visible, four thousand men in a neat line moving at the double. They came over the crest and down the hill, toward Ibsly's still-deploying soldiers.

“Balls of the
fucking
Beast!” Winter had risen to her feet before she realized she'd moved, grinding the glass against her eye socket so hard it hurt. Her godlike detachment was gone, replaced with a terrible helplessness. She could see what was about to happen, but nothing she could do from here would make the slightest difference. Cyte took a shocked breath.

Scattered fire broke out among the Vordanai, mostly from the Girls' Own, who were falling back from the unexpected threat. At fifty yards, the red line halted, and the men brought their muskets to their shoulders. The battalions of the Sixth, still half-formed, started to open fire, but their scattered shots were drowned under the crash of a single, concentrated volley from the enemy. It lit up the field like a flash of lightning, and the sound that reached Winter was like
a wave crashing against a beach. Men fell up and down the line, staggering forward or slumping against their neighbors. At this distance, Winter couldn't hear the screams, but her mind supplied them all the same.