The Guns of Empire (26 page)

“I want a watch kept day and night,” Marcus said. “Nothing gets past this point in the river without our permission. If so much as a rowboat refuses to dock, blow them out of the water.”

“Yes,
sir
,” Viera said, with obvious relish.

So far, so good,
Marcus thought. Scouts sent to the east still reported no sign of the main Murnskai army.
Let's hope this works.

W
inter regarded the bowl of gray stuff with intense suspicion.

“What is it?” she said.

“Try it first,” Cyte said, offering a slice of heavy black bread.

“That is
not
encouraging,” Winter said. She picked up a knife and dipped it into the gray stuff. It spread over the bread like thick, grainy butter.

“The Murnskai call it
dimotska
. It's considered a delicacy.”

“Remind me sometime to tell you about what they considered delicacies in Khandar.”

“Just eat it.”

Winter sighed, closed her eyes, and took a bite. The bread was coarse and chewy, and the gray stuff was intensely salty, with a slippery texture. Some of the tiny grains popped between her teeth. Privately, she had to admit that it wasn't bad.
I'd still rather have a nice pat of butter, though.

“Okay,” she said, finishing the slice. “What did I just eat?”

“Fish eggs,” Cyte said, helping herself.

Winter had a confused vision of a fish sitting atop a nest. “Fish don't lay eggs.”

“They do, actually,” Cyte said, spreading a thick layer of the
dimotska
atop the bread. “They're just tiny. This stuff comes out of the female arrowfish. When they're in season, they swarm off the Split Coast, and the fishermen catch them and cut out—”

“You know, that's enough.” Winter wiped her lips on her sleeve and sighed. “What's the matter with the rest of the fish, anyway?”

“Fish is peasant food,” Cyte said. “This is for nobility.”

“I'm going to go on record and say that every country outside Vordan is insane,” Winter said. “Why can't they eat
normal
things?”

“Like unmentionable bits of pig ground up and stuffed inside its own intestines?”

“That's more of a Hamveltai thing,” Winter said, fighting a grin. “Foreign influences.”

“We eat chicken eggs,” Cyte said, finishing her slice of bread. “This isn't so different.”

Winter made a face. Food had been plentiful the past few days, thanks to the depots of Bskor, but full of unfamiliar flavors. Cyte seemed to take a particular delight in grabbing the strangest items, usually “delicacies” intended for officers and royalty. Fish eggs weren't the half of it.

There was a scratch at the tent flap. “Sir?” Bobby said without waiting for an answer. “They're coming again.”

“By all the fucking saints,” Winter said. “I don't believe it.”

“I saw them myself,” Bobby said. “At least six battalions—”

“I know. I know.” Winter grabbed her jacket off the ground and started doing up the buttons. “I'll be right there.”

“That makes six attacks in two days,” Cyte said.

“Are they hoping we're going to get
tired
?” Winter said, fastening her collar. “Or run out of ammunition?” Fortunately, there was no chance of the latter—the same depots that were providing their food had been stuffed with shot and powder.

“Maybe they just don't know what else to do,” Cyte said.

“I know what
I'd
do,” Winter muttered.
Head home as fast as I could, and to hell with anybody who tried to stop me.
She belted on her sword and pulled the tent flap open, letting in the brilliant sun. The rain had passed, leaving the sky a blinding blue almost free of clouds.

Cannon-fire began as she hurried down the mud-churned path from her tent. The Second Division's two batteries were placed high on the hillside, with clear lines of fire over their own infantry to the flat ground below. Between attacks, the artillerymen had occupied themselves with improving the position by creating a ramp of packed earth behind each gun; when it fired, the cannon would recoil backward, then roll down the ramp into firing position, allowing the crew to reload and fire again more quickly. Colonel Archer's crews had the drill down to a fine art now, and the guns boomed with clockwork regularity.

Janus had chosen their position with his usual care. Halfway between Polkhaiz and Bskor, where the river Shulia entered the Syzria, a spur of hills extended north to within a mile of the riverbank. He'd brought the Second,
Third, and Fourth Divisions to hold the narrow gap, following much the same route the First had taken days earlier, while the remaining half of the Grand Army bristled aggressively against the Murnskai front. The artillery reserve had come as well, manhandled by cursing, sweating infantrymen over miles of bad roads and muddy valleys.

The Third and Fourth had set up in the narrow strip of low ground between the river and the hill. At first Janus' demand that the troops dig ditches and earthen ramparts had been met with widespread grumbling, but the past few days had convinced any doubters. The Murnskai army had come west, a seemingly endless stream of white-coated infantry and squadron after squadron of horsemen. They'd been met by a line of spiked ditches, with the infantry taking cover behind waist-high mounds of dirt topped with sturdy logs. Periodic gaps in the line allowed the massed batteries of the two divisions and the artillery reserve, parked nearly hub to hub, to rake the open ground of the valley floor.

Winter's Second Division was deployed on the army's right, where the land started its rise into the wooded hills they'd so recently struggled to march through. They were spread thinner, with more front to cover, but the terrain was enormously favorable. Just below the tree line, they'd dug pits and set up ramparts, strewing the approaches with more felled trees as an additional obstacle. The slope meant the guns had a perfect field of fire, outranging their Murnskai counterparts, although Murnskai gunnery had thus far proven to be lackluster at best.

Thus fortified, Janus had settled in to wait for the Murnskai army to attack. Which, to Winter's astonishment, they obligingly had, bulling ahead in spite of the obvious difficulties.
Whoever's in command isn't worried about casualties, that's for certain.

The camp was even higher on the slope, back among the trees. Winter passed the artillery line and made her way down to the infantry. They'd set up a command post in the center of the Girls' Own position, surrounded by logs with notches wide enough to peek through. Abby was already there, holding a spyglass to her eye.

“Looks like us and Blackstream's boys are the lucky ones this time,” she said. Blackstream's Fourth Infantry Regiment was deployed to the right, Sevran and de Koste's regiments to the left. “But they're doing something I don't understand.”

“Let me have a look,” Winter said.

Abby handed over the spyglass. Sweeping it across the field, Winter could
see eight battalions in column, the equivalent of an entire division, concentrated onto a narrow front and advancing steadily. Their white coats made for a pretty line, she had to admit. The ground they were crossing was already strewn with dead; as best Winter could tell, the Murnskai made no effort to either bury the corpses or gather the wounded, leaving soldiers who'd been hit to get off the field under their own power. The Girls' Own had rescued a few who'd fallen relatively close to their own line, but hadn't dared to venture out any farther. At night the camp was haunted by hoarse cries and pleas from the killing field, growing steadily weaker as time went on.

“What's strange?” Winter said.
Besides the fact that they're coming at all.

“Look behind the infantry,” Abby said. “That looks like a cuirassier regiment to me, all strung out.”

Winter shifted the glass.
They can't be mad enough to try a cavalry charge, can they?
Even a commander as rock stupid as this Murnskai general seemed to be would have to know that sending horsemen uphill into stakes and obstacles was madness.

But the cuirassiers were there, all right, big men on big horses, with steel breastplates and long fur capes. They were advancing slowly, keeping pace with the infantry. Instead of holding a tight formation, as cavalry usually tried to do, they were spread out in a long line, as wide as the entire infantry attack. Each man had his saber drawn already.

“That
is
strange.”
Strange is bad,
instinct told her. “But I can't see how it's going to help them.”

“Me neither.” Abby took her spyglass back. “Any orders?”

Winter shook her head. “Not for the moment.” By this time none were needed.

The cannon-fire tore great gaps in the Murnskai formations. After two days firing over the same ground, Archer's gunners knew the ranges and elevations by heart, and nearly every shot went smashing through the white-coated lines. More human wreckage joined the stiffening corpses of the previous day and a half, piling in drifts that were so tall in places the advancing infantry had to detour around them.

After the first attack, the Girls' Own had paced out distances from their position and set up markers that would be easily visible from the heights. When the Murnskai advanced past a hundred and fifty yards, therefore, the entire line erupted at once, as though the enemy had struck a tripwire. With the advantage of height, even a musket had a chance of being deadly at that range, and as
ammunition was plentiful, Winter saw no reason to have her troops hold their fire. Smoke boiled over the log ramparts and poured down into the spiked ditches. From the command post, set slightly farther back, Winter still had a good view.

“They're breaking up,” Abby said.

Winter nodded. The leading companies of the Murnskai battalions were melting away under the onslaught of fire, men halting to take cover behind piles of their own dead and shoot futilely at the wall of muzzle flashes ahead. The following companies got tangled up with them, the neat lines dissolving into an amorphous blob, which provided the artillery with an even better target. The enemy on the far right broke first, the blob coming apart under the combined volleys of Blackstream's regiment, breaking up into a mass of fleeing, frightened men. Panic spread down the line, one battalion at a time.

“The cavalry—” Abby began, then stopped. “Oh.”

“What?” Winter said.

Wordlessly, Abby handed over the glass. Winter trained it on the cuirassiers and saw that they were in motion, riding forward. Sabers rose and fell, cutting down their own infantry, who'd thrown down their packs and rifles in order to run faster.

“Balls of the Beast,” Winter swore.

“That answers your question,” said Cyte, who'd joined them and was looking through her own glass. “Apparently devotion to Church and emperor isn't enough.”

“God Almighty.” Winter lowered the glass and shook her head. The attack had broken up more than a hundred yards from the line, reduced to a bloody shambles just like all the ones that had come before.

“It might be a good sign,” Cyte said. “If that's what it takes to get them to come at us . . .”

“Division-General, sir!”

Winter turned to find a Girls' Own ranker so stiffly at attention she looked like she couldn't breathe. Behind her, trailing a dozen soldiers with Colonial scorpion insignia, was Janus himself. Winter automatically drew herself up into a salute, and Abby and Cyte did likewise.

“Thank you,” Janus said, waving a hand for them to relax. “I got word they were trying this end of the line again, so I thought I would check in. Anything to report?”

“The enemy are repulsed, sir,” Winter barked, stiffly formal in front of her officers. “Their losses seem heavy.”

“As I've come to expect from the Girls' Own,” Janus said, a bit louder than was necessary. The rankers close enough to hear repeated his words, the praise spreading up and down the line like the ripples from a rock dropped into a pond.

“The enemy . . .” Winter hesitated. “We saw their cuirassiers slaughtering their infantry after they broke, sir. I think they're driving their men toward us under threat of execution.”

Janus raised an eyebrow. “Desperate indeed.”

“Yes, sir.”

He paused for a moment. “Do you recall, Division-General, a conversation we once had about the nature of a perfect victory?”

“Yes, sir. You said that the perfect victory would be bloodless, because the outcome would be so clear that the battle would never even be fought.”

“Indeed.” Janus stared out at the field, heaped with white-coated Murnskai dead. “Unfortunately, it appears that the perfect victory requires an opponent smart enough to know when he's beaten.” He sighed and raised his voice again. “Division-General Ihernglass. Can you hold this position?”

“Sir.” Winter straightened up. “If they have to come at me across that ground, and you keep me well supplied with ammunition, my division could hold this position against all the armies of the world.”

Janus smiled like a wolf.

—

By nightfall, the battle, such as it was, was over. Prince Vasil had steadily withdrawn more and more of his army from the lines facing south at Polkhaiz, throwing it against Janus' impromptu fortress on the road to Bskor. On the afternoon of the second day, the four divisions of the Grand Army still waiting on the Pilgrim's Road launched a sudden attack north that split the Murnskai line wide open. Give-Em-Hell's cavalry reserve flooded into the gap, scattering the enemy and taking the force facing Janus in the rear. Much of the Murnskai army, battered by days of fruitless assaults, dissolved completely, with only a few cavalry formations holding together to beat a retreat over the Syzria. Even the bridge at Polkhaiz was captured intact.

The news arrived at the Second Division sometime after dinner. Cook fires were quickly built into bonfires, and the celebrations began. Gilphaite had been a hollow victory at best, with the enemy escaping mostly intact, and in any case the Second's heavy casualties had left no one in the mood for revelry. This time, though, there was no reason to hold back. The enemy was destroyed, and their
own losses scarcely amounted to a few dozen, most of those lightly injured when their fortifications had been struck by cannon-fire.