Warlord (33 page)

" . . . let's
go
."

Raj held Horace's bridle as the men led their beasts onto the barge. It was a normal bulk-cargo vessel, brownish-grey native
pigaro
wood, hard and impervious and full of tiny bubbles of air. The shallow hold was roofed with arches of willow-withe, and a cover of dark canvas on top of that, also standard for cargoes vulnerable to sun or rain. Just enough room for the dogs, if they walked half-crouched and lay down in neat rows; thirty-two men and mounts of Foley's platoon, the two men and four dogs of the portable heliograph unit, M'lewis, Holdor Tennan, and himself. The vessel sank deeper against the inlet mud as fifty thousand pounds of dog and man and gear filed aboard; the steersman at the rear sweep began to look worried.

"Come on, boy," Raj said, stepping towards the plank. Last on, first off on the other side.

Horace balked, flopping himself down with a jingle of accoutrements.

"This is no time for that, you sumbitch!" Raj hissed, painfully conscious of eyes watching him, the men from the heliograph tower and others from within the barge. He hauled, with no result; kicked the dog in the ribs with the flat of his boot, and produced nothing but a hollow drum-sound, hideously loud. Dogwhips were useless on Horace; there was only one thing to do.

"Suit yourself," he said, and walked up the gangplank. Behind him the dog watched, whined when Raj jumped down into the hold of the barge, then picked up its reins in its teeth and followed, testing the footing with each step.

"Phew," Foley muttered, as the last of the men disembarked on the east bank. It had grown fairly rank inside the barge, while they drifted down toward the east bank and past the spot where the Civil Government border curved away from the west. They were in the Colony, now, and far from help.

"
Avocati
,"
Raj whispered back. The common dog-fodder along the river, a noxious, flabby sucker-mouthed bottom-feeding scavenger fish with no backbone; the main drawback was that it made the dogs' breath even worse than usual.

He looked up the bank; the floodplain held the same mix of carob and native thorny brush as the other shore, but the ravine-scored silt of the bluff was much higher, twenty meters, notched and slashed by winter flooding. The air smelled of river, dog, and wet mud; Raj took a deep breath and exhaled, grinning up at the dark menace of the hill.
I
feel
young
again
,
he realized with a start; which was very odd, because he had yet to reach his twenty-sixth year. Even in his teens he hadn't shared his peers' pleasure in taking useless risks, in riding vicious dogs or hanging around girls with dangerous male kin; they had called him a sober-sides for it, and for occasionally turning down a hunting trip or a cockfight to crack a book.

It's because this is a comprehensible job
,
he thought. No huge amorphous army, where he
had
to leave a dozen crucial things a day in the hands of men he had never fought beside; no not-quite-omniscient computer angel to show him unassailable reasons for doing things he despised; no snakepit spy-hive of a city . . . just a cavalry patrol into hostile country, go in, get the information and get out. Succeed or die.

Foley came back along the line of kneeling men and crouching dogs; there was a slight frown on his half-youthful face, the look of someone focusing on a complicated piece of work.
Learn to do it right and they'll just stick you with something more difficult, lad
,
Raj thought mordantly.

"M'lewis has a way up, sir," he said. "Passable without much cutting." Native scrub was like resilient metal wire that bit; they had saw-edged clearing bars, but the noise and delay were to be avoided if at all possible.

"Let's do it then," Raj said.

"Avatars of the Spirit," Raj swore, as he poked his head cautiously over the rise.

It was morning of the second day, south from their landing point; he had been about to pack it in, the patches of cultivated land along the bank of the river were growing more and more frequent, reaching inland further and further. Another fifty kilometers, and the bluffs would fall away to the wide alluvial plains, densely cultivated all the way east to the Rushing River and the highlands of Gederosia.

"That's the biggest fukkin' raghead army I ever
wants
to see," M'lewis said beside him on the ridge.

The skin around his lips was off-white . . . well, it
was
stunning. The date groves and norias of the riverside were lost in a sea of tents, orderly clumps and rows, dog-lines running for kilometers, artillery parks with everything from the common pompoms to heavy muzzle loading howitzers. Supplies were being unloaded from riverboats, pyramids of sacks and crates and bundles; men marched through the streets of the tent city, the spikes of their helmets glinting; parties of cavalry dashed across the plain round about. In the center of the camp was a huge white and scarlet tent like a miniature mountain range. Banners hung in the still morning air above it, or fluttered briefly; the sound of the camp was like surf, spiced and peaked with the sharp music of drums and the shrill of fifes.

A muezzin had called the morning prayer; campfires were blossoming higher, carrying the sharp spices of Colonist cooking.

"There must be a hunnerd thousand men there," M'lewis whispered again.

Raj smiled; the Warrant Officer was as good a man of his hands as you could hope to find, a superb dogsman with an instinctive feel for the lay of the land and a crack shot, but the scale of this was outside his experience.

"Barton?" Raj asked.

The young lieutenant was quartering the camp with his own binoculars; his face was pale under natural olive and heavy tan, but his voice was steady:

"I make it . . . twenty thousand, or a little more," he said, writing and sketching on a pad by his head.

"Much better," Raj said. He took the drawing and laid it before M'lewis. "See, each of the standard tent holds a Colonist squad; six men, smaller than ours. So many men to a gun; banners are graded, like in our regular army. Sample a section, figure out how many equivalents, and you've got a reliable estimate, the same way you'd number a sheep herd quickly." A pause. "You're counting too many camp followers, I think, Barton: they're building that bridge with peasants they've rounded up, mostly."

"Bridge, sir?" Barton asked.

"Mmmh. See there?"

Down by the water's edge the Colonial forces had dug and pushed a huge ramp of earth and timbers down into the current of the Drangosh. Two enormous cables of flax lay coiled and ready at the head of it, rope as thick as the chest-height of the men who handled it; behind the coils further lengths were anchored in timber and stone. Working parties upstream anchoring other cables that were small only by comparison. Across the river a similar ramp was being built; Foley turned his glasses on one, then the other.

"Little men in loincloths, and bigger men in pantaloons working stripped to the waist," he said.

"Combat engineers, troops and labor-levies," Raj said. "I've read of this in some of the older chronicles. You warp the cables across on both sides, then slide . . . barges, purpose-made pontoons, even rafts . . . underneath and secure them. Brushwood and planking, then a layer of earth, and you've got a good solid bridge. It won't last forever, or even through a spring flood, but you can march an army over it like it was a firm made road for a couple of months. Much better than boats, faster, more secure
 . . . 
Get the banners, Barton: full sketches, so we'll know who's here."

The great tent bore the green flag with the crescent and star. The Settler's banner, not just the national one, Jamal was here. But not Tewfik's black-and-crimson Seal of Solomon. A group of turtle shapes, down near where the supply boats were landing, armored cars.

"Yer a great comfort t'me, ser, but twenty thousand ragheads is summat too many, I'd say."

Foley nodded. "And that's a very impressive piece of engineering," he added, handing his modified notes over to Raj. "But all things considered, sir, I'd rather be in Sandoral."

"We'll see what can be done about that," Raj said, rolling over onto his back and pulling out his watch. "Hmmm. First priority is to get the message back to the Army. They'll have that bridge up in a day or two, and it's not that far up the west bank . . . M'lewis," he continued, turning the notes over and scribbling a message.

"Take this back to the heliograph." They had set it up on the reverse slope of a hill three kilometers back, the furthest it could go and still reach the southernmost outpost of the temporary chain on the west bank. "Tell them not to bother to encode it, just send it in clear and repeat until they get acknowledgement. And hurry."

He nodded wordlessly and set off down the reverse slope, plunging over the lip of a gully in a controlled fall. Raj and the younger man followed a little more sedately, leopard-crawling backward down the slope to keep their heads below the line, then trotting in a crouch with their sabers held in their left hands.

"It shouldn't take us nearly as long to get back, now that we know the terrain in detail," Raj said. "I added an instruction to have the ferry prepared, so—"

He halted; Foley wasn't listening. His head rotated to the right with the delicate precision of an aiming screw, and Raj had learned to respect the younger man's eyesight. The lieutenant brought his glasses up again, turning the focus wheel with his thumb.

"Shit."

Raj followed suit, blinking against the low sun-glare to the east. A dust cloud, and a line of tiny doll figures on dogback, out in the flatter land away from the riverbank and its tumbled hills. Heading straight for the conical hill where the heliograph was waiting; not that they had seen the Civil Government detachment, from the leisurely way they were proceeding, but it was the best terrain feature for kilometers around, even so, a natural place to put in a watching post. Following straight in M'lewis' tracks would be futile. The little Bufford parish soldier rode lighter and with greater skill than most of Foley's platoon, good men though they were, and where one man could go undetected thirty-odd could not.

"There's a draw, through there," Foley said with tight calm, pointing. If the heliograph team and the Colonist patrol were the bases of a triangle and the platoon the point, his arm bisected it. "We can get between them and the heliograph, I think."

An ambush, but it would be very unlikely that a firefight would go unheard or unnoticed, this close to a major camp. It would give them time, provided that there were no survivors; the Colonists would have to find their men in the maze of rough country, and a stern chase was a long one.

"Let's do it, then," Raj said.

The heliograph tower was the highest place in Sandoral, a slender pillar of concrete rising from the complex of government buildings at its center, the Legate's Palace. It contained nothing but a windowless spiral staircase and a two-story bulb at the end of that spindle; the outside was sheathed in marble, because this
was
the palace, after all. The inside was severely plain, a lower room with bunks and table and chamberpot, an upper with the signalling equipment. That was a contrast to the drabness, a great gimbal-mounted telescope and the intricate levers of brass and iron that controlled the mirrors and slides and big lighthouse-style lantern on the roof. Right now there was a smaller telescope as well, pointing south at the temporary chain set up down to the border.

Highest place and the dullest
,
thought the watch-stander resentfully. Learning the code and equipment was like learning to read, a great way to get promoted . . . 
and stuck up here
,
he thought. He looked out of the corner of his eye at the woman who sat quietly smoking in a corner, looking cool and aristocratic in white linen riding clothes. With the commander's wife hovering over them they wouldn't be able to rack out or start up the usual friendly dice game, from which he'd made a fair bit of wine-and-girl money.
Nice piece, though, if you like 'em skinny
,
he thought idly.

She smiled and spoke, with a crisp Messer-class East Residence accent. "I'm not here to pull an inspection, boys. Just do your jobs as usual and ignore me."

A head rose through the circular railed stairwell. "Hey, Corporal Stainez? Gotta raghead down here, says he works for Wenner Reed an' gots a message fer Lady Whitehall?"

Stainez sighed and nodded. "Send t' wogboy up," he said.

Abdullah al'Azziz bowed low before Suzette; it amused him to do so openly, when it was so deeply secret who he served, almost as much as it amused him to use his given name. It had been a
long
time since most of those about him knew him as "Slave of God."

"My master, the Honorable Messer Wenner Reed, Commander of Reserve Forces for the City District of the County of Sandoral, sends greeting, Lady Whitehall, and wonders if there is some delay that prevents you from joining him on the excursion to his country house that was planned for this day."

"I am ill," she said. "My apologies to your master, perhaps another day." The Arab bowed again, catching the signs of furiously throttled worry and impatience.

"I will return to my . . . duties, Messa, and convey your regrets—"

"Holy Spiritshit!" The soldier glancing through the telescope to the south blurted. "Priority message!"

The corporal pushed the man aside and sat in his chair. "Kearstin, Hainez, get yer arses up here! Mefford, take it down."

The soldier grabbed up a writing board and began scribbling in shorthand:

"Relay . . . 
stop
Contact with main Colonist field force thirty kilometers south last west-bank relay station
stop
pontoon bridge under construction suitable for rapid crossing whole force nearing completion
stop
estimate Colonial force eight thousand cavalry ten thousand foot one hundred light fifty medium field guns siege train engineers and support units in proportion—
oh, holy shit no don't take that down, ye dickhead—
to above
stop
Jamal leading force in person
stop
no indication presence Tewfik and southern field army
stop
estimate main Colonist force arrive vicinity Sandoral five days plusminus two
stop
relay to East Residence
stop
order full mobilization highest alert
stop
will attempt to reach eastbank ferry point eight hours soonest
stop
Gerrin have fullest confidence in your judgment Foley doing well
stop
be home soon Suzie darling
stop
."