Midst Toil and Tribulation by David Weber
But there were four hundred and thirty pikemen defending the line; there were ten times that many assaulting it, and the weight of all those charging ranks drove the column forward.
Zhorj Styvynsyn drew his sword as the first of the Temple Loyalist pikeheads reached across the parapet and found a victim. More of the abatis was being pulled apart, and all too many of his riflemen found themselves face-to-face with pikes. A bayoneted rifle was a lethal close-quarters melee weapon, but it was far shorter than an eighteen-foot pike, and his men found themselves at a deadly disadvantage, despite the parapet. They started going down, and he felt the pain of their loss as if those pikeheads had been driving into his own flesh. But there was no time to let himself acknowledge that pain, and he bared his teeth as he dropped his sword and snatched up a fallen rifleman’s bayoneted weapon in its place..
“Reinforce right!” he shouted to the youthful platoon commander standing beside him, and the youngster slapped his chest in salute, shouted to his platoon sergeant, and vanished into the glare-slashed darkness. Somehow Styvynsyn knew he would never see the lieutenant again.
“The rest of you, follow me!” he snapped, and his headquarters section moved left on his heels.
* * *
Men shouted their hate, boots slipping and sliding in the mud, rain pounding down, fresh thunderbolt flares arriving from the guns on the rafts. Screams, grunts of effort, and the horrible wet, rending sound of steel cleaving flesh was all the universe, and there was very little to choose between the discipline, the fury and determination—and the courage—of either side. Men who had remained loyal to their lord protector and their constitution through every privation of that horrible winter stood their ground against men who had given their allegiance to no mortal power or piece of paper but to God Himself, and there was no give in them. They bared their teeth, the spray of blood hot on their faces in the icy rain, the stink of death rising over the smell of mud and water … and they died.
In the end, when courage met courage and determination trumped fury, it was numbers that counted. The men of the Army of God were not—quite—the equal in training and experience of the 37th Infantry, but they were close. And there were many, many more of them.
* * *
Regulations said the proper sidearm for a Siddarmarkian officer was a sword, but Zhorj Styvynsyn didn’t much care about that. He’d discovered that a bayoneted rifle was a far more lethal weapon, even if the Republican Army hadn’t yet devised the bayonet drill Merlin Athrawes had originated for the Royal Charisian Marines and the Marines, in turn, had bequeathed to the Imperial Charisian Army. The twelve men of his headquarters section—there’d once been fifteen of them, but that had been an eternity ago—followed on his heels as he slammed into the wedge of Temple Loyalist pikemen beginning to penetrate the left end of the fraying Siddarmarkian line.
The flash and crack of occasional rifle muzzles and the glaring glitter of the Church’s flares lit the scene in a nightmare of midnight black shadow and blinding light, picking individual raindrops out of the night like fleeting jewels in a madman’s crown. Men cursed and screamed and died in that maelstrom, and Styvynsyn saw Grovair Zhaksyn fighting madly at the heart of an isolated knot of defenders. The pikemen of Langhorne Division were intermingled with those of the Holy Martyrs Division, their own cohesion vanished in the chaos, but they closed in on the major’s company sergeant like a ravening beast with pikes for fangs.
“Hang on, Grovair!” he shrieked, though the sergeant couldn’t possibly have heard him in the clamor and roar of battle. “Hang on!”
He and his twelve men hit the Temple Loyalists like a hammer. He lunged, feeling the horrible, twitching softness as his bayonet sank into an unwary pikeman’s back. He withdrew, kicking the writhing body aside, and slammed into the next enemy. He blocked the thrust of a shortened pike with his rifle, slammed a muddy boot into the man’s belly, smashed his skull with the rifle butt as he went down, and whirled back to yet another Temple Loyalist. He heard screams from every side, knew the men of his section were fighting desperately to cover his back, and spared another glance for his sergeant … just in time to see Grovair Zhaksyn go down as a pikehead drove into him just below his breastplate.
A moment later, it was Styvynsyn’s turn.
* * *
“Stand! Stand!” Major Dynnys shouted.
His men were going down, turning from a tight, disciplined line into knots and clusters of individual, desperately fighting men. He’d picked up a dead man’s pike, and he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his company sergeant, thrusting again and again.
“Stand, boys! Stand with me!”
They heard the boom of that deep, familiar voice, the men of 1st Company, and they obeyed it. They stood with their major, falling around him, ranks thinning with every second, but they stood.
“Stand, First! Stand! Don’t let—”
The pikehead hit Dynnys’ breastplate and skidded up the rain-soaked steel. The razor point went into his throat, just under his chin, and he went down, the voice which had held his company like iron stilled forever.
Yet even without that voice, 1st Company never broke. It simply died around its major’s body.
* * *
“Fall back!” Stahn Wyllys shouted as the center of the defensive line collapsed. “Third Company, stand where you are! Second Company, fall back!”
Zhorj Styvynsyn’s surviving men heard the colonel’s voice. They backed away from the parapet, still snarling defiance, and their bayonets ran red as the Temple Loyalists scrambled across the entire front of the earthwork, close enough now that a man with a rifle could get inside the points of their pikes and claim his vengeance.
But there was no holding that tide of roaring fury, and the men of 2nd Company obeyed Colonel Wyllys. Less burdened than someone carrying a pike three times his own height in length, far more familiar with the terrain behind the earthwork, they managed to break contact in the darkness and chaos, falling back behind the thin double line of young Hainree Klairynce’s depleted company.
“Take your aim!” Klairynce’s tenor voice cut through the confusion and cacophony with impossible clarity. “Ready! Fire!”
Despite the rain, despite everything, three hundred rifles fired as one. The shocking sheet of flame stabbed out like an old-fashioned musket volley at a range of under twenty yards, and Temple Loyalists went down like grass before a Charisian reaper. Third Company blew a hole in the Army of God’s advance—a moment of sheer slaughter not even the Langhorne Division could bring itself to cross.
It didn’t last long, but it lasted long enough for the 37th’s survivors to break contact and fall back on its last two companies’ entrenched positions in the belt of woods they’d defended for so long. They fell back in that brief window of time before the thirty-two hundred surviving Temple Loyalists recovered from the shock and came charging after them.
Of the thousand Siddarmarkians who’d held that muddy wall of earth, less than three hundred survived to retreat.
.II.
Daivyn River, Cliff Peak Province, Republic of Siddarmark
“Crap.”
Once upon a time, Howail Brahdlai would have used a somewhat stronger term. That, however, had been when he had been Howail Brahdlai, apprentice brick mason, and not Corporal Howail Brahdlai, 191st Cavalry Regiment, Army of God. Most of the clergy attached to the army were remarkably tolerant where soldier-style language was concerned. Unfortunately, the 191st’s chaplain wasn’t among them, and he’d been “counseling” Brahdlai ever since the day he’d heard the corporal pointing out the shortcomings of his section in pungent, pithy style.
Personally, Brahdlai thought God and the archangels probably had better things to do than listen in on their servants’ language, but Father Zhames held a different view, and Colonel Mardhar had a tendency to support his chaplain … who’d been his personal chaplain before both of them had joined the Army of God. Brahdlai respected the Colonel, and the Father was a good
“What?” Svynsyn Ahrbukyl asked. He was the senior trooper in Brahdlai’s scouting detail—a good, solid man, like all of them.
“WW’s disappeared again,” Brahdlai growled. “Damn it,” he appended a mental apology to Father Zhames, “I told him to stay in sight!”
“Hard not to get out of sight sometimes,” Ahrbukyl pointed out philosophically. He liked Brahdlai, and the corporal was a good leader and hard-working. Like altogether too many of the Army of God’s cavalry, he’d been only an indifferent rider when he was “volunteered” for the cavalry, but he’d buckled down to master that skill the same way he had the rest of his duties. He was a bit prone to fuss and worry, though, in Ahrbukyl’s opinion.
“Sergeant Karstayrs doesn’t see it that way,” Brahdlai pointed out in reply. He liked Ahrbukyl, but the man could be so phlegmatic that sometimes the corporal wanted to choke him. “Do you want to explain to him that it’s ‘hard not to get out of sight sometimes’ after the new asshole he ripped Hyndryk last five-day?”
Perhaps, Ahrbukyl reflected, the corporal wasn’t quite that prone to worry too much, after all.
“Not especially,” he admitted, but he also shrugged. “Still, Corp, it’s WW we’re talking about.”
Brahdlai grunted in sour agreement. Wyltahn Waignair was one of their company’s characters. He was smart, he was always cheerful, and unlike Corporal Howail Brahdlai, he rode as if he were a part of his horse, all of which was fortunate, since he was constantly in trouble for one practical joke or another. He was also the best scout in the entire 191st, and Ahrbukyl was right—one of the things that made him the regiment’s best scout was a tendency to follow his nose wherever it led him. On the other hand.…
“All right, you’ve got a point. But even if it is WW, I don’t want the Sergeant ‘discussing’ my shortcomings with me. So let’s get a move on”—the corporal looked over his shoulder at the other four men of his section—“and catch up with him.”
“Suits me,” Ahrbukyl agreed, and the small group of horsemen moved up to a hard trot along the westbound tow road.
They’d been trotting for about three or four minutes when Brahdlai realized someone had been logging off the slope north of the road. They’d seen plenty of signs of that during their advance out of Westmarch, given how bitter the winter had been and how little coal had come west out of Glacierheart last year. But this was more recent than the fuel-cutting they’d seen earlier—the stumps were still green—and he frowned thoughtfully, wondering who’d been cutting up here. The Daivyn River snaked its way through a line of low hills and steep bluffs here, about a hundred and fifty miles west of Ice Lake, and aside from the abandoned inn they’d passed a few miles back, where the high road from Sangyr crossed the river, there didn’t seem to have been very many people in the area even before the Rising.
He was still scratching at that mental itch when he and his troopers trotted up and over a riverside hill and suddenly saw a cavalry horse standing by the side of the road cropping grass. The gelding’s reins had been tied to a sapling, and its rider, in the same uniform Brahdlai wore, sat facing away from them with his back to a tree, his arms crossed against his chest, and his head down, obviously catching up on his sleep on a pleasant summer afternoon.
Brahdlai drew rein, his eyes widening with too much astonishment for immediate outrage.
The insulation of surprise didn’t last long, and the eyes which had widened narrowed, crackling with a dangerous light. This was a serious business, damn it! The Siddarmarkians this close to the Glacierheart border had almost all embraced the heresy. Rather than greeting the Army of God as liberators, they’d fled before it, like the owners of the inn they’d passed, which meant there were precious few—if any—local guides available. That made scouting parties like this one the eyes and cat lizard whiskers of Bishop Militant Cahnyr’s entire army! Waignair damnned well knew better than to be taking a frigging nap at a time like this!
The corporal swung down from the saddle, his expression thunderous. Father Zhames was just going to have to set him a penance for what he was about to say, he thought as he strode angrily towards the trooper who hadn’t even bothered to wake up at the noise of his arriving companions. Well, he’d just see—
Howail Brahdlai paused in midstride as he rounded the trooper’s position and suddenly saw the bloodstain those folded arms had concealed.
An arbalest bolt protruded from the left side of Waignair’s rib cage, an isolated corner of his brain observed. The rest of his mind was still trying to catch up with what that might mean when a dozen more arbalest bolts came sizzling out of the underbrush.
* * *
“Told you it’d work,” Private Zhedryk Lycahn said, watching as the Marines who’d been hiding farther back along the tow road emerged from concealment to make sure none of the cavalry horses got away. He nodded in satisfaction as the last of them eased up just a bit skittishly to one of the Marines and allowed its bridle to be grasped. “Don’t think we should set them all up to be having a tea party, though,” he said then, looking over his shoulder at Corporal Wahlys Hahndail.
“Probably not,” Hahndail agreed dryly.
The corporal had always suspected that Private Lycahn hadn’t always been respectably—or even legally—employed before his enlistment. That hadn’t bothered the corporal much before, but he was beginning to wonder exactly how illegally Lycahn might have earned his living. The private hadn’t simply picked the spot for their ambush; he’d also been the one who dragged their first … customer over and arranged him so artfully to suck in the rest of his patrol. And he’d been remarkably cool about going through the first trooper’s pockets for any potentially useful information.
“I suppose that since we’ve got their horses, we might as well use them to carry the bodies back,” he continued, waving his hand to catch another Marine’s attention. He pointed at the bodies, then waved at the empty saddles, and the Marine nodded back.
“Makes sense to me,” Lycahn replied agreeably. “Can I keep the first one, though?” He showed two missing teeth when he grinned. “Makes fine bait, Wahlys!”
“Yes, Zhedryk,” Hahndail sighed, shaking his head as he watched the other Marines heaving the dead cavalry troopers up across their saddles. “You can keep the first one. Just make damned sure anyone else who stops by to visit with him gets the same treatment this batch did.”
“Oh,” the private said, his voice suddenly much less amused, “you can count on that.”
* * *
Private Styv Walkyr, Zion Division, Army of God, sat on the barge’s abbreviated foredeck, his legs hanging over the side, and watched the trio of dragons leaning against their collars. Walkyr was a farm boy, a man who appreciated fine draft animals when he saw them, and two of these—one of them might go as high as eight tons—were clearly well above average. They ought to be, he thought. The Church was used to getting first quality when it bought, and the dragons had come all the way from the Temple Lands—most of the trip by water themselves—and been grain-fed the entire way. It was a scandalously expensive way to feed something the size of a dragon, but he’d long since come to the conclusion that the Church (and her army) didn’t worry about the kind of mark-pinching a farmer had to keep in mind.
And, he thought grimly, remembering all of the abandoned farms they’d passed on their way through, it makes more sense to feed them grain than hay. Easier to transport and gives them more energy … and no one around here was cutting that much hay last fall, anyway.
He sighed, leaning forward and stretching one leg down until he could just dip a toe into the river water. They’d passed through some wonderful farmland on their way south into Cliff Peak, and the farmer in him hated to see it going to wrack and ruin this way. And, he admitted to himself, he hadn’t found as much satisfaction in chastising the he
The Faithful who’d greeted the Zion Division along the way were no better fed, but he’d seen the fire in their eyes, heard the fierce baying of their welcoming cheers as they beheld Mother Church’s green and gold standards. That filled the army with a sense of pride, of having come to the relief of God’s loyal children, but there’d been an ugly side to that fire, as well. Walkyr was just as glad the Zion Division’s place at the head of the advance had kept it moving, prevented it from getting involved in rounding up heretics for the Inquisition’s attention. Even so, he’d seen some things he wished he hadn’t, heard the shrill edge of hatred in the voices denouncing neighbors for heresy … and the panicky edge in voices frantically protesting their innocence and orthodoxy.
He was still more than a bit bemused by how rapidly Bishop Militant Cahnyr had moved once they crossed the border, especially after such an abrupt change in plans. Aside from the brief overland march from Aivahnstyn towards Sangyr to deal with the fleeing heretical garrison—Zion had missed that one; they’d been detailed to watch the Daivyn east of the city—they’d stuck to the canals and rivers, and the lack of other traffic had let them advance even more rapidly than anyone—even the Church officials overseeing their transport, he suspected—had anticipated. There’d been only three locks between Aivahnstyn and today, and with the army in charge and civilian traffic banned, they’d used both sets of locks, eastbound and west, each time. They’d been averaging close to fifty miles a day for the entire five-day since the rest of the army had returned to Aivahnstyn. At that rate, they should reach Ice Lake and the Glacierheart border in another three or four days.
He watched the drovers slowing the dragons slightly while the barge crew veered more tow cable. They were coming up on another bend in the river as it wound its way through the hills, and the clear channel was farther from the bank than it had been. The current was with them, though, and the helmsman was swinging to the north, obedient to the buoys and channel markings, while the drovers started their dragons up a steeper than usual section of the tow road. The extra cable let them make the ascent at their own best pace, and the long, six-legged dragons whistled cheerfully as they climbed.