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"Hell of a way to come back from a raid," she grumbled to herself. "You do need to be changed, little'un."
Then she looked at the river as the crew began to pull away into the central current, bright-lit through the rain by the wavery blurs of huge fires on both banks. The barge-trains were ahead of her, with the raiding force's boats around them like sculling centipedes. Safer to have burned the barges in place, she thought. But better for morale to take them; the troops were mostly from cultures that thought "victory" and "plunder" were the same thing. It wouldn't hurt the whole expedition's logistics if there was useful stuff in them, too.
Alston put the handset to her face with her free hand: "Commander Ortiz."
"Here, ma'am. No trouble so far."
"None on this end either," Alston said. A warbling went through the sky, and a muffled whuddump raised a plume of shocked white water a hundred yards behind. Spray fell across her, and the baby began to cry again, a thin reedy wailing.
"Ah… ma'am?" Ortiz said, bewilderment in his tone at the sound. Not at all the sort of cry you expected with a rear guard on a fire-lashed shore.
"Don't ask, Commander." She cleared her throat. "They're lobbing mortar shells into the river, but they're firing blind. I doubt they'll get any observers forward before we're out of range."
"Now all we have to do is run the guns of the fort, ma'am," Ortiz said, cheerfully deadpan.
Ke
Something was going wrong out here on the northern flank of the allied host. The firing was still heavy, but it was dying down, which meant that the Achaeans were pushing through the narrow defile and around the edge of his command.
The snow, however, wasn't dying down, and he strained his eyes through it and cursed, and cursed the falling light.
But I shouldn't, he thought. We've held them most of the day. If we can hold them until night, they'll feel it more, out in the open.
The horse beneath him stumbled again, on a rock that turned beneath its hoof under the concealing white. He reined in and swung out of the saddle. The thunder ahead was louder than that to the south now; fewer ca
"O'Rourke!" he shouted.
"Sir?"
"Officers on foot, except for couriers," he said. "Chargers to the gun carriages as spares. And the troops to the double-quick."
"Sir," the other man said, looking back at the column.
It was only thirty feet away, but still a dark indistinct mass through snow and shadow, stumbling forward into the wind with helmets bent to take the bite. The thudding clatter of boots and hooves on stone and wet earth came muffled, as if they watched an army of ghosts condemned to march forever.
"Sir," O'Rourke went on. "They're tired. We pulled them right out of the line for this. Another mile and at the double, and they won't have much left."
Robbing Peter to pay Paul and calling it a reserve, Ken agreed, behind the mask of his face.
"If we don't get there in time, there won't be anything-at all left," he said. "That's the choke point. Anywhere else and they can flank us and get by."
"Sir," O'Rourke said, gri
Hollard walked over to the head of the column; it wound back into the rocky hills, broken here and there by the higher shape of a gun team pulling ca
"All right," he roared, and the front ten rows looked up. Hollard drew his sword; they were good for dramatic gestures, at least. "Up ahead, the Mita
He turned with the standard-bearer beside him and strode forward. Behind him the whole force stumbled into a trot.
Whole force, he thought. Four hundred rifles and half a dozen heavy weapons. About all we've got left that isn't hanging on by its teeth.
He recognized most of the sounds ahead; the crackle of rifles, the sound of the multibarrel quick-firers the Achaeans used because Walker couldn't duplicate Gatlings yet, and the bark of ca
"Deploy into line," he said. "Heavy weapons forward as best they can-and be goddamned careful, I don't want any friendly-fire accidents here."
"Sir!"
O'Rourke gave orders; the thick column of marching Islanders dissolved, Marines ru
He drew a deep breath of air cold and damp and full of the scent of wet wool and unwashed soldier and gun oil and powder. Light flickered through the snow ahead… muzzle flashes.
"Charge!" he shouted, and ran forward.
Otto Verger came to full alertness when the sounds began to the northward, upriver. Very faint at first, a crackling of small arms. Then several huge soft thuds, like very large doors slamming shut. He turned his head, raised it slightly, strained his eyes to see through the murky dimness.
Was that a hint of fire, the red war-hawks of the mirutha beating their wings on a Tartessian foeman's thatch? He could hear a whispered chant from his left; it raised his hackles a little, for Rueteklo was invoking Moon Woman-or Her sister of the Barrow, who he suspected was the same as the Blood Hag of Battles. You didn't want to attract Her attention, and the Moon goddess was an unchancy thing… though to be sure, she'd be on his side this time, and wasn't that an odd happenstance? The noise from the north grew louder, and there was definitely a hint of light there…
"Oh, you sorry bastards are fucked the now," he chuckled again. "The Midnight Mare will leave hoofprints on your grave-mounds-not that you'll get graves, you'll rot unresting, your ghosts wailing in the wind…"
"Why don't I report you for using something else but English on duty?" Rueteklo said, equally soft, a chuckle in her voice as well.
"Oh, shut up and get ready," Verger said, switching to that language with a trace of resentment. She spoke it with less accent than he, for all his studying until he thought his head would crack.
"I wasn't talking, I was cursing the foe," he went on. It was a breach of regulations to talk anything but the Islander tongue when you were working-a fine of four days' pay and four days' KP. Most of the time he even thought in English, but it just wasn't as satisfying for some things, like threatening or cursing. "I'll want, mmmm, one more incendiary after the first. Then HE and frag."
"You ask, I deliver."
Gathering tension, silence save for an occasional buzz of insects-thank the Gods it wasn't summer, or they'd be eaten alive. He could feel the spirits of his fathers and their fathers gathering around him, to witness his honor or his shame; his oath-brothers were here, too, and they would see.