By Heresies Distressed (30 page)

“As a matter of fact, I would,” Windshare told him with a grin, then glanced at Doyal. “Would you care to come along with us, Charlz?”

Windshare's tone was more than half-teasing, given Doyal's well-known aversion to any unnecessary physical activity. To his surprise, the older man promptly nodded.

“As a matter of fact, I'd like to check my impressions from the map against the actual terrain. There are a couple of places that look pretty close to ideal for artillery deployment. I'd prefer to make sure they really are good positions before I order my people into them, though.”

“Excellent!” Gahrvai said approvingly. “Charlz, show Alyk the spots you particularly want to see. I've got to go draft a couple of dispatches for Father and the Prince before we go wandering off. Alyk, once you and Charlz have discussed where we need to go and what we need to see, make sure we really do have an adequate escort. I'm not feeling especially vain this afternoon, but it occurs to me that if the army loses its senior field commander, his cavalry commander, and the closest thing we have to a genuine expert on field artillery, it wouldn't be the very best possible beginning to our campaign, would it?”

“If we let
that
happen,” Doyal said with a smile, “the only good thing I could see about it would be that all three of us would be safely dead, which would at least spare us from your father's analysis of all the truly stupid things we must have done to bring it about.”

“And what exactly in my record to date convinces you that I'm not fully capable of doing truly stupid things if I put my mind to it?” Gahrvai inquired.

“I wish we were up against the Temple Guard,” Cayleb Ahrmahk grumbled as he stood looking down at a map of Corisande.

“Dare I ask
why
you'd prefer that?” Merlin inquired.

“Because Allayn Maigwair is an idiot, and Koryn Gahrvai isn't,” Cayleb replied succinctly, in something very like a growl.

“No, he isn't,” Merlin agreed, stepping closer to the map table.

He and Cayleb were alone, for the moment, in the library of the Baron of Dairwyn's townhouse. It was a palatial temporary home for Cayleb's headquarters, although their reluctant host had managed to take at least some of his most valuable knickknacks with him. Cayleb didn't really begrudge Sir Farahk his personal treasures, however. After all, the emperor had the baron's entire city, in exchange.

Baron Dairwyn had been unable to deny any of the points Cayleb had made in his final note to him. And, to give him his due, his concern over what might happen to the citizens of his barony's capital if it had come down to fighting in the streets had played a major role in his decision to surrender Dairos to Cayleb. He, himself, however, hadn't been included in the package. He'd delegated authority to the city's mayor to treat with Cayleb, while he and his personal armsmen had hastily mounted and galloped off towards the Dark Hill Mountains, evading Clareyk and Haimyn's Marines en route.

Most of Cayleb's men, and at least some of his officers, had taunted Dairwyn in absentia for his “cowardice.” Cayleb didn't agree. Dairos might have fallen, but the baron was responsible for defending the
rest
of his barony. Besides, he'd clearly recognized how valuable his firsthand report would be to Prince Hektor. Or, at least, to Sir Koryn Gahrvai. At this particular moment, the baron had joined Gahrvai, and his armsmen and the subjects of his barony who'd been pressed into service as militia were busy serving as Gahrvai's local guides. Which, Cayleb admitted, was probably the most useful thing they could possibly have been doing for the other side.

Over the last six days, the majority of Cayleb's Marines had been landed. Dairos couldn't possibly have absorbed fifty thousand men, even if the citizenry had been happy to see them. Aside from a strictly limited garrison, whose primary responsibility was keeping the peace, the Charisian troops had poured through the city like water through a net and settled into vast, neat encampments outside the city limits. So far, they'd behaved themselves extraordinarily well, too. Part of that was undoubtedly due to the fact that they hadn't yet had to do any real fighting, which meant they had no casualties to “avenge” upon the local citizenry. Another part of it was the eagle eye the chaplains were keeping on them, and their officers' stern injunctions about the importance of not providing the Group of Four's propaganda mills with the free gift of any atrocity fodder.

And, of course, there were the bloodthirsty field regulations Emperor Cayleb, Admiral Lock Island, and General Chermyn had composed. Every man in the invasion army had heard those regulations read out in formation at least once per five-day. And none of them doubted for a moment that Cayleb and his commanders would enforce every stringent penalty upon any violators.

The invasion's supplies, unlike its troops, were still coming ashore in a steady stream. Dairos had many things to recommend it, including some fairly spectacular beaches, if anyone had had time to consider going for a dip, but no one would ever confuse its waterfront with Tellesberg's. Wharf space was limited, its warehouses were far smaller and sparser, and aside from one or two main thoroughfares, the city's streets were much narrower and more constricted. All of that conspired to turn Dairos into a logistical bottleneck.

Cayleb and his planners had realized that was going to happen, and they'd allowed for it in their original timetable. His engineers were busy building new wharves and extending existing ones, and some public buildings and houses were being demolished to widen roads and improve traffic conditions. The astonishment of the homeowners when Cayleb insisted on actually
paying
them for their houses had been palpable, but that hadn't stopped them from accepting the compensation with alacrity. Or from complaining loudly to their neighbors about how coin-pinching the payments had been.

In the meantime, the invasion force's horses and draft dragons required enough time to regain their land legs before moving into the field, anyway, so Cayleb and his advisers had always planned on spending at least the first couple of five-days consolidating their hold on Dairos while their animals recovered and their supplies came ashore. They hadn't quite made sufficient allowance for the limited warehouse space in the city itself, and more of their supplies than anyone liked were being stacked up under canvas, instead of a solid roof, which wasn't exactly a pleasant thought with the storm season coming on. But at least they'd been able to send almost half their troopships back to Port Royal under escort by a third of the Chisholmian galleys. That had relieved much of the port's congestion, and the shore patrol Chermyn had organized and rigorously trained as military police had kept things moving smoothly and relatively peacefully as their forces ashore built up.

On the other side of the coin, Gahrvai had already concentrated the majority of his eighty thousand–man force in the vicinity of Talbor Pass before coming farther east with his own advance guard. Another twenty-five thousand men were on their way to join him, and should be arriving within the next five-day or so. When they did, he would outnumber Cayleb's entire invasion army by better than two-to-one, and Hektor had at least another thirty thousand men within a hundred miles or so of Gahrvai's main position. Those numbers didn't make for pleasant contemplation.

“I don't like how carefully Gahrvai is thinking these things through,” Cayleb said more seriously, clasping his hands behind him and rocking gently up and down on the balls of his feet. “I'd be ever so much happier if someone like Windshare were in command over there!”

“It
would
be nice,” Merlin agreed almost wistfully.

In fact, he had an even better feel for Sir Koryn Gahrvai's irritating competence than the emperor did, since it was Merlin's SNARCs which had been keeping an eye on Hektor's field commander for the past several months. He'd been focusing even more closely on that for the last few five-days, although his ability to monitor all of the sensors he had deployed here in Corisande (and elsewhere), even with Owl's assistance, was being stretched to (and beyond) its limits. The fact that his hacked PICA's software had disabled his high-speed data interface was becoming an increasingly significant handicap. He couldn't really complain too much, given the fact that if Dr. Elias Proctor
hadn't
hacked the software, it would have automatically shut Merlin down and dumped his entire memory after ten days of autonomous operation, but that didn't prevent it from causing significant problems. He had to review the data at little more than “human speed,” and even the fact that he could go so long without “sleep” couldn't put enough hours into even one of Safehold's lengthy days to examine all of the reports and recordings he ought to be examining.

“You're sure he's going to come across that river and hit Clareyk and Haimyn?” Cayleb asked.

“As sure as I can be, before he actually does it. He's already started moving the bulk of his planned striking force across it, after all.”

“Damn.” Cayleb said the word remarkably mildly, given his expression, and his eyes flashed. “Why the hell couldn't he have just sat on the defensive and concentrated on digging in?”

“Because he
is
competent.”

“What I'd like to do is pull Clareyk and Haimyn back,” Cayleb said. “I know they've spent months training for exactly this, but they've got barely four thousand men between them, and odds of three- or four-to-one don't strike me as the best ratio for their first serious battle.”

“And how would you justify pulling them back?” Merlin asked. Cayleb turned his head to shoot him a sharp glance, and the man who'd once been Nimue Alban shrugged. “It's one thing when you're there yourself, Cayleb. When you can use your ‘seaman's instinct' to explain why you're ‘playing a hunch' with the fleet. But all of Chermyn's reconnaissance reports continue to indicate that there are only a few thousand of Hektor's troops on this side of the Dark Hills. You and I know those reports are wrong—or, at least, not complete. But we can't tell anyone that without their wondering just how it is that we do know. And Clareyk and Haimyn are doing precisely what all of your plans and discussions called for them to do until we encounter Hektor's troops in strength.”

“I could still order them to stand fast until we get more troops up with them,” Cayleb argued.

“Yes, you could. But look at the terrain where they are right now. It's all second-growth forest, wire vine, brambles, and woodlots. Our people's main advantage is going to be the ranges at which they can engage, and that kind of ground cuts visibility to as little as ten or fifteen yards—even less than that, in places.”

Merlin considered mentioning an Old Earth general named Grant and a place called The Wilderness, but decided against introducing the distraction.

“At that range, a smoothbore's just as effective as a rifle,” he continued, “and a third of the musketeers on the other side have been equipped with flintlocks of their own. Those musketeers are going to be able to fire almost as rapidly as ours can, and given the absolute numbers on each side, those proportions mean Gahrvai's got as many flintlock muskets as we do, with twice that many matchlocks to support them. If we want to maximize our advantages, give our people the best chance for victory, then we need more open terrain. Which, as it happens, is exactly what Gahrvai is looking for, as well. Without knowing all our musketeers are actually
riflemen
, he's deliberately seeking a battlefield which will give him clear enough lines of fire for him to use his advantage in artillery most effectively.”

“Which will just happen to do the same thing for our rifles,” Cayleb agreed. “I know that. It's just the numbers on each side, Merlin. If I could at least warn them, tell them what's coming, how many men Gahrvai has on the other side of the hill . . .”

“Cayleb,” Merlin said quietly, his sapphire eyes soft with sympathy, “once upon a time, back on Old Earth, there was a statesman named Winston Churchill. He was the leader of a nation very much like yours, in a lot of ways, actually. An island nation, which had relied upon its own navy and naval tradition to protect its freedom for hundreds of years. But when Churchill became prime minister, that nation—Great Britain—was fighting for its life against something that was just as evil as, and even more vicious than, the Church of God Awaiting is today here on Safehold.”

The emperor had stopped rocking up and down. He stood very still now, listening intently as the voice of the PICA named Merlin gave life once more to a past so dusty no living man on Safehold had ever even heard of it.

“Great Britain was at least as alone as Charis ever was, but, like you, the British had certain advantages. One was that they were intercepting their enemy's communications. Those messages were being transmitted in a very advanced and complicated code, one which their enemies—the Nazis—believed was unbreakable. But the British
had
broken the code. As a result, they knew a great deal about what the Nazis were going to do before it ever happened. And one of the things they discovered was that one of their cities, the city of Coventry, was going to be heavily attacked by bombers.”

“ ‘Bombers'?” Cayleb repeated, tasting the peculiar word on his tongue.

“Machines that flew through the air at a couple of hundred miles an hour loaded with bombs, like very big, very powerful versions of the ‘shells' Seamount is experimenting with. They were dropped from high up in the air, and they weren't very accurate at the time I'm talking about. The Nazis couldn't hope to hit specific targets or military installations, but they were going to send over hundreds of bombers. What they planned was a deliberate attack on a civilian target—it was called ‘terror bombing'—and all of the prewar projections had indicated that an attack like the one they were planning would kill thousands and thousands of people, most of them civilians.”