Great Kings' War (49 page)

On his next reload he heard volley firing close at hand and looked around to find that his bodyguards had scrounged enough abandoned arquebuses, calivers and muskets to give each one of them several weapons apiece. He gave them a thumbs-up signal—an almost universal hand signal on every time-line—and felt pleased when they responded with wolfish grins. It was almost a shame he couldn't take them along with him the next time he had to appear before the Executive Council on Home Time Line!

When he looked down again, the Holy Warriors were at Harmakros' makeshift barricade, in the process of being repulsed by his musketeers and pikemen. Wielded by veterans who knew their strengths and weaknesses, the eighteen-foot pikes were deadly against the poorly equipped Holy Warriors, spearing some right off their horses. He saw one man take a pikehead though the mouth that came out in the other side of his head in an explosion of blood, teeth and gore. Others were speared out of their saddles and sent tumbling down to join the rocks under the horses' hooves.

At last the Holy Warriors retreated back down the slope out of range and dismounted. Someone with a lot of plumes and gilded armor was yelling and waving his arms at them, probably telling them to dismount. Most were beginning to follow his orders, when at almost point-blank range, a round shot took out a dozen or more men just to his right. To give him credit, the near hit didn't appear to faze the commander and he continued with his rant. Another half dozen cannons fired almost in a volley and shifted the entire front line of the Holy Warriors, scything down horses and men with equal impartiality.

The commander got back on his horse and the dismounted Holy Warriors advanced on foot over their own casualties and up the slope at a dead run. Harmakros' musketeers shot them down by the dozens, but that wasn't enough; hundreds of them reached the barricade and suddenly it was every man for himself. Verkan's riflemen continued to help thin their ranks, but more kept coming from behind. To make a difference here, Verkan's riflemen would have needed breech-loaders or Gatling guns!

The Mobile Force pikemen at the barricade dropped their pikes in favor of swords, mallets and pistols, while the musketeers swung their muskets like clubs. Over a third of his dragoons and reinforcements were dead or wounded before Harmakros began a slow retreat to the top of the ridge. Of the three thousand Holy Warriors, at least half their number littered the ground or had run away. Still, a formidable number kept charging.

Verkan fired five shots and hit four men before the first wave of dismounted Holy Warriors reached his boulder. He fired a sixth shot with his hide-away pistol, then used his rifle like a club, letting his unarmed-combat training take over his muscles and reflexes. He might look a little strange if anyone was watching carefully, but he'd not lay any bets on that and he did intend to stay alive.

The rifle wasn't quite balanced like the quarterstaff Verkan knew well, but the butt end's extra weight made up for it. Designed especially for Verkan, his rifle—while looking like a perfectly ordinary flintlock—was almost indestructible. With ridiculous ease he brained the first man who ran at him, poked a second in the groin, smashed a short sword or long knife out of the hand of the third and knocked down a fourth with a butt-blow to his armored chest and finished him with another to the forehead under the rim of his morion helmet.

He turned to see Xykos decapitate a heavily bearded Holy Warrior with his two-handed sword. The Veterans' banner-bearer had lost one arm to an evil-looking polearm and was in the process of losing the other, when Verkan shot his attacker dead with his belt pistol.

Someone was shouting in his ear and tugging at his arm. It was Dalon Saln, pulling him back from the edge of the slope. Xykos and one of the halberdiers were coming with him, but the third Veteran was dead and the banner-bearer was dying, one arm gone, the other crippled, but his teeth locked on the banner pole.

They cleared the Great Battery's field of fire just in time, as case shot from something heavier than a sixteen-pounder sprayed the slope. Two score of dismounted Holy Warriors and a few mounted ones behind them went down, and twice as many turned and ran; apparently even religious zeal had its limits.

Verkan and his bodyguards ran back another fifty yards, then stopped to make sure the rest of the Mounted Rifles were clear. They were. The number of Holy Warriors, both mounted and on foot, climbing the slope discouraged him from lingering to count the Rifles' casualties, particularly since the Holy Warriors were now being pushed ahead of the first ranks of the Royal Square. A company of billmen rose out of a draw, and a round shot smashed the first six of them into a bloody, screaming tangle.

Verkan began to reload his rifle on the move, and discovered the lock was hopelessly jammed with blood and gore. He made a mental note to suggest caltrops to Kalvan if he could find a non-contaminating way of doing so. Strewn over the slopes of the ridge, those multipointed hoof destroyers would have made Kalvan's Great Battery a lot more cavalry-proof.

The ground between Verkan and the Great Battery offered little cover or concealment, and he had the nasty feeling that the career of the Mounted Rifles was about to end here. A four-pounder had already been overrun, and an old-style eight-pounder was being defended by its crew against mounted Holy Warriors. What was left of Harmakros' three regiments of dragoons was manhandling two eight-pounders and the sixteen-pounder called
Galzar's Teeth
into a position where they could hit the Styphoni at point-blank range.

Alkides himself was standing on the breech of
Galzar's Teeth
in a fraction of his shirt and a smaller fraction of his trousers, defaming the ancestry and habits of his gunners for not moving faster. Behind the big gun rode Harmakros, and behind him was a line of men carrying objects the size and shape of round shot, but not quite...

Verkan suddenly realized he was about to see the first test of explosive shells in Kalvan's Time-Line. While he appreciated the honor, he hoped the fusing was reasonably accurate or the shells might burst right over the Mounted Rifles.

"Down!" he shouted, gesturing frantically. The Riflemen obeyed, searching for any fold in the ground large enough to give at least the illusion of safety. The two eight-pounders bellowed together, hammering the advancing Holy Warriors with grape shot. The line stopped and a good number of them dropped to the ground as well. The Riflemen opened fire, to encourage this notion.

With his rifle useless and the action just out of pistol range, Verkan was free to watch the entire process of loading the first shell, including the lighting of the fuse, the various rites of propitiation and Alkides firing
Galzar's Teeth
. Verkan kept his head up, following the shell all the way to where it struck the ground, bounced twice, rolled under the legs of a Holy Warrior's horse—and exploded!

It took only four shells to convince the Holy Warriors that they were facing something unusual. From "unusual" to "Demonic" was a short mental step for most of them. Contemplating the undignified speed of the Holy Warrior's retreat, Verkan had to admit that superstition could have its uses.

Verkan would have felt better if
Galzar's Teeth
hadn't fired a fifth shell, which burst over the Mounted Riflemen. When the smoke cleared away, he saw that the one-eyed captain would never argue with him again, and the captain wasn't the only casualty.

Then the massed billmen of the Royal Square topped the rise, still in their columns of march and with a self-confident swagger that said bluntly, "Clear the way, you amateurs. The professional soldiers have arrived."

"Move out!" Verkan ordered. There weren't enough guns the size of
Galzar's Teeth
to take a bite out of these men. He turned to Xykos and added, "When we reach Captain-General Alkides, you make sure he goes with us. I don't give a damn what he says, general or no general!"

The grin splitting Xykos' face told Verkan that Alkides would have an easier time avoiding the marksmen of the Royal Square than he would escaping his giant bodyguard.

Sirna stepped out the door of the foundry warehouse, mopped the sweat off her forehead, and looked up at the roof where Captain Ranthar was still wearing a groove in the wood as he paced back and forth, looking off to the southwest. Sirna had been up there herself earlier in the day, but the steady drumming of gunfire and the vast cloud of gray smoke off toward Phyrax didn't tell her anything.

She doubted they told Ranthar very much either, and suspected that he was up on the roof because it was a way of not having to talk with the rest of the University Team. She was sure he'd sensed the hostility of some of them, and she also suspected that he felt guilty at not being in battle with his comrades—and whom did he see as his comrades, his Chief Verkan Vall or the Mounted Rifles?

Even their military advisor Professor Aranth Saln had admitted that it was hard to tell much from a lot of smoke and intermittent rumbling noises, without being able to see any troop movements. "At least there haven't been any wounded or fugitives coming back," he'd added. "That means
something
. Either Kalvan's army has gone into the bag without any survivors"—at which point Sirna felt the blood leave her head—"or else the Hostigi are still holding on and in good order. I'd say it's more likely the second. From what we know about Kalvan and his army, it would take more than the Holy Host to mop them up that fast."

That was typical of Aranth Saln despite his formidable appearance—polite to everybody, intelligent whenever he spoke, but committing himself only on his own specialty of Pre-industrial Military Science. It was hard to trust him completely but harder still to really dislike him, even if he was a retired Army Colonel. He certainly didn't fit Sirna's image of a military professional.

"Hey!" Ranthar shouted, and ran toward the stairs from the roof. Sirna looked around and saw three bedraggled horsemen cantering toward the foundry gate. Two rode haltingly, as though they'd never been on horseback before. All wore the colors blue and gold, which she remembered were the colors of the Princedom of Ulthor, and the red sashes of Hos-Hostigos. She reached the gate at the same time as the lead horseman, a tall man with a young-looking bearded face.

"Run for your life, mistress! The Styphoni have broken through the center and turned the Great Battery on our own army. King Kalvan is missing—all is lost!"

"Is the whole army running?" a voice from behind Sirna asked, full of contempt and authority.

The young horseman looked as if he'd been slapped, then lunged for his sword.

Captain Ranthar had his pistol drawn and stepped forward. "I asked you a question."

The young man dropped his hand from his sword hilt and said, "I don't know, sir...I guess we didn't stay around to see. We saw some comrades get hit by case shot and decided we didn't want anything to do with it."

One of the horsemen cried, "I got a wife and son back in Ulthor! What do I care about Styphon's House or Hostigos?"

"That will be enough," Ranthar said.

By now the rest of the University Study Team and half the foundry workers had gathered around the gate. "Let the man speak!" Varnath Lala cried. "If the Army of Hostigos is losing, then we'd better get marching."

There was chorus of agreement from the rest of the Study Team faculty members.

The horseman looked encouraged and was about to speak, when everyone heard the sound of Ranthar's pistol being cocked. "You and I"—he paused and used his barrel to point to the horseman's two companions—"and these two—gentlemen—are going to go back and take another look to see what's really happening. And pick up any other stragglers we happen to find."

"You're here to take care of
us
, Ranthar, and don't you forget it!" Lala screeched.

"He can take care of himself," Lathor Karv said, "but I'm for getting out of here." He set off for the stables in a wide-loping gait followed by two-thirds of the Study Team, including Varnath Lala, who only paused long enough to give Captain Ranthar a withering glare.

Ranthar turned to Talgan Dreth, who looked as if he would have much preferred to be with the party heading for the stables. "Director Talgan, if you decide it's necessary, go ahead and prepare for Emergency Evacuation Procedure, Code Yellow. I'm going to reconnoiter the battlefield and find out first hand what is happening and whether or not we need to evacuate." He pointed to one of the undercover Paratime Policemen who acted as Foundry guards. "I'll send someone back if things look bad. I suggest you leave a few volunteers to watch over the foundry until you hear from me, or until it becomes apparent that King Kalvan's army has really been routed."

Talgan was white as a Styphon's House lower priest's robe. He mumbled a response and walked as quickly as his tattered dignity would allow back to the foundry farmhouse they used as quarters.

Rather to her surprise, Sirna found herself volunteering to stay. So did Eldra, Aranth Saln and some of the others who weren't on their way to the stables. Ranthar put Aranth in charge of Foundry security and rode off with the three reluctant Ulthori horsemen and one of the lower ranking Paracops.

The last of the mercenary cavalry held out for nearly an hour, far longer than Kalvan had expected. Most of that resistance could be credited to the big mercenary captain whom Kalvan recognized as the same captain who'd escaped the envelopment at Ryklos Farm. How he had ridden from the Harphaxi disaster at Chothros to Phyrax had to be a story that might one day be sung by troubadours—if the man survived the day's battle.

The big captain had escaped, but the Hostigi still wound up with more than three thousand prisoners, all of whom had to be guarded and removed from the battlefield as quickly as possible. Kalvan assigned a regiment to escort them back to Hostigos Town where they could best be split up and kept out of mischief.

All this, only to learn that Harmakros and the center had been pushed back, and worst of all, the Great Battery lost! If Chartiphon had already committed the reserve and the center folded, well, the next battle might be at the gates of Tarr-Hostigos.