Hope Renewed (31 page)

Three long, two short. Still no acknowledgment.
Ibrahim ibn’Habib is a lazy, wine-swilling son of a pig, but he isn’t
that
negligent.
Best send someone over to take a look.

Mustafa blinked out into the darkness where the sentry paced. The bright light killed his night vision, but he could see the outline.

“Moshin?” he said. The other man was Qahtan ash-Shabaai, and much taller. “Moshin, take your dog and check those bastards on Post Three. They must be asleep, or dead.”

“Dead,” Moshin said—but it was not Moshin’s voice, and the word was so thickly accented that he could barely understand it.

Mustafa al-Kerounai reached for his sidearm. He felt the bayonet that punched through his jaw, tongue and palate only as a white flash of cold. Then the point grated through brain and blood vessels within his skull, and the world ended in a blaze of light.

Antin M’lewis withdrew the blade with a jerk. Around him there was a flurry of movement; bayonets and rifle butts struck, and the pick end of an entrenching tool went into the back of a sleeping man’s skull with the sound an axe made striking home in hard oak. Talker stamped on a neck with an unpleasant crunching sound, like a bundle of green branches snapping. Dogs wuffled and snarled, dragging at their picket chain as they smelled death. He ignored them and swiveled telescope and signal lantern around on their mountings. The alignment was marked in chalk on the fixed baseplate of the equipment, and he had the code for
acknowledge 0100 hours all is well
on his pad. He clacked it out carefully and waited for the return signal.

Good. There it was. They
still
didn’t suspect anything. He used one tail of his uniform jacket to shield his hand and picked up the pot of
kave
, pouring a cup into his messtin.

“Throw summat more wood on t’fire,” he said. It might arouse suspicion if the sentinel fire went out during the night. He tossed aside the spiked Colonial helmet. “ ‘N git back ter yer dogs. We’ns’ll see how many more of t’ wogs is overconfident.”

“Fwego!”

BAM. The single massive volley turned the supply convoy’s night encampment into a mass of screaming men and howling dogs, with the oxen’s frantic bawling as accompaniment. Major Peydro Belagez smiled, a cruel closed upturn of the lips. He could see the scene quite well, with the watchfires as background.

BAM. Men rose from their blankets and slapped backward instantly, punched down by the heavy Armory bullets. BAM. Maddened by pain and the smell of blood, an ox-team pulled over the wagon to which they’d been tethered and ran off into the night. The wagon’s tilt fell across a fire and the dry canvas flared up brightly.

“Forward,
compaydres
,” he said.

The two companies of the 1st Rogor Slashers moved forward in line, with a crackle of platoon volleys. Less than thirty Colonial troops had guarded the convoy, and they were infantry—support troops, hardly fighting men at all. The few who lived ran into the night, or knelt and raised their hands in surrender.

As Belagez watched, the platoon commanders called the cease-fire. Two surviving Colonials bolted when they saw the Civil Government troops more clearly; their dark complexions and the shoulder-flashes made it clear they were Borderers, men whose feud with the Colony was old and bitter. A bet was called, and two troopers stepped forward and knelt, adjusting the sights of their rifles. The running Colonials jinked and swerved as they fled; the two Slashers fired carefully. On the third shot one of the Arabs flopped forward, shot through the base of the spine. His face plowed into the dirt, mercifully hiding the exit wound. The other went down and then rose again, hobbling and clutching his thigh as if to squeeze out the pain of his wounds.

“Hingada thes Ihorantes!”
the first rifleman said. Death to the Infidel, the Slashers’ unit motto. “You should do better than that, Huan!”

“Malash. The Spirit appoints our rising and our going down,” the other man grunted. He breathed out and squeezed the trigger.
Crack.
Measurable fractions of a second later, dust spurted from the back of the Arab’s djellaba. He went down and sprawled in the dirt.

Meanwhile the others had been rounded up. They sat, hands behind their heads, staring at their captors with the wide-eyed look of men who wanted very badly to wake from an evil dream and couldn’t. The toppled wagon was burning fiercely now, with a thick flame that stank like overdone fish three days dead to begin with—
advocati
, no mistaking the stench. Sun-dried, they were oily enough to burn like naphtha.

Belagez pointed with his saber. “Get moving—push the other wagons over and tip them into the fire. Break open those crates, that’ll be hardtack.” The Colonial version came in thin sheets about the size of a man’s hand; it would burn too, in a hot fire.

He switched to Arabic, accented but fluent enough. “You, you unbelieving sons of whores. Get to work.”

The teamsters and surviving guards joined his men in heaving more of the supplies onto the growing blaze. Another wagon toppled onto it, and the smell of frying apricots joined the stink, enough to make his stomach knot a little. The blaze would be visible for kilometers, but there was nobody alive to witness it—not unless a survivor or two from the last convoy they’d hit had run very fast. The twenty-wagon parties had been spaced quite evenly at four-kilometer intervals along the road, commendable march-discipline and very convenient for the battalions the
heneralissimo
had landed on the west bank. He looked at his watch; it was bright as day now, and hot enough to make him step back.

0300. This would be their last, they’d have to ride hard to make the rendezvous with the river flotilla by dawn. He certainly didn’t want to miss the end of this campaign. The fire grew swiftly; his men were in a hurry too, and the prisoners worked very hard.

Idly, he wondered if they knew they were building their own funeral pyres. Probably. Still, it was the Spirit’s blessing that men were reluctant to abandon hope while they still breathed.

“
Oh night that was my guide
Oh night more loving than the rising sun
Oh night that joined the lover
To the beloved one,
Transforming each of them into the other.”

Raj opened his eyes, then started awake. Suzette laid aside her
gittar
and smiled at him, handing over a cup of
kave
.

“This yacht has all the conveniences, my love,” she said.

“What—”

“Absolutely nothing has happened except what you said would. Belagez and the other landing parties made rendezvous. The Colonials have no idea what’s going on—we’re moving faster than the news. It’s noon.”

“Ah.”

He took the cup and sipped. He felt less jangled than usual on waking, less of the sense that something catastrophic had happened and had to be turned around immediately.
How long has it been since I slept without worry?
he thought.

Five years, one month seven days. defining “worry” as your subtextual intent rendered the term.

Thank you very much,
he thought. Aloud: “Thank you, my sweet. You must have fended them off like a mother sauroid on a rookery.”

Suzette smiled; not her usual slight enigmatic curve of the lips, but widely as if at some private joke. She shook her head.

“You’ve had five years to train them, Raj; and they’re good men. They wanted you to rest while you could. They can carry out your orders, but we all want—need—you to be at your best when you’re needed. Besides” —she dimpled slightly— “you look so young and vulnerable when you’re asleep.”

Raj laughed softly.
I’m committed,
he realized.
One turn of pitch and toss, winner take all.
It would either work or it wouldn’t, and if it didn’t he wouldn’t be around to worry about it. There was nothing behind them but Ali and his fifty thousand men, barring the road to the border.

“What was that song?” he asked, finishing the coffee. Suzette poured him another and handed him breakfast—toasted hardtack, but she’d found some preserves for it, somehow.

“Very old. My tutor taught it me when I was a girl; Sister Maria, that was.”

“Doesn’t sound religious,” Raj said.

the song is derived from the devotional poetry of st. john of the cross,
Center said.
the musical arrangement was made approximately two thousand four hundred years ago on earth.

“Ahem.” A voice from behind the door of the little stern cabin, out on deck. “I hate to interrupt this touching domestic scene, but . . .”

“Coming, Gerrin,” Raj said ruefully.

He stamped into his boots and fastened on his equipment, then scooped up the map he’d been working on late into the night. The sun outside was blinding, the shadow of the awning above hard-edged and utter black by comparison. Raj blinked out over the sparkling green waters of the Drangosh. For a kilometer either way, out of sight behind bends in the high banks, it was covered with rafts and barges and boats. With men and guns and ammunition . . .
nine thousand men.
Nine thousand, to decide the fate of empires.
Nine thousand men relying on
me
to pull it off.
The thought was less crushing than usual.
If there was any force this size on Earth—

bellevue.

—Bellevue, then, you pedant, this was it.

Raj smiled. Staenbridge and the other battalion commanders grinned back at him. Bartin Foley chuckled.

Raj raised his brows. “Your thoughts, Captain?”

He spread the rolled paper on the deck; the officers and Companions crowded around it, kneeling, staking down the corners with daggers.

“
Mi heneral,
I was just thinking how much less pleasant this morning must be for our esteemed friend Tewfik, when he finds out we’ve left the party and stiffed him with the drink tab.”

A snarling ripple of laughter went around the map. “True enough.” Raj rested one hand on his knee and spread the fingers of the other over the map. It was his drawing, with Center supplying a holographic overlay for him to work with. “Gentlemen, this is our latest intelligence on the enemy’s bridgehead camp and the pontoon bridge over the Drangosh. You’ll note—”

Bompf.
The little mortar chugged, and a grapnel soared up through a puff of smoke.

Why?
Tewfik thought. The fires had raged all through the night, as if the
kaphar
did not care that the city burned around their ears. No fire from the walls and towers, not all through the night and the bombardment. Now they were ignoring his herald under a flag of truce, for the whole hour since dawn.
Since I could finally free myself from my brother’s whining and threats.

The sun was bright in the east, eye-hurting. He shaded his eye with one hand, the other hooked through the back of his sword belt. The breeze blew from the river and fluttered his djellaba; it snapped out the blue-and-silver Starburst of the Federation from the gate towers of Sandoral, as well. The air was heavy with the sickly scent of things that should not burn—one of the constants of war. He had smelled the same in Gurnyca, and in burnt-out cities down on the Zanj coast. Worse, once, when they had shelled a warehouse full of holdouts in Lamoru and the dried copra inside had caught fire.

“Lord Amir, a lucky sniper from the wall—”

“I do not think this is a plot to assassinate me, Hussein,” Tewfik said.
Allah alone knows what it
is,
but not that, I think.

Men climbed up the cable the mortar had thrown. The first of them had a stick with a white rag attached to it thrust through the shoulder harness of his webbing gear; a flag of truce, by the one and only God. Let Whitehall respect it; he had a name for being scrupulous in such things.

The men climbed in through a narrow window high above the bridge that carried the railway over the moat and through the city wall. Tewfik waited with iron patience. A mirror flashed from the parapet.

Tower apparently empty,
he read. He clawed at his forked beard, nostrils flaring instinctively as if to smell out a trap. More silent waiting, until there came the muffled
thud
of an explosion behind walls, and very faintly, a scream.

The officers around him tensed. A half-minute later, the mirror blinked again.

Boobytrap, six casualties. Tower deserted. Walls deserted. No enemy in sight.

A hubbub of oaths and excitement broke out around him; the word spread along the siege lines as the great gates swung open and revealed the dogleg passage beyond. A long slow roar like heavy surf welled up, as men climbed out of the entrenchments and onto the gabions, and others dashed from the tents and the cooking-fires behind.

“The city is ours!” someone shouted. “The
kaphar
have fled!”

Tewfik felt a great hand reach into his chest and squeeze. Azazrael’s wings brushed darkness over his eyes. Almost, he prayed that the dark angel would come for him now; surely this would count as dying for the Faith, in the Holy War. Hussein and one of his mamluks cried out in shock and rushed to support him; he brushed them aside and staggered forward to the edge of the main works.

Fled?
he thought. “Fled? Where? Northeast, to the valleys of the Borderers? To hide in their mud-built forts and make little raids, while we bottle them up with one-tenth of our strength and march to the gates of East Residence with the rest? Whitehall?”

“But . . .” The aide’s face was fluid with shock. “If not north, then where?” He looked at his commander’s face, and fear replaced the shock. “What is it, Lord
Amir
?”

“Kismet,” Tewfik said. “Fate. If not north, then south . . .”

“But, Lord
Amir
, the message stations, the outposts along the road—we have heard nothing!”

“Exactly.” He whirled. “Hussein. Twenty men, each with three led dogs. Kill the dogs with haste if they must, but make such speed as men may. To the commandant of the railhead camp; maintain maximum alertness, enemy in your vicinity.”

Hussein gaped. Tewfik seized him by the shoulder-straps of his harness and shook him. “Fool born of fools, the entire raid across the Drangosh was a diversion—their bridge a disguise for boats and rafts to
float their force south.
”