Warlord (65 page)

Kaltin grinned. "Mebbe we'uns kin do summat fer ye, loik, ser," he drawled in broad County dialect

They all slapped fists together, and Raj watched them walk out to their commands with envy.
Damn, but I'd like to have just one job of manageable size,
he thought as he watched.

"Mount!"

The troops swung into the saddle; forward file-closers in each company carried lighted torches of bundled oilwood sticks, so that the formations could keep position in a fast night march.

Gerrin Staenbridge stood in the stirrups and pitched his voice to carry:

"Right, lads, it's time to earn our pay and show the enemy what County men are made of. These barbs make a lot of noise and look a sight, but they'll go back faster than they come forward after they meet us. Just remember to mind the orders and aim low." His right fist shot skyward and then chopped down to the front. "To Hell or plunder, dog-brothers—walk-march,
trot.
"

Suzette came up behind Raj, sliding her hand through the crook of his elbow as they watched the streaming fires pour down to the gate and turn north on the coast road; the moons were both down, and there was only the rippling frosted light of the stars to show them against the white dirt of the track. Her voice was a murmur at his shoulder.

"You should sleep, my darling," she said. "A little while, at least."

He put an arm around her waist. "Can't," he sighed. "Too wired—hell, too much kave."

"Come." She pulled him gently toward the rear of the tent. "I can make you sleep. Come with me, my love."

"Raj. Raj, wake up."

"
Huh.
" Raj sat upright with a jolt, out of dreams of fear and flight. It was still hard dark; Suzette was there in her wrap, touching his shoulder. He slid the pistol back under the pillow and swung his feet to the floor, scrubbing his face with his hands, then splashing water over it from the basin and running fingers through his hair. Right now his brain felt muzzy, worse than if he had not slept at all, but he would be better for the rest in a little while.

"It's da Cruz," Suzette said quietly.

Swift and skillful, one of the servants was laying out fresh kit: trousers, boots, underclothes, belt, ammunition pouches, slide rule, mapcase, binoculars. And another mug of kave with a cup of goat's milk.
Spirit,
he thought, swigging them down in alternate gulps.
If the Azanians ever cut off our supply of kave beans, the Army high command is doomed.
 

"He's wounded," she went on. "Not seriously. It was the Skinners, not the enemy."

Scramento,
he thought, grunting. "There goes the western flank." And a three-battalion force of the Admiral's death-sworn household guards getting ready to fall on him out of nowhere, too.

"Don't worry," he said, laying a hand on her cheek for an instant. "Just the usual desperate emergency."

Da Cruz was swearing as Raj dipped a shoulder through the doorflap into the outer room of the tent, fastening the collar of his tunic and knotting the red-and-black checked bandanna. The noncom was on a stool, bare to the waist while a Renunciate medico in jumpsuit and robe worked on a long superficial cut on his forearm. The coal-oil lamp showed the stocky torso and knotted arms laced with scar tissue; knife, sword, bullet, and shrapnel had all left their marks, and it looked as if someone had once tried to write their name on the Master Sergeant's stomach with a hot iron, getting as far as the second letter before trailing off.

Now he had a new wound, a long shallow slash along the outside of the arm from wrist to elbow. The nun swabbed it out with iodine, washed the arm with blessed water, and began building a substantial bandage with linen and gauze.

"Spirit's holy static, careful with that, Sister!" he said.

"Watch your language," she snapped back. "No hope of getting you to rest it?" She clicked her tongue. "Boys. Well, try and keep it clean."

"What happened, Top?" Raj said.

Some of it was obvious from da Cruz's uniform tunic, thrown on the floor. The left arm was blood-soaked and slit—it had taken a
very
sharp blade to do that—and one of the tails had been cut off as an improvised bandage. A Skinner
patcha
knife, Raj judged, the arm-long type they kept as general-purpose chopping tool. It had been originally designed to cut firewood and hack through the massive bones of grazing sauroids; but the Skinners were nothing if not versatile.

"It's them Skinners, Messer Raj," da Cruz said. He took the water-jug a servant offered and drank, Adam's apple bobbing. Wounds made a man thirsty, and he looked to have lost some blood. "Theyun er five klicks outa position, an' boozin' summat fierce in a Squadron
kasgrane.
Tole 'em to git movin'—git this fer my pains, ser. Lucky to 'scape wit' me life."

"Joy," Raj said.

Think. This is your job, think.
The Squadron battle plan was a monstrosity, even before it was compromised; it depended on things going right and precise coordination between what were little better than armed mobs. The two thousand out west were the only enemy force that was really mobile, and the only one that was all full-time professional fighters—not really soldiers, but they would have
some
idea of what they were doing.

"The Skinners won't listen to anyone else, and they're the only force in reach," he said, mostly to himself. "The Forty Thieves have the line of march pegged"—that bunch of guardhouse rejects and throat-cutters really
could
do reconnaissance now that M'lewis had put the fear of the Spirit into them—"but only the Skinners can intercept them."

Unless he committed his only reserve battalion of regular cavalry . . . but the roll call of battles won by the last man to commit his reserves stretched back beyond recorded history.
Here's where I start cursing sending Kaltin and Gerrin both,
he thought. Then:
It was the right decision. We can't have them catching us like a
pinyata
between two sticks.
 

"Suzette?" he called. She came through the curtain in her riding costume, holding the Colonial repeater carbine and thumbing a last round into the tube magazine through the gate above the lever. "Sorry, darling—you're staying behind this time. Officer of the guard!"

"Get me Colonel Menyez." Cavalry snobbery be damned; Menyez would have to hold the fort, and send the two columns south. Poplanich would be his second . . . 
and if I'm ever in a position to do it, we're going to have a regular table of ranks and establish permanent brigades,
he decided. Damn
the political risks.
We need formations that are used to working together.
 

Four men are just right for this, Raj thought.

Not a squadron of Poplanich's to clank and clatter in the night, though they were shaping to be good battlefield soldiers. Just himself and da Cruz and two of the Scouts, for quiet work in the dark. One was a cousin of M'lewis's, a little rat-faced man everyone called Cut-Nose, because most of his had been removed with something sharp; the other was a silent hulking brute called Talker from the northeast border of Descott, on the mountainous fringe of Asuaria County. The battalion rolls listed their former occupations as vakaro and sauroid hunter; offhand, he judged Cut-Nose for a sheep-stealer. Talker had the eyes of someone who just liked to kill—people by preference, though sauroids would do at a pinch. If either had come calling back home he'd have had the vakaros whip them off, or hang them for the County's peace. Both rode with an easy slouching seat, reins knotted on their pommels and eyes never still; their rifles they cradled in their arms, and both weapons had rawhide sleeves shrunk onto the forestocks.

And Spirit, but it's good to be doing something myself for a change, he thought.

It was very quiet in the hour before dawn, somehow blacker than deep night. Dew beaded the dogs' coats to the breast as they pushed through a rustling cornfield, chill on the soaked cloth of trouser-legs. Their way led through the last of the coastal plain, foothills heavy with fruit-orchards where springs welled up at the foot of the escarpment. Water rippled in stone-lined ditches beside the road.

Da Cruz reined in beside the general. "'Tis thissaway, ser," he said quietly, nodding at a rutted cart-track that led up the face of the limestone ridge that loomed at a sixty-degree angle on their west.

"This way's quicker."

The holographic map hovered over his vision at every turning, and beneath it he picked out the trail better than his eyesight could have done; somehow Center looked through the darkness even though It had only his vision to use. He remembered the visions It had shown him, of the floating
satellites
that had been Its eyes before the Fall.
They
could have looked through absolute darkness or deepest cloud. . . . Not for the first time, he wondered how an angel came to be condemned to the cislunary sphere of Fallen corruption.

The hillsides ran upward in steep scree-clad illex and whipthorn, then leveled off into a plateau; once a herd of wild grazing sauroids fled in honking, hissing confusion and a little later a wild boar held the way against them for an instant.

One of the troopers hissed a little through his teeth at the commander's certainty, and Raj smiled silently to himself. "That way," he said, cutting his palm over the fields.

There are advantages to having a legend, he thought.

"Cowards!"

Raj let his voice roar out over the patio, as the dogs picked their way in among the broken glass and rubble of the Squadron manor's courtyard. Horace stepped delicately over a Skinner facedown in a pool of vomit, and up the steps, not even looking aside when two Skinner hounds growled and raised their hackles at him. A human leg was hanging by a cord around its ankle from the wrought-iron balcony above the main entrance; judging from the bits and pieces scattered around, they'd hung whoever it was off alive and then used him for target practice until the body fell apart.

"You cowards hide like old women!" Raj shouted again. "Your ancestors die again with shame to see you run from battle!"

Roars and grunts answered him as troll-figures stirred amid the doors and shrubberies. A squat shape appeared on the balcony and jumped down, long gun over one shoulder.

"Eh, sojer-man! Neck-stretcher!" The banter was less friendly than usual. "What you want, eh?
Tu peti lahpan hilai kouri ahvent nus coup,
you little rabbit, run away before we get skin—mebbe we skin you now, eh?"

"I want you to
fight,
Juluk," Raj said, leaning over. "Or is killing farmers and drinking all Skinners can do?"

The chief grunted. "No Squadron men here—all run away," he said a little defensively.

Raj lifted one hand from the pommel of the saddle to point behind and to the left, southwest. "There are two thousand Squadron troops there, moving fast to the east—no more than three kilometers away. I ask you again, Shef Juluk Peypan—will you fight, or just sit here drinking while better men do battle?"

The Skinner chief grunted again and leaned on his long rifle, making a motion with one hand. Three of his men leaped to dogback and pounded out of the courtyard; others were moving about, readying gear and kicking their dogs to wakefulness. Then they gathered around the little group of Descotters, staring with the steady hungry gaze feral dogs gave guard-hounds. Barely half an hour passed before the scouts returned, shouting in Paytoiz. An exultant yell went up from the assembled warriors, and a deafening chorus of howls from their hounds. Juluk had been standing with a hunter's patience, both hands on the rifle and one foot crooked behind the opposite knee; now he straightened and unhooked a flask from his belt.

"Today we doan' skin you, sojer-man," he said, holding it up.

Raj took the ceremonial drink, fighting not to cough.

Gah.
Juluk had really done him honor; not looted wine or brandy but
arak,
the date gin spiked with red pepper and gunpowder that was the Skinners' own favorite drink.

"I'll piss out this sauroid-gall on your grave," he replied politely. "Now, can you keep the Squadron troops off my men's flank, while we fight our battle?"

"
Hoya-hey!
" The chieftain laughed, and the others joined him in a barking chorus. "Six hundred Real Men against only two tens of hundreds of long-hairs?" he chortled, using the Skinner's slang term for any of the western barbarians of the Military Governments. "We chew their bones! We kill them all, take their dogs and cattle and guns, fuck their women, burn their houses!
Hoya-hey,
it is a good day to die!"

He pulled at one long drooping mustache, leering up at the Civil Government commander. "You come with us, kill long-hairs?" he said. "You got balls enough to fight like Real Man, sojer-boy?"

Raj looked up at the eastern horizon; the sky was paling slightly behind the distant mountains.
On the other hand, I can kiss goodbye to any chance of controlling these wild men if I don't,
he thought.

"Can you girls fight like me?" he said.

Juluk swung onto his hound. "
Fray hums!
" he shouted, shaking his rifle in the air. "
Hoya-hey,
it is a good day to die! Let's go fight!"

Yipping and howling, they poured out of the gate at his heels. Raj and his men heeled their dogs into the same loping stride.

"When we make contact, I'll send you back with the news," Raj said to the senior noncom. They swerved apart a little to avoid a cork-oak tree in the middle of a pasture, then set their mounts at a thorn-hedge beyond, leaning forward into the saddle. Their dogs soared,
wurfing
slightly and lashing their tails to match the pack-excitement of the Skinners' dogs.

"No ser," da Cruz said in the same stolid tone, as they landed and continued stirrup to stirrup.

Raj looked around at him in surprise. Da Cruz was a long-service man, only two years short of the thirty-five maximum, steady to a fault. He'd bought Casanegri Farm from Squire Dorton back in the County on his last leave, the property he'd thought to retire to as yeoman-tenant. Bought it free and clear and stocked it well, with the prize-money and plunder from the campaign against the Colony, and married a sensible woman of middling years who was managing it until he returned. That had been his private dream, to be a well-respected yeoman freeholder with a good farm.