by David Weber
I really ought to stop feeling surprised when Alyk does something right, he scolded himself. He isn’t stupid, whatever else, and he’s probably the best cavalry brigade commander in Corisande. It’s just—
The sudden “wheeet” of one of the Charisians’ infernal bullets, passing unpleasantly close to his head, reminded him forcibly that he was almost to the front line and that it was unwise to allow his mind to wander.
And, he thought with wry bitterness, quickly ducking back down behind the sheltering parapet, it’s also the reason I ordered all of my officers to take the damned cockades off their hats!
He scrambled the last fifty or sixty yards along the communications trench to the redoubt he’d come to visit. The major commanding it saluted sharply as Gahrvai entered the work, and Sir Koryn returned the courtesy with equal sharpness. He suspected that some of his subordinates thought it was silly of him to insist on maintaining proper military etiquette at a time like this, but Gahrvai was convinced the familiar requirements helped keep the men focused, not to mention maintaining their sense of identity as soldiers, rather than a frightened rabble huddling in their fortifications.
And I’m not going to let them turn into a rabble, either, he promised himself—and them—grimly.
“Good afternoon, Major,” he said now.
“Good morning, Sir.”
“How have things been today?”
“More of the same, Sir.” The major shrugged. “I think some of their light infantry was sneaking around out there early this morning, before dawn. We haven’t seen any sign of them since sunrise, though.”
“And their marksmen?”
“A pain in the arse, Sir,” the major said frankly. Then he grinned crookedly. “As usual,” he added.
“How bad are your losses?”
“Actually, Sir, I think they’re a little off their game today. I’ve got two wounded, only one of them seriously. That’s about it.”
“Good!” Gahrvai slapped the younger man on the shoulder, wondering if it sounded as bizarre to the major as it did to his own ears to call two wounded in return for no enemy casualties “Good.”
On the other hand, that’s exactly what it is, so there’s no point pretending otherwise. Besides, I wouldn’t be fooling anyone if I did.
Gahrvai climbed up onto the redoubt’s firing step and very cautiously lifted his head above the parapet. No Charisian bullets screamed around his ears immediately, but he made a mental note not to assume things would stay that way as he rapidly scanned the approaches to his present position.
Talbor Pass was the shortest, most direct route through the Dark Hill Mountains, although at just under twenty-seven miles “short” was a purely relative term. It was also a thoroughly unpleasant place to fight a battle. “Shortest” and “most direct” didn’t say a thing about “straightest,” and no general in his right mind would launch an offensive battle in a place like this. Which was precisely why Sir Koryn Gahrvai’s army was here.
The western half or so of the pass was fairly broad and really did have extensive stretches of good going, but as one moved farther east, it became increasingly narrow, twisting, and steep-sided . . . among other things. The handful of places that weren’t bare rock, or a thin coating of dirt over bare rock which might support a threadbare patch of alpine grasses, were covered in tangled thickets of wire vine and dagger thorn. Whatever the wire vine didn’t manage to entangle, the dagger thorn’s six-inch, knife-edged thorns ought to cut to ribbons quite handily. Best of all, from Gahrvai’s perspective, places where firing lines were more than a hundred and fifty yards long were virtually impossible to find. In many places, the longest field of fire available was less than fifty yards, which suited his smoothbores as well as it did the Charisians’ rifles. And it also meant the shorter-ranged Corisandian batteries could count on holding their own against the Charisian guns.
He couldn’t keep the Charisians from sending their marksmen scurrying up the steep slopes to find suitable positions, but it had quickly become evident that the number of Charisians capable of those truly astounding long-range shots was limited. They managed to inflict a steady, painful stream of casualties, a handful here and a handful there, but there weren’t enough of them to be a serious threat to his ability to hold his ground. Especially not with the redoubts and connecting earthworks he’d ordered built. Most of them had been thrown up before what was left of his retreating advance guard had reached the pass, and they’d been steadily improved by working parties each night thereafter. By now, Gahrvai was completely confident of his ability to hold any frontal assault . . . assuming someone as smart as Cayleb would suffer a sufficiently severe case of temporary insanity to launch any such assault.
Part of Gahrvai was deeply tempted to pull back behind Talbor. He could have left perhaps a quarter of his total infantry strength to hold the fortifications, and it probably would have eased his supply problems. He’d fallen back to the west of the worst bottleneck before he’d ever dug in, so getting supplies forward to his advanced positions in sufficient quantity wasn’t quite impossible. The bulk of his army lay spread out along the wider portions of the pass behind him—close enough to move forward quickly if the opportunity to do so presented itself; far enough to the rear to make supplying it relatively easy. That didn’t make those problems magically go away, by any stretch of imagination, however, and moving forty or fifty thousand men out of the pass would have helped a lot.
I ought to do just that, he told himself for perhaps the thousandth time. But if I do, then I lose the ability to threaten Cayleb’s rear if he suddenly decides to go somewhere else. Besides, there’s that little surprise we’re working on for him.
He grimaced as he gazed eastward, then ducked as a puff of smoke blossomed high on the side of the pass and a bullet thudded into the parapet close enough to throw dirt into his face.
“See what I mean about being off their game, Sir?” Gahrvai turned his head and saw the major crouched beside him, grinning. “Most days, that bugger would have nailed you.”
Despite himself, Gahrvai found himself smiling back. He supposed some generals might have reprimanded the youngster for his familiarity, but Gahrvai treasured it. The major’s “what-the-hell-we’re-all-in-this-together” grin was the clearest indication possible that despite its awareness of how its enemies’ weapons outclassed its own, his army was still far from defeated.
“Well, Major, I suppose I’ve seen what I came to see, anyway. No point giving him an opportunity to improve his score, is there?”
“I’d really prefer for you to get shot on someone else’s watch, Sir. If you insist on being shot, that is.”
“I’ll try to bear that in mind,” Gahrvai chuckled, and patted the young man on the shoulder. Then he looked back the way he’d come, squared his shoulders, and drew a deep breath.
“Well, back to headquarters,” he said, and set off on the cautious trek towards the rear.
There hadn’t really been any need for him to make the trip forward this morning in the first place. He’d already known exactly what he was going to see, it wasn’t as if his personal reconnaissance was going to change anything, and it could certainly be argued that exposing the army’s commanding officer to an incapacitating wound (or death) without some damned compelling reason wasn’t a particularly bright move. But he’d made it a point to spend at least part of every day in one of the forward positions, primarily because he felt he did have a compelling reason. He was no more fond of the sound of bullets whizzing past him than anyone else, and his personal opinion was that an officer who deliberately exposed himself to fire when there was no need for him to do so wasn’t proving his bravery, just his stupidity. Unfortunately, there were times when a commanding officer had no choice. Nothing could destroy morale faster than a sense that an army’s officers were keeping themselves safely out of harm’s way while leaving their subordinates exposed to the enemy. That was the very reason he’d found the major’s reaction to his own near
-miss so welcome.
And I suppose, if I’m going to be honest, I did have a need to see the front line with my own two eyes. Just to be sure the damned thing was where I left it last night.
He snorted at the thought, then glanced up at the sky. One of the storm season’s tropical storms was moving in on Corisande from the east, across the Great Western Ocean. To Gahrvai’s experienced eye, it was obvious that plenty of rain and high winds were about to sweep in across Dairwyn and the Earldom of Coris yet again. It would be the second storm since he’d dug in here, which meant he had a pretty fair idea of what was going to happen when it hit. It was going to be thoroughly unpleasant here in the pass when the water began flooding his earthworks and trenches, but it wasn’t going to be any picnic for the Charisians, either. And it should at least keep the damned marksmen off the slopes for a day or two.
And the longer Cayleb will let us sit here, the better. It may be hard work keeping the men fed, but it’s the best damned defensive position this side of Manchyr. And Cayleb is about to get a surprise of his own if Father’s last semaphore message is accurate.
The Charisians’ rifles had come as a nasty—one might as well be honest and say “terrifying”—surprise to Gahrvai and his army. They’d come as an equally unpleasant surprise, if at secondhand, to Earl Anvil Rock. No one had been able to imagine how the Charisians had managed to equip every single one of their Marines with a rifle which actually fired faster than most smoothbore muskets.
Not until one of Gahrvai’s surgeons recovered a half-dozen bullets from the bodies of his wounded men.
The bullets had been badly deformed from their mangling passage through human flesh and bone, but they’d been sufficiently intact for Gahrvai to realize what he was looking at. It was another of those damnably simple “innovations” Charisians seemed so fond of. He’d been sure there were aspects of it which had required experimentation on the Charisians’ part, but the underlying principle was absurdly easy to grasp. Instead of hammering an oversized bullet down the bore, which was the way everyone else forced it to take the rifling, the Charisians had simply designed a hollow-based, conical bullet. When the powder detonated, the force of the explosion spread the base of the bullet, forcing it into the rifling and sealing the bore behind it, and the bullet’s stretched shape meant it was heavier than a spherical ball of the same diameter. It was probably also a better shape for driving through the air, although Gahrvai wasn’t certain about that. And the fact that, before the base expanded on its way to its target it was actually a looser fit in the barrel than a regular musket’s round ball made it faster to load one of the new rifles than it was to load even one of his own men’s smoothbore muskets.
The critical point was that once the surgeon had realized what he was looking at and drawn it to Gahrvai’s attention, Earl Anvil Rock and his artisans had assigned the highest possible priority to figuring out exactly how the Charisians had made the design work . . . and how to duplicate it. According to his father’s last message, they seemed to have done just that. There was no way they would have time to manufacture anything like the numbers of rifled muskets the Charisians had, but his father was scraping up every single sporting rifle he could find and turning out new bullet molds for them. Gahrvai would be surprised if there were more than a couple of hundred rifles in the entire Duchy of Manchyr. They were expensive toys, which only wealthy hunters could afford, and the fact that they came in such a wide diversity of calibers meant each of them would require its own specifically designed bullet mold. But even fifty of them in the hands of trained marksmen of his own would be a nasty surprise for the Charisians who were steadily pecking away at his men.
And if Cayleb will just give me another month, say—just to the end of the storm season, for example—then Father will be able to start putting worthwhile numbers of rifled muskets into production. We still won’t have anything like the same total numbers, but we’ll have enough to . . . convince Cayleb to approach us more cautiously than he did at Haryl’s Crossing. And if it should happen that the next time we fight an open field battle I’ve got a few hundred, or a couple of thousand, rifled muskets of my own and he doesn’t know it . . .
Sir Koryn Gahrvai knew he was indulging in wishful thinking. Still, it could work out that way. And for now, at least, he had a cork firmly in the bottle of Talbor Pass, and he had no intention of pulling it back out again.
“—still say we ought to go ahead and hammer him, Your Majesty.” It was hard to imagine a respectful growl of disgust, but Hauwyl Chermyn managed to pull it off. Cayleb’s senior Marine stood on the far side of the map table, glowering down at the broken-backed snake of Talbor Pass, and from his expression, he would have liked to personally throttle Sir Koryn Gahrvai with his own large, sinewy hands.
“That’s only because you’re constitutionally opposed to doing nothing, Hauwyl,” the emperor said mildly. The general looked up at him and had the grace to blush, and Cayleb chuckled. That chuckle was not a sound of unalloyed amusement.
“Trust me,” he said. “I’m not incredibly in love with the idea of sitting on our hands, either. But in your saner moments, you know as well as I do that hammering straight into the positions Gahrvai’s managed to build for his troops is going to produce nothing but a bloodbath, rifles or no rifles. And not, unfortunately, a Corisandian bloodbath.”
Chermyn looked very much as if he would have liked to disagree, but he couldn’t, and so he nodded unhappily, instead.
“You’re right, of course, Your Majesty. I just hate the thought of sitting here. We’ve got virtually the entire Marine Corps camped out here, and we haven’t done a thing since Haryl’s Crossing. We’re giving them time, Your Majesty, and we’re wasting time of our own.”
“Granted.” Cayleb didn’t even glance at the tall, sapphire-eyed guardsman standing behind him. “The problem is that we don’t have enough mobility on land to slip around Gahrvai. If we had more troops than he does, we could try stretching out our right flank, forcing him to garrison other passes until he thinned out Talbor enough for us to punch through it. Unfortunately, he has more men than we do. And he also has a lot more—and a lot better—cavalry than we do. Charisians are seamen, not horsemen. You might want to get Admiral Lock Island’s view on the proper degree of familiarity between sailors’ arses and saddles. Believe me, he doesn’t think they should spend any more time in contact with one another than they can possibly avoid. And that, unfortunately in this instance, pretty well sums up the Navy’s attitude in general.”
“All of that’s true, Your Majesty, but—”
“We knew it was going to be like this,” Cayleb pointed out. “Oh, I don’t believe any of us thought it would be quite this bad, but we recognized from the beginning that we were going to face a problem rather like this one. So, while I fully understand why you’re feeling so impatient, I think we’ll stick to our original strategy.”
If he’d been speaking to anyone else, Chermyn would have puffed his mustache at Cayleb. Since he happened to be speaking not simply to his superior officer, but to his emperor and commander-in-chief, he didn’t. And in all fairness to the Marine, Cayleb knew Chermyn understood exactly what he was saying. After all, the general had helped build their original strategy in the first place.
“You’re right, of course, Your Majesty,” Chermyn said after a moment. “It just goes against the grain to sit here, doing nothing.”
“As it happens, General, ‘nothing’ is exactly what we aren’t doing,” Cayleb said with a nasty smile. Chermyn’s eyes narrowed, and the emperor chuckled again. This time it was a much more pleased sound.
“The longer he’s prepared to sit there, the better I like it, Hauwyl,” Cayleb told him. “I’m still pushing the thought around in my brain, but believe me, if we can convince him to give me another month or so to work with, he’ll really, really wish he hadn’t.”
“I’ll take your word for that, Your Majesty,” Chermyn said with simple sincerity, then bowed and wi
thdrew from the room. The door closed behind him, and Cayleb turned to Merlin.
“That,” he remarked, “is an impatient man.”
“Not so much impatient as tenacious, I think,” Merlin replied. “He reminds me of a lot of Marines Nimue knew. Their instinct was always to attack, to push the pace and keep the other side off-balance whenever possible. When the Gbaba pushed us completely back onto the defensive, they hated it . . . and not just because it meant we were losing.”
“I can see that.” Cayleb nodded. “For that matter, I tend to be that way myself. The notion of giving the other side time to get set has never really appealed to me. Or, at least, not usually.”
He and Merlin smiled nastily at one another, then looked back down at the map of Corisande on the table before them.
The real problem, Cayleb reflected, was that no one involved in crafting the overall Charisian strategy had considered making their landing in Dairwyn until very late in the planning process. The possibility that Grand Duke Zebediah might be able to convince his brother-in-law to come over to the Charisian side hadn’t occurred to any of them until they learned of Prince Nahrmahn’s correspondence with the grand duke. Their earlier plans had called for landing in either the Barony of Brandark or the Earldom of Coris, if they’d landed east of the Dark Hills, or else much farther to the west, in the Earldom of Rochair, if they’d landed on the Margo Sound coast. In either case, the idea had been that they would establish a firm foothold, then use their amphibious capability to offset the Corisandians’ greater mobility on land by leapfrogging along the coast in a series of amphibious “hooks.”
