[Von Carstein 03] - Retribution

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  The dispatch rider was derisive. “What does it matter?” he asked. He waved a dismissive hand at the mouth of the valley. “There is your enemy. Are you a coward, man? Fight for your master, and do not question him.”

  With that he spurred the horse’s flanks and rode away.

  Dietrich Jaeger threw up his hands in sheer delight. At last we do something!” he said. Vorster did not share his enthusiasm for suicide. “Too many days sitting on their hands drive the rank and file crazy. Better to keep in the thick of it. Glory, my young friend; that is what it is all about, the glory of war.”

  Vorster stood stock still, barely able to keep his temper in check. He felt bitterly aggrieved by the blatant disregard the high command had shown for the lives of his men. He braced his hands on the war table and waited for his superior officer’s dresser to finish fumbling about trying to put the preening fop’s boots on. The dresser buffed the leather with a rag. He wanted to stuff the idiot’s words down his throat so that he choked on them. There was no glory in war. The longer he served men like Dietrich Jaeger the more he realised that their idea of honour was an outmoded concept. What it really meant was dying spectacularly and stupidly.

  “Now we’ll show those infantry swine a thing or two. They can be the butt of our jokes for a change.”

  Vorster bit his tongue. He wanted to say something. He wanted to point out the idiocy of the orders, but he knew that Jaeger wouldn’t care one whit. The man was a buffoon. He looked at the he map of the battlefield. It was an unmitigated mess and the orders that went with it were suicidal. He looked up from the map, straight at Jaeger. “Show them what, exactly, sir? That we place no value on human life? Well we could show them that, most certainly. You know as well as I do that no cavalry should ever charge blackpowder gun emplacements. Even just a few cannons and a line of flintlocks are enough to wreak havoc among the horses.”

  Jaeger got to his feet dismissively. “Nonsense! You fuss like an old woman. Just imagine! It will be glorious!”

  “I am imagining, sir. It will be slaughter. The horses panic and we’re cut off and the entire field becomes pandemonium. Not to mention that we have a weakness on our left flank.”

  Jaeger snapped his fingers for a goblet of wine. His dresser moved up smoothly to his side with a fine glass and a decanter filled with ruby red liquid. He poured the officer a glass and then melted back into the shadows in the corner of the command tent. “What weakness?” Jaeger quipped sauntering over to join Vorster. “What are you talking about, man? Really, Vorster, you asked for more horses and I found a way to give you horses.”

  “I did not ask for stallions, sir, and for good reason.”

  Jaeger sighed elaborately, and raised his hands to the heavens as though beseeching Sigmar to intervene on his behalf. You really are an impudent son of a bitch, you know that? Let me remind you that you are a junior officer! My junior officer. Now, where is Lord Ignatz?” Jaeger sipped his wine, rich, like a goblet of blood. He glanced at his dresser. This really is very good, Fredrich. Where did we get this one?”

  “Sir, with respect—”

  Jaeger slammed his goblet down on the table slopping a deep red stain right across the map of the valley, a foreshadowing of the slaughter to come if the idiots were allowed to run the asylum. “Good God, Vorster! What does it matter?”

  Vorster spoke slowly and carefully, enunciating every word perfectly as though he were talking to a simpleton. “Because, commander, cavalry horses are either geldings or mares. Ours are mares, and our mares are in heat.”

  Jaeger clapped an amused hand over his mouth and laughed from his belly. “So we’ll breed ourselves a new division!” he chortled, tickled at the notion of his junior’s prudishness. “Let the stallions have their heads, and see the enemy tremble.”

  “The strength of our plan is in our swiftness, and surprise,” Lord Ignatz declared melodramatically as he swept into the tent unannounced. “Mark my words, boys, we’ll be on top of them before they can get off their first shot. What good are their cannons then, eh?”

  Vorster seized on the glimmer of hope. “Did the scouts return? I didn’t see them.”

  Ignatz seemed bemused by the question. “I can see the range from my tent flap perfectly well. If we pass through the valley here, at Ramius Point,” he said, driving his knife into the map with cold arrogance, “we ride up over the ridge, and they’ll never see us coming.”

  The knife was buried right in the darkest part of the spilled wine.

  “There!” Jaeger said excitedly, jabbing a finger at Ignatz’s chest for Vorster’s benefit. There is a man who understands strategy.”

  Vorster felt the blood drain from his face. Since the battle had begun Dietrich Jaeger had taken no steps to find out what was happening beyond the mounds, hillocks and ridges that cut off their view of the ground that had fallen into the hands of the enemy, none at all.

  The worst tactical mistake a commander could make was to assume that the battlefield remained static, that all the pieces of the enemy’s forces had remained exactly where they were at their last encounter. The battlefield was dynamic, constantly shifting.

  Vorster cast a desperate eye over the battle plans laid out on the table. There was no guarantee that the Talabeclanders were in any of the positions Jaeger had assigned to them. Any idiot ought to know enough to wait for the latest scout reports, but no, not this idiot.

  Dietrich Jaeger was determined they should go in blind and no matter what Vorster said he couldn’t make the man see that it was suicide. The fool was blinded by promises of glory. No doubt he had already begun drafting something to say when the elector count himself came to laud him with praise for his unsurpassed heroism—arrogant, ignorant fool.

  Vorster quietly made his way towards the exit. “I’ll tell the men to get a good night’s rest,” he said. “I assume we go at dawn?”

  Jaeger shook his head. “Oh I don’t think so, young man. I didn’t put my boots on to go to sleep. Tell them to saddle up. We go in an hour.”

  When the time came, three hundred and sixty-five men and bristling horses made a gleaming display spread out across the dead earth of the Hardamin Flats.

  It had threatened snow earlier in the day, but the wind had picked up, blowing the clouds through. The afternoon sky was clear—a glorious day, as Jaeger had said, emerging from the command tent. The sun, past its zenith, was still high in the sky and there wasn’t a cloud to be seen.

  Vorster eyed the afternoon sky with unease, hoping in vain that Jaeger would see sense. By the time they reached the valley floor the sun would be low and in their eyes.

  Of course, Dietrich Jaeger was more concerned with clambering up onto an old wooden chest so that he could deliver his little speech, exhorting the men to valour in the name of Martin and freedom. He really was an odious little toad. He didn’t care for a minute that the charge represented the single biggest stroke of insanity ever perpetrated on the field of battle, because it, like his stallions, would be glorious.

  Vorster let the words wash over him, filling his senses instead with the strong smell of oiled leather, polished steel and anxious horses. He went inside himself, centering his spirit around a calm core. He had no god to pray to, none that he believed capable of intervening as he plunged headlong into the mouth of madness, at any rate.

  It wasn’t that he was afraid to die; he had made his peace with whatever deity had spawned him a long time ago. Dying on some foreign field was not what worried him, either. It wasn’t that he was filled with sudden regrets for the things he hadn’t done. It wasn’t even that there were so many beautiful and ugly women he had yet to make the acquaintance of. None of that mattered. He would die willingly for freedom. He believed in what Martin of Stirland asked his men to do, and admired the fact that Martin could be seen on the battlefield, not hiding away behind the command line. The man was a natural leader. Unfortunately he was surrounded by a few too many fools, and Vorster didn’t suffer fools gladly.

/>   He snapped out of his introspection as the roar went up, the men vaunting their leader. Jaeger and Ignatz thrived on this rubbish; it pandered to their egos.

  They moved into position.

  When the final command was given, field commander Lord Ignatz dropped his sword in a flashing—and yet cold—salute and the cavalry rode out as one.

  The ground trembled under hoof, the advance sending ripples through the earth.

  The riders moved across the plain, stalking beasts, the scent of blood in the air, eager to chase the jackals of Talabecland from their turf.

  They rode, triumphant, into the mouth of the valley, the banner of Stirland snapping in the breeze. Vorster surveyed the terrain from his mount. The first three quarters of a mile was a gentle descent into a narrow pass between cliffs that rose up like gnashing teeth ready to crush them. It was here that the first sign of trouble came, from the left flank as stallions and mares became pressed together, intoxicated by each other’s heady scents. The proximity was too much for one powerful horse and the stallion reared up, attempting to mount the mare before it, throwing the rider from his saddle and smashing another man with its flailing hooves.

  A wave of panic rippled out from the chaos.

  Vorster rode forwards. There was no time for doubt or hesitation. Panic was a rare beast. Once it took hold in one mount it would spread like wildfire through the others. He steered his own stallion through the press of horses until he was close enough to take charge.

  He drew his sword and slit the throat of the frisky stallion. The beast screamed and rolled onto its side causing two more riders to guide their mounts away from the bright red spray of blood that gouted out across parched soil and men alike.

  It did not slow their advance even a hoof beat.

  As the valley opened out before them the arrowhead shaped tip of the imposing Ramius Point ridge loomed ever closer. Vorster spurred his horse forwards, coming up level with Ignatz. He saw a flash of uncertainty in the man’s eyes. The fool had not thought to take the fork into account.

  “Which track, sir?” Vorster asked earnestly. “Left or right?”

  Ignatz ignored him, straightening up in the saddle. He rode forwards as if nothing was wrong. “Left or right, sir?”

  The decision was vital. Vorster mapped the battlefield out mentally, placing the landmarks according to what he remembered seeing on the map. The reality was nothing like the map though. Left or right? One track gave limited cover. The other did not. The time for sending out scouts to check the lie of the land was long passed. Ignatz ought to have known immediately which tine of the fork they should take. He could see the conflict in the officer’s eyes. He was clueless.

  Vorster pressed the point. “Which track, sir? Left or right?”

  Ignatz fumbled with his sword, the sweat from his palm loosening his grip. “The left—no! The right!”

  “Surely the left offers more cover, sir.”

  “I said the right!” And with that Ignatz spurred his mount hard and surged ahead to lead the way, brandishing his sword above his head and shouting, “Canter!”

  The cavalry upped its pace and followed him into the corner.

  The hot, sweaty muscle of the warhorses beat out the faster rhythm of their advance. The dust from so many angry hooves, thrown up into the air like a ghostly shroud, announced their approach to all.

  The lip of the ridge came into view.

  The bowl of the Färlic Hills lay beyond the ridge.

  Horses and riders streamed up the incline. It was too late to turn back. They rode out into no-man’s land.

  From their vantage point on the Obelheim Plateau, high above the bowl, the Stirland command watched Lord Ignatz’s advance with increasing alarm. It was lunacy in the extreme. They couldn’t—in all honesty—believe what they were seeing. Their orders had been simple enough, deliberately so, to avoid the chance of mistakes like this.

  It was suicide, nothing more and nothing less.

  “Where in Sigmar’s name does he think he is going?” Martin breathed in disbelief.

  Junior officers scrambled to make sense of Ignatz’s manoeuvres as they compared them to the battle plans laid out before them and the orders they had given him, but it was quite impossible to enforce any kind of logic onto the charge. The idiot was taking them the wrong way!

  Flustered, Oskar Zenzi, one of Martin’s more trusted Kompmeister’s hurried over to his marshal’s side. “We’ve checked the maps, double checked them, sir, and well, we believe he’s going the wrong way, sir.”

  “I can see the fool is going the wrong way, man! I am not blind! My orders were explicit. He was to outflank the enemy!” The Marshall’s voice dropped an octave as the gravity of Ignatz’s mistake began to settle in. “Where does that path lead him?”

  Zenzi rubbed at his face. He had gone very pale. “Right across the enemy cannons, sir, and well within their range.”

  The command post descended into bedlam. The chaos was mirrored on the field of battle below. Shouts rang out, officers desperate to apportion and deflect blame for the fiasco. They tripped over themselves in a hurry to address the Marshall’s rage until finally one of them had the presence of mind to roar at the dispatch rider.

  “Get your arse down there and tell him to pull back, man! Tell him to pull back!”

  It was a desperate gallop, the messenger driving his horse into the ground, and even as the beast gave up the ghost and collapsed beneath him he saw it was for nothing.

  The cavalry had been engaged.

  They were as good as dead.

  The first blasts were deafening. They shook the ground with a jarring ferocity, but mercifully they were off target.

  Vorster knew they were nothing more than probing round shots to enable the Talabecland gunners to judge their distances. The second volley would be lethal.

  Iron cannonballs hit the ground obliquely, skipping over the cavalrymen’s heads. The air grew thick with churning dust making it difficult to see where they were going, and in the process transforming the pockmarked soil into a silent death trap. One hit its mark, bringing horse and rider down in a spray of blood and bone. His screams were hideous.

  “Listen to me! It’s not too late to turn back! There’s no cowardice in it!” Vorster pleaded, but Ignatz was having none of it. He held his sword arm firmly aloft, keeping the men at canter and crying, “Steady…! Steady…!”

  “We’re too exposed, sir! This is insane! Get your head out of your arse and think for once, sir!”

  “Damn you, man, we ride!” Ignatz bellowed.

  More cannon fire came spewing down upon them, a barrage from somewhere ahead and to the left. It was a brutal mixture this time that was far more accurate in finding targets. Explosive shells, cannon balls filled with black powder, began the volley and grapeshot ended it, canvas bags stuffed with clusters of small iron shot that mowed the nearest horses down as if taking a saw to their flesh. It was ruthlessly efficient in decimating the ranks of the Stirland riders.

  Small pockets of fire pocked the front and rear lines. The air stank of burned horseflesh. The cries of the fallen beasts were pitiful. The stink in turn made the remaining horses skittish.

  Clouds of smoke rafted up from the smouldering earth. Many of the riders that had escaped the onslaught found themselves disorientated by smoke and noise, their mounts turning frantically on themselves, bucking and shying blindly. Too many of the frightened beasts stumbled into the craters, falling badly and breaking their necks and legs.

  Despite the brutal efficacy of the bombardment it was merely the opening salvo in what was a massacre.

  Vorster struggled with his stallion, exercising a heavy hand on the beast to keep it from bolting. He could see precisely where the Talabeclander emplacements were situated. The main range of cannons was strung out in an arc across the top of the Farlic Hills, at the far end of the bowl, while flanking positions bore down on either side.

  He spat and swore bitterly. Ignatz was ever
y bit as big a fool as Jaeger. How could any commander not know that the Talabeclanders had a triangulated bead on anyone that entered the valley?

  This head on assault was nothing short of madness. Vorster wheeled his horse around, looking down the ruined line. Another barrage would decimate their ranks, effectively rendering them impotent. Ignatz had to be able to see he had made a mistake, had to. He was just too pig-stubborn to order a retreat.

  Vorster watched in horror as Ignatz lowered his sword arm, thrusting his blade forwards into the booming din ahead and gave one almighty cry, “Charge!” The cavalrymen spurred their horses into full gallop and into hell’s chasm.

  Within the blink of an eye the horse and rider alongside Vorster vanished from view as a cannonball ploughed into the mare’s skull only to explode through its ribs, taking the rider’s leg with it.

  Vorster kept his hands on the reins, too afraid to wipe the kiss of warm scarlet from his face. He gritted his teeth and spurred his mount on, jumping it over the corpse of another fallen mare. Huge puffballs of smoke rose silently from the hills over to the right, followed seconds later by the roar of another barrage. Bone and horseflesh blossomed across the battlefield to the cacophony of shrill screaming.

  Still the Stirlanders plunged forwards, closer to the ranks of the Talabeclanders and their guns, closer to their objectives, and right into the curtain fire from the Talabecland fusiliers.

  The sudden furious pop, pop of muskets pierced the deep booming rumbles of cannon fire like dry twigs snapping on an open fire. One after the other, horses reared, and Stirlander cavalrymen were thrown back, their bodies riddled with bloody punctures.

  Vorster quickly lost sight of Ignatz, and the other cavalry commanders in the thick blanket of smoke and dust that had descended upon the battlefield turning day into night. He orientated himself by the drum of thundering hooves until suddenly he was thrown from his horse.