The Water Road

by JD Byrne

  “About time you got here,” said Nale, who would be ready for sleep and a warm fire after six hours of a night’s watch.

  “I’m early,” Suhs said in protest.

  “Not by much.” Nale shook his head.

  “Early is early,” said Suhs. “Besides, I have a hard time getting moving on these cold mornings.”

  “Pfft,” Nale said. “You think this is cold? You should try a spell in those mountains.” He pointed out the southern window, to the peaks of the Orford Range that were starting to shine as the sun crept up. “Every morning is a cold morning up there.”

  Suhs shrugged off the suggestion as unsupported bragging. Nale had more experience than he did, having been stationed at other forts, and had no doubt done his share of ranging. But he also knew that Nale was prone to exaggeration. There was a reason, in spite of his experience, that he and Suhs shared the same rank. Regardless, there was no need to antagonize him. “Anything interesting happen overnight?” Suhs asked, shifting the conversation.

  “Just the usual,” he said. “A few fires visible in the long-range glass, but nothing more.”

  “Did you make a report?” Suhs asked. They were drilled to do their paperwork with as much fervor, if not more, as they were in the use of their weapons.

  “Of course,” he said.

  Suhs bent over and stared through the eyepiece of the most powerful telescope in the room. It was so advanced that they could see the movements of individuals almost all the way up the north side of the facing mountains. Suhs settled and studied the view for a moment, then stood straight up. “Hmm,” Suhs said.

  “What is it?” Nale asked. He was nearly out the door and down the stairs.

  “Let me look again,” Suhs said, kneeling down to take a second, longer look. “Maybe I was just seeing things.” But his mind was not fooling him. He saw the same thing again. He stood up and looked at Nale, puzzled. “Come take a look at this. Tell me what you see.”

  Nale put down his cartridge bag and the blanket in which he wrapped himself during the night in a disappointed huff. “Fine. But if this is some kind of dumb joke, Suhs, you’ll pay for it.” He walked over to the telescope and looked through it. He looked for a long time, not saying anything at all.

  “What do you see?” Suhs asked. He knew what the answer should be.

  Nale stood up, the look on his face matching how Suhs felt. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say there was a company of Neldathi on horseback at the base of the mountains.”

  “But those barbarians don’t ride horses, do they?” Suhs asked. “I’ve never read anything about Neldathi cavalry tactics.”

  “Well,” Nale said, obviously searching for words, “yeah.”

  “But there they are,” Suhs said, finishing his thought.

  Nale did the same double take Suhs had already done. “Indeed, there they are.” He stood up, the look on his face making it clear that he was not going to enjoy a warm fire or sleep for a while longer. “Go find a Sentinel, will you? This is above our pay grade.”

  Suhs agreed and scurried back down the spiral staircase.

  ~~~~~

  It took a surprisingly long time to find a Sentinel who could come to the observation tower. However, once he had seen what Suhs and Nale had seen, it was only a few moments more before the room was full of them. By the time Suhs and Nale were sent away, the only regular military man left was Colonel Jals. Suhs had a hard time leaving the colonel alone with all those Sentinels, but he knew something was up.

  An hour later, Suhs’s company was assembled in the mess hall. The orders from their captain were ominous, but expected. They were going out to the mountains to reconnoiter in force. The usual squadron of cavalry would be joined by three full infantry companies, nearly 450 men. It would happen quickly, the men packing only muskets, ammunition, and water canteens. They were to gather intelligence, while assuring that whatever they gathered would be returned to the fort. The sight of Neldathi on horseback had shaken up the Sentinels as much as it had Suhs. By midday, they were off.

  For all the winter cold, there had not been much snow, so at least they could feel the solid ground under their feet as they marched. They made good time, reaching the base of the mountains in three hours, about half the time the trip normally took. They could make it back to the fort in far less time if needed.

  The plains that began on the south bank of the river gave way to dense forest just before they reached the mountains. Cavalry scouts went ahead of the men on foot, looking for more evidence of the Neldathi horsemen. The infantrymen were left to speculate as to whether they would find anything at all. Most of the men thought they were chasing shadows and would return to the fort with nothing more than a deep chill and empty stomachs.

  Suhs kept his observations to himself. It would do little good for him to try and argue the point. The others would likely accuse him of making the whole thing up, or of being such a poor lookout that he mistook normal sights for the unusual. He knew better, but that didn’t matter. At best, he might convince them of the serious danger they faced, but that was unlikely to sway any of them. He kept his mouth shut and his feet moving forward.

  The force paused when they reached the edge of the woods. The scouts had found a plateau a short ride up the mountain that showed some signs of having recently been used as a campsite. The infantry was ordered to split up, with each of the three companies assigned to a pass that led up to the plateau. They would join together at the plateau and try to flush out the Neldathi.

  Suhs’s company was assigned to the western pass. It was not as narrow as he feared, but he would not call it wide. At most, three men could stand shoulder to shoulder, but at other times they had to proceed single file. It made progress excruciatingly slow. They had spent a great deal of energy getting there so quickly that the slowdown caused Suhs to feel the fatigue and exhaustion all the more.

  They slowed down even more when the shooting started.

  Once the entire company had entered the pass, rifle shots from unseen locations began to ring out. There were not many of them, nor were they particularly accurate. One of the men near Suhs was wounded when a bullet struck the rock wall and a piece of earth bounced to his face. There were a few similar injuries, but nothing severe. Regardless, the attempts to track the shooters slowed their pace and frayed their nerves.

  Suhs and his company were the first to arrive on the plateau, but only by a few moments. All three companies had come under sniper fire, but there were no serious injuries. Only one person had really been wounded, a sergeant in the eastern pass who was surprised by the fire, lost his footing, and broke his leg.

  Although the lack of casualties was a good thing, Suhs was still concerned. If there were Neldathi in the area then one or two of the companies being fired upon was not surprising. But all three coming under fire in exactly the same manner? Something about it was not quite right.

  As they waited for the stragglers to arrive, Suhs found Nale. “Does this make any sense to you?”

  Nale nodded. “Now that you mention it. Something was out of place, but I couldn’t figure what.”

  “Are the Neldathi that bad of a shot?” Suhs asked. He knew the answer, but wanted confirmation.

  “Not normally,” he said. “Their rifles are better than ours, for the most part. They train with them almost constantly. Lots of practice when they hunt, too.”

  Suhs nodded. “So what’s different this time?”

  The two men stood for a moment, resting their tired frames on their muskets. As he watched the men move around the plateau and the Sentinels who had come with them begin to inspect the encampment, something occurred to him. “If the Neldathi are generally good shots,” he said, more to himself than to Nale, “and for all the shooting in the passes they didn’t actually hit anyone, doesn’t it figure that they actually weren’t trying to hit anyone?”

  Nale looked at him. The look on his face told Suhs he had come to the same conclusion. They took
off running towards the spot where the senior officers had gathered.

  “Captain!” Suhs yelled. “It’s a…”

  That was all he could say before the plateau erupted in a hail of gunfire.

  ~~~~~

  Nale did not survive the first volley. Massed musket fire from the hills cracked out of the woods and plowed into the men standing around on the plateau. The volley was followed by the scattered sounds of single, precision rifle shots that took direct aim at the commanders and Sentinels. Suhs instinctively dove for cover behind a boulder that had fallen from the hillside who knows how many years ago.

  From his hiding place, Suhs took a quick look around the plateau and confirmed his initial impressions. There were massed groups of Neldathi with muskets raking the area with inaccurate, but nonetheless effective, fire. Where did those come from? The Neldathi had used rifles for years, but not the kind of mass-produced muskets like Suhs carried. They didn’t have the industrial capacity to make them. Or at least they hadn’t, until now. He filed that bit of confusion away for later, for the inevitable debrief that would happen when they returned to Fort Dugald.

  If they returned to Fort Dugald. Dozens of men already lay dead or wounded. His captain was among the dead, a Neldathi rifle blast having taken him in the head. Two of the Sentinels with the force had already met a similar fate. He saw Colonel Jals, clutching a bloody left arm, scrambling back towards the central pass. The lieutenant who was now Suhs’s commanding officer ran for the western pass. He shouted some order as he did so, but the din of wounded men and musket volleys meant Suhs could not hear it. It did not matter. On their own, in pairs and trios, the men began picking their way back to the passes and then back down the mountain. The wounded and dead were left behind.

  Suhs joined the exodus from the plateau. As he expected, the sniper fire on the way back down the mountain was much more accurate. Thankfully, it was also less effective, as the men could hardly move down the pass any slower than they had come up. The occasional death or wounding caused the column to stop and lurch, but it continued. The shots ringing off the rock walls provided ample motivation to keep moving.

  The infantry reassembled in the woods at the bottom of the mountain, but was half its original size. Colonel Jals set them up in a defense line that matched up with their assigned passes. Suhs fell in near the very far end of the right flank. They formed a firing line, doing the best they could to fill the gaps left by the dead and wounded, and loaded their muskets. Suhs took a knee and readied himself to fire.

  Once they settled into the line, it became suspiciously quiet in the woods. There was an occasional pop of rifle fire up on the hill, as snipers finished off the stragglers. But there was nothing that sounded like movement, nothing to indicate the Neldathi were headed down the mountain.

  “Hold steady, boys!” the lieutenant cried, walking up and down the line. “They’ll be coming!”

  Suhs wondered how the lieutenant knew that, or whether he was simply making it up as he went along. For all they knew, the ambush on the plateau was the full extent of the Neldathi plan. A more cunning attack than the regular occasional and uncoordinated attacks on the fort itself, to be certain, but nothing more. Suhs assumed the line would hold here for a few moments, long enough to allow everyone to catch their wits, before they retreated to the fort.

  Suhs waited on bended knee for something to happen as the silent moments ticked on. Waited for anything to happen.

  There was a blast of musket fire from somewhere out of the woods. It had not come from their line, Suhs was certain, as no order to fire had been given. Yet he saw neither the telltale flashes of muzzle fire out in front of them, nor could he see any movement in the woods. The underbrush was not especially thick, but the lumbering Neldathi would have difficultly moving through it unnoticed.

  A second volley rang out a few seconds later. This time Suhs could pinpoint the location of the fire. It was coming from the opposite side of the line, the left flank. This time the first crack was followed almost immediately by the sound of his comrades returning fire.

  Then came the screams, the cries of Neldathi warriors throwing themselves into a melee.

  Suhs had just enough time to register the frightening cacophony when another round of musket fire rang out off towards his right. They were being flanked on both sides, he realized. If they remained in place, the entire line would be rolled up between two sets of onrushing barbarians.

  Suhs looked around for someone in command and saw the lieutenant who had taken command lying on the ground, dead or dying from a musket ball through his throat. Suhs decided this was no time to worry about the chain of command.

  “Company! Right face!” he yelled, trying his best to sound authoritative and calm. It must have worked, as what remained of his company wheeled expertly to the right and reformed the firing line.

  “On my command!” he yelled, waiting until he could at least see something at which they could aim. At the limit of his vision, he saw multiple flashes of blue. Suhs counted to three, giving just enough time that a horde of blue-skinned warriors burst through the wood, wielding muskets as clubs and screaming like a child’s worst nightmare.

  “Fire!”

  The company did as ordered and delivered a volley of lead balls into the oncoming Neldathi. A few of them were hit and felled instantly, like enormous stands of autumn wheat. Others staggered as they were struck by a musket ball, but they did not stop.

  Suhs knew they had no hope of holding the line. The other flank was in similar chaos, so even if they managed to hold the Neldathi in front of them, they would swiftly be overrun from the rear. There was only one further order to give.

  “Retreat!” he yelled. “Make for Dugald, men! Mamur herself is on your heels!” It was hard to tell if the men actually followed his orders or simply acted on instinct. It was time to run, to run for their lives. Suhs followed his own order, turned, and sprinted towards the edge of the woods.

  The sight he saw once he cleared the wood, on the snowy plain leading back to the river, chilled his bones. There was a mass of uniformed men, some still clutching muskets but many having thrown them down as excess weight, running raggedly for the safety of Fort Dugald. Off in the distance, Suhs could see a single rider, accompanied by a second riderless horse, in a full gallop heading for the fort. It was impossible for Suhs to tell if it was one of the remaining Sentinels or part of the regular army. Regardless, he would help get the gates open and sound the call of attack to all the others in the fort.

  Trailing the ragged band was two to three times their number in Neldathi warriors. Hulking and shrieking their incomprehensible war cries, they drove the frightened men before them. Their size and sluggishness meant they were unlikely to catch any of the soldiers, save for those that stumbled or fell to the frozen ground, but that made them no less frightening. Suhs looked back over his shoulder and made sure the Neldathi behind him were not gaining any ground. Then he saw another of his company trip and flail to the ground just a few yards away from him, only to be set upon by three Neldathi with bayonets.

  Suhs looked back again and what he saw this time was far worse. Throughout the ordeal on the plateau and in the woods, there had been no sight of the oddity that drove them to this place initially, the Neldathi horsemen. Now he saw them, four or five groups of three riders each, blasting through their brothers chasing on foot. They rode colossal steeds that bore their weight with ease. Their massive hooves threw dirt, snow, and muck into the air with each step as they tracked down the fleeing soldiers.

  Suhs turned his head around and focused on the fort. Focused on the one place that would be safe in all this carnage. He saw the gate swing open just long enough for the one man on horseback to slip through, then it closed again behind him. “No,” he said to himself, “they wouldn’t….”

  He kept running even though his legs and back burned from exhaustion. He kept his eyes fixed on the fort, except to glance over his shoulder every few moments to se
e if any of the horsemen had come for him. They had not, at least not yet.

  The fort was only a few hundred feet away. From inside its walls he heard the first reports of rifle fire, shouting out raggedly from the gun ports on the second level. They were not very well coordinated and weren’t having much of an impact. Suhs knew they could do little except pick a few Neldathi off their pursuit. The riflemen in the fort were meant to deal with scouts and small raiding parties, not fend off forces of this size.

  He strode for the gate, each footfall bringing him a few feet closer to safety, but it remained closed. He was not the first to reach it, and lent his voice to the others already there, pounding on the heavy wood of the gate with fists and musket butts. “Open up!” he yelled. “For the love of our families, open this gate!” There was no response.

  Suhs began to realize that there was no problem of communication, no strategic reason to hold the gate shut until some future time. In his stomach, there was a sinking feeling that those outside the gate were to be left there. Rather than turn and face whatever might be behind him, Suhs broke and ran towards the right side of the fort. He wanted to get out of the chaos in front of the gate to better survey the situation. He ran until he could see the observation towers rising up out of the snowy plain.

  He turned and saw the man who had been on the horse that slipped in through the gate while it was open. He was in the observation tower, in frantic discussions with others, one of whom ran from the room with great urgency. Suhs could see now.

  The man was a Sentinel. He had been let in because he had valuable information that needed to be broadcast back north of the Water Road. The rest of them were cover. “They left us here to die,” Suhs said to himself. “Left us here…”