"It is a problem I see no answer to," Hulagar replied.
"Yet it must be answered," Jubadi replied. He looked down at the sword in his hand, the blade burnished, the leather of the grip rewrapped and fresh, and then he looked back across the river.
The forest started to lighten, and looking overhead Jubadi saw the gray clouds thinning, a patch of blue appearing for a moment.
He smiled.
"Storm's lifting."
Hulagar nodded, turning his face upward as a thin shaft of sunlight filtered through the trees. The smells here were so different. Unlike the endless sea of grass, here it was dank, rich with damp earth, trees that never shed their thin needles. He could not decide if he liked the smell or not.
"Ground should start drying out tomorrow; we'll be able to move up."
"I want us across the river within seven days," Jubadi announced, looking out on the flood-swollen river. "I don't trust these Yankees to stay beaten for long."
"Is everyone here?" Andrew asked, looking around the nave of the cathedral.
Kal nodded wearily, motioning for the guards to close the doors. Outside, the square was in turmoil. Casualty lists had at last been posted, and the screams of lamentation echoed through the building even as the oaken doors slammed shut. Three Suz-dalian regiments had been entirely wiped out—fifteen hundred men gone in an instant. Similar lists were going up throughout Rus, and panic was in the air.
"A hard day out there," Casmar said. Rising, he offered his blessing to the assembly of officers and senators, all going to their knees except the non-Catholic New Englanders and Marcus.
Andrew nodded his thanks and stepped before the group, looking around the church.
A strange place to be holding a council of war, but the Senate Hall had been hit by an airship only the hour before. If the timing had been slightly different they might have succeeded in annihilating the high command in one stroke. The high stain-glassed windows, depicting the lives of the Saints, of Kesus, shone with a soft translucent light, the church smelling of thousands of candles and incense burned down through the centuries. It had stood as the focal point of the Rus since they had come through the tunnel of light nearly eight hundred years before. Its time was finished.
"You all know that we are in serious trouble," Andrew began.
The men were silent.
"I fully expect that even if we fight it out on the Neiper we will lose that position as well—it is far less defendable than the Potomac. After that, I expect they will invest this city. They will have artillery unlike the Tugars. Even if we hold against that, it is only the middle of spring. The first harvest will not be in for months, and when it does come in it will be in their hands and not ours. We might hold out here for weeks, maybe even for months. But in the end ..." and his voice trailed off.
"And what about Novrod, Kev, Vyzama, all the other cities of the Rus?" a senator shouted from the back of the room. "Are you saying that Suzdal will be defended, and we will be left outside to fend for ourselves?"
Andrew held up his hand, nodding in agreement.
"I will not do that. To start with, all the Rus could not possibly hide in the city. Second, I will not ask regiments of Kev to abandon their city and defend this capital. We built fortifications around those cities in case a raiding group should break through. But if we try to defend all the cities, they will simply reduce them one by one."
The men looked at Andrew with open curiosity.
"Then what are you saying?" the senator replied.
"I propose to evacuate all of Rus, and move it east before the Merki arrive. All noncombatants will be shipped to Roum—half a million people. Marcus Licinius Graca has come back here to voice his agreement to this, to offer shelter, food for our people. All involved with the army, or who can work in any way, will be moved to our eastern borders of the White Hills, where we will make our next stand outside Kev. Anything we can use will go with us, that which they can use we will destroy. All factories will be torn apart. The tools, the engines, even the raw material will go with us, and will be rebuilt, if need be, in the open fields and kept working. Anything we can eat—cows, pigs, grain—all will go, and that which we cannot take will be destroyed. The wells we'll poison, we'll sow the ground with traps. We'll leave them nothing. With our navy the river, the sea, will still be ours, and we'll harry their every movement. The army will fight it out on the Neiper and buy the time for the rest to escape, to rebuild and to fight again. I am asking for two weeks from all of you, to give our people that time to escape.
And when we are gone what we leave behind will be a wasteland, in which those bastards will starve!"
Pandemonium broke out in the cathedral, and Andrew stood silently. He looked over at John Mina, with Ferguson and Bob Fletcher by his side. John stared straight ahead, not saying anything.
Andrew held up his hand and the room fell silent.
"It is the only alternative. We cannot hold the Neiper. I realize now that my dream of holding the Potomac was a vain hope as well."
He paused, waiting for the condemnation, the bitter recriminations to echo forth. He had already resolved within himself that if they came he would tender his resignation.
The room was silent. He looked into the eyes of all his generals, the ones whom he and Hans had elevated, to the senators he had created in writing a constitution, and at last to Kal, who had quietly risen from his chair to stand beside him.
"Lead us, Andrew Lawrence Keane," Kal said, his voice cold and clear, "Lead us and we shall follow."
The church was silent, and Andrew looked over at Father Casmar.
"Lead us, and I will follow."
He turned his gaze back to the others. Marcus stepped forward and grasped his hand. The men looked at him, grim-faced, filled with coldness, as if they had heard a call to battle. They came to their feet—first one, and then in seconds the entire assembly—and a cheer of defiance rang out. Andrew turned away, blinded by tears.
Chapter 8
"All of your ideas were easily stated," John Mina said, "but I do hate to be the one who starts to throw the cold water."
Andrew struggled to keep from falling asleep. The grandfather clock in the parlor ticked in slow rhythmic time. He picked up the hot tea that Kathleen had placed on the side table by his chair and took a sip. The parlor was almost too warm, for the fire in the stove which had been lit to drive out the cool chill of evening had made the room feel stuffy.
He unbuttoned the collar of his shirt, glad to be out of the heavy woolen uniform and vest. Outside, in the town square of their little New England village in the heart of Suzdal, all was quiet. The mass meeting had gone smoothly enough, the men and their families going back home in silence. Ten of the men lost with Hans had families, and their homes were now dark. He tried not to think about the simple log cabin on the other side of the square, where he had spent many an evening in quiet talk. A guard was at the door, the inside dark and cold. He'd have to go over there to decide what should be done with the personal effects. He pushed the thought out of his mind. There was too much to worry about to allow grief to creep back in.
He had told them that all of it was lost, that they were to abandon their homes, which they had built with such a loving recreation of an older life, and go east into an unknown fate.
He looked around the room at his old friends, the companions who had been with him in this adventure from the beginning: Pat, John, Emil, Vincent, Chuck Ferguson, Kal, the staff officers, and the two new leaders, Marcus and Hamilcar; and of course Kathleen, who sat down beside him.
"Throw all the cold water you want," Andrew replied. "That's part of your job, John, to tell me what we can and cannot do. But this time I'm telling you it has to be done."
"I know that, Andrew."
"Then tell me how we'll do it."
"We have sixty-six locomotives, and of all rolling stock just about eight hundred cars. That's what we'll have to base all of this on.
"In all of Ru
s the census counted just over three-quarters of a million people. That's increased somewhat since last year." He looked over at Hamilcar. "By about thirty thousand."
"About two hundred thousand of those people live within a hundred miles of Kev, with fifty thousand of those within twenty miles of the city. Except for the infirm and the old, I'm proposing that nearly all of them walk out."
"What about their provisions?" Emil asked.
"I'll get to that, doctor," John said wearily.
"It means we'll have to move at least five hundred and fifty thousand people by rail. I'm proposing that we do it in two steps. We go first to Kev—that'll put us two hundred and fifty miles east of here. From there, we'll stage all noncombatants the rest of the distance to Roum." "Two hundred and fifty miles can be covered by the Horde in five days," Hamilcar said coldly.
"On what?" Andrew asked. "They expect to live off the land when they get here; if we turn it into a desert as we leave, it'll make that somewhat more difficult."
"You can't burn green grass," Hamilcar replied.
Andrew nodded in agreement.
"They'll have a million horses with their army. John, what does it take to keep one horse going?"
"I remember hearing that for one of our regular-size horses, not the monsters we have here, that it comes out to about twenty-five acres a year. I'd say at least thirty, maybe thirty-five acres of prime pasture land."
"They'll not be quartering for a year," Emil said quietly. "They just need to cut through us. Seventy pounds of hay a day for horses that size will do it."
"A million horses, four hundred thousand warriors, four hundred guns, all funneling in through Suzdal," Andrew said forcefully. "And remember, this is not just an army marching, it's an entire people, a Volkswanderung."
"A what?" Pat asked.
"A people movement," Emil said. "You know, like the Huns. Women, children, old people, wagons, everything."
"Another million horses with them as well, at the very least," Andrew added.
"They'll eat horse flesh. The Tugars refused that, but I think these people know better now."
"Two thousand horses a day, if there isn't any other foodstuff available. It'll start to hurt fairly quick, if we can slow them down. They can't abandon their yurts, so they'll have to keep those beasts of burden alive. It'll come out of their remounts."
"Even with the sweet grass of spring," Pat said, a glimmer of optimism in his eyes, "ten horses will eat through an acre of this farmland in a day. It'll drop off like mad, maybe down to an acre a horse in a couple of months."
"A hundred thousand acres a day, just for the army mounts, a million acres a day by midsummer," Andrew said, a thin smile lighting his drawn features.
"You still haven't answered my earlier objection," Hamilcar said, barely giving his translator time to work. "They can still rush a dozen umens across the entire length of Rus in five or six days, then smash into the disorganized mass around Kev."
He lowered his voice.
"It'll be a slaughter."
Everyone looked at Andrew.
"They'll be slowed down. You can be sure of that."
Andrew's tone was emphatic.
"How?"
"It'll be done," he replied, his manner indicating that the topic was closed.
"They'll continue to feed off my people," Hamilcar said angrily.
Andrew looked over at the Cartha leader, unable to say anything, still ashamed of the slaughter on the Potomac.
"I'm still in the fight, though," Hamilcar said quietly.
"If we hold the river with our ironclads, even after we retreat it'll force them to go further upstream to cross, and the river road will be untenable. They'll have to cut another road entirely through the woods for fifty or more miles to move their wagons up."
"And our food?" Emil asked.
Andrew looked back to John hopefully.
"With the trains I have, we can move eighty thousand people a day to Kev, each with ten pounds of belongings.
"I estimate that we have approximately a ninety-day supply of food in all of Rus at this moment. Roughly one hundred thousand tons of food—that's counting everything on hoof or in the barns. Considering the bulk, it comes out to at least six hundred trainloads."
John shuffled his notes for a moment.
"Well need at least thirty days to move everything by rail, just for the people and food up to Kev. But there is one hell of a lot more. We have all the tools and machinery from the iron mills, foundries, shot works, the locomotive yard, and sawmills. And I recommend all farm tools as well, if we wish to survive—and if, on the off chance, we win.
"I figure forty days of trains running nonstop can do it, and that's assuming that every locomotive keeps on running. We cut a lot of wood this winter, but I'm not sure it'll be enough. And we've only converted six of the engines to coal-burning."
The room was silent.
"And after that, Andrew, don't forget the army. We'll need to keep the river posted throughout, and when the line finally breaks all rolling stock will be needed to get the army out. That is, if we want an army and its equipment, which we've worked three years to build. Just to get the field artillery out will take every flatcar for two days. Another day for guns emplaced in the cities."
"What about the navy?" Bullfinch asked.
"Every ironclad will be on the river or patrolling the sea," Andrew said.
"The galleys?"
"If we land them further up the coast, we could evacuate all my people and some of the Rus living nearby," Hamilcar said.
Andrew nodded his thanks.
"Then we start tomorrow," Andrew said. "Those that can start to walk out will do so. Children, mothers with infants, anyone over sixty, the infirm, all the wounded—they go out by rail starting tomorrow morning."
"Jesus, Andrew, we have no contingency plans for this type of thing. It'll take days to figure it out."
"We don't have days!" Andrew snapped. "You just said it."
"It'll get tangled as hell. These people won't have a place to live in Kev."
"Then stage off several trains, take the dormitory cars the rail workers used, and start running them all the way up to Roum right off. If we did that, we could get at least a hundred thousand up to Roum in thirty days."
John nodded in agreement.
"First step is to load on all food after the first wave of evacuees. Though I hate to do this, Mr. President, I'm going to declare military law as of this moment."
Kal smiled.
"I assumed it."
"We have to. All food will have to be pooled. Webster, you and Gates start printing up voucher forms tonight. I'm nationalizing all food. Everyone will receive a receipt, and after this is over we'll try and sort out compensation. When a farm is cleared out, the farmer and his family start walking east. If there's room on a train, we take them out."
"There goes capitalism," Webster sighed, bringing rueful smiles to the group.
"We tear down the factories. If we lose the tools and the machines, we lose the war. Once the factories are torn down they receive top priority—all the workers and families still here go out on the trains with them. We don't want those people getting separated from their equipment, since they'll be the only ones who know how to put it back together.
"Finally, we pick up everything else that we can move. Wagons and their teams, even the rails from the tracks, and then the army, when it can no longer hold."
"It'll have to be done in three weeks," Andrew said softly, looking back at John. "I can't even promise you ten days, but we'll try to hold longer."
John said nothing.
"And if they break through before we are done?" Casmar asked.
"The priorities stand," Andrew whispered. "As we organize, noncombatants go first, then food as it's moved in, and the factories once they're torn down, and finally the army and what's left. If they break through before that, the army goes out first along with the factories, and the rest will have to mov
e to Kev by foot."
Casmar nodded and said nothing.
"Fire the cities," Emil said quietly.
"Moscow?" Andrew said hesitantly.
He looked around the room.
"No," he whispered. "Cities are useless to these people. Maybe something of what we have will still be standing when it's over at last."
He looked around his home, realizing for the first time what he had ordered and how it applied to himself. The clock ticking in the corner, the desk carved by a Rus peasant and left on his doorstep one morning, the simple plates in the kitchen, even the jewelry box, the one he had given to Kathleen so long ago, when they had first walked the streets of Suzdal together. All of this, left behind. He struggled with the thought for a moment and looked over at Kathleen, their hands touching.
"Emil, I want you to go out tomorrow to Kev with all the wounded. Start setting up a hospital there, and organize sanitation. Fletcher, you go with him—you're responsible for organizing food storage and distribution. We'll need to get warehouses up to store everything."
For once, there was no argument from the doctor.
Andrew looked over at Kathleen.
"Maddie and I leave when you do," she whispered. He said nothing, and squeezed her hand.
"There is a final point," Andrew said. "This is to be done in secret. The Merki are not to know until they cross the river and get in here."
"A hell of an order, Andrew," Kal said. "What with them damned aerosteamers buzzing about."
"That is a point," John said. "We had some defenses along the military railroad down to the Potomac, but past the Novrod turnoff the road is empty for miles. Once they get wind they can swoop in, bomb a section, maybe even land and tear up a rail or two. One derailment could cripple the line for a day or more."
Andrew looked over at Chuck.
"You flew a machine last week?"
"Well, sir, Jack was the pilot."
"I knew all along you'd go up, in spite of my orders," Andrew said, a note of reproach in his voice. "Is it ready to fight?"
"We're still getting some minor problems ironed out."
Terrible Swift Sword Page 28
