For a few moments, confusion reigned down below. Winter could see men on horseback galloping back and forth, presumably the Hamveltai colonel and his officers. Orders went out, even as the shot continued to fall, and after no more than a few minutes the columns began to advance up the hill. With no guns of his own, the Hamveltai commander could either retire out of range or advance and silence the troublesome battery. As Winter had hoped, he’d chosen the latter course.
What he was not doing, she saw, was deploying into line as he came on. That was less encouraging. Tactics manuals said that all attacks should be delivered in line, but the long, cumbersome formation was difficult at best in rough ground like the woods. She’d hoped the Hamveltai would stick to their doctrine and get bogged down, on ground that would favor the Girls’ Own and their skirmish tactics. Clearly, though, the enemy intended to simply bash ahead by sheer numbers, not bothering with the niceties of a firefight.
On the other hand, the tighter confines of the columns gave Archer’s guns a better target, and as the range shrank the cannonade began to inflict serious damage. Yellow-clad bodies littered the slope, and a well-aimed shot could plunge through an entire column, snatching a dozen men out of the ranks and laying them in pieces on the hillside. Hamveltai discipline held, however, and they kept to their formations in spite of the pounding they were taking.
Bobby returned, with Abby and Jane at her side. Behind them came the women of the Girls’ Own, those who’d kept up on the march and were still fit enough to fight. They spread out along the edge of the woods, not attempting any kind of formation but taking whatever cover they could find among the trees and rocks. Folsom led his company to the area where Winter and the other officers were standing, offering a cursory salute before turning to his rankers and assigning positions. The soldiers looked grim, and their new blue uniforms were travel-stained, but Winter was glad to see determination in their faces. After coming this far, they won’t break easily.
But anyone could break in the face of overwhelming numbers. Winter turned to Abby and Jane.
“Remember the plan,” she said. “Stand as long as you can, but give ground when they push too hard. No heroics.” Not yet, anyway.
Abby nodded. “We’ll bleed them.”
“That’s all we need.” Winter turned to Bobby. “Find Archer and tell him to give them one round of canister at a hundred yards, then pull back. I don’t want him around when it comes to musket range.”
Bobby saluted and rushed off again.
“Speaking of musket range,” Jane said, looking at the approaching Hamveltai. “You should be moving back, don’t you think?”
Winter chewed her lip. She was right, of course. Once the fighting started, here in the woods, there was nothing she would be able to do, no meaningful control she’d be able to exert over the battle. All she could do was put herself in danger, and risk disorganizing the whole regiment if she was injured or killed. But I can’t just leave them.
Jane seemed to read all that in her expression. She gave a crooked smile and put a hand on Winter’s shoulder.
“Go back,” she said. “We can handle things here.”
“Sevran might need you to hold his hand,” Abby said.
“All right, all right,” Winter said. “But I mean it when I say no heroics, all right?” She caught Jane’s eye. Be safe. Please.
“Understood, sir.”
They both saluted, though in Jane’s case it felt as though the gesture was a little mocking. Winter turned and hurried back through the forest, where the Girls’ Own were still filing into position, picking out positions, and loading their muskets. Broad paths had been chopped from the underbrush, leading from Archer’s guns back through the woods. It would still be rough going, and Winter hoped the cannoneers would be smart enough save themselves and leave their pieces behind if they got stuck.
Too late to give orders on that subject now, though. She emerged, blinking, into the meadow on the other side of the woods, and found the Royals drawn up in a solid line of blue in front of her. With so many lost or straggling on the road, they made a very thin line, sometimes only one man deep, but it was still an impressive sight. Sevran, mounted, rode along the front of the formation inspecting their alignment. When he saw her, he waved to another officer, and a sergeant rode out with Edgar trailing behind him.
“Everything ready here?” Winter said.
“Ready, sir,” Sevran said. “They’re going to get a hell of a surprise if they make it this far.”
“Let’s hope it’s enough.” Surprise and terrain were what they had to work with, against superior numbers and training. “What about Captain Stokes?”
Sevran nodded to the end of the line of Royals, where the horsemen were assembling in a tight-packed mass. “Champing at the bit, as it were.”
“He’s sure he can get through the trees?”
“He rode through this morning and said it shouldn’t be a problem.”
Winter wasn’t sure she trusted Give-Em-Hell’s assessment of what was and was not a problem, but she had no alternative. She followed Sevran around the end of the line, to where the lieutenants, dismounted, stood behind their companies. Sergeants waited between them, and in the center a color party carried the Vordanai flag, surrounded by drummers poised to relay signals.
Turning back to the woods, Winter could see almost nothing, just the swaying branches of the closest trees. She closed her eyes and listened instead. In the distance, the racket of Janus’ fight was swelling, but it was drowned out by the closer booms of Archer’s guns. They’d have switched to canister by now, each shot spraying musket balls into the enemy ranks like an enormous shotgun. The lead ranks of Hamveltai would be cut down, but they’d come on, stepping over their dead like automata. Four hundred yards, three hundred, two hundred, one hundred . . .
The cannon fell silent. In their place, she heard the tearing rattle of musketry, a scatter of shots at first that quickly rose to a continuous roar. It was punctuated by clattering thunderclaps, the sound of a disciplined volley being delivered by trained troops. That would be the Hamveltai columns, finally able to fire on their tormentors. Then, barely audible over the shooting, Winter heard the skirl of drums and the shouts of men as they charged.
The woods began to boil with powder smoke, wisps of blue-gray tugged out of the trees by the steady wind. Muskets popped and clattered, and now they were mixed with screams and curses in more than one language. Women were dying in there, Winter knew, torn by musket balls or pierced with bayonets. Men in yellow were dying, too. And I can’t even see what’s happening. Her hands had gone tight, fingernails digging painfully into her palms.
Archer’s guns burst from the edge of the woods, first one and then the others, dragged by wild-eyed horses clearly glad to be away from the fighting. The mounted sergeant who’d brought Winter her horse waved them on, around one side of the Royals’ formation. Winter held her breath for a moment—if the Girls’ Own had given way completely, and the enemy was hard on the gunners’ heels, there would be a dangerous moment while the Royals’ fire was blocked by their own men. No yellowjackets appeared, however, and the firing went on in the woods. Muzzle flashes were visible now, coming steadily closer as the Girls’ Own fell back in the face of the more numerous Hamveltai.
Finally, women in blue uniforms started to emerge from the edge of the woods, stopping to fire one final last shot at fleeting forms in yellow, then running for the safety of the Royals’ line. Answering flashes came from among the trees, and one tall woman doubled over and crashed to the turf. The others kept running, and were joined by other companies, up and down the line. Winter saw Abby in the center, her sleeve damp with blood, waving her sword back toward the Royals.
“Open the line to pass skirmishers,” Winter said to Sevran.
The captain repeated the command, and the drums thrilled. The men of the Royals turned in place, ope
ning gaps as the Girls’ Own reached them to let the desperate, bloodied women through. They were all in the meadow now, and yellowjackets were starting to appear in pursuit. The fleeing women mostly obscured their view of the Royals, or else they saw the gaps in the Royals’ line and thought they were about to flee as well. Either way, they kept coming, pouring into the meadow, all formation lost in the vicious running battle in the woods.
The last of the Girls’ Own passed through the line, only thirty yards or so separating them from the closest yellowjackets.
“Close up,” Winter said, and at another drummed command the blue line straightened out, gaps shutting like slammed doors. The sight of them brought the Hamveltai up short, and here and there a musket popped. The yellowjackets hung in a strange limbo for a moment, too broken up to maneuver, not ready to charge that steady line but with their retreat blocked by their companions still coming out of the woods.
Winter drew her sword and slashed the air. “Fire!”
Even reduced to four hundred muskets, a battalion volley at close range was deafening. The balls cut through the mass of Hamveltai, dropping men by the score. The yellowjacket officers were shouting, but they’d lost control of their men. Some were attempting to load and fire back, others were edging backward, while still others simply milled in confusion, unable to see. They were still shuffling thirty seconds later, when another volley slammed out, tearing great holes in the yellow ranks.
By the third volley, they were joined by Archer, who’d gotten his guns turned around and loaded with double canister for close-range work. The combination of point-blank artillery fire and rapid musketry from the Royals convinced any yellowjackets who still had doubts that discretion was the better part of valor, and they poured back into the woods. Some ran; others took cover to load their weapons. Winter slashed the air again.
“Hold fire! Fix bayonets!”
The Royals, after loading another round, drew their bayonets and attached them to the lugs behind the barrels of their weapons. Archer’s guns fired one more time, flailing the brush with musket balls with explosions of splinters and falling branches.
“Charge!”
Four hundred men shouted and stormed forward, weapons lowered. Here and there, shots dropped a blue-uniformed soldier, but the yellowjackets didn’t stick around to be on the receiving end of the Vordanai bayonets. They ran, all cohesion lost, and the Royals plunged into the woods after them. Winter rode in their wake, walking Edgar down one of the trails they’d cut for the guns, until she could see out the other side. The Royals had stopped at the forest’s edge, as ordered, but the Hamveltai were still running, three solid columns of yellow converted into a mass of fleeing men no more capable of offering resistance than if they were unarmed. Winter turned her horse about and rode back to the meadow, where Give-Em-Hell was practically bouncing in his stirrups.
“It’s all yours,” she said. “Those Guardians are still in reserve, though, so you’re in for a fight.”
Give-Em-Hell didn’t bother to shout an order, only unsheathed his saber and pointed. He rode into the woods, and his men pounded after him, rank after rank of cavalry in gleaming cuirasses. Winter watched them disappear under the trees until the last had passed out of sight.
The Girls’ Own had gathered just behind where the Royals had been. Winter was pleased to see that none of them had kept on running, always a worry in any retreat. She sought out Abby, and to her relief found Jane by her side, winding a strip of bandage around her arm.
“Are you all right?” Winter said.
Abby grinned. “I wasn’t looking where I was going and ran into a tree.”
“Typical.” Jane tied off the bandage, tight enough that Abby squeaked.
“How was it?”
“Hot,” Abby admitted. “But we did all right.”
“They certainly lost a hell of a lot more than we did,” Jane said.
“They had more to lose,” Winter said. “Take another few minutes to rest, then get back into the woods. They may try this again, and in the meantime we should pull all the wounded back here.”
As if to compensate for not being where the fighting was hottest, Winter found herself helping with this latter task, scouring the underbrush and following the cries of the injured. There were, as Jane had said, many more dead and injured in yellow uniforms than blue, but there were plenty of both. Every rock and ditch had been a defensive position to be fought over, and she found dead yellowjackets drifted three or four deep at the base of a boulder. A young woman had climbed a tree to get a better shot, and gotten her leg stuck there when she was hit, so her corpse hung upside down with her arms dangling and loose hair drifting in the wind. A Hamveltai boy with his intestines coiled in a gory pile in his lap calmly asked in heavily accented Vordanai if Winter could please kill him. She drew her saber and cut his throat.
When Bobby found her, they had run out of wounded, and had turned to the task of extracting the corpses. Winter was holding the legs of an older woman while one of the Royals took her shoulders. One of her hands had flopped loose and trailed limply in the dirt.
“Sir!” Bobby said.
“What?” Winter stopped. “Are they coming back?”
“No, sir! It’s Give-Em-Hell!”
Winter waved over a nearby soldier to take up her burden and hurried back with Bobby to the edge of the woods. Yellowjacket corpses covered the slope of the hill, whole mangled rows of them lying where they’d been cut down by canister from Archer’s guns. Scattered bodies in blue lined the edge of the woods, where they’d been caught by answering volleys. The men and women tasked with retrieving them had stopped to watch the drama going on below.
Winter shaded her eyes with her hand, trying to make out what was happening. A large body of horsemen was in motion—that was Give-Em-Hell, the uniforms were blue, and the Vordanai flag snapped at their head. It was more of a disorganized mass than a formation, but it hung together, which was more than could be said for the Hamveltai cavalry. Yellow-clad riders galloped in every direction, escaping their blue pursuers, while riderless horses ran about and added to the confusion. A sprawling mass of dead and wounded men and animals marked the point where the two sides had first come together; evidently, the Hamveltai Guardians had not been as elite as they’d been made out to be.
As Winter watched, the Vordanai cavalry overran a line of guns that had been firing at the Vordanai on the hilltops. The cannoneers struggled to turn their pieces around and face the oncoming threat, but before they could get into firing position the cavalry was on top of them, sabers rising and falling. Panicked artillerymen fled, not just from that battery but from the guns on either side as well, and the horsemen rode on without a shot being fired at them. Ahead was the Hamveltai infantry, deployed into line for the final advance on the heights. Their officers saw the cavalry coming, and drums beat a frantic tattoo while the lines writhed and attempted to shape themselves into squares.
They didn’t make it. Artillery fire from Janus’ army was still coming hard and fast, sowing confusion and death in the Hamveltai ranks. When their men turned around, they could see the wreckage of the once-proud Guardians scattered across the field, and their own artillerymen running for their lives. The first battalion in the horsemen’s path had half completed its evolution into a bayonet-fringed square, and a ragged volley of musketry emptied a few saddles, but Give-Em-Hell’s men rode around the firm part of the formation and cut into it from the sides. Without the solidity of a line of bayonets, the foot soldiers were no match for the armored horsemen, and they knew it. A few moments of bloody saber-work, and the battalion was in full flight, scattered beyond any hope of recall. The two nearest Hamveltai units, still struggling to form their own squares, broke into panicked flight along with it as the men ignored the shouts of their officers and took to their heels.
Just like that, five hundred horsemen had put to flight five or six time
s their number. But the Hamveltai infantry were thick on the ground, and a canny commander might still have saved the situation. Before anyone could try, however, a wave of blue appeared at the crest of the hill, Vordanai infantry filing out into line and marching down to join their mounted countrymen. The artillery paused to let them pass, then thundered over their heads at the Hamveltai battalions that had managed to form square, wreaking havoc on such tight-packed targets.
It was too much. First one battalion began to crumble, then another, and then the entire Hamveltai flank fell to pieces before Winter’s astonished eyes. Ten thousand men, as finely trained and equipped as any army in the world, were converted in a moment into a fleeing, helpless mob. They overran their own guns and the few officers who tried to stop them, sitting helplessly on their horses amid the human flood. They didn’t try for long, as the Vordanai infantry broke into a charge, firing wildly into the mass of panicked enemy. Hundreds of yellowjackets, unable to get clear, were throwing down their weapons and waving frantically in surrender.
For a long moment, there was dead silence on the wooded ridge, among the piled dead.
“Sir?” Bobby said, stunned. “What just happened?”
“We won the battle,” Winter said.
There was still firing at the far end of the line, men fighting and dying for a cause they didn’t yet know was lost. Heavy columns of Vordanai infantry were marching down from the hills in that direction, in case they needed convincing.
Two women standing beside Winter let out a hesitant cheer, which was quickly joined a half dozen more. Moments later the whole forest was ringing with triumphant shouts, and bayonetted muskets waved in the air. Winter snatched off her cap and joined in, though in truth she was still too numb to feel much elation. In any case, once the celebration was done, there was still the grisly work of clearing out the corpses to attend to.
The Price of Valor Page 39
