by David Weber
“’Preciate that, M’lord,” Slaytyr said, and Ahlverez looked at his aide.
“See to it that we feed Master Slaytyr a good hot meal, too, Lynkyn. Then get him bedded down. By the time you’ve done that, I’ll have drafted the letter to Duke Harless.”
* * *
I feel almost guilty, Merlin Athrawes realized with a certain bemusement.
His PICA’s transformation back from Zhapyth Slaytyr’s gray hair and brown eyes was nearly complete, and he glanced over his shoulder at the pair of well-laden pack mules following obediently along behind his horse. In another twenty minutes or so, he’d be far enough out from the Army of Shiloh to feel comfortable summoning the stealthed air lorry, despite the wet, cloudy daylight.
I’ll be damned if that bastard Ahlverez might not have an actual human being hiding somewhere inside, he thought, then cautioned himself against an excess of fancifulness. Given how little love there was between Ahlverez and Harless, it was entirely possible the Dohlaran’s consideration for a commonly born Siddarmarkian had more to do with planting one in Harless’ eye than any sudden effusion of human kindness. Still.…
It was possible he and Nahrmahn were being overly clever this time, but it was definitely worth a try, and Nahrmahn had become extremely fond of an ancient Old Earth aphorism: “If you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying hard enough.” By Merlin’s estimate, Ruhsyl Thairis’ strategy had an excellent chance of success as it stood, but it never hurt to nudge the odds along.
Which was exactly what “Colonel Bryahn Kyrbysh’s” wyvernborne messages to the Duke of Harless should do.
NOVEMBER
YEAR OF GOD 896
.I.
Fort Tairys The South March Lands, Republic of Siddarmark
“Took them long enough,” Duke Eastshare murmured to himself, looking down from the same hilltop from which he’d watched the bombardment of Fort Tairys.
The hilltop was still the same; Ohadlyn’s Gap was not. A lot had changed in the four five-days since the fort had fallen.
For starters, he’d been reinforced by Colonel Maikel Stywyrt’s 2nd Glacierheart Volunteers, who’d arrived via the Branath Canal with the anticipated convoy of ammunition and additional thirty-pounders, and the Siddarmarkian 10th Independent Brigade, coming overland from Siddar City. His total strength was now almost thirty-four thousand; within two five-days, it would be forty-two thousand, and when the 3rd Infantry and the rest of his dragoons arrived, it would reach seventy thousand, not that he had any intention of letting the Army of Shiloh know that.
In the meantime, the fort’s broken walls had been further demolished by Charisian engineers, copiously supplied with blasting charges and ably assisted by the Glacierheart miners, until only a few broken tiers of brick rose from drifts of rubble. None were over four or five feet high, and by a strange coincidence, none of them ran from east to west. The earthworks which had previously guarded the fort’s southern approaches—and those guarding the Gap as a whole from the east—had been assaulted by the same energetic workers (aided by thousands of Shilohian volunteers eager to swing a shovel or a pick) and either leveled or incorporated into an entirely new set of south-facing works.
Eastshare was too sane to try holding the vast, sprawling defensive works Walkyr had thrown up. Instead, Major Lowayl had designed a very different set of fortifications just north of the fort’s tattered ruins.
Walkyr’s works—which had demonstrated his own lack of professional training—had been walls, straight across the Gap, with precious little in the way of flanking fire. Lowayl had been granted insufficient time to start from scratch, using all the new techniques which had been worked out by the ICA’s engineers and artillerists, but the product of his labors was still … formidable.
He’d incorporated two of Walkyr’s earthen curtainwalls into the new defenses, but he’d added simple bastions—triangular secondary works in front of the curtains—at regular intervals, well supplied with artillery to sweep the faces of adjoining bastions and the curtain between them. Walkyr’s covering ditches had also been improved to offer advanced, covered firing positions for infantry, though there’d been no time to build a proper glacis, and Lowayl had built covered wooden bridges as protected routes by which that infantry might retreat into the main work if the enemy broke into the ditch. And, of course, the bridges could be burned to prevent attackers from making use of them. Mortar pits had been dug at regular intervals behind the curtains, multiple firing positions well to the rear had been prepared for Colonel Celahk’s angle-guns, and corduroyed roads ensured that the heavy angles could be moved rapidly between them, despite the soft, saturated earth. The Temple Loyalists’ abatises had also been salvaged for reuse, and given the shorter frontage of Eastshare’s works, provided a far denser and more formidable barrier before the ditch.
The line across the Gap ran for almost twenty-two miles, reaching up into the foothills proper where its ends were anchored by a pair of redoubts, each provided with its own artillery, although on a rather less lavish scale than the main position. On the extreme left of his line, the Gray Walls Redoubt covered the trail by which Wyllys’ infantry had joined 1st Brigade for the final assault on the fort. That was the only really practical route for a significant body of troops; Eastshare had made certain of that, sending out scout snipers with local guides to survey every cow and lizard path within thirty miles. The redoubt blocked the only one that seriously concerned him, but he’d placed pickets with generous supplies of landmines to cover all of them. He wouldn’t want anyone spoiling his surprise for Harless and Ahlverez, now would he?
Taken all in all, it was a far more challenging obstacle than Walkyr had managed, manned by a far better armed and trained garrison and with the most lethal artillery in the world to support it. Which was probably just as well, given that the oncoming Army of Shiloh still consisted of over one hundred and seventy thousand men with hundreds of less lethal but still deadly artillery pieces in support.
The vanguard of that enormous army was crawling up the Gap as Eastshare watched, and he wondered if Duke Harless was stupid enough to try a quick assault. It seemed unlikely. He’d read Earl Hanth’s reports describing the bungled night assault on Thesmar, and he found it difficult to imagine that any general who’d lost so many men so uselessly would attempt the same maneuver twice. Still, one could always hope.
Don’t get too full of yourself, Ruhsyl, he reminded himself. If they ever do punch through anywhere, there’re more than enough of them to swamp you, at least until Symkyn comes up with the 3rd. Not only that, but unlike Walkyr’s clowns, they’ve got at least some trained siege engineers over there.
All of that was true, and he had no intention of becoming overconfident or allowing any of his subordinates to fall into the same error. Still, the truth was that he was rather counting on those engineers. Their expertise was sadly out-of-date, but they probably didn’t know that yet, and the weather actually seemed to be improving a bit—colder, but with longer breaks between bouts of rain. That would offer them significantly better conditions to conduct operations against his position, and he devoutly hoped they’d do just that for at least the next three or four five-days.
* * *
Sir Rainos Ahlverez stood beside his horse, training the heavy spyglass on the heretics’ works, and hoped none of his subordinates could see his expression. From what he could see, Colonel Kyrbysh’s wyvern messages had actually understated the situation.
Anything which might have offered cover for troops advancing towards the heretics had been carefully demolished. Heaps of broken brickwork showed where the fort had once been, but it had been even more completely wrecked than Alyksberg after the garrison blew up their magazines. The heretics obviously had no interest in holding those ruins, and that was more than enough to give him pause. It said things he didn’t really want to hear about their attitude towards what had once been one of the most formidable fortifications in the entire Republic of Siddarmark.
Bastions had been a feature of permanent fortifications for centuries, but not on this scale. They’d been incorporated into castles, usually in the form of towers rather than these low-lying gun platforms, and they’d been close together because missile weapons had been short-ranged and cannon had been huge, bulky, slow-firing, and clumsy. Only a certified lunatic would have depended on old-style artillery to beat off determined infantry—that was what bows, arbalests, and matchlocks had been for, and none of them had been effective at anything over a hundred yards. Everyone had known that, which at least partly explained—it did not excuse, for nothing could do that—Harless’ assault at Thesmar. He’d known the new artillery and rifles were more deadly, but it had been an intellectual awareness, one which hadn’t yet penetrated deeply enough to displace old habits and old calculations.
But these works seemed to bristle with artillery. He was positive there were plenty of firing positions for riflemen, but it was the artillery that truly frightened him. It looked as if those bastions were as much as four thousand yards apart at their greatest separation. That was far too great a range for matchlocks and old-style artillery, but the heretics had demonstrated that their guns could reach that far with deadly effectiveness.
He lowered the spyglass, his mouth grim. He’d wondered why the heretics hadn’t tried to delay them in the Kyplyngyr Forest. He’d found that especially puzzling in light of the skill with which Eastshare, the heretic commander, had used the same sort of terrain against Bishop Militant Cahnyr in July. Now he understood. There’d been no point in digging in among the trees, where it was always possible someone could find an open flank and get around it, no matter how tangled the terrain might be. Not once Fort Tairys had fallen and one had such a lovely defensive position as Ohadlyn’s Gap, which offered no flanks at all. Harless and Hankey were still talking about pushing infantry around the heretics through the hills, but Ahlverez had never had much faith in the possibility. He had even less now. A commander who’d chosen that position and erected those fortifications hadn’t left any spider-rat holes someone could use against him. Not even Zhapyth Slaytyr seemed able to get through now, and Ahlverez was far from eager to play catch-as-catch-can in the hills with the “scout snipers” who’d wrought such carnage on Bishop Militant Cahnyr’s troops.
No, he thought. This Eastshare’s got Shan-wei’s own cork in this bottle, and I understand exactly what the devious bastard had in mind. Unfortunately for him, he’s got an unanticipated little problem of his own now, doesn’t he?
Hennet’s cavalry were, indeed, ranging north along the Branath Canal, although Eastshare had been too canny to leave pickets out where Hennet could get at them. In fact, the whole time he’d been using the canal to move his troops south, he’d been using the same barges to move civilians north, out of harm’s way, on the return trip. And he’d been very thorough … just as he’d been thorough about emptying every barn and granary between Kharmych and Fort St. Klair. It sounded very much as if Eastshare’s troops could have given even the Faithful lessons in how to strip a countryside bare of anything that might support an invading army. Starvation and disease among the besiegers had been the bane of too many sieges as supplies ran out. Eastshare had obviously intended to deploy those weapons against the Army of Shiloh, and Ahlverez was unhappily certain that the already parlous state of that army’s supplies was about to get even worse far more quickly than Harless expected.
But that works both ways, doesn’t it? he told himself. And Eastshare got just a little too clever this time. Not that knowing about his problems does much about ours, and we’re heading into the middle of winter. A lot milder winter than anything farther north, but still winter, and too many of Harless’ troops’re already ready to eat their boots and belts. It’s going to get worse—a lot worse—with the way Eastshare’s stripped the countryside, and we’re damned near nine hundred miles from Thesmar. How the hell are the frigging Desnairians supposed to haul supplies nine hundred miles overland when they’ve got less than half—hell, less than a third—of the wagons they need? An army that depends on foragers needs to keep moving, needs to keep advancing into territory that hasn’t been stripped of food, and that’s exactly what Eastshare’s counting on.
He and Baron Tymplahr had done what they could, but even the secondary route along the St. Alyk was … inefficient, at best. Yet even while they worked to improve their own logistics, the Desnairians’ got only worse. They were losing scores of draft dragons to exhaustion, overwork, and hunger, and each one they lost took another bite out of their transport capacity. Worse, even the portion of their supply line being managed by the Church was in disarray. The heretics had total control of the Gulf of Jahras, and the miserable excuse of a “high road” around its western shore had been cut in at least six places. All shipments from Desnair now had to cross the southern lobe of the Gulf of Dohlar, and to make bad worse, two of those damnable armored ships had arrived in Silkiah Bay. They’d closed the eastern end of the Salthar Canal, requiring every ton of supplies to travel almost sixty miles overland between the Salthar and the Silk Town-Thesmar Canal, which required still more draft animals and wagons.
Wherever he looked, Harless’ ability to supply his troops was eroding still further, and there was only so much assistance even a wizard like Tymplahr could provide. They couldn’t—they simply could not—adequately feed this many men and this many animals under these conditions.
At the very least they should send as much cavalry as possible back to Thesmar. They needed to retain some of it, if only for flank security, but it would be virtually useless in any sort of siege, and each damned horse ate ten times as much as a man. Surely even Hankey and Hennet had to realize that!
Don’t count on it, Rainos, he thought glumly. Hennet’ll swell up like a swamp hopper in mating season if you even suggest sending his precious horsemen to the rear. Obviously the only reason you’d be suggesting it would be to see to it that the despicable infantry—your infantry—gets the glory for securing the gateway to Shiloh while he gets left out in the cold.
He sighed, and admitted that he’d have been thinking in much the same patterns not so very long ago. Of course, he wasn’t Desnairian. That meant he could learn from experience when it hit him over the head with a heavy enough club.
Time to sit down with Shulmyn, he told himself. When Harless’ men get hungry enough, they’re going to expect us to feed them. Sir Borys is hopelessly out of his depth, even with Kahsimahr working himself to death trying to cover for him. So as the only quartermaster with a clue as to what he’s doing, it’ll all come down on Shulmyn when the situation starts going into—further into—the crapper.
He grimaced at the unfairness of expecting his own quartermaster to shoulder such a burden, but pretending he had any alternative would be stupid. And at least they’d have the St. Alyk River open for barge traffic, despite the formidable obstacles, in another five-day or so. That would help a lot. Whether it would help enough was a very different question, however, and it was entirely possible they’d finally encountered a problem not even the redoubtable Sir Shulmyn Rahdgyrz could solve. But if he couldn’t solve it, no one could, which meant that fair or not, Ahlverez was going to have to ask him to do it.
And, he reminded himself, the Army of Shiloh’s quartermasters weren’t the only ones having problems.
He raised his spyglass once more, glowering at those fortifications, and treasured those wyvernborne messages.
You pl
anned to sit there behind those earthworks with your own provisions arriving securely through Maidynberg while we starved out here at the end of our so-called supply line, but a sword has two edges, my heretical friend, he thought grimly, and you shouldn’t have let Kyrbysh get away. Now we’ll just see who starves first!
.II.
