“Get a runner back to Colonel Wyllys,” he told Zhaksyn. “They’re going to have that gap filled by sundown, and it’s going to be pouring by Langhorne’s Watch. If I were them, I’d come at us in the dark, when we don’t have the light to pick targets and the rain soaks our priming.”
* * *
Bishop Gorthyk Nybar, commanding officer, Langhorne Division, Army of God, clamped his jaws on the stem of his pipe, his expression grimly satisfied as he listened to the steady thudding of his guns and the crackle of rifles. It wouldn’t be long now.
He looked up at the clouds, then down at the map on the table, green eyes hard, and stroked his heavy cavalryman’s mustache thoughtfully. Langhorne was Bishop Militant Bahrnabai’s favorite division, and Nybar knew it. He also knew his men had earned that regard. They’d been the lead element of Wyrshym’s advance all the way down the Hildermoss River and the Guarnak-Sylmahn Canal. And it had been Nybar’s suggestion to build the rafts and tow them along with the barge loads of infantry and cavalry in order to turn the heretics’ strategy of flooding the Gap against them.
He was pleased, overall, with how well the Army of God in general and the Langhorne Division in particular had done, but that didn’t mean he was blind to some of the problems they’d turned up. Nor had he been surprised when they did turn up. The entire Army of God was less than two years old, and not even the archangels could have gotten everything right with so many new and radical weapons being introduced in such a short period of time.
The artillery organization seemed workable, although he wished the damned fuses were more reliable, but Vicar Allayn and his advisors had been unsure of how to balance the relative effectiveness of pikes and the newfangled rifles. In Nybar’s opinion, they’d gotten it wrong. Indeed, from what he’d heard, it sounded as if the Dohlarans, of all people, had come closest to getting it right, although that was at least partly because they’d been willing to settle for a much smaller total force while the Army of God had been determined to get as many men as possible under arms.
And it hadn’t hurt that the Dohlarans had possessed at least the core of an army, much of its infantry armed with matchlocks to begin with, while Mother Church hadn’t. The Temple Guard had provided her with some secular might, but it had been tiny compared to the needs of the Jihad—more of a police force than what anyone might have called an army, really—which had required her to massively expand her forces. Dohlar had increased its army by a much smaller amount, which meant a lower absolute number of rifles had sufficed to arm a far higher percentage of King Rahnyld’s total infantry.
Mother Church hadn’t enjoyed that luxury, and even though she’d been able to produce a far higher absolute number of rifles, she had a much lower percentage of them. Worse, the Temple Guard had been forced to split the limited number of experienced officers it did possess between the Army of God and the Navy of God … and until very recently, the navy had taken precedence. And even if that hadn’t been true, none of the officers who hadn’t been sent to sea (and largely lost when Bishop Kornylys’ fleet surrendered) had possessed the least experience in raising or officering a true army.
So Mother Church had begun more or less from scratch, and the truth was that Vicar Allayn and his advisors had done a much better job than Nybar had been afraid they might. It wasn’t perfect, not by a long chalk, but it worked, and experience was already suggesting ways in which it could be improved.
In Nybar’s opinion, the unit organization they’d adopted had the potential to be more flexible than the Dohlaran model and a lot more flexible than the Siddarmarkian model, once they could fix the problems with its armament. One of Mother Church’s divisions was about half again the size of a Dohlaran regiment, which gave it—or should have given it—considerably more punch. Unfortunately, half the men in each of the division’s sixteen companies were armed with pikes, not rifles and not matchlocks. He understood why Captain General Maigwair hadn’t wanted to co-mingle matchlocks, with their much shorter range, miserable rate of fire, and wretched accuracy, with the new rifles, but he’d come to the conclusion that combining pikes and firearms in the same companies had been a mistake. Pure companies—or even regiments—in which every man was equipped with the same weapon would have been more efficient than having a little bit of each piled together. Rifles were better than smoothbores, and flintlocks were better than matchlocks, but he personally would rather have seen entire four hundred and eighty-man regiments armed solely with matchlocks than to have half the platoons in each company carrying pikes. He knew the high percentage of pikemen was at least partly the result of the Army of God’s uncertainty about the ability of men armed with bayoneted rifles to hold off cavalry or opposing pikes. Until they’d had an opportunity to actually try the new weapons in the field, he’d entirely agreed that it was best to be cautious in that regard; now he realized they’d all been wrong, himself included, but it was too late to do anything about it … this year, at least.
And pikemen are just fine for dealing with the militia rabble we’ve been running into so far, he reminded himself. If we’d tried to equip everyone with a firearm, we’d’ve had no more than two-thirds our current manpower—probably less!—even if we’d used every matchlock we had, and that would leave us spread even thinner when it comes to securing our rear areas. So I can’t really argue with the decision to bring the pikes along; they just aren’t what we need for dealing with regulars—especially regulars with rifles of their own.
On the other hand, there were circumstances under which pikes could be decidedly useful, as he intended to demonstrate tonight.
He took the pipe from his mouth and blew a smoke ring, watching it drift away on the breeze, then bent back over the map. Hastings’ maps gave an infallibly accurate picture of the world on the Day of Creation, but fallen man and the forces of nature had been making changes ever since, and the inaccuracy of maps produced by mere mortals often hid all sorts of unpleasant surprises. The tree-dotted terrain here in the Sylmahn Gap offered more examples of that than Nybar could have wished, but his scouts had been correcting and amending his original maps throughout the army’s long advance from Lake City. He knew what the terrain immediately in front of them looked like, at any rate, and assuming Colonel Baikyr’s militiamen could be relied upon, his picture of the rest of the Gap south to Serabor ought to be more than adequate for his needs.
What mattered most was that once he got past Harystn there were no more belts of trees like the one the heretics had dug themselves into here. The Gap widened for the next forty miles or so, too, until it pinched back down to no more than five and a half or six miles twenty-five miles north of Serabor. If he were the heretics, that would be where he’d put his next strongpoint, and digging them out of there would be Shan-wei’s own bitch. But he’d deal with that when he got there. What mattered now was clearing the woods directly in front of him, and he had Bishop Adulfo Vynair’s Holy Martyrs Division, Bishop Edwyrd Tailyr’s Jwo-jeng Division, and Bishop Harys Bahrkly’s Rakurai Division to help with that little task.
And if that’s not enough, I’ve got all the rest of the army, he told himself.
“Tell the guns to start concentrating on the woods now,” he said, glancing up at his aide. “Then get a runner to Colonel Mairyai and ask him for his best estimate on when the engineers will have that gap in the road filled.”
“Yes, Sir!”
The aide sketched Langhorne’s scepter in salute, turned, and hastened off on his mission, and Nybar sniffed at the damp, freshening breeze, then looked back down at the map.
* * *
“Zhorj is right; they’ll be coming tonight,” Colonel Stahn Wyllys said quietly, looking at his company commanders’ faces in the fading light. He wondered if his own looked as grim as theirs did. “That’s why they’ve been tearing up the trees. They’re trying to kill—or at least disorder—as many of our reserves as possible.”
They looked back at him silently while the Church’s artillery boomed s
teadily behind his words and the first few drops of rain sifted down through the branches. Most of them were at least ten years younger than he was, but those silent eyes looked far older than they’d been a year ago, he thought.
“If I were them,” he continued, “I’d put the pikes in front. In the dark, at close quarters, rifles would lose a lot of their effectiveness even without rain, and, frankly, they can afford to lose pikemen more than they can afford to lose riflemen. They’ll probably go on pounding the parapet with their guns until the pikes are right on top of us, and then it’s going to get ugly. Very ugly.”
He drew a deep breath.
“Ahbnair,” he looked at Major Ahbnair Dynnys, commanding 1st Company, the only pure-pike company he had left, “I’m putting you in with Zhorj. It’s going to be the best opportunity for you to make effective use of your pikes. I want you in the center, right on the roadbed. Zhorj,” he turned to Major Styvynsyn, “I want three of your platoons on either of Ahbnair’s flanks. Keep the Seventh and your HQ section behind him in the middle to reinforce as needed. Hainree,” he turned to the absurdly youthful Captain Klairynce, “Third Company’s the reserve for First and Second. I’ll be with you, trying to keep an eye on things and hopefully lending you the seasoned counsel of an older and wiser head.”
His last sentence got the chuckle he’d hoped for. It might have been more than a little dutiful, but there was at least some genuine humor in it. He let them enjoy it for a moment before he looked at Ahrnahld Mahkynty and Gahvyn Sahlys, the commanders of his 4th and 5th Companies.
“You two will stay right where you are,” he said, his voice much more serious. “You’re our backstop. If it comes apart for us, you’re who we’re going to rally behind … and you’re also the last position between us and the Forty-Third.”
Mahkynty and Sahlys nodded, their faces grimmer than ever. Colonel Paityr Chansayl’s 43rd Infantry, dug in almost forty miles behind them, was the linchpin of the last defense before Serabor itself. He had Colonel Fraihman Hyldyr’s 123rd Infantry and Colonel Frahnklyn Pruait’s 76th Infantry under his command, as well, and General Stohnar had given him half the Charisian thirty-pounders to bolster his forces, but all of his regiments were understrength. He ought to have had sixty-seven hundred infantry; what he actually had was barely five thousand men and six guns to hold over ten thousand yards of frontage. The backed-up canal and river cut that total by perhaps a third, but it was still an unenviable position.
“We’re going to hold,” Wyllys said looking around their faces again. “But if we don’t, if they manage to push our arses out of here, we rally on Colonel Chansayl’s line. He’ll need every rifle and pike he can get when it’s his turn, and we’d going to give them to him. Understand me on that, and make sure all the rest of our people do, too. That’s as far as we go. I don’t care if they bring Shan-wei herself with them, that’s as far as we go.”
* * *
Colonel Spyncyr Mairyai, CO, 2nd Regiment, Langhorne Division, tilted his head back and smiled as he looked up into the rain. In some ways, it was a bit like gilding the spike-thorn. The heretics had already turned the entire Gap into a mucky, squelching quagmire. Anywhere off the roadbed itself, a man was likely to step into a submerged pothole deeper than he was tall, and he’d seen dragons get so thoroughly mired that at least one of them had had to be put down where it was because they simply couldn’t get it back out of the mud. So they hardly needed more rain to make the going even more wretched.
But it was a lovely, beautiful, Langhorne-sent rain, in Mairyai’s considered opinion. A rain that was turning steadily heavier, pelting out of a sky blacker than Shan-wei’s riding boots and promising to soak the priming of any rifle ever made.
Of course, finding his way to his objective was going to be an interesting challenge, but the gun rafts still blazing away out on the flooded canal gave his lead companies a reference point, and the engineers had lined the edges of the road in the same sort of lime they used for baselines on a baseball diamond. The broad, white stripes gleamed wetly, picked out of the blackness in sporadic spits of lightning by the muzzle flashes of the artillery. With the rain picking up, it was questionable how long the guide stripes would last, but they’d last long enough.
He drew rein and climbed down from his horse, handing the bridle to his orderly. Colonels weren’t supposed to get involved in the confusion and carnage of desperate nighttime assaults, but the 2nd wasn’t going in without him, and the last thing he needed was to be trying to control a spooked horse in the middle of a pitch black melee.
He half-drew his sword, checking to make sure it would come out of the scabbard cleanly when he needed it, and touched the grips of the two pistols thrust through his sash. Chihiro only knew if the pans were closed tightly enough to protect the priming, and he had no intention of relying on them unless he had absolutely no choice, but it was still good to know they were there.
He turned his head, looking at the bugler beside him. The whites of the youngster’s eyes gleamed starkly, picked out of the darkness as two or three twelve-pounders went off as one, and his shoulder quivered with tension when Mairyai gripped it encouragingly.
“Anxious, lad?”
“N—” the bugler began, then stopped. “Yes, Sir,” he confessed instead.
“Well, so am I.” Mairyai squeezed his shoulder. “So is every other man in that column.” He twitched his head at the endless ranks of pikemen moving soddenly down the high road between the stripes of lime. “So you’re hardly alone, now, are you?”
He chuckled, and after a moment, the boy chuckled back a bit nervously.
“Better!” The colonel smiled. “We’re in God’s hands now, son—His and the archangels’—and when you think about it, that’s not such a bad place to be, now, is it?”
“No, Sir. It isn’t,” the bugler said with more assurance, and Mairyai gave his shoulder a little shake.
“Good lad! And now, I think it’s time we put you to work. Sound reveille.”
“Yes, Sir!”
The boy took just long enough to sign Langhorne’s scepter in salute, then raised the bugle to his lips.
* * *
“Stand to! Stand to!” Ahbnair Dynnys bawled as the bugle notes flared sweet and golden through the rainy dark. Reveille was the last thing he’d expected to hear in the middle of the night, but he was confident it didn’t mean anything good.
More bugles sounded, taking up the same call, and eight of the Church twelve-pounders thudded as one.
They’d clearly been waiting for the bugles. The shells’ sputtering fuses drew lines of fire across the night, and six of them carried across the parapet to slam into the trees beyond, but this time they didn’t explode. Instead of gunpowder and musket balls, they were filled with a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and meal powder, with three extra holes bored around the fuse. They hit the trees, dropped to the ground, and suddenly those holes were volcanoes, spewing smoke and fountains of brilliant, blinding light that simultaneously dazzled the defenders and silhouetted them against their glaring intensity.
As if the flares had been a signal, all of the other artillery stopped firing instantly … and a great, deep-throated roar came out of the dark.
“God wills it!”
The pikeheads came on the wings of that shout.
* * *
There were four thousand pikemen in that column; there were three understrength companies, with just under one thousand men behind the parapet.
“Fire!” Sergeant Zhaksyn shouted from the western end of the line, and a hundred and sixty riflemen squeezed their triggers.
Ninety-seven of the rifles actually fired in the driving rain, and long, lurid fingers of flame reached across the parapet. Perhaps another hundred rifles fired from the eastern flank, ripping through the half-seen, half-guessed column of pikes. Men screamed and went down, and others tripped over them in the dark, but the bugles were sounding the charge now, not reveille, and another shout went up from the Army of G
od.
“Holy Schueler and no quarter!”
* * *
“Stand your ground, boys!” Dynnys bellowed. “Stand your ground! Send these bastards to hell!”
The front of the pike column reached the abatis and tried to drive bodily through it. But the branches were too thick, and at least some of Styvynsyn’s riflemen were managing to reload, despite the rain, sending fresh fire into the tangle of limbs and enemies. More pikemen screamed, folding up, writhing in agony, yet others dropped their pikes. They grabbed the interwoven branches, heaving, wrenching at them, tearing holes in the obstacle. More of them fell, but for every man who went down, two more seemed to take his place, and some of them had brought axes that flashed in the glare of flares and the blaze of rifles. The axe blades rose and fell, hewing at the abatis, and the barricade began to leak.
The men of the Langhorne Division roared in triumph as they forced a path through the barrier. Every yard of that path was draped with a dead or wounded body as the Siddarmarkian rifles continued to sputter and bark through the rain, but only a small percentage of those rifles were managing to fire reliably, and pikeheads crossed as the charging Temple Loyalists drove up the face of the entrenchment.
* * *
“Siddarmark! Siddarmark!”
The battle cry went up as the men of Ahbnair Dynnys’ 1st Company lunged over their parapet. This was the kind of combat for which they had trained, and no one in the world was better at it than they were. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, pikes raised two-handed and almost head-high, slamming them forward with shoulders and backs, ramming the keen-edged, leaf-shaped steel into their enemies. They had every advantage of height and position, and they used those advantages ruthlessly, reaping a gory harvest as they ruptured chests and bodies. They slaughtered the first men up that wet, soft, treacherous slope, and the Temple Loyalists following behind stumbled and slid across the writhing bodies of their dead and dying fellows.