Hells march, p.31
Hell's March, page 31
“To the formalities, then,” Itzam agreed. “I’m just as new at this as you are, I believe, but since you’re the aggressor, I understand it’s traditional for you to go first.”
“Very well.” Agon took a long breath. “My Army of God’s Vengeance is far larger and much better than the army I brought here before. I’m unconstrained by higher authority and may employ it as I will. You are doomed. Sadly, I don’t have the discretion to offer you your lives, but I entreat you to surrender so I can be merciful in regard to the manner of your deaths. Your heresy doesn’t celebrate the cleansing power and grace of pain, so should you yield, you have my word all your people will die as quickly and painlessly as possible.” He grimaced. “You also have my word of honor that none will be delivered to the Blood Priests for their . . . amusement.” He paused again before adding quickly, “Believe it or not, your deaths will grieve me more than I can say. The warrior tradition observed by our military officer class remains touched by ancient ideals from a gentler time when our respective faiths were not so different. That very similarity is what makes them so profoundly incompatible now. Regardless of that, I feel drawn to the notion that proper soldiers serve a higher calling and shouldn’t have to slaughter others who can no longer resist—but I have no latitude in this. I’ve been charged with eradicating the heresy on this peninsula and must do so.”
Itzam blew out a stream of smoke and nodded. “I appreciate your . . . gracious offer,” he said, tone very dry. “I must refuse, of course. On the other hand, if you and your army will lay down your arms and approach the south gate of Nautla in an orderly, nonthreatening manner, you have my word that all will be treated firmly but well, with the utmost respect due fellow soldiers. Officers may even keep their swords or other personal weapons as long as they give their parole. That means their word of honor they won’t try to escape, harm anyone, or damage our war effort in any way. They’ll be treated as honored guests of this army, but any who break their word will be hanged. Enlisted personnel will be formed into labor battalions for the remainder of our conflict unless they choose to join us—that offer is sincere—but they won’t be slaves. They’ll be fed and sheltered, and none will be abused.”
Arevalo could only stare, openmouthed.
“You can’t be serious,” Agon objected.
“I’m perfectly serious,” Itzam countered harshly. “We don’t make war on the innocent or murder the helpless. Prisoners of war are both, in their way.”
A stutter of gunfire erupted in the woods far to the east, rising to a strident thumping sound before gradually tapering off. Itzam managed an amused glance at Lieutenant Uo. “Ah,” he said. “It seems General Agon has already sent scouts to find our forest flank.” He grinned at Agon. “They’ll have discovered that we really don’t have one.” He gestured around at the countless stumps. “All these trees—thousands of them—have been dragged into the forest for leguas. There are impassable obstacles and breastworks woven into the very forest. Beyond even that is a convenient escarpment you’ll never drag your guns up on. I only tell you to save some time so we can get down to business, but by all means, see for yourself. You won’t like it a bit.” His grin turned predatory. “I’m afraid Colonel Cayce has designed this defense in such a way that you’ll be obliged to come right at us. Ponder that, while you consider my very generous offer.”
* * *
—
“THAT . . . ENTIRE EXCHANGE was quite extraordinary, my general,” Arevalo observed to his stony-faced commander as they rode back to their developing line. Two more regiments had spread out from the road, backs to the trees, and at least half of Agon’s field guns had been deployed. Three five-gun batteries and around six thousand men arrayed in deep, disciplined ranks, garish red-and-gold flags popping in the offshore breeze. “What do you think about it all?” Arevalo almost pleaded. “He can’t be as confident as he seemed . . . can he? And his offer . . . ridiculous! No one would be so generous!”
“I think I’m even more convinced that Colonel Cayce is elsewhere,” Agon replied with a snort. “If that’s the case, he’ll have taken the cream of his army away. We must discover where he’s gone, and the quickest way to do that is to defeat this former guardsman, this Colonel Itzam.” He frowned. “Once we do, we can question him and his men as vigorously as we must.”
“So we attack?” Arevalo asked.
Agon looked at him. “Of course, and at once. Particularly with Cayce’s forces away, the defenses here can’t be as formidable as they seem.”
If anything, the defenses at Nautla were stronger than they looked, more so than Agon could’ve imagined. He began with a long-range cannonade, eventually bringing twenty guns online. They roared and bellowed and filled the stump-studded plain with choking white smoke while he watched their effect with his spyglass. Lack of effect, to be more precise, in spite of better accuracy than he’d really expected to see. Either his new artillery officers or the survivors of the previous campaign had seen the need for profound improvement. Still, the 8pdr roundshot that struck the enemy fortifications only geysered earth from the hard-packed berm heaped in front of the ancient stone wall and bounded ineffectually over it. Those, and the rounds missing high, might’ve created some injury and damage in the city, but didn’t much bother the defenders on the walls—or the enemy cannon that finally replied.
The first to fire were the two great siege guns, 36pdr monsters that blanketed the field with smoke by themselves, the heavy shot roaring in and crashing right down the road that much of Agon’s army still densely packed. Screams echoed down the cut for a depressing distance as countless men were spattered into flying, bony gobbets by the seemingly unstoppable spheres.
“Those fiends!” Arevalo cried, his voice edged with shock. “They did that on purpose!”
“Of course they did, you fool!” Agon snapped back. “They’ve had all the time in the world to lay those guns, and we obligingly walked right into them. Messenger! Go to Coronel Gonzals at once and have him get those men off the road!”
The captured enemy 8pdrs spoke next, about ten of them—which seemed to prove they didn’t have as many as they’d made emplacements for—but these were aimed at the forming troops in the open, scything whole files of them down the depth of their deep ranks, before bounding up and crashing through the trees. And unlike the bigger guns, which took longer to load, these fired again before Agon’s own gunners were ready to respond. They don’t need twice as many guns if they fire them twice as fast! Agon seethed.
“I apologize for my outburst, my general,” Arevala said. “I wasn’t shocked as much by what they did as by the fact they could. Such weapons aren’t known for their precision.”
“Yet they make the most of what they have, somehow. I already doubted their superiority in most things has as much to do with their tools as it does how they use them. I’d be most intrigued to learn how they push a loose projectile down a barrel—any barrel—and manage to . . . tighten it on the way out. That’s the only way they could do it.” His twenty cannons fired again, one after the other, for the same small return as far as he could see, but their puny thunders were drowned by the 36pdrs once more, bounding down the Camino Militar and slaughtering men only now scrambling off it. The trees there were exceptionally dense, and so—Agon now realized—was the mass of entangling brush deliberately heaped among them. They planned this very well indeed, he growled in his mind. He couldn’t see how far the awful confusion extended, but doubted his follow-on regiments could be reorganized quickly enough to do much.
“General Tun!” he called to his increasingly agitated friend.
“Attack?”
Another storm of 8pdr shot slashed into Agon’s men among a spray of blood and a chorus of screams.
“Yes,” Agon confirmed, rapidly assessing. “Advance your brigada. Advance everything already in the open being slaughtered to no purpose. All their guns will focus on you, but it’ll be better than just standing and taking it. I’ll try to untangle another brigada to strengthen your push.” He paused, still thinking furiously. “They’ll be expecting our usual, ponderous advance, so hurry your men. Run them, General! Don’t stop to fire. Our cannon will try to suppress them. Get under the enemy’s guns and drive up over the walls!”
“It will be done!” General Tun replied savagely. “God will revel in the suffering this day, but I cannot—until we inflict some on the enemy!” Whipping his lovely white stallion with the flat of his sword, General Tun galloped to the left, shouting at officers to keep their men firm—and prepare to charge. Tun was much like Agon in every way but looks. Where Agon was short and dark and built like one of the stumps on the field, Tun was tall, almost willowy, with shockingly light brown hair. But his background was the same. A third son who’d never inherit his father’s wealth or position, he hadn’t been drawn to the priesthood or obispado and the elusive track to the Blood Cardinalship, so he’d made a place in the army. A true friend, he shared Agon’s devotion to the old ways of worship and the army and cordially (in public) hated the Blood Priests for what he saw as their impious power grab and self-serving, bloody-handed changes they sought to press on the Dominion. Even if those day-to-day changes were subtle, for now, like most of his and Agon’s generation, he feared the extent to which Blood Priests would take things if their power was unchecked.
Nearing the very center of the line, in front of the better part of two brigadas—almost eight thousand men—he stopped and stood in his stirrups as another pair of 36pdrs shrieked by overhead. One struck a great tree by the edge of the road not very far back, and an explosion of bright splinters slashed into the backs of some of the men facing him before the tree groaned heavily and began to fall, accelerating rapidly to crash down across the road in a welter of expanding dust and ferny leaves. He didn’t think many soldiers were crushed, but now the reserves were blocked. Could the damned heretics have done that on purpose too? he wondered. At a thousand paces? How?
“First Brigada!” he roared, and the frustrated men matched his feral shout. “First of the Second Brigada!” he added. (He must leave some men to guard the gun line and Agon, after all.) “At the sound of the horns we’ll cross that field in a holy charge against the heretics such as this world has never seen! Affix your bayonets now and fire not a shot. Let nothing distract you from sweeping over their defenses and into their rear. You’re the Army of God’s Vengeance, and God will have His reckoning! You will enjoy the spoils and pleasures of victory before God takes their chastened, heretic souls.”
A cheer welled up. That was another tradition the Blood Priests would undermine: demanding all the spoils of conquest, material and “spiritual,” including all enemy survivors, for the Church. That meant for the Blood Priests themselves, of course—loot and unsullied young captives to use as they wanted before they were sacrificed. Like Agon, Tun would’ve been happy to humble an enemy—and not only was sacking a city or enemy camp consistent with that, it helped motivate his soldiers—but he disagreed with the whole notion of massacre. Not only was it . . . disrespectful to “honest” enemies, he was sure it made them fight harder. The “old traditions” often allowed truly excellent enemy warriors to be spared as slaves, sometimes in the benevolent service of their conquerors.
As the war horns sounded over the bleak, broken-tooth plain south of Nautla, General Tun had few illusions regarding who’d slaughter whom as he rushed some of what he considered the Dominion’s finest troops across the vast killing ground the enemy so fiendishly prepared. There was nothing for it, however. The army couldn’t yield to its fears and the confusion thrust upon it, just meekly turning away. Even a bloody nose was preferable to that—and Tun suspected the army’s nose was about to get very bloody. “Charge!” he bellowed.
* * *
“Colonel Cayce was right,” murmured Lieutenant Uo in something like shock when the tightly ordered Dom ranks suddenly surged forward, quickly losing the geometric precision they’d maintained throughout the brief bombardment and turning into a running, yelling, mob. Colonel Itzam nodded. “Yes. They’ll be exhausted by the time they get here—and some of them will, mark my words—no matter how many we kill on the way. Heavenly Father, I really didn’t think they’d do it, but they are.” He cleared his voice and raised it. “Very well. All batteries except the section of siege guns will target the advance, switching to grapeshot at five hundred paces and canister at three. The siege guns will start throwing grapeshot at the enemy artillery.”
The Allied Army had just about exhausted its exploding case shot from another world at the Washboard and hadn’t yet managed to make any more. With examples to look at, the wooden fuses were actually the easy part, though getting the kinks out of timed powder trains so the shells would burst when desired was harder than expected. Powder had to be mealed and measured, wet and poured and dried just right, and no one had ever done it before. A lot of trial and error was required. Casting hollow iron or copper balls was still the biggest hang-up, though, and no one knew how to do that either. Experiments were ongoing. In the meantime, stands of grapeshot had been reintroduced. Grapeshot was like canister in that it turned a cannon into a giant shotgun. There were fewer pieces of shot in a stand of grape (just nine 2-inch one-pound lead balls in Itzam’s 8pdrs as opposed to the new standard fifty .69 caliber musket balls in a tin of canister), so theoretically it wasn’t as effective. But being considerably larger and carrying farther with lethal results against massed targets—easily shattering several men in a row beyond the lethal effect of canister—the results were not dissimilar to what might be expected from exploding case at those reduced ranges.
Screaming, steaming gaps started opening in the charging horde, all nine rounds from each stand of grape having difficulty not hitting something in the press, often many somethings, arriving before the boom of the guns and squall of whirring balls. These sounds joined the screams to make them even more unearthly and appalling to General Tun, who trotted forward gesturing with his sword, fully exposed on his magnificent horse and leaning into the howling storm of death as he encouraged his men to close with the heretics.
“Halfway there! Halfway there!” he shouted. “Keep going, keep moving! Soon you’ll be under the guns, and mere men can’t stand against you! God is watching. The joys of victory or heaven await!”
Clouds of earth still rocketed up from the enemy works as Agon’s artillery pounded them, but even that was diminishing. A stand of grape for the 36pdrs contained thirty-six 2-inch balls that had more than sufficient energy to kill at one thousand paces. The pattern was badly dispersed by then, so death was highly random, but several—at least—balls from each blast slashed among the Dom gun’s crews the distant siege pieces targeted, killing men and even damaging cannon carriages.
Tun didn’t know what was happening behind him. He was surrounded by carnage enough and entirely preoccupied with shouting and exhorting men forward, almost willing the charge to hold together, keeping it moving at its brisk, exhausting pace. He’d learned at the Washboard and was being brutally reminded that nothing exhausts like terror—and he was mortally terrified, sure he’d be struck any instant. But he’d also learned that the failure at the Washboard had been one of leadership, not the men, and he’d lead these men, by his conspicuous presence alone if he must, as long as they’d conquer their own panting terror and keep pressing onward. “Three hundred paces, no more! Almost there!” he roared hoarsely.
* * *
“Commence firing canister!” called Colonel Itzam, and the drums rolled.
“Look at that fool on the horse!” cried Lieutenant Uo. In all the charging thousands, there was only one “fool” on a horse, his yellow-and-black uniform festooned with the silver lace of a high-ranking officer, his animal very distinctive as well. “Someone get that fellow!”
“No!” shouted Itzam. “Pass the word quickly; do not target the officer on the horse!”
Too late. An 8pdr roared close beside them, canister spraying out. The bottom of the pattern kicked up dust and shredded grass before skating up and smashing knees, shins, pelvises. Slowed and distorted projectiles slashed bellies open. The rest slammed into the gasping front of the enemy or fell on men behind. The horse reared up, red blotches on white fur clearly visible at a little more than two hundred paces, and it crashed down in the press. Troops seemed to waver in the vicinity, but almost immediately, Itzam was sure he saw the sun-burnished glint of the officer’s sword rise above the heads of men, shouts lost in the din, and the Doms came on.
Poom! Poom! Ppoom! Pppoooom! All the guns fired canister now, and the Doms went down like stalks of maize in a whirlwind. Infantry was lining the walls, starting to fire muskets or launch heavy arrows.
“Why didn’t you want that one dead?” Uo asked over the noise. “He’s giving them more backbone than I like. Look to the left; they’re getting awfully close.”
They weren’t, really. They’d been stopped by the fences and other obstacles that either slowed them too much to bear or funneled them into the fire. They’d also discovered the reinforced walls of Nautla weren’t exactly as straight as they seemed from a distance. The added berm bulged with subtle lunettes that allowed men and guns to fire down the length of the wall instead of just straight outward. No, the Doms were in a meat grinder, and Itzam doubted any would live to crest the wall. They had no chance of taking it. “Two reasons,” Itzam shouted back over the growing musketry. “First, they probably would’ve broken already if it wasn’t for him. We get to kill more of them,” he said simply. “Second . . . I hope he lives to see what we do when they do break.”
