Hells march, p.57
Hell's March, page 57
“Who’s in charge, here?” Lewis asked.
“Could be me or Meder or Burton,” Boogerbear said, then tilted his head slightly to the side. Neither of those young men would give him an order and pretending otherwise was ridiculous. “Me, I guess.”
“Are you well, Captain Meder?”
“Yes sir. Just a scrape.”
“Glad to hear it. Where’s Major Anson?” Lewis asked anxiously. Leonor’s expression never changed, but Boogerbear knew she was worried.
“He’s down with Mr. Lara’s lancers,” Burton supplied. “Probably getting them mounted by now and bringing the rest of our horses up.” He grinned. “He knew you’d come, sir, and knew you’d want us mounted when you did.”
Lewis looked at Sal, who nodded back and galloped off in search of his friend. “I do,” Lewis told Burton. “All who can ride.”
Word was spreading that they were going to mount up and “finish the Doms,” and men were gulping water, feverishly cleaning weapons and generally rushing about. Reverend Harkin rode among them, praising them for their valor and getting in the way, but the men didn’t seem to mind. Hahessy was cleaning his own musket by the simple expedient of spitting water down the barrel and squirting it through the vent with his rammer head wrapped with a piece of his shirt. When the greasy black stream dribbled to a stop, he ran the rammer up and down a few times, then drew it out and removed the now jet-black piece of wet cloth, which he used to wipe fouling out of the pan and off the lock. Tearing off more shirt, he proceeded to dry everything in a similar way, but caught Lewis’s eye while he did so.
“Private Hahessy,” Lewis acknowledged neutrally. Of course he remembered the big man. He was quite distinctive, and he’d once nearly had him hanged. “You seem to have made yourself of use, at last.”
Hahessy frowned, but Barca spoke up. “He did, sir. Quite valiantly.” He looked at Hanny and the others. “All my men did, and losses were severe on the Number One gun. This one’s out of action, but only until we replace the wheel. Speaking of which . . .” He turned to see Sergeant O’Roddy and another man rolling the spare up behind them. First Sergeant Petty and several more men had come over from the Number One gun to help mount it. Barca grinned. “Speaking of which, never mind.”
Hahessy laughed. “Colonel Cayce, if ye please, I’ve a small complaint ta report.” Mac and Hanny glowered at him, but he ignored them. “It’s my understandin’, sir, that our section o’ Mr. Hudgens’s battery is the only unit in the army that didn’t elect its own officer.”
Lewis was frowning now as well, and Leonor looked furious. Varaa was grinning hugely and blinking something no one could read. “Untrue,” Lewis said sharply. “We’ve had to appoint quite a few officers, for their experience, to some of the newer units.”
“Aye,” Hahessy amiably agreed, “but we ain’t one o’ them, now are we? No.” He looked hard at Barca, then back at Lewis. “I think it’s only proper for us so’jers ta exercise the rights ye granted us, an’ I want it on record that I, Daniel Hahessy, nominate Mr. Barca for our Lieutenant.” He glared around. “Vote ‘aye,’ damn ye all, or I’ll choke the life out o’ ye, I will!”
The rising tension around him shattered, and men exploded in laughter and a chorus of “ayes.” Barca felt stunned, looking around at the battered, bloody men, all grinning at him. I haven’t done anything, really, he thought, but they’ve accepted me anyway. Even him. He loved them for it. Probably like Hahessy in another respect, he had a home for the first time as well.
Varaa was nodding. She’d seen it, somehow, and even Colonel Cayce was smiling now. “I’ll take it under advisement,” he said dryly to another round of laughter.
“What the hell? We ain’t got time for foolin’ around!” Anson bellowed, riding up beside Ramon Lara, whose arm was in a bloody sling again. The same arm as before. About four hundred tired, scruffy lancers were strung out behind them. At least their horses were fresh. Anson looked around disgustedly. “What a sorry, worn-out-lookin’ bunch. Busted guns, half-dead troops—ain’t fit ta shoo flies off a turd.” His severe expression broke. “But I bet there’s two thousand dead Doms on the slope o’ this hill, an’ I think we can summon the gumption ta add some more!”
“It’s good to see you too, Major Anson,” Lewis said ironically. Leonor didn’t go to her father but was smiling with relief.
“Sal’s bringin’ the rest of the horse-holders up,” Anson continued more seriously. “Dukane’s wounded an’ his two sections of howitzers still down below are shot out. I figured to leave ’em in place with support as a deterrent.” He gestured down the hill at the milling Dom soldiers. No one was shooting at them now, but they weren’t shooting either. “We need to leave some troops here too. Walkin’ wounded who can still fight, at least, so how many saddles can we fill?”
Meder and Burton quickly conferred with Boogerbear. “ ’Tween the Rangers an’ rifles an’ dragoons who just joined us, we can mount a thousand,” Boogerbear said.
“We need four horses,” Barca said abruptly, earning a nod from O’Roddy. “We lost that many, shot down in the traces.”
“We’ve already unhooked ’em,” O’Roddy reported. “Four more for the howitzers. An’ they lost their officer,” he added with a look at Barca.
“Fine,” Barca said, effectively accepting command of a short battery. He looked challengingly at Lewis. The Number Two gun’s shattered wheel had been replaced while they talked, but the whole carriage was shot to pieces and whiskered with splinters from musket balls. The Number One gun would be just as bad, and Barca realized he needed to spend time with its crew, now. Especially since most were replacements. The howitzer crew to the left was watching.
“Have you any ammunition left at all?” Lewis asked gently.
“Solid shot,” Barca answered at once. They still had quite a lot of that in the chests on the caissons. He looked questioningly at the howitzer crew, and the gunner stepped over the trail to stand before him. “We have six rounds of canister and six exploding case. I expect the other twelve pounder has about the same. They can’t shoot any faster than us,” he added proudly.
Barca looked back at Lewis, who was nodding. “That’s enough to be useful, and the Doms won’t know any better.” He scrutinized the young gunner. “The question is, are you game for more?”
The kid—he really was just a kid, like Hanny—glanced at Barca. Just like me too, Barca acknowledged. The gunner nodded. “Hell yes . . . sir. We want to whip them this time, not just run them off.”
Lewis arched a brow. “Very well. That’s the idea, and this is what we’re going to do. . . .”
* * *
It couldn’t really be said that General Agon was “behind” the lines of his army now, because those lines had grown hopelessly entangled as both flanks peeled back upon him. He was at the rear, however, because what was left of the Army of God’s Vengeance now stood between him and the enemy on three sides, and the only thing behind him and his diminished staff was the beach and the sea. Even back there, he was exposed, remounted beneath his cluster of flags for all to see on another shiny black stallion. By some miracle, he hadn’t been wounded beyond the wrenched and painful leg, but he was in agony nevertheless, his heart torn to shreds as his army died around him. He’d never poured so much of himself into anything as he had this army, and as it died and contracted inward, he felt his soul do the same. “And now we’re effectively surrounded,” he remarked with despair.
“As thinly as if by the shell of an egg. We still have more men than they do,” General Tun rasped, arms firmly crossed over his chest as if holding his ribs in place. He’d been carried back from the collapsing right after his horse fell and rolled on him. His teeth were pink with blood, and he spat it out constantly. Agon was sure he had internal injuries, broken ribs at least, but Tun had demanded another horse and now faced the storm beside him.
“Not for long,” Agon replied miserably. He couldn’t see it through the gunsmoke himself, but it had been reported that a heavy cloud of dust was rising in the east. That would be Coronel Itzam and the fresh division that had followed them all the way down from Nautla.
“Then we must break through now,” Tun pressed.
Agon just looked at him. “How?” he demanded. “This army has been battered into the shape of a ball. It’s a desperate mob, with every regiment intermingled. As it is, it still fights—by firing in all directions—but if I tell the . . . western half to attack toward Gran Lago while the eastern half holds the forces to our east and south, what do you think will happen?”
“The . . . eastern half will break through to the city!” Tun declared.
“I think so as well,” Agon agreed, “with barely five or six thousand men fit to fight, no artillery, and little ammunition,” he countered relentlessly. “It will be of no use at all in catching and defeating Tranquilo and stopping the Blood Priests. In the meantime, the ‘eastern half,’ no longer supported from behind, will panic and be slaughtered.” Agon blinked and looked at his hands. “I formed this army as well as I could, with the finest material left to us. But what ‘formed’ me as a general? High status due to an accident of birth, a little experience with savages on the frontier, and a single meeting with properly shaped officers led by an imaginative and flexible commander I continue to underestimate—even as I scream at myself not to! I thought I’d learned from him—and I did, a few things—but nowhere near everything Coronel Cayce had to teach.” He laughed bitterly. “The worst of it is, we even deduced his strategy, and he still outmaneuvered us because he has men like El Diablo Anson—and who knows how many more?—who can move independently of him. Could probably replace him if they had to! Who do I have besides you, General Tun, who could even complete my own modest schemes?” He looked thoughtfully at Capitan Arevalo, sitting silently on his nervous horse while cannon boomed and musketry crackled, and the ball shrank ever smaller. He shook his head. It didn’t matter.
“God will grant us victory, when we suffer enough to earn it,” Tun declared, but he sounded less than certain.
Agon snorted. “Don’t be absurd. You sound like Tranquilo yourself! God has abandoned us because we abandoned Him long ago!” He gestured around. “There is abundant proof. The enemy still worships the very same God as those who brought The Blood to this world in the first place! Even if our leaders, and certainly those such as Tranquilo, have forgotten this, those in our order of soldiers know it’s true.” His eyes went wide. “Cayce, the enemy, all of them . . . they’re the true instruments of the one God our people have forgotten, sent to destroy those who serve . . .” He covered his face with his hands. “Oh no,” he murmured. “All who’ve died here today for God, for decades, for almost two centuries of Dominion rule, have instead died for a usurper far worse than Don Julio!”
Arevalo looked very troubled indeed. “Either you speak blasphemy, my general, or . . .” He paused, expression torn by a mounting horror beyond anything he’d seen that day. “Or our cause, all along, has been that of el verdadero Diablo. The true Devil,” he almost whispered.
Can it all be that remarkably, hideously simple? Agon silently begged of himself, and a God he was suddenly certain wasn’t listening to him at all. Of course, the God of the Dominion never hears, does He? He only watches and glories in suffering and pain and death like some demented, voyeuristic . . .
“My general!” cried Coronel Uza, bashing his horse through stunned and milling infantry who didn’t know where to go. Agon looked at him, disassociated for a moment, utterly adrift, deserving to die.
Apparently at a loss for words himself, Coronel Uza could only point behind them with his saber. At the sea. Bugles were blaring and a long line of horsemen was clearing the grassy dunes by the shoreline, surging up from the beach. A beach touching the nearly unmolested left of the blocking force’s fortifications, and which couldn’t be seen from the battle plain. Of course, Agon thought dispassionately, then turned to the west and gazed at Anson’s line once more. There were still heads peering over the breastworks and a few guns here and there, but nothing like there’d been. They’ve emptied their line, possibly all the way up the hill. Not that it mattered now. More enemy infantry and artillery were moving to interpose themselves. Some were turning his own abandoned cannon against him.
“That will be El Diablo Anson himself, I shouldn’t wonder,” Agon said without inflection, looking back at the advancing horsemen. “More than a thousand mounted men, aimed directly at our utterly distracted and unprepared rear. And look!” he said, something bizarrely almost like enthusiasm creeping into his tone. “They’ve even brought a battery of guns! How do they move them like that? So rapidly, so much like . . . quicksilver flowing across the palm of one’s hand!”
The milling infantry started to panic, pushing, shoving, voices rising. The terror would quickly spread. Even men on the firing line would soon be distracted, try to pull back. They’d been through too much—and for nothing! Agon suddenly knew. Wincing at the pain in his leg, he stood as high in his stirrups as he could and tried to shout over the roar of battle and growing bedlam.
“Cease firing! Cease firing!” He looked at the red flags with jagged gold crosses fluttering around him. “Throw those down!” he shouted at the men holding them.
General Tun said nothing. Arevalo looked shocked, but was beginning to nod understanding.
Coronel Uza’s eyes bulged. “What are you doing? You can’t do this! Better to die for God than surrender to heretics!”
Agon looked at him. “Yes!” he cried, “I’ll fight to the death for God, for this army, but I’ll spill no more blood to amuse the Devil, and that’s all we’ve ever done! God, the real God, is not on our side, and I don’t say that just because we’ve lost. We are the heretics! Surely that should be clear to you now. This entire campaign has been cursed from the start, just as the one before it. We attacked the only people left in this land who worship a God who doesn’t enjoy their misery and were repulsed at Nautla, marched through hell and were harried by El Diablo all the way here. Your lancers were annihilated.” He waved at the disaster unfolding around them. “Now this! We have been the playthings of the Devil and done his bidding far too long.”
“Blasphemy!” Uza shrieked, pulling his long, brass-barreled pistol from his sash. It shone like dull gold in the sun as he pointed it.
Looking down the large, dark hole, Agon was disappointed. Uza had believed in the cause of stopping the Blood Priests, but he was a lancer. Lancers, by and large, were the most devout troops in the army. He’d opposed the Blood Priests because they meant to subvert the obispos, “stack” the Blood Cardinalship with their own, and change his religion. Agon had just denounced it outright. At least I won’t live to see my army die for such a terrible cause, Agon thought. He heard a shot, but felt no pain. No new pain, anyway. He hadn’t realized he’d closed his eyes, and now opened them to see Uza slide off his horse and fall with a thud in the tall, dusty grass, his head a bloody, mostly hollow gourd.
Capitan Ead Arevalo grimaced slightly and thrust his own smoking pistol into his saber belt. He’d rather liked Coronel Uza. “You heard the general!” he shouted at the flag bearers. “Throw those down at once! They’re bloody, perverted lies and no longer stand for this army!”
General Tun spat more blood and looked at Agon with a strange expression. Finally, he nodded. “I thought someday it would come to this with you.” That could’ve meant anything, but Tun joined with Arevalo in calling for the men to stop shooting and cast down the Dominion flag. With the guns of the enemy battery already unlimbering less than three hundred paces away and the mounted men pausing to dress their lines before they struck, Agon could only hope they’d grasp the significance of what he’d done. “General Panti, are you with me?” he asked the commander of the closest and most intact brigade. Panti looked frightened, and not of the enemy. Even if they lived through the day, the army’s mission had very suddenly gone beyond merely stopping the Blood Priests and anointing Don Hurac as Supreme Holiness. Of course, aimed where it was, even the relatively small mounted force would scatter them. If they didn’t do something quickly, the army would have no mission because it would cease to exist.
“Yes,” General Panti tentatively replied, then his voice firmed. “I am with you, my general!”
“Then take charge here. Stop the fighting, however you must!” Agon looked at Tun. “Come, General, if you’re able.” His voice filled with irony. “We ride out and speak with El Diablo Anson once more. Join us, Capitan Arevalo. I don’t think he’ll shoot just the three of us. Really,” he added absently, “I do wish we’d established some means to signal we wanted to talk.”
“My apologies. I never thought we’d meet them . . . socially again, but I should’ve mentioned that their Capitan Lara told me a white flag is customary,” Arevalo supplied as they urged their horses into the open and set a quick but careful pace that wouldn’t cause Tun more discomfort than necessary.
“Indeed?” Tun hissed, spitting blood. “That would’ve been good to know.”
CHAPTER 32
Lewis, Anson, Leonor, Varaa, and a grumbling Corporal Willis galloped up behind Barca’s short battery of combat-ravaged guns and men as their limbers completed wide turns to the rear and gunners shouted, “Load!” The guns looked much like the men: battered, blackened, and covered with blood, little wounds showing all over them. Even their once-glistening bronze tubes were dull and lightly dented under contrastingly bright lead smears. Three of the four had replaced a wheel, and two were still missing at least one spoke. But they’d sent runners to secure shot-torn battery flags from Captains Hudgens and Dukane and the sections stood under the flapping gold banners, ready and willing for more. Barca had remained mounted on Dukane’s own horse in the center of the battery, slightly back, posture stiff, but apparently confident.
