Ice, Iron and Gold Read online

  ICE, IRON AND GOLD

  S. M. Stirling

  Ice, Iron and Gold © 2007 by S. M. Stirling

  This edition of Ice, Iron and Gold © 2007 by Night Shade Books

  Jacket art © 2007 by Vincent Chong

  Jacket design by Claudia Noble

  Interior layout and design by Jeremy Lassen

  All rights reserved

  "Riding Shotgun to Armageddon" ©1998 by S. M. Stirling. Originally appeared in Armageddon.

  "Three Walls-32nd Campaign" ©2001 by S. M. Stirling. Originally appeared in Foreign Legions.

  "Cops and Robbers" ©1986 by S. M. Stirling. Originally appeared in Far Frontiers Vol. IV.

  "Roachstompers" ©1989 by S. M. Stirling. Originally appeared in New Destinies Vol. VIII.

  "Constant Never" ©1994 by S. M. Stirling. Originally appeared in Dragon's Eye.

  "Taking Freedom" ©1999 by S. M. Stirling. Originally appeared in Flights of Fantasy.

  "Lost Legion" ©1993 by S. M. Stirling. Originally appeared in Bolos: Honor of the Regiment.

  "Ancestral Voices" ©1994 by S. M. Stirling. Originally appeared in Bolos 2: The Unconquerable.

  "The Sixth Sun" ©1997 by S. M. Stirling. Originally appeared in Bolos 4: Last Stand.

  "The Apotheosis of Martin Padway" ©2005 by S. M. Stirling. Originally appeared in The Enchanter Completed.

  "Compadres" (with Richard Foss) ©2002 by S. M. Stirling and Richard Foss. Originally appeared in Alternate Generals II.

  "The Charge of Lee's Brigade" ©1998 by S. M. Stirling. Originally appeared in Alternate Generals.

  "Something for Yew" ©2007 by S. M. Stirling. This story is original to this collection.

  "The Mage, the Maiden, and the Hag" (with Jan Stirling) ©1996 by S. M. Stirling and Jan Stirling. Originally appeared in Lammas Night. Only available in the limited edition of this collection.

  First Edition

  Trade Hardcover: 978-1-59780-115-7

  Limited Edition: 978-1-59780-114-0

  Night Shade Books

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  Other Books by S. M. Stirling:

  The Emberverse

  Dies the Fire

  The Protector's War

  A Meeting at Corvallis

  The Sunrise Lands

  Island in the Sea of Time

  Island in the Sea of Time

  Against the Tide of Years

  On the Oceans of Eternity

  The Lords of Creation

  The Sky People

  In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

  The Draka

  Marching Through Georgia

  Under the Yoke

  The Stone Dogs

  The Domination (Omnibus of Vols. 1-3)

  Drakon

  The General (With David Drake)

  The Forge

  The Hammer

  The Warlord (Omnibus of Vols. 1 & 2)

  The Anvil

  The Steel

  The Sword

  The Conqueror (Omnibus of vols. 3-5)

  The Chosen

  The Reformer

  The Peshawar Lancers

  Conquistador

  Riding Shotgun to Armageddon

  The cannon were keeping up well with the chariots; Pharaoh would be pleased.

  Djehuty, Commander of the Brigade of Seth, was a little uncomfortable on horseback even after months of practice with the new saddle with stirrups. Still, there was no denying it was convenient. He turned his horse and rode back down along the track beside his units, with the standard-bearer, scribes, aides, and messengers behind him. The rutted track was deep in sand, like most of the coastal plain of Canaan . . . where it wasn't swamp mud or rocks. The infantry in their banded-linen corselets plodded along, their brown faces darker yet with dust and streaked with sweat under their striped headdresses of thick canvas. Big round-topped rectangular shields were slung over their shoulders, bronze spearblades glinted in the bright sun. After them came a company of Nubians, Medjay mercenaries from far up the Nile. Djehuty frowned; the black men were slouching along in their usual style, in no order at all . . . although anyone who'd seen one of their screaming charges could forgive them that. Then came one of the New Regiments, with their muskets over their shoulders and short iron swords at their sides. They wore only kilts and pleated loin-guards, but there were leather bandoliers of papyrus cartridges at their right hips. Djehuty scowled slightly at the sight of them, despite the brave show they made with their feet moving in unison and the golden fan standard carried before them on a long pole.

  Their weapons are good, he acknowledged. "But will they stand in battle?" he murmured to himself. They were peasants, not iw'yt, not real soldiers whose trade was fighting, raised from childhood in the barracks.

  After them came the cannon themselves, wrought with endless difficulty and expense. Djehuty's thick-muscled chest swelled with pride under his iron-scale armor at the number Pharaoh had entrusted to him—a full dozen of the twelve-pounders, as they were called in the barbaric tongue of their inventors. Each was a bronze tube of a length equal to a very tall man's height, with little bronze cylinders cast on either side so that the guns could ride in their chariot-like mounts. Very much like a chariot, save that the pole rested on another two-wheeled cart, the limber, and that was hauled by six horses with the new collar harness that bore on their shoulders rather than their necks.

  Better for the horses, he admitted grudgingly, passing on to the chariots. Those had changed in the last few years as well. Besides a compound bow and quiver on one side, there was a scabbard on the other for two double-barreled shotguns, and the crew was now three, like a Hittite war-cart—one being a loader for the warrior who captained the vehicle.

  He reined in and took a swig from the goatskin water bottle at his saddle. It cut gratefully through the dust and thick phlegm in his mouth; he spat to the side and drank again, since there were good springs nearby and no need to conserve every drop. Years of work, to make the Brigade of Seth the finest in Pharaoh's service, and then to integrate the new weapons. Something his father had told him . . . yes: To be good commanders, we must love our army and our soldiers. But to win victories, we must be ready to kill the thing we love. When you attack, strike like a hammer and hold nothing back.

  "Stationed in Damnationville with no supplies," he said, quoting a soldier's saying as old as the wars against the Hyksos.

  "But sir, there are plenty of supplies," his son said.

  Djehuty nodded. "There are now, boy," he said. "But imagine being stuck here on garrison duty for ten years."

  The young man looked around. To their left was the sea, brighter somehow than that off the Delta. The road ran just inland of the coastal sand dunes; off to the right a line of hills made the horizon rise up in heights of blue and purple. Thickets of oak dotted the plain, and stretches of tall grass, dry now in midsummer. Dust smoked off a few patches of cultivation, here and there a vineyard or olive grove, but the land was thinly settled—had been since the long wars Pharaoh had waged early in his reign, nearly thirty Nile floods ago.

  And those did not go well, he remembered uneasily—he'd been a stripling then, but nobody who'd been at Kadesh was going to believe it the great Egyptian victory that the temple walls proclaimed.

  A village of dun-colored mud brick huts with flat roofs stood in the middle distance, dim through the greater dust plume of the Egyptian host passing north. The dwellers and their stock were long gone; sensible peasants ran when armies passed by.

  By the standards of the vile Asiatics, of the hairy dwellers in Amurru, this was flat and fertile land. To an Egyptian, it was hard to tell the difference between this and the sterile red desert that lay
east of the Nile.

  "War and glory are only found in foreign lands," the younger man said stoutly.

  "Well spoken, son," the commander said. He looked left; the Ark of Ra was sinking towards the waves. "Time to camp soon. And Pharaoh will summon the commanders to conference in the morning."

  Pharaoh was a tall man, still lean and active in the thirty-sixth year of his reign despite the deep furrows in his hawklike face and the plentiful gray in his dark auburn hair. He stood as erect as a granite monolith, wearing the military kilt and the drum-shaped red crown of war with the golden cobra rearing at his brows, waiting as still as the statue of a god. The officers knelt and bowed their heads to the carpet before him in the shade of the great striped canvas pavilion. There was a silence broken only by the clank of armor scales and creak of leather. Then the eunuch herald's voice rang like silver in the cool air of dawn:

  "He is The Horus, Strong Bull, Beloved of Ma'at; He of the Two Goddesses, Protector of Khem who Subdues the Foreign Lands; The Golden Horus, Rich in Years, Great in Victories; He is King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Strong in Right; He is User-Ma'at-Ra, Son of Ra; Ramses, Beloved of Amun."

  The officers bowed again to the living god, and Pharaoh made a quick gesture with one hand. The officers bowed once more and rose.

  Djehuty came to his feet with the rest. Servants pulled a cover off a long table. It was covered by a shallow-sided box, and within the box was a model made of sand mixed with Nubian gum, smelling like a temple on a festival day. Its maker stood waiting.

  There is the outland dog, he thought. Mek-andrus the foreigner, the one who'd risen so high in Pharaoh's service. He wore Egyptian headdress and military kilt but foreign armor—a long tunic of linked iron rings. Foreign dog. Disturber of custom.

  "The servants of Pharaoh will listen to this man, now Chief of Chariots," Ramses said. "So let it be written. So let it be done."

  Djehuty bowed his head again. If Pharaoh commands that I obey a baboon with a purple arse, I will obey, he thought. Mek-andrus was obviously part Nubian, too, with skin the color of a barley loaf and a flat nose. The will of Pharaoh is as the decrees of fate.

  The foreigner moved to the sand table and picked up a wooden pointer. "This is the ground on which we must fight," he said. His Egyptian was fluent, but it had a sharp nasal accent like nothing any of the Khemites had ever heard before. "As seen from far above."

  All the officers had had the concept explained to them. Some were still looking blank-eyed; Djehuty nodded and looked down with comprehension. There was the straight north-south reach of the coast of Canaan, with the coastal plain narrowing to nothing where the inland hills ran almost to water's edge; a bay north of that, where a river ran into the sea. The river marked a long trough, between the hills and the mountains of Galilee to the north, and it was the easiest way from the sea inland to the big lake and the Jordan valley.

  "The Hittites, the men of Kar-Duniash, the Mariyannu of the Asiatic cities, the Aramanaean tribes, and their allies are approaching from the northeast, thirty-five thousand strong not counting their auxiliaries and camp followers, according to the latest reports."

  The pointer traced a line down through Damascus, over the heights, along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, then northwest from Bet Shean.

  "Of those, at least five thousand are infantry equipped with fire weapons, with thirty cannon, and four thousand chariots."

  None of the Egyptian commanders stirred; there was a low mutter of sound as the Sherdana mercenary commander translated for his monoglot subordinates, their odd-looking helmets with the circle of feathers all round bending together.

  "Favored of the Son of Ra," Djehuty said. "If we are here"—he pointed to a place half a day's march before the point where the coastal plain pinched out—"can they reach the sea and hold the passes over Carmel against us?"

  Mek-andrus nodded; he no longer smiled with such boorish frequency as he had when he first came to Egypt. "That is the question. They were here"—he tapped the place where the Jordan emerged from Galilee—"yesterday at sunset."

  Another rustling. That was a longer distance than they had to travel, but it was over flat land with supplies to hand; in time of peace the harvest of the Jezreel went to Pharaoh's storehouses. The Egyptian force must cross mountains.

  "Thutmose did it," Mek-andrus said. "If we take this pass"—his finger tapped—"as the Great One's predecessor did, we can be here and deployed to meet them before they expect us."

  Thutmose . . ., Djehuty thought. Then: Ah. One of the great Pharaohs of the previous dynasty, the one that had petered out after the Accursed of Amun tried to throw down the worship of the gods. His eyes narrowed as he watched Mek-andrus. How did the outland dog know so much of Khem? Djehuty knew the barbarian didn't read the Egyptian script, so he couldn't have simply read the story off a temple wall the way a literate, civilized man might. The fire weapons themselves weren't sorcery, just a recipe, like cooking—plain saltpeter and sulfur and charcoal, whatever the peasants might think. But there was something not quite canny about Mek-andrus himself.

  Yet the gods have sent him to us. Without Mek-andrus, the Hittites and Achaeans and other demon-begotten foreigners who knew not the Black Land or the Red would have had the new weapons all to their own. That would have been as bad as the time long ago when the Hyksos came with their chariots, before any Egyptian had seen a horse, and it had taken a long night of subjection and war to expel them.

  "Who should take the vanguard?" Pharaoh asked.

  Mek-andrus bowed. "Let Pharaoh choose the commander who has both wisdom and bravery . . . and many cannon, so that they can hold off the enemy host until the whole army of Pharaoh is deployed."

  Remote as jackal-headed Anubis deciding the fate of a soul in the afterworld, Pharaoh's eyes scanned his generals.

  Djehuty fell on his face as the flail pointed to him. "Djehuty of the Brigade of Seth. The vanguard shall be yours. Prepare to move as soon as you may. You shall cross the pass and hold the ground for the rest of our armies. So let it be written! So let it be done!"

  It was a great honor . . . and possibly the death sentence for the Brigade of Seth.

  Djehuty slid gracelessly down off the horse, keeping a tight grip on the reins as it whinnied and shied sideways. Its iron shoes struck sparks from the rocks beside the trail. The column was winding its way upwards, through rocky hills covered in resin-scented pine forest, towards the saddle between two peaks. He tossed the reins to a groom and walked back down the narrow twisting passage—it would be boastful to give it the name of road—as the sweating files of infantry and charioteers made their way upwards. The chariots were no problem; even the heavier new models could still be lifted easily by two strong men when the going became very rough. The cannon, though . . .

  A wheel lurched over a rock and came down with a slamming bang that made him wince as if his testicles were being drawn back up into his gut. He let out a sigh of relief as the wheel stayed in one piece and the tough Nubian ebony of the axle didn't crack.

  "Halt!" he called. "You, Senefer—get a company of infantry up here, a hundred men, and ropes." They could repeat the process with each gun from this point to the saddle of the pass, changing the infantry companies as needed.

  He ran a hand along the sweating neck of the lead horse in the gun team, murmuring soothingly when it blew out its lips in weary protest.

  "Peace, brother of the field of war," he said. "So, so, my pretty. Soon you may rest."

  An officer must be thrifty with Pharaoh's goods. There was no sense in killing valuable horses with overwork when peasants were available.

  "I do not like the thought of cowering in a hole," Djehuty said.

  The valley stretched out before him, land flat and marshy in spots, in others fertile enough even by an Egyptian's standards. Stubble stood sere on that half of the plowland that made this year's harvested fields, blond-white and knee high; the fallow was densely grown with weeds. Olive trees grew thick on the hills
that rose on either side of the southeastward trend of the lowlands; orchards of fig and pomegranate stood around hamlets of dark mud brick, and green leafy vineyards that would produce the famed Wine of the North. These lands were well-peopled, a personal estate of Pharaoh and on a route that carried much trade from the north in times of peace.

  "All the courage in the world won't stop a bullet," Mek-andrus said. "A man in a hole—a rifle pit—can load and fire more easily, and still be protected from the enemy's bullets. They must stand and walk forward to attack; and the Divine Son of Ra has ordered us to defend."

  Djehuty made a gesture of respect at the Pharaoh's name. "So he has," he said. You purple-arsed baboon, he thought to himself. Pharaoh was a living god, but a commander in the field was not always bound by his sovereign's orders—it was the objective that counted. And occasionally Egyptians had committed deicide . . . No. He thrust the thought from him. That was a counsel of desperation, and Ramses had been a good Pharaoh, strong and just.

  "How do you advise that we deploy, then?" Djehuty said.

  He looked back. The land fell rapidly from the saddle, and most of the Brigade of Seth were out, forming up in solid blocks.

  "Let us keep the pass to our backs," the foreigner said.

  "So—half of a circle?" Djehuty said, making a curving gesture.

  "No, not today. That would disperse the fire of our guns. Instead—"

  Mek-andrus began to draw in the dirt with a bronze-tipped stick he carried. "Two redoubts, little square earth forts, on either end of a half circle whose side curves away from the enemy. That way they can give enfilading fire."

  "Please, O Favored of the Divine Horus, speak Egyptian; I plead my ignorance."

  Mek-andrus looked up sharply. Djehuty gave him a bland smile; let him see how a civilized man controlled his emotions.