Hope Renewed Page 6

  He hoped he’d have time to see the great Star Temple that Governor Barholm had built. It was supposed to make the one in Old Residence look like a hut—and now, that seemed possible.

  Minatelli’s feet and body took him through the crowded hold of the troopship without more than an occasional jostle; after the cleaner air on deck, the stink of it hit him again. His eight-man section was waiting by their gear.

  “What’s t’word, corp?”

  “We’re heading east,” Minatelli said.

  His own Sponglish was fluent now, but it still carried the accent of the Spanjol more common in the Western Territories. He’d been recruited into the 24th Valencia when Messer Raj came to make war against the Brigade; before that his local priest in Old Residence had taught him his letters and numbers, which was one reason he’d made watch-stander and then corporal so fast. Most of the Civil Government’s infantry were of peon stock, and almost all illiterate.

  He made a quick check of the gear laid out on each of the straw pallets. Waterproof blanket, blanket, long sword-bayonet, cartridge pouches with seventy-five rounds, another fifty in a cardboard box, entrenching spade or short pick, mess tin, canteen, haversack, spare clothing if any, bandage packet, blessed chlorine powder for purifying water, three days’ hardtack . . .

  The corporal picked up one of the Armory rifles and stuck his thumb into the loop of the lever before the handgrip. A push and the block went snick, snapping down at the front so the grooved ramp on top led to the chamber. He peered down the barrel, raising it to the light. No rust, not too much oil. He snapped the lever back: clack. A pull on the trigger brought a sharp click as the pin fell on the empty space where a cartridge would lie in combat.

  “Not too bad, Saynchez,” Minatelli said. “Awright, git the kit on.”

  A chorus of grumbles. “Yor all gone soft,” he said relentlessly. “Be off yor backsides soon.”

  He swung his own on. Webbing belt, pouches, shoulder-straps, haversack and bayonet went on like a coat; all you had to do was snap the buckle on the belt. Everything else went into the blanket roll; you rolled that up into a sausage, strapped the roll shut with leather thongs, then bent it into a U-shape and slung it over your left shoulder with the tied-together ends at your right hip. He grunted a little as it settled down, shrugging until it rode properly; you could wear blisters the size of a cup if you didn’t adjust it just right.

  An officer and bugler came down the main hatchway. The brassy notes of Full Kit and Ready to Move Out sounded, loud through the dim crowded spaces. The troops erupted in cursing, crowding movement, all but the most experienced veterans—they’d gotten ready beforehand. Minatelli grinned at his squad.

  “Happy now?”

  It was a lot easier to put your gear on when a couple of hundred others weren’t trying to do the same, and that in a hold packed with temporary pinewood bunks.

  Saynchez snorted. He was a grizzled man in his thirties, one of two in the squad who’d been out east with the 24th the last time. He’d also been up and down the ladder of rank to sergeant and back to private at least twice; it was drink, mostly.

  “We goin’ east fer garrison, er t’fight?” he asked.

  “Messer Raj didn’t tell me, t’last time he had me over fer afternoon kave n’ cakes,” Minatelli said dryly.

  He wouldn’t be looking forward to garrison duty, himself. Some preferred it; in between active campaigns Civil Government infantry were assigned farms from the State’s domains, with tenant families to work them. You had to find your own keep from the proceeds, minus stoppages for equipment. Provided your officers were honest—which Major Felasquez was, thank the Spirit—the total came to about the same as active-service cash pay. About what a laborer made, with more security and less work. But it sounded dull, especially to a city boy like him, and he hadn’t joined up to be bored.

  Mind you, some of the fighting in the Western Territories had been more interesting than he really liked. He remembered the long teeth of the Brigade curaissiers’ dogs, the lanceheads rippling down, sweat stinging his eyes, and the sun-hot metal of the rifle as he brought it up to aim.

  “Word is,” he went on, relenting, “that t’wogboys is over the frontier. Messer Raj’s bein’ set out to put ’em back.”

  Saynchez shaped a silent whistle. Minatelli looked at him hopefully; the far eastern frontier with the Colony was only a rumor to him. Saynchez had been with the 24th when Messer Raj whipped the ragheads and killed their king.

  “Them’s serious business,” the older private said. “Them wogs is na no joke.”

  “Messer Raj done whup ’em before,” one of the other soldiers said.

  “Serious,” Saynchez said softly. “Real serious.”

  Minatelli slung his rifle. The bugle sounded again: Fall in.

  A locomotive let out a high shrill scream from its steam whistle. Its two man-high driving wheels spun, throwing twin streams of sparks from the strap-iron rails beneath. The long funnel with its bulbous crown belched steam and black smoke, thick and smelling of burnt tar. Behind it eight iron-and-wood cars lurched against the chain fastenings that bound them together. They were heaped with coal, and heavy. It took more wheel-spinning and lurching halts before the train finally gathered way and rocked southward through the city towards the Hemmar Valley and the long journey east.

  Raj’s hound Horace snarled slightly at the train. He ran a soothing hand down the beast’s neck, clamping his legs slightly around its barrel. Other riders were having more trouble with their animals. Hounds tended to have good nerves; it was one of their strong points. They also tended to do exactly as they pleased whenever they felt like it, but everything was tradeoffs. Horace moved forward at a swinging walk, stepping high over the rails, his plate-sized paws crunching on the cinder and crushed rock of the roadbeds.

  More coal trains pulled out, building up the reserves at the stations farther east along the Central Rail; barges lay beside the dock, heaped with the dusty black product of the Coast Range mines. Other trains were making up, of slat-sided boxcars with 40 hombes/8 dawg freshly stenciled on their sides; forty men, or eight riding dogs. The railyards sprawled along a good part of East Residence’s harbor. Barholm Clerett had built more kilometers of line than the previous ten Governors combined; whatever you said of him, he was a builder. Temples, forts, railways—the great Central Line from the capital to Sandoral completed at last—dams, canals. Much of it financed with the plunder from Raj’s campaigns, and dug by captives from them.

  It was a mild early-summer day, the sky blue except for a few puffs of high cloud, both moons up—Maxiluna was three-quarters full, Miniluna a narrow crescent. Like the one on the Colony’s green banner, the crescent of Islam.

  Raj shook his head at the thought. Beyond the moons were the Stars, and the Spirit of Man of the Stars.

  Today there were more soldiers than railway men in the marshaling yard. Men heaved rectangular crates onto the bed of a railcar. Each had the Star of the Civil Government stenciled on its side, and 11mm 1000 rnds. A group of artillerymen—they were stripped to their baggy maroon pants, but those had a crimson stripe down the outside of the leg—was manhandling a field gun onto the flatcar behind, heaving it up a ramp of planks and lashing the tall iron-shod wheels down to eyebolts on the deck. Oilcloth covers were strapped over the muzzle and breech, to keep dust and moisture out of the mechanism. Near-naked slaves with iron collars embossed with Central Rail were pulling in handcarts loaded with rations: hardtack, raisins, blocks of goat cheese, sacks of dried meat, barrels of salt fish. A farrier-sergeant of the 5th Descott came by leading a string of riding dogs on a chain lead snapped to their bridles; they surged away in wuffling alarm as a locomotive hooted, and the man clung until his feet were nearly off the ground.

  “Pochita! Fequez! Ye bitches brood, quiet a’down, er I’ll—sorry, Messer Raj—”

  “Carry on, sergeant.”

  “—I’ll skin yer lousy hides, quiet there.”

 
The giant carnivores calmed, but their ears stayed back, and lips curled away from teeth as long as a man’s finger. Few of the beasts had ever seen a steam engine before, much less ridden in a train. For that matter, few of the troopers had either, even the natives of the Gubernio Civil; most of them were countrymen, the cavalry from border areas or backwaters like Descott County. What the half-savage westerners he’d brought into the service thought of it, the Spirit only knew.

  A platoon of infantry passed him, rifles at their right shoulders and blanket rolls over the left. He read their shoulder-flashes, and gave the officer a salute.

  “Glad to have you with me again, 24th Valencia,” he said. “That was good work you did at the siege of East Residence, and the pursuit.”

  The lieutenant at their head snapped out his sword and returned the salute with a flourish. The men raised a deep shout of Raj! Raj! Some others picked it up, until he waved them to silence. In the relative quiet that followed, he heard a noncom cursing at a fatigue-party:

  “Didn’t hear t’ General tell ye t’stop workin’, did ye? Move yer butts! Put yer backs inta it.”

  What with one thing and another, it’s probably for the best there’s no time to address the men, he thought mordantly.

  A speech from the commander was customary before taking the field, but the last thing he needed right now was the inevitable spies—in East Residence they were even thicker than fleas and almost as common as bureaucrats—giving a lurid description of his troops crying him hail. Far too many Governors had started out as popular generals; bought popularity more often than not, but winning battles would do as well. It made any occupant of the Chair suspicious, and usually more comfortable with mediocrities holding the high military ranks.

  He looked around at the bustling yard: chaotic, but things were getting done.

  “Good work, Muzzaf,” he said to the man riding at his side.

  The little Komarite looked up from his clipboard; there were dark circles under his eyes. “A matter of times and distances, solamnti,” he said. “No different from calculating tonnages or profit margins.” He grinned. “A pleasure working for a man who understands numbers, at that, my lord. Too few military nobles do.”

  Few nobles have Center advising them, Raj thought. Aloud: “I say again, good work.”

  It was that: a formidable bit of organization. Railways had been around for a long time now, but there had never been enough of them, or enough uninterrupted kilometers of line, to move large forces. He’d had enough to do managing the men; Muzzaf had been invaluable once Raj explained the basic idea. This was going to change warfare forever. Not that the railways were that much faster than dogback yet, but they were untiring—and more importantly, they could carry heavy supplies long distances at the same speed as light cavalry, without draft beasts eating up their loads or dying.

  And it never hurt to acknowledge when a man did something right, either. Another thing too many nobles did was simply snap their fingers and expect things to fall into place. It was the engineers and administrators that made the Civil Government more than another feudal pigsty.

  Muzzaf grinned. “Half of it was your lady’s labors,” he said. “Without her keeping the patricians off my back . . .” He shrugged meaningfully.

  Raj nodded. Suzette Whitehall had been born in East Residence, to fifteen generations of city nobility. Nobody knew how to work the system better. It was one of her manifold talents. The wonder is she picked a hill-squireen like me, he thought with a smile. He’d been nothing in particular then, just another land-poor Descotter nobleman making his way in the professionals like his fathers before him.

  And where—

  “My lady,” he said.

  She stood with the command group, but she turned quickly at the sound of his voice. Her smile was slight, but it warmed the slanted gray eyes; Horace crouched, and Raj stepped free of the stirrups and bent over her hand. She was in Court walking-out dress, lace skirt split at the front and pinned back to show embroidered leggings, mantilla, the works. It surprised him; he’d expected her traveling gear. Fatima was beside her, carrying a tray with a bottle of Kelden Sparkler and several long-stemmed glasses, each with half a strawberry on its ice-cooled rim.

  He reached out a hand—not for the wine, it was too early for him—but for the fruit. She touched his fingers with her folded fan.

  “That’s ammunition, my knight,” she said.

  A party of officials was picking their way through the shouting chaos of soldiers and guns and dogs, heading his way. He recognized the Municipal Prefect of East Residence—the Governors didn’t allow the city an alcalle of its own, knowing the fickleness of an East Residence mob—and he looked deeply unhappy. Raj braced himself.

  “More time lost,” he growled deep in his throat.

  Suzette touched him on the arm. “A minute, darling,” she said. “I expected this. That’s Rahol Himentez, and he had a mob stone his townhouse when the coal ran out one winter. He’s had a bee in his breeches about it ever since.”

  She swept off towards the dignitaries.

  “—winter reserves,” Raj could hear the Prefect bleating. “And the enemy’s on the Lower Drangosh, not the Upper—”

  But he stopped, and his flunkies with him, milling around as Suzette’s soothing voice cut through the plaintive whine.

  Beside him, Gerrin Staenbridge chuckled with admiration. “Cut off by the flying squadron, by the Spirit,” he said. “Commandeered my mistress to do it, too.”

  One of the other officers laughed. “Small loss to you,” he said. Staenbridge had an eye for handsome youths.

  “Well, she is the mother of my heir,” he pointed out, and cocked an eye toward the civil servants Suzette had intercepted. They were beginning to move back towards the headquarters building, in a sort of Brownian motion gently shepherded by the women.

  Raj nodded curtly. “Right, gentlemen,” he said to the circle of battalion commanders; most of them his Companions, all of them veterans. “Now, you’ve all got your maps?”

  They did, although some of the ex-barbarians, Squadrones and Brigaderos, were looking at them a little dubiously. The Civil Government’s cartographic service was one of a number of advantages it had had over the Military Governments. Unfortunately, the Colony’s mapmakers were just as skillful.

  “This campaign,” he went on, meeting their eyes, “is what we’ve been training for these past five years.”

  “Conquering half the world was a training exercise?” Ludwig Bellamy blurted.

  Raj nodded, with an expression a stranger might have mistaken for a smile. “No offense, Messers, but we’re not fighting barbarians this time. If we hold out a sausage grinder, they’re not going to scratch their heads, mutter and then obligingly ram their dicks into it while we turn the crank.

  “These are disciplined troops with first-rate equipment, operating closer to their base of supplies than we will be. And they have a first-rate commander; Tewfik ibn’Jamal is nobody’s fool. I’ve fought him twice; lost one, won one—and the time I won, Tewfik had his father Jamal looking over his shoulder and jogging his elbow. Jamal was no commander.”

  Gerrin nodded. “This time he’s got Ali along,” he pointed out. His square, handsome face was dark olive, more typical of Descott than Raj’s, who had a grandmother from Kelden County in the northwest. “Ali’s not only no commander, by all accounts he’s a raving bloody lunatic.”

  “That’s our only advantage, and we’ll need it. Messers, no mistakes this time. We move fast, and we hit like a hammer. Gerrin, detail two hundred of the 5th to me, and I’ll take them ahead on the first train. You’ll be rearguard here and come in on the last with the remainder of the battalion.”

  He held up a hand when the other man began to protest. “I need someone here I can trust to see the plan carried out, Colonel.”

  “We also serve who only stay and chivvy bureaucrats,” Staenbridge said.

  “Ludwig,” Raj went on. “We’re short of ro
lling stock. I’m giving you the 1st and 2nd Mounted Cruisers” —the former Squadron troops— “and the 3/591, 4/591 and 5/591” —all Brigaderos from the Western Territories— “and you’ll follow on dogback. Entrain your baggage, commandeer what remounts you need from the Residence Area pens, and keep to the line of rail. You can pick up supplies at the railstops; nothing on the men but their weapons and personal gear. Understood?”

  Ludwig Bellamy slapped one gauntleted fist into the other. “Ci, mi heneral,” he said, his Sponglish as pure as a native Civil Government officer; it even had a hint of a Descott Country rasp.

  Nobody would mistake him for an Easterner, though. He stood a finger over Raj’s 190 centimeters, and the hair cut in an Army bowl crop was yellow-blond. He’d been the son of a Squadron noble, one who surrendered to Raj to keep his lands. Ludwig had been part of the deal, a hostage for his father’s good behavior. He was far more than that now. The man beside him was like enough to be his brother, and was his cousin-in-law; Teodore Welf, former second-in-command of the Brigade.

  He tapped his fingers on his sword-hilt; unlike his kinsman by marriage, he kept the shoulder-length hair of a Military Government officer, and wore the basket-hilted longsword of the Brigade rather than an Easterner’s saber.

  “Good thinking, mi heneral,” he said. “Some of the men . . .” He shrugged at the shrieking locomotives around them. “Well, they’re not used to these modern refinements.”

  “True, Major Welf,” Raj said. Meaning, he thought, that steam engines scare them spitless. They probably thought they were captive demons. “It’ll toughen them up, too. See that they get in some drill with their Armory rifles, Ludwig.”

  Bellamy tossed his chin upward slightly in affirmation; with a slight start, Raj recognized the gesture as one of his own. How times change.