“Let’s get ready, boys,” he said quietly as the first branahlk passed the four-hundred-meter range stakes. A soft chorus of responses came back, and his hundred dragoons settled down in their paired-off positions. He watched them sighting across fallen trees and logs as Rokas’ scouts closed to just over two hundred meters. That was still far beyond aimed smoothbore range, but some of them were beginning to look more speculatively his way than he liked.
“Fire!” he barked, and fifty rifled joharns cracked as one.
The muzzle flashes were bright in the shadows of the grove, and powder smoke stung his nose, but his attention was on the scouts. Thirty or more went down—many, he was sure, dismounted rather than hit; branahlks were bigger targets than men—and the others gaped at the smoke cloud rising from the trees. Tamman grinned at their stunned reaction, counting under his breath while the first firers reloaded. The second half of each team waited until his partner was half-reloaded, then fired, and more riders went down. The survivors wheeled and spurred frantically back towards the bend, dismounted men racing after them on foot, but individual shots barked at their heels, and most of them were picked off before they could get out of range.
“Okay, boys, saddle up,” Tamman said, and grinning dragoons filtered back towards their mounts. Their commander waited a moment longer, and his own grin faded as he watched the road. A handful of wounded crawled along it, their agony plain to his enhanced eyes, while others writhed where they’d fallen, and even unenhanced ears could have heard their screams and sobs.
He shivered and turned away, hating himself just a little because not even his horror made him feel one bit less satisfied.
Lord Marshal Rokas glowered at the map in the lamplight, but his glare couldn’t change it, and the reports were just as disturbing now as they’d been when they were fresh.
He scowled. The first ambush had cost him seventy-one men, and that at a range Under-Captain Turalk swore was two hundred paces if it was a span. The second and third had been worse. The Host’s total losses were over four hundred, and they were concentrated in his cavalry—which he wasn’t over-supplied with in the first place.
His scouts would be more than human if what had happened today didn’t make them cautious tomorrow, which was bad enough, but how had the heretics done it? Where had they gotten that many dragoons? Or hidden them? He wouldn’t have believed more than a hundred men could be concealed in any of those ambush sites, but his casualties argued for three or four times that many—with malagors, at that—in each.
He poured a goblet of wine and sank into a folding chair. How they’d done it mattered less than that they had, but ambushes wouldn’t save them. Unless they wanted to lose any chance to bottle him up in the mountains, they had to stand and fight; when they did, he would crush them.
He’d better, for two-thirds of Mother Church’s own artillery and muskets and half her armor and pikeheads had come from Malagor’s foundries. Rokas had never liked being so dependent on a single source, yet what they faced now was worse than his worst nightmare, for every foundry Mother Church had lost, the heretics had gained.
Rokas knew to the last pike and pistol how many weapons had lain in the Guard’s armories in Malagor. His figures were less accurate for the secular arsenals but still enough for a decent guess, and even if the heretics had them all, they could field little more than a hundred thousand men. Yet given time, Malagor’s artisans could arm every man in the princedom, and if that happened, the cost of invading that mountain-guarded land would become almost unbearable.
He’d finally managed to convince the Circle of that simple, self-evident fact; if he hadn’t, the prelates would have delayed the Host until first snow “strengthening their souls against heresy.”
But High Priest Vroxhan had listened at last, and now Rokas brooded down at the map tokens representing a hundred and twenty thousand men—the picked flower of the Guard from eastern North Hylar. His force was really too large for the constricted terrain, but, as he’d told the high priest, strategy and maneuver were of scant use in this situation.
He stared unhappily at the blue line of the Mortan River and sipped his wine. An infant could divine his only possible path, and Tibold was no infant, curse him! He was a seldahk, with all the speed and cunning of the breed; a seldahk who’d offended a high-captain and been banished to the most miserable post that high-captain could find. Tibold would know precisely what Rokas planned … and how to make the most of whatever force he had.
The marshal chewed his mustache at the thought. Mother Church’s last true challenge had been the conquest of barbarian Herdaana six generations ago, and even that had been far short of what this could become. If the heresy wasn’t crushed soon, it might turn into another nightmare like the Schismatic Wars, which had laid half of North Hylar waste, and the thought chilled him.
Sean MacIntyre stood on the walls of the city of Yortown and stared down at the fires of his men. His men. The thought was terrifying, for there were fifty-eight thousand people down there, and their lives depended on him.
He folded his hands behind him and considered the odds once more. Worse than two-to-one, and they’d have been higher if the Church had chosen to squeeze more troops into the valley. He’d rather hoped they might do just that, but this Lord Marshal Rokas knew better than to crowd himself—unfortunately.
He gnawed his lip and wished he weren’t so far out of his own time, or that the Academy’s military history hadn’t tended to emphasize strategy and skimp on the military nuts and bolts of earlier eras. Half of what they’d introduced to the Malagorans had been dredged up from remembered conversations with Uncle Hector. The rest had been extrapolated from that or gleaned from Israel’s limited (and infuriatingly nonspecific) military history records, and he intended to have a severe talk with Aunt Adrienne about her curriculum.
He paced slowly, brooding in the night wind. The pike was the true mankiller of Pardal, and most armies had at least three of them for every musket. The Temple Guard certainly did, and Tibold had explained how it used its phalanx-like formations to pin an enemy under threat of attack, “prepared” him with artillery and small arms, and finally charged home with cold steel. Yet for all their horrific shock power, those massive pike blocks were unwieldy; he suspected traditional Malagoran tactics would have given Rokas problems even without the “angels” and their innovations.
The Malagorans’ polearms reminded him of Earth’s Swiss pikemen, but with fewer pikes and more bills which, in the absence of any heavy cavalry threat, were shorter, handier melee weapons than those of Earth. Tactically, they were far more agile than the Guard, relying on shallower pike formations to hold an enemy in play while billmen swept out around his flanks, and Sean’s modifications should make them even deadlier … assuming they were ready.
If only he’d had more time! He’d let Tibold handle training, and the tough old captain made Baron von Steuben look like a Cub Scout, but they’d had barely two months. Their army had incredible esprit and a hard core of militia (Malagor’s self-governing towns and villages raised their own troops in the absence of feudal grandees), and over eight thousand Guardsmen had defected to the rebels, but fusing them into a single force and teaching them a whole new tactical doctrine in two months had been a nightmare.
Worse, none of his own training had taught him how to lead troops with so little command and control. He was used to instant, high-tech communication, and he suspected his most pessimistic estimates fell far short of just how bad this was going to be. His men looked good at drill, but would they hang together in battle when the whole world went crazy about them? He didn’t know, but he knew too many battles in Earth’s history had been lost when one side lost its cohesion and fell apart in confusion.