Vincent shook his head.
“Get the men digging in. We’ve got fresh water here.” He nodded to the oasis-like spring that was in the center of the camp. “Even if the water is somewhat bitter, they can’t block it off. We dig in and let them come at us. As for our ironclads, we move up onto the ridge east of here to keep their artillery back. That’s where we’ll meet their ironclads coming in.”
“They could wait us out, you know. We’re down to five days’ rations.”
“They don’t know that. No, I think their pride is hurt, us getting this far through territory they felt was theirs. No, once those ironclads come up the fight will be on.”
“Wonder if this is all futile anyhow.” Gregory sighed.
Vincent looked over at him.
“Sorry, but word is getting around with the boys. Somehow rumors are floating about a coup back in Suzdal, that the war might already be over, and we’ve surrendered, that Hans and even Andrew are dead.”
“And what do you think?”
“If we surrendered, how long do you think those hairy bastards would let someone like you or me live. We know too much.”
He laughed, shook his head, and slapped the ironclad they were sitting on.
“We’re all doomed to die anyhow; if given the choice, I want to go down fighting in one of these. I was nothing before you Yankees came. You trained me, gave me a chance to command, gave me a machine I could master and even learn to love. That’s a pretty good life, I think, and something worth dying for today.”
“I wish we had another corps though,” Vincent whispered.
“Air cover, that’s what I want. What the hell do you think the Hornets were doing last night?”
Vincent shook his head. At least twenty machines had flown directly overhead in the middle of the night. One of them had circled several times and then pressed on. He had hoped that someone would have found a dropped message streamer, but so far nothing. Perhaps they were attempting a moonlit strike on the enemy ships off-loading the ironclads. If that was their mission, the smoke just over the next hill was indicator enough that the mad scheme had been a failure.
“Anyhow, the fewer men, the greater share of honor,” Gregory continued with a smile, and the two chuckled softly.
“Well, I guess we’re the bait. We wanted a stand-up fight, and we’re going to get one. Let’s make the most of it.”
“Hans.”
The voice was gentle but insistent, waking him from a soft floating dream. It was Maine. Funny, he had actually spent very little time there, but even after all these years it still haunted his memory and dreams. Pulled from the Regulars, he’d been sent to Augusta to help form up a volunteer regiment, 1030-odd farm boys, lumbermen, clerks, students, fishermen, boat builders, craftsmen, railroad men, factory hands, and a lone history professor who would become the 35th Maine. He’d arrived early in July. By the end of August they were already heading south to join the Army of the Potomac in Maryland. Less than two months, and yet somehow it had made its stamp upon his heart. He remembered the day he and a nervous and still-young lieutenant hiked their company from the parade field below the Capitol to the village of Belgrade. The lieutenant allowed the boys to strip down for a swim in Snow Pond while the two sat on a grass-covered hill and first questions were asked. “What’s the war like … how good are the Rebs” and the startling admission … “I hope I don’t fail these boys.”
He had grown, sick of officers who only seemed concerned with rank, privilege, clawing to promotion and this shy volunteer, voice near breaking, wondering aloud if he would “fail his boys.”
He’d been dreaming of that, but it was different. His own wife, Tamira, their baby Andrew, and with them Andrew, Kathleen, and their children. It was like a dream of heaven. No fear, a soft lazy summer day in Maine where, though the sun was warm in July, there was always a cool breeze stirring off the lake.
Even in the dream he wondered if he was wandering in Andrew’s dream realm, for the colonel had told him of his feverish morphine-twisted visions of death, of lingering by a lakeshore with all the dead who had gone before.
No. This was different, and he wondered if it was a foreshadowing, a dream of heaven.
“Hans.”
It was Ketswana, hand lightly on the shoulder, shaking insistently.
Hans opened his eyes and saw the dark features, the shaved head, eyes that were so transparent, like windows into the soul, and the look of concern.
Hans sat up, disoriented. He had sat down on the woodpile, the city was burning, the powder works had blown.
He sat up, feeling light-headed, unsure of where he was. The air was heavy with the smell of burned wood, rubbish, and the ever-present clinging smell of the camps. He looked around. He was off the train, inside a brick building, roof burned off and collapsed. There was a chill; it was all so familiar in a distorted way, the foundry where he had once slaved.
Everything was a mad scurry of confusion, men using stoking rods were cutting into the brick wall, chiseling out firing ports through the heavy wall. He was near the main doorway, dead Bantag from storming the building were dragged to one side and piled up, and had been half-con-sumed in the fire.
He stood up. “How did I get here?”
“You don’t remember?”
Hans shook his head.
Ketswana looked at him closely.
“You all right?”
“Sure. Now tell me what’s going on.”
Ketswana motioned for him to follow as he climbed up a ramp that had once been used by labor crews pushing wheelbarrows of crushed ore, coke, and flux up to the tops of the furnaces. Most of the heavy-beamed walkway had survived the fire but was badly charred.
The walkway rimmed the inside of the factory walls just below the roofline and men and women were working feverishly, clearing away rubble from the collapsed roof, and to his amazement a couple of dozen were slowly dragging a Bantag light fieldpiece, a breechloader, to the northeast corner.
“Where the hell did you get that thing?”
“At the cannon works. A dozen of them brand-spanking-new. We even found some shells. I got one posted down by the gate, the rest of the guns are in the other compounds.” A couple of Chin, a single rifle between them, looked up as they passed, one of them holding up a half-charred piece of flesh and, grinning, nodded his thanks. Directly below, on the floor of the factory compound, Hans could see the burned remains of the Bantag he had shot yesterday, baked into the frozen pool of iron.
Ketswana, knowing what he was thinking, shook his head and laughed.
“I've had crews working all night. We found a herd of horses. I ordered them slaughtered and, using the wreckage of a barracks compound, we roasted tons of the stuff.”
He grimaced.
“Well, most of it was damn near raw, but I remember a time when you and I wouldn’t have turned down raw meat, as long as we knew what it was. That was the lure, word spread, and we must of had them coming in by the tens of thousands. Anyone who could do anything we organized off with their compound leaders, village elders, even some of their princes.
“We fed them and made it clear, if they ran off, everyone would be slaughtered come dawn. Hans, they all know that. Did you hear who’s here?”
“No, who?”
“Tamuka.”
Hans said nothing.
“Word is he’s the one that fired the city. They went crazy yesterday, started murdering everyone, as word spread that we had taken Xi’an and were coming this way.”
Hans nodded, but said nothing. There was no hope of trying to turn these people into a trained cadre, that’d take weeks, months, and months of simply feeding them right as well. Though it was hard to believe he felt they actually looked worse than what he had experienced a year ago. The simple knowledge of what was coming that day would give them the courage to go down in a final mad frenzy.
“Hans, they were organizing for this day, did you know that?”