"Pour it on!" he heard O'Rourke shout, and his subordinates echoing it. "Pour it on, and they'll break!"
The Islanders pushed forward, advancing by squads, throwing themselves down and firing to support their comrades moving forward. Soon the forward units were close enough to throw grenades as well, and a cannon came forward at a run with a dozen men pushing at the trail. They let it fall with a thump and jumped out of the way as the gunner jerked the lanyard. The weapon bucked back, muzzle spitting out a huge blade-shaped lance of flame. Canister whined forward, hundreds of lead balls tearing into the enemy at point-blank range.
"Sound charge again!" Hollard called.
The bugles cried, like the distant horns of Elfland through the blizzard. The Marines rose up like a wave out of the earth and flung themselves forward, and the enemy were running – not retreating, running, some of them throwing away their rifles to run faster; falling, too, shot in the back or spitted with the bayonet.
Hollard ran forward with the rest. A clump of Achaean soldiers rose up in front of him, trying to buy some space for their comrades. Crack, and he felt the hot wind of the muzzle blast on his cheek. He fired the revolver six times and took down two men, dim figures spinning backward into the snow and rolling away down the steep ground. He had just time to slap the Python back into its holster before another was lunging at him. His katana slapped the weapon aside and then they were chest to chest. Hollard butted his helmet forward into the other's face, felt bone crumble, brought the sword down from its position over his left shoulder in a blurring slash, ran on over the twitching body.
The Nantucketers swept on over the crest of the hill, shooting and stabbing.
"Sound halt," Hollard gasped-the rest of the rocky passage ahead was a blinding whirl of snow. The guns began throwing shells into it. That and the Gatlings firing ahead ought to keep the enemy running. He couldn't send troops into that and keep any control at all.
The Mitannian flag still flew, the staff forlorn and crooked at the summit of the hill. Kenneth Hollard walked in that direction, controlling the pumping heave of his chest. Stretcher-bearers were bringing back wounded and dead; out of the corner of his eye he saw one Marine with her hand wadded in a sodden ball of fabric walking beside a figure with its poncho spread over its face.
"You great shambling Fiernan gowk," he heard her mumble, half grief and half anger. "You went and got yourself killed."
Then he was at the summit, amid the ruins of foxholes and the craters of a rocket bombardment-they were almost close enough to step from one to the next. The surviving Mitannians were laying out their dead as well-that looked to be half of them at least. The survivors had the stunned, distant look of men who've gone to the limit of endurance and a little beyond. One of them he recognized, Tekhip-tilla, Raupasha's second-in-command. He was kneeling beside a pile of blankets. Kenneth Hollard swallowed and closed his eyes for an instant. Then he saw that the man was holding a mittened hand between his. Sabala lay plastered to the side of her body, whining and giving the warmth that was the only gift he could.
"She lives?" Hollard said.
Tekhip-tilla looked up at him, tears freezing on his cheeks. "She lives-if you can call it that, Great General," he spat. "But I do not think she will live for long. And would she wish to, like this?"
Hollard looked down at the glistening mass of blood across the side of Raupasha's face, and swallowed again.
"Corpsman!" he called sharply. "Corpsman here."
The stretcher-bearers came at the run. Tekhip-tilla made as if to accompany them.
"No," Hollard said, barring his way with the blade of his katana. "You can do nothing there."
"I can be by my ruler's side!"
"You can continue the work she was hurt to do," he said sharply. "Or will you leave your countrymen in wreck? Get your men together-help us see to the wounded-everything to your chariots and pull back to base."
Tekhip-tilla nodded once, with the look of a man biting down on an upalatable truth, then stalked away and began to shout orders, shaking stunned men by the shoulder and getting them moving.
Kenneth Hollard slammed his gloved fist against his thigh. "Damn," he said. Then: "God damn it!"
A long breath, and he called for his radio tech. The connection was bad, but he could make out his sister's voice through the popping and static.
"Sir, the line's cracking like river ice in spring. I just put in the last of Tudhaliyas's men, and that's it. If they hadn't run out of rockets for their katyushas we'd be running like hell right now. The next major push is going to punch right through."
"Right," Hollard said.
He put the fingers of his right hand to his brow, squeezing the cold-numbed flesh as if he could drive answers through the bone by main force.
"Right," he went on. "The right flank's secure, I think- they're not going to put anything through here without fresh troops and with extreme caution."
"Thank God for that," Kathryn said. "We couldn't even disengage with that hanging over us. How's Raupasha?"
"Not good-bad wound," Hollard said, forcing his voice to flatness.
"Oh, shit. All right, sir, what are we going to do?"
"What else?" Kenneth said. "Pull back. Right to the Halys and over, if we can make it. Start right away and we'll be able to salvage something; I'll get there as fast as I can."
"I do not stay with a plan that is a failure," Isketerol of Tartessos snapped. "But first I must know. Fool, have I ever punished the bearer of bad news? Speak!"
The officer gulped, drew himself straight, then threw off a salute of fist to chest. It would have looked more impressive if he hadn't been such a drowned, scorched rat himself. The winter dawn was bright but chill; Isketerol drew his cloak around him, glad of the new-style trousers that were so much less drafty than a tunic alone, and of the warmth of his horse.
"Lord King, we lost two hundred and twenty dead-mostly in fighting the fires, and from the explosions. We do not know how many the enemy suffered, they took their wounded and dead with them."
Isketerol nodded. Even a few years ago, he would have boasted of hundreds slain, he thought. And by the next seven-day, he would believe the tales himself. That had been a difficult thing to teach, first himself and then others, the absolute importance of accuracy, as it was called in English. It had been easier for him because he was a merchant, used to dealing in precise quantities, so-and-so many ingots of fixed weight, interest at such-and-such a rate per year. Even better that he'd been a merchant used to foreign adventuring, where a lapse in knowledge could mean death.
He looked beyond the man who stood at his stirrup. The town of Kurutselcaryaduwara-biden lay in a haze of bitter smoke, tumbled blackened walls whose adobe had been half fired to baked brick, charred rafters still smoldering. Soldiers, civilians and slaves were already at work clearing rubble out of the streets, but it would be a work of months-years-to replace all that had been lost. I should have taken more precautions, he thought bitterly. There had been so much else to do, so many other things clamoring for attention… Now I must, though the ox is already through the broken gate and his grazing has laid waste the grain.
Perhaps that was what the Amurrukan word staff really meant, someone to think of things the supreme commander had no time for. If that was so, it was knowledge bitter in its uselessness. There were too few who could understand the thought; he barely did himself. I have not the time, he thought angrily. A thousand lifetimes would not be enough.