"SsssssSSSSAA! SA! SA! SsssssSSSSAA!"
BAAAAAMMMM.
"Independent fire, rapid-fire!" Barnes said. Then, quietly: "By Jesus, I think they're going to make it to the wall."
"No," O'Rourke said judiciously, watching the fast steady crackle scythe into the thinning ranks of the attackers. "No, that last volley rocked them back on their heels, the saucy bastards."
Now the attack wavered, men bunching and hesitating. They were less than a hundred yards away now, close enough for him to imagine he could hear the flat smacking impact of bullets striking home, close enough to see men jerk and stumble and sprawl or a brazen helmet ring like a bell as it went spinning away from a shattered skull. They reached a low stone wall and began to climb over, until half a dozen were struck at the same instant and toppled backward. That sent them to earth, crouching behind the loose-piled stones of the field boundary.
All except a knot who came on at the same dead run, led by the chief with the gilt wheel on his helmet. A standard-bearer ran beside him, holding up a pole with a bronze boar on its top. Man after man fell, some in the sack-of-potatoes slump that meant instant death, more screaming or writhing on the ground. Bullets kicked up sudden puffs of dust around the chiefs feet, or sparked off rocks, but some freak of odds and ballistics spared him even when the standard-bearer fell and the curl-tusked boar tumbled in the dirt.
"Don't kill him!" someone shouted from the firing line. "Don't kill him, Goddammit!"
A dozen others took up the cry; Barnes looked at O'Rourke and raised an eyebrow as the firing crackled to a halt. Everyone could admire courage that absolute, even in an enemy.
"Let them have their gesture," he said, and checked his watch. "Good for morale. Five o'clock… it's going to be a long day and night, I think."
The Ringapi chief kept coming, teeth bared and spear raised. But the end of the slamming fusillade seemed to waken him from his trance of ferocity, as much as the shouts of Go back! and Look behind you! from the line of barley sacks ahead of him. He slowed, his moccasined feet gearing down from their pounding run to a walk. The shouts continued-some of them in the Sun People dialects of Alba, close enough to his own speech to be understood for short simple phrases. He did look around, and realized that he was alone; looked back, at the ruin of his clan's war band, bodies scattered all the way to the ravine they'd jumped off from. The exaltation of the spirit that had carried him so far ran away like water from a slit sack. He turned back to face his enemies and stood, slowly raising spear and shield until they made an X against the lowering sky.
His pale eyes traveled back and forth along the breastwork. With a convulsive gesture he slammed his spear into the ground and left it quivering upright like a seven-foot ashwood exclamation mark. Then he turned and began to walk back the way he'd come, striding along at a pace neither fast nor slow, pausing only to scoop up the boar standard, until he reached the stone wall where the remnant of his followers pulled him down into shelter.
"What," O'Rourke said thoughtfully, glancing up at the hillside where the enemy commander had his post, "was the point of all that, now?"
Hantilis answered: "I think they were counting your bows… your guns, I mean. Testing the strength of one wall." He pointed at the enemy command post. "With the far-seeing tube he could see how you moved your men about, and plan how to strike a stronger blow."
The Islander commanders nodded. Well, that's a cool one, then, O'Rourke thought. When he puts things together, look out for fair.
"Heads up!"
The cry came from sentries stationed on the flat roof of the hospital. They were pointing southward.
"Mind the store, macushla," O'Rourke said, and jumped down from the firing platform. He nodded in passing to Chaplain Smith, who was helping organize the stretcher-bearers.
"The hand of the Lord fell heavy on the enemy," Smith said. "But Colonel, I must protest that many of the troops are given to blasphemy in the heat of battle. No luck can come of taking the name of the Lord in vain, or that of His mother. I do not speak of naming heathen Gods," he added sourly, acknowledging the regulations about religious tolerance without approval. "Only of my own flock."
O'Rourke stared at him for a second, before he could force himself to believe the man was deadly serious. "Reverend Smith, you may tell your flock that I'm firmly opposed to blasphemy in all forms," he said finally.
The young ex-Irauna smiled and drew the sign of the cross.
"Bless you, my son."
The Islander colonel was shaking his head as he trotted on through the open space. Mary Mother of God, but sometimes I wonder if sending those missionaries to Alba isn't going to come back to haunt us, he thought to himself, and went up a rough pole ladder to the roof of the hospital. The lookout there pointed southward and a little west.
"They're moving there, Colonel," she said. "Fair number of 'em, but pretty scattered."
He trained his own binoculars and hissed. Yes, Ringapi for sure; moving by ones and threes and little groups, into the hills that made the southern wall of the valley and into the open forest above that. There they promptly disappeared into the shadowy bush, settling down behind trees or rocks. That was probably a hunting skill where they came from-mostly prairie and forest and wooded mountains, from the Intelligence reports-but useful here nonetheless. The first puff of smoke came as he watched. The crack of the rifle sounded a perceptible fraction of a second later; he couldn't see where the bullet landed. That was the signal for more; he scanned the mountainside, trying to count the guns as muzzle flashes winked at him out of the shadows. Now he could hear bullets going by, or going thock into the hard mud-brick walls of the hospital building, or making a peculiar crunching shrush into the sacks of barley.
"Lieutenant Hussey," he called, as he dropped down the ladder again.
"Sir?"
The boy was even more painfully young than his captain, thin and dark; O'Rourke decided that either he was getting old himself, or this one had lied about his age to enlist.
"Hussey, pull me out twelve Marines and a corporal-all of them good with a bayonet. Include- ' He named four from the escort that had ridden in with him. "Form them up by the wellhead over there. Take charge of them, and use 'em as a flying squad, to plug gaps. Oh, and marksmen on the south wall are to reply to those riflemen on the hill."
Barnes had come up while he was speaking, and raised an eyebrow. "They won't be able to see them, sir," she pointed out.
O'Rourke nodded. "But it will keep their heads down. They aren't what you'd call good shots-lousy, I'll wager, the lot of them-but there are a lot of them."
"And we're what you might call a large target," Barnes said grimly, tapping her fingers on her holstered pistol.
As if on cue, one of the Marines on the north-facing wall dropped back and cried out, clutching at his leg, and yelling: "Corpsman, corpsman!"
The stretcher-bearers trotted over and lifted him onto the stretcher, trotting off to the hospital building, ignoring the occasional bullet kicking up a pock of dust in the open space they had to cross.
"That we are, macushla," O'Rourke agreed, his voice equally ironic. He pointed westward, past the hospital building. "Droopy Gray Whiskers up there, his dispositions make sense now. He'll send his men in like this"-he clenched his fist, put the first two fingers out in a fork, and pushed them forward- "at the hospital; it's where we're weakest because the firing line is narrow, and the sun'll be directly in our eyes. Then the most of them will come around the north side, along the building's wall, and then the breastwork."