Private Hook heard the cry. "Here they come, the whole fucking lot of them!" from the lookouts on the roof above. He heard it with a little difficulty, because Sergeant Edraxsson was raving in his bunk, calling commands to an imaginary platoon. There was no time to get an orderly now, either, to give him a shot and quiet him down.
"Oh, shut your bloody hole!" he snapped, and threw some water from a jug on the sick man; his wounded foot was giving off a bit of a smell, too, under the sharp aroma of the disinfectant on his bandages.
The raving died down to mumbles. The thunder-rumble of the approaching Ringapi host was much louder; five thousand men made a good deal of noise, walking in a group. Hook had taken over the slit window that had been here before the Islanders came; it gave him a better view and field of fire than any of the improvised loopholes. Right now the view was uncomfortably good. Not good enough, though; the sun was nearly in his eyes, making him squint and making them water.
"Shit on it," he said, and pulled a chest near.
Then he dumped packets of shells on it, ripping them open with his teeth and tossing the heavy paper aside. Wearing the webbing hurt too much, with the left strap pressing on the open sore on his back.
Best place in the station, he thought, with a little sour satisfaction; all those dumb bastards out in the open on the breastworks were exposed to the enemy firing down from the hill, nothing but a ditch and six-foot wall between them and hand-to-hand combat with the enemy's spears and swords. He had three foot of rock-hard mud brick. If you had to be here at all, this was the place to be. I wonder if I could get out after sundown? No, better not, unless things got really desperate. He didn't want to be out there alone in the dark with the fucking locals, either.
Bugle calls and shouts sounded outside. "Set your fucking sights," he said to the other walking wounded. "Four hundred."
He wanted as many of those locals killed as far away from his precious pink buttocks as he could arrange. Hook thoughtfully licked a thumb and wet the foresight of his rifle, watching the approaching host. They weren't just marching up the road from Troy; splitting up into columns, rather, and flowing forward from wall to wall, grove to grove, pausing to build up in little hollows where they couldn't be seen. Chiefs directed them, with horn calls and waving spears.
"Okay, buddy, let's see you manage this," he snarled.
The foremost figures were close enough to distinguish arms and legs from bodies. That meant… he carefully adjusted the sights of his Werder, rested his left hand beside the window, and clamped the forestock to the mud brick with the thumb it lay across. His right snuggled the butt into his shoulder. Lay the sights on that big, confident-looking bastard with the tanned wolf's-head over his helmet and a belt with gold studs, waving a steel longsword and shouting. Breathe out, stroke the trigger with your finger…
Crack. The recoil punched back at him. One hundred and- The big local doubled over, clutching himself as if he'd been kicked in the groin. Hook laughed as his finger continued the pull. The trigger came all the way back and hit the little stud behind it. The block snapped down and the shell ejected, a sharp fireworks smell in his nose. He reached down without taking his eyes away, picked up a fresh round, pushed it home, then transferred his thumb to the cocking lever on the side of the breech. It slid back with a smooth resistant softness and a double click-clack; the breech came up and tension came on the trigger again.
Hook shifted his aim, chuckling softly. There weren't many things he liked about the Marine Corps. One of them was that they'd pay him to kill people.
The Republic's fleet had folded its wings and come to rest in the Groyne, off what another history would have called the city of La Coruna, in the far northwest of Iberia. A fishing village huddled at the end of a long peninsula, amid a few scattered fields. The inhabitants had fled in terror when the Islander ships appeared; this was an ancient stop on the trade routes to northern Europe, but they had seen nothing on this scale before. Coaxed back, they sold provisions and stored wood, very sensibly made no objection to working parties on shore, and for modest payments in coin and trade goods provided all the information they could through Tartessian-speakers who'd learned that tongue from the numerous south-Iberian traders who passed this way. In fact, the headman of the village bore a Tartessos-made musket with immense pride undiminished by the fact that it was missing a trigger and several other essential parts, and his tribesmen walked in awe of it.
From the quarterdeck of the Chamberlain Alston could see liberty parties moving around, working parties stacking firewood on rafts or towing it out to the ships, and the brown canvas of the field hospital they'd set up.
Her lips quirked almost invisibly. Some of the Sun People auxiliaries had gone on their knees and kissed the solid earth when they were set ashore, and then flung up their hands in the gesture of thankful prayer. They'd clubbed together to buy a cow and some sheep to sacrifice, and it would have been military horses-or men-without the Islanders watching. Mass seasickness on the transports had been no joke; several of them still had hatch covers off and ports open, water pouring over their sides from the pumps as the bilges were repeatedly flooded and pumped out. The smell was no longer perceptible at distance, thank God; just a clean scent of sea and damp forest from the mainland, tar and hemp, paint and wood, and cooking from the galley.
It was good to see the ships in order again; after a week of hard effort they looked nearly as trim as they had setting out from Portsmouth Base. And no word of the Farragut, or the Severna Park, either. Still, only two lost out of nearly forty…
The frigates lay in a line, their battleship-gray hulls with the red Guard slash rocking slightly at anchor beneath furled sails, a slim lethal elegance. Two of the schooners-Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman-were on patrol well out to the west, invisible against the setting sun, and an ultralight buzzed through the sky above, tiny against the fading blue and the few sparse white clouds. The rest of the fleet were closer in to shore, at last with the full complements of masts, spars, and sails.
It was just chilly enough to make the wool of her uniform jacket welcome, and the thought of dinner enticing. They deserved one day of rest before putting to sea again.
"Ma'am, the captains will be arriving soon," a middy murmured.
"Thank you, Mr. Rustadax," she said quietly.
She glanced over to the quarterdeck gangway, where the flagship's accommodation ladder led down to the water. The captain's gigs from the warships were standing in toward it, oars rising and falling. The first of them slid out of sight, and the bosun's pipe twittered. The immaculately uniformed side boys-and girls, her mind prompted wryly-came to attention. There were five of them, the number due to a commander. In the first age of sail senior officers had come aboard in a bosun's chair, and the number needed to haul on the line had been an indication of rank… and hence physical weight, which in those days tended to grow with age and importance.
There was a rattle of rifle butts on the deck as the Marine guard snapped to attention. The quarterdeck bell began to sound, a measured bronze bong-bong… bong-bong… four strokes in all as the visiting officer walked up the ladder.
"Lincoln arriving!" the bosun barked, saluting with his left hand and bringing the little silver pipe to his mouth with the other.
At the weird twittering sound the Marine guard near the rail moved in a beautifully choreographed stamp-clack-clash as they brought their rifles to present arms, the twenty-inch blades of their bayonets glittering like polished silver. Alston gave a slight nod. Although compulsively tidy herself she had no use for spit and polish, not when it was just for its own sake. But ceremony had a very definite, very necessary place in any military organization. It taught-at a level well below the conscious mind-that they weren't a collection of individuals, but a community with a common purpose more important than any single member. And that was as functional as a bayonet or eight-inch Dahlgren; so was the habit of obedience. Both were particularly needed in the Republic's military, where so many members were only a few years-months, sometimes-from a Bronze Age peasant's hut. Constitutional government was pretty abstract to them, but ceremony and ritual were the warp and weft of their lives.