How did the others get in front of him, cut him off from the River?
And then he looks up, checks the sun in the sky. And knows.
He has become confused, somewhere in the dust behind. He has ever so slowly made an erroneous turn. And not only him, but the men he leads. The two hundred. The survivors. The final muster after the devastation at Garangipore.
They were to escape and begin the guerilla harassment.
They were to be the unvanquished.
And now a simple mistake.
So easy to do in his exhaustion.
So costly. So entirely his own fault.
He has slowly turned, somehow gotten off course. Has allowed his terror and tiredness to join the chase. He has allowed himself and his command to run right into the enemy’s advancing, encircling front lines.
The Blaskoye rifles crackle.
We were to be the unvanquished.
The Redlanders reload. He raises his own weapon, but of course he is long out of caps and powder. Only bayonets remain, and the enemy will never allow him, allow any of his band, to get within range to use those.
The Blaskoye rifles crackle yet again.
And he is down, taken in the hip and shoulder. He has seen such wounds. He knows he will be a long time dying.
A long time to burn with the certain knowledge.
He is forever among not the unvanquished, but the vanquished.
Abel started in his saddle, almost sending his mount skittering. Joab, who was considering Abel’s previous statement, didn’t seem to notice.
“I believe it is a test,” Joab said, nodding to himself. “Yes. They wish to gauge our response so they will know what to expect the next time. And the next.”
Good head on his shoulders, that man, said Raj with an approving growl.
The Scouts had already been deployed to cut off a retreat up the Escarpment, or at least to harry any Redlanders if they did manage to break through. Abel had been reassigned to command the Militia Regiment, much to his chagrin at first, until Raj had pointed out that Joab had given him responsibility for his entire right. That, in fact, Joab intended to use the Regulars to drive the Redlanders out of the town directly into Abel’s lines.
He’s made you the anvil, lad, Raj said. He knows the townfolk trust you, or at least they trust him, and know you are his son. They need a unified command.
It is a good strategy if the goal is to drive the Blaskoye back where they came from, Center intoned. Notice that the southeast of the village is open. Joab doubts himself, and he is providing them with a route of retreat. With the proper stroke, he might annihilate them here.
The Scouts will take them when they retreat, Abel thought. We will annihilate them.
There is an eighty-seven point three percent chance that a significant portion of the Blaskoye will escape, said Center. The Scouts are too few.
Abel stopped arguing. He was sure that Center was correct-in the abstract. He always was. Yet there must be something…
He reached his command, a ragtag group of five hundred-one could hardly call it a regiment-that had taken up position behind a knoll to the south-southeast of the village. He was met by a group of three “captains,” that is leaders elected from within the militia themselves. One of these he recognized. It was Fleming Hornburg, the son of Matlan Hornburg. He was arrogant and privileged, but Abel also knew him to be no coward. They’d tangled once in the market over a bumped shoulder, and the fight had been inconclusive. Of course Abel had been conscious of the fact that if he beat the living hell out of Hornburg, he would have put his father in a very awkward political position in the town, if not the district. Perhaps he’d pulled a couple of punches that might otherwise have ended it-and that perhaps would have ended Hornburg’s existence as a result.
The other captain was a local miller named Prokopov. And their third Abel did not recognize. He was dressed in ill-fitting garb, as if he wore a shirt and trousers a size too big. He held a carbine in his right hand and had a bow and quiver strung across his back. Then Abel took another glance and realized-this was no man at all, or boy, either.
It was a young woman.
And then he realized that he did recognize her. Mahaut DeArmanville. This was the sister of Xander. She was the daughter of Henri DeArmanville, a lieutenant in the Regulars. No, not Mahaut DeArmanville. Mahaut Jacobson. She had recently married into the well-to-do Jacobson clan of Hestinga.
“Mahaut?” he asked. “Mrs. Jacobson? What are you doing here?”
“Same as you, sir,” she answered. “I am the leader of the women’s auxiliary.”
“The-what? But that’s a support group.”
“We’re going to support you by firing our muskets into the enemy.”
Abel looked at her a moment, shook his head. “Where is your husband? What does he have to say about this?”
“He’s with me,” answered Flem Stopes, the miller, cracking the faintest of smiles. “And he says that he’s tried for six months to break this mount…“ He turned toward Mahaut and bowed. “Pardon me, ma’am.” Mahaut nodded her assent for him to go on. “And he can’t do it. He says he figures no man can if he cannot, but that maybe a fight will finally do his job for him. Break her, I mean. Make her a little more pliable.”
Mahaut smiled, shook her head. “I’m pliable enough for what he wants,” she said. “This is different. I have friends in that village. Lots of us women do. And we don’t want to leave it all to the men, getting rid of the Blaskoye.”
Mims accent, though Abel. It was a larger town, almost a city-although only Lindron would truly qualify for that distinction given what he’d been shown by Center and his projections-and the women were given more leeway there than elsewhere in the Land, at least anywhere Abel had been. They might hold professions other than teacher or whore in Mims, for instance.
“I want you in the rear,” Abel said. “You and the other women.”
“We want to fight, Lieutenant,” she said. Being the daughter of DeArmanville, she would know his official rank. “Lots of us are armed with muskets-older ones, true-and all of us have had practice with bow and even spear. I’ve seen to it for months, ever since they elected me.”
She’s right about one thing. A woman can pull a trigger just as easily as can a man, Raj said. And she looks to be capable with that bow, or at least she wears it well.
Abel looked at Mahaut, blinked once. They had met several times at officers’ family get-togethers, but she, being a year his senior-an enormous gap at fourteen-had barely given him the time of day. For his part, he hadn’t thought her particularly comely. Her diaphanous robes were the best one could get from the linen works of Fyrpahatet, the seaside town where a leaf-eating creature that produced the fiber thrived, but she’d worn them indifferently. Although she was pretty enough, she’d also worn hardly a smudge of makeup back then, and he’d believed her skin was on the darker side of bronze, until he’d noticed a tan line near her shoulder.
Exactly the lighter strip that a quiver strap might create, he now realized.
Most of the girls of Hestinga worked hard to stay out of the sun and light-toned, even those who were black and brown by ancestry. The idea, Abel supposed, being that un-tanned skin signaled less work in the sun, and hence a higher social status. Obviously, this did not matter to Mahaut Jacobson, and if it mattered to her husband, he hadn’t been able to persuade her of the matter.
“Listen,” he said to her. “We’re circling that knoll to the west”-he pointed to the rise to the northwest, beyond which lay Lilleheim-“and forming up half way down the beginnings of the Escarpment slope. If you’re in the rear, you’ll be above the main body of militia. You’ll have a clear sightline to the Blaskoye if they make a run for us, which I’m guessing they will.”