Heirs of Empire

In many respects, Erastor was a stronger defensive position even than Yortown, and Sean and Tibold had considered meeting Rokas there. In the end, they’d decided in favor of Yortown because its terrain had let Sean set his ambush, but for a simple holding engagement, Erastor would actually have been better. There were no open flanks between the Erastor Spur and the river, which left an opponent with superior numbers—or mobility—no openings. He had to attack head-on, and if Ortak refused to come out, Sean would have to go in after him … which meant the Guard’s outnumbered and outranged musketeers could hunker down behind their parapets until Sean’s men entered their range. The Guard’s morale had to be shaken by what had happened at Yortown, while the Angels’ Army’s morale had soared in inverse proportion, and Sean knew his troops could take Erastor. It was the cost of taking it that terrified him.

He frowned more deeply at the map and once more castigated himself for not pushing on more quickly. He’d taken five days to march a distance a Pardalian army could have done in three if it was pushed, and the consequences promised to be grim. If he’d crowded the routed Host harder, he might have bounced Ortak out of Erastor before the high-captain dug in, and telling himself his troops had been exhausted by the Yortown fighting made him feel no better. He should have gotten them on the way with the next dawn, however tired, not wasted two whole days burying the dead and collecting the Host’s cast away weapons, and he swore at himself for delaying.

He wanted to swear at Tibold, as well, for letting him, but that wouldn’t have been fair. The ex-Guardsman was a product of the military tradition which had evolved after the Schismatic Wars, and Pardalian wars were fought for territory. Ideally, battles were avoided in favor of efforts to outmaneuver an opponent, and campaigns were characterized by intricate, almost formal march and countermarch until they climaxed in equally formal engagements or sieges for vital fortresses. The Napoleonic doctrine of pursuing a beaten foe to annihilation was foreign to local military thought. It shouldn’t have been, given the mobility nioharqs bestowed, but it was, and a crushing victory like Yortown would have brought most wars to a screeching conclusion as the defeated side treated for terms. Not this time. High Priest Vroxhan and the Inner Circle might not have the least idea what Sean and his marooned friends were truly after, but they’d realized they were fighting for their very survival. Worse, they were fighting, as they saw it, for their souls. Oh, it was obvious they’d become firmly attached to their secular power, but they also saw no distinction between “God’s Will” and the Temple’s domination of Pardal. Under the circumstances, there were—could be—no acceptable “terms” for them short of the “heretics’ ” utter destruction, and they were mobilizing their reserves. Within another two weeks, at most three, thousands of fresh troops would be marching into Erastor. Somehow he had to crush the Erastor position before those reinforcements arrived, and his soul cringed at the thought of the casualties his men would suffer because he’d screwed up.

His frown at the map became a glare. He knew, intellectually, that there wasn’t always a clever answer, but he was also young. Centuries older than he’d been before Yortown, but still young enough to believe there ought to be an answer, if he were only smart enough to see it.

A hand touched his elbow, and he turned his head to see Sandy looking up at him. Her face was no longer the haunted mask it had been the first night after Yortown, but, as for all of Israel’s crew, the slaughter of that day had left its mark upon her. Her eyes had learned to twinkle once more, yet there was less brashness behind them. No less confidence, perhaps, but a deeper awareness of the horrible cost reality could exact. Now those eyes met his searchingly, the question in them plain, and he sighed.

“I don’t see an answer,” he said in English. “They’ve put in too solid a roadblock, and it’s my own damned fault.”

“Oh, shush!” she said in the same language, squeezing his elbow harder. “We’re all getting on-the-job training, and the last thing we need is for you to kick yourself for things you can’t change. Seems to me you did a pretty fair job at Yortown, and you’ve got a lot more to work with now.”

“Sure I do.” He tried to keep the bitterness from his voice. His officers might not understand English, but they could recognize emotional overtones, and there was no sense shaking their confidence. “Unfortunately,” he went on in a determinedly lighter tone, “the bad guys have more to work with, too. Not in numbers, but in position.” He waved at the fifteen kilometers of earthworks linking the stony Erastor Spur to the river. “We surprised Rokas by doing something he knew was impossible, but Ortak has a much better idea of our capabilities, and he’s dug in to deny us all our advantages. We can take him out with a frontal assault, but we’ll lose thousands, and I just can’t convince myself it’s worth it, Sandy. Not just so we can get hold of a computer!”

“It’s not just to get us to the computer!” she said fiercely, then smoothed her own tone as a few officers stirred in surprise. She shook her head and went on more calmly. “It’s life and death for all these people, Sean—you know that.”

“Yeah? And whose fault is that?” he growled.

“Ours,” she said unflinchingly. “Mine, if you want to be specific. But it’s something we blundered into, not something we did on purpose, and if we started all this, then we have to finish it.”

Sean closed his eyes and tasted the bitterness of knowing she was right. It was a conversation they’d had often enough, and rehashing it now would achieve nothing. Besides, he liked the Malagorans. Even if he’d borne no responsibility for their predicament, he still would have wanted to help them.

“I know,” he said finally. He opened his eyes and smiled crookedly, then patted the hand on his elbow. “And it’s no more your fault than it is mine or Tamman’s or Brashan’s—even Harry’s. It’s just knowing how many of them are going to get killed because I didn’t push hard enough.” She started to open her mouth, but he shook his head. “Oh, you’re right. People make mistakes while they learn. I know that. I only wish my mistakes could be made somewhere that didn’t get people killed.”

“You can only do the best you can do.” Her voice was so gentle he longed to take her in his arms, but God only knew how his officers would react if he started going around hugging an “angel”!

He actually felt his mouth quirk a smile at the thought, and he folded his hands behind him again and walked slowly around the table, studying the relief map from all angles. If only there were a way to use his mobility! Someone—he thought it had been Nathan Bedford Forrest—had once said war was a matter of “getting there firstest with the mostest,” not absolute numbers, and the one true weakness of Ortak’s position was its size. He had fifteen kilometers of frontage—more, with the salients built into his earthworks—and that gave him barely two thousand armed men per kilometer even if he withheld no reserve at all. Of course, he had another thirty or forty thousand he could send in to pick up the weapons of their fallen comrades, but even so he was stretched thin. If Sean could break his front anywhere, and get behind his works, he could sweep them like a broom. But there was no way he could—

He paused suddenly, and his eyes narrowed. He stood absolutely still, staring down at the map while his mind raced, and then he began to smile.

“Sean? Sean?” Sandy had to call him twice before he looked up with a jerk. “What is it?” she asked, and his smile took on a harder, fiercer cast.

“I’ve been going at this wrong,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about how Ortak has us blocked, and what I should have been thinking about is how he’s trapped himself.”

“Trapped?” she asked blankly, and he waved Tibold closer and pointed at the map.

“Could infantry get through these swamps?” he asked in Pardalian, and it was the ex-Guardsman’s turn to frown down at the map.

“Not pikes,” he said after a moment, “but you might be able to get musketeers through.” He cocked his head, comparing the exquisitely detailed map the angels had provided to all the ones he’d ever seen before, then tapped the southern edge of the swamp with a blunt forefinger. “I always thought the bad ground was wider than that down along the south face of the valley,” he said slowly. “We could probably get a column across this narrow bit in, oh, ten or twelve hours. Not with guns or pikes, though, Lord Sean. There’s no bottom to most of this swamp. You might get a few chagors through, but arlaks would sink to the axles in no time. And even after you get through the swamp, the ground’s still soft enough between there and the river to slow you.”

“Would Ortak expect us to try anything like that?” Sean asked, and Tibold shook his head quickly.

“He’s got the same maps we had before you and the ang—” The ex-Guardsman bit the word off as he remembered how Lord Sean and the angels kept trying to get people not to call them that.