March To The Sea

sledgehammers, and splitting wedges, had altered the landscape almost beyond recognition. Massive trees, some of them more than a meter in diameter, had been cut off close to the ground, sawn into lengths, split, and dragged out to the side of the roadbed. Wood wasn't the best material for covering a road, especially on Marduk, because it rotted and broke too quickly. But this road was being designed for one purpose and one purpose only, and it only had to hold up for a few days of heavy use.

Behind the woodcutters and splitters had come other teams of Mardukans, including civilians impressed from D'Sley and K'Vaern's Cove, leveling and grading the beaten track and filling in the deepest bogs with gravel and gabions of bundled barleyrice straw. When they finished, a third group had taken the split logs by the side of the grading and laid them down to form a corduroy road. The entire project had been one continuous motion, and now that it was done, the first wagon loads of supplies and materials liberated from Sindi were creaking along it towards D'Sley.

Ther Ganau, one of Rus From's senior assistant engineers, trotted up on a civan and waved two hands.

'Stay out of the right-of-way, if you will. I don't want anything to slow traffic.' He gestured at the heavy flow of nose-to-tail wagons. 'What do you think?' he asked Roger.

Pri looked over at the silent prince, and sighed. 'Brilliant, Ther Ganau. Truly amazing. I've never seen such a sight in all my days.'

Roger remained silent, and Cord dug a thumb into his back.

'Say something,' the shaman hissed, and Roger looked up at last.

'Very nice, Ther,' he said listlessly. 'The Captain said he wants us anchoring this end of the line. Where's the best place to dig in?'

The engineer began to reply, then paused for a moment as he noted the roll of material lying on the withers of the prince's flar-ta. He recognized one of the humans' devices for cremating their dead, but all the people who would normally have been around Roger in the field were still there, and he brushed the question aside. He could deal with that mystery later.

'Yes, Your Highness. The Captain has called most of our infantry forward from this end of the line, so if I could borrow the Carnan Battalion for close security and push your cavalry a bit further out to the west, I'd be grateful.'

'Whatever,' Roger said. 'Take whatever you want.' The prince kneed Patty towards the river and lifted his rifle from the scabbard. Unless the Tam was totally abnormal, there were bound to be damncrocs in it.

'What happened?' Ganau asked quietly, gazing after the flar-ta.

'A croc got Kostas,' Beckley replied.

'The God take him,' the priest-engineer said sincerely. 'A terrible loss.'

'Especially to the prince,' the Marine pointed out. 'Kostas was with him for years. And he's blaming himself.'

'What should we do?' the engineer asked. 'Is there anything?'

'I don't know,' Beckley said as a shot rang out from the river bank. 'I just don't know.'

* * *

The incoming call's priority code said it came from the sergeant major, and Pahner told his toot to accept it.

'Pahner.'

'We have a situation with His Highness,' Kosutic said without preamble. 'Beckley just called it in. She says Kostas bought it this morning, and Roger's in a total funk. He's turned over his command to Ther Ganau and isn't answering calls. Reneb says he's sitting down by the Tam shooting crocs and won't talk to anybody.'

Pahner carved off a slice of bisti root and popped it into his mouth.

'You know,' he said after a long moment, 'I'm trying and failing to decide which part of that I like the least.'

'Me, too. I'm gonna miss Kostas' damnbeast casserole. And I'm not sure I'll be able to eat croc again.'

Pahner looked out over the gathering heaps of material outside the gates. The stores of Sindi, which soon would be the stores of D'Sley and K'Vaern's Cove, were unbelievable. Despite the tremendous inroads the Boman had made upon them, the food supplies of the city remained enormous. Sindi had completed its own massive harvest just before the invasion began, and it was also a central gathering point for the products of the entire region. More than that, it seemed obvious that the rumors that Tor Cant had been stockpiling grain for at least two full harvests in anticipation of the present war had been accurate.

The result, when gathered in one place, was a truly awesome mountain of barleyrice, and the Boman had barely begun to devour it. The barbarians had been too busy eating the draft animals of the city and its satellite communities to waste much time with mere grains and vegetables. All of which meant that even with the barges which had moved the infantry upriver, there was no way to recover those supplies before the Boman returned. The barges would have time to make one, possibly two, trips, but if he committed them to that, they would be unavailable in the event that the plan came apart and a precipitous retreat from Sindi became necessary. Which didn't even consider the fact that there had never been enough barges to lift the combat troops and Ther Ganau's engineers.

The city's magazines had also contained several dozen tons of gunpowder, but that posed no particular transportation problems, since From and his engineers were busily expending it as they completed the destruction of northern Sindi.

If they were going to get all the other captured supplies out, though—and God knew K'Vaern's Cove could use every scrap of food in Sindi, especially if things worked out to leave a Boman field army still active in the area— then that corduroy road through the swamps had to be held. And while this would-be Boman Napoleon, Camsan, seemed to be chasing Rastar and Honal as fanatically as one could wish, there were still other bands of barbarians wandering around out there. If one of them should hit the convoys of wagons and flar-ta lumbering back and forth between Sindi and D'Sley, the results could be catastrophic. Which meant he needed Roger functional. Now.

He thought about a solution and grimaced. The obvious one—which wouldn't work—was to call Roger and tell him to get over it. The one which would work, unfortunately, wasn't a good answer in the long-term. The consequences could be literally cosmic, but it was the only one that might work in less than the couple of days it would take Roger to get over his funk without it.

'Eva,' he said, 'I'm gonna have to break every rule in The Book. As a matter of fact, I'm gonna have to throw it away.'

'Okay,' the sergeant major said. 'What are we gonna do?'

'Get me Nimashet.'

* * *

Nimashet Despreaux paused.

The prince sat on the river bank, rocking back and forth, his rifle across his lap. She knew, intellectually, that there was no way he would use it on her, but she also knew that he wasn't tracking very well at the moment. So she cleared her throat just a bit nervously.

'Your Highness?'

Roger looked out over the rippling water. He was scanning for 'v's in the fading evening light, but even as his eyes watched the stream with the alertness and intensity of the hunter he was, he wasn't really present. His mind, to the extent that he was thinking at all, was in a brighter past. A past that wasn't filled with blood and death. A past where his mistakes didn't kill people, and where all he had to worry about was getting his mother's attention, if not approval, and not completely screwing up in the process. Not that he ever had. God knew he was a screwup. He always had been. It just did not make any sense to give him the slightest shred of responsibility. All he ever did was fuck it up.

He started without turning his head when someone laid a hand on his shoulder.

'Go away. That's an order. I'm busy.'

'Roger. Your Highness. It's time to leave.' Despreaux wondered if she could get the rifle away from him without inflicting—or suffering—damage, then decided to shelve that question. Even if she'd been able to get the rifle, he'd still have his pistol, and facing Roger with a pistol in his hand was a losing proposition. 'We need to get