The Heretic

“Fire!” The command from lieutenants down the line. It, too, crackles sporadically, as each platoon comes up a little faster, or a little slow.

The arrow cloud strikes. Those who came up faster get their shots off. Many do not, or, if they do, are hit before the trigger pull and sent reeling. Some fire into their own forces. And some, reloading from behind, almost ready, now raising their weapons, are startled. They pull the triggers and more than one man in the front line of a square goes down with a minie ball in his back, his neck, or the flesh of a calf, shot by his brother in arms.

Now it’s slaughter on both sides.

Ahead, the two levees: the one nearest the road, and, across a basin of rice paddies, the other levee that ran along the Canal.

Abel bent his head down and galloped all the harder.

Observe:

The Militia lines are breaking. Even if the call had not come, which it does in places up and down the road-“fall back!”-there would be no choice.

And some march, but others run, north into the post-harvest flax and barley stubble.

“Halt!” Some, not all, but most, do so. They turn around and begin to pack and prime their muskets, even as the Blaskoye charge down upon them.

These men who had been farming not days before, who had been tending carpentry shops, potteries, charcoal pits, or droving daks, wrighting wheels, driving wagons with goods for trade, milling barley, retting linen from flax, were nervously, competently, tipping their powder into the muskets while a line behind protected them with arrow fire.

Such unreasonable pride I feel, Abel thought. I had, somehow, expected them to be too soft, to lose cohesion, to break and run. At least that was my greatest fear.

And with the donts almost upon them, many, most, get those rifles up, take aim-

“Fire!”

And the charging wave breaks upon the spray of lead. The Blaskoye veer away, suddenly riderless donts charging back into the mass behind them, spreading confusion and chaos.

The Redlanders will recover, said Raj. But that was enough. This should give the Militia time enough to make the first levee before they’re ridden down. All they need do now is-

“Fall back!”

Then Abel’s vision became whole, and he was charging up the first slope of the outer levee, the road levee, he and the Scouts who accompanied him. Up and onto the top.

“Slow now!” Abel called out and enforced the order with a hand signal. But his Scouts knew what they were about. If they were to go charging over the levee’s top and down the other side, they would risk running their donts directly into a wall of chevaux-de-frise.

These lined the levee along its length. Mostly willow-wood cut from the beautiful trees that had once lined the Canal, but now were no more. A generation or more would have to wait until the Canal was lined with such beautiful shade again.

At least there will be generations to greet the return of those old willows, said Raj. If we are successful here today, that is.

Beyond the chevaux-de-frise, the gathered forces of the Regulars waited. They were invisible from the fields to the south.

Abel and the Scouts veered down the line of pointed stakes, searching for and finding the few gates that had been left open for them, and for the approaching Militia.

Then they were through and among the Regulars. A triple line of riflemen. At least half of them had bayonets, something wholly lacking among the Militia. Then, several paces behind the riflemen, the archers, standing ready with archer’s stakes set in the ground beside them. Each bowman had cut his own stake, each a sapling’s thickness, and a few had seemingly competed for length. Some had festooned the ends with a gaudy banner, a black and tan flag, but most were notched and tapered to wicked points, set at a height calculated to pierce donts’ breasts most effectively and fatally. It would make a most effective secondary curtain of menace to retreat behind. All archers were well within range of the top of the levee, as were, of course, the rifle troops.

A position prepared for slaughter if I ever saw one, Raj said with a savage growl. Your father has a very good idea of what it takes to kill a great many men at one time.

Abel looked for Joab, who would be near a standard bearer somewhere in the rice fields below. He spotted him and led his Scouts thundering down to meet the district commander.

The ground descended for a ways, bottomed out, and then began to rise. It would continue rising up, even higher than the levee Abel had just left behind, until it abutted another levee, the true Canal level, at about a fifty- elb elevation from the bottom of the bowl. The field itself was not a single field, but consisted of terraced units, divided by dikes, and ascending to the Canal levee. Each was hemmed in by a low dike that ran parallel to the Canal levee and the secondary levee upon which the Regulars were gathered. It was, in effect, a lopsided half tube that ran the length of the both levies. Its purpose: to collect water from the irrigated sluices that ran out in regular intervals through dike headgates set in the Canal levee.

The fields were rice paddies, and they must be flooded twice a year.

Abel had always loved the week after rice harvest, watching Hestinga fill up with wagons of the green paddy rice. Then it seemed as if half the population-any adult who could participate was required to by the priesthood-was flailing, treading, working the rice in a mortar. And then the winnowed rice would be tossed free of chaff in great papyrus mats controlled by groups holding to the corners. Sometimes, after the work was done, the mats were also used to toss small children into the air for a joyride.

Second cutting had been completed a two-moon before, and the fields were now bone dry and in low-cover crop and stubble.

Perfect ground for a dont charge.

A perfect bowl into which to trap an infantry and run it to ground, hack it to pieces, destroy it wholesale.

Abel hoped the Redlanders would see this fact. He hoped they would understand the opportunity that lay before them and would seek that slaughter with glee and abandon.

Everything depended on them doing so.

And for that, everything depended on preventing any outriders, lookouts, or-Law and Land forbid-an actual flank attack from penetrating the ruse by coming upon the assembled forces unawares and then communicating to the charging main horde the danger they faced.

Abel reined to a stop before Joab. His dont was breathing hard, snorting a fine spittle through its breathing hole that sprayed backward and settled in a trail of phlegm across Abel’s tunic and shoulder.

At least it didn’t catch me in the face, thought Abel. Dont drool was acidic and, though not harmful to the point of incapacitating, burned like an oven coal when it got in the eyes or settled on nasal membranes.

“Father, the Blaskoye are on their way,” he reported. Although he spoke loudly, he found he didn’t have to shout once his dontback Scouts had settled their beasts nearby. “It looks like we have hell on our tails.”

“Do we have at least seven thousand?”

Abel smiled. “Yes, Commander,” he said. “I got a good look at the dust cloud they chuffed up while they were gathering to charge. And Kruso read the horn signals they were blowing. We believe we have ten thousand. The dust-it was like those stories you told me. When the rain came and stayed for a day.”

“If you’re right, it’s the main body,” Joab said. He didn’t smile, but Abel could tell he was pleased, and at the same time gauging the effort that taking full advantage of the opportunity would entail.

“All right,” Joab said. “So far so good. But if we can’t beat them in the field, and we’re sent fleeing-” He turned in his saddle and caught Abel with a stare. “If I fall, I want you to lead the regiments, all of them, to Garangipore. It will be emptied and easily taken. Not Hestinga, you understand?”

“Yes, Father, but-”