earth, it became mud slurry. Where there was ground cover, it sheened the ground with great patches of wetness.
And then the priests stopped. They closed the gates, turning in the opposite direction, speaking their prayers and blessings backward, as long tradition and special practice demanded.
The Blaskoye charged down the basin, chasing fleeing men, wreaking destruction with bow and then with reloaded musketry. Shooting men in the back. Riding them down. Putting arrows through throats, arms, legs. Cutting men down with knives, swords, spiked clubs, the butts of rifles.
And yet more remained. More sprinted ahead, huffing up the terraces of the fields, seeking the levee.
These Farmers stood no chance, thought the riders. What was there on the other side but the Canal? Those that fled would be ruthlessly pursued. Slaughtered without mercy. It was amusing! It was exhilarating!
A cry went up among the Blaskoye that Abel and many of the Scouts understood but, perhaps fortunately, few of the Regulars or Militia could.
“Kill the Farmers!”
And then the vanguard of the Blaskoye’s charging donts, riding donts unequalled in speed and power among all the dontflesh of the known world, hit the mud.
They charged forward ten, twenty paces. It was not as if they sank out of sight into the damp ground. They even kept going, after a fashion, these donts, creatures of the desert, who had never conceived of such a substance as mud, much less encountered it. They were brave, well-bred creatures. Their masters urged them forward, and so forward they struggled.
And that struggle served only to make room for more Blaskoye to reach the bottom of the outer levee slope and run into mud themselves.
Up and down the line, the same scene repeated itself over and over. Then, as if it were a thought that had never occurred before, but now struck and burned like wildfire, about half the Redlanders attempted to turn around, to retreat back up the outer levee wall. They yanked at the reins. Some dismounted and tried to physically pull, or push, their animals backwards.
They were cut off.
Now observe the outcome:
Even as the final stragglers of the horde charged the levee, another cloud of dust was forming to the west. There was a vanguard of a few donts with riders, but most of the dust was churned up by wagons rolling down the levee road. The wagons were stacked with a most curious cargo. Papyrus tubes, some of them four and five elbs long, lay in the wagon beds. Attached to each tube was a willow-wand shaft, each shaft about a thumb’s thickness and each cut to seven elbs in length.
From the rear of each tube, facing down the length of the shaft, depended a long fuse.
It was the women’s auxiliary, riding hell-for-leather down the wagon track on the top of the levee.
This was not a new maneuver, but one they’d been practicing over and over again for two days. They had practiced not here, but on wagon tracks close-in to Hestinga. This was even easier, for the wagon trail here was completely straight. Then the vanguard reached its agreed upon destination, and the line ceased to move. A signal went up from wagon to wagon.
Each wagon was crewed by a team of ten. Six manned the artillery, four defended with muskets or, more commonly, bow and arrow.
And what artillery it was-new to the Land itself.
The lucifers had been supplied by the Scouts, the secret matches of Irisobrian, mother of Zentrum, patron of Scouts, who kept Zentrum alive with fresh milk from her otherwise dead body for fifty days and fifty nights. Now, using these fire sources, the wagon crews set up a simple A-frame on which to balance the rocket shafts.
The box canyon explosion, gone awry, had provided the idea.
Center and Raj had shown him how to improve the design once he’d seen the effect that could be achieved.
Golitsin had engineered the final product, adding a pitch-coated interior that the priest claimed was fire resistant.
Raj had warned him not to expect much actual damage.
Rockets burn their fuel as they fly, said Center. This causes the weight to change in flight. And the guide shafts that are essential to a good launch begin to shimmy, and the entire contraption frequently flies randomly off course. The Congreve rocket was an instrument of terror far more than a weapon of destruction. It is possible to create a multiple-angled exhaust nozzle that will impart spin to correct this tendency, but this piece requires metallic forges, which we at present lack.
The women set the rockets for a low trajectory. Their targets were below them, but the parabolic path would require them to elevate somewhat to reach their targets. Finding range would be the hard part. Each group had at least five rockets.
The discipline was impressive. It was almost as if they moved according to Mahaut’s telepathic command. The fire began at one end of the line and moved down it to the end as each team lit their rockets and fired them into the hordes below.
Then, when the last rocket on the end was fired, the direction was reversed and the rocket next door fired, and so back up the line again to its end. Watching the fire travel was like watching an echo made visible, Abel thought.
As he’d known would be the case, the rockets didn’t kill many Blaskoye. Some were hit, and he saw at least one man’s head taken off by the two-pound charge that went off at the end of a rocket’s flight.
The disorder and confusion the rockets created was complete, however. Those that had turned their donts around to retreat were terrified back into the basin. All around them rockets streaked, creating horrible shrieks of tortured sound as they travelled through the air, so loud a man couldn’t hear himself speak.
Over and over again, until the black powder smoke hung in a cloud, and still more rockets poured into that cloud.
Drowning the screams of donts and men.
And when the rockets reached their range and exploded, the sound resonated down the basin, rang from the levies, and obliterated all lesser noise in a moment that produced astonishment that something could be this loud, could physically hurt as much as a blow to the head.
So the Blaskoye could not face the women with their rain of fire. They struggled on and up toward the Canal levee. Through the muck, churning themselves deeper, making the way forward for their compatriots all the more difficult.
“When them walkers gome thinkah ye, Capun?” asked Kruso. “Donned them tha flats.”
“Sounds like we’re ready,” Abel answered. He turned to Anderson, his wigwag officer. “Send a signal in all directions, Lieutenant. Forward half speed. Attack.”
“Yes, sir.” While still on dontback, Anderson began waving his flags.
Abel glanced over to Kruso. “You ready?”
Kruso smiled his gap-toothed, ragged smile. “Aye, Capun,” he said. “Bet makem can tha.”
“Sure, what do you want to wager?”
“Thet four to yorn drei get mah.”
“I’ll take that,” Abel said. “I know exactly how this breechloader works, you know.”
“Aye, sir,” said Kruso. “But Ah hov practis.” He showed his right hand. Three paper cartridges were gripped between his fingers. So he’d learned Golitsin’s trick-or maybe been the one who taught it to the priest.
Abel joined the crooked but unbroken line that had formed along the top of the levee. Took a breath. Let it out.
He raised his hand, put it down. They began to trot down the levee’s slope into the basin, firing their rifles as they came.
