Warlord

'General salute for the King of Spades!'

'Silence in the ranks!' an officer or noncom shouted; Menyez saluted.

The men had thrown up a low observation platform behind the trenches; Raj and Menyez took their positions there, beside the infantry commander's personal guard and standard, and the lounging figures of a 5th Descott squad around Raj's banner.

'Proceed,' Menyez called.

Drums and bugles sounded, and orders relayed down the long trench. The men stepped up onto the firing platform; their heads were still below the top level of sandbags, but regularly-spaced gaps had been left below that, and the rifles slanted through. Raj looked over his shoulder; the barrels of the 75's were sliding out.

POUMP. POUMP. POUMP. Shells whirred by overhead, their ten-kilo bursting charges raising poplar tree-shaped plumes of dirt three thousand meters downrange. POUMP. POUMP. POUMP. In a prepared position like this you could build sloping ramps behind the guns. They recoiled up the slope, gravity killing momentum, then slid down nearly into battery again, ready to be reloaded and pushed the final meter or two; it saved a good deal of time. POUMP. POUMP. POUMP. Barked orders, and a quivering of the rifle muzzles as the soldiers pushed at the stepped wedges under the rear sights of their weapons, setting them for maximum range.

'Prepare for volley fire,' Menyez said. Repetitions like echoes, down to the platoon sergeants. POUMP. POUMP. POUMP. This series on the outermost row of straw figures; fragments and pieces of wooden pole spun up into the air.

'Fire.'

The slamming ripple of massed rifles ran along the line, and the staggered rows of targets began to disintegrate; leg-thick poles sagged and fell, and water jugs sent out spectacular fountains of clear liquid to glitter in the late-morning sun.

'Aim low, aim low!' Shouts along the firing line, as shots kicked up dust-spurts beyond the target. There were not too many of them, far fewer than there had been six months ago. Raj listened carefully; the volleys came fast and crisp, none of the telltale stutter between. Thick grayish gunsmoke pooled before the muzzles. Officers with binoculars were standing behind each unit's section of trench, ready to run out and assess the results; drummer boys and corpsmen and stretcher-bearers were stepping up with dippers of water from the buckets they carried, not for the men but to dash over the barrels and breeches of the weapons. It hissed and sizzled as it struck the hot metal; more maintenance work afterward, but it cut down on extraction jams and the even more disastrous occasional cook-off, rounds exploding as the thumb pushed them into contact with an overheated chamber.

'Cease firing!' A long bugle call. 'Battalions will pass in review, by the left!'

'Shaping nicely,' Raj said to Menyez. 'They don't tire as fast, they're starting to hit what they shoot at, and they're starting to act as if they believed they were soldiers, too.'

'It helps that they know they're not getting fucked over by the people in charge,' Menyez replied, cold anger mixed with satisfaction in his tone.

Half the infantry battalion commanders had been transferred or retired since they arrived to join the Army of the Upper Drangosh, and a good third of the Company Senior Lieutenants. For everything from age and incapacity, through persistent absenteeism-several had not seen their putative commands in years-to selling their ammunition allotments.

'You tell people long enough that they're shit,' the brown-haired man continued, 'that they're not fit for anything but to suck mud in front of the paws of anyone who rides by on dogback, and they believe it and act like it.' His pale eyes watched as the thousand men of the two battalions mustered in a row of columns of fours. 'They're still nowhere near as steady as I'd like, except for the Ausarians. And my Kelden County Foot.'

'Tewfik's going to outnumber us badly, and if I can I'm going to make him come to us,' Raj answered. I'd better; if I can't manage to force the enemy to assume the tactical offensive when they are invading us, then I'd better just get circumcised and be done with it. 'I think they'll hold, in field entrenchments.'

There was a roll of martial music, as the fife-and-drum unit behind each battalion standard struck up; they had rifles slung over their shoulders, but Raj had seen to it that every outfit produced a band. The officers had bought the instruments out of their own pockets; a 'suggestion' from Raj relayed through Menyez and backed by his writ of extraordinary authority from Barholm. Some of the infantry outfits hadn't even had standards; he had made the men contribute to those themselves, then had the ArchSysup of the Southeastern Diocese bless them in as impressive a ceremony as the cleric and he could come up with together. That sort of thing was almost as important as prompt pay and sound boots and seeing that the sutlers kept their cheating within bounds . .

'Pass in review!'

Tramp of marching feet, the whole line moving like a uniform centipede with a blue body and red legs; sunlight glittered on flags and bayonets and polished brightwork.

'Eyes. . right.' He and Menyez saluted; behind him the standard of the 5th dipped in answer to the flourish of the infantry banners as each passed. The men's arms swung briskly, their shouldered rifles in perfect alignment; officers and noncoms whirled their swords in flourishes. Perfectly useful skills. .

'Purty,' one of the cavalry troopers behind him muttered.

. . not least because they reminded the foot soldiers that they were something other than men who had the bad luck to be visible when the press gang came around, and too poor to bribe their way out. His Descotters and the other cavalry units were mostly here because they'd wanted to be, or their families had. . or at worst, because a father had come after them with compulsory weddings in his eyes and a loaded gun in his hands. They didn't need as much prompting to think of themselves as fighting men rather than victims.

Of course, it was debatable whose perception was more accurate.

The column had passed down to the end of the trenchline, wheeled and marched back. This time as the midpoint passed the mount, different orders rang out:

'Halt. Ay-bout face,' A wheel and stamp, and they were facing him and Menyez. 'Ground. . arms.' The rifle butts thumped the ground, held rigidly between left arm and flank; the tips of the bayonets were shoulder-high. 'Stand at. . ease.' Each right foot moved out to shoulder-width from the left, while the rifles swung in to rest slanted across the body and held at the muzzle in the folded hands; it was an easy posture to maintain, where the rigid attention would produce a crop of men fainting, under a sun like this. Many of the men before him were from the northwestern provinces, as naturally pale-skinned as the officer beside him.

Menyez's leather-lunged Master Sergeant bellowed, 'All units, attention to orders! Stand by for address by the Honorable Messer Brigadier Raj Whitehall, Commander of the Army of the Upper Drangosh.'

Raj leaned forward, pommel under his palms. 'Right, fellow soldiers,' he said, his voice pitched to carry. There was no other sound besides the soughing of the wind through the banner behind him, and a distant hissing from a flock of dactosauroids flying toward the river.

'Today you've shown that you can march, dig, and shoot,' he continued. 'All good preparation for your real work, which is to kill the enemy.' An almost imperceptible rustle of uneasiness; that enemy would outnumber them badly-Sandoral traded across the river into the Colony, rumor abounded, and it had exaggerated what was coming up from Al-Kebir even beyond the unpleasant probable truth.

'Before they get a chance to kill you.' No harm in reminding them of the unfair but inescapable fact that in the event of defeat cavalry had some chance of getting away, and infantry none at all. 'Just remember this: men aren't any more bulletproof than those scarecrows you just blew the hell out of. Put a bullet through a man, and he falls down and dies. Messer or cropper, raghead or believer, the bullet doesn't care. And if he's on a dog-' Raj slapped Horace's neck, which twitched '-it just makes him a bigger target. Spirit of Man of the Stars firm your aim, for the restoration of the Holy Federation!'

'Endfile,' the soldiers murmured in unison.

'Carry on.'

Menyez nodded. 'Carry on, Top,' he said to the senior noncom.

'Attention to orders! 17th Kelden County Foot, Fifth Company, second platoon, is hereby judged best unit of today's exercise, and will be issued a 24-hour pass to Sandoral, effective from 12:00 hours tomorrow! 21st Olgez County Rifles, First Company, first platoon, is low-ranked and will do double fatigues for the next week. Dismissed to duties!'