On the Oceans of Eternity (46 page)

The chief began speaking, ran into subjects beyond the meager vocabulary he shared with Tidtaway, and they called for Jaditwara.

“These Big Dogs,” he said. “Some say there are bad spirits in them—that we should kill them all and eat them, to gain power over this medicine.”

Eddie snorted tactlessly. “Couple of them tried to get on horseback ’cause it looked like easy fun,” he said. “No bones broken. I think.”

Tidtaway had been practicing off and on for a couple of months, and he still rode like an animated sack of potatoes; these locals would be hopeless for a good long while. According to the books he’d read back when—part of ranger training and interesting in its own right—in the original history the Indians had taken to horses like ducks to water. Whole tribes had given up farming, moved onto the Plains, and become mounted buffalo-hunters and mobile raiders almost overnight. But
overnight
apparently meant years rather than months.

“You already have a few dead ones to eat,” he pointed out. “And these
horses
will be very useful to you. To fight the Tartessians, and then to carry things and carry men faster than they can go on foot.” He searched for an example. “Hunters could ride very far and fast, and then bring meat to camp easily.”

The chief grunted, then looked at the horses staked out to the picket line dubiously. “Maybe,” he said. Then more brightly: “We have given the Tartessians a bad defeat. Their women will wail and put tar on their hair; their war chief will cut his cheeks and roll in the dust. Maybe now they will leave us alone, and everything will be as it was.”

Peter Giernas sighed. “All you have done is enough to enrage them—as if you stamped on a man’s foot, or threw one spear at a bear,” he said. “If you go home now, they will strike again. And you will be weaker from the plague.”

The older man glanced up sharply. “But now we have their magic of the
cow
,” he said. “Your shamaness says she can protect us.”

“We can protect you, here, yes. Your women and children at your camp, yes. But not all the tribes even in the valley of this river—and none of the ones in the other land south of the delta, or in the coast valleys. Already they will begin to sicken, and when the sickness has gone past one man in two, maybe three in four, will be dead. These are the men that might have helped you fight the Tartessians. If you-all the people who dwell here—do not come together
now
and make an end of them, they will make an end of you. Not this year, not next, but someday, as certain as the rain in winter and the grass in spring.”

The chief winced, as if the outlander had spoken in the same tones as the voice at the back of his head. His shoulders slumped.

“Then we will have to take their camp with the big houses,” he said in a dull voice. “But how? The Great Camp has walls like a mountain, and they have the thunder-makers there, big logs that throw death a mile or more, and many men with the death-sticks that you call rifles.”

“We need a plan,” Giernas said. “For that, we need better knowledge of their fort.”

He’d have to talk to people who’d been inside. The problem with that was they’d generally have only fuzzy ideas of what he wanted to know. When you put perception and language problems together, not much but noise would come out.

“And we must make sure that nobody warns the Tartessians,” he went on. “So that they don’t miss their men too soon.” They’d caught the patrol early in its swing out into the boondocks, and it wasn’t due back for weeks. “And we must gather many, many warriors. As many again as we had today, and as many more, and as many more again, at least.”

At least Indigo and Jared will be safe,
he thought.

When the chief went off shaking his head, Eddie Vergeraxsson laughed and shook his rifle southward again, calling out a single sentence in his mother tongue. Giernas recognized the sound, if not the meaning. Eddie had once told him that he didn’t even dream in the Sun People language anymore, but now and then he used a stock phrase.

“What does that mean?” Giernas asked.

“Oh ...” Eddie frowned for a moment, lips moving. “Near as I can render it ...
Oh, you sorry bastards are
fucked
now!
”

 

C
olonel O’Rourke glared around the enclosure in an instinctive search for something more to throw into the fight. Spears and arrows lay thick on the ground or stood up from the dirt, giving it the bristling look of a hedgehog’s back. More flew in continously, their heads flashing in the light of the fires that burned here and there along the barricade. The roof of the hospital seemed to have caught as well—which at least was keeping most of the enemy snipers off it: they’d brought them forward from the hillside to the south as night fell. All around the walls was a swarming melee as the Marines stabbed and smashed and cut, heaving the enemy back from the parapet and shooting whenever they got the chance to reload.

Thank God for the bayonet,
a corner of his mind thought. As soon as the Republic started issuing firearms in the Year 2, they’d found to everyone’s surprise that rifle and bayonet in skilled hands made a better hand-to-hand weapon than bladed weapon and shield; it combined the virtues of a spear, a quarterstaff, and a halberd.

Chaplain Smith was still doing the rounds with spare ammunition and Scripture, using a broken spear as an improvised crutch; a sopping red bandage circled his thigh. Some of the others passing out ammunition could do no more than crawl. Most of the rounds in the chaplain’s sack were loose, stripped out of the remaining Gatling drums now that the weapon was useless. Even with the wind a standing fog of powder smoke ghosted around the Islander outpost, leaving everything hazed in burned sulfur; a corner of his mind estimated that every Marine in the compound must have fired something like two hundred rounds, and it was still four hours to dawn.

“We can’t hold them here,” he said. muttering to himself. “The perimeter’s too long.”

Lieutenant Hussey charged with his intervention squad to a spot where the line bulged, their sudden ordered impact giving them an effect beyond their numbers. Hussey had managed to acquire an extra pistol from somewhere, and was shooting two-handed. Hitting what he shot at, too, a minor miracle. They fell back from the wall once the breakthrough was contained, reloaded, and headed for the next ... but this time there were only nine of them.

Surgeon-captain Wenter threaded her way through the chaos with another group of wounded from the burning hospital, the ones who could walk helping those who couldn‘t, the last of her orderlies carrying one man across his shoulder and half-carrying another with an arm around his waist. She trotted over to O’Rourke and examined the bandage on his neck.

“Normally I’d say you should be on your back for a week, with that,” she said. “Looks all right for now.”

He nodded. “Are the wounded and sick all out of the hospital?”

“No, they aren’t,” she said. “Some of them are in those two rooms at the northwest corner—the Ringapi on the roof shoot at anyone who tries to get to them through the courtyard, and there’s no interior corridor. All the rooms give on to the courtyard. You’ll have to send in some people to get them out now.”

O’Rourke looked west. “Can’t be done,” he said. “Get these into the storehouse.” He met her incredulous glare steadily. “I’m not going to get everyone killed to rescue a few,” he said. “Do it, Doctor. Do it
now
.”

“Damn you, O’Rourke!” she spat, turning to obey. A glance around. “Damn all you butchers!”

He ignored her, not without an inward wince, and called Barnes over. “We can’t hold,” he said. “This is going to be tricky—”

 

“They’re on the bloody roof!” someone said.

“Well, what do you expect me to do about it, shithead?” Private Hook screamed, ducking aside as a Ringapi outside the hospital’s west wall thrust a rifle barrel through the windowslit.

The explosion was deafening inside the confined space of the hospital room. The bullet chipped a divot out of the pole of a bunk bed, showing the raw pinewood within. Hook stepped back before the man outside could reload or withdraw his weapon, grabbed it by the barrel with his left hand, and shoved his own rifle out until the muzzle touched flesh. It bucked in his hand as he snatched it back, reloaded, and fired again.

Sweat stung his gnawed lips. The dim lanternlit space of the hospital room was full of powder smoke. with shapes looming up out of it like rocks on the floor of hell; the smell of the diarrhea from the patients who couldn’t go to the latrines anymore added the final touch. The mud-brick wall under his shoulder shook; there just weren’t enough guns here to keep the enemy from dashing forward and crouching along the bottom of it. They reached up and grabbed at the rifles, or thrust spears through, or fireams of their own—more and more of those. Others were beating at the walls, cutting through with axes and spearheads ...

Hook turned on his heel and went to the door that led into the courtyard. He opened it, and jerked back as a spear flashed down and buried itself in the floor beside his foot; he hopped back conwlsively and then had to wrestle the shaft free before he could close the door and bar it again.

Edraxsson was staring at him again. “What are you looking at?” he shouted at the fever-struck sergeant. He looked around again.
We’re all going to die here! Hell with we, I’m going to die here!

Here ...

“All right, heads up,” Hook said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“You sucksoul, the enemy are on the roof; they’d spit us like deer if we tried to run through the courtyard—and half of us can’t walk.”

Hook ignored the interruption. “They’ll be through the front wall soon,” he said. “Then they’ll swamp us. You, you, you—cut through the interior wall there. We’ll go through and down the side of the hospital that way. Come on, move it!” He picked up one of the entrenching tools. “The rest of you, keep firing. Faster, God damn you.”

He slammed the pick side of the tool into the side wall of the room. The impact jarred him all the way down to the small of his back; he levered it sideways, tearing out a chunk, ignoring the pain where the bandage worked against the sore on his back.

“Come on, you lazy motherfuckers—work!”

Edraxsson laughed, high and shrill and delirious. The others looked at Hook for a moment, then moved to obey. He slammed the tool into the mud brick again and again; the stuff resisted him, bricks dried hard as iron over the years, and the mud mortar and plaster around them had been mixed with animal hair and straw to begin with. He looked through when the hole was big enough, then back over his shoulder.

“Watch it!” he yelled, snatching up his rifle and turning.

A steel spearhead probed down through the widening hole in the roof, then a bronze one. Mud and old dry bundles of reeds and twigs fell down into the room, and then the face of a Ringapi, his long mustaches dangling down to make horns below his head. Hook fired without being aware he was aiming and the man’s head flew apart like a dropped melon. The body followed it, twitching and bucking like a pithed frog. Hook screamed in frustration as the ambulatory cases began dragging the ones who couldn’t walk out through the hole he’d dug, the hole to safety and freedom.

Smoke was pouring down through the hole. The long-dry pine poles that held the whole heavy mass of the roof up must be catching as well. He coughed and fired twice more into the gap.

“Hurry up!” he screamed, and then to his horror the other two walking wounded stopped firing through the slit window and dashed out through the hole. “Cowards! Pussies!” he shrieked as he reloaded.

The door to the courtyard smashed in with a shower of splinters. Hook shot the man in the door in the belly, scrabbled in his bandolier, loaded, thumbed back the cocking lever and fired again just as the Ringapi who’d vaulted the first was drawing back his spear for the killing thrust. The heavy soft-lead slug took the other man right under the chin and flipped him backward like an anvil on a rope. The third had a long light bronze tomahawk and a shield; Hook met the descending arm with a sweep of the bayonet, gashing it to the bone. The same motion punched the edge of the butt up into the man’s face, and then he turned and threw his rifle through the hole and dived headfirst after it.

The sore on his back broke open and bled as he landed, knocking most of the wind out of him. He ignored the warm trickle; it was his ass, now. The other two fit enough to shoot were firing through the waist-high hole into the first room.

“Leave that!” he yelled, grabbing one of them and pushing him staggering across the room. “You dig. You, get to the door into the courtyard—first thing you hear there, shoot through it, gut height.”

He snatched up his own rifle just in time; a Ringapi came shoving through with a round shield held high before him and a spear short-gripped beneath. To do that he had to stick one leg through first, of course. Hook stamped down on it, felt the green-stick crunch of it breaking beneath the heel of his boot. The shield came down and the Marine chopped his rifle butt into the bent neck before him, shoved the thrashing body back so that it blocked the hole.

Then he looked up. This room was dim and long, most of it just empty bunks. Something stung him on the neck, and he looked up to see the reeds and twigs above him blackening, little flickers of red-blue flame running along them. The smoke was thicker, choking, and he coughed. More smoke poured in through the hole from the first room, and the body moved again as hands hauled it back; he could hear them screaming in there, it must be like an oven. The fire roared like a bass undertone to the hammering crackle of gunfire outside, and the hissing, screeching war cries of four thousand men. But the ones back in there where he’d been, they were roasting by now...