“So
burn,
you bastards,” he shouted, and threw his shoulder against a row of bunks. The pine-pole construction fell across the ragged circle cut in the mud brick, and he shot the man crawling through against that obstruction under the armpit.
Shots from behind him brought his head around. The walking-wounded case he’d pushed toward the door was backing away from it, firing through the oak boards as fast as she could reload, and each time a hole precisely .4 of an inch snapped into existence, surrounded by long blond splinters of wood. Despite that, the impact of shoulders against the planks never ceased. Spearpoints appeared, flecking through the wood like points of red light in the smoky flame-shot darkness. More spearpoints, reaching for the bar that closed the door ...
“You useless twat!” he shouted, running forward.
The door burst inward.
Behind Kyle Hook the last of the sick were going through the hole hacked in the wall, the final hole to the final room in this building where he was going to die. Something flashed behind Hook’s eyes, a white light that flooded him and left him moving lightly, easily.
“Motherfuckers!”
The shouting mouths of the Ringapi were silent. That was all right, because they were—
“Bastards!”
They were the ones who’d stranded him here. They were the parents who’d left him on his own, gone away and left him in a place where suddenly nothing worked and there wasn’t even any TV or good food or anything to do but work at things he hated. They were the foster parents always more concerned with those Alban brats than
him.
They were the judge and Sergeant Edraxsson and the giggling prick of a God who’d left him here to die three thousand years before he’d even been
born.
And they were a bunch of homicidal locals who wanted to kill him. He ran toward them laughing ...
Private Kyle Hook saw the others looking at him as he came through the hole smashed in the mud-brick wall. Their eyes were wide and staring as he walked over to the doctor’s cabinet. The rifle in his hands was broken and bent, and clotted with red and bits of hair and bone; he used it to smash the padlock off the front of a supply chest and lift out one of the square brown bottles of medicinal brandy.
“Hook—you can’t do that, that’s a Captain’s Mast offense!”
He knocked the head off and poured the liquor into his open mouth, sparing his bruised lips. They stung; so did his raw throat. He laughed, drank again, threw the bottle away. “So call me up on report—you going to put me on report, Edraxsson?”
The man with the wounded foot laughed himself, still glassy-eyed with the fever. “I don’t have to, Hook. I’ve won; I made a Marine out of you, boy.”
“That’s not all you did,” he said. He bent down and hoisted the sick man across his shoulder, grunting at the solid weight. “You went and sent half my pay to my foster parents while I was in the brig.” He slapped the half-conscious man on the buttocks. “What did you have to go and do something like that for?”
Hook glanced around at the others. “Well, come on, you going to sit here with your thumbs up your assholes waiting for the enemy? Let’s go defend our beloved Corps.”
“Well, at least the hospital’s giving us plenty of light,” Patrick O’Rourke said, with his back to the biscuit-tin barricade of the redoubt around the storehouse.
“Sir?” the bugler said.
He was very young, and his voice shook a little. That was forgivable, in this fire-shot night. The hospital at the other end of the fortlet’s long rectangle was fully aflame now, a belching pyramid of yellow-red that sent smaller tongues licking out of windows and loopholes. By that light he could see the backs of his Marines, catch the flash of steel and bronze as they fought along the lines of the barricades to either side in a heaving, thrashing confusion. More and more clots of Ringapi warriors were rushing in out of the darkness, and there was little long-range fire to slow them down—fewer shots at all, more shouts and shrieks, clash of metal on metal and thump of iron on wood. Arrows and flung spears and slingstones rained down out of the night in an unceasing stream. Some of them had bundles of burning oil-soaked wool attached to them, and those looked like flaming meteors and cast little puddles of light about them where they landed.
Soon,
he thought, staggering a little when the shaft of a falling javelin smacked against his thigh; with a practiced effort of will he didn’t think about what would have happened if the spear had come down six inches closer.
He’d briefed Barnes and all the noncoms on what they were supposed to do and told them to pass it on. The noise was enormous, stunning, and the stink nearly as bad, sweat and fear and shit and death, and the foul odor of the wrong things burning.
Now I have to ask them to run without actually running away.
“Standard-bearer,” he said.
The young woman was new to the job, having only one arm usable at the moment—everyone who could fire a rifle was working, right now: even his radio tech was on the line in the redoubt. She came forward at his gesture and stood to his right.
“Bugler.” He’d been sticking tight to O’Rourke’s left elbow, just as he should.
“Ready,” he said, flipping his pistol to his left hand and drawing his
katana.
The sword rose, pointing to the flag and the gilt eagle topping it—he had to be seen, and if that made him a conspicuous target, that was a cost of doing business.
Now, here’s where we learn whether we’re certainly dead, or just probably.
If the Marines broke, they’d be overrun and swarmed under in seconds. The Ringapi didn’t look as if they were in a prisoner-taking mood.
Head-taking, more likely.
Like O’Rourke’s own remote ancestors, the migrants from the middle Danube were given to collecting trophies.
“Sound
retreat and rally,”
he ordered crisply.
The bugler had to take two tries—the first one ended in a strangled squeal, and he worked his mouth and spat before making a second attempt. That rang out chill and strong, cutting through the snarling brabble of battle like a knife through flesh.
For a moment, relief made his knees waver. The troops were doing it, peeling back from the walls and dashing back toward him, starting with those furthest away. It was hurried, a little ragged—and some disappeared under knots of Ringapi, spear butts rising and falling and axes glittering. But most made it back, most, the enemy still had to clamber over the wall, even if the ditch around it was full of their dead in layers often four deep.
“To me, the First!
” O’Rourke shouted, throwing his voice from the gut.
“Rally by me!
”
The ones who lived did; he felt himself swelling with pride. They halted by the biscuit-tin barricade; not one tried to clamber over it for a moment’s safety. Instead they swung into two lines, one to either side of him and one behind at the very base of the wall, forward kneeling and rear standing. The bayonets on their rifles didn’t glitter in the firelight; every single one of them was colored a slick, dripping red. So was the sword of Hantilis the Hittite; he’d picked up a round Ringapi shield, now much nicked and battered, and he fell in behind O’Rourke’s bugler without waiting to be told not to get in the line of fire.
Hands scrambled to reload. The whole interior of the rectangular enclosure outside the wall at its eastern end was suddenly packed solid with Ringapi warriors, every one of them rushing forward. There was no way the Marines who’d rallied to him could meet it in time ...
... but the line who rose from behind the biscuit-box wall could. The space spanning the north and south walls was much smaller than either was long. Even with casualties, the rifles on the wall behind him bristled shoulder to shoulder. Cecilie Barnes’s voice called out, steady and calm:
“Volley
fire,
present—fire!
”
BAAAAAMM.
The bullets slammed into the front rank of the Ringapi, who were crammed shoulder to shoulder across the width of the enclosure, too. And packed arse to belly down the length of it, where they’d swarmed over the walls from both sides.
The Marines who’d fired ducked down and reloaded; behind them in the last redoubt another line stood and volleyed over their heads; the firing step there was a foot higher, and they were over the heads of the Marines in front of the biscuit-tin wall as well. Hot air slapped the back of O’Rourke’s neck beneath the flare of his helmet, like a soft heavy hand. The noise slapped his eardrums, too, hard enough to hurt.
“
Volley
fire,
present—fire!
”
BAAAAAMM.
By then the front rank of the Marines who’d rallied to him were ready. He filled his lungs, remembering to keep his voice in the same parade-ground tone as always:
“Front
rank—
volle
y fire,
present
—”
“
—fire!
”
“—
fi
re
!
”
“—
fire!
”
“—fire!”
The volleys slashed out at intervals of three-quarters of a second, four ranks to shoot, steady as a metronome, the rifles rising and falling like the warp and weft of a loom. Islanders still fell; the Ringapi were throwing spears at close range, and they thudded into chests and bellies, gashed faces and arms. But most of the enemy were too crowded to do anything but stand or try to swarm forward. The front rank ran into an almost physical barricade of lead.
O’Rourke added his pistol’s fire to the volleys. Even shooting left-handed he didn’t miss, with a row of targets scarcely beyond arm’s reach. This close to a Ringapi warrior with the battle lust upon him, you knew right down in your gut that this was a man who’d kill you if he could, and acted accordingly. Somewhere down deep in a very busy mind he still found a spare second to admire the way they kept coming, right into the muzzles. If this was what his ancestors were like, he wasn’t surprised they’d ended up overrunning everything between Turkey and Ireland. He was surprised they hadn’t gotten themselves massacred
en masse.
Of course, then they’d met Roman discipline, and that was about what had happened....
The wall of enemy warriors in front of him bulged, swelling upward like a wave hitting a steep beach: men falling dead or wounded; men tripping over them as they were pushed from behind by the onrush of those too stupid to realize what was happening or too brave to care; or men trying to climb right over the mass ahead of them.
“Front
rank—
volley
fire,
present
—”
“—fire!”
“
—fire!
”
“—fire!”
“—fire!”
And suddenly the wave ahead of them wasn’t trying to advance anymore. The volleys went on as the front rank turned and clawed at the men behind, and then they turned as well, until no Ringapi were left standing inside the enclosure.
“Cease fire,” O’Rourke said, his voice sounding a little tinny and faint in his ears.
Hantilis was swearing in amazement, possibly just at being alive. Stretching across from the northern wall to the southern in front of the leveled rifles was a mound of dead and dying Ringapi; at the very front it was higher than a man’s waist—nearly high enough to block the fire of kneeling marksmen, too high to remain stable, and bodies were slithering down to rest against the Marines’ boots. The heaving of injured men trying to get free of the four-deep crush atop them helped that process. Where the layer of bodies thinned out behind the front of the wave the whole surface crawled and moved, amid a threnody of agony, right back to the wall of the burning hospital.
“All—” O’Rourke cleared his throat. “All right, let’s get back over this wall here. See to the wounded. Move it, people, let’s go!”
Barnes’s voice added to his, and the surviving noncoms. He lost himself in work, waiting for the shrieks and panther screams that would herald the next attack. It was ten minutes before he realized that there was silence outside the fortlet, half an hour before he believed it. The Ringapi campfires still guttered and gleamed through the dark to the westward. Not until dawnlight caught the snows atop Mount Ida to the south was his gut convinced, and not until he heard the cries of the jackals and foxes coming close to feed.
True dawn showed the Ringapi camp struck and empty, nothing but litter and smoldering fires left burning through the tail end of night. The ruins of the hospital still smoldered as well, sending up a sour dark smoke that had everyone coughing when the wind shifted wrong. Ash came along with the smoke, more of it when brick or bits of roofing fell with thumps and crashes. Overhead there was a thick scatter of circling kites and ravens and ...
Yes, by God,
eagles too,
he thought with dull amazement.
“What do they eat when there’s no war?” he thought aloud.
“When is there no war in these lands?” Hantilis asked.
Barnes came up as well, with mugs of sassafras tea. O’Rourke sipped gratefully at his, trying to ignore the men calling akawa ...
akawa
... from the heaps of enemy dead. Water, he suspected. And
mathair
was unpleasantly obvious, too ...
“What’s the butcher’s bill, Captain?” he asked.
“Twenty-two dead, sir,” Barnes said; it was as if a robot was speaking. “Including Hussey and my company sergeant. Another forty badly injured. That’s not counting the sick from the hospital.”
He knew she was using the term
badly injured
conservatively; half or more of the ones still at the walls had crusted bandages. Many of them were only fit to shoot if they had something to prop them up.
“We’re down to eighty rounds per rifle.” she went on. “Must’ve shot off ... God, forty, fifty thousand rounds. We’re short of medical supplies, too; well fixed for food. Most of the transport animals are dead but we’ve got about six horses left.”