The Thousand Names Part 51

"You know what I mean, d.a.m.n it." Val twisted his mustache anxiously, then smoothed it out again. "I went along with it because I thought he might be right."

"A lot of people went along with it," Marcus said. Everyone, really, except Fitz and Lieutenant Iherngla.s.s.

"But they weren't in command of a battalion," Val insisted. "They couldn't have stopped it all."

"What would you have done? Ordered the Second to fire on the Fourth?"

"If necessary," Val said stiffly.

"That would have been worse than anything that actually happened," Marcus said. "Believe me."

"But-" Val hesitated. "After all that, how can the colonel have any confidence in me?"

That was the heart of the matter, Marcus thought. It was one thing to make a wrong decision, and quite another to believe your commander held a grudge against you because of it. He picked his words carefully.

"The colonel hasn't given any indication to me that he's lost confidence in any of the senior officers. If anything, he blames himself." And isn't that a wonder?

"You think so?"

Marcus shrugged. "He confides in me as much as he confides in anyone, and he hasn't mentioned anything of the kind. Besides, do you think he would want you to resign now? We're going to need every man in the next couple of days."

"I could carry a musket, if necessary."

The images of Val, with his neat uniform and his waxed mustache, walking in the ranks with the common soldiers was enough to make Marcus chuckle. After a moment, Val managed a weak smile as well.

"You understand what I mean, don't you, Marcus? I just thought I ought to . . . to make amends somehow."

"I know. The best way to do it is to make sure the Second is ready. There'll be action tomorrow."

"You think so?"

"The colonel as good as told me so. And he never tells anyone anything."

Val nodded. "Just as well. Water won't last much longer. The lads are eager for a fair shot at the cowardly b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, too."

"I think we all are." He gestured at the writing desk. "Anything but this."

"What is all that, anyway?"

"Discharges. For the men of the Second Company who were involved in the mutiny, and a few others in the Fourth as well."

Val frowned. "Discharges? Aren't they being held for court-martial?"

"The colonel said we can't spare the time or the men to keep prisoners. He's going to give them as much food and water as they can carry and turn them loose. Let them make for the coast, if they can."

"Across the Great Desol?" Val sucked in his cheeks. "That's small mercy."

"They'd all hang, if we ever get back to civilization," Marcus said. "The Ministry takes a dim view of mutiny."

"Still . . ." Val looked up. "Is Adrecht going with them?"

Marcus nodded. Val shook his head.

"Poor Adrecht. He ought to have stayed in the city. Losing a limb can have a terrible effect on a man."

"Maybe he'll make it back there."

"Maybe."

They sat for a moment in silence. After a while Val said, "I think Mor feels the same way I do."

"About Adrecht?"

"About resigning. He thinks he's guilty."

"He certainly didn't look it this afternoon."

"You know Mor," Val said. "He's either angry, or pretending to be angry. But underneath-"

"Will you talk to him? Or send him to me, if that's easier."

"I'll talk to him," Val said. "It may take a while to bring him around."

Another silence.

"Well." Val slapped his knees and levered himself to his feet. "I had better get some rest myself. Action tomorrow, you say?"

"Almost certainly."

a a a It was full dark, but sleep eluded him. He lay in the bedroll, thin blanket wadded beside him, and stared at the tent ceiling. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Adrecht. They hadn't spoken a word to each other while the colonel had p.r.o.nounced sentence, but Adrecht's eyes hadn't left Marcus for a moment.

How can he tell me I betrayed him? He's the one who raised a G.o.dd.a.m.ned mutiny. And yet . . .

When he closed his eyes he saw Adrecht, not grim and one-armed but laughing and gambling like he had in their War College days. Sharing a drink, kissing a pretty blond girl with delicate skin and powder-darkened eyes. Offering a pistol in one outstretched hand, his eyes full of pain. "If you're going to kill yourself, Marcus, at least be a man about it . . ."

He never belonged here, for all his fancy clothes and Khandarai girls. This was my post. Marcus had taken the Khandar posting when Adrecht had been handed his exile, out of solidarity, but he'd fitted into it in a way his friend never had. It had been away, about as far away as it was possible to get from Vordan, from the burned wreckage of a house and a family.

The tent flap rustled. Marcus' eyes flicked sideways and he saw a female silhouette against the faint glow of the camp. He relaxed.

Once the flap fell back, the tent was in darkness again. He heard a couple of footsteps, and then the soft cloth sounds of disrobing. A moment later Jen slid across the bedroll and pressed herself against him, bare skin warm against his. Marcus slipped an arm underneath her and turned his head to give her a kiss, but found his nose b.u.mping into something cold and hard.

"Sorry," she said. "Spectacles." She pulled them off and set them carefully aside, then leaned back against him, brus.h.i.+ng his lips with hers before settling her head on his shoulder.

A long moment pa.s.sed quietly. He listened to her breathing, feeling it tickle the hair on his neck, the softness of her body pressed against his side.

"Are you all right?" she said.

"Mmm?"

"Adrecht. He was your friend."

"He was." Marcus let out a long breath. "No. I'm not all right. I just . . . I don't understand."

"People do strange things when the pressure gets too high."

"Is that a professional opinion?"

He meant it as a joke, but by the way she stiffened he realized it was the wrong thing to say. He squeezed her shoulder rea.s.suringly. After a moment, he felt her relax.

"Sorry," she said. "After today . . ."

He was silent. Her hand lay lightly on his chest, fingers tightly curled.

"I was sure they were going to kill me," she whispered. "They'd have to, wouldn't they? If you're staging a mutiny, you don't keep the informer around to write a report. Adrecht might have been too much the gentleman, but not Davis. I kept waiting for them to come back and . . ." She pressed against him a little tighter.

"I wouldn't have let them," Marcus said.

"Then they'd just kill you, too."

"Is that why you told me I should let you handle it?"

He felt her nod. "You have to look at it logically," she said, only the faintest quiver in her voice. "If I'm going to end up raped and dead anyway, there's no sense in you getting killed as well if it won't change anything."

"Easy for you to say." He thought about that for a moment, then said, "Well. Not easy. But if I had just sat by while something like that happened, I don't think I could have lived with myself afterward."

"At least you would have had the chance to try."

Another pause. Marcus cleared his throat.

"It's a good thing it didn't come to that, then."

"It's a good thing," Jen agreed.

There was a long silence. With Jen soft and warm beside him, Marcus' eyes finally closed, and sleep beckoned.

"I can't do this anymore." Her voice was so quiet it might have been an incipient dream. "I can't. If it really comes down to it . . ."

Marcus intended to ask her what she meant, but he was asleep before he got the chance.

a a a The sun seemed to have been nailed to the sky. It refused to move, in spite of Marcus' repeated glances and entreaties, and hung a few degrees short of its zenith like the flame in some enormous oven.

If he'd had a watch, he'd have checked it, for the hundredth time. The only watch he knew of in all of Khandar sat in Ja.n.u.s' breast pocket, and Marcus was unwilling to reveal his anxiety by asking the colonel the time.

Trying to conceal that sort of thing from the colonel was a lost cause, however. Ja.n.u.s glanced at him and said, encouragingly, "It's not noon yet, Captain. A few minutes more."

"Yessir," Marcus said. "Besides, I doubt the Desoltai will be completely punctual."

"On the contrary. I expect them to be where we want them at noon on the dot. In fact-" Ja.n.u.s shaded his eyes with one hand. "Yes. I believe that's the vanguard."

Marcus looked, and at first saw nothing. Gradually, though, a patch of the unmitigated brown-on-brown landscape resolved itself into brown-robed riders, on brown or sandy-colored horses, pa.s.sing across brown rock and rills of windblown sand. With the sun high overhead, there weren't even shadows to give them away. No wonder we never spot the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds in time.

He turned to the two runners, chosen from the hardiest of the young recruits. They saluted and hurried off at his gesture, having memorized in advance the message they were to repeat to Val and Mor if all went according to plan. Marcus satisfied himself that they were scampering down the rear of the hill, then turned back to Ja.n.u.s.

He and the colonel occupied a fissure in a ma.s.sive boulder, around which sand and smaller rocks had built up until it was nearly covered. The shelf was deep enough for a half dozen men and provided a lip of rock that would screen anyone waiting there from casual observation. It was an excellent vantage point.

"He's getting sloppy," Ja.n.u.s murmured.

"Who is?"

"Our friend the Steel Ghost. Look-they're in a single column. No outriders, no scouts."

Marcus frowned. That didn't sound like the Desoltai. "Do you think they're onto us? This could be a trap."

"Unlikely," Ja.n.u.s said. "I suspect they've simply become a little overreliant on their secret advantage. Remember, the Ghost already knows where the raschem army is headed."

They'd been up half the night making sure of that. At Ja.n.u.s' direction, pickets had marked down the locations and patterns of the lights flas.h.i.+ng in the darkness around the camp. A detachment of picked men had surrounded one of them, neat and quiet, and dispatched the three-man Desoltai patrol without anyone being the wiser. The messages that followed had been composed by the colonel, an apparently meaningless sequence of flashes and pauses that Ja.n.u.s a.s.sured Marcus the Ghost would understand. In the meantime, Give-Em-h.e.l.l's cavalry had been noisily unleashed, driving back the other Desoltai observers and guaranteeing there would be no contradictory testimony.

It had all been carried out very smoothly, Marcus had to admit, especially for a regiment that had been on the brink of mutiny the day before. But that was only natural. Every soldier's nightmare was being stuck fighting a foe he couldn't hit back. Offered the chance to strike a blow, the Colonials had jumped at it, and morale had surged. Even the Fourth Battalion troops had shown some spirit.

"They're coming this way," Ja.n.u.s said. "Now it's down to discipline."

Marcus gave a grim nod. He bent his thoughts toward Val and Mor, and every man in their commands, as though he could calm them by mental effort alone. Hold fire . . . hold fire . . . wait for it . . .

There were a lot of Desoltai. Ja.n.u.s had been right about that, as about so much else. They rode five or six abreast, a rough column snaking along the twisting course between two sandy rills. It went on for what looked like miles. Marcus did a rough mental estimate and came up with two to three thousand hors.e.m.e.n. That has to be close to everything they have. He wondered if Ja.n.u.s was right and the Steel Ghost was down there in person. There was no gleam of a metal mask amidst the riders, but those brown robes could hide anything.

"Almost there," Ja.n.u.s said, as calm as if he were watching a tennis match. "Captain Vahkerson has kept his nerve, in any case."

"He always does," Marcus said. The Preacher had a hold over his cannoneers that bordered on the fanatic.

His eyes were glued to the tall blue-and-gray rock that they'd fixed as the starting post, standing out from the dusty landscape like a menhir. It was a few hundred yards from the little hill. The leading hors.e.m.e.n were approaching it, so close that they could have reached out and touched it, when one of them reined up. Behind them, the column shuffled to a halt, spreading out across the flat ground and up the sides of the rills.

"Not quite far enough," Ja.n.u.s said. "We'll have to signal from here."

"Now?" Marcus queried.

"Now."

Marcus grabbed the musket that leaned against the lip of rock, aimed it in the general direction of the Desoltai, and pulled the trigger. The familiar mule kick of the gun shocked his shoulder into numbness, and the crack of the shot carried out across the desert and echoed off the walls of the valley.

The chance of the ball hitting anything at this distance was nil, but the flash and the sound would be obvious for a long way. Val and Mor would be watching. The single shot from the hill was the signal to open the attack.

For a lingering moment, nothing happened. The Desoltai milled, shouting and pointing. Marcus had a brief fantasy that something had gone horribly wrong, that he and Ja.n.u.s were alone out here with two thousand desert warriors and the Steel Ghost.

Then the flas.h.i.+ng tips of bayonets emerged from behind the rills on either side of the long column. Neat rows of dusty blue uniforms double-timed over the crests, far enough to get all three ranks into view, then halted and leveled weapons with practically parade-ground timing. Some of the Desoltai caught sight of them, but they had barely enough time to turn their horses around before sergeants up and down the line yelled the order to fire.

The ma.s.sed chorus of musketry, at this distance, was a rolling crash like nearby thunder. Neat puffs of off-white smoke rose from every lock and barrel. They were too far away to hear the horrible zip of b.a.l.l.s and the smack of impact in man and horseflesh, but Marcus had heard it often enough that his mind filled it in. Among the Desoltai, all was suddenly pandemonium. Men fell, horses stumbled, lost their footing, rolled over their riders or collapsed in a broken-legged heap. Every one of the riders was suddenly fighting for control of his mount, as even animals trained for battle panicked at the unexpected attack.

Marcus counted heartbeats under his breath. Here and there along the line, flashes and puffs of smoke from the riders' carbines showed they were firing back, but there was no coordinated return volley. A few small groups struggled free of the wreckage of dying horses and tried a charge, fighting to build speed on the rocky slopes. Marcus had reached thirty-five when the men on his left, Mor's Third Battalion, let loose another volley, more ragged than the first but just as effective. The Desoltai closest to the line went down in a single body, as though a giant's hand had swept across them, and the carnage in the valley multiplied. A few heartbeats later Val's troops fired as well, completing the chaos.