Futile. The crews were within easy small-arms range of the ridge; dozens went down in the few seconds he watched. More shells burst among them, and overhead as the Civil Government artillery switched to time-fused shells that flailed them with shrapnel from above. More ammunition limbers exploded. He saw Colonial artillerymen cut dogs loose from their surviving teams and spur to the rear; officers who tried to stop them were ridden down. The whole crimson-uniformed mass was in full flight, those who could still move. The men on the fastest dogs were first, with the dismounted running or limping or dragging themselves afterwards.
Smoke drifted across the Civil Government line, thick even though a stiff breeze was blowing. Crewmen crawled forward from the splatguns, staying low and calling targets and distances back to their fellows. Officers directed the troopers' volleys with their swords.
Gerrin Staenbridge raised an eyebrow at Raj, who nodded. Another signal rocket hissed skyward, and this time the starburst puff of smoke was blue. A trumpet snarled six notes out on the right flank of the Civil Government force, and the cry of cease firing ran down the battalions on that end of the line. The 1/591st trotted their dogs over the ridge and down the slope, speed building. The swords came out in a single ripple of sun-struck silver as the speed of the charge built. Slowly at first-those were big men on heavy dogs, huge-pawed Newfoundlands and Alsatians sixteen hands at the shoulder. They growled as they charged, a sound like massed millstones grinding away in a cave, and the men shouted:
"UPYARZ! UPYARZ!"
"Nicely done," Raj said. "Oh, nicely done."
The charge swept down the hill and crashed through the flank of the disintegrating Colonial formation. The ex-Brigaderos held their ranks with fluid precision, stabbing and hacking and shooting with the revolvers most of them wielded in their left hands; the dogs were well enough trained to need no guidance but knees and voice and their place in ranks. The lighter Arab cavalry would have had trouble meeting a charge like that mounted at the best of times. With half their men down and unit cohesion gone, they reacted the way a glass jar did dropped on a flagstone floor. Men spattered in every direction; the 1/591st rode through their line, rallied to the trumpet call, dressed ranks and charged through again in the opposite direction. Hundreds of dismounted Colonials were holding up reversed weapons or helmets, asking quarter.
The barbarians in Civil Government service were whooping like boys as they cantered up the slopes again, despite a few empty saddles; shaking bloodied swords in the air and chanting their guttural Namerique war cries.
"Damn, but that's frightening," Raj said, shaking his head and scanning the enemy.
"Frightening?"
"One mistake, and two thousand disciplined troops with an able commander get creamed."
"Their mistake, fortunately."
Raj nodded grimly. "Unfortunately, Tewfik has enough men that he can afford to make a mistake-and he won't make this one again. If we make one mistake like this, the campaign is lost and so is Sandoral and the war. We'd lose everything south of the Oxheads as far west as Komar."
Staenbridge blinked. "It must hurt, thinking ahead like that all the time," he said. "General pursuit, mi heneral? I think we can take the lot of them, here."
Raj nodded. "That would be best. I hate to see so many good soldiers wasted like this, though."
wait. listen.
"Wait," Raj said automatically. Then: "Sound Cease Fire and Silence in the Ranks."
Staenbridge looked at him oddly, then signed to the trumpeters. The call rang out, and silence fell-silent enough so that the sounds of wounded men and dogs were the loudest things on the battlefield.
And off to the northeast, a muffled thudding sound, very faint.
"Guns," Staenbridge said. "You've got good ears, mi heneral."
distance 18 kilometers.
An hour or two at forced-march speed. "All a matter of knowing what to listen for," Raj said. Center had to use his ears, but it could pay attention to everything they detected, however faintly. "We went looking for Tewfik, and we've bloody well found him, haven't we?"
"You think that's him?" Staenbridge said.
"It's another battle group of Colonial cavalry meeting one of the raiding parties I called in," Raj said. "And where there's two, there'll be more. Tewfik's here, and if he's got less than twenty thousand men with him, I'm a christo. He's probing to find out where we are, and once he knows he'll pile on."
He tapped one fist into the palm of the other hand. "Messenger, ride to the sound of the guns; that's probably Major Zahpata's group. Tell him to withdraw as quickly as possible and rejoin on the route north. Gerrin, let's get ready to move out of here, and do it now. Hostile-territory drill."
* * *
"We have to move anyway," Raj said, preparing to rein Horace around.
The doctor's shoulders slumped. Suzette moved over two steps and laid her blood-spattered hand on Raj's knee. The dog bent its head around and snuffled at her. She shoved it gently away as she looked up at her husband.
"We'll do what's necessary," she said. He nodded wordlessly and pulled on the reins with needless force.
Suzette moved back to the line of wounded. Not this one, the Renunciate's eyes said.
Suzette looked down at the soldier sweating on the litter. His olive face was gray with shock, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. There was a tourniquet around the upper thigh of his right leg, and a pressure bandage over a wound below the ribs. He might have survived the leg wound, although he'd have lost the limb-there were fragments of bone sticking out of the mass of red-and-gray flesh below the tight-wound cloth. There was a faint sewer smell from the stomach wound, though.
"Here, soldier," she said in Namerique-from his coloring the man was MilGov. "Take this, it'll help with the pain."
The blue eyes fluttered open, wandering, the pupils dilated. She lifted a shot-glass sized dose of liquid opium to his lips; enough to knock a war-dog out, and fatal for a man.
Better than leaving them for the Colonials, she thought. It was bleak comfort.
* * *
"Yes!" Major Hadolfo Zahpata said. "Pour it on, compaydres. Give those wogs hell!"
He walked down the firing line-more like a C with the wings bent back, now. Fifteen hundred if it's a man, he thought, squinting into the bright sunlight. I have perhaps three hundred fifty. And we had to run into them facing the sun.
Twigs fell on his uniform coat from the apricot trees of the little orchard, cut by the bullets of the Colonial dragoons to his front. More went overhead with flat cracking sounds; he looked down and saw the left sleeve of his jacket open to the elbow, sliced as neatly as by a tailor's shears. One millimeter closer, and. .
They were advancing by squad rushes across the open grainfields; several hundred were behind the lip of an irrigation ditch about a hundred fifty meters to the front. That gave them cover, which was very bad. His guns were firing over open sights, trying to suppress them, which meant that they had to more or less ignore the steady flow of men over the embankment and into the open ground-although, thank the Spirit, they had knocked out the brace of pom-poms there. And the enemy were working around his flanks, both of which were now re-fused.