Raj moved a few meters to another boulder, sat and uncorked his canteen. "The 7th and the Skinners will drive them to us," he said, half to himself. From the volume of fire, within a few minutes.
"Drive them to us, sir?" the lieutenant said. "The 7th is finally doing the 5th a favor?" His color was returning, a little.
Raj looked over at the boulder, where the gunners were piling head-sized stones in front of their weapon. They'd tossed the bodies out to have more room; the girl's long black hair hid what was left of her face.
"Nobody's doing anybody any favors here today, Lieutenant," he said. "Nobody."
"Here theyuns come, tall's storks n' thick as grass!"
* * *
Kaltin Gruder had a girl on the saddlebow before him when he rode up to the command-station at the exit to the crater. That might have been expected-although it was a bit early for an officer as conscientious as Gruder to be looting, with the odd shot still going off behind him. Except that she was about eight years old, a huge-eyed creature with braided tow-colored hair in a bloodied shift.
"Took her away from a Skinner," he said, at Raj's raised eyebrows, his voice slightly defensive.
Embarrassed at impulse of compassion, something as out of place here as a nun in a knockshop, Raj supposed. Feelings were odd things. Antin M'lewis had adopted a three-legged alley cat that spring and lugged it all the way from East Residence.
Gruder shrugged: "Well, Mitchi"-the slave-mistress Reggiri had given him last year-"can use a maidservant, or whatever. There, ah, weren't many prisoners. Most of the Brigaderos civilians killed themselves before we broke through, when they could tell nobody was getting out."
Raj nodded. That simplified things for him. . and for them, come to that, if they felt like that about it. He could understand that, too.
Gruder was looking around at the number of bodies lying in the five hundred meters before the final stop-line the 5th's two companies had established. A D-shape of corpses, two or three deep in spots, a thick scattering elsewhere.
"Hot work," he said.
"The splatguns," Raj said. "We put them on the flanks and had the Brigaderos in a crossfire; they were worth about another company each, in sheer firepower on the defensive."
Kaltin frowned, stroking the whimpering girl's head absently. She clung to the cloth of his uniform jacket, although the right-hand sleeve was sodden and streaking her bright hair with blood.
"This was certainly more like a battle than most of what we've seen this campaign, Messer," he said. "I've got twenty dead, and as many again badly hurt."
"Ten from the 5th," Raj confirmed. Spirit dump Barholm's cores into the Starless Dark, I told him to give me forty thousand men. Even thirty thousand-
He sighed and rose, swinging into Horace's saddle. "Let's see if there's some wheeled transport for our wounded."
Chief Juluk was riding up, seven-foot rifle over his shoulder. He looked as if he'd waded in blood, and quite possibly had; one of the subchiefs behind him had managed to cram his body into a ball-gown covered in ruffled lace and had a bearded head tied to his saddlebow by its long hair. That must have been a brave man, to be worth preserving.
The Skinner looked around at the carnage. "Bad like us!" he giggled. "You one big devil, sojer-man. Bad like us!"
Raj felt his head nodding in involuntary agreement.
no, raj whitehall, you fight for a world in which there will be no men like him at all.
Or like me, he thought. Or like me.
"Lion City next," he said aloud. "Spirit of Man, I hope they have sense enough to come to terms."
Kaltin had been trying to disengage the girl's hands so that he could turn her over to an aide, but she clung desperately and tried to keep him between her and the Skinners.
"What do we do if they don't accept terms?" he said with professional interest, giving up the attempt. "We've nothing that'll touch their walls."
"Do?" Raj said. He reached out and touched the girl's hair with careful tenderness; she buried her head in Gruder's shoulder. "Anything we have to. Anything at all."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"Excellent work, Abdullah," Raj said.
The maps were sketched, but accurate; street-layouts, the location of listed merchants' and landowners' mansions, the waterworks, warehouses, estimates of food-reserves, number of men in the militia and their commanders. A little of it overlapped with the Ministry of Barbarians' reports, somewhat more with Muzzaf Kerpatik's data from his merchant friends, but a good deal was new-particularly the information on the large Colonist community that controlled Lion City's grain trade. He flicked through; faster than he could read, but Center was looking out from his eyes and recording. He'd have to go over it again; Center's knowledge was not accessible to him in really useful form most of the time, not directly. Center could implant it; without the learning process it was there, but not understood.
The man bowed, touching brow and lips and chest; it looked odd, when his appearance was so thoroughly Southern Territories.
"Saayid," he said.
"Your family is still living in that house in the Ox-Crossing, isn't it?" Raj asked.
That was a suburb of East Residence, outside the walls and across the bay. Abdullah nodded.
"It's yours, and the grounds," Raj said, and waved away a pro-forma protest. "Don't deprive me of the pleasure of rewarding good service," he said.
"Thank you, saayid," Abdullah said. "And now. . I think the merchant Peydaro Blanhko-" he touched his chest "-should vanish from the earth. Too many people will be asking for him."
Raj looked at Suzette as the Druze left the tent. "Someday I'm going to get the whole story of that one out of you," he said.
"Not with wild oxen, my love."
Raj stepped up to the map and began sketching in the extra data. "No, but I suspect that if I tickle you around that tiny mole, you'll tell all. . Right, that's the shipyard. Now-"
* * *
The flap of the command tent had been pinned up, leaving a large three-sided room open to the west. In full dark the camp outside the walls of Lion City was a gridwork of cooking fires and shadowed movement; Raj could hear the tramp of feet in the distance, howling from the dog-lines, and a harsh challenge from a sentry on the rampart.
They can probably see our fires from the walls, Raj thought, standing with his hands behind his back; the center of the camp was slightly higher than the edges, and he could make out the pale color of the city walls. Lantern-lights starred it. Much brighter was the tall lighthouse, even though it was on the other side of the city. The light was a carbide lamp backed by mirrors, but the lighthouse itself was Pre-Fall work, a hundred meters tall.
There were probably plenty of nervous citizens on the ramparts, besides the civic militia. Looking out at the grid of cooking fires in the besieger's camp, and thinking of what might happen in a sack.
Then they'd bloody well better give up, hadn't they? He turned back to the trestle table. "First, gentlemen," he said to the assembled officers, "I'd like to say, well done. We've subdued a province of nearly a million people in less than two weeks, suffered only minor casualties"-every one of them unpleasantly major to the men killed and maimed, but that was part of the cost of doing business-"and your units have performed with efficiency and dispatch.
"Colonel Menyez," he went on, "you may tell your infantry commanders that I'm also pleased with the way they've shaken down. Their men have marched, dug-and shot, on a couple of occasions-in soldierly fashion."
A flush of real pleasure reddened Menyez' fair complexion. "I've had them under arms for a full year and a half or more now," he said. "Sandoral, the Southern Territories and this campaign. I'd back the best of them against any cavalry, in a straight stand-up firefight."