Sean's army had every advantage in an open field battle. The Yortown loot had included twenty-six thousand joharns, enough for Sean to convert all fifty-eight thousand of his men into musketeers and send several thousand to the force covering the Thirgan Gap in the west to boot, and Brashan had shifted Israel to the mountains directly above Yortown to decrease cutter transit time to the battleship. The Narhani's machine shop modules had increased their modification rate to forty-five hundred rifles (with bayonet rings) a night, and the Malagoran gunsmiths were adding almost a thousand a day more on their own, now that "the angels" had taught them about rifling benches. Unfortunately, over half Sean's army had been trained as pikemen, and the new men were still learning which end the bullet came out of.
Even so, his troops were fleeter of foot and had incomparably more firepower than any other Pardalian army. The new, standardized rifle regiments he and Tibold had organized could kill their enemies from five or six times smoothbore range, and the absence of polearms made them far more mobile. Even the best pikemen were less than nimble trailing five-meter pikes, and his rifle-armed infantry could dance rings around the Guard's ponderous phalanxes. Coupled with its higher rate of fire, the Angels' Army could cut four or five times its own number to pieces in a mobile engagement.
Unhappily, High-Captain Ortak knew it. He was well supplied with artillery, since Lord Marshal Rokas had known the cramped terrain at Yortown would reduce his guns' efficiency and left many of them with his rearguard, and reinforcements had come forward, but less than half his roughly eighty thousand men were actually armed. Less than twelve thousand were musketeers, and he dared not face the Angels' Army in the open. But short of arms or not, his men still outnumbered Sean's by almost forty percent, and all those unarmed men had been busy with mattocks. The earthworks he'd thrown up at Erastor closed the Keldark Valley north of the Mortan, and he clearly had no intention of venturing beyond them. Nor could any army go around them. The Mortan was unfordable for over ninety kilometers upstream or down from Erastor, and the terrain south of the river was so boggy not even nioharqs could drag artillery or wagons through it.
In many respects, Erastor was a stronger defensive position even than Yortown, and Sean and Tibold had considered meeting Rokas there. In the end, they'd decided in favor of Yortown because its terrain had let Sean set his ambush, but for a simple holding engagement, Erastor would actually have been better. There were no open flanks between the Erastor Spur and the river, which left an opponent with superior numbers—or mobility—no openings. He had to attack head-on, and if Ortak refused to come out, Sean would have to go in after him... which meant the Guard's outnumbered and outranged musketeers could hunker down behind their parapets until Sean's men entered their range. The Guard's morale had to be shaken by what had happened at Yortown, while the Angels' Army's morale had soared in inverse proportion, and Sean knew his troops could take Erastor. It was the cost of taking it that terrified him.
He frowned more deeply at the map and once more castigated himself for not pushing on more quickly. He'd taken five days to march a distance a Pardalian army could have done in three if it was pushed, and the consequences promised to be grim. If he'd crowded the routed Host harder, he might have bounced Ortak out of Erastor before the high-captain dug in, and telling himself his troops had been exhausted by the Yortown fighting made him feel no better. He should have gotten them on the way with the next dawn, however tired, not wasted two whole days burying the dead and collecting the Host's cast away weapons, and he swore at himself for delaying.
He wanted to swear at Tibold, as well, for letting him, but that wouldn't have been fair. The ex-Guardsman was a product of the military tradition which had evolved after the Schismatic Wars, and Pardalian wars were fought for territory. Ideally, battles were avoided in favor of efforts to outmaneuver an opponent, and campaigns were characterized by intricate, almost formal march and countermarch until they climaxed in equally formal engagements or sieges for vital fortresses. The Napoleonic doctrine of pursuing a beaten foe to annihilation was foreign to local military thought. It shouldn't have been, given the mobility nioharqs bestowed, but it was, and a crushing victory like Yortown would have brought most wars to a screeching conclusion as the defeated side treated for terms. Not this time. High Priest Vroxhan and the Inner Circle might not have the least idea what Sean and his marooned friends were truly after, but they'd realized they were fighting for their very survival. Worse, they were fighting, as they saw it, for their souls. Oh, it was obvious they'd become firmly attached to their secular power, but they also saw no distinction between "God's Will" and the Temple's domination of Pardal. Under the circumstances, there were—could be—no acceptable "terms" for them short of the "heretics' " utter destruction, and they were mobilizing their reserves. Within another two weeks, at most three, thousands of fresh troops would be marching into Erastor. Somehow he had to crush the Erastor position before those reinforcements arrived, and his soul cringed at the thought of the casualties his men would suffer because he'd screwed up.
His frown at the map became a glare. He knew, intellectually, that there wasn't always a clever answer, but he was also young. Centuries older than he'd been before Yortown, but still young enough to believe there ought to be an answer, if he were only smart enough to see it.
A hand touched his elbow, and he turned his head to see Sandy looking up at him. Her face was no longer the haunted mask it had been the first night after Yortown, but, as for all of Israel's crew, the slaughter of that day had left its mark upon her. Her eyes had learned to twinkle once more, yet there was less brashness behind them. No less confidence, perhaps, but a deeper awareness of the horrible cost reality could exact. Now those eyes met his searchingly, the question in them plain, and he sighed.
"I don't see an answer," he said in English. "They've put in too solid a roadblock, and it's my own damned fault."
"Oh, shush!" she said in the same language, squeezing his elbow harder. "We're all getting on-the-job training, and the last thing we need is for you to kick yourself for things you can't change. Seems to me you did a pretty fair job at Yortown, and you've got a lot more to work with now."
"Sure I do." He tried to keep the bitterness from his voice. His officers might not understand English, but they could recognize emotional overtones, and there was no sense shaking their confidence. "Unfortunately," he went on in a determinedly lighter tone, "the bad guys have more to work with, too. Not in numbers, but in position." He waved at the fifteen kilometers of earthworks linking the stony Erastor Spur to the river. "We surprised Rokas by doing something he knew was impossible, but Ortak has a much better idea of our capabilities, and he's dug in to deny us all our advantages. We can take him out with a frontal assault, but we'll lose thousands, and I just can't convince myself it's worth it, Sandy. Not just so we can get hold of a computer!"
"It's not just to get us to the computer!" she said fiercely, then smoothed her own tone as a few officers stirred in surprise. She shook her head and went on more calmly. "It's life and death for all these people, Sean—you know that."
"Yeah? And whose fault is that?" he growled.
"Ours," she said unflinchingly. "Mine, if you want to be specific. But it's something we blundered into, not something we did on purpose, and if we started all this, then we have to finish it."