"Not you, too," Raj muttered, and turned to the Lieutenant of the 7th Descott Rangers in charge of the station. "Message by rider, word of mouth only, Lieutenant: starting tomorrow night, be ready for anything we send from the other side. Otherwise, keep your movements routine. Understood?"
"Sir," the lieutenant said earnestly.
"Just a minute, Raj," Gerrin said. "I really think you should reconsider. . If you think a senior officer is necessary, I'd be glad to go"
"No." Forcing relaxation: "After all, you've got an infant son to consider, don't you, Captain Staenbridge?"
He could see the other man's mouth close. "By the Spirit, you're right. . damnable habit of yours, Raj."
"Er, excuse me, Brigadier," the lieutenant said. "I've got a rather odd request. Squad of my men-a Corporal M'kintok-just volunteered to accompany you."
Raj snorted softly. "Who's next, Tzetzas? My thanks to your squad, Lieutenant Meagertin, and tell them they're going to ruin the County's reputation. Now, if nobody else has precious time to waste. ."
Salutes, embraces, fists slapped together. A voice inside his skull, this risk is strictly unnecessary.
Shut up. observe.
I said, shut up: you're the voice of god, but I'm a man, Spirit take it, and this is something I'm going to do! There was a pause that took no time in the observable world. Then:
stochastic effects may randomize even the most rigorous Calculation, the voice of Center said; it was the first time he had heard Center lapse into religious jargon. Consciousness returned to the world of men.
". . let's go."
* * *
Raj held Horace's bridle as the men led their beasts onto the barge. It was a normal bulk-cargo vessel, brownish-grey native pigaro wood, hard and impervious and full of tiny bubbles of air. The shallow hold was roofed with arches of willow-withe, and a cover of dark canvas on top of that, also standard for cargoes vulnerable to sun or rain. Just enough room for the dogs, if they walked half-crouched and lay down in neat rows; thirty-two men and mounts of Foley's platoon, the two men and four dogs of the portable heliograph unit, M'lewis, Holdor Tennan, and himself. The vessel sank deeper against the inlet mud as fifty thousand pounds of dog and man and gear filed aboard; the steersman at the rear sweep began to look worried.
"Come on, boy," Raj said, stepping towards the plank. Last on, first off on the other side.
Horace balked, flopping himself down with a jingle of accoutrements.
"This is no time for that, you sumbitch!" Raj hissed, painfully conscious of eyes watching him, the men from the heliograph tower and others from within the barge. He hauled, with no result; kicked the dog in the ribs with the flat of his boot, and produced nothing but a hollow drum-sound, hideously loud. Dogwhips were useless on Horace; there was only one thing to do.
"Suit yourself," he said, and walked up the gangplank. Behind him the dog watched, whined when Raj jumped down into the hold of the barge, then picked up its reins in its teeth and followed, testing the footing with each step.
* * *
"Phew," Foley muttered, as the last of the men disembarked on the east bank. It had grown fairly rank inside the barge, while they drifted down toward the east bank and past the spot where the Civil Government border curved away from the west. They were in the Colony, now, and far from help.
"Avocati," Raj whispered back. The common dog-fodder along the river, a noxious, flabby sucker-mouthed bottom-feeding scavenger fish with no backbone; the main drawback was that it made the dogs' breath even worse than usual.
He looked up the bank; the floodplain held the same mix of carob and native thorny brush as the other shore, but the ravine-scored silt of the bluff was much higher, twenty meters, notched and slashed by winter flooding. The air smelled of river, dog, and wet mud; Raj took a deep breath and exhaled, grinning up at the dark menace of the hill. I feel young again, he realized with a start; which was very odd, because he had yet to reach his twenty-sixth year. Even in his teens he hadn't shared his peers' pleasure in taking useless risks, in riding vicious dogs or hanging around girls with dangerous male kin; they had called him a sober-sides for it, and for occasionally turning down a hunting trip or a cockfight to crack a book.
It's because this is a comprehensible job, he thought. No huge amorphous army, where he had to leave a dozen crucial things a day in the hands of men he had never fought beside; no not-quite-omniscient computer angel to show him unassailable reasons for doing things he despised; no snakepit spy-hive of a city. . just a cavalry patrol into hostile country, go in, get the information and get out. Succeed or die.
Foley came back along the line of kneeling men and crouching dogs; there was a slight frown on his half-youthful face, the look of someone focusing on a complicated piece of work. Learn to do it right and they'll just stick you with something more difficult, lad, Raj thought mordantly.
"M'lewis has a way up, sir," he said. "Passable without much cutting." Native scrub was like resilient metal wire that bit; they had saw-edged clearing bars, but the noise and delay were to be avoided if at all possible.
"Let's do it then," Raj said.
* * *
"Avatars of the Spirit," Raj swore, as he poked his head cautiously over the rise.
It was morning of the second day, south from their landing point; he had been about to pack it in, the patches of cultivated land along the bank of the river were growing more and more frequent, reaching inland further and further. Another fifty kilometers, and the bluffs would fall away to the wide alluvial plains, densely cultivated all the way east to the Rushing River and the highlands of Gederosia.
"That's the biggest fukkin' raghead army I ever wants to see," M'lewis said beside him on the ridge.
The skin around his lips was off-white. . well, it was stunning. The date groves and norias of the riverside were lost in a sea of tents, orderly clumps and rows, dog-lines running for kilometers, artillery parks with everything from the common pompoms to heavy muzzle loading howitzers. Supplies were being unloaded from riverboats, pyramids of sacks and crates and bundles; men marched through the streets of the tent city, the spikes of their helmets glinting; parties of cavalry dashed across the plain round about. In the center of the camp was a huge white and scarlet tent like a miniature mountain range. Banners hung in the still morning air above it, or fluttered briefly; the sound of the camp was like surf, spiced and peaked with the sharp music of drums and the shrill of fifes.
A muezzin had called the morning prayer; campfires were blossoming higher, carrying the sharp spices of Colonist cooking.
"There must be a hunnerd thousand men there," M'lewis whispered again.
Raj smiled; the Warrant Officer was as good a man of his hands as you could hope to find, a superb dogsman with an instinctive feel for the lay of the land and a crack shot, but the scale of this was outside his experience.
"Barton?" Raj asked.
The young lieutenant was quartering the camp with his own binoculars; his face was pale under natural olive and heavy tan, but his voice was steady:
"I make it. . twenty thousand, or a little more," he said, writing and sketching on a pad by his head.
"Much better," Raj said. He took the drawing and laid it before M'lewis. "See, each of the standard tent holds a Colonist squad; six men, smaller than ours. So many men to a gun; banners are graded, like in our regular army. Sample a section, figure out how many equivalents, and you've got a reliable estimate, the same way you'd number a sheep herd quickly." A pause. "You're counting too many camp followers, I think, Barton: they're building that bridge with peasants they've rounded up, mostly."