Django Wexler - The Thousand Names

“Yessir,” Archer said. “We’ll do our best, sir.”

• • •

There was a lull of a few hours, for which Marcus was duly grateful. It gave him the chance to evacuate the dead and wounded from the wrecked waterfront, and the men took the opportunity to dig in as best they could among the piles of rubble. This was what he’d brought the Old Colonials for. Fighting behind barricades and building field fortifications were not part of the skill set of the average Vordanai soldier, since on the continent wars were simply not fought that way. It was considered impolite to blast an enemy town with siege guns, for example. The Old Colonials, however, had spent years in Khandar-where the bandits and Desoltai raiders thought nothing of commandeering local dwellings as blockhouses-and thus had seen their share of desperate house-to-house fighting. The script was familiar to them.

This is the first time we’ve been on the receiving end, though . Normally it was the locals holed up in some little speck of a village and the Colonials rousting them out with cannon and bayonet.

He had Corporal Montagne, who reputedly had the sharpest eyes in the regiment, perched on the roof of the temple looking south. Four days, Janus had said, and this was the fourth day. Every time someone shouted, Marcus’ heart leapt in the hope that long blue-uniformed columns had been sighted wending their way north.

No such luck. A runner hurried out of the temple, skidded to a halt, and saluted hastily.

“Sir! Enemy movement, sir! Looks like heavy guns, sir!”

Here it comes . He stared north, across the river, where the brown uniforms were boiling into view like angry ants. It was only a few minutes before he caught the first flash of fire, followed by its distant thudding boom . He watched to see where the shot would land, and was startled to hear it pass overhead with a shriek like an angry cat as it cleared the roof of the temple to land beyond the village entirely.

“Saints and martyrs,” Marcus swore. “What the hell was that?” He gestured impatiently at the runner. “Go find Lieutenant Archer and ask him what the hell is going on.”

By the time the man returned, though, Marcus had figured it out for himself. Three more of the monstrous guns had opened fire, two overshooting the town and one shot landing well back from the waterfront, plowing through a whole row of houses before it finally came to rest. The runner’s breathless report confirmed his suspicions.

“Siege guns, sir,” the man said, still winded from running the length of the village twice. “Big ones, twenty-four pounders at least.”

“Thirty-six,” Marcus said. “Those are thirty-six-pound naval guns.”

“Are they?” The runner turned to look at the distant clouds of gunsmoke, impressed. “Well spotted, sir!”

Marcus’ lip twisted in a brief smile. “I’m afraid my eyes aren’t as good as that. But I used to walk past them at least once a week. The prince had them lined up along the wharf in Ashe-Katarion, remember?”

They’d been a gift from the King of Vordan to his royal friend and cousin. The prince had been very impressed with them, Marcus recalled. He’d been there the day the Colonials manhandled them off the boat, grunting and swearing, twenty men to each gun. If the little Gesthemels were older than Lieutenant Archer, those guns were older than any man in Khandar, relics of an earlier era. No one had told the prince that the enormous weapons he was so proud of were museum pieces, of course.

The runner gaped. “ Those guns, sir? I always thought they were just for decoration!”

“Apparently General Khtoba has found a use for them.” Marcus spared a brief moment of thanks for the foresight Janus had shown in avoiding Westbridge. The thought of trying to charge across a bridge into the face of those monstrous pieces made him shiver. “Does Archer think he can silence them?”

“He said he’ll try, sir, but they’re well back from the river’s edge. Long range, sir.”

“Tell him to try. And get the ammunition relay running again.” Another shot from one of the monsters landed, closer to the waterfront. The huge projectile tore through the town as if through tissue paper, leaving a neat line of rising dust in its wake. The ranker swallowed hard, saluted again, and ran off.

Archer’s guns opened fire a few minutes later. As the lieutenant had predicted, his replies were less effective than before due to the longer range, but the man’s skill was evident. It was only a few shots before his pieces were regularly bowling their roundshot into the growing clouds of smoke that surrounded the big naval guns. One mercy was that the ancient pieces would be difficult and time-consuming to aim. If they got into a duel with Archer, it would take ages for them to zero in.

In the event, they didn’t even try. The naval guns kept slamming away at the waterfront, blasting through the barriers of wood and clay as though they were made of matchsticks. Instead, a descending scream announced another set of unwelcome arrivals. Marcus watched the first shot fall short, churning up a stretch of riverbank. Howitzers.

The king had given those to the prince, too. Marcus wished his sovereign had been a little less generous over the years, even if he was only cleaning obsolete pieces out of his armories. These were midgets compared to the naval guns, stubby weapons that looked vaguely like a washing tub on wheels. They fired shells instead of shot, iron spheres packed with powder and an impact fuse. Like the huge naval guns, they were weapons of a previous age, when wars had been less polite and sieges were common. Unlike the huge thirty-six-pounders, which had been built to defend harbors from enemy ships, the howitzers had been designed for the express purpose of bombarding dug-in enemies and fortifications.

Archer kept trying. It took some time for the howitzers to find the range-they weren’t terribly accurate weapons at the best of times, firing as they did in high arcs rather than the shallow trajectories of ordinary cannon. Once they started landing shots close by, however, they made a mockery of all of the gunners’ careful preparation. The shells descended from on high, not straight ahead, and they were as likely to land behind the sheltering walls of rubble as in front of them. When they hit, they blew apart into iron fragments as deadly as any musket ball.

The artillerymen kept up the now patently unequal contest for a few minutes, gamely banging away into the cloud of gunsmoke while the shells rained down around them. It wasn’t long before they gave it up, however, and one by one the Colonial guns fell silent, leaving only the distant, shuddering booms from across the river.

Archer himself turned up not long after, bleeding from a long cut on one shoulder and even more smoke-blackened than before. He saluted, gingerly, and shook his head.

“Sorry, sir. I told my boys to pull out. We’ve had a dozen men hit already, and one of the new guns is down with a cracked axle-”

Marcus waved him into silence. Once it became clear that the Vordanai guns were no longer replying, the howitzers had turned their attention to the waterfront. Fires were once again burning through the sad little town, and each exploding shell was accompanied by a fountain of debris and burning thatch. Marcus glanced at the sky. The sun had not even reached the meridian, and the southern horizon remained empty.

“Archer,” he said, “get your guns back to the temple and start digging in. Get that shoulder seen to while you’re at it.”

“Yessir. But-”

Marcus was already turning away. “Runner!”

“Here, sir!” said a nearby ranker, a keen-looking young man with a crisp salute.