The senior mare was close to foaling. Sigrid finished determining that the mare was well and the foal was as it should be, and went on to one of the younger, and less gravid, mares.
The yearling that she had taken from Katlinsvale, now a gangling two-T-year-old, came up behind and nibbled her hair.
Time to start training that one. She knew about the halter and the lead. She would need more if she was to be ridden. Sigrid had not decided yet. Her potential as a broodmare was priceless, but in between foals she should be of other use. Anything else was inefficient.
They were all in excellent condition, barely run down from their T-year on the march. And Sigrid was avoiding less pleasant considerations.
Soldier heads on spears. Soldiers killed by this army of mongrels and madmen. There were Bandari with assault rifles now. They talked of taking the Citadel as if they really could do it.
Never, said soldier pride.
Impossible, said the Cyborg brain, shutting out data that made cattle a threat to soldiers.
All too possible, said the gestalt that was Sigrid, assembling data with tireless efficiency. Hormone changes from pregnancy affected it; she had no illusions about that. But she could still put two binary units together and get binary ten.
She draped an arm over the filly's back and rubbed the horse's nape, frowning at the data running behind her eyes. The fetus rolled and kicked, demonstrating admirable technique. The Frystaat-Soldier combination was turning out even better than she had hoped. He was maturing early, physically. She could expect equally impressive neural development.
It was a pity that she had not had access to the laboratory in the Citadel in the early T-months, when she could have made the modifications that engineered a Cyborg from superior soldier stock. What materials she had with her were enough to ascertain that he was healthy, carried no overtly lethal recessives, and was developing ahead of schedule, but still within acceptable norms.
She had noticed the habit pregnant women had of resting a hand on her belly as if to protect it. She was doing it now. She took her hand away and went back to rubbing the filly's nape.
Soon she was going to have to admit something. She was uneasy.
The little bitch watched her constantly. Wherever she went, the bitch seemed to be, fondling her captured rifle and glaring in a manner that, no doubt, she reckoned formidable. She made no secret of what she thought. The word Sauron was usually a part of it.
So far no one seemed to believe her. Sigrid knew better than to think that that would last. And then?
Fight her way out if she had to. Cattle had a kink about pregnant women. Soldiers did too, for that matter. It was hardwired into the system. It made them protective. And they persisted in thinking that pregnant meant delicate.
She was off balance, but she could compensate. She was ungainly, but she was a poor soldier if an extra few kilos up front could cancel her fighting abilities. It was useful to let cattle think that it had, to stay among her horses when there was a skirmish, to wear an aspect that shouted noncombatant.
Her back informed her that it was tolerating its load for now, but by the time she came to term, it was going to be displeased. If it had been up to her to engineer the perfect soldier, she would have rearranged the reproductive system and found a better way than this to carry a baby.
She said as much to the one who had been standing in what he probably fancied was deep shadow, breathing like a bellows and wrapped in a breathtaking combined stink of lye soap and land gator blood. He stopped breathing. He could hardly stop stinking.
"It was half dead when you killed it," she said. "Whose head were you bashing in? Or did you care?"
"She says you you're a Sauron."
Sigrid almost smiled. "Does she? And who is that famous she? Your Judge with the senile dementia? Your bint with the planet-sized chip on the shoulder?"
Karl burst into the light, but stopped short, hands working, face shades darker than usual. "You are. Aren't you?"
"Will you club me to death if I say yes?" His eyes dropped to her middle. She rested her hand on top of it. And smiled.
He howled like a tamerlane. "I should have cut my balls off!"
"You should not," said Sigrid. "Your genes are by far the best thing about you."
"You . . . ice . . . cold . . . bitch."
She studied him. "You could probably give me a fight. But I would win."
It would have been characteristic of him to spit something else equally uninspired, heave for breath a few more times, then bolt. He surprised her by staying put. "That's my child, too. Don't you forget that."
"Never for a moment," she said. Karl stood glaring at her, but gradually going gray. Abruptly he turned and ran. Somewhat later, she heard the sound of retching.
Bandari, she had noticed, had a horror of soldiers that amounted to phobia. Interesting, considering what led them on this march. This reaction was extreme, but preferable to the alternative, which was attempted murder.
She did not regret driving him to it. He should forget his Bandari delusions of fatherhood. This child was a soldier. So he would be born, and so he would die.
And if the Citadel fell . . .
She would get it back. If that was soldier arrogance, then so be it. Blind arrogance had set soldier heads on spears. Open-eyed arrogance tempered with caution would serve her until she had something better to work with.
She had already considered and discarded assassinating the leaders, or at least the madwoman who led them. That would not dissipate the horde. She would only make a martyr. And martyrs above all were the wrong thing to make in this kind of war.
Karl, having gagged up his supper, was gone. She thought of calling after him to tell him where his little bitch was—rutting in the grass with a Mongol who appeared to have done her a favor. But that would have been petty. Pettiness was inefficient. Which was rather a pity, but she could not help her conditioning, any more than she could help the gnawing in her stomach. She signaled the she-dog to guard the horses, and, followed by the he-dog, went in search of her own supper.
Barak chopped his hand backward and the column behind him sank to the ground. To his ears, the rattle and clank of iron and stone was as loud as thunder; worse, he knew it would be just as loud to the Saurons ahead. If there were Saurons ahead. There were probably enemy soldiers ahead; they knew the horde was close, and this was one of the obvious ways through the hills to the south of the Citadel and the Karakul Pass. High enough to be chilly, even on a trueday noon in late summer . . . Some of the chiefs had been surprised they didn't wait for darkness. Barak snorted silently; how long was it going to take them to realize that the Saurons could see in the dark?
He moved forward, harness muffled to prevent any clatter, Sauron assault rifle at the ready. Shulamit was beside him; she was almost as quiet, rag-wrapped saber across her back and the same alien deadliness in her hands. Other rifle-armed followed, with Sauron weapons or Pale breechloaders. A squad of Sapper's pets followed them, carrying boxed instruments. The hills narrowed in around them as they moved, turning from tumbled rock cut by gullies to a canyon, with sides that closed in and rose. Signalers dropped off as they progressed, keeping each other in line of sight; the rock turned from old granite to softer volcanic tufa and lava, cut into fantastic shapes by wind and water, red and yellow and iron-red and black. The level of the ground rose as they pressed westward, and a wind was coming up from the valley. It smelled of wet and greenery, and of the dry canyons of the pass as well, and of men. A fair number, quite close. Sweating. Human norms, and the slightly blander, less salty scent of Saurons. Tools on rock sounded, and metallic clanking he could not identify; that should cover their approach, if they were very careful.
Barak made a hand gesture. Everyone stopped, and the last in front dropped to their bellies. They crawled forward through dirt and soft pumice dust that scratched at the insides of their noses, until they could look out. Behind him, the riflemen moved softly to take up positions upslope and down, wherever there was good cover and a clear line of retreat.
The Saurons were setting up behind rock sangars—one-man breastworks—a couple of hundred meters beyond this narrow spot. The cliffs here would make it easy to outflank a blocking force and fire down from above; the broader spot the enemy had chosen had a dropoff on one side and an unscalable overhang on the other. Good choice, Barak thought. Picks and shovels were flashing. His eyes went into telescope mode, and the scene flashed out at him. A dozen Saurons, and twice that of human norms—they must be laborers from Nûrnen, helping with the entrenchments. Several of the Saurons looked preadolescent, and the one with Assault Group Leaders collar-flashes had only a fringe of gray hair above his ears and neck. There was nothing substandard about their equipment, though; every man had an assault rifle—some of the outlying bases were making do with bolt-action models these days—and they were setting up a portable Gatling gun, with a huge sheet-steel tub of ammunition. Rifle pits were being dug, and a stone sangar for the Gatling. Boxes of grenades were being carried forward. In Sauron hands, grenades were about as bad as a mortar, and he wouldn't be surprised if the Saurons had one of those too.
Barak made another hand signal. The last engineer unpacked his box of tricks. Part of it was a shuttered lantern for signaling back down the line to the forward base. The rest was crystal lenses and brass wheels and turning screws, all on a tripod that itself could be carefully adjusted. Barak knew the cost of them: he had been an officer in the h'gana, the army of the Pale, after all. About the price of five hundred good horses or ten thousand sheep, endless skill by the finest artisans on Haven, shaping and filing. Well worth it, since the ability to judge distances with precision was half the secret of the Bandari military "magic" the tribes feared so much.
"Got it," the engineer whispered. He had the lanky build and ash-blond hair that sometimes cropped up in Clan Gimbutas; there was a Balt strain among them. "Got the meshgah pinned like a beetle on a card."
"Send it," Barak said.
He slid his assault rifle through the narrow slit between two rocks and focused his eyes again. Behind him, the lantern clattered as the engineer squeezed at the handle and so worked the slats over the flame and mirror. Sure enough, the gray-haired Sauron turned and looked, squinting. Then his eyes flared wide, and Barak's finger stroked the trigger. Crack. The rifle gave its love-tap to his shoulder, nothing compared to the black-powder models he was used to. Barak could generally hit a man at five hundred meters snapshooting; prone, with a steady rest and this fine piece of Sauron engineering, the thousand or so were nothing. The copper-jacketed bullet punched the Assault Group Leader back like a jointed doll, blowing out a fist-sized exit hole where the back of his neck had been.
The rest of the Bandari opened up. So did the Sauron Gatling, even though they had to spend a second or two to finish securing it to the mounting. The savage rrrrrrrrt-rrrrrrrt of the six-barreled weapon slammed echoes back from the jumbled hills around them. Fifteen-millimeter slugs savaged the volcanic rock in front of Barak's position, and he rolled backward spitting out pumice dust and blinking to clear his eyes before crawling to a new position. The engineer was lying on his back, tranquilly making notes on a pad.
"Hope Sapper gets that bloody thing into position pretty damned soon, or we'll be needing Piet's direct intervention," Barak snarled to him. As if in counterpoint, a scream came from the cliff to their right and a Bandari sniper fell from his firing post, pinwheeling through the air to land with a tooth-grating clump. Two more rounds hit him on the way down; the Sauron was taking no chances. "And the Founder helps those who help themselves."
"Sapper will come through." the man replied. "Hell, Hammer-of-God's watching him, isn't he?"
"Just pray they don't undershoot."
"Up here ought to do," Sapper called, pointing ahead and then wheeling his horse and riding westward to the platform he had selected.
"About bloody time," Hammer snarled.
"The men are working very hard," Aisha said. "They are not accustomed to it."
She nodded down at the trail, unconsciously laying a hand on her stomach. Karl Haller put an arm around her shoulders with something of the same protectiveness, and Hammer harumphed from the base of his throat.
They were working hard. The new-made road stretched back five kilometers, to where the main camp of the horde butted up against the hills, directly northeast of the Gates of Paradise. Almost hidden in the dust of the workings, and not much of a road, just the boulders rolled out of the way and the fist-sized rocks stamped down and covered in gravel, then watered and rolled. Not arrow-straight, either; Sapper's people had laid it out for minimum grade and maximum speed. Still more than good enough for wagons and heavy transport. Men swarmed ahead of it like ants across spilled beet sugar, slamming at rock with crowbars and sledges and improvised tools of a dozen sorts, digging with their hands if nothing else was available. Twenty thousand of them at a time in continuous relays, with tribeswomen carrying endless loads in baskets, on their heads or slung between two. It was amazing what that many pairs of hands could do, even when they were unused to any labor that involved getting off their horses.
Everyone wanted to get into the Valley, into Nûrnen.
Rations were short already, and little grass was left within a day's journey of the entrance to the Karakal Pass.
"I'm going down and seeing them get the Ariksa in place," he said.
The weapon was being hauled up by a twenty-pair hitch of muskylopes, and a hundred haBandari troopers besides, pulled off road duty for something that needed skill as well as raw muscle; that was besides the twenty or so who made up its crew. Six more of the weapons waited back in camp, but there was only room to deploy one here. They'd bring the others up once they were through the hills. Once they'd run past the Citadel they could sledgehammer their way in from both sides, with the horde to pin the Saurons down and the siege mortars to blast them out. The walls of the Citadel itself would be impregnable, but their field fortifications wouldn't.
Hammer ran a critical eye over the Ariksa; as a secret, it had never seen action before, but he had been involved in the planning and execution, of course. There was a special six-wheeled articulated wagon to carry it, man-tall wheels rimmed in steel and tired with woven drillbit gut. On that was a circular platform of welded steel plates and bars, none thinner than a man's palm. Endless trouble and expense. Above that was a complex arrangement of wheels and gearing, with a steel rod in the center the height of a man and the thickness of a strong man's arm.
The whole thing was heavy, and that was not counting the ammunition in the carts coming up behind. The smiths of Eisenstaadt, the Gimbutas Clan headquarters town back in the Eden Valley, had worked on it and its siblings for sixty years, experimenting and adjusting at a cost that set two successive kapeteins and their councilors wincing. All for an opportunity like this.
One of the Bandari officers heaving at a wheel left off and came over to meet him, flipping a casual gesture of salute. Except for a harness supporting breasts that scarcely needed it she was stripped to the waist, her thick arms and blocky torso glistening with sweat where it wasn't plastered with the dust that made a mask of her eyes; they were bright blue, glittering like the silver medallion bouncing between her breasts. A couple of the nomad roadworkers stopped to gape at her as she scratched under her halter, until someone shouted them back to their tasks. The wagon ground on, with a slamming rattle as one wheel rolled over a larger-than-average rock and crunched down an inch. The ground shook.
"Marija bat Yende fan Gimbutas," she said "Glad to be here; we could follow your track by the bones and scavengers all the way from Cliff Lion springs."
Hammer nodded. That was a compliment, of sorts . . . and you had to live up to your reputation.
"Glad you're ready to go right into action," he said. "This mamzer"—she jerked a thumb over her shoulder—"my grandfather, my father, and my mother all worked on it. I've been wanting to fire the bliddy thing in action all my life!"
He nodded silently, and the teams heaved again. Up ahead, Sapper's squads were working to level a place for it, and from further ahead still they could hear the crackle of gunfire. Gunfire and something else, something that sounded like a powered saw cutting stone. That would be the Sauron Gatling that Barak had reported. Hammer smiled thinly, and several of the nomads working nearest made warding gestures behind his back. The road ended here, more or less, with only the largest stones pushed out of the way. The big wagon lurched and slowed, and more haBandari swarmed forward to steady it and roll it the last dozen meters.
Few of the nomads would be willing to associate with such technology, reeking of Djinni.
What followed was as smoothly choreographed as a Piet's Day dance. Jacks went onto the corners, and the coulter pins of the wheels were pulled out; pairs of workers hammered them off the axles and rolled them away; and the gears ratcheted as the wagon-turned-platform was lowered onto the prepared bed of rocks. They paused for an instant to check the leveling as it touched down, then pounded long iron stakes through slots in the frame to secure it. Hands spun the wheels, and the long steel rod dipped. Nearer to Hammer, tarpaulins were stripped off the ammunition cart. Each shell within was two meters long, a stubby cylinder with fins at one end and a blunt rounded head at the other. Moans broke out from the nomads, for on each iron casing was painted the symbol of the atom. Panic sent them surging back.
Hammer grinned. Actually, there was nothing inside the shells but good old-fashioned black powder, mill-ground to a coarse peameal consistency as for blasting work. There was, however, a lot of powder—and it never hurt to use tribal superstition. Hellmouth, they think accounting is magic, he mused. Marija bat Yentle came back, wiping herself down with her shirt and then shrugging into it.
"We're getting the portable crane up." she said. A shell went into the cradle, swung over and up and turned; waiting hands guided it, and it slid down with the pole traveling up the central hollow until it disappeared altogether.
"Still seems odd for a projectile weapon not to have a barrel," Hammer mused aloud.
"Oh, it's got a barrel," Marija said. "The cylinder inside the shell is the barrel, the pole is the piston-head, and when you let off the propelling charge"—she brought her hands together and then swung them apart—"gas expands and pushes the piston out of the cylinder. Its called a 'spigot mortar,' and we spent years piecing it together from hints in bits and pieces of ancient works—had to reinvent it, really. Bloody hell getting the tolerances close enough to make, ah, sorry, sir."
Hammer waved indulgently. Sapper and his chief aides were consulting over pieces of paper; messages flashed up and down the line of signal-lanterns. Sapper himself turned the wheels, and the huge weight of the shell swiveled, light and precise. Then he clamped the end of a long blue cord that ran from its base into a small mechanism of wood and brass, and hopped down to walk over to Hammer-of-God, "Marija." He nodded to the officer. "Hammer—you want to do the honors?"
Around them haBandari were scattering back, taking cover. The nomads dropped their tools and followed with considerably more speed, as soon as translated explanations told them why. Hammer took the igniter in his hands and held it aloft.
"One—"
"Two—"
"Three." His fingers clenched.
Nothing dramatic happened, just a fizzing as the friction-primer inside lit the slowmatch. He turned and walked away slowly, letting his limp show a little, and stopped to stretch before he stepped behind a rock some distance away. Aisha was there—he scowled at that—and Chaya, and Kemal watching with bright curiosity in his slanted eyes. No night-terrors with him; he was a downy one, and dangerous. They all craned their necks around the edges of the rock. Thirty seconds, Sapper had said. The sound of the Gatling came clearly, now that everyone was holding their breath and the work-parties had stopped in their labors all the way back to the camp. Everyone was watching . . . even the spies who were undoubtedly among them, probably slipped in from Nûrnen last truenight; nobody could keep an accurate headcount in this mass-migration masquerading as a war.
Hammer-of-God Jackson felt a sudden deep happiness, pleasure sweeter than he had felt since his wife died, as deep as the pain had been when his son's wound went gangrenous. Whatever happened, he was here. He had led an army to the gates of the Citadel; he had mustered a host against Antichrist. Chaya was the prophet; Aisha the voice that had lashed the plains people into rage and shame: old Barak back in the Pale had seen which way the wind was blowing with those shrewd little eyes of his and sent what was necessary along. But he had organized it, he, plain Hammer-of-God Jackson of no clan, Jackson the sharecropper's son, the dumb Edenite, the peasant. His name would be there in the histories and the songs. Hammer-of-God. God's hammer to smite the wickedness of the Saurons, to humble their pride and might.
BWAAAMP. The ground moved and hit at his feet; he reached out a hand to steady himself against the rock. Dust puffed up; a great pancake of it about the Ariksa, mingled with the rotten-egg stink of burnt powder. An arch blurred through the sky heading toward the north for a few seconds, then another crash—louder, but muffled by distance and the rocky earth between. The Bandari stood and cheered at the cloud of black smoke and dust rising from the unseen target. The crew rushed out and began dancing around their weapon, leaping on it and kissing it and yelling endearments. More slowly, the nomads joined the celebration, until Hammer turned and roared; officers passed it down the chain of command, and in ten minutes the picks were sounding on rock once more.
"That," Hammer said, his hands on his hips as he stared north, "ought to take care of that."