On the Oceans of Eternity

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

September, 10 A.E.-O'Rourke's Ford, east of Troy

Colonel O'Rourke glared around the enclosure in an instinctive search for something more to throw into the fight. Spears and arrows lay thick on the ground, many stood up from the dirt, giving it the bristling look of a hedgehog's back. More flew in continously, their heads flashing in the light of the fires that burned here and there along the barricade. The roof of the hospital seemed to have caught as well-which at least was keeping most of the enemy snipers off it; they'd brought them forward from the hillside to the south as night fell. All around the walls was a swarming melee as the Marges stabbed and smashed and cut, heaving the enemy back from the parapet and shooting whenever they got the chance to reload.

Thank God for the bayonet, a corner of his mind thought. As soon as the Republic started issuing firearms in the Year 2. they'd found to everyone's surprise that rifle bayonet in skilled hands made a better hand-to-hand weapon than bladed weapon and shield; it combined the virtues of a spear, a quarterstaff, and a halberd.

Chaplain Smith was still doing the rounds with spare ammunition and Scripture, using a broken spear as an improvised crutch; a sopping red bandage circled his thigh. Some of the others passing out ammunition could do no more than crawl. Most of the rounds in the chaplain's sack were loose, stripped out of the remaining Gatling drums now that fhe weapon was useless. Even with the wind a standing fog of powder smoke ghosted around the Islander outpost, leaving everything hazed in burned sulfur; a corner of his mind estimated that every Marine in the compound must have fired something like two hundred rounds, and it was still four hours to dawn.

"We can't hold them here," he said, muttering to himself. "The perimeter's too long."

Lieutenant Hussey charged with his intervention squad to a spot where the line bulged, their sudden ordered impact giving them an effect beyond their numbers. Hussey had managed to acquire an extra pistol from somewhere, and was shooting two-handed. Hitting what he shot at, too, a minor miracle. They fell back from the wall once the breakthrough was contained, reloaded, and headed for the next… but this time there were only nine of them.

Surgeon-captain Wenter threaded her way through the chaos with another group of wounded from the burning hospital, the ones who could walk helping those who couldn't, the last of her orderlies carrying one man across his shoulder and half-carrying another with an arm around his waist. She trotted over to O'Rourke and examined the bandage on his neck.

"Normally I'd say you should be on your back for a week, with that," she said. "Looks all right for now."

He nodded. "Are the wounded and sick all out of the hospital?"

"No, they aren't," she said. "Some of them are in those two rooms at the northwest corner-the Ringapi on the roof shoot at anyone who tries to get to them through the courtyard, and there's no interior corridor. All the rooms give on to the courtyard. You'll have to send in some people to get them out now."

O'Rourke looked west. "Can't be done," he said. "Get these into the storehouse." He met her incredulous glare steadily. "I'm not going to get everyone killed to rescue a few," he said. "Do it, Doctor. Do it now."

"Damn you, O'Rourke!" she spat, turning to obey. A glance around. "Damn all you butchers!"

He ignored her, not without an inward wince, and called Barnes over. "We can't hold," he said. "This is going to be tricky-

"They're on the bloody roof!" someone said.

"Well, what do you expect me to do about it, shithead?" Private Hook screamed, ducking aside as a Ringapi outside the hospital's west wall thrust a rifle barrel through the windowslit.

The explosion was deafening inside the confined space of the hospital room. The bullet chipped a divot out of the pole of a bunk bed, showing the raw pinewood within. Hook stepped back before the man outside could reload or withdraw his weapon, grabbed it by the barrel with his left hand, and shoved his own rifle out until the muzzle touched flesh. It bucked in his hand as he snatched it back, reloaded, and fired again.

Sweat stung his gnawed lips. The dim lanternlit space of the hospital room was full of powder smoke, with shapes looming up out of it like rocks on the floor of hell; the smell of the diarrhea from the patients who couldn't go to the latrines anymore added the final touch. The mud-brick wall under his shoulder shook; there just weren't enough guns here to keep the enemy from dashing forward and crouching along the bottom of it. They reached up and grabbed at the rifles, or thrust spears through, or fireams of their own-more and more of those. Others were beating at the walls, cutting through with axes and spearheads…

Hook turned on his heel and went to the door that led into the courtyard. He opened it, and jerked back as a spear flashed down and buried itself in the floor beside his foot; he hopped back convulsively and then had to wrestle the shaft free before he could close the door and bar it again.

Edraxsson was staring at him again. "What are you looking at?" he shouted at the fever-struck sergeant. He looked around again. We're all going to die here! Hell with we, I'm going to die here!

Here…

"All right, heads up," Hook said. "We've got to get out of here."

"You sucksoul, the enemy are on the roof; they'd spit us like deer if we tried to run through the courtyard-and half of us can't walk."

Hook ignored the interruption. "They'll be through the front wall soon," he said. "Then they'll swamp us. You, you, you- cut through the interior wall there. We'll go through and down the side of the hospital that way. Come on, move it!" He picked up one of the entrenching tools. "The rest of you, keep firing. Faster, God damn you."

He slammed the pick side of the tool into the side wall of the room. The impact jarred him all the way down to the small of his back; he levered it sideways, tearing out a chunk, ignoring the pain where the bandage worked against the sore on his back.

"Come on, you lazy motherfuckers-work!"

Edraxsson laughed, high and shrill and delirious. The others looked at Hook for a moment, then moved to obey. He slammed the tool into the mud brick again and again; the stuff resisted him, bricks dried hard as iron over the years, and the mud mortar and plaster around them had been mixed with animal hair and straw to begin with. He looked through when the hole was big enough, then back over his shoulder.

"Watch it!" he yelled, snatching up his rifle and turning.

A steel spearhead probed down through the widening hole in the roof, then a bronze one. Mud and old dry bundles of reeds and twigs fell down into the room, and then the face of a Ringapi, his long mustaches dangling down to make horns below his head. Hook fired without being aware he was aiming and the man's head flew apart like a dropped melon. The body followed it, twitching and bucking like a pithed frog. Hook screamed in frustration as the ambulatory cases began dragging the ones who couldn't walk out through the hole he'd dug, the hole to safety and freedom.

Smoke was pouring down through the hole. The long-dry pine poles that held the whole heavy mass of the roof up must be catching as well. He coughed and fired twice more into the gap.

"Hurry up!" he screamed, and then to his horror the other two walking wounded stopped firing through the slit window and dashed out through the hole. "Cowards! Pussies!" he shrieked as he reloaded.

The door to the courtyard smashed in with a shower of splinters. Hook shot the man in the door in the belly, scrabbled in his bandolier, loaded, thumbed back the cocking lever and fired again just as the Ringapi who'd vaulted the first was drawing back his spear for the killing thrust. The heavy soft-lead slug took the other man right under the chin and flipped him backward like an anvil on a rope. The third had a long light bronze tomahawk and a shield; Hook met the descending arm with a sweep of the bayonet, gashing it to the bone. The same motion punched the edge of the butt up into the man's face, and then he turned and threw his rifle through the hole and dived headfirst after it.

The sore on his back broke open and bled as he landed, knocking most of the wind out of him. He ignored the warm trickle; it was his ass, now. The other two fit enough to shoot were firing through the waist-high hole into the first room.

"Leave that!" he yelled, grabbing one of them and pushing him staggering across the room. "You dig. You, get to the door into the courtyard-first thing you hear there, shoot through it, gut height."

He snatched up his own rifle just in time; a Ringapi came shoving through with a round shield held high before him and a spear short-gripped beneath. To do that he had to stick one leg through first, of course. Hook stamped down on it, felt the green-stick crunch of it breaking beneath the heel of his boot.

The shield came down and the Marine chopped his rifle butt into the bent neck before him, shoved the thrashing body back so that it blocked the hole.

Then he looked up. This room was dim and long, most of it just empty bunks. Something stung him on the neck, and he looked up to see the reeds and twigs above him blackening, little flickers of red-blue flame running along them. The smoke was thicker, choking, and he coughed. More smoke poured in through the hole from the first room, and the body moved again as hands hauled it back; he could hear them screaming in there, it must be like an oven. The fire roared like a bass undertone to the hammering crackle of gunfire outside, and the hissing, screeching war cries of four thousand men. But the ones back in there where he'd been, they were roasting by now…

"So burn, you bastards," he shouted, and threw his shoulder against a row of bunks. The pine-pole construction fell across the ragged circle cut in the mud brick, and he shot the man crawling through against that obstruction under the armpit.

Shots from behind him brought his head around. The walking-wounded case he'd pushed toward the door was backing away from it, firing through the oak boards as fast as she could reload, and each time a hole precisely.4 of an inch snapped into existence, surrounded by long blond splinters of wood. Despite that, the impact of shoulders against the planks never ceased. Spearpoints appeared, flecking through the wood like points of red light in the smoky flame-shot darkness. More spearpoints, reaching for the bar that closed the door…

"You useless twat!" he shouted, running forward.

The door burst inward.

Behind Kyle Hook the last of the sick were going through the hole hacked in the wall, the final hole to the final room in this building where he was going to die. Something flashed behind Hook's eyes, a white light that flooded him and left him moving lightly, easily.

' 'Motherfuckers!''

The shouting mouths of the Ringapi were silent. That was all right, because they were-

"Bastards!"

They were the ones who'd stranded him here. They were the parents who'd left him on his own, gone away and left him in a place where suddenly nothing worked and there wasn't even any TV or good food or anything to do but work at things he hated. They were the foster parents always more concerned with those Alban brats than him. They were the judge and Sergeant Edraxsson and the giggling prick of a God who'd left him here to die three thousand years before he'd even been born.

And they were a bunch of homicidal locals who wanted to kill him. He ran toward them laughing…

Private Kyle Hook saw the others looking at him as he came through the hole smashed in the mud-brick wall. Their eyes were wide and staring as he walked over to the doctor's cabinet. The rifle in his hands was broken and bent, and clotted with red and bits of hair and bone; he used it to smash the padlock off the front of a supply chest and lift out one of the square brown bottles of medicinal brandy.

"Hook-you can't do that, that's a Captain's Mast offense!"

He knocked the head off and poured the liquor into his open mouth, sparing his bruised lips. They stung; so did his raw throat. He laughed, drank again, threw the bottle away. "So call me up on report-you going to put me on report, Edraxsson?"

The man with the wounded foot laughed himself, still glassy-eyed with the fever. "I don't have to, Hook. I've won; I made a Marine out of you, boy."

"That's not all you did," he said. He bent down and hoisted the sick man across his shoulder, grunting at the solid weight. "You went and sent half my pay to my foster parents while I was in the brig." He slapped the half-conscious man on the buttocks. "What did you have to go and do something like that for?"

Hook glanced around at the others. "Well, come on, you going to sit here with your thumbs up your assholes waiting for the enemy? Let's go defend our beloved Corps."

"Well, at least the hospital's giving us plenty of light," Patrick O'Rourke said, with his back to the biscuit-tin barricade of the redoubt around the storehouse.

"Sir?" the bugler said.

He was very young, and his voice shook a little. That was forgivable, in this fire-shot night. The hospital at the other end of the fortlet's long rectangle was fully aflame now, a belching pyramid of yellow-red that sent smaller tongues licking out of windows and loopholes. By that light he could see the backs of his Marines, catch the flash of steel and bronze as they fought along the lines of the barricades to either side in a heaving, thrashing confusion. More and more clots of Ringapi warriors were rushing in out of the darkness, and there was little long-range fire to slow them down-fewer shots at all, more shouts and shrieks, clash of metal on metal and thump of iron on wood. Arrows and flung spears and slingstones rained down out of the night in an unceasing stream. Some of them had bundles of burning oil-soaked wool attached to them, and those looked like flaming meteors and cast little puddles of light about them where they landed.

Soon, he thought, staggering a little when the shaft of a falling javelin smacked against his thigh; with a practiced effort of will he didn't think about what would have happened if the spear had come down six inches closer.

He'd briefed Barnes and all the noncoms on what they were supposed to do and told them to pass it on. The noise was enormous, stunning, and the stink nearly as bad, sweat and fear and shit and death, and the foul odor of the wrong things burning.

Now I have to ask them to run without actually running away.

"Standard-bearer," he said.

The young woman was new to the job, having only one arm usable at the moment-everyone who could fire a rifle was working, right now; even his radio tech was on the line in the redoubt. She came forward at his gesture and stood to his right.

"Bugler." He'd been sticking tight to O'Rourke's left elbow, just as he should.

"Ready," he said, flipping his pistol to his left hand and drawing his katana.

The sword rose, pointing to the flag and the gilt eagle topping it-he had to be seen, and if that made him a conspicuous target, that was a cost of doing business. Now, here's where we learn whether we're certainly dead, or just probably. If the Marines broke, they'd be overrun and swarmed under in seconds. The Ringapi didn't look as if they were in a prisoner-taking mood. Head-taking, more likely. Like O'Rourke's own remote ancestors, the migrants from the middle Danube were given to collecting trophies.

"Sound retreat and rally" he ordered crisply.

The bugler had to take two tries-the first one ended in a strangled squeal, and he worked his mouth and spat before making a second attempt. That rang out chill and strong, cutting through the snarling brabble of battle like a knife through flesh.

For a moment, relief made his knees waver. The troops were doing it, peeling back from the walls and dashing back toward him, starting with those furthest away. It was hurried, a little ragged-and some disappeared under knots of Ringapi, spear butts rising and falling and axes glittering. But most made it back, most, the enemy still had to clamber over the wall, even if the ditch around it was full of their dead in layers often four deep.

"To me, the First!" O'Rourke shouted, throwing his voice from the gut. "Rally by me!"

The ones who lived did; he felt himself swelling with pride. They halted by the biscuit-tin barricade; not one tried to clamber over it for a moment's safety. Instead they swung into two lines, one to either side of him and one behind at the very base of the wall, forward kneeling and rear standing. The bayonets on their rifles didn't glitter in the firelight; every single one of them was colored a slick, dripping red. So was the sword of Hantilis the Hittite; he'd picked up a round Ringapi shield, now much nicked and battered, and he fell in behind O'Rourke's bugler without waiting to be told not to get in the line of fire.

Hands scrambled to reload. The whole interior of the rectangular enclosure outside the wall at its eastern end was suddenly packed solid with Ringapi warriors, every one of them rushing forward. There was no way the Marines who'd rallied to him could meet it in time…

… but the line who rose from behind the biscuit-box wall could. The space spanning the north and south walls was much smaller than either was long. Even with casualties, the rifles on the wall behind him bristled shoulder to shoulder. Cecilie Barnes's voice called out, steady and calm:

"Volley fire, present-fire!"

BAAAAAMM.

The bullets slammed into the front rank of the Ringapi, who were crammed shoulder to shoulder across the width of the enclosure, too. And packed arse to belly down the length of it, where they'd swarmed over the walls from both sides.

The Marines who'd fired ducked down and reloaded; behind them in the last redoubt another line stood and volleyed over their heads; the firing step there was a foot higher, and they were over the heads of the Marines in front of the biscuit-tin wall as well. Hot air slapped the back of O'Rourke's neck beneath the flare of his helmet, like a soft heavy hand. The noise slapped his eardrums, too, hard enough to hurt.

"Volley fire, present-fire!"

BAAAAAMM.

By then the front rank of the Marines who'd rallied to him were ready. He filled his lungs, remembering to keep his voice in the same parade-ground tone as always:

"Front rank-volley fire, present-"

"-fire!"

"-fire!"

"-fire!"

"-fire!"

The volleys slashed out at intervals of three-quarters of a second, four ranks to shoot, steady as a metronome, the rifles rising and falling like the warp and weft of a loom. Islanders still fell; the Ringapi were throwing spears at close range, and they thudded into chests and bellies, gashed faces and arms. But most of the enemy were too crowded to do anything but stand or try to swarm forward. The front rank ran into an almost physical barricade of lead.

O'Rourke added his pistol's fire to the volleys. Even shooting left-handed he didn't miss, with a row of targets scarcely beyond arm's reach. This close to a Ringapi warrior with the battle lust upon him, you knew right down in your gut that this was a man who'd kill you if he could, and acted accordingly. Somewhere down deep in a very busy mind he still found a spare second to admire the way they kept coming, right into the muzzles. If this was what his ancestors were like, he wasn't surprised they'd ended up overrunning everything between Turkey and Ireland. He was surprised they hadn't gotten themselves massacred en masse.

Of course, then they'd met Roman discipline, and that was about what had happened…

The wall of enemy warriors in front of him bulged, swelling upward like a wave hitting a steep beach: men falling dead or wounded; men tripping over them as they were pushed from behind by the onrush of those too stupid to realize what was happening or too brave to care; or men trying to climb right over the mass ahead of them.

"Front rank-volley fire, present-

"-fire!"

"-fire!"

"-fire!"

"-fire!"

And suddenly the wave ahead of them wasn't trying to advance anymore. The volleys went on as the front rank turned and clawed at the men behind, and then they turned as well, until no Ringapi were left standing inside the enclosure.

"Cease fire," O'Rourke said, his voice sounding a little tinny and faint in his ears.

Hantilis was swearing in amazement, possibly just at being alive. Stretching across from the northern wall to the southern in front of the leveled rifles was a mound of dead and dying Ringapi; at the very front it was higher than a man's waist- nearly high enough to block the fire of kneeling marksmen, too high to remain stable, and bodies were slithering down to rest against the Marines' boots. The heaving of injured men trying to get free of the four-deep crush atop them helped that process. Where the layer of bodies thinned out behind the front of the wave the whole surface crawled and moved, amid a threnody of agony, right back to the wall of the burning hospital.

"All- ' O'Rourke cleared his throat. "All right, let's get back over this wall here. See to the wounded. Move it, people, let's go!"

Barnes's voice added to his, and the surviving noncoms. He lost himself in work, waiting for the shrieks and panther screams that would herald the next attack. It was ten minutes before he realized that there was silence outside the fortlet, half an hour before he believed it. The Ringapi campfires still guttered and gleamed through the dark to the westward. Not until dawnlight caught the snows atop Mount Ida to the south was his gut convinced, and not until he heard the cries of the jackals and foxes coming close to feed.

True dawn showed the Ringapi camp struck and empty, nothing but litter and smoldering fires left burning through the tail end of night. The ruins of the hospital still smoldered as well, sending up a sour dark smoke that had everyone coughing when the wind shifted wrong. Ash came along with the smoke, more of it when brick or bits of roofing fell with thumps and crashes. Overhead there was a thick scatter of circling kites and ravens and…

Yes, by God, eagles too, he thought with dull amazement.

"What do they eat when there's no war?" he thought aloud.

"When is there no war in these lands?" Hantilis asked.

Barnes came up as well, with mugs of sassafras tea. O'Rourke sipped gratefully at his, trying to ignore the men calling akawa… akawa… from the heaps of enemy dead. Water, he suspected. And mathair was unpleasantly obvious, too…

"What's the butcher's bill, Captain?" he asked.

"Twenty-two dead, sir," Barnes said; it was as if a robot was speaking. "Including Hussey and my company sergeant.

Another forty badly injured. That's not counting the sick from the hospital."

He knew she was using the term badly injured conservatively; half or more of the ones still at the walls had crusted bandages. Many of them were only fit to shoot if they had something to prop them up.

"We're down to eighty rounds per rifle," she went on. "Must've shot off… God, forty, fifty thousand rounds. We're short of medical supplies, too; well fixed for food. Most of the transport animals are dead but we've got about six horses left."

Including Fancy; he felt a slight pang of guilt even now at how relieved that made him feel.

"We should get things policed up," she continued in the same dead voice. "Get some hot food for the troops. Clean weapons. See if we can help some of the enemy wounded, get the bodies buried or at least hauled away, strengthen the walls-they might be back."

O'Rourke looked around; most of the Marines were slumped into unconsciousness beside their rifles; the one in ten still awake on orders looked at him through red-rimmed eyes that stared out of smoke-blackened faces. He suspected he had the same fixed, flat stare; he also suspected-knew-that what everyone wanted right now was sleep.

"You're right," he said, dragging himself upright. Then, softly: "Hell of a shindy, macushla. Hell of a shindy, indeed." A mental shake. "First-

"Heads up!" the lookout on the roof of the storehouse called, and then: "By God, it's the regiment!"

That brought a thin cheer from those awake, and woke some of the sleepers. O'Rourke dragged himself to the rooftop and confirmed the sentry's sighting; two companies in column of march, mounted scouts out ahead, and some heavy weapons in between. He walked out into the track he'd ridden down…

"Saints, was it only thirty hours ago?" he whispered to himself. "They must have forced the march." The base was better than forty miles away, and the roads were terrible.

He blinked in surprise when he saw who was heading up the column, and snapped off a salute. "Brigadier Hollard!" he said. "Last I heard you were in Hattusas."

"Came out to see to some things," he said.

O'Rourke looked back at the Marines who'd halted in the roadway. In normal times he'd have said they were clapped out and ready for rest; right now they looked almost indecently fresh.

"With two companies of the First and those heavy weapons, and a day to entrench, we can hold against anything outside the hosts of hell," he said.

"It looks like you already did, Pat," Hollard said softly, looking over the battlefield; he removed his helmet and ran a hand over cropped sandy hair. "Christ crucified… I thought you'd all been massacred, until I saw the flag still flying."

"Reverend Smith's hearing confessions right now," O'Rourke said grimly. Captain Barnes came up while he was speaking. "It didn't come cheap, I'm telling you that, I am."

"I could use some extra medics and supplies, sir," Barnes said.

Hollard shook his long head. "Of course, right away."

He turned in the saddle and gave the orders, and figures with the winged snake emblem on blue uniforms ran forward. The rest of the column seemed paralyzed, staring at the carnage around the little outpost, some of them gagging when the wind shifted.

"We can hold forever, now. Against the hosts of hell themselves," O'Rourke went on, conscious that he was repeating himself but too tired to really care.

Hollard swung down from the saddle and gave him a sympathetic slap on the shoulder. "I'm afraid that's what's heading this way," he said. "Troy's fallen, and Walker's men are pouring up from the coast-here, and up the Meneander Valley from Miletos. We're retreating."

O'Rourke nodded dully. "I'll need transport for the wounded," he said.

"Emancipator is making a run into the regimental HQ and she'll pick up anyone who can't march," Hollard said.

"What about the supplies here, sir?" Barnes asked.

"Take what you can. Burn the rest," Hollard said, his thin mouth and knob of a chin closing like granite. "Starting now, we don't let anything fall into Walker's hands that he can use. Vastatio."

"Ah, that's the way of it, then," O'Rourke said, nodding mechanically.

"One thing," Kenneth Hollard said, looking at the barley-sack ramparts, half-visible now under the men who'd died sprawled across them. "Why didn't you dig a ditch outside the walls-no time?"

"We did dig one, Brigadier sir," O'Rourke said. "It's just full."

Hollard shook his head again. "Colonel, this is going to be one for the Corps history books, up there with Chosin and Okinawa."

O'Rourke hadn't thought of it in quite that way before… but it was a notable feat of arms, after all. "I'll want to see that my lads and lasses get the recognition they deserve for it, too," he said. My one regret about that is that I'll have to recommend Kyle Hook for a medal. And there I was hopin' to send him to the punishment company.

"And we'll have to find a name for it." Hollard's mouth quirked from its chiseled line. "How about the Battle of O'Rourke's Ford?"

Even then, they could laugh. Barnes looked at them both as if they were insane… which, when he thought of it, wasn't all that far wrong. Plus she'd been barely into her teens at the Event.

"Classical reference, macushla" he said. "Classical reference."