The Saxon Uprising(142)

“Fire!” he screeched.

This time, all the guns went off together. There were misfires, here and there, but not many.

Again, almost nine hundred balls hammered the milling cavalrymen. Thorsten’s men still hadn’t taken more than a couple of dozen shots fired in return and so far as Thorsten could tell, all of them had gone wild.

Dozens more were killed and wounded. The one company that had started to form up was shredded again, its captain thrown out of the saddle by a ball that struck him in the head. He survived the shot—just a crease, he wasn’t even stunned—but after he landed on the ground his horse stepped on his head and crushed it into the hard soil beneath the snow. He survived that, too, although he was no longer really conscious. Then his horse and another trampled his ribs before they stumbled off, away from the guns.

He survived that as well. But three ribs were broken, he was now bleeding internally, and everyone who looked at his body assumed he was dead. Engler’s soldiers did too, when they passed by.

So, a while later, he died from hypothermia. He’d never managed to get his boots on. He died in his socks—and both of them had holes. His had not been a wealthy family and the Swedes had been late with the pay.

Again.

Thorsten gauged the enemy, as much of them as he could see. Then, decided to take the risk. Instead of ordering another volley, he ordered the guns moved forward.

“Ten yards up!” he screeched.

Jeff Higgins heard the screech, although he couldn’t make out the exact words. In the half-blindness of the snowfall, his volley gun company had gotten separated from the regiment and charged ahead. He’d been groping his way forward with the infantry battalions, trying to find them before it was too late. The volley guns were murderous but they were a lot more fragile than the gunners themselves liked to admit. If they got caught between volleys by cavalry—even well-led infantry that could move quickly—they were dead meat.

Engler was particularly oblivious to that reality, damn him. How could a man who planned to become a psychologist behave like a blasted lunatic on a battlefield? If Jeff didn’t find him and reunite the volley gun company with the regiment’s infantry, things were likely to get very hairy. The Hangman was light, when it came to regular artillery, so they relied a lot on the volley guns.

He heard another screech. Again, he couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded closer.

The words had been: “Come into position!”

Thirty-six volley guns swiveled on the snow, gliding easily on their Bartley rigs.

“Come on!” Jeff shouted, raising his sword and waving it. He detested the thing almost as much as he detested horses, but it was just a fact that an officer leading a charge had to wave a stupid sword around. Waving a pistol just didn’t do the trick, not even a big down-time wheel-lock.

Yes, it was asinine. Nothing but a pointless tradition left over from the days when illiterate men went into battled armed with nothing but oversized swords and blue paint. But the Hangman was an elite unit and elite units take tradition seriously.

Thankfully, Jeff was a big man and had big hands even for a man his size. So he probably wouldn’t lose his grip on the sword more than twice before the battle was over.

Somehow, it never occurred to him that he might be dead or maimed before the battle was over. He never thought of that, in the middle of a battle. He’d only think of it as he tried to sleep afterward, when sometimes he’d get the shakes.

He heard another screech. He might finally have been close enough to make out the words but the screech was immediately drowned by a thunderclap. Nine hundred volley gun barrels going off at once made the term “noisy” seem inadequate if you were anywhere nearby.

That third volley—again, at point blank range—destroyed the Östergötland Horsemen. Most of them survived, as men somehow do on a battlefield. Most of them weren’t even injured. But as a fighting formation, they were done. On this battlefield today, at least. The survivors raced to the rear, insofar as men could race through heavy snow and insofar as they could tell where “the rear” was in the middle of a heavy snowfall.

The sun was still invisible. It would remain invisible through that day and most of the next. But there was now enough light that a man could distinguish, approximately, between east and west. And, that done, determine which way was north—which is where they wanted to go. Back into the siege lines.

Miserable they might be, those trenches, but they weren’t as miserable as being savaged by musket balls fired by an unseen enemy.

Not more than one soldier in five of the Östergötland Horsemen had caught so much as a glimpse of the men who’d been killing them. Not more than a dozen had gotten a good look at them. Of those dozen, only two were still alive.