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"Who are you, son? You have that kind of pull?"
"I'm an officer with Southern Command. I can offer whatever I think appropriate to the locals as long as it'll be used for us and not against us. Maybe I'm overstepping what they expected, but if they're going to grant me that authority, I'll use it. We put a health center up near the Saint Francis a year or so back. Why not here? Every gun you have means one more gun Southern Command can put on another border. You feed, clothe, and arm yourselves. That's a savings in money and organization. I'll put it all on paper, assuring your independence. No ten percent tithe. You'd never have to defend anything but your own lands."
Steiner probed his teeth with his tongue and stared out the window at the wash troughs.
"Mr. Valentine, you have yourself an ally."
Lieutenant Mallow stared openmouthed as the sergeants quieted the excited comments of the men of First Platoon. Captain LeHavre shook his head, a wry smile on his face as the ferry pulled him and the weary men across.
LeHavre had sent a runner two days ago to let Valentine know the patrol was coming in, tired and hungry. The river was still deep enough to make refloating the ferry necessary. Valentine alerted his new ally at the swamp fortress to gather his militia for a meeting and review.
On one side of the landing Valentine had his platoon drawn up, at least the men who weren't working the lines and mules pulling the ferry across. On the other, Colonel Steiner stood at the head of three hundred men, women, and Grogs. Each wore a dark green bandanna tied around the neck, the only common item to the tatterdemalion Militia Steiner had christened the "Evergreen Rifles." To Valentine, the name had a certain amount of irony, as under half the group's members had firearms, mostly shotguns, and the rest carried spears, bows, pitchforks, and axes. A hundred more rifles were on their way from Southern Command, as Valentine had added several impassioned letters to the paperwork requesting heavier weapons, a health center, and a radio for the local residents. From the Wolf camp, smells of barbecue and cooking drifted out to the river. The first semiofficial gathering of the Evergreens would be celebrated with a feast.
LeHavre jumped off the ferry and splashed ashore.
"What's all this, Mr. Valentine? Grog prisoners, or a posse?"
Valentine saluted. "Welcome back, sir. Those are local Militia. Their commander and I are still going around to some other homesteads. We hope to get five hundred together before the summer is out. He's an influential man in this area."
"Leave it to you, Valentine. I leave you with a little over twenty men, and I come back to hundreds. What are you handing out, free beer?"
"Just freedom, sir."
The battlefield, August of the forty-third year of the Kurian Order: Burned-out motors and wagons fill the streets of Hazlett, Missouri. Some of the brick buildings still stand, but of the wooden houses only stone chimneys remain, standing as monuments to the homes that had been.
A few soldiers still poke and rake among the sooty ruins, their smoldering houses finally quenched by the morning's downpour. The salvaged Grog weaponry and equipment lay in three heaps: destroyed, repairable, and intact. Expert scroungers added to this mechanical triage as they gleaned further material from the surrounding woods and the road back to Cairo, Illinois.
The only bodies in evidence lay in neat, unshrouded rows lined up outside a wooden barn a half-mile outside the town proper, conveniently close to a water spring. The maimed and wounded inside, groaning their agony out on pallets, old doors, and even hay bales, envied the corpses now past all suffering. Two-man teams of battlefield surgeons, faces gray with fatigue and smocks brown with hundreds of bloodstains, fought exhaustion and sepsis.
The gravediggers adhered to their own priorities. The first day after the battle, they put to rest the dead of Southern Command: Bears, Wolves, Guards, and Militia. The second day, the dead Quislings were buried in a long common grave, dug by the prisoners spared after the fall of Hazlett. Finally on this day, the third after the battle, the gravediggers set alight a great pyre of Grogs, who shared the flame with putrefying dead horses, oxen, and mules inside a ring of firewood. Exhausted from the labor of dragging the bigger corpses out of sight and smell, the officer in charge decided to rest his detail before attending to the row of this morning's bodies outside the field hospital. The doctors couldn't save everyone.
Thus the miasma of burned flesh introduced Lt. David Valentine to the tableau of a battlefield. Three companies of Wolves, including Zulu, marched up from reserve near the southern border. Sent to help deal with the incursion, they arrived too late to do anything but shake their heads at the destruction of the little town and join in the services held over the bodies of the slain.
Chuckwagon tales told by the survivors of the Battle of Hazlett described a push into the valuable mining towns of the area from the tip of Illinois. The Quislings and Grogs made a fortress of the little crossroads town, and only a concentration of every available Bear in eastern Missouri backed up by Wolves and a Guard regiment forced them out again. It might have been worse, but Valentine learned that a company of Wolves had ambushed reinforcements at the Mississippi, sacrificing themselves to keep the road to Hazlett closed. Out of a hundred Wolves, a bare sixteen now licked their wounds on the banks of the WhitewaterRiver.
It was this destruction of Foxtrot Company that led Captain LeHavre, the senior Wolf officer in the area, to call Valentine into his tepee one afternoon. Zulu Company was preparing to return below the state line again, as an incursion in the northeast might mean an even larger one in the southwest.
Valentine wondered, as he answered the summons that afternoon, what the news would be. LeHavre always hit his officers, whenever possible, with bitter medicine early in the morning and saved the sugar for evenings. So an afternoon conference might be a trail-mix assortment of sweet and sour.
He found LeHavre by a commissary wagon, sharing a cup of coffee with an unknown, clean-shaven Wolf.
"David Valentine, meet Randall Harper," the captain introduced. "Sergeant Harper here is part of the Command Staff. A courier, to be exact."
The young men shook hands. Harper seemed a little young to be a sergeant, particularly on the Command Staff, but then Valentine was even younger to be a lieutenant. The courier had a lazy eye, which made looking into his face unsettling, but he wore a cheerful smile that brightened his whole face to such a degree that Valentine liked him from first sight.
"Pleased to meet you, sir," Harper said.
"Valentine, you are going on a trip. I need some young legs to accompany Harper here on a four-hundred-mile jaunt. All the way up to Lake Michigan, as a matter of fact."
"I've got two bags of mail and one of dispatches, sir," Harper added.
"Why me, sir?" Valentine asked, risking a rebuke.
"Normally an officer from Foxtrot Company and another Wolf would go, but as of these last few days, Foxtrot doesn't exist anymore and probably won't for another year or so. There's only acting-lieutenants in the junior position in the other two Wolf companies, and I don't know enough about them to pick one. And you're from the Great White North, so I thought you'd like a trip back up. I was going to send you up with Paul Samuels anyway on one of his recruiting sweeps, but this'll be a better experience for you."
"Mounted or afoot, sir?"
"With a little luck, you'll be mounted all the way. Three horses plus a spare is what you have, right, Sergeant?"
