The gunners scrambled aside and the soldiers yanked out the pins which held the sections in place. Then, with a shout and heaved shoulders, toppled the improvised boarding ramps onto the pirate ship.
Then—
Nothing. At their First Spear’s shouted command, they simply stood by the ramps, waiting. Helga was too confused to do more than notice that they weren’t even hefting their weighted darts for an initial volley.
She heard Jessep’s harsh chuckle. “I told you Uther was a good First Spear. Good as I was, truth be told—sure enough at his age.”
She turned her head and stared at him. Jessep’s rare grin was back.
“Live and learn, ma’am. Experience always counts.” He pointed with his square chin at the pirate vessel, still half obscured by smoke. “Uther’s never seen gunpowder at work before, but he has led boarding operations onto burning ships. You don’t want to lead men into a pile of smoke, you surely don’t. Half your discipline’ll vanish in a few heartbeats. Let Vanbert soldiers know their place—see and feel their mates at their shoulders—they’ll handle anything. Let them lose their bearings, and you never know what’ll happen. The only Confederate hundred I ever saw break and run did so in a dense fog.”
The grin vanished, replaced by the usual block-against-block that did Jessep for a jaw. “Didn’t keep ’em from being decimated afterward, o’ course. Those of ’em who survived the enemy pursuit.”
Now understanding, Helga nodded jerkily. Not for the first time, she was reminded of the harsh regime under which the Confederacy’s soldiers lived and fought.
Another shout from Uther jerked her head back around. The smoke had cleared enough, apparently. The first wave of marines was charging across the ramp, two abreast. Even on that precarious footing, they had their shields locked and the assegais ready for that terrible underhand thrust which had made Confederate infantrymen feared for centuries.
There were four ramps, in all. The first eight men hammered into the screeching mass of pirates. Their spear thrusts were almost desultory. For the most part, the vanguard was using the force of their charge and their shields to clear some fighting room for their comrades coming behind.
The shields were well designed for the purpose. Oval in shape, covering a man from shoulder to mid-thigh, and with a metal rim and boss to bolster the laminated wood from which they were made. Between their own mass and the weight of the three lead-weighted darts clipped on the inside, the shields were just about perfect for the task of driving back a crowd.
Perfect, at least, when wielded by men trained in their use. Watching the soldiers at work, the way their shoulders hunched into the shields and their powerful legs worked like the pistons Trae had shown her in the captured steam ram, Helga suddenly understood something else for the first time.
She’d been trained in combat herself, at her insistence, and by the finest retired gladiators her father could find, Lortz being the latest of them. But her training had been, basically, in the Emerald style which was fashionable in aristocratic duels and the gladiator arenas. That style favored long swords, small round shields, with all the fancy footwork and need for room which it required.
She snorted. “It’s no wonder we whipped them.”
Jessep, again, showed an uncanny ability to read her mind. “True enough, la—ah, ma’am. You want a short blade for real killing. And then you do most of the killing with your shoulders and legs anyway. The spear thrust’s just the finish. Easy enough, if you’ve gotten the strength and endurance it takes to keep a heavy shield steady at all times—and leg muscles like iron.”
She remembered watching her father’s soldiers at training. It had seemed a bit odd to her, at the time, the way they devoted such a relatively small amount of time to practicing spear thrusts. For the most part, the training of Confederate infantrymen seemed to be nothing more than endless running—and shield work. Time after time, she’d watched as a squad of men—always a squad, or a whole hundred; Confederate soldiers never trained as individuals—pushed a huge and heavy box full of dirt all the way across a training field. Their legs hammering like pistons, the shields steady against the obstacle. Never halting, never tiring, never stumbling.