"Mitchell Smith - Kingdom River" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Mitchell)

Different bootsteps, stomping. The Rascobs appeared side by side and saluted — a fashion that had
settled in the army after the early days in the Sierra. It was something all soldiers apparently loved to do.
The brigadiers, Jaime and Elvin Rascob, were twins, scarred and elderly at fifty-eight — both tall,
gray-haired, gray-eyed, baked brown and eroded by weather. Elvin was dying of tuberculosis, caused
by poison plants too small to see, so he wore a blue bandanna over mouth and nose as if he were still a
young mountain bandit and sheep-stealer.
"We just rode in." Jaime Rascob's face was flushed with rage. "And saw what comes of sending
Light Cavalry where infantry should have gone."
"Told you, Sam," Elvin said, the south's blue cotton fluttering at his mouth. "Heavy Infantry to hold
the pass — Light Infantry to come down the hills on them. Would have trapped those imperials, maybe
killed them all. Told you." Dying, Elvin was losing courtesy.
"Ned thought he could deal with them." Sam stuck his fork in the eggs and left it there.
"Ned Flores is a fool kid-goat — a Light-Cavalry colonel! What the fuck does he know about
infantry situations?" Courtesy lost entirely.
"It was your fault, sir." Jaime's face still red as a rooster's comb.
"Yes, it was my fault." Sam looked up at two angry old men — angry, and dear to him. "Scouts
reported only a few hundred imperials, and from the careful way they came, with no great force behind
them. So, it seemed to me that Light Cavalry, with room to run east if they had to, could handle their
heavies without our infantry to lever against. I was wrong."
"Three hundred dead," Jaime Rascob said.
"That's incorrect. It will be nearly four hundred."
"Goodness to Godness Agnes..." Elvin, through his bandanna — certainly a Warm-time copybook
phrase. "Almost three out of every four troopers dead. And we told you!"
"Elvin — "
"Jaime, I'm just saying what everybody knows." A statement definite, and with the weight of years as
well, since he and his brother were each old enough to have been their commander's grandfather.
Squinting in morning sunlight, Sam pushed his breakfast plate a little away. The smell was troubling.
A mistake. He noticed the colonels noticing; an exchange of glances. He picked up his fork, ate a
bite of eggs, then another. Took a sip of chocolate. "Do we know the cataphracts' commander?"
"Voss says it was likely one of the new ones, probably Rodriguez." Jaime didn't sound convinced,
though the Empire, slow at everything, had begun to allow promising younger officers commands. Michi
Rodriguez was one of those 'Jaguars.'
"Whoever," Jaime said, "he whipped Flores with just six hundred heavy horse."
"Less."
"Not less, Elvin," his brother said. "Three squadrons, at least."
Elvin didn't argue. Any argument with Jaime Rascob ended only after a long while.
"Still a damn shame." Elvin cleared his throat behind the bandanna. "We could have bottled them in
Please Pass, maybe killed them all."
Sam chewed a bite of sausage and managed to swallow it. "My decision to let them come through.
My decision to send only Light Cavalry down to deal with them. My fault." The breakfast was hopeless
— one more bite and he would be sick for all the camp to see. The young Captain-General, who'd never
failed, vomiting his breakfast while troopers rotted in the mountain grass.
"You got too big for your bitches," Elvin said, certainly not the correct Warm-time phrase. The old
man took little care with them, rarely got them right.
"It's a mistake I won't make again." Sam took a sip of chocolate. A smell of spoiling was rising from
the valley.
"We can't win every fight, Elvin." Jaime gave his brother a shut-up look.
"For sure not campaigning like this!" Elvin coughed a spatter of blood into his kerchief, turned, and
marched away into the camp. His brother sighed, and followed him.
 Sam turned on his camp stool to watch them go. Two tough old men. Both wore heavy