The March North by Graydon Saunders Read Free Book Online

wire brushes; fingers don’t really get through.
    Our Independent Part-Captain has explained three or four times now to various groups of worried drovers that the cud-chewing motion doesn’t mean the bronze bull wants to eat, or is hungry;eating isn’t a source of contentment to a cow. Cud-chewing, being certain to have eaten enough today, is, and that’s what was kept in the enchantment. It doesn’t do to have bronze bulls that aren’t content with their lot.
    Blossom has absolutely no idea why this doesn’t reassure anybody.
    Part-Captain Blossom’s watching the four gunners take turns going through push-hands with Twitch, while thebattery as a whole does the full-body breathing exercises meant to improve focus. The four gunners are a varied lot, more or less the just run of the Commonweal, which means one is shorter than me, one is about my height, one’s a bit taller, and one’s a whole decimetre taller than I am. Even the shorter one is heavier.
    Twitch is a typical Creek, which means two decimeters taller than the tallgunner and weighing, in armour, twice what I do in my socks. Creeks tend strong, too; bending horseshoes straight with your bare hands isn’t a party trick in the Creeks because it’s something you’re embarrassed if you can’t do, not proud if you can. And Twitch is, past the twitches and fits of Creek-ness, a fine Sergeant-Major and was a fine Sergeant in the Fourteenth before being sent on a territorialtransfer as a chance to get less twitchy after the Fifth Company of the Second Heavy of the Fourteenth had a spectacularly bad day. So Twitch’s personal focus is really solid, and it’s not like any of the gunners could hope for a physical lift.
    Part-Captain Blossom figures twenty metres is far enough away to smile, watching the gunners work very hard to generate enough focus to keep their balance.All four tubes are up to ten long shot in thirty seconds, once and even twice. The Part-Captain is trying for perfect readiness marks, doing that ten times over at two minute intervals. Trying hasn’t killed any of the battery yet, and no one has gone so far as to point out to the Part-Captain that the readiness standards apply to fives, not nines. The gunners are a bunch of volunteers, and theywant the bragging rights if they can manage more than twice the throw involved in regular perfect readiness marks.
    The battery are using the same sand-pit Halt’s glass factory digs out of as a backstop, and sifting the shot back out again. Since the sand needs to be sifted for the glass anyway, it’s making them friends. Sometimes more than friends; the usual social risk when you park a RegularLine unit in garrison anywhere. So far, only a couple of informal wrestling matches and no formal complaints.
    All of that, the Part-Captain has handled very well. I was expecting the shot-making to go well; I wasn’t expecting an outright factory, full-time local workers, or series production black-red-black and black-red-red shot, nor for Blossom to start making sintered front caps so the shotcan be thrown as hard as the nine-layer tubes can push without catching fire in the air. As Blossom pointed out, very formally, the Line hasn’t had nine-layer artillery before, and the shot-making will have to catch up. It usually seems like Blossom’s had all of this figured out for months and is relieved to get it built to clear the thinking room for the next thing.
    It’s a contrast. The Part-Captainhas single-handedly advanced artillery in the Commonweal some immense amount, and hasn’t figured out why there’s been so much trouble getting Creeks to really listen. Blossom’s about concluded that women in authority aren’t some sort of cultural problem — Dove is obeyed, with good will and forethought, and the Creeks are not like some of the odd corners of the Commonweal where people try tocling, despite the law, to odd old customs about work or property. I thought what happened when we tried a mixed-focus