"David Drake - Hammer's Slammers - Counting the Cost" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

Well, he couldn't say that he hadn't been given a responsible job when he returned from furlough.

He shrugged his shoulders, settling the pack more comfortably. "Right," he said. "Let's do it then. Sergeant Major."

"Palace of Government," Scratchard said in evident relief, pointing west in the direction the procession had been headed. He stepped off with a stiff-legged stride that reminded Tyl that the non-com had complained about his knees.

The crowd had thinned enough that the Slammers officer could trust other pedestrians to avoid him even if he glanced away from his direction of movement. "You go by Jack when you're with friends?" he asked, looking at the bigger man.

"Yessir, I do," Scratchard replied.

He grinned, and though the expression wasn't quite natural, the non-com was working on it.

Mercenary units were always outnumbered by the indigenous populations that hired them - or they were hired to put down. Mercenaries depended on better equipment, better training - and on each other, because everything else in the world could be right and you were still dead if the man who should have covered your back let you down.

Tyl and Scratchard both wanted - needed - there to be a good relationship between them. It didn't look like they'd be together long... but life itself was temporary, and that wasn't a reason not to make things work as well as they could while it lasted.

"This way," said Scratchard as the two soldiers emerged from the mall crossing the river. "Give you a bit of a view, and we don't fight with trucks."

There was a ramp from the mall down to interlocking vehicular streets - one of them paralleling the river, the plaza, and then sweeping west along the comiche. The other was a park-like boulevard which T-ed into the first after separating the golddomed cathedral from a large, three story building whose wings enclosed a central courtyard open in the direction of the river.

"That's the... ?" Tyl said, trying to remember the name.

"Palace of Government, yeah," Scratchard replied easily. He was taking them along the pedestrian walk atop the levee.

Glancing over the railing to his right, Tyl was shocked to see the water was within two meters of the top of the levee. He could climb directly aboard the scores of barges moored there, silently awaiting for the locks to open. All he'd have to do was swing his legs over the guard rail.

"Via!" he said, looking from the river to the street and the buildings beyond it. "What happens if it comes up another couple meters? All that down there floods, right?"

"They've got flood shutters on all the lower floors," Scratchard explained/agreed. "They say it happened seventy-odd years ago when everything came together - tides and a storm that backed up the outlet channels up-coast. But they know what they're doing, their engineers."

He paused, then added in a tone of disgust, "Their politicians, now.... But I don't suppose they know their asses from a hole in the ground, any of'em anywhere."

He didn't expect an argument from an officer of Hammer's Slammers; and Tyl Koopman wasn't about to give him one.

Bamberg City was clean, prosperous. The odor of toasted tobacco lead permeated it, despite the fact that the ranks of hogsheads on the waiting barges were all vacuum-sealed; but that was a sweet smell very different from the reeks that were the normal concomitant of bulk agriculture.

Nothing wrong here but the human beings.

A flagpole stood in the courtyard of the Palace of Government. Its twelve-man honor guard wore uniforms of the same blue and gold as the fabric of the drooping banner.

In front of the cathedral were more than a thousand of the men in cross-marked white robes. They were still chanting and blocking vehicles, though the gaps in the ranks of staff-armed choristers permitted pedestrians to enter the cathedral building. The dome towered above this side of the river, though it in turn was dwarfed by the House of Grace opposite.

There was a pedestrian bridge from the embankment to the courtyard of the Palace of Government, crossing the vehicular road. As they joined the traffic on it, heavy because of the way vehicles were being backed up by the tail end of the procession, Tyl asked, "Who wears white here? The ones who hold Easter on Christmas?"

"Umm," said the sergeant major. The non-com's tone reminded Tyl of the pistol that weighted his pocket - and the reason it was there.

In a barely audible voice, Scratchard went on, "Those are orderlies from the House of Grace. They, ah, usually turn out for major religious events."

Neither of the mercenaries spoke again until they had reached the nearly-empty courtyard of the government building. Then, while the honor guard was still out of earshot, Tyl said, "Jack, they don't look to me like they empty bedpans."