And a lot of them are calling me Ingolf the Wanderer now. I’d be flattered, except that I’m damned sick of wandering. And I’m a married man now. I want to settle down, put my legs under my own table and my head under my own roof on my own land every day. OK, Ingolf, let’s win this war so we can.
Ten minutes, and the man disappeared, even his dust-trail invisible through the binoculars. Ingolf waited another ten, then cased the precious instrument and wormed his way backward on hands and knees to where he’d left his round shield, quiver of arrows and four-foot recurve horseman’s bow. He shrugged the archer’s baldric over his shoulder; the strung bow was pushed through loops on the outside of the quiver. Then he crawled a bit more. Not until he was a good ten yards back did he rise to one knee, turn and wave his hand in a signal.
A horse and rider lay at the base of the slope. The man slapped his mount’s neck; the horse rose, and the man was in the saddle as it did, and trotting west a heartbeat after. His own men were out there, and the Sioux contingent under Rick Three Bears, and Ingolf’s wife Mary, and her followers-Dunedain Rangers. Of which he supposed he was one too.
Sorta. Kinda.
“Go let ’em know, Mark,” Ingolf muttered. “I’ve got to see the local panjandrum.”
He walked down the slope, a big broad-shouldered man with a bear’s strength in his long limbs and thick shoulders. But he moved lightly, with a sort of lazy precision; his shaggy ear-length hair was sun-faded brown, his eyes dark blue in a weathered face that had been better looking before a broken nose and a fair assortment of scars, some showing as white hairs in his close-cropped beard. There was a sword by his side, the heavy horseman’s chopping blade known as a shete, and a bowie on the other hip, with the handle of a tomahawk tucked through a loop at the back.
None of the weapons clattered as he scooped up his helmet-a locally made sallet with a neck-flare-and trotted across the open grassland with the scabbard of the shete in his left hand. The black cottonwoods here were thicker than in the next valley over with the sheep, up to forty or fifty feet tall, with a dense understory along their edge. He slowed down as he approached them and waved his sword-hand to show it was empty.
Because there are a bunch of local yokels with crossbows there; I’m not coming back to the same spot I slipped out of. I don’t think some of them really grasp the distinction between stranger and enemy all that well. Christ… Manwe… but a lot of the peasants on these Association manors are more like turnips than people. And I thought we Readstowners were hicks!
“Come ahead!” someone said from ahead of him. “Slowly!”
He came ahead… slowly. Sure enough, two crossbows were pointed at him, and a bunch of spears with unpleasant foot-long heads sharpened until the naked metal gleamed. The men behind them were bearded if they were old enough for it, with fairly close-cropped hair; short hair was a lower-class marker here, like their shapeless linsey-woolsey shirt-tunics and wool pants and moccasinlike shoes tied at the ankle with thongs. Ingolf spread his arms.
“Ingolf Vogeler. Your ally. Remember?” he said.
The powerful smell they gave off was just summer and not much opportunity to wash in the last little while. They didn’t have the crusted, scabrous appearance or the hard stink people did in areas where the habit of washing at all had died out. And the weapons were pointed up once they recognized him as one of the newfound allies helping them fight Boise and the Prophet. A couple of them even smiled.
Better than I expected.
“Take me to your leader,” he said.
“The lord baron has arrived with his menie, my lord,” one of them said.
His full-time soldiers, Ingolf mentally translated. What we’d call his deputies back home, or National Guardsmen.
“Girars, you show him,” the oldest of the men said; he might have been anything from a work-gnarled thirty to fifty.
The militiaman delegated for the job was pathetically young, not more than seventeen and a bit scrawny with a growth spurt, with only a little yellow peach-fuzz on his acne-scarred cheeks. The steel-strapped leather breastplate and simple bullet-shaped conical helmet he wore both seemed too big for him; he left the four-foot kite-shaped shield propped against a stump, which was a bad sign. Ingolf’s own went on his back on a leather strap, where he could swing it forward with a quick duck of his left shoulder and pull.
Yeah, those big shields weigh fifteen pounds, the way they make them here. But if you suddenly need a shield, you need it bad. I’d roast his ass for leaving it just ’cause it’s heavy and awkward if he were in my outfit. Better years of a sore arm than one minute of an arrow in the gut. I’m tempted to do it anyway, but I don’t know the baron well enough to interfere in his chain of command.
The militiaman led Ingolf forward and down the bank of the dry river to the sandy bottom, an arroyo they called it hereabouts. The branches of the cottonwoods mingled overhead, turning the creek bed into a tunnel of green that sparkled with moving golden flickers.
It was cooler here, too, and easy walking. No water showed, but the sandy bottom was damp in spots, and insects buzzed and clicked. This was a fair-sized river in the winter rains, to judge from the height of the banks; it might flow at night even in August, when the cottonwoods weren’t sucking water and pumping it into the air. It was a convenient place to be safely out of sight in daytime right now, but it would be dangerous a little later in the year; he’d spent enough time in arid areas to understand what a flash flood meant.
“My lord… is there going to be a fight?” the boy asked after they were out of sight and hearing of his friends and neighbors.
Ingolf stopped himself from barking: I’m not a lord!
He was a Sheriff’s son back home-his father had been the one who organized his remote rural district after the Change and led the effort to deal with the failure of the machines and the wave of city folk fleeing chaos and starvation. He’d become a powerful landowner in the process, a giver of judgments and leader of the local Farmers and their dependent Refugees in war and peace. Now Ingolf’s elder brother Edward held the position.
And actually does a pretty decent job at it. I… well, I can’t wish we hadn’t quarreled when Dad died. If I hadn’t stormed out, I wouldn’t be where I am now, which is not such a bad place. I’m glad we made it up when the Quest passed through, though. Glad I got to see Wanda again and my nieces and nephews even if young Mark is a pain in the butt sometimes.
Being a Sheriff didn’t mean quite as much back in Richland as a title of nobility did around here and they were a lot less formal about it, but he was roughly equivalent to the younger son of a baron in Association terms.
The whole feudal folderol is pretty damned silly to my way of thinking, names from books and all, but they take it very seriously indeed here in this part of Montival. And they outnumber me about six, seven hundred thousand to one and I have to stay here for now, so they can call themselves whatever the fuck they please, right.
“Probably there’s going to be more than one fight, kid,” he said instead. “Those bastards aren’t invading your land ’cause they love you.”
“I’m not scared, my lord,” the boy said, lying transparently. “It’s just… my family’s not far. My mom and my brothers and sisters and all.”
“Then don’t let them get past you, that’s all I can say. Kill the other bastard before he can kill you and your home and family are safe. Running from a fight just means it follows you. It’s as simple as that.”
The boy’s grimy knuckles tightened and went white on the spear shaft; he’d probably take the advice to heart. Ingolf had long since seen that it was a rare and lousy specimen of a man who couldn’t show willing with his back to his home and kin.
And probably he’ll get himself killed and die still a virgin, poor brave little clod. I’ve also seen how much willing counts for when amateurs go up against real soldiers with real gear, who know what they’re doing when the amateurs don’t.
Another set of sen
tries stopped and identified them, and then they began to pass horses picketed on either side of the arroyo, tethered to ropes strung from pegs driven into the sandy soil. Most simply stood hipshot, their tails swishing regularly; others were being watered, with buckets filled at holes dug in the lower parts of the sandy bed of the seasonal watercourse. The homey, familiar smell of horse-piss, horse-sweat and manure added to the odors of damp sand and sun-baked earth and grass and sagebrush.
Lord Maugis de Grimmond, Baron Tucannon and enfeoffed vassal of the Counts Palatine of Walla Walla, was a year or two younger than Ingolf, which meant he’d been four or so at the time of the Change. His parents had both been SCA members in Oregon who threw their lot in with Norman Arminger and ended up with a barony here.
Mathilda is a fine person, but her dad was one heap big bad badass, from all I’ve been able to gather, Ingolf thought. Still, needs must. Those were hard times. Mary’s father, Rudi’s dad Mike Havel, killed Arminger.
Though he’d only survived it by about forty minutes before dying of the wounds Arminger inflicted; and now Rudi was married to Norman Arminger’s only child. The family politics here got twisty, and he was still learning his way around them. For one thing, Rudi’s mother Juniper Mackenzie hadn’t been married to Mike Havel, either. Mary’s mother, Signe, had married him. She still wasn’t what you’d call overenthusiastic about Rudi or Juniper, though she and the outfit Havel had founded and she ran, the Bearkillers, had accepted High King Artos gracefully over around Larsdalen on the other side of the Willamette from Clan Mackenzie. Mary and her twin Ritva had moved out from there in their teens to live in the woods with their Aunt Astrid, who was… strange. Even by comparison with other people who’d had a rough time in the first Change Year.
Like most Changelings his age Ingolf had elastic standards when it came to what was or wasn’t outright barking madness, having grown up among an adult population many of whose members had been strained beyond the breaking point by what they’d seen, suffered and done to survive. They were functional most of the time or they’d have been bones in a ditch somewhere, but screaming sweating nightmares or people who suddenly burst into tears or rages at odd moments were pretty common, and every year brought a trickle of suicides done one way or another. His own father had just taken a bottle out to a barn and drunk himself unconscious now and then; you could see it coming on in his eyes, when he got to remembering.
And Mike Havel wasn’t nasty like Arminger, or crazy like Arminger, but he was a hard man and no mistake. Dad did what was necessary back then too, so I’m not going to be too snippy about this baron guy’s parents. They lived, and so did their kids. And if it helped to plaster everything with names out of old books, so be it.
Their son had coarse, curly bowl-cut red hair of a dark copper color like an old penny, pale skin of the sort that turned ruddy rather than tanning, slightly buck teeth, a big nose and ears like the handles of a jug. He also wore a full set of Western plate armor except for the helmet and the gauntlets, which lay beside him, and while he wasn’t particularly large he moved as if the weight and heat and constriction didn’t bother him more than dayclothes.
He was busily engaged in cutting bread and cheese, using a painted shield as a platter. Ingolf dredged up newly acquired heraldic knowledge to read it: Argent, a fess Gules, in chief two greyhounds courant proper while the nobleman stopped and glanced up at the pair. The peasant spearman bowed low in a complicated gesture with something like a curtsy involved. Maugis returned it with a nod that was… literally… lordly.
Mind you, he could have just ignored the kid.
“Thank you, Girars… Bero, get some of this, take it back to the rest at your post, boy… and tell your father I’m glad he’s keeping a sharp lookout,” he said.
“Thank you, my lord!” the youngster said, louting low again as he accepted the loaves and cheese and meat wrapped in a length of coarse sacking.
“And Girars, next time you leave your post, take your shield with you as well as your spear, or you’ll be very sorry.”
“Yes, my lord!”
The nobleman turned to Ingolf, and bowed respectfully with the gesture between equals.
“Colonel Ingolf! Welcome, my lord of Readstown. What news of the enemy?”
Of course, when it comes to people here being polite to me it sure as shoot doesn’t hurt that I went with Rudi all the way to Nantucket and back and am officially now one of the Nine Companions of the Sword- Quest in song and story. Or that I married his half sister on the way, Mary being a big wheel among the Dunedain Rangers and now a princess, more or less. Since Rudi is High King Artos these days. I didn’t realize quite how important she was, and it wasn’t why I married her, but since it’s a fact… well, use the mojo where you can get it, Ingolf old son. Sure as shit beats being a wandering paid soldier the local Farmers wouldn’t let in the front door and the Bossmen treated like something nasty you scrape off your shoe on a hot day.
“Looks like we’ll have company the way I thought, my lord Tucannon,” he said aloud.
“You saw them?” the nobleman said eagerly.
“Saw one of them, and he saw the sheep. It was an enemy scout, all right; I caught the sun-blink off his binoculars. I sent my aide back to alert our own scouts and they should be reporting in… an hour to three.”
The baron nodded. Binoculars were an expensive specialty tool and among the most prized of salvage from the old world; the modern replacements just starting to appear were bulkier, not nearly as good, and almost as expensive. Field glasses ended up in the hands of those whose missions really demanded them, or those of extremely high status.
Ingolf went on: “And you can bet he’s part of the screen for a cavalry outfit. One gets you ten they take the bait.”
That brought a general rustle. About forty of the men sitting with their backs against the bank upstream of him munching on sausage and bread and cheese were equipped in articulated steel plate much like their lord; some of them de Grimmond’s household knights and men-at-arms, and the rest his vassal knights called up from their manors and their men-at-arms. They were the ones who fought as heavy cavalry; the twelve-foot lances they’d carry were stacked neatly in pyramids of ash wood and steel.
Very bad news if you can’t get out of the way, dodge around and pepper them with arrows, Ingolf thought. If you can… not so much.
He had a suit of plate complete too, the gift of Sandra Arminger, but he preferred lighter gear for work like this.
You have to use great big horses with that ironmongery, and even bigger ones if they’re wearing armor too. They’re fast in a charge, but not what you’d call nimble, and they get tired out quick.
Rather more men wore light armor of leather and mail like Ingolf’s; they also had tight horseman’s breeches, swords and powerful recurve bows of horn and sinew and wood. This far east the PPA bred its own cowboys and hence horse-archers. There were also foot spearmen with the same big kite-shaped shields as the knights and crossbowmen with small round bucklers and their specialist missile weapons; both carried swords as well and they wore what they called three-quarter armor here, which was like a man-at-arms’ but with some of the pieces left off. Spearmen and crossbowmen and men-at-arms were the three types of soldier that Association military tenure required landholders here to maintain and furnish at need.
All those looked at least unbothered by the prospect of bloodshed, working on their gear or talking quietly and joking as they ate, a few praying with their rosaries in their hands, a couple even sleeping; but then it was their trade, more or less, even if the infantry did farming on the side and the horse-archers stared up the ass-end of a lot of livestock. The rest of the force were dispersed up and down the arroyo in spots where water was available and the cover good, several hundreds strong; they were peasant militia not unlike the unfortunate Girars, a few callow-eager, most grimly determined. Ingolf suspected that their main military purpose would be to absorb arrows that might otherwise hit a real f
ighter.
“If they do come, we’re ready,” said the baron.
Ingolf looked back over his shoulder, juggling distances and the lie of the land.
“You sure you can take heavy horse down that slope?” he said, a little dubious. “Looked mighty steep to take fast, much less a flat-out charge in all that gear.”
The baron laughed and handed Ingolf a length of dried and smoked mutton sausage, salty and greasy and pungent with garlic and sage and hot peppers, balanced on a thick chunk of maslin wheat-and-barley bread with a slab of strong-smelling cheese a little runny with the heat. There was a helmet full of onions not far away, another full of raisins and dried apricots, and someone was handing around a skin bottle of water cut with a rough red wine. Ingolf sat with one foot drawn up-which let you get back on your feet in a hurry, a fixed habit he’d picked up long ago-and set to the food, using his own helmet to hold things he wasn’t chewing on at the moment.
It was all reasonably undecayed, and far, far better than some things he’d eaten in the field. Nearly raw foundered mule three days dead, eaten in a weeping late-autumn rainstorm that kept smothering the fire, for instance.
“Lord Vogeler,” de Grimmond said patiently. “This is not only my barony of Tucannon, it’s Grimmond manor, the place I was raised as far back as I can remember and where I’ve spent nine-tenths of my life. I’ve ridden and hunted and hawked and walked and strolled and camped out and searched for strayed stock and led my men-in-arms practice and occasionally fought bandits or raiders over every inch of it starting when I could walk three steps. Yes, it’s steep right there, but we can do it.”
“Point taken, my lord,” Ingolf said. “I’d laugh at you if you gave me advice on using terrain back in Readstown. We’ll need confirmation on how many of them there are before we settle the details of the plan, of course.”
The Tears of the Sun tc-5 Page 32