The High King of Montival

by SM Stirling

  “Not necessarily. This is specialized equipment. Imagine five thousand men-at-arms in plate on barded horses.”

  The redcoat whistled silently. “That would hit like a sledgehammer on an egg!”

  “Sure and it would . . . does, in fact. But imagine them lumbering across these plains, with horse-archers stinging like wasps and running away faster than the knights could pursue. What you’ve got there is a good compromise, and you can still shoot from the saddle as well.”

  The horsemen were all ready to advance now, deployed columns of fours with Artos and the redcoats on the right and the First Richland on his left. He pulled on the guige strap that held his shield across his back, then ran his arm through the loops. A brief alarm, and then forty more Anchor Bar Seven cowboys joined them; they’d been gathering for a doomed attack of their own, and their relief at seeing a substantial force was palpable. Artos tipped his lance to the west, and the pennant flapped in the breeze.

  “Forward,” he said.

  Bjarni Ironrede pointed his red-running sword downward. “Plant the standard!” he barked. “Shield-wall, shield-wall! Positions!”

  The raven banner’s butt-spike was rammed into the hard prairie dirt, and a hundred warriors formed up to either side of it, their big round shields overlapping with a hard clattering rattle of ironbound birch. Those in the second, third and fourth ranks stood ready behind them. That gave everyone the place they’d need; then they relaxed for a moment, leaned on their pair of spears, many pushing up their helmets and taking a drink from their canteens as the foe drew off. They didn’t stop just out of bow-range, either; as soon as they weren’t masked by the Norrheimer force the catapults on the walls opened up on them, bolts and round shot hissing by overhead and driving them a thousand yards away.

  Bjarni took a drink himself, the warm stale water flowing blissfully down his throat; this climate sucked the water out of a man’s body, he found, and it was turning into a warm day, with scarcely a cloud in the sky. His breathing slowed after the mad dash from the railcars and the brief savage fight; running in armor took almost as much out of you as battle. He was rank with sweat beneath his mail, but that was a familiar enough experience for a warrior and a farmer both.

  The bowmen were to their left in a double rank—what Edain Samkinsson called a harrow formation. Everyone was facing south and a little east, which put the afternoon sun over their right shoulders and in the foe’s eyes. To their right and behind them was the burg, and most particularly the gate guarded by the flamethrower, the fire-drake’s breath whose ugly work lay twisted and blackened and smoking still before it. Ladders and leather ropes dropped from the ramparts as he glanced that way, pushed and pried away.

  The Christian mass-priest Ignatius was getting the eight light field-catapults set up in front, spreading the trails, testing the elevating and traverse screws, hooking the armored hoses to the pumps and the hydraulic jacks that cocked the springs. A priest, but a man too, and a dangerous one for all he was so quiet. Dangerous with his hands, more so with his head.

  “Good,” Bjarni grunted. “This is a solid position, with the fort at our backs. We can hold this ground.”

  The endless horizons here still made him feel nervous and out of place, but the iron-copper stink of blood and the dung smell of cut-open bodies were wholly familiar—for that matter, it was not altogether different from the autumn hog-butchering time. Syfrid came up beside him, with his son Halldor bearing his white-horse flag; the Norrheimers were formed up about two hundred yards from the walled burg of the local chief. That had been his own inclination, reinforced by messages born by runners let out by the little postern gate in the nearest tower.

  The godhi here has his wits about him, he thought. And there are many enemy dead around the walls. The Cutters are brave men, killers, but they’re tired and they’re confused. They’ve been hit from different directions, distracted with a new task before they could finish the first. This can work. Thor, lend me your might!

  “Are these the Cutters that are supposed to be so fearsome?” the lanky chief of the Hrossings said contemptuously.

  He kicked a body aside and leaned on the haft of his ax. Many of the men had shoved enemy fallen aside with their feet as well, to make for better footing. Most Norrheimer helmets had a nasal bar; Syfrid’s had a triangular mask instead, with large holes cut for the eyes; it gave him the look of a predatory bird, and the twin horse-tail plumes that rose from either side of its peak added to his height. His teeth showed yellow-white through his thick brown beard.

  “They were as awkward as hogs on river-ice,” he went on; the blade of his bearded ax was wet, and there was a shiny line on his helm where a shete had grazed it. “Not much more work than slaughtering-time after the first frost, Lord King.”

  “We caught them mostly by surprise,” Bjarni said; he’d been using his ears as they came west. “And they fight on horseback by preference, with the bow; they dismounted to storm this burg, not to stand shield-to-shield with us. I’d not care to be caught out here on the plains without horsemen of our own, or a burg to retreat to.”

  He glanced left. “And plenty of good bowmen,” he added.

  They were mostly his men, but they’d been selected by Edain the Archer from among the many volunteers and he’d seen to their gear and had been bully-damning them into constant practice all through their journey. Privately the Norrheimer king was impressed by how much they’d improved and more than a little awed by how even the best of them still fell far short of the master-bowman’s skills.

  The man is like Ullr come down among us, he thought. He’s called the Archer and is the best of these Mackenzies . . . but their battle line must be fearsome if they can produce a man like that. And he knows every trick to make arrows count for more in battle, too. I wish he were my handfast man, and not Artos’. Some like to hoard gold or weapons or horses, but what a King should covet is men. Good men can always get you gold and gear and stock.

  “Here they come,” said Syfrid, who’d kept his eyes fixed on the enemy; he crouched a little, shifting his ax to a one-handed grip and bringing up his shield.

  “Come and kiss this!” he shouted at the enemy, and flourished his war-ax; then he turned, bent a little, and slapped it on his buttocks in derision.

  “Are they supposed to kiss your ax or your arse?” Bjarni said, and everyone within hearing laughed.

  This time the enemy had all had a chance to get mounted; their chiefs had called back their storming parties from around the wall, and they broke forward in two compact bodies from either side of the wrecked building by the rail line. They charged straight towards his men, and already he could see them rising in their saddles and drawing.

  “Shield-wall!” Bjarni shouted, and his signalers repeated it by horncal l.

  The snarling dunt of the ox-horn trumpets brayed beneath the gathering thunder of hooves. The shields of the rear ranks came rattling up, overlapping like a shingled roof or a dragon’s scales, with the warriors’ spears making the spikes of a porcupine. Bjarni nodded even as he raised his own; they were notably faster and crisper at it than they’d been when they left Norrheim.

  And then the artillery cut loose; eight tung-crack! sounds as the heavy springs released and the throwing arms smacked into the padded stops. The weapons were Iowan-made, light six-pounders; they called them scorpions after a deadly stinging insect of the far southern deserts. His own folk used catapults mainly on ships, and sometimes to defend towns. Bjarni had wondered whether they and their horse-teams were worth the bother of dragging along in the field. Now he watched the fist-sized iron balls smash into the enemy, traveling so fast that their passage was a blur until they struck. Again and again, gruesome tangles where they’d aimed low to set the shot bounding through the thicket of horses’ legs.

  We must have this art in Norrheim too, some part of Bjarni thought. We can’t afford ignorance, as if we were wild-men. We won’t be isolated forever.

  And then the crews
crouched under their own shields as arrows arched up in a mist like rising threads. He could hear a piercing whistle, and the shafts seemed to fly faster as they approached. He ducked his head and held the shield higher.

  “Draw . . . wholly together . . . let the gray geese fly . . . shoot!” came Edain’s bellow.

  Shafts began to arch out in return in pulsing volleys. Just then the first flight from the Cutters struck the shield-burg like a stream of gravel striking an old sheet-metal barn, but one that did not stop. Bjarni grunted in surprise at the force of the impacts against his shield; as he watched, four gleaming points showed through the tough birch plywood and sheet steel and the felt covering on the inside. The metal boss over the grip kept his hand safe, but he could hear men cursing or screaming as points went home. More banged into shields, bent or snapped or glanced off hauberks and helms, but there was no way to strike back and even good mail wouldn’t stop them all.

  No way to strike back here, he thought. Not for us. But the archers—

  The enemy were slanting away sharply from Edain’s command, with piles of horses and men kicking or crawling or lying still in front of them . . . but some of the bowmen were down too. They couldn’t hold shields up and shoot at the same time, and mostly they had less armor.

  Still, horses are bigger targets than men.

  Then the Cutters were looping away and shooting over the rumps of their horses, ready to turn in a circle and come back to peck at their foes once more. The fieldpieces began to speak again as the crews scrambled to their machines; they outranged the saddle bows by two or three times.

  “The bastards can shoot,” Syfrid said, looking at his shield; there were seven or eight arrows standing in it, and some of them had punched through a handspan or more. “If they could do that to us over and over again—”

  Bjarni used the hilt of his sword to hammer the points back out of his own shield, then a sweep of the blade to cut the shafts on the other side.

  “They won’t,” he said stoutly.

  He glanced eastward down the long curved length of the railroad where the railcars stood with their doors open like the wings of birds. Artos was there, invisible behind the swell and drop of the land, waiting for precisely the right moment to appear and strike.

  Not waiting too long, I hope!

  “Deploy them in double-rank line,” Artos said.

  Epona paced forward, treading the hard ground of the dry prairie beneath her hooves. The sun was four hours past noon, moving to a point where it would be in their eyes, but not too low yet on this long summer’s day. Tiny white grasshoppers spurted ahead of the hooves of the horses; the ironshod feet made a drumhead of the soil, a low muffled rumbling at this steady pace, and a plume of dust rose and drifted behind them. The visor of the sallet acted like the brim of a hat while it was slid up along the smooth low dome of the flared helmet, and the land rolled in green-tawny waves ahead of them.

  “Two-deep is pretty thin,” Ingolf observed.

  “There are more of them than of us, even with Bjarni tying some down,” Artos said. “I don’t want them to flank us. Your Richland heroes are a little green for a maneuver as complex as refusing a flank in the middle of a moving cavalry engagement. And I don’t want them piling up and colliding when they try.”

  Ingolf ’s mouth twisted in agreement. “But they’ll do fine in a straight-up charge.”

  “That they will. There are old soldiers, and bold soldiers—”

  “—but few old, bold soldiers,” Ingolf finished.

  “Also it will avoid getting into a long arrow duel.”

  Ingolf nodded again. His countrymen here were mostly from the landed classes, who had the leisure to practice with horse and shete and saddle bow. The Cutters didn’t just practice; they would be men who rode to earn their living on the open range, long hours every day. And who shot from the saddle every day too, to fill the cookpot or to protect their herds or just because there was nothing else to do while you were herding but shoot at thrown targets or bushes or cowpats or prairie dogs, except stare up the south end of a northbound cow. Their rulers had been at war for most of the past generation, too; they would all have fought before.

  “We’ll do better if we get stuck in hand-to-hand,” the Readstown man pointed out.

  “Also true.”

  The youngsters all had good mail shirts and steel helmets, and they were better drilled than the enemy. The Sword of the Prophet had discipline, and their standing army, but the Ranchers and their men fought more like a swarm of bees. A shirt of light mail wasn’t all that much of an advantage against arrows. It was a very considerable one in a hand-to-hand fight with blades.

  Montana is poor in metals and rich in men; no great cities before the Change and plenty of rangeland. When the old world fell, the folk were mostly able to escape, but there are few of the great steel towers for salvage.

  The Church Universal and Triumphant’s hostility to all outsiders and its bans on many types of machine hadn’t helped, either.

  Ingolf nodded, raised a hand in salute and turned his horse. Mary followed him, though she paused to say:

  “The hand of the Valar over you, brother.”

  “The Crow Goddess spread Her wings over you, sister,” he replied. “And may She be with Ritva, too.”

  “So mote it be.”

  Ensign Vogeler’s brass trumpet blew a call, and the First Richland shook themselves out from column into two lines staggered so that each man had a clear view ahead, moving smoothly on horses who knew the trumpet calls as well as their riders. Men and mounts looked harder and leaner than they’d been at home, but the humans were just as cockerel-confident. The redcoat commander gave them a pawky glance and angled over beside Artos.

  “First battle?” he said.

  “For most of them. Ingolf has experience and to spare, and his second-in-command fought the Sioux in Marshall and Fargo. A few others.”

  “They’ll be brave, then,” Rollins said sardonically. “Fool’s courage.”

  “Which works as well as any other; a man’s first charge may be the best he ever has in him. Now, we’ll be the pivot on which the door turns. We’ll need to keep your men well in hand.”

  The older man looked slightly offended. “We’re the Force,” he said. “Your Majesty.”

  “That’s what I’m counting on and why I’m using you here, Inspector,” Artos pointed out, and grinned.

  Mathilda rode behind him and to his left—his sword side, which meant that she could use her shield to cover him in a melee.

  “You know how to get him going, don’t you?” she said softly as the redcoat reined aside to lead his men.

  “It’s part of a King’s trade,” he said, then turned his head. “Eh, Fred?”

  The younger Thurston nodded. “That’s not quite how Dad put it, but it amounts to the same thing.” A frown. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

  “Yes, you can,” Artos and Virginia said simultaneously; she bit back a snort of laughter.

  “And you’ll have your opportunity soon enough,” he said.

  The dark handsome young face turned southward and west. “We’re not far from the border,” he said. “The old Idaho border. Red Leaf said there was news about my mother and my sisters.”

  “They’re safe enough,” Artos said.

  Which is probably true. Even a bad man will love his mother or his younger sisters, more often than not. My judgment of your brother Martin was that he was ambitious beyond reason, and ruthless as a stoat, but not the sort who lacks all human connection. And Virginia is giving you a very worried look. She doesn’t know or love them; she loves you and she loves the prospect of vengeance on those who killed her father and took her family’s ranch.

  “Now let’s cut a way for them to freedom, eh? And to a payment on an account the Cutters owe the whole world.”

  The pillar of red smoke had grown as they approached. Now they came over the last rise of land and saw the Anchor Bar Seven homeplace lai
d out before them. Ahead the strip of cultivated fields, to the right the dam and lake, and then beyond that the walled headquarters on its not-quite-hill. It was toy-tiny in the distance, and the figures of the men who fought beneath the walls were like ants, but he knew. Knew where each was, the pitch of the land, the range of the weapons on the towers. Things that might be played out in his mind, each turning on the pivot of his decisions like the throwing-arm of a trebuchet. They were many, but the thread of his actions led through them like a vein of gold in quartz.

  And it is the best course, he thought, shivering a little internally. Not a certain one, because the world is not made so that anything is certain, but the closest to certainty and near enough for King’s work.

  “Here they come again!” Syfrid said harshly.

  The enemy were forming up, just beyond catapult range. The ground between them and the Norrheimers was littered with dead men and dead horses, or some of both not quite dead; every time they came across the killing ground to within bow-range of the men of the shield-wall the catapults Ignatius commanded reaped them, and then the engines from the towers, and then Edain’s bowmen.

  “They’re paying,” Bjarni observed.

  “So are we,” Syfrid said. “We’ve lost thirty men, and more wounded, and all we are is bait. We haven’t landed a blow since we chased them away from the wall.”

  “Not bait,” Bjarni said. “We’re the plug that keeps them back. They could overrun the bowmen if we weren’t here. Horses won’t run onto a spearpoint, or ram into a shield-wall.”

  Syfrid jerked his head backward. “Within that burg they couldn’t touch us and we could massacre them if they tried to storm the wall.”

  “They’d be all over us if we tried to retreat, like flies on a midden. Besides, Artos needs us here,” Bjarni said. “They’ve lost five to our one, maybe more, and more of their horses. They weaken themselves, like a man trying to butt through a locked door with his face. While we’re here they don’t think of anything else.”