The High King of Montival

by SM Stirling

  Syfrid nodded grudgingly. “As a man will with a bit of gristle stuck between his teeth and driving him mad. But if your blood brother Artos doesn’t come soon they’ll gnaw us down and swallow us.”

  “He’ll come,” Bjarni said. “And we’ll die the day the Three Spinners cut the thread of our lives; not a day sooner, not a day later.”

  Syfrid’s face stiffened a little; that was an implied rebuke. Then they had more pressing work. Bjarni frowned as he watched the mass of horsemen approach. They were packed closer together, the formation a bit deeper and wider. And they were picking up speed, not holding to a hand gallop but coming flat-out. All the ones with any body armor were in the front, the men of rank . . .

  “They’re not going to shoot us up and retreat, they’re trying to overrun us. Something’s changed. They want, they need, to finish us quickly.”

  He glanced eastward. Was that a twinkle of sun on steel, above a distant black line?

  “Yes!” he said. Then he filled his lungs and shouted:

  “Our brave comrades are here, they’ll strike the enemy soon! Hold fast, Norrheimer men! This time we can greet them with spears and welcome them with swords. Hold fast! Thor with us!”

  “Ho La, Odhinn!”

  A growl went up with a baying eagerness in it; his men were tired of being pecked at from beyond their own reach. A ratcheting clatter began as spearshafts and the flats of swords and axes were hammered on the shields, building up into a drumming thunder of defiance and anger as men stamped and roared. The catapults shot; only five were manned now, for want of crews. The beating of the hooves filled the earth, and the ground to their front was a solid mass of riders. The first flights of arrows were rising from the bowmen to his left, and then every man in the enemy host rose in the stirrups. The Norrheimer shields came up, but this time more men fell as shafts punched through, or flicked through the gaps.

  “Close up, close up, Niðhöggr bite your balls!” he heard a voice rasping. “Close up when a man falls, don’t leave a gap!”

  “Ready, ready,” Bjarni called.

  He crouched with the shield-rim right up under his eyes, grunting a little as the shafts went thock-thock-thock-thock and hammered him back against his braced right leg. Two more broke off his helmet, hurting like blows with a sword, and another banged at an oblique angle into the mail over his right shoulder, breaking several of the links but not penetrating the stiff linen padding beneath. The ground was shaking beneath him, thousands of hooves hammering through it. A few men around him were wide-eyed; more were mouthing curses or calling on their Gods or just baring their teeth and screaming hatred and rage. The arrowstorm slackened as Cutters began slapping their bows back into the scabbards and drawing their shetes, a long rippling glitter along the enemy line, a flexing as they slid their shields onto their arms.

  “CUT! CUT! CUT!”

  Bjarni rose and held his sword up, sucked the hot dusty stinking air into his lungs:

  “Now!” he screamed, and slashed the blade downward towards the foe.

  The shields came down from overhead and every man behind the front rank threw a spear. The heavy weapons weren’t really made for that, but the target was close, close. Three hundred punched into the mass of horsemen, and they staggered. The front rank of Norrheimers crouched, butting the ends of their spears into the dirt as if they faced so many bears or boars, and the charge struck like wagonloads of anvils. Horses reared and struck out at the shields with their hooves, and Norrheimers shouted and stabbed at their faces and chests and guts, holding up their shields to stop blows as the riders hammered at them from above.

  “Kill them! Kill the swine! Don’t prick their pimples, kill!”

  Near Bjarni a horse took a spear in the belly and went mad, bounding forward in a great leap, then falling screaming like a woman in childbirth, thrashing blindly. That did what no spurs could; it broke the shield-wall as the half-ton beast collapsed forward onto men and kicked about. Instantly a wedge of horsemen were thrusting into the gap. Bjarni threw himself forward; the first of them was a man with a thong-bound yellow beard beneath a scarred contorted face. He had a mail shirt and a helmet of leather covered in metal plates and topped with a horsehair plume dyed scarlet, and he dodged a spear and leaned far over and slashed with terrible skill. A man spun away with half his face sheared off, screaming in a spray of blood.

  The wounded man rammed into the Norrheimer king, broke Bjarni’s forward rush and left him staggering, his shield swinging wide in an instinctive try for balance. His hirdmenn threw themselves forward to cover him with reckless abandon, but more Cutters were pushing through behind the chief in the plumed helmet. The blade went up, fluid and sure.

  Then the fixed snarl behind it turned to a gaping scream. Syfrid was there, his shield slung over his back and his ax in both hands, extended in the follow-through to the blow that had hacked the Cutter’s thigh open and chopped through the bone, with a spray of blood following the blade in a curve that seemed to hang in the air like a trail of scarlet light behind a torch.

  Bjarni was back on his feet; a guardsman put his shield against his back to help him.

  “Behind you, Syfrid!” he shouted.

  Now they don’t know whether to shit or go blind, Artos thought grimly.

  He took a deep breath of the thundery air, smelling of endless grass like a giant haymow, and horse and sweat and oiled metal and leather. His men were sweeping in from eastward now, between the railway line and the little lake where the ruins of the pre-Change ranch-house lay, a long rippling line of armor and the plunging heads of horses. They rode up the long shallow rise from the tilled fields towards the modern settlement, jumping the little irrigation ditches without effort or splashing through them in wings of spray. There was a huge clot of Cutters hung up at the Norrheimer front, and his lips skinned back in what might have been a smile.

  A moving horse under close control was a weapon in itself and one of terrible power, besides what its rider could do. In a melee, the saddle of a frightened stalled horse was like trying to fight while sitting in a chair—a skittish chair that jerked you around at short, unpredictable intervals. The Norrheimers were breaking their ranks and wading into the Cutters, spear and sword, ax and hamstringing seax-knife, giving more than they received. Their archers had closed up and were shooting into the enemy’s rear, steady careful aimed shots.

  Artos blew a hufff of relief. He couldn’t see it at this range, but that close control meant Edain was still alive, as surely as a glimpse of the oak-colored curls would have. Every time you took a pot to the well, there was a certain chance of it breaking, and he didn’t want to be the one to ride to Dun Fairfax with that news. Plus Edain was his closest friend, Mathilda aside.

  And he’s my strong right arm, with the strength of the good brown earth that bore him.

  The rest of the Cutters were turning to meet the new threat, all of them that could break away; they had the sun behind them, an advantage since it meant his men were staring straight into it. He’d always been good at calculating numbers quickly, but now he knew. Eight hundred twenty-six, more than half of what they had left. More than he had, but not impossibly more; they were good riders, but their horses looked tired. His eyes flicked over the battlefield and then he saw the light pedal-cart that Ritva had taken ahead on the scout with Rollins’ men, abandoned a hundred yards eastward of the wrecked warehouse. It was empty, the doors wide open, and feathered with arrows until it bristled like a porcupine. His mind sketched distances.

  Possibly, he thought. Possibly. Or possibly she’s dead, though I see no bodies. Poor Ritva, it was always like a game to her, even when the stakes were life and death, the which she knew full well. They say our father was like that; that there was always a bit of a grinning boy on a dare in him, even at the end when he knew he was dying.

  The trumpet brayed again, and the First Richland moved up from a trot to a canter; they would all switch to a gallop when they were closer, to get the horses
to the target without being blown. Epona responded automatically, and he glanced over his shoulder.

  Then he blinked. Virginia Thurston still had her visor up, and . . .

  I’ve always known she hated the Cutters. He’d seen her scalp one of her neighbors who’d gone over to them, on the border of the Powder River country last year. I didn’t suspect quite how much she hated them, though.

  Though all the Powers knew they deserved it, the sight of her white staring face was still a little disconcerting. She had her bow in her hands and an arrow on the string, not being trained to the lance. He looked around again, and the Cutters were much nearer; the two forces were coming together with the shocking combined speed horsemen had in open country.

  “It was a complex plan,” he admitted to himself with another mirthless grin. “But sure, it was complex in conception, not execution. It’s simple enough the now. There they are, and we bash them. Time to kill.”

  Filling his lungs: “Sound charge!”

  Rollins’ trumpeter sounded it, and it went down the line.

  Then he used the edge of his shield to knock down his visor, and the bright world narrowed to a slit.

  “Morrigú!” he called, then screamed on a rising note that built to a banshee shriek: “Morrigú!”

  The arrows lifted from the oncoming Cutters, and the Richlanders and redcoats shot back. Behind him Virginia was screaming wordless hate as she drew and loosed, and Fred called: “Ho La, Odhinn!”

  The long lifting stride of the great mare was like floating, like flying. The arrows came down with a whistling rush, and he brought his kite-shaped four-foot shield up and let the lance incline down. Shafts went thunk into the shield, skipped and broke and glanced from his armor with sounds like a metalsmith’s hammer striking, and felt like that too, but it was nothing. A few broke off Epona’s barding, and she bugled shrill defiance.

  Behind the raven visor his teeth pulled back from his lips; the men ahead would kill him if they could, and he intended to return the favor. Swelling speed, dust, the huge bellows sound of Epona’s lungs working, strings of slobber from her mouth spattering her barding and his armored legs. The lancehead came down; the others to his right followed in a rippling wave. He rode lightly, picking his man, some Montana Rancher with the rayed sun of the CUT painted on his steel-strapped leather breastplate.

  The man brought his shield up, but the light leather targe barely slowed the point of the lance. The Cutter’s body flexed like a flicked whip as the lancehead punched through him and blood burst out of his nose and wide-open mouth. Impact shocked Artos back against the tall cantle of the war-saddle and the lance cracked across.

  He threw away the stub and swept out the Sword.

  Shock.

  The world seemed to slow for an instant, sounds deepening. Arrows moved past him, and he could see how they twirled as they flew. Cold fire ran through him, and he screamed in what might be agony or joy beyond bearing, and he could feel his connection to everything that was. Raven wings beat behind him, vast, implacable, fanning the fires that consumed worlds. He was those fires, the twisting transmuting light at the heart of exploding suns, the primal blaze that set the universe alight and made the very fabric of things. Time rushed past him, and he rent the substance of eternity as time itself rent apart cheap cloth. Behind him new life would rise.

  This is how it is to wield the lightning, some lost fragment of selfhood knew. This is what it is to be a God, a lord of sky and storm and war!

  He screamed again as the ríastrad took him and the Dark Mother’s mantle covered his eyes. He danced among veils of stars and galaxies, and the substance of his being flung outward. A tug at his hand, and a man’s arm flew upward; a backhand cut and ruin flopped away. Epona slammed into a lighter horse shoulder to shoulder, and the beast flipped backward to land on its wailing rider. Men hammered and stabbed at him, but shield and armor protected him like Her wings. He struck and struck, and struck and struck, killing with each blow. An ax twisted the metal of his visor, and he ripped it off with an impatient sweep of his shield-hand and cast it aside. He was wholly of the moment, and the observer at the still and hidden heart of things, the pivot on which the worlds turned.

  Men saw his face, and the hardened fighters of the CUT screamed and threw themselves aside and fled. A few drove their own blades into their throats before he could reach them.

  Sword and man and horse were one.

  And that One was Death.

  “Rudi!”

  A voice was calling him, beneath the long slow sonorous song that was the dance of Time running from glowing Creation to the flaming Rebirth. The Sword struck, struck—

  “Rudi! Come back! Now!”

  Light and darkness blew through him. He was a man who rode a horse, and—

  “I am the smile of the Mother and the grin of the Wolf, the dancer and the Dance! I am light, and lust, and power, and love, and hate! I—am—Artos!”

  “Rudi, please, please don’t leave me!”

  Shock.

  He gasped, mouth struggling to suck in air to a body burning its substance with supernal speed. A wave of weakness, as he stared at Mathilda’s white tear-streaked face. He blinked, and then screamed again as he collapsed back into himself, as if the universe crammed itself into a grain of sand. Time resumed.

  The battlefield had fallen still, except for the sounds of agony in the background. Men were staring at him; some had thrown themselves down and beat their faces against the earth, or hammered at their own temples with their fists. Many wept.

  “I . . . I’m me, Matti. Thank you.”

  The bulk of the Cutters were still in front of him, though a spray were already in full flight southward. He rode out towards them; Epona reared and milled the air, shrilling a challenge, then came down again, pawing the earth with one hoof. He thrust the Sword towards the sky.

  “Hear me!” he called into the echoing silence. “This is no mere war of men for land or power. Your lords have sold you to demons who are the enemies of humankind, and of Life and Mind itself; their victory would be your own eternal defeat. If you stand here, every one of you will die. Run, and some will see their homes again; not many, but some. Tell your people what I have told you, I, Artos, High King of Montival, who am the Sword of the Lady. Go!”

  He never knew what followed in the next few minutes. When he came to himself he was standing and Mathilda had her arm around his waist, holding something to his lips. He drank, choked on the strong almost tasteless vodka, drank again. The Sword was sheathed again; it never needed to be cleaned or sharpened.

  “God, that was scary,” Ingolf said slowly.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Artos said. “From the inside, it was far worse.”

  “Ah . . . you want a pursuit? Our horses are fresher, we could probably catch a lot of them.”

  Artos shook his head. “No. No need to lose men in little scrimmages, and it’ll be dark soon.”

  “I hate to see so many get away.”

  Artos’ hand touched the pommel of the Sword, and he spoke with the certainty of a man saying the rain would come when the clouds rolled in black:

  “I told them the truth. Not one in ten of them will cross the border alive.”

  He looked around. The after-battle tasks had resumed, and folk were pouring out of the gates; a few score of the enemy were captives, not counting their wounded. The Drumhellers were giving those first aid, rather than the mercy-stroke, though of course they tended their own hurt first . . . and the strangers who’d come to rescue them. Bjarni’s men had taken the gravest losses, but most of them were still on their feet. He gave Mathilda’s arm a squeeze, more symbol than anything else when they were both in full plate, but symbols were important—more important than anything else, he was finding.

  Then he walked over to where the Norrheimer flag stood. Bjarni was there, looking downward at something . . .

  Syfrid of the Hrossings, Artos thought.

  Lying on his b
ack, mouth still a little open and his great ax in one outflung hand, two arrows through the mail on his chest. Lanky Halldor Syfridsson glared across his father’s body at Bjarni.

  “Wyrd bithful araed,” the Norrheimer king said. “Fate is that which cannot be turned aside.”

  “Now my father is dead,” the younger man said, a tear streaking his blood-spattered face. “As you wished!”

  The redbeard shook his head; blood clotted the close-cropped whiskers as well. It pooled on the ground around them, and the flies buzzed hundredfold.

  “No, by almighty Thor and Forseti who hears oaths! Your father was not my friend, but he was my father’s man, a worthy godhi and a strong warrior, brave and cunning, and we fought side by side.”

  “He should have been King!”

  “He would have made a good one, but that was not his wyrd. We were rivals, yes. So the Gods made men: to contend with each other for power and place, as they made bulls or stallions to be rivals to lead the herd. Yet I did not wish him dead.”

  “So you say!”

  The Hrossings and Bjornings bristled at each other, and the men of other tribes looked alarmed; that was perilously close to calling Bjarni a liar. Artos stepped forward and pulled the sheathed Sword from its frow.

  “Hold!” he said, and held it pommel up between them. “Look. Look and see the truth of each other’s hearts!”

  They did, their eyes meeting through the crystal. Artos felt a humming, a meeting and merging. Bjarni’s face went pale. The long horselike countenance of the younger Norrheimer seemed to waver. Then it firmed as he clenched his jaw.

  “I have wronged you, lord. I say it. Accept me as your handfast man!”

  “I will. It’s right to grieve for a father, but this day Syfrid feasts with the heroes in Valhöll. He waits your coming, and your sons, and the sons of your sons.”