Whoever the leaders there were, they’d gotten all the men who could ride onto horses that could run and they were pulling out fast. Arrows began to whine towards the Richlanders, fired over the rump in the way that made chasing about as dangerous as being chased in this style of fighting. They’d be planning on running north until they’d broken contact and then angling east back towards their main body. He brought his own bow up.
“Sound shoot!” he shouted.
To himself: Let’s keep their attention well and truly on us.
With a grunt of effort, he pulled his shaft to the ear, thick biceps swelling as he brought his bow up to a forty-five degree angle and drew against the resistance of horn and wood and sinew and bent the stave into a deep curve. The string rolled off his gloved fingers and recoil slammed him back in the saddle.
His voice wouldn’t carry far in the rush of wind and the drumming thunder of hooves. The action did; the trumpet would, and the way the squad and platoon leaders followed suit even better. Three-hundred-odd arrows whipped up in a high arch, twinkled as they turned and plunged downward, then a steady stream as men shot and shot and shot. Not as many shafts were coming back but they were just as dangerous; here and there one banged off armor or went home in meat. Men or horses dropped out or fell, and the line rippled as the others opened out and then closed up.
Ingolf ducked his head from sheer instinct, letting the brim of his kettle helm shield his face before he was consciously aware of a threat. In the same instant something hit, hard. His head jerked around, but the broken arrow flicked away before he saw it; there would be an ache in his neck muscles tomorrow and a bright scar across the browned steel of the helmet, but it beat dying. He’d tried the Associate-style knight’s sallet with a visor, and it made him feel like his head had been riveted into a bucket.
And head-to-toe plate’s just not right for a horse-archer’s battle, he thought, as something banged off his chest as well, making him grunt in reflex. But this breastplate has a mail shirt beat all to hell, even good riveted mail from Richland, I’ve got to admit.
It was made of overlapping ripple-edged steel plates in the fashion western knights favored, cunningly curved and fitted and riveted, so that it covered your torso without confining it. Just about as flexible as mail, no heavier, and much stronger—which meant it was a damned sight better at stopping sharp pointy things, particularly arrows and crossbow-bolts. With that and short mail sleeves he felt properly equipped.
And…
Up out of the ground to the north came another clot of several hundred horsemen who’d been lying beside their prone horses, springing into the saddle even as the mounts surged to their feet, and at a gallop almost at once. They weren’t in neat lines either, but there was a terrifying wolfish vigor in their attack as the feather headdresses or buffalo-hair crests they wore streamed in the wind. Their shrill screams split the air, and they crashed into the Cutters in a shooting, slashing melee.
“Hokahe, Lakota! Le anpetu kin mat’e kin waste ktelo!” Go for it, Lakota! It’s a good day to die! he translated the scream mentally.
He could speak the language of the lords of the high plains, or at least get along in it. As well as a lot of people who belonged to the Seven Council Fires did, at least; most of them spoke English as often or more so. He snapped the bow back into the saddle scabbard at his knee, slid the shield off his back and onto his left arm, and swept out his shete. Shield up under the eyes, sword up and angled back…
“Sound Charge! And Blades!”
The jaws of the trap swung closed; not many of the Cutters escaped, as the greater wear on their horses told. One turned and drove at him with a spear poised. Ingolf judged the distances and angled his round shield. The point hit it hard enough to jar his arm and shoulder, but slid over the sheet steel facing. Before the man could recover, the Richlander’s shete lashed down, splitting mail links and driving into the meat and bone of his arm.
Ingolf wrenched the heavy curved shete free, using the momentum of his horse as they sped by each other to drag against the clutch of riven bone and muscle, looking around for another foeman. None were visible, unless you counted the ones who’d gotten a good head start eastward. The Richlanders rode right through what was left of the Cutters, leaving a trail of empty saddles behind them—striking in a mass doubled or tripled the impact.
By then…A galloping figure pulled up next to him.
“More coming up from the east, sir,” a man from the flanking platoon said. “De were close on dis bunch’s ass.”
Developing our position, he thought. Somebody over there is feeding in troops to make sure where we are and what terrain we’ll fight for.
The flanker was panting, and blood cut through the dust on his face along with the sweat, from a slash that reached from his right ear nearly to his pale-blue eye through stubble so fair it was nearly invisible. He had his shete out. There was red clotting on it, and his round shield had score-marks where blows had split the thin metal facing over the bullhide and plywood. Two black-fletched arrows stood in it as well, and he absently broke them off with the blade of his shete as he spoke.
“How many?”
“Can’t be sure, sir, dey had more than us out screening, but plenty, you betcha. Yah hey, two, t’ree thousand, maybe more, from the dust. N’less dey’re dragging brush.”
“Good. Dismissed, and get a bandage on that cut.”
“Uff da, I am cut!” the man said, touching his face in mild surprise before he saluted and rode off.
Rick Three Bears cantered up. “We’ve…”
“Got trouble coming, yah,” Ingolf said to the Sioux incantan, war chief.
Rick grinned, which with the war-paint of black and white on his proud-nosed face and the buffalo-hair and horns on his steel cap gave him a faintly alarming look. There were eagle feathers woven into the not-quite-black braids that fell past his shoulders and a look of ironic good cheer in his dark hazel eyes; he was a tallish rangy ropy-muscled man, but not quite as thick through the shoulders as Ingolf. There was a ceremonial vest of white bone tubes over his perfectly functional shirt of riveted Iowa-made mail, too, and scalp hair sewn into the outside seam of his leather britches.
“More trouble than this,” Rick clarified. “But then again, we won’t have to deal with it ourselves. There’s something to be said for this white-eyes army shit. Nice to have friends when you already have a lot of enemies.”
Behind him his men were finishing the last of the Cutters; there were about as many of them as the Richlanders, a token of the Lakota nation’s allegiance to the new kingdom while most of their men fought out east. There was an occasional scream and the guttural shout of Hoon! Hoon! as they worked with spear and shete and long knife.
Hoon! was what a Sioux said when he stabbed you to death, sort of a more elegant tribal equivalent of Die, you cocksucking sonofabitch, die! They weren’t stopping to take scalps. Not very often, at least.
Ingolf had spent the first few years of his adult life fighting the Sioux, or what a nineteen-year-old taking an excuse to go running away from home had thought was adult life and looking back from his middle thirties, he considered a period when he’d been a large, very dangerous child blundering and hacking his way through obstacles and people. He’d been part of a Richlander volunteer force helping the Bossmen of Fargo and Marshall fighting to keep the Red River Valley and vicinity. Nominally in command of a company of enthusiasts just as pig-ignorant as he was, but mostly not as lucky. It had been a bloody draw, more or less; at least the border had stayed just where it started out, a little more than halfway across what had been North and South Dakota before the Change. With the main difference being a lot of fresh graves and burned-out farms and lost crops and slaughtered livestock.
Those years had been an education in many senses of the word. Nobody who’d ridden with Icepick Olson and come back alive from the freezing red ruin of the Badlands Raid was ever going to be completely relaxed when someone screamed
Hoon! close by.
It produced an almost irresistible impulse to shout Guard your hair, boys! and dive for cover, shield up and shete ready.
Even if you’ve been adopted by the Oglalla and called Iron Bear, he thought. And Christ…by the Valar, I mean…that was pretty damned scary too.
Rick held up two fingers split in a V and then pulled them back towards himself with his palm parallel to the ground. “Still want to pull ’em after us that way?”
“Yeah, it’s working so far and it’s what we said we’d do,” he said. “Let’s go. It isn’t really a very good day to die.”
“Who said anything about us dying, cousin? Better to give than to receive.”
The dead and seriously wounded had gone back, mostly over captured horses with a few of the walking wounded leading them; walking wounded meant men who could move but not fight. Nobody thought of minor cuts like the slash on the scout’s face as real wounds. Everyone else had dismounted, and all the smarter ones had poured their canteens into a helmet and held them for the horses to take a drink. Sergeants encouraged the others to do that too, often with a cuff across the back of the head.
A thirsty man could keep going on willpower much longer than a horse; horses just lay down and gave up when they got sufficiently miserable. Willpower didn’t mean squat if a slow horse got you an arrow through the gizzard, though.
“Boots and saddles!” Ingolf said, and Mark raised his trumpet.
CHAPTER NINE
THE HIGH KING’S HOST
HORSE HEAVEN HILLS
(FORMERLY SOUTH-CENTRAL WASHINGTON)
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)
NOVEMBER 1ST, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
More plumes of dust were moving half an hour later. They stretched as far as Ingolf could see, north and south for many leagues and east and west as units moved behind the front. The armies were well into the opening steps of their dance, probing and shifting for advantage like all-in fighters at the beginning of a bout. He was far enough west now that he could just see the line of tethered balloons the Montivalan forces had put up behind their position, each of them a finned orca shape with its canoe-sized gondola hanging below and the cable that held it slanting away in a long pure curve.
Ingolf was the son of a Sheriff, lord of broad acres, and hence an educated man who could read and write fluently and use practical mathematics to calculate volumes and heights, all useful skills for a military commander or someone who had to keep track of the food-stores that would take a community through the winter. He understood the theory; the hydrogen produced when zinc shavings and strong acid met in lead containers filled the bags of impermeable pre-Change fabric. The balloons were lighter than an equivalent volume of air, just as the air in a ship’s hull was lighter than the water it displaced and so floated upward. It still awed him to see so many of them. He could remember his own childish delight when there had been a single hot-air balloon at a county fair in Richland City. His father had sworn in astonishment, too; that had been…
Two thousand eight, in the old style, Ingolf thought; around here they mostly used the Change Year count. He hadn’t seen anything fly for ten years. Not since the Change. That was the last year Dad and I weren’t fighting really bad. It got worse from then on.
The Upper Midwest was as populous and wealthy and advanced as anywhere in the known world after the Change, but the Free Republic wasn’t exactly at the center of things back there. More like the frontier boondocks.
“And those balloons’ll be damned useful,” he murmured to himself. “Must be able to see as far as infantry could march in an hour or more, or twenty minutes’ gallop.”
And if you made a horse gallop that far flat-out, it was done in. The enemy had gliders, but those had far less endurance, and the prevailing wind was from the west. A blinking light snapped from the nearest balloon, plain uncoded Morse:
Approximately…three…thousand…enemy…horse…in…pursuit…you. Forces…moving…as…planned.
“That won’t last long,” Ingolf said.
“Sir?” Mark said.
“Plans don’t last long once the fighting starts,” Ingolf amplified. “So we don’t want to get too far ahead and give ’em time to think. It’s like playing a brown trout back on the Kickapoo. Sound walk-march, trot.”
The trumpet sounded again. Being a commander’s signaler-aide was good education for a young man like Mark; you got to see everything, hear all the plans and consultations, and you acquired a really good command of the language a commander used to turn a cavalry regiment into an extension of his will.
“I wish Aunt Mary was with us,” Mark said suddenly. Hastily: “She’s, ah, a really good scout. All those Dúnedain—” he pronounced it Dunny-dan “—are.”
“I wish she were too, Mark,” Ingolf said. Though the real reason is you’ve got a gawd-awful crush on her, he added tolerantly to himself.
Mark was a good kid, and smart, and wouldn’t make a nuisance of himself. Though that sort of thing could really hurt when you were his age.
“But we’ve all got our jobs to do,” he finished.
Which is true. Mary makes a pretty fair horse-soldier but she’s a goddamned ghost as a sneaker-and-peeker. And I’m a pretty good sneaker-and-peeker…for a goddamned good horse-soldier.
The First Richland slowed; so did the Sioux on their right. They came over another low ridge. Ingolf grinned.
“And here’s the reception committee for those dumb cowboy fucks chasing us to get revenge for their dumb dead cowboy fuck friends.”
Rick laughed loud and long, and Mark smothered his snort as befitted a very junior officer. The troops waiting there were mostly infantry, and newly arrived, double-timing forward to a brisk squeal and rattle of fifes and drums from the spot where they’d laid their bicycles down.
Ingolf’s eye estimated upward of ten thousand, serious numbers even on this battlefield. He recognized their banners and the devices on shields and breastplates, brown with a bright red-white-black bear’s-head, snarling and shown face-on. Bearkillers, the Outfit as they called themselves, the people who lived across the Willamette from the Mackenzies. Which made them in-laws of his now that he and Mary—nee Havel—were hitched. The Bearkillers had come together in the year after the Change, like the Clan Mackenzie. Montival was a pretty new kingdom; he’d been around while Rudi’s friends came up with the idea on the Quest, and folks back here…back home, now…had taken to it like Polaks to vodka. They’d been desperate because they were facing defeat from the Boise-CUT alliance, desperate enough to clutch at a new-minted myth and shelve their local rivalries.
Sorta shelve the rivalries. Like my sorta in-laws. I’m married to their boss-lady’s daughter, Rudi’s half sister. Same dad, Mike Havel, the guy who founded the Bearkillers and killed Norman Arminger ten years later. But his widow is the boss-lady of the Bearkillers for all that they’ve got councils and elections and she really didn’t appreciate her hubby getting Rudi’s mom Juniper knocked up before she got hitched to him. Or Rudi being the big bossman, instead of one of her kids. My mother-in-law, Signe Havel, nee Larsson…Damn, but there are some scary womenfolk in this part of the world!
The troops had left their bicycles farther back, with the ambulances and forward aid stations. They were deploying at a jog-trot from column of march—the denser formation that was quicker for movement—into the longer blocks in which they’d fight. Doing it smoothly, too, only the occasional shout or rat-tat-tat-tat of drums and blare of bugle under the hard many-fold thump of boots. The Bearkiller infantry weren’t the A-List, which was what their Outfit called its full-time elite fighters; they were militia, but it was damned good militia. The only way you got out of serving in time of war among Bearkillers was to be pregnant, nursing, or a cripple and from what he’d heard they practiced a lot.
As he watched, the heavy infantry stopped and unslung the twin eight-foot poles they were carrying across their backs and then
fitted them together. A metal sleeve clipped them into one sixteen-foot pike, topped with a spearhead shaped like a double-edged dagger the length of a forearm; that was an ingenious trick, and gave you a shorter spear as an alternative weapon for close-quarter work like storming a wall. The pikemen wore visored sallets, and jointed steel-plate armor covering their torsos, arms to the hands, and lower bodies to the knees. What they called three-quarter armor here, and in a mass they looked like so many walking beetles, a murderous ordered bulk of steel and muscle and wood.
Their thirty-five companies were eight ranks deep and thirty long; each suddenly bristled like a hedgehog as the command rang out:
“Pikes up…Ground pikes! Stand at ease!”
Thousands of the steel-shod butts thumped into the ground, like a single sound. Ingolf nodded in approval as the Richlanders and Sioux threaded their way through the formation, passing between the companies like smoke through a picket fence. The Bearkillers were as immobile as a rattler coiled under a rock; even the pikepoints didn’t waver as the breeze caught them, and there was a lot of leverage in those things. It needed more than just muscle to hold one steady, though it needed muscle to start with.
I feel better about this now, he thought; appraising troops he had to rely on was a professional reflex ground in by long habit.
Drill mattered, and never more so than when men were moving something as awkward as a pike around. He didn’t have to imagine the jammed-up mess a pike phalanx could collapse into if it all went into the chamberpot; all he had to do was remember it. And the screaming mass of dead and dying men and hacking riders that had followed when the line broke, and his own blind fear and rage as death came avalanching at him and his.
Christ, the things I do!
Behind each block of pikes were two more files of men armored much the same but carrying glaives instead, six-foot shafts with a heavy pointed chopping-stabbing blade on the end and a cruel hook welded to its back; they would move quickly to contain any threat the pikes couldn’t handle. Between each block of pikemen were units of crossbows—less strictly crossbowmen, since a substantial proportion seemed to be women. They wore open-face helmets and the sort of articulated breastplate he had on himself, carried sword and buckler, but depended on the lever-cocked bolt throwers they carried at port arms across their chests. Even with the cunning mechanical assist, the weapons were slower to shoot than a bow, but they had plenty of range and they hit damned hard. Plus you didn’t have to start at six and train every day to be really good with them.
Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change Page 15