“My lord your father?” High Queen Mathilda asked. “I didn’t hear the details.”
The heir to County Odell shrugged in a clatter of metal. “The chirurgeons say he’ll be on his back for six months and limp when he walks again, Your Majesty. Pelvic cracks, hit with a war hammer, they have him in traction and on blood-thinners, but he’ll live, for which God and St. Dismas be praised.”
“Amen!” the High Queen said, crossing herself. “He would try to take on a younger man’s work.”
Érard grinned. “He told me that until today he’d always thought it was just a metaphor, Your Majesty, but that now he can indeed truthfully say he’s busted his ass for the Crown.”
She raised her eyes a little in fond exasperation; the Grand Constable just blinked, but there was a bark of harsh male laughter from the noblemen before the High Queen went on:
“Ride with me a moment, my lords.”
They crested the rise, two-score horsemen, and rode a little down it. Ahead of them the land sloped eastward, a gentle surface with only a little roll to it for several thousand yards; then some steeper ground. The shadows of the lances lay long and thin before them. The ground was open, save for the rust-streaked mound of brush growing in drifted soil that marked the grave of some great farming-machine of the ancient world, the size of a peasant’s cottage and dead with the Change long before he was born.
The rest was pasture, nothing growing more than knee-high…except the piled bodies of men and horses, of which there were a fair number scattered here and there. Everyone but the screen had kept below the crest as the heavy horse moved into position, but that had meant a fair bit of fighting to keep eyes away as both armies extended their flanks northward, reaching for advantage.
“That’s good ground, that’s very good ground, Your Majesty,” Count Chaka of Molalla said admiringly, his smile splitting his broad-featured dark-brown young face. “You couldn’t find any better. Not for a knight’s battle.”
Piotr Stavarov of Chehalis nodded silently, his pale blunt jowly face looking very like a wolf’s for a moment; by what Huon suspected was no coincidence, the arms on his shield included a white wolf passant. Countess Anne of Tillamook wasn’t here in person, of course, but her contingent was and her war-captain Baron Juhel de Netarts, the Warden of the Coast March. If the company of the greatest nobles of the PPA intimidated him, he didn’t give any sign, just tapped fist into palm on either hand like a man absently settling his gauntlets as he frowned, narrow-eyed.
“The Grand Constable picked it and the High King confirmed the choice,” Mathilda said. “We’ve spent considerable blood today getting things set up this way.”
Out there, men were fighting right now, and his breath came quicker at the sight. Not the smashing impetus of a charge à l’outrance; this was the darting quicksilver snap-and-slash of the eastern light cavalry, the way ranchers and rovers made war.
Huon could see little knots and groups of riders tiny with distance, each trailing its plume of dust. The twinkle of arrowheads as the horse-archers swept past each other, rising in the stirrups to bend their short thick recurve bows. Now and then two groups would dart together, and the sabers and shetes came out, the blades swinging in deadly arcs. He thought he caught the faint ting-crang! of steel on steel and the shrill war-shouts. Or possibly of men screaming in mortal pain and fear of death. Once a melee ran over a knot of the fallen, and the black wings of the carrion birds squabbling for tidbits exploded upward like a torrent of grief.
He grimaced a little at that. He’d seen men die—you couldn’t grow to his years without that happening, in the modern world—but the birds were an uncomfortable reminder that at seventh and last people were made out of meat.
With souls, remember that, Huon. So many to Heaven or Hell or Purgatory today…Holy Mary, Mother of God, intercede for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
After a moment he noticed the leaders had given the skirmishing only a glance as they turned their field glasses about. A squire was supposed to learn by example as well as precept, even a very new and very young one; and he had the luck to be a squire of the royal household, with more to see than how to hold a lance and charge when the trumpets blew. His left hand was busy steadying the two spare lances that rested with their butts in a rawhide bucket at his saddlebow, but he managed to get the small pair of binoculars cased at his waist out and up to his eyes; the light squire’s sallet he wore didn’t have a visor to get in the way.
The Association foot was northward to provide the base on which the chivalry would pivot, blocks of spearmen and crossbowmen and field-catapults between them; beyond that only swarms of light cavalry, screening the flank of the war-host of Montival. Some of them were from the eastern manors of the Protectorate, where the PPA bred its own cowboys; more were from south of the Columbia, refugees from the Central Oregon Rancher’s Association territories occupied by the enemy. They weren’t very organized beyond the level of individual ranches, but they certainly had plenty of spirit. And not much inclination to take prisoners. They wanted their homes and grazing back, and they wanted revenge.
South beyond the last Portlander banners he could just make out the positions Clan Mackenzie held, the long jagged hedge of swine-feathers planted point-out and behind them the harrow formation of the kilted archers. They weren’t engaged right now either; the thick drifts and windrows of dead out three hundred paces beyond their position showed why, and what happened when a charge tried the arrowstorm. And the goose-feathered arrows standing in the ground so thick that they made a gray haze over it where the flail had fallen, hundreds of thousands of shafts falling out of the sky like hard steel rain.
Eoghan—youths and maidens about his own age who were something like squires in a rude tribal fashion—were running about there, snatching up armfuls and rushing them back to the reserves. Far and faint he could hear the triumphant pagan war-chant of the clansfolk roared from thousands of throats:
We are the point
And we are the edge—
We are the wolves that Hecate fed!
Huon shivered a little and crossed himself as it ended with a rising banshee shriek and then silence save for the eerie wail of the pipers; so did Lioncel. Mackenzies weren’t actually evil, the way the Church Universal and Triumphant was, even the most stiff-necked Catholics admitted that. But…
They are very, very strange and weird. I’m glad I was born among sensible and civil folk with normal customs and in the bosom of Holy Church.
Mathilda bent her wrist to look at the watch tucked under her armored gauntlet, then up and back at the nearest tethered balloon behind the Montivalan lines. A heliograph snapped a signal from the basket below, bright enough to leave after-images. Huon could read Morse; it was part of the training a youth of gentle blood received, but this was in code and gibberish to him.
The High Queen followed it; Huon could see her lips moving slightly as she decoded mentally.
“Not long now,” she said. “The High King is on his way. Rudi’s coming.”
The Grand Constable nodded and spoke, her voice as cool and expressionless as her pale grey eyes:
“It’s our turn to do something besides feint and skirmish, and start bearing our share of the heavy work. Most of the action has been down towards the Columbia, the Bearkillers and the Corvallans. And the Yakima regiments.”
There were a few muttered grumbles, from the retinues of the great lords if not from the noblemen themselves, and Mathilda laughed.
“Be content, my lords, be very well content. The High King hasn’t stinted our plate. Take another look at who we’re facing now.”
Stavarov’s field glasses were a heavy Zeiss model, pre-Change heirlooms his elders had looted early in the first year. You couldn’t really stand in a knight’s saddle, your legs were already about straight and the armored saddlebow and curving crupper locked you in place, but he managed to come up a little as he leveled the binoculars and peered eastward.
> He grunted and then spoke bleakly: “The Sword of the Prophet. They’ve got that lacquered armor. Just about the color of dried blood, I can make that out, now that they’re closer. There are Satan’s own lot of them! At least as many as we are here. They’re the only real lancers the enemy have, and they’re bloody madmen, too.”
“The High King shows his trust for us by using our chevaliers against the enemy’s elite. That’ll satisfy the most sensitive man’s honor,” Lord Chaka said happily.
Huon nodded to himself; he’d been a page for a while with House Jones, and he liked and admired the young Count.
“Yes,” Stavarov said dryly. “Though it may be less good for his body.”
Everyone chuckled at that except Tiphaine d’Ath, and she unbent enough to quirk an eyebrow. Mathilda went on:
“And our Boiseans versus theirs in the center, though that was more talking and less fighting and then the lot of them just sat down. That was…fortunate. They’ve been giving the Corvallans and the Yakima foot hard trouble, they certainly don’t have any objection to fighting them.”
Everyone but the Grand Constable grinned at that, though Huon noticed that the High Queen’s expression was a little strained; he’d seen how tight-wound she’d been about it, before things came right.
Just then trumpets sounded; faint, but out in the fields between the main armies. The enemy light horse were withdrawing. So were the Montivalan horse-archers, forming up and heading northward around the PPA’s position, some in ordered ranks while others just streamed away in a clotted sprawl that still gave the impression of coiled danger. A smaller party came cantering towards the High Queen’s standard, and everyone waited.
There’s a lot more waiting to war than I’d thought there would be, Huon thought. They leave that part out of the songs.
He leaned aside and whispered that to Lioncel, who snorted as he smothered a laugh and then said sotto voce:
“And then Bold Sir Dagobert/He did yawn/And then he did scratch himself/With a stick up under his breastplate/And wish he could get down/From his faithful steed Papillion/And take a leak…”
The three horsemen reined in, saluting; the High Queen returned the gesture gravely with a thump of fist to breastplate. Off to the side, Huon thought she winked. Certainly Lady Mary of the Dúnedain did, the more conspicuous for the eyepatch. She was tall and slim and elegant in her dark green-and-black Ranger war-gear, spired helmet and brigandine with polished bronze rivets holding the little steel plates between the layers of leather. Huon found himself fascinated by one of the men with her; he had a headdress of buffalo hair and horns, black-and-white war paint on his face, a vest of white bone tubes across his mail shirt, eagle feathers woven into his braids and several fresh scalps slung from his saddle, besides tufts of older ones sewn into the outside seams of his buckskin pants.
“Saw ’em off,” he said. “The Dúnedain punched through while we tied up most of their screen and got a look. They’ve got some good horses, the Rangers, and they ride pretty well. For white-eyes.”
The Sioux rolled a cigarette in a leaf wrapper one-handed as he spoke, flicked a lighter and ceremoniously inhaled a lungful of the smoke. Huon watched with interest. Some of the tribes in Montival used tobacco as a sacrament—the Warm Springs confederation and the Yakama among them—but he’d seldom seen it himself.
“It wasn’t too much like hard work, either,” the Indian said cheerfully. “I’ll leave that to you guys.”
Rick Mat’o Yamni, Huon reminded himself. A war chief of the Lakota. Who are part of Montival now, and invading the Cutters from the eastward. St. Stephen’s wounds, but this is a big war!
He handed the cigarette to Lady Mary’s husband, passing a hand through the smoke before he did. Ingolf Vogeler inhaled, in a way that showed he was accustomed to the peculiar habit. He had a strange accent too, at once flat and harsh and slightly singsong; he was from the fabulous lands of the far east, east of the Mississippi itself, though he looked mostly like a battered fighting-man a little past thirty with a cropped brown beard, nose slightly kinked by an old break, and dark-blue eyes; his deeds were legend, though. He’d been the one to bring the news of the Sword all the way from Nantucket to Montival, and had accompanied the High King on the Quest all the way there and back again. They called him Ingolf the Wanderer, and it was said no man since the Change had crossed from the eastern sea to the western so many times.
He spoke to the High Queen with casual friendliness; they’d been on that Quest together, after all.
“They weren’t trying too hard, Matti. The light horse weren’t, that is.”
When some of the Counts scowled at him, he added: “Your Majesty. Just screening while the Prophet’s bone-breakers got into position.”
That’s right, they have different ideas about rank and station off in the Midwest, Huon reminded himself. Though Lord Vogeler is nobly born; his father was a Sheriff, which is a baron, near enough, from what I’ve heard. He married Lady Mary, who’s the High King’s half sister and daughter of Lady Signe of the Bearkillers, and so a princess twice over. And of course he was one of the High King’s companions.
For a moment he felt pure sea-green envy; Ingolf’s name would live as long as honor’s praise was sung, and so would Lady Mary’s and the others who’d made the great journey and shared its perils. So would his elder brother Odard’s name and fame go on down the ages, who’d been with them and who’d died on the cold shores of the Atlantic. Squires generations from now would hear the ballads and try to model themselves on him.
Well, I’m young yet. Odard brought great honor to our House, but I’ll do my part too.
Ingolf went on as the High Queen took the smoking cylinder and joined in the ritual: “They weren’t really pushing at us or even trying to keep us out of sight of their main battle line, just making us keep out of bow-range so the Sword of the Prophet could get into position and get ready without being harassed, I think.”
“They’re deploying by companies of around two hundred, flank to flank in a triplex formation,” Lady Mary added. “Tricky, charging in a three-deep line—”
Huon nodded unconsciously; moving horses were big objects and collisions a disaster waiting to happen.
“—but from the way they moved I think they’re up to it.”
Ingolf nodded. “This is the big push, probably the last they can make this fight. Seems like we all had the same idea; the southern half of this…screwed up battle—”
“I think the phrase you’re looking for is cluster-fuck, Lord Vogeler,” Tiphaine d’Ath said crisply, which brought a chuckle.
He nodded and handed the cigarette back to Three Bears; Lady Mary made a slight moue of distaste as it passed her:
“—the southern part of this gigantic cluster-fuck…is tied up solid for now. So they’re going to hit us as hard as they can here on the north. I don’t think they realize how many of your lobster-backs are here. If they think they’ve got all our reserves pinned down piecemeal, they’ll calculate on ramming home a charge and breaking this flank, then rolling us up because we don’t have enough left to throw in and stop them.”
“And we’re going to do that to them,” the Grand Constable said. “Any field artillery with the Prophet’s men?”
“Not that I could see,” Ingolf said.
Lady Mary nodded. “We Rangers got as close as we could, about half ordinary arrow range—the Sword carry bow and lance both, it wasn’t easy—and didn’t spot any.”
“They don’t like it, the Cutters,” Ingolf said. “Too many gears, some crazy religious thing.”
“We could bring up some batteries from the general reserve,” Count Piotr said thoughtfully. “Soften them up.”
“Then they’d retaliate in kind, my lord of Chehalis, and this would turn into another artillery duel,” Tiphaine replied. “They may not approve of complex machines, but they’ve still got a lot of Boisean artillery working for them. On balance, and right here, taking the springalds and
scorpions off the table is a net advantage to us if we want to force a rapid decision. Besides the no-fun-at-all part of having roundshot and four-foot darts and balls of napalm shot at you.”
Everyone nodded; Association nobles used artillery and heliographs and field-engineers and the other accoutrements of scientific modern war, but most of them didn’t really like the contraptions of springs and levers much. Knightly accomplishment lay in the clash of lance and blade. From the slight pursed expression around the Grand Constable’s mouth, she didn’t agree, at least not in principle.
Lioncel caught Huon’s eye, inclined his head towards his liege-lady and nodded, mouthing almost silently: She can’t stand that Society bullshit.
Huon was surprised the other boy had known what he was thinking, and mildly scandalized; his family had been Society—the Society for Creative Anachronism, a heroic band who kept alive the arts of knightly combat, the skills and graces of noble life and good lordship before the Change. Or at least his mother had been; his father had been a free-lance man-at-arms who rose to noble rank during the early days of the Association, like many others in the terrible years. That made his mouth thin a little. His parents were dead, his father long ago in the Protector’s War and his mother more recently, dying by the sword for treason.
And she actually was a traitor. She could have gotten us all killed and the estates attainted, she nearly did, only Odard’s deeds and the High Queen’s favor saved us from the Regent’s anger…but she was still Mother.
Just then a new sound came from the southward, deep and thudding, blurred by distance—and, Huon realized, because tens of thousands of voices could not call in perfect unison even if they tried. It grew and cleared as it approached, and behind the wave of sound came a band of men beneath a great banner of green and blue and silver, the Crowned Mountain and Sword of the new High Kingdom of Montival. Knights of the Protector’s Guard, some Bearkiller A-Listers, and the bowmen of the High King’s Archers following on their bicycles.
And the shout…an enormous guttural sound, like Pacific surf growling on storm-beaten cliffs:
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