De Grimmond nodded. “It’s in accordance with the laws of chivalry anyway,” he said. “But thank you for the reminder, Lord Vogeler; it’ll help keep that in my vassals’ minds. God go with you.”
“Good luck to you too, Lord de Grimmond.”
“It is a good day to die,” Rick Mat’o Yamni—Three Bears—said solemnly, in a deep sonorous voice, with a broad gesture of one hand.
Rick was a young man, about Rudi Mackenzie’s age, with a hawk-nosed high-cheeked face and a complexion a little darker than a deep tan; his furbound braids were a very dark brown, and there were green flecks in his dark eyes. His mother’s name was Fox Woman, from the color of her hair; she’d been one of the many volunteers who’d ended up joining the Lakota nation, as it re-emerged from the Change. By now the Seven Council Fires dominated much of the northern High Plains; since last May they’d also been formally part of Montival, in exchange for complete internal autonomy and a pledge of help in defending their borders.
Rick’s father John Whapa Sa, Red Leaf, had negotiated it. He’d also sent his son and three hundred warriors along when Rudi came home to Montival, as a symbol.
“It is a day when the sun shines on the Hawk and on the quarry,” Rick went on, raising both hands in a hieratic gesture. “We shall take many horses, many scalps!”
Three Bears had white and black bars painted across his face, the eagle feathers that marked his deeds in his braids, and his steel helmet was topped by buffalo hair and horns. There was an ornamental vest of white bone tubes across his entirely functional shirt of riveted mail, and a string of perfectly genuine tufts of scalp-hair down the leather seams of his buffalocalf breeches. Tom Yallup was staring at him and his followers—some of whom were in full fig of eagle-feather bonnet—with a look halfway between fascination and suspicion.
Suddenly Rick grinned at him and burst into laughter, leaning his hands on the pommel of his saddle.
“Nah, I’m just fuckin’ with your head, dude.”
He turned to Ingolf. “OK, cousin, give us until”—his arm pointed accurately to where the sun would be at about three—“to get into position and start playing Cowboys and Indians. We want to make sure we get ’em all. Otherwise we’re blown and whoever’s following on will know where we are.”
“Right,” Ingolf said. “That would be a bad thing. Hey, tahunsa, remember we’re supposed to take ’em alive if we can.”
“Sure thing, Iron Bear,” he said, which was mildly impolite; his people didn’t use personal names when it could be avoided. “Shee! How could you possibly think we’d do anything else? Gentle as kittens, that’s us.”
Then he stood in the stirrups and waved his bow overhead. “Hokahe! Let’s go, Lakota!”
The Sioux poured away in a torrent, their horses moving like a wave of flowing water up the slope to the west and disappearing as if they were the passing of a dream.
Mary Vogeler, née Havel, laughed beside him. “What do you think the odds are they’ll take any prisoners?”
“Fucking zip, honey,” he said. “But they’ll collect every single horse, you betcha.”
“Ah . . . Colonel . . . Iron Bear?” the Yakima scout asked.
Mary answered him. “We spent some time with the Oglala last year. A good deal happened. I’m Zintkazawin, for example. Yellow Bird.”
She touched the wheat-blond hair that rested in a tight, complex fighting braid at the back of her neck below her light helmet; the ribbon that ran through it helped secure the patch over her missing eye. The other was a bright cornflower blue, in a face that was smoothly regular in a chiseled Nordic way.
“Rudi . . . High King Artos . . . is Strong Raven. It’s a considerable honor to be taken in by the Lakota,” she added sincerely.
Tom Yallup looked after the Sioux war party. “They really are some serious’skins,” he said again.
“Tell me,” Ingolf said. “I spent the first four years after I left home fighting them, and I never, ever want to have to do that again. It’s a lot more fun having them on my side.”
He turned and beckoned. Major Will Kohler came up beside him and drew rein.
“Yah hey, Colonel?” he said, in a heavier version of Ingolf’s rasping, singsong Richlander accent.
“Let’s get our Cheeseheads ready,” he said. “We’ll be moving out in about twenty minutes.”
There were still three hundred and sixty of the First Richland Volunteer Cavalry alive and fit for duty, after the long trip from the Kickapoo through the Midwest and the Dominions with Rudi and the rest of them. Their round shields were painted brown, with an orange wedge, the national colors of the Free Republic of Richland.
Like the Sioux contingent they were a symbol, in this case of the alliance against the Prophet between Montival and the League of Des Moines that encompassed the Midwest realms and their various Bossmen. They were also all volunteers, wild young men of the Farmer and Sheriff classes for the most part. Major Kohler had been the chief arms instructor for the Vogeler family Sheriffdom in Readstown; he was the oldest man in the regiment at forty, and he was a big part of why they’d shaken down very well. The other was the educational value of hard experience.
Educational for the ones that lived, Ingolf thought grimly. There were four hundred thirty of them when we left. But they’re not complaining.
Instead they were finishing off baiting the horses, feeding them cracked barley from nose bags. These were fairly tall beasts, not as muscular as the destriers, but not cow ponies either. More like what they called coursers here, and they benefited from some grain before really hard work. Then each squadron led theirs away from the water hole and put on their tack. If you could, you always rested your horses and unsaddled whenever possible, letting them roll and graze; every moment of that added to their endurance and speed when you desperately needed it. Horses were curiously fragile beasts, despite their size and strength. Dead ones had littered the trail of every big army he’d ever seen.
The orders were passed, blankets and saddles went on quickly, and each squadron mustered under its banner. Ingolf looked them over with a pang. They were him, minus a decade in most cases, big fair muscular young men born and fed from the same soil and folk that had bred him, and when they were gone back home—or dead—he’d probably never see their like again.
The Dúnedain were something else, wearing mail-lined leather tunics in sage-green and elegantly practical clothing of similar shades, chests blazoned with the Tree and Seven Stars and Crown and riding some of the prettiest horses he’d ever seen, mostly Arab by breed. They bowed in the saddle to him, with a massed murmur of “Ve thorthol.”
Which meant at your command, pretty much. He was getting good at conversations in pseudo-Elvish as long as they were mostly commonplaces and clichés. Though the first time Mary had started yelling in it during a clinch he’d nearly been thrown off his stride.
“No dirweg,” he replied: take care, or stay alert.
Polite youngsters, superb scouts in open country and even better in forests, very respectful of him as Mary’s husband and increasingly for his own abilities . . . and all of them at least a bit weird, in his opinion. He supposed they were his future, rather than his past.
“I’ll keep the enemy in sight . . . in our sight, out of theirs,” Mary said cheerfully, swinging up into the saddle of her dappled Arab mare as gracefully as an otter climbing onto a rock. “And let you know if they turn away from our muttonish bait.”
They reached out and touched hands for an instant; then she turned the horse with a motion of balance and thighs, and cried: “Garo chûr an dagororo! Noro lim, Rochael, noro lim!”
He suppressed his anxiety with a practiced effort of will. Mary was very, very good with her weapons; most of the few professional fighting women he’d met were. Male soldiers could get by with being average, more or less, because most of the opposition would be too. You had to be way out on the right edge of the curve if you were going to risk your life over and over again fighti
ng people on average bigger and thicker-boned and stronger than you were. His wife wasn’t petite; she was a big strapping young woman taller than the average man, heavy as some and as strong as many. Sparring with her was like trying to nail a ghost to a wall, she was fast as a cat and sneaky as a fox, an even better rider than he was and a dead shot with the recurve . . .
Of course, you can still just get unlucky, especially if there’s artillery involved . . . back to business!
“Ensign Vogeler!” he said as they bore away northwest.
Mark brought up the trumpet he wore on a baldric.
“Sound advance in column of twos.”
This was all supposed to buy time. He hoped someone was using it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK
CHARTERED CITY OF WALLA WALLA
PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION
(FORMERLY SOUTHEASTERN WASHINGTON STATE)
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)
AUGUST 23, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
Tiphaine nodded as Sir Tancred saluted with fist to breastplate, whistled for his squire and horse, and detached a conroi of lancers and two of mounted crossbowmen to stay with her. Only a few of her own menie were with her now and they all had real work to do; if you were a retainer of d’Ath you usually had more urgent things to do than dance attendance and lend her credence.
Then he swung easily into the saddle despite a full set of plate and cantered off to the army camp that had sprung up outside Walla Walla’s northern wall in the course of the long day now ending. She looked after the Guard commander with a slight envy; he had a straightforward job to do.
Whereas I have to spend the evening herding barons and bucking up justifiably terrified townsmen and reassuring a Count. Still, that’s a big part of higher command.
The force she’d brought was off the trains and camped on what was usually common-pasture for the chartered city’s horses and mules, with a few spilling over into stubble-fields. A low constant rumble came from it; rows of tents, dust smoking from under wheels and hooves and boots, picket lines, neatly racked bicycles and pyramidal stacks of twelve-foot lances and seven-foot infantry spears, lines of field artillery parked next to their limbers. Grooms and squires were leading strings of horses down to the water of the little Walla Walla River, or to irrigation ditches; files on work detail made the light loess soil fly in a chorus of spades and dirt and muttered curses as they dug sanitary trenches. Light blinked fiercely from metal, and here and there the heraldic banners and shields of baron and knight were splashes of color, but most of it was variations on the color of the soil.
A little farther off the landscape still looked peaceful and prosperous despite its aridity, surprisingly so to someone reared west of the Cascades. Here it was two months before the winter rains were due and it seemed dubious that it had ever rained at all. Reaped grain fields stood sere and yellow-brown, shedding ochre dust to the occasional whirling wind-devil, with the odd remaining wheat-stack like a giant round thatched hut of deeper gold. Poplar trees made vertical accents along a canal, more conspicuous for the general lack of trees, with here or there the intense green of vines or fruit trees or alfalfa and sweet clover in blocks startling against the dun landscape. Rippling distant hills quivering with heat haze were the brown of summer-sere bunchgrass. The creaking sails of tall frame windmills circled, grinding grain or pumping water, and villages of rammed-earth cottages stood each with its church steeple, clustered around the gardens and groves of manor houses often based on pre-Change farms.
You couldn’t see how few folk remained, or how the ones who did worked at a frantic pace with spears close to hand, under the protection of mounted guards. The smell right here made it obvious that peace had flown, though. She took a deep breath through her nose. War did have a set of smells all its own, like the varied bouquets of wine. She liked wine well enough; Sandra had put her through an informal course in telling the various types apart. But she was a connoisseur of the bouquet of lethal conflicts.
Even when you weren’t fighting in a miasma of copper-iron blood and the unique scent of cut-open stomach, or marching past the week-old bloated bodies of dead livestock and smoldering burnt-out houses. Mostly war smelled of old stale sweat soaked into wool, unwashed feet and armpits and crotches, horses, and canola oil smeared on metal and leather and long since gone rancid. A big camp like this added the woodsmoke of campfires, salt pork and beans and tortillas cooking, the charcoal and scorched metal of the little wheeled forges the field farriers used, and latrine trenches. It was all the smell of her trade, the way manure was to a groom or dye-vats to a clothier or incense to a cleric.
Getting the expeditionary force detrained and ready to march had gone fairly smoothly, but she’d been at it all day. Too often dealing with various noble scions who insisted on quarreling over precedence and citing cases right back to the day Norman Arminger proclaimed himself Lord Protector, and who considered themselves too important to listen to anyone but the Grand Constable in person.
That was the drawback of calling out the arrière-ban, the full levy of the Association; you got everyone who had military obligations to the Crown, which meant mobilizing a lot of contumacious, well-and-high-born pricks who hated taking orders from anyone, even if their lives depended on it. Some of the great families had followed their medieval models all too seriously.
I haven’t had to kill any of them. Yet. Which is almost disappointing. Though it’s fun bringing home that the rules in the Schedule of Ranks really, really, really do apply to the ones who think they can’t possibly be expected to go on campaign without three pavilions, a chef and hot and cold running mistresses.
A very small bleak smile turned her lips; she had a long straight-nosed regular face, but at that moment it looked very like a predatory bird. She’d had any baggage found over the established maximum for a man’s status pitched off the barges on the Columbia or the railcars as they turned up later and left for the fish, the coyotes, the camp followers and anyone who had a use for a down mattress or six sets of court dress or a knock-down bathtub or a crate of Domaine Meriwether Cuvée Prestige ’15 with bottles of pickled oysters on the side. Excess servants had been shed with a little more ceremony, but not much.
The fingers of her left hand touched the twelve silver-inlaid notches on the hilt of her long sword, the metal smooth and cool against the callused skin. Nobody had argued much, however purple their faces turned.
A party rode up from the camp. A nobleman in gear that looked to have seen hard use in the last few days led them, and over their heads a fork-tailed baron’s pennant flew from a lance. A squire behind him carried a shield that had been recently and roughly field-repaired after being hit repeatedly with things sharp and hard and heavy.
“My lady Grand Constable,” Rigobert Gironda de Stafford said, thumping his breastplate with his right fist in salute before he dismounted.
“My lord Marchwarden,” she replied, returning the gesture. “Your horses look hard-used. I suppose screening us up there required a lot of riding.”
She turned and gestured for a squire. “Get my lord de Stafford and his party fresh coursers, and have these seen to. Bring water for his men, and bread and cheese and raisins if they want it.”
The nobleman nodded his thanks. “We’ve been busy, my lady. Just got in, in fact. It’s quieted down up towards Castle Campscapell a bit now or I wouldn’t have been able to make this meeting, but it’s the stillness before the storm. I’m extremely glad to see you’ve brought us a substantial force.”
He cocked his head and looked at her. “You were smiling a most evil little smile just now, my lady.”
Tiphaine let it grow . . . just a little. This particular campaign would probably be a preliminary to the main event, and she was going to use it to toughen up some of the feudal levies who hadn’t seen the elephant in this war yet. Toughen them up or kill them off; either would do.
> “I know that expression, Grand Constable,” the lord of Forest Grove said with a grin of his own, offering his canteen. “Someone who deserved it suffered, eh, my lady d’Ath?”
“Suffered the loss of oversize tents and silk sheets and overweight private rations, my lord Forest Grove,” she said, putting the canteen to her mouth and tilting it. “And the services of various doe-eyed beauties.”
It was field-purified water, cut one-to-six with harsh coarse brandy to cover the chemical taste and kill any bacteria the chlorine missed. The mixture cut the gummy saliva and dust in her mouth quite nicely; she swilled it around, spat and drank.
“But they can’t say I didn’t warn them,” she finished, handing it back.
“Thirty lashes with an acerbic tongue and an icy stare, too,” Rigobert said. “The novel experience of having to bow their heads and stand silent while their arses are roasted in public will be good for them. It’ll rectify their humors, though not as much as a good bleeding and purge would.”
They were both in half-armor, the articulated lames of the back-andbreasts covering their torsos, pauldrons and faulds on shoulders and thighs; with their junior squires standing by, the rest of the gear could be donned in less than two minutes. Sweat and dust clung to their faces beneath the peaked Montero hats—the type she’d always thought of as a Robin Hood hat, from an old movie she’d watched on TV before the Change. Nobody put their head in a steel bucket if they didn’t have to right that moment. She could feel more sweat trickling down her neck and flanks and between her breasts, itching and chafing in the padded arming doublet and her underwear as it baked to a rime of salt in the hot dry air and then more dripped in, long-familiar and still irritating. The interior was hot this time of year, and its mountain-fringed geography made the Walla Walla valley warmer still.
“Is the Count due?” de Stafford asked.
He was seven years older than she, in his mid-forties, a tall broad-shouldered man with pale blond hair like hers worn in the usual nobleman’s bowl-cut, eyes of a blue that was startling against his tanned face, and an unfashionable short-cropped beard that emphasized his square chin and ruggedly masculine good looks.
Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun Page 34