A Meeting At Corvallis

by S. M. Stirling

  Off to the west, he saw Eric Larsson nod and wave acknowledgment. Ahead the enemy formation parted to let the heavy throwing engines through, and then the infantry lay down in their formations; which was sensible of Stavarov, though not as sensible as pulling back out of catapult range and waiting for his engines to silence their opposite numbers.

  Of course, that would take all day, Havel thought. And without infantry support … well, what a frustrating dilemma for Alexi Stavarov, you Slavo-Sicilian wannabe, you!

  The A-listers were moving, but their lances stayed in the rests, and their shields stayed slung. Instead, two hundred horn-and-sinew recurve bows were pulled from the saddle-scabbards by their left knees, and two hundred hands went over their shoulders for an arrow. The long column of horse-archers moved in a staggered two-deep row, rocking forward from a canter into a gallop. The thunder of hooves built, until it was a drumroll over the half-mile distance. Near as loud came the crashing bark:

  "Hakkaa Paalle! Hakkaa Paalle!" And from the watching Bearkiller foot: "Hakkaa Paalle!"

  "This is where it pays off," Havel muttered as he adjusted the focus of his field glasses. "Hack them down!"

  Bearkiller A-listers could play armored lancer just as well as the Protectorate's knights … but they could also shoot as well as Mackenzies, and do it from a fast-moving horse, twelve times a minute, and actually hit what they were aiming at half the time—more, if it was a big target. Six heavy horses pulling a large-ish catapult with a twenty-man crew running beside the team qualified as a very big target indeed, and there were ten of them moving out into the open beyond the Protector's infantry. They'd just begun to turn, swinging the business-ends of their massive weapons towards the Bearkiller field-pieces, when the charge of the A-listers brought them into range. Havel's cavalry masked the fire of their own catapults now, but they didn't need it.

  Eric's scarlet crest showed as he stood in the stirrups and drew his bow to the ear. Havel's fingers tingled in sympathy, and his shoulders remembered the heavy, soft resistance. The arrow flickered out from his bow, covering the two hundred yards in a count of one … two … three …

  The first of the draught-horses reared and screamed, immobilizing a team; the catapult's crew killed the thrashing animal with a poleax, cut it loose and dragged the rest of the team into motion again, ducking their heads and holding up shields as they pushed forward. Commendable courage; so was that of the crossbowmen off to their right, who stood and volleyed at the riders. An A-lister fell, and another collapsed limply across the withers of his horse. But arrows were falling in a continuous sleet on the catapults now as the A-listers dashed across their front from right to left, and the infantry right behind them were spearmen; the Bearkiller formation bent back into a moving oval of galloping horses, each horse-archer turning right to come around for another firing pass at the target.

  "And Stavarov pulled his cavalry too far back to countercharge us," Signe said.

  Havel noticed that the military apprentices—A-list understudies—were leaning forward, their ears practically flapping as they heard the leaders talking. Well, they were supposed to be learning …

  "Yeah, it's paper-scissors-rock," he said, making the three gestures with his right hand. "Now, young Piotr, from what the spies say and what Will Hutton did to him last year up by the Crossing Tavern, he would have just barreled straight up the road at us, taking the losses to get stuck in. The catapults couldn't have killed enough to stop them."

  "But charging straight in is all Piotr ever does," Signe pointed out.

  "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day," Havel pointed out. "Whereas Alexi thinks things through … yup!"

  Trumpets brayed among the Protector's forces. With a deep, uniform shout the block of spearmen rushed forward to shelter the catapults, shields up to form an overlapping shell. Arrows slammed into them, some standing quivering in the metal-faced plywood, tock-tock-tock; others punched through, wounding men even though their armor. But behind the shelter the crews of the catapults began to manhandle them around, frantically dragging away dead horses, driving the survivors out, wrestling the heavy steel frames and four-wheel bogies into position by sheer desperate effort.

  The Bearkillers' own horns sounded. The A-listers reined around; suddenly they were all galloping away from the shield-wall protecting the enemy catapults, turning in the saddle to shoot behind Parthian-style while they were in range. The spearmen kept their shields up; as soon as the cavalry had galloped out of archery distance the Bearkiller fieldpieces started lofting roundshot and javelins over their heads—now at the conveniently massed spearmen protecting the catapults and their crews …

  Metal smashed into metal. Some of the shot flew trailing smoke, and splashed into carpets of inextinguishable fire when they broke on shields. Men ran screaming when gobbets of the sticky flaming liquid ran under their armor, rolling and clawing at themselves as they burned to death; the rest of the spearmen gave back rapidly, not running but wanting to get out from under. Signe turned her head aside slightly, her lips tightening. She'd toughened up a great deal since the Change, but her husband had walked through the results of cluster-bomb strikes before his nineteenth birthday.

  Havel gave a long look and a nod, before he turned his head towards the center of the enemy formation. OK, our catapults cancel their catapults, he thought, as bolts and roundshot and fire began to fall around the Protector's machines.

  Their crews were struggling to respond, and as he watched, the first ragged volley came back at the weapons that were punishing them so. The Protector's artillerymen could throw heavier weights, but Havel's fieldpieces were protected by the earth berms. All that was to his advantage; shot could break up the infantry and open the way for lancers, and subtracting it from the overall mix favored the Bearkiller defense.

  Besides which, when didn't infantry wish the artillery would shoot at each other and leave everyone else alone? Now, what'll Alexi try next?

  Around the enemy center files of horsemen were coming forward, walking their mounts through the paths between blocks of infantry. The footmen cheered the knights and men-at-arms, beating spear on shield and fist on buckler, a harsh drumming, booming roar. The horsemen tossed their lances in the air, some of them making their mounts rear and caracole, but that didn't stop them from forming up in a four-deep formation a hundred lances wide. The double-headed eagle and the Lidless Eye came to the front, and the lancers shook their weapons and shouted to see it.

  "OK, now Alexis getting impatient too," he said. "Messenger: to Captain Sarducci. Concentrate on keeping the enemy catapults suppressed. Ignore the lancers unless they go for you, or you've got spare firepower or I command otherwise. Trumpets: formation stand to, and prepare to receive cavalry!"

  The brass instruments screeched. The Bearkiller foot responded as if the notes were playing directly on their nervous systems, the front rank of the missile troops lying down and bringing crossbows to the ready, the second rank kneeling and aiming over their heads. And in the center, the sixteen-foot shafts of the pikes bristled skyward with a massed, grunting huah! as they were taken in both hands and raised to present-arms height. Ahead the destriers took a single step forward almost in unison. The riders' lances dipped, the barded horses tossing their heads and the curled trumpets toning and dunting.

  Then an officer's voice among the Bearkiller infantry barked: "Pikepoints … down!"

  A quick bristling ripple as the long poles dropped, presenting a row of knife-edged blades four deep.

  "Prepare to receive cavalry!"

  The front rank went down on one knee, jamming the butts of their pikes into the sod and bracing their left boots against them to make them even steadier, slanting the great spears out into a savage line of steel at precisely chest-high on a horse. The two ranks behind them held theirs with both hands at waist height; the fourth held theirs overarm, head-high. Behind them the two ranks of glaives stood ready …

  Havel's head swiveled left and right
. Gonna have to risk it, he thought unhappily.

  "Captain Stevenson," he called to the commander of the block of polearms. "Countermarch your glaives out to either side. Back up the missile troops. I think their men-at-arms are going to overlap our pikes."

  The rearmost file of glaives hefted their weapons, faced left and trotted out to stand behind the crossbowmen there. The next did exactly the same, but to the right. Havel could see a few helmets turn and show faces among the pike-men, visibly unhappy at having the backing of those two extra ranks taken away.

  "Eyes front, Matthews!" one of the file-closers snarled. "If you want to look at something scary, watch the fucking horses coming at you, you quivering daisy!"

  "Steady, Bearkillers, steady," their officer said, his voice commendably calm.

  A messenger came galloping up behind the line, drawing up beside the bear's-head banners with a spurt of dirt from under her mount's hooves, teenage face alight with excitement as she saluted.

  "Lord Bear! Lord Eric requests permission to hit the enemy horse in the flank as they charge."

  "Not this time," Havel said, smiling grimly. What was it that Israeli general said? "It is better when you have to restrain the noble steed than prod the reluctant mule"? "The A-listers are to support the artillery and wait for the command."

  The Protector's trumpets screamed again, massed, like a chorus of metallic insects worshipping some alien god of war. The horsemen lowered their lances and began to advance at a walk, then a trot, then a canter. The thunder of the hooves grew, shaking the earth beneath their feet, the snap of pennants beneath it, shouted war cries, the glitter of steel and painted shields and plumes. Havel glanced along his lines, saw everything from bored calm to lips gripped tightly between teeth. He swung down from his horse and handed it to an aide, taking a glaive from another.

  "Sure look pretty, don't they?" he asked, his voice calm and amused, but pitched to carry. "They'll look even better going away. Hakkaa Paalle!"

  "Hakkaa Paalle! Hakkaa Paalle! Hakkaa Paalle!"

  The chant grew until it was a hoarse, crashing screech; the Bearkiller pike-men began to sway ever so slightly as they chanted, faces flushed and lips peeled back over teeth. Havel grinned to himself as he shouted with them.

  That was the purpose of battle cries; they drove out thought. The same thing happened in the audience at games back before the Change, but this deliberately induced hysteria had a lot more purpose behind it. Four hundred yards, he estimated. Three fifty. Three hundred— He raised the glaive and caught the trumpeters' eyes: that took a second, lost as they were in the roaring chorus.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sutterdown, Willamette Valley, Oregon

  March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9

  "Well, there it is, my lords," Conrad Renfrew said.

  He accepted a cup of hot coffee from a servant and inhaled the welcome scent that had been a haunting memory for so many years. Coffee was unimaginable luxury, available only to the Protector and a few great nobles even now that a square-rigger from Astoria was on the run to Hawaii.

  The command pavilion stood about a mile north of the Mackenzie town called Sutterdown, in open country out of catapult range, with good water from a creek running westward out of the hills. The cloth walls drawn up on the southern side gave the assembled officers a good view; the noise of two thousand troops pitching camp around the great tent came clear, the clink of shovels, hammers driving in pegs, the bawling of livestock and from the other chambers of the command tent the rattle of an abacus and the ca-ching! of a manual adding machine. They'd finally managed to duplicate those, and very useful they were—he didn't know how medieval commanders had managed, since most of them probably couldn't have counted past ten without taking off their hose and looking at their feet.

  The big table in the center held maps and papers; there was a buffet along one side laden with lunch, and some of the commanders were holding chicken legs or cheeseburgers or roast-beef sandwiches as they looked at the maps, or at their target.

  "And here we are," Renfrew went on after a sip of the coffee and a sigh of pleasure. "Anyone got any brilliant ideas?"

  Sutterdown was the closest thing the Mackenzies had to a city. Even by CY9 standards it wasn't much, less than two thousand people in normal times; there were a dozen towns in the Association's territory as big or bigger already. The walls were impressive, though, better than thirty feet high and, by report, nearly twenty thick, and the circuit was big enough to hold a lot more people in an emergency. They were studded at hundred-yard intervals with round towers half again as tall topped by conical roofs sheathed in green copper and shaped much like—appropriately—a witch's hat. A four-tower minifort guarded the gates at the quarters; the one on the south gave directly onto a bridge over the Sutter River, and the town as a whole was nearly contained within a U-shaped bend, giving the south and east and west a natural moat. A ditch across the north side completed the protection.

  The crenellations along the top of the walls had been covered over the last few days by prefabricated metal-faced hoardings of thick timber, like a continuous wooden shed with the roof sloping out; that protected the fighting platform atop the wall from missiles, and gave an overhang so that the defenders could drop things straight down on anyone climbing a scaling-ladder. Association forts had the same provision; he'd practiced assembling the hoardings during emergency drills at his own Castle Odell, the Renfrew stronghold in the Hood Valley. Evidently the architects here had been reading the same books the Portland engineers studied—Castle by Macaulay for starters.

  It looked more formidable to the naked eyeball than he'd thought it would be from the reports and sketches, and he was surprised the near anarchy of the Clan Mackenzie had managed to put so much labor into something with a long-term payoff. The bright white stucco on the town wall was different from anything he'd seen before, and so were the odd, curving designs of flowers and leaves painted on them. If you looked at them long enough you started to see faces peering out …

  It's not altogether like one of our castles, or one of our towns, though: there's no inner keep, he thought, freeing his eyes with a wrench. Though those two hills on the west side of town might serve the purpose …

  They were about a hundred feet above the general level of the town, or of the Sutter River that flowed along its southern edge. One of them was topped by some sort of temple or church or whatever the kilties called it, according to the intelligence briefings. He could see a bit of it, a round open structure with Douglas fir trunks smoothed and carved as pillars all around. A drift of smoke came from the center of the conical roof.

  Unfortunately the dark-robed Bishop Mateo could see it too, and it had set him off again. Nobody dared interrupt him. "There is the altar of Satan!" he said, pointing; the cleric was a slender brown-skinned man with burning black eyes. "It is a stink in the nostrils of God! You must destroy it!"

  There were nods all around the table. "Well, that's exactly what I'm going to try and do, Your Grace," Renfrew said politely.

  Does he talk like that all the time? he wondered. Then: I'm not afraid of Leo's men, he thought, slightly defensive. Then again, I'm not anxious to butt heads with them, either.

  He'd been an agnostic before the Change. Now he was an ostentatiously dutiful son of Mother Church, like anyone in the Protectorate's territories who wasn't a complete idiot, since the Lord Protector was too.

  Does Norman really mean it? some fraction of his mind wondered. Or is it just part of the pageantry to him? Or was his mother scared hy a copy of King Arthur and the Round Table while she was pregnant? Well, I'm not going to kick. I couldn't have put this show together myself.

  A fragment of poetry went through his mind, pseudo-Shakespeare:

  Lay on, MacDuff

  Lay on with the soup, and the Haggis and stuff;

  For though 'tis said you are our foe

  What side my bread's buttered on you bet I know!

  Sometimes he wondered how m
any were trimmers like himself, and how many had come to genuinely believe. More of the latter than the former, he suspected, and his own un-belief got sort of shaky sometimes these days. When people heard the same story all the time and had to act as if they accepted it, most just did accept it; maintaining private reservations was too much like hard mental work. And it did help the Protectorate run smoothly, and would be even more helpful in another generation, when his children were growing up to inherit what he'd built.

  But, oh, how I wish the damned priests would stick to their churches!

  The bishop fingered the steel crucifix that hung around his neck; His Holiness Leo disapproved of ostentation, save where ritual demanded it. Fortunately Mateo's gaze stayed locked on the Mackenzie settlement. As they watched, something flashed out from one of the towers, trailing smoke. It landed a quarter mile closer to them, near a knot of patrolling horsemen, and splashed flame near enough to make the cavalry scatter. When they rallied, it was further out.

  "Sir Richard?" Conrad asked calmly.

  Dick Furness had been a combat engineer in the National Guard before the Change and was in charge of the Association's siege train now; he was forty-two, the only other man in the tent besides Renfrew to have seen his fourth decade, with a sharp-nosed face and brown hair and glasses. He shrugged, making his mail hauberk rustle and clink, and pointed. Another globe of napalm followed the first just as he began to speak, and then two four-foot bolts like giant arrows. They went over the cavalry's heads, and made them canter off again, which was sensible. Those things could go through three horses in a row … lengthwise.

  "Well, as you can see, my lord Count, they've got lots of artillery, and it's well protected. Good reloading speed, too—must have hydraulic reservoirs in the towers. I'd say they probably bought the whole system from Corvallis, or the Bearkillers. Probably the Bearkillers, I recognize Ken Larsson's style … anyway, the wall's that Gallic construction, a frame of heavy timbers with rubble and concrete infill, and a layer of mortared stone on the outside and inside to cover the ends. Not as good as our ferroconcrete, but nearly."