A Meeting At Corvallis

by S. M. Stirling

  "How many? How close you get?"

  "I got within long bowshot for better than ten minutes, and I had some of my boys over the road on the north for a while until the cora-boys ran them out. Nine hundred kilties more or less, my lord—that's the archers, and they're right along the road here, past these old school buildings. Another hundred, hundred and fifty with axes and spears in back of them, east of the road. Then the cora-boys on their right, north, about four hundred or maybe a little less now."

  Emiliano looked at the map, then up to turn it into real fields and trees, then down again. "OK, I think they made a mistake," he said. "They get their peckers up after they take Piotr and underestimate us."

  Jabar rumbled deep in his massive chest. "They got hills back of them."

  "Yeah, but they're low and open. You gotta go, por Dios, ten miles east of there before you hit heavy forest. That right?"

  The scout nodded. "I've ridden all the way to Missouri Ridge and beyond since we got here, my lord. It's five miles to the edge of cultivation and then another four, five to what I'd call real cover that would stop cavalry."

  "There's no fucking road heading right back east from there, either," Emiliano said. "So they can't bike away from us. They fight us straight up, they got nowhere to run."

  "Could be more of them," Jabar said. "That's how they got Piotr's ass in a crack, my lord. Suckered him into thinking they weren't as many as they really were."

  "No, a thousand, maybe a little less or more, is all they got. My lord the Count, he's seen at least that many in Sutterdown and they only got two thousand five hundred total when they call out everyone for field service, tops. A thousand here, a thousand there, that just don't leave no more. These pandilleros, they're the First Levy, their best, but it's all they got."

  Jabar looked over his shoulder, westward towards Mount Angel. "We don't have enough back at the base camp to stop a breakout."

  "Yeah, but we can see troops coming down that switchback into town. We can't stop them, but we can sure see them. That'll take a while and we'd get the message. The monks aren't going to come out in the open where our cavalry can get at them."

  Emiliano's own finger moved on the map. "We'll keep going east until we're just north of them, here." That was about another three miles. "Then we deploy facing south, cavalry on the left, stickers and shooters on the right, and move straight down at them." His finger slashed across the page.

  "That means we've got this big orchard on our right and this other one on our left, with those woods along the creek," Jabar said. "Like a funnel pouring us at them."

  Emiliano shrugged. "If we try to get fancy, they'll just fuck off again and leave us holding our dicks, maybe get behind us and get on our supply lines, maybe even raid our manors—they've done that before. We got the numbers, and we got the lancers, and even with those orchards and shit we got enough room there to get everyone into the fight. If they had a line of spearmen to hold off the knights, it'd be different, but they don't. We got eight hundred foot and five hundred heavy horse with us here. Let's use 'em."

  * * * *

  Boom. Boom. Boom-boom-boom-boom …

  The hammer of the huge Lambegs massed behind them was soul-shattering, which had been precisely the intent of her ancestors, when they made them echo over moors and down the glens; to break the heart of an enemy and then charge home with claymore and Lochaber ax to break his head. Juniper Mackenzie let them echo in hers, until they were like the beating of her own heart; even the green-and-silver silk fabric of the Clan's flag shivered in rhythm with the sound, like the tympanum of an ear.

  The bagpipes skirled beneath and around the huge sound, "MacNeil's Kin," jaunty and jeering and full of a swaggering threat as the pipers paced and turned along the road before the line of the Clan's warriors. Here and there a few of the younger fighters couldn't wait standing still, and began to do an impromptu war dance of their own, left hands on hips and bows aloft as their feet stamped and flashed, screeching out the ritual cries of their totems, hawk screech, dragon roar, wolf howl. The music spoke to something in her as well, something that bristled the fur along her spine and the fox red mane on her head, and peeled lips back from teeth.

  Nigel Loring chuckled, squinting beneath the raised visor of his sallet; she laughed at the same instant.

  "What's the joke, my love?" Juniper asked; you could speak privately in this din.

  He leaned over. "That this must have been what Scotland sounded like to a great many of my ancestors, riding north to Bannockburn or Dupplin Moss or Flodden," Nigel said.

  "You're such a fine human being that sometimes I forget you're a Sassenach, sure," Juniper replied, restraining a nervous impulse to check the arrows in her quiver one more time.

  "You're only half Irish, and no more Scottish than I am."

  "Scots on my father's side."

  "And German, French-Canadian, Swiss, Cherokee … even English, from what you've said."

  "I try to remember that they're human beings too, sure."

  "And what was our good Chief laughing at?"

  She nodded towards the leaping figures and their painted, snarling faces. "That if the Change hadn't happened, they'd be thinking about the senior prom, or what courses to take next semester, or a new fad diet to shed a few pounds, and watching TV ads for mouthwash and personal computers. That they'd be entirely different people, not even looking very similar." A deep breath. "Will you stand with the axmen and spears again this time?"

  "I'll stay with you, if you please, my … Lady Juniper."

  "You're a romantic at heart, my darling Englishman," she said softly.

  "I'm repellently practical," he said stoutly. "It's just that my exiled existence would have little point without you, my dear."

  She smiled and touched the cool braided gold and silver of the torque, now stretched a little to fit around the chain-mail collar of her arming doublet. The silver moon on the brow of her helmet reflected the gray of the sky as she turned to look northeast. Open fields stretched beyond the four-lane highway up to the road where the enemy would come. Off to their right were a few of the CORA riders, with the whole of their reserve horse-herd.

  "Nonsense," she said crisply, with a twinkle in her green eyes. "We're not a boy and girl, Nigel. We're middle-aged, and we have grown sons and daughters and soon we'll have grandchildren to see to as well. I love you well and I'd grieve all my life if you died, but I would go on living, and do my best to find joy and work in it. So would you."

  He blinked at her, then reached up a steel-clad finger to brush his mustache, laughing softly. "Perhaps I am an incorrigible romantic. My dear, you never cease to amaze me. And that, I think, will make life together very enjoyable indeed."

  She nodded; the little exchange had helped her disperse the last knot in her stomach, leaving her grounded and centered for what must come. They stood by the banner, at the center of the Mackenzie formation. That stood along the southeast side of the old Cascade Highway, strung out behind the shallow roadside ditch and a post-and-board fence in a field of rippling blue-green winter wheat, waiting patiently in their three-deep staggered harrow formation. Even then she felt a pang of regret at trampling someone's crop; it would have been a good one, the stems thick and stiff and close-placed, already well over ankle-high four months before the harvest. Trampled, it smelled sweet, like grass cut for haying, but with a strong mealy undertone, mixing with the damp earth beneath.

  A gesture to the signaler, and the wild music died away into a ringing silence. She took a deep breath and shouted: "Plant the swine-feathers!"

  She turned to look as the order was relayed to either side of her. There were a few whoops and yips from the grinning, gaudy-painted faces of her clansfolk; these of the First Levy were mostly young men and women, few past their mid-twenties, and they could appreciate Eilir's idea—the more so since they were her generation, and eager to show what they could do. Each reached back into a leather bag slung beside their quiver, on the op
posite side from the loops that held their bows. Each brought out two poles bound together with twine; one was like a shovel with a narrow, flat blade and a yard-long handle, the other like a short spear of the same length. Each stubby pole had a steel collar and locking device on its rear, where the handle or butt-cap would usually be.

  Shovel and spear fitted together with a push and twist, a click and snick! and suddenly every archer held a seven-foot length of ashwood with a spade on one end and a knife-edged spearhead on the other. They turned in place and rammed the shovel blades into the dirt, stamping them home with the heels of their boots as if they were digging a ditch. Then each turned back, but now they stood amid a forest of long spears, pointing forward in a bristling block a thousand yards long and three deep, and each was slanted forward with the point a bit above chest-high on a man … or precisely chest-high on a horse. The whole process had taken barely twenty seconds.

  Sam Aylward came trotting up the road, inspecting it from the front. "Lady," he said, with a quick nod. "It certainly looks bloody frightening."

  "We already knew that, Sam," she said. "We'll just have to see if it works, won't we?"

  The swine-feathers weren't a line of spearmen or a pike-hedge. They weren't much impediment at all to men on foot. Experiment had shown that a horse could get through them too … if it slowed down, and chose its way at a careful walking pace, and didn't have anything to spook or frighten it out of what limited concentration the little herbivore minds could muster.

  Aylward looked at her. She nodded, and he signed to the signaler. The low dunting snarl of the cow-horn trumpet—huu, huu, huuuuuu. Helpers were running forward, setting out bundles of spare arrows in the ground behind the swine-feathers, pushing them down until the points stood in the dirt deep enough to support the shafts, then undoing the slipknots. The archers trotted forward, vaulting the board fence, then across the pavement and over the fence on the other side and into the pasture there. On their left was a school—built before the Change, but still in use, though she could see from the signs that it had a different name from the one on the maps, Queen of Angels rather than Butte Creek.

  Huuuuuuu—hu-hu!

  The horn droned and blatted, and they halted as one, still in the harrow formation; the helpers rushed forward behind them, hurrying to get three or four bundles of arrows within reach of every string hand.

  She looked northward. A column appeared on the road there; not the enemy, but two-score riders led by the tree-and-stars banner of the Dunedain. They peeled off and galloped over the half mile of open pasture towards the Macken-zies and their friends; midway Astrid and Alleyne turned towards the CORA position with most of the Rangers, and Eilir and John Hordle led the rest to the Clan's banner. Juniper checked anxiously; neither was hurt, though both were splashed with mud. Her daughter gave her a wink and a thumbs-up gesture.

  "Brown's following fast," Hordle said, and Eilir nodded. "The enemy's behind them."

  "How many?" Juniper said.

  "Twelve, thirteen 'undred, Lady."

  About our numbers, she thought.

  The big man went on: "Eight hundred foot, five hundred lancers, and some odds-and-sods of scouts. Not many of the mercenaries; they had a bellyful from Brown and his CORA cowboys."

  Her daughter and her daughter's lover dismounted, handing their reins to a teenage helper who led their mounts to the rear. Both drew their bows from the loops with matter-of-fact readiness, looking around for spare shafts to fill their quivers and helping each other with the chore—Hordle had to bend for Eilir, a tall woman, to slide handfuls into his. Juniper sipped a little from her canteen—not much, she wasn't shy but peeing on a battlefield was still awkward— as she watched Rancher Brown and his men come galloping down the road, frantic to get to their remounts—the horses looked blown. And that meant …

  Terrible as an army with banners, she thought, as the enemy followed them into sight. Christian, but a telling phrase nonetheless.

  The Protectorate force was only equal to her own, but it seemed like an endless snake of dull-gleaming metal and spearpoints as it came eastward along the road, the men and beasts and bicycles toy-tiny with distance. When she focused her binoculars on them they leapt closer—dark eyes in a dark face above a mouth-covering mail coif, vanishing for a second as the helmet was brought up in both mail-gauntleted hands and adjusted. Banners and pennants, and a priest and acolytes pacing before men who knelt and crossed themselves, while incense and holy water went forth.

  She could not hear the words under the distant grumble of feet and hooves, but she knew them: Fight the Holy War .. . Heaven awaits warriors who fall in His service … smite the Satan-worshippers …

  Her people had had their own rituals. Juniper's lips tightened as she lowered the glasses; war of any sort was bad enough, but Holy War wasn't something she liked at all. Sir Nigel and Aylward were talking in low tones—probably nobody else but the banner-bearer could hear them under the racket as the pipes and drums greeted the enemy.

  "They should have sent more infantry," her First Armsman said. "If they had enough bicycles for them. Got a fair well-balanced force but they're not what you'd call smooth at using it proper. Another couple of hundred infantry and they could pin us for a flank attack by the cavalry. As it is, I'd say they'll have to come straight at us."

  "They'll not have met much serious opposition until now," Nigel said judiciously. "Learning by doing. Better next time, I would expect."

  Does there have to be a next time? some part of Juniper's heart cried with anguish.

  She said nothing aloud; the polite looks from the two lifelong warriors would be too hard to bear, especially when she knew they were right.

  I love Nigel like my life, and Sam like a brother, but the way they discuss chopping people up as if it was turnips still makes me feel … odd.

  "Surprised they've managed to train so many men-at-arms," Nigel went on. "That takes serious application."

  "That's those Society buggers, sir. They were odd before the Change and afterwards the ones who stayed with Arminger were bloody barking mad."

  "A functional madness … Ah, they're shifting … cavalry forward to cover the infantry deployment, then to their left opposite our friends from the CORA on our right. Crossbows and spears in mixed blocks … underestimating how badly we can outshoot them, I daresay. They'll send the infantry forward to develop our position, and punch their lancers at Rancher Brown and his fellows to try and uncover our right. A good thing they didn't bring any of their field artillery."

  "They keep that for siege operations when they can, sir."

  The CORA leaders and their retainer-cowboys had finished slapping their gear on fresh mounts; they crowded forward over the road northward, except for a trickle of wounded from the earlier action who moved to the rear, towards the healers.

  Juniper took three deep breaths, letting each out with a long, slow hiss, feeling the strength of Earth flow up her lungs to calm her heart with its unmoved solidity, feeling Air add its light quickness to the surging strength of Water in her sea-salt veins, and the thought of Fire reaching out across the field.

  Sam Aylward rinsed out his mouth, spat, returned his canteen to his waist and put an arrow to his bow. "Sir Nigel, Lady, we've a roit proper job of work to do 'ere today."

  Despite the gathering tension she smiled to herself. Sam might be Earth itself. And Nigel is Fire … does that make me an airy wet blanket?

  Curled trumpets screamed in the enemy ranks.

  * * * *

  Lord Emiliano scanned the field ahead. Suddenly he noticed small enemy parties setting out several strings of six-foot posts, planted in staggered rows out from where the banner of moon and horns stood in the field this side of the road. They were hard to see, because the side turned towards him was painted green-brown, and far too fragile to be any hindrance to men on foot or horseback. They puzzled him for a moment, until he realized they were ranging-marks, planted precisely fifty yards apart, probably
with the other side whitewashed for better visibility. His lips tightened; it was a gesture of methodical, thoughtful ferocity more frightening than the screaming painted faces and the inhuman throbbing of the drums or the snarling drone of the pipes. And he would have to send his men into that killing field.

  Sufiaccent, it will cost us, he thought. Worth it. We break this force, they're finished; we get the land, and nobody bothers us no more. If I capture their witch-bitch alive, the Lord Protector will make me a duke, maybe marry his daughter to my Gustavo!

  "Let the foot advance!" he shouted. "Lord Jabar, take half the lancer conrois at the cora-boys."

  * * * *

  Juniper Mackenzie drew and loosed, drew and loosed, despite the burning pain in hands and arms and shoulders. The enemy spearmen were only thirty yards away now and coming on crabwise, crouched behind their big shields until only their feet and the narrowest slit under the helmet brim showed; the men behind them held their shields overhead. Arrows flickered out in waves over the distance between them and the Mackenzies; nine hundred bows, three hundred arrows a second, turning the shields into bristling porcupine shapes and the ground into a pelt like some gigantic stiff-haired, gray-furred dog. The sound of the bodkins striking was like surf on a gravel beach, or heavy hail on a tin roof, a hard, endless tocktocktocktocktock, louder than the shouts and screams. Many bounced off helmets with a ringing sound like a ball-peen hammer; many others rattled off chain mail and flipped away.

  Others bit, and more and more, opening gaps in the wall of shields as men fell, shrieking and tearing at the iron in their flesh, or moaning and twitching, or dropping limp. The spearmen closed the holes, stepping in from the next ranks. As the distance closed, many shafts punched right through the tough leather and plywood of the shields, stripping their feathers off as they drilled into arms and faces. The air stank of damp sweat, and the iron-sea-salt odor of blood, turning soil to mud as hundreds of men bled out their lives. And still the wall walked, like a wounded bear lumbering forward with blood and slaver dripping from its teeth …