Dies the Fire

by S. M. Stirling

  Aylward nodded. "No reason our militia couldn't work that way too," he said. "Easy enough for someone like me"—he grinned a sergeant's grin—"to go around checking that nobody's slacking off or playing silly buggers. Say ten to twenty families in each settlement, and a palisade like we're putting in at the Carson place. That would be enough to stand off a gang of bandits or Eaters long enough for help to gather."

  Sally had been quiet. Now she spoke up: "We could have the library and high school here, and an all-grades primary at each dun."

  "Hey, and we could call the septs after a totem animal," Andy Trethar said; he'd always liked shamanistic stuff like that. "You know, wolf, raven—"

  Juniper sat back with relief and let them go at it. Of course, I'll have to persuade people in general, and get their ideas, and …

  At least we're not fighting a war anymore.

  Chapter

  Twenty-eight

  "Confirm … enemy … position," Havel read, binoculars to his eyes.

  The Bearkiller column and Woburn's posse were down at the bottom of a swale. That cut visibility to a thousand yards in any direction, but it meant nobody could see them either, except from a height.

  A height like that of the hot-air balloon floating over the Bearkiller camp in Craigswood, for example; the three Bearkillers in the basket hanging two thousand feet above ground level had an excellent view. He could make out the semaphore signal quite clearly through the field glasses, and they'd be able to pick up his mirror-flash of light even more easily.

  "Damn, I wish I'd thought of that," Woburn muttered awkwardly. "We might not be in this mess, if we'd had a balloon."

  "Everyone tends to think engines when they think aircraft," Havel said. "I certainly did; but the Protector over in Portland didn't."

  Woburn rubbed his lantern jaw. "Sort of hard to think of Portland having much to do with our problems. These days, it seems a long ways off."

  "Believe it," Havel said grimly. "I doubt Iron Rod would have been more than a major nuisance without someone giving him help and ideas. Hell, the Protector gave me ideas, unintentionally."

  He looked at the balloon again. It had taken a bit of finding . but there were a surprising number of hot-air balloon enthusiasts in Idaho—had been, before the Change.

  It was still an hour before noon, and the sun wouldn't be getting into anyone's eyes for a couple of hours, no matter which way the fight turned.

  God, I hope this isn't too expensive when the butcher's bill is totaled up, he thought.

  Partly that was the simple desire to keep his people from harm; he'd selected every one, and a lot of them were friends by now, and all of them were his. Partly it was a desire to conserve the Bearkillers' capital assets.

  Condottieri, he thought. The word simply meant "contractor" in Renaissance Italian. That's what we've ended up as.

  It turned out that Pam and Rothman and Ken all knew a lot of stories about Renaissance Italy, and they were a lot less dull that what he remembered of high school history classes; if Woburn had heard some of them, he might have been more cautious about hiring his fighting done.

  Particularly the ones about condottieri leaders deciding they'd rather be Duke of Milan or something of that order. Havel intended to keep scrupulously to the terms, but how could the sheriff know that?

  On the other hand, Florence got taken over by a family of bankers, of all things, he thought with a taut grin. Now, there's a real gang of mercenary pirates for you.

  At least he had the consolation that he was fighting people who needed killing, on the whole.

  He leaned forward and slapped his big bay gelding affectionately on the neck; it tossed its head and snorted, shifting its weight from foot to foot, making its harness jingle and his armor rustle and clank.

  "Work to do, Gustav," he said. Then, louder, he turned in the saddle and called to his Bearkillers: "Time to do good, and earn our pay!"

  That brought a cheer; Signe grinned at him and tossed her helmeted head. She had an old-style cavalry trumpet slung from her saddlebow, a relic of the last Indian wars a century and more ago, salvaged from a museum up in the Nez Perce reservation.

  Damn, but I wish she weren 't here, he thought. Nothing to be done about that, though, except win this fight as quick as we can.

  His eyes made one last check of equipment, although he would have been astonished had anything been less than perfect. Also present, through unavoidable political necessity, were twenty of Woburn's posse members, which made him a little less than happy. They were equipped with anything that came to hand, and about half of them were pushing into middle age.

  Sixty-odd horsemen took up a lot of room. The strong musky-grassy smell of the horses and their sweat filled the hollow, and the scents of human sweat soaked into leather and cloth, of steel rings wiped down with canola oil, of fear and excitement, and of earth torn open by ironshod hooves.

  "Will, you get going on your part of it," Havel said.

  The horsemaster nodded and reined his mount around; rather more than half the Bearkillers followed him, and all Woburn's men except the sheriff himself.

  "Let's go, Gustav," Havel added to his mount, and gave the big gelding a leg signal; the horse broke into an obedient canter. A file of twenty followed him, and Woburn— but he didn't expect the sheriff to do much fighting. He pulled his bow from the case that slanted back from his left knee under the saddle flap and reached over his shoulder for an arrow, conscious of everyone doing likewise behind him … except Woburn, of course.

  "I'm really starting to think we can run this raiding party off," the local man said.

  "No!" Havel answered sharply, without looking around. "We are not going to chase them away. We're going to kill every last one of the filth, for starters."

  The horses crested the top of the hill without pausing; the land to the south was flatter, rolling so gently it would have seemed level without the wind ruffling waves through the knee-high wheat that covered it and showing the long low swellings. The hooves were a drumroll under the soughing breeze.

  "There!" Signe called, pointing southwest.

  There was a dark clot against the green, one that swiftly turned into a group of armed men on horseback. Twenty or so of them, all in scale-mail tunics and steel helmets; one of them even had bulls' horns on his, bad-movie-Viking style. With them were half a dozen captives, four women and two men, with their feet lashed into the stirrups of their horses and their hands tied behind their backs, and a biggish herd of cattle and horses being driven along. Many of the horses had bags of plunder thrown over their backs to make rough packsaddles.

  He could hear the outlaws' yells and whoops as they caught sight of the Bearkillers; one or two stayed to guard prisoners and plunder, but the rest hammered their heels into their mounts and thundered forward. Havel's eyes narrowed as the distance closed; the Devil Dogs were in no particular order, but they didn't appear to be shy of a fight. Their bellowing cries were full of blood-lust; and worse, of confidence.

  Not very good riders, he thought; none better than he'd been at the Change, most worse. Big men mostly, with beards spilling down their chests. Well-armed.

  They all had decent body armor, and they all had a crossbow slung like a rifle at their saddlbows. For the rest they carried swords—double-edged swords with long hilts, what they'd called a bastard sword in Europe in the old days—or axes ground down so they were light enough to be used single-handed. And they all carried shields slung over their backs, kite-shaped models bigger than the Bear-killer targe, and heavier too from the looks.

  "Let's give them their first surprise!" he shouted over his shoulder. "Signe, Shooting circle and At the gallop."

  She put the trumpet to her lips and sounded the calls, the bugle high and sweet in the warm still air. Havel dropped the knotted reins on his saddle horn and leaned forward, signaling his horse up to a gallop. Distance closed with shocking speed; he could see the leader of the Devil Dogs shouting and gesturing franticall
y to his men.

  Havel's lips skinned back from his teeth in a carnivore grin as the Devil Dogs began to pull up and dismount; they weren't going to fight on horseback, and he'd confirmed with Woburn that nobody else around here had tried it more than once or twice.

  Not that we're very good at it yet, he thought. But we have trained for it. And they're expecting us to get down to fight too.

  He waited until the distance closed further; one pre-Change military skill that still had value was being able to do a quick accurate assessment of how far away something was. The Devil Dogs had all gotten off their horses, and they were bending to span their crossbows—the weapons shot hard and straight at close range. They were expecting to catch his people dismounting and shoot them up before they could reply.

  "Yo!" he shouted, and turned his horse with balance and knees—skills Will and Luanne had taught them all.

  Gustav pivoted neatly, like a rodeo mount in a barrel race. The dozen riders behind him did likewise, at well-timed intervals; suddenly they were galloping from left to right across the line of the Devil Dogs' formation. Black soil flew up in divots; the horses' heads pounded up and down like pistons, and he felt a sensation of rushing speed no machine could quite match as the great muscles flexed and bunched between his legs.

  Havel clamped his thighs to his mount and raised his bow, drawing to the angle of his jaw with the chisel point slanting up at a thirty-five-degree angle. Horn and wood and sinew creaked as the string pulled the recurved stave into a smooth half-circle; he breathed out in a controlled hooosh as he pushed and pulled and twisted his torso to put the muscles of gut and back and shoulders into the effort.

  It wasn't just a matter of raw arm strength. You had to know how to apply it.

  He waited for the high point of the gallop and let the string fall off the balls of his fingers. Crack-whipppt! as the string lashed his steel-clad forearm and the arrow flicked out, blurring with speed. The bow surged against his left arm with the recoil; his right hand was already reaching back, plucking another shaft out of his quiver: knock, draw, loose—

  He had two in the air before the first one struck—struck and stood in the ground ten yards in front of the nearest Devil Dog.

  Congratulations, Genghis! he thought acidly.

  The next one banged off the curved surface of a helmet, making the bandit spin and then stagger; he felt a little better after that.

  And I'm not aiming at one man. I'm aiming at twenty, and their horses, all nicely bunched up.

  Behind him the other Bearkillers were shooting as well. He leaned to the right, and Gustav pivoted, turning. The others followed, and the line became a loose oval like a racetrack. The arrows had come as a complete surprise to the enemy; the problem was that not many of them had hit.

  A horse ran plunging across the wheatfields, with an arrow buried half its length in the beast's rump. A bandit was down on the ground, screaming shrill bubbling shrieks as he rolled about and clutched at a shaft that had slanted down through one cheek and out the side of his jaw, slicing his tongue and shattering half a dozen teeth as it went.

  Most of the Devil Dogs had dropped their crossbows and swung their shields around, holding them up against the sleet of steel-tipped wood.

  He saw two arrows strike one shield, and the man take a step backward as the points punched crack-crack through the sheet-metal covering and buried themselves in the plywood beneath. Then he was curving around again himself, his left side towards the enemy once more. Some of them were shooting; a crossbow belt went by a few feet ahead of Gustav's nose, with an unpleasant vwup! of cloven air. Another struck a horse, and it went down with a scream to lie thrashing; two more riders halted for an instant and bore the rider off to the remount string before they returned to the shooting circle.

  None of the bolts had struck a Bearkiller yet, which wasn't surprising, with moving targets that shot back.

  Havel smiled an unpleasant smile as he shot again, and again, and again, and then wheeled his horse around once more. The Devil Dog leader was trying to get more of his men out from behind their shields to return fire at the elusive riders, without much success.

  He was discovering some very nasty facts about being a stationary target; the ones that had let horse-archers grind infantry armies into dust from China to Poland before gunpowder came along.

  More useful hints from Will's books on cavalry.

  An arrow struck a Devil Dog, and the shaft sank halfway to its flight-feathers after it knocked a steel scale away spinning and twinkling in the sunlight. The man went down and writhed, clawing at the trampled wheat, trying to shriek as he coughed out bits of lung and gouts of blood.

  The fourth time he finished the circuit Havel found his quiver empty. He cased his bow and took the reins in his left hand again, cantering away to where Astrid waited, with Reuben Waters helping. Each was leading packhorses, and a saddled remount string to replace losses.

  The youngest Larsson turned and grabbed a bundle of arrows from the racks on the back of a packhorse.

  "Thirty-inchers, and when are you going to let me into the line, Lord Bear? I'm a better shot than you are!"

  "Thirty-inchers," Havel confirmed, bending so that she could untie the bundle and slide them loose into his quiver.

  He reined around: "And you can ride in the line when you can pull a fifty-pound bow twelve times a minute and do the assault course in a full-weight hauberk."

  My opposite number must be getting pretty desperate, Havel thought, as he trotted back towards the action.

  Once he realizes we can keep this up all day, whittle them down one by one no matter that we're lousy shots. If they scatter, we can bunch up and ride each one down separately. And any time now he's going to look west and see—

  A screaming shout went up from the Devil Dogs. A lot of them were pointing west. Several thousand yards in that direction were Will Hutton and the rest of the Bearkillers, with Woburn's men behind them. Neatly blocking the direct route to St. Hilda's and the Devil Dog base; as an added bonus the distance made it impossible to tell who was who, so they'd probably think that all the mounted men there were armored Bearkiller horse-archers.

  "Shouldn't get your attention so set on one thing that you forget to look around you," Havel called out to the enemy, grinning like a wolf. Then, louder: "Fall in here, out of crossbow range! Everyone make sure your quivers are full and your mounts sound!"

  The Bearkillers did, one of them swearing white-faced at a crossbow bolt standing buried deep in the cantle of his saddle, sunk through layers of leather and wood. Three inches closer, and it would have nailed his thigh to the saddle, or buried itself in his groin.

  Havel ignored that, after checking that it hadn't injured the horse. Instead he uncased his binoculars. The Devil Dogs were doing the only thing possible; the man in the pseudo-Viking helmet seemed to be in charge, and he was getting them mounted again, abandoning the prisoners and cattle and heading south of west, to loop around the blocking force and get back to their base. Havel stood in the stirrups and waved to Hutton; the second-in-command waved back, and began to trot his band towards the commander's.

  "What's horns-on-head trying to do, Mike?" Signe asked, jerking her head after the departing enemy.

  Havel cased the binoculars again and took a sip from his canteen—not too much, since taking a leak while wearing the armor required contortions.

  "The one with a crap-brown beard? He's trying to disengage," he said. "He's still not thinking in terms of mounted combat. If he only had Woburn's men to worry about he'd be home free. All they could do was follow him until he got back to St. Hilda's. Mounted infantry can't force each other to fight, because the other side can just trot off. But we can make him fight, because we don't have to stop and get off our horses to shoot."

  "Not just a rat, but a stupid rat," Signe said. Her expression was grimmer than his, if anything. "I hope those farmers, the Clarkes, can watch from wherever they are."

  "What goes arou
nd, comes around," Havel replied, nodding. "Sound: pursuit at the canter. Let's go!"

  The Devil Dogs were galloping off, but they couldn't keep that up for long—not without more remounts than they had along. Carrying a heavy man in armor was hard work for a horse, the more so if he rode badly. Havel set a loping pace, letting the enemy draw ahead. Any chase was going to be from behind, here; the land was open and the Devil Dogs had been cutting fences all over the place precisely so they could move without running up against one.

  Don't want to catch up to them too soon anyway, he thought. Not until Will rejoins. Let brown-beard-horns-on-head relax in his illusions for a while.

  Then the Devil Dogs stopped, milled around, turned further south; they had to, if they wanted to keep from being caught between the two Bearkiller forces. Havel gave Will a high thumbs-up sign, and got a wave in return.

  So far, so good. We've cut them off from home. Now for the hard part.

  The muffled thunder of hooves seemed to drum inside his head and chest, beating like his heart. Even forty or fifty horsemen gave you a surprising sense of power, of irresistible momentum, as if so many hooves and so many tons of muscle and bone could ride down anything.

  This is why so many brave idiots were in the cavalry, he thought.

  He looked around carefully—the helmet and neck guard cut down on your peripheral vision—and waved a hand in summons. Woburn turned his horse until he was cantering knee-to-knee with the Bearkiller leader.

  "Slick!" he said, grinning. "I dropped off a couple of men to look after the prisoners we got back—and all that stock."

  "Thanks," Havel replied—by the terms of the contract, most of it went to his folk.

  To himself. Slick? We shot three hundred-odd arrows at them and knocked out three men and one horse!