“They’ll be visible just beyond that clump of eucalyptus around the ruined farmhouse, sire. The ones under attack are making a stand on a slight rise—it’s open to the east, flanked by woods, and at the west end there are some low snags of brick wall they’re using, I’d say they were making for the mountains and that was as far as they got before the others caught them. There’s about thirty or forty of them left. Three times that of the attackers. Four-score dead and wounded on both sides. They’re serious about this, no prisoners I could see. Nobody else within an hour’s walk unless they’re lying on their backs in the swamp breathing through reeds.”
“How much time?” the High King asked.
He’s thinking of Oak, Órlaith knew. With his Dun Barstow levy, we’d have the numbers on our side.
“None. The next rush will overrun them, sire,” Hellman said stolidly.
“What’s the ground like, just there?”
“Grass, mostly, leadin’ up to the ruins. Looks like it was open grazing land or what did they call it, a lawn, and the snags of walls are long enough to have been a knight’s manor or a fair-sized Rancher’s home-place, but nothing much above waist-high now. None of these damned vine-stumps between those two tongues of woodland, and they’ve trampled it pretty flat. It looks solid, I’d take it at a gallop. Even on them big beasts you’re riding.”
“Gear?”
“Mixed. The foreigners on the hill all have pretty good armor and what looked like longbows and curved swords like the Kyklos use. They’re in dense formation around a banner but I couldn’t see what was on it. The Haida, the usual light gear. Looks like the strangers with them have mail, mostly; and they all have helmets. Pole arms and recurve bows, chopping swords. Some shields. They’re in fair order but it’s no Bearkiller phalanx.”
The High King blew out a breath. “Hasty approach, then.” He cocked an eye at their surroundings. “Not dry enough for much dust, they may not spot us until we’re upon them. The which would be a good thing.”
He thought for a moment, right hand caressing the pommel of the Sword, then went on calmly: “They’ll break for their ships if they can when they’re beaten . . . you lead in on my signal, then extend our flank to the left, Captain Hellman. Block them when they run, we’ll have none leaving to alert others who may be about. We can snap up their ships afterwards. Sir Aleaume, we’ll let the light horse and the Archers soften them a little, and then give them the lance when they’re on the back foot. Edain, deploy on either side of the men-at-arms, riddle them, then follow us in when we charge.”
Edain grunted. “Where’s that battery of field catapults when you need them?” he said.
Rudi grinned. “Why not wish for that band of McClintocks we were offered when we guested at their Chief’s hall south of Ashland? Likely lads and lasses they looked, if a bit . . . rambunctious and independent, as you might say.”
“Or a pack of drunken fookin’ savages . . . as you might say. Covered in tattoos, as well. But I wish we had them, Chief, that I do.”
High King Artos heeled his horse a little forward and turned as he stood in the stirrups for a second, speaking to carry:
“Strangers have come with weapons in hand to make war on Montival’s land. It’s the King’s work to ward his folk from such. Are you with me, brothers and sisters?”
“Artos and Montival!”
Órlaith found herself shouting as loud as the rest, and echoing the growl within the cry. Her father raised a hand, and silence fell.
“All right, let’s be about it. Hellman, move out. Edain, follow at fifty yards.”
The light cavalry reined about. Edain wet a finger and held it up, then called to his command.
“The wind will be in our teeth and a little from the left, but not too bad. Remember you’ll lose ten paces range and correct for drift. We’ll start dropping shafts on their heads at ten-score and fifty paces and advance with walking fire; use your bodkins first and we’ll clear a path for the lobsters. They need it, the puir darlin’s.”
Many of the High King’s Archers grinned, and some of the men-at-arms scowled. Lobster was Mackenzie slang for the plate-armored heavy cavalry of the Association, and not a compliment.
Edain went on: “Shoot fast and listen for the word. Take surrenders if they’re offered at the last but don’t take any risks about it. Now follow me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
County of Napa, Crown Province of Westria
(Formerly California)
High Kingdom of Montival
(Formerly western North America)
April 29th, Change Year 46/2044 AD
The High King’s force slid south. Time seemed to pass with shocking speed for Órlaith though she was achingly conscious of every second; she made herself let her shield drop a little so the guige-strap could take its fifteen-pound weight and keep that arm limber for when she needed to move it swiftly. She could see a plume of smoke now from ahead and to the left, dirty-brown wisps rising and blowing towards them; that must be the burning ship the scout had mentioned.
“I wonder why it is that folk always set things on fire during a fight?” her father mused calmly. “Because they do, so. Whether there’s a reason or not. I’ve seen horizons afire from one edge to the other, rick and cot and tree, when armies passed through.”
Then they were past the last roll of land—even what looked like flat terrain could be deceptive that way—and the clamor of voices and a hard banging clatter came on the wind. She could see the strangers as they turned west, a cluster of tiny figures at the end of a long alley of trampled tall grass no more than a bowshot across. A chant was building amid a rhythmic clash of wood and metal, probably the attackers nerving themselves for another rush . . . though she couldn’t be sure.
It’s confusing, she thought. Well, thank the Crone and the Keeper-of-Laws I’m not in charge. Twenty minutes ago all I was looking forward to was a Beltane feast at Dun Barstow and findin’ out what roast ostrich tastes like!
Órlaith thrust her right hand out.
“Lance!”
The squire who’d armed her father pushed the lance into her palm. She closed her hand around the ashwood of the grip below the dish-shaped guard, the hide binding rough even through the leather palm of her steel gauntlet, resting the butt on her thigh with a click of metal on metal. The sound and the feel of the tapering twelve-foot shaft were familiar, but everything was strange, as if she were seeing the world clear yet distant through a sheet of salvaged glass.
“Noisy bastards,” Heuradys said quietly to her side, as Toad tossed his head and champed at his bit until foam drooled from his jaws. “But this is good ground for a knight’s battle. Very good. Auntie Tiph always said picking the right ground was half way to winning.”
Her father made another gesture with his left hand and called: “Now, Hellman.”
The horse-archers all dropped their knotted reins on their horses’ necks, reached over their shoulder for a shaft and leaned forward. Their mounts rocked up to a canter and then a gallop, abruptly shrinking away forward. Another shout of Artos and Montival! went up from them, and then a chorus of yelping, yipping cries, like mad coyotes or files on metal or both.
The High King hadn’t taken his lance yet, and used that hand to raise binoculars to his eyes. He barked a laugh.
“Da?” she said, startled.
“They’re just now noticing us. There’s a Haida chief in a sealskin jacket sewn with iron rings running up and down shouting at them to look to their rear . . . yes, and kicking their backsides too, by way of getting their attention.”
Even Sir Aleaume, who was a bit stiff, chuckled at that.
“So sorry, are we interrupting something private and intimate?” Heuradys added, and there were more harsh barks of amusement.
They were closer now, close enough to see the enemy formation writhe and shake as the first flight of arrows from the horse-archers slashed into them, just as they tried to turn their attention to the rear
. The light horsemen rose in their stirrups and went into a fast nock-draw-loose rhythm as they charged.
The war cries from the strangers were suddenly interspersed with shrieks of raw pain as arrows driven by the springy horn-and-sinew bows slammed down out of the sky; and the beleaguered group in the ruins rose and started shooting at their foemen again too. The horse-archers broke to the right at fifty yards from the enemy front—you could only aim ahead, behind and to the left from horseback—and raced down their ranks, loosing with flat aimed shots at close range in a ripple that emptied their quivers. Arrows came back at them, but few and hasty; then they were turning away, twisting in the saddle to shoot a last shaft or two behind them. They thundered by the rest of the Montivallan party to the right, whooping triumph and waving their bows in the air, looping around to refill from the packhorses led by the varlets.
“Nicely done, almost like a drill,” her father said judiciously. “Hellman knows his business.” A little louder: “When you think the range is right, Bow-Captain.”
Another dozen paces, and Edain’s voice cracked out: “Draw!”
His command halted and the yew staves bent, the Archers sinking into the wide-braced, whole-body, arse-down style that the Clan’s longbowmen practiced from the age of six, what they called drawing in the bow. The points of the bodkins glittered as they rose to a forty-five-degree angle, and the drawing-hands went back until they were behind the angle of the jaw. Behind the Archers their piper cut loose with the keening menace of the “Ravens Pibroch”; bringing along a battery of Lambeg drums would have been excessive with less than a tenth of the guard-regiment here, but you wouldn’t find forty Mackenzies without at least one set of bagpipes.
Edain’s voice punched through the savage wail of the píob mhór:
“Let the gray geese fly! Wholly together—shoot!”
There were twice twenty and one of the High King’s Archers here, counting their commander. That wasn’t enough longbows to generate the sort of sky-darkening arrowstorm that had smashed armies on the battlefields of the Prophet’s War. Though the target was a lot smaller too, if nicely packed, and these were picked experts who could loose a shaft every three or four seconds and put it exactly where they wished. Forty scythed down into the foreigners in the first volley, then a flickering stream as each bowman walked four paces, shot, walked, shot . . .
Órlaith swallowed; she was close enough now to see men screaming and staggering with an arrow through the face or writhing on the ground trying to pull out one that had punched through armor into chest or belly or groin, or just lying still with their eyes open wide. With the wind in her face she thought she could smell that tang of salt and iron too, like being in a garth in the autumn at pig-slaughtering time . . . except that there was no one standing by with a bucket of oatmeal to catch the blood for sausages.
When her father spoke his voice had the flat judiciousness of a landsman looking at a yellow field of grain he’d plowed and sown and tended, rubbing a handful of ripe ears between his hands before tasting the kernels and nodding satisfaction that it was time to send in the reapers.
“We surprised them right enough. Now they’re dung for our pitchforks, the careless bastards. Let’s not let them get their balance back.”
Even with her nerves thrumming-taut Órlaith shivered a little. Her father was a gentle and forbearing man, slow to anger and quick to laugh and endlessly patient in composing the quarrels of which Montival’s wildly varied peoples had an abundance.
One of her earliest memories was clinging to his back with a tiny fallen bird in her free hand as they climbed a tree to put it back in the nest. He would make a three weeks’ ride in the dead of winter to be sure of the facts in an appeal to the Crown’s justice, when a death sentence was at stake. This was a side of him she hadn’t seen much of before, and suddenly the tales of the man who’d broken the Prophet’s hordes and forged a kingdom took on a new light.
It had been a sword that the Lady had given him on the magic isle, after all.
“Sir Aleaume!” he said crisply, as he extended his hand for his lance and a squire leaned forward to fill it. “Advance to contact!”
The baron’s son nodded to his signaler. That young man raised the long Portlander trumpet slung across his body and put the mouthpiece to his lips.
The men-at-arms knocked down their visors with the edge of their shields as he raised the oliphant. Órlaith did the same; darkness fell with a click as the metal snapped into its catch, and the world shrank to a long narrow slit of brightness, like a painting or a tapestry. Her father’s visor and hers were both drawn down to points at chin level, suggesting a beak: his was scored and inlaid with black niello like his helm, echoing the feathers of the Raven that was his sept totem. The markings on hers were threads of pure burnished gold, for the great hunting eagle that had come to her on her spirit-quest. Something of that raptor’s intensity seemed to fill her, as if she were a vessel of movement and focus stooping from a great height.
“Chevaliers, haro!” Aleaume shouted. “For Artos and Montival . . . à l’outrance, charge!”
The silver scream of the oliphant echoed the command, like a white flash in the mind. Their coursers were as well trained as the men, and scarcely needed rein or spur or even the riders’ shift of balance. The dozen armored men-at-arms spread out into a close-spaced line and their horses moved up the pace. Walk . . . trot . . . a long rocking canter . . . and the pennants began to snap and flutter in the speed of their hoof-drumming rush.
They passed where the archers had halted in easy range of the enemy, a score on either side; the arrows were still going by overhead, focused now on the spot where the lanceheads would go home. Apparently the foemen knew something about receiving a cavalry charge, for they were trying to pack together and present a hedge of points to the horses; trying and failing, falling or throwing up shields to stop the rain of gray-feathered cloth-yard shafts.
Closer, a hundred yards, and then the trumpet shrieked again for the gallop—a close-held controlled hand-gallop, not the wild dash that would scatter them like hailstones on a roof. Her instructors had hammered home that the shock of a charge depended on all the lances striking at the same moment. Her father’s lance came down, and she couched her own; the rest followed in a ripple, the black-gold-silver of Heuradys’ pennant rattling and cracking a yard to the right and twelve inches behind her own.
The foot-long blades of the heads pointed down at breast-height on a standing man, wavering only a little as the hooves pounded and the horses’ heads pumped up and down. She raised her left fist to just below her chin, and that put the curved upper rim of her shield right below the level of her eyes.
It didn’t feel heavy now, just comfortingly solid. Arrows shot by the men facing them went by with a nasty whpppt sound, one glanced with a tick against the side of her helmet like a quick rap with a hammer, and then three smashed into the shield crack-crack-crack, punching through the thin sheet-steel facing and into the bullhide and plywood beneath.
Someone is trying to kill me! went through her mind.
She knew it was absurd even as she thought it, but that didn’t remove the sense of indignation, and it carried the faint memory of a scolding and swat on the bottom she’d gotten when she was six and pointed a half-drawn bow at someone.
The impact of the arrows hammered against her, but the grip of the high-cantled war saddle kept her firm and she braced her legs in the long stirrups. What was about to happen would be much worse. Hitting things at speed with a lance she knew about.
Pick your man, a harsh remembered voice spoke at the back of her mind. Pick him the moment you couch the lance and your horse goes up to the gallop.
It had been an old knight from County Molalla, with a wrinkled brown face like a scar-map of campaigns and lumpy with ancient badly healed bone-breaks. He lectured the young squires in his charge with the combination of vehemence and boredom used for vital truths told a thousand times, and he’d spared none
of them an iota for birth or rank or sex:
You can’t change your mind once you’re committed and you get only one chance with a lance. Don’t waste it.
A mailed figure ahead of her with a spike atop a conical helmet that spread in a lobster-tail fan over his neck was waving his square-tipped blade and screaming a war cry that sounded something like jew-che as he tried to rally his men. She let the point dip towards him; a touch of the rein to neck and the alignment of the lance itself brought the last ounce of effort from Dancer. The man snarled with his eyes wide and swept the sword back, suddenly close enough to see a mole beside his mouth—
Thud!
Impact, massive and somehow soft and heavy at the same time, wrenching savagely at her arm and shoulder and slamming her lower torso against the curved cantle of the saddle. Near two thousand pounds of horse and armored rider moving fast, all packed behind the hard steel point. You could knock yourself head over heels off the horse if you did it wrong, but she came back upright as the lance broke across and she made her hand unclench and toss away the stub. The man in the pointed helm was down, with the lancehead driven right through his body and three feet of the shaft standing out of his chest.
He’s dead, she thought suddenly. I killed him. Then her father’s voice: Don’t hesitate.
Her hand pulled the war hammer loose from the straps at her saddlebow, a yard of steel shaft with a serrated head on one side and a thick curved spike on the other. A Haida warrior with an orca painted on his round shield tried to come in stooping low and hack at the horse’s legs. Dancer came up in a perfect running levade and lashed out with both forehooves. Her body flexed again, and her teeth went click as the horse stamped on over the prostrate body.
She blocked a spearhead with the point of her shield and lashed down with the war hammer on the top of the man’s helmet: metal dented and bone cracked beneath, the feeling vibrating up the shaft and into her hand.
The Given Sacrifice Page 39