Near West Salem, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9
"H ell, I didn't like cities even before the Change. Always made me feel cramped," Mike Havel said, reining in his horse and flinging up his clenched right fist for halt. "Now they give me the willies," he went on.
The Bearkiller column clattered to a stop, without the bunching or collisions you might expect from over a thousand tight-packed humans on horseback and on bicycles and driving wagons. A few horses snorted, and one bugled in protest, but the only voices raised were a few sharp commands. There was a massed scuffing as the infantry squeezed their brakes and each put a foot down to bring themselves to a halt. Most of them were red-faced and puffing; cycling in armor was a little less strenuous than marching, and a lot faster, but that didn't make it easy. The majority of the bicycles had solid rubber on their wheel rims, built up of strips salvaged from car and truck tires, which made for a rougher ride.
Havel squinted eastward, where the sun was just over the Cascades on the farthest edge of sight. It was going to be a bright day with scattered white clouds, mild and cool and damp with yesterday's drizzle-the sort of day you could have anytime but high summer here.
What did the Sioux call it? "A good day to die"? Hell with that, but it's a good day to fight, ij you have to.
"Graveyards give me the willies too," Signe Larsson replied grimly, looking south and then east.
They were just outside the brush and incipient forest that covered the wasteland that had been West Salem; wind soughed through spiky brush and tall grass, through fir needles and leaves just beginning to bud out. There was a little noise from the troops behind, bike wheels and hobnailed feet and steel horseshoes clopping on pavement or crunching in gravel, the voice of a non-com here and there blistering someone's ear about a loose strap, the flutter of a pennon crackling in the wind from the north. Below that was a deep silence, where the gruck-gruck of ravens was the loudest sound-they always seemed to know when a fight was in the offing, and a flock of them was gliding down from the hills.
To his left the old Salemtown Golf Course had hugged the northern edge of Wallace Road. The river was about a mile eastward, hidden from here by scrub and feral orchards and wet grassland that had once been fields. To his right were rolling hills, upscale horse farms and more orchard and woodlot before the Change; he had a lookout on Chapman Hill, the highest ground nearby at a little over four hundred feet. Beyond that were the old suburbs proper, where the bigger pre-Change trees towered over scrub and saplings where they hadn't been killed out by the fires, and an occasional chimney or snag of wall reared out of a green jungle. The treacherous net of bramble, vine, car-wrecks, twisted metal, scattered brick and glass shards made it nowhere he'd take troops willingly, but if he had to retreat the narrow cleared zone along the railroad tracks would do nicely. A few taller buildings still stood by the river, showing black trails of scorch-mark above the empty windows.
More and taller ones reared on the eastern shore, where the bulk of the old city had lain; three spans crossed over, a railroad bridge on the north and two road crossings just a little south. The Mackenzies and Bearkillers had spent considerable effort last autumn, clearing the piers of wrecked cars and logs and accumulated rubbish that were acting like giant beaver-dams and threatening to bring the bridges down. All that might be wasted effort now:
The roads were fairly clear of dead cars and trucks; the state government had managed to get that much done before it collapsed, but tendrils of vine thick as his arm crossed them except on the main thoroughfares, and sprays of brick and rubble stretched out where buildings had collapsed. The bridges were still in use for trade across the valley, and the ruins were mined for metals and useful parts. Nothing human had lived there since the last cannibal bands self-destructed late in the first Change Year, Kilkenny-cat fashion, although he supposed there might be a few lunatics hiding in cellars and living on rats and rabbits. Otherwise there were only occasional bandit gangs looking for hideouts and vantage points. The mass graves didn't stink anymore, not physically, and they'd been on the east side of the river anyway.
It still creeped him out. A world had died here in a convulsion of agony and bewildered terror, and its remains haunted the new one that he and his like were building on the bones.
And will until the last of us dies who remember the Change, he thought. Then this'll just be ruins, like the Pyramids to me.
A rider came up the road from the bridges, riding on the graveled verge to spare his horse's hooves at the trot. He was a Bearkiller scout, with an A-lister's mark between his brows but lightly equipped with sword, bow, helmet and a short mail shirt. His name was Bert, and he'd been a Marine before the Change, on leave and visiting family in Idaho.
"The bridges are still clear," he said. "The nearest boats are still two miles downstream and coming on slow; the current's strong."
"Good!" Havel said. "That confirms what the lookouts said. Signe, let them know it's OK for Ken to bring his toys up. Time for my esteemed father-in-law to strut his stuff."
His wife took a convex mirror out of her saddlebag and angled it to the sun, blinking light across the mile to the hilltop south of them. A half minute later the reply came through: Message relayed and then Confirmed. Kenneth Larsson out.
"Take care, Daddy!" Signe called softly.
"Heads up!" her brother Eric said.
Havel looked up into the sky, following his gauntleted finger. "Well, shit!" he said. "Crap and double-damn and hell. I expected this, but not so soon."
The winged shape of a glider turned in the air a thousand feet above them- it was riding the thermal thrown up by the concrete mass of the ruins, spiraling in a widening gyre. He unlimbered his binoculars; the aircraft was a pre-Change sporting model, shaped like an elongated tadpole with long, slender wings, but those had the Protector's Lidless Eye on them, and a mirror rigged for heliograph signals stood outside the cockpit. That worked as the glider banked, the bright light a flicker of dots and dashes meaningless to him. Signe sighed regretfully-they hadn't broken the Association Air Force's latest field code yet, but there wasn't much doubt what it was telling the boats and barges coming southward on the Willamette. Starting with his numbers and dispositions.
"OK, they'll disembark their force well north of the bridges-north of here," he said.
"You sure?" Signe asked.
"Yeah. They're not going to get them tangled up in the ruins while they disembark. And they probably want a fight here-they can't chase us, they don't have enough bikes with them. They'll try to come ashore close to here and march down River Bend Road till it joins this one, then south on that past the old radio tower. We'll move a little north-see where River Bend makes that elbow and heads more north of east? We'll anchor our line there."
The others nodded. Havel went on: "Eric, you take the lancers and move a little north, couple of hundred yards. See those old gravel pits?"
He pointed with his right hand, a little south of east. "About a mile that-away? The ground's too soft for movement past there so I'll anchor my right on it, and straddle the roadway with the pikes and glaives, more crossbows on the west. But that leaves my far left swinging in the breeze. You cover it, be ready to move forward or back to hold 'em off if we have to pull out through the ruins-we'll use the railway line if we have to do that, and you can either follow or pull out west according to circumstances. We've got good coverage from Chapman Hill so keep your scouts just far enough forward to make theirs stay out of direct sight of the main body."
"Right, bossman," the big blond man said, fastening the cheek-pieces of his crested helmet under his chin.
He nodded to Luanne, and she blew a complex series of notes on the trumpet slung across her mailed torso. The banner-bearer on the other side moved with them as they kneed their horses forward over the roadside ditch with a scramble and surge. The two hundred A-lister cavalry followed by squads and sections and troops, the long lances swaying in their scabbards as they deployed onto an overgrown putting green. Havel nodded gravely to them as they passed. Some were grinning in excitement, with the older ones mostly flatly calm, although few enough here were much over thirty.
I'm starting to feel like an old man at thirty-seven, he thought, smiling like a shark himself as he turned away. Old enough to know how easy it is to die, at least. Old enough to know how much turns on this fight. It's amazing how much more serious you feel when you've got kids.
He turned his horse with a shift of balance and leg-pressure; Gustav was feeling the tension himself, and stamped a forefoot as he moved. The foot soldiers were the home-levy of Larsdalen, and the companies from the hamlets and steadings north and east of it in the Eola Hills and along their foot, the Field Force units he'd had time to collect on the way here-every Bearkiller adult would go to war at need, but the Outfit was a bit more selective about who went into an open-field fight. There were just under a thousand, half with polearms-glaives or the two eight-foot staves of a take-down pike-in scabbards riveted to the frames of their bicycles. The rest had crossbows, all of them the new fast-loading type, thank God. A lot of the crossbowmen were actually crossbow-women. Any sturdy farm-girl used to working in the fields could handle one, and the pointy end of the bolts hit just as hard whoever pulled the trigger; the Outfit certainly couldn't afford to leave anyone useful home just because of their plumbing. Pikes and glaives took more mass to use properly, and two-thirds of the troops holding them were men, about the same proportion as the A-list.
Many of the foot soldiers' faces were tight with conscious self-control as they stood in their ranks. The A-listers might do other things in their spare time, but fighting was their lifework. The infantry were precisely the other way round. On the other hand:
"Right, Bearkillers," he said, rising in the stirrups and throwing his voice to carry. He pointed northeast. "The Protector's men are coming up the river to try and take away our homes and kill our families. We're going to fight them." He grinned. "Any questions?"
A rippling growl went through the formation. Someone shouted Hakkaa Paalle! and the rest took it up, a deep, roaring chant, each stamping a foot in time to it, beating their gloved hands on the bucklers slung at their belts. Havel felt himself flush with pride; he'd brought them through the terrible years after the Change, and from starving refugees made a nation of them. Now they trusted him: The sound cut off when he raised one gauntleted hand.
"Now get ready and wait for the word," he said into the silence that followed.
For a wonder, he and Signe had a moment to themselves. The troops put their bikes on the kickstands, then got to work-for the pikemen, that meant unslinging their weapons and fitting the two halves together with a snap and rattle as the spring-locks clicked home. A leafless forest sixteen feet high rose as they fell in four-deep along the road, facing north and east, the long steel heads of the pikes above them; the glaives waited to the rear.
"What do you think?" she said.
"Depends on how many of them get off the boats, alskling," he said. "If there's more than we can handle, we pull back sharpish and wait for the rest of our call-up companies to arrive. They'll be gathering fast."
"Why not do that now?" she asked.
"I really don't want to lose the bridges," Havel said, nodding in the direction her father had gone. "If Arminger takes those, or breaks them down, he can operate on both sides of the river, and we can't help each other. And if he fortifies the crossing, it's a major blow. Worth risking a battle for, even against odds, as long as it isn't totally impossible."
"Aren't we risking defeat in detail?"
Havel grinned at his wife, who'd been an occasional vegetarian and quasi-pacifist before the Change. "Learning the family business, eh? Nah, there can't be all that many of them, not if they're besieging Mount Angel and pushing into Mackenzie territory at the same time. Armchair generalship, like I said- he likes drawing arrows on maps. He's trying to get fancy and I'm betting he doesn't have enough men to do everything at once."
"We're all betting that," she said gravely, and he nodded. "Do you think it's Arminger in person? Here?"
"Nope," Havel said. "At a guess, it's Stavarov or Renfrew. Hopefully Renfrew."
"But Renfrew's his best commander!" Signe said.
"Exactly," Havel said, licking a forefinger and marking the air with it. "Plus he's the only one Arminger really trusts. This would be a good day for the bastard to die."
He'd been keeping an eye on the Chapman Hill lookout. Now a mirror blinked from there; he read the code as easily as he would have print.
"Barges holding back," he said. "Turtle boats coming forward. Now it's up to your dad."
"We should have set the engines on the bridge up earlier," she fretted.
"Nah, that wouldn't work," Havel pointed out. "They would have twigged to that, even if Arminger's troops aren't long on individual initiative. But if you don't give them too much time to think and consult higher echelons they'll try to go through with a plan even when things have changed."
They both looked to the river, a mile and better northward. The low, beetling shapes of the armored riverboats were hard to see at first, marked more by the white froth curving away from their bows and sloping forecastles than by the hulls themselves. The sight was a little eerie-you could believe that motors drove them, rather than dozens of dozens of bicycle cranks geared to a propeller shaft. That smooth mechanical motion without sails or oars looked unnatural, in this ninth year of the Change.
"I just hope Daddy can deal with it," Signe said as they slid silently by and headed for the bridges. "He's not a hands-on fighter."
"Yeah, but he's got Pam to look after that," Havel said reassuringly. Then, harshly, as the barges and transports showed at the edge of sight: "Trumpeter! Sound fall in!"
Kenneth Larsson shifted under the uncomfortable, unaccustomed weight of the mail hauberk as he sat his horse beside the railcar, waiting for the signal from Chapman Hill. The armor he wore was strictly for protection-just-in-case, like the blade at his side. He'd put a lot of effort into the various weird-looking contraptions on salvaged rail-wheels that followed him, and was metaphorically rubbing his hands at the chance to use them. Right now that wouldn't be too advisable, because the leather and steel cup that covered the stump on his left wrist held a simple hook: a very sharp hook: rather than any of the various tools he found useful in the labs and workshops back at Larsdalen.
The heliograph on the hilltop a mile and a half north blinked at him. He nodded and waved to his own signaler to respond, then looked back along the wagon train-a phrase literally true, since the dozen flatcars were each drawn by four horses. Rail made a smooth surface, and the beasts could pull five or six times as much as they could on even the best roads, and do it faster. Here they pulled flat surfaces that bore a weight of gears and ratchets, frames and tanks and tubing; the hard angular shapes and smooth mathematically precise curves made him nostalgic for the lost world:
"Move out!" he called, waving his hook forward, neck-reining his horse to the side of the railroad tracks and bringing it up to a canter.
His personal guard followed-commanded by his wife Pamela-and the crews of the war-engines rode their charges like grinning, hunched baboons, cheering him as they went by amid a clattering rumble of hooves and whine of steel on steel. The rail line lay along the riverbank further south, but here it turned inland through the ruins of West Salem, running five or six hundred feet from the water, amid buildings whose smoke-stained windows peered out from shattered glass and rampant vines:
"What's chuckle-worthy at this point?" Pamela asked him from his blind side.
She didn't find scorched, overgrown ruins any more cheerful than most people did. These had the further distinction of having been flooded out a couple of times. He turned his head to grin at her; the helmet and nasal bar framed her narrow, beak-nosed, brown-eyed face, and the armor added bulk to her whipcord figure. They'd met in Idaho not long after the death of his first wife and married late that year. A decade-and two kids-later, he still thought he'd gotten the better of the deal. Somehow the throttled fear that made his stomach churn with acid brought that home still more strongly. He kept his voice light as he answered: "I was just thinking that anyone else here would have said it's half a long bowshot to the river, instead of estimating it in feet," he said, waving his right hand across the brush-grown rubble towards the blue-gray water.
"Except possibly me," she said. "I'm an old fart too."
"No, you were the one who belonged to the Association for Hitting Things with Sharp Pointy Things," he pointed out.
"Hey, I wasn't one of those Society get-a-lifes," she said, aggrieved. "I practiced the real thing in ARMA. The Association for Renaissance Martial Arts didn't spend time playing at the kings-queens-damsels-and-minstrels stuff."
"Prancing around with swords: " he teased. "Well, it turned out to be a good career move."
She shuddered a little. "And there was the hiking. I owe my life to that."
Which was true; it had been that hobby that had taken her from San Diego to Idaho just under ten years ago. Southern California had been the worst of all the death-zones, twenty million people trapped instantly in a desert without even drinking water. Not one in a thousand had escaped; explorers who'd been there since told of drifts of desiccated corpses lining the roads for a hundred miles out into the Mojave, preserved by alkaline sand and savage heat.
Then: "Here we go."
The railway broke out into open fields; the brush had been cleared from hereabouts last year, during the joint project with the Mackenzies to unblock the wreckage and drift-logs piled around the bridges. That had given them a good reason to do maintenance work on the permanent way, as well. The rails turned rightward, east over the water, with the tall ruins of Salem proper ahead of them on the eastern side of the fast-running spring water.
"Here comes the kimchee," Kenneth Larsson said. His assistants looked at him curiously. "Classical reference."
He didn't actually think that the low, beetling shapes moving upriver towards him were modeled on the Korean turtle ships that had turned back a Japanese invasion in the sixteenth century. The similarities were functional; when you covered a boat with a low sloped carapace of metal armor, it had to have a certain shape, just as a wheel had to be round. Evolution and design turned up similarities all the time, which had befuddled generations of the wishfully superstitious before the Change shot scientistic rationalism through the head.
His wife knew that bit of Asian history too. Pam grinned back at him over her shoulder, before turning to oversee the gangs fitting steel shields along the northern edge of the railroad bridge. Ken walked down the line of engines, keeping a critical eye as the crews unfolded and bolted and braced, and tested that the water-lines that carried power to the heavy hydraulic cocking-jacks were securely screwed home. Everything looked ready:
"Looks like Arminger's men can't make up their minds," Pam said as the horses were led back westward out of harm's way, riders guiding long leading-reins of the precious beasts.
Either we win and they can come back: or we don't, and we won't need horses. They did have some handcars for escape if worst came to worst without time to get the engines clear; those were the fastest way available to travel by land.
Ken grunted and leveled his binoculars, adjusting them one-handed. The six low, dark shapes of the armored craft had slowed, barely keeping station a thousand yards north against the current that curled green waves over their bows. In the center of each was a hexagonal turret with eye-slits on all sides, probably the bridge the craft was conned from. He tried to imagine the sweltering closeness within, lit only by dim lamps, the long rows of bicycle cranks geared to the propeller shafts and the near-naked, sweating human engines:
"Watch it!"
A hatch opened on the foremost turtle boat. Something within went snap, then snap-snap-snap about as fast as a man could click his fingers.
"They're ashore north of here at Rice Rocks," Mike Havel said, looking over his shoulder at the hilltop observation post. "Deploying from the barges; horse, foot and catapults. Let's go. Signaler: Advance by company columns, at the double."
The militia responded to the trumpet-calls, turning left from Brush College Road and going northeast at a pounding trot, seven columns of a hundred and fifty each; the tall grass and brush swayed and went down before their trampling boots as they moved off the roadway. Each had a mounted A-lister officer, usually an older member of the Brotherhood or one some injury had left fit enough for command but no longer quite up to the brutal demands of frontline cavalry combat.
Light war-engines went with them on two-wheeled carts, each pulled by a four-horse team, bouncing and swaying as they trotted along; the sloping shields that fronted them had words painted on them-jocular graffiti, Hi there! and Knock-knock, guess who!, Many Happy Returns! and Eat This!
He turned Gustav eastward, cantering along with the column on the far right. Wet, brushy grassland stretched ahead, bugs springing up where the hooves passed, and occasionally a bird. A mile to the north he could just see the first little dots that were the enemy scouts meeting his light cavalry. As he watched, arrows flew between the scattered riders, and there were little flickers of pale spring sunshine off steel as the swords came out. He glanced west, and saw Eric and the bulk of the A-listers waiting ready just this side of Glen Creek, their lances a leafless forest above their heads. East, and the ground ran out in sloughs with the rank, green look of bog, patches of reeds among the tall grass and dead trees killed by the post-Change floods. The blue eyes of old, flooded gravel pits blocked the way, and beyond that the ground was even worse.
North, angling gradually east towards the Willamette, stretched the old River Bend Road, its thin pavement buckled and pitted by ten years of weather and several high floods that had left drifts of silt across it for grass and brush to root in. He spoke to the easternmost column's commander: "Captain Dinsel, get your people set up. Shuffle east until your boots start sinking in. You're the far anchor of the line; don't let them get around you. Refuse the flank if you have to."
Her face split in a grin. "They're not likely to get any closer to the river than this, Lord Bear. Not unless they can walk on liquid mud. Another ten yards and it's too thin to plow and too thick to drink. This is a good position."
"Keep an eye on it anyway," he said.
Then he turned back towards the central column, the one advancing up River Bend Road, the pathway the enemy would use. The artillery was following it, sparing horses and wheels as long as possible.
"Sarducci," he said.
The man in charge of the war-engines looked up; he was one of Ken Larsson's buddies, recruited from the Corvallis university faculty where he'd been teaching engineering at the time of the Change, tall with a dark, narrow, big-nosed face and a walrus mustache. Not an A-lister, but keen enough for all that, and with a very useful hobby in Renaissance history. Havel pointed westward to where the lancers waited.
"Put them about there. A little to the left of the cavalry and advance 'em say a hundred yards beyond our stopline. Dig in; they've got to come to us. I want you able to rake their flank."
"Won't we be masking the A-listers there, Lord Bear?" the Tuscan asked.
Havel nodded; not agreeing, but acknowledging it was a fair question. "Nah. They can go in on your right, or stop a flanking attack-and they can support you if the Protector's people get too close. Go for it!"
He followed them westward down the formation, shouting: "Deploy! Deploy into line and halt!"
The columns opened like fans, with only a little cursing and adjustment as the militia infantry shouldered into position. The center was the pikes, a block eighty across and four ranks deep, with two files of glaives behind them. On either side the crossbows spread in a looser double line.
Most of them had fought before: But nothing like this. Nothing on this scale.
"Captain!" This time to the westernmost end of the line. "Help the artillery dig in. Do it fast, then get back here."
The company commander nodded and turned, barking the order; his unit was crossbows, and they stacked their weapons and broke open their folding entrenching tools, trotting forward to help the artillery crews. With nearly two hundred strong arms, the job went quickly; they laid out semicircular trenches, using the blades of their shovels to cut the turf in rectangular blocks, then set it aside while they piled up the soft, damp earth on the inner side, shovelfuls flying as they labored with panting, grunting intensity. When that was high enough to leave only the business end of the engine behind it exposed they laid the turf back on the surfaces of the mounds and pounded it down with the flat, folded their spades again and trotted back to their own weapons. The twelve engines settled in, each behind a chest-high horseshoe mound, each ten yards from its neighbor, each showing only the top of its metal shield split by the slot for the casting trough, what would have been the muzzle back in the days of guns.
Havel nodded at the beginning of the process and turned back to his own station, in the center where his line crossed the River Bend Road at right angles; he didn't have to hand-hold his people for something elementary like that.
"Big fight," he said cheerfully to Signe; the gallopers and staff here had to see the bossman confident. "Biggest we've had so far." Then, to the trumpeters: "Sound stand easy."
The brass throats of the instruments screamed. The block of pikes and glaives in the center let the butts of their polearms rest on the dirt and leaned on them; those with crossbows checked their weapons once again. Light wagons advanced until they were a suitable distance behind the line; ambulances, medics-including Aaron Rothman, despite loudly voiced claims that violence made him queasy and faint-vehicles with bundles of crossbow bolts, ammunition for the artillery, bandages and disinfectants. A little forward of that and just behind the main line was the clump of his headquarters staff; the brown-and-crimson bear's-head banner, mounted messengers, signalers and a block of seventy picked infantry with glaives. The messengers were mostly teenage military apprentices, which was a measure of just how desperately thin they were stretched.
I'd like to have a bigger reserve, he thought; it was amazing the number of things a CO could find to worry about, which was one reason he felt nostalgic about the days the Outfit was smaller, or even the time:
Christ Jesus, is it nearly twenty years since I was a corporal in the Gulf? Going on eighteen years, at least. Another world, and probably everyone there's dead, and who cares about the fucking oil now? Nowadays people fight over horses and cows and wheat. And people : so that hasn't changed.
He shook his head and went back to wishing he had more troops waiting behind the line to patch holes if-when-the enemy punched through.
But I just don't have enough on hand. This line's nearly a mile long as it is and it's too damned thin for comfort, but the Protector's men will overlap it. On the west, at least. The only good thing about it is that they have to get by me to get at the bridges and support their gunboats: they have to go through me. If they tried to loop around I could punch the A-listers at their flank while they were in column. It'd take days for them to do it safely and by then the rest of my militia would be here for sure.
Commanding a battle like this was uncomfortably like a knife duel : and he'd always despised those, because they guaranteed even the victor got cut up pretty badly.
More signals flickered in from the hilltop to his rear; the Protector's glider went by again, its heliograph stuttering. And beyond the skirmishing scouts came a long flashing, twinkling ripple across the fields to the north; a ripple of sunlight on thousands of steel points and edges, like summer at the lake when he was a kid, and light flickering off a wave. But this wave was human, an army's worth of men walking shoulder-to-shoulder, riding boot to boot. With it came a hammer of drums, the shriller scream of the long, curled trumpets the Association used, and the endless grumbling, rumbling sound of hooves and booted feet striking the soft earth. Havel leveled his binoculars.
"Well, shit," he muttered to himself, doing a quick count. Let's see, a yard per man, formation's four ranks deep: "You were right, honey. Two thousand men, or a bit more. That's bad odds. Four, five hundred knights and men-at-arms. That's real bad odds. He's got as many lancers on this field as we've got pikemen."
"Told ya, told ya," Signe said, without taking her own eyes from her field glasses. "Did you ever hear of that study they did before the Change, when they found out that only the clinically depressed had a realistic view of the world?"
Havel looked over his left shoulder at the depressingly empty roads from the south and west. The rest of the Bearkiller militia would be on the road to him here: which did him very little good right now. Then Signe hissed.
"Look," she said. "Look at the banner in the middle of their line."
Many fluttered there; the Protector's force was moving with its heavy horse in the center, and every tenant-in-chief and baron had his own flag. One drew his eye, on a tall crossbar next to the Lidless Eye, its white background conspicuous in that company.
"Argent, double-headed eagle sable," he said. "No cadet baton. It's Alexi Stavarov."
"Alexi Stavarov, Baron Chehalis, Marchwarden of the North. Even Arminger isn't crazy enough to send little Piotr out with a force that size," Signe said absently, still counting banners and reading their blazons. "I see a lot of his vassals, and some from the other baronies over the Columbia-Pomeroy, Alequa, Vader. More tenants-in-chief and their followings from up in the northwest part of the Valley, the Yamhill country, and the Tualatin valley. None of the Protector's household troops, I suppose they're with Renfrew. It's a baron's army with a baron in charge."
"Refresh my memory," Havel said. "Alexis the Protector's point man north of the Columbia. He was in command in that last brush with the Free Cities of the Yakima, wasn't he?"
"Yeah," Signe said. "Last year, while Arminger and Renfrew were taking over the Pendleton area. He beat the League's muster in an open-field battle just north of the Horse Heaven Hills, then stalled in front of the walls of Zilla- you know, they're on the edge of that bluff-and spent a fair amount of time devastating the countryside and breaking down the irrigation ditches to soothe his frustrations. That really hurt them. The Protector wasn't serious about taking any territory there yet; it was more like a warning to the Yakima League not to push at Walla Walla or Burbank or Richmond while he was busy getting a hold on Pendleton. It'll probably keep them out of this fight, though."
"OK, so Alexis not as hot on the throttle as his kid. Let's see what sort of a general he thinks he is," Havel said.
He'd have to be a pretty piss-poor one to lose a battle where he outnumbers the other side three to two or better, he thought. He's got a good five, six hundred knights and men-at-arms there, too. I've got a bad feeling about this.
He looked aside at a sudden deep tung sound and a chorus of startled obscenities as a crossbow bolt whistled up from the second rank of the company to his left. The careless militia soldier stood at rigid attention, a red flush gradually filling in the space between her freckles. A noncom's snarl-he was probably a well-to-do tenant farmer or bailiff or craftsman back home-followed the accidental discharge:
"Angie, you dim, thick bitch, what the fuck do you think that is you're holding? It's a fucking crossbow trigger, not a cow's tit or your boyfriend's dick! Do us all a favor and point it up your own ass next time, not at Wendy's! Christ crucified, if the Protector's men don't kill you I'll have you digging latrines from now until the last gray hair falls out of your crab-crawling-"
Well, you can tell our original noncoms were Marines like me, Havel thought, suppressing a grin at the corporal's inventive vocabulary.
The glares and mutters of her neighbors, who were her neighbors and relations back home in the village, probably hurt just as much; and the knowledge that the reaming was abundantly deserved-the bolt could just as easily have hit someone in the back of the head. Silently, she reloaded: gripping a pivoted lever set into the forestock of her weapon and pumping it six times. There was a ratcheting sound as she did, and the string drew back and the heavy steel bow made from a car's leaf spring bent, until the trigger mechanism engaged with a click. Still red-faced, she pressed the quarrel into the groove and stood with the weapon at port arms, point skyward and finger carefully outside the trigger guard this time.
That new crossbow is really going to help, and with a little luck it'll be a nasty surprise to the Protector's men. Bless you, esteemed father-in-law.
The cocking mechanism built into the forestock was made from cut-down car jacks salvaged from the trunks of abandoned vehicles and auto-supply stores, and it shortened the reloading time from just over twenty-five seconds to around eight or nine; still not as fast as a good archer, but a lot closer. And you didn't have to practice incessantly with a crossbow the way an archer did; you could learn to use it well in a couple of months, and keep it up practicing once a week. Plus this model could be loaded easily lying down:
All in all it's a lot better than the Rube Goldberg thing with chains and cranks the Corvallis people keep working at, simple and sturdy is better when it comes to things that get you killed if they break down. On the other hand, better is better too. I think the Protector hasn't pushed his R amp;D types for an equivalent because he doesn't want a weapon that gives a footman too much of a chance against a lancer. That'll teach him to be such a snob.
"Messenger," he said, giving another close look at how the enemy was advancing. "Polearms rest in place, missile troops on the left swing in about ten degrees."
The youngster galloped off. A few moments later the long double line of crossbows on the left began to move-those closest to him marching in place, those out at the end of the line double-timing until the whole formation slanted forward a little. It looked as if the enemy were going do it hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle, and that would give his people enfilade fire.
The barons' men were closer now, barely a half mile, well within catapult range; the light horse on both sides scurried off to the flanks. Before he could signal Sarducci to begin the curled trumpets screamed again, and the Protectorate's force came to a halt in three well-drilled paces. Silence fell, or what felt like it without the ground-shaking thudding of men and horses moving in mass. He looked over; Sarducci's crews had their catapults cocked and armed, and behind each a pumping apparatus on a wheeled cart with two men on each end of the lever and an armored pipe running to clip under the carriage of the split-trail fieldpiece. Relays were running light horse-carts back to the main supply wagons and piling up extra ammunition-four-foot javelin-arrows, six-pound iron roundshot like smallish cannonballs and larger glass globes full of napalm with gasoline-soaked fuses of twisted cloth wrapped around them.
The artillery chief evidently thought he'd get a chance to do some serious reach-out-and-touch-someone, and he was grinning like a devil Satan had assigned to stoke the furnace holding Arminger's soul. Havel cantered his horse up and down behind the line one last time, checking and finding nothing to quarrel with. As he passed the artillery their commander stood on one of the berms, waving his arms and making taunting gestures at the enemy and singing exuberantly:
"Quant' e bella giovinezza
Che sifugge tuttavia!
Chi vuol esse lieto, sia!
Di doman' non c' e certezza"
Havel grinned at the sound; the war-engine crews were laughing, but with their commander and not at him, which was a good sign. A leader had to show the troops he knew his business, but after that the odd larger-than-life gesture didn't hurt at all.
A glance at his watch when he reined in beside Signe and the banner again:
Ten o'clock. This is all taking longer than I expected. OK, they want to wait, we'll wait. This is a delaying action, after all. If I had the rest of our Field Force here, I wouldn't be worried – not at even odds. Of course, that's only about a fifth of their army there, and what I've got here now is half of mine. Where are the other eight thousand men Arminger can field? Are they all over on the east side of the river, taking on Mount Angel and the Mackenzies and my wife's lunatic little sister? Or are they going to send another couple of thousand down between the Eola Hills and the Coast Range, swarm Will Hutton under and bugger us for fair, as Sam would put it? That's what I'd do in his shoes:
He still kept an eye on the Chapman Hill lookout post now and then; they could tell him if Stavarov was trying to get fancy, working a force west around his flank through the hills, or if his own reinforcements were in sight. Instead the next move from the Protector's ranks came as a surprise.
"What's he doing?" Signe asked.
A knight had spurred out from the block of men-at-arms, his plumed helmet and the forked pennant on his lance fluttering in the wind. He tossed the lance over his head, whirling the eleven-foot weapon like a baton, shouting something not quite understandable at this distance and putting his horse through fancy footwork. His kite-shaped shield was divided into wedges of gold and black with their points meeting in the center, and a purple motorcycle wreathed in flames painted over it.
"Gyronny or and sable, a Harley purpure," Signe said, reading the blazonry.
"At a guess, that guy's folks were gangers, not Society types," Havel said, grinning despite himself. "It has a certain style. I used to really like my Harley in high school."
"That's the Wereton family," Signe said in a quelling tone. "Of Laurelwood Manor, up near Chehalem Mountain; they hold it by knight-service from the Barony of Forestgrove. Lord Harrison Decard's their liege. And Mr. Motorcycle out there is challenging all and sundry to single combat. Stavarov's going to let his hotheads work off some steam. Idiots."
Havel felt his grin spread wider; here was something besides the tangled complexities and haunting fears of high command:
Speaking of gestures: and I'm not forty yet, he thought. Besides which, this is a delaying action. Playing at El Cid is delay, all right.
He ignored Signe's horrified yelp and brought Gustav up in a rear that turned into a gallop as he shot ahead, north down River Bend Road. A roar went up from the assembled Bearkillers, turning into a rhythmic chant from a thousand throats as they punched their weapons in the air:
"Lord Bear! Lord Bear! Lord Bear!"
A swift glance showed his wife's mouth moving too, but he suspected she wasn't cheering. Her brother would be cursing enviously over there on the right, but he was too well disciplined to try anything on his own.
There's method in my madness, alskling, he thought, and then: I hope.
The Protectorate knight drew up, raising his lance and letting the butt rest on the toes of his right boot, and trotted towards the Bearkiller leader. Havel slowed down likewise, turning left off the treacherous surface of the road's broken asphalt. As they drew closer :
Aha, he thought, looking at the painfully young face behind the helmet's nasal bar, and the way his eyes went wide as they darted to the snarling bear's head on Havel's helmet. Thought so. That's a young guy's stunt, and for more reasons than what my charming wife calls testosterone poisoning.
The man was at least as tall as Havel and broader built even allowing for the effect of the hauberk and gambeson, but his light brown beard was scarce and tufty. The hazel eyes were fearless and delighted; this boy would have been a year shy of ten when the Change happened, and those golden spurs on his boots were a very recent acquisition. The horses halted, mouthing their bits and tossing their heads and making the spikes of their chamfrons glitter, pawing at the turf of knee-high grass and glaring at each other. Wet, dark soil showed where the steel-shod hooves broke through the sod, the rich, meaty green smell blending with horse sweat and leather, the old-locker-and-dirty-socks scent of gambeson padding and the slightly rancid canola oil that glistened on the mail and metal gear of the two warriors. The challenger undid the mouth-covering flap of his mail coif and let it hang free while he spoke.
"You do me great honor by meeting me lance to lance, Lord Bear!" the young knight said, grinning from ear to ear.
"Damn right I do, boy," Havel replied. "But hell, it's a nice day for a spanking and I always did believe in corporal punishment for delinquent youth."
The youngster looked a little affronted and more than a little bewildered. "My lord, I am Sir Jeff Wereton of Laurelwood, by rank a knight, and the son of a knight."
"I'm the son of a hard-rock miner, myself. And your dad was a Hell's Angel," Havel observed dryly.
Wereton nodded proudly. "A band of fearless warriors in an age of city-dwelling cowards!" he said. "Knights of the roads! I remember their great roaring steeds of steel, and everyone fleeing in fear before them-once my father bore me before him on his Harley, though I was only a child at the time."
"Well, that's one way to look at it," Havel said, letting his crooked smile show.
Let's not get into the drug-dealing, extortion and such. Nowadays they just collect a third of the crops, and labor-service and heriot fines:
"The Angels rallied to the Protector first of all, and stood like solid rock amid chaos."
Yeah, that's the problem with bringing kids up on legends. They really believe them, no matter how much of a crock of horseshit they are.
"Two hundred yards suit you, boy?" he drawled, letting his tone say the get on with it, dickweed part.
"Yes, my lord," Wereton snapped.
Good, got him mad. That'll make him careless, Havel thought, reining Gustav around. Lot of testosterone running loose there. Arminger would make him a duke with his own castle and estates to the horizon if he killed me, but he couldn't have known it would be me coming out. He's probably even more over the moon at the thought of the glory he'd get if he beats me in public.
The Portland Protective Association was a protection racket, and a rather nasty one. But when the kids asked what the family did for a living, even your average thug didn't like having nothing to say but: Well, son, we're thugs, oppressors, vicious parasites and members of the Brute Squad in good standing.
Without Arminger and his re-creationist cronies and hangers-on the roughnecks and gangbangers who made up the rest of his following would have gradually invented an ethos justifying their rule and stories telling why they were the bee's knees. But the Society had provided a ready-made mythos to feed the younger generation. God alone knew what the third generation would be like: probably they'd wait at crossroads to joust all comers with a lady's glove tucked under their helmets, or make goofy vows to liberate the Holy Sepulcher and set sail for the walls of Jerusalem with Crusader crosses on their surcoats.
From what Pam and Ken had told him the whole thing wasn't more than loosely connected to real medieval chivalry; say, about the way Treasure Island was to real pirates. Mostly it was drawn from stories and make-believe, starting with the ones Cervantes had laughed his compatriots out of by mocking them in Don Quixote, and going on from there to Ivanhoe and The Cid and finishing with Braveheart and Disney's Magic Kingdom. But it worked as a morale booster just as well for all that. Which was mostly a plus for the people running the Portland Protective Association, but the downside was that they had to play along with it themselves, including things like letting this valiant young idiot play at knight-errantry with real blood and real bones at stake.
Although: he thought, as he turned the big gelding and reached back to lift the bottom four feet of his eleven-foot lance out of the tubular scabbard, at what point does make-believe become real? When it's the way you live every day of your life? When you're prepared to die for it?
He reached down and ran his arm through the loops of his shield, lifting it off the hook on his bow-case as he let his knotted reins fall on the saddlebow. Doll-tiny, the figure of Sir Jeff dipped his lance in acknowledgment. Havel did the same with his own, then couched it loosely. Ten feet of tapering ashwood, thick as his wrist at the steel-capped butt, just wide enough to be gripped comfortably in the hand at the balance-point a third of the way up from there, a little over thumb-thick where the socket of the narrow twelve-inch knife head was heat-shrunk onto the wood. The two men's armor differed only in detail, except for the Bearkiller's shield; that was a convex circle about two feet in diameter, rimmed and bossed with metal, and made of a layer of thick leather over stout plywood.
The Protectorate knight's was of similar construction, but much larger, a curved top a yard across tapering to a rounded point four feet below. It covered most of his body now as he brought it up under his eyes and crouched forward, his feet braced in the stirrups.
"Let's go, Gustav," Havel said to his horse, and shifted his weight.
The big gelding tossed his head again and paced forward, building to a trot and then a canter and then a controlled hand gallop; he knew this game as well as his master. Havel kept the lance loose in his gauntleted hand, trained across the horse's head so that it jutted over the spike in the middle of the chamfron's forehead. The figure of the knight grew with sudden, startling speed; he could see the divots flying from under his mount's hooves and the unwavering spike of the lancehead aimed at his throat, the skillfully sloped shield, the high metal-shod saddlebow:
Havel's knees clamped home on Gustav's barrel, bringing the last plunging bit of speed out of the great muscles flexing beneath him. His hand clamped as well on the shaft of the lance as he trained it over the horse's head, and his body tensed:
And the very last instant his left arm whipped up the shield, sweeping it out. The lighter, more mobile, round Bearkiller shield that could be used as easily as a sword, not a twenty-pound kite-shaped weight that stayed in one place.
Crack-crack!
The curved surface and the artful sideways blow flung the knight's lancehead out of line; the impact was brutal and rammed Havel back against the high can-tie of his war-saddle, but not nearly so much so as the strike of his own lance. That punched the gaudily painted kite-shaped shield neatly at its midpoint, and the lancehead pierced the facing and gouged deep into the tough alder-plywood, driven by the huge momentum of a pair of armored horses and armored men. For one stomach-clenching instant Havel thought it would lever him into the air like a fly on the end of a fishing line, but then the ashwood broke across with a gunshot snap.
Sir Jeff slammed back into the cantle of his own saddle and over it, turning a complete somersault in the air and landing flat on his face as Havel galloped by and his own horse went off like a shooting star. The Bearkiller lord reined in as quickly as he could-you couldn't stop a ton of man and horse and metal on a dime-and looked around.
Wereton's conical helmet had burst free from the straps that held it and rolled away, and the mail coif beneath had come off too; the shield-strap looped diagonally across his back still held, hindering him as he rolled over faceup. Mouth and nose and ears dribbled blood and he twitched like a pithed frog, but Havel judged he'd probably recover-though not in time for the rest of this campaigning season. Not with a squashed nose, concussion, whiplash, head-to-toe bruises and probably half a dozen sprung ribs. His body would probably heal faster than his bruised ego, at that.
"Thought so," he panted, spitting to clear his mouth of thick saliva mixed with blood where the shock had cut the inside against his own teeth. "Never jousted with anyone who wasn't using Association gear before, did you, sonny-boy?"
He gestured with the stump of his lance for Sir Jeff's friends or attendants to come and get him; a boy in his early teens galloped out with an older man in servant's clothing, and between them they caught the fallen knight's destrier, levered him over it and headed back for the shelter of the Protectorate army's lines. As the defeated champion returned draped across his saddle a long, low, disconsolate muttering came from there, plus curses and shaken fists. The Bear-killer force roared Havel's name as he cantered down the line, tossing the six-foot stave that was all that remained of his lance in good-natured mockery of the knight's flamboyant gesture before the fight. When he drew in before the A-lister cavalry the cheers grew even louder, and the horses neighed and snorted in protest.
Eric Larsson spoke: Havel couldn't hear it under the pulsing beat of the sound, but he was pretty sure it was you selfish glory-hound son of a bitch! shouted in tones of deepest sea green envy.
Havel grinned at his brother-in-law and tossed him the stump of the lance. Eric caught it, then reached behind, pulled his own free of the scabbard and tossed it to his commander in a casual display of strength-it took a lot of muscle to treat one of these barge poles as if it was a garden rake. Havel caught it neatly, hiding the grunt of effort under the smack of leather on wood, and slid it into the tubular socket.
Beside Eric, Luanne rolled her eyes and made a remark of her own; probably You idiot! Or Men! Why does everything have to be a pissing match?
"Because in this life everything, absolutely everything, is either a challenge or a reward," he said to himself, and turned his horse and cantered back to the Outfit's banner.
"Don't say it," he said, as he reined in and most of the staff crowded around to pound him on the back.
One handed him a canteen of water cut with a little wine that was more like vinegar; he took a mouthful, swilled it around his mouth and winced as it hit the cuts, then drank down a dozen long swallows. Sweat was running down his face in rivulets, and the padding of his mail collar was already chafing a little under his chin, despite the coolness of the day and the silk neckerchief tucked inside it.
"Why shouldn't I say it, when we both know it's true?" Signe snapped. Dammit, Mike, this business is dangerous enough without-"
"That wasn't showing off," he said, and at her glare added: "All right, it wasn't just showing off. I knew whoever it was, it was probably some dick-with-legs first-timer type I could take without breaking a sweat."
"And if it had been Stavarov sending out his best lancer to mousetrap you?" she hissed, when they were close enough for the remark to be less than totally public. "You know, I'd like my children to have a living father-and not grow up hiding from the Protector in a cave in California, either!"
I'd have beaten his best lancer, too, Mike didn't say aloud. Instead he went on reasonably: "But he didn't. It was like stealing candy from a baby. We won some time, our troops' peck-ah, tails are up, and the enemy's men are feeling half beaten already. Stavarov must be chewing on the rim of his shield. I wouldn't like to be Sir Jeff when the lord baron gets around to him!"
Signe snorted, but changed the subject. "I wonder how Dad's doing over at the bridges?" she said. "At least he's old enough not to try the Achilles-before-the-walls-of-Troy stuff."
"That's geek to me," Havel replied, grinning like a wolf.
And yeah, I am feeling pretty pleased with myself, he add silently. So it's atavistic. Whoopee-shit.
Then he looked south again, and worry returned with a rush, like cold water trickling up his spine. That was the problem with losing yourself in action; like booze, the oblivion was temporary and the troubles came right back, often worse than before.
And where are the rest of my troops, goddammit? He tried not to wonder if they'd be enough when they did get here.
Snap. Snap. Snap.
Ken Larsson ducked involuntarily as the metal bolts from the war-boat flicked towards him, mere blurred streaks at better than four hundred feet a second. They struck the row of heavy sheet-metal-and-timber shields his crew had rigged along the northern edge of the railway bridge. The sloping surface shed the impact with a tooth-gritting sound halfway between a bang and a squeal; the bolts flickered and tumbled upward, still moving so quickly they were barely visible, leaving an elongated, dimpled dent in the quarter-inch steel.
Ouch, Larsson thought. Glad I thought of the shields and didn't just rely on the ones on the engines themselves.
The nearest of the turtle boats was well under a thousand yards away now; they were coming on in a blunt wedge, slowly, no more than walking pace- probably because they'd diverted the power of the pedals to the weapons rather than the propellers. The open hatch snapped down again as he watched, and he turned to one of the engines mounted on the railway cars.
"They're probably too far away for our bolts to penetrate yet," he said. "Let's see how good their sealing is. Number Three, let 'em have it."
The catapult crew nodded, and two of them used a scissorslike clamp to raise a big ceramic sphere into the metal throwing cup. Its coarse clay surface had an oily, glistening sheen to it, and the sharp petroleum stink of the gooey stuff oozing through the thick pottery was pungent enough to carry several yards. Firebombs of this size were kept empty, and filled from steel barrels only a few minutes before action. Ken repressed an impulse to step back; there were fifteen gallons of the stuff in there, and sometimes-not often, but every once in a while-the container shattered when the machine cut loose, with very nasty consequences. If you made the pottery thick enough that that never happened, you cut down on the payload too much and sometimes it didn't break at all when it struck at the other end, if it hit a soft target like dirt or brush.
The aimer sat in a chair behind the sloping shield of the war-engine, peering through a telescopic sight and working traverse and elevation wheels with her hands. The aimer's chair and the throwing-groove and arms rose and turned smoothly, with a sound of oiled metal moving on metal.
"Range five hundred," she said crisply. "Ready-"
One of the crew lit a wad of tow on the end of a stick and touched it to the napalm bomb. Blue-and-yellow flames licked over the surface of the porous clay, and wisps of black smoke began to rise. The rest jumped down, and a hose team stood by.
"Ready!"
"Shoot!"
The aimer squeezed a trigger. The machine's throwing arms snapped forward with a hard, flat brack! sound and thudded into the rubber-padded stop plates. The clay globe snapped out, trailing more smoke as the wind of its passage fanned the flames. Ken leveled his binoculars eagerly; the shot had the indefinable sweet feeling of a mechanism working perfectly:
Crack!
The sound came sharp and clear despite the distance; a gout of flame enveloped the turtle-boat, the tulip-shaped orange blossom rising from its curved steel deck. A cheer went up from the crews on the railroad bridge. It died to a grumbling, cursing mutter as the war-boat slid forward through the smoke, the fire running down its sloping carapace to burn on the surface of the water, hurried along by water gushing from a valve near the view-slits of the bridge.
Ken tried again to imagine what it had been like inside, in the dim hot sweat-and-oil stench of the interior, the slamming impact making the frame groan, the sudden roaring through the thin plates, the heat and the sharp acrid stink sucked in through the ventilators-and all the while having nothing to see but the back of the man ahead of you, knowing you could burn and drown at the same time at any instant.
Serves 'em right, he thought grimly. If they want to be safe, let them stay home.
Which wasn't quite fair-probably most of them had no say in the matter, unless they wanted to face the Lord Protector's men who wore black hoods, or provide the tiger-and-bear-feeding halftime spectacle at the next tournament.
On the other hand, I'm not feeling like being fair right now. Aloud: "Three, Five, Seven-rapid fire, and concentrate on the lead boat! Fry the fascist sons of bitches!"
As a student rebel in the sixties, he'd made Molotov cocktails.
"OK, now we get serious," Havel said, as the Protectorate's host began its advance.
Lessee. Spearmen on the far west wing, call it three hundred of 'em, opposite our A-listers, then crossbows, more spears, more crossbows, and so forth, until they end up with spearmen again on the far east end next the river. The heavy horse behind the center, but not far enough behind. They'll overlap us on the west unless we do something. So:
"Signal, artillery open fire, priority target enemy cavalry," Havel said. It was long range, but when you hit someone, you hit them where it hurt.
The trumpets called. Seconds later a ripple of tunngg: tunnggg: tunnggg repeated four times over sounded from his left as the batteries fired. The basic principles were those of Roman or Greek ballistae, but the throwing arms of the catapults were carefully shaped steel forgings rather than wood, and the power was provided by the suspensions of eighteen-wheeler trucks, not twisted skeins of ox sinew. The javelin-sized arrows they threw were visible, but only just-they traveled at half the speed of a musket ball. The six-pound spheres of cast iron that followed were almost as swift.
Havel tracked them with his field glasses. One ball struck short, bounced and slammed rolling into a file of spearmen. The first three went down in a whiplash tangle as the high-velocity iron snapped their legs out from beneath them; then it bounced high again and came down on an upraised shield. He couldn't hear the shield's frame and the arm beneath it crack, but he could imagine it. The screaming mouths were just open circles through the binoculars, but he could imagine that as well. Two more struck at waist height; a broken spear flipped fifteen feet into the air, pinwheeling and flashing sunlight as the edges twirled.
The big darts lofted entirely over the block of infantry-heads twisted to follow them as they flashed by about ten feet up. The cavalry formation behind them exploded outward as four of the heavy javelins came slanting in, punching through armor as if it were cloth, pinning men to horses and horses to the ground.
"Good work, Sarducci!" Havel called, and waved at the man. At the enemy he muttered the names of the engines as they fired:
"Hi there, you bastards! Knock-knock, guess who! you sons of bitches! Eat this! motherfuckers! And Many Happy Returns, Alexi!" he said, pounding his right fist into the palm of his left hand with every greeting.
He got a thumbs up from Sarducci; seconds later the tunnngg: tunnngg: began again. The teams behind the fieldpieces were pumping like madmen, sending water through the armored hoses to the cylinders under the firing grooves-compressed gases didn't work the way they had before the Change, but hydraulics still functioned the way the textbooks said they should. Water filled the cylinders and pushed out the pistons; the piston rods rammed at the steel cables that linked the throwing arms, bending them back against the ton-weights of resistance in the springs until they engaged the trigger mechanisms. The crew chiefs snapped their lanyards to the release levers, and the aimers on seats on the left trail spun the elevation and traverse wheels, while the loaders slapped fresh darts and roundshot home, ready for launching.
Havel turned the field glasses back to the enemy lancers. They were trotting back out of range, some of them shaking their fists at him as they went. He laughed aloud, and Signe gave him a quizzical look.
"I can tell what they're saying," he said. "Something like no fair throwing things! And then why don't you fight like a gentleman, you peasant!"
His laughter grew louder, and her corn-colored eyebrows rose further over the sky blue eyes as the troops took it up and it spread down the line, a torrent of jeering mockery directed at the backs of the Protectorate's lancers. He shook his head and went on: "What's really funny is that some of them actually mean it!"
After a moment she chuckled as well. Then: "Oh-oh," she said. "Here comes their artillery."
Havel nodded. "Yup, right on schedule. That's heavy stuff for mobile field use-looks like light siege pieces, really. Six horse teams; six, eight, ten of them all up. Tsk-they should have more and it should be as easy to move as ours. They've certainly got the engineers and the materials. Arminger's a: what did the Society people call guys who had a hair up their ass about getting historical details just right instead of mixing and matching?"
"Period Nazi," Signe supplied.
"Yeah, his fixations are getting the better of him again. William the Conqueror of Normandy didn't use field artillery, so Norman the Magnifolent of Portland doesn't like doing it either. Signalercavalry engage enemy engines with firing circle."
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.