Near West Salem, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9
"N ow this is going to be awkward," Mike Havel said grimly, looking up at the sun.
It was late afternoon now. Out on the field before them the A-listers charged again; enemy infantry stopped in a sudden bristle of spears. Once more the flicker of arrows showed as the Bearkiller cavalry reversed and rode away shooting. Once more crossbow bolts harvested some of them.
More bright, eager young kids who half killed themselves to get that scar between the eyebrows, Havel thought. Cost of doing business. Christ, I decided I didn't like being a soldier before the Change, then I had to go and become King afterwards.
The northern men-at-arms waited behind their footmen. Out on the right, towards the river, the Protectorate's crossbowmen were slugging it out with their Bearkiller equivalents, and not enjoying it; there were twice as many of them, but the Outfit's shooters were firing three or four times as fast, and didn't have to stand up to do it. The spearmen there edged closer under the cover of that exchange, but they were leaving a trail of dead and writhing wounded to do it. Stretcher parties moved behind their line as they did behind his. Right now they were paying higher than he was, but the tables would be turned when they came to within arm's reach.
"Trumpeters, signal cavalry withdraw left," Havel said. Wish it would rain, he thought; but the weather stayed obstinately nice, mixed sun and cloud.
The A-listers obeyed the trumpet signal, breaking off and returning to their position beside and a little behind the artillery. The six pieces still in operation opened up again. Three roundshot smashed into the upraised shields of the spearmen on the enemy's west flank, but the infantry ignored their losses and kept coming. They were only five hundred yards from his own front now;
Havel could hear the shouting of officers keeping them under control, keeping them to a steady marching pace against the impulse to run forward. The whole formation edged towards the river to get away from the throwing engines, though, which put them in the path of more crossbow bolts.
"All right," he said to the commanders of his militia. "Our job now is to get out of here without turning a setback into a disaster. We back up to Brush College Road. The crossbow companies get on their bikes and belt out of here, west, and make for Larsdalen. The pikes will retreat through the ruins-the cleared road's narrow enough we can't be flanked. The A-listers will hang on their flank so their lancers can't pursue."
Bicycles could outrun horses, but only if they got a bit of a start, say a mile or two.
"Ah: Lord Bear, that leaves all of them and just four hundred of us," the commander of the pike phalanx said. "What do we do then?"
"That's going to be the awkward bit," Havel said. "Signe, you oversee the withdrawal of the crossbows."
She was white about the lips, but she nodded.
"I'll stay with the pikes, of course. We'll back up Glenn Creek Road, and then the creek itself, moving west. We'll have to abandon the artillery, but it can't be helped. Their cavalry won't be able to get at us there."
But their crossbowmen will shoot us to shit, he didn't say aloud. With a little luck, we might be able to get half of the pike companies away. We can turn on them a couple of times, make them use mainly spearmen to follow us up. Those crossbows of theirs can't stop a charge by firepower alone.
"Ready?" he said, and saw grim nods. "Then-"
Signe waved to get his attention, and then pointed to Chapman Hill. He looked south to the lookout station, and managed to keep his face calm while he read:
Two thousand repeat two thousand bicycle-borne troops approaching from the southwest along Doaks Ferry Road. Forward scouts on Glen Creek Road.
It couldn't be his reinforcements. They wouldn't be anything near two thousand strong. The blinking heliograph continued; it was as unemotional as ever, of course, but somehow it seemed to have a tone to match the clamping feeling in his lower belly.
Force does not properly reply to my request for code of the day. Will continue to signal as long as possible.
"Serious pucker time," he murmured to himself.
Some of the militia captains were gaping at him; he relayed the message. "Signe," he went on. "Inform Eric of this, will you? And tell him you're in command."
So he won't do something nobly suicidal, he thought. The kids need a mother and an uncle, because they're not going to have a dad, not after this. Maybe California is a good idea. Be a while before the Protector gets down there.
He had the enemy to the front, what could only be more enemy behind him, and the river to the east. If he tried to run west they'd be all over him like ugly on an ape.
"You all know what this means," he said quietly, as his wife spurred her horse westward towards the only force mobile enough to break out of the trap. "The only thing we can do for our families now is kill as many of the enemy as possible before we go down. I take full responsibility. We'll form a half circle with our backs to the river-the swamp will cover us. Any questions?"
A few hasty swallows. Someone raised a hand.
"Yeah?"
"I'm not limber enough to kiss my own ass good-bye, especially wearing this fucking breastplate. Anyone care to do it for me?"
"By rights, that ought to be my job," Havel said, feeling a flush of pride as a grim chuckle ran around the half circle facing him. "But you can ask Lord Alexi to do the honors. Let's get going. Hakkaa Paalle!"
"Hakkaa Paalle!"
Near Castle Todenangst, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 6th, 2008/Change Year 9
"Whoa, girl. Whoa, pretty lady! Where did you come from?"
Sir James Wickham raised his eyebrows at the mare that had jumped the fence to join the herd. He'd cursed the roll of the dice that gave him this duty-looking after the reserve destriers was important work, but deadly dull, and there was a girl among the castle staff who'd given him a sidelong look. Here he was stuck with the smell of horseshit, keeping strange horses trained for aggression from fighting for dominance when they were penned too close, and to top it all off he had to do it in full war harness. Because there was a war on, as if anyone was going to raid within a mile of Castle Todenangst!
Now he forgot the serving-girl and his own annoyance; the black mare was a lot more interesting than anything else out here at the edge of the war-camp.
Big 'un, he thought as she cantered around the edge of the crowded meadow.
A few of the other horses nickered challenge at her, but she ignored them with lofty disdain. Big and beautiful. Christ and the Saints, that one's fit for the Protector's stud! She took a seven-board fence as if she were stepping over a dead man. And wouldn't I love to have her myself!
Sixteen hands and a bit, warmblood with a strong dash of Arab, and young-four or maybe even a little less, early teens in horse years. Enough muscle and bone to carry a man in full armor, but a floating gait like thistledown. Spring sunlight brought out the gloss of her black coat and mane, where mud hadn't spattered up her legs and onto her belly and chest. Some idiot had left her saddled for far too long, and it was an odd-looking saddle as well, a tiny thing.
"Any of you recognize her?" he asked sharply.
"No, my lord," the head groom said respectfully, shaking his head. "Never seen her before in my life, and I think I'd remember; that's a fine horse. But there's a lot of bloodstock here with the army."
Wickham nodded in turn. The groom was a decade and change older than the knight, nearly forty, and very good at his job-otherwise he wouldn't be working at the Protector's principle country residence. Instead of replying the younger man walked further on the dung-littered, close-cropped grass of the paddock, extending a hand and talking soothingly.
"Whoa, girl. Steady there: " In a slightly different tone: "By God, someone was riding her without a bit! That's just a hackamore! And that's a kid's saddle, look at the stirrup-leathers."
The horse snorted and tossed its head as he approached, turning three-quarters on and looking at him out of one eye. It tossed its head again as he ran a hand down its arched neck, and stamped one foot on the ground. That made a faint ringing sound, like a muted, far-off cymbal.
This is the first horse I've ever seen in all my life without a single fault I could find, he thought. What a pity if nobody could claim her!
"You're a good-natured lady too, I bet," he said. You'd have to be, if a kid was riding you. Even so, what a stupid risk – this is a warhorse if I've ever seen one. What the hell:
He eased the bridle off and gave it a look. It was a perfectly standard piece of harness, new-made but from well-tanned leather kept supple with neat's-foot oil and hard work, perhaps a little simpler and lighter than most; the metalwork was plain brass and stainless steel and someone had cleaned it carefully not too long ago. The saddle was elementary, a mere pad, even lighter than an English hunting saddle, and secured by a single girth. He unbuckled that as well, lifting it off her back, and then the saddle blanket, marveling at the condition of the muscles of her back and barrel. Leaving a saddle on a horse for days was a crime, although possibly she'd just run off. But whoever owned her had cared for her very well indeed before that. He cast a quick look at her hooves, which was easier when she picked one up and pawed at the turf. They were sound, and the shoes looked fairly new, and as if the farrier knew his business.
"Get me a hobble," he snapped over his shoulder, offering a piece of dried apple in one palm.
The horse took it, then turned away again; it twitched its skin when he tried to stroke its neck again. The head groom picked up the light pad saddle and turned it over in work-hardened hands.
"Sir James," he said suddenly. "Look at this!"
The knight drew himself out of a dream. It had been a very pleasant dream; nobody claimed the mare, he performed some heroic deed right where the right person could see it in the battles to come: title on the estate near Walla Walla he'd been half promised: the Protector gave him the stud services of his Salafin, and he bred him to this proud beauty to produce the perfect destrier:
"What is it?" he asked sharply.
"Look," the groom said simply, holding up the saddle.
There was a design on the flap, tooled into the fine-grained brown leather with an awl. A circle flanked by two crescents pointing out to left and right:
"Jesus!" he said, crossing himself and taking half a step back, scrubbing his hand against his side. "Hecate's moon. The Witch-mark!"
"Should I get a priest, my lord?" the groom said expressionlessly.
"Yes. And get the officer of the day-Lord Burton. And get me that hobble."
An under-groom came running with it an instant later. He took it in his own hands and advanced again, stooping.
"So, so, so, quietly there, girl-"
"Watch out!"
Sir James managed to get an arm up before the hoof hit his face. It was a forward flick with the forehoof, not a milling downward strike, and only the bone of his arm broke midway between elbow and wrist as the sheet steel of the vam-brace bent. His breath hissed out at the spike of shrill, cold agony up the nerves of his arm, and he curled around it. More pain as a stamp cracked ribs through mail and padding, and then the mare was away and took the fence in a floating leap that brought a gasp of wonder to him, even through the agony in arm and chest.
Hands lifted him a little, and he cursed breathlessly. "Carefully, oaf! It's a sprung rib and a broken arm. Get a doctor."
So much for my visible heroism, he thought. I'm not going anywhere except very carefully to the toilet for the rest of this campaigning season.
"That was one beautiful horse, though."
Tail and mane like flags, it paced away northward.
Near Mount Angel, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 6th, 2008/Change Year 9
"Nigel!" Juniper said, and seized him for a quick, fierce hug before stepping back.
"My dear," Nigel Loring said, slightly shocked at how haggard Juniper's face had grown. "I heard. I seriously don't think they'll hurt him, though. They'll want to make use of him."
Juniper nodded. "They'll expect fear for him to wear me down, the which I will not allow," she said stoutly. "And since there's nothing we can do about it now, let's attend to what we can do."
He nodded, keeping the admiration off his face. I worry enough about Alleyne now, and he's a man grown, he thought. I can't begin to imagine what it would have been like to have him carried off at nine. And I know full well she's thinking But I wasn't there! Over and over again.
Instead, he looked up at the sky. It wasn't raining anymore, this cold and windy afternoon, but it was wet enough, with wisps of fog drifting from the tops of the trees on the ridges about them. That would neutralize the enemy's air scouts, at least for a while.
Juniper took a deep breath and ducked back under the awning set up under an overhang of the gravel pit's wall. There was very little there, besides the shelter itself; a bedroll covered in hard-woven greased wool, and a small chest that mostly contained maps now spread out on a folding table. Sam Aylward was looking at one as they entered, standing side-by-side with John Brown; he dipped his head to Juniper, and then nodded to his old commander.
"Lady," he said. "Sir Nigel."
"What's the word?" the CORA leader said eagerly. "My guys' horses are get-tin' hungry. They can't eat fir needles."
"I had a very productive conversation with Abbot Dmwoski and his staff," Nigel said. "A most remarkable man. We all left safely-they have a remarkable collection of secret passages and posterns, too. And now we should really begin."
The rancher nodded. "Glad to get on with it," he said. "Our fodder's just about gone and there isn't enough grass up here. Wouldn't want to try this if my remuda lost its edge."
"Very well," Nigel said. He bent over the map, and everyone else followed suit. "The encampment is here, with ditch, bank and barbed wire on top, and a surveillance tower at each corner."
Juniper nodded, blinking her leaf green eyes. He admired the way she could put aside grief; even more, he admired the way she'd picked up the tricks of the fighter's trade without any formal training, simply by experience and by being around experts.
"First, let's poke them with a stick," she said.
Lord Emiliano Gutierrez, Baron Dayton, Marchwarden of the South, looked down at the commander of the eastern mercenaries attached to his force.
"Sumbitch shot me a clear two hundred yards away. Wouldn't a thought any of those Sisters from Sisters could do it," the man said. "Musta been usin' one of those fancy bows from before the Change, with the wheels at the ends. That's not fair nor right.'' Then: "Shitfire!"
Words came to Emiliano's mind, but it was a bit awkward to curse a man who was having an arrow extracted from his thigh and who'd refused painkillers so he could report clearheadedly, or to tell him he was being an idiot-the only reason compound bows weren't used more widely was that so many of their parts couldn't be duplicated without computer-controlled machine tools and synthetics. Instead he rubbed a hand across his beardless brown face and rose slightly on the balls of his feet; he was a short stocky man in his midthirties, but quick-moving, full of bouncy muscle. He glanced at the medic.
The doctor wasn't a cleric, but an older man who'd been trained before the Change. His voice was crisp: "He will recover, my lord. It isn't a complex wound and the bone was not split. It will keep him immobile for a number of weeks."
The doctor's hands had learned their skill in an era of MRI scans and laser scalpels, but they were still nimble on the spoonlike instrument that had been invented several thousand years ago to deal with wounds of exactly this sort. The hospital tent smelled of blood and bedpans and antiseptic, but not too badly; they hadn't had many casualties yet, or much sickness-and most of that was among the plainsman mercenaries, who were careless about sanitation. They'd had time to lay the prefab timber and plywood floors, as well; the war against Mount Angel had been a nice leisurely siege, with nothing beyond a little skirmishing now and then, and nuisance raids on their supply lines. That pleased the baron well enough. Less was likely to go wrong with this than with the jobs Alexi Stavarov or Conrad Renfrew had gotten.
And the monks had it coming. They'd been a pain in the arse to all the southern baronies for years, giving refuge to runaways and sticking their oars in half a dozen other rackets, not to mention letting that puta Astrid Larsson and her gang of lunatics set up in the woods just south of here. And those Rangers so-called and the kilties had been spreading subversion with the monks' help. That was the only reason he was backing this war, that and fear of the Lord Protector. Arminger was right about getting rid of the disturbing influences.
Nice and quiet suits me fine, he thought. I've got everything I want, or I will when we hang Dmwoski: no, the pope wants to burn him. I've got my good land and my castle and I just want the rest of the world to go away so my kids, they can have it too.
The man on the table gave an animal grunt and sighed as the arrow came out. It was a simple broadhead, hammered and filed down from a stainless-steel spoon into a razor-edged triangle; the doctor flipped it and a three-inch stub of the wooden shaft into a pan one of the nurses held.
"Wait a bit," the mercenary said as the doctor's assistants came forward with bottles and tools and a curved needle and thread.
This is one hard man, Emiliano thought with reluctant respect, as the mercenary went on.
"OK, they jumped us out of the woods. Looked like they was movin' north of us. We tried to hit 'em right away, but there was more of the bastards than we thought at first-two hundred, two-fifty, to our one-twenty, that I saw. Maybe a bit more. That's all I know."
"Good work, Sheriff Simmons," Emiliano said, and nodded to the doctor.
The wounded man relaxed as the nurse ran a hypodermic of morphine into the tube that was dripping saline solution into his arm; the doctor waited, then began to irrigate and close the deep fissure. Outside in the gray, damp not-quite-rain Emiliano's own guards fell in behind him as he walked to the commander's pavilion, hobnailed boots crunching and grating on wet stone; there had even been time to scrape up gravel from the monks' roads-which were very well kept, like the farms around here-and lay it down so that the laneways inside the big square camp didn't turn to bottomless mud. The guards wheeled into place at the entrance to his own pavilion, and he nodded to them as he passed.
Emiliano had learned a long time ago-in the Lords, before the Change- that you needed to keep tight with the men who had your back. The Lord Protector had run what he called a diversity program to make sure none of the greater lords had a following exclusively drawn from their pre-Change backers, so only a couple of the guards were from the Lords, or their younger brothers; a few more were Society types, or their younger brothers; and half were just ordinary survivors who'd worked their way up. But he still made sure that his guards were his men, men he could trust, and once he was sure, he did trust them. He'd also learned long ago that trusting nobody was just as deadly as trusting the wrong people.
He'd never trusted Norman Arminger, for example.
Lord Jabar Jones of Molalla waited for him in the outer room of the command pavilion. The big black man was brooding over the map boards, but he looked up and nodded at the Marchwarden. They were social equals-both barons, both tenants-in-chief-and the other man was his second-in-command in military rank for this expedition.
"He have much to say, Lord Emiliano?"
The former Blood's voice was deep and rich, and a lot smoother than it had been in the early days. They all were, come to that. Emiliano grinned to himself.
Dolores especially, he thought, thinking of how his wife did the Great Lady thing these days. Hey, pardon me, that's Lady Dolores of Dayton. Mother of God, but you look at her in those cotte-hardi things and nobody would suspect she used to spray the jeans on her ass out of a can they were so tight. Nobody sees the ring in her navel anymore, either, except me.
She'd learned to play the game with the Society bitches, and went at it with a convert's zeal. Sometimes he thought she worked as hard memorizing the Table of Rank and Precedence as he did with the sword, and she was already planning the marriages of their kids to link them to the other great houses.
Aloud, the Marchwarden said: "Yes, he did. Short and to the point, my lord Molalla."
You had to observe the courtesies; it wasn't too different from the way things had been with his pandilleros in the old days; you didn't diss a man unless you were prepared to meet him face-to-face and kill him. The names were fancier, but he'd gotten used to it, and there was a ring to being called "lord"; he supposed that was why they'd called the gang that back when. A servant slid forward and put a mug of hot coffee in his hands, then retired to invisibility in a corner of the big canvas room. He blew on the steaming surface and took a sip before he went on: "It's the cora-boy types; we knew they and the kilties were tight, just didn't expect to see them this far north. Light cavalry like the ones we get from Pendleton, except not such balls-on-fire types, from what I hear. Better than two hundred of them, maybe more, and they're loose north of us."
Jabar shut one enormous fist. "Motherfuckers."
"Si," Emiliano said. "This trouble we don't need."
"How'd they get over the mountains without our knowing it?"
"How they got here, I don't know. Maybe over Route 20 and then the old logging trails, maybe through the reservation-we should teach the goddamned indios a lesson someday. Anyway, we got a problem. Plus the air cover ain't worth mierda right now."
"Bet your ass we got a problem, my lord," Jabar said. "We can guard our supply trains from small bunches of Rangers or kilties or any of that good shit. We can't guard it against no three, four hundred men on ponies. No how, no way, not without we jam everything into great big convoys with a couple hundred guards. 'Specially with God pissing on us this way."
They looked out at the gray spring day. The sky was the color of a wet iron manhole cover, with patches like a concrete sidewalk in the rain. This time of year it could stay like that for weeks, or break up into sunshine overnight; it wasn't as if they had weather forecasts any more.
Until I got to fighting out in the campo, I never realized weather was so important, he thought; he'd always been a child of cities and pavements, although his grandparents had been farmers in Jalisco and he was a lord of farmers now.
Along one edge of the camp was a long prefabricated ramp like a ski jump, with a hydraulic catapult that could throw a glider into the air. The problem was, cloud was at barely a thousand feet, with patches of mist and fog below that. Or to put it another way, the problem was Oregon.
"I got couriers out by a couple different routes," Emiliano said, looking at the map.
It was a modern one, showing wilderness and populated zones, ruins, living towns, which roads were passable and which weren't, and right now it had colored pins showing the locations of the Association's forces, and conjectured enemy ones.
"To Count Conrad and to the Protector. But neither of them's going to be what you'd call real happy with us if we don't handle this on our own."
Jabar grunted; he was still uncertain of his standing at court after the fiasco with Princess Mathilda. That might be forgotten now that the astonishing news about her rescue had come through; on the other hand, it might not. Nobody in their right mind expected Norman Arminger to forget a grudge, and Lady Sandra:
Emiliano hid a slight shudder with another sip of coffee. "OK, what we got to be careful of is getting mousetrapped the way that hijo Piotr was."
Jabar traced lines on the map with a thick finger. "He tried stomping eight hundred Mackenzies with a hundred lancers," he said. "Even if there's four hundred of those light horse, they're not going to ass-fuck four hundred knights. Not if we can pin them against something for a charge so they can't run away and shoot us up as they go. Those sheep-fuckers can't stand up to us hand-to-hand."
"Yeah, but there's a chance-just an off chance-that the Mackenzies might be up here, too."
The cannonball head came up, his eyes narrowing until they were white slits in the eggplant face. "You think so? The Grand Constable don't."
"Think? Bro, I know Renfrew doesn't have his dick on the chopping block here, whatever the hell he thinks."
Jabar rubbed his jaw; his coif rested loose over his bullock-broad shoulders and down his back. "Eight hundred archers: even with, say, four hundred CORA riders, that's still not enough to take us on. Not even close. Yeah, their bowmen are good, but there's a difference between charging eight hundred with one hundred and charging eight hundred with four hundred. Without they got some spears or pikes or something, we could smash their ass, open-field. And that's just the lancers. We got the infantry, two thousand men, and the Pendleton scouts."
He was starting to look enthusiastic; Emiliano raised a cautionary hand. "My lord, let's not get a hard-on so all the blood runs out of our heads, like that little white-ass Mafiya cocksucker Piotr. We got the monks to think about too, you know."
Jabar's brows knitted. Emiliano had worked with him a number of times over the years, and knew the brutish appearance was a false front. Nobody had stayed on top through the turbulent early years of the Association without plenty of smarts, and not just the street variety.
"We got more men than we need to keep them bottled up," Jabar said at last. "There's no quick way to get out of the Abbey. They got to send men down the switchbacks on the north side of the hill into the town before they can sally. That takes time."
"So let's find the motherfuckers, my lord."
The round head nodded. "And then, if we can kill them before they get away, the war is over."
Near West Salem, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9
Ooof, Michael Havel thought, closing a jaw gone slack. It's a pleasant surprise, but it's still a hell of a surprise. He felt disoriented for a moment, with a whirling vertigo, as if his whole body had been prepared for a step at the bottom of a ladder and had instead run into a hard floor. Actually, I was prepared for death. A momentary surge of nausea surprised him, and he spat to clear his mouth.
The Bear Lord recognized the first pair of the men pulling up their lathered horses before him. Behind them troops were pouring down out of the ruins of West Salem onto Brush College Road, moving at the double-quick and making the earth shake with the uniform pounding of their boots. Pikes bristled above them, waving like ripe wheat in July, light glistening on the steel.
"Major Jones," he said, returning the man's salute. "Let's be understated and say it's good to see you."
"Edward Finney," the other man said, offering a hand in a metal gauntlet.
He was in his late forties, stocky and weathered, wearing first-class armor- breast-and-back of overlapping articulated plates, lobster-style, mail-and-plate leggings and arm-guards, a visored helmet on his head-with a sword at his hip and a long war-hammer slung over one shoulder. It wasn't gear Havel would have cared to wear on horseback, but from the weapon that wasn't the way he fought, either, and the horse was for mobility. Two much younger men with a strong family resemblance and similarly armed rode behind him, probably his sons. An even younger woman followed-barely old enough to take the field- in lighter gear, with a trumpet and a crossbow slung over her back.
"Ah, you're a friend of Juney's," Havel said. A mental file clicked: Big yeoman farmer down south of Corvallis city, the son of old Luther. Influential guy. "So, the Faculty Senate finally got its collective thumb out?"
"Nope," Finney and Jones said together. The farmer shrugged and signed the soldier to go on. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in turn.
"That back there is the First Corvallis Volunteers; two thousand of them, half crossbows, half pikes and heavy infantry, a couple dozen mounted scouts. Could have had more, but we didn't want to wait, since that message you read on your veranda the other day sounded pretty time-constrained. It was obvious Turner and Kowalski would keep the Senate chasing round in circles and biting its own ass with amendments to secondary clauses to reports of special committees on the Whichness of the Wherefore, so we convened an overnight emergency session of the Popular Assembly-your man Hugo helped a lot getting the word around quick. That man's got contacts!"
"The Assembly can't declare war or order mobilization," Havel said, surprised. At least, if I know as much about the way Corvallis is set up as I think I do.
"But it can authorize people to go off as volunteers without a declaration of war."
"It can? "It can now, because we just did exactly that, and it hadn't occurred to the Economics Faculty that we could. We rammed through a vote, and most of the people voting showed up with their armor already on, which was sort of a hint-Ed here turned out a good five hundred from south of town, and another farmer friend of Lady Juniper's did the same out around Philomath, and Bill Hatfield and I have some pull in town. Somehow nobody wanted to get in our way when we pushed our bikes up to the Northgate."
Havel grinned, imagining the scene. "I bet they didn't!"
"Yeah. We geared up, got in the saddle before dawn this morning and started pedaling like mad while the Bobbsey Twins of the Faculty of Economics waved their arms and screeched about unconstitutional actions and threatened us with paper-armored lawyers. Christ, watching their faces was worth it all by itself! Not as much fun as smashing the butt end of a glaive there, but still worth it."
"You didn't happen to run into my reinforcements on the way here, did you?"
Jones nodded. "The guy in charge there decided to go up and reinforce Will Hutton instead, since he hadn't got the last of his people in, and we were going to get to you first."
Havel fought down a surge of irritation; he wanted his subordinates to exercise initiative, and it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
"Where do you want us, O Lord Bear?" Jones went on.
Havel shook his head again, looking westward along his line and then north at the enemy. No time to be flabbergasted. The enemy had frozen in place when they saw the reinforcements coming up behind him; there was a lot of trumpeting and flag-waving and messengers riding back and forth.
"You're already up there, so form up on my western flank."
He put out his left arm, pointing it at the Corvallans as they poured out onto the road, then swung it around to his front. "We'll come in on them like this, and see if we can catch Alexis nose in the door."
"Or his thieving fingers," Edward Finney said.
"Or his dick," Jones added, and the younger Finneys laughed. "Let's go!"
They turned their horses around and cantered west to direct their soldiers. Havel looked around at his company commanders, who were either standing slack-faced: : or grinning like red-arsed baboons who've just stumbled across a stash of bananas.
"Gentlemen, ladies, let's get to work." He shrugged his shoulders as they scattered for their commands, settling himself as if preparing for a hard task. "Messengers: to Lord Eric, fall in on the extreme left flank of our friends from Corvallis, and try and get around the enemy and keep them from pulling back. To Captain Sarducci, limber up and hitch your teams. Trumpeters, sound general advance!"
Three-quarters of a mile westward other trumpets blew, their timbre and the sequence of notes they used different from the Bearkillers'. He understood them, though: Pikepoints down, and Prepare for push of pike!
The sixteen-foot shafts came level in a quick, disciplined bristle of points. Flanked by the crossbows, the hedgehog shape of the phalanx began to walk.
Two hours later Mike Havel sat his horse and watched the Protector's men digging in. They were about two miles north of the battlefield, near Rice Rocks, where the Willamette turned north again after an east-west stretch. That was where the northern troops had disembarked that dawn. The Bearkillers and Corvallans observed from a safe distance westward. The falling sun at their backs threw their shadows before them, like goblin mockeries of men and horses; the air didn't have the stink of blood and shit that went with battle here, but it already smelled of turned earth and sweat.
"I take it back," Havel said sourly.
"Take what back?" Major Jones said.
"I told Signe earlier today that Arminger is too much of a Period Nazi"-he looked at the Corvallan and the younger man nodded to show he grasped the phrase; he'd been a Society fighter before the Change-"to use artillery properly. I take it back."
The barges that had landed the Association's men were still there, drawn up on the sandy-muddy beach that marked the south side of the river at the point of the curve. Their crews and the rowers who'd tugboated them south and upstream hadn't been idle. The square shape of an earthwork fort already showed on some low heights near the river, with workers and wheelbarrows and crank-powered lifts swarming over it like ants. Skeletal gantries with huge lanterns at the tops showed how they were planning on keeping going when the sun finished setting, though there would be plenty of moonlight.
Havel looked aside at Sarducci. The chief of his field artillery shook his head regretfully. "They outrange me by too much, Lord Bear," he said. "The stuff mounted on the barges in the river is bad enough, but they've been moving some of it ashore, too. Couple of heavy, turntable-mounted trebuchets, I'd say-"
As if to draw a line under his words, there was a monumental soft whoosh sound from within the budding earthwork fort. The darkening twilight made the fireball that arced up from inside the walls look enormous, trailing a mane of red-orange flames. It landed and spread flame over a field already marked by circular scorches; turf smoldered as the napalm burnt itself out. The bitter reek drifted faintly to them. Steel darts glittered in the same area, half buried; the barges had some sort of machine that threw bundles of them, which came apart n midair and landed traveling almost straight down, dozens at a time.
"OK, I think everyone's agreed we can't rush them?"
The men and women around him nodded; Eric Larsson last and most reluctantly of all. "They couldn't kill all of us before we got to the berm," he said.
The others stared at him. "Yeah," his sister said. "They could only kill five or six hundred of us. And then we'd have a thousand crossbowmen shooting at us from behind cover. And then we'd have a thousand spearmen and, say, four hundred knights and men-at-arms standing on the fighting platform they're building waiting to noogie on us. Do you think they'd bother chasing whoever was left when they ran away?"
"All right, all right, Sis, I didn't say we should attack them," the big young man said, raising a placating hand. "But we can't let them set up a base here. They could raid all along the eastern flank of the Eolas and up into Spring Valley. A lot of our farms are there."
Sarducci pointed to higher ground a half mile westward from the Protectorate position. "We could build a fort there and keep a watch on them," he said.
Signe made a hissing sound between her teeth. "What are we supposed to garrison this fort with, half the A-list? It's spring planting season. The militia have to go home, or even if the wheat harvest this summer is the best we've ever had it'll be a hungry winter. Unless we eat too much of our stock, and where would that leave us the year after?"
She gestured at the Corvallans; Edward Finney rubbed at his jaw-gingerly, since it had a bandaged slash on it now. One of his sons, the dark-haired one, had a bandage wrapped turban-style around his head, and was sneaking looks at himself in the still-polished inner surface of his vambrace, doubtless thinking how heroic he'd look back to home. The other was praying silently, his rosary moving through gloved fingers sticky with congealing blood, eyes still wide with what he'd seen on his first battlefield.
"And our friends here can't stay forever-most of them are farmers too, and they all have a living to earn."
"Hey, people," Havel said. They all looked at him. "A couple of hours ago we thought we were all going to die. This is an improvement."
He glanced at the fort, lacing the fingers of his hands together and tapping one thumb on the other. In his mind he called up maps, and memories of riding this ground before. Few Bearkillers lived on the actual banks of the river; it was too dangerous, from floods and half a dozen other menaces. But the drier ground just to the west was cultivated for miles north of here, and strategic hamlets and A-lister steadings were plentiful; it was part of the Outfit's heartland. Eric was right; they couldn't leave an enemy base here-their own people would rightly withdraw allegiance if they weren't protected. Signe was right, too; they couldn't afford to just stick a big garrison here to watch the Protector's new fort. Besides the fact that they just didn't have that many full-time soldiers, if they did that the Association would turn it into a castle over the next couple of months, and that would be completely intolerable.
"But two can play at the fort game," he said. "It's no use if they can't supply it, and that means riverboats. Hey, Ken."
The older man looked up with a start; he'd been lost in an engineer's reverie as he stared at the earthworks, making notes on a pad now and then.
"Ken, you said you punctured those turtle boats of theirs?"
"Some of them," he said. "Burned a couple more."
"Think they could make the armor much thicker?"
"Not much, not and keep them mobile. The reason we beat them was that they didn't have much room inside for weapons, with all the men on cut-down bicycles pedaling away in there. If you made the boats bigger, the armor problem would get worse-the inverse square law is still working fine! So if you increase the volume to fit in more men pedaling: well, human beings just aren't very efficient engines."
He shook a fist skyward. "And we're not allowed to have efficient engines! God damn you, Alien Space Bats!"
"Maybe God did it," someone said quietly.
"In that case, may God damn God!"
"Hey, gently, gently. Let's not discuss the Change, hey?" Havel said.
He got a quiet chuckle from most of those within earshot: that was a proverb for "utter waste of time."
"You know that bit where there's a bluff near the west bank of the river, maybe a mile and a half north of here, maybe a little less?"
Ken nodded; so did Signe and a few of the other Bearkillers, and Major Jones; a good eye for terrain was an officer's trait.
"We put in a fort there-doesn't have to be too big, just big enough to hold out against a storming party until help arrives from the Spring Valley settlements, and we can tie it into the message relays easily enough. And in that fort we put in some of those big-ass throwing machines you built, with a nice view of the river and good thick earth berms in front, and overhead cover. With that, we can interdict the Willamette even at night; it's less than a tenth of a mile across there, even counting that big sandbar, the Darrow bar. We can put obstacles in the riverbed under cover from the engines; come to that, you can rig us up a diving suit, right?"
Smiles broke out around the circle. They became a little strained when Havel turned to the Corvallans. "And I'm sure our friends here would be glad to help with building the fort before they go home, eh?"
Edward Finney winced. "Well: look, I've got enough hands back home to get by at a pinch, but a lot of our people are smaller operators-"
"Won't take all that long, not with three thousand strong backs. We may not even have to finish it. I expect that when we show we can cut them off, Alexi will haul everyone back north; we can work some sort of truce-and-ransom thing, which is why I made sure to get some prisoners he'll value. He's probably just hoping we don't have the equipment or the smarts to block the river, and hoping to show the Lord Protector something besides a bloody nose and Corvallis involved on our side. We only need to keep a lid on this bunch here until they realize they can't stay."
Jones cleared his throat. "Ed, we can do that. And if we have to keep people here more than a week, we can call for volunteers again and have a whip-round from the ones who have to go home to get the spring crop in. Everyone can chip in, oh, a couple of sacks of potatoes and some flour, or bacon or whatever. That way the weavers and blacksmiths and factory workers won't be out of pocket for their lost time."
"Yeah, we can do that." He looked at Havel, obviously thinking of asking the Bearkillers to chip in, then reconsidered.
Which is good. Because we just paid in blood. I lost two in every hundred of our militia today, and worse than that for the A-listers.
"And while we're digging, let's figure out how to make the Protectorate pay," Havel said. "I am"-he paused to consider-"a bit peeved."
The Corvallans blinked a bit at the ripple of wolfish laughter that went through the Bearkiller leaders.