Near Mount Angel, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 7th, 2008/Change Year 9
E ilir Mackenzie flattened as the patrol rode nearer, peering under the branch of a bush with her bow across the crook of her elbows to keep it and the waxed string out of the damp. The damp, bedraggled mixture of twigs and grass in her war cloak's loops would hide her well on this gray spring day. Wetness soaked up into her brigandine and wicked into the padding underneath it, bringing chill and a stale-sweat smell to mingle with the damp earth and oiled metal. The patrol was more of the easterners, strung out along a road that ran between new hedges and old rows of beech trees planted by some nostalgic Swabian a long time ago-many Germans had settled around here, a century and a half past.
The sun was just up over the Cascades behind the ambushers, but that was merely a spot of brighter gray in the overcast sky; they were about a mile from the Abbey, as close in as the Protectorate forces and their hirelings patrolled in daytime for fear of the catapults. The huge white bulk of the fortified monastery and the red roofs above it seemed like a dream in the gloaming, like an illustration in one of Mom's books:
The books that Rudi loved to read. Stop that, girl! We're going to get him back, by the Dark lady and the Dread Lord! Get your mind on business!
Her eyes flicked down the line of enemy horsemen; six of them, riding down towards the southern edge of Mount Angel's hill, before turning back around the other side towards the enemy camp north of Mount Angel town. She couldn't see fine detail, since they were a hundred yards away or better, but it was definitely easterners, not the Protector's own scouts. That was good-they'd let a patrol of those go by. The mercenaries were skilled at their trade, but they tended to be a bit more impulsive than the men who served the Protector and his barons. Plus they were all close relations, which made them hot for revenge when a man was hurt.
Closer, closer, and then they were in easy range.
This has to look good, she thought, then fought down a sneeze as a grass stem tickled her nose, smelling spicy-sweet with new growth. Then: Now!
She hit the quick-release toggle at her throat and shed the war cloak as she leapt to her feet. That was the signal, and the patrol's heads whipped around in horrified disbelief as a dozen archers appeared from the overgrown verge of the road by the orchard.
The last one was hers, by prearrangement. Tricky shooting at this range, but the air was millpond-still:
She let the breath go out between her teeth as she drew the eighty-pound longbow to the ear, pushing out with the left arm and twisting her body into the pull. It wouldn't be too hard to kill at this range, but precision was much more difficult. The broadhead came to the edge of the arrow-rest, and the bow moved up in a single curve as she exhaled. Watch the target, and let thousands of hours of practice tell you where the arrow would go, and hope no twitch of the man or the air threw it off. Let the string roll off the gloved draw-fingers, and you were the bow and the arrow and the target all in the same instant, driving it with your will like a spell.
The cord slapped at her bracer with a sharp impact felt up her left arm even through the metal and tough leather. The release felt right, smooth and sweet, the surge of recoil like a dance. She was so caught up in the moment that she almost ignored the arrows coming back towards her; then she ducked at the unpleasantly familiar feel of cloven air moving on her face. Then she drew and loosed again, and again, using bodkins designed to punch armor now. That startled volley was the only one the riders could fire, though, and that only because they'd been moving with their bows in hand and a shaft on each string. Five of the enemy were down almost at once; most of the Rangers loosed only two or three shafts.
Among the other qualifications, you had to be a good shot to be a Ranger.
Eilir grinned silently as the last enemy trooper galloped off northward, bent over his horse's neck with an arrow in his shoulder; from the look of it the broadhead had just barely punched through the stiff leather of his cuirass, enough to wound but not knock him off his horse. A bodkin would have sunk deeper and done more damage:
But that's the point, she thought with a silent giggle. Then she thrust the bow back through its carrying loops. And thank Luck that nobody got carried away and shot him jor real. Get the horses! she signed. They had to make this look like an ordinary nuisance raid, and they wanted to be chased. No real raiders would pass up the opportunity to snaffle off three good quarter horses and their gear.
The Dunedain ran onto the road, one or two grim but the rest grinning like children pulling off a prank. Sometimes they all make me feel very old, Eilir thought; she and Astrid were the senior Rangers in years as well as rank. Except for Alleyne and John, of course. And John can be like a kid sometimes, too. Alleyne's too serious for my taste. Lovely package, hut he and Astrid were meant for each other.
She could feel the wet gravel scrunch under their feet and see little milky spurts of mud come up under the horses' hooves; this was a road built after the Change. One of the enemy mounts had galloped away north after the wounded scout; another was down with an arrow through its ribs, breathing like a bellows and rolling an eye at her in piteous entreaty: make it better. She signed the air to ask its forgiveness and used her dirk to give it peace; Pilimor did likewise with a wounded mercenary with three shafts through his body who lay arching his back in a bow and spitting out wet bits of lung as he clawed at the stone with bloody fingers. Then they led the horses east at a trot through the orchard. Their own mounts and a dozen more Dunedain waited there. Astrid slid down from the crown of a tall Douglas fir and dashed across the open ground. Alleyne was leading Asfaloth, with the mare's head already in the right direction, and the Dunedain leader vaulted laughing into the Arab's saddle.
"Go!" she shouted. "They're coming! They had a force ready; two hundred riders or better. They probably think we're the ones who shot their chief yesterday, and they want vengeance."
The score of Dunedain turned their horses' noses towards the east and a little north and the band surged into motion. John Hordle wasn't with them; it wouldn't have been sensible, when a pursuit on horseback was in order. The half-Percheron they'd found for him could bear his weight easily enough, and it was even fairly fast given time to work up a gallop, but it couldn't keep the pace they expected for long. The ground ahead was open farmland with plank or wire fences, a few with new, low hedges, mostly wheatfields or pasture, or half-readied for the spring planting and abandoned when the northern foe arrived. They fell into a long lope, the sort of gait used when they expected to be running for a while, turning a little aside now and then to avoid plowed ground where the mud would suck speed and strength out of the hooves and legs of their mounts.
Eilir looked over her shoulder. Horses didn't raise dust this time of year in the Willamette and the easterners' gear was mostly dull-colored, hard to spot against the brown of plowland and the green of pasture. Another fence came up, and Celebroch took it without needing directions: yes, she could see a mass of horsemen boiling down from the northward, angling out from the enemy camp, with one in the lead carrying a banner with a mountain lion worked on the cloth, and another beside him wearing the tanned head of one on his helmet. Perhaps they'd copied that from descriptions of the Bear Lord's headgear.
How Mike would scowl, she thought.
The Dunedain slanted more directly east to avoid them, making a great show of urging their horses on without adding much speed.
Celebroch tossed her head, as if to say: Don't you know what you're doing? Am I supposed to run all out, or not? Make up your mind, woman!
There were two hundred in the band that pursued them. She could make out the numbers clearly enough once they'd fallen in behind the Rangers, despite their having no more order than a swarm of attacking bees. Arrows began to flick out from them, falling well short-two hundred yards was about the maximum you could really expect to hit someone when both were moving fast. Their mouths were all open too, probably howling curses-or just howling. Eilir left the knotted reins on Celebroch's neck and stood in the stirrups, slanting her longbow across the mare's rump as she turned and drew. A six-foot bow was awkward on horseback, but not impossible if you practiced enough. Aim high There.
The arrow plunged down among the very first of the mercenaries; two of them surged away from each other a bit as they galloped. It must have come down between them. Both of them shot back at her; one had a pre-Change compound bow, and the arrow came uncomfortably close to Celebroch's heels.
Astrid fell back beside her and drew her recurve. The arrow struck. Eilir couldn't see exactly where but a horse went over as if it had been poleaxed, and the rider hit the ground rolling. He gathered himself into a ball and put his arms over his head; one of his friends jumped his mount right over him, and others swerved, with a couple of near collisions corrected with impressive skill. Then the Rangers were plunging down a bank into the shallow, gravelly expanse of Zollner Creek; they surged through in exploding sheets of cold spray, holding their bows high overhead to avoid wetting them, and then galloped in earnest. Something hit her between the shoulder blades-hard-and she gasped and lurched forward in the saddle for an instant, making her mount check its stride. Astrid reached over and pulled something free of her brigan-dine, showing it to her before tossing it aside; it was an arrow with a barbed head. There would be a spot on her back where the leather was scraped free of the little steel plates.
Wow. Too close for comfort – -maybe we left it a little too long! They didn't have to shoot her to kill her, just cripple Celebroch. Probably they don't shoot at horses much 'cause they want to steal them. But sooner or later they'd get mad enough to ignore the niceties.
The Dunedain were thundering over a stretch of rolling meadow now, towards an old country road and then a big orchard about a mile long and a quarter wide, the riders ahead throwing divots of turf and dirt at her. The trees were neatly tended, and the buds were just about to break, but she could only see the top halves though they were twenty feet tall or better. The northeast-southwest line of the road ran along a low ridge; the cherry trees were on the other side, and sloped down a little to a creek. Closer and closer, the white-painted fence along the roadway looming up and the first of the Dunedain taking it in flying leaps. One had his horse refuse and fought it to a standstill, forcing its head around until it went in a circle for a moment, then riding off southward along the line of the fence, probably hideously embarrassed.
Asfaloth and Celebroch soared over it. She could see John Hordle there just beyond the other side of the road, lying flat as she had only a few moments before, grinning the way a Lughnasadh baked ham would if it had teeth. The twin Arab mares halted in a few strides; the rest of the Rangers continued for a few more paces, under the cherry trees, and among the CORA ranchers and their retainers waiting there. Those were all standing by their horses to keep out of sight from the meadow on the west side of the road; they grinned and gave her thumbs-up and worked their mouths.
Astrid drew up beside Alleyne. Eilir kicked her feet out of the stirrups, vaulted to the ground, dropped the reins-that meant Celebroch would stay, unless her mistress blew the high-frequency whistle that dangled around her neck-and ran a dozen paces to kneel beside John Hordle.
The big Englishman was lying on his back with his hands behind his head, helmet pushed forward over his eyes, chewing a grass stem and smiling around it at her. She scowled and thumped him on the top of his headpiece with the flat of her hand, driving it down until it covered everything above his nose. Since it was a good, solid steel sallet with a padded lining, his grimace and wince was undoubtedly put on.
Get ready! she signed as he pushed it back and winked.
"I am ready," he said, turning his head towards her.
One of the many things she liked about him was that he always remembered to face her when he spoke; lip-reading was half guesswork at the best of times, though she was very good at it.
"I'm just not rushing about getting hysterical, like some people I could name," he went on.
Eilir would have thumped him again, except that he was rising to one knee and turning with a smooth ease astonishing in a man who stood six-foot-seven in his stocking feet. Then he took up his bow, and they raised their heads until they were looking head and shoulders over the much-patched asphalt of the roadway.
The Pendleton men were reckless fighters, but not fools: they'd reined in at long bowshot rather than ride straight into territory they couldn't see, even in hot pursuit. Where they came from war was largely a matter of raid and skirmish; feigned retreats to draw pursuers into an ambush were standard operating procedure. Half a dozen came whooping forward to the road, where they could see into the orchard and warn the others if it was a trap.
Eilir and Hordle came to their feet along with the rest of the Rangers. She drew again, sensibly aiming at one of the men in the vanguard only twenty yards away, and drove a bodkin point through his leather cuirass and chest and out the spine in a shower of blood and chipped bone. Hordle was grinning and he had a heavy four-ounce arrow to his bow, the type of four-to-a-pound shaft that his seven-foot stave with its hundred-and-fifty-pound draw-weight could throw. The muscles knotted in his arm as he pulled the shaft to the ear and loosed upward at a forty-five degree angle.
Two hundred and fifty yards away the doll-tiny figure of the enemy standard-bearer looked up sharply. Then he dropped the flag and fell off his horse, scrabbling at the arrow that had slammed through his face from right cheek to left jaw.
She gave him a glance that said as plainly as Sign: Showoff!
"They always look up," he said, and fell into a steady rhythm of draw-aim-loose, once every four or five seconds. "Bloody odd, if you ask me. I mean, here you are, bits of pointed iron flying about in a roit frightening way, you 'ear this sssssss noise, like an arrow coming down at you, so what do you do: look up?"
Eilir waggled her ears. Wouldn't happen to me, the gesture said.
The loss of their standard-bearer enraged the mercenaries, and so did the sight of the same dozen enemies they'd been chasing making a stand and inflicting yet more losses. They surged forward in a mass; Eilir could feel the growing drumroll of their horses' hooves through the soles of her feet. Arrows flicked out, and heavy, curved slashing blades were swung in menacing circles.
"Time to scarper," Hordle said cheerfully.
They all turned and dashed back-which meant that the men from the eastern plains would see their prey escaping again, after killing yet more of their kinfolk.
They must be frothing and drooling, she thought. From what I've been told and seen, they're very sensitive about being made to look foolish.
Ahead in the orchard the CORA riders were swinging into the saddle. They rode the same type of ranch-country quarter horse that the Pendleton men did and were likewise lightly armed, although there were more with short mail shirts rather than boiled-leather cuirasses; a few had brigandines and their leader was resplendent in a steel breastplate painted brown. They all had bows and a long blade or light ax; most swords were stirrup-hilted sabers whose first models were the blades of the US cavalry of Old West times, salvaged from museums and antique stores after the Change; a few bore light lances, shorter and slimmer than those of Protectorate knights or Bearkiller A-listers. Rancher John Brown did, and he waved it at her before he slapped his horse on the rump with the shaft. His followers moved forward in a rough double line, not a rigid formation but a lot more orderly than their enemies'.
Quarter horses had good acceleration. The four hundred riders went from a stop to a walk to a canter in half a dozen paces. The board fence along the road went over with a thud she felt even through the hoofbeats, its uprights cut through and smeared with mud in the night-that had been her idea, and she felt a flush of pride as she swung around and led Celebroch forward. Astrid and Alleyne had snatched up lances left leaning against cherry trees and were off with the rest. Astrid held back a little; with a six-foot man clothed from head to toe in jointed alloy steel on its back, the big gelding her lover rode took a little longer to hit a hard gallop. When it did it was as fast as any of the horses there; Asfaloth had no trouble accelerating with Astrid wearing a Bearkiller-style hauberk and her raven helm.
The mercenaries had checked only an instant when they saw the CORA force coming at them; more a matter of men leaning back in the saddle than of the horses actually slowing. Then they came on faster than ever; there wasn't room to switch and make a chase of it. A fast horse could make thirty miles an hour for short distances, and with their combined speeds the two groups were approaching each other at better than sixty. Arrows flew between them, but only for a few seconds. That was enough to empty a dozen saddles, but nobody wanted to be left with a bow when his enemy came within saber range. Then the two formations passed through each other in a mutual blur of speed and slashing steel, bright blades sparking on metal, or leaving trails of red through the damp air to glisten on the dew-wet grass. Astrid and Alleyne lifted their targets out of the saddle and discarded the lances, sweeping out their long swords as the battle turned into a wheeling melee. Eilir's eyebrows went up as she saw the swath the steel-clad figures cut through the plainsmen. She knew that Astrid was cold death with any weapon, but Alleyne was such a gentleman He dodged the sweep of an eastern slashing sword, broke the man's jaw with the edge of his heater-shaped shield. In the same instant a backhand cut across the eyes left another mercenary lurching back with his hands pressed to his face, mouth an O beneath them:
– that she sometimes forgot what he was like in a fight.
"Seems like a shame to disturb them," John Hordle said calmly, reaching over his shoulder for an arrow. "Still one always 'as to do one's bit, as Sir Nigel used to say."
Hordle was no more than passable at mounted combat. Eilir was far better than that, but she'd decided without thought to stand by him: and now she felt a sudden slight pang, as if she'd abandoned her anamchara.
Don't be ridiculous, she thought stoutly. Didn't we swear to be goddess-mother to each other's children, all those years ago?
Also she and Hordle were among the few present who could shoot into that whirling, slashing, hoof-milling chaos without much risk of friendly-fire accidents.
"I'll take the one with the steel cap and feathers," the big man said, lifting his seven-foot bow. "You want the one with the fringed: what are those things called?"
Chaps, Eilir signed shortly, and drew her own bow.
"Got two chaps on 'is legs," Hordle chuckled, and let the string roll off his fingers.
I don't like killing people, she thought, and shot. John doesn't either but he does like to fight – there's a difference. Me, I'd rather not do either. Odd. Alleyne's more like me that way, and John's more like Astrid – she doesn't like killing either but it's all the old stories to her while she's fighting, so she glories in that. I think she really means it when she says yrch.
An arrow-almost certainly hers-nailed the man's thigh to his saddle through his fringed chaps. The horse must have been wounded too, for it suddenly went berserk, bucking and plunging while the man screamed and clawed at the steel and cedarwood that held him fast. A sweep from someone's sword put an end to that, and the body flopped and dangled and then fell as the horse bolted.
I don't want to fight them, but if they take the Protector's silver and come here to fight, they have to expect what happens, she thought, arrow on string and looking for another target. May the Guardians help them choose a better way next time 'round. In the meantime, I'm not ready for the Summerlands yet!
Outnumbered two to one, the mercenaries could not take the punishment for more than a few seconds. Then they broke like quicksilver and scattered, the largest clump of them running north, back towards the enemy camp. The CORA fighters hung on that group's flanks and rear, shooting and hacking with a ferocity born of feuds as old as the Change, which was either ten years or since the beginning of time, depending on how you wanted to look at it.
Alleyne and Astrid cantered back, talking to each other in Sindarin; Eilir thought he was using it to bring her down from that scary-exalted place she went when she fought, and humanness was returning bit by bit to the blue-silver eyes. She and John Hordle swung into their saddles along with the rest of the Dunedain. They turned and trotted eastward, cross-country; that was the other big advantage of horses over most bicycles-you didn't need to stick to a road, or even a track. The gray clouds overhead had lightened a bit, but didn't look like either going away or raining. Ahead eastward the land rose, growing more rolling as it did; another ten miles and they'd be into the mountain foothills, trackless and densely forested.
They weren't going quite that far.
Now we find out whether that idea of yours works, me girl, Hordle signed.
Don't remind me, Eilir replied with a shudder. I'll be so embarrassed if it doesn't.
No, love, you won't be embarrassed, not likely, Hordle answered, his usually good-natured face gone more sober.
She nodded unwillingly. The chances were that if it didn't work, she'd be too dead to be embarrassed, along with her kinfolk and friends and all their hopes.
Boom.
"Sound halt," Baron Emiliano said.
The curled trumpets screamed. The long column of men on bicycles clamped on their brakes, skidding to a halt and resting on one booted foot; they'd just turned east at what the old maps said was a Lutheran church and what looks said was a Catholic one now. The long, crunching rumble of the cavalry moving up on the graveled verges stopped a little more slowly. For a moment, the Marchwarden of the South idly thanked the monks for keeping the roadways in their territories so well; the surface was smooth, the potholes patched not just with gravel but fresh melted asphalt, and the fields on either side were neatly trimmed.
Silence fell, or as much silence as a force of twelve hundred men could make; even their breathing was a susurrus under the sough of the wind, shifting of horse hooves, snap of banners, chink and jingle of chain mail and bridle-fittings, the occasional thud of a noncom's fist and silence in the ranks! The air was wet and close otherwise, leaving the sweat undried on his face despite its coolness. He sniffed at the breeze as if it could tell him what he wanted to know, and peered eastward down the road, at the empty fields on either side where only the distant cantering dots of his scouts and the odd drift of wildfowl feasting undisturbed on new-sown grain showed movement.
Boom.
The sound was deep and resonant, even in the muffling dankness, traveling as if it would echo across miles.
Boom. Boom. Boom: boom-boom-boom -
The thudding continued, building to a continuous thudding crash. Beside him, Lord Jabar stirred in the saddle. "Drums," he said unnecessarily, and then more precisely: "Lambegs. Mackenzies."
As to confirm his guess a raw, squealing drone started underneath the deep hammering, weaving around it with a sound at once jaunty and menacing; the war-pipes of the Clan.
"That's Mackenzies all right," Emiliano said with a grin. "But not close. From the sound, say two, three miles."
He started to raise his hand to shade his eyes, then stopped, feeling faintly foolish for a moment. For one thing it was very cloudy, for another he was wearing a new type of helmet, with a hinged visor like a pierced mask of flat steel. It was swung up at the moment, sticking out like the bill of a cap. Instead he glanced skyward, cocking his head as he judged where the bright patch was.
"Not ten o'clock yet," he said happily. "We got time."
Hails came from ahead, and he watched a figure approach at a canter. When he drew rein, it was one of Emiliano's own mounted scouts; the Pendleton cowboys weren't what you could call organized right now, though they were mad enough to get into a chewing match with a bear.
"Hey, my lord," the Association commander said to Jabar. "Remind me, next time we see the Grand Constable, if we hire any of those cow-country clowns next time, we put them under our officers. They make my old gangers look like fucking Marines."
The scout saluted. "My lord Marchwarden," he said. "We've located the enemy."
"How many, and where?" Emiliano asked, unfolding a map glued on stiff leather from his saddlebag; it was pleated accordion-style, and he held it open across the saddlebow.
The scout brought his horse close and sketched with a fingertip. "This road we're on, South Drake, it goes right east past the orchard where the cowboys got suckered this morning, till it hits Cascade Highway about three miles from here at this little town-town called Marquam. The town's empty, looks like the people ran for Mount Angel. Cascade Highway runs south from there, angling back west a bit too, down to Butte Creek, about a mile and a quarter. The Mackenzies and the cora-boys are there at the southern end-they've got their left anchored on the bridge there where Cascade Highway crosses the creek, Jacks Bridge, and then up the road north and east."
"How many? How close you get?"
"I got within long bowshot for better than ten minutes, and I had some of my boys over the road on the north for a while until the cora-boys ran them out. Nine hundred kilties more or less, my lord-that's the archers, and they're right along the road here, past these old school buildings. Another hundred, hundred and fifty with axes and spears in back of them, east of the road. Then the cora-boys on their right, north, about four hundred or maybe a little less now."
Emiliano looked at the map, then up to turn it into real fields and trees, then down again. "OK, I think they made a mistake," he said. "They get their peckers up after they take Piotr and underestimate us."
Jabar rumbled deep in his massive chest. "They got hills back of them."
"Yeah, but they're low and open. You gotta go, por Dios, ten miles east of there before you hit heavy forest. That right?"
The scout nodded. "I've ridden all the way to Missouri Ridge and beyond since we got here, my lord. It's five miles to the edge of cultivation and then another four, five to what I'd call real cover that would stop cavalry."
"There's no fucking road heading right back east from there, either," Emiliano said. "So they can't bike away from us. They fight us straight up, they got nowhere to run."
"Could be more of them," Jabar said. "That's how they got Piotr's ass in a crack, my lord. Suckered him into thinking they weren't as many as they really were."
"No, a thousand, maybe a little less or more, is all they got. My lord the Count, he's seen at least that many in Sutterdown and they only got two thousand five hundred total when they call out everyone for field service, tops. A thousand here, a thousand there, that just don't leave no more. These pandilleros, they're the First Levy, their best, but it's all they got."
Jabar looked over his shoulder, westward towards Mount Angel. "We don't have enough back at the base camp to stop a breakout."
"Yeah, but we can see troops coming down that switchback into town. We can't stop them, but we can sure see them. That'll take a while and we'd get the message. The monks aren't going to come out in the open where our cavalry can get at them."
Emiliano's own finger moved on the map. "We'll keep going east until we're just north of them, here." That was about another three miles. "Then we deploy facing south, cavalry on the left, stickers and shooters on the right, and move straight down at them." His finger slashed across the page.
"That means we've got this big orchard on our right and this other one on our left, with those woods along the creek," Jabar said. "Like a funnel pouring us at them."
Emiliano shrugged. "If we try to get fancy, they'll just fuck off again and leave us holding our dicks, maybe get behind us and get on our supply lines, maybe even raid our manors-they've done that before. We got the numbers, and we got the lancers, and even with those orchards and shit we got enough room there to get everyone into the fight. If they had a line of spearmen to hold off the knights, it'd be different, but they don't. We got eight hundred foot and five hundred heavy horse with us here. Let's use 'em."
Boom. Boom. Boom-boom-boom-boom:
The hammer of the huge Lambegs massed behind them was soul-shattering, which had been precisely the intent of her ancestors, when they made them echo over moors and down the glens; to break the heart of an enemy and then charge home with claymore and Lochaber ax to break his head. Juniper Mackenzie let them echo in hers, until they were like the beating of her own heart; even the green-and-silver silk fabric of the Clan's flag shivered in rhythm with the sound, like the tympanum of an ear.
The bagpipes skirled beneath and around the huge sound, "MacNeil's Kin," jaunty and jeering and full of a swaggering threat as the pipers paced and turned along the road before the line of the Clan's warriors. Here and there a few of the younger fighters couldn't wait standing still, and began to do an impromptu war dance of their own, left hands on hips and bows aloft as their feet stamped and flashed, screeching out the ritual cries of their totems, hawk screech, dragon roar, wolf howl. The music spoke to something in her as well, something that bristled the fur along her spine and the fox red mane on her head, and peeled lips back from teeth.
Nigel Loring chuckled, squinting beneath the raised visor of his sallet; she laughed at the same instant.
"What's the joke, my love?" Juniper asked; you could speak privately in this din.
He leaned over. "That this must have been what Scotland sounded like to a great many of my ancestors, riding north to Bannockburn or Dupplin Moss or Flodden," Nigel said.
"You're such a fine human being that sometimes I forget you're a Sassenach, sure," Juniper replied, restraining a nervous impulse to check the arrows in her quiver one more time.
"You're only half Irish, and no more Scottish than I am."
"Scots on my father's side."
"And German, French-Canadian, Swiss, Cherokee: even English, from what you've said."
"I try to remember that they're human beings too, sure."
"And what was our good Chief laughing at?"
She nodded towards the leaping figures and their painted, snarling faces. "That if the Change hadn't happened, they'd be thinking about the senior prom, or what courses to take next semester, or a new fad diet to shed a few pounds, and watching TV ads for mouthwash and personal computers. That they'd be entirely different people, not even looking very similar." A deep breath. "Will you stand with the axmen and spears again this time?"
"I'll stay with you, if you please, my: Lady Juniper."
"You're a romantic at heart, my darling Englishman," she said softly.
"I'm repellently practical," he said stoutly. "It's just that my exiled existence would have little point without you, my dear."
She smiled and touched the cool braided gold and silver of the torque, now stretched a little to fit around the chain-mail collar of her arming doublet. The silver moon on the brow of her helmet reflected the gray of the sky as she turned to look northeast. Open fields stretched beyond the four-lane highway up to the road where the enemy would come. Off to their right were a few of the CORA riders, with the whole of their reserve horse-herd.
"Nonsense," she said crisply, with a twinkle in her green eyes. "We're not a boy and girl, Nigel. We're middle-aged, and we have grown sons and daughters and soon we'll have grandchildren to see to as well. I love you well and I'd grieve all my life if you died, but I would go on living, and do my best to find joy and work in it. So would you."
He blinked at her, then reached up a steel-clad finger to brush his mustache, laughing softly. "Perhaps I am an incorrigible romantic. My dear, you never cease to amaze me. And that, I think, will make life together very enjoyable indeed."
She nodded; the little exchange had helped her disperse the last knot in her stomach, leaving her grounded and centered for what must come. They stood by the banner, at the center of the Mackenzie formation. That stood along the southeast side of the old Cascade Highway, strung out behind the shallow roadside ditch and a post-and-board fence in a field of rippling blue-green winter wheat, waiting patiently in their three-deep staggered harrow formation. Even then she felt a pang of regret at trampling someone's crop; it would have been a good one, the stems thick and stiff and close-placed, already well over ankle-high four months before the harvest. Trampled, it smelled sweet, like grass cut for haying, but with a strong mealy undertone, mixing with the damp earth beneath.
A gesture to the signaler, and the wild music died away into a ringing silence. She took a deep breath and shouted: "Plant the swine-feathers!"
She turned to look as the order was relayed to either side of her. There were a few whoops and yips from the grinning, gaudy-painted faces of her clansfolk; these of the First Levy were mostly young men and women, few past their mid-twenties, and they could appreciate Eilir's idea-the more so since they were her generation, and eager to show what they could do. Each reached back into a leather bag slung beside their quiver, on the opposite side from the loops that held their bows. Each brought out two poles bound together with twine; one was like a shovel with a narrow, flat blade and a yard-long handle, the other like a short spear of the same length. Each stubby pole had a steel collar and locking device on its rear, where the handle or butt-cap would usually be.
Shovel and spear fitted together with a push and twist, a click and snick! and suddenly every archer held a seven-foot length of ashwood with a spade on one end and a knife-edged spearhead on the other. They turned in place and rammed the shovel blades into the dirt, stamping them home with the heels of their boots as if they were digging a ditch. Then each turned back, but now they stood amid a forest of long spears, pointing forward in a bristling block a thousand yards long and three deep, and each was slanted forward with the point a bit above chest-high on a man: or precisely chest-high on a horse. The whole process had taken barely twenty seconds.
Sam Aylward came trotting up the road, inspecting it from the front. "Lady," he said, with a quick nod. "It certainly looks bloody frightening."
"We already knew that, Sam," she said. "We'll just have to see if it works, won't we?"
The swine-feathers weren't a line of spearmen or a pike-hedge. They weren't much impediment at all to men on foot. Experiment had shown that a horse could get through them too: if it slowed down, and chose its way at a careful walking pace, and didn't have anything to spook or frighten it out of what limited concentration the little herbivore minds could muster.
Aylward looked at her. She nodded, and he signed to the signaler. The low dunting snarl of the cow-horn trumpet- huu, huu, huuuuuu. Helpers were running forward, setting out bundles of spare arrows in the ground behind the swine-feathers, pushing them down until the points stood in the dirt deep enough to support the shafts, then undoing the slipknots. The archers trotted forward, vaulting the board fence, then across the pavement and over the fence on the other side and into the pasture there. On their left was a school-built before the Change, but still in use, though she could see from the signs that it had a different name from the one on the maps, Queen of Angels rather than Butte Creek.
Huuuuuuu – hu-hu!
The horn droned and blatted, and they halted as one, still in the harrow formation; the helpers rushed forward behind them, hurrying to get three or four bundles of arrows within reach of every string hand.
She looked northward. A column appeared on the road there; not the enemy, but two-score riders led by the tree-and-stars banner of the Dunedain. They peeled off and galloped over the half mile of open pasture towards the Macken-zies and their friends; midway Astrid and Alleyne turned towards the CORA position with most of the Rangers, and Eilir and John Hordle led the rest to the Clan's banner. Juniper checked anxiously; neither was hurt, though both were splashed with mud. Her daughter gave her a wink and a thumbs-up gesture.
"Brown's following fast," Hordle said, and Eilir nodded. "The enemy's behind them."
"How many?" Juniper said.
"Twelve, thirteen 'undred, Lady."
About our numbers, she thought.
The big man went on: "Eight hundred foot, five hundred lancers, and some odds-and-sods of scouts. Not many of the mercenaries; they had a bellyful from Brown and his CORA cowboys."
Her daughter and her daughter's lover dismounted, handing their reins to a teenage helper who led their mounts to the rear. Both drew their bows from the loops with matter-of-fact readiness, looking around for spare shafts to fill their quivers and helping each other with the chore-Hordle had to bend for Eilir, a tall woman, to slide handfuls into his. Juniper sipped a little from her canteen-not much, she wasn't shy but peeing on a battlefield was still awkward- as she watched Rancher Brown and his men come galloping down the road, frantic to get to their remounts-the horses looked blown. And that meant:
Terrible as an army with banners, she thought, as the enemy followed them into sight. Christian, but a telling phrase nonetheless.
The Protectorate force was only equal to her own, but it seemed like an endless snake of dull-gleaming metal and spearpoints as it came eastward along the road, the men and beasts and bicycles toy-tiny with distance. When she focused her binoculars on them they leapt closer-dark eyes in a dark face above a mouth-covering mail coif, vanishing for a second as the helmet was brought up in both mail-gauntleted hands and adjusted. Banners and pennants, and a priest and acolytes pacing before men who knelt and crossed themselves, while incense and holy water went forth.
She could not hear the words under the distant grumble of feet and hooves, but she knew them: Fight the Holy War… Heaven awaits warriors who fall in His service: smite the Satan-worshippers:
Her people had had their own rituals. Juniper's lips tightened as she lowered the glasses; war of any sort was bad enough, but Holy War wasn't something she liked at all. Sir Nigel and Aylward were talking in low tones-probably nobody else but the banner-bearer could hear them under the racket as the pipes and drums greeted the enemy.
"They should have sent more infantry," her First Armsman said. "If they had enough bicycles for them. Got a fair well-balanced force but they're not what you'd call smooth at using it proper. Another couple of hundred infantry and they could pin us for a flank attack by the cavalry. As it is, I'd say they'll have to come straight at us."
"They'll not have met much serious opposition until now," Nigel said judiciously. "Learning by doing. Better next time, I would expect."
Does there have to be a next time? some part of Juniper's heart cried with anguish.
She said nothing aloud; the polite looks from the two lifelong warriors would be too hard to bear, especially when she knew they were right.
I love Nigel like my life, and Sam like a brother, but the way they discuss chopping people up as if it was turnips still makes me feel: odd.
"Surprised they've managed to train so many men-at-arms," Nigel went on. "That takes serious application."
"That's those Society buggers, sir. They were odd before the Change and afterwards the ones who stayed with Arminger were bloody barking mad."
"A functional madness: Ah, they're shifting: cavalry forward to cover the infantry deployment, then to their left opposite our friends from the CORA on our right. Crossbows and spears in mixed blocks: underestimating how badly we can outshoot them, I daresay. They'll send the infantry forward to develop our position, and punch their lancers at Rancher Brown and his fellows to try and uncover our right. A good thing they didn't bring any of their field artillery."
"They keep that for siege operations when they can, sir."
The CORA leaders and their retainer-cowboys had finished slapping their gear on fresh mounts; they crowded forward over the road northward, except for a trickle of wounded from the earlier action who moved to the rear, towards the healers.
Juniper took three deep breaths, letting each out with a long, slow hiss, feeling the strength of Earth flow up her lungs to calm her heart with its unmoved solidity, feeling Air add its light quickness to the surging strength of Water in her sea-salt veins, and the thought of Fire reaching out across the field.
Sam Aylward rinsed out his mouth, spat, returned his canteen to his waist and put an arrow to his bow. "Sir Nigel, Lady, we've a roit proper job of work to do 'ere today."
Despite the gathering tension she smiled to herself. Sam might be Earth itself. And Nigel is Fire: does that make me an airy wet blanket?
Curled trumpets screamed in the enemy ranks.
Lord Emiliano scanned the field ahead. Suddenly he noticed small enemy parties setting out several strings of six-foot posts, planted in staggered rows out from where the banner of moon and horns stood in the field this side of the road. They were hard to see, because the side turned towards him was painted green-brown, and far too fragile to be any hindrance to men on foot or horseback. They puzzled him for a moment, until he realized they were ranging-marks, planted precisely fifty yards apart, probably with the other side whitewashed for better visibility. His lips tightened; it was a gesture of methodical, thoughtful ferocity more frightening than the screaming painted faces and the inhuman throbbing of the drums or the snarling drone of the pipes. And he would have to send his men into that killing field.
Sufiaccent, it will cost us, he thought. Worth it. We break this force, they're finished; we get the land, and nobody bothers us no more. If I capture their witch-bitch alive, the Lord Protector will make me a duke, maybe marry his daughter to my Gustavo!
"Let the foot advance!" he shouted. "Lord Jabar, take half the lancer conrois at the cora-boys."
Juniper Mackenzie drew and loosed, drew and loosed, despite the burning pain in hands and arms and shoulders. The enemy spearmen were only thirty yards away now and coming on crabwise, crouched behind their big shields until only their feet and the narrowest slit under the helmet brim showed; the men behind them held their shields overhead. Arrows flickered out in waves over the distance between them and the Mackenzies; nine hundred bows, three hundred arrows a second, turning the shields into bristling porcupine shapes and the ground into a pelt like some gigantic stiff-haired, gray-furred dog. The sound of the bodkins striking was like surf on a gravel beach, or heavy hail on a tin roof, a hard, endless tocktocktocktocktock, louder than the shouts and screams. Many bounced off helmets with a ringing sound like a ball-peen hammer; many others rattled off chain mail and flipped away.
Others bit, and more and more, opening gaps in the wall of shields as men fell, shrieking and tearing at the iron in their flesh, or moaning and twitching, or dropping limp. The spearmen closed the holes, stepping in from the next ranks. As the distance closed, many shafts punched right through the tough leather and plywood of the shields, stripping their feathers off as they drilled into arms and faces. The air stank of damp sweat, and the iron-sea-salt odor of blood, turning soil to mud as hundreds of men bled out their lives. And still the wall walked, like a wounded bear lumbering forward with blood and slaver dripping from its teeth:
Juniper started to duck at a sinister hiss. The crossbow bolt struck her on the collarbone, and she nearly dropped her bow at the sharp stabbing pain; but the short, thick shaft bounced back, turned by the riveted plates within the brig-andine and the distance from which it had been sent. Lightly armored and without shields, outnumbered two to one by the Clan's bowmen and carrying weapons that shot far less quickly, few of the Protectorate army's crossbowmen had lived to come within a hundred yards of the Mackenzie archers. Survivors formed a ragged line behind the blocks of spears, lofting their bolts at the archers on high arcing trajectories, but the stubby darts lacked the aerodynamic efficiency of a thirty-inch arrow.
She reached behind her shoulder for another arrow. Her hand froze. Trumpets wailed behind the Protectorate line. The blocks of spearmen halted; then they began to walk backward; she could hear file-closers and sergeants counting cadence, their voices harsh and loud enough to carry through distance and racket, keeping the ranks solid and the shields up for their lives' sake. For the arrows did not stop, and the trail of bodies they'd left coming south was added to as they went north.
Juniper lowered her bow, panting; her shooting was more of a symbol than anything else, to show her clansfolk the Chief was with them. She was as accurate as most, and quick. But the heaviest weapon she could draw was barely within the minimum set for marching with the levy, a good deal lighter than Eilir's eighty-pound mankiller, and nothing like the smashing power of Sam Aylward's war bow, much less the monster stave John Hordle could pull to the ear. Instead she stepped back to turn her head either way, caught the eye of bow-captains, grabbed the signaler by the mail collar and shouted in his ear: "Sound the first halt!"
He put the horn to his mouth: "Huu-huu-huu-huuuuuuu!"
Every third archer stopped shooting. Some of them busied themselves helping the wounded to the rear; one passed her with another man's arm held around his shoulder, the hurt Mackenzie swearing luridly every time his right leg touched the ground and the plastic vanes of the bolt in his shin waggled. Others dashed forward recklessly to pull arrows from the ground, from abandoned shields, even from the bodies of the dead.
"Ooooh, look 'ow short we are," Aylward said- he was still shooting, choosing every target with a second's care. "Bloody sad, isn't it, how we're running short. Eat this, you evil sodding shite!"
The enemy crossbowmen were backing up too, but stopping to shoot as they went as long as they were in range, not running away. She noted distantly how Nigel had quietly stepped between her and the enemy as soon as she lowered her bow, raising his heater-shaped shield; a last bolt hit it, and sank an inch deep into the tough bullhide and wood, quivering like a malignant wasp. If that had hit her in the eye: a body lay on its back nearby, a young woman with hair as red as Juniper's own and a bolt sunk halfway to its vanes in one eye, the other open and blue and staring. There was a surprised expression on her face beneath the raven painted on it, and only the slightest trickle of blood down the black design; she had the same totem, then:
The Hunter comes for us all in our appointed hour, she reminded herself, letting sights, sounds, stenches flow over and through her without giving them purchase to linger and leave horror behind.
Ravens and crows of the flesh hovered overhead, riding the slow, chill, wet wind, and eagles, falcons: all waiting. They had learned quickly what such doings as this meant, after the Change.
Ground and center, she told herself. Then she raised her bow and waved it to either side again. The silver mouthpiece of the long ox-horn went to the signaler's lips, and he blew round-cheeked.
This time the arrowstorm slackened to nearly nothing; that was the signal for only the chosen marksmen, the ones with the best scores and the heaviest draw-weights, to shoot. More went out collecting shafts, rushing desperately from one to the next in a great show of haste.
See, Juniper thought, looking to where the Marchwarden's banner hung beside the Lidless Eye and driving her will behind the glance like an arrow in itself.
Her hand moved in a gesture. See and believe, Emiliano Gutierrez. By the keen sight of Brigid and the long hand of Lugh, by the silver tongue of Ogma, by the power of the blood shed this day upon the Mother's earth, by every soul here sent untimely to the Lord of the Western
Gate, by the grief of children orphaned and the sorrow of lovers' tears, I bind your thought, your hand, your loins, your eyes, blinding the inward sight of your mind with the lust of your heart! So mote it be!
It would be easy enough for an outsider to believe that they'd run short of arrows. Few who hadn't been under a Mackenzie arrowstorm before could believe just how many shafts they could lay down. The Protector's men had crossed the three-hundred-yard mark only ten minutes ago; in that time nine hundred archers had sent a hundred and thirty thousand arrows onto the killing ground. And when near a thousand men came marching at you shoulder-to-shoulder, it was hard to miss:
Let them think we're spent, easy meat for the men-at-arms. We've fought the Protector's men often enough, but mostly in skirmish and raid and ambush rather than pitched battles. Sam is right – massed shooting like this is: different. And they won't know we brought bundles of arrows in plenty.
Hooves clattered behind her on the roadway. She looked around, walked back; it was John Brown, his helmet knocked awry, long dentsswordstrokes-in his breastplate, his left hand a blob of bandages where spots showed sopping-red. His face was red-brown now, drenched with sweat; a younger kinsman rode by his side, looking ready to catch him if he started to slide out of the saddle.
"We can't hold the knights," he said. "Sorry, Juney. Not any longer, not hand-to-hand. We'll hang on their flank, use our bows, try to keep 'em from getting around, that's all we can do. Lost better'n a hundred riders trying. They've got too much weight for us."
"The Mother-of-All bless you, John, you've done splendidly. Now it's with the Luck of the Clan."
Emiliano Gutierrez stood in the stirrups and focused his binoculars. The infantry were coming back faster than they'd gone forward, even walking in reverse, and a lot less of them than had started out. They were shot for now:
Si, shot up good, he thought with grim indifference, listening with half an ear to the screams as monk-surgeons and ordinary medics operated on the tables set up behind his position, cutting steel and cedarwood out of flesh-morphine took time to work, and seconds could mean the difference between life and death. Horse-drawn ambulances trotted westward, taking those who could endure it to the field hospital.
Lord Jabar rode up; he had his sword across his saddlebow, running red, and the shield hung from his shoulder was battered and hacked, with a broken-off arrow standing in the spear-wielding lion there and splinters showing white-brown through the facing. He'd hung his helmet by the saddlebow and pushed back his coif, panting as sweat rolled down his shaven head in rivulets.
"Got the cora-boys to pull back," he panted. A squire handed him a canvas waterskin; he gulped, and then squirted water on his face, washing a thin reddish film from the ebony skin as the blood spattered there sluiced off. "Couldn't make them stand long enough to finish them, they kept pulling away and shooting, but we hurt them bad. Lost about twenty men, twice that wounded too bad to fight; I think we killed three, four times that many of them-they couldn't get their wounded away from us, either. Should I try to swing in behind the kilties, my lord?"
Emiliano shook his head and handed over the glasses, indicating the Mackenzie line. "Take a look."
White teeth showed in the brutally handsome, full-lipped face. "Sheee-it! They lookin' raggedy-ass fo' sure."
"Si. I think they're short of ammunition."
Jabar grunted and nodded, returning the field glasses; Emiliano pulled a handkerchief out of a saddlebag and wiped the surface. It was hell getting blood out of the fine machining there if you let it dry and set. The black nobleman wiped his sword so he could sheathe it; getting blood inside the scabbard was an even worse pain.
"We better hit them fast, then, before they get more," he said. "I can't see any coming up behind them, though. Hard to miss that many arrows: sheee-it, they shot enough!"
The pasture for three hundred yards in front of the Clansfolk bristled with goose feathers at the ends of cedarwood shafts, enough to give a silvery-gray sheen to the whole patch of land-save where bodies lay, or twitched and writhed, or tried to crawl back.
"Yeah, that was why I sent the infantry in first," Emiliano said. "They'll do to soak up arrows."
Jabar pulled his coif back up, fasting the mouth-protecting flap by the thongs to the brass studs riveted through the mail on the right side. His squire came up with a fresh lance as he lifted his helm and set it on his head.
Emiliano nodded and waved to the trumpeters; the long, curled instruments sang and screamed. His banner moved forward, and the Lidless Eye with it. The reserve conrois of lancers came up to fall in behind it, along with those Jabar had led against the CORA riders; hooves rang as they stamped, and horses snorted. The men were silent behind coif and nasal bar this time, eyes hard and set.
Emiliano slapped down his visor. Hey, I wonder if I can get Mount Angel tacked on to Barony Dayton? Or at least a couple-dozen manors here. Young Julio is going to need an inheritance too.
The world turned into gray shadow, the eyeholes windows into a place narrowed to little more than the chamfron of his destrier. The big horse moved beneath him as he turned and reached out his hand for the lance that his squire thrust into his gauntlet. It had taken him years of practice before he could do anything more than knock himself out of the saddle with these things, and then more years to stay level with the young dickheads coming up who started with their first pimples: and it was time to mix it in.
Two days after the Change someone in the Lords had tried to move in on him with a fire-ax, figuring there weren't any rules anymore because guns didn't work. Emiliano had used a shovel on him, then cut his head off with the ax and hung it in a hairnet over the door. Guns, knives, chains, swords, lances: it was all a matter of your 'tude, how much of a pair you had.
He swung the point down. "Haro!" he shouted. "Haro, Dayton! Haro, Portland! Holy Mary for Portland!"
The answering roar of the men-at-arms came in like surf on a windy day.
Juniper licked dry lips. The earth shook beneath her as five hundred leveled lances came across the meadows, and the rain of arrows hadn't done more than slow it a little: two hundred yards: a hundred and seventy-five:
"Now!" she shouted, and the horns coughed and blatted.
Juniper turned and ran, the flag beside her. That was the easiest hard decision she'd ever made; when you saw that mass of armored men and barded horses coming at you behind the cruel spikes of the lanceheads, and thought what they and the pounding hooves could do to your own precious, irreplaceable self, you wanted to run away. Never mind that running away from a galloping horse was like running in a bad dream, where you pumped your legs and stayed nailed in one spot.
Every Mackenzie did the same. A long surge of them swarmed over the fence, over the road, over the second fence and dashed past the swine-feathers, panting. And then they stopped and turned, each with bundles of arrows ready to their hands, most working their drawing-arms and shaking out the wrist for an instant before they reached down and picked up a shaft.
"That's a relief," she gasped, reaching for a shaft herself. "I was a bit worried they'd keep going."
The earth trembled, and the knights came up the slight rise on the other side of the road. Their plumes and lanceheads were bright against the thinning pearl gray clouds. "Haro! Portland!"
"On, brothers, on!" Abbot Dmwoski said.
He stood at the exit of the tunnel, and the column of armed monks poured past him and up the staircase into Mount Angel town. Some had thought him paranoid for wasting labor on a vertical stairway and sloping tunnel from the heights that bore the Abbey to a spot inside the walls of the town at its feet. He'd nonetheless insisted, and now men in armor with black robes kirted above it rushed by. When the last had passed him he followed, out into the gray light of an overcast spring day, wet air damping the scent of fear-sweat and the sour smell of oiled metal.
An aide held the reins of his horse, though almost all Mount Angel's host would be on bicycles, save for a few messengers. And the banner-bearer, with the flag that carried the image of Virgin and Child and was topped with the Cross.
"Good boy, Sobieski, sooo, brave fellow," he crooned, stroking the big beast's arched neck; it was sweating, sensing the tension of the men about.
He swung into the saddle, armor clanking; each knight-brother slid his poleax into the carrier beside the rear wheel and bestrode his machine. The banner followed, and the formation fell in behind him in column of fours as they pedaled north and then east, towards the Jerusalem Gate. Few civilians watched from the windows of the half-timbered houses or shops on either side; some built in that style in the old days for the tourist trade, more since because it was a fairly easy style to imitate with the tools available in the post-Change world. Most of the remaining townsfolk had gone through the tunnel the other way, carrying the ill and the young children.
Those who lined the streets were the first rank of the town and country militia, who would follow him. The second and third ranks-women, the old men, all commanded by the Sisters-would hold the town walls, and the Abbey. He didn't think the enemy could take the town, even so. He was absolutely certain they couldn't take the Abbey, but if he lost this force, there would be little left:
The faces of the men waiting to follow were tight and grim for the most part; they were fighting for their homes-for their families, the fields that they worked and the workshops where they labored, and for freedom in a most immediate and concrete sense.
And because they trust me, they follow me as I hazard everything on one throw of the dice. Lord who blessed the centurion, if Head these Thy people astray, let mine alone be the fault and mine the punishment. Give them victory, O Lord, I beseech You, he thought one last time. They fight for all that a man rightfully holds dear: for their women and children, for the graves of their fathers and for Your Church. Yet Thy will be done, not mine: for Thy judgments are just and righteous altogether.
Signing himself: Mary, pierced with sorrows, all those who fall today are born of woman. Madonna, intercede for us, now and at the hour of our deaths!
At the gate, the keepers waved to show the road was still clear and the enemy still in their camp to the north. He raised a steel gauntlet to give the signal. Within the blockhouse and towers, gears ratcheted as the portcullis and its mate went up. The inner gates swung back.
As they did, one of the militiamen suddenly shouted, breaking the thick silence: "For Father Dmwoski! Jesu-Maria!"
As he rode out onto the drum-hollow boards of the drawbridge, the cry broke from twelve hundred throats: "Jesu-Maria!"
The first fence went over with a long crackling as the steel-clad chests of the barded destriers struck it. The boards meant to confine cows and sheep were little hindrance to the heavy horse, but it slowed them; here and there a mount went down, a brief shriek of man and beast under the pounding hooves. Then they struck the asphalt of the roadway, more slippery than bare ground beneath steel horseshoes.
It wasn't until they hit the second fence that even the first rank were really aware of what awaited them-and it wasn't the backs of the broken, fleeing rabble they expected to ride down and skewer like lumps of meat. Instead long steel points bristled towards their horses beyond the fence, and near nine hundred bows were drawn to the ear, at a range where shafts would smash through shield and armor. Despite the roaring clamor, a silence seemed to fall for an instant that stretched like winter taffy.
Juniper saw Emiliano Gutierrez then, under his banner and raising his visor with the expression of a man who wakes from dream into nightmare. Beside her, as if from a great distance, she heard Sam Aylward say in a conversational tone: "And when you ride against the Mackenzies, you nasty little booger, keep your visor down!" Then in a great shout: "Let the gray geese fly-wholly together- shoot!"
The Marchwarden dropped his lance and shrieked as the arrow sprouted suddenly from his eyesocket:
"Blow the rally!" Jabar Jones shouted, reining in his horse.
He shook the blood out of his eyes; the helmet and coif had saved him from having his face transfixed, but not from a long gash on his forehead where a flap of skin hung down to show naked bone. The taste of his own blood was like tarnished copper in his mouth, the taste of defeat.
The curled trumpet screamed. Knights and men-at-arms pulled up their mounts, the horses panting and dribbling foam, those that weren't bucking or squealing from the pain of arrow wounds; one went over in a roar of metal as he watched, but the rider got free, staggered erect despite the weight of metal, and took the reins of a riderless horse that another led over to him.
Three hundred twenty, he rough-counted.
Back south by the road over which the charge had gone-both ways-the Mackenzies were coming forward again, each of them with their spear-shovel in hand. They planted them well forward, in their original position.
And then they stood, waiting. A murmur grew from them, then a chant, as they shook their bows overhead:
"We are the point-we are the edge
We are the wolves that Hecate fed!"
The baron of Molalla ground his teeth; pain and fury blended into an intolerable knot below his breastbone. Almost, he shouted charge!
"No," he muttered to himself.
A scout pulled up in a spurt of gravel. "My lord!" he shouted, pointing westward towards Mount Angel. "The monks-all of them, out of the city gates without warning! What should we do?"
Sutterdown, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 8th, 2008/Change Year 9
"The Lord Protector won't be happy," Sir Buzz Akers said, as the last of the officers left the tent.
"He's not the only one," Conrad Renfrew said, stepping out of the pavilion and pulling on his mail-backed gauntlets.
The camp had been full of desperate, disciplined motion since the courier arrived and Renfrew gave his orders; now the headquarters support staff threw themselves at the big command tent, knocking down poles and folding fabric. Little was left of the encampment that had held twenty-five hundred men, save the ditch and bank; the supply wagons waited drawn up in columns down the principal street, and the troops themselves in neat formations with their unit banners before them, ready to mount horse or bicycle. The air was thick with bitter chemical smoke as the napalm stores went up in flames, the black pillar of smoke trailing away to the north in the warm wind that had sprung up overnight. High above, hazy white clouds drifted through a sky gone blue from the bright rim in the east to the lingering night in the west, the last stars just now fading as the sun rose opposite them.
"I thought Dick Furness was going to cry and cut out his own heart when I told him to torch the stores," Renfrew added, with a grim smile contorted further by the scars theft seamed his face. "But we're traveling light-west to the I-5, north to Oregon City. If we can, we'll cover whatever fugitives from Emiliano's force managed to make it out."
He looked at the sky again. The peach orchards would be at their peak in the Hood River country now, and from the tower of Castle Odell he could see them scattered like blocks of pink froth between the plowlands. And April would be even better, as the cherries and pears came into bloom; he could smell them a mile off. His wife Tina loved them, and had the place stuffed with flowering branches; the scent lingered for weeks afterwards.
"So, we lost despite our numbers, my lord?"
Renfrew shrugged and set the helmet on his head. "We haven't won," he said. "But neither have the enemy-they haven't knocked us out of the game, not if I can save this army. We still have more men, and we have the castles to fall back on. They've just pushed us back to the start-line and cost us a campaigning season."
And you're right. The Lord Protector will not be pleased. But Norman Arminger is going to get a piece of my mind.