Lord of Mountains

CHAPTER NINE

THE HIGH KING’S HOST

HORSE HEAVEN HILLS

(FORMERLY SOUTH-CENTRAL WASHINGTON)

HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

NOVEMBER 1ST, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

More plumes of dust were moving half an hour later. They stretched as far as Ingolf could see, north and south for many leagues and east and west as units moved behind the front. The armies were well into the opening steps of their dance, probing and shifting for advantage like all-in fighters at the beginning of a bout. He was far enough west now that he could just see the line of tethered balloons the Montivalan forces had put up behind their position, each of them a finned orca shape with its canoe-sized gondola hanging below and the cable that held it slanting away in a long pure curve.

Ingolf was the son of a Sheriff, lord of broad acres, and hence an educated man who could read and write fluently and use practical mathematics to calculate volumes and heights, all useful skills for a military commander or someone who had to keep track of the food-stores that would take a community through the winter. He understood the theory; the hydrogen produced when zinc shavings and strong acid met in lead containers filled the bags of impermeable pre-Change fabric. The balloons were lighter than an equivalent volume of air, just as the air in a ship’s hull was lighter than the water it displaced and so floated upward. It still awed him to see so many of them. He could remember his own childish delight when there had been a single hot-air balloon at a county fair in Richland City. His father had sworn in astonishment, too; that had been…

Two thousand eight, in the old style, Ingolf thought; around here they mostly used the Change Year count. He hadn’t seen anything fly for ten years. Not since the Change. That was the last year Dad and I weren’t fighting really bad. It got worse from then on.

The Upper Midwest was as populous and wealthy and advanced as anywhere in the known world after the Change, but the Free Republic wasn’t exactly at the center of things back there. More like the frontier boondocks.

“And those balloons’ll be damned useful,” he murmured to himself. “Must be able to see as far as infantry could march in an hour or more, or twenty minutes’ gallop.”

And if you made a horse gallop that far flat-out, it was done in. The enemy had gliders, but those had far less endurance, and the prevailing wind was from the west. A blinking light snapped from the nearest balloon, plain uncoded Morse:

Approximately…three…thousand…enemy…horse…in…pursuit…you. Forces…moving…as…planned.

“That won’t last long,” Ingolf said.

“Sir?” Mark said.

“Plans don’t last long once the fighting starts,” Ingolf amplified. “So we don’t want to get too far ahead and give ’em time to think. It’s like playing a brown trout back on the Kickapoo. Sound walk-march, trot.”

The trumpet sounded again. Being a commander’s signaler-aide was good education for a young man like Mark; you got to see everything, hear all the plans and consultations, and you acquired a really good command of the language a commander used to turn a cavalry regiment into an extension of his will.

“I wish Aunt Mary was with us,” Mark said suddenly. Hastily: “She’s, ah, a really good scout. All those Dúnedain-” he pronounced it Dunny-dan “-are.”

“I wish she were too, Mark,” Ingolf said. Though the real reason is you’ve got a gawd-awful crush on her, he added tolerantly to himself.

Mark was a good kid, and smart, and wouldn’t make a nuisance of himself. Though that sort of thing could really hurt when you were his age.

“But we’ve all got our jobs to do,” he finished.

Which is true. Mary makes a pretty fair horse-soldier but she’s a goddamned ghost as a sneaker-and-peeker. And I’m a pretty good sneaker-and-peeker…for a goddamned good horse-soldier.

The First Richland slowed; so did the Sioux on their right. They came over another low ridge. Ingolf grinned.

“And here’s the reception committee for those dumb cowboy fucks chasing us to get revenge for their dumb dead cowboy fuck friends.”

Rick laughed loud and long, and Mark smothered his snort as befitted a very junior officer. The troops waiting there were mostly infantry, and newly arrived, double-timing forward to a brisk squeal and rattle of fifes and drums from the spot where they’d laid their bicycles down.

Ingolf’s eye estimated upward of ten thousand, serious numbers even on this battlefield. He recognized their banners and the devices on shields and breastplates, brown with a bright red-white-black bear’s-head, snarling and shown face-on. Bearkillers, the Outfit as they called themselves, the people who lived across the Willamette from the Mackenzies. Which made them in-laws of his now that he and Mary-nee Havel-were hitched. The Bearkillers had come together in the year after the Change, like the Clan Mackenzie. Montival was a pretty new kingdom; he’d been around while Rudi’s friends came up with the idea on the Quest, and folks back here…back home, now…had taken to it like Polaks to vodka. They’d been desperate because they were facing defeat from the Boise-CUT alliance, desperate enough to clutch at a new-minted myth and shelve their local rivalries.

Sorta shelve the rivalries. Like my sorta in-laws. I’m married to their boss-lady’s daughter, Rudi’s half sister. Same dad, Mike Havel, the guy who founded the Bearkillers and killed Norman Arminger ten years later. But his widow is the boss-lady of the Bearkillers for all that they’ve got councils and elections and she really didn’t appreciate her hubby getting Rudi’s mom Juniper knocked up before she got hitched to him. Or Rudi being the big bossman, instead of one of her kids. My mother-in-law, Signe Havel, nee Larsson…Damn, but there are some scary womenfolk in this part of the world!

The troops had left their bicycles farther back, with the ambulances and forward aid stations. They were deploying at a jog-trot from column of march-the denser formation that was quicker for movement-into the longer blocks in which they’d fight. Doing it smoothly, too, only the occasional shout or rat-tat-tat-tat of drums and blare of bugle under the hard many-fold thump of boots. The Bearkiller infantry weren’t the A-List, which was what their Outfit called its full-time elite fighters; they were militia, but it was damned good militia. The only way you got out of serving in time of war among Bearkillers was to be pregnant, nursing, or a cripple and from what he’d heard they practiced a lot.

As he watched, the heavy infantry stopped and unslung the twin eight-foot poles they were carrying across their backs and then fitted them together. A metal sleeve clipped them into one sixteen-foot pike, topped with a spearhead shaped like a double-edged dagger the length of a forearm; that was an ingenious trick, and gave you a shorter spear as an alternative weapon for close-quarter work like storming a wall. The pikemen wore visored sallets, and jointed steel-plate armor covering their torsos, arms to the hands, and lower bodies to the knees. What they called three-quarter armor here, and in a mass they looked like so many walking beetles, a murderous ordered bulk of steel and muscle and wood.

Their thirty-five companies were eight ranks deep and thirty long; each suddenly bristled like a hedgehog as the command rang out:

“Pikes up…Ground pikes! Stand at ease!”

Thousands of the steel-shod butts thumped into the ground, like a single sound. Ingolf nodded in approval as the Richlanders and Sioux threaded their way through the formation, passing between the companies like smoke through a picket fence. The Bearkillers were as immobile as a rattler coiled under a rock; even the pikepoints didn’t waver as the breeze caught them, and there was a lot of leverage in those things. It needed more than just muscle to hold one steady, though it needed muscle to start with.

I feel better about this now, he thought; appraising troops he had to rely on was a professional reflex ground in by long habit.

Drill mattered, and never more so than when men were moving something as awkward as a pike around. He didn’t have to imagine the jammed-up mess a pike phalanx could collapse into if it all went into the chamberpot; all he had to do was remember it. And the screaming mass of dead and dying men and hacking riders that had followed when the line broke, and his own blind fear and rage as death came avalanching at him and his.

Christ, the things I do!

Behind each block of pikes were two more files of men armored much the same but carrying glaives instead, six-foot shafts with a heavy pointed chopping-stabbing blade on the end and a cruel hook welded to its back; they would move quickly to contain any threat the pikes couldn’t handle. Between each block of pikemen were units of crossbows-less strictly crossbowmen, since a substantial proportion seemed to be women. They wore open-face helmets and the sort of articulated breastplate he had on himself, carried sword and buckler, but depended on the lever-cocked bolt throwers they carried at port arms across their chests. Even with the cunning mechanical assist, the weapons were slower to shoot than a bow, but they had plenty of range and they hit damned hard. Plus you didn’t have to start at six and train every day to be really good with them.

It’s no wonder the Mackenzie idea of a pleasant afternoon is herb tea, crumpets, a sing-along and archery practice. Or archery practice followed by beer and a pig-roast and a sing-along. Or any damned thing combined with archery practice. I swear they take those bows to bed with them and shoot arrows into the ceiling in the intervals between making babies.

The batteries of springalds and scorpions and twelve-pounders that also waited along the line of foot soldiers could throw their four-foot darts and cast-iron roundshot and globes of napalm farther yet. He was glad to see them, but he still didn’t like them or the crews who were digging them in, throwing up waist-high earth berms in front and spreading their trail legs behind and working the aiming wheels to make sure the elevation and traverse was smooth, while handlers led the six-horse teams to the rear.

He didn’t know any soldier who did like the damned things, artillerists aside. They killed men beyond bow-range like a boot on an ant, and there was nothing you could do but pray and close ranks over the dead and screaming maimed.

With any luck they’ll spend most of their time shooting at each other.

That happened sometimes.

The Bearkiller cavalry were farther back, off to the south in a brown mass topped with the thread-thin lances and the bright reflection from their heads, a standing menace like a poised sword. A command party cantered from there over towards the Richlanders and Sioux in a flutter of banners.

“Your in-laws,” Rick Three Bears said. “Better you than me, cousin.”

“I’ve seen worse. Rudi’s mother-in-law is Sandra Arminger, for God’s sake.”

Rich shuddered a little theatrically. “Yeah. Met her last year when Dad came out to negotiate the alliance. Real motherly type.”

The funny thing was that it was true…as far as looks went; she was small and slightly plump and you could imagine her with a tin baking tray of cookies in her hands, or at least pouring afternoon tea in a garden. For that matter, Sandra really did have her daughter Mathilda’s interests at heart.

Stone-cold, genius-intelligent manipulative killer-by-proxy heart.

He’d met plenty of men who’d slash you into bloody gobbets in a rage-he’d been that man, now and then. Sandra killed like a housewife picking a chicken for the pot.

The Bearkiller leaders drew rein. Eric Larsson might have been Ingolf Vogeler, a few years older and blonder and a missing left hand replaced with a steel fist and maybe a hair less self-control. He was the Bearkiller military commander, pretty much. Signe Havel was his fraternal twin, a tall blond woman in her forties, tautly fit and dangerous as a wolverine, and ran the civil side of things-though she looked at home in that armor too. Her son Mike Jr. was beside her, and he was a pretty good kid, a little older than Mark. He looked a lot like a younger version of Rudi, in fact, except that his hair was wheat-yellow rather than copper-gold. Their faces had the same chiseled handsomeness, which was apparently the way Mike Havel had looked.

Goes to show you can’t always judge someone by their parents. Of course, Mathilda’s father Norman was a complete bastard and all-round evil monster shit, by all accounts, and her mother’s a polite and smiling monster, but Matti’s fine.

Right now the twins were both all business. “You’ve got a couple-thousand Cutter cavalry chasing you?” Eric asked.

“You betcha,” Ingolf said. “Infantry following them, probably, but we couldn’t punch far enough through their shielding screen to be sure. The balloons should confirm one way or another soon.”

“Yeah, Rudi thought they’d poke hard here too, and we got intel confirmation,” Eric said. “Heavy column of Boise regulars, say thirty thousand foot minimum and as many batteries of artillery. They want to knock us back away from the river here, that’s their opening move and pin as much of our reserve as they can. Should be coming into view any time now, but we’re ready for them. Well, we and the Corvallans-they’re coming in on our left as soon as they get their asses in gear. Hopefully before noon, or sunset, or dawn tomorrow. We’ll cover that flank with our cataphracts until they’re in place.”

“How’d we find out exactly where the Boiseans were going in?” Ingolf said, impressed.

Eric grinned. “Your wife-both my nieces-and the rest of the Legolamb Brigade of the Dúnedain. They got direct observation on the Boisean’s line of march and they took a really communicative and useful prisoner. I didn’t know elves could have eyepatches too. Arrrrr, matey,” he added, which for some reason seemed to amuse both him and his sister.

Maybe some family joke, Ingolf thought. Or maybe some pre-Change thing. Those two were eighteen when it happened-not really Changelings all the way. I am, for all practical purposes. I was six and I can’t really remember the old world, and Mary certainly is.

“And now we get to take a whack at the people who killed my little sister,” Eric added.

“And the ones who cost my daughter that eye,” Signe said.

His smile turned into something you might expect to see coming out of the woods at night. So did Signe’s, and for an instant looked even more gruesome; she and Astrid hadn’t gotten on, and she’d quarreled with Mary and Ritva too, but family was family.

Damn, but I’m glad they’re not my enemies, Ingolf thought. The official line is that only the Boise government is really an enemy; their troops are just friends who don’t know it yet. I don’t think Eric’s enthusiastic about making fine distinctions, or Signe either-though she’ll make sure he follows orders; she’s colder-blooded that way.

It was odd hearing someone referring to Astrid Larsson as a kid sister, too; though of course that was how Eric would remember her.

Another burst of code from the balloon brought Ingolf’s head up; that and the familiar massed drumming of hooves. The Cutters surged into view, a massive clot of horsemen. Eric made a signal, raising his hand and chopping it down ninety degrees.

“Shoot!” he called.

Trumpets and kettledrums blared and hammered. The artillery along the Bearkiller front all cut loose within a second or two of each other. Ingolf squinted into the sun as the four-foot javelins arched out. Scores of them hit the Prophet’s horsemen all at once. He winced, even though it was nearly a thousand yards away. They kept coming, though, at a fast canter.

Nothing wrong with their instincts, he thought.

Running towards trouble was the right reflex to have, even if it had to be controlled by second thoughts.

Another gesture by Eric, and drums and trumpets rang again. The scorpions and twelve-pounders were firing roundshot now, globes of cast steel. You could just see them traveling through the air, a whistling sound under the tung-whack! of heavy truck springs letting go and the throwing-arms and slides hitting their stops. Where they struck men and horses splashed, and the metal globes went bounding and tumbling along the ground for scores of yards, breaking legs like matchsticks.

“Pikepoints front…down!”

There was a bristling ripple all along the Bearkiller line as the call was transmitted by the drums and bugles and fifes. The front five ranks of pikes came down level, the first three held underarm at waist height, the next two chest and shoulder-height. Each block was a solid wall of staggered glittering points, with three ranks at the rear still upright and ready to step into any gaps.

“By the left…left march…Forward!”

Trat-rat-tat-rat-tat, and the wall of blades began to walk. There was a crashing bark from ten thousand throats:

“Haakaa päälle!”

That was the Bearkiller war cry. Mike Havel had been about half Finnish by ancestry, despite the Czech name an immigrant great-grandfather had been landed with by a petty clerk utterly unable to spell or pronounce the original arm-long string of Karelian consonants. For the Outfit he founded he’d adopted the old battle chant that had once had half of Europe crowding into its churches to pray:

From the terrible Finns, Lord deliver us!

“Haakaa päälle!”

“What’s that mean?” Mark asked as they nodded to the Bearkiller leaders and turned their horses away. “Colonel Ingolf Uncle, sir.”

“Hack them down! more or less.” Ingolf grinned. “Mary filled me in on it.”

A roar to make the earth shake: “Haakaa päälle!”

“Hack them down!” Rick said. “It’s got a certain earthy simplicity. I like it. And over there, they don’t.”

Ingolf grinned wider and shook his head, the particular expression a man got at seeing an enemy suffer; there wasn’t going to be anyone very happy over there on the other side just now. Major Jaeger reined in beside him as the First Richland and the Sioux fell into column and sat their horses behind the advancing infantry, amid the ambulances and the light supply wagons tensely ready to dash forward and bring wounded out or sling bundles and crates of crossbow bolts and artillery ammunition and spare pikes and whatnot. A lot of them were teenagers too young to fight, or other noncombatants. The Bearkillers had brought everyone who could do something useful, and from the looks they were organized right down to the boot-laces.

“Damn, they’ve got sand going straight in from the march like that!” Jaeger said, grinning; there was a spatter of someone else’s drying blood in his brown beard, and he absently rubbed at it. “That is a pretty sight.”

Rick Three Bears chuckled as he finished doing some quick work on a nick in the edge of his shete with a whetstone and slid it home in the fringed, beaded scabbard hung from his saddlebow. He preferred to rely on the two long knives strapped to his thighs if he was dismounted.

“No shit. Atanikili! Awesome, dudes! Glad they’re on our side. Hey, we should get our quivers filled while we can, all that stuff.”

It was a splendid display of arrogance, infantry advancing on horsemen. The Bearkillers handled the way the terrain rolled with nonchalant ease, keeping their alignment and flowing around obstacles like an incoming tide. Some of the artillery were firing over their heads now-which showed both skill and an unusual degree of trust. Some of the shot trailed smoke; thick glass globes of napalm, wrapped in fuel-soaked cord. The first volley of them slashed home. At this distance the impacts were little blossoms of yellow flame and black smoke. Close up it would be clinging fire spattering in all directions, horses with their manes on fire, burning gobbets taking off a man’s face or running down under his armor while he rolled and screamed and beat at himself with blackened hands.

They were just close enough to see a twelve-pounder’s crew pumping madly at the handles of a tripod-shaped arrangement, sending water through armored hoses to the hydraulic bottle jacks built into the mechanism of their weapon. There was a ratcheting clackclackclack as the springs bent and the throwing arms cocked backward and then locked. The loading squad moved with the precision of dancers to the command of the battery officer standing with binoculars to her face:

“Target cavalry front…Range eight hundred…load flame…ten degrees left traverse…fifteen elevation…ignite fuse…shoot!”

A massive tung…tung…tung…tung…tung…tung…sound as the six throwers in the battery cut loose, the recoil moving the shooting part back against the recoil cylinders that transmitted it through the trails and into the ground. They were well-made pieces; you could have balanced a coin on the top of the road wheels and not had it slide off. Then the whole began again-they were nearly as fast as crossbows, which was very good practice. He unlimbered his own binoculars.

That brought them close enough to see a signaler over there among the enemy blowing his cowhorn trumpet; the blatting hu-hu-hu-huuu carried well, and more than one was echoing it. He could also see some Rancher hitting an enthusiast who didn’t want to pull out over the head with his bowstave. The Cutter non-formation turned and cantered away eastward with its wounded and dead draped over their saddles, leaving a scattering of bodies and crippled horses. A few Bearkiller lancers trotted forward to finish them off, an unexpected display of sentiment from a bunch he’d started to think were inhumanly businesslike. The rest halted, and the pikepoints swung upward again in a show of casual panache as they all about-faced and marched back to their starting point.

“Looks like the Cutters’ve had as much as they want and a bit more, sir,” Jaeger said, rubbing his hands with glee.

“Yeah,” Ingolf said. “This bunch, for now. They’re between the devil and the deep blue sea, you betcha.”

“My ass bleeds for them,” Rick said, starting to make himself a cigarette one-handed. “Šicáya ecámu!” he swore, mumbling around the thongs as he found the pouch empty. “You got any more makings, cousin?”

Ingolf snorted and raised a fist with an elevated middle finger; he smoked a pipe occasionally, but the tobacco habit had died out here in Montival, except among some tribes who used it as a sacrament, part of their religion. What little tobacco available locally was so bad you pretty well had to be deeply religious to use it. The Sioux made ceremonial use of it too, but plenty of them also smoked because they liked it, since they could import good-quality weed from the Midwestern bossmandoms. His own Readstown area had produced fine leaf even before the Change, and still did-Ingolf had brought twenty pounds of it back west as they passed through his birthplace, packed in sealed foil-lined boxes. Mary hated the smell, but tolerated him as long as he only used his pipe occasionally; appeals to the example of hobbits, wizards, dwarves and Rangers in the Histories had fallen on deaf ears.

I incline to the elven side of the Force, was all she’d say on that subject, some old-time reference she’d picked up from her aunt.

“No,” he said. “Not one ounce to spare.”

“Brothers-in-arms!” Rick said.

“I trust a buddy with my life-” Ingolf began, an old soldier’s litany.

“-but not with a girl, a bottle, or smokes,” Rick finished. “Have a heart. I don’t want to die with the jitters.”

Ingolf laughed and tossed him his own pouch. “OK, let’s get to work,” he said.

Their supply train had caught up with them; that was fairly easy, for light cavalry. Mark handled off-saddling Boy and switching the tack to one of his remounts. Ingolf would have been shocked if it hadn’t been done quickly and perfectly, but he gave it a swift check anyway.

The rest was a few minutes of routine; replacing lost items of gear, filling quivers, taking canteens to the carts that held tanks of clean water, putting on nose bags and giving the horses a quick hit of oats rolled with molasses for energy. He saw to handing their wounded off to the Bearkillers personally, and Jaeger did an inspection too. His mother-in-law’s army had field medics as good as any he’d ever come across, their mobile clinics were beautifully equipped and almost painfully clean, and he finished the miserable chore feeling as good about it as was possible, making sure all his people were tagged so they could be identified later come what may. But-

“Well, hello, Ingolf, you handsome macho brute,” Dr. Aaron Rothman said, as he ducked out from beneath the tent. “What’re you doing after the battle? Presuming you’re not dead or visiting me in my professional capacity.”

Even if their head medico is as swish as all hell and likes to screw with your head, he thought resignedly. Not that I’ve got anything against queers, and Mary always calls him “uncle,” and so does every other Havel and Larsson younger than Signe and Eric. Old family friend, obviously. Juniper and her kids treat him that way too.

He’d campaigned with some queers who were first-class, and more switch-hitters. What they did in their off-duty time was their business as long as they were polite about it, which they were no more or less likely to be than cavalry troopers of more orthodox tastes; Ingolf had a soldier’s priorities, not a priest’s. But Readstown was a conservative little place in the back of beyond, not a great and sophisticated metropolis like Des Moines, and your upbringing stuck at a level below conscious thought or belief. Gay people there mostly kept quiet about it and were glad to get live-and-let-live.

“You’re too old for me, Doc,” Ingolf said with mock sadness, thumping his fist on his chest in a display of grief. “It’s a cruel fate that keeps us apart.”

“I swear, straight people exist to make life dull. Where’s your spirit of adventure, your get-up-and-go?”

“It got up and went a long time ago. Besides, I’m married.”

“You people can even make sex dull,” Rothman replied, grinning.

He was in his sixties and slimly elegant even in shapeless green scrubs and a surgical mask hanging down around his neck, with a neatly trimmed white beard and mockingly intelligent brown eyes, and a limp. That was because he’d lost a foot to a cannibal band not long after the Change, one that kept the meat fresh as long as possible by removing it in installments; the incipient Bearkillers had rescued him on their westward trek in Idaho, and he’d been in charge of their medical service and doctor-and-nurse training program ever since.

Apparently among Bearkillers medicine had become the occupation of choice for people like him, one of those chance-made local customs you found all over the place. A set of ambulances came up, and Rothman turned away from the banter as if a switch had been thrown, his face as intent as a watchmaker’s at his workbench.

“Triage!” he snapped, and other green-clad figures came running. Then as he bent over the first bloodied figure, easing a field-bandage free as aids snapped the armor loose with bolt-cutters: “Sucking chest wound here! Plasma and drain, stat!-”

Ingolf nodded and swung back into the saddle, reaching into the saddlebag for one of the Dúnedain honey-nut-fruit-cracked-grain confections, peeling off a corner of the leaf that wrapped it and gnawing away a bite. They had most of the field rations he’d ever encountered beat all to hell, though the Mackenzie equivalent-they called it trail mix, for some reason-was almost as good.

And it was going to be a long, long day. For all of them.