Lord of Mountains

CHAPTER TWELVE

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

Rudi took a last look to his right and left and right as the canter built to a gallop, then knocked his visor down with the edge of his shield; he needed no hand for the reins, not with Epona, who had known no bit or bridle in all their time together. There was the familiar sensation as the world went dark save for the long slit of brightness that framed his vision ahead. A darkness full of thunder, the thunder of eighty thousand hooves as the two great masses of horseman swept together over the sparse bunchgrass and hard dirt of the plain. The line stayed even enough, but grew slightly jagged as the faster horses drew a little ahead, like a huge jaw full of steel shark’s-teeth. Everything had shrunk to the point of the lance in his left hand where it angled over Epona’s plunging head and the men ahead.

The Sword of the Prophet were shooting as they charged; arrows went by with that grating malignant whirr, and here and there in the great line of lancers one found a target in man or horse and an image of martial glory suddenly turned to a tumbling mass of hideously vulnerable flesh. Their comrades opened out about them and closed up again without checking as the long lances slanted down in a bristling wall of steel points driven by ton-weights of armored destrier and man. Where necessary, a rear-rank man lifted his steed in a leap over the fallen. Most of the shafts broke or flicked from the curving surfaces of the plate, or stood quivering in the long shields.

Arrows from powerful recurves could be a deadly threat to knights, but only if the horse-archers could dodge about and strike from beyond reach for volley after volley. Here there would be no time or space for that. Behind the visor Rudi’s teeth were bared in a wolfish snarl; he could almost pity the commander of the Prophet’s elite troop. He’d hoped the Montivalans had been tied down throughout the day, set up for the final smashing blow…and now the tables had been turned, and he had no choice but to launch the death-grapple against much worse odds than he’d expected and hope and pray to his Ascended Masters that it worked.

I almost pity him, Rudi thought.

Far beyond the carnivore concentration of battle some distant part of him did pity the Prophet, Sethaz. He’d probably been an evil man, and certainly ruthless; but nobody deserved what had almost certainly befallen him when his father died and the mantle of the Masters descended on him. Rudi hoped that the Prophet was here leading his private regiments; the Sword of the Lady could deal with him, freeing the man into clean death…and possibly ending the war at a stroke, or most of it.

More shafts whined by, or glanced from his armor or thudded into the shield he kept up under his chin. The enemy swelled from a shape coming out of the dust into a great vision-swallowing line of men and animals with shocking abruptness, spired helmets with spikes and red ribbons streaming from them, dull-red armor of steel and cuir-bolli, good big horses but not destriers and not barded. The stinging clouds of arrows ceased as the Prophet’s men cased their bows, slid their round shields onto their arms and lifted the lances out of the scabbards behind each man’s right hip with a smooth coordination that was like one man acting, or a dance. The line of shields with the rayed sun on them were like some great beast opening its manifold eyes and glaring, and a harsh barking cry rose from nine thousand throats:

“CUT! CUT! CUT!”

Rudi’s snarl widened. The Sword of the Prophet was a weapon that had been forged for war in the far interior, in what had once been Montana. Against light cavalry with little or no armor they were supremely effective because they were far more flexible than the Association’s knighthood, able to shift instantly from missile fire to shock action with disciplined precision, like Bearkiller A-Listers though not as heavily armed. They couldn’t be pecked to death by a lighter opponent, and they could hit very hard at need.

All that the Associate nobles of the north-realm could do was one thing, really. Charge home with the lance and finish the matter, smashing away toe-to-toe with sword and war hammer.

But they do that one thing very, very well. And here the Prophet’s men have no choice but to meet them on my chosen ground. Trying to match that one thing on its own terms.

Seconds now. He jammed his feet hard into the long stirrups, brought the lance fully down and couched the weighted butt tightly beneath his left arm, the pennant behind the point streaming and flapping and popping as he clamped his hand behind the shallow metal bowl of the guard on the shaft. The big horses were stretching their legs all-out now as the last hundred yards flashed by, fast as racing mounts when they had time to build their full shattering momentum.

Epona recognized the moment and gave it her last magnificent effort, drawing a little ahead despite the best efforts of the Protector’s Guard knights around Rudi and Mathilda.

A leveled spear faced him. His lance punched past it. Into and through a breastplate, with an impact that wrenched him out of a trance of concentration as the weight of man and armor and galloping horse on both sides all struck behind the point. His torso slammed back into the high chair-like cantle of the knight’s saddle, and harder still as the spear struck his own shield and glanced off it and bent him back. Epona stumbled for a single pace, and the Cutter went over his horse’s crupper with a violence that snapped the tough ashwood of the lance across and left him lying with four feet of it through his torso.

Rudi Mackenzie threw the broken stub aside and swept out the Sword of the Lady. The action felt like perfection in his own mind. Diving into the crest of an ocean wave and flying landward, riding forces huge and terrible like a sea-otter tumbling fearless and utterly alive within the storm-surge. Epona turned beneath him as nimble as a colt, though her sides were heaving against the barding like a great bellows. He could see her eye rolling wild behind the wrought steel of the chamfron, and there was blood splashed across it.

“Morrigú!” he shrieked, and cut, and ruin fell away.

Black wings enfolded him, bore him up. He danced with them, amid clouds and lightnings…

Dust hid his surroundings, a cloud of it from tens of thousands of hooves. Time had passed; he knew that somehow. Knew that the chevaliers had ridden through the enemy line, and that three times out of four it had been an Easterner who went hurtling to the ground wounded or killed by the longer spear and the greater skill and the heavier armor. There were knights with him, and Matti, the Protector’s Guard and some of her menie. And not far away a clump of men in armor the color of dried blood, the Sword of the Prophet, grouped around a great banner of the rayed Sun.

And among them a man with a shaven head and a tuft of chin-beard. A man who had been young recently and now looked as if he’d watched the world cool from molten rock.

Sethaz.

Their eyes met. That was like a blow from a mace felt through armor; Epona threw up her head and neighed, and beside him Ignatius grunted and flung up his own sword. Time froze, thick as amber honey on a cold morning. He could see-

Bjarni Ironrede, King in Norrheim, corked his canteen. “Time, now, oath-brothers,” he called. “The shield-burg walks.”

Beside the Norrheimers the greater array of the Mackenzies were moving too. Each of them walked forward and pulled out their swine-feather. Those were two sections of ashwood a yard long that clipped together, one tipped by a narrow-bladed shovel and the other by a spearhead. The archers twisted them free of the joining collars, slipped them into the loops beside their quivers, put an arrow on the string of their bows and went forward to the attack.

That meant hopping and scrambling over the litter of arrow-bristling corpses, men and horses both, that lay where the line of points had stalled them in the unmerciful killing ground of the longbows’ point-blank fire. Beyond that the bodies didn’t lie so often atop one another, but they nearly carpeted the ground in straggling lines where attacks had crested and fallen back like the surge of a retreating tide.

The scrim in front of the Norrheimers was more concentrated, where the CUT’s spearmen had piled up in front of the shield-wall and been stabbed and hacked to ruin with point and blade and swinging ax. They clambered over it, Bjarni watching where he put his feet and occasionally thrusting downward to put a foeman out of their pain. They hadn’t dared turn in against the Mackenzies, not while the living fortress of Norrheim had stood.

Beyond, the dead were scattered rather than piled on each other, and there was room for ordered lines. If enemy horse made a dash at the archers, his men would meet them.

“Swine-array!” he called.

Shield to shield, the Norrheimers fell into a blunt wedge like the head of a boar, ready to gore and crush and utterly destroy. His own banner went up at the point, the black raven with its AA blazon seeming to flap its wings on the triangular surface with its stiffening batten at the top edge and its fringe of tassels. His mother had made that banner in the days just after the Change with her own hands, and his father had carried it north through the wreckage of a dying world to the founding of Norrheim. Bjarni had won the throne beneath it at the Six Hills fight. The sun behind them threw the shadows of men and spears long on the ground before, monstrous and troll-like amid the hard stink of death.

It’s a long way to come to spill your blood on this dry ground, he thought.

A bitter longing for the pine-scented breezes of the homeland seized him for a moment, and for the faces of his wife and daughter and the son who would take his first steps without him there to see. He shook it off, shrugging his bear-like shoulders into the weight of his hauberk and the padding beneath, and working aching fingers on the grip of his shield and the hilt of his broadsword. Aloud he shouted in a bull bellow:

“The trollkjerrings of the CUT came to Norrheim with their army of wild-men and foreign reavers. Artos Mikesson aided us. With his might and main he fought for us, spilled his blood and that of his sworn men, when we did battle to defend our homes, our wives, our children and our land. Now we repay all our oaths!”

Another deep breath; he was a man of medium height but stocky-strong, and he could outshout the thunder like his friend Thor:

“Forward, Norrheimer men!”

To himself:

Without him Norrheim might not have survived, my hall would lie in ashes. And I would not be King. A man pays his debts, and only the lighter ones can be met with a golden arm-ring.

His followers were picked fighters from all the Norrheimer tribes, his own Bjornings, the Hrossings, Wulfings, Kalkings, Verdfolings, Hundings. He saw them stiffen and stride out when they heard his words, despite the long day’s weariness and the wounds many bore.

“Thor with me!” he shouted. “Ho La, Odhinn!”

Feet pounding, the Norrheimer array trotted towards the retreating enemy.

Lioncel de Stafford cursed and hauled at the half-conscious body of Sir Rodard where it lay with one leg under the body of his dying horse. There was an arrow through the chain-mail grommet under the knight’s left arm, and he shrieked feebly as the squire pulled. Blood rivuleted over the armor, but it was a risk of death against a certainty; there were still Cutters around, those willing to sell their lives for the chance to kill one last time. The dust settled a little, and he saw armored figures looming out of it; he almost sobbed with thankfulness as he saw that it was Lady d’Ath and Rigobert de Stafford and their menies. Less the dead and fallen, but those still in the saddle were the most of those who’d started.

“Sir Ivo, see to it,” the Grand Constable snapped.

Men dismounted and completed the task Lioncel had begun, their hands impersonally gentle as they pulled off armor and applied a pressure bandage; one took a hypodermic out of a boiled-leather tube and injected the fallen knight. Lioncel staggered back and bowed, then snatched up a canteen. Drinking the tinny-tasting water heavily laced with wine was the most pleasurable thing he’d ever done; he coughed some out, drank again and began to feel like a human being. He also felt the sting of sweat in minor cuts, the ache of bruises and a sharp pain in his side that might be a sprung rib or just a bone bruise. The brigandine would hold it either way, and he could breathe without coughing blood. A coolness in his hair made him realize that his helmet was gone, and he caught himself looking around for it before he realized it was probably lost forever and possibly trampled into scrap.

The Baron of Forest Grove looked around himself, at the bodies of horses and men and lone figures wandering or calling for comrades, lords, followers. More and more of them trickled in to the banners of the two nobles by the minute, some with more presence of mind than most leading strings of horses they’d gathered up, and dismounted men eagerly swung into the saddles. Sometimes they had to scrabble at it; vaulting into the saddle in full armor was one of the tests of knighthood, but that was when you were fresh and the horse knew you.

“What was that favorite expression of yours, my lady d’Ath?” Lioncel’s father said.

She seemed amused. “No, for once it isn’t a cluster-fuck, Rigobert. We’ve broken them; they were fools or desperate to try and meet us lance to lance, but it’s disorganized us as well, we’re all over the place. Hear that?”

The oliphants were screaming again, and kettledrums; Lioncel let the sound penetrate his mind, and suddenly it made sense: Rally. Rally. Rally…

“Where’s the rest? Where’s the King?”

“Probably mostly within catapult-shot, once the dust settles, getting together catch-as-catch-can the way we are. And believe me, we’d know it if the King were down. Time to get this tidied up; the destriers can’t push a pursuit anyway. Let our cowboys handle it, we just have to see off any remnants who feel like being heroic.”

Hands linked to make a step and helped Lioncel into the saddle of a horse, from the unfamiliar feel of the saddle an animal that had belonged to an enemy until a little while ago. The stirrups were slightly long but they would do, and the height and feeling of a willing horse beneath him immediately made the world seem more controllable. Then a stir went through the knights and men-at-arms, a growl like a satiated tiger threatened while lying-up on the body of its kill. A ragged band loomed up, in dark red-brown armor. A snarl rose as they hefted heavy shetes and plainsmen’s bows.

Rigobert laughed and let the steel haft of the war hammer in his right hand slope back over his shoulder. Lioncel’s liege smiled, a slight and terrible expression that showed teeth white against the dust and blood on her steel-framed face. She drew her sword, a delicately precise motion like a hummingbird drinking from a flower, and raised the blade to point as her followers and Rigobert’s settled their shields and knocked down visors.

“My name is Tiphaine d’Ath,” she said, in a voice that started out cool as water in a mountain brook.

Then it rose to an astonishing soprano lioness roar. “And…you…are…in…my…way!”

“We can’t hold them!” a voice bawled in Peter Jones’ ear. “It’s like trying to wrestle a mill-wheel with your bare hands!”

The commander of the Corvallis Field Force coughed and spat and wrestled his bent visor up. His body felt as if his blood had all been replaced with lead just on the point of melting.

Christ, fifty-five is too old for this.

He hacked up dust and spat phlegm mixed with blood from a cut where his mouth had been struck against his own teeth. With the visor out of the way, his first sight was of the butt of a glaive, coming far too close as the wielder drew it back and then slammed the heavy weapon forward. The Boise soldier just beyond couldn’t get his shield up in time because two pikes were embedded in it and pushing hard, and the point of the blade crunched into his face just above the bridge of his nose with a sound that carried even over the roar of shouting and the clash of metal and trampling of thousands of feet.

More dust cut visibility to a few dozen yards, but all he could see anyway was a tangled heaving confusion; many of the first rank of pikemen had dropped their long weapons and were fighting with sword and buckler. And not doing very well at it, against men whose primary weapon was the gladius and shield. If it hadn’t been for the remaining pikes and glaives slamming forward over their shoulders…

“U-S-A! U-S-A!” the Boiseans barked.

You could feel the momentum in it, and they shoved forward in a stabbing, chopping mass.

“Hold them!” Jones shouted. “Just fucking hold them!”

But we can’t. Not for much longer.

Time began again. Sethaz smiled, and for an instant Rudi felt an almost irresistible impulse to slam his fists into his own face simply so that he wouldn’t have to see that expression for another second. Sethaz’ eyes blinked, and for that single moment the pupils were black and enormous, filling them from lid to lid, windows into an emptiness where matter had decayed to nothingness in a final squeal and even space itself grew tattered.

Then it passed, and they became almost human once more. The Prophet turned and spurred away with his followers behind him, their speed rocking up to a gallop.

“No!” Rudi said sharply, at the rattle of gear behind him.

Mathilda looked a question, pausing as she drew her sword.

“There’s more urgent work to hand,” Rudi said grimly. “Get me the Grand Constable.”

She wasn’t far away; the dust was subsiding, and the falling sun turned it into a mist of gold out of which she and her knights loomed. For a moment they were like figures in a tapestry in a castle solar, until the reality of blood and sweat-stink and battering showed.

“Your Majesty, we have a victory,” she said, bringing her sword up to salute.

There was fresh blood on it. Rudi was spattered all along his left side, and further. He glanced at the Sword of the Lady, and blinked slightly to see it shining as if fresh from an armorer’s care…though in fact it never needed to be polished or sharpened that he’d been able to detect, even when it had just slammed through metal armor. Nothing clung to it, either.

Unlike my hands, he thought with grim amusement, feeling the sticky salt that soaked his gauntlet and jelled against the callused skin.

The feel of the whole battle flowed through him, a balance of forces like two huge beasts grappling through a thousand tentacles and jaws.

“We have a budding disaster on our hands too,” Rudi said briskly. “The Boiseans are pushing home an attack with all they have left on the Corvallans south of here and they’re close to breaking through, breaking the line between the Bearkillers and the regiments from the Free Cities.”

He raised the Sword a little as an answer to the question he saw in their eyes, though it was a bit more complex than that.

“That doesn’t make any sense!” Mathilda said; at the madness of it, not the manner by which he’d gotten the information. “They can’t win now, that’ll just put them in the bag! They should be retreating.”

Tiphaine nodded-she’d been one of the military tutors who’d taught both of them and the logic was irrefutable-but Rudi shook his head.

“It makes perfect sense from Sethaz’ point of view; it means he can get more of his forces out, because I cannot order a general pursuit until the Boiseans are dealt with. And the army of the United States of Boise has shown itself most unreliable today…from his point of view. Better to sacrifice them to preserve men he can count on. And to kill as many of ours as he may, to weaken us.”

“It’s suicide for the Boisean forces,” Tiphaine observed neutrally. “If I were Martin Thurston…”

For all the blood and flecks of hair and brains that coated half her armor, her voice still had that cool impersonal observer’s tone. She might have been discussing a battle fought centuries ago.

“Martin Thurston’s mind has not been his own for some time now,” Rudi said. “D’Ath, I need thirty or forty conroi of lancers; more if you can, but that number at least and quickly. Get them together from whatever’s to hand; don’t stop to match vassal with liege if they’re separated. Strip the barding from the destriers, cut the buckles and let it lie. We need to move fast. Matti, you’ll be with me. Rigobert, I’m leaving you in charge here.”

He extended his left arm and swung it slowly from left to right.

“If the Prophet is leaving us a prize we can’t refuse, we’ll take as big a bite of it as we can. You swing in like this with the rest of the men-at-arms as soon as you can get them organized again. Probably some of the Boisean commanders will disregard orders and retreat as fast as they can, but we’ll put those who don’t into the bag. Use the men-at-arms for the outer tip, and the Association foot for the rest of it. Our light horse can press what’s left of Sethaz’ cavalry. More will get away than I’d hoped, but we need to deal with this.”

D’Ath had been rapping out orders while he spoke to the Baron of Forest Grove, and her menie had already dissolved into a mass of messengers, directed at the first clumps of knights and men-at-arms to hand. The nearest were already turning and cantering towards the High King’s standard.

“Now we ride.”

Epona’s breath was harsh; foam coated her forequarters and spattered on his leg-armor, the smell heavier than the blood drying on his armor. Downslope with the setting sun a huge disk of red behind him he could see the standards of seven or eight battalions of Boise infantry, but the ranks were inextricably mixed, and they were more like clumps than precise formations as they heaved against the thinning line of Corvallans.

Knots of men stumbled and hacked and stabbed, and a circular hedge of pikes held out around the wreck of two field-pieces with crossbowmen standing and shooting from the tumbled machines. The war cries were croaks and grunting now, but the hard rattling clatter of steel on wood and leather and steel still sounded, and the dull pounding of boots on soil moistened by the blood of the corpses that almost covered the ground.

“Get my people out,” Peter Jones wheezed.

An aide was supporting him; one leg was a mass of red from the knee down, with bone fragments showing pink-white. A medic was trying to administer morphine, but the man waved it away, despite the sweat of pain that was washing blood and dust in rivulets down his stubbled face.

“We held them as long as we could.”

“You held long enough,” Rudi said.

Frederick Thurston’s face was stark-grim as he watched. “He’s thrown away two or three thousand men killed or crippled,” he said bitterly. “That’s the Sixth in the center, they were always closest to him; he served with them as a junior officer and they backed him when…he did it. And now he’s murdered them. Them, too.”

Rudi nodded, showing teeth in what was not a smile. War is waste. This is madness and futility and waste thrice compounded.

He turned and looked behind him. There were the better part of seven hundred lancers there; a few score less than he’d started with, less the ones who’d dropped out with foundered horses along the way. Many of them had managed to snatch up fresh lances, and they were in front. Behind were the others with their swords and war hammers ready. The shields were mostly ragged from blows, and the armor dinted and dimpled; the bright colors of heraldic devices scored and broken.

“Edain,” Rudi said.

The commander of his guards was red-faced; bicycles could outrun horses in the long run, not the short, and the distance from here to the northern end of the Montivalan line was just on the cusp between the two. He was streaming with sweat, and so were his followers, but they were all there-less those wounded or killed during the day’s fighting.

“I’m taking the men-at-arms in. You follow on our flanks. We’ve reinforcements moving here as fast as they can, but we’ll have to rock that madman back first. Get the Archers in on either side and give the enemy more pinfeathers than a goose. It’ll be tricky shooting but if anyone can, it’s your lads and lasses.”

“Aye, Chief,” he said, his gray eyes steady; he knew Rudi was accepting a high risk of friendly fire as a cost of doing business in a crisis. “It’ll be done.”

Rudi turned and raised the Sword. Tired as they were, the men behind him growled at the sight. He could feel their anger, colder than the first flush of exultation that had carried them into the great charge that broke the Prophet’s guardsmen, and all the more dangerous for that. He was one with the battlefield, and with the ones fighting on it.

“One last charge, gentlemen and chevaliers. One last charge and we carry the day. Upon the enemy-Haro!”

“Haro!” crashed back at him. “Haro, Portland! Holy Mary for Portland!”

“Will you follow me, men of the Association?”

“Artos and Montival! Death…death…death!”

He brought the Sword off his shoulder and slanted it forward. A clump of the surviving Corvallan signalers were gathered around them; they started to sound retreat at speed. Down the slope men tired beyond bearing still heard the familiar notes. The more so as it finally gave them permission to do what everything but sheer willpower and the stubborn pride of their disciplined valor had been screaming for hours: run. Apart from the knot around the field-pieces every Corvallan still fit to move threw down their weapons and took to their heels, most dashing to either side where formed units still held out, a few directly to the rear.

Some of those kept coming, heedless and witless at last as they let panic take them. When they saw the mass of lancers, more swerved or threw themselves down and buried their heads between their knees with their arms wrapped around their heads, trusting to their armor and luck and babbled prayers. The oliphants screamed their high silver shriek once more.

Tired horses stumbled into a trot and then a canter and then a shambling gallop. Epona’s nostrils were red pits and slobber coated her neck as her lungs foamed out, but she drew ahead of the others stride by stride. The Boiseans were lumbering forward rather than pursuing, near the ultimate tipping-point of exhaustion themselves; probably only the fact that their minds were clubbed half-unconscious by fatigue kept them going. He could see one man making mechanical thrusts one after another at opponents no longer there. Pride and reflex drove them on, until they realized what was coming down the low slope at them.

Even then clumps of them came together and overlapped their shields instead of running, but their spears were gone, and there was nothing to make a hedge of points. Even destriers wouldn’t impale themselves, but they were trained from colthood to run at straw figures of men with shields. The rough wedge struck, lance-points and rearing smashing hooves, a multi-ton mass ripping into the scattered footmen.

Rudi slashed. The Sword of the Lady cut through the staff of the Sixth Battalion’s flag standard. A man picked up the six-foot stub of it and threw it at him as if it were a javelin; he caught it on his shield and slammed the mass away. Epona’s forehooves flashed out, and something broke where they struck. A snap went through Rudi, clicking his teeth together. Then she leapt off her haunches once more, with something of her old strength and grace.

Rudi shouted, raising the Sword again, and men began casting down their weapons or turning to run, or simply falling to their knees with the blank beaten expressions of those pushed beyond all human endurance. One stood, wolf-snarling at him. He snatched up a fallen pila and threw. Rudi knew that pure arch even as it left the Boisean’s hand; it had the cold inevitability of certainty. All he could do was drop his shield and pull his feet out of the stirrups as the sharp steel thudded into the base of Epona’s neck.

The labored grace of her charge turned into a wheeling fall. Momentum threw him clear of the saddle, and he was turning through the air; then the ground hit him in the back and side, hard enough to stun through the armor. Men were running at him, the hard core who wanted revenge more than a chance to get away, or who’d adopted the Prophet’s faith. The Sword was still in his hand, and it seemed to pull him up even while his lungs were straining to take the first breath as he came to one knee. A man raised a spear above him before he regained his feet, but something flicked between them; then he was falling backward with a cloth yard shaft in his throat, coughing out a gout of blood past an expression of agonized astonishment.

Men died in a sleet of arrowshafts that punched right through hoop armor and shields. An instant later only one was on his feet, a dark man in armor that had the distinctive sheen of high-strength alloys. His eyes were pools of blackness as he poised his blade.

Rudi rose, and the Sword of the Lady drove forward. There was a crisp popping sensation up the hilt, Martin Thurston jerked to a stop with Rudi’s sword-hand only an inch from his breastbone and two feet of not-steel jutting out shining furnace-bright from his back.

The dying man’s eyes flared open. Everything fled from them except pain and the knowledge of death. Rudi came fully upright and grabbed him under the arm, ready to ease him down and pull the Sword free and let the lifeblood out to end his suffering. That put their faces close together for an instant, and even then Rudi was conscious of his astonishment as the other man spoke in a breathy whisper that sent red bubbles swelling and popping on his lips.

“Thank…you…”

The eyes lost their focus on Rudi, and the voice went thinner:

“Juliet…Larry…I’m sorry. Dad.”

Mathilda was kneeling beside him when he came to himself. Rudi was vaguely conscious of voices-Fred Thurston’s, taking a surrender; Tiphaine d’Ath tongue-lashing some nobleman into granting quarter. It was all distant as he touched Epona’s neck. She snorted very quietly and rolled her eye towards him, but her head only left the ground for an instant as she recognized him. There was a blind questioning in the glance, as if she asked him what kept her from rising to her feet and carrying him once more and what he meant to do about it.

“Goodbye, girl,” he said. “I’m-”

She gave a final sigh and he felt the huge muscles of her neck go slack. Then he let the tears flow from beneath clenched eyelids. Matti’s hand closed on his shoulder, more sensed than felt through the steel.

“Rudi, I’m so sorry,” she said gently. “She was with you so long.”

“She…”

A wail escaped him, the high Mackenzie keening for the dead. He throttled it off before it could take him into the full rhythmic surge of grief.

Instead he rose dry-eyed, though his Clan didn’t account tears shameful in a man.

“I am the King,” he said to Matti’s glance of concern. “And there is King’s work yet to do this day.”

He raised his voice: “Signal to the balloons, transmit to all units: general pursuit!”

The flames of the funeral pyre burned hot, so hot that there was little scent save a darkness that curled in the throat with each indrawn breath; it was most of a rough barge of Douglas fir wood made for the campaign, broken up like many others this night to serve a final need and stacked in a lattice of timbers stuffed with brush for kindling. The resin-soaked wood exploded upward and the wind carried the tower of red-gold southeastward, towards the river far below, sparks like stars in the gathering dark. More pyres starred the edge of the waters, for a mile and more downstream; the contingents would bring the ashes of their fallen home to rest among their own.

“You did it all perfectly,” Mathilda said softly beside him. “There’s time for the man within the High King now.”

Rudi nodded; the tears were running down his face, unchecked this time and soaking into his short red-gold beard, but his voice was calm as he looked out over the night.

“They’ll say this was the kingdom’s foundation and a springtime of hope, someday, this great victory. They’ll sing of it.”

He nodded towards the funeral fires. “But this is Samhain, and there’s grief enough to fill the world and Otherworld.”

Her arm went around his waist, and her warm solidity leaned against him; they were both out of their armor at last.

“Men die, and horses die,” she said gently. “Grief dies in the end too, or grows gentle. We go on. Until we don’t.”

He nodded. “Death is part of life. But it still hurts. Epona bore me to battle and across half a world, and there were things she knew of me that no one else did, not even you, my love.”

The roaring crackle gave them privacy, though a surprising number of others had come to mourn as well, Mackenzies keening a little way off, but a scattering from all the host.

After a moment he stepped forward and threw back his head and gave the wail for the beloved dead, keeping the note high until his chest ached and his head throbbed. Then he raised his hands skyward in the Old Religion’s gesture of prayer and called:

“Go in peace to the meadows of the Land of Summer, sister of my heart, comrade, friend. Run free and wait for us there. The threads of our lives are woven together, yours and mine and the ones we love. We shall return to meet again in other times. Yet never more shall it be Rudi and Epona, a boy and his horse, riding free in the summer wind again.”

He stood while the fire burned. At last Mathilda pulled gently at his arm.

“Come, my darling. Come and let me hold you, and sleep.”