The High King of Montival

CHAPTER ELEVEN

COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK

BARONY OF WALLA-WALLA, NEAR CASTLE WAITSBURG

PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

(FORMERLY SOUTHEASTERN WASHINGTON STATE)

MARCH 31, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

“Were they really evil?Whatlies orthreats brought them here to die. .” she began, looking down at the dead men sprawled beside their dead horses. You’re quoting again, Astrid! Eilir signed. I’ve been listening to you do that since we were both fourteen!

“That doesn’t make it any less true, soul-sister,” Astrid Loring said calmly. “They’re not necessarily bad men, even if they are Cutters and from Montana. Good and ill are not one thing in the Third Age and another now.”

The identity of the men they’d ambushed was fairly clear from their mixed gear, which was the sort of thing a Rancher’s retainers put together from what came to hand, and from the common element: the rayed golden sun of the Church Universal and Triumphant. The younger Dunedain behind her nodded solemnly; those words were from the Histories after all, and apt.

It was the quiet time when sick men died, not-quite-dawn, and the blood of men and horses looked more black than red; chilly enough to make it smoke a little too, though the days were already mild even this far inland. It made an iron undertone to the sweet cool smell of spring and green growth; a few trees beside the roadway had already burst their swelling buds to show a mist of green. A quivering birdcall sounded, and the Rangers on the slope looked sharply southwestward. Another call followed and they relaxed; just afterwards the first clatter of hooves sounded on the old asphalt of the roadway, patched with pounded gravel. A spray of light cavalry went through first, several score local levies riding with arrows nocked on the strings of their recurved saddle bows.

I’ll go with them, Eilir signed. We’ll have to coordinate.

She swung into her saddle and trotted over to the local nobleman leading the horse-archers, who was in three-quarter armor himself; this far east the Association produced its own ranch-style fighters. John Hordle followed-he rode a destrier-bred warmblood even when in light gear, as at present-and a file of a dozen Dunedain ohtar.

Then a heavier drumbeat on the broken, patched asphalt, and a long column of heavy cavalry came up the roadway, the butts of their twelve-foot lances resting on their right stirrup-irons and their kite-shaped blazoned shields across their backs. The riders were knights and men-at-arms in plate cap-a-pie from the sabatons on their feet to the bevoirs that guarded their chins, the metal of their harness bright with the polish and chamois leather and elbow grease of squires and varlets.

They’re going to fight? she decided. The destriers are barded. She might have told me in advance, rather than just saying “if circumstances allow.”

The figure at their head reined aside, warhorse looking almost insectile behind the laminated armor; the raised curved visor of the sallet showed a face which was. .

Not all that different from me, Astrid admitted grudgingly.

They were both around five foot ten, both blond, both in their late thirties, and both moved with a leopard’s assurance. The Grand Constable had gray eyes rather than blue, and her face was a little harsher-boned, but otherwise they might have been sisters.

And we’ve hated each other for what. . nearly fifteen years now. Since the War of the Eye. Since I killed Katrina Georges, and even worse, since I spared Tiphaine’s life, which she’ll never really forgive. Even after she saved mine at Pendleton last year. . which I find rather hard to forgive, may the Valar forgive me.

“My lady Astrid,” Tiphaine said; or at least her lips did, in a coolly polite tone that probably disguised something like you gibbering lunatic.

She bowed in the saddle with impeccable precision-acknowledgment of Astrid’s status as sovereign of an independent realm, albeit not her sovereign, as opposed to her own high military rank and middling social status within the Association’s nobility.

“My lord Alleyne.”

That to Astrid’s handfasted husband, with a bow fractionally deeper than that to an equal, since he was a ruler’s consort. He replied in kind, with a minuscule lift of one pale eyebrow.

“Hirilen o Ath,” Astrid replied, then at the blank look remembered to shift to the Common Tongue and repeat it in English: “My lady d’Ath.”

You orc, she added to herself. No, not an orc. A Black Numenorean? Yes, that would fit. But a very dangerous one.

“Thank you for the report, my lady, my lord,” the Grand Constable went on. “Very complete, and very convenient since we’re out of heliograph communication with Castle Waitsburg for the moment. I’m glad to hear they haven’t deployed caltrops. And you took out their scout network very neatly indeed.”

“Thank you for being so timely,” Alleyne said. “They’re going to notice within ten minutes when they don’t get a man going back to check in; they’re not stupid. I trust all goes well with Lady Delia?”

“My Chatelaine is in excellent health, but pregnant. Again,” Tiphaine said, with the slightest hint of a grave wink. “Now let’s get to work.”

“You’re going to try and break the siege?” Alleyne asked. “And not just raid them?”

His smooth voice still held a trace of the officer-class Englishman he’d been before he arrived during the War of the Eye to court and win her; Astrid thought it added a touch of distinction to his Sindarin too. The way some of her folk treated the “r” sounds or butchered the vocalic umlauts. . but at least the Noble Tongue was being spoken again, here in the Fifth Age of the World. That love of the Histories was what had first brought them together.

Well, that and he looked so dreamy, she admitted. And the charm, and his laugh, and that he’s so smart.

“We’re going to try,” Tiphaine said. “Break through, destroy the siege works, reinforce and resupply the castle and evacuate the non-combatants at least. Make them commit their field force to reestablish a siege, and tie down more men here. For once I think we’ve gotten inside their decision curve; it’ll make the-”

“Special mission, yes,” Alleyne said crisply. “We’ve been briefed.”

“-disguise for the special mission more convincing if we do them some real damage. A raid with this strong a force would look too much like a demonstration to cover something else unless it had an objective of commensurate importance.”

They all swung into the saddle and moved forward, like the ghosts of horsemen in the dawn gloaming. The Dunedain peeled off to the right as the bulk of the men-at-arms deployed; Astrid thought there were probably twenty lances of them-two hundred riders, more or less.

The sun was just beginning to peek over the rolling hills eastward, and it caught at a lancehead here and there, or the colored pennants with the arms of count and baron and knight. As they came over the rise they saw the long gentle slope below running down to the river. The besiegers’ camp was there at the bridge, then the occupied ruins of the village, and the castle on the first ridge beyond. It was a rectangle with a tallish square tower in one corner and smaller round ones at the others; a standard design of a type the Protector’s labor gangs had built by the dozens in the Association’s years of expansion after the Change. This had been the northeastern boundary, until the PPA divided the Palouse with Boise well before the current war started.

Woodsmoke drifted down from it, and the besiegers’ camp, a familiar musty-sharp scent on the cool morning air; she even thought she could detect a faint hint of scorched bacon. The castle was probably densely crowded with the villagers who’d fled within the gates when the enemy came. Certainly there were plenty of tiny heads between the distant crenellations.

This is a better use for the place than its original intent.

Which had been to intimidate anyone who objected to having their land handed out willy-nilly by the Lord Protector as fiefs for his newborn lords.

The alarm had just been given down there. The Boisean infantry had been digging like moles; they already had one of their square marching camps within twelve-pounder range of the castle, the Stars and Stripes flying defiantly from a pole topped with a gilded eagle. They’d been digging a trench and barrier all around the castle too, a brown scar against the green of the winter wheat and pasture, but it was incomplete. Now they were swarming out of their orderly rows of tents and from their working parties, falling in with smooth precision outside the southward facing camp gate with its stubby wooden tower above. She took her heavy binoculars out of their lamb’s-wool-padded steel case at her saddle bow; they were a treasure and heirloom of her House, a mechanically stabilized Zeiss 20x60 S-type bought by her father a few years before the Change.

And prying them out of Signe was a complete pain. Honestly, she got Larsdalen and all the rest of Dad’s stuff, but she’s such a clutchfist! Bad as a dwarf. Of course, I got the original editions of the Histories signed by the Great Translator, but still.

The field glasses were cumbrous, requiring both hands and full attention, but worth the trouble: the enemy sprang to within arm’s reach instantly and the image stayed centered. The United States-“of Boise” to outsiders, simply “of America” to themselves-equipped its heavy infantry with big curved oval shields, marked by crossed thunderbolts and a spread-winged eagle. Each man wore identical armor of bands and hoops of steel for his torso and shoulders, with mail sleeves and a plate vambrace for the right arm, a complex helmet with hinged cheek-guards and a flare to protect the neck, and a sporran-like spray of metal-shod leather straps covering the groin. Their weapons were a dagger, a short broad-bladed stabbing sword worn high on the right side, and three long javelins, two with cast-iron balls beneath the yard of metal point to add armor-piercing weight to impact.

Each eighty-man platoon was commanded by an officer they called a centurion, with a transverse crest on his helmet, a vine-stock swagger stick and a scarlet cloak. There were four of them; that meant a half-battalion, a little over three hundred men if they were at full strength, which they probably weren’t. One of the centurions looked back at her through his own binoculars, then over at the Portlanders. He nodded to a signaler beside him, a man with a trumpet and a wolf?s head and hide over his helmet and shoulders. A standard-bearer had the old American flag on a pole topped by a gilded hand.

The curled tubae brayed, and the first row of Boisean soldiers went down on one knee, their shields overlapping and a spear in each right hand snapping out in a quick uniform bristle. Another call, repeated by the officers’ silver whistles, and the ranks behind brought up their shields and cocked a shaft ready to throw. It was hardly like watching individual men move at all; more as if the signals were playing directly on their nerves, like some automatic machine of the ancient world. The formation gave fairly complete protection from arrows, and even heavy horse would often flinch from a line of unbroken points.

The men shouted as they lifted their shields, a unified hooo-rahhh sound, deep and guttural. Then a crashing bark of: “USA! USA!”

“They are stretched thin,” Astrid said with satisfaction, counting them. “I wouldn’t start a siege this close to an enemy force without at least twice as many men.”

“Nice to know we’re not alone in that overextended feeling,” Alleyne added dryly. “I’ve been feeling like too little butter-”

“-scraped thin on too much bread,” she completed for him.

“For over a year now,” he finished.

He took the heavy binoculars from her for a moment, returned them, and began checking his gear. They were in Dunedain light armor, open-faced sallet helms, no limb protection except their buff leather boots, and torso protection of fine chain mail made from stainless-steel wire riveted inside a soft green leather tunic.

Behind the Boiseans a scorpion spat from the north wall of their marching fort, throwing a bolt on a long blurred arch towards the castle and warning its garrison not to interfere. Stone and cement spalled away where the pyramid-shaped steel head punched into the wall above the gate. A harsh unmusical taaank! sounded at the impact as hard alloy steel deformed where it met the dense mixture of concrete and crushed granite.

“They think they can see the knights off,” Alleyne said. “And thanks to our bit of Sentry Removal, they don’t know about anything else coming their way.”

“If those pikemen ever show up,” Astrid said. “But I agree, it was a mistake.”

“Reasonable, if aggressive, but perhaps a bit arrogant. I’d be more cautious in his place.”

Astrid nodded in quiet satisfaction. She’d dreamed of being a warrior like those of the War of the Ring from her early youth-someone like Eowyn, but less Anglo-Saxony-but before she actually took it up as a trade after the Change she hadn’t realized how much craftsmanship there was to it, as opposed to simple derring-do.

And archery and horsemanship and swordplay, but I started those when I was a little girl, when I first read the Histories. The rest of it. . is more like a combination of chess and tennis, more or less. You are playing against your foeman’s mind, when you are in command.

Her brother-in-law Mike Havel had started her education in that, and she’d learned diligently from many instructors over the past generation. Including the people she’d fought.

The Montival light horse spurred down the long slope towards the Boisean troops. Their equivalents came to meet them, and arrows twinkled as they arched in long flat trajectories between the two formations of horse-archers. The Association men-at-arms walked their horses forward at a steady pace, halting just out of practical catapult range of the fort, about three times the distance of a long bowshot. The enemy mounted archers withdrew, with Eilir and John Hordle and their troop chivvying them north and west; they were outnumbered, and anyway had no place on a confined field where armored lancers and heavy infantry might clash, any more than a wasp did between hammer and anvil.

Over the crest of the hill behind Astrid poured a stream of soldiers on bicycles, puffing as they pumped at the pedals in low climbing gear. Their leader was on horseback; he spurred over to the Grand Constable, then stood in his stirrups and waved to his command, about six hundred men. They skidded to a halt, laid their cycles on the kickstands and ran to deploy between the Portlanders and the smaller group of Dunedain. One carried a red-white-and-blue flag on a tall pole; it streamed out in the cool breeze, showing. . she blinked.

“Ah, they did make it,” Astrid said. “And in time, too, for a wonder. Thanks be to the Lord and Lady.”

“Hazards of coalition warfare. . Is that a bloody teapot on their flag?” Alleyne asked. “Surrounded by seven stars? I call that cheek!”

Their eyes went immediately to their own banner; the silver tree on black, surmounted by the winged crown of the Sea-Kings and surrounded by seven stars also.

She fought down a stab of irritation, and went on: “It’s. . yes, that’s Zillah’s banner. One of the Seven Free Cities of the Yakima League. Manwe and Varda alone know why they use a teapot. Wait, wait, there’s a famous building there shaped like a teapot. Quite an old building, as Men of these later ages count years. Tourists used to come and see it.”

“They’re rather out of the way there. Doubtless some story behind it originally.”

“Yes, they’re a little like the Marish beyond the Eastfarthing,” she said, running a soothing hand down the silky dapple neck of her horse, Arroach. “Full of odd notions and queer customs. I wouldn’t mind paying them a visit after the war. I understand it’s very pretty country, and the wine is certainly good.”

Astrid watched with interest as the infantry deployed; the Yakima valley’s prosperous but rather insular little cities-towns, by the old world’s standards-hadn’t come in her way much before. Their close-settled, intensively farmed irrigated countryside didn’t need the Rangers to put down bandits or beasts or guard caravans or convey messages and parcels through dangerous territory, and they were surrounded on all sides by Portlander fiefs anyway; they’d fought valiantly in the wars against the Association in Norman Arminger’s time. The troops were armored catch-as-catch-can, brigandines mostly, with mail shirts and some leather jackets sewn with washers; reasonable for infantry, though a bit old-fashioned except for the modern turtlelike sallet helms, which were probably recent issue and looked as if they’d been bought en masse from a Portlander arsenal, or someone else who had pneumatic presses.

About what you’d expect from a prosperous farmers’ militia.

The weapons were more standard, sixteen-foot breakdown pikes, glaives, and sword-and-buckler at their waists. There was a long rattling clatter as the two sections of each long polearm were fitted together in their metal collars, and then a shout as the pikemen raised them in unison. Suddenly what had been a collection of anxious tillers of the soil a long way from home was a bristling hedge of foot-long steel points each on an ashwood shaft more than twice a tall man’s height; the formation was six men deep and ninety wide. A bugle called, one of the type that high school marching bands had used before the Change.

“Pike points. . down,” Alleyne murmured to himself, reading the notes.

Another shout, and the front four rows of pikes swung downward; the first two rows held underhand, the third at chest height, and the fourth overarm at shoulder height slanting down. That put four rows of overlapping steel points in front of the formation; the last two rows of pikemen held theirs upright, ready to step forward if a comrade before them in the file was struck down.

The rest of the Yakimans were armed with glaives or billhooks, six-foot shafts topped with heavy pointed single-edged blades, each with a vicious hook on the reverse side, capable of stabbing or yanking a horseman out of the saddle or a roundhouse chop. They formed up in columns to either side of the rectangle of pikes, making the formation like a thick I shape. The bugle beside the flag at the center blew again, and a quartet of snare drums beat: rat-tat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat-tat. The soldiers began to mark time, marching in place; they counted cadence too, heep-heep-heep, but it took half a dozen paces before they were all keeping step.

“Not bad, for amateurs.” Alleyne chuckled and stroked a knuckle across his mustache, which was corn-yellow with the first few gray hairs hidden in it.

The long Portlander trumpets-the oliphants, a name she’d always liked-gave a high silvery scream, and the formation of men-at-arms swung behind the Zillah infantry, split into two, and began to deploy on either flank. The pennants on their tall lances flickered and fluttered out as the destriers paced into the wind from the north.

His smile grew a little cruel: “That Boisean commander is going to be a very unhappy fellow; he thought we were digging in to defend Walla-Walla. And he’ll be wishing he’d had his own men out on over-watch, not the Prophet’s.”

“We’d have killed them just the same, bar melindo,” she pointed out. “He wouldn’t have known a thing then, either.”

“Yes,” he drawled, sounding something a little more like yaaaz. “But he won’t believe that. They’re none of them very happy with each other in that alliance. Oft evil will-”

“-will evil mar,” Astrid said happily, and they grinned at each other.

Eilir and John Hordle came up with their troop. Hordle had his greatsword out, looking like a yardstick in his massive paw; there was blood on it, and on the side of his face and neck.

“Nothing,” he said to their questioning looks. “Just an arrowhead grazed me, loik. We got them going in the right direction, and I don’t think they’ll be back anytime soon.”

Eilir leaned over in the saddle to deal with it; Hordle swore mildly as she wiped away the blood with a square of cloth soaked in alcohol, then ripped open a package of glazed paper with her teeth and slapped the adhesive edges of the sterile bandage to the shallow slice-wound on his neck behind the ear, under the tail of his sallet.

“Glad I’m not ’im,” he grunted in Sindarin heavily accented with Hampshire yokel, nodding at the Boisean position. “Thanks, luv. You’ve got it corked.”

A final rattle came from behind them as a six-machine battery of catapults came up, and then rocked up to a gallop. The field artillery were Corvallan demi-scorpions, six-pounders on spoked rubber-tired wheels pulled by four strong cobby horses each, the type used by farmers who preferred them to oxen. Each machine had the scowling beaver’s-head blazon of that rich city-state painted on its shield in brown on an orange circle; those of the crew not riding on the teams were on mountain bikes. Astrid estimated heights, and her lips moved in a small smile.

“They can shoot over the pikemen with that slope to help,” she said. “And they can get into position to cover the whole ground between them and the earthwork of that marching fort. It’s really not a very good position; he should have stayed inside, even before he saw the infantry.”

“Boise’s commanders still tend to underestimate how dangerous heavy horse are,” Alleyne said. “Especially when you can’t get out of their way.”

Another bugle call and rattle of snare drums from the League’s levy, and they began to advance at the quickstep, a hundred and twenty paces to the minute, thirty inches to the pace. The honed edges of the pike heads caught the early sun in a continuous blinking ripple as the shafts flexed to the pounding half-trot, glittering as if on wind-ruffled water.

The Boisean commander evidently thought he’d made a mistake too; he looked over his shoulder as the fieldpieces slewed around. Their crews let the bicycles fall and sprang into action; one leading the horses back, two opening and spreading the legs of the trails behind the weapons, another attaching the armored hose to the outlet of the hydraulic jack built into the mount. The remaining four in each set up the pump, a rocker beam with handles on either side. Smoke rose as thick glass globes of napalm were set in the launching troughs and the gunners’ mates set their lighters to the wicks of oiled rope wrapped around them. Pale flame ran over the hemp. Faint with distance she heard the shouted orders of the battery commander:

“Elevation thirty-” Hands spun the aiming wheels and the troughs rose. “Ready. . battery. . shoot!”

Tunnnggg- whack!

Repeated six times, as the throwing arms slammed forward against the rubber-padded steel of the stops, driven by massive coiled springs taken from the suspensions of heavy trucks. The globes flew up the elevated launch troughs and on long arching trajectories, farther than granite or cast-iron round shot would have carried, though not as far as finned bolts. The Zillah men stayed steady, though some helmets turned as they followed the flight of burning globes overhead, for which she didn’t blame them. Astrid winced at what came next. Two landed short and cracked on the ground, sending sudden gouting tendrils of flame towards the Boisean soldiers.

“Brave men,” she admitted, as none of the Boiseans flinched, only hunched a little behind their shields as liquid fire spattered the surfaces. “Very brave men.”

Fire may not kill you more dead than steel, or even be more painful than a pike point through the kidney, but it’s harder to face somehow.

“Magnificent discipline,” Alleyne said.

“Got brass balls, that lot,” Hordle added; all of which meant much the same thing.

Ouch, Eilir said in Sign.

The next two came down in the middle of the enemy formation, and shattered on upheld shields. There were only a few pints of liquid in each missile, but that was enough to spatter onto half a dozen men and run blazing under their armor. The stuff clung like glue, too.

Not even the Republic’s army had discipline enough to keep still under that; men rolled shrieking on the ground, until their comrades smothered the flames or gave them the mercy-stroke. Orderlies ran out through the gate to drag the wounded back, but the last two of the balls had slammed into the side members of the gateway itself. It was heavily built, but of green pine timber without the metal sheathing they would have added if they’d had a bit more time. The edges caught at once.

The battery’s pump teams had started swinging their levers madly as soon as the first volley lifted, and in twenty seconds the water had forced the bottle-jack plungers forward against the resistance of the springs, until the trigger mechanisms caught at full cock. Gunners adjusted the aiming screws as hands passed more globes from the limbers and fuses were lit. Then:

Tunnnggg- whack!

Tunnnggg- whack!

Tunnnggg- whack!

Tunnnggg- whack!

Tunnnggg- whack!

Tunnnggg- whack!

Another flight of napalm globes soared over the advancing pikemen; this time all six burst in and around the gateway and threw a savage orange barrier across it. The whole framework of the gate began to burn as well, crackling and sending flame licking up towards the watchtower above.

“Charge! Zillah forever!” the commander of the pikemen roared, and pointed his sword forward.

The trumpets screamed, the snare drums sounded a long quick roll, and the pikemen broke into a pounding run behind their leveled weapons, shrieking wordlessly. Even with their tower burning beneath their feet the Boisean crews above the fort’s gate fired their two scorpions. Their deeper note sounded beneath the growing white roar of the fire, and two twelve-pound cast-iron shot streaked out at point-blank range. The Zillah commander was running forward beside his city’s banner when one of them smacked off his head in a spray of blood and fragments of hair and bone, and threw them and his helmet bounding behind the body that took two more steps and pitched forward. The other struck short, bounced and whipped forward at knee height, and an entire file of pikemen went down screaming as their legs snapped with a crackle like chicken bones in a dog’s jaws.

“Hooo-rah! USA! USA! Hooo-rah!”

The guttural shout sounded again. Three ranks of the Boisean soldiers cocked their six-foot javelins back and then threw in perfect unison. Fifty yards away the charging block of League pikemen had just enough time to hesitate before the missiles slanted down out of the air at them. Pikemen didn’t carry shields; they needed both hands for their unwieldy weapons. A hundred and twenty of the throwing-spears punched into their formation; about half of them hit rather than landing in earth or bouncing off pike shafts or glancing away from smooth pieces of metal, and men went down screaming as the hard narrow points punched through armor and flesh. Then another volley, and another.

It was a ragged line of pikes which rammed into the big shields of the Boisean troopers. But the Zillah men were still moving at a flat-out run, either brave enough to keep in mind that the way to get out from under a shower of spears was to close with the enemy as fast as they could, or simply too frenzied to think of anything but killing. The front ranks of the Boiseans snapped out their stabbing-swords and took the pikes on the faces of their shields or knocked them up, or hacked to cut the heads free from the shafts. Men ducked forward, shoving and pushing to get within reach of the Zillah pikemen. At arm’s length they would be helpless against the stabbing-swords held underarm for the gutting stroke, but in the meantime men were going down with pike points in the face or throat or belly.

The whole Boisean force rocked backward; and then the Portlander cavalry hammered home on each flank, swinging in at a steady hand gallop like the jaws of a spring trap.

A bellow of “Haro! Haro, Portland!” and the lances struck.

Some horses went down at the impact, but far more men, run through shield and armor and body by points with a ton of horse and rider behind them, bowled over or smashed backward. Even then the Boiseans didn’t break; men stepped up and flung javelins at close range, or stabbed and hacked at the vulnerable legs. Then the long-swords were out, and serrated war-hammers, smashing down as the knights loomed like steel towers over the men on foot. The Boisean formation shrank as their commander ordered men from the interior of it to break back through the burning gate, throwing down their shields to make a temporary bridge through the flames; behind them their comrades stayed and died to buy them time. So did their commander, fallen beside his standard with its gilded hand on top, two lances through his body.

The watching Dunedain bowed in their saddles, right hand to heart; part salute to the Grand Constable’s handling of the little battle, part respect for the enemy’s courage.

“Time for us to depart, if we’re to meet those Indians,” Astrid said.

Alleyne nodded and neck-reined his horse around to the east. “And I don’t think anyone down there is going to be paying much attention. Really I don’t.”