The Scourge of God

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"They're holding out there!" Sir Ivo said. "St. Michael must be looking out for them!"

"You're right," Tiphaine said.

She resisted a temptation to sip at her canteen, despite the dry dust blowing across the land. What you had to go through to pee in one of these steel suits…

Ivo crossed himself, and she reflected that sometimes it was a bit lonely, being one of the last agnostics.

"God grant that they're still alive when we get there," she said with pious hypocrisy.

Even my girlfriend's a believer, she thought. Just a different set of beliefs.

She raised her binoculars again, adjusting her visor as it went tick against the leather-covered metal of the field glasses. The thin chamois on the palms and fingers of her gauntlets let her adjust the screw easily enough. The action was nearly two miles west of the Pendleton city wall, on a hill about twelve hundred feet high. It was bare and not too steep, and several hundred of the enemy cavalry were swirling around it like bees around sugar, surging up the slope to shoot with their recurves and then back again in the quicksilver Eastern style.

The binoculars brought it suddenly, startlingly close; there were about a dozen Dunedain on their feet, hiding behind rocks and ridges, and as many wounded. A party of the Pendleton horsemen surged up to their position with shetes in hand, and then a giant figure rose beneath the hooves. A long blade glittered as it hacked through both a pony's forelegs to cast the rider screaming down at the man's feet, where he died an instant later. The rest of the Easterners rode away, shooting behind them as they retreated…

This is so tempting, she thought. What a song the bards would make of Astrid's Last Stand… that overgrown peasant Hordle with a circle of his foes at his feet and a broken sword in his hand… blood-stained banners, faces to the foe, eternal glory… no, no, I promised Sandra.

Her knights were out of sight from the enemy's position behind a ridge. In the little dry valley ahead waited two hundred of the CORA cowboys under Bob Brown of Seffridge Ranch. Their commander was looking back at her; she raised a gauntlet and chopped it forward with her hand extended like a blade. The cowboys had their bows out and arrows ready on the string; they started their mounts forward. The agile quarter horses managed to build speed even as they climbed the little rise ahead of them, and she could see the sudden alarm on the other side as the solid block of horses and men came over the crest.

"Yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-"

The alarm call rang out as the Easterners started to draw together to meet the CORA attack, turning westward and away from the beleaguered little party on the hill. Cow-horn trumpets blatted as the two loose swarms headed towards one another, and the Western Ranchers' shout went up:

"Cora! Coraaa!" interspersed with raw catamount shrieks.

"And about now," she murmured, and in that instant the foremost in either band rose in the stirrups and shot.

The arrowheads twinkled in the midmorning sun as they plunged downward. That was how they liked to fight out here in the cow-country, only coming in to close quarters when an enemy had been savaged by arrow-fire. Normally for heavy horse to try and strike them was like trying to beat water with a sledgehammer. Water whose spatters turned into viciously dangerous stinging wasps as it flew away.

But ah, if you can trick them into bunching up to receive a charge, she thought, with a slight cold smile, as she returned her binoculars to their padded steel case. Then it's more like using a sledgehammer on a bowl of eggs.

She turned in the saddle. "Now, my iron-heads, I'm going to do you a favor," she said, looking at the eager young faces, shadowed by raised visors or bisected by the nasal-bars of the older helms. "Now I give you a chance to die with honor!"

They cheered, shaking their lances in the air. And they actually think I am doing them a favor, she thought. It's true what they said in the old days. Testosterone rots the brain, not to mention listening to the bards when you're young.

She held out her own right hand, and Armand thrust the lance into it. Tiphaine rested the butt of the twelve-foot weapon on the ring welded to her stirrup-iron, shrugged her shield around and brought it up. The banner of the Lidless Eye came up beside her, and the destriers began to walk. They'd keep the pace slow until just before arrow range…

BD looked up from the wounded as she heard the high harsh singing of the Portlander oliphants, the long curled silver trumpets holding the sustained scream that meant charge. It was faint with distance, but the sound was as startling as it would have been to hear a chorus of girls singing a festival hymn to the Lady of the Blossom-time. She'd grown so used to the thought that she would die here amongst angry strangers and the smell of wounds that it took a moment for what her ears heard to filter through to her mind.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Eilir's eyes move. Her head was a mass of bandages, seeping red where an ear had been sliced; there was another wound on one thigh, a shete-cut.

"The Portlanders are here," BD said, and then repeated it in basic Sign in case she was too dazed to read lips.

Eilir sighed and closed her eyes. Not far away from her, Astrid roused a little and turned and tried to vomit. It was only a dry retching, and when she sank back her face was gray. One of the wounded with a splinted leg dragged himself over and helped her drink. Abstractly, BD sympathized-the pain would be savage, and a concussion like the one she'd gotten from her own sword hilt would keep her immobilized for weeks, and might cripple-but it was Astrid's plan that had gotten them into this mess. BD didn't want her dead, but she had to admit there would have been some justice in her getting hit so hard the brains spurted out of her ears.

It would have been worth it to avoid a battle, she thought. But it looks like we're going to have the battle anyway.

Part of it was taking place right below. The Easterners had better things to do than lob arrows at the little cluster of Rangers atop the hill, and she risked rising from behind a ridge of rock and clay to watch.

Most of the horsemen were fighting the CORA men, at close quarters and handstrokes now that their quivers were empty. Dust hid most of the action, but the sun glinted off the edges of sabers and shetes and axes. Eddies in the earth-mist showed men who hacked and died; she saw a doll-tiny figure topple to earth and go beneath the hooves, anonymous in ranch-country leather and wool, and another dragged from the saddle by a flung lasso.

The sound of their curses and war-shouts came up the slope that was also littered with bodies of men and horses, some still thrashing or trying to crawl away, others motionless. Overhead turkey vultures waited, sweeping in broad circles with their black-and-gray wings outstretched. Ravens skittered lower on the wind. One went over close enough for her to see the clever black eye it cocked at the ground, judging its time.

They're always on the winning side, she thought.

Then the Association's trumpets screamed again; much louder this time, and closer. From here she could see what the men lost in dust and rage below couldn't, the line of a hundred lances catching the morning sun as they came over the low rise to the westward. The pennants were snapping with the speed of their passage, and the big horses had had time enough to build momentum.

The CORA men withdrew if they could, most of them turning north and south in clumps and ones and twos, their mission done. The wind from the west blew the dust away, just in time for the Pendleton Ranchers' men to see what was coming at them. Some tried to turn their agile cow ponies and run; some charged forward, or shot the last arrows cunningly hoarded against extremity. Shafts hammered into shields, or rang off the sloping surfaces of helmets and the steel lames of the barding that covered the horses' necks and shoulders.

But the Portlander knights were at the full gallop, their tall mounts faster over the short distance remaining, their enemies' ponies tired and confused. The long lances dipped in a shining ripple; the hammer of four hundred hooves pounded the earth like war-drums, like thunder; even here she could feel the vibration in the bones of earth, and divots of the hard dry soil flew skyward. Plumed helmets bent forward as the men-at-arms braced themselves in the high-cantled saddles, shields up under the visors to present nothing but shapes of wood and bullhide and steel to their enemies.

Even in that noise, the deep-voiced shouts of Haro! were loud.

Then they struck.

There was no crash; instead a series of heavy hard thud sounds as lance-heads slammed into flesh with a ton-weight of armored horse and armored man behind them. Men were lifted out of the saddle, rising in the air like obscene kebabs until their weight cracked the tough ashwood of the lance-shafts. The destriers bowled the lighter Eastern horses over by main force as they struck breast to breast; she saw one pony pitch over backwards and land full on its screaming rider. Then the knights were through the loose mass of their enemies, throwing aside broken lances. The swords came out, bright and long, or men snatched up the war-hammers slung to the saddlebows, and the knights went raging among their lightly armored foes like steel-clad tigers.

BD sank back down, wincing a little. No need to watch. She'd grown used to what edged metal did to the godlike human form, but there was no point in looking at it if you didn't have to.

Hooves thudded up the slope, and Alleyne Loring and John Hordle stood to raise their blades in salute as Tiphaine d'Ath reined in. The Grand Constable had the stumps of three arrows in her shield, and another in the high cantle of her saddle; her sword glistened with a coat of liquid red so fresh it had not even begun to clot, and more spattered up her arm and across the articulated lames of her breastplate.

She used the edge of her shield to push up the visor, and her face showed framed in the mail coif, red and running with sweat as she drew in air through a wide-open mouth. Fighting in armor was brutal labor at best, worse than hauling a plow like an ox.

"We'd best get going," she said, timing the words to her breath. "They'll be here in strength soon; it's going to be a busy day. I've got ambulances."

The light well-sprung vehicles were bouncing up the slope behind her, two tall spoked wheels for each, and a pair of fast horses to draw them.

"We've got the Bossman," Hordle said, jerking his thumb at a man who lay bound hand and foot. "Wasn't 'alf a nuisance, dragging him through the tunnels."

"Then we got something out of this," Tiphaine said.

"Not as much as we thought," Alleyne said. "Thurston and the Prophet are both in Pendleton. And Estrellita Peters, too, for them to use as a puppet."

Alleyne turned and helped his wife to her feet. She blinked, squinted, and then raised one hand in acknowledgment.

"I commend the army to your care, Lady d'Ath," she said.

There was a lump the size of a robin's egg on her forehead just above her nose, and she squinted and blinked at the tall steel-clad figure.

"To both of you," she added owlishly, then swallowed and forced clarity on herself with a visible effort. "I've seen the new Dark Lord. This time he's the genuine article."

I'm a gardener, Chuck Barstow Mackenzie thought.

That had been his first love, growing things, though the Barstow family had already been two generations off the farm when he'd been born. One of his first memories was helping his father plant a Japanese cherry tree in the backyard, his small hands pressing the peat moss and potting soil down around the little sapling, and he'd checked it daily and laughed with delight at the first blossoms.

He'd been working in the city Parks Department in Eugene when the Change happened, and thirty years old.

How the hell did I end up a general? the First Armsman of Clan Mackenzie thought. OK, so I was in the Society…

"Halt!" he called, and his signaler-his younger son Rowan-unslung the cow-horn trumpet and sounded it: huuuuu-hu-hu!

The column braked to a stop, the dust of their trail-bikes falling ahead of them. He was on horseback, and a few others, but most Mackenzie crofts didn't run to a riding horse, and a bicycle didn't need to be fed or tended when you weren't using it. Their faces were glistening with sweat; it was no joke biking cross-country in thirty pounds of brigandine and helmet, with a quiver across your back and two more slung on either side of the rear wheel, but it beat marching for effort and speed both.

"The Grand Constable says you're to deploy there, my lord," the Portlander courier said, pointing to the low crest ahead of them. "The Bearkillers and the contingent from the Warm Springs tribes will be on your right."

"Very well," he said. "You may tell Lady d'Ath that we'll hold the position."

And I don't like taking Tiphaine d'Ath's orders, either, he thought.

She had killed his foster daughter Aoife in the War of the Eye-with her own hands during the abduction of Rudi, back when she'd been Sandra Arminger's personal black-body-stocking girl ninja.

OK, that was war and Aoife was armed and fighting back. And now we're all allies. It still sucks.

The rest of the Mackenzie contingent set their bicycles on the kickstands, lining them up with the front wheels pointing west. The carts and ambulances and the healers set up nearby; everyone else followed him a thousand yards eastward, loping along at a ground-eating trot. Chuck reined in and waited until they were all within range and then raised his voice to carry; there was a trick to doing it without screeching.

"Mackenzies," he said. "The Prophet's men came onto our land and killed our own folk in Sutterdown last Samhain, when we'd never harmed them. When our dead come visiting this Samhain night, what will we tell them?"

"Blood for blood!" someone shouted. "That we've taken the heads of them and nailed them up over the door!"

A long growl answered from the broad semicircle of snarling painted faces, fists or bows thrust into the air in a rippling wave.

OK, I like the old stories too, but let's not get ridiculous.

The problem was that you could never be quite sure what the younger generation would take from the ancient tales. Chuck continued:

"We came here because we thought the Prophet's men might come and use Pendleton as a base against us, and his friend the tyrant of Boise."

Which would have been a bit unfair to the old General, but fits his son Martin like a glove, he thought. And probably a lot of these kids volunteered because they were bored with working on their home-crofts and because Lady Juniper asked it. I'm glad I don't have Juney's job, by the Horned Lord!

He grinned at them and put his hands on the horn of his saddle.

"Well, it turns out they're both here-not just their men, but the leaders themselves, to be sure. Lady Juniper knew what she was talking about, eh? So there are more of the enemy than we hoped or expected, and that's war for you. Don't think of it as being outnumbered…"

"Think of it as having lots of targets!" someone finished the old joke, and there was a roar of laughter.

"That's not all we've learned," he went on. "We've had a letter from our tanist, Rudi Mackenzie-Artos himself himself, the very Sword of the Lady off on his quest to the sunrise lands."

That brought them all leaning forward, eyes intent.

"This prophet scabhteara attacked him, yes, and set evil magic against him and his friends, and took his anamchara Mathilda prisoner. They scorn all other men, and all gods save theirs. But Artos walked into their camp at night, and brought her out for all their sorcerers or swordsmen could do… and when he left there were a fair number of them making their accounting to the Guardians, for the Morrigu was with him, and his sword her scythe, reaping men."

He paused, and said with mock solemnity: "Earth must be fed."

That brought more laughter, some a little scandalized, and another long cheer, with shouts of Rudi! and Artos! all rising into the racking banshee shriek of the Mackenzie battle-yell, stunning-loud from a thousand throats at close quarters. Chuck raised a hand to quiet it.

"The Lord of the Long Spear is with us, and the Crow Goddess. We're fighting for our homes, our kin, our Clan, and the land your parents spent their blood and their sweat to win," he said, just quietly enough that they had to strain to hear him.

"But Earth must be fed. Not all of us will walk away from this field. And this war won't be ended with a single battle. So listen to your bow-captains, stand by your blade-mates, and shoot fast, straight and hard!"

Their pipers struck up, leading the contingents to their places, the skirling drones pealing out the jaunty menace of "The Ravens' Pibroch." Behind them there was a faint rat-tat-tat… And then a shattering BOOM! Even expecting it, he had to control a start.

He'd read somewhere before the Change that a big Lambeg drum had about the same decibel level as the engine of a Piper Cub. Nothing else in the world today came close to massed Lambegs, unless it was thunder or an avalanche of anvils falling on rock. That was something Juniper Mackenzie had taken from her father's people, who'd been Ulster-Scots before they began the long trek West. This was the music they'd used to shatter their enemies' hearts and lash their own folk into the blood-frenzy.

BOOM! Then Boom-boom… boom-boom-boom… boom… BOOM! repeating over and over with a maddening irregularity. It wove through the piping until he could taste it at the back of his throat, like blood and hot brass.

He dismounted, handed off the reins, and walked a dozen paces eastward. That put him on the crest of a low ridge running north-south, with a long slope before them, a patchwork of stubble fields among the broader gray brown of bunchgrass and sage. It was good ground, as long as the sun wasn't in their eyes, and it was already too high above the horizon for that to be a real problem. It did gild the dust clouds that the feet and hooves of the advancing enemy raised, twinkling on spear-points like stars through mist. A long ripple of comment went down the ranks of the Clan's archers. All along the front the bow-captains plucked out tufts of the dry grass and tossed them into the air to test the breeze; it was faint, but directly from the west.

Rowan planted the green flag with the Crescent Moon between antlers beside him. The Mackenzies waited in their three-deep harrow formation, a long slightly curving line like a very shallow S that followed the crest, each dun's fighters by the neighbors who would take home the news of their honor or their shame. He waited until they were set before barking:

"Plant the swine-feathers!"

Spread out like this they couldn't all hear his voice, but Rowan put the horn to his mouth and blew a series of long-and-shorts, the blatting snarl cutting through the rumble of an army shaking itself out into battle formation. Each of the Clan's warriors reached over their backs to a bag slung beside their quivers and pulled out a pair of yard-long ashwood shafts, tied together with thongs. There was a flurry of purposeful movement, and a long snick-snick-clack! as the metal collar-and-tongue joints were fitted together. That left every Mackenzie holding a six-foot pole with a long spearhead on one end and a narrow-bladed shovel on the other.

They jammed the shovel blades into the ground and hammered them home with boot-heels. The shunk of steel in dry soil sounded over and over again for a few seconds; when it was done a forest of spear-points jutted forward, three ranks deep and slanted at just the right height to catch the chest of a horse. Then the whole formation took four steps back, and they had a barrier ahead of them that most horses would refuse to take-at least at a gallop.

He looked left and right while the clansfolk worked; northward was a battery of the Corvallan field artillery, their glaives stacked as they labored like maniacs with pick and shovel to pile up berms in front of their throwing engines. Beyond them the first of the Portlander infantry, leaning on their spears with their shields still slung across their backs.

In the distance there he could just make out Tiphaine d'Ath's banner, floating amid a forest of upright lances.

The First Armsman of the Mackenzies filled his lungs again:

"Make ready!"

The bows came out of their carrying loops beside the quivers. Here and there some of the clansfolk stretched and twisted or rotated their right arms. From each contingent one trotted out to the front, planting a red-painted stick every so often out to three hundred yards-extreme battle range-to help the archers judge distance.

"Good open ground," Oak called to his father, grinning; he was leading the Dun Juniper contingent, nearest the standard, which put him within conversational distance. "Fine weather, the wind at our backs, and downhill. Praise to the Long Spear and the Battle-Hag!"

Chuck nodded back, matching the smile-but it was a conscious gesture for him. He envied the youngsters their calm acceptance of it all; there was still a touch of unreality to this, for him. As if he'd wandered into a tale…

Hooves thudded behind him. He glanced back; the carts with the spare arrows were already trotting along behind the Mackenzie line. Youngsters like Rowan-just a year or two too young to stand in the battle line-grabbed bundles and rushed them forward, planting them point down by the warriors' feet until each had three or four, and then poising ready to bring more as needed. A Mackenzie war-quiver held forty-eight shafts, but those were the chosen handmade arrows that each bought or crafted to suit their own fancy for precision work. These were from the stored reserves, and making them to the standard pattern was winter work, done as a part of the Chief's Portion that every dun paid from its crops and labor for the Clan's common purposes. All the heads were alike, too-narrow bodkins shaped like a metalworker's punch, of hardened alloy steel.

When the work was complete the ground around the clan's warriors seemed to bristle like the hide of some monstrous boar, topped with the gray goose feathers of the fletching.

Chuck took a sip from his canteen and spat to clear the alkaline dust of this dry Eastern land. Some of the others did likewise; more were lifting their kilts and taking a last chance to empty their bladders downslope towards the enemy-that always happened, for you went tight when danger approached. The bawdy jokes were as traditional as the harsh ammonia smell.

Horsemen cantered up before him, led by Winnemuca of the Three Tribes, and Eric Larsson of the Bearkillers with the ostrich-feather plumes on his helm making him even more of a steel tower.

Winnemuca looked as if he'd already seen some action; there was a sheen of sweat on his broad features, making the paint on his face run a little below the eagle-plumed steel cap-the design was black, with circles of white around his eyes.

"Whoa, that's war- paint," he said, looking at the crimson-gold-black-green designs that swirled over the faces of the nearer Mackenzies. "You white-eyes always go overboard with an idea once you steal it."

A few of the archers who could hear elevated their middle fingers in neighborly wise. Chuck grinned at him.

"The woad was traditional long before we decided to relocate, sure an' it was," he said, exaggerating the Mackenzie lilt that had become second nature over the years. "Along with scalping and head-hunting."

"No accounting for taste," the Indian said. Then he went serious: "They're going to be here soon. Light cavalry-Ranchers-they've got a good screen, but I saw a lot of them massed farther back, nearly a thousand horse-archers. Then the Cutter mounted levies, and then the Sword of the Prophet behind them, they've got bow and lance both. The Boiseans are over north, opposite the Portlanders, horse and foot-mostly infantry. And the Pendleton city militia in the center. Pikemen mostly, it looks like. We can't hold the Pendleton Ranchers off you much longer. Too many. Most of their cavalry is on this flank, but it looks like they're concentrating their field artillery in the center and the northern wing."

The three leaders looked at one another. The northern edge of the allied army was anchored on steep ravines, but the country southward was open and rolling, ideal for a horseman's battle.

"Well," Eric said to his son and Mike Havel Jr., who rode behind him with the snarling bear's-head banner of the Outfit on a staff that was also a very practical lance. "Now you're going to see how a fighting retreat is managed-and that's a lot more difficult to pull off than a pursuit."

He nodded to Chuck. "We'll hold 'em off while you get out," he said. "But you'll have to rake them hard first."

"Sethaz is going to regret ordering the horse in there," General-President Martin Thurston said, leveling his binoculars.

The long glitter of the swine feathers showed close through the lenses, and behind them the archers leaning on their weapons or squatting, waiting patiently or talking to one another-a few were even napping, amid the furze of arrows stuck in the ground. God alone knew how anyone could sleep near the savage music of the pipes and drums.

God, I'd love to have those longbowmen on my side! And someday I will, he thought, and popped a piece of the tasteless twice-baked hardtack into his mouth; there hadn't been time for breakfast, or even much sleep, and he chewed doggedly at the compacted-sawdust taste of it.

No time after that cluster-fuck at the Bossman's house last night.

His memory shied away from that a little.

And Sethaz' people act damned odd, sometimes. Well, they're lunatics, but even so… I thought Sethaz was a cynic exploiting fanatics… maybe he's more sincere than that.

"You think it's a mistake to attack?" his aide said. "About even odds-a thousand or so each. And they're light infantry; if the Pendleton cavalry can unravel them, the whole enemy position goes into the pot and we could bag them all."

"I've seen Mackenzies shoot," Martin said. "Two of them, at least. If they were within a couple of miles of typical, rushing a thousand of them head-on is a bad idea. Or maybe Sethaz won't regret it. The holy Prophet is sending our glorious local allies in first over there, I notice."

The Boisean command group were on a slight rise behind the line. Thurston's brown face was considering as the mass of Pendleton light horse finished sweeping their CORA equivalents out of the way and charged towards the Mackenzie archers. He took a deep breath, full of the smell of war-acrid dust, sweat of humans and horses, dung, piss, oiled metal, leather, dirty socks, the musk of fear and tension.

"Yeah, the wogs'll do to soak up arrows," the aide said, and a chuckle ran through the men around Thurston. "And if they get killed by the shitload, then afterwards there are that many less around to cause trouble."

"Those Cutter maniacs are polygamists, aren't they?" another said. "Lots of widows…"

The line of kilted archers was silent, and then a chant began-too faint to hear at first, but building until it rang clear even over the hammer of the drums and the noise of the hooves:

"We are the point "We are the edge "We are the wolves that Hecate fed!"

Then a cow-horn trumpet snarled and blatted, and the chant stopped. Another call, and a thousand yew bows came up and drew, each arrowhead pointing halfway to the vertical as the yellow staves bent.

"Oh, notice the ranging stakes in front of each unit?" Thurston said. "That's clever, that's really quite clever."

The aide was from a prominent military family who'd supported his assumption of his father's power, and was beside Thurston because of it, but he was no fool. He blinked at the bristling unison of the movement, bringing up his own binoculars.

"They've got good fire discipline," he said. "I would have expected a fangs-out-hair-on-fire charge, what with the war-paint and the-"

He grimaced in a mime of ferocity, mock flapping his arms and making a movement that suggested jumping up and down; the traverse red crest on his helmet wobbled with the motion.

"- wudda-wudda-wudda stuff. It's like something out of ancient history."

"They had good instructors right at the beginning-British SAS men, and a Blues and Royals colonel, of all things. Right, the Pendleton horse are really starting to move."

The Pendleton men went forward in a body, calling out the name of their kidnapped Bossman as a war cry, not in any particular order but spreading out in loose clumps and clots around the banners of their ranches marked with brands. They rose in the stirrups as they came in range, loosing as they did-or possibly a little out of range, as the first shafts fell short of the glittering menace of the swine feathers. In every battle Martin had seen, someone overestimated how far he could shoot.

"Three hundred yards, two hundred and fifty-"

The first arrows from the Ranchers' bows were dropping on the Mackenzie warriors when an order ran down the harrow formation. It was too far to hear it, particularly with the drumming thunder of four thousand hooves an endless grumbling rumble between, but Martin had learned to read lips. His own followed what he saw through the binoculars, repeating softly:

" Let the gray geese fly! Wholly together- shoot! "

Despite his trained calm the General-President of Boise felt the tiny hairs along his spine crawl at the massed snap of waxed linen bow-strings striking the leather bracers on each left wrist. And beneath that a whickering, whistling sound. The arrows arched into the sky like a forest of rising threads, more and more, and still more-three more from each bow in the air before the first thousand struck. The whole Mackenzie line was a shiver of motion as the archers snatched shafts from the bundles at their feet, set them to the strings, drew and loosed in a single smooth wrench of arm and shoulder and body.

He focused on one bowman with a wolf's mask painted across his own face and mentally timed the sequence.

Three or four seconds per arrow. Christ, better than three hundred a second all up-call it twenty thousand a minute. Crossing the killing ground, even at a gallop… those saddle-bunnies are going to have to eat close to a hundred thousand of those arrows!

The narrow steel arrowheads blinked in a manifold ripple like sunlight on distant water as they reached the top of their arch and seemed to hang poised for a second. Then they turned and plunged. The whistle of their flight was much louder as they came down, and the air above was a continuous sparkling flicker as thousands more followed in wave after wave.

They can see and hear them coming, he thought. Glad I'm not there , by God! Nor my men.

The whole mass of charging horsemen faltered and shook as men sawed at the reins. Then the first volley struck. The noise was like a storm in the mountains driving hail or heavy rain on a shingle roof, but there was nothing in flesh or bone or the light armor of the range-country horsemen to stop the bodkins. The whole first swath went down, mounts dropping like limp puppets or tumbling or plunging and squealing and kicking in astonished agony, men falling out of the saddle or clawing at the iron in face or body or screaming as horses fell and rolled across them. The rising threnody of pain was loud even on a battlefield.

Those behind ran up against that wall of kicking flesh and halted, rearing, or slowed to pick their way between the bodies… and still the arrows fell out of the sky in a pulsing, hissing sleet. Three thousand of them in the time a man could count to ten…

The party around Martin was silent as the survivors turned and fled as fast as they could flog their horses; men followed them on foot, running or staggering or crawling. A mass of human and horseflesh lay where the arrowstorm had struck, some of it still twitching or writhing or screaming for its mothers… or simply screaming and moaning. Only when it stopped did you realize how loud the sheer rush of arrows had been.

"You know, sir, I'm sort of glad you wanted the northern part of the line," Thurston's aide said. "Even if the ravines are steep off there."

Martin Thurston grinned. "Courier! To the most holy Prophet of the Church Universal and Triumphant; I respectfully suggest that he try to work around their flank."

The party of Boisean officers chuckled. Martin went on: "Now, gentlemen, this allied army has three commanders-which means it's a disaster waiting to happen. But we do outnumber the enemy by two to one, so let's get to work. To your units!"

He looked to his front; there were the Portlander infantry, blocks of spearmen and crossbowmen, and beyond them the knights, sitting ready.

"Colonel Jacobson!" he said.

"Sir!"

The cavalryman was standing at the head of his horse. "You keep those lancers in play. I don't expect you to beat them, but keep them busy while we chew our way through their foot."

He saluted and vaulted into the saddle. Martin Thurston looked down at the solid disciplined ranks of Boise infantry, standing easy with the lower rims of their big curved oval shields resting on the ground. He raised his hand and then chopped it downward, and the signalers raised their tubae. The brass bellowed out the order ready ; the men picked up their shields by the central grips, each holding an extra heavy javelin there too. Their right hands hefted the first pila, the long iron shanks sloping forward.

Then: "Advance!"

Two thousand men stepped off, an audible thud through the hard ground as the hobnails struck. Ahead of them the Eagle standard swayed, carried by a man who wore a wolfskin over his helmet, and along the lines the upright hands on poles that marked the battalions.

"The game begins," Martin Thurston said. Then: "Courier!"

His brain was busy with distances and numbers and contingencies, but behind that was an image of his wife and the son just born to them.

My son, he thought. From sea to shining sea… and every bit of it will be yours!

TheScourgeofGod