Dies the Fire dtf-1

by S. M. Stirling

  Sixty-odd horsemen took up a lot of room. The strong musky-grassy smell of the horses and their sweat filled the hollow, and the scents of human sweat soaked into leather and cloth, of steel rings wiped down with canola oil, of fear and excitement, and of earth torn open by ironshod hooves.

  “Will, you get going on your part of it,” Havel said.

  The horsemaster nodded and reined his mount around; rather more than half the Bearkillers followed him, and all Woburn’s men except the sheriff himself.

  “Let’s go, Gustav,” Havel added to his mount, and gave the big gelding a leg signal; the horse broke into an obedient canter. A file of twenty followed him, and Woburn-but he didn’t expect the sheriff to do much fighting. He pulled his bow from the case that slanted back from his left knee under the saddle flap and reached over his shoulder for an arrow, conscious of everyone doing likewise behind him… except Woburn, of course.

  “I’m really starting to think we can run this raiding party off,” the local man said.

  “No!” Havel answered sharply, without looking around. “We are not going to chase them away. We’re going to kill every last one of the filth, for starters.”

  The horses crested the top of the hill without pausing; the land to the south was flatter, rolling so gently it would have seemed level without the wind ruffling waves through the knee-high wheat that covered it and showing the long low swellings. The hooves were a drumroll under the soughing breeze.

  “There!” Signe called, pointing southwest.

  There was a dark clot against the green, one that swiftly turned into a group of armed men on horseback. Twenty or so of them, all in scale-mail tunics and steel helmets; one of them even had bulls’ horns on his, bad-movie-Viking style. With them were half a dozen captives, four women and two men, with their feet lashed into the stirrups of their horses and their hands tied behind their backs, and a biggish herd of cattle and horses being driven along. Many of the horses had bags of plunder thrown over their backs to make rough packsaddles.

  He could hear the outlaws’ yells and whoops as they caught sight of the Bearkillers; one or two stayed to guard prisoners and plunder, but the rest hammered their heels into their mounts and thundered forward. Havel’s eyes narrowed as the distance closed; the Devil Dogs were in no particular order, but they didn’t appear to be shy of a fight. Their bellowing cries were full of blood-lust; and worse, of confidence.

  Not very good riders, he thought; none better than he’d been at the Change, most worse. Big men mostly, with beards spilling down their chests. Well-armed.

  They all had decent body armor, and they all had a crossbow slung like a rifle at their saddlbows. For the rest they carried swords-double-edged swords with long hilts, what they’d called a bastard sword in Europe in the old days-or axes ground down so they were light enough to be used single-handed. And they all carried shields slung over their backs, kite-shaped models bigger than the Bearkiller targe, and heavier too from the looks.

  “Let’s give them their first surprise!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Signe, Shooting circle and At the gallop.”

  She put the trumpet to her lips and sounded the calls, the bugle high and sweet in the warm still air. Havel dropped the knotted reins on his saddle horn and leaned forward, signaling his horse up to a gallop. Distance closed with shocking speed; he could see the leader of the Devil Dogs shouting and gesturing frantically to his men.

  Havel’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a carnivore grin as the Devil Dogs began to pull up and dismount; they weren’t going to fight on horseback, and he’d confirmed with Woburn that nobody else around here had tried it more than once or twice.

  Not that we’re very good at it yet, he thought. But we have trained for it. And they’re expecting us to get down to fight too.

  He waited until the distance closed further; one pre-Change military skill that still had value was being able to do a quick accurate assessment of how far away something was. The Devil Dogs had all gotten off their horses, and they were bending to span their crossbows-the weapons shot hard and straight at close range. They were expecting to catch his people dismounting and shoot them up before they could reply.

  “Yo!” he shouted, and turned his horse with balance and knees-skills Will and Luanne had taught them all.

  Gustav pivoted neatly, like a rodeo mount in a barrel race. The dozen riders behind him did likewise, at well-timed intervals; suddenly they were galloping from left to right across the line of the Devil Dogs’ formation. Black soil flew up in divots; the horses’ heads pounded up and down like pistons, and he felt a sensation of rushing speed no machine could quite match as the great muscles flexed and bunched between his legs.

  Havel clamped his thighs to his mount and raised his bow, drawing to the angle of his jaw with the chisel point slanting up at a thirty-five-degree angle. Horn and wood and sinew creaked as the string pulled the recurved stave into a smooth half-circle; he breathed out in a controlled hooosh as he pushed and pulled and twisted his torso to put the muscles of gut and back and shoulders into the effort.

  It wasn’t just a matter of raw arm strength. You had to know how to apply it.

  He waited for the high point of the gallop and let the string fall off the balls of his fingers. Crack-whipppt! as the string lashed his steel-clad forearm and the arrow flicked out, blurring with speed. The bow surged against his left arm with the recoil; his right hand was already reaching back, plucking another shaft out of his quiver: knock, draw, loose-He had two in the air before the first one struck-struck and stood in the ground ten yards in front of the nearest Devil Dog.

  Congratulations, Genghis! he thought acidly.

  The next one banged off the curved surface of a helmet, making the bandit spin and then stagger; he felt a little better after that.

  And I’m not aiming at one man. I’m aiming at twenty, and their horses, all nicely bunched up.

  Behind him the other Bearkillers were shooting as well. He leaned to the right, and Gustav pivoted, turning. The others followed, and the line became a loose oval like a racetrack. The arrows had come as a complete surprise to the enemy; the problem was that not many of them had hit.

  A horse ran plunging across the wheatfields, with an arrow buried half its length in the beast’s rump. A bandit was down on the ground, screaming shrill bubbling shrieks as he rolled about and clutched at a shaft that had slanted down through one cheek and out the side of his jaw, slicing his tongue and shattering half a dozen teeth as it went.

  Most of the Devil Dogs had dropped their crossbows and swung their shields around, holding them up against the sleet of steel-tipped wood.

  He saw two arrows strike one shield, and the man take a step backward as the points punched crack-crack through the sheet-metal covering and buried themselves in the plywood beneath. Then he was curving around again himself, his left side towards the enemy once more. Some of them were shooting; a crossbow belt went by a few feet ahead of Gustav’s nose, with an unpleasant vwup! of cloven air. Another struck a horse, and it went down with a scream to lie thrashing; two more riders halted for an instant and bore the rider off to the remount string before they returned to the shooting circle.

  None of the bolts had struck a Bearkiller yet, which wasn’t surprising, with moving targets that shot back.

  Havel smiled an unpleasant smile as he shot again, and again, and again, and then wheeled his horse around once more. The Devil Dog leader was trying to get more of his men out from behind their shields to return fire at the elusive riders, without much success.

  He was discovering some very nasty facts about being a stationary target; the ones that had let horse-archers grind infantry armies into dust from China to Poland before gunpowder came along.

  More useful hints from Will’s books on cavalry.

  An arrow struck a Devil Dog, and the shaft sank halfway to its flight-feathers after it knocked a steel scale away spinning and twinkling in the sunlight. The man went down and writhed,
clawing at the trampled wheat, trying to shriek as he coughed out bits of lung and gouts of blood.

  The fourth time he finished the circuit Havel found his quiver empty. He cased his bow and took the reins in his left hand again, cantering away to where Astrid waited, with Reuben Waters helping. Each was leading packhorses, and a saddled remount string to replace losses.

  The youngest Larsson turned and grabbed a bundle of arrows from the racks on the back of a packhorse.

  “Thirty-inchers, and when are you going to let me into the line, Lord Bear? I’m a better shot than you are!”

  “Thirty-inchers,” Havel confirmed, bending so that she could untie the bundle and slide them loose into his quiver.

  He reined around: “And you can ride in the line when you can pull a fifty-pound bow twelve times a minute and do the assault course in a full-weight hauberk.”

  My opposite number must be getting pretty desperate, Havel thought, as he trotted back towards the action.

  Once he realizes we can keep this up all day, whittle them down one by one no matter that we’re lousy shots. If they scatter, we can bunch up and ride each one down separately. And any time now he’s going to look west and seeA screaming shout went up from the Devil Dogs. A lot of them were pointing west. Several thousand yards in that direction were Will Hutton and the rest of the Bearkillers, with Woburn’s men behind them. Neatly blocking the direct route to St. Hilda’s and the Devil Dog base; as an added bonus the distance made it impossible to tell who was who, so they’d probably think that all the mounted men there were armored Bearkiller horse-archers.

  “Shouldn’t get your attention so set on one thing that you forget to look around you,” Havel called out to the enemy, grinning like a wolf. Then, louder: “Fall in here, out of crossbow range! Everyone make sure your quivers are full and your mounts sound!”

  The Bearkillers did, one of them swearing white-faced at a crossbow bolt standing buried deep in the cantle of his saddle, sunk through layers of leather and wood. Three inches closer, and it would have nailed his thigh to the saddle, or buried itself in his groin.

  Havel ignored that, after checking that it hadn’t injured the horse. Instead he uncased his binoculars. The Devil Dogs were doing the only thing possible; the man in the pseudo-Viking helmet seemed to be in charge, and he was getting them mounted again, abandoning the prisoners and cattle and heading south of west, to loop around the blocking force and get back to their base. Havel stood in the stirrups and waved to Hutton; the second-in-command waved back, and began to trot his band towards the commander’s.

  “What’s horns-on-head trying to do, Mike?” Signe asked, jerking her head after the departing enemy.

  Havel cased the binoculars again and took a sip from his canteen-not too much, since taking a leak while wearing the armor required contortions.

  “The one with a crap-brown beard? He’s trying to disengage,” he said. “He’s still not thinking in terms of mounted combat. If he only had Woburn’s men to worry about he’d be home free. All they could do was follow him until he got back to St. Hilda’s. Mounted infantry can’t force each other to fight, because the other side can just trot off. But we can make him fight, because we don’t have to stop and get off our horses to shoot.”

  “Not just a rat, but a stupid rat,” Signe said. Her expression was grimmer than his, if anything. “I hope those farmers, the Clarkes, can watch from wherever they are.”

  “What goes around, comes around,” Havel replied, nodding. “Sound: pursuit at the canter. Let’s go!”

  The Devil Dogs were galloping off, but they couldn’t keep that up for long-not without more remounts than they had along. Carrying a heavy man in armor was hard work for a horse, the more so if he rode badly. Havel set a loping pace, letting the enemy draw ahead. Any chase was going to be from behind, here; the land was open and the Devil Dogs had been cutting fences all over the place precisely so they could move without running up against one.

  Don’t want to catch up to them too soon anyway, he thought. Not until Will rejoins. Let brown-beard-horns-on-head relax in his illusions for a while.

  Then the Devil Dogs stopped, milled around, turned further south; they had to, if they wanted to keep from being caught between the two Bearkiller forces. Havel gave Will a high thumbs-up sign, and got a wave in return.

  So far, so good. We’ve cut them off from home. Now for the hard part.

  The muffled thunder of hooves seemed to drum inside his head and chest, beating like his heart. Even forty or fifty horsemen gave you a surprising sense of power, of irresistible momentum, as if so many hooves and so many tons of muscle and bone could ride down anything.

  This is why so many brave idiots were in the cavalry, he thought.

  He looked around carefully-the helmet and neck guard cut down on your peripheral vision-and waved a hand in summons. Woburn turned his horse until he was cantering knee-to-knee with the Bearkiller leader.

  “Slick!” he said, grinning. “I dropped off a couple of men to look after the prisoners we got back-and all that stock.”

  “Thanks,” Havel replied-by the terms of the contract, most of it went to his folk.

  To himself. Slick? We shot three hundred-odd arrows at them and knocked out three men and one horse!

  He went on aloud: “What I’d like you to do, Sheriff, is push them, since most of your people are riding lighter than mine.”

  Havel waved ahead towards the fleeing enemy. “Don’t try to engage them, just get their horses lathered and blown, and stay on their right hands so they’ve got to keep heading south instead of right for St. Hilda’s.”

  Woburn settled the Bearkiller-style helmet he’d bought. “That we can do,” he said.

  Whooping, he rode over to his men and shouted to them. They spurred their horses, pulling ahead of the double column of armored fighters, closing rapidly. The Devil Dogs flailed at their own mounts with their heels and the loose ends of their reins, pulling ahead again.

  The whole clot of horses and men disappeared over one of the long low swellings; there wasn’t much dust, but the rumble sounded loud through the warm air. A canter made enough wind to dry some of the sweat that runneled down his body, but not enough to get through most of the quilted padding under the armor.

  Time crept by at a walk-trot-canter rhythm; he started to wonder whether he should step up the pace himself.

  No. Remember the horses. They’re not Humvees and ours are carrying a lot of weight.

  Over the next rise, and a black clump showed in the distance. Down another shallow dip in the prairie, through fields of clover that smelled candy-sweet when crushed underhoof-that required a little discipline, because the horses saw no pressing reason not to stop and eat-and through a shallow creek fringed by pines, and then up another swale. The tracks of the Bearkillers and Woburn’s men showed clearly, black against the poplin-green of wheat and the crimson-starred clover. This time they could see both parties; the Devil Dogs had slowed to a jog-trot.

  Closer still, and he could see the streaks of foam on the necks and flanks of their horses, hear the wheezing bellows panting. They were tiring quickly; not in as good condition as the Bearkiller mounts to begin with, and badly ridden. Havel slowed, dropping down the column.

  “Be careful when we catch up,” he repeated over and over. “Remember, we don’t want to let them close in too soon. Listen for the signals and keep alert.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Eric muttered.

  Havel rang the knuckles of his armored glove off the younger man’s helmet.

  “Hey!”

  “Shut up!” Havel said. The white noise of the hooves would cover the words. “People are going to start dying right about now.”

  That won’t work, he thought. This kid’s still eighteen. He’s seen people die since the Change but he still doesn’t really believe it could be him, not down in the gut.

  Inspiration struck: “Luanne there could die.”

  That got through; he saw Eric flush
and then go pale.

  “So let’s all keep fucking focused, shall we?” he concluded grimly.

  Havel tightened his thighs and shifted his balance, bringing Gustav up to a hand gallop. Woburn came alongside when he came back to the head of the line.

  “What now?” he asked.

  Havel cocked an eye at the sheriffs horse, and those of his posse. Not bad. About as worn down as ours, much less than the bad guys’ nags. Woburn’s men weren’t wearing much armor, and they were a lot easier on their horses than the Devil Dogs.

  “Hang back,” he said. “You can’t help with the next part. Stay in range-get ready to pile in if you have to, or chase ‘em for real if they scatter.”

  “They’re going to scatter?” Woburn asked.

  “Well, if they don’t there won’t be any problem,” Havel said. “Because then they’ll all be dead. It’ll take a while, though.”

  The sheriff peeled off to the loose array of his posse. Havel reached over his shoulder for a shaft and slid it through the arrow-shelf in his bow’s riser, thinking hard.

  The Devil Dogs weren’t riding in any particular order; more like a loose mass that anything resembling his staggered column of twos. Havel waved his right arm and chopped it forward, brought the Bearkillers up level with their opponents and to their right, no more than forty yards away.

  A few of the Devil Dogs had loaded their crossbows, and tried to shoot them one-handed like huge pistols; mostly they ended up sinking shafts into the ground at their horses’ feet, or in wild arcs up into the air.

  That bought a few derisive shouts from the Bearkillers, and elevated-finger salutes. Then they drew their bows. The sound that went up from the Devil Dogs as the first slashing volley of forty arrows arched out towards them was as much frustration as fear, but there was a lot of terror in it too. Two men went down when their horses were struck; the range was much closer this time, and more of the horse-archers were in the firing line.