The enemy’s trumpets sounded, a harsher deeper blatting tone than the ones his people used. The Boise horsemen responded to the order with beautiful precise discipline, reining in from their gallop and turning; their whole formation was racing away back up the valley in a brace of seconds, with the troopers turning and firing backward. The Parthian shot, and his men couldn’t shoot back. He thrust his shete skyward to keep them from uncasing their bows again, and heard officers and noncoms taking it along the line:
“Blades! Blades!”
They’d be wondering why he gave that order, but they obeyed, hunching with their shields up under their eyes as they rode. The enemy were thirty yards away, edging to the right as the Lakota shot at them from across the little creek or began to cross themselves in fountains of spray from the plunging hooves of their horses, holding their bows high over their heads to keep them out of the wet, their yelping, yipping war cries splitting the air.
Thock!
An arrow thudded home in his shield, slamming through the sheet metal and leather and plywood, the point appearing as if by magic with four inches of shaft behind it. He grunted with the impact as it rocked him back in the saddle; sheer dumb luck it hadn’t gone through his left arm. He’d fought an action with an arrow there once and didn’t remember it fondly. Also he’d lost that skirmish and barely gotten away with his life.
Tock!
Another; he used the hilt of his shete to break them off with two sharp blows. One of the oddities of command was that you had to keep thinking when things like this were happening.
The Boise troops were bunching closer together; their commander was aiming at the gentlest, or least steep slope—up ahead to the right. If he could get his men across that he had options. If he stayed to fight, he didn’t. The numbers were against him. Being outnumbered two to one didn’t mean you were half as strong as the other side; the ratio of combat power was more like four or five to one, other things being equal.
But I know something you don’t, you son of a bitch! It’s even worse than you think it is right now.
The onrushing Richlander line overran the springalds and a few sections stayed to deal with them. The battery commander had wasted time trying to hitch his weapons up to their teams, and they all paid for it. There was a brief flurry as the gunners swung cocking-levers and billhooks, the cavalry shetes rising and falling in lethal chopping arcs, bright and then throwing arcs of red drops. It ended soon; artillerymen rarely got a chance to surrender when those they’d been shooting at from out of bow range got within arm’s reach of them for payback time.
Then...
Perfect timing, Ingolf thought vengefully.
The line of the crest above suddenly bristled steel and the Boise formation halted in a ragged stutter with yells of dismay. Steel lance heads glinted above bright pennants flapping in the wind, the steel of armor on man and destrier glinted, a glow of color shone from the heraldic arms on their shields. Another trumpet sang, this time the high harsh sweetness of a Portlander oliphant.
A cry rang out from forty throats, muffled by the visors that turned their faces into blank steel curves with only the vision slit showing dark, but still deep and hard:
“Haro! St. Joan for Tucannon! Haro!”
The lance-points of the men-at-arms came down in a long falling ripple, and their followings came up behind them, ready to run in their wake through the hole they’d punch in the enemy formation.
“Haro! Chevaliers, à l’outrance—charge!”
Nine minutes later Ingolf stopped his shete in midswing; the jarring mental effort left him weak and gasping for an instant. The Boise trooper who’d dropped his saber and cried for quarter had his hands crossed over his face and his eyes screwed shut. When he didn’t die he opened them again.
“Down!” Ingolf barked. “Down and hands on your head!”
The man scrambled out of the saddle to obey, kneeling with his palms on top of his helmet, and his horse galloped off with its stirrups flapping. The will to fight ran out of the Boisean formation with an almost audible rush that spread throughout the milling chaos of the melee battle in instants; their commander put his cross-crested helmet on the end of his sword and pushed it high.
“We surrender! Quarter, comrades, we call for quarter! Throw down, men! It’s useless! Throw down!”
They did. It didn’t always save them. Most human beings found it hard to kill; once rage and fear had pushed them into that state of un-mind, it was even harder to stop. Officers and sergeants and corporals in the Richlander force grabbed men and held them in bear grips until the killing madness ran out of them, sometimes stunning with a blow from the flat or knocking them out of the saddle with the edge of a shield. The knights dealt with their subordinates a bit more roughly, clubbing more than a few militiamen down with broken lances or skull-shaking kicks from armored feet and stirrupirons.
The Sioux weren’t even trying; he heard the savage guttural blood shout of Hoon! Hoon! as the steel drove home. More and more of them were crossing the river, too.
“Kohler!” he shouted.
“He’s dead, sir. Arrow through the throat.”
Damn, he was a good man. Just bad luck. Later!
“Then you, Captain Jaeger! Get your men behind me, now! Shields up, shetes down.”
They followed as he booted Boy back into motion, and he wheeled them between the Lakota and the bulk of the Boiseans, holding up their shields but not the threatening steel. Violence wavered on the brink of reality for an instant, and then Three Bears rode up to Ingolf’s side, reining in stirrup to stirrup. He rose in the saddle and shook his dripping shete at his own folk, shouting something in the fast-rising, slow-falling syllables of their language—which was mostly used for ceremony and important public announcements these days, something that probably redoubled the impact. They stopped, looked at each other sheepishly, shrugged, and pulled back.
“Thanks, cousin,” Ingolf said, looking down at his sword-hand.
It was glistening with thick red liquid, and so was the whole yard-long shete and more was spattered across his thigh and torso and some on his face, and his gauntlet was greasy where it had run down under the cuff and soaked into the leather. The harsh iron-coppery stink was everywhere, and he felt the weary disgust, the sense of let-down-ness that he always did after a fight. For a while you were just an armor-clad set of reflexes that shouted and struck, and then you had to be yourself again.
“Colonel!”
He whipped around. Mark was on a horse that was obviously not his own, and his bugle was bent nearly in half where it rested on its sling across his chest.
“You OK?” Ingolf barked.
Christ, Varda, whatever, thank You I don’t have to write that letter to Ed and Wanda. Not this time, at least!
“Nothing hurt but my bugle and my pride, Unc . . . Colonel. A springald bolt went right through Dancer’s neck and cut the saddle-girths and the next thing I knew I was lying flat on my ass. Took me a while to catch a loose horse. Where’s Major Kohler?”
“Dead,” Ingolf said, and the boy’s face struggled with shock for an instant.
“We’ve got work to do,” Ingolf said grimly. “We made the mess and now we need to clean it up.”
Mary rode up laughing a couple of hours later, cantering past the rows of Boise prisoners sitting with their hands still on their heads. Ingolf looked up at her with relief; just beyond the prisoners were the rows of wounded, and he’d been consulting with the doctors, his own and the Boisean medic squad. The dead were a little farther out, their shields over their faces and a couple of walking injured to keep the birds away.
His wife had a bright scratch across the matte green paint on her helmet, just the sort an arrowhead would make when it banged off the steel. Two inches lower and it would have punched through her face and into the brain.
I’ve been in this business too long, Ingolf thought. I’ve seen too many of the people I care about die. It’s starting to get to me mor
e and more.
He shook his head and looked at the Portlander beside her in the dented and scuffed suit of plate. The man had a tower and a lion on his shield, still discernible beneath a couple of arrow-stubs despite a lot of recent dings and nicks and one lopsided corner looking like someone had hit it with an ax, very very hard. A war hammer in his right hand rested with its shaft across the high steel-plated cantle of his knight’s saddle; the end of it was caked gruesomely, with drying bits of hair and bone and skin caught in the serrations on the blunt side and bits of sticky gray goo as well.
Sometime in the last hour, hour and a half from the state of that. And he didn’t stop to smell the roses afterwards, his horse is foaming its lungs out. Big courser and not a barded destrier, must have been a mobile fight.
The face below the raised curved visor was older than Ingolf by about a decade or a bit more though not as banged up, running with sweat and red with exertion—fighting in armor was like that, especially in that sort of armor in this sort of heat, and you didn’t get over it quick—but it looked coolly amused and totally in command of everything around, starting with his breath. Also it had the sort of sculpted but slightly harsh good looks that would make women coo; the short golden beard added to the impression.
“You’ve done a nice little job of work here, Colonel Vogeler, Lord de Grimmond,” he said, his voice deep but smooth. “I don’t believe we’ve met in person before, Colonel. Marchwarden Rigobert de Stafford, Lord Forest Grove, currently in charge of the Crown’s forces in this area. I’d offer to shake hands but I’m a bit messy right now. I’ve met your charming and capable spouse, Princess Mary.”
He handed off the war hammer to another man, probably his squire. “Well-met again, Maugis,” he said to de Grimmond; they exchanged a knuckle-tap, a clunk of armor on armor. “And thank you for your aid, intancan Rick Mat’o Yamni.”
“What happened out there?” Ingolf said bluntly, jerking his head to the west a little.
He couldn’t look there now, because the sun was only a couple of hours from setting, but he needed to know. His mind filed away the fact that this Portlander had gone to the trouble to learn the Lakota for war chief. It was an extremely tactful thing to do, when you had one under your command. When it came to bloody-minded touchy pride the Sioux and the PPA’s nobility were surprisingly similar.
“There were more of them,” Mary said. “Heading towards Dayton originally, but they probably saw your dust when you mousetrapped their cavalry, and they veered this way. Quite a lot of them. We got cut off and fell back south to try to get around them, and then ran into Lord Forest Grove’s outriders. Which was a very considerable relief. And he acted very quickly.”
“You supplied us with just the information we needed,” de Stafford said, with a savage grin and an inclination of his head.
Then he took a moment to unfasten the straps of his visored sallet helm and take it off, shaking his sweat-darkened hair out with a grunt of relief, leaving his head looking rather odd above the bevoir that buckled to the upper part of the breastplate and protected his chin.
“They had about four battalions of infantry and a couple of cavalry regiments,” he went on. “A raid in force and enough to invest Castle Dayton and do much damage if we didn’t hit them hard. We had a stiff brush with them, and then their infantry pulled back on bicycles with their cavalry screening them. It might have been much worse if we hadn’t been forewarned, but there didn’t seem much point in following. They could get back to Castle Campscapell faster than we could pursue, and it’s a useless to attack a castle that strong if the garrison is alert. Without the sort of special help they had taking it last year.”
Ingolf nodded wearily. Given a few miles start and on some sort of road, men on bicycles could run to death any horses ever foaled. There simply wasn’t any return in trying to catch them.
“Thank you, my lord,” he said. “That might have been awkward, if they’d showed up here.”
“You’re entirely welcome, but they’ll be back . . . and this is a close relative of yours, from the good bones?” he added curiously, looking at Mark and smiling. “Not your son, my lord? Too old, I should think.”
That’s sharp, Ingolf thought. Aloud: “My nephew, Ensign Mark Vogeler.”
“Off to a good start in his career, I see. Well, Maugis, Colonel, we need to talk. Can your wounded be moved?”
A doctor looked up from one body resting atop the folding table he was using and threw aside the broken shaft he’d just extracted from the muscle of a thigh. He was an older man, gray-bearded, with blood splashed on his gloves and apron. The one shuddering through the leather strap clenched in his teeth was young Girars, but the peasant boy looked as if he’d make it. They were saving the ether for the really serious cases; two men picked up the stretcher he lay on and carried it off.
“They’d better be, my lords. I need to get them under cover by nightfall, though fortunately it won’t be too chilly,” the doctor said. “Moving will hurt some but help more.”
Then, absently under his breath as he returned to work, “Christ, I never thought when I got out of Johns Hopkins I’d end up sewing up sword-cuts and pulling out arrows in godforsaken Walla Walla County.”
“We have plenty of wagons and carts, my lord de Stafford. It’s not far to Castle Tucannon and the Grimmond-on-the-Wold manor,” the local baron said. “My people should be arriving with the transport any moment.”
“Then let’s get moving.”
De Grimmond fell behind for a moment to whisper into Ingolf’s ear as the Marchwarden rode on with his lancers at his heels.
“Ah . . . about my lord de Stafford . . . just a word to the wise . . .” he began.
Ingolf blinked in surprise as he listened; Mary snorted from his other side as the baron heeled his horse forward again.
“You mean you couldn’t tell?” she said.
“No,” Ingolf said shortly.
“Tell what, Unc . . . Colonel?” Mark said.
Ingolf thought for a moment, then told him. The young man goggled for a moment. “Him? But . . . but . . .”
Mary laughed, which added to his confusion; he had what he probably thought was a well-concealed burning crush on his uncle’s wife. Who was only five years older than he was, after all.
And good-looking if I do say so myself, Ingolf thought a little smugly. If you like ’em tall and blond and with an eye patch, which I do.
She reached over and tweaked the young man’s ear. “Welcome to the club of those who’ve had their butts looked on with the eyes of desire, Mark,” she said. “I’ve been a member since I was much younger than you, and it’s always a hoot when guys complain about it. That’s what I noticed about Lord Rigobert; he didn’t. Look lecherously, that is; not even a glance.”
“Lord de Grimmond said he’s a perfect gentleman, though. Knows how to take no for an answer,” Ingolf said. Then he grinned. “It probably isn’t relevant, Mark. I never did make a try for every pretty girl who caught my eye, either.”
“You’d better not,” Mary said, amused; Mark sputtered a little more.
“You look like a landed carp,” Ingolf said; teasing the boy was probably unkind but irresistible. “And you’re turning the color of a ripe tomato. What’s the problem?”
“Because he looks like, well, like a fighting man!”
This time Ingolf laughed out loud; Mary chortled too, not unkindly.
“Son,” he said, “what did I tell you assume does?”
“Makes an Ass Out of You and Me,” Mark answered automatically. Then: “Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
Mary rolled her eye skyward. “If you knew the number of times people up here in the PPA have just taken it for granted I like girls because I wear pants and I’m not the flounces and furbelows type . . . since we got back and there’s this starry-eyed Companions of the Sword-Quest thing going around I’ve had to literally kick them out of my bed at least once . . .”
Ingolf started
to laugh helplessly; it wasn’t the first time he’d done that on a battlefield with the stink of death in his nose, or Mary either. That was where and when you needed a laugh most. Worry aside, there was a lot to be said for having a wife who was in his line of work. They could share things that most couples couldn’t.
Mary pointed an accusing finger at him. “You didn’t help! You stood there and brayed like a laughing jackass, just like you’re doing now. And then she cried.”
“Welcome to the club of them as has been cried at by girls, honey. I’ve been a member of that one a long time, too, and it’s sort of a hoot to hear a woman complaining about it.”
She snorted, and turned back to Mark, who was crimson to the ears. Ingolf sympathized, abstractly. The kid was probably also longing to be able to adjust his jock-cup.
I remember what it was like to be a hard-on with legs at that age. Thinking about gargling vinegar would give me one, much less imagining that situation!
“It’s just so annoying!” she said. “And it’s true about ‘assume,’ Mark.”
Ingolf reached over to tousle his nephew’s hair. “I couldn’t tell everything about de Stafford there, but I could tell he is a fighting man to be careful of, and I’d still say he’s exactly that. The guy whose brains were decorating that war hammer would say just the same, only he’s doing it sitting on a rock in hell . . . or the Halls of Mandos . . . cursing him as the world’s most dangerous killer faggot. Don’t assume about that. Don’t assume about anything, Mark. It can get you killed.”
Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun Page 37
