Big, somehow, he thought. As if the sky were larger, somehow. And yet-is that sense of some menace just things working below the surface of what my waking mind thinks, or am I really feeling it?
“The League and the Dominions are on the other side of Bozeman Pass,” Rudi said aloud.
“The League’s siege-train was most impressive, what we saw in Iowa,” Mathilda said, her voice carefully neutral. “Now they’ll get a chance to use it.”
“Lucky it is that the CUT put their major forts there when they were thinking how to protect Corwin, is it not?” Rudi said, with just a little sarcasm.
“Because nobody would be crazy enough to come through Yellowstone,” d’Ath said dryly. “Always better to fight nature than men, when you can. They’re earning their corn, our gallant allies. . at last.”
Mathilda made a slight chiding sound; she’d never say anything so impolitic in public. Ruling folk were seldom really alone, and their words travelled. You had to remember that what you said casually could hit like a club.
Rudi glanced upward; sunlight flashed off his reconnaissance fliers, wheeling thousands of feet above. The High King’s host had direct communication with the League and Dominion forces now, by very daring glider pilots, which cut about a week off the closest land route. Coming through Yellowstone had been nerve-wracking, mainly because he had to cover both banks of the river, giving the enemy the chance to cut one half of the army off from the other and destroy it. . or it would have given them the chance, if the Scouts hadn’t given him a better grasp of the Cutters’ movements than their own commanders had.
Sure, and it’s the Threefold Law in operation.
“Not long now,” Mathilda put in. “A month or two, and we’ll be seeing Órlaith again.”
Rudi nodded agreement, putting aside a stab of longing that felt like a wound to speak judiciously:
“There’s no doubt about the outcome. Their last chance to preserve anything was to keep us from crossing into this valley. . and they failed at that, thanks to our Scout friends. We’re just seeing to the details the now.”
The details would mean an arrow through the gut for some, which would be unpleasantly final whether you were winning or losing. No point in mentioning that; it was a cost of doing business.
“About now, I think,” he said aloud instead.
The surface of the valley was open, with few buildings and those clustered inside palisades or earth berms. Much of it was tilled in big square fields colored brown or shades of green, planted with buckwheat and rye and potatoes and other hardy crops that could grow in a climate that consisted of an eight-month winter briefly interrupted by two months each of spring and autumn. Most of the harvest had been gathered, except for some rye that was cut but still standing with the sheaves in stooks. The rest was pasture and hay-meadow, and there was rarely anything tall enough to be much obstacle to a horse.
He leveled his binoculars. The skirmish-it would have been counted a battle in any war less huge-involved several thousand fighters on either side. There was a block in the reddish-brown armor of the Sword of the Prophet, about a regiment’s worth, six or seven hundred, hanging back to the north, waiting to punch at the right moment. That was more than he’d seen of them since the Horse Heaven Hills last year, and he hadn’t missed them at all; the Prophet’s guardsmen were as disciplined as any of his own troops, too disciplined by far, and fanatically dedicated to their cause and leader. They waited quietly with the thread-thin shafts of their lances standing upright topped by the bright slivers of the heads.
The main action was between the light horse on both sides, armed with bow and round shield and curved sword, few with more armor than a helmet and mail shirt. His CORA levies and some of the PPA’s eastern cavalry and the Boisean equivalents, along with the Richland volunteers under his brother-in-law Ingolf, and Rick Three Bear’s Lakota and the Dúnedain.
The Grand Constable was using her own binoculars, below the raised shelf of her visor. “Now, the question is, will the CORA-boys obey the signal to get the hell out of the way? They’ve got lots of motivation, but not much discipline.”
“Oh, I think so,” Rudi said. “We’ve all been working together for some time now. You have Baron Tucannon. . Lord Maugis de Grimmond. . in charge of your first detachment of men-at-arms, correct?”
She nodded. “I’ve been giving him more work, now that a lot of the Counts are out of the picture. He’s very able, and well-born enough he doesn’t have to kill anyone to get the others to pay attention. And he’s mentally flexible as well as intelligent.”
Which was not something you could say for every Associate baron; they were all brave, but many had about as much subtlety as a war hammer in the face. Maugis was a vassal of the Counts of Walla Walla, a smallish wiry young man with frizzy red hair and jug ears, and he was very clever indeed. Also. .
“Also the enemy burned his manor house and villages and those of his vassals, and chased him and his men like a wolf before hounds through the Blue Mountains for months while his lady held their castle against the besiegers.”
Motivation like that could turn a man into a berserker; or if combined with intelligence and self-control into someone very useful to his King.
“Let’s bring it all together and sample the taste of the stewpot,” Rudi said. “Now, Grand Constable.”
D’Ath nodded and raised her gauntleted hand and the wand of office, chopping it downward. A signal team nearby worked the lever of their heliograph, flashing the sun through an angle. Instants later trumpets blew below, half a dozen different varieties.
The Montivallan light horse had been busy at the deadly swirl of a horse-archery engagement, small parties sweeping past each other, rising in the saddles to shoot as they passed, advancing or retreating with eyeblink agility. Only occasionally would two bands clash hand to hand when one or the other miscalculated. A brief melee of shetes and sabers, the clash of steel on steel or the cracking thud of blades against the varnished leather of shields, a scream of war cries or just animal shrieks of rage and pain, then the combatants exploding outward with riderless horses galloping and bodies lying in the green grass.
At the sound of trumpets the Montivallans all turned tail and ran for the shelter of the woods as fast as their horses could carry them, turning in the saddle to shoot behind. The Cutters pursued, but cautiously-feigned retreats to draw an enemy in were the favorite tactic of all the vast interior lands of mountain and steppe and desert. The Cutters would be afraid of artillery, too, field catapults that outranged even the powerful composite bows. They didn’t make the machines themselves, and now that Boise was part of Montival they didn’t have allies to supply the lack. What they wouldn’t be afraid of, hopefully, was what was really waiting for them. Down there Oak Barstow Mackenzie, the First Armsman of the Clan, would be judging distances and preparing to give the signal.
About. .
“Now,” Rudi said crisply; it was the moment he’d have chosen.
Three thousand Mackenzies stood and threw off their disguising war-cloaks, trotting forward out of the final screen of trees. They were in open order, and they drew as they came, halting only when they needed to pull that last few inches. The savage snarl of the war-pipes sounded, raw and hoarse, and the inhuman roar of the Lambeg drums.
“Let the gray geese fly!” Rudi murmured to himself, what the bow-captains would be shouting down there. “Wholly together-shoot!”
The arrows flew upward at forty-five degrees for maximum range, two more flights in the air before the first came slanting down out of the sky and struck like steel-tipped rain. The loose mass of horse-archers wavered, men dropping clawing at the iron in their flesh, horses running in bucking frenzies.
“They’re really going to have to stop underestimating infantry,” d’Ath said thoughtfully, in a detached professional tone. “Particularly longbowmen. Everybody understands a pike when it’s pointed at them, but it’s taking them a while to realize foot-archers have three t
imes as many bows per unit of front than mounted ones. Horses take up a lot of space.”
“It’s a bit late for them to learn. Now let’s see how desperate they are to knock back our vanguard.”
The cowhorns the Cutters used sounded in a series of snarling blats. The whole mass came forward after an instant’s wavering, and the contingent of the Sword of the Prophet moved up in support. . or to take advantage of the arrow-absorbing capacity of their light cavalry, depending on how you wanted to look at it. The Mackenzies were spread out, and they hadn’t planted their swine-feathers-the knock-down double-ended spears they carried to jam into the dirt and hold off horsemen with a hedge of points while they shot.
It would look like a tempting bit of arrogance by an overconfident invader, a chance to get in close with the shete and cut down footmen.
“There they go, taking the bait. Sure, and when something’s too good to be true, it usually isn’t true,” Rudi said. “But you’ll also seldom go wrong encouraging men to believe what they strongly want to be so.”
“Let’s see how Lord Maugis is at timing,” d’Ath said meditatively, raising a brow for permission to wait. He nodded; that was something you needed to know.
They waited a few moments more; Mathilda was looking a bit unhappy at the length of it by the end. She was a good competent field commander but a little more conservative in her style than Rudi. Or the Grand Constable-the gauntlet was just going up again when the Portlander oliphants sounded down below, long and shrill, a sound that somehow gleamed like polished metal in the sun, fit to raise the hair on the back of your neck.
“He’s good,” the Grand Constable said. “Waited until the last minute but no longer.”
“Or we’re all three wrong in the same way,” Rudi said dryly.
He wished he were down there, ready to charge with the rest, but that would have been self-indulgent under the circumstances.
There was a concerted flicker from among the underbrush, as the knights walked their destriers forward. They’d had time to add the horse-barding for their mounts as well, or rather their varlets had; armor of articulated steel plates riveted to padded leather, covering for head and neck, shoulders and breast. It made the great beasts look like dragons uncoiling as they emerged into the sunlight, the more so for the touches of fancy, plumes nodding, rondels and silvered unicorn-horns on the chamfrons, spikes or brass inlay. There were five hundred of them, their formation a block of two staggered lines, a mass of muscle and hoof and steel that would make ground quiver hundreds of yards away once they got moving. The clatter and ring of the harness of men and horses carried clearly to where he waited.
More metal glittered as the low-held lances went up to the rest position, hand on the grip behind the bowl-shaped guard and the butt resting on the thigh. The trumpets screamed again, and the mass of horsemen began to move, first a walk, then a canter, the colorful pennants on the lances beginning to flutter, blazoned with the arms of knight and baron and count like the big kite-shaped shields. Then the fast pulsing call for the charge à l’outrance.
The horses were as well-trained as the men, and they rocked up to a controlled hand-gallop as the lancepoints fell in a rippling wave amid a crashing bark of:
“Haro, Portland! Artos and Montival!”
“Go for it, ironheads,” d’Ath said. “Another chance to die with honor.”
The words were cool, but there was undertone of affection; Rudi reflected that the Grand Constable had mellowed somewhat over the last few years.
The Cutter horse-archers had learned enough not to try to play at handstrokes with Associate men-at-arms or their Bearkiller equivalents. With enough room to run and sting like an elusive cloud of wasps they could be very dangerous, but here they were caught between the onrushing lancepoints and the Sword of the Prophet frantically deploying and countercharging behind them; their only option was to slide away eastward, and that put them in the killing ground where the Mackenzie arrows still rained down. The men-at-arms slammed through the ones who remained without slowing, spearing men out of the saddle or just letting their chargers bowl the light cow ponies aside with their armored shoulders. The tall long-legged destriers were fast once they got going, if not as nimble as the quarter-horses, and they built up massive momentum.
The Sword of the Prophet answered with a charge of their own, but they’d never done well against the heavy metal of the western knights in this sort of stand-up fight. Twenty minutes later the whole Cutter force was in flight north, with half the Montivallan light cavalry ant-tiny figures in pursuit. A brigade of Fred’s Boiseans came swinging down the cracked, potholed pavement of the old US Highway 89 and out into the valley, with a regiment of Bearkiller cataphracts deploying into the open on their flanks; their leader Eric Larsson had argued furiously that they be allowed to launch the charge, and had still been grumbling about it when Rudi left him.
Behind them came blocks of sixteen-foot pikes, like rectangular walking forests topped with a glitter of honed steel; the levies of the Free Cities, with the banners of their towns before and their batteries of field catapults rumbling along between. A crash of boots and squeal of fifes, and a deep chorus paced to the marching stride:
“O’er the hills and o’er the main
Through mountain snows and burning plain
Our King commands and we obey
Over the hills and far away-”
Rudi nodded to the Grand Constable; he and Mathilda turned the noses of their coursers and trotted down to the main body. Their escorts followed, the High King’s Archers and the lancers and mounted crossbowmen of the Protector’s Guard bristling slightly at each other. Huon turned and gave a friendly salute good-bye to Lioncel de Stafford where he stood by the Grand Constable’s stirrup, handing up a leather map folder.
“D’you think they’ll be a book, someday, Songs of the Prophet’s War?” Rudi said. “There are enough to fill a mort of pages. Mind, there’s been a fair deal of marching and waiting in camp, and singing does make that go faster.”
Matti grinned. “If there is a book. . maybe Marching to Corwin. . your little sister Fiorbhinn will write it. And make up half the songs, and change the rest to make them more lively, and nothing anyone but an expert could sing or play.”
“And claim the credit for the whole, the scamp,” Rudi chuckled. “Mind, she does have the talent; to be just, for simple things as well as the high art. Odd that she and Maude are so unalike, in looks and nature both.”
Rudi’s two younger half sisters had both been sired by his mother Juniper’s second husband, Sir Nigel Loring. Maude was tanist of the Clan now-hailed as his mother’s successor-in-training by the Óenach Mór, the Great Assembly-and she was brown of hair and eye, steady and calm by inclination and very clever; Fiorbhinn was fair and slim and had the music and magic running through her soul strong and wild. Along with a good deal of wildness in other directions.
“If there’s one thing I always envied you it was having siblings,” Mathilda said.
Rudi raised a brow at her. “Ah, but I was lucky in mine, or at least the most of them. Your friends and your lover you can choose, most often: your blood kin you’re stuck with. And it’s. . how did Ingolf put it. . a crapshoot.”
She nodded. Their friend had spent a long time quarreling with his elder brother, or in exile; and then there was Fred and Martin Thurston to consider. Being born to power magnified the usual rivalries and gave them a malignant importance that ordinary folk didn’t have to take into reckoning.
Their path took them past the First Richland coming back to fill their quivers and head out again to sweep the western side of the valley. Ingolf saluted from their head. The volunteers were still young men-the war hadn’t lasted that long since they joined in as the Quest returned through the Midwest-but their gear was battered and their faces had an indefinable something that hadn’t been there when they were just gentry sprigs riding off heedless to seek adventure in distant lands, the sons and brothers of Farm
ers and Sheriffs back there on the Kickapoo.
They’d had the adventure and no mistake, and taken the measure of it. He’d be sorry to see them go when the High King’s Host met the army of the League and they headed home. No doubt Ingolf would be too; the older man was committed to Montival, and he’d left home as a youngster anyway, but his heartstrings would always be there. Having seen it, Rudi didn’t blame him; it was a fine fair land, fairer to his eyes with its rolling forested hills and winding river valleys than the endless flat, fat black earth of Iowa or the Red River. He’d liked the hardy, stoic, plainspoken folk who dwelt there as well.
“They’ll have a tale to tell, back on the Kickapoo,” Rudi said. “For the rest of their lives. Of mountains and battles and strange folk and stranger Gods.”
“Mostly lies,” Mathilda said, but with a smile. “And then sixteen Cutters and a grizzly bear had me cornered in a gulch! With my leg broken and nothing but a roast turkey drumstick to fight them off!”
“Whereupon I died,” Rudi finished for the hypothetical storyteller sitting before a winter hearth waving a mug of mulled cider while his grandchildren gaped. “The which is why I’m not here drinking this and telling the story!”
The easterners gave him and the High Queen a cheer, which was gracious in foreigners fighting for the sake of the thing, and went back to the jaunty marching song they favored, roaring it out loud if not particularly tunefully as they trotted along in an orderly column of fours:
“Instead of water we’ll drink ale
And pay no reckoning on the nail
The Given Sacrifice c-7 Page 27
