The Given Sacrifice

by S. M. Stirling

  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 Farmers 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

  No man for debt shall go to jail

  While he can Garryowen hail!

  We’ll break windows, we’ll break doors

  The watch knock down by threes and fours—”

  They passed Oak among the Mackenzies retrieving their arrows; the big blond man was laughing and exchanging a fist-bump with Lord Maugis, who leaned over with a gruesomely spattered war hammer held across his saddlebow. They both waved to him, well pleased with how the stratagem had worked, and he returned the gesture; now the Montivallan army could deploy unhindered in the broad open valley. Tomorrow would end the war, bar the mopping up and reconstruction . . . which unfortunately might occupy the rest of his life.

  And isn’t that a sight, to be sure, the two of them thick as thieves, when Oak marched in the War of the Eye against the Protectorate, and his first arrow sent in anger perhaps aimed right at the breastplate of Maugis’ father? And isn’t it a hopeful thing to see?

  Mathilda caught his eye, and she knew that she shared the thought. It was natural enough, since their own parents
had been bitter enemies once and their sires had killed each other in single combat.

  “To work,” she said.

  The first chore was visiting the wounded, those who weren’t actually still on the operating tables; a painful task, but something those willing to risk maiming and death for them and the kingdom had a right to expect. Mathilda did the same, and they went from one form to the next while the hospital tents were going up.

  When he’d finished, Ingolf Vogeler was waiting outside, pacing and slapping his leather gauntlets into his palm. His nephew-cum-trumpeter Mark stood nearby holding the horses, a youth who looked much like his father’s brother, though lankier with hair of light sun-faded tow rather than brown. Right now he was looking a bit pale despite summer’s tan, as well. Ingolf was merely grim, but something in his eyes brought Rudi up.

  “Couple of things you need to look at, bossman,” the Midwesterner said.

  Rudi nodded. He trusted Ingolf’s judgment as to what was important. And the High King had a good staff, which freed him from administrative detail, as long as he remained reasonably available. Part of commanding was standing aside and letting your subordinates do their jobs; his was to concentrate on the big picture.

  “You too, bosslady,” Ingolf said to Mathilda.

  The enemy dead mostly lay where they’d fallen once the Montivallan medics had—carefully—checked for living men to be carried off; bitter experience had shown that some of Cutter wounded were given to pretending helplessness and then lashing out with hidden weapons at any who approached them. Policing up weapons and gear wasn’t the maximum priority, and burial could wait. Followers of the CUT usually cremated their dead, in any case. Rudi’s brows went up a little when he saw a dozen of the Sword of the Prophet laid out in rows, the lacquered leather and steel of their harness oddly bright in the midmorning sun. The smell of blood and opened bodies was fairly heavy, as it always was, though it was cool enough that they were spared the quick bloat and stink. He brushed aside flies; overhead the buzzards and crows and ravens were hanging, waiting, or descending to tear at the dead horses who’d been given quick mercy-strokes.

  Oak and the Baron of Tucannon waited for them. The Mackenzie nodded casually, and the nobleman gave a Protectorate military salute, fist to chest in a clash of steel gauntlet on articulated breastplate.

  “Take a look at their faces, your Majesties,” he said grimly.

  The pleasure of doing a difficult job well seemed to have fled, and neither was a man to be easily upset by the miserable aftermath of battle.

  “Aye, Ard Rí,” Oak said. “This is just a sample, mind, but it’s the same with most in the red armor. Save for some officers. It wasn’t until we went over the field looking for the wounded that we noticed the pattern.”

  Rudi did too. At first glance along the row of battered, bloodied bodies he thought some were women. Which was vanishingly unlikely, since the CUT regarded females as a lesser creation and had strict rules restricting them to domestic tasks. Far more so than even Associates, and unlike them with no provision for exceptions for those too stubbornly bloody-minded to accept or work around customs they found grated on them. Then he realized . . .

  “Young, First Armsman Oak, my lord Maugis,” he said. “Very young indeed—too young to raise a beard, every one.”

  “Yah,” Ingolf said. “They take them young from their parents, six or so, but I’ve never heard of them putting the cadets in the line before they’re full grown. That’s eating the seed corn with a vengeance, wasting all that training.”

  “Tuili,” Rudi said flatly. “Bastards. They’re desperate, but even so.”

  There were battlefield chores youngsters did; junior squires among Associates, eòghann in the Clan, military apprentices among Bearkillers. Some of those tasks involved danger, because there was no absolute safety in an environment full of flying metal and human beings in the mildly insane state of savage focus required for naked extreme violence at arm’s length. Tasks like pulling back the wounded, bringing up arrows or a fresh lance, carrying messages. Riding in the ranks to meet a charge of knights was not among the things that youths just learning their trade were fit for.

  “There wasn’t anything we could do,” Maugis de Grimond said. “It’s unchivalrous, but there wasn’t anything we could do but cut them down.”

  He seemed to be trying to convince himself, which spoke well for him. Rudi knew plenty, and not necessarily wicked men, who’d simply shrug and move on.

  “Not if they were serious, no, there wasn’t anything you could do but strike,” Rudi said. “My lord, I slew my first man in battle when I was barely ten. It would have been fair enough if he’d killed me instead. Since I’d a blade and I intended to see his blood.”

  That had been when a Protectorate deep-penetration squad led by one Tiphaine Rutherton kidnapped him and rescued Mathilda, who the Clan had in turn captured in an earlier raid, all part of the build up to the War of the Eye. Or the Protector’s War, as they called it in the north-realm. That was the feat that had won the future Grand Constable knighthood and the barony of Ath, though it wouldn’t be very tactful to mention the details right now.

  The knight nodded, his eyes still haunted. “We . . . we just thought it was one or two exceptions, some squire getting a rush of spirits, a boy pushing into a man’s work, that happens. They were out to kill, and for squires that junior they were very well trained. And they wouldn’t give up. Then just now we rode back over the battlefield and saw how many . . .”

  Mathilda put a hand on his shoulder. “Duty is hard, my lord,” she said. “And facing mere danger is not the hardest part of war, sometimes.”

  The baron nodded, his face relaxing a little.

  Rudi gestured agreement. “After years each in the House of the Prophet, I’m not surprised they wouldn’t give up. And a lad of fourteen can kill you dead as dead, if he’s determined enough and you don’t fight back with all your force. Weight of arm isn’t the only thing that matters.”

  He turned back to Ingolf. “There was something else?”

  “Yah, you betcha,” he said, the sing-song guttural of his native speech a bit stronger than usual in his voice. “The Dúnedain overran one of these farm things.”

  “Temple-farms, I think they call them.”

  “Yah.” Ingolf glanced at Maugis; they were good friends, if not particularly close ones. “You ought to come too, Maugis, if you can. I think you might feel better about this”—he indicated the enemy dead—“if you did.”

  “What is it?” Mathilda asked.

  “Better just to show you, and I wish I didn’t have to know it myself, Matti,” he said.

  They cantered in his wake, a squad of Ingolf’s Richlanders added to the party leading the way. The path turned off the old highway and onto a narrower road, dirt but well maintained and covered in rolled gravel. Ingolf was closemouthed.

  “I’d have planted trees on the roadsides,” Mathilda said, to fill the silence—something unusual for her.

  “The Cutters don’t do anything just for nice,” Rudi said.

  The headquarters of the temple-farm was a set of plain log buildings surrounded by an earth berm twelve feet tall, the wooden plank gate sagging open. Within were barns and grain-stores and the usual workshops essential to cropping and grazing, though there was far less machinery than in most places; the corrals outside were empty, which was logical—nobody left livestock to be swept up by an enemy. Storehouses trailed sacks of grain and potatoes, evidence of a hasty attempt to move the just-completed harvest as well, and a rather crude wagon lay with a broken wooden axle and crates and boxes spilling out of it. The traces lay before it, sliced and loose where someone had cut the team out of its rig rather than bothering to unharness.

  Rudi’s lips tightened in a snarl. A pile of scrap wood and straw had been piled against one long low-set building that looked like a cross between a bunkhouse and a fort and set alight, with parts of it still smoldering and reeking. From the look of
the shattered door someone inside had broken open the barred portal and then pushed through the flames.

  “The Cutters killed the male slaves and pushed the rest inside that building, it’s only got one door, and then lit the fire,” Ingolf said, confirming his guess. “They busted out—which took some presence of mind.”

  “Not something the Cutters would expect of women,” Mathilda said, a little white around the lips.

  “Yah, well, stupid evil shits, fortunately. The Dúnedain came along about then, and signaled for us. Though damned if I know what they expected us to do that they couldn’t, just at a loss, I guess.”

  There were other signs of haste as well. An X of stout timbers held the body of a man; his throat had been cut recently enough that the blood pooled at his feet wasn’t completely dry, but from the look of his body he’d been on the cross for some time. Several other bodies lay about, all men with lash-marks, sprawled naked where they’d been shot or cut down. They had arrow-stubs in their bodies, or just the wounds, and slash-marks from shetes.

  So much is bad, but I’ve seen as bad or worse, in war, Rudi thought.

  That wasn’t what made his escort swear until their officers’ barked commands for silence, or make signs against ill luck, or cross themselves if they were Catholics. Nor even the fact that all the dead men-slaves had been gelded, and had their right eyes burned out.

  One whole man in a rag loincloth crouched beside a cage of poles lashed together with twists of iron-hard rawhide, a short but muscular fellow with bewildered eyes roaming about and his face slack. Two Dúnedain with spear and shield were in front of him, protecting him from a crowd of women. Most of them were naked too, and many were pregnant, had burns on their legs and hands, or both. A round dozen were trying to get towards the man, some of them with billets of firewood or rocks in hand. Others wandered about, or sat and wept, or stared vacantly, several score in all. One dangled from an improvised noose that ran out of a window, and he didn’t think that the Cutters had done it. A team of medics, Rangers and from Ingolf’s volunteers, was tending to the burns and other injuries of some of the women.