Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (22 page)

“No shit.
Atanikili!
Awesome, dudes! Glad they’re on our side. Hey, we should get our quivers filled while we can, all that stuff.”

It was a splendid display of arrogance, infantry advancing on horsemen. The Bearkillers handled the way the terrain rolled with nonchalant ease, keeping their alignment and flowing around obstacles like an incoming tide. Some of the artillery were firing over their heads now—which showed both skill and an unusual degree of trust. Some of the shot trailed smoke; thick glass globes of napalm, wrapped in fuel-soaked cord. The first volley of them slashed home. At this distance the impacts were little blossoms of yellow flame and black smoke. Close up it would be clinging fire spattering in all directions, horses with their manes on fire, burning gobbets taking off a man’s face or running down under his armor while he rolled and screamed and beat at himself with blackened hands.

They were just close enough to see a twelve-pounder’s crew pumping madly at the handles of a tripod-shaped arrangement, sending water through armored hoses to the hydraulic bottle jacks built into the mechanism of their weapon. There was a ratcheting
clackclackclack
as the springs bent and the throwing arms cocked backward and then locked. The loading squad moved with the precision of dancers to the command of the battery officer standing with binoculars to her face:

“Target cavalry front…Range eight hundred…load flame…ten degrees left traverse…fifteen elevation…ignite fuse…
shoot!
”

A massive
tung…tung…tung…tung…tung…tung…
sound as the six throwers in the battery cut loose, the recoil moving the shooting part back against the recoil cylinders that transmitted it through the trails and into the ground. They were well-made pieces; you could have balanced a coin on the top of the road wheels and not had it slide off. Then the whole began again—they were nearly as fast as crossbows, which was very good practice. He unlimbered his own binoculars.

That brought them close enough to see a signaler over there among the enemy blowing his cowhorn trumpet; the blatting
hu-hu-hu-huuu
carried well, and more than one was echoing it. He could also see some Rancher hitting an enthusiast who didn’t want to pull out over the head with his bowstave. The Cutter non-formation turned and cantered away eastward with its wounded and dead draped over their saddles, leaving a scattering of bodies and crippled horses. A few Bearkiller lancers trotted forward to finish them off, an unexpected display of sentiment from a bunch he’d started to think were inhumanly businesslike. The rest halted, and the pikepoints swung upward again in a show of casual panache as they all about-faced and marched back to their starting point.

“Looks like the Cutters’ve had as much as they want and a bit more, sir,” Jaeger said, rubbing his hands with glee.

“Yeah,” Ingolf said. “This bunch, for now. They’re between the devil and the deep blue sea, you betcha.”

“My ass bleeds for them,” Rick said, starting to make himself a cigarette one-handed. “
Šicáya ecámu!
” he swore, mumbling around the thongs as he found the pouch empty. “You got any more makings, cousin?”

Ingolf snorted and raised a fist with an elevated middle finger; he smoked a pipe occasionally, but the tobacco habit had died out here in Montival, except among some tribes who used it as a sacrament, part of their religion. What little tobacco available locally was so bad you pretty well
had
to be deeply religious to use it. The Sioux made ceremonial use of it too, but plenty of them also smoked because they liked it, since they could import good-quality weed from the Midwestern bossmandoms. His own Readstown area had produced fine leaf even before the Change, and still did—Ingolf had brought twenty pounds of it back west as they passed through his birthplace, packed in sealed foil-lined boxes. Mary hated the smell, but tolerated him as long as he only used his pipe occasionally; appeals to the example of hobbits, wizards, dwarves and Rangers in the Histories had fallen on deaf ears.

I incline to the elven side of the Force,
was all she’d say on that subject, some old-time reference she’d picked up from her aunt.

“No,” he said. “Not one ounce to spare.”

“Brothers-in-arms!” Rick said.

“I trust a buddy with my life—” Ingolf began, an old soldier’s litany.

“—but not with a girl, a bottle, or smokes,” Rick finished. “Have a heart. I don’t want to die with the jitters.”

Ingolf laughed and tossed him his own pouch. “OK, let’s get to work,” he said.

Their supply train had caught up with them; that was fairly easy, for light cavalry. Mark handled off-saddling Boy and switching the tack to one of his remounts. Ingolf would have been shocked if it hadn’t been done quickly and perfectly, but he gave it a swift check anyway.

The rest was a few minutes of routine; replacing lost items of gear, filling quivers, taking canteens to the carts that held tanks of clean water, putting on nose bags and giving the horses a quick hit of oats rolled with molasses for energy. He saw to handing their wounded off to the Bearkillers personally, and Jaeger did an inspection too. His mother-in-law’s army had field medics as good as any he’d ever come across, their mobile clinics were beautifully equipped and almost painfully clean, and he finished the miserable chore feeling as good about it as was possible, making sure all his people were tagged so they could be identified later come what may. But—

“Well, hello, Ingolf, you handsome macho brute,” Dr. Aaron Rothman said, as he ducked out from beneath the tent. “What’re you doing after the battle? Presuming you’re not dead or visiting me in my professional capacity.”

Even if their head medico is as swish as all hell and likes to screw with your head
, he thought resignedly.
Not that I’ve got anything against queers, and Mary always calls him “uncle,” and so does every other Havel and Larsson younger than Signe and Eric. Old family friend, obviously. Juniper and her kids treat him that way too.

He’d campaigned with some queers who were first-class, and more switch-hitters. What they did in their off-duty time was their business as long as they were polite about it, which they were no more or less likely to be than cavalry troopers of more orthodox tastes; Ingolf had a soldier’s priorities, not a priest’s. But Readstown was a conservative little place in the back of beyond, not a great and sophisticated metropolis like Des
Moines, and your upbringing stuck at a level below conscious thought or belief. Gay people there mostly kept quiet about it and were glad to get live-and-let-live.

“You’re too old for me, Doc,” Ingolf said with mock sadness, thumping his fist on his chest in a display of grief. “It’s a cruel fate that keeps us apart.”

“I swear, straight people exist to make life dull. Where’s your spirit of adventure, your get-up-and-go?”

“It got up and went a long time ago. Besides, I’m married.”

“You people can even make
sex
dull,” Rothman replied, grinning.

He was in his sixties and slimly elegant even in shapeless green scrubs and a surgical mask hanging down around his neck, with a neatly trimmed white beard and mockingly intelligent brown eyes, and a limp. That was because he’d lost a foot to a cannibal band not long after the Change, one that kept the meat fresh as long as possible by removing it in installments; the incipient Bearkillers had rescued him on their westward trek in Idaho, and he’d been in charge of their medical service and doctor-and-nurse training program ever since.

Apparently among Bearkillers medicine had become the occupation of choice for people like him, one of those chance-made local customs you found all over the place. A set of ambulances came up, and Rothman turned away from the banter as if a switch had been thrown, his face as intent as a watchmaker’s at his workbench.

“Triage!” he snapped, and other green-clad figures came running. Then as he bent over the first bloodied figure, easing a field-bandage free as aids snapped the armor loose with bolt-cutters: “Sucking chest wound here! Plasma and drain, stat!—”

Ingolf nodded and swung back into the saddle, reaching into the saddlebag for one of the Dúnedain honey-nut-fruit-cracked-grain confections, peeling off a corner of the leaf that wrapped it and gnawing away a bite. They had most of the field rations he’d ever encountered beat all to hell, though the Mackenzie equivalent—they called it
trail mix
, for some reason—was almost as good.

And it was going to be a long, long day. For all of them.

F
rederick Thurston lowered his binoculars as the last of the screening cavalry drifted back, shifting balance as the horse made the beginning of a motion under him and squinting into the rising sun.

“Extended order,” he said. “Deploy them now.”

“Sir—” one of the battalion commanders said.

He grinned, feeling a tautly controlled fear that came out as exhilaration.

“Matt, this is either going to work, or it isn’t. If it doesn’t work, we’re all going to die, the officers at least. If it does work, we want to win as big as possible.”

“Yessir.”

“To your units, gentlemen. The God, Goddess, spirit, philosophical consolation or lucky rabbit’s foot of your choice be with you. Major Woburn, with me—your battalion hasn’t shown up yet.”

“I expect they’ll be here shortly, sir,” Dave Woburn said calmly. “And ready for action.”

That brought a chuckle from all of them as they dispersed, since Woburn’s battalion was on the other side. The signalers set their lips to
the mouthpieces of their coiled brass tubae and then brayed a complex set of commands; the battalion and company signalers took it up and relayed it, with one long sustained note at the end that meant
execute.

Fred turned in the saddle to watch. The understrength brigade he commanded was cobbled together out of prisoners who’d come over to him, and of those who’d slipped across the lines to join on their own initiative because they couldn’t stomach Martin’s growing tyranny or the spreading knowledge of what he’d done.

I’m not worried about their determination.

Both options involved taking really deadly risks for yourself and your relations, potentially fatal decisions that had to be made in cold blood with full knowledge of the implications. And Rudi could weed out infiltrators, though he didn’t have the time to do it all that often.

What concerns me is their
organization.
They’re all first-rate trained troops and they’re willing, but men need to practice working together, just like anything else.

So far they were doing it smooth. The columns opened out like a fan into a formation two deep, the rear rank staggered so that each man in it faced the gap in the line before him. Every soldier held his big oval
scutum
out in his left hand for a moment, and his
pila
by the middle in his right; there was a shuffling ripple as they moved until the spear points touched the shields.

It was an orderly formation…but not one that could fight a stand-up battle. This was how you arranged men for a skirmish, or a pursuit, to cover the maximum possible front. In normal battle order it would take nine battalions and a couple in reserve to cover this much with sufficient depth to give the array depth and punch and staying-power. Call it three full-strength brigades in a two-up-one-back formation…

That much was probably coming at him. This particular segment of the Horse Heaven Hills was close country, ripples running southeast to northwest, covered in sere bunchgrass and occasional sage, olive-green and brown. Nowhere too steep for infantry in formation, but he wouldn’t want to use much cavalry here, and artillery would be cramped. Passable for infantry, and one which would give them relative advantage against any other arms.

Well, bless you, Rudi. You really caught the terrain at a glance. Dad always did say an eye for ground was an essential talent.

Another glance over his shoulder, and the nearest balloon was snapping out details of approaching enemy forces.

Three brigades coming at us, right enough. It’s inconvenient, the way you can read our strength easily from the banners…Maybe we should rethink that, after the war. If we win, we won’t need such a big standing army anyway, we can put more into irrigation and roads…

It was time. His father had told him that pre-battle speeches had gone out of fashion in the centuries before the Change, but they’d made a comeback since, along with much else, and now it was a skill that a commander had to master. The men needed to see that their leader was there with them and hear him—not just the words, but the confidence behind them.

He turned his horse and rode along the ranks at a slow canter, waving his hand to the cheers; then back again, stopping at intervals so that everyone could hear what he said. There wasn’t much background noise, either. A distant brabble; the fighting had started closer to the Columbia, but far enough away that you just heard a rumbling burr. The wind whistled a little, and there was a thuttering, ripping sound as it made the banners and flags dance.

“All right, men,” he said. “We’re not here because we
want
to fight our brothers. We’re here to keep them from fighting for the Prophet and the CUT. If we
have
to fight them, we will; I’m not going to ask you to commit suicide. There are reinforcements we can fall back on—they’re waiting behind us. I
am
telling you to take a risk. Anyone here have a problem with that?”