Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (24 page)

Fred motioned and the white flag of parley went up. Then he reined in; he was close enough to see details—the stiff plowboy face of a ranker under the beetling brow and cheek-guards of his helmet, a mended strap in a sword belt, the distinctive thin scarring lines in the facing of a shield that marked where blades had struck. Well within pila-cast now, and there were batteries of field artillery moving up, keeping pace with the marching battalions even if they hadn’t yet been turned around to put the business-ends forward.

The Sixteenth’s tubae signaled the halt. It came with a crashing unison and deep shout of
hoo-rah!
The troops were in march-to-contact order, their packs left behind, shields advanced with some of the weight taken on the leather strap around the neck but most held by the left hand on the central grip; two of the pila were held there too. The third was over the shoulder, ready to raise into the casting position at the word of command, or to snap down to present a hedge of points if cavalry approached.

Fred could see Woburn striding forward briskly, then pausing to salute the unit banner. The command party around the flag could probably see who he was by then and that the ones following him on horseback were unarmed women.

The effort of will to keep motionless made sweat break out on his face, like dew on a mask carved from teak. He could smell the rankness
of it, and a sudden stab of nausea made him swallow and clench his teeth; he couldn’t even spit to clear his mouth, someone might take it wrong…

Every eye in the Sixteenth was on the scene around the banner and the signalers. Voices were raised, and there was a ripple as the sideways crests of the officer’s helmets tossed. Cecile was closer now, pointing to one man after another—

Using their names or their parents’. Their wife’s name, too, and their kids’, probably. Reminding them how Dad saved them, gave them a life and a chance at a home.

One of the company commanders shook his head again and again; he and his sergeant backed away, hands on the hilts of their swords, then started to turn and stalk back towards their command. Two other officers grabbed the company commander by his arms and held him despite his heaving struggles; the Sixteenth’s senior noncom stepped close to the sergeant and said something. It looked like he was whispering at point-blank range. The man stopped frozen in mid-stride, cast a quick look at his officer, and then slowly, slowly unbuckled his sword belt and held it out. Woburn’s second-in-command stepped over, flipped the captive officer’s helmet off and cold-cocked him with a single brutally efficient punch behind the ear; the two who’d been holding him laid him down with brisk speed but no unnecessary roughness.

Woburn nodded. Fred’s mother and sisters and sister-in-law rode their horses down the front rank, calling out:

“Don’t do it! Don’t kill your neighbors and your brothers!”

Juliet’s voice, a little higher and more desperate: “Martin isn’t worth it, he killed his father, he tried to kill me!
Martin killed the President!”

There was a stir down the ranks, incipient panic. Woburn looked over his shoulder, and Fred nodded. The major nodded back and snapped a command.

The tubae brayed:
attention to orders!

Silence fell, the rattle and murmur that had preceded it suddenly conspicuous by their absence. Woburn’s voice lifted:

“We’re sitting this one out, boys. Battalion—”

The order echoed down the ranks: “Company—”

“Platoon—”

“
About face!
”

A unified grinding crash, as the infinitely familiar sounds played on the men’s nervous systems—something
comfortingly
familiar, as well.

“Battalion,
take knee and ground arms!
”

They obeyed. Fred looked over his shoulder and raised his hand in signal. The prearranged shout started then:

“Sit it out! Sit it out!
Sit it out! SIT IT OUT!
”

The Sixteenth was startled by the crash of sound behind them, but only for an instant. Then
they
started shouting too, deafeningly loud in their denser formation. Behind them to the east the follow-up battalion was coming to a ragged halt. To either side the forward march had slowed to a crawl as well. As he watched, one unit broke ranks, a platoon turning and taking a knee, another trying to march forward through them, an officer pushing at men with his swagger stick until a spearshaft knocked it out of his hand and then decked him.

Woburn came trotting back with the Sixteenth’s command party at his heels.

“It worked, sir!”

Fred grinned at him and returned his salute with a snap. “So it did, Major. Let’s get this organized, but I think—”

He looked around at what would
not
become a battlefield. Not far away the crew of a field-piece were carefully extracting part of the control gearing for their weapon, and then the gunner equally carefully put it on the trail and started to hit it with a hammer.

“—I think we just took about one-quarter of the other side’s pieces off the board. Let’s get the sit-down strike organized.”

“Ah—”

That was Lundquist, the Sixteenth’s senior non-commissioned man, a tough-looking stocky man in his late thirties.

“Ah, sir, what if the high command orders in troops to put down this, ah, disorder?”

He pointed with a pila; the brigade command post was decamping to
the rear, fast and in fairly good order. Individuals and clumps were following as the formations shook and writhed, sorting themselves.

Martin had the higher levels sewn up,
Fred thought, nodding.
He just didn’t realize that men aren’t chesspieces. What was it Rudi said? Every helmet’s got a head under it, and the head can
think.

“That,” he said cheerfully, “would be a very foolish thing to do, sergeant-major.” Then, louder: “Courier! And major, we have work to do.”

The women rode up. His mother leaned across and touched his face.

“Your father would be proud, Fred. So proud.”

“Yes!” Rudi said, reading the dispatch, grinning like a wolf as he crumpled it in one armored fist. “Yes, by the Gods of my people,
yes
!”

Then he spent a second quieting his horse; the beast had sensed his tension, even through the heavy knight’s saddle.

“Fred succeeded, then?” Ignatius said.

“Better than I’d hoped,” Rudi replied.

He turned his head. “Courier to Knight-Brother Commander Cyril.
Rally behind the Corvallans and place yourself at Brigadier Jones’ disposal
. In clear, and verbal.”

Two riders dashed off westward. Rudi turned back to Ignatius and went on:

“That’s less than three thousand men on our side out of the fight and upward of nine or ten thousand of theirs—a sixth of their total foot strength and over a quarter of the regular line infantry and field artillery Boise brought onto this ground today. There’s our remaining disadvantage of numbers gone at a stroke, and without a man slain! They’re all taking a knee and chanting
Sit It Out!
”

His grin turned to the particular slightly smug smile a man uses at the discomfiture of an enemy, and Ignatius shared it with him in a moment of pure communion. Rudi went on:

“And probably Martin Thurston, or the portion of him that’s still a soldier, doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind, the spalpeen. He thought he’d punch through there, which just on the numbers he should have done, but now it’s locked down—and he can’t shift those men elsewhere
against those they
would
have fought, either, or strike at them without risking his army falling apart altogether. Those men are as much out of the fight as if they were dead. I’ve his face in the midden on that spot, and a boot on his neck holding him there, may he have joy of the fresh steaming dung. Human beings aren’t numbers on a list and a ruler should remember it.”

“Will you go there, Your Majesty?” Ignatius asked. “To consolidate the gain?”

“By the Threefold Morrigú, no! They’re not joining in to fight
for
me, not yet—though afterwards they may find they have little choice, and then I’ll introduce myself to smooth things along. What they’re saying this moment is that they
won’t
fight their own and feel no overwhelming loyalty to Martin Thurston. The which suits me down to the buckles of my shoon, not to mention to the cockles of my heart, for now. That’ll be a delicate dynamic there; I won’t risk upsetting it with my alien, magical and all-too-monarchical presence.”

There was a golden circlet on the helmet Sandra’s artisans had made to go with this suit of armor; as well as a spray of raven feathers on either side, and the round curve of the visor was drawn down to a beak-like point at the bottom and the whole scored with niello patterns to suggest black feathers. When he had the visor down, he looked remarkably like a raven, which was appropriate enough since that was the totem of his sept and the form the Mother had taken to claim him. A raven with a crown, which didn’t look as odd as one might think.

It isn’t an overall effect to appeal to a bunch of wavering Boiseans raised to revere the name Republic, though. They’re old-fashioned there.

Aloud: “Let Fred and his ladies handle it; they speak the language. Literally and metaphorically.”

“We did better than we knew, rescuing him when his father was murdered,” Ignatius said thoughtfully.

“Threefold return,” Rudi said.

“Bread upon the waters.”

“Same thing. And the Dúnedain likewise when they plucked his mother and sisters and Juliet out of Boise’s citadel. You might call that a
light blow set against the clash of armies, but it was a shrewd blow right at the fracture point, so to say. The way a granite block can be split with one tap, if you strike it exactly so.”

His face went grim again. “We’ve enough to do with the ones here, though.”

The Boise troops to the east of him were coming on with a smoothness like a sheet of oil; the rising swell of land he and his command group occupied gave him a disconcertingly good view. The contingent facing them were Corvallans, pike and crossbows much like the Bearkiller foot—the two realms were neighbors down there in the Willamette, and despite friction had been close allies with each other and the Clan since the early years after the Change. As he watched the command rang out;
pikepoints down!
and each block turned into a bristling hedgehog. Field artillery was already firing on both sides, the blurred arcing streaks of bolts loosed at extreme range.

Where they struck men went down, usually with a rag-doll finality; the four-pound bolts made absolutely nothing of any shield or armor a man could wear, tearing off limbs or killing by shock alone or ripping out hearts and spines and lungs. The pike formations rippled slightly as rear-rank men stepped forward to take the place of the fallen and helpers dragged away bodies and the wounded. Across the shallow dry vale that separated the armies the same occurred, but on the move as the Boise battalions came on at a stolid jog-trot.

And as each right foot hit the ground, the pila went
boom
into the shield.
Boom-chuff-chuff-
boom, like a force of nature more than anything human, or some great fabled machine of the ancient world.

There was a tooth-grating
brang
as one of the four-foot bolts struck the shield of a springald in front of him, rocking the weapon and sending bits of the missile flipping up end-over-end into the air like jackstraws that soared half a hundred yards. Closer, and the roundshot began to fly, striking and skipping and bouncing along the hard earth to snap legs and smash bone to splinters. The defenders had the advantage there, but the Boisean artillerists were working hard, leapfrogging half-batteries forward to keep up so they could support their foot with half the throwers at least.

Two twelve-pound shot struck a team just as it was wheeling a scorpion to the front, and the sound the horses made ripped right across the front. Rudi barred his teeth. Down in the ranks, the stink of fear would be heavy now. And the smell of blood and smashed-open bodies; like hog-slaughtering in the autumn if someone was clumsy with the hammer and knife, except that there was no hearthmistress on hand with a bowl of oatmeal to catch the blood for puddings and sausage, and pigs didn’t scream for their mothers in human speech.

Crowded in shoulder to shoulder, the forest of points and shafts out ahead, the massive presence behind your back, no room to dodge so you let your eyes blur out of focus because watching it come for you made it worse. Chanting and shouting to shut down your mind, the white noise in your head pierced only by the conditioned reflex of training and the knowledge that your brother and your cousin and the neighbor whose sister bore your babe were there with you, ready to tell others what you’d done.

So spit on your hands and brace the pike, work the lever and listen to the loading cadence, bite back the fear and the angry outrage that all these strangers are trying to kill the one precious irreplaceable you…think of whatever helps. Think of your friends, of what you’ll do when you march home from the war, of a baby held up under a tree on a summer’s day or the sweat and ache of the harvest or a wagon frame taking shape under your hands, of a beloved face smiling at you from the pillow by candlelight while cold rain falls outside. Or think of nothing at all but what you must do; and do it.

Tubae brayed across the enemy front, and the whole array coming to the attack rippled and shifted; sections sank back, others forward, until it was like the points of a portcullis rather than a walking wall, all without a pause and across a rolling hillside.

“Oh, Anwyn’s Hounds take it,
I want those men on my side
,” Rudi cried involuntarily, with the reflex of a warrior born and trained.

Ignatius nodded in a similar professional appreciation. “They’ve learned about fighting pike-and-shot formations in the past couple of years,” he said.

That the temptation of trying to rush the crossbowmen is a trap, and it’s better to
swallow the losses of doing it head-on against the points of the pikes instead,
Rudi thought.