One of the horsemen passed within ten yards of her blind; he must nearly be on top of Uncle Alleyne. He stood in his stirrups to look southward, down the slope towards the Columbia; the river would be a glowing ribbon from here, catching what starlight and moonlight there was. This one was in a centurion’s cross-crested helmet rather than cavalry gear, some battalion or brigade commander who wanted to check for himself and not just take a report.
“Goddammit, something doesn’t feel right,” she heard him say. Then, much more quietly: “Goddamn this war.”
He shook his head wordlessly and neck-reined his horse aside, then turned and cantered back east with a purposeful air.
Mary let her breath out slowly. Most of the cavalry went on; several platoons’ worth stayed and screened the road and the flat land on either side. More time crawled past, and then a different sound came through the earth. A thudding like the world’s biggest horse, only each beat was somehow a little blurred. Then she saw glints of light, regularly spaced and moving at about walking pace; someone was using shuttered lanterns as guides. Then starlight glinting on metal to the eastward, and the noise increased, with rhythmic clattering and clunking sounds underneath it and the peculiar rumbling of six-horse teams drawing heavy weights on steel wheels over rutted country roads.
Field artillery and ambulances on the road, she thought. Light baggage wagons too, spare weapons and medical supplies and maybe some packaged field rations. Enough for a day or two.
The vehicles were blurs, but she could pick up the outlines; off to either side the spaced-out lights became men with bull’s-eye lanterns, each marking march routes through the empty rolling fields.
Infantry to either side in the open country, marching in battalion columns every hundred yards for as far as I can see. Probably the same thing on that road north of this. Valar and Maiar, but they’ve got good march discipline, to do this in the dark without everything tying up in a mess!
That was dry textbook stuff; the books that Uncle Alleyne and John Hordle had made part of the Dúnedain curriculum said pushing a big army down a single road or a few roads was like trying to pour the Columbia through a straw. It would take forever and the men at the end would still be breaking camp when the ones at the head got where they were going. The books had a lot of complex rock-paper-scissors stuff about how you couldn’t fight while you were in column of march, but if you deployed to fight you couldn’t march well…
Theory. Reality was the dull bronze gleam of the eagle standards, and the blackness below that was the heavy silk banners with the Stars and Stripes stirring slightly in the night as the standard-bearers carried them forward, the tanned masks of wolves on their helms and the hides flowing down their backs. It was rank on rank of pila-points moving in unison behind, the heavy javelins swaying over each man’s right shoulder to match the big oval shield on the left as their hoop armor clattered and the apron of metal-bound leather thongs that guarded their groins rattled. It was hobnailed boots hitting the dry soil and thin grass of the arid plain like the feet of so many giant centipedes. It was the massed smell of leather and male sweat and oiled metal and dirt ground open to the air, the scent of war drifting through the cold dampness.
Slowly, slowly she raised the night-glass monocular to her eye and details sprang close; the tight intent face of a centurion, the stolid endurance of the rankers pushing through the darkness and a man’s head tossing as he tripped a little on some rock or pocket and recovered without even cursing…
Mary felt a furious bubble of anger beneath her breastbone. Lawrence Thurston had created this awesome thing, this mighty instrument of human will and effort and devotion, courage and discipline, for a purpose. It had been a thoroughly demented purpose-the United States had perished in the moment when the wave of Change flickered around the planet and trying to restore it was like trying to make rivers flow backward-but that had been a noble madness. A faithfulness and steely honor that had refused to bend its oath-given word even at the death of a world. She had met the man: she knew.
His traitor son Martin was wasting it, stealing it for mere ambition; or at least he had planned to do that, before he’d fallen into a trap more subtle and more cruel than anything he could have imagined himself. Which meant he’d put it in the service of the enemies not simply of humankind, but of existence itself.
All the while her mind was counting the movement that turned the darkened plain into a rippling carpet, a skill so automatic that it was like the breath in her lungs. The answer it presented made no sense, which was like having your eyes tell you that down was up. Then she counted again, and this time she used the tricks consciously, counting the men in an area, estimating how many multiples…
That’s twenty or thirty thousand men. That I can see in this fucking cloudy night. There must be nearly as many again out of sight! Dulu! Help! Manwë, Varda, Mother!
The only time she’d seen more human beings in one spot was in Iowa, looking down from the city wall on Des Moines…and Des Moines was a monster, the biggest inhabited city left in all the millions of square miles from Panama to Hudson’s Bay. Seeing an army this size made her swallow, even after watching the host of Montival forming up for the past couple of months. War wasn’t particularly complex, but it certainly was hard.
The march seemed endless, though she knew from the stars that it lasted hours rather than the days she felt. She spent her time identifying unit banners so that the High King’s staff could fit them into their appreciation of the enemy’s TOE. At last it was past them; heading towards the west, towards the heart of Montival, towards the host of the High King, towards…
My handfasted husband, my family, my friends, and everything I hold dear, she thought. The forests where my children not yet born will walk. Well, we knew they were coming. Now we know how many of what, where, and when.
The stars wheeled on through gaps in the clouds. Those closed, and a light rain began to fall, cutting visibility to nearly nothing by the time the infantry had passed and the cavalry followed; trickles of cold wet soaked into the front of her clothes where she lay in the blind, but there didn’t seem to be any more patrols. Even this enemy didn’t have enough men to put them everywhere they might be useful without dispersing effort fatally; war was a matter of prioritizing, and sometimes that rose up and bit you on the ass even if you did everything right.
Another chittering from Alleyne and they rose cautiously, moving together in the drizzle. The war-cloaks had the added merit of being rain-repellant, since the base layer was woven tightly of greased wool. They crouched in a triangle, close enough together that the brims of the hoods met.
“Compare figures,” Alleyne said. “Ritva first.”
His voice was dry, but not as numb as it had been a while ago. Work helped grief.
“Nelc-a-meneg, hîr nín,” she said crisply.
“Thirty thousand, my lord,” Mary agreed. “But perhaps as many as forty thousand or more, if the road north of this is being used on the same scale. Catapults in proportion to infantry, according to the Boise scales. That would be the full reserve the US of Boise has in this theatre, though they’d have to strip their lines of communication to do it.”
“Good analysis,” he said, and wrote quickly on a pad. “They’re not trying to hedge their bets, which is precisely the right thing to do from their point of view.”