“Aye. We shall be th’ strong castle ye dinnae hae.”
Rudi nodded; the man was no fool. “The riverboats will support you with their catapults and flame-throwers, but they can only control the strip right along the water. Work east and come in on their flank if you can, but hold them you must.”
The hairy man nodded. “It’s gae bare for oor taste, but steep and rough enough tae suit. We canna complain, and we’ll hold it waur there’s bluid in oor veins.”
Chief Collin wasn’t crazed; often uncomfortably shrewd, in fact, but he had to use what his father’s obsessions had left. Things had jelled in the generation since the Change and become less fluid; back then there had been plenty of survivors eager to follow anything that looked as if it would keep them alive and their children fed. More than ready to dive headlong into what they thought was the past, since the present had betrayed them, though from what he’d heard and read, what they made usually had only a passing resemblance to anything in real history.
Real being a term much in dispute in these times, of course.
Mackenzies had been known to refer to the McClintocks as the Clan Wannabee. Epithets in the other direction included Clan Little Wussy Pleated Skirt and went downhill from there. There were probably about as many of them as there were Mackenzies, but nobody knew for sure; they didn’t go in for census-taking.
But they’ve certainly sent everyone who could walk and do anything useful in a fight.
A little west the grassy plain was covered in them, in a dense mat of tartan and bonnets and plaids, mail shirts and boiled leather and hide vests sewn with pre-Change washers and crude noseguarded helms, all spread down a long slope. Banners rose above them, and a forest of steel; spears, gruesome-looking hooked Lochaber axes with broad blades two feet long, a fair number of yew bows, two-handed swords worn across the back in rawhide slings as well as the more common basket-hilted broadswords, round nail-studded shields with spikes in the center. The two men walked over to a jutting knee of hillside above them and Chief Collin drew his great blade with a flourish.
“Clan McClintock will hae the honor of holding the right wing! Och aye, there we wa’ stand, and there die maun we must-for our homes an’ oor bairns and this tall lad here! Hurrah for bonny Ard Rí Artos! Artos and Montival!”
“Artos and Montival!” Then a rhythmic pulse of: “Ar-tos! Ar-tos! Ar-tos!”
Rudi raised a hand, and the roaring cheer sank away. When he spoke it was in the Scots variety of Gaelic; he’d grown up familiar with the closely related Erse dialect, and the Sword made him preternaturally ready with tongues used anywhere in Montival. He shouted:
“Clamar theid na h-uaislean cruinn
Gun Cailean ’bhith san airmh!”
Collin McClintock grinned widely in his burst mattress of a beard. That translated roughly as:
How can there be a gathering of warrior chiefs without Collin?
It was part of an ancient poem about the McClintocks, too, and before the Change Collin’s father had owned or accumulated quite a set of tomes on the subject of the Highland clans. From which he and his followers had afterwards pulled a dreadful muddled mulligatawny of ideas from history, legend, myth and bad romantic fiction all simmered to taste with a curry-sauce of things wholly their own.
They no more spoke the tongue in their daily lives than Mackenzies did Erse, but enough of his followers knew the phrase for an enormous roaring cheer to bellow out amid brandished weapons. McClintocks didn’t paint their faces for war like his own clan…but a lot of them tattooed instead, everything from woad-blue to screaming scarlet. Rudi suspected they’d have frightened the victors of Cath Raon Ruairidh into fits, or possibly hoots of slack-jawed laughter.
Chief Collin leapt down among them, and dozens of sub-chiefs crowded around. A brace of his armored gallowglass bodyguards heaved him up on a shield as he harangued his followers with sword flourishes for punctuation. They surged about him, a tossing sea of weapons and contorted faces and banshee shrieks.
“By the Threefold Morrigú and the Dagda’s Club, will you look at that lot of prancing monkeys?” the commander of the High King’s Archers said under his breath. “They’ll be setting up a Wicker Man next. With real people in it. Where do they think they’re livin’, the boothie next the Dá Derga’s hostel?”
He nodded at one woman with bars of red and orange across her face and bones through the knot of black hair on the top of her head who was doing an improvised war-dance with a javelin in each hand and more in a hide bucket across her back.
“Poetry in motion, I don’t think,” he concluded.
Rudi grinned to himself as he walked back to the map table.
“I happen to know that their Chief’s sire forbade the ancient sacrifices as gessa to their whole clan. Admittedly, it’s without doubt or question a very good thing that he did just that before they got completely out of hand, so. Forbye they have their uses, mo bhearthár.”
“Breaking heads and bottles and windows in a tavern, would that be, Chief?” Edain Aylward Mackenzie muttered, his square stubborn young face frowning. “Or gettin’ more friendly with their sheep than is right altogether or proper?”
“Well, my mother did say once they’d all be fanatical Jacobites if only there were any Stuarts about the place for them to be loyal to, the which there are not. As it is, I’ll have to do.”
Edain and the archers took stance behind him as he rejoined the party around the map table, their strung longbows in their arms; compared to the southerners, their green brigandines and sallet helms and neatly uniform kilts and plaids looked very disciplined indeed. Eric Larsson was looking dubious himself as the hairy mass of McClintocks went pouring off south at a swinging trot. The massed rumble of their feet made a counterpoint to the keening wail of their pipers, which Rudi had to admit were just as good as any the Mackenzies produced. Or they would have been, if only they’d all been playing the same tune, which they manifestly were not.
“They’re reliable?” Eric said.
“Down among the rocks and gullies?” Rudi said. “Most certainly. To stand against cavalry in open country, no; to fight in ranks against a pike-hedge of heavy foot, no, not that either unless they carried all before them in the first charge. But for this? They were born for it.”
Everyone around the table nodded; a few just looked relieved to get the wild men out of the way and doing something useful where they didn’t have to look at them. Feeding the McClintocks and keeping them from starting epidemics with lax hygiene had been a continuous trial. They were battle-hardy enough, experienced from constant skirmishing with the bandits and the remnants of the cannibal bands down towards the old California border and sometimes with each other. And it wasn’t that they didn’t wash, but they also lived widely scattered in the forests and dells and by the hunt about as much as from their flocks and fields. Gathering together in numbers was something they simply weren’t used to, and they’d lost the necessary habits. Things that were tolerable in small doses were lethal when you crammed tens of thousands into a limited space.
“Eric,” Rudi went on. “Lady Signe.”
They were fraternal twins, tall and fair and in their early forties, and they ran the Bearkillers as war-leader and head of state, more or less-the post of Bear Lord had been vacant since Mike Havel died at the end of the War of the Eye, fifteen years and a bit previously. Signe had never liked Rudi overmuch…but they respected each other, and he did like her son and heir, Mike Jr. Right now they were both in browned-steel armor, suits of plate that differed only in detail from Association styles, with the snarling crimson bear’s-head of the Outfit on their chests.