“Hooo-rah! USA! USA! Hooo-rah!”
The guttural shout sounded again. Three ranks of the Boisean soldiers cocked their six-foot javelins back and then threw in perfect unison. Fifty yards away the charging block of League pikemen had just enough time to hesitate before the missiles slanted down out of the air at them. Pikemen didn’t carry shields; they needed both hands for their unwieldy weapons. A hundred and twenty of the throwing-spears punched into their formation; about half of them hit rather than landing in earth or bouncing off pike shafts or glancing away from smooth pieces of metal, and men went down screaming as the hard narrow points punched through armor and flesh. Then another volley, and another.
It was a ragged line of pikes which rammed into the big shields of the Boisean troopers. But the Zillah men were still moving at a flat-out run, either brave enough to keep in mind that the way to get out from under a shower of spears was to close with the enemy as fast as they could, or simply too frenzied to think of anything but killing. The front ranks of the Boiseans snapped out their stabbing-swords and took the pikes on the faces of their shields or knocked them up, or hacked to cut the heads free from the shafts. Men ducked forward, shoving and pushing to get within reach of the Zillah pikemen. At arm’s length they would be helpless against the stabbing-swords held underarm for the gutting stroke, but in the meantime men were going down with pike points in the face or throat or belly.
The whole Boisean force rocked backward; and then the Portlander cavalry hammered home on each flank, swinging in at a steady hand gallop like the jaws of a spring trap.
A bellow of “Haro! Haro, Portland!” and the lances struck.
Some horses went down at the impact, but far more men, run through shield and armor and body by points with a ton of horse and rider behind them, bowled over or smashed backward. Even then the Boiseans didn’t break; men stepped up and flung javelins at close range, or stabbed and hacked at the vulnerable legs. Then the long-swords were out, and serrated war-hammers, smashing down as the knights loomed like steel towers over the men on foot. The Boisean formation shrank as their commander ordered men from the interior of it to break back through the burning gate, throwing down their shields to make a temporary bridge through the flames; behind them their comrades stayed and died to buy them time. So did their commander, fallen beside his standard with its gilded hand on top, two lances through his body.
The watching Dunedain bowed in their saddles, right hand to heart; part salute to the Grand Constable’s handling of the little battle, part respect for the enemy’s courage.
“Time for us to depart, if we’re to meet those Indians,” Astrid said.
Alleyne nodded and neck-reined his horse around to the east. “And I don’t think anyone down there is going to be paying much attention. Really I don’t.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE WILD LANDS
(FORMERLY TORONTO, ONTARIO)
APRIL 12, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
“Now, that is amazing, so it is,” Artos said quietly. He stared up into a clear blue sky where a few small fleecy clouds drifted, and bisecting that view. .
“The wonder of the world!”
He’d felt awe in his life; never more than on Nantucket, when he’d met something so-
So wholly grand and wholly beyond the grasp of humankind that my mind could not hold it, still cannot, so that I grasp and fumble after memories, memories not gone so much as too big, and I can contain only specks and splinters of them at any one time.
Or watching snow tearing from the peaks of the Three Sisters in a winter storm, or the Pacific thundering into a cliff beneath his feet and making the living rock quiver like some great beast in pain while the spray battered at him with chill salt hands. Or a tiger glimpsed moving like a yellow-and-black spirit of the Wild through the thickets along the Willamette. Awe at the Powers, or at the nature They embodied.
It was a little new to feel it at the works of mortal men like himself. Great buildings were common enough in the still-occupied ancient cities like Portland, so common that usually you didn’t bother to notice them beside the modern life below. Or you looked at them as merely mines in the sky, sources of steel and brass and aluminum and glass and copper. There were plenty of that kind off northward to his right, some scorched and leaning drunkenly and others seemingly intact and everything in between, mostly of the usual upended-box profile. The ancients had had awesome powers, but very little in the way of taste, to judge from the things they’d built in the generations just before the Change.
The tower that reared over the travelers here near the edge of the lake wasn’t a building, really. It was a narrow spire of concrete shaped like a Y in cross section, tapering inward like a lance or a finned crossbow bolt, but swelling out again to a pod near the top. Above that was a stepped metal spike. Only as they pedaled closer had he been able to get any feeling for the scale of the thing, and that mostly by how slowly it grew despite their speed on the rail. The Norrheimers were subdued by the dead city anyway; there was nothing even remotely as big where they lived, but if you’d seen enough ruins it was nothing extraordinary. The tower, though, was impossible to grasp until you realized that to see much of it from beneath you had to lie on your back.
“It fills the sky,” he breathed.
“Nearly two thousand feet high,” Ignatius said. “Possibly over two thousand, but I think a little under. One or two hundred feet under.”
What I thought, but I thought I was getting it wrong, Artos mused.
He’d deployed the usual way of making a quick-and-dirty estimate of something’s height, the one you used with a big tree or a castle tower. Do a rough cut of the distance from the base to where you stood, not difficult if you had something to give you the scale. Then stretch out your arm with the thumb extended and sight over it to the top of the object; with some practice that gave you the angle of elevation between the ground and the peak to within a degree or two. After that it was just a simple little bit of practical trigonometry, the sort anyone got with a warrior’s or builder’s education.
I just didn’t believe it.
“Surtr!” Bjarni exclaimed. “Two thousand feet! That’s. . that’s. . three bowshots. .”
“Two long ones,” Edain said, craning his neck. “But straight up, d’you see! Can you imagine being up there in a thunderstorm? By the Dagda’s dick, man!”
Bjarni signed the Hammer in aversion, and so did several of this folk.
“Can you imagine being up there right now?” Mathilda said eagerly. “Think how far you could see on a clear day like this! The Silver Tower at Todenangst would be nothing next to this; even a balloon or a glider wouldn’t be the same. It would be like a mountain, but a mountain shaped like a needle, all by itself!”
Artos whistled softly as his half sisters cheered her. That it would. Not like a mountain, not like a glider. . not even like hang gliding in the Columbia Gorge. Like nothing else in the world.