The youngsters all had good mail shirts and steel helmets, and they were better drilled than the enemy. The Sword of the Prophet had discipline, and their standing army, but the Ranchers and their men fought more like a swarm of bees. A shirt of light mail wasn’t all that much of an advantage against arrows. It was a very considerable one in a hand-to-hand fight with blades.
Montana is poor in metals and rich in men; no great cities before the Change and plenty of rangeland. When the old world fell, the folk were mostly able to escape, but there are few of the great steel towers for salvage.
The Church Universal and Triumphant’s hostility to all outsiders and its bans on many types of machine hadn’t helped, either.
Ingolf nodded, raised a hand in salute and turned his horse. Mary followed him, though she paused to say:
“The hand of the Valar over you, brother.”
“The Crow Goddess spread Her wings over you, sister,” he replied. “And may She be with Ritva, too.”
“So mote it be.”
Ensign Vogeler’s brass trumpet blew a call, and the First Richland shook themselves out from column into two lines staggered so that each man had a clear view ahead, moving smoothly on horses who knew the trumpet calls as well as their riders. Men and mounts looked harder and leaner than they’d been at home, but the humans were just as cockerel-confident. The redcoat commander gave them a pawky glance and angled over beside Artos.
“First battle?” he said.
“For most of them. Ingolf has experience and to spare, and his second-in-command fought the Sioux in Marshall and Fargo. A few others.”
“They’ll be brave, then,” Rollins said sardonically. “Fool’s courage.”
“Which works as well as any other; a man’s first charge may be the best he ever has in him. Now, we’ll be the pivot on which the door turns. We’ll need to keep your men well in hand.”
The older man looked slightly offended. “We’re the Force,” he said. “Your Majesty.”
“That’s what I’m counting on and why I’m using you here, Inspector,” Artos pointed out, and grinned.
Mathilda rode behind him and to his left-his sword side, which meant that she could use her shield to cover him in a melee.
“You know how to get him going, don’t you?” she said softly as the redcoat reined aside to lead his men.
“It’s part of a King’s trade,” he said, then turned his head. “Eh, Fred?”
The younger Thurston nodded. “That’s not quite how Dad put it, but it amounts to the same thing.” A frown. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Yes, you can,” Artos and Virginia said simultaneously; she bit back a snort of laughter.
“And you’ll have your opportunity soon enough,” he said.
The dark handsome young face turned southward and west. “We’re not far from the border,” he said. “The old Idaho border. Red Leaf said there was news about my mother and my sisters.”
“They’re safe enough,” Artos said.
Which is probably true. Even a bad man will love his mother or his younger sisters, more often than not. My judgment of your brother Martin was that he was ambitious beyond reason, and ruthless as a stoat, but not the sort who lacks all human connection. And Virginia is giving you a very worried look. She doesn’t know or love them; she loves you and she loves the prospect of vengeance on those who killed her father and took her family’s ranch.
“Now let’s cut a way for them to freedom, eh? And to a payment on an account the Cutters owe the whole world.”
The pillar of red smoke had grown as they approached. Now they came over the last rise of land and saw the Anchor Bar Seven homeplace laid out before them. Ahead the strip of cultivated fields, to the right the dam and lake, and then beyond that the walled headquarters on its not-quite-hill. It was toy-tiny in the distance, and the figures of the men who fought beneath the walls were like ants, but he knew. Knew where each was, the pitch of the land, the range of the weapons on the towers. Things that might be played out in his mind, each turning on the pivot of his decisions like the throwing-arm of a trebuchet. They were many, but the thread of his actions led through them like a vein of gold in quartz.
And it is the best course, he thought, shivering a little internally. Not a certain one, because the world is not made so that anything is certain, but the closest to certainty and near enough for King’s work.
“Here they come again!” Syfrid said harshly.
The enemy were forming up, just beyond catapult range. The ground between them and the Norrheimers was littered with dead men and dead horses, or some of both not quite dead; every time they came across the killing ground to within bow-range of the men of the shield-wall the catapults Ignatius commanded reaped them, and then the engines from the towers, and then Edain’s bowmen.
“They’re paying,” Bjarni observed.
“So are we,” Syfrid said. “We’ve lost thirty men, and more wounded, and all we are is bait. We haven’t landed a blow since we chased them away from the wall.”
“Not bait,” Bjarni said. “We’re the plug that keeps them back. They could overrun the bowmen if we weren’t here. Horses won’t run onto a spearpoint, or ram into a shield-wall.”
Syfrid jerked his head backward. “Within that burg they couldn’t touch us and we could massacre them if they tried to storm the wall.”
“They’d be all over us if we tried to retreat, like flies on a midden. Besides, Artos needs us here,” Bjarni said. “They’ve lost five to our one, maybe more, and more of their horses. They weaken themselves, like a man trying to butt through a locked door with his face. While we’re here they don’t think of anything else.”
Syfrid nodded grudgingly. “As a man will with a bit of gristle stuck between his teeth and driving him mad. But if your blood brother Artos doesn’t come soon they’ll gnaw us down and swallow us.”
“He’ll come,” Bjarni said. “And we’ll die the day the Three Spinners cut the thread of our lives; not a day sooner, not a day later.”
Syfrid’s face stiffened a little; that was an implied rebuke. Then they had more pressing work. Bjarni frowned as he watched the mass of horsemen approach. They were packed closer together, the formation a bit deeper and wider. And they were picking up speed, not holding to a hand gallop but coming flat-out. All the ones with any body armor were in the front, the men of rank. .
“They’re not going to shoot us up and retreat, they’re trying to overrun us. Something’s changed. They want, they need, to finish us quickly.”
He glanced eastward. Was that a twinkle of sun on steel, above a distant black line?
“Yes!” he said. Then he filled his lungs and shouted:
“Our brave comrades are here, they’ll strike the enemy soon! Hold fast, Norrheimer men! This time we can greet them with spears and welcome them with swords. Hold fast! Thor with us!”
“Ho La, Odhinn!”
A growl went up with a baying eagerness in it; his men were tired of being pecked at from beyond their own reach. A ratcheting clatter began as spearshafts and the flats of swords and axes were hammered on the shields, building up into a drumming thunder of defiance and anger as men stamped and roared. The catapults shot; only five were manned now, for want of crews. The beating of the hooves filled the earth, and the ground to their front was a solid mass of riders. The first flights of arrows were rising from the bowmen to his left, and then every man in the enemy host rose in the stirrups. The Norrheimer shields came up, but this time more men fell as shafts punched through, or flicked through the gaps.
“Close up, close up, Ni?hoggr bite your balls!” he heard a voice rasping. “Close up when a man falls, don’t leave a gap!”