“Ready, ready,” Bjarni called.
He crouched with the shield-rim right up under his eyes, grunting a little as the shafts went thock-thock-thock-thock and hammered him back against his braced right leg. Two more broke off his helmet, hurting like blows with a sword, and another banged at an oblique angle into the mail over his right shoulder, breaking several of the links but not penetrating the stiff linen padding beneath. The ground was shaking beneath him, thousands of hooves hammering through it. A few men around him were wide-eyed; more were mouthing curses or calling on their Gods or just baring their teeth and screaming hatred and rage. The arrowstorm slackened as Cutters began slapping their bows back into the scabbards and drawing their shetes, a long rippling glitter along the enemy line, a flexing as they slid their shields onto their arms.
“CUT! CUT! CUT!”
Bjarni rose and held his sword up, sucked the hot dusty stinking air into his lungs:
“Now!” he screamed, and slashed the blade downward towards the foe.
The shields came down from overhead and every man behind the front rank threw a spear. The heavy weapons weren’t really made for that, but the target was close, close. Three hundred punched into the mass of horsemen, and they staggered. The front rank of Norrheimers crouched, butting the ends of their spears into the dirt as if they faced so many bears or boars, and the charge struck like wagonloads of anvils. Horses reared and struck out at the shields with their hooves, and Norrheimers shouted and stabbed at their faces and chests and guts, holding up their shields to stop blows as the riders hammered at them from above.
“Kill them! Kill the swine! Don’t prick their pimples, kill!”
Near Bjarni a horse took a spear in the belly and went mad, bounding forward in a great leap, then falling screaming like a woman in childbirth, thrashing blindly. That did what no spurs could; it broke the shield-wall as the half-ton beast collapsed forward onto men and kicked about. Instantly a wedge of horsemen were thrusting into the gap. Bjarni threw himself forward; the first of them was a man with a thong-bound yellow beard beneath a scarred contorted face. He had a mail shirt and a helmet of leather covered in metal plates and topped with a horsehair plume dyed scarlet, and he dodged a spear and leaned far over and slashed with terrible skill. A man spun away with half his face sheared off, screaming in a spray of blood.
The wounded man rammed into the Norrheimer king, broke Bjarni’s forward rush and left him staggering, his shield swinging wide in an instinctive try for balance. His hirdmenn threw themselves forward to cover him with reckless abandon, but more Cutters were pushing through behind the chief in the plumed helmet. The blade went up, fluid and sure.
Then the fixed snarl behind it turned to a gaping scream. Syfrid was there, his shield slung over his back and his ax in both hands, extended in the follow-through to the blow that had hacked the Cutter’s thigh open and chopped through the bone, with a spray of blood following the blade in a curve that seemed to hang in the air like a trail of scarlet light behind a torch.
Bjarni was back on his feet; a guardsman put his shield against his back to help him.
“Behind you, Syfrid!” he shouted.
Now they don’t know whether to shit or go blind, Artos thought grimly.
He took a deep breath of the thundery air, smelling of endless grass like a giant haymow, and horse and sweat and oiled metal and leather. His men were sweeping in from eastward now, between the railway line and the little lake where the ruins of the pre-Change ranch-house lay, a long rippling line of armor and the plunging heads of horses. They rode up the long shallow rise from the tilled fields towards the modern settlement, jumping the little irrigation ditches without effort or splashing through them in wings of spray. There was a huge clot of Cutters hung up at the Norrheimer front, and his lips skinned back in what might have been a smile.
A moving horse under close control was a weapon in itself and one of terrible power, besides what its rider could do. In a melee, the saddle of a frightened stalled horse was like trying to fight while sitting in a chair-a skittish chair that jerked you around at short, unpredictable intervals. The Norrheimers were breaking their ranks and wading into the Cutters, spear and sword, ax and hamstringing seax-knife, giving more than they received. Their archers had closed up and were shooting into the enemy’s rear, steady careful aimed shots.
Artos blew a hufff of relief. He couldn’t see it at this range, but that close control meant Edain was still alive, as surely as a glimpse of the oak-colored curls would have. Every time you took a pot to the well, there was a certain chance of it breaking, and he didn’t want to be the one to ride to Dun Fairfax with that news. Plus Edain was his closest friend, Mathilda aside.
And he’s my strong right arm, with the strength of the good brown earth that bore him.
The rest of the Cutters were turning to meet the new threat, all of them that could break away; they had the sun behind them, an advantage since it meant his men were staring straight into it. He’d always been good at calculating numbers quickly, but now he knew. Eight hundred twenty-six, more than half of what they had left. More than he had, but not impossibly more; they were good riders, but their horses looked tired. His eyes flicked over the battlefield and then he saw the light pedal-cart that Ritva had taken ahead on the scout with Rollins’ men, abandoned a hundred yards eastward of the wrecked warehouse. It was empty, the doors wide open, and feathered with arrows until it bristled like a porcupine. His mind sketched distances.
Possibly, he thought. Possibly. Or possibly she’s dead, though I see no bodies. Poor Ritva, it was always like a game to her, even when the stakes were life and death, the which she knew full well. They say our father was like that; that there was always a bit of a grinning boy on a dare in him, even at the end when he knew he was dying.
The trumpet brayed again, and the First Richland moved up from a trot to a canter; they would all switch to a gallop when they were closer, to get the horses to the target without being blown. Epona responded automatically, and he glanced over his shoulder.
Then he blinked. Virginia Thurston still had her visor up, and. .
I’ve always known she hated the Cutters. He’d seen her scalp one of her neighbors who’d gone over to them, on the border of the Powder River country last year. I didn’t suspect quite how much she hated them, though.
Though all the Powers knew they deserved it, the sight of her white staring face was still a little disconcerting. She had her bow in her hands and an arrow on the string, not being trained to the lance. He looked around again, and the Cutters were much nearer; the two forces were coming together with the shocking combined speed horsemen had in open country.
“It was a complex plan,” he admitted to himself with another mirthless grin. “But sure, it was complex in conception, not execution. It’s simple enough the now. There they are, and we bash them. Time to kill.”
Filling his lungs: “Sound charge!”
Rollins’ trumpeter sounded it, and it went down the line.
Then he used the edge of his shield to knock down his visor, and the bright world narrowed to a slit.
“Morrigu!” he called, then screamed on a rising note that built to a banshee shriek: “Morrigu!”