A Meeting at Corvallis (64 page)

She could not hear the words under the distant grumble of feet and hooves, but she knew them:
Fight the Holy War…Heaven awaits warriors who fall in His service…smite the Satan-worshippers…

Her people had had their own rituals. Juniper's lips tightened as she lowered the glasses; war of any sort was bad enough, but Holy War wasn't something she liked at all. Sir Nigel and Aylward were talking in low tones—probably nobody else but the banner-bearer could hear them under the racket as the pipes and drums greeted the enemy.

“They should have sent more infantry,” her First Armsman said. “If they had enough bicycles for them. Got a fair well-balanced force but they're not what you'd call smooth at using it proper. Another couple of hundred infantry and they could pin us for a flank attack by the cavalry. As it is, I'd say they'll have to come straight at us.”

“They'll not have met much serious opposition until now,” Nigel said judiciously. “Learning by doing. Better next time, I would expect.”

Does there have to be a next time?
some part of Juniper's heart cried with anguish.

She said nothing aloud; the polite looks from the two lifelong warriors would be too hard to bear, especially when she knew they were right.

I love Nigel like my life, and Sam like a brother, but the way they discuss chopping people up as if it was turnips still makes me feel…odd.

“Surprised they've managed to train so many men-at-arms,” Nigel went on. “That takes serious application.”

“That's those Society buggers, sir. They were odd before the Change and afterwards the ones who stayed with Arminger were bloody barking mad.”

“A functional madness…Ah, they're shifting…cavalry forward to cover the infantry deployment, then to their left opposite our friends from the CORA on our right. Crossbows and spears in mixed blocks…underestimating how badly we can outshoot them, I daresay. They'll send the infantry forward to develop our position, and punch their lancers at Rancher Brown and his fellows to try and uncover our right. A good thing they didn't bring any of their field artillery.”

“They keep that for siege operations when they can, sir.”

The CORA leaders and their retainer-cowboys had finished slapping their gear on fresh mounts; they crowded forward over the road northward, except for a trickle of wounded from the earlier action who moved to the rear, towards the healers.

Juniper took three deep breaths, letting each out with a long, slow hiss, feeling the strength of Earth flow up her lungs to calm her heart with its unmoved solidity, feeling Air add its light quickness to the surging strength of Water in her sea-salt veins, and the thought of Fire reaching out across the field.

Sam Aylward rinsed out his mouth, spat, returned his canteen to his waist and put an arrow to his bow. “Sir Nigel, Lady, we've a roit proper job of work to do 'ere today.”

Despite the gathering tension she smiled to herself.
Sam might be Earth itself. And Nigel is Fire…does that make me an airy wet blanket?

Curled trumpets screamed in the enemy ranks.

Lord Emiliano scanned the field ahead. Suddenly he noticed small enemy parties setting out several strings of six-foot posts, planted in staggered rows out from where the banner of moon and horns stood in the field this side of the road. They were hard to see, because the side turned towards him was painted green-brown, and far too fragile to be any hindrance to men on foot or horseback. They puzzled him for a moment, until he realized they were ranging-marks, planted precisely fifty yards apart, probably with the other side whitewashed for better visibility. His lips tightened; it was a gesture of methodical, thoughtful ferocity more frightening than the screaming painted faces and the inhuman throbbing of the drums or the snarling drone of the pipes. And he would have to send his men into that killing field.

Sí,
it will cost us,
he thought.
Worth it. We break this force, they're finished; we get the land, and nobody bothers us no more. If I capture their witch-bitch alive, the Lord Protector will make me a duke, maybe marry his daughter to my Gustavo!

“Let the foot advance!” he shouted. “Lord Jabar, take half the lancer
conrois
at the CORA-boys.”

Juniper Mackenzie drew and loosed, drew and loosed, despite the burning pain in hands and arms and shoulders. The enemy spearmen were only thirty yards away now and coming on crabwise, crouched behind their big shields until only their feet and the narrowest slit under the helmet brim showed; the men behind them held their shields overhead. Arrows flickered out in waves over the distance between them and the Mackenzies; nine hundred bows, three hundred arrows a second, turning the shields into bristling porcupine shapes and the ground into a pelt like some gigantic stiff-haired, gray-furred dog. The sound of the bodkins striking was like surf on a gravel beach, or heavy hail on a tin roof, a hard, endless
tocktocktocktocktock,
louder than the shouts and screams. Many bounced off helmets with a ringing sound like a ball-peen hammer; many others rattled off chain mail and flipped away.

Others bit, and more and more, opening gaps in the wall of shields as men fell, shrieking and tearing at the iron in their flesh, or moaning and twitching, or dropping limp. The spearmen closed the holes, stepping in from the next ranks. As the distance closed, many shafts punched right through the tough leather and plywood of the shields, stripping their feathers off as they drilled into arms and faces. The air stank of damp sweat, and the iron-sea-salt odor of blood, turning soil to mud as hundreds of men bled out their lives. And still the wall walked, like a wounded bear lumbering forward with blood and slaver dripping from its teeth…

Juniper started to duck at a sinister hiss. The crossbow bolt struck her on the collarbone, and she nearly dropped her bow at the sharp stabbing pain; but the short, thick shaft bounced back, turned by the riveted plates within the brigandine and the distance from which it had been sent. Lightly armored and without shields, outnumbered two to one by the Clan's bowmen and carrying weapons that shot far less quickly, few of the Protectorate army's crossbowmen had lived to come within a hundred yards of the Mackenzie archers. Survivors formed a ragged line behind the blocks of spears, lofting their bolts at the archers on high arcing trajectories, but the stubby darts lacked the aerodynamic efficiency of a thirty-inch arrow.

She reached behind her shoulder for another arrow. Her hand froze. Trumpets wailed behind the Protectorate line. The blocks of spearmen halted; then they began to walk backward; she could hear file-closers and sergeants counting cadence, their voices harsh and loud enough to carry through distance and racket, keeping the ranks solid and the shields up for their lives' sake. For the arrows did not stop, and the trail of bodies they'd left coming south was added to as they went north.

Juniper lowered her bow, panting; her shooting was more of a symbol than anything else, to show her clansfolk the Chief was with them. She was as accurate as most, and quick. But the heaviest weapon she could draw was barely within the minimum set for marching with the levy, a good deal lighter than Eilir's eighty-pound mankiller, and nothing like the smashing power of Sam Aylward's war bow, much less the monster stave John Hordle could pull to the ear. Instead she stepped back to turn her head either way, caught the eye of bow-captains, grabbed the signaler by the mail collar and shouted in his ear: “Sound the first halt!”

He put the horn to his mouth:
“Huu-huu-huu-huuuuuuu!”

Every third archer stopped shooting. Some of them busied themselves helping the wounded to the rear; one passed her with another man's arm held around his shoulder, the hurt Mackenzie swearing luridly every time his right leg touched the ground and the plastic vanes of the bolt in his shin waggled. Others dashed forward recklessly to pull arrows from the ground, from abandoned shields, even from the bodies of the dead.

“Ooooh, look 'ow short we are,” Aylward said—
he
was still shooting, choosing every target with a second's care. “Bloody sad, isn't it, how we're running short. Eat this, you evil sodding shite!”

The enemy crossbowmen were backing up too, but stopping to shoot as they went as long as they were in range, not running away. She noted distantly how Nigel had quietly stepped between her and the enemy as soon as she lowered her bow, raising his heater-shaped shield; a last bolt hit it, and sank an inch deep into the tough bullhide and wood, quivering like a malignant wasp. If that had hit her in the eye…a body lay on its back nearby, a young woman with hair as red as Juniper's own and a bolt sunk halfway to its vanes in one eye, the other open and blue and staring. There was a surprised expression on her face beneath the raven painted on it, and only the slightest trickle of blood down the black design; she had the same totem, then…

The Hunter comes for us all in our appointed hour,
she reminded herself, letting sights, sounds, stenches flow over and through her without giving them purchase to linger and leave horror behind.

Ravens and crows of the flesh hovered overhead, riding the slow, chill, wet wind, and eagles, falcons…all waiting. They had learned quickly what such doings as this meant, after the Change.

Ground and center,
she told herself. Then she raised her bow and waved it to either side again. The silver mouthpiece of the long ox-horn went to the signaler's lips, and he blew round-cheeked.

This time the arrowstorm slackened to nearly nothing; that was the signal for only the chosen marksmen, the ones with the best scores and the heaviest draw-weights, to shoot. More went out collecting shafts, rushing desperately from one to the next in a great show of haste.

See,
Juniper thought, looking to where the Marchwarden's banner hung beside the Lidless Eye and driving her will behind the glance like an arrow in itself.

Her hand moved in a gesture.
See and believe, Emiliano Gutierrez. By the keen sight of Brigid and the long hand of Lugh, by the silver tongue of Ogma, by the power of the blood shed this day upon the Mother's earth, by every soul here sent untimely to the Lord of the Western Gate, by the grief of children orphaned and the sorrow of lovers' tears, I bind your thought, your hand, your loins, your eyes, blinding the inward sight of your mind with the lust of your heart! So mote it be!

It would be easy enough for an outsider to believe that they'd run short of arrows. Few who hadn't been under a Mackenzie arrowstorm before could believe just how
many
shafts they could lay down. The Protector's men had crossed the three-hundred-yard mark only ten minutes ago; in that time nine hundred archers had sent a hundred and thirty
thousand
arrows onto the killing ground. And when near a thousand men came marching at you shoulder-to-shoulder, it was hard to miss…

Let them think we're spent, easy meat for the men-at-arms. We've fought the Protector's men often enough, but mostly in skirmish and raid and ambush rather than pitched battles. Sam is right—massed shooting like this is…different. And they won't know we brought bundles of arrows in plenty.

Hooves clattered behind her on the roadway. She looked around, walked back; it was John Brown, his helmet knocked awry, long dents—swordstrokes—in his breastplate, his left hand a blob of bandages where spots showed sopping-red. His face was red-brown now, drenched with sweat; a younger kinsman rode by his side, looking ready to catch him if he started to slide out of the saddle.

“We can't hold the knights,” he said. “Sorry, Juney. Not any longer, not hand-to-hand. We'll hang on their flank, use our bows, try to keep 'em from getting around, that's all we can do. Lost better'n a hundred riders trying. They've got too much weight for us.”

“The Mother-of-All bless you, John, you've done splendidly. Now it's with the Luck of the Clan.”

Emiliano Gutierrez stood in the stirrups and focused his binoculars. The infantry were coming back faster than they'd gone forward, even walking in reverse, and a lot less of them than had started out. They were shot for now…

Sí,
shot up good,
he thought with grim indifference, listening with half an ear to the screams as monk-surgeons and ordinary medics operated on the tables set up behind his position, cutting steel and cedarwood out of flesh—morphine took time to work, and seconds could mean the difference between life and death. Horse-drawn ambulances trotted westward, taking those who could endure it to the field hospital.

Lord Jabar rode up; he had his sword across his saddlebow, running red, and the shield hung from his shoulder was battered and hacked, with a broken-off arrow standing in the spear-wielding lion there and splinters showing white-brown through the facing. He'd hung his helmet by the saddlebow and pushed back his coif, panting as sweat rolled down his shaven head in rivulets.

“Got the CORA-boys to pull back,” he panted. A squire handed him a canvas waterskin; he gulped, and then squirted water on his face, washing a thin reddish film from the ebony skin as the blood spattered there sluiced off. “Couldn't make them stand long enough to finish them, they kept pulling away and shooting, but we hurt them bad. Lost about twenty men, twice that wounded too bad to fight; I think we killed three, four times that many of them—they couldn't get their wounded away from us, either. Should I try to swing in behind the kilties, my lord?”