A Meeting at Corvallis (7 page)

“You don't?” Kowalski blurted in surprise. Turner glared at her and made a placating gesture to his hosts.

“Not directly,” the Grand Constable said. “No fiefs, no castles, no bond-tenants. Besides, frankly, your militia is too well equipped and too numerous for us to be comfortable about fighting it head-on. Not while the Free Cities League in the Yakima is hostile, and we have the Pendleton area to pacify.”

“Plus,” Arminger said, “and quite commendably, you in Corvallis came through the bad years with much less damage than most areas. That means, however, that, ummm, the old habits of mind are still entrenched in your city's territories. It would be difficult to introduce new ones as we did up here during the chaos.”

He made a spare gesture with one long-fingered hand. “As you know, I've drawn a good many precedents from my pre-Change studies in medieval European history; they suit our times, and they've generally worked well. Let me explain another medieval idea, the concept of the autonomous, self-governing chartered
free city;
that was a way of accommodating urban life within a rural world. You'd have a, as it were, constitution, guaranteed by the Association, confirming your autonomy and your own laws, but—”

When the Corvallans had left, Renfrew poured himself more of the brandy. The three of them lifted glasses in salute.

“Do you think they'll buy it?” the commander of Portland's armies said.

“Why not, Conrad?” Sandra replied, nibbling a flaky pastry centered on hazelnuts and honey and sweetened cream. “We actually mean it, for a wonder, this once.”

“More or less,” Arminger said. “More or less.”

A maid came in to clear the table; she smiled at their laughter, glad to find the overlords in so merry a mood.

Larsdalen, Willamette Valley, Oregon
December 12th, 2007/Change Year 9

“Hold them!” Michael Havel shouted. “Hold them!”

The long pikes bristled out, a sixteen-foot barrier in front of the line. Horses reared and bugled as the charge stalled before that hedgehog menace, giant shapes in the gray misty light of the winter afternoon. Breath snorted white into the fog from the great red pits of the destriers' nostrils, and eyes rolled wild in the faces concealed by the spiked steel chamfrons. Mud flew from under their hooves, and squelched beneath the infantry's boots. Pikes stabbed for the horses' unprotected bellies; the peytrals of their barding only shielded the chests. There was a hard, sharp crack as a hoof shattered the ashwood haft of a pike, and curses as splinters flew and the foot-long spearhead pinwheeled away. Clods of earth flew into the air; riders leaned far over in the saddles, hacking at the points or thrusting with the lance. Wet, oiled chain mail gleamed with a liquid ripple.

“Now forward!” Havel shouted, when he saw that the charge was thoroughly stalled, and the lancers at their most vulnerable, tangled and unable to maneuver. “Push of pike!
Hakkaa Paalle!
”

“Hakkaa Paalle!”

Trumpets blared and drums thuttered in the wake of that huge, crashing shout. The line of pikes advanced, jabbing with two-handed thrusts at the mounts and riders; the wielders' faces were set and grim under the wide brims of their kettle helmets. A horse slipped on the treacherous footing and crashed over as it tried to turn, adding its high, enormous scream to the racket of voices and the scrap-metal-on-concrete din. The formation grew uneven as it surged forward, leaving wedges of open space between the files; Havel cursed as two riders pushed their mounts through a gap in the wall of weapons, striking down left and right at helmets and shoulders.

The fifth and sixth ranks had glaives rather than pikes; seven-foot shafts topped with heavy, pointed blades for stabbing and chopping, and a cruel hook on the reverse. Havel held one himself. He dodged a slash, and his weapon darted out. The hook caught on mail beneath an armpit; he braced his feet and hauled, and the rider came off with something halfway between a screech and a squawk, and then an almighty thump as armored body met sodden, muddy turf.

He reversed the glaive with a quick, expert flick and drove the point down to menace the rider's face. The fallen lancer wheezed and raised one fist, middle finger extended.

“OK!”
he shouted.
“Time out! Time out!”

It took a minute or two for flags and trumpets to pass the message. The huge noise died down, leaving only the bellows panting of humans and horses, and a few moans or screams from the injured. Havel grounded his glaive and reached a hand down.

“You all right, honey?” he said as he hauled her erect.

Signe Havel grinned up at him, unbuckling her helmet and shaking back long, wheat-colored braids. Her cornflower blue eyes sparkled in a long, oval, straight-featured face; it would have been Nordic perfection except for the slight white line a sword had nicked across the bridge of her nose.

“You mean, apart from the bruises and contusions? You betcha.” The last was in a parody of Havel's flat Upper Midwestern accent.

“Wimp,” he said, deliberately exaggerating his U.P. rasp. “Real women wear contusions like they were a corsage.” Then, louder: “All right, everyone gather 'round!”

The infantry company did, and the forty A-lister cavalry. Stretcher parties carried off half a dozen with injuries bad enough to need the medicos; that was a pity, but sweat shed in training saved blood, and to be useful it had to be at least a little dangerous. The occasional broken bone or concussion was well worth it. At that, it was easier to practice realistically with pre-gunpowder weapons than it had been with firearms, in his first incarnation as a fighting man, which had been as a Marine; Force Recon, to be precise…

Fortunately none of the valuable and exhaustively trained warhorses had been seriously hurt; destriers were
expensive,
harder to train than humans and a lot less likely to recover from a broken limb.

The hale survivors of the exercise gathered around—bloody noses, sprains, bruises and incipient shiners didn't count as serious these days—panting as they cooled off in the rain-swept pasture, legs and bodies thickly plastered with mud. It wasn't raining, not quite, but it had been fairly recently; what they were getting now was weather that couldn't quite make up its mind between fog and drizzle and a possibility of snow.

The infantry were farmers and artisans and laborers, militia who drilled in the slow parts of the agricultural year and fought when he called them out. Their equipment was a little varied and a lot of it homemade, though everyone had some sort of metal helmet, and at least a brigandine or chain-mail shirt for armor; some of the more affluent had breastplates hammered out of sheet steel, and plate protection on their shins and forearms, and long, metal-plated leather gauntlets. Good steel was abundant in the Changed world, salvaged from the ruins; it was the time of the scarce, skilled craftsmen that made armor expensive.

The cavalry were A-listers, full-time warriors and the elite of the Outfit, uniformly kitted out in knee-length chain hauberks, greaves and vambraces of plate or steel splints on leather, round helmets with nasal bars, hinged cheek-pieces and mail-covered neck-flaps, and two-foot circular shields. Their weapons were lances, recurved bows made of laminated horn and wood and sinew, and long, single-edged swords with basket hilts; the shields were dark brown, with the stylized outline of a bear's head in crimson. His own helmet had the tanned, snarling head of a bear mounted on it; he'd killed the beast himself, shortly after the Change, with an improvised spear. From that, a great deal had followed.

A great deal including the Outfit's name, though that was Astrid's idea, as usual.
Aloud: “All right, Bearkillers. What would have been different if this was for real?”

“We'd have crossbows on our flanks, Lord Bear,” one of the infantry said, a stocky, freckled young man with shoulders like a blacksmith—which was what he was—leaning on a glaive. “When the charge stalled in front of the pikes, we'd have shot the shit out of them, killed a bucketful and made the others easy meat. Armor's not much help at close range like that.”

Havel nodded. A hard-driven arrow or crossbow bolt was just too damned dangerous to use in a practice match, even with a padded, blunt head, and having people standing around shouting
Twang! Twang!
as they pretended to shoot was sort of silly. Instead the referees had tapped on a certain percentage of the mounted troops with their batons, often starting furious arguments, while the missile troops were off shooting at targets.

“Hey,” one of the A-listers said. “If this were for real, we'd have been using
our
bows and that line of pikes would have been a lot more ragged before we hit it.”

Havel nodded again, but added: “Yeah, Astrid, that's true. But we're practicing to fight the Portland Protective Association, and the Protector's men-at-arms don't use saddle bows. Sword and lance only, and they rely on their own infantry for missile weapons. OK, we'll say that cancels out.”

He didn't add:
And there aren't many who can use a horse-bow like you, either.
It was true—everyone on the A-list was a good, competent shot, but Astrid was a wonder.
Your ego doesn't need any stroking, however.

Astrid Larsson pouted a little as she leaned her hands on the horn of her saddle. “I suppose so.”

She was twenty-three to her sister Signe's twenty-eight, with white-blond hair and huge blue eyes rimmed and veined with silver. They gave her face an odd, nearly inhuman quality despite its fine-boned good looks. She was intensely capable when it came to anything involving horses or bows, a fine swordswoman and in Michael Havel's view just one hair short of utter-raving-loon status. Unlike many, she'd been that way at fourteen,
before
the Change and its aftermath.

“Lord Bear,” she added, confirming his thought.

And she stuck me with that moniker and this damned taxidermist's nightmare on my helmet,
he thought.
Plus that shield…

Hers wasn't the standard outline of a snarling bear's head that was the blazon of the Outfit. It had a silver tree instead, and seven stars above it, around a crown. Her helmet was even stranger-looking, with a raven of black-lacquered aluminum on the steel, wings extending down the cheek-pieces and ruby-eyed head looking out over the nasal bar.

It's all those books she reads, those giant doorstopper things with dragons and quests and Magical Identity Bracelets of the Apocalypse.

She'd been obsessed with them when he first met her, and the ensuing decade had made her worse, if anything. He wished, very much, that she'd only been weird about archery and horses, but no such luck.

Not to mention she's become so popular and influential among the younger and loopier element. I can't really clamp down on it because that Ranger outfit she and Eilir put together are too fucking
useful,
dammit! OK, so she can be the Elf-Queen of the goddamned woods if that's the way she wants to play it.

Aloud he went on to the audience: “Here's the important thing. As long as that line of pikes stayed solid, the lancers couldn't get anywhere near you infantry types. And when they got crowded and stalled, they got tangled up bad. A lot of them would have died before they could disengage—which, incidentally, they'll have to practice more. Charging's easy; retreating without getting your ass reamed is a lot more difficult. So—it's official. The infantry wins today!”

Everyone cheered. The younger A-listers looked a bit sullen as they did, but
their
fighting morale didn't need bolstering; if anything, they tended to be a little reckless and cocky. It took serious effort and native talent to get onto the A-list, and the fact that their families were usually the ruling class of the Outfit, more or less, didn't hurt in the self-esteem sweepstakes either. An occasional ass-whupping by the horny-handed sons and daughters of toil did them good, in his opinion; that was one reason he'd been fighting on foot in today's match.

“Certainly, Lord Bear,” Astrid said again. “But once some gaps opened up, we could get in past the pikepoints.”

Havel nodded vigorously, then removed his helmet and handed it to a military apprentice—a teenaged aspirant to A-Lister status—and ran his hands over his bowl-cut hair. That was straight and coarse and still crow black in his late thirties, a legacy of his Anishinabe-Ojibwa grandmother. The high cheekbones and slanted set to his gray eyes might have been from her, or from the Karelian Finns who made up most of the rest of his ancestry; the sharp-cut features were startlingly handsome in a harsh, masculine way, emphasized by the long white scar that ran from the corner of his left eye and across his forehead. He stood just under six feet, and his lean frame moved with a leopard's easy grace under fifty pounds of armor and padding.

“Yeah, good point,” he said to his sister-in-law.

He gave the militia a glare, and they shuffled uneasily—which produced an alarming volume of clanks and clinks among two hundred people in metal protective gear.