Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (21 page)

Sorta shelve the rivalries. Like my sorta in-laws. I’m married to their boss-lady’s daughter, Rudi’s half sister. Same dad, Mike Havel, the guy who founded the Bearkillers and killed Norman Arminger ten years later. But his widow
is
the boss-lady of the Bearkillers for all that they’ve got councils and elections and she really didn’t appreciate
her hubby getting Rudi’s mom Juniper knocked up before
she
got hitched to him. Or Rudi being the big bossman, instead of one of her kids. My mother-in-law, Signe Havel, nee Larsson…Damn, but there are some
scary
womenfolk in this part of the world!

The troops had left their bicycles farther back, with the ambulances and forward aid stations. They were deploying at a jog-trot from column of march—the denser formation that was quicker for movement—into the longer blocks in which they’d fight. Doing it smoothly, too, only the occasional shout or rat-tat-tat-tat of drums and blare of bugle under the hard many-fold thump of boots. The Bearkiller infantry weren’t the A-List, which was what their Outfit called its full-time elite fighters; they were militia, but it was damned
good
militia. The only way you got out of serving in time of war among Bearkillers was to be pregnant, nursing, or a cripple and from what he’d heard they practiced a lot.

As he watched, the heavy infantry stopped and unslung the twin eight-foot poles they were carrying across their backs and then fitted them together. A metal sleeve clipped them into one sixteen-foot pike, topped with a spearhead shaped like a double-edged dagger the length of a forearm; that was an ingenious trick, and gave you a shorter spear as an alternative weapon for close-quarter work like storming a wall. The pikemen wore visored sallets, and jointed steel-plate armor covering their torsos, arms to the hands, and lower bodies to the knees. What they called three-quarter armor here, and in a mass they looked like so many walking beetles, a murderous ordered bulk of steel and muscle and wood.

Their thirty-five companies were eight ranks deep and thirty long; each suddenly bristled like a hedgehog as the command rang out:

“Pikes up…Ground pikes! Stand at ease!”

Thousands of the steel-shod butts thumped into the ground, like a single sound. Ingolf nodded in approval as the Richlanders and Sioux threaded their way through the formation, passing between the companies like smoke through a picket fence. The Bearkillers were as immobile as a rattler coiled under a rock; even the pikepoints didn’t waver as the breeze caught them, and there was a lot of leverage in those things. It needed more than just muscle to hold one steady, though it needed muscle to start with.

I feel better about this now,
he thought; appraising troops he had to rely on was a professional reflex ground in by long habit.

Drill
mattered
, and never more so than when men were moving something as awkward as a pike around. He didn’t have to imagine the jammed-up mess a pike phalanx could collapse into if it all went into the chamberpot; all he had to do was remember it. And the screaming mass of dead and dying men and hacking riders that had followed when the line broke, and his own blind fear and rage as death came avalanching at him and his.

Christ, the things I do!

Behind each block of pikes were two more files of men armored much the same but carrying glaives instead, six-foot shafts with a heavy pointed chopping-stabbing blade on the end and a cruel hook welded to its back; they would move quickly to contain any threat the pikes couldn’t handle. Between each block of pikemen were units of crossbows—less strictly crossbow
men
, since a substantial proportion seemed to be women. They wore open-face helmets and the sort of articulated breastplate he had on himself, carried sword and buckler, but depended on the lever-cocked bolt throwers they carried at port arms across their chests. Even with the cunning mechanical assist, the weapons were slower to shoot than a bow, but they had plenty of range and they hit damned hard. Plus you didn’t have to start at six and train every day to be really good with them.

It’s no wonder the Mackenzie idea of a pleasant afternoon is herb tea, crumpets, a sing-along and archery practice. Or archery practice followed by beer and a pig-roast and a sing-along. Or any damned thing combined with archery practice. I swear they take those bows to bed with them and shoot arrows into the ceiling in the intervals between making babies.

The batteries of springalds and scorpions and twelve-pounders that also waited along the line of foot soldiers could throw their four-foot darts and cast-iron roundshot and globes of napalm farther yet. He was glad to see them, but he still didn’t like them or the crews who were digging them in, throwing up waist-high earth berms in front and spreading their trail legs behind and working the aiming wheels to make sure the elevation and traverse was smooth, while handlers led the six-horse teams to the rear.

He didn’t know any soldier who did like the damned things, artillerists aside. They killed men beyond bow-range like a boot on an ant, and there was nothing you could do but pray and close ranks over the dead and screaming maimed.

With any luck they’ll spend most of their time shooting at each other.

That happened sometimes.

The Bearkiller cavalry were farther back, off to the south in a brown mass topped with the thread-thin lances and the bright reflection from their heads, a standing menace like a poised sword. A command party cantered from there over towards the Richlanders and Sioux in a flutter of banners.

“Your in-laws,” Rick Three Bears said. “Better you than me, cousin.”

“I’ve seen worse. Rudi’s mother-in-law is
Sandra Arminger
, for God’s sake.”

Rich shuddered a little theatrically. “Yeah. Met her last year when Dad came out to negotiate the alliance. Real motherly type.”

The funny thing was that it was true…as far as looks went; she was small and slightly plump and you could imagine her with a tin baking tray of cookies in her hands, or at least pouring afternoon tea in a garden. For that matter, Sandra really did have her daughter Mathilda’s interests at heart.

Stone-cold, genius-intelligent manipulative killer-by-proxy heart.

He’d met plenty of men who’d slash you into bloody gobbets in a rage—he’d been that man, now and then. Sandra killed like a housewife picking a chicken for the pot.

The Bearkiller leaders drew rein. Eric Larsson might have been Ingolf Vogeler, a few years older and blonder and a missing left hand replaced with a steel fist and maybe a hair less self-control. He was the Bearkiller military commander, pretty much. Signe Havel was his fraternal twin, a tall blond woman in her forties, tautly fit and dangerous as a wolverine, and ran the civil side of things—though she looked at home in that armor too. Her son Mike Jr. was beside her, and
he
was a pretty good kid, a little older than Mark. He looked a lot like a younger version of Rudi, in fact, except that his hair was wheat-yellow rather than copper-gold. Their
faces had the same chiseled handsomeness, which was apparently the way Mike Havel had looked.

Goes to show you can’t always judge someone by their parents. Of course, Mathilda’s father Norman was a complete bastard and all-round evil monster shit, by all accounts, and her mother’s a
polite
and
smiling
monster, but
Matti’s
fine.

Right now the twins were both all business. “You’ve got a couple-thousand Cutter cavalry chasing you?” Eric asked.

“You betcha,” Ingolf said. “Infantry following them, probably, but we couldn’t punch far enough through their shielding screen to be sure. The balloons should confirm one way or another soon.”

“Yeah, Rudi thought they’d poke hard here too, and we got intel confirmation,” Eric said. “Heavy column of Boise regulars, say thirty thousand foot minimum and as many batteries of artillery. They want to knock us back away from the river here, that’s their opening move and pin as much of our reserve as they can. Should be coming into view any time now, but we’re ready for them. Well, we and the Corvallans—they’re coming in on our left as soon as they get their asses in gear. Hopefully before noon, or sunset, or dawn tomorrow. We’ll cover that flank with our cataphracts until they’re in place.”

“How’d we find out exactly where the Boiseans were going in?” Ingolf said, impressed.

Eric grinned. “Your wife—both my nieces—and the rest of the Legolamb Brigade of the Dúnedain. They got direct observation on the Boisean’s line of march and they took a really communicative and useful prisoner. I didn’t know elves could have eyepatches too.
Arrrrr, matey
,” he added, which for some reason seemed to amuse both him and his sister.

Maybe some family joke
, Ingolf thought.
Or maybe some pre-Change thing. Those two were eighteen when it happened—not really Changelings all the way. I am, for all practical purposes. I was six and I can’t really remember the old world, and Mary
certainly
is.

“And now we get to take a whack at the people who killed my little sister,” Eric added.

“
And
the ones who cost my daughter that eye,” Signe said.

His smile turned into something you might expect to see coming out
of the woods at night. So did Signe’s, and for an instant looked even more gruesome; she and Astrid hadn’t gotten on, and she’d quarreled with Mary and Ritva too, but family was family.

Damn, but I’m glad they’re not
my
enemies
, Ingolf thought.
The official line is that only the Boise
government
is really an enemy; their troops are just friends who don’t know it yet. I don’t think Eric’s enthusiastic about making fine distinctions, or Signe either—though she’ll make sure he follows orders; she’s colder-blooded that way.

It was odd hearing someone referring to Astrid Larsson as a kid sister, too; though of course that was how Eric would remember her.

Another burst of code from the balloon brought Ingolf’s head up; that and the familiar massed drumming of hooves. The Cutters surged into view, a massive clot of horsemen. Eric made a signal, raising his hand and chopping it down ninety degrees.

“
Shoot!
” he called.

Trumpets and kettledrums blared and hammered. The artillery along the Bearkiller front all cut loose within a second or two of each other. Ingolf squinted into the sun as the four-foot javelins arched out. Scores of them hit the Prophet’s horsemen all at once. He winced, even though it was nearly a thousand yards away. They kept coming, though, at a fast canter.

Nothing wrong with their instincts,
he thought.

Running
towards
trouble was the right reflex to have, even if it had to be controlled by second thoughts.

Another gesture by Eric, and drums and trumpets rang again. The scorpions and twelve-pounders were firing roundshot now, globes of cast steel. You could just see them traveling through the air, a whistling sound under the
tung-whack!
of heavy truck springs letting go and the throwing-arms and slides hitting their stops. Where they struck men and horses
splashed
, and the metal globes went bounding and tumbling along the ground for scores of yards, breaking legs like matchsticks.

“Pikepoints front…
down!”

There was a bristling ripple all along the Bearkiller line as the call was transmitted by the drums and bugles and fifes. The front five ranks of pikes came down level, the first three held underarm at waist height, the next two chest and shoulder-height. Each block was a solid wall of staggered
glittering points, with three ranks at the rear still upright and ready to step into any gaps.

“By the left…left
march
…Forward!”

Trat-rat-tat-rat-tat
, and the wall of blades began to walk. There was a crashing bark from ten thousand throats:

“
Haakaa päälle!
”

That was the Bearkiller war cry. Mike Havel had been about half Finnish by ancestry, despite the Czech name an immigrant great-grandfather had been landed with by a petty clerk utterly unable to spell or pronounce the original arm-long string of Karelian consonants. For the Outfit he founded he’d adopted the old battle chant that had once had half of Europe crowding into its churches to pray:

From the terrible Finns, Lord deliver us!

“
Haakaa päälle!
”

“What’s that mean?” Mark asked as they nodded to the Bearkiller leaders and turned their horses away. “Colonel Ingolf Uncle, sir.”

“
Hack them down!
more or less.” Ingolf grinned. “Mary filled me in on it.”

A roar to make the earth shake: “
Haakaa päälle!
”

“Hack them down!
” Rick said. “It’s got a certain earthy simplicity. I like it. And over there, they don’t.”

Ingolf grinned wider and shook his head, the particular expression a man got at seeing an enemy suffer; there wasn’t going to be
anyone
very happy over there on the other side just now. Major Jaeger reined in beside him as the First Richland and the Sioux fell into column and sat their horses behind the advancing infantry, amid the ambulances and the light supply wagons tensely ready to dash forward and bring wounded out or sling bundles and crates of crossbow bolts and artillery ammunition and spare pikes and whatnot. A lot of them were teenagers too young to fight, or other noncombatants. The Bearkillers had brought everyone who could do something useful, and from the looks they were organized right down to the boot-laces.

“Damn, they’ve got sand going straight in from the march like that!” Jaeger said, grinning; there was a spatter of someone else’s drying blood in his brown beard, and he absently rubbed at it. “That is a pretty sight.”

Rick Three Bears chuckled as he finished doing some quick work on a nick in the edge of his shete with a whetstone and slid it home in the fringed, beaded scabbard hung from his saddlebow. He preferred to rely on the two long knives strapped to his thighs if he was dismounted.