Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (25 page)

The monk crossed himself and spoke more gently: “Kyrie eleison. Kriste eleison. Mary pierced with sorrows, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our deaths.”

Shouts and bugle-calls ran down the Corvallan ranks: “Set sights for two hundred yards!
Prepare for push of pike!
”

The pikemen began to stamp, running slowly in place, a thunder of hobnailed boots and rattling armor. The long honed blades at the end of the sixteen-foot weapons glimmered as they moved. Between each pike-phalanx was a triple line of crossbowmen, standing and kneeling. The formations moved, like grass swaying a little at this distance, as each set the aperture sight on their weapon by turning a knob over the locking bridge. A little circle near your eye, the blade at the front, bring it down onto the target…it’s just a target, not a young man missing his mother and wishing he were back in a cold shed mucking out half-frozen manure instead…

Rudi murmured to himself what the officers and sergeants would be repeating as they paced behind the lines with their half-pikes or stood sweating in the line:

“
Steady, steady…open your eyes, Sally, they won’t go away ’cause you don’t look at them! Pick your man, everyone pick your man, no firing into the blue…pick your man, aim low, Jesus love us Miguel are you trying to poke of those fucking gliders in the ass or what? Get that thing level…”

Fire-shot was arching back and forth now, trailing smoke. The artillery were working with desperate speed, trying to take each other out before formations could be broken. The screams where the flame landed were loud enough to hear, like needles of sound through the thunder and brabble.

“Volley fire by ranks at two hundred yards.
Don’t
forget to adjust your sights between rounds. Front rank,
make ready
. Present!
Aim!
In volley…
fire!
”

There was a huge blurred unmusical sound of vibrating string and steel as thousands of crossbows released, then an instant later something
like bucketfuls of pebbles tossed hard on sheet iron and logs. Men stumbled all along the Boise front as the short heavy bolts punched into their big shields. Others dropped as the bolts went through or slipped between, their pyramid-shaped heads smashing into meat and bone.

“Reload, load in nine times! Second rank, make ready…present…aim…in volley
fire!
Reload in nine times! Third rank, make ready…present…aim…in volley
fire!
Reload in nine times! First rank, make ready…present…aim…in volley
fire!
—”

The front of the Boise formations was eroding like sand hit by steady rain, but it closed up as it advanced. The shields of the rear files went up, a big sloping roof presented to the front, and the men were shouting in cadence as they picked up the pace to a slow pounding run:

“
Hooo
-rah!
Hooo
-rah!
Hooo
-rah!—”

Rudi made his teeth unclench and his fist unknot on the reins.
Here I am, High King and commander of the host, and I’m more helpless than the least of those stretcher-bearers.

A pair of them went by, the wet canvas dripping beneath its burden.

At least they’re
acting,
not sitting on a horse making an example!

The Corvallan bugles blared, and officers shouted:

“Pikes will advance to contact! By the left—at the double-quick—charge!

The pike-hedges charged at a controlled pace, stepping off in unison from their jog in place into instant motion despite the weight of the long weapons and their own armor. At the same instant, tubae snarled and men shouted in the enemy ranks, harder to hear. The order was instantly clear to see, though; every single man in the front rank of the enemy pivoted on his left heel and threw one of the heavy six-foot javelins he carried.

A cloud of them rose and fell, seeming to accelerate as they sleeted down into the pikemen. Then the second rank threw, and the first again, and the third, and the second, and the first, in a continuous stuttering ripple until all of them had launched their three spears. Whole clumps fell across the front of the Corvallans, and here and there pikes crossed as files tangled. The rest continued, stamping over the bodies of the dead and the ones who screamed and writhed with whetted iron in their flesh, or picked themselves up and staggered forward again when the heavy
spears bounced or slid from the hard overlapping plates of their armor, but sheer momentum knocked them down.

Then a uniform crashing bark of:

“
U-S-A! U-S-A!”
from the Boiseans.

Hands snapped down to the short broad-bladed stabbing swords hung at their right hips and flipped them out, held angled up to thrust or hack down towards an ankle. They tucked their shoulders into their shields and charged towards the advancing bristle of pikes.

The sound of impact was muffled but enormous when that many armored forms ran into each other, and it went on for seconds before it settled down into a roaring blurr. The Boiseans took the points of the pikes on their shields, shoving with their comrades pushing at their backs or lofting more pila overhead into the mass. Men pushed, grunting and heaving, hacking at the pikepoints and trying to cut them free of the shafts, the swordblades clanging and showering sparks as they struck the long lappets that protected the wood behind the heads. Here and there the Boisean line buckled where three or four pikes pushed against a single shield; more held overarm smashed forward in two-handed stabs into faces and shoulders and chests with all the wielder’s weight behind them. In other spots the Boiseans bashed and shoved and slid their way to closer quarters, swords busy.

And the crossbows shot, and shot, and shot; the rear ranks of the Boiseans threw volley after volley of pila, and Rudi could see light two-wheel wagons coming up behind them and men passing out bundled spears. The artillery on both sides was arching its loads over the heads of the locked scrimmage in front, landing in the rear ranks with splashing fire or the snapping impact of heavy iron.

He nodded grimly, measuring distances with his eyes. The two forces had simply run into each other and were locked like a pair of elk bulls in the mating season. Horns together, muscles rigid—nothing moving, but huge forces balanced in tension threatening to buckle through at any instant.

And this is the most expensive type of fight there is,
he thought.
Equal forces of good soldiers head-to-head, neither willing to take a step back, hammering away and in spare moments pouring down some water and cursing the idiot who got them into this.

As if to echo the thought, Brigadier Peter Jones rode up. He was in three-quarter armor himself, with the visor of his sallet raised like Rudi’s, looking like a very large billed cap; beneath it his face was lined and grizzled, that of a tough-fibered fit man in his fifties. His command staff were behind him, and a standard-bearer with a flag that showed an orange beaver’s head on brown, its vaguely anthropomorphic face locked in a scowl. Usually Corvallans took a squad of young women in sweaters and short skirts along on campaign, who performed arcane ritual acrobatics and chants before action started; it was some legacy of Oregon State University, a brotherhood of learning which had formed the seed-crystal of survival there. They’d skipped that this time—the girls were cross-trained as nurses or clerks or whatnot, of course, and would be busy anyway.

“Sir. Ah, Your Majesty,” Jones said.

Rudi suppressed an impulse to say,
Ah, and it’s still Rudi, Pete
.

The man was an old friend of the family; Juniper Mackenzie had met him the day after Rudi was conceived, when he’d been a very junior officer in the newly-founded military of Corvallis, and he’d been a frequent visitor at Dun Juniper all Rudi’s life. But the situation required a certain formality.

Jones went on: “We’re holding them for now. But if they put in further reserves, I’m going to need reinforcements myself. Most of my men are already in the line and it’s too damned early in the day to be fully committed.”

From the look in his tired blue eyes he wasn’t expecting the help he needed; every senior commander knew how stretched they were. There was a certain brute arithmetic to war, all things being equal, and no prize at all for coming in second. Rudi nodded to him and returned his salute; Corvallis used the old American style…like Boise.

Nothing wrong with that. Boise is not the enemy; the CUT and its agents are.

“You’ll have reinforcements,” Rudi said. “I’m stationing the Queen of Angels Commonwealth contingent behind you here, and they’re to be under your command. That should do to plug any holes, and you’ve got the Bearkillers south of you.”

Jones’ face split in a grin of pleasure for a moment. The Commonwealth wasn’t the largest contingent in the motley alliance that made up Montival’s host, but it was high-quality. And it included the Knight-Brothers of Mt. Angel, who were also not numerous but universally respected…or feared.

“I’m glad you can spare them, Your Majesty!” he said.

Rudi held up the crumpled dispatch. “Around ten thousand of Boise’s troops have decided they don’t want any part of this battle and are sittin’ it out,” he said.

Jones swore in amazement, and Rudi raised a cautionary hand: “So are
our
three thousand Boiseans…but that was by design and the advantage is heavily to us. The sit-down means I can strip that part of our line naked at acceptable risk.”

The Corvallan commander swore again, delightedly and fluently, then:

“Lady Juniper’s Luck! Or High King Artos’, now.”

“It evens the odds, no more. I’ll not take more of your time. Hold them for me, Peter. Just hold them.”

Jones saluted and wheeled his horse about. Rudi cast another glance at the jammed mass below, then over his shoulder at the nearest observation balloon; messages were flickering up and down the line of them. Ignatius closed in at his side as they turned their horses north, along the roadway that paralleled the Montivalan position for most of its length.

“Ah,” he said, grinning. “Now it’s
my
compatriots, Your Majesty.”

A force was approaching from the east, out of the stop-zones where his all-too-scanty reserves were deployed, the foot marching beneath the banners of their guilds and confraternities. A column of horsemen in full armor led them, visors up but lances in rest and shields on their arms. The gear was much like that used by Association men-at-arms, but colored a plain medium brown, and all the long teardrop shields the same with a black raven and cross—the emblem of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict. They were singing and riding at a slow walk to keep pace with the infantry and spare their chargers; Rudi recognized the tune as a Christian hymn much used around Yule—“Good King Wenceslas,” he thought—but the words weren’t familiar:

“I like to see men go to a fight in good spirits,” Rudi said. “We’re all going to need spirit like that before the day’s over.”

“I think many in your host have it, Your Majesty,” Ignatius said soberly. “They fight for love—of people and family, a cause close to the heart, a dear familiar place—and that is stronger than hate.”

He signed the air before him with the cross, and the bearded monk leading the approaching force with the banner hanging from the crosspiece of his staff gravely returned it, then smiled like a delighted child.

“They’re all going to need it,” Rudi said. “It’s their battle, more than mine. And they must win it for me, and for us all, down to the lowliest crofter with a pike or most junior squire at his lord’s heel.”

T
he High Queen’s party cantered forward, her banner of the Lidless Eye taking the breeze beside the triangle-and-delta of the Grand Constable’s; another lance carried the Crowned Mountain and Sword of Montival between them.

Royal squire Huon Liu spat aside to get the harsh alkaline dust out of his mouth; tens of thousands of shod hooves and hobnailed boots had ripped the thin sere grass of late summer here on this stretch of the Horse Heaven Hills, and the few rains hadn’t been enough to lay the light volcanic soil beneath. Dust blew tawny about the fetlocks of the horses, and the rays of the westering sun behind them turned it to a mist of gold all along the front where the armies had met and clashed and parted since dawn.

“Grit gets right into your teeth, doesn’t it?” Lioncel de Stafford said quietly.

“Yeah,” Huon said.

He gave his friend a look; the dust of a hard day made him seem older and Huon was struck again with how much he looked like the Grand Constable, which was sort of odd when you thought about the…

Complex
, Huon decided, pleased with his own sophistication.
Complicated.

…
complex
family arrangements. Though you never knew how much of the rumors were true…Thinking about some of them was enough to make you shift uneasily in the saddle at the sinful images. Rather intriguing sinful images, at that; he was dolefully sure that “impure thoughts” were going to figure in his next confession, which was sort of doubly embarrassing when they were sinful thoughts about your friend’s
mother,
of all people.