Mitchell Smith - Kingdom River

"Sir… Sir!" Gomez rode up, shouting, miming listening, his hand cupping his ear. Rodriguez thought he meant that odd sound of thunder – then heard a trumpet call out of the fighting, an imperial call. The rally.

Why?

Rodriguez spurred Salsa to a gallop, drew his saber, and rode into the hammered dust of fighting, his guidon-bearer still calling after him.

There was, he thought, as he leaned to strike one of their wounded cuirassiers staggering past – there was an odd satisfaction in seeing the difficulty.

The ranks of northerners, that had swung so wide apart at Second Squadron's charge, were now slowly swinging shut to enclose it. Remarkable, such a maneuver, and accomplished by dismounted cavalry. Fine officers… .

The rally sounded again, Ticotin trying to keep his horsemen together – to drive deeper yet, break the trap's jaws… It would not work.

Rodriguez longed to charge into the fight. He felt that he could ride into the battle, gallop over the battle like an angel, and save his men. He spurred Salsa closer to the fighting, and rode against a file of men, bearded, covered with dust, clumsy in their high boots. One saw him, turned, and presented a lance-point. Rodriguez parried it aside, cut down at the man, struck something – perhaps only the lance shaft – and that man and all of them were gone, swallowed in clouds of dust, shouted commands, confusion.

Dust was in the colonel's mouth, but a breeze had come and bannered red haze aside to show clearly how Ticotin's troopers were dying, as if a great carnivorous plant – its petals treacherously open – now closed bright thorns upon them from either side.

More thunder behind him – odd sliding thunder. Gomez, that idiot, was shouting again… Ticotin was stuck in shit and would not get out, but Third Squadron was coming. Rodriguez turned in his saddle to wave them on and into a gallop. They'd be in time… but barely.

He turned to see their bannered ranks now spurring into the gallop – and saw, a moment later, the mountainsides coming down into the pass.

The steep slopes to right and left were suddenly brown and gray rivers of bounding, rolling, skidding boulders. A torrent of stone was coming down in landslides, great granite monuments tilting, toppling to swell those catastrophic currents.

Of course. The Light Cavalry archers had stopped shooting only to climb to the ridges… begin those slides of stone.

The sound was beyond sound; it buffeted Rodriguez like blows. Salsa shied and reared away.

He controlled the horse – had time to see Davila and his trumpeter, at the head of Third Squadron, both staring up like astonished children as the mountainsides fell upon them. Avalanches of rock, a flood of stone, flowed and thundered down into the narrow pass and over the horsemen. Here and there bright steel wavered for an instant, ranks of men and horses screamed – and were gone, vanished beneath tons of rumbling granite that seemed to come down forever, while dust billowed, eddied in the air.

… Perhaps forty, perhaps fifty men and horses – saved by miracles – staggered here and there as the last showers of stone, the last great boulders skipped, crashed, rolled and settled. Several of these horses had broken legs dangling. Many of the men, dust-coated, swaying in their saddles, were shouting warnings – as if what had already happened was only about to happen.

Rodriguez heard a trumpet call – a call unknown to him – back at the entrance to the pass. He turned Salsa's head and rode that way. Gomez reined up beside him. "How?" he said. "How?" – as if their ranks were equal.

The destroyed men were still shouting behind them. There were also screams, but not many.

Rodriguez smiled at his guidon-bearer as if they were old friends, the best of friends riding together. "How? By my misjudgment, and the northerners' commendable initiative."

"Ah…" Gomez nodded, apparently satisfied.

At the mouth of the pass, now only those northerners stood – though there were slight disturbances within their ranks as the last of Ticotin's men were pierced with lances or dragged from their big horses to be hacked to death.

"Yes," Rodriguez said aloud, and meant he'd been right before, to wish to ride into the fighting. "Go with God," he said to his guidon-bearer – drove in his spurs, and galloped out of the pass toward the ranks of his enemies. He felt very well, really quite well… though he was saddened to hear Gomez following, riding behind him. Well, the man was a fool… always had been.

The fighting dust had settled, so the southern sun shone richly to warm the men and horses still alive. Now, near silence lay as if there'd been no noise in these mountains, no shouting, no trumpets, no hammering steel on steel in Boca Chica Pass.

It was a familiar quiet, the stillness after battle. Sam Monroe closed his eyes, eased his muscles to enjoy it. He was sitting on a dead horse, its skirts of chain-mail dark with blood and shit. Its rider lay with it; he'd been caught with a leg under the animal when it fell, and had been killed there.

Sam hadn't drawn his sword through most of the fighting. He might have; he'd met several of their horsemen in the battle's dust and fury. It had been odd – perfect Warm-time word. Odd.

He'd ridden here and there, watching his men maneuver – and so well, obedient to their officers and sergeants as if they'd been veteran infantry, never cavalry at all. Wonderful, really, and all the more appreciated when a man simply rode – his worried trumpeter reining behind – as if terrible noise, dust, savage struggles, and the screams of hurt horses and dying men had nothing to do with him at all.

He'd met two cataphracts. They'd spurred at him, then passed, never striking – as if he were a person separate from the fighting. At the battle's end, one imperial, galloping blind out of clouds of dust, had come swinging his battle-ax.

Sam had swayed to the side and away from the ax's stroke – drawing sword as he did – then straightened in his saddle to slash the cataphract just under his helmet's nasal. And as the injured man reined past, spitting teeth and blood, Sam struck again, a back-stroke and much harder, to the nape. Though the chain-mail there caught the sword's edge, the blow's force broke the man's neck, and his charger trotted him away dying, his head rolling this way and that.

… Sam opened his eyes to hoofbeats as Howell Voss rode up, looking furious. An ax, that must have been swung very hard, had chopped his helmet's steel, snicked off the tip of his left ear. Voss, bareheaded now, was holding his bandanna to it.

"Howell… Lucky for the helmet."

"I know it." Blood still ran down Voss's wrist. "You want their colonel's head to take back?"

"No, don't disturb their colonel. Leave him lying with his troopers." There was a spray of blood across Sam's hauberk.

"You hurt?"

"Not anymore," Sam said. Just the sort of vainglorious phrase the army would like, with a defeat so thoroughly revenged. The sort of phrase that seemed to come to him more and more easily.

Small black shadows printed across the battlefield. The ravens had come to Boca Chica.

"We have two hundred and eighteen prisoners, Sam – we finished the worst wounded. Nine of the prisoners are officers."

"Behead those officers. And please tell them I regret the necessity."

"… Yes, sir." A battle-made gentleman himself – his mother a tavern prostitute, his father a passing mystery – Voss had a soft spot for officers.

"Someone else can do it, Howell."

"I'll do it."

"Okay." That strange Warm-time word 'okay.' Yet everyone seemed to know what it meant, without explanation. "We'll let the troopers go. Leave them twenty of their horses for the wounded, and a few bows and battle-axes in case bandits come down on them."