John Ringo - There Will Be Dragons

After Kane was done and the lances recovered, Alyssa gave a demonstration with the horse-bow. She first demonstrated firing from a still horse at about seventy-five yards, putting three arrows into the center of the target just about as fast as she could draw and fire. After that she began to canter, putting an arrow into the central area of the target about every five or six seconds, then last she demonstrated the “Parthian shot,” turning on her horse as it was galloping away and firing. These last were… more or less in the target area. But Herzer could see how it would be a nasty situation to deal with on a tactical level.

After the demonstrations Kane told them off to their duties. Herzer was going to be one of the “zone riders,” in charge of managing a certain section of the main corral. He was supposed to move herd animals out of his sector and to the herding riders, break up dangerous activities, drag off any animals that were killed in his sector and otherwise handle any contingencies. Besides Diablo he would have two more animals to switch off to, an even larger bay gelding called Butch and a bad tempered palomino named Duchess. He’d have to lead them over himself but as long as Duchess was at the rear of the lead he wasn’t worried.

Before they headed out to the slaughtering corral Herzer trotted over to Alyssa, who was in last minute consultation with Kane, and waited until she nodded in his direction.

“Ma’am, is there any way I could try out that bow for a moment?” he asked, diffidently.

“You’ve shot before?” she asked.

“Not from horseback and I know I can’t shoot while riding. But I think I can hit the broad side of a barn from Diablo when he’s still.”

She looked at Kane and traded a look, then nodded and pulled out the bow. However, she then looked at his bulging forearms. Both of her own were guarded by bracers, but his were bare and the left would be turned into hamburger if he didn’t have some protection. She paused and traded a look of consternation with the younger man; there was no way that her relatively dainty bracers would ever fit over his arms.

“Hang on a second,” Kane said with a laugh and rode over to his hut. He went inside and emerged a moment later with a pair of metal bracers and another bow case.

“Really should be leather for bow work,” he said. “But see if these fit.”

Herzer tried them on and found that they fit fairly well. There was an internal leather strap arrangement that was somewhat adjustable and the bracers were, if anything, a tad large.

“Keep ’em,” Kane said, remounting. “I won ’em off someone a while back and have just been carting them around. I don’t use that kind of armor.”

Herzer accepted the bow and a quiver of arrows with a nod and then trotted out to the range. He carefully checked to make sure no one was going to be riding across the way and then stopped Diablo with a gulp. He realized that if he missed he was going to look like an idiot but he had to try it anyway. He took a moment to check the inside of his bracer to ensure that there were no protruding bits of metal or sharp edges that would strike the bowstring, then drew out an arrow. He kneed Diablo to a stop, gave him a quiet word, then took a breath and nocked the arrow. The draw on the bow was, as he suspected, at least sixty kilos but he’d fired worse and the recent “exercise” he’d had helped in the strength department.

He drew it properly, pushing the bow away himself while “standing” with the string, then took aim. He’d forgotten how much a string could cut into your fingers and then recalled Alyssa was wearing bowman’s gloves, very light gloves of thin leather. Nonetheless, despite the pain, he took a good aim and fired with a prayer to any watching gods. Diablo, bless him, didn’t flinch in the slightest.

The arrow flew straight and true and dead into the center of the target, sinking to the fletching. He fired two more, just to ensure that that wasn’t a fluke, and both were nearly as accurate. Then, despite the pain of his fingers and the fact that they appeared to have started bleeding again, he tried it at a walk, a trot and a canter.

At a walk he could get the arrows into more or less the center of the target at fifty yards. But he had to aim carefully and it was not a fast process. At a trot he was afraid that he’d lost a couple of Alyssa’s arrows deep in the woods. At a canter he was a bit better, it was a smoother ride than a trot anyway, but the arrows still were only “near” the target; one hit in the center more or less by a fluke but the other two missed low.

“Where’d you learn to use a bow?” Alyssa asked as he rode back up after retrieving the arrows.

“The same place I learned to ride a horse,” Herzer said with a rueful grin. “Stupid me, I kept all my stuff off-line rather than at my house or something. Or I’d be fully decked out. Lu, I had a beautiful bow,” he added sadly.

“Did you do horse archery?” Kane asked. “And what kind of bow?”

“No, I didn’t really fight from horseback at all; I’d dismount,” Herzer replied. “And it was a long recurve, hundred kilo draw.”

“A hundred ?” Alyssa said, her jaw dropping.

“Well, I couldn’t shoot it a lot,” Herzer admitted. “But when I hit a fisking orc, it stayed dropped!”

“You weren’t a reenactor, though,” Kane said with a frown.

“I… no I wasn’t,” Herzer replied. “I had some physical problems up until recently. I was training to start being a reenactor. Then the Fall hit. And here we are.”

“Well, if you’ll help me string this thing, you can carry Alyssa’s spare.”

“I think I can do that,” Herzer said. “And you’d better get me out one of those pig-stickers, too.”

“You said you hadn’t trained on horseback,” Kane said with a frown.

“I haven’t, but I’m thinking of the origin of the name,” Herzer replied with a grin.

The capture corral had been established where the Little Shenan met the big Shenan, just to the side of the main bridge for the Via Apallia. In fact the “funnel” fences, split logs mostly tied to trees, extended over the road. Their own corrals were just to the south so it was a short ride up to where everyone had gathered. Buildings had been erected along the main road and there were now steel kettles being filled with water and A frames being erected in front of them.

“For the slaughtering,” Kane said. “Get the water boiling hot, dip a pig in the water to loosen up the bristles. Other animals, too. And the frames are for slaughtering.”

“Are they going to slaughter all the pigs?” Herzer asked. “They’re important animals for a farmer.”

“Wild pigs aren’t anything for a new farmer to be handling,” Kane pointed out. “We’re not to kill any of the young ones. And the people along the fences are going to try to capture any that get through. But we’re going to slaughter all the big ones and smoke them. We don’t have enough salt to smoke them properly, but if you give them enough of a smoking they’ll last a while. Unless there’s a huge number of animals we’re going to go through the food pretty quick. There’s two types of deer that are going to be coming out, white tails and wapiti. The white tails will go right over the fences; kill any of them you can. But the wapiti can’t cross them so we’re going to collect them.”

There were four smaller corrals off the main corral, planted so that herd animals could be driven in. Herzer, having seen how “easy” it was to drive animals the previous day thought them optimistic.

He tied off his two spare horses to the corral and took up his position, on the “outside” corner and waited for the first animals to come in. There were people starting to line the fences, many of them with spears made from saplings. He saw Shilan in his sector and waved at her, then spotted Rachel walking along the line, a bag slung over her back. That brought him back to the fact that many of the animals that were going to be coming in were not going to be exactly friendly. He thought about riding over and talking but stayed in his place instead, trying to figure out what his “good” lines of fire were. If he missed a shot the arrow would just keep going and eventually the entire line of fences were supposed to be manned. That was going to make shooting problematic. That being the case he left the bow and the spear where they were.