S. Stirling - Dies The Fire

"Listen for the horn calls, lad," he repeated again and again, or variations, with the odd slap on the shoulder. "Just do what you've practiced, and it'll all come right."

And if things go wrong, the order will be to scarper up-slope, right quick; we can climb the hillsides faster than the Protector's men; their armor is heavier and they're going to be a lot more tired.

All done, he settled down to wait behind a hundred-foot-tall lodgepole pine on the west side of the road, taking out a hardtack and gnawing quietly at it, his bow across his knees. It took him half an hour to eat it-if you went too fast, you risked damage to your teeth, which since the Change was no joke. It was about two o'clock when the scout stationed at the northward curve of the road stepped out onto the pavement, waved her bow overhead, then vanished back into the undergrowth.

"That's that, then," Aylward said, standing and dusting a few crumbs off the front of his jack.

"How many's that?" Havel asked, as they stopped to pick up a wounded straggler.

"Twenty," Luanne said. "Not counting the three deaders."

Havel made a tsk sound as he looked at the steep slopes on either side. In theory the Protector's men could have set an ambush; Josh's scouts were only a couple of hundred yards ahead, and the only way to get a horse into the forest would be to dismount and lead it. The enemy still had half again his numbers. In practice:

"The Protector thought he had a real army because they had weapons and ranks," he said to her father. "Big mistake."

Will Hutton nodded; he had his helmet pushed back, and now he pulled it back down by the nasal bar.

"Sure was," he said, looking as a Bearkiller stretcher party carried the wounded prisoner back towards the ambulance wagons. An abandoned bicycle lay tumbled not far away.

"What was that you said about these here?"

"Low unit cohesion," Havel said with a grin. "Aka, bugging out on your buddies. Gunney Winters would have been livid. Still, they may improve with time, if we let them."

He looked around, matching the terrain to the maps. "All right, people!" he said, louder. "Dismount by squads, water and feed the horses, and final equipment check. We're going to be caught up to them pretty soon."

"Timing's going to be tricky," Hutton said. "Don't want too much of a battle goin' before we get there."

Havel shrugged. "Well, that wasn't Lady Juniper's plan," he said. "We'll see what happens."

Aylward made a sound of disgust between his teeth. "Straight into it," he said contemptuously.

"You'd rather they were alert?" someone muttered.

He snorted; the Mackenzies had learned to do what the one in charge told them when a fight was brewing, but they weren't long on deference. And they did love to talk; probably picked it up from Juniper and her original crew.

The column of Protectorate troops halted and milled around when they saw the barricade; through binoculars he could see some of them looking over their shoulders.

There was shouting and shoving before they all got off their bicycles; eventually a banner eddied forward, black with the lidless eye in red, hanging from a crossbar on the pole. The enemy opened out into a deep formation, sixteen across and eight or nine deep, and began to trot forward; the man beside the flag had a plumed helmet, and was almost certainly the leader-the baron, in Protector Arminger's terminology. Besides the plume and the position, he was wearing a chain mail hauberk, and that was officer's garb in the Portland Protective Association's forces.

Probably has to lead from the front this time, Aylward thought. Or the others won't follow at all.

Lady Juniper's plan depended on demoralization. It was time to help that along:

He rose, throwing a wisp of dried grass in the air to gauge the wind direction, and looking at the extremely helpful banner to do the same for the target area. Seventy-five yards, give or take a foot; not too far:

"Now," he said, throwing off his cloak and plucking an arrow out of the ground to set it on the string of his war bow.

A signaler put his cowhorn bugle to his lips and blew. Huuu-huuu-huuuu, the weird dunting bellow echoed back from the hills. A banshee squeal answered it; this time they had four bagpipers. They stayed hidden, but all along the hillsides on. both sides of the road Mackenzie archers shed their war cloaks and stepped forward, bows in their hands.

The sudden appearance and rustle of movement combined with the eerie keening of the pipes to make them appear more numerous than they were; imagination painted scores more behind them in the trees. Aylward watched as the ranks eddied and milled, heads twisting this way and that-and behind them again. The baron beside the banner of the Lidless Eye drew his sword.

Well, I can read your bloody mind, mate. Neck or nothing, a charge is the only way you 're getting out. Got to put a stop to that.

Swift as a thought, he drew the string to the angle of his jaw, the heavy muscle bunching in his right arm, then let the string fall off the balls of his fingers. The cord went snap against his bracer; before the sensation faded the next was drawn, and the next, and the next. Pale and gray and directionless, the light was still good for shooting; he could see the slight glint as the arrow hit the top of its arc, and anticipate the sweet smooth feeling you got when you knew it was going to hit:

The bagpipes and the rustling and clanking of his own men must have masked the whistle of cloven air. The first arrow smashed into the face of the Protector's baron beside the nose. The steel point and six inches of the shaft came through just behind the hinge of his jaw, sending him turning in place with a high muffled shriek. The second hit him in the upper chest, made a metallic tink! sound as it broke two metal rings and sank almost to the feathers. The third struck between his shoulder blades as he continued the turn; that ended with his knees buckling and the armor-clad body falling limp with a thud and last galvanic drum of feet on the pavement. The conical helmet rolled away, its strap burst by the force of impact.

Aylward flung up his bow. The bagpipers fell silent, and the Mackenzie archers stood motionless, their bows up, the pointed-chisel bodkin heads of the arrows aimed down at the dense mass of men on the road. The silence was so profound for an instant that he could hear the sheet metal of the helm ring on the asphalt of the roadway.

His own mind could paint what came next; the whistling of the arrow-storm, the hundreds of shafts arching out and down, the punching impact on armor and flesh and bone, the screams of the wounded and dying:

And those laddies don't know that most of us can't shoot as well as I, or draw a hundred-pound stave. So their imaginings will be still more vivid and unpleasant.

A Mackenzie beside him raised a white cloth on the butt-end of a spear and walked forward, gulping a little as crossbows were leveled. He got to within talking distance of the men grouped around Arminger's standard, but when he spoke he pitched his voice to carry to the whole group:

"You'd better surrender," he said, keeping his voice neutral-getting their hackles up was the last thing he wanted. "I'm authorized to offer you your lives, food for the winter and homes for you and any families you had back at the fort-for everyone not guilty of war crimes."

The second-in-command swallowed and looked up from where he'd been staring, at the leaking corpse of the baron. Blood pooled under the slack arrow-transfixed face and spread; there was an astonishing lot in a human body, and it looked worse when it spread on a watertight surface like this. The fecal smell of violent death was muted by the chill of the air, but nonetheless final and unpleasant for that.

A bugle sounded from the northeast, and the clopping roar of hundreds of hooves on pavement. Every face in the Protector's force turned over their shoulder as the Bear-killers came in sight. They pulled up four hundred yards away, their armored bulk and their horses filling the roadway from verge to verge; heads swiveled back to the silent longbowmen on either side, ready to shoot.