S. Stirling - The Tears of the Sun

“What forces specifically, Sir Ruffin?” the Viscount asked a little more formally.

Ruffin chewed his lip and shook his head. “How good are you at kicking butt? The only one I think we can detach is going to be from House Stavarov’s contingent from County Chehalis; Sir Constantine and his menie , you know.”

“Piotr’s brat? He’d better not mess with me. But he won’t.”

“His reputation isn’t long on discipline.”

The heir to Odell snorted. “To hell with discipline, Sir Ruffin. He likes to fight . He’s a complete loss at knightly courtesy and social graces, in fact his vocabulary is limited to variations on drink and fuck and kill , but give him a chance to charge screaming at the head of his men-at-arms and he’s happy as a drunken pig in a grape-vat. That maneuver is the limit of his military knowledge but he does it well. And he’ll take my orders.”

Guelf glanced curiously over at the iron expression on Viscount Chenoweth’s face, but decided not to ask. Sir Ruffin nodded and picked up the yard square map. Guelf hurried to help him shake it gently and roll it up. Map paper was horribly difficult to press evenly and cost the earth. Only the Albany presses of Corvallis made this grade of paper. He tapped it very carefully and slid it into the carry tube for Ruffin.

The Viscount took off his helmet with a single pungent word as Ruffin mounted and left in a spurt of pebbles and dust, the pennants of his escort flapping as the lance heads glittered in the sunlight. He scrubbed his short, light-brown hair and growled.

“Thank you so very much for this gift of a helmet full of horse turds, Sir Ruffin! Guelf, get your men; take out those bridges. I don’t need to teach you how to suck eggs. What the hell happened to the Dúnedain? That op was tricky, but they’ve pulled off harder. Beelzebub’s arse with piles the size of plums, I wish I knew the details!”

Guelf didn’t answer, limiting himself to a duck of the head and thump of fist on breastplate in salute. He took off looking for Sir Harold Czarnecki, the other Gervais knight here, and waved their squires forward. But he bared his teeth in a sudden angry grin.

The Dúnedain, huh? Hope that bitch and her sidekicks all bought it. That would be a nice little dividend on Gervais’ arrears of revenge for my brother Jason’s death back in the Protector’s War! Baroness Mary will be pleased. And they promised me, uncle to the King , they did indeed promise me that. Which doesn’t mean throwing this fight. Uncle to the King of As Much As Possible, that’s the thing.

“Chezzy! Get the menie together; we’re on dirty tricks! Grab some mantlets, one of Thierry’s engineering wagons and let’s go burn and destroy!”

His men-at-arms and footmen. .

Odard’s men! he thought. But I’m here and my nephew isn’t.

. . roared with pleasure.

“Valentine! Valentine! St. Valentine for Gervais! Let the arrows fly! Valentine will suck them up! Face Gervais, face Death! ”

The battle banner of the barony waved in the hot sun with its black-andred image of St. Valentine, transfixed with arrows, on a yellow background.

Looks painful , he thought, not for the first time.

The crossbowmen slung their weapons and put their shoulders to the heavy wheeled shields, heaving them up on their props like wheelbarrows.

“Six men pulling, six pushing on each!” Guelf snapped. “Get to it!”

The spearmen moved their shields to their right shoulders and fanned out in a protective screen between the mantlets and the city walls.

“Dismount the lancers,” he decided. “We won’t have time to get the mounts out and warhorses can’t be wasted.”

There was grumbling at that, but Association knights trained to fight on foot when they had to, and being armored cap-a-pie the men-at-arms would stiffen the footmen nicely. The mantlets trundled along, bouncing on their spoked steel wheels over the irregular ground.

“Idle bastards,” Guelf said, looking around at the ruins of what had been Pendleton’s northern half.

Nobody had to ask who he meant. The wreckage of the suburbs here had mostly been left to decay naturally, with only occasional efforts to clear a field of fire on the north bank of the river-or perhaps that was simply people salvaging building material. Concrete floor-pads and basements and the ruins of burnt-out houses were still thick, and others had been converted into workshops or storage or piles of rubble had been shoved aside for truck gardens and turnout pasture. There were even occasional rusted automobile hulks littering the dirt-drifted, sagebrush-grown roadways, though they’d been stripped of useful items like springs and glass windows. Anywhere in the Association territories-or at least anywhere with an inhabited countryside and a city in the middle of it-would have been a lot neater.

The wagon with the engineering supplies followed behind, lurching and jerking as the heavy horses dragged it up the footpath east along the bank opposite Pendleton’s walls.

“Keep going!” Guelf called. “Eighth Street first, then work your way back!”

They broke out into open country as they traveled, east of the ruined suburb. There was the Eighth Street bridge, the last one actually fronted by the wall of the smaller modern city on the south bank. A couple of sentries pelted back across it, their yells thin with distance; a sally port beside the main gate opened for a second to their frantic pounding, and then slammed with a hollow boom as they dashed through. That looked as if everyone in the city was firmly focused on the battle shaping up to the southwest.

Good.

“My lord, where should I put this stuff?” a sergeant asked, gingerly holding a cloth tube of the mixture of powdered aluminum and iron oxide.

“The thermite? See there, where the crossbeams are riveted to the main support pillars? Pack it in there. Crossbowmen here, ready to give covering fire!”

The mantlets swiveled to face the city walls, trundled forward and dropped on their support props with a thunk. The crossbowmen took position behind them, thumbing bolts into the grooves of their weapons and leveling them through the firing slits. Working parties scrambled down the steep slope to the foundations of the bridge, men standing on each other’s shoulders to reach the vulnerable part he’d pointed out.

Guelf sweated more than running around in a sixty-pound suit of plate and carrying a fifteen-pound shield in ninety-degree heat demanded. Pendleton was notoriously sloppy, but Boise was equally notorious for paying tight-arsed attention to detail. And the CUT. .

His mind seemed to skip a beat. He blinked in confusion. What was I about to think? What-

“Done!” the sergeant called.

“Light the fuse. Back west, next bridge!”

The river turned a little south of west; the Main Street bridge was absurdly wide in the fashion of pre-Change construction, and the banks of the Umatilla were forested here.

“Sentries!” yelled Sir Harold, pointing.

Guelf looked up. Several men were standing on the wall, visible between the crenellations as light flashed off field glasses. One had a transverse crest of scarlet-dyed horsehair on his helmet.

Boise centurion, that one, he thought. The rest are Registered Refugee Regiment, no mistaking the red pants. The Pendleton Bossman, Carl Peters, must have ordered some of his household troops to stay back and protect his precious hide.

“Get going! They’re not going to stay asleep forever!”

Damn! he thought. It made sense to rush to the end of the job and work my way back, I thought; we have to take these down so they use the ones we want when they sally. At five hundred feet from the wall to us this one isn’t safe, that’s a long crossbow shot. Much less the next one, it’s barely half that. Should have taken the nearer ones out first before they got men here to harass the working parties. Crap! No help for it, got to get it done. They’ll be waiting for us at 10th; might even defend it.