S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

Motivation like that could turn a man into a berserker; or if combined with intelligence and self-control into someone very useful to his King.

“Let’s bring it all together and sample the taste of the stewpot,” Rudi said. “Now, Grand Constable.”

D’Ath nodded and raised her gauntleted hand and the wand of office, chopping it downward. A signal team nearby worked the lever of their heliograph, flashing the sun through an angle. Instants later trumpets blew below, half a dozen different varieties.

The Montivallan light horse had been busy at the deadly swirl of a horse-archery engagement, small parties sweeping past each other, rising in the saddles to shoot as they passed, advancing or retreating with eyeblink agility. Only occasionally would two bands clash hand to hand when one or the other miscalculated. A brief melee of shetes and sabers, the clash of steel on steel or the cracking thud of blades against the varnished leather of shields, a scream of war cries or just animal shrieks of rage and pain, then the combatants exploding outward with riderless horses galloping and bodies lying in the green grass.

At the sound of trumpets the Montivallans all turned tail and ran for the shelter of the woods as fast as their horses could carry them, turning in the saddle to shoot behind. The Cutters pursued, but cautiously-feigned retreats to draw an enemy in were the favorite tactic of all the vast interior lands of mountain and steppe and desert. The Cutters would be afraid of artillery, too, field catapults that outranged even the powerful composite bows. They didn’t make the machines themselves, and now that Boise was part of Montival they didn’t have allies to supply the lack. What they wouldn’t be afraid of, hopefully, was what was really waiting for them. Down there Oak Barstow Mackenzie, the First Armsman of the Clan, would be judging distances and preparing to give the signal.

About. .

“Now,” Rudi said crisply; it was the moment he’d have chosen.

Three thousand Mackenzies stood and threw off their disguising war-cloaks, trotting forward out of the final screen of trees. They were in open order, and they drew as they came, halting only when they needed to pull that last few inches. The savage snarl of the war-pipes sounded, raw and hoarse, and the inhuman roar of the Lambeg drums.

“Let the gray geese fly!” Rudi murmured to himself, what the bow-captains would be shouting down there. “Wholly together-shoot!”

The arrows flew upward at forty-five degrees for maximum range, two more flights in the air before the first came slanting down out of the sky and struck like steel-tipped rain. The loose mass of horse-archers wavered, men dropping clawing at the iron in their flesh, horses running in bucking frenzies.

“They’re really going to have to stop underestimating infantry,” d’Ath said thoughtfully, in a detached professional tone. “Particularly longbowmen. Everybody understands a pike when it’s pointed at them, but it’s taking them a while to realize foot-archers have three times as many bows per unit of front than mounted ones. Horses take up a lot of space.”

“It’s a bit late for them to learn. Now let’s see how desperate they are to knock back our vanguard.”

The cowhorns the Cutters used sounded in a series of snarling blats. The whole mass came forward after an instant’s wavering, and the contingent of the Sword of the Prophet moved up in support. . or to take advantage of the arrow-absorbing capacity of their light cavalry, depending on how you wanted to look at it. The Mackenzies were spread out, and they hadn’t planted their swine-feathers-the knock-down double-ended spears they carried to jam into the dirt and hold off horsemen with a hedge of points while they shot.

It would look like a tempting bit of arrogance by an overconfident invader, a chance to get in close with the shete and cut down footmen.

“There they go, taking the bait. Sure, and when something’s too good to be true, it usually isn’t true,” Rudi said. “But you’ll also seldom go wrong encouraging men to believe what they strongly want to be so.”

“Let’s see how Lord Maugis is at timing,” d’Ath said meditatively, raising a brow for permission to wait. He nodded; that was something you needed to know.

They waited a few moments more; Mathilda was looking a bit unhappy at the length of it by the end. She was a good competent field commander but a little more conservative in her style than Rudi. Or the Grand Constable-the gauntlet was just going up again when the Portlander oliphants sounded down below, long and shrill, a sound that somehow gleamed like polished metal in the sun, fit to raise the hair on the back of your neck.

“He’s good ,” the Grand Constable said. “Waited until the last minute but no longer.”

“Or we’re all three wrong in the same way,” Rudi said dryly.

He wished he were down there, ready to charge with the rest, but that would have been self-indulgent under the circumstances.

There was a concerted flicker from among the underbrush, as the knights walked their destriers forward. They’d had time to add the horse-barding for their mounts as well, or rather their varlets had; armor of articulated steel plates riveted to padded leather, covering for head and neck, shoulders and breast. It made the great beasts look like dragons uncoiling as they emerged into the sunlight, the more so for the touches of fancy, plumes nodding, rondels and silvered unicorn-horns on the chamfrons, spikes or brass inlay. There were five hundred of them, their formation a block of two staggered lines, a mass of muscle and hoof and steel that would make ground quiver hundreds of yards away once they got moving. The clatter and ring of the harness of men and horses carried clearly to where he waited.

More metal glittered as the low-held lances went up to the rest position, hand on the grip behind the bowl-shaped guard and the butt resting on the thigh. The trumpets screamed again, and the mass of horsemen began to move, first a walk, then a canter, the colorful pennants on the lances beginning to flutter, blazoned with the arms of knight and baron and count like the big kite-shaped shields. Then the fast pulsing call for the charge à l’outrance.

The horses were as well-trained as the men, and they rocked up to a controlled hand-gallop as the lancepoints fell in a rippling wave amid a crashing bark of:

“Haro, Portland! Artos and Montival! ”

“Go for it, ironheads,” d’Ath said. “Another chance to die with honor.”

The words were cool, but there was undertone of affection; Rudi reflected that the Grand Constable had mellowed somewhat over the last few years.

The Cutter horse-archers had learned enough not to try to play at handstrokes with Associate men-at-arms or their Bearkiller equivalents. With enough room to run and sting like an elusive cloud of wasps they could be very dangerous, but here they were caught between the onrushing lancepoints and the Sword of the Prophet frantically deploying and countercharging behind them; their only option was to slide away eastward, and that put them in the killing ground where the Mackenzie arrows still rained down. The men-at-arms slammed through the ones who remained without slowing, spearing men out of the saddle or just letting their chargers bowl the light cow ponies aside with their armored shoulders. The tall long-legged destriers were fast once they got going, if not as nimble as the quarter-horses, and they built up massive momentum.

The Sword of the Prophet answered with a charge of their own, but they’d never done well against the heavy metal of the western knights in this sort of stand-up fight. Twenty minutes later the whole Cutter force was in flight north, with half the Montivallan light cavalry ant-tiny figures in pursuit. A brigade of Fred’s Boiseans came swinging down the cracked, potholed pavement of the old US Highway 89 and out into the valley, with a regiment of Bearkiller cataphracts deploying into the open on their flanks; their leader Eric Larsson had argued furiously that they be allowed to launch the charge, and had still been grumbling about it when Rudi left him.