The identity of the men they’d ambushed was fairly clear from their mixed gear, which was the sort of thing a Rancher’s retainers put together from what came to hand, and from the common element: the rayed golden sun of the Church Universal and Triumphant. The younger Dúnedain behind her nodded solemnly; those words
were
from the Histories after all, and apt.
It was the quiet time when sick men died, not-quite-dawn, and the blood of men and horses looked more black than red; chilly enough to make it smoke a little too, though the days were already mild even this far inland. It made an iron undertone to the sweet cool smell of spring and green growth; a few trees beside the roadway had already burst their swelling buds to show a mist of green. A quivering birdcall sounded, and the Rangers on the slope looked sharply southwestward. Another call followed and they relaxed; just afterwards the first clatter of hooves sounded on the old asphalt of the roadway, patched with pounded gravel. A spray of light cavalry went through first, several score local levies riding with arrows nocked on the strings of their recurved saddle bows.
I’ll go with them
, Eilir signed.
We’ll have to coordinate.
She swung into her saddle and trotted over to the local nobleman leading the horse-archers, who was in three-quarter armor himself; this far east the Association produced its own ranch-style fighters. John Hordle followed—he rode a destrier-bred warmblood even when in light gear, as at present—and a file of a dozen Dúnedain
ohtar
.
Then a heavier drumbeat on the broken, patched asphalt, and a long column of heavy cavalry came up the roadway, the butts of their twelve-foot lances resting on their right stirrup-irons and their kite-shaped blazoned shields across their backs. The riders were knights and men-at-arms in plate cap-a-pie from the sabatons on their feet to the bevoirs that guarded their chins, the metal of their harness bright with the polish and chamois leather and elbow grease of squires and varlets.
They’re going to fight
¸ she decided.
The destriers are barded. She
might
have told me in advance, rather than just saying “if circumstances allow.”
The figure at their head reined aside, warhorse looking almost insectile behind the laminated armor; the raised curved visor of the sallet showed a face which was . . .
Not all that different from me
, Astrid admitted grudgingly.
They were both around five foot ten, both blond, both in their late thirties, and both moved with a leopard’s assurance. The Grand Constable had gray eyes rather than blue, and her face was a little harsher-boned, but otherwise they might have been sisters.
And we’ve hated each other for what . . . nearly fifteen years now. Since the War of the Eye. Since I killed Katrina Georges, and even worse, since I
spared
Tiphaine’s life, which she’ll never really forgive. Even after she saved mine at Pendleton last year . . . which
I
find rather hard to forgive, may the Valar forgive
me
.
“My lady Astrid,” Tiphaine said; or at least her lips did, in a coolly polite tone that probably disguised something like
you gibbering lunatic
.
She bowed in the saddle with impeccable precision—acknowledgment of Astrid’s status as sovereign of an independent realm, albeit not
her
sovereign, as opposed to her own high military rank and middling social status within the Association’s nobility.
“My lord Alleyne.”
That to Astrid’s handfasted husband, with a bow fractionally deeper than that to an equal, since he was a ruler’s consort. He replied in kind, with a minuscule lift of one pale eyebrow.
“Hirilen o Ath,”
Astrid replied, then at the blank look remembered to shift to the Common Tongue and repeat it in English: “My lady d’Ath.”
You orc
, she added to herself.
No, not an orc. A Black Númenórean? Yes, that would fit. But a
very dangerous
one.
“Thank you for the report, my lady, my lord,” the Grand Constable went on. “Very complete, and very convenient since we’re out of heliograph communication with Castle Waitsburg for the moment. I’m glad to hear they haven’t deployed caltrops. And you took out their scout network very neatly indeed.”
“Thank
you
for being so timely,” Alleyne said. “They’re going to notice within ten minutes when they don’t get a man going back to check in; they’re not stupid. I trust all goes well with Lady Delia?”
“My Châtelaine is in excellent health, but pregnant. Again,” Tiphaine said, with the slightest hint of a grave wink. “Now let’s get to work.”
“You’re going to try and break the siege?” Alleyne asked. “And not just raid them?”
His smooth voice still held a trace of the officer-class Englishman he’d been before he arrived during the War of the Eye to court and win her; Astrid thought it added a touch of distinction to his Sindarin too. The way some of her folk treated the “r” sounds or butchered the vocalic umlauts . . . but at least the Noble Tongue was being spoken again, here in the Fifth Age of the World. That love of the Histories was what had first brought them together.
Well, that and he
looked
so dreamy
, she admitted.
And the charm, and his laugh, and that he’s so smart.
“We’re going to try,” Tiphaine said. “Break through, destroy the siege works, reinforce and resupply the castle and evacuate the non-combatants at least. Make them commit their field force to reestablish a siege, and tie down more men here. For once I think we’ve gotten inside their decision curve; it’ll make the—”
“Special mission, yes,” Alleyne said crisply. “We’ve been briefed.”
“—disguise for the special mission more convincing if we do them some real damage. A raid with this strong a force would look too much like a demonstration to cover something else unless it had an objective of commensurate importance.”
They all swung into the saddle and moved forward, like the ghosts of horsemen in the dawn gloaming. The Dúnedain peeled off to the right as the bulk of the men-at-arms deployed; Astrid thought there were probably twenty lances of them—two hundred riders, more or less.
The sun was just beginning to peek over the rolling hills eastward, and it caught at a lancehead here and there, or the colored pennants with the arms of count and baron and knight. As they came over the rise they saw the long gentle slope below running down to the river. The besiegers’ camp was there at the bridge, then the occupied ruins of the village, and the castle on the first ridge beyond. It was a rectangle with a tallish square tower in one corner and smaller round ones at the others; a standard design of a type the Protector’s labor gangs had built by the dozens in the Association’s years of expansion after the Change. This had been the northeastern boundary, until the PPA divided the Palouse with Boise well before the current war started.
Woodsmoke drifted down from it, and the besiegers’ camp, a familiar musty-sharp scent on the cool morning air; she even thought she could detect a faint hint of scorched bacon. The castle was probably densely crowded with the villagers who’d fled within the gates when the enemy came. Certainly there were plenty of tiny heads between the distant crenellations.
This is a better use for the place than its original intent.
Which had been to intimidate anyone who objected to having their land handed out willy-nilly by the Lord Protector as fiefs for his newborn lords.
The alarm had just been given down there. The Boisean infantry had been digging like moles; they already had one of their square marching camps within twelve-pounder range of the castle, the Stars and Stripes flying defiantly from a pole topped with a gilded eagle. They’d been digging a trench and barrier all around the castle too, a brown scar against the green of the winter wheat and pasture, but it was incomplete. Now they were swarming out of their orderly rows of tents and from their working parties, falling in with smooth precision outside the southward facing camp gate with its stubby wooden tower above. She took her heavy binoculars out of their lamb’s-wool-padded steel case at her saddle bow; they were a treasure and heirloom of her House, a mechanically stabilized Zeiss 20x60 S-type bought by her father a few years before the Change.
And prying them out of Signe was a
complete
pain. Honestly, she got Larsdalen and all the rest of Dad’s stuff, but she’s such a clutchfist! Bad as a dwarf. Of course, I got the original editions of the Histories signed by the Great Translator, but still.
The field glasses were cumbrous, requiring both hands and full attention, but worth the trouble: the enemy sprang to within arm’s reach instantly and the image stayed centered. The United States—“of Boise” to outsiders, simply “of America” to themselves—equipped its heavy infantry with big curved oval shields, marked by crossed thunderbolts and a spread-winged eagle. Each man wore identical armor of bands and hoops of steel for his torso and shoulders, with mail sleeves and a plate vambrace for the right arm, a complex helmet with hinged cheek-guards and a flare to protect the neck, and a sporran-like spray of metal-shod leather straps covering the groin. Their weapons were a dagger, a short broad-bladed stabbing sword worn high on the right side, and three long javelins, two with cast-iron balls beneath the yard of metal point to add armor-piercing weight to impact.
Each eighty-man platoon was commanded by an officer they called a centurion, with a transverse crest on his helmet, a vine-stock swagger stick and a scarlet cloak. There were four of them; that meant a half-battalion, a little over three hundred men if they were at full strength, which they probably weren’t. One of the centurions looked back at her through his own binoculars, then over at the Portlanders. He nodded to a signaler beside him, a man with a trumpet and a wolfʹs head and hide over his helmet and shoulders. A standard-bearer had the old American flag on a pole topped by a gilded hand.
The curled
tubae
brayed, and the first row of Boisean soldiers went down on one knee, their shields overlapping and a spear in each right hand snapping out in a quick uniform bristle. Another call, repeated by the officers’ silver whistles, and the ranks behind brought up their shields and cocked a shaft ready to throw. It was hardly like watching individual men move at all; more as if the signals were playing directly on their nerves, like some automatic machine of the ancient world. The formation gave fairly complete protection from arrows, and even heavy horse would often flinch from a line of unbroken points.
The men shouted as they lifted their shields, a unified
hooo—rahhh
sound, deep and guttural. Then a crashing bark of: “USA! USA!”
“They
are
stretched thin,” Astrid said with satisfaction, counting them. “I wouldn’t start a siege this close to an enemy force without at least twice as many men.”
“Nice to know we’re not alone in that overextended feeling,” Alleyne added dryly. “I’ve been feeling like too little butter—”
“—scraped thin on too much bread,” she completed for him.
“For over a year now,” he finished.
He took the heavy binoculars from her for a moment, returned them, and began checking his gear. They were in Dúnedain light armor, open-faced sallet helms, no limb protection except their buff leather boots, and torso protection of fine chain mail made from stainless-steel wire riveted inside a soft green leather tunic.
Behind the Boiseans a scorpion spat from the north wall of their marching fort, throwing a bolt on a long blurred arch towards the castle and warning its garrison not to interfere. Stone and cement spalled away where the pyramid-shaped steel head punched into the wall above the gate. A harsh unmusical
taaank!
sounded at the impact as hard alloy steel deformed where it met the dense mixture of concrete and crushed granite.
“They think they can see the knights off,” Alleyne said. “And thanks to our bit of Sentry Removal, they don’t know about anything else coming their way.”
“If those pikemen ever show up,” Astrid said. “But I agree, it was a mistake.”
“Reasonable, if aggressive, but perhaps a bit arrogant. I’d be more cautious in his place.”
Astrid nodded in quiet satisfaction. She’d dreamed of being a warrior like those of the War of the Ring from her early youth—someone like Éowyn, but less Anglo-Saxony—but before she actually took it up as a trade after the Change she hadn’t realized how much craftsmanship there was to it, as opposed to simple derring-do.
And archery and horsemanship and swordplay, but I started those when I was a little girl, when I first read the Histories. The rest of it . . . is more like a combination of chess and tennis, more or less. You are playing against your foeman’s mind, when you are in command.
Her brother-in-law Mike Havel had started her education in that, and she’d learned diligently from many instructors over the past generation. Including the people she’d fought.
The Montival light horse spurred down the long slope towards the Boisean troops. Their equivalents came to meet them, and arrows twinkled as they arched in long flat trajectories between the two formations of horse-archers. The Association men-at-arms walked their horses forward at a steady pace, halting just out of practical catapult range of the fort, about three times the distance of a long bowshot. The enemy mounted archers withdrew, with Eilir and John Hordle and their troop chivvying them north and west; they were outnumbered, and anyway had no place on a confined field where armored lancers and heavy infantry might clash, any more than a wasp did between hammer and anvil.