“And you’ll have your opportunity soon enough,” he said.
The dark handsome young face turned southward and west. “We’re not far from the border,” he said. “The old Idaho border. Red Leaf said there was news about my mother and my sisters.”
“They’re safe enough,” Artos said.
Which is
probably
true. Even a bad man will love his mother or his younger sisters, more often than not. My judgment of your brother Martin was that he was ambitious beyond reason, and ruthless as a stoat, but not the sort who lacks all human connection. And Virginia is giving you a very worried look. She doesn’t know or love
them
; she loves
you
and she loves the prospect of vengeance on those who killed her father and took her family’s ranch.
“Now let’s cut a way for them to freedom, eh? And to a payment on an account the Cutters owe the whole world.”
The pillar of red smoke had grown as they approached. Now they came over the last rise of land and saw the Anchor Bar Seven homeplace laid out before them. Ahead the strip of cultivated fields, to the right the dam and lake, and then beyond that the walled headquarters on its not-quite-hill. It was toy-tiny in the distance, and the figures of the men who fought beneath the walls were like ants, but he
knew
. Knew where each was, the pitch of the land, the range of the weapons on the towers. Things that
might be
played out in his mind, each turning on the pivot of his decisions like the throwing-arm of a trebuchet. They were many, but the thread of his actions led through them like a vein of gold in quartz.
And it is the best course
, he thought, shivering a little internally.
Not a certain one, because the world is not made so that anything is certain, but the closest to certainty and near enough for King’s work.
“Here they come again!” Syfrid said harshly.
The enemy were forming up, just beyond catapult range. The ground between them and the Norrheimers was littered with dead men and dead horses, or some of both not quite dead; every time they came across the killing ground to within bow-range of the men of the shield-wall the catapults Ignatius commanded reaped them, and then the engines from the towers, and then Edain’s bowmen.
“They’re paying,” Bjarni observed.
“So are we,” Syfrid said. “We’ve lost thirty men, and more wounded, and all we are is
bait
. We haven’t landed a blow since we chased them away from the wall.”
“Not bait,” Bjarni said. “We’re the plug that keeps them back. They could overrun the bowmen if we weren’t here. Horses won’t run onto a spearpoint, or ram into a shield-wall.”
Syfrid jerked his head backward. “Within that burg they couldn’t touch us and we could massacre them if they tried to storm the wall.”
“They’d be all over us if we tried to retreat, like flies on a midden. Besides, Artos needs us here,” Bjarni said. “They’ve lost five to our one, maybe more, and more of their horses. They weaken themselves, like a man trying to butt through a locked door with his face. While we’re here they don’t think of anything else.”
Syfrid nodded grudgingly. “As a man will with a bit of gristle stuck between his teeth and driving him mad. But if your blood brother Artos doesn’t come soon they’ll gnaw us down and swallow us.”
“He’ll come,” Bjarni said. “And we’ll die the day the Three Spinners cut the thread of our lives; not a day sooner, not a day later.”
Syfrid’s face stiffened a little; that was an implied rebuke. Then they had more pressing work. Bjarni frowned as he watched the mass of horsemen approach. They were packed closer together, the formation a bit deeper and wider. And they were picking up speed, not holding to a hand gallop but coming flat-out. All the ones with any body armor were in the front, the men of rank . . .
“They’re not going to shoot us up and retreat, they’re trying to overrun us. Something’s changed. They want, they
need
, to finish us quickly.”
He glanced eastward. Was that a twinkle of sun on steel, above a distant black line?
“Yes!” he said. Then he filled his lungs and shouted:
“Our brave comrades are here, they’ll strike the enemy soon! Hold fast, Norrheimer men! This time we can greet them with spears and welcome them with swords. Hold fast! Thor with us!”
“
Ho La, Odhinn!
”
A growl went up with a baying eagerness in it; his men were tired of being pecked at from beyond their own reach. A ratcheting clatter began as spearshafts and the flats of swords and axes were hammered on the shields, building up into a drumming thunder of defiance and anger as men stamped and roared. The catapults shot; only five were manned now, for want of crews. The beating of the hooves filled the earth, and the ground to their front was a solid mass of riders. The first flights of arrows were rising from the bowmen to his left, and then every man in the enemy host rose in the stirrups. The Norrheimer shields came up, but this time more men fell as shafts punched through, or flicked through the gaps.
“
Close up, close up,
Niðhöggr
bite your balls!
” he heard a voice rasping.
“Close up when a man falls, don’t leave a gap!
”
“
Ready, ready
,” Bjarni called.
He crouched with the shield-rim right up under his eyes, grunting a little as the shafts went
thock-thock-thock-thock
and hammered him back against his braced right leg. Two more broke off his helmet, hurting like blows with a sword, and another banged at an oblique angle into the mail over his right shoulder, breaking several of the links but not penetrating the stiff linen padding beneath. The ground was shaking beneath him, thousands of hooves hammering through it. A few men around him were wide-eyed; more were mouthing curses or calling on their Gods or just baring their teeth and screaming hatred and rage. The arrowstorm slackened as Cutters began slapping their bows back into the scabbards and drawing their shetes, a long rippling glitter along the enemy line, a flexing as they slid their shields onto their arms.
“
CUT! CUT! CUT!”
Bjarni rose and held his sword up, sucked the hot dusty stinking air into his lungs:
“Now!
” he screamed, and slashed the blade downward towards the foe.
The shields came down from overhead and every man behind the front rank threw a spear. The heavy weapons weren’t really made for that, but the target was close, close. Three hundred punched into the mass of horsemen, and they staggered. The front rank of Norrheimers crouched, butting the ends of their spears into the dirt as if they faced so many bears or boars, and the charge struck like wagonloads of anvils. Horses reared and struck out at the shields with their hooves, and Norrheimers shouted and stabbed at their faces and chests and guts, holding up their shields to stop blows as the riders hammered at them from above.
“Kill them! Kill the swine! Don’t prick their pimples,
kill
!”
Near Bjarni a horse took a spear in the belly and went mad, bounding forward in a great leap, then falling screaming like a woman in childbirth, thrashing blindly. That did what no spurs could; it broke the shield-wall as the half-ton beast collapsed forward onto men and kicked about. Instantly a wedge of horsemen were thrusting into the gap. Bjarni threw himself forward; the first of them was a man with a thong-bound yellow beard beneath a scarred contorted face. He had a mail shirt and a helmet of leather covered in metal plates and topped with a horsehair plume dyed scarlet, and he dodged a spear and leaned far over and slashed with terrible skill. A man spun away with half his face sheared off, screaming in a spray of blood.
The wounded man rammed into the Norrheimer king, broke Bjarni’s forward rush and left him staggering, his shield swinging wide in an instinctive try for balance. His
hirdmenn
threw themselves forward to cover him with reckless abandon, but more Cutters were pushing through behind the chief in the plumed helmet. The blade went up, fluid and sure.
Then the fixed snarl behind it turned to a gaping scream. Syfrid was there, his shield slung over his back and his ax in both hands, extended in the follow-through to the blow that had hacked the Cutter’s thigh open and chopped through the bone, with a spray of blood following the blade in a curve that seemed to hang in the air like a trail of scarlet light behind a torch.
Bjarni was back on his feet; a guardsman put his shield against his back to help him.
“
Behind you, Syfrid!
” he shouted.
Now they don’t know whether to shit or go blind
, Artos thought grimly.
He took a deep breath of the thundery air, smelling of endless grass like a giant haymow, and horse and sweat and oiled metal and leather. His men were sweeping in from eastward now, between the railway line and the little lake where the ruins of the pre-Change ranch-house lay, a long rippling line of armor and the plunging heads of horses. They rode up the long shallow rise from the tilled fields towards the modern settlement, jumping the little irrigation ditches without effort or splashing through them in wings of spray. There was a huge clot of Cutters hung up at the Norrheimer front, and his lips skinned back in what might have been a smile.
A
moving
horse under close control was a weapon in itself and one of terrible power, besides what its rider could do. In a melee, the saddle of a frightened
stalled
horse was like trying to fight while sitting in a chair—a skittish chair that jerked you around at short, unpredictable intervals. The Norrheimers were breaking their ranks and wading into the Cutters, spear and sword, ax and hamstringing seax-knife, giving more than they received. Their archers had closed up and were shooting into the enemy’s rear, steady careful aimed shots.
Artos blew a
hufff
of relief. He couldn’t see it at this range, but that close control meant Edain was still alive, as surely as a glimpse of the oak-colored curls would have. Every time you took a pot to the well, there was a certain chance of it breaking, and he didn’t want to be the one to ride to Dun Fairfax with
that
news. Plus Edain was his closest friend, Mathilda aside.
And he’s my strong right arm, with the strength of the good brown earth that bore him.
The rest of the Cutters were turning to meet the new threat, all of them that could break away; they had the sun behind them, an advantage since it meant his men were staring straight into it. He’d always been good at calculating numbers quickly, but now he
knew
. Eight hundred twenty-six, more than half of what they had left. More than he had, but not impossibly more; they were good riders, but their horses looked tired. His eyes flicked over the battlefield and then he saw the light pedal-cart that Ritva had taken ahead on the scout with Rollins’ men, abandoned a hundred yards eastward of the wrecked warehouse. It was empty, the doors wide open, and feathered with arrows until it bristled like a porcupine. His mind sketched distances.
Possibly
, he thought.
Possibly. Or possibly she’s dead, though I see no bodies. Poor Ritva, it was always like a game to her, even when the stakes were life and death, the which she knew full well. They say our father was like that; that there was always a bit of a grinning boy on a dare in him, even at the end when he knew he was dying.
The trumpet brayed again, and the First Richland moved up from a trot to a canter; they would all switch to a gallop when they were closer, to get the horses to the target without being blown. Epona responded automatically, and he glanced over his shoulder.
Then he blinked. Virginia Thurston still had her visor up, and . . .
I’ve always known she hated the Cutters
. He’d seen her
scalp
one of her neighbors who’d gone over to them, on the border of the Powder River country last year.
I didn’t suspect quite
how much
she hated them, though.
Though all the Powers knew they deserved it, the sight of her white staring face was still a little disconcerting. She had her bow in her hands and an arrow on the string, not being trained to the lance. He looked around again, and the Cutters were much nearer; the two forces were coming together with the shocking combined speed horsemen had in open country.
“It
was
a complex plan,” he admitted to himself with another mirthless grin. “But sure, it was complex in
conception
, not execution. It’s simple enough the now. There they are, and we bash them. Time to kill.”
Filling his lungs: “Sound
charge
!”
Rollins’ trumpeter sounded it, and it went down the line.
Then he used the edge of his shield to knock down his visor, and the bright world narrowed to a slit.
“Morrigú!” he called, then screamed on a rising note that built to a banshee shriek: “
Morrigú!
”
The arrows lifted from the oncoming Cutters, and the Richlanders and redcoats shot back. Behind him Virginia was screaming wordless hate as she drew and loosed, and Fred called: “
Ho La, Odhinn!”