Dies the Fire

Havel clamped his thighs to his mount and raised his bow, drawing to the angle of his jaw with the chisel point slanting up at a thirty-five-degree angle. Horn and wood and sinew creaked as the string pulled the recurved stave into a smooth half-circle; he breathed out in a controlled hooosh as he pushed and pulled and twisted his torso to put the muscles of gut and back and shoulders into the effort.

It wasn't just a matter of raw arm strength. You had to know how to apply it.

He waited for the high point of the gallop and let the string fall off the balls of his fingers. Crack-whipppt! as the string lashed his steel-clad forearm and the arrow flicked out, blurring with speed. The bow surged against his left arm with the recoil; his right hand was already reaching back, plucking another shaft out of his quiver: knock, draw, loose-

He had two in the air before the first one struck-struck and stood in the ground ten yards in front of the nearest Devil Dog.

Congratulations, Genghis! he thought acidly.

The next one banged off the curved surface of a helmet, making the bandit spin and then stagger; he felt a little better after that.

And I'm not aiming at one man. I'm aiming at twenty, and their horses, all nicely bunched up.

Behind him the other Bearkillers were shooting as well. He leaned to the right, and Gustav pivoted, turning. The others followed, and the line became a loose oval like a racetrack. The arrows had come as a complete surprise to the enemy; the problem was that not many of them had hit.

A horse ran plunging across the wheatfields, with an arrow buried half its length in the beast's rump. A bandit was down on the ground, screaming shrill bubbling shrieks as he rolled about and clutched at a shaft that had slanted down through one cheek and out the side of his jaw, slicing his tongue and shattering half a dozen teeth as it went.

Most of the Devil Dogs had dropped their crossbows and swung their shields around, holding them up against the sleet of steel-tipped wood.

He saw two arrows strike one shield, and the man take a step backward as the points punched crack-crack through the sheet-metal covering and buried themselves in the plywood beneath. Then he was curving around again himself, his left side towards the enemy once more. Some of them were shooting; a crossbow belt went by a few feet ahead of Gustav's nose, with an unpleasant vwup! of cloven air. Another struck a horse, and it went down with a scream to lie thrashing; two more riders halted for an instant and bore the rider off to the remount string before they returned to the shooting circle.

None of the bolts had struck a Bearkiller yet, which wasn't surprising, with moving targets that shot back.

Havel smiled an unpleasant smile as he shot again, and again, and again, and then wheeled his horse around once more. The Devil Dog leader was trying to get more of his men out from behind their shields to return fire at the elusive riders, without much success.

He was discovering some very nasty facts about being a stationary target; the ones that had let horse-archers grind infantry armies into dust from China to Poland before gunpowder came along.

More useful hints from Will's books on cavalry.

An arrow struck a Devil Dog, and the shaft sank halfway to its flight-feathers after it knocked a steel scale away spi

The fourth time he finished the circuit Havel found his quiver empty. He cased his bow and took the reins in his left hand again, cantering away to where Astrid waited, with Reuben Waters helping. Each was leading packhorses, and a saddled remount string to replace losses.

The youngest Larsson turned and grabbed a bundle of arrows from the racks on the back of a packhorse.

"Thirty-inchers, and when are you going to let me into the line, Lord Bear? I'm a better shot than you are!"

"Thirty-inchers," Havel confirmed, bending so that she could untie the bundle and slide them loose into his quiver.

He reined around: "And you can ride in the line when you can pull a fifty-pound bow twelve times a minute and do the assault course in a full-weight hauberk."

My opposite number must be getting pretty desperate, Havel thought, as he trotted back towards the action.

Once he realizes we can keep this up all day, whittle them down one by one no matter that we're lousy shots. If they scatter, we can bunch up and ride each one down separately. And any time now he's going to look west and see-

A screaming shout went up from the Devil Dogs. A lot of them were pointing west. Several thousand yards in that direction were Will Hutton and the rest of the Bearkillers, with Woburn's men behind them. Neatly blocking the direct route to St. Hilda's and the Devil Dog base; as an added bonus the distance made it impossible to tell who was who, so they'd probably think that all the mounted men there were armored Bearkiller horse-archers.

"Shouldn't get your attention so set on one thing that you forget to look around you," Havel called out to the enemy, gri

The Bearkillers did, one of them swearing white-faced at a crossbow bolt standing buried deep in the cantle of his saddle, sunk through layers of leather and wood. Three inches closer, and it would have nailed his thigh to the saddle, or buried itself in his groin.

Havel ignored that, after checking that it hadn't injured the horse. Instead he uncased his binoculars. The Devil Dogs were doing the only thing possible; the man in the pseudo-Viking helmet seemed to be in charge, and he was getting them mounted again, abandoning the prisoners and cattle and heading south of west, to loop around the blocking force and get back to their base. Havel stood in the stirrups and waved to Hutton; the second-in-command waved back, and began to trot his band towards the commander's.

"What's horns-on-head trying to do, Mike?" Signe asked, jerking her head after the departing enemy.

Havel cased the binoculars again and took a sip from his canteen-not too much, since taking a leak while wearing the armor required contortions.

"The one with a crap-brown beard? He's trying to disengage," he said. "He's still not thinking in terms of mounted combat. If he only had Woburn's men to worry about he'd be home free. All they could do was follow him until he got back to St. Hilda's. Mounted infantry can't force each other to fight, because the other side can just trot off. But we can make him fight, because we don't have to stop and get off our horses to shoot."

"Not just a rat, but a stupid rat," Signe said. Her expression was grimmer than his, if anything. "I hope those farmers, the Clarkes, can watch from wherever they are."

"What goes around, comes around," Havel replied, nodding. "Sound: pursuit at the canter. Let's go!"

The Devil Dogs were galloping off, but they couldn't keep that up for long-not without more remounts than they had along. Carrying a heavy man in armor was hard work for a horse, the more so if he rode badly. Havel set a loping pace, letting the enemy draw ahead. Any chase was going to be from behind, here; the land was open and the Devil Dogs had been cutting fences all over the place precisely so they could move without ru

Don't want to catch up to them too soon anyway, he thought. Not until Will rejoins. Let brown-beard-horns-on-head relax in his illusions for a while.

Then the Devil Dogs stopped, milled around, turned further south; they had to, if they wanted to keep from being caught between the two Bearkiller forces. Havel gave Will a high thumbs-up sign, and got a wave in return.