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They turned their horses around and cantered west to direct their soldiers. Havel looked around at his company commanders, who were either standing slack-faced: : or gri
"Gentlemen, ladies, let's get to work." He shrugged his shoulders as they scattered for their commands, settling himself as if preparing for a hard task. "Messengers: to Lord Eric, fall in on the extreme left flank of our friends from Corvallis, and try and get around the enemy and keep them from pulling back. To Captain Sarducci, limber up and hitch your teams. Trumpeters, sound general advance!"
Three-quarters of a mile westward other trumpets blew, their timbre and the sequence of notes they used different from the Bearkillers'. He understood them, though: Pikepoints down, and Prepare for push of pike!
The sixteen-foot shafts came level in a quick, disciplined bristle of points. Flanked by the crossbows, the hedgehog shape of the phalanx began to walk.
Two hours later Mike Havel sat his horse and watched the Protector's men digging in. They were about two miles north of the battlefield, near Rice Rocks, where the Willamette turned north again after an east-west stretch. That was where the northern troops had disembarked that dawn. The Bearkillers and Corvallans observed from a safe distance westward. The falling sun at their backs threw their shadows before them, like goblin mockeries of men and horses; the air didn't have the stink of blood and shit that went with battle here, but it already smelled of turned earth and sweat.
"I take it back," Havel said sourly.
"Take what back?" Major Jones said.
"I told Signe earlier today that Arminger is too much of a Period Nazi"-he looked at the Corvallan and the younger man nodded to show he grasped the phrase; he'd been a Society fighter before the Change-"to use artillery properly. I take it back."
The barges that had landed the Association's men were still there, drawn up on the sandy-muddy beach that marked the south side of the river at the point of the curve. Their crews and the rowers who'd tugboated them south and upstream hadn't been idle. The square shape of an earthwork fort already showed on some low heights near the river, with workers and wheelbarrows and crank-powered lifts swarming over it like ants. Skeletal gantries with huge lanterns at the tops showed how they were pla
Havel looked aside at Sarducci. The chief of his field artillery shook his head regretfully. "They outrange me by too much, Lord Bear," he said. "The stuff mounted on the barges in the river is bad enough, but they've been moving some of it ashore, too. Couple of heavy, turntable-mounted trebuchets, I'd say-"
As if to draw a line under his words, there was a monumental soft whoosh sound from within the budding earthwork fort. The darkening twilight made the fireball that arced up from inside the walls look enormous, trailing a mane of red-orange flames. It landed and spread flame over a field already marked by circular scorches; turf smoldered as the napalm burnt itself out. The bitter reek drifted faintly to them. Steel darts glittered in the same area, half buried; the barges had some sort of machine that threw bundles of them, which came apart n midair and landed traveling almost straight down, dozens at a time.
"OK, I think everyone's agreed we can't rush them?"
The men and women around him nodded; Eric Larsson last and most reluctantly of all. "They couldn't kill all of us before we got to the berm," he said.
The others stared at him. "Yeah," his sister said. "They could only kill five or six hundred of us. And then we'd have a thousand crossbowmen shooting at us from behind cover. And then we'd have a thousand spearmen and, say, four hundred knights and men-at-arms standing on the fighting platform they're building waiting to noogie on us. Do you think they'd bother chasing whoever was left when they ran away?"
"All right, all right, Sis, I didn't say we should attack them," the big young man said, raising a placating hand. "But we can't let them set up a base here. They could raid all along the eastern flank of the Eolas and up into Spring Valley. A lot of our farms are there."
Sarducci pointed to higher ground a half mile westward from the Protectorate position. "We could build a fort there and keep a watch on them," he said.
Signe made a hissing sound between her teeth. "What are we supposed to garrison this fort with, half the A-list? It's spring planting season. The militia have to go home, or even if the wheat harvest this summer is the best we've ever had it'll be a hungry winter. Unless we eat too much of our stock, and where would that leave us the year after?"
She gestured at the Corvallans; Edward Fi
"And our friends here can't stay forever-most of them are farmers too, and they all have a living to earn."
"Hey, people," Havel said. They all looked at him. "A couple of hours ago we thought we were all going to die. This is an improvement."
He glanced at the fort, lacing the fingers of his hands together and tapping one thumb on the other. In his mind he called up maps, and memories of riding this ground before. Few Bearkillers lived on the actual banks of the river; it was too dangerous, from floods and half a dozen other menaces. But the drier ground just to the west was cultivated for miles north of here, and strategic hamlets and A-lister steadings were plentiful; it was part of the Outfit's heartland. Eric was right; they couldn't leave an enemy base here-their own people would rightly withdraw allegiance if they weren't protected. Signe was right, too; they couldn't afford to just stick a big garrison here to watch the Protector's new fort. Besides the fact that they just didn't have that many full-time soldiers, if they did that the Association would turn it into a castle over the next couple of months, and that would be completely intolerable.
"But two can play at the fort game," he said. "It's no use if they can't supply it, and that means riverboats. Hey, Ken."
The older man looked up with a start; he'd been lost in an engineer's reverie as he stared at the earthworks, making notes on a pad now and then.
"Ken, you said you punctured those turtle boats of theirs?"
"Some of them," he said. "Burned a couple more."
"Think they could make the armor much thicker?"
"Not much, not and keep them mobile. The reason we beat them was that they didn't have much room inside for weapons, with all the men on cut-down bicycles pedaling away in there. If you made the boats bigger, the armor problem would get worse-the inverse square law is still working fine! So if you increase the volume to fit in more men pedaling: well, human beings just aren't very efficient engines."
He shook a fist skyward. "And we're not allowed to have efficient engines! God damn you, Alien Space Bats!"
"Maybe God did it," someone said quietly.
"In that case, may God damn God!"
"Hey, gently, gently. Let's not discuss the Change, hey?" Havel said.
He got a quiet chuckle from most of those within earshot: that was a proverb for "utter waste of time."
"You know that bit where there's a bluff near the west bank of the river, maybe a mile and a half north of here, maybe a little less?"