Страница 115 из 156
Her daughter and her daughter's lover dismounted, handing their reins to a teenage helper who led their mounts to the rear. Both drew their bows from the loops with matter-of-fact readiness, looking around for spare shafts to fill their quivers and helping each other with the chore-Hordle had to bend for Eilir, a tall woman, to slide handfuls into his. Juniper sipped a little from her canteen-not much, she wasn't shy but peeing on a battlefield was still awkward- as she watched Rancher Brown and his men come galloping down the road, frantic to get to their remounts-the horses looked blown. And that meant:
Terrible as an army with ba
The Protectorate force was only equal to her own, but it seemed like an endless snake of dull-gleaming metal and spearpoints as it came eastward along the road, the men and beasts and bicycles toy-tiny with distance. When she focused her binoculars on them they leapt closer-dark eyes in a dark face above a mouth-covering mail coif, vanishing for a second as the helmet was brought up in both mail-gauntleted hands and adjusted. Ba
She could not hear the words under the distant grumble of feet and hooves, but she knew them: Fight the Holy War… Heaven awaits warriors who fall in His service: smite the Satan-worshippers:
Her people had had their own rituals. Juniper's lips tightened as she lowered the glasses; war of any sort was bad enough, but Holy War wasn't something she liked at all. Sir Nigel and Aylward were talking in low tones-probably nobody else but the ba
"They should have sent more infantry," her First Armsman said. "If they had enough bicycles for them. Got a fair well-balanced force but they're not what you'd call smooth at using it proper. Another couple of hundred infantry and they could pin us for a flank attack by the cavalry. As it is, I'd say they'll have to come straight at us."
"They'll not have met much serious opposition until now," Nigel said judiciously. "Learning by doing. Better next time, I would expect."
Does there have to be a next time? some part of Juniper's heart cried with anguish.
She said nothing aloud; the polite looks from the two lifelong warriors would be too hard to bear, especially when she knew they were right.
I love Nigel like my life, and Sam like a brother, but the way they discuss chopping people up as if it was turnips still makes me feel: odd.
"Surprised they've managed to train so many men-at-arms," Nigel went on. "That takes serious application."
"That's those Society buggers, sir. They were odd before the Change and afterwards the ones who stayed with Arminger were bloody barking mad."
"A functional madness: Ah, they're shifting: cavalry forward to cover the infantry deployment, then to their left opposite our friends from the CORA on our right. Crossbows and spears in mixed blocks: underestimating how badly we can outshoot them, I daresay. They'll send the infantry forward to develop our position, and punch their lancers at Rancher Brown and his fellows to try and uncover our right. A good thing they didn't bring any of their field artillery."
"They keep that for siege operations when they can, sir."
The CORA leaders and their retainer-cowboys had finished slapping their gear on fresh mounts; they crowded forward over the road northward, except for a trickle of wounded from the earlier action who moved to the rear, towards the healers.
Juniper took three deep breaths, letting each out with a long, slow hiss, feeling the strength of Earth flow up her lungs to calm her heart with its unmoved solidity, feeling Air add its light quickness to the surging strength of Water in her sea-salt veins, and the thought of Fire reaching out across the field.
Sam Aylward rinsed out his mouth, spat, returned his canteen to his waist and put an arrow to his bow. "Sir Nigel, Lady, we've a roit proper job of work to do 'ere today."
Despite the gathering tension she smiled to herself. Sam might be Earth itself. And Nigel is Fire: does that make me an airy wet blanket?
Curled trumpets screamed in the enemy ranks.
Lord Emiliano sca
Sufiaccent, it will cost us, he thought. Worth it. We break this force, they're finished; we get the land, and nobody bothers us no more. If I capture their witch-bitch alive, the Lord Protector will make me a duke, maybe marry his daughter to my Gustavo!
"Let the foot advance!" he shouted. "Lord Jabar, take half the lancer conrois at the cora-boys."
Juniper Mackenzie drew and loosed, drew and loosed, despite the burning pain in hands and arms and shoulders. The enemy spearmen were only thirty yards away now and coming on crabwise, crouched behind their big shields until only their feet and the narrowest slit under the helmet brim showed; the men behind them held their shields overhead. Arrows flickered out in waves over the distance between them and the Mackenzies; nine hundred bows, three hundred arrows a second, turning the shields into bristling porcupine shapes and the ground into a pelt like some gigantic stiff-haired, gray-furred dog. The sound of the bodkins striking was like surf on a gravel beach, or heavy hail on a tin roof, a hard, endless tocktocktocktocktock, louder than the shouts and screams. Many bounced off helmets with a ringing sound like a ball-peen hammer; many others rattled off chain mail and flipped away.
Others bit, and more and more, opening gaps in the wall of shields as men fell, shrieking and tearing at the iron in their flesh, or moaning and twitching, or dropping limp. The spearmen closed the holes, stepping in from the next ranks. As the distance closed, many shafts punched right through the tough leather and plywood of the shields, stripping their feathers off as they drilled into arms and faces. The air stank of damp sweat, and the iron-sea-salt odor of blood, turning soil to mud as hundreds of men bled out their lives. And still the wall walked, like a wounded bear lumbering forward with blood and slaver dripping from its teeth:
Juniper started to duck at a sinister hiss. The crossbow bolt struck her on the collarbone, and she nearly dropped her bow at the sharp stabbing pain; but the short, thick shaft bounced back, turned by the riveted plates within the brig-andine and the distance from which it had been sent. Lightly armored and without shields, outnumbered two to one by the Clan's bowmen and carrying weapons that shot far less quickly, few of the Protectorate army's crossbowmen had lived to come within a hundred yards of the Mackenzie archers. Survivors formed a ragged line behind the blocks of spears, lofting their bolts at the archers on high arcing trajectories, but the stubby darts lacked the aerodynamic efficiency of a thirty-inch arrow.