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"Right, bossman," the big blond man said, fastening the cheek-pieces of his crested helmet under his chin.
He nodded to Lua
I'm starting to feel like an old man at thirty-seven, he thought, smiling like a shark himself as he turned away. Old enough to know how easy it is to die, at least. Old enough to know how much turns on this fight. It's amazing how much more serious you feel when you've got kids.
He turned his horse with a shift of balance and leg-pressure; Gustav was feeling the tension himself, and stamped a forefoot as he moved. The foot soldiers were the home-levy of Larsdalen, and the companies from the hamlets and steadings north and east of it in the Eola Hills and along their foot, the Field Force units he'd had time to collect on the way here-every Bearkiller adult would go to war at need, but the Outfit was a bit more selective about who went into an open-field fight. There were just under a thousand, half with polearms-glaives or the two eight-foot staves of a take-down pike-in scabbards riveted to the frames of their bicycles. The rest had crossbows, all of them the new fast-loading type, thank God. A lot of the crossbowmen were actually crossbow-women. Any sturdy farm-girl used to working in the fields could handle one, and the pointy end of the bolts hit just as hard whoever pulled the trigger; the Outfit certainly couldn't afford to leave anyone useful home just because of their plumbing. Pikes and glaives took more mass to use properly, and two-thirds of the troops holding them were men, about the same proportion as the A-list.
Many of the foot soldiers' faces were tight with conscious self-control as they stood in their ranks. The A-listers might do other things in their spare time, but fighting was their lifework. The infantry were precisely the other way round. On the other hand:
"Right, Bearkillers," he said, rising in the stirrups and throwing his voice to carry. He pointed northeast. "The Protector's men are coming up the river to try and take away our homes and kill our families. We're going to fight them." He gri
A rippling growl went through the formation. Someone shouted Hakkaa Paalle! and the rest took it up, a deep, roaring chant, each stamping a foot in time to it, beating their gloved hands on the bucklers slung at their belts. Havel felt himself flush with pride; he'd brought them through the terrible years after the Change, and from starving refugees made a nation of them. Now they trusted him: The sound cut off when he raised one gauntleted hand.
"Now get ready and wait for the word," he said into the silence that followed.
For a wonder, he and Signe had a moment to themselves. The troops put their bikes on the kickstands, then got to work-for the pikemen, that meant unslinging their weapons and fitting the two halves together with a snap and rattle as the spring-locks clicked home. A leafless forest sixteen feet high rose as they fell in four-deep along the road, facing north and east, the long steel heads of the pikes above them; the glaives waited to the rear.
"What do you think?" she said.
"Depends on how many of them get off the boats, alskling," he said. "If there's more than we can handle, we pull back sharpish and wait for the rest of our call-up companies to arrive. They'll be gathering fast."
"Why not do that now?" she asked.
"I really don't want to lose the bridges," Havel said, nodding in the direction her father had gone. "If Arminger takes those, or breaks them down, he can operate on both sides of the river, and we can't help each other. And if he fortifies the crossing, it's a major blow. Worth risking a battle for, even against odds, as long as it isn't totally impossible."
"Aren't we risking defeat in detail?"
Havel gri
"We're all betting that," she said gravely, and he nodded. "Do you think it's Arminger in person? Here?"
"Nope," Havel said. "At a guess, it's Stavarov or Renfrew. Hopefully Renfrew."
"But Renfrew's his best commander!" Signe said.
"Exactly," Havel said, licking a forefinger and marking the air with it. "Plus he's the only one Arminger really trusts. This would be a good day for the bastard to die."
He'd been keeping an eye on the Chapman Hill lookout. Now a mirror blinked from there; he read the code as easily as he would have print.
"Barges holding back," he said. "Turtle boats coming forward. Now it's up to your dad."
"We should have set the engines on the bridge up earlier," she fretted.
"Nah, that wouldn't work," Havel pointed out. "They would have twigged to that, even if Arminger's troops aren't long on individual initiative. But if you don't give them too much time to think and consult higher echelons they'll try to go through with a plan even when things have changed."
They both looked to the river, a mile and better northward. The low, beetling shapes of the armored riverboats were hard to see at first, marked more by the white froth curving away from their bows and sloping forecastles than by the hulls themselves. The sight was a little eerie-you could believe that motors drove them, rather than dozens of dozens of bicycle cranks geared to a propeller shaft. That smooth mechanical motion without sails or oars looked u
"I just hope Daddy can deal with it," Signe said as they slid silently by and headed for the bridges. "He's not a hands-on fighter."
"Yeah, but he's got Pam to look after that," Havel said reassuringly. Then, harshly, as the barges and transports showed at the edge of sight: "Trumpeter! Sound fall in!"
Ke
The heliograph on the hilltop a mile and a half north blinked at him. He nodded and waved to his own signaler to respond, then looked back along the wagon train-a phrase literally true, since the dozen flatcars were each drawn by four horses. Rail made a smooth surface, and the beasts could pull five or six times as much as they could on even the best roads, and do it faster. Here they pulled flat surfaces that bore a weight of gears and ratchets, frames and tanks and tubing; the hard angular shapes and smooth mathematically precise curves made him nostalgic for the lost world: