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"Keep an eye on it anyway," he said.
Then he turned back towards the central column, the one advancing up River Bend Road, the pathway the enemy would use. The artillery was following it, sparing horses and wheels as long as possible.
"Sarducci," he said.
The man in charge of the war-engines looked up; he was one of Ken Larsson's buddies, recruited from the Corvallis university faculty where he'd been teaching engineering at the time of the Change, tall with a dark, narrow, big-nosed face and a walrus mustache. Not an A-lister, but keen enough for all that, and with a very useful hobby in Renaissance history. Havel pointed westward to where the lancers waited.
"Put them about there. A little to the left of the cavalry and advance 'em say a hundred yards beyond our stopline. Dig in; they've got to come to us. I want you able to rake their flank."
"Won't we be masking the A-listers there, Lord Bear?" the Tuscan asked.
Havel nodded; not agreeing, but acknowledging it was a fair question. "Nah. They can go in on your right, or stop a flanking attack-and they can support you if the Protector's people get too close. Go for it!"
He followed them westward down the formation, shouting: "Deploy! Deploy into line and halt!"
The columns opened like fans, with only a little cursing and adjustment as the militia infantry shouldered into position. The center was the pikes, a block eighty across and four ranks deep, with two files of glaives behind them. On either side the crossbows spread in a looser double line.
Most of them had fought before: But nothing like this. Nothing on this scale.
"Captain!" This time to the westernmost end of the line. "Help the artillery dig in. Do it fast, then get back here."
The company commander nodded and turned, barking the order; his unit was crossbows, and they stacked their weapons and broke open their folding entrenching tools, trotting forward to help the artillery crews. With nearly two hundred strong arms, the job went quickly; they laid out semicircular trenches, using the blades of their shovels to cut the turf in rectangular blocks, then set it aside while they piled up the soft, damp earth on the i
Havel nodded at the begi
"Big fight," he said cheerfully to Signe; the gallopers and staff here had to see the bossman confident. "Biggest we've had so far." Then, to the trumpeters: "Sound stand easy."
The brass throats of the instruments screamed. The block of pikes and glaives in the center let the butts of their polearms rest on the dirt and leaned on them; those with crossbows checked their weapons once again. Light wagons advanced until they were a suitable distance behind the line; ambulances, medics-including Aaron Rothman, despite loudly voiced claims that violence made him queasy and faint-vehicles with bundles of crossbow bolts, ammunition for the artillery, bandages and disinfectants. A little forward of that and just behind the main line was the clump of his headquarters staff; the brown-and-crimson bear's-head ba
I'd like to have a bigger reserve, he thought; it was amazing the number of things a CO could find to worry about, which was one reason he felt nostalgic about the days the Outfit was smaller, or even the time:
Christ Jesus, is it nearly twenty years since I was a corporal in the Gulf? Going on eighteen years, at least. Another world, and probably everyone there's dead, and who cares about the fucking oil now? Nowadays people fight over horses and cows and wheat. And people : so that hasn't changed.
He shook his head and went back to wishing he had more troops waiting behind the line to patch holes if-when-the enemy punched through.
But I just don't have enough on hand. This line's nearly a mile long as it is and it's too damned thin for comfort, but the Protector's men will overlap it. On the west, at least. The only good thing about it is that they have to get by me to get at the bridges and support their gunboats: they have to go through me. If they tried to loop around I could punch the A-listers at their flank while they were in column. It'd take days for them to do it safely and by then the rest of my militia would be here for sure.
Commanding a battle like this was uncomfortably like a knife duel : and he'd always despised those, because they guaranteed even the victor got cut up pretty badly.
More signals flickered in from the hilltop to his rear; the Protector's glider went by again, its heliograph stuttering. And beyond the skirmishing scouts came a long flashing, twinkling ripple across the fields to the north; a ripple of sunlight on thousands of steel points and edges, like summer at the lake when he was a kid, and light flickering off a wave. But this wave was human, an army's worth of men walking shoulder-to-shoulder, riding boot to boot. With it came a hammer of drums, the shriller scream of the long, curled trumpets the Association used, and the endless grumbling, rumbling sound of hooves and booted feet striking the soft earth. Havel leveled his binoculars.
"Well, shit," he muttered to himself, doing a quick count. Let's see, a yard per man, formation's four ranks deep: "You were right, honey. Two thousand men, or a bit more. That's bad odds. Four, five hundred knights and men-at-arms. That's real bad odds. He's got as many lancers on this field as we've got pikemen."
"Told ya, told ya," Signe said, without taking her own eyes from her field glasses. "Did you ever hear of that study they did before the Change, when they found out that only the clinically depressed had a realistic view of the world?"
Havel looked over his left shoulder at the depressingly empty roads from the south and west. The rest of the Bearkiller militia would be on the road to him here: which did him very little good right now. Then Signe hissed.
"Look," she said. "Look at the ba
Many fluttered there; the Protector's force was moving with its heavy horse in the center, and every tenant-in-chief and baron had his own flag. One drew his eye, on a tall crossbar next to the Lidless Eye, its white background conspicuous in that company.
"Argent, double-headed eagle sable," he said. "No cadet baton. It's Alexi Stavarov."
"Alexi Stavarov, Baron Chehalis, Marchwarden of the North. Even Arminger isn't crazy enough to send little Piotr out with a force that size," Signe said absently, still counting ba
"Refresh my memory," Havel said. "Alexis the Protector's point man north of the Columbia. He was in command in that last brush with the Free Cities of the Yakima, wasn't he?"