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"Eyes front, Matthews!" one of the file-closers snarled. "If you want to look at something scary, watch the fucking horses coming at you, you quivering daisy!"
"Steady, Bearkillers, steady," their officer said, his voice commendably calm.
A messenger came galloping up behind the line, drawing up beside the bear's-head ba
"Lord Bear! Lord Eric requests permission to hit the enemy horse in the flank as they charge."
"Not this time," Havel said, smiling grimly. What was it that Israeli general said? "It is better when you have to restrain the noble steed than prod the reluctant mule"? "The A-listers are to support the artillery and wait for the command."
The Protector's trumpets screamed again, massed, like a chorus of metallic insects worshipping some alien god of war. The horsemen lowered their lances and began to advance at a walk, then a trot, then a canter. The thunder of the hooves grew, shaking the earth beneath their feet, the snap of pe
"Sure look pretty, don't they?" he asked, his voice calm and amused, but pitched to carry. "They'll look even better going away. Hakkaa Paalle!"
"Hakkaa Paalle! Hakkaa Paalle! Hakkaa Paalle!"
The chant grew until it was a hoarse, crashing screech; the Bearkiller pike-men began to sway ever so slightly as they chanted, faces flushed and lips peeled back over teeth. Havel gri
That was the purpose of battle cries; they drove out thought. The same thing happened in the audience at games back before the Change, but this deliberately induced hysteria had a lot more purpose behind it. Four hundred yards, he estimated. Three fifty. Three hundred – He raised the glaive and caught the trumpeters' eyes: that took a second, lost as they were in the roaring chorus.
Chapter Thirteen
Sutterdown, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9
"W ell, there it is, my lords," Conrad Renfrew said.
He accepted a cup of hot coffee from a servant and inhaled the welcome scent that had been a haunting memory for so many years. Coffee was unimaginable luxury, available only to the Protector and a few great nobles even now that a square-rigger from Astoria was on the run to Hawaii.
The command pavilion stood about a mile north of the Mackenzie town called Sutterdown, in open country out of catapult range, with good water from a creek ru
The big table in the center held maps and papers; there was a buffet along one side laden with lunch, and some of the commanders were holding chicken legs or cheeseburgers or roast-beef sandwiches as they looked at the maps, or at their target.
"And here we are," Renfrew went on after a sip of the coffee and a sigh of pleasure. "Anyone got any brilliant ideas?"
Sutterdown was the closest thing the Mackenzies had to a city. Even by CY9 standards it wasn't much, less than two thousand people in normal times; there were a dozen towns in the Association's territory as big or bigger already. The walls were impressive, though, better than thirty feet high and, by report, nearly twenty thick, and the circuit was big enough to hold a lot more people in an emergency. They were studded at hundred-yard intervals with round towers half again as tall topped by conical roofs sheathed in green copper and shaped much like-appropriately-a witch's hat. A four-tower minifort guarded the gates at the quarters; the one on the south gave directly onto a bridge over the Sutter River, and the town as a whole was nearly contained within a U-shaped bend, giving the south and east and west a natural moat. A ditch across the north side completed the protection.
The crenellations along the top of the walls had been covered over the last few days by prefabricated metal-faced hoardings of thick timber, like a continuous wooden shed with the roof sloping out; that protected the fighting platform atop the wall from missiles, and gave an overhang so that the defenders could drop things straight down on anyone climbing a scaling-ladder. Association forts had the same provision; he'd practiced assembling the hoardings during emergency drills at his own Castle Odell, the Renfrew stronghold in the Hood Valley. Evidently the architects here had been reading the same books the Portland engineers studied-Castle by Macaulay for starters.
It looked more formidable to the naked eyeball than he'd thought it would be from the reports and sketches, and he was surprised the near anarchy of the Clan Mackenzie had managed to put so much labor into something with a long-term payoff. The bright white stucco on the town wall was different from anything he'd seen before, and so were the odd, curving designs of flowers and leaves painted on them. If you looked at them long enough you started to see faces peering out:
It's not altogether like one of our castles, or one of our towns, though: there's no i
They were about a hundred feet above the general level of the town, or of the Sutter River that flowed along its southern edge. One of them was topped by some sort of temple or church or whatever the kilties called it, according to the intelligence briefings. He could see a bit of it, a round open structure with Douglas fir trunks smoothed and carved as pillars all around. A drift of smoke came from the center of the conical roof.
Unfortunately the dark-robed Bishop Mateo could see it too, and it had set him off again. Nobody dared interrupt him. "There is the altar of Satan!" he said, pointing; the cleric was a slender brown-ski
There were nods all around the table. "Well, that's exactly what I'm going to try and do, Your Grace," Renfrew said politely.
Does he talk like that all the time? he wondered. Then: I'm not afraid of Leo's men, he thought, slightly defensive. Then again, I'm not anxious to butt heads with them, either.
He'd been an agnostic before the Change. Now he was an ostentatiously dutiful son of Mother Church, like anyone in the Protectorate's territories who wasn't a complete idiot, since the Lord Protector was too.
Does Norman really mean it? some fraction of his mind wondered. Or is it just part of the pageantry to him? Or was his mother scared hy a copy of King Arthur and the Round Table while she was pregnant? Well, I'm not going to kick. I couldn't have put this show together myself.
A fragment of poetry went through his mind, pseudo-Shakespeare:
Lay on, MacDuff
Lay on with the soup, and the Haggis and stuff;
For though 'tis said you are our foe
What side my bread's buttered on you bet I know!
Sometimes he wondered how many were trimmers like himself, and how many had come to genuinely believe. More of the latter than the former, he suspected, and his own un-belief got sort of shaky sometimes these days. When people heard the same story all the time and had to act as if they accepted it, most just did accept it; maintaining private reservations was too much like hard mental work. And it did help the Protectorate run smoothly, and would be even more helpful in another generation, when his children were growing up to inherit what he'd built.