Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (20 page)

Ingolf ducked his head from sheer instinct, letting the brim of his kettle helm shield his face before he was consciously aware of a threat. In the same instant something hit,
hard
. His head jerked around, but the broken arrow flicked away before he saw it; there would be an ache in his neck muscles tomorrow and a bright scar across the browned steel of the helmet, but it beat dying. He’d tried the Associate-style knight’s sallet with a visor, and it made him feel like his head had been riveted into a bucket.

And head-to-toe plate’s just not right for a horse-archer’s battle
, he thought, as something banged off his chest as well, making him grunt in reflex.
But this breastplate has a mail shirt beat all to hell, even good riveted mail from Richland, I’ve got to admit.

It was made of overlapping ripple-edged steel plates in the fashion western knights favored, cunningly curved and fitted and riveted, so that it covered your torso without confining it. Just about as flexible as mail, no heavier, and much stronger—which meant it was a damned sight better at stopping sharp pointy things, particularly arrows and crossbow-bolts. With that and short mail sleeves he felt properly equipped.

And…

Up out of the ground to the north came another clot of several hundred horsemen who’d been lying beside their prone horses, springing into the saddle even as the mounts surged to their feet, and at a gallop almost at once. They weren’t in neat lines either, but there was a terrifying wolfish vigor in their attack as the feather headdresses or buffalo-hair crests they wore streamed in the wind. Their shrill screams split the air, and they crashed into the Cutters in a shooting, slashing melee.

“
Hokahe, Lakota! Le anpetu kin mat’e kin waste ktelo!” Go for it, Lakota! It’s a good day to die!
he translated the scream mentally.

He could speak the language of the lords of the high plains, or at least get along in it. As well as a lot of people who belonged to the Seven Council Fires did, at least; most of them spoke English as often or more so. He snapped the bow back into the saddle scabbard at his knee, slid the shield off his back and onto his left arm, and swept out his shete. Shield up under the eyes, sword up and angled back…

“
Sound Charge!
And
Blades!
”

The jaws of the trap swung closed; not many of the Cutters escaped, as the greater wear on their horses told. One turned and drove at him with a spear poised. Ingolf judged the distances and angled his round shield. The point hit it hard enough to jar his arm and shoulder, but slid over the sheet steel facing. Before the man could recover, the Richlander’s shete lashed down, splitting mail links and driving into the meat and bone of his arm.

Ingolf wrenched the heavy curved shete free, using the momentum of his horse as they sped by each other to drag against the clutch of riven bone and muscle, looking around for another foeman. None were visible, unless you counted the ones who’d gotten a good head start eastward.
The Richlanders rode right through what was left of the Cutters, leaving a trail of empty saddles behind them—striking in a mass doubled or tripled the impact.

By then…A galloping figure pulled up next to him.

“More coming up from the east, sir,” a man from the flanking platoon said. “De were close on dis bunch’s ass.”

Developing our position
, he thought.
Somebody over there is feeding in troops to make sure where we are and what terrain we’ll fight for.

The flanker was panting, and blood cut through the dust on his face along with the sweat, from a slash that reached from his right ear nearly to his pale-blue eye through stubble so fair it was nearly invisible. He had his shete out. There was red clotting on it, and his round shield had score-marks where blows had split the thin metal facing over the bullhide and plywood. Two black-fletched arrows stood in it as well, and he absently broke them off with the blade of his shete as he spoke.

“How many?”

“Can’t be sure, sir, dey had more than us out screening, but plenty, you betcha. Yah hey, two, t’ree thousand, maybe more, from the dust. N’less dey’re dragging brush.”

“Good. Dismissed, and get a bandage on that cut.”

“Uff da, I am cut!” the man said, touching his face in mild surprise before he saluted and rode off.

Rick Three Bears cantered up. “We’ve…”

“Got trouble coming, yah,” Ingolf said to the Sioux
incantan
, war chief.

Rick grinned, which with the war-paint of black and white on his proud-nosed face and the buffalo-hair and horns on his steel cap gave him a faintly alarming look. There were eagle feathers woven into the not-quite-black braids that fell past his shoulders and a look of ironic good cheer in his dark hazel eyes; he was a tallish rangy ropy-muscled man, but not quite as thick through the shoulders as Ingolf. There was a ceremonial vest of white bone tubes over his perfectly functional shirt of riveted Iowa-made mail, too, and scalp hair sewn into the outside seam of his leather britches.

“More trouble than this,” Rick clarified. “But then again, we won’t have
to deal with it ourselves. There’s something to be said for this white-eyes army shit. Nice to have friends when you already have a lot of enemies.”

Behind him his men were finishing the last of the Cutters; there were about as many of them as the Richlanders, a token of the Lakota nation’s allegiance to the new kingdom while most of their men fought out east. There was an occasional scream and the guttural shout of
Hoon! Hoon!
as they worked with spear and shete and long knife.

Hoon!
was what a Sioux said when he stabbed you to death, sort of a more elegant tribal equivalent of
Die, you cocksucking sonofabitch, die!
They weren’t stopping to take scalps. Not very often, at least.

Ingolf had spent the first few years of his adult life fighting the Sioux, or what a nineteen-year-old taking an excuse to go running away from home had thought was adult life and looking back from his middle thirties, he considered a period when he’d been a large, very dangerous child blundering and hacking his way through obstacles and people. He’d been part of a Richlander volunteer force helping the Bossmen of Fargo and Marshall fighting to keep the Red River Valley and vicinity. Nominally in command of a company of enthusiasts just as pig-ignorant as he was, but mostly not as lucky. It had been a bloody draw, more or less; at least the border had stayed just where it started out, a little more than halfway across what had been North and South Dakota before the Change. With the main difference being a lot of fresh graves and burned-out farms and lost crops and slaughtered livestock.

Those years had been an education in many senses of the word. Nobody who’d ridden with Icepick Olson and come back alive from the freezing red ruin of the Badlands Raid was ever going to be completely relaxed when someone screamed
Hoon!
close by.

It produced an almost irresistible impulse to shout
Guard your hair, boys!
and dive for cover, shield up and shete ready.

Even if you’ve been adopted by the Oglalla and called Iron Bear
, he thought.
And Christ…by the Valar, I mean…that was pretty damned scary too.

Rick held up two fingers split in a V and then pulled them back towards himself with his palm parallel to the ground. “Still want to pull ’em after us that way?”

“Yeah, it’s working so far and it’s what we said we’d do,” he said. “Let’s go. It isn’t really a very good day to die.”

“Who said anything about
us
dying, cousin? Better to give than to receive.”

The dead and seriously wounded had gone back, mostly over captured horses with a few of the walking wounded leading them; walking wounded meant men who could move but not fight. Nobody thought of minor cuts like the slash on the scout’s face as real
wounds
. Everyone else had dismounted, and all the smarter ones had poured their canteens into a helmet and held them for the horses to take a drink. Sergeants encouraged the others to do that too, often with a cuff across the back of the head.

A thirsty man could keep going on willpower much longer than a horse; horses just lay down and gave up when they got sufficiently miserable. Willpower didn’t mean squat if a slow horse got you an arrow through the gizzard, though.

“Boots and saddles!” Ingolf said, and Mark raised his trumpet.

M
ore plumes of dust were moving half an hour later. They stretched as far as Ingolf could see, north and south for many leagues and east and west as units moved behind the front. The armies were well into the opening steps of their dance, probing and shifting for advantage like all-in fighters at the beginning of a bout. He was far enough west now that he could just see the line of tethered balloons the Montivalan forces had put up behind their position, each of them a finned orca shape with its canoe-sized gondola hanging below and the cable that held it slanting away in a long pure curve.

Ingolf was the son of a Sheriff, lord of broad acres, and hence an educated man who could read and write fluently and use practical mathematics to calculate volumes and heights, all useful skills for a military commander or someone who had to keep track of the food-stores that would take a community through the winter. He understood the theory; the hydrogen produced when zinc shavings and strong acid met in lead containers filled the bags of impermeable pre-Change fabric. The balloons were lighter than an equivalent volume of air, just as the air in a ship’s hull was lighter than the water it displaced and so floated upward.
It still awed him to see so many of them. He could remember his own childish delight when there had been a single hot-air balloon at a county fair in Richland City. His father had sworn in astonishment, too; that had been…

Two thousand eight, in the old style
, Ingolf thought; around here they mostly used the Change Year count.
He hadn’t seen anything fly for ten years. Not since the Change. That was the last year Dad and I weren’t fighting really bad. It got worse from then on.

The Upper Midwest was as populous and wealthy and advanced as anywhere in the known world after the Change, but the Free Republic wasn’t exactly at the center of things back there. More like the frontier boondocks.

“And those balloons’ll be damned useful,” he murmured to himself. “Must be able to see as far as infantry could march in an hour or more, or twenty minutes’ gallop.”

And if you made a horse gallop that far flat-out, it was done in. The enemy had gliders, but those had far less endurance, and the prevailing wind was from the west. A blinking light snapped from the nearest balloon, plain uncoded Morse:

Approximately…three…thousand…enemy…horse…in…pursuit…you. Forces…moving…as…planned.

“That won’t last long,” Ingolf said.

“Sir?” Mark said.

“Plans don’t last long once the fighting starts,” Ingolf amplified. “So we don’t want to get too far ahead and give ’em time to think. It’s like playing a brown trout back on the Kickapoo. Sound
walk-march, trot.
”

The trumpet sounded again. Being a commander’s signaler-aide was good education for a young man like Mark; you got to see everything, hear all the plans and consultations, and you acquired a
really
good command of the language a commander used to turn a cavalry regiment into an extension of his will.

“I wish Aunt Mary was with us,” Mark said suddenly. Hastily: “She’s, ah, a
really good
scout. All those Dúnedain—” he pronounced it Dunny-dan “—are.”

“I wish she were too, Mark,” Ingolf said.
Though the real reason is you’ve got a gawd-awful crush on her
, he added tolerantly to himself.

Mark was a good kid, and smart, and wouldn’t make a nuisance of himself. Though that sort of thing could really
hurt
when you were his age.

“But we’ve all got our jobs to do,” he finished.

Which is true. Mary makes a pretty fair horse-soldier but she’s a goddamned ghost as a sneaker-and-peeker. And I’m a pretty good sneaker-and-peeker…for a goddamned good horse-soldier.

The First Richland slowed; so did the Sioux on their right. They came over another low ridge. Ingolf grinned.

“And here’s the reception committee for those dumb cowboy fucks chasing us to get revenge for their dumb dead cowboy fuck friends.”

Rick laughed loud and long, and Mark smothered his snort as befitted a very junior officer. The troops waiting there were mostly infantry, and newly arrived, double-timing forward to a brisk squeal and rattle of fifes and drums from the spot where they’d laid their bicycles down.

Ingolf’s eye estimated upward of ten thousand, serious numbers even on
this
battlefield. He recognized their banners and the devices on shields and breastplates, brown with a bright red-white-black bear’s-head, snarling and shown face-on. Bearkillers, the Outfit as they called themselves, the people who lived across the Willamette from the Mackenzies. Which made them in-laws of his now that he and Mary—nee Havel—were hitched. The Bearkillers had come together in the year after the Change, like the Clan Mackenzie. Montival was a pretty new kingdom; he’d been around while Rudi’s friends came up with the idea on the Quest, and folks back here…back home, now…had taken to it like Polaks to vodka. They’d been desperate because they were facing defeat from the Boise-CUT alliance, desperate enough to clutch at a new-minted myth and shelve their local rivalries.