The Tears of the Sun (49 page)

Almost all of them would be cowboys from the ranching parts of Idaho originally anyway; you nearly had to be born at it to make a good horse-archer. They'd know how to gather a mob of woolies. It was probably a homelike interval in the war for them . . . until the moment they felt the hook inside the delectable bait. He looked behind. Most of his men would still be hidden by the folds he'd been diligently following, but they were getting too close for caution.

“Sound
advance in file order
,” Ingolf called, and legged his horse up to a canter.

The sweet notes of Mark's bugle rang. The columns opened out like fans; a few moments later the First Richland was strung out in a great line two men deep, rippling and twisting as it moved over the swells of the ground. Ingolf looked left and right and over his shoulder; the Sioux were closing in from the rear, their formations more like the flocking of birds than regular lines, but keeping up easily. Three Bears slanted through the Richlander files to ride beside him, his quarter horse matching the longer strides of Boy.

“Got 'em all!” he called, over the growing, growling thunder of hooves; there were fresh scalps at his saddle. “And the remuda. Good horses.”

Horse-theft was the Lakota national sport; you just had to accept that they were obsessed.

“Any prisoners?”

“Nah, they all fought to the death. Brave as shit. Look, cousin, I've got a bad feeling about this. They may not have been alone, you know? Yellow Bird and her tree huggers and some of my boys are sweeping back west of here.”

“Good. Let's get this part done quickly.”

He chopped his hand left, to the north, where the little creek ran down from the hills and came closer to that steeper edge of the valley.

“Keep them from getting across that, will you? It's fordable everywhere but it'll slow them if they try to cross and you can shoot the shit out of them. We need them bunched and I don't want to extend that far. Your call on when you get stuck in.”

“Right, cousin.
Ki-yi-yip-ki!
”

He angled away again, and the Lakota veered in that direction, pulling ahead at a gallop. A growing pillar of dust was rising from the pounding hooves, fortunately mostly swept behind them by the wind and the speed of their own passage. The spicy scent of crushed grass mixed with Ingolf's own sweat and Boy's and the oily metallic smell of his mail and the muskier stink of leather. Ahead the Boise formation was reacting with commendable speed now that they'd realized . . .

They're about to be corncobbed,
Ingolf thought with a taut grin, reaching over his shoulder for an arrow.

The wind in his face would give the other side a slight advantage in a horse-archery duel. You had to be careful about that sort of thing, and remember always that mounted men could only shoot ahead, behind and to a half-circle arc on their left. Even worse, the enemy had a battery of four springalds.
Spitters
, they were called sometimes. Not as bad as scorpions or twenty-four pounders throwing dart-bundles, but bad enough and very mobile. A four-horse team could drag them almost anywhere cavalry could go, and about as fast.

The Boise cavalry were back in formation already, four blocks three men deep—risky, but it would add firepower and weight to any charge. Now they were rocking forward, but between the blocks of the enemy formation loomed squat wheeled shapes behind angled arrow-shields . . .

“For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful,” Ingolf muttered, then louder: “Mark! Drop behind me!”

Reluctantly the boy obeyed; Major Kohler was over on the left flank of the formation with the other guidon banner so that a lucky spray of shafts couldn't decapitate the regiment, but being a commander meant you got shot at more, and that was that. You were completely useless if your men couldn't see you, and if they could the enemy could too.

Up to a hand gallop now, the knotted reins dropped on the saddlebow, guiding the horse with weight and thighs alone. It took almost as long to train a cavalry mount as it did the rider, longer in proportion to life span, ordinary horses were useless for this . . .

TUNG!
A great metallic bass throb of a sound, like the world's biggest untuned lute, and instantly the
crack
as the springald's slide hit its stops and the dart flashed free.

Something arched out from behind the onrushing body of horsemen. It seemed to go faster as it approached, a blur in a long shallow curve traveling too fast to really see. Then
shunk!
as it struck the dirt fifty feet ahead of him and buried half its length in the ground. He was past it immediately, close enough to see the malignant quiver of the sheet-metal fins that fletched it. Then another went by, and he could hear the
whipppt
of cloven air as it passed his left shoulder. Death missed by six inches; it would have torn his arm off at the shoulder if it had struck. And there was a huge scream from behind him, just an instant before it stopped sharp as an ax-cut.

Mark!
he thought, then ruthlessly suppressed the wave of anger and grief.

More three-pound darts traveling hundreds of feet per second; one made a brutal wet cracking sound as it passed entirely through a trooper not far to his right in a spray of blood and broken mail-links and killed the man behind him too. Another skewered a horse, punching into its chest and disappearing entirely into its body cavity. The beast went down between one stride and other, limp as a banker's charity, tangling the feet of the mount behind as it tried to leap the sudden obstacle. The second horse went over in a tumble of limbs and crackle of bone, the rider flying free to strike with crushing force. And they were close now, close, four hundred yards, three hundred . . .

“Shoot!” he bellowed.

Few of the men could hear him. They could all see and the commanders would relay the order; he rose in the stirrups, twisting his torso as he drew against the recurve's hundred-pound resistance with the thick muscle of arms and shoulders, chest and gut. The arrow slid through the centerline cutout in the bow's riser, and the smooth curved limbs bent back into a deep C-shape, sinew stretching and horn compressing on either side of the central layer of hickory.

He let the string roll off his draw-fingers.

Three hundred and fifty shafts followed within a second, arching into the sky like slivers of incarnate motion, seeming to pause for an instant and then plunging downward. The enemy shot in almost the same instant, and in the passing of a fractional second Ingolf fought and won the usual battle of will not to duck and hunch his head forward. You got hit or you didn't; he'd had both. Instead he was flicking out more arrows, shooting as fast as he could draw and adjusting the angle as the forces came together. More men and horses went down on both sides, falling out with iron in their bodies, going limp or thrashing out of the saddle, horses suddenly uncontrollable with the pain of sharp steel and wood in their flesh. Not much to choose between his men and the enemy in speed or accuracy of shooting, but there were more of his and the Sioux were into it now too, at extreme range.

Six arrows, seven, eight—

He thrust the bow into the boiled-leather scabbard at his knee. The same motion helped slide the yard-wide round shield off his back and onto his left arm, and an instant later the shete was in his right hand, moves practiced for decades. That switch needed careful timing; too soon and you got shot at without being able to reply, too late and you were fumbling with things while the guy on the other side cut you out of the saddle like a side of pork. Juggling your weapons like that, fast but without dropping anything, was a big part of cavalry training. It was even worse if you had a lance to worry about too.

The enemy's trumpets sounded, a harsher deeper blatting tone than the ones his people used. The Boise horsemen responded to the order with beautiful precise discipline, reining in from their gallop and turning; their whole formation was racing away back up the valley in a brace of seconds, with the troopers turning and firing backward. The Parthian shot, and his men couldn't shoot back. He thrust his shete skyward to keep them from uncasing their bows again, and heard officers and noncoms taking it along the line:

They'd be wondering why he gave that order, but they obeyed, hunching with their shields up under their eyes as they rode. The enemy were thirty yards away, edging to the right as the Lakota shot at them from across the little creek or began to cross themselves in fountains of spray from the plunging hooves of their horses, holding their bows high over their heads to keep them out of the wet, their yelping, yipping war cries splitting the air.

An arrow thudded home in his shield, slamming through the sheet metal and leather and plywood, the point appearing as if by magic with four inches of shaft behind it. He grunted with the impact as it rocked him back in the saddle; sheer dumb luck it hadn't gone through his left arm. He'd fought an action with an arrow there once and didn't remember it fondly. Also he'd lost that skirmish and barely gotten away with his life.

Another; he used the hilt of his shete to break them off with two sharp blows. One of the oddities of command was that you had to keep
thinking
when things like this were happening.

The Boise troops were bunching closer together; their commander was aiming at the gentlest, or least steep slope—up ahead to the right. If he could get his men across that he had options. If he stayed to fight, he didn't. The numbers were against him. Being outnumbered two to one didn't mean you were half as strong as the other side; the ratio of combat power was more like four or five to one, other things being equal.

The onrushing Richlander line overran the springalds and a few sections stayed to deal with them. The battery commander had wasted time trying to hitch his weapons up to their teams, and they all paid for it. There was a brief flurry as the gunners swung cocking-levers and billhooks, the cavalry shetes rising and falling in lethal chopping arcs, bright and then throwing arcs of red drops. It ended soon; artillerymen rarely got a chance to surrender when those they'd been shooting at from out of bow range got within arm's reach of them for payback time.

Then...

Perfect timing,
Ingolf thought vengefully.

The line of the crest above suddenly bristled steel and the Boise formation halted in a ragged stutter with yells of dismay. Steel lance heads glinted above bright pennants flapping in the wind, the steel of armor on man and destrier glinted, a glow of color shone from the heraldic arms on their shields. Another trumpet sang, this time the high harsh sweetness of a Portlander oliphant.

A cry rang out from forty throats, muffled by the visors that turned their faces into blank steel curves with only the vision slit showing dark, but still deep and hard:

“Haro! St. Joan for Tucannon!
Haro!
”

The lance-points of the men-at-arms came down in a long falling ripple, and their followings came up behind them, ready to run in their wake through the hole they'd punch in the enemy formation.

“Haro!
Chevaliers, à l'outrance—
charge!”

 

Nine minutes later Ingolf stopped his shete in midswing; the jarring mental effort left him weak and gasping for an instant. The Boise trooper who'd dropped his saber and cried for quarter had his hands crossed over his face and his eyes screwed shut. When he didn't die he opened them again.

“Down!” Ingolf barked. “Down and hands on your head!”

The man scrambled out of the saddle to obey, kneeling with his palms on top of his helmet, and his horse galloped off with its stirrups flapping. The will to fight ran out of the Boisean formation with an almost audible rush that spread throughout the milling chaos of the melee battle in instants; their commander put his cross-crested helmet on the end of his sword and pushed it high.

“We surrender! Quarter, comrades, we call for quarter! Throw down, men! It's useless! Throw down!”

They did. It didn't always save them. Most human beings found it hard to kill; once rage and fear had pushed them into that state of un-mind, it was even harder to stop. Officers and sergeants and corporals in the Richlander force grabbed men and held them in bear grips until the killing madness ran out of them, sometimes stunning with a blow from the flat or knocking them out of the saddle with the edge of a shield. The knights dealt with their subordinates a bit more roughly, clubbing more than a few militiamen down with broken lances or skull-shaking kicks from armored feet and stirrupirons.

The Sioux weren't even trying; he heard the savage guttural blood shout of
Hoon! Hoon!
as the steel drove home. More and more of them were crossing the river, too.

“Kohler!” he shouted.

“He's dead, sir. Arrow through the throat.”

“Then you, Captain Jaeger! Get your men behind me,
now
! Shields up, shetes down.”

They followed as he booted Boy back into motion, and he wheeled them between the Lakota and the bulk of the Boiseans, holding up their shields but not the threatening steel. Violence wavered on the brink of reality for an instant, and then Three Bears rode up to Ingolf's side, reining in stirrup to stirrup. He rose in the saddle and shook his dripping shete at his own folk, shouting something in the fast-rising, slow-falling syllables of their language—which was mostly used for ceremony and important public announcements these days, something that probably redoubled the impact. They stopped, looked at each other sheepishly, shrugged, and pulled back.