longbowman. However, you can learn to shoot a crossbow in a couple of weeks. Less, if it’s at a big target. A couple of days, if it’s just a matter of blazing away into the brown.”
“That doesn’t make a soldier!” came a protest from the scar-faced baron. “Not a real crossbowman.”
“No, it doesn’t, my lord. It doesn’t mean being able to march twenty miles in armor and being fit to fight at the end of it, or knowing how to use sword and buckler, or maneuver in units to the word of command or fire volleys, or stand in ranks under fire and close up the files over the bodies of the wounded and the dead, or a hundred other things including being a genuine marksman. It does mean, however, that the one you’ve trained can run upstairs to the wall of a city, aim over the parapet, and shoot at a massed assault column. For that, all you have to be is able to walk and work the cocking lever and see something the size of a battalion in close ranks. Lioncel!”
The young squire had been standing motionless with Tiphaine’s sword cradled in his arms. Now he laid it respectfully down on one of the side tables and opened a basket. The crossbow came out and he stood with it at port arms, his young face calm and attentive.
“This is my squire, Lioncel de Stafford. He’s a very junior squire, a page until earlier today, and while he is in excellent training for his age and inches he’s thirteen years old and as you can see far from his full growth. That is a standard-issue crossbow of the sealed pattern. Lioncel, span and fire!”
The youngster brought the weapon up before his face in the first move of the drill-book sequence. His right hand held the grip, and his left went to a metal loop set into the base of the forestock.
The weapon was still made as the Lord Protector’s conscript engineers had designed it in the first weeks after the Change. The stock was hardwood, modeled after an old-time rifle called an M-14, with adjustable aperture sights over the trigger, a groove down the center for the bolt and a spring catch to hold it in place. The prod-the short horizontal bow bolted into a slot at the end-was a thirty-two-inch section of shaped automobile leaf spring.
Making the weapons was a Crown monopoly, and charging vassals for the ones they required to outfit their troops a source of revenue. The whole assemblage had a blunt, functional grace, rather like a war hammer.
Lioncel pulled on the loop, and the lever it was attached to pivoted down. Then he worked it, using his grip on the stock to make the two a scissors-style source of mechanical advantage. Click- clack , click- clack, click- clack, click- clack, click- clack, click- clack, as the pawl-and-ratchet mechanism in the stock forced the thick string back; then a louder click! as the trigger nut caught it.
The squire slapped the lever back into its slot and held the weapon by its forestock with his left hand as his right snapped down to an imaginary belt-quiver. He mimed pressing a short bolt into the groove, brought the weapon up to his shoulder and aimed at a snarling bear in the mural.
Tung, and a slight whapping sound as the string vibrated.
“Again.”
He repeated the process. A crossbow didn’t have the suave elegance of a Mackenzie longbow; the short prod had to draw at much more raw weight to give a bolt the same speed and range as the superbly efficient spring the long subtly curved yew stave made, and arrows were more aerodynamic than the stubby bolts. Even with the built- in spanning mechanism, a good bowman could get off three shots to the crossbow’s one. But it had the supreme virtue that you didn’t need to start at age six and practice all your life to master it, and at short range the bolts had a brutal authority that would make nothing of most armor.
“Again.”
When Lioncel had fired three imaginary bolts he came to port arms again. Tiphaine looked around the table.
“Reverend Mother, may I borrow your attendant Sister…”
“Sister Fatima.”
“Sister Fatima for a moment.”
“Yes, my lady,” the abbess said.
Sister Fatima stood immediately, standing with her eyes slightly cast down and hands linked before her. Tiphaine nodded approval; she’d seen soldiers less disciplined.
“Sister Fatima, you are… what, twenty?”
“Nineteen, my lady.”
Nineteen, and of no more than middling height and slim, though healthy-looking, as far as you could tell with the voluminous habit.
“Your birth?”
“My father has a fief-minor in sergeantry on a manor of the Count’s, a day’s travel south of the city, my lady. Ferndale Manor.”
That put him in the lowest class of Associate. As an infantry reservist called up a month a year in peacetime he would have a double-sized peasant farm and pay less rent and labor service; his sons would spend a couple of years in the Count’s garrisons as young men. Such families were as close to a rural middle class as the Association had.
“Have you ever handled a crossbow?”
“No, my lady. My father and brothers are spearmen.”
“Your occupation?”
“I helped with all the usual farm chores, my lady. Now in God’s service
I am an orderly at our hospital, and a student of medicine, and assist with clerical duties in the Mother Superior’s office as needed.”
“Excellent, Sister. Lioncel, give the good Sister the crossbow. Sister Fatima, please span and shoot three times.”
Lioncel presented the weapon across his palms with a polite bow. The nun’s eyes went a little wide as she accepted it, and it wobbled slightly as she adjusted to the solid nine pounds of weight. Then she settled it in a rather clumsy copy of Lioncel’s posture and went through the loading procedure. She was awkward, and made elementary mistakes-holding the butt away from her shoulder in a way that would have given her a painful thump if there had been a bolt to launch. But it was obvious that she was handling the basic effort without much strain.
“Thank you, Sister, Reverend Mother,” Tiphaine said, as Lioncel retrieved the weapon, replaced it in the basket and retrieved the sword.
“And there you have it,” she went on to the room at large as he took up his position behind her. “You can quickly identify the natural shots. Bolts are reusable, so there’s no limit on practice. Any laborer, any healthy peasant girl, can load. Have two or three behind the shooter handing forward loaded crossbows. That will augment your firepower quite a bit, especially here with the large circuit of the city walls to hold, and let you use your trained men where you really need them. The enemy are not going to sit down to two-year sieges, or an artillery and combat-engineering duel. If they come, they’ll try ramps, siege towers, and plain old ladders, to swamp you with massed assaults regardless of costs. Shoot the guts out of them, break their hearts with losses, and you can stop them. Then your walls will be the anvil against which we’ll hammer them to death.”
Eventually, she thought but did not say.
The commoners were nodding enthusiastically. She thought she saw signs of hidden stomach cramps among some of the nobles, though not the Count, and the Countess was beaming and nodding herself. The Association had conquered as far and fast as it had because its leaders had quickly grasped the consequences of the Change, equipped their forces with effective gear based on pre-gunpowder weapons and armor, and given them at least some training from their own experience as hobbyists. That expansion had slowed and then stopped when the PPA ran into others who’d had variations on the same idea and time to recover from the shock of the Change and implement it. A lot of the nobles here were survivors of encounters with massed Mackenzie longbowmen or Bearkiller lancers or Corvallan or Yakiman pike-hedges, or the children and younger siblings of those who hadn’t survived the experience. She let them take the full force of her glacier-colored eyes for a moment.
There was still a good deal of indigestion at the thought of letting too many of the lower classes have weapons which could penetrate the armor of a knight.
“This program will be implemented immediately and fully. So the High King in his wisdom has decreed,” she said.
Which settles that, her glance said. Or I will settle you.
The silver notches in the hilt of the long sword that was in Lioncel’s arms once more reinforced the message.
