bait.”
That brought a general rustle. About forty of the men sitting with their backs against the bank upstream of him munching on sausage and bread and cheese were equipped in articulated steel plate much like their lord; some of them de Grimmond’s household knights and men-at-arms, and the rest his vassal knights called up from their manors and their men-at-arms. They were the ones who fought as heavy cavalry; the twelve-foot lances they’d carry were stacked neatly in pyramids of ash wood and steel.
Very bad news if you can’t get out of the way, dodge around and pepper them with arrows, Ingolf thought. If you can… not so much.
He had a suit of plate complete too, the gift of Sandra Arminger, but he preferred lighter gear for work like this.
You have to use great big horses with that ironmongery, and even bigger ones if they’re wearing armor too. They’re fast in a charge, but not what you’d call nimble, and they get tired out quick.
Rather more men wore light armor of leather and mail like Ingolf’s; they also had tight horseman’s breeches, swords and powerful recurve bows of horn and sinew and wood. This far east the PPA bred its own cowboys and hence horse-archers. There were also foot spearmen with the same big kite-shaped shields as the knights and crossbowmen with small round bucklers and their specialist missile weapons; both carried swords as well and they wore what they called three-quarter armor here, which was like a man-at-arms’ but with some of the pieces left off. Spearmen and crossbowmen and men-at-arms were the three types of soldier that Association military tenure required landholders here to maintain and furnish at need.
All those looked at least unbothered by the prospect of bloodshed, working on their gear or talking quietly and joking as they ate, a few praying with their rosaries in their hands, a couple even sleeping; but then it was their trade, more or less, even if the infantry did farming on the side and the horse-archers stared up the ass-end of a lot of livestock. The rest of the force were dispersed up and down the arroyo in spots where water was available and the cover good, several hundreds strong; they were peasant militia not unlike the unfortunate Girars, a few callow- eager, most grimly determined. Ingolf suspected that their main military purpose would be to absorb arrows that might otherwise hit a real fighter.
“If they do come, we’re ready,” said the baron.
Ingolf looked back over his shoulder, juggling distances and the lie of the land.
“You sure you can take heavy horse down that slope?” he said, a little dubious. “Looked mighty steep to take fast, much less a flat-out charge in all that gear.”
The baron laughed and handed Ingolf a length of dried and smoked mutton sausage, salty and greasy and pungent with garlic and sage and hot peppers, balanced on a thick chunk of maslin wheat-and-barley bread with a slab of strong-smelling cheese a little runny with the heat. There was a helmet full of onions not far away, another full of raisins and dried apricots, and someone was handing around a skin bottle of water cut with a rough red wine. Ingolf sat with one foot drawn up-which let you get back on your feet in a hurry, a fixed habit he’d picked up long ago-and set to the food, using his own helmet to hold things he wasn’t chewing on at the moment.
It was all reasonably undecayed, and far, far better than some things he’d eaten in the field. Nearly raw foundered mule three days dead, eaten in a weeping late-autumn rainstorm that kept smothering the fire, for instance.
“Lord Vogeler,” de Grimmond said patiently. “This is not only my barony of Tucannon, it’s Grimmond manor, the place I was raised as far back as I can remember and where I’ve spent nine-tenths of my life. I’ve ridden and hunted and hawked and walked and strolled and camped out and searched for strayed stock and led my men-in- arms practice and occasionally fought bandits or raiders over every inch of it starting when I could walk three steps. Yes, it’s steep right there, but we can do it.”
“Point taken, my lord,” Ingolf said. “I’d laugh at you if you gave me advice on using terrain back in Readstown. We’ll need confirmation on how many of them there are before we settle the details of the plan, of course.”
He finished the food, extracted some gristle from between his teeth and went to check on his horses, including his favorite, a big brown gelding named Boy he’d picked up in Nebraska years ago. He made a point of feeding them some of the apricots. A horse wasn’t like a water mill where you pulled a lever and got a given result. It was important that it liked and trusted you as well as knowing you were boss.
Then he went back and waited, thumbing through a copy of The Silmarillion from his saddlebags, which was more or less essential if you were going to be part of the Dunedain Rangers, into which he’d married. This edition was from the Mithrilwood Press. The cover was gilt-stamped tooled leather over board, and it had annotations by her aunt Astrid Loring-Larsson, the Lady of the Rangers, along with her Helpful Hints on Modern Spoken Sindarin at the end. She had started the Rangers a few years after the Change, she and her anamchara Eilir, Juniper Mackenzie’s daughter. They and their husbands still ran the outfit.
That priest I met in Fargo said Christians and Jews are People of the Book. Well, so are the Dunedain Rangers! Or Books, plural.
He’d actually read some of the other stories by this guy when he was younger…
OK, hold that thought. According to Astrid Loring, the Hiril Dunedain, those aren’t stories, they’re the Histories and the Englishman was The Historian, inspired by the Valar demigods even if he didn’t know it and every word is goddamned gospel true. I don’t know if all the Rangers actually buy that… I’m not really sure how seriously Mary takes it… but on brief acquaintance with her aunt I think that living in the woods with Astrid for a couple of years would convince pretty well anyone, much less a bunch of impressionable teenagers who wanted to believe in the first place.. . It’s the official line anyway, sure as shit stinks. What the hell, it works. And it’s no sillier than all these Protectorate guys ready to draw swords over who gets to paint what stuff on their shield. All your perspective, I guess.
When you considered what the Cutters believed about their Ascended Masters and the Nine Rays and whatnot, it wasn’t even very strange. Nor was the Church Universal and Triumphant just imagining things. There was something there, it just wasn’t what they thought it was.
A soft call came from one of the sentries and he stuffed the book away. A few minutes later two figures came up leading their horses.
The one in the lead was Mark Vogeler, his nephew and aide-de-camp. The boy would be eighteen about Christmas, but he was tall and well built for his age; still gawky but when and if he got his full growth he’d look a lot like his uncle, except that his hair was the color of corn tassels and that his snub-nosed face was considerably less battered. The mail shirt and helmet he wore, his shete, tomahawk, the quiver over his back and the laminated recurve bow in its saddle scabbard on his horse, were all of the highest quality and they’d been new that spring.
But they’d seen use since. The long trip from Readstown and several stiff fights had knocked a lot of the puppylike piss and vinegar out of the eldest son of Edward Vogeler; he was no longer quite the brash youngster who’d virtually blackmailed his kin into letting him come along to the war. The grin was still wide and white in his dark-tanned face below the mop of summer-faded hair.
“Reporting, Colonel Vogeler,” he said, saluting and handing over a folded sheaf of papers. With a bow that showed how quickly he’d picked up local custom: “My lord Tucannon.”
The other newcomer was in worn buckskins deliberately stained and mottled in shades of brown and sage- green to make them better camouflage. He was a short brown-skinned man in his thirties with black braided hair and high cheekbones, definitely Indian or mostly so. He bowed as well but remained silent afterwards, squatting with his reins tucked through his belt and munching on a handful of the apricots someone passed him.
“Ah,” Ingolf said, flipping quickly through the papers covered in small, neat handwriting and hand-drawn maps. “Yup, Lady Mary’s report. About three hundred fifty men, Boise light cavalry, regulars, all horse-archers, with a battery of four springalds along with them. Damn, horse artillery. I hate those things.”
Everyone in hearing nodded, including the men-at-arms. Plate would turn most arrows, unless they came from a powerful bow and hit just right. Springalds were like giant crossbows on wheeled carriages, but they threw four-foot bolts powered by an entire set of leaf-springs from the rear suspension of a light truck. They had three times the range of a bow and they’d punch through knight’s armor as if it were made from old tin cans. A good crew could fire nearly as fast as a crossbow, with two men heaving on the cocking levers from behind the steel shield that protected them from arrows.
“They’re advancing in squadron columns-”
