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, a 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.”
Damn, he was a good man. Just bad luck. Later!
“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.
“Thanks, cousin,” Ingolf said, looking down at his sword-hand.
It was glistening with thick red liquid, and so was the whole yard-long shete and more was spattered across his thigh and torso and some on his face, and his gauntlet was greasy where it had run down under the cuff and soaked into the leather. The harsh iron-coppery stink was everywhere, and he felt the weary disgust, the sense of let-down-ness that he always did after a fight. For a while you were just an armor-clad set of reflexes that shouted and struck, and then you had to be yourself again.
“Colonel!”
He whipped around. Mark was on a horse that was obviously not his own, and his bugle was bent nearly in half where it rested on its sling across his chest.
“You OK?” Ingolf barked.
Christ, Varda, whatever, thank You I don’t have to write that letter to Ed and Wanda. Not this time, at least!
“Nothing hurt but my bugle and my pride, Unc… Colonel. A springald bolt went right through Dancer’s neck and cut the saddle-girths and the next thing I knew I was lying flat on my ass. Took me a while to catch a loose horse. Where’s Major Kohler?”
“Dead,” Ingolf said, and the boy’s face struggled with shock for an instant.
“We’ve got work to do,” Ingolf said grimly. “We made the mess and now we need to clean it up.”
Mary rode up laughing a couple of hours later, cantering past the rows of Boise prisoners sitting with their hands still on their heads. Ingolf looked up at her with relief; just beyond the prisoners were the rows of wounded, and he’d been consulting with the doctors, his own and the Boisean medic squad. The dead were a little farther out, their shields over their faces and a couple of walking injured to keep the birds away.
His wife had a bright scratch across the matte green paint on her helmet, just the sort an arrowhead would make when it banged off the steel. Two inches lower and it would have punched through her face and into the brain.
I’ve been in this business too long, Ingolf thought. I’ve seen too many of the people I care about die. It’s starting to get to me more and more.
He shook his head and looked at the Portlander beside her in the dented and scuffed suit of plate. The man had a tower and a lion on his shield, still discernible beneath a couple of arrow-stubs despite a lot of recent dings and nicks and one lopsided corner looking like someone had hit it with an ax, very very hard. A war hammer in his right hand rested with its shaft across the high steel-plated cantle of his knight’s saddle; the end of it was caked gruesomely, with drying bits of hair and bone and skin caught in the serrations on the blunt side and bits of sticky gray goo as well.
Sometime in the last hour, hour and a half from the state of that. And he didn’t stop to smell the roses afterwards, his horse is foaming its lungs out. Big courser and not a barded destrier, must have been a mobile fight.
The face below the raised curved visor was older than Ingolf by about a decade or a bit more though not as banged up, running with sweat and red with exertion-fighting in armor was like that, especially in that sort of armor in this sort of heat, and you didn’t get over it quick-but it looked coolly amused and totally in command of everything around, starting with his breath. Also it had the sort of sculpted but slightly harsh good looks that would make women coo; the short golden beard added to the impression.
“You’ve done a nice little job of work here, Colonel Vogeler, Lord de Grimmond,” he said, his voice deep but smooth. “I don’t believe we’ve met in person before, Colonel. Marchwarden Rigobert de Stafford, Lord Forest Grove, currently in charge of the Crown’s forces in this area. I’d offer to shake hands but I’m a bit messy right now. I’ve met your charming and capable spouse, Princess Mary.”
He handed off the war hammer to another man, probably his squire. “Well-met again, Maugis,” he said to de Grimmond; they exchanged a knuckle-tap, a clunk of armor on armor. “And thank you for your aid, intancan Rick Mat’o Yamni.”
“What happened out there?” Ingolf said bluntly, jerking his head to the west a little.
He couldn’t look there now, because the sun was only a couple of hours from setting, but he needed to know. His mind filed away the fact that this Portlander had gone to the trouble to learn the Lakota for war chief. It was an extremely tactful thing to do, when you had one under your command. When it came to bloody-minded touchy pride the Sioux and the PPA’s nobility were surprisingly similar.
“There were more of them,” Mary said. “Heading towards Dayton originally, but they probably saw your dust when you mousetrapped their cavalry, and they veered this way. Quite a lot of them. We got cut off and fell back south to try to get around them, and then ran into Lord Forest Grove’s outriders. Which was a very considerable relief. And he acted very quickly.”
“You supplied us with just the information we needed,” de Stafford said, with a savage grin and an inclination of his head.
Then he took a moment to unfasten the straps of his visored sallet helm and take it off, shaking his sweat- darkened hair out with a grunt of relief, leaving his head looking rather odd above the bevoir that buckled to the upper part of the breastplate and protected his chin.
“They had about four battalions of infantry and a couple of cavalry regiments,” he went on. “A raid in force and enough to invest Castle Dayton and do much damage if we didn’t hit them hard. We had a stiff brush with
