impassable for long enough if you can’t destroy them.”
He turned to the scions of House Renfrew. “Sir Thierry, we’re abandoning the siege engines, so you can start the teams and limbers out now, at least we can save the horses. You’ll hold this headland until the evacuation is complete. Breaking contact is going to be a bitch.”
Thierry thought for a moment, then grinned like a coyote scenting a housecat.
“I think we can get some use out of the engines first, Sir Ruffin. There’s only a couple of ways they can get at us here; if a place is hard to get into it’s usually hard to get out of as well. And if we channel them a bit that narrows it even more. Done right we can turn it into a real killing ground and they’ll lose all interest in chasing us for a while.”
Sir Ruffin nodded. “Good, use your discretion. I need you and you, my lord Viscount, to hold here and get as much materiel out as possible as well as the troops. We’ve got the pedal cars all set up; they’ll go to Hermiston and return for a second trip if possible, and anyone marching in that direction can hop on when they reach them. When you leave, take out these three bridges over the Umatilla…”
Sir Ruffin marked a cross on the bridges at Highway 84, the Westgate Bridge and the rail bridge.
“They have to be impassable for at least twelve hours, more if possible. That’ll bottleneck the enemy long enough, hopefully.”
The elder Renfrew brother looked east. “We don’t have enough men for that, Sir Ruffin. If there’s a sortie in any strength from the city to capture the engines, we’ll be up Shit Creek, not the Umatilla River!”
The Grand Constable’s right-hand man nodded. “I’ll send a couple of conroi of men-at-arms and infantry to help you hold. Most of the fighting is down around the John Day Highway and south of the old Highway 84 and 30, that’s where it looks like the battle line is shaping up. The enemy is anchoring their right on the city and trying to swing up north. We’ll have to rock them back on their heels there, that’s where we’ve got most of our lancers and the Mackenzie longbowmen, but this position has to be secured or they can use their reserves to flank us out too soon. As soon as I can spring the men I’ll send them to you.”
“What forces specifically, Sir Ruffin?” the Viscount asked a little more formally.
Ruffin chewed his lip and shook his head. “How good are you at kicking butt? The only one I think we can detach is going to be from House Stavarov’s contingent from County Chehalis; Sir Constantine and his menie, you know.”
“Piotr’s brat? He’d better not mess with me. But he won’t.”
“His reputation isn’t long on discipline.”
The heir to Odell snorted. “To hell with discipline, Sir Ruffin. He likes to fight. He’s a complete loss at knightly courtesy and social graces, in fact his vocabulary is limited to variations on drink and fuck and kill, but give him a chance to charge screaming at the head of his men-at-arms and he’s happy as a drunken pig in a grape-vat. That maneuver is the limit of his military knowledge but he does it well. And he’ll take my orders.”
Guelf glanced curiously over at the iron expression on Viscount Chenoweth’s face, but decided not to ask. Sir Ruffin nodded and picked up the yard square map. Guelf hurried to help him shake it gently and roll it up. Map paper was horribly difficult to press evenly and cost the earth. Only the Albany presses of Corvallis made this grade of paper. He tapped it very carefully and slid it into the carry tube for Ruffin.
The Viscount took off his helmet with a single pungent word as Ruffin mounted and left in a spurt of pebbles and dust, the pennants of his escort flapping as the lance heads glittered in the sunlight. He scrubbed his short, light-brown hair and growled.
“Thank you so very much for this gift of a helmet full of horse turds, Sir Ruffin! Guelf, get your men; take out those bridges. I don’t need to teach you how to suck eggs. What the hell happened to the Dunedain? That op was tricky, but they’ve pulled off harder. Beelzebub’s arse with piles the size of plums, I wish I knew the details!”
Guelf didn’t answer, limiting himself to a duck of the head and thump of fist on breastplate in salute. He took off looking for Sir Harold Czarnecki, the other Gervais knight here, and waved their squires forward. But he bared his teeth in a sudden angry grin.
The Dunedain, huh? Hope that bitch and her sidekicks all bought it. That would be a nice little dividend on Gervais’ arrears of revenge for my brother Jason’s death back in the Protector’s War! Baroness Mary will be pleased. And they promised me, uncle to the King , they did indeed promise me that. Which doesn’t mean throwing this fight. Uncle to the King of As Much As Possible, that’s the thing.
“Chezzy! Get the menie together; we’re on dirty tricks! Grab some mantlets, one of Thierry’s engineering wagons and let’s go burn and destroy!”
His men-at-arms and footmen…
Odard’s men! he thought. But I’m here and my nephew isn’t.
… roared with pleasure.
“Valentine! Valentine! St. Valentine for Gervais! Let the arrows fly! Valentine will suck them up! Face Gervais, face Death! ”
The battle banner of the barony waved in the hot sun with its black-andred image of St. Valentine, transfixed with arrows, on a yellow background.
Looks painful, he thought, not for the first time.
The crossbowmen slung their weapons and put their shoulders to the heavy wheeled shields, heaving them up on their props like wheelbarrows.
“Six men pulling, six pushing on each!” Guelf snapped. “Get to it!”
The spearmen moved their shields to their right shoulders and fanned out in a protective screen between the mantlets and the city walls.
“Dismount the lancers,” he decided. “We won’t have time to get the mounts out and warhorses can’t be wasted.”
There was grumbling at that, but Association knights trained to fight on foot when they had to, and being armored cap-a-pie the men-at-arms would stiffen the footmen nicely. The mantlets trundled along, bouncing on their spoked steel wheels over the irregular ground.
“Idle bastards,” Guelf said, looking around at the ruins of what had been Pendleton’s northern half.
Nobody had to ask who he meant. The wreckage of the suburbs here had mostly been left to decay naturally, with only occasional efforts to clear a field of fire on the north bank of the river-or perhaps that was simply people salvaging building material. Concrete floor-pads and basements and the ruins of burnt-out houses were still thick, and others had been converted into workshops or storage or piles of rubble had been shoved aside for truck gardens and turnout pasture. There were even occasional rusted automobile hulks littering the dirt-drifted, sagebrush-grown roadways, though they’d been stripped of useful items like springs and glass windows. Anywhere in the Association territories-or at least anywhere with an inhabited countryside and a city in the middle of it-would have been a lot neater.
The wagon with the engineering supplies followed behind, lurching and jerking as the heavy horses dragged it up the footpath east along the bank opposite Pendleton’s walls.
“Keep going!” Guelf called. “Eighth Street first, then work your way back!”
They broke out into open country as they traveled, east of the ruined suburb. There was the Eighth Street bridge, the last one actually fronted by the wall of the smaller modern city on the south bank. A couple of sentries pelted back across it, their yells thin with distance; a sally port beside the main gate opened for a second to their frantic pounding, and then slammed with a hollow boom as they dashed through. That looked as if everyone in the city was firmly focused on the battle shaping up to the southwest.
Good.
“My lord, where should I put this stuff?” a sergeant asked, gingerly holding a cloth tube of the mixture of powdered aluminum and iron oxide.
“The thermite? See there, where the crossbeams are riveted to the main support pillars? Pack it in there. Crossbowmen here, ready to give covering fire!”
The mantlets swiveled to face the city walls, trundled forward and dropped on their support props with a thunk. The crossbowmen took position behind them, thumbing bolts into the grooves of their weapons and leveling them through the firing slits. Working parties scrambled down the steep slope to the foundations of the bridge, men standing on each other’s shoulders to reach the vulnerable part he’d pointed out.
Guelf sweated more than running around in a sixty-pound suit of plate and carrying a fifteen-pound shield in ninety-degree heat demanded. Pendleton was notoriously sloppy, but Boise was equally notorious for paying tight-
