Fortunately none of the valuable and exhaustively trained warhorses had been seriously hurt; destriers were expensive, harder to train than humans and a lot less likely to recover from a broken limb.
The hale survivors of the exercise gathered around-bloody noses, sprains, bruises and incipient shiners didn't count as serious these days-panting as they cooled off in the rain-swept pasture, legs and bodies thickly plastered with mud. It wasn't raining, not quite, but it had been fairly recently; what they were getting now was weather that couldn't quite make up its mind between fog and drizzle and a possibility of snow.
The infantry were farmers and artisans and laborers, militia who drilled in the slow parts of the agricultural year and fought when he called them out. Their equipment was a little varied and a lot of it homemade, though everyone had some sort of metal helmet, and at least a brigandine or chain-mail shirt for armor; some of the more affluent had breastplates hammered out of sheet steel, and plate protection on their shins and forearms, and long, metal-plated leather gauntlets. Good steel was abundant in the Changed world, salvaged from the ruins; it was the time of the scarce, skilled craftsmen that made armor expensive.
The cavalry were A-listers, full-time warriors and the elite of the Outfit, uniformly kitted out in knee-length chain hauberks, greaves and vambraces of plate or steel splints on leather, round helmets with nasal bars, hinged cheek-pieces and mail-covered neck-flaps, and two-foot circular shields. Their weapons were lances, recurved bows made of laminated horn and wood and sinew, and long, single-edged swords with basket hilts; the shields were dark brown, with the stylized outline of a bears head in crimson. His own helmet had the tanned, snarling head of a bear mounted on it; he'd killed the beast himself, shortly after the Change, with an improvised spear. From that, a great deal had followed.
A great deal including the Outfit's name, though that was Astrid's idea, as usual. Aloud: "All right, Bearkillers. What would have been different if this was for real?"
"We'd have crossbows on our flanks, Lord Bear," one of the infantry said, a stocky, freckled young man with shoulders like a blacksmith-which was what he was-leaning on a glaive. "When the charge stalled in front of the pikes, we'd have shot the shit out of them, killed a bucketful and made the others easy meat. Armor's not much help at close range like that."
Havel nodded. A hard-driven arrow or crossbow bolt was just too damned dangerous to use in a practice match, even with a padded, blunt head, and having people standing around shouting Twang! Twang! as they pretended to shoot was sort of silly. Instead the referees had tapped on a certain percentage of the mounted troops with their batons, often starting furious arguments, while the missile troops were off shooting at targets.
"Hey," one of the A-listers said. "If this were for real, we'd have been using our bows and that line of pikes would have been a lot more ragged before we hit it."
Havel nodded again, but added: "Yeah, Astrid, that's true. But we're practicing to fight the Portland Protective Association, and the Protector's men-at-arms don't use saddle bows. Sword and lance only, and they rely on their own infantry for missile weapons. OK, we'll say that cancels out."
He didn't add: And there aren't many who can use a horse-bow like you, either. It was true-everyone on the A-list was a good, competent shot, but Astrid was a wonder. Your ego doesn't need any stroking, however.
Astrid Larsson pouted a little as she leaned her hands on the horn of her saddle. "I suppose so."
She was twenty-three to her sister Signe's twenty-eight, with white-blond hair and huge blue eyes rimmed and veined with silver. They gave her face an odd, nearly inhuman quality despite its fine-boned good looks. She was intensely capable when it came to anything involving horses or bows, a fine swordswoman and in Michael Havel's view just one hair short of utter-raving-loon status. Unlike many, she'd been that way at fourteen, before the Change and its aftermath.
"Lord Bear," she added, confirming his thought.
And she stuck me with that moniker and this damned taxidermist's nightmare on my helmet, he thought. Plus that shield:
Hers wasn't the standard outline of a snarling bear's head that was the blazon of the Outfit. It had a silver tree instead, and seven stars above it, around a crown. Her helmet was even stranger-looking, with a raven of black-lacquered aluminum on the steel, wings extending down the cheek-pieces and ruby-eyed head looking out over the nasal bar.
It's all those books she reads, those giant doorstopper things with dragons and quests and Magical Identity Bracelets of the Apocalypse.
She'd been obsessed with them when he first met her, and the ensuing decade had made her worse, if anything. He wished, very much, that she'd only been weird about archery and horses, but no such luck.
Not to mention she's become so popular and influential among the younger and loopier element. I can't really clamp down on it because that Ranger outfit she and Eilir put together are too fucking useful, dammit! OK, so she can be the Elf-Queen of the goddamned woods if that's the way she wants to play it.
Aloud he went on to the audience: "Here's the important thing. As long as that line of pikes stayed solid, the lancers couldn't get anywhere near you infantry types. And when they got crowded and stalled, they got tangled up bad. A lot of them would have died before they could disengage-which, incidentally, they'll have to practice more. Charging's easy; retreating without getting your ass reamed is a lot more difficult. So-it's official. The infantry wins today!"
Everyone cheered. The younger A-listers looked a bit sullen as they did, but their fighting morale didn't need bolstering; if anything, they tended to be a little reckless and cocky. It took serious effort and native talent to get onto the A-list, and the fact that their families were usually the ruling class of the Outfit, more or less, didn't hurt in the self-esteem sweepstakes either. An occasional ass-whupping by the horny-handed sons and daughters of toil did them good, in his opinion; that was one reason he'd been fighting on foot in today's match. "Certainly, Lord Bear," Astrid said again. "But once some gaps opened up, we could get in past the pikepoints."
Havel nodded vigorously, then removed his helmet and handed it to a military apprentice-a teenaged aspirant to A-Lister status-and ran his hands over his bowl-cut hair. That was straight and coarse and still crow black in his late thirties, a legacy of his Anishinabe-Ojibwa grandmother. The high cheekbones and slanted set to his gray eyes might have been from her, or from the Karelian Finns who made up most of the rest of his ancestry; the sharp-cut features were startlingly handsome in a harsh, masculine way, emphasized by the long white scar that ran from the corner of his left eye and across his forehead. He stood just under six feet, and his lean frame moved with a leopard's easy grace under fifty pounds of armor and padding.
"Yeah, good point," he said to his sister-in-law.
He gave the militia a glare, and they shuffled uneasily-which produced an alarming volume of clanks and clinks among two hundred people in metal protective gear.
"This field's pretty level; if you can't advance over it without breaking front, what's going to happen on a battlefield, maybe with grapevines or fences, and people shooting at you? Or if you have to do something more complicated than pushing straight ahead? You let a pike wall get ragged, and the Protectors knights will be all over you like flies on cowshit. One-on-one, they'll slaughter you. Keep drilling until the formation's always tight, and you slaughter them. It's as simple as that. Understood?"