Juniper forced her lungs to work, drawing in a shaky, shallow first breath, and then another. The spike of pain in her stomach was almost welcome, after the first numbness. She blinked her eyes clear, and saw that the remnants of the men-at-arms were in full retreat, some on foot, more falling with shafts in their backs as she watched. The arrowstorm ceased as the last of them moved out of range; the spearmen had retreated in a solid phalanx, covered by their overlapping shields. Here and there along the Mackenzie line at the edge of the forest a scrimmage rippled where a lancer had reached the Clan's position. Dozens swarmed each one under, working together like wolves pulling down an elk. From the rest came a cry directed at the Protector's men, high and mocking and shrill.
Juniper wheezed and forced herself to her knees, groping for her bow and then leaning on it as she came to her feet. A clanking sounded as Nigel Loring ran up, moving as lightly as a man in running gear despite the steel on his back, his mild eyes blinking anxiously, his face red and streaming with sweat under the raised visor.
"Are you all right, my dear?" he asked.
Juniper nodded. "Just: winded: " she managed to gasp.
"You're wounded!" he said.
A knot of men followed him, the broad blades of the Lochaber axes glistening-wet and slinging sprays of red drops as they dipped and jostled above the heads of the running warriors. She wiped her face and looked in surprise at the blood on her palm; more dripped from her nose onto her upper lip, hot and salt and tasting of copper and iron.
"Just a scratch," she said. "We'd better-"
She looked around for her signaler. Sam Aylward came trotting up, mounted and leading their horses. She caught his eye.
"Sound the retreat," she called.
The boy with the ox-horn trumpet put it to his lips and blew, a droning and snarling combination of rising and falling notes. The Mackenzies turned in their tracks and trotted away, eeling back through the dense brush and into the woods, scrambling upward; their bicycles were on the other side of the ridge. Juniper gratefully accepted Nigel's helpful lift into the saddle.
"Now let's see what they do next," she said.
Nigel Loring nodded, smiling. The warmth of his regard melted a little of the cold control she must keep; it was good to feel his straightforward happiness at seeing her whole, and to know her own matched it.
"It's a judgment on them," he said.
"Judgment, Nigel?" Juniper asked, neck-reining her horse about.
"A judgment for their choice in historical models," Nigel went on, waving northward across the grassy field. "When a man establishes a military force, and then decides to base it not just on the medieval nobility, but on the medieval French nobility: well, really, now: "
Unwillingly, Juniper's mouth quirked. Aylward's laughter sounded like sword on shield as they spurred their mounts into motion.
Conrad Renfrew's horse was panting beneath him like a great bellows between his knees as he reined in; he'd ridden it hard and fast up the road, only to arrive when the battle was over. Gray-faced with pain, Lord Piotr lay propped against a saddle while a surgeon worked on the arrow that transfixed his sword-side shoulder. The wound was a simple in-and-out with a narrow bodkin point, though serious enough; it bled when the shaft was withdrawn, but with none of the arterial pumping that told of death, and from the way he worked his hand it hadn't even crippled him by cutting tendons or nerves.
Unfortunately, Renfrew thought, grimly silent for a moment as the man bit back a shriek as the disinfectant was poured in.
Then he dismounted and knelt beside a man far more gravely wounded. There was a froth of blood on Sir Ernaldo's lips as he gave the Protector's commander an account.
When he stood again, his experienced eyes confirmed what the dying man had said. There was a fringe of bodies along the road and up to the point where it ran between the two hills, but the infantry had come off fairly lightly-no more than a score of dead, and twice that seriously injured. It was the great mass of dead horseflesh and armored bodies lying like a windrow across the meadow to the west of the road that made him breathe quick and hard, panting like his horse as soldiers and laborers dragged men free, laying out the dead and bringing the wounded back on stretchers to where the doctors worked beside the supply wagons.
Spearmen and crossbowmen could be recruited easily enough, there were always more volunteers from the ranks of the tenant farmers than they could use. You could train a spearman in a few months, if he had guts and strong arms; it took only a little more to turn out a decent crossbowman. Skilled men-at-arms took years, and their mounts almost as long, years of effort and sweat and expense:
He walked to his horse and hung the serrated mace thonged from his wrist on his saddlebow, to put temptation beyond reach. Then he looked down at Lord Piotr Stavarov and ground out: "You fool. You cretin. You complete fuckup. You shit-for-brains. You-"
"My lord!" The young nobleman struggled to his feet, ignoring the clucking of the medic. "My lord Count, you cannot address me so!"
"You: no, shit has some use. You're worthless even as fertilizer!"
The bystanders were backing away; the Grand Constable of the Association had a reputation for icy control, and his flushed face and snarling voice were shocking.
"My lord," Stavarov said, drawing himself up. "I: I admit we've suffered heavy losses, but we can inform the Lord Protector that we did drive the enemy from the field. What would you have me do?"
Renfrew struck with the leather-covered palm of his hand, not his ironclad fist, but the blow still sent Piotr spinning to the ground; the doctor cried out in alarm for his patient as fresh blood broke through the bandage.
"Give me back my knights!" the Grand Constable roared. "That's what I'd have you do, you Mafiya moron! Give me back my knights!"
Chapter Twelve
Near West Salem, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9
"H ell, I didn't like cities even before the Change. Always made me feel cramped," Mike Havel said, reining in his horse and flinging up his clenched right fist for halt. "Now they give me the willies," he went on.
The Bearkiller column clattered to a stop, without the bunching or collisions you might expect from over a thousand tight-packed humans on horseback and on bicycles and driving wagons. A few horses snorted, and one bugled in protest, but the only voices raised were a few sharp commands. There was a massed scuffing as the infantry squeezed their brakes and each put a foot down to bring themselves to a halt. Most of them were red-faced and puffing; cycling in armor was a little less strenuous than marching, and a lot faster, but that didn't make it easy. The majority of the bicycles had solid rubber on their wheel rims, built up of strips salvaged from car and truck tires, which made for a rougher ride.
Havel squinted eastward, where the sun was just over the Cascades on the farthest edge of sight. It was going to be a bright day with scattered white clouds, mild and cool and damp with yesterday's drizzle-the sort of day you could have anytime but high summer here.
What did the Sioux call it? "A good day to die"? Hell with that, but it's a good day to fight, ij you have to.
"Graveyards give me the willies too," Signe Larsson replied grimly, looking south and then east.
They were just outside the brush and incipient forest that covered the wasteland that had been West Salem; wind soughed through spiky brush and tall grass, through fir needles and leaves just beginning to bud out. There was a little noise from the troops behind, bike wheels and hobnailed feet and steel horseshoes clopping on pavement or crunching in gravel, the voice of a non-com here and there blistering someone's ear about a loose strap, the flutter of a pennon crackling in the wind from the north. Below that was a deep silence, where the gruck-gruck of ravens was the loudest sound-they always seemed to know when a fight was in the offing, and a flock of them was gliding down from the hills.