Many of the foot soldiers' faces were tight with conscious self-control as they stood in their ranks. The A-listers might do other things in their spare time, but fighting was their lifework. The infantry were precisely the other way round. On the other hand:
"Right, Bearkillers," he said, rising in the stirrups and throwing his voice to carry. He pointed northeast. "The Protector's men are coming up the river to try and take away our homes and kill our families. We're going to fight them." He grinned. "Any questions?"
A rippling growl went through the formation. Someone shouted Hakkaa Paalle! and the rest took it up, a deep, roaring chant, each stamping a foot in time to it, beating their gloved hands on the bucklers slung at their belts. Havel felt himself flush with pride; he'd brought them through the terrible years after the Change, and from starving refugees made a nation of them. Now they trusted him: The sound cut off when he raised one gauntleted hand.
"Now get ready and wait for the word," he said into the silence that followed.
For a wonder, he and Signe had a moment to themselves. The troops put their bikes on the kickstands, then got to work-for the pikemen, that meant unslinging their weapons and fitting the two halves together with a snap and rattle as the spring-locks clicked home. A leafless forest sixteen feet high rose as they fell in four-deep along the road, facing north and east, the long steel heads of the pikes above them; the glaives waited to the rear.
"What do you think?" she said.
"Depends on how many of them get off the boats, alskling," he said. "If there's more than we can handle, we pull back sharpish and wait for the rest of our call-up companies to arrive. They'll be gathering fast."
"Why not do that now?" she asked.
"I really don't want to lose the bridges," Havel said, nodding in the direction her father had gone. "If Arminger takes those, or breaks them down, he can operate on both sides of the river, and we can't help each other. And if he fortifies the crossing, it's a major blow. Worth risking a battle for, even against odds, as long as it isn't totally impossible."
"Aren't we risking defeat in detail?"
Havel grinned at his wife, who'd been an occasional vegetarian and quasi-pacifist before the Change. "Learning the family business, eh? Nah, there can't be all that many of them, not if they're besieging Mount Angel and pushing into Mackenzie territory at the same time. Armchair generalship, like I said- he likes drawing arrows on maps. He's trying to get fancy and I'm betting he doesn't have enough men to do everything at once."
"We're all betting that," she said gravely, and he nodded. "Do you think it's Arminger in person? Here?"
"Nope," Havel said. "At a guess, it's Stavarov or Renfrew. Hopefully Renfrew."
"But Renfrew's his best commander!" Signe said.
"Exactly," Havel said, licking a forefinger and marking the air with it. "Plus he's the only one Arminger really trusts. This would be a good day for the bastard to die."
He'd been keeping an eye on the Chapman Hill lookout. Now a mirror blinked from there; he read the code as easily as he would have print.
"Barges holding back," he said. "Turtle boats coming forward. Now it's up to your dad."
"We should have set the engines on the bridge up earlier," she fretted.
"Nah, that wouldn't work," Havel pointed out. "They would have twigged to that, even if Arminger's troops aren't long on individual initiative. But if you don't give them too much time to think and consult higher echelons they'll try to go through with a plan even when things have changed."
They both looked to the river, a mile and better northward. The low, beetling shapes of the armored riverboats were hard to see at first, marked more by the white froth curving away from their bows and sloping forecastles than by the hulls themselves. The sight was a little eerie-you could believe that motors drove them, rather than dozens of dozens of bicycle cranks geared to a propeller shaft. That smooth mechanical motion without sails or oars looked unnatural, in this ninth year of the Change.
"I just hope Daddy can deal with it," Signe said as they slid silently by and headed for the bridges. "He's not a hands-on fighter."
"Yeah, but he's got Pam to look after that," Havel said reassuringly. Then, harshly, as the barges and transports showed at the edge of sight: "Trumpeter! Sound fall in!"
Kenneth Larsson shifted under the uncomfortable, unaccustomed weight of the mail hauberk as he sat his horse beside the railcar, waiting for the signal from Chapman Hill. The armor he wore was strictly for protection-just-in-case, like the blade at his side. He'd put a lot of effort into the various weird-looking contraptions on salvaged rail-wheels that followed him, and was metaphorically rubbing his hands at the chance to use them. Right now that wouldn't be too advisable, because the leather and steel cup that covered the stump on his left wrist held a simple hook: a very sharp hook: rather than any of the various tools he found useful in the labs and workshops back at Larsdalen.
The heliograph on the hilltop a mile and a half north blinked at him. He nodded and waved to his own signaler to respond, then looked back along the wagon train-a phrase literally true, since the dozen flatcars were each drawn by four horses. Rail made a smooth surface, and the beasts could pull five or six times as much as they could on even the best roads, and do it faster. Here they pulled flat surfaces that bore a weight of gears and ratchets, frames and tanks and tubing; the hard angular shapes and smooth mathematically precise curves made him nostalgic for the lost world:
"Move out!" he called, waving his hook forward, neck-reining his horse to the side of the railroad tracks and bringing it up to a canter.
His personal guard followed-commanded by his wife Pamela-and the crews of the war-engines rode their charges like grinning, hunched baboons, cheering him as they went by amid a clattering rumble of hooves and whine of steel on steel. The rail line lay along the riverbank further south, but here it turned inland through the ruins of West Salem, running five or six hundred feet from the water, amid buildings whose smoke-stained windows peered out from shattered glass and rampant vines:
"What's chuckle-worthy at this point?" Pamela asked him from his blind side.
She didn't find scorched, overgrown ruins any more cheerful than most people did. These had the further distinction of having been flooded out a couple of times. He turned his head to grin at her; the helmet and nasal bar framed her narrow, beak-nosed, brown-eyed face, and the armor added bulk to her whipcord figure. They'd met in Idaho not long after the death of his first wife and married late that year. A decade-and two kids-later, he still thought he'd gotten the better of the deal. Somehow the throttled fear that made his stomach churn with acid brought that home still more strongly. He kept his voice light as he answered: "I was just thinking that anyone else here would have said it's half a long bowshot to the river, instead of estimating it in feet," he said, waving his right hand across the brush-grown rubble towards the blue-gray water.
"Except possibly me," she said. "I'm an old fart too."
"No, you were the one who belonged to the Association for Hitting Things with Sharp Pointy Things," he pointed out.
"Hey, I wasn't one of those Society get-a-lifes," she said, aggrieved. "I practiced the real thing in ARMA. The Association for Renaissance Martial Arts didn't spend time playing at the kings-queens-damsels-and-minstrels stuff."
"Prancing around with swords: " he teased. "Well, it turned out to be a good career move."
She shuddered a little. "And there was the hiking. I owe my life to that."
Which was true; it had been that hobby that had taken her from San Diego to Idaho just under ten years ago. Southern California had been the worst of all the death-zones, twenty million people trapped instantly in a desert without even drinking water. Not one in a thousand had escaped; explorers who'd been there since told of drifts of desiccated corpses lining the roads for a hundred miles out into the Mojave, preserved by alkaline sand and savage heat.