Edain’s voice punched through the savage wail of the píob mhór:
“Let the gray geese fly! Wholly together-shoot!”
There were twice twenty and one of the High King’s Archers here, counting their commander. That wasn’t enough longbows to generate the sort of sky-darkening arrowstorm that had smashed armies on the battlefields of the Prophet’s War. Though the target was a lot smaller too, if nicely packed, and these were picked experts who could loose a shaft every three or four seconds and put it exactly where they wished. Forty scythed down into the foreigners in the first volley, then a flickering stream as each bowman walked four paces, shot, walked, shot. .
Órlaith swallowed; she was close enough now to see men screaming and staggering with an arrow through the face or writhing on the ground trying to pull out one that had punched through armor into chest or belly or groin, or just lying still with their eyes open wide. With the wind in her face she thought she could smell that tang of salt and iron too, like being in a garth in the autumn at pig-slaughtering time. . except that there was no one standing by with a bucket of oatmeal to catch the blood for sausages.
When her father spoke his voice had the flat judiciousness of a landsman looking at a yellow field of grain he’d plowed and sown and tended, rubbing a handful of ripe ears between his hands before tasting the kernels and nodding satisfaction that it was time to send in the reapers.
“We surprised them right enough. Now they’re dung for our pitchforks, the careless bastards. Let’s not let them get their balance back.”
Even with her nerves thrumming-taut Órlaith shivered a little. Her father was a gentle and forbearing man, slow to anger and quick to laugh and endlessly patient in composing the quarrels of which Montival’s wildly varied peoples had an abundance.
One of her earliest memories was clinging to his back with a tiny fallen bird in her free hand as they climbed a tree to put it back in the nest. He would make a three weeks’ ride in the dead of winter to be sure of the facts in an appeal to the Crown’s justice, when a death sentence was at stake. This was a side of him she hadn’t seen much of before, and suddenly the tales of the man who’d broken the Prophet’s hordes and forged a kingdom took on a new light.
It had been a sword that the Lady had given him on the magic isle, after all.
“Sir Aleaume!” he said crisply, as he extended his hand for his lance and a squire leaned forward to fill it. “Advance to contact!”
The baron’s son nodded to his signaler. That young man raised the long Portlander trumpet slung across his body and put the mouthpiece to his lips.
The men-at-arms knocked down their visors with the edge of their shields as he raised the oliphant. Órlaith did the same; darkness fell with a click as the metal snapped into its catch, and the world shrank to a long narrow slit of brightness, like a painting or a tapestry. Her father’s visor and hers were both drawn down to points at chin level, suggesting a beak: his was scored and inlaid with black niello like his helm, echoing the feathers of the Raven that was his sept totem. The markings on hers were threads of pure burnished gold, for the great hunting eagle that had come to her on her spirit-quest. Something of that raptor’s intensity seemed to fill her, as if she were a vessel of movement and focus stooping from a great height.
“Chevaliers, haro!” Aleaume shouted. “For Artos and Montival. . à l’outrance, charge!”
The silver scream of the oliphant echoed the command, like a white flash in the mind. Their coursers were as well trained as the men, and scarcely needed rein or spur or even the riders’ shift of balance. The dozen armored men-at-arms spread out into a close-spaced line and their horses moved up the pace. Walk. . trot. . a long rocking canter. . and the pennants began to snap and flutter in the speed of their hoof-drumming rush.
They passed where the archers had halted in easy range of the enemy, a score on either side; the arrows were still going by overhead, focused now on the spot where the lanceheads would go home. Apparently the foemen knew something about receiving a cavalry charge, for they were trying to pack together and present a hedge of points to the horses; trying and failing, falling or throwing up shields to stop the rain of gray-feathered cloth-yard shafts.
Closer, a hundred yards, and then the trumpet shrieked again for the gallop-a close-held controlled hand-gallop, not the wild dash that would scatter them like hailstones on a roof. Her instructors had hammered home that the shock of a charge depended on all the lances striking at the same moment. Her father’s lance came down, and she couched her own; the rest followed in a ripple, the black-gold-silver of Heuradys’ pennant rattling and cracking a yard to the right and twelve inches behind her own.
The foot-long blades of the heads pointed down at breast-height on a standing man, wavering only a little as the hooves pounded and the horses’ heads pumped up and down. She raised her left fist to just below her chin, and that put the curved upper rim of her shield right below the level of her eyes.
It didn’t feel heavy now, just comfortingly solid. Arrows shot by the men facing them went by with a nasty whpppt sound, one glanced with a tick against the side of her helmet like a quick rap with a hammer, and then three smashed into the shield crack-crack-crack, punching through the thin sheet-steel facing and into the bullhide and plywood beneath.
Someone is trying to kill me! went through her mind.
She knew it was absurd even as she thought it, but that didn’t remove the sense of indignation, and it carried the faint memory of a scolding and swat on the bottom she’d gotten when she was six and pointed a half-drawn bow at someone.
The impact of the arrows hammered against her, but the grip of the high-cantled war saddle kept her firm and she braced her legs in the long stirrups. What was about to happen would be much worse. Hitting things at speed with a lance she knew about.
Pick your man, a harsh remembered voice spoke at the back of her mind. Pick him the moment you couch the lance and your horse goes up to the gallop.
It had been an old knight from County Molalla, with a wrinkled brown face like a scar-map of campaigns and lumpy with ancient badly healed bone-breaks. He lectured the young squires in his charge with the combination of vehemence and boredom used for vital truths told a thousand times, and he’d spared none of them an iota for birth or rank or sex:
You can’t change your mind once you’re committed and you get only one chance with a lance. Don’t waste it.
A mailed figure ahead of her with a spike atop a conical helmet that spread in a lobster-tail fan over his neck was waving his square-tipped blade and screaming a war cry that sounded something like jew-che as he tried to rally his men. She let the point dip towards him; a touch of the rein to neck and the alignment of the lance itself brought the last ounce of effort from Dancer. The man snarled with his eyes wide and swept the sword back, suddenly close enough to see a mole beside his mouth-
Thud!
Impact, massive and somehow soft and heavy at the same time, wrenching savagely at her arm and shoulder and slamming her lower torso against the curved cantle of the saddle. Near two thousand pounds of horse and armored rider moving fast, all packed behind the hard steel point. You could knock yourself head over heels off the horse if you did it wrong, but she came back upright as the lance broke across and she made her hand unclench and toss away the stub. The man in the pointed helm was down, with the lancehead driven right through his body and three feet of the shaft standing out of his chest.