There were more screams as he pushed himself clear of the twitching body and climbed to his feet. And a shout he recognized all too well from the past few years:
"Come, ye Saints!"
Though he wasn't used to hearing it in high-pitched female voices. The dim light showed a heaving, thrashing confusion in the rocky flat where they'd camped; he dropped the bowie and snatched out his shete just in time to cut down another woman running at him with a wood-chopping ax already wet with blood.
"Rippling Waters men! Here, here, here! " he shouted in the rally call.
"Back to back!"
He quickly stamped his feet into his boots, which were the only part of his clothes he had taken off to sleep, and caught up his shield. A man came running, limping with blood on his knee but with his shield and shete. Another, and another… and his horse came trotting as well, and then a clump of men. He jerked his cow-horn trumpet loose from the pile of gear on the ground as they formed up around him and blew a long dunting blast, huuu-hhhhrrr-uuuu!
"Here, here, here! "
The light was waxing, and he could see half a dozen little fights going on, and men sprawled bloody and still in their bedrolls, one going down under half a dozen shrieking women armed with knives and a camp kettle and snatched-up rocks. How had they planned it? But that didn't matter now; if they could just live through the first couple of minutes, strength and weapons would beat down any amount of desperation. A woman could knife a sleeping man, but that was about all she could do.
"Here, here, here! Kill those bitches!"
Then the trader Ingolf came loping; his shete was wet too. More of his party was behind him. They'd be useful, but they were running away from a mob of women Then the hatchets and knives in their hands registered, and the blood dripping from the steel. The women weren't chasing the Newcastle men; they were following them into battle. Rage warred with disgust.
That gal of theirs, Rebecca. She went around among the others before the shoot… They must have used her as their go-between for this!
"Hey, Rancher Smith," Ingolf called. "Why don't you kill me? I'm more your size!"
Steel slammed into steel, shedding a tail of sparks, banged on shields. His sworn men and kin closed in on either side of him and threw the outlanders back.
"Bastard!" Smith wheezed. His arm dripped blood, and one of his men took an instant to tie it up. "Lying bastard! Cut! Cut! "
Rudi Mackenzie leaned aside and thrust past Edain's back, feeling bone pop and crunch as the point went through the body and into the dry gritty soil. The Cutter named Jack tried to scream once as the blade nailed him to the ground, writhing around the steel and coughing out a single gout of dark blood that steamed in the cold dawn air.
"I had him!" Edain said-almost snarled.
From the red-purple blotches on the dead Cutter's throat he was right. And Garbh's fangs had already cut his hamstring; the right leg sticking out beneath his dirty shirt looked as if it had been chewed to rags, which was a pretty accurate description.
"We don't have time to settle scores," Rudi panted.
A rally shout sounded, and the dunting of a war-horn, and someone screamed out: Cut! Cut! Cut! A good many other people were simply screaming.
"Come on. We've a fight to win."
Edain came, snatching up his bow. Odard was finishing a man already wounded by the woman who sprawled beside him dying slowly with a crushed larynx; he whipped the shete around his head in a Portland-style flourish blow, and the sharp edge drove halfway through the Cutter's neck.
"Haro! Face Gervais, face death!"
Odard surprised the Mackenzie by dropping to his knees for an instant and pressing the heels of both hands against the woman's throat.
"All I could do," he panted, loping on beside him. "If the tissues don't swell shut… and damn this peasant's overgrown weeding tool! I want a proper longsword, and a knight's shield!"
The three young men came up with Ingolf; the big Easterner was just pulling his shete out of a man's back, bracing his foot on the body to get the broad point free of the bone.
"The sentries?" he said.
"Dead," Rudi replied succinctly.
"Let's go pay a call on Rancher Smith," Ingolf said quietly. "Kill them ourselves, or wait? I'd like to kill them, but…"
"Let's see how things lie," Rudi said. "Nystrup should be here soon, but it's better to overrun them ourselves, if they're still rocked far enough back on their heels. We can't let them get their feet under them."
They ran on, past wagons and horses wandering loose or rearing and tearing at their picket ropes, past blankets and tumbled cookware and bodies lying still, or crawling or writhing or clutching themselves and calling for their mothers-high-plains cowboys and Mormon women both. The smell of blood and filth mixed with brewing chicory and scorched bacon that had fallen into the embers.
Some of the wounded just shrieked with pain greater than they had ever imagined, and those were of both sides too. The Mormon women still standing fell in with them, running or hobbling at their heels, holding weapons snatched from their captors. Rudi was disappointed when he saw the Cutters' forming shield-wall; there were thirty men still on their feet, though many of them were wounded. They all had their shetes and shields, and many had managed to snatch up bits and pieces of their war-harness as they ran to the sound of the horn and the rally-call. His own folk had all been able to put on their gear, mostly leather with pieces of steel riveted to it, but Ingolf had his mail-shirt.
A good many of the women were naked and barefoot, and none had more than a shift and drawers.
"Here, here, here! " the Cutter leader called. "Kill those bitches!"
"Hey, Rancher Smith!" Ingolf cried; there was a note of playful ferocity in his voice, release from the role he'd had to act. "Why don't you kill me? I'm more your size."
Rudi saw Smith's face change, twisting into something inhuman. Then he and Ingolf were at handstrokes, their blades lashing out in the hacking Eastern shete-style. An arrow flashed past the Mackenzie chieftain's shoulder, and lanky brown-haired Lin toppled backwards limp as a rope, with a gray-fletched Mackenzie arrow in his eye.
"Now be eating that, and a sodding apple too, a phiosa chaca brean !" Edain shouted. Then in angry frustration: "Get out of my way!"
The mass of women ignored that; ignored anything. They threw themselves on the Cutters' points in a shrieking mass, sheerly mad-at home he'd have said the Dark Goddess had them, from the fixed glaring eyes and the froth on some lips. Rudi engaged a Cutter himself, bringing his round shield up in a looping curve to stop the downward stroke of the shete without blocking his own vision. The weapon banged on the hard leather; he threw it sideways with a twitch of his long arm, but another came at him from the side and he had to block that. ..
Even Lugh can't fight two, he knew angrily; not in a straight-up fight between lines. There aren't enough of us!
Then three women threw themselves on the man ahead of him, so quickly that he nearly put his back out halting his own strike; one grabbed at the Cutter's shield, the second hung on his sword arm despite a chop that sliced open her leg to the bone, and the third leapt up and wound her legs around his waist and stabbed him in the face, over and over again with a long-tined roasting fork held in both hands, her arms pumping like a water-driven machine in a foundry. She stopped only when a tomahawk whirred across the width of the Cutter formation and sank into her skull with a chock that was horribly like an axman landing a cut on a tree.