Winnemuca looked as if he'd already seen some action; there was a sheen of sweat on his broad features, making the paint on his face run a little below the eagle-plumed steel cap-the design was black, with circles of white around his eyes.
"Whoa, that's war- paint," he said, looking at the crimson-gold-black-green designs that swirled over the faces of the nearer Mackenzies. "You white-eyes always go overboard with an idea once you steal it."
A few of the archers who could hear elevated their middle fingers in neighborly wise. Chuck grinned at him.
"The woad was traditional long before we decided to relocate, sure an' it was," he said, exaggerating the Mackenzie lilt that had become second nature over the years. "Along with scalping and head-hunting."
"No accounting for taste," the Indian said. Then he went serious: "They're going to be here soon. Light cavalry-Ranchers-they've got a good screen, but I saw a lot of them massed farther back, nearly a thousand horse-archers. Then the Cutter mounted levies, and then the Sword of the Prophet behind them, they've got bow and lance both. The Boiseans are over north, opposite the Portlanders, horse and foot-mostly infantry. And the Pendleton city militia in the center. Pikemen mostly, it looks like. We can't hold the Pendleton Ranchers off you much longer. Too many. Most of their cavalry is on this flank, but it looks like they're concentrating their field artillery in the center and the northern wing."
The three leaders looked at one another. The northern edge of the allied army was anchored on steep ravines, but the country southward was open and rolling, ideal for a horseman's battle.
"Well," Eric said to his son and Mike Havel Jr., who rode behind him with the snarling bear's-head banner of the Outfit on a staff that was also a very practical lance. "Now you're going to see how a fighting retreat is managed-and that's a lot more difficult to pull off than a pursuit."
He nodded to Chuck. "We'll hold 'em off while you get out," he said. "But you'll have to rake them hard first."
"Sethaz is going to regret ordering the horse in there," General-President Martin Thurston said, leveling his binoculars.
The long glitter of the swine feathers showed close through the lenses, and behind them the archers leaning on their weapons or squatting, waiting patiently or talking to one another-a few were even napping, amid the furze of arrows stuck in the ground. God alone knew how anyone could sleep near the savage music of the pipes and drums.
God, I'd love to have those longbowmen on my side! And someday I will, he thought, and popped a piece of the tasteless twice-baked hardtack into his mouth; there hadn't been time for breakfast, or even much sleep, and he chewed doggedly at the compacted-sawdust taste of it.
No time after that cluster-fuck at the Bossman's house last night.
His memory shied away from that a little.
And Sethaz' people act damned odd, sometimes. Well, they're lunatics, but even so… I thought Sethaz was a cynic exploiting fanatics… maybe he's more sincere than that.
"You think it's a mistake to attack?" his aide said. "About even odds-a thousand or so each. And they're light infantry; if the Pendleton cavalry can unravel them, the whole enemy position goes into the pot and we could bag them all."
"I've seen Mackenzies shoot," Martin said. "Two of them, at least. If they were within a couple of miles of typical, rushing a thousand of them head-on is a bad idea. Or maybe Sethaz won't regret it. The holy Prophet is sending our glorious local allies in first over there, I notice."
The Boisean command group were on a slight rise behind the line. Thurston's brown face was considering as the mass of Pendleton light horse finished sweeping their CORA equivalents out of the way and charged towards the Mackenzie archers. He took a deep breath, full of the smell of war-acrid dust, sweat of humans and horses, dung, piss, oiled metal, leather, dirty socks, the musk of fear and tension.
"Yeah, the wogs'll do to soak up arrows," the aide said, and a chuckle ran through the men around Thurston. "And if they get killed by the shitload, then afterwards there are that many less around to cause trouble."
"Those Cutter maniacs are polygamists, aren't they?" another said. "Lots of widows…"
The line of kilted archers was silent, and then a chant began-too faint to hear at first, but building until it rang clear even over the hammer of the drums and the noise of the hooves:
"We are the point "We are the edge "We are the wolves that Hecate fed!"
Then a cow-horn trumpet snarled and blatted, and the chant stopped. Another call, and a thousand yew bows came up and drew, each arrowhead pointing halfway to the vertical as the yellow staves bent.
"Oh, notice the ranging stakes in front of each unit?" Thurston said. "That's clever, that's really quite clever."
The aide was from a prominent military family who'd supported his assumption of his father's power, and was beside Thurston because of it, but he was no fool. He blinked at the bristling unison of the movement, bringing up his own binoculars.
"They've got good fire discipline," he said. "I would have expected a fangs-out-hair-on-fire charge, what with the war-paint and the-"
He grimaced in a mime of ferocity, mock flapping his arms and making a movement that suggested jumping up and down; the traverse red crest on his helmet wobbled with the motion.
"- wudda-wudda-wudda stuff. It's like something out of ancient history."
"They had good instructors right at the beginning-British SAS men, and a Blues and Royals colonel, of all things. Right, the Pendleton horse are really starting to move."
The Pendleton men went forward in a body, calling out the name of their kidnapped Bossman as a war cry, not in any particular order but spreading out in loose clumps and clots around the banners of their ranches marked with brands. They rose in the stirrups as they came in range, loosing as they did-or possibly a little out of range, as the first shafts fell short of the glittering menace of the swine feathers. In every battle Martin had seen, someone overestimated how far he could shoot.
"Three hundred yards, two hundred and fifty-"
The first arrows from the Ranchers' bows were dropping on the Mackenzie warriors when an order ran down the harrow formation. It was too far to hear it, particularly with the drumming thunder of four thousand hooves an endless grumbling rumble between, but Martin had learned to read lips. His own followed what he saw through the binoculars, repeating softly:
" Let the gray geese fly! Wholly together- shoot! "
Despite his trained calm the General-President of Boise felt the tiny hairs along his spine crawl at the massed snap of waxed linen bow-strings striking the leather bracers on each left wrist. And beneath that a whickering, whistling sound. The arrows arched into the sky like a forest of rising threads, more and more, and still more-three more from each bow in the air before the first thousand struck. The whole Mackenzie line was a shiver of motion as the archers snatched shafts from the bundles at their feet, set them to the strings, drew and loosed in a single smooth wrench of arm and shoulder and body.
He focused on one bowman with a wolf's mask painted across his own face and mentally timed the sequence.
Three or four seconds per arrow. Christ, better than three hundred a second all up-call it twenty thousand a minute. Crossing the killing ground, even at a gallop… those saddle-bunnies are going to have to eat close to a hundred thousand of those arrows!
The narrow steel arrowheads blinked in a manifold ripple like sunlight on distant water as they reached the top of their arch and seemed to hang poised for a second. Then they turned and plunged. The whistle of their flight was much louder as they came down, and the air above was a continuous sparkling flicker as thousands more followed in wave after wave.
They can see and hear them coming, he thought. Glad I'm not there , by God! Nor my men.
The whole mass of charging horsemen faltered and shook as men sawed at the reins. Then the first volley struck. The noise was like a storm in the mountains driving hail or heavy rain on a shingle roof, but there was nothing in flesh or bone or the light armor of the range-country horsemen to stop the bodkins. The whole first swath went down, mounts dropping like limp puppets or tumbling or plunging and squealing and kicking in astonished agony, men falling out of the saddle or clawing at the iron in face or body or screaming as horses fell and rolled across them. The rising threnody of pain was loud even on a battlefield.