Meanwhile, back on the front lines, one of the noncoms lowered his pike and held out a wineskin. The advance wavered; then the duke's troopers dropped their pikes, reached for the wineskins, and pulled out some hardtack. In a few minutes, they were laughing and chatting with their opposite numbers, having a regular party while they watched the lobsters open one another's shells.
"How can they think they will not be punished?" Gilbert wondered.
"Nice question." I pointed to the silver melee. "Here come their masters."
The knights were riding back full-tilt, and those broadswords rose and flailed down at their own men. They hit ...
And broke.
Snapped clean across, just as if each sword had been a brittle antique. The knights stared at the remnants of blade attached to their hilts, then roared and pulled out their maces.
The heads flew off on the first swing.
The tankers' arms shot up, presumably with a cheer; then their pikes raised and stabbed, some finding chinks in armor, some jabbing between saddle and tin pants, levers to tip knights out of saddles, which they did. Then each knight disappeared in a cluster of soldiers, and pikes rose and fell.
Gilbert was pale-faced. "Soldiers striking down their own knights!" It was the ultimate threat to him.
"Suettay's harvest," I told him, knowing it would be reassuring.
"She's trained her army to get everything they can for themselves and prey upon the weaker, killing off anybody who gets in their way. She forgot that she might not always be the stronger." But the queen's side hadn't dispensed with all its strong-arms yet; a sorcerer in a midnight robe banded with gray stood up, waving his arms.
"A man of the second rank." Frisson frowned. "This may be their undoing, poor devils."
"Maybe not," I said. "Don't underestimate the Gremlin's capacity for making things go wrong," Suddenly, a rain fell - a very localized rain; it seemed to envelop only the sorcerer. He clutched his hat and ran, but the storm followed him.
I frowned. "What kind of rain is that? It looks yellow-no, brown, when there's enough of it! And it foams "Ale!" Frisson cried. The sorcerer fled, pursued by foot soldiers who stopped every few paces to dip up the puddles he left behind him.
But they were already growing smaller in the gazing pool; the field dwindled, forests leaning in from the sides to hide it. Then the treetops began to look like waves in a pool as they shrank away, and kept shrinking. A patchwork quilt of farmland moved in around the edges, still shrinking until it became a plain flat area of yellowish green with dark-green masses of forest and clots of dots that were towns made of houses. The blue shimmer of the Baltic appeared at the top of the pool, with the white beard of the Alps below. Ribbons of blue marked the boundaries, and I found myself looking down at Germany as I knew it. But the picture kept on expanding, including Austria, Hungary ...
"The Holy Roman Empire," I whispered.
"Holy no longer," Friar Ignatius said grimly, and 'tis odd that you should couple the empire with Rome, for Hardishane refused to accept the crown the pope would have given him. He did revere the pope and his bishops, for he was a man of faith - but he held that the churchmen should no more partake of governance, than he should of ministry, and that 'twould be as great a catastrophe for the one as for the other."
I whistled. "Brave words, for the time! How did he avoid being excommunicated?"
Brother Ignatius shrugged, and Gilbert said softly, "Who would have dared excommunicate Hardishane?
I took it that Hardishane was this universe's answer to Charlemagne, and had been just a little more deft than the Frankish king - or a little more paranoid. I decided I wanted to learn more about him - but now wasn't quite the time.
An area of the map was growing in the screen - the southeast, here the Alps gave some security to the smaller kingdoms and principalities that would someday be Switzerland, in my universe.
We seemed to be going in for a close look at the sector that would have been the Dauphin - the bridge between France and Germany. I wondered why - but as the view swelled, we saw a long dark line snaking out of the mountains into Allustria. The line was moving - and as it swelled, I could make out the gleams of armor and spear heads, then individual knights and soldiers. It was an army on the move.
"The army of Merovence!" Gilbert cried. "Praise Heaven!" But the view went past them, a pair of mountains swelling, then their tops flanking the screen. There the view steadied, and I saw soldiers in the same colors as the marchers below standing on crags, bows in hand. Among them stood men in homespun tunics, looking as hard as the rocks they stood on, bearded and booted against the cold.
"The montagnards have thrown in with Merovence!" Gilbert cried, "and the Free Folk with them!"
"The Free Folk?" I frowned.
"Behind the soldiers," Friar Ignatius prompted. I looked, and realized that the gray-green wall I had taken for rock had a head and a tail - and wings! So help me, it was a dragon!
But it was growing smaller in the pool, and the scene blurred as we swept along the line of the army. It steadied again, and a dragon floated by, filling the pool for a moment, its wingspan vast but still nowhere near enough to support such a huge body. Was magic in the air, here?
Yes, of course. If Friar Ignatius was right, raw magical power filled all of space, like the hypothetical ether of early electronics. I mentally kicked myself - I had known that! And if there were a magic field that surrounded the whole Earth, why wouldn't life-forms have evolved to take advantage of it?
I resolved to keep a closer eye on the local fauna. But the view was narrowing again, the individual soldiers growing larger as the view swept on to the head of the file - and I saw a sight that stung like a slap in the face. At the head of the column rode a knight whose long blonde hair streamed out from under a steel cap with a crown around it.
" 'Tis Queen Alisande!" Gilbert yelped. "The queen of Merovence herself! " My heart leapt into my throat. "Isn't that a little dangerous?"
"Nay." Gilbert pointed. "See who rides beside her." On the lady's right hand rode a man in midnight blue, emblazoned with stars and crescent moons and comets, though he wore a steel cap instead of a pointed one. "A sorcerer?"
"Nay, the Lord Wizard!"
"I notice he's riding a dragon," I said. "Thought you said they were the Free Folk."
"They are, and the fabled Stegoman is the Lord Wizard's friend, not his slave. And, see! " Gilbert pointed; on the other side of the Queen rode a knight all in black, on a midnight charger.
"Sir Guy de Toutarien!" Gilbert crowed. "I know his blank shield."
"Black armor and a blank shield are pretty anonymous," I demurred.
"Aye, but what other Black Knight would ride beside Queen Alisande of Merovence? Nay, all do know of that blank-shield knight, Wizard Saul! 'Tis he who aided the Lord Wizard to overthrow the vile usurper Astaulf and his sorcerer Malingo, to set Queen Alisande again upon her ancestral throne!"
I could see there was a lot of old news I was going to have to catch up on.
"Thereafter," Frisson said, his eyes glowing, "they two worked among the folk of lbile and shook the throne so sorely that Queen Alisande could ride in, depose the false sorcerer who had taken the crown, and restore the rightful heir."