Hansen lead his little unit into the bed of the stream. Here, the watercourse was little more than washed stones, ice, and the brown, hollow stems of frozen reeds.
Trumpets called frequently, but Hansen now realized the cries were more generally for the amusement of the freemen with the horns than they were signals or commands. Warriors argued with what their king told them directly—or ignored him, if they had Taddeusz' stature, at any rate. They weren't going to take directions passed by members of the lower orders.
One of the hobbled draft mammoths joined in with a series of piercing shrieks, as meaningful and perhaps as musical as the human notes.
"This isn't taking us toward the battlefield," Maharg said. They were all stumbling and patting their hands on the bank to keep from falling down. "They'll . . . Taddeusz, he'll give us the chop for deserting like this."
"We're going to get to the battle," Hansen said. "The streambed curves around, no problem."
He hoped it did. If this wasn't the same creek, he was going to have some explaining to do.
Though not, he suspected, to Golsingh.
"We're gonna get there late, though," Shill said with an undertone of . . . 'satisfaction' might be too strong a word. Might be.
Hansen crashed on. So long as the others' suits didn't have to power their arcs or electronic defenses, they could match his more efficient unit stride for stride. It can't have been a pleasant march, but it wasn't for their leader either.
They were getting out into the prairie, where herds of mammoths had kept the grassland open with their destructive feeding. The stream banks were a little deeper.
Hansen could see nothing directly beyond the reeds and alders. His quadrant of Malcolm's display showed the main line of Golsingh's army straggling up the hill which overlooked the chosen battlefield. Their footing had been much better, and they were, as Shill had said, well in advance of Hansen's unit.
They didn't look like an army, though. The warriors were in blobs and clumps, with potentially dangerous gaps all along the line. They had no more organization than bits of popcorn strung into a necklace by a kindergartner.
Taddeusz, with a dozen or so followers, was far in the lead on the right flank. Just as he had been during the battle against Count Lopez.
Taddeusz hadn't learned a damned thing. Which figured.
Hansen used his artificial intelligence to identify the players. Even without the compression of the remote display, he would have found it difficult to tell one set of painted armor from the next.
The sky hadn't brightened since dawn, and the snow was falling thicker.
"Mark friendlies blue," Hansen muttered, watching tags flicker across the quadrant. If he looked behind him, he'd see the same markers of blue light on the helmets of Shill and Maharg.
"You two," he ordered. "Say 'Mark friendlies blue' the way I told you in training."
"We did that," Shill grumbled. "Back to the camp."
Good lord, they were learning!
"Any chance we could siddown and rest?" Shill asked abruptly. The microphone in his helmet picked up his panting breath. "I won't be good fer shit if I don't get a breather."
"When were you ever good fer shit, Shill?" Maharg gibed.
"If we rest now, there won't be anything to do but count the corpses by the time we get where we're going," Hansen said. His body felt as though he'd spent the morning as a tackling dummy.
"Suits me," the older man muttered; but he kept up, and they all kept going despite the fact that the water was now knee deep. Occasionally they broke through the ice, then tripped on hidden rocks.
The banks were waist high and slightly undercut. Willow roots provided solid handholds for Hansen and his men when their feet slipped.
Malcolm had reached the top of the hillock. Through the veteran's eyes, Hansen saw freemen shout thinly and charge in the center of the plain. The Thrasey riders were badly outnumbered. They fell back immediately behind the oncoming row of warriors.
Crossbowmen banged bolts toward the freemen and occasionally at the warriors as well. Hits sparkled vainly on the battlesuits.
The forces of the Lord of Thrasey outnumbered Golsingh's by at least twenty warriors.
On the far right flank, a knot of men under Taddeusz charged the Thrasey line at a lumbering run. They were a good hundred meters ahead of the king's more regular array in the center, while Lamullo's left wing was echeloned back about the same distance behind Golsingh's division.
And, thanks to the rough going and the way the creek meandered, Hansen's pitiful unit was just about that far behind the left wing. It made good geometry but bad war.
"Come on," Hansen snarled. He started running. If that stupid bastard of a warchief could do it, so could he.
Shill fell headlong. Hansen turned, but Maharg was already helping the older warrior to his feet. They pounded down the creek like enraged hippos, striking sparks from the rocks and cursing monotonously into their microphones.
The Thrasey right wing was thrown forward also, so the forces engaged along their full lengths more or less simultaneously. Rippling arc weapons reflected between the ground and the low clouds.
Hansen noticed a phenomenon which had escaped him during the forest battle of the previous week: at the moment of contact, each battleline spread into two lines. The well-armored champions engaged one another in the front ranks, while lesser folk in scruffy, cobbled-together armor hung back a pace or two.
Malcolm snapped his arc at a warrior in black and white from four meters out. His opponent blocked the stroke and replied with a cut of his own. Armor of the quality of either suit was impervious at that distance, but neither man seemed inclined to close for the moment. Three other warriors flanked the Thrasey champion—from a step back.
Malcolm was missing the support of Shill and Maharg. Not that his juniors did anything, not really; but they were there. . . .
Hansen fell down. Shill put out a hand, but Hansen grabbed a tree root and jerked himself upright by it.
At the edge of Malcolm's display, Hansen saw Lamullo being pressed hard by a warrior in red and white. Tooley, the one with a terrible temper but nobody you'd wish to see on the other side.
Lamullo was blocking his opponent's strokes adequately, but he seemed unable to counterattack. After each parry he stepped backward.
Malcolm rushed his man with a shout. The Thrasey champion dodged back and collided with one of his own supporters. Malcolm's arc crackled the length of his opponent's outflung left arm, glancing but shearing also in a fountain of sparks.
The Thrasey warrior staggered in the opposite direction and fell. One of his retinue stepped over the champion to guard him. Malcolm cut vertically. The other warrior caught the arc on his own weapon, but he didn't have the power to stop it from sizzling into and halfway through his helmet.
Malcolm slashed to his right, taking the second member of the retinue on the hip joint and crumpling him like a sheet of heated polyethylene.
The third low-status warrior turned to run. Malcolm's arc sliced off his feet at the ankles.
Hansen swore. He'd seen in the swirling action what Malcolm didn't have the time or inclination to notice.
"Hold up!" Hansen snarled to his men. He thrust his arm into the reeds to clear a sight line. The growth was too thick. His arc scythed down the reeds in a cloud of steam.
They hadn't come as far as he'd intended, but the battle itself had moved toward them. Hansen was slightly behind the right flank of the Thrasey line. The nearest warrior was twenty meters away, watching his front, and the nearest actual fighting was ten meters beyond that.
Tooley jumped over the Lamullo's body and bore down on Malcolm with a roar.
"All right," said Hansen, cool again. "Let's go."
He gripped a willow trunk and started to drag himself up. The roots pulled out in a shower of dirt.
"Here," said Maharg, making a stirrup of his hands. Hansen stepped into it and felt the other warrior's battlesuit lift him. Shill followed by the same route, then bent and with Hansen jerked Maharg to the top of the bank.
A pair of Thrasey freemen watched with amazement as the three warriors appeared from the dense growth. They rode into the battleline, shouting a warning.
A warrior—it looked like one of the Thrasey side—cut them both down with as little hesitation as Hansen had shown when he cleared his sight line.
"Remember . . . ," said Hansen. He didn't feel the aches and battering he'd just given his body, but his forearms were quivering with adrenalin. "When the marker goes red, everybody hits 'im together."
But Hansen took the nearest Thrasey warrior himself, cutting the man so deeply through the shoulderblades that the arc crackled out through the flimsy plastron before Hansen shut it off.
They dropped three of their opponents before the fourth man even turned around. The warriors hanging back behind the real engagement weren't well equipped anyway.
Maharg's arc froze the fourth man. Hansen swatted away the fellow's life with something near contempt, as though he were scraping cow manure from his glove.
They struck the front rank, unaware and from behind; three of the Thrasey champions went down under the multiple attacks as easily as the hirelings had.
The air stank of ozone and burned flesh. The snow softened the outlines of the bodies, but it couldn't hide the smells of death.
Golsingh's collapsing line stiffened. Several of the more formidable surviving warriors on the left wing fell in with Hansen and his crew. They were turning the Thrasey flank.
Tooley screamed an amplified challenge as he lunged toward Hansen. His arc was a dense blue-white, even though it was extended more than a meter.
Malcolm must be dead.
"Strike!" Hansen shouted with his arc hovering just above his right gauntlet. He stepped close, the opposite of what he wanted to do and—with luck—not what Tooley expected.
Shill and Maharg had jumped back from Tooley's furious rush. Hansen was alone.
Hansen knew he couldn't block Tooley's weapon, even with his own flux as dense as his suit could produce. He caught Tooley's downward slash and held it momentarily while his body twisted out of the way.
Their armor clanged together. Tooley's arc carved into the sod explosively, covering both men in a veil of steam. Hansen's right arm was numb. His chest shuddered as he tried desperately to hold his opponent's weapon aside.
Something crackled past at the lower edge of Hansen's vision—an arc, Maharg stepping in to cut at Tooley's hip joint. Red and white paint blistered in the dancing arc, but the electronic armor held—
Until Shill squeezed between Hansen and Maharg. The old man thrust home at the core of the younger warrior's attack, and Tooley's battlesuit failed with a crack! that blew a doughnut of soot and steam across the field.
Tooley fell backward. Hansen started to topple onto the corpse. Shill braced him for a moment until Maharg could grab Hansen's shoulders and lift him upright.
Hansen tried to raise his right arm. He watched with amazement as the limb obeyed, but he still had no sensation from the shoulder on down. His chest felt cold and he was shuddering.
The battle paused. The warriors who'd followed Tooley, and those men of Golsingh's whose opponents had fallen in the flank attack, waited uncertainly. Hansen was trying to get his breath.
Malcolm got to his feet behind the Thrasey warriors. His helmet and plastron had been seared black by Tooley's arc. It was only by the red-blue-silver bands on his arms and legs that he could be identified. He hacked down the nearest man from behind.
"General freq!" Hansen gasped to his AI. "Come on, you bastards! Golsingh and Peace!"
He wasn't sure that was the best battlecry for this place, but peace was the brightest hope Hansen himself could imagine just now.
And he knew there'd be no peace on this field until every one of the Thrasey warriors was down.
"Strike!" with his display centered on a Thrasey warrior whose arc quivered first toward Hansen's unit, then toward Malcolm.
Hansen slashed; Shill and Maharg cut, together and within a fraction of a second of their leader's stroke. The warrior's helmet burned as Malcolm chopped down the man beside him.
"Come on!"
The whole Thrasey flank collapsed. Warriors turned and ran as Golsingh's troops swept toward them from the front and side simultaneously.
"No-'count merchant kissers!" Malcolm bawled as he strode down the line he was crumpling. "Frekka-paid cowards!"
They didn't look like cowards a minute ago, Hansen thought as he tried to keep up with the veteran.
But the prejudice against merchants' hirelings must be as great among those hirelings as it was among warriors who hadn't decided to accept Frekka's offers. So long as they were led by a champion of Tooley's stature, they stood and fought; with their leader down, there was no sign of the willingness Count Lopez' men had shown to fight on after the battle was clearly lost.
Despite the success of Hansen's flanking movement, the battle wasn't clearly lost for the Thrasey forces.
The central division around a figure in blue and silver armor ("The Lord of Thrasey," answered a feminine voice when Hansen asked his AI for an identification) had surged into the gap between Golsingh and the headlong advance of Taddeusz' unit. The king had avoided being surrounded only by falling back, and the Lord of Thrasey was pushing him hard.
A dozen Thrasey warriors faced around to meet the threat from the collapsing flank. The foremost were champions from the lord's personal bodyguard, and even the warriors of their retinues, falling into place behind them, looked reasonably well equipped.
Malcolm slowed and stopped five paces from the new line. The rush of easy winners behind him halted at the appearance of a real enemy again.
Hansen put a hand on the veteran's shoulder. "Malcolm," he said. "I'll lead and you back—"
Malcolm pushed Hansen aside with a clang.
A maelstrom of arcs snarled around the leaders. The Lord of Thrasey had led the remainder of his bodyguard in a rush to overwhelm Golsingh before the king's left flank could rescue him.
The melee blazed like the lightning which swirls in the funnel of a tornado, flinging battlesuits and bits of battlesuit out from its lethal core. Golsingh stood in his blue armor and struck with deadly effect, but the warriors to either side of him dropped.
Malcolm shouted wordlessly and charged the waiting line.
"Strike with Malcolm!" Hansen snarled as he lurched forward beside the veteran.
Malcolm's arc crossed with that of a fellow whose armor was decorated in orange swirls. Hansen feinted toward the next Thrasey warrior to the left, then struck at the shoulder of Malcolm's man. The armor burned, flinging the limb in one direction as the man's body toppled in the other.
Maharg parried the thrust of the left-hand warrior and went to his knees with the searing force of the fellow's arc. Hansen's sideways sweep drove the Thrasey warrior back. Maharg stayed down, shaking his head.
The Thrasey survivors backed. Some of Golsingh's warriors pressed forward.
"What are you doing?" Malcolm demanded. "He was mine!"
"Winning!" Hansen snarled back on straight audio. "D'ye want to die? We'll all die if we don't cut the king loose, 'n that means teamwork!"
Malcolm lunged forward, thrusting. His arc slipped past the guard and through the plastron of a warrior hesitating between facing Malcolm and joining the attack on Golsingh. The man was dead and falling, but Hansen struck him anyway because he was moving with the stroke and it was better to follow through than to change his rhythm.
Shill chopped at the body as he followed Malcolm and Hansen. His arc cut at the ankles of the next Thrasey warrior as his betters—as his fellows—whipsawed the victim through both shoulder pieces.
The last of Golsingh's bodyguards fell. Three of the four men with the Lord of Thrasey, all of them champions, turned and faced the threat from the flank.
Thrasey and his remaining warrior slashed at the king. The warrior got home with a blast of sparks that blistered blotches of paint away from Golsingh's helmet.
Malcolm cut at a guard wearing black and white checks. The Thrasey warrior thrust back, not at Malcolm but at Hansen lunging in to double the stroke. Hansen's display blurred and all his hair stood out straight as his muscles twitched.
He almost fell as his display shrank back into bright focus. All three of the Thrasey bodyguards held their blocking position. One of the Golsingh's left-wing warriors had fallen between them and Malcolm.
Two meters away, the Lord of Thrasey was body to body with Golsingh. Their arcs were locked in a shower of blue fire. The warrior with the Lord of Thrasey had lifted his rippling arc weapon for the final blow.
"Come on," Hansen gasped as he jumped forward. The check-armored warrior parried his cut.
Their armor crashed together, jarring the Thrasey warrior back a half step before the power of his better suit stopped Hansen's rush and began bending him over. Malcolm was dueling with another bodyguard, and there was no chance that—
Shill stepped between Hansen and Malcolm with his palm outstretched. His bolt struck the Lord of Thrasey at the join of his backplate and helmet. Malcolm's opponent swiped sideways, cutting through both knees of Shill's powerless suit.
Golsingh neatly decaptitated the Lord of Thrasey.
Shill toppled forward. The bodyguard struggling with Hansen doubled up as Maharg stabbed him through the belly.
Hansen's AI tagged all the figures still standing with the spike of blue light. Friendlies, they were all friendlies. Malcolm had finished his opponent when the fool struck down Shill, and Golsingh was hacking with an intensity that was more vengeance than caution at the smoldering ruins of the warrior who'd almost killed him.
Hansen unlatched his suit. He opened the heavy clamshell with hysterical strength that belied his exhausted weakness of moments before. The snowy air was a club, but his body was already shuddering.
The smell of burned meat was even worse when he jerked open Shill's battlesuit.
Shill's eyes were closed, but his nostrils flared as he breathed.
He wouldn't be breathing long. The wounds were cauterized by the arc that made them, but the shock of the high voltage and double amputation would certainly be fatal.
Freemen rode in to join the warriors at the moment of victory.
"Furs!" Hansen screamed. His voice cracked. "Furs! Here! Now, goddam you!"
"Fin'ly broke my way," Shill whispered. He was smiling. "Didja see him go down? I killed the fuckin' Lord a Thrasey!"
A freeman leaped from his pony and draped his cloak over Hansen's shoulders. Hansen snatched it off and tucked it around Shill, still cradled in the back half of his armor.
Maharg knelt beside them. "You all right, sir?" he asked. "You all right?"
"Old Shill fin'ly . . . ," Shill said.
His eyes opened. The old man's pupils were a brilliant blue that Hansen hadn't noticed before.
"Old Shill fin'ly had some luck!" Shill gasped.
His chest arched. A convulsion drove the remainder of his breath out in a long rattling cough that continued several seconds after the light had gone out of the blue eyes.
Maharg shook Hansen by the shoulders. "Sir?" he said. "Are you all right? You're crying."