Few of the men could hear him. They could all see and the commanders would relay the order; he rose in the stirrups, twisting his torso as he drew against the recurve’s hundred-pound resistance with the thick muscle of arms and shoulders, chest and gut. The arrow slid through the centerline cutout in the bow’s riser, and the smooth curved limbs bent back into a deep C-shape, sinew stretching and horn compressing on either side of the central layer of hickory.

He let the string roll off his draw-fingers.

Whap!

Three hundred and fifty shafts followed within a second, arching into the sky like slivers of incarnate motion, seeming to pause for an instant and then plunging downward. The enemy shot in almost the same instant, and in the passing of a fractional second Ingolf fought and won the usual battle of will not to duck and hunch his head forward. You got hit or you didn’t; he’d had both. Instead he was flicking out more arrows, shooting as fast as he could draw and adjusting the angle as the forces came together. More men and horses went down on both sides, falling out with iron in their bodies, going limp or thrashing out of the saddle, horses suddenly uncontrollable with the pain of sharp steel and wood in their flesh. Not much to choose between his men and the enemy in speed or accuracy of shooting, but there were more of his and the Sioux were into it now too, at extreme range.

Six arrows, seven, eight—

He thrust the bow into the boiled-leather scabbard at his knee. The same motion helped slide the yard-wide round shield off his back and onto his left arm, and an instant later the shete was in his right hand, moves practiced for decades. That switch needed careful timing; too soon and you got shot at without being able to reply, too late and you were fumbling with things while the guy on the other side cut you out of the saddle like a side of pork. Juggling your weapons like that, fast but without dropping anything, was a big part of cavalry training. It was even worse if you had a lance to worry about too.

The enemy’s trumpets sounded, a harsher deeper blatting tone than the ones his people used. The Boise horsemen responded to the order with beautiful precise discipline, reining in from their gallop and turning; their whole formation was racing away back up the valley in a brace of seconds, with the troopers turning and firing backward. The Parthian shot, and his men couldn’t shoot back. He thrust his shete skyward to keep them from uncasing their bows again, and heard officers and noncoms taking it along the line:

“Blades! Blades!”