The Yakima infantry were deployed in a triangular formation on a low swale. It was the best position around, chosen with a good eye for ground; the eastern side was shielded by a steeper section of rising earth, almost like a bank. Rain or no, dust hung over them where hooves and wheels and thousands of hobnailed boots had torn the thin bunchgrass, and he hoped they’d had a chance to fill their water wagons. He could taste the dry papery flavor of it on his lips now, along with the salt of sweat. This was better fighting weather than high summer, though.

The formation on the rise bristled with pikes; the front four ranks had theirs down into the prepare to receive cavalry position, the front row on one knee and bracing each butt against a boot, the next three at shoulder or chest or waist height, a forest of sharp points. Behind them the next three stood with the weapons upright, and behind them was a double rank with glaives ready to stop any breakthrough.

It took strength to hold the sixteen-foot weapons like that. And a cold considered courage to spit on your hands and brace the pike and stand under arrows and bolts, closing up the holes as men fell silent or screaming and the earth shook under the charging hooves. The crossbows were interspersed between the blocks of pikes, three deep—prone and kneeling and standing. The silent menace was less showy, but just as real. So was that of the springalds and scorpions that were spaced along the lines.

“Cavalry in the center for now,” Rudi noted. “Now that is a position I would not care to assault, Alleyne.”

“They have been, though, Sire.”

He nodded agreement without taking the binoculars from his eyes. You could see the bodies of men and horses scattered back from each side of the triangle, out several hundred yards but thicker as you approached up to a wavering line at fifty yards or so, then a thinner scattering and a few right under the pike points. Some lying still, others still moving. He could see one man crawling away, legs motionless and a bolt standing in his back.

War, he thought. Not a pretty sight nor a pretty thing, for all that we dress it.

The enemy were going to try again, though. He could see them dispersed across miles around; most where in clumps around trains of packhorses.

“Filling their quivers. Rancher levies from the far interior, I make them for the most part, but not altogether savages.”

Alleyne nodded. “Sire. Ah, there they go.”

The horsemen from over the mountains moved towards the ranks on the hill. It was like watching water spatter on a pane of glass, but running backward so that the clots and streams flowed together, building around banners that bore odd spiky sigils—the brands of their Ranchers—or the rayed sun of the Church Universal and Triumphant, gold on scarlet.