A Meeting at Corvallis (33 page)

“When did I hear that tune before?” he said. “There's never going to be a convenient time, Mike. Not unless we make it. There isn't going to be a time when there's no emergency, either.”

“OK, I said it, and I mean it. January. The Association's going for us soon, and it'll all be over one way or another by Christmas. I swear to God we'll elect…OK, call it two from every A-lister steading and strategic hamlet. On that Australian ballot thing you're fond of. Christ Jesus, it'll be a relief to have some single group I can go talk to and bargain with and settle things with! Plus it'll help put a leash on some of our A-listers who've got delusions of baron-hood.”

“Give the man a cookie!”

He offered one. Havel shook his head. “Nah, don't want to spoil supper. They butchered a nice plump steer a couple-three days ago, and Talli down in the kitchens says the steaks look great.”

Ken's wife—second wife—Pamela snorted; she had a plate of carrot sticks beside her chair. That wasn't what kept her lean, though; partially genes, and partially the fact that she'd been a hobbyist who studied Renaissance sword techniques before the Change, and the Bearkiller's primary blade trainer since. She'd taught
him
the backsword, and a good many others, and her pupils had passed it on. Quite a stroke of luck to stumble onto her, that day in Idaho when they took in their first recruits, and not just for then-widowed Ken because they'd ended up married.

But then, if I wasn't very lucky, I'd be dead about one hundred and thirty-eight times,
he thought.
Don't let that make you overconfident, Marine. The dice have no memory.

“And not a word about the first early greens of the year,” Pam went on, rolling her eyes and shrugging expressively, then asked rhetorically: “How do you make a Finnish salad?”

Havel grinned. “Yeah, yeah, I know—first you fry sausages in bacon grease. Then you add a dozen potatoes…”

The laugh died as trumpets screamed from the gate-towers. All the adults' heads came up; those three rising notes meant
attention
! And after that came the signal for
urgent courier.

Havel swung erect, his hand automatically picking up the basket-hilted sword that leaned against the recliner, with the belt wound around it. They waited, watching two riders trot up the roadway and draw rein before the veranda, tumbling down out of the saddle while the guards grounded their polearms and took the reins. One of the riders had a black jerkin with Astrid's tree-stars-crown thing on it, a young woman in her late teens with reddish-brown hair plastered to her face by sweat and wind; she raked it free and bowed. The man beside her was a Bearkiller scout wearing a mail vest and a helmet, more practical for quick work than a full hauberk. An A-lister, though, a lieutenant commanding a unit of couriers who doubled as scouts and light cavalry.

His name's Smythe,
memory prompted. The A-list wasn't yet so big that he couldn't remember every Brother and Sister. His eyes flicked to the horses. The one the Bearkiller scout rode was breathing hard though not blown, but the Ranger's looked as if it might drop dead any minute: head drooping, panting like a bellows, its neck and forequarters streaked with dried foam.

The Dúnedain Ranger was reeling with fatigue too as she scrabbled in her saddlebags and handed him an envelope; he didn't need to ask if it was urgent.

“I had to go far out of the way and dodge Protectorate scouts, Lord Bear,” she said. “I'm sorry it delayed me.”

She inclined her head towards her horse. Behind him Eric Larsson whistled softly; there was a broken-off stub of arrow standing in the cantle of her saddle. Three inches forward and it would have gone into her pelvis.

“You got it here, which is what counts,” Havel said, taking the envelope. “If there's no verbal addition, why don't you get the horse seen to and get something for yourself?”

She stumbled away, leading the horse; its dragging hooves made a counterpoint to her boots. Havel ripped the letter open and read on aloud: “Elvish, Elvish, Elvish—meaning
it's me, Astrid
; Elvish, Elvish, Elvish—meaning
Hi, Mike;
Elvish…OK, here's the meat of it:
Three columns of Protectorate troops…
”

He went on to the end. “Right,” he said, passing it to Will Hutton.

The black Texan's graying eyebrows shot up as he looked over the map. “Some motherfucker up north has decided it's a beautiful spring day, so let's have a war. Three guesses who.”

The children sensed the adults' tension and fell silent. Mike took an instant to wave them into the house; the older ones shooed the protesting youngest along with them, or dragged them by the wrist. That gave time for the message to be passed around from hand to hand as well, and for him to call up the maps in his head. The river and the ruins of Salem, with the bridges; then open country north and south, the Eola Hills to the west, then more open country with the odd hill, then the Coast Range if you went far enough…

“OK,” he said, his voice flat and cold. “This is the opening move. He's investing Mount Angel, pushing through the Waldos to the edge of Mackenzie country, and to back it all up, he's going to try and rush the Salem bridges to cut the opposition in half. If he can hold them, he'll cut us off from each other. Anyone got any ideas on why the ones going south out of Molalla are carrying all that heavy gear and taking labor gangs with them?”

“Going to put up a forward base, if they can punch through to the open country north of Lebanon,” Eric Larsson said. “Prefab castle, or maybe more than one, base for a campaign south of the Santiam and protection for their supply route.”

“Right, that's what I thought.”

He paused, weighing options. Silence lengthened as everyone looked at him.

And it's all up to me,
he thought.

When he'd been a Marine in the Gulf it had been just him. Well, a Force Recon corporal had a fire team, but his biggest worry had been what was in the wadi and where to put the SAW.
Semper Fi,
slip in, find the position, report, maybe do some demolition, GOPLAT, VBBS, playing a deadly game with the ragheads, sometimes down to knives in the dark. Sure, they'd cut your balls off with a
blunt
knife if they caught you, but that went with the territory, and anyway they were such total half-hards and dipshits it was usually just dangerous enough to let you show your
sisu
. And let them go to Allah and the seventy-two virgin white raisins.

Fight for the Corps, yeah, fight for your buddies. For the goddamn country, too, show them nobody fucks with the US of A without ending up sorry and sore, all right and proper. But nobody was going to invade Michigan, burn down the Havel home-place and kill my family if I screwed up. Shit, I'm scared. I don't
want
to fight. I'm thirty-eight and a father, not nineteen and a killing-mean dick-on-legs the way I was then. I want to stay home and watch my kids play and enjoy a steak dinner and screw Signe silly tonight and go hunting tomorrow.

He smiled, hard and confident. “Arminger's an armchair general,” he said. “He likes to draw pretty lines on maps and think he's Bobbie Lee. Actually it's my guess he's more on the order of John Pope. You know, the guy who said ‘my headquarters are in the saddle'?”

“Headquarters in his hindquarters,” Ken said, and his laugh boomed out. He'd gotten them all interested in the Civil War over the past decade; it was one of his hobbies, and damned useful.

Grant, though. Grant was always
my
favorite general.
Havel turned his head. “OK, Will. That force they've got up around McMinnville, my guess is that they're a distraction, but they'll raid if we let them. Get over the hills, call up—”

He looked at Signe, who kept track of the intel. She answered without hesitation. “A hundred A-listers ready for duty in the steadings there.”

That was the point of having an A-list; they were fully trained and always ready to muster. The militia took longer, and they couldn't be kept away from the fields forever, and the spring planting was under way…
Christ Jesus, thank You this isn't harvesttime!

“Collect up fifty lances from the A-list, and say two hundred infantry from the strategic hamlets, and screen the area between the Coast Range and the Amity Hills with 'em, send the rest east to me. Make it obvious you're there, and if you can make them think there are more of you than there really are, all the better.”

Damn, that's not much of a force for the job,
Havel thought, as the weathered brown face of the ex-cowboy nodded, hard and grim. He fought back the temptation to send more.
I've got four drains in this bathtub and only one plug. Gotta remember to keep focused and put the troops at the point of maximum effort.

“You don't think they'll make a serious attack thataway, son?” Hutton asked.

“No. Not if they're trying to do everything else at once. Like I said, armchair general.” His grin grew wolfish. “Now, if
I
had his ten thousand men, you'd bet I'd throw every one of them in, and all on the same front. Finish up one of us, then concentrate on the others. We couldn't move around as freely to match him, bridges or no, we're all defending our homes, but he's trying to do it all at the same time. The result is he's not overwhelmingly strong in any one place.”

Ken Larsson nodded.
“If you try to be strong everywhere, you are weak everywhere,”
he quoted. “Frederick the Great.”

“I'll snort and paw the ground up there some, like a mean bull out to hook you.” Hutton nodded, satisfied. “I'll keep 'em occupied. Maybe raid a bit, get 'em hot and bothered.”

Havel nodded back.
And I can rely on you to do
just
that, thank God, and not get a hair up your ass and decide you're going to win the whole damned war,
he thought.
Which is why your mad Swedish bull of a son-in-law is going to be kept right under my eye. He's a wonder when you can point him right at something that needs smashing, but a bit short on the self-restraint thing.

“Just so you don't try to fight any big engagements,” he said. He looked at his mental map again. “Damn, but I wish we could have put a garrison in on those bridges at Salem. It's going to be close even if we leave tonight.”

“We didn't have enough troops,” Signe said. “Not in the spring planting season.”

Havel nodded.
Well, shit. Four drains, one plug.
That was Arminger's advantage; his troops were full-timers, paid men or landholders with bond-tenants and peons working their fiefs and fiefs-in-sergeantry. The Association's leadership wasn't getting as much out of it as he would have in the Protector's position, but the advantage hadn't gone away, either.

“Right, everything's ready to roll at Rickreall?” he asked his father-in-law.

Ken nodded. “I'll leave right away, and get the stuff started by midnight. We got that whole section of the old Southern Pacific line reconditioned last year when we cleared the bridge piers at Salem. I checked it over a little after Christmas and nothing's washed out since then. Shouldn't be any problem to get to Salem by dawn if we push the horses, and once I get those beauties on the railroad bridge, I defy anything built since the Change to sail past.”

“Whoa, Ken. You personally?”

“I bossed the shops that made the damn things, didn't I? For exactly this contingency. Damned if I'm not going to boss them when they're going into action.”

Havel pursed his lips.
Yeah, he did. And the crews did the work with him. They're not A-listers. They'll do better with him there to steady them. He's not much with a sword and he's too old for a forced march, but he's got guts to spare and he's smart.

“OK, but Pam, you take ten lances and go with him. Your job is to see he's not distracted by nasty men killing him while he's doing his job. They may try to slip some commando types past us to the bridges.”

“Will do, bossman,” she said, grinning the way a wolf did at a rabbit.

“Ken, tell your guy Sarducci to get the field artillery here ready to go—”

“It's ready to go on one hour's notice anyway. All we need to do is get the horses and crews together. He's the most punctual Italian I ever met. Glad we got him to move up from Corvallis; he was wasted as a university professor.”

“Good; tell him to fall the engines in outside the gate. When you get to Rickreall, commandeer anything you need in the way of horses to pull the trains with the heavy stuff for the bridge, and get the militia mobilizing and following you as fast as they can, Rickreall and Dallas both.”

“What about me?” Eric Larsson said plaintively.