A Meeting at Corvallis (35 page)

A curled trumpet spoke, and the rest of the Protectorate force came around the curve of the northward road. A score of crossbowmen on bicycles came first, weaving among the obstacles on the road; they dismounted and set their machines on their kickstands, fanning out to either side of the road. That freed the mercenary horse who'd been guarding the crossing, and most of them trotted southward over the bridge to scout farther on. Next came gangs of laborers in metal collars and rags, carrying mattocks and picks and shovels, some pushing wheelbarrows, all guarded by infantry equipped with shields and spears, conical helms and mail hauberks. The peons set to work on the roadway, shoving aside the rusting hulks of cars, chopping back the vegetation and filling holes with earth and rock. After that the wagons came, huge things with steel frames and twin four-wheel bogies from heavy trucks, drawn by sixteen span of oxen each and loaded high with shapes of metal and timber—a prefabricated fort, with the hundreds-strong labor force that would build it trudging in coffles beside the roadway and carrying their tools. Then there were several dozen ordinary baggage wagons loaded with food and supplies, and last of all a dozen mounted men-at-arms around a rider in a knight's plumed helmet, the lanceheads swaying bright above their heads. The horseman beside the knight carried a banner that hung from a crossbar—the Portland Protective Association's Lidless Eye, not quartered with a baron's blazon; that meant the commander must be of the Protector's own household troops.

“Didn't expect the lancers,” Alleyne said, as the mercenary with the horse-tail crest cantered back to report. “Now let's see…”

Astrid felt the tension rise, and trained reflex take control of her breathing, making the diaphragm pull air down to the bottom of her lungs and release it slowly. That slowed the beating of her heart, and kept her hands steady. Words and images flitted through her mind: fire and arrows and a white tower like a spike of pearl and silver, tall gray-eyed men riding through wilderness and by tumbled ruins, a host of horsemen charging across a plain wracked by battle, while winged shapes hovered overhead…

“Nazgûl!”

Everyone froze. Astrid let her head drift up. The slim shape of the glider slid through the sky above, toy-tiny at about two thousand feet. None of her Rangers should be visible from there…but it turned on a wing and dove, coming down the road at a third that height.
Which will be a real test of our fieldcraft,
she thought.

Fingers moved in gestures of aversion among the Dúnedain, with here and there a sign of the Cross. John Hordle raised one massive fist, with the middle finger extended, but kept it below head height.

Then it was past; it flashed across Puddle Creek, swift and graceful, and soared on an updraft that rose from the slope opposite, wheeling skyward like a falcon in a gyre until it was high above. Then it waggled its wings and turned southward once again, scouting the road the column would take.

“He didn't see a thing,” Alleyne chuckled. “Victory through Air Power, what?”

They all nodded, though they also knew it would be a hideous handicap to have the Protector's gliders overhead when they were trying to move larger forces than this raiding party, spying and dropping messages to his troops.

The knight commanding the column nodded and waved his men forward. Half of them went over the bridge, and the forward labor gangs to clear the way, while the first of the huge freight wagons inched into movement. That took a minute or two. Whips cracked as the long line of paired oxen leaned into the traces with their heads down and shoulders straining at the yokes, nostrils flaring wide and mouths open with the effort. Here and there one slipped a little on the asphalt, lurching and scrabbling and bawling in alarm. A man-at-arms barked a command, and several score of the laborers added their shoulders to the effort, and the wheels began to turn slowly. The humans fell away gasping as the big vehicle moved, building up to a steady walking pace.

Astrid felt her smile waver as the first team put its hooves on the bridge.
Wait for it, wait for it, the bulk of the weight's in the wagon—

It rolled across. The next two wagons followed, each occupying one lane, and she felt sweat trickling down her flanks. They'd had to calculate the stresses roughly—

“What's plan B?” Alleyne whispered.

“Tail, caro!”

Her beloved wasn't the first to chuckle; his Sindarin was still improving, and he took a moment to realize that she'd just said,
Feet, do your stuff.
Because if the trap failed, running away was all they could do….

The paired wagons rolled onto the bridge; she could see the man leading the first ox-team suddenly stop and look around him in puzzlement, then stare down at his feet in horror before running screaming for solid ground. The first lurch came soundlessly; they'd labored all night on the bridge pillars just below the water level, miserable work in relays as hands grew too numb to grip the saw handles. They'd gone through an implausible number of the blades, too, which could never be replaced. But it was worth it; and if the scouts detected a little incomplete sabotage they'd stop looking before they found the real thing.

We hoped,
she thought, with an enormous relief that left her stomach feeling oddly liquid for an instant.
And it worked, it worked…

The scream of tortured metal was joined by the screams of the rest of the wagon crews as they pelted either way off the lurching length of the bridge, arms and legs pumping in panic flight. The next jolt was even louder, with a popping, crackling sound beneath it as the leverage of the severed uprights ripped welds and rivets loose. The bridge swayed right, hesitated for a moment and then collapsed to the left. The bellows of the oxen did tear at her heart, but there was no way to spare the innocent beasts.

Chaos boiled among the hundreds of men below as two of the giant wagons slid into the water. Astrid hit the toggle that released her war cloak and rose to her feet with a slight grunt—she was wearing a full hauberk and gear. She filled her lungs as she rose, drew her bow and shouted:
“Lacho calad! Drego morn!”
The same Dúnedain war cry broke out from two-score throats:
Flame Light! Flee Night!

Arrows followed. By prearrangement, everyone was aiming at the crossbowmen at first. There were a dozen of them left by the side of the road. As many again had crossed to the other side of the bridge, but they were out of range and the swift-moving water was as deep as a tall man's chest. That cut them off from the action here. And most of the ones within range of the Dúnedain had turned to gape at the disaster unfolding as ten tons of metal and wood and two score of oxen slid inexorably into the river. The first forty shafts struck before they could do more than begin to turn back. Two more volleys were in the air before the first hit; the Dúnedain were all
good
with the bow, and the range was nowhere more than two hundred yards, mostly less. The light mail shirts the crossbowmen wore were no more protection than their woolen jackets.

“Yes!” Alleyne shouted as he drew and shot, using a longbow as skillfully as any Mackenzie.
“Yes!”

There were sixty Association troops with the convoy. There were more than seven times that number of laborers…and as the crossbowmen fell beneath the arrowstorm, the workers turned on the soldiers guarding them in a screaming mass of fury, swinging shovels and mattocks and dragging men down with their bare hands to be beaten and stomped to death. A dozen swirls of vicious combat broke out all at once, arms and armor and skill against numbers and surprise and hate; the soldiers fought their way towards each other, the laborers hanging on their flanks like wolves. Here and there a knot stood back-to-back and beat off their assailants. More went down before they could reach help….

The Protectorate lancers had their destriers as well as their weapons, rearing and lashing out with steel-shod hooves; only two of the men-at-arms were pulled out of the saddle and pounded into bags of shattered bone and pulped meat inside their harness. The others cut their way free, with short-gripped lances stabbing and swords casting arcs of red into the morning air. One laborer died as a warhorse sank its great yellow teeth into his shoulder and shook him like a terrier with a rat. Ten men-at-arms and the knight who commanded them spurred into the open, drawing together, getting ready to charge to the aid of the footmen in a wedge of armored muscle. That couldn't be allowed.

“To horse!” Astrid shouted with a voice like a silver trumpet, then whistled sharply.
“Tolo, Asfaloth!”
she called to her own mount.

Her gray Arab mare came, cantering, moving so lightly her feet barely seemed to touch the ground. Astrid caught the saddlebow and used the momentum and a skipping spring to vault into the saddle, her feet catching the stirrups easily. The raven-topped helmet hung by her bow-case. She slipped it on. The cheek-pieces that clipped beneath her chin were covered with wings, their pinions blackened aluminum; the tail feathers that made up the aventail protecting her neck were steel of the same color, on a mail backing, and the eyes that looked out over hers were rubies. One of the Dúnedain offered her a long ash lance, but she shook her head.

“Lacho calad! Drego morn!”
she called again, and then to the horse that trembled with eagerness beneath her, tossing its head and snorting.
“Noro lim, Asfaloth, noro lim!”

A dozen of the Rangers were in the saddle, Alleyne beside her. They put their horses recklessly at the steep slope ahead; her Asfaloth plunged down it agile as a cat, sometimes resting her weight on her haunches for an instant and sliding, sometimes twisting to avoid a sapling or tangle of thorny brush. When she hit the level ground it was with a long bound that landed her in a hand gallop. Alleyne's heavier mount reached the flats almost as quickly; the big gelding had a steel barding plate on his chest and simply smashed through much that Asfaloth had dodged. The other mounted Dúnedain all made the passage, though two had to struggle back into the saddle after losing a stirrup.

Behind them the rest of the Rangers were leaping down the slope in turn, shouting their war cry. Ahead the Protectorate men-at-arms were turning to meet the menace of their mounted foes; they had no choice, if they weren't to be taken in the rear. The laborers took heart and threw themselves on the spears that faced them in a screaming swarm, led by men willing to hold the steel in their own dying flesh while their comrades beat at heads and shoulders beyond. A helm and mail coat and the padding beneath were good protection, but there was a limit.

Time to look to her own fight. Alleyne was coming up on her left, the long steel of his lancehead ready. Ahead the knight in the plumed helmet was coming for her; some hidden sense told her that she was the target of his lance; all she could see of his face were the eyes glaring at her from over the curved rim of his big kite-shaped shield, its black surface marked with the Lidless Eye. She shot once; the arrow struck the surface of the knight's conical Norman helmet and flipped off into the air. Divots of grass and dark, moist earth shot skyward as well, as the destrier's hooves pounded at the turf and brush. The lancehead pointed at her midriff, directed over the neck of the knight's horse with unerring skill, and her smaller round shield was slung at her knee—you needed both hands for a bow.

Her right hand whipped back for another arrow and she put shaft to string in a single smooth motion; there would be time for just one more shot, and the knight was well protected, the horse a small target with a steel chamfron covering its head and a peytral on its chest.

Two seconds, one…

The Protectorate lancer was expecting her to duck, or swerve her more maneuverable mount. He wasn't expecting her to throw herself to the right with her left knee over the bow of her saddle, hanging off the side of the horse Commanche-style. The lancehead flashed through the space where her breast had been a moment before with the driving power of an armored man and tall horse behind it, yet cutting only air.

It was a risky thing to do even for a rider of her skill, especially in armor, and for an instant she felt herself begin to slip towards the earth dashing by at thirty miles an hour beneath her before a desperate wrench of straining thigh muscles brought her back upright. The horses flashed past each other as her left foot found the stirrup again; as it did she turned in the saddle, the cord coming to the angle of her jaw as she drew against the heavy resistance of wood and horn and sinew. The lancer was pulling up, screaming a curse as he tried to get his mount around and to turn the long point of his shield behind him to cover his back, but the same weight and momentum that put terrible power behind a lancehead made a galloping destrier hard to turn. Shield and weapon, mount and rider were locked into a drive forward behind the narrow steel point.

Even with the combined velocities of the two horses she was less than twenty yards behind him when she shot.
Snap
of the string on the bracer, a flash of fletching and pile-shaped bodkin head, and the arrow struck the knight's hauberk over the kidney. It broke the links of the riveted mail and sank three-quarters of its thirty-inch length into his body with a solid, punching impact, a dull thudding sound audible even over the thunder of scores of hooves and the screaming of men, the shrill calls of horses, the low, deep bellowing of oxen. He shrieked again, wordlessly this time, dropping his lance in reflex and then toppled leftward to the ground, dragging with one foot tangled in the stirrup until his warhorse came to a halt, looking back to see what it was that tugged so at its harness. Asfaloth braked to a halt, rearing and turning in her own length.