A Meeting at Corvallis (37 page)

Eilir raised her longbow—she was one of the few who could shoot the unwieldy weapon from horseback. Her shaft made a long curve in the air, trailing black smoke, and went
thunk
into a balk of timber on one of the wagons; more followed it, until the air over the river looked as if vanished fireworks had spanned it. The Dúnedain cheered and waved their weapons in the air as those wagons began to burn as well, adding their bitter plumes to the smoke that was making the air hot and tight in her chest.

Alleyne reined in next to her. “They're happy,” he said.

“Good,” Astrid replied. “We've stung the
yrch,
at least.”

“A bit more than that,” the young Englishman said judiciously. “Still, there's no denying they can shrug off a loss like this more easily than we.”

Astrid flung him a smile; the way he took everything so equably was one of the wonderful things about him. She knew her own nature was more changeable.

“Not much more. Even if Lady Juniper brings off what she's planning, that would only be a start. It
is
like trying to shoot an elephant!”

Aha,
Eilir signed, after she'd pushed her bow back through the loops on her quiver.
You should remember that my most magical Mom's plans usually have a couple of little hidden wheels within the big obvious one.

Waldo Hills, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9

T
he Grand Constable of the Portland Protective Association looked back at the tumbled wreckage of the bridge, and coughed slightly at the wafts of bitter smoke from the wagons that had borne the framework of his portable castle. The bodies lay about it; he gritted his teeth at the tumbled, naked corpses of his men-at-arms. Their commander still looked comically surprised as he sprawled on his side in a pool of congealed blood swarming with flies. The stump of the arrow that had killed him had broken off short when someone pulled the hauberk and gambeson off over his head; that someone now had a fine suit of mail, with only one small hole in it.

Conrad Renfrew repressed an urge to dismount and kick him in the face. It wouldn't do any good; it wasn't as if the idiot was still alive and able to feel it. Besides, right now his boots were full of water from fording the stream. The engineers were getting a temporary wooden bridge ready, but that would take at least eighteen hours, short as they were of grunt labor.

And I'm short a dozen men-at-arms and a knight,
he thought sourly. The infantry weren't that much of a much, but losing skilled lancers
hurt
. Men-at-arms had scarcity value, and knights also had relatives and comrades who mattered at court.

“So I reckoned the only thing I could do was get the word to you,” the mercenary said, tugging at his forked beard. “There were a few too many of 'em for my boys to tackle. They didn't lose more 'n four, five all up when they ambushed your folks.

“'Course, a lot of them peons got it where the chicken got the ax while they was swarmin' over your boys. We had a ringside seat over there on the other side of the water.”

He jerked a thumb at a file of nearly fifty bodies laid out in a row, all of them with the iron collars still on their necks.

“You're not here just to drink and screw the peon girls, Sheriff Bauer,” Renfrew rumbled.

He knew his face intimidated most men, which was some compensation for the memory of pain. The fact that they were surrounded by the household knights of the Constable's personal guard shouldn't have hurt either, but Bauer was smiling slightly…or that might just be his own scar, which was as spectacular as any of the Constable's, and stood out more for being alone. Renfrew tapped the serrated steel head of his mace on his stirrup-iron with a
chink…chink…
sound and stared at him; the other's green eyes blinked innocently.

Aloud the Portland commander went on: “Or to sit in the saddle across a chest-deep creek and watch my men getting massacred while you pick lice out of your beards.”

Bauer shrugged. “We ain't here to get kilt for no reason, neither. Your men weren't outnumbered much but they managed to lose that fight good and proper, the way them Rangers outsmarted 'em and took 'em by surprise; the only ones got out was the ones we took with us. Then I lost three good men chasin' the Rangers into the woods when they pulled out afterwards. You got too many woods around here for comfort. But that was fair business; like you say, we're here to fight, and I'm a man of my word. We're not here to get our asses kicked certain-sure.”

Renfrew shrugged massive shoulders made more so by armor and padding. It was a fair point. The Pendleton area was theoretically under the Association now, but they couldn't afford to lean too hard on the men from there yet. They were volunteers from the winning faction the Protector had backed, and from a mercenary's point of view, Bauer had been making a perfectly valid argument. You couldn't expect hired men to throw themselves away on a forlorn hope just to do the enemy some damage, and you couldn't punish them if you wanted them to stick around. A mercenary leader's men were his capital assets, and if he lost too many of them then he had nothing to sell. This particular band were the Sheriff's friends and kinfolk and neighbors, as well.

In fact, that little pursuit was well handled. At least thanks to Bauer I've got some idea which way they went, and he did save a dozen crossbowmen.

“OK,” he said, turning and looking at the wagons again. “We'll salvage the metal; they can rework it at the foundries up in Oregon City. And get someone to pull those oxen out of the river and hang them up to drain. No sense in letting good meat spoil.”

“My boys already got one ready to barbeque,” Bauer said. “We can handle the rest iff'n you want us to.”

He gave a vague, sketchy salute and wandered off. Renfrew looked over at his clerk. “Do up a report and have it ready for dispatch to the Lord Protector inside twenty minutes,” he said.

That got the man out of earshot. He was probably reporting to the Church and certainly to the Chancellery as well; it was amazing how a country with fewer people than a medium-sized city in the old days could develop layers of competing institutions and factions. Then he turned to the young knight beside him who commanded his guards.

“Buzz, get that idiot Melford's body packed up and send it on back to his kin with the usual nonsense about how bravely he died.”

“Why not leave it for the buzzards and the coyotes?” Sir Buzz Akers said.

He was one of the Constable's own vassals, whose father had seizin of a manor near the castle at Odell; Renfrew had known the family in the Society before the Change, and arranged to get them the estate when he led the conquest of the Hood Valley for the Association, back in the second Change Year. The father stayed home these days and did his military service as castle garrison commander, since he had a leg that would never work very well again; that happened when they were smoking a lunatic archer in green out of the ruins of Seattle on a salvage mission five years ago. The son was here to learn, as well as serve.

And because
my
family will need loyal, able vassals if I kick off too early.
He hadn't married until after the Change; his countess was a gentle soul and his children were all young.

“I won't leave the carrion where it belongs because it would piss off his family,” Renfrew said. “Otherwise that's just what I'd do. Who cares if the coyotes choke on it?” He looked up at the sky; three hours to sunset. “That fool didn't scout carefully enough, and it's cost us a day and that fort, God damn it!”

Akers nodded. “Are we going to bring up more timber?”

“Not in time enough to do much good. Without the steel cladding and braces it's too vulnerable; we'll do what we can with earthworks for now and get fancy later. You take over here, Buzz; I've got to get back and make sure that Piotr doesn't screw things while I'm gone. Though how he could foul up a straight advance to the Santiam with three hundred troops, God only knows.”

“Sir Ernaldo's a good man,” the knight observed.

“And if Piotr would listen to him, I wouldn't worry so much. I wish he was over fighting the Bearkillers. He hates them but he doesn't underestimate them. I've tried to hammer into his head how dangerous the kilties can be if you let them call the tune for the dance, but it won't sink in. Sometimes—”

He made a gesture with the steel mace to show how he'd
like
to hammer some sense into the younger nobleman. Akers laughed.

“It's a pity Old Man Stavarov's too important to diss,” he said, shaking his head regretfully.

Renfrew nodded. That was one of the drawbacks of the Association's setup. His aide went on: “I think Piotr may underestimate the kilties because they look so fucking weird—all those kilts and plaids and bagpipes, and that dumb face-painting thing they do. And that screwy religion of theirs. All that makes it hard to take them seriously, unless you know what's under the make-believe.”

Renfrew started to nod, and then looked around at his host of spearmen and crossbowmen, the armored knights with the plumes fluttering from their helmets and the pennants from their lances, the golden spurs on their heels and the quartered blazons on their shields, the peasant laborers in their tabards by the oxcarts and the monk-doctors seeing to the wounded…

Akers glanced at him oddly as he started to laugh. “What's so funny?” he enquired.

“How old were you at the Change, Buzz?”

“I'd just turned twelve…well, hell, you'd been giving me sword lessons for a year already then, my lord Count. Why do you ask?”

“If you have to ask why it's funny to say the Mackenzies look weird, you're too young to ever understand,” the thickset, scar-faced man said. Then he looked southward and scowled.

“This whole plan is too fucking complicated,” he muttered. “Not enough allowance for screwups and accidents, too many separate things we're trying to do all at once.”

“My lord? If you think it's too complicated, why didn't you advise the Lord Protector and the Council of War?”

“Why do you think it isn't even
more
complicated, Buzz?” Renfrew grunted.

“This ambush couldn't have been anticipated,” his aide remarked, obviously trying to be fair.

“Not exactly. Not the details. But Sir Buzz, when you're up against anyone good enough to give you a run for their money, you
can
be pretty damned sure that they're going to fuck you
somehow
at
some
point and the first you'll know about it is when the bunny dies. That's why you build in a margin of error; every added bit of fancy footwork means another opportunity for the other side. We're not fighting some pissant village militia in Lower Butt-Scratch, equipped with baseball bats and kitchen knives tied on broomsticks and old traffic signs for shields. Not this time. I get this feeling I'm trying to juggle too many balls with not enough hands.”

“Not to mention the kilties are tricky,” Akers said. “Christ, how I wish we'd managed to wipe them out when they were small, back in the first Change Year. Now those bastards have plans of their own.”

Renfrew forbore to mention that Akers had been a page then, and just getting used to the idea that all this wasn't a tournament or a trip to the Pennsic War with his folks, and that he'd never be going on to high school.

Instead he shrugged. “Right. The enemy, that dirty dog, usually does have a plan of his own. That's why we call him the
enemy
. It's a mistake to think
your
plan isn't going to trip over
their
plan.”

Such frankness was slightly risky, since it was the Lord Protector's orders they were critiquing, but Sir Buzz and his family were the Count of Odell's own sworn vassals, not the Lord Protector's. The Grand Constable
was
Arminger's own vassal himself, but Norman needed him nearly as much as vice versa.

And if he wanted to avoid his noblemen saying what they thought sometimes, he should have based this setup on Byzantium or the Chin Legalists, not William the Bastard's Normandy.

He slapped his gauntlets into the palm of his left hand, then began to pull them on. “All right, let's get to work. Keep a sharp eye out and don't let your lancers get in bowshot of any cover without beating it clear first. Those damned Rangers are too tricky for comfort and the kilties aren't much better.”

Dun Juniper, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9

Epona turned her head and butted Rudi Mackenzie affectionately in the chest. He laughed and shooed a horsefly away from her nostril; it was starting to get warm enough for them. Then he hugged her neck as she tried to nibble at his hair, the warm scent of horse all around him. The long dark stable smelled of horses in general, manure-musk, the sweet hay stored above their heads, the dry sneeze-scent of straw and sawdust on the ground, of liniment and leather. Light came through the big double doors down at the other end, or through knotholes that had fallen out of the fir boards, spearing into the dimness in shafts of yellow swimming with dust motes. Now and then a horse would shift a foot with a soft, hollow
clop
of horn and steel on the dirt floor, or make wet tearing and crunching sounds as it stripped grass-and-clover fodder through the wooden bars of a crib and ate.

We did a lot of shoveling out,
Rudi thought virtuously.
And we oiled all that tack and pitched the hay down and groomed all the horses that're left.
And
got all that schoolwork done this morning. I deserve some time for myself. 'Sides, Epona'll get antsy if she doesn't get a run. She
needs
to run.

Besides, it would help him forget that his mother and so many of his friends were away at war.

Mathilda's big black tomcat Saladin looked at him with bored yellow eyes; the feline didn't think it was warm enough on the ground, and was curled up on the withers of the black mare. The two animals had become friends, which was strange, since Epona still wasn't friendly much with anyone but him, and usually responded to small annoying things with an uncomplicated stomp. But then, she and Saladin had come to Dun Juniper about the same time, last Lughnasadh, and they'd both lived in the stables; Saladin ran the gauntlet every evening so he could cadge stuff at dinner and sleep on Mathilda's bed, but the Hall cats were still hissing and spitting and generally making him unwelcome every chance they got.