A Meeting at Corvallis (42 page)

“Haro!”

The air whistled—

The foremost knight passed the split wand planted at precisely two hundred and fifty yards—planted with the inner white side towards the woods and the dark, concealing bark towards the enemy. Up and down the line the bow-captains' voices broke into the chant, and it turned into a wordless shrieking snarl of fury as they shouted: “Let the gray geese fly! Wholly together—
loose!
”

Juniper let the string roll off the three gloved drawing fingers of her right hand. Eight hundred bowstrings struck the smooth hard leather of the bracers in a simultaneous crackle like some monstrous whip falling on rock. Over it rose the high, keening whistle of eight hundred shafts as they rose at a forty-five degree angle into the air, paused for an instant, then turned and plunged downward nearly as fast as they'd left the bows. Her hand was by her ear as she released; it went back to the quiver and snatched out a shaft, her movements smooth and economical with long practice. Even so several of the First Levy were ahead of her; sixteen hundred more of the bodkin-pointed lengths of cedar were in the air before the first struck, and more followed at a rate of two hundred each second. It would take the Protector's men-at-arms less than a minute to cross the beaten ground between them and the Mackenzie archers, but in that time ten
thousand
arrows would be aimed at one hundred men and horses.

She let her eyes blur a little out of focus then; you didn't need to see every detail when you were shooting at a massed target. The screams were bad enough, and the horses more pitiable than the men, for they were brought unwilling to the field of war without understanding why their flesh must be torn and pierced.

“Heads up!” Cynthia shouted in her ear.

A lancer had broken through the hideous tangle of thrashing horses and dying men. An arrow dangled from the nostril of his horse, and it was wild with terror, running blind as only a frightened horse could do. Unfortunately it was running right at
her
.

The bannerman and the horn-caller threw themselves aside with a yell. Juniper dropped flat under the point of the lance, rolling frantically; one hoof landed close enough to take a sliver of skin from the tip of her nose, and another struck her in the stomach as she threw herself across the grass. The metal plates of her brigandine and the padding of the arming doublet beneath kept it from rupturing organs or splintering bone, but the shock was like being hit in the gut by a swinging battering ram, and all the breath came out of her in a single agonized
whoosh.

She lay paralyzed, struggling to draw in another breath. Cynthia Carson had been behind her; she spun aside from the lance-point and smashed the boss of her buckler into the horse's injured nose with dreadful precision. The same motion brought her around again and she plunged twelve inches of her shortsword into the horse's belly just behind the saddle at the junction of body and haunch, where no bone protected the body cavity. The animal screamed like a woman in childbirth, stunningly loud even on a battlefield. It went over with a crash of metal, landing on the knight's shield-side leg; he screamed himself, at the pain and as Cynthia launched herself snarling over the horse's body and onto his, red blade raised to kill.

Juniper forced her lungs to work, drawing in a shaky, shallow first breath, and then another. The spike of pain in her stomach was almost welcome, after the first numbness. She blinked her eyes clear, and saw that the remnants of the men-at-arms were in full retreat, some on foot, more falling with shafts in their backs as she watched. The arrowstorm ceased as the last of them moved out of range; the spearmen had retreated in a solid phalanx, covered by their overlapping shields. Here and there along the Mackenzie line at the edge of the forest a scrimmage rippled where a lancer had reached the Clan's position. Dozens swarmed each one under, working together like wolves pulling down an elk. From the rest came a cry directed at the Protector's men, high and mocking and shrill.

Juniper wheezed and forced herself to her knees, groping for her bow and then leaning on it as she came to her feet. A clanking sounded as Nigel Loring ran up, moving as lightly as a man in running gear despite the steel on his back, his mild eyes blinking anxiously, his face red and streaming with sweat under the raised visor.

“Are you all right, my dear?” he asked.

Juniper nodded. “Just…winded…” she managed to gasp.

“You're wounded!” he said.

A knot of men followed him, the broad blades of the Lochaber axes glistening-wet and slinging sprays of red drops as they dipped and jostled above the heads of the running warriors. She wiped her face and looked in surprise at the blood on her palm; more dripped from her nose onto her upper lip, hot and salt and tasting of copper and iron.

“Just a scratch,” she said. “We'd better—”

She looked around for her signaler. Sam Aylward came trotting up, mounted and leading their horses. She caught his eye.

“Sound the
retreat,
” she called.

The boy with the ox-horn trumpet put it to his lips and blew, a droning and snarling combination of rising and falling notes. The Mackenzies turned in their tracks and trotted away, eeling back through the dense brush and into the woods, scrambling upward; their bicycles were on the other side of the ridge. Juniper gratefully accepted Nigel's helpful lift into the saddle.

“Now let's see what they do next,” she said.

Nigel Loring nodded, smiling. The warmth of his regard melted a little of the cold control she must keep; it was good to feel his straightforward happiness at seeing her whole, and to know her own matched it.

“It's a judgment on them,” he said.

“Judgment, Nigel?” Juniper asked, neck-reining her horse about.

“A judgment for their choice in historical models,” Nigel went on, waving northward across the grassy field. “When a man establishes a military force, and then decides to base it not just on the medieval nobility, but on the medieval
French
nobility…well, really, now…”

Unwillingly, Juniper's mouth quirked. Aylward's laughter sounded like sword on shield as they spurred their mounts into motion.

Conrad Renfrew's horse was panting beneath him like a great bellows between his knees as he reined in; he'd ridden it hard and fast up the road, only to arrive when the battle was over. Gray-faced with pain, Lord Piotr lay propped against a saddle while a surgeon worked on the arrow that transfixed his sword-side shoulder. The wound was a simple in-and-out with a narrow bodkin point, though serious enough; it bled when the shaft was withdrawn, but with none of the arterial pumping that told of death, and from the way he worked his hand it hadn't even crippled him by cutting tendons or nerves.

Unfortunately,
Renfrew thought, grimly silent for a moment as the man bit back a shriek as the disinfectant was poured in.

Then he dismounted and knelt beside a man far more gravely wounded. There was a froth of blood on Sir Ernaldo's lips as he gave the Protector's commander an account.

When he stood again, his experienced eyes confirmed what the dying man had said. There was a fringe of bodies along the road and up to the point where it ran between the two hills, but the infantry had come off fairly lightly—no more than a score of dead, and twice that seriously injured. It was the great mass of dead horseflesh and armored bodies lying like a windrow across the meadow to the west of the road that made him breathe quick and hard, panting like his horse as soldiers and laborers dragged men free, laying out the dead and bringing the wounded back on stretchers to where the doctors worked beside the supply wagons.

Spearmen and crossbowmen could be recruited easily enough, there were always more volunteers from the ranks of the tenant farmers than they could use. You could train a spearman in a few months, if he had guts and strong arms; it took only a little more to turn out a decent crossbowman. Skilled men-at-arms took
years,
and their mounts almost as long, years of effort and sweat and expense…

He walked to his horse and hung the serrated mace thonged from his wrist on his saddlebow, to put temptation beyond reach. Then he looked down at Lord Piotr Stavarov and ground out: “You fool. You cretin. You complete fuckup. You shit-for-brains. You—”

“My lord!” The young nobleman struggled to his feet, ignoring the clucking of the medic. “My lord Count, you cannot address me so!”

“You…no, shit has some use. You're worthless even as fertilizer!”

The bystanders were backing away; the Grand Constable of the Association had a reputation for icy control, and his flushed face and snarling voice were shocking.

“My lord,” Stavarov said, drawing himself up. “I…I admit we've suffered heavy losses, but we can inform the Lord Protector that we did drive the enemy from the field. What would you have me do?”

Renfrew struck with the leather-covered palm of his hand, not his ironclad fist, but the blow still sent Piotr spinning to the ground; the doctor cried out in alarm for his patient as fresh blood broke through the bandage.

“Give me back my knights!” the Grand Constable roared. “That's what I'd
have you do,
you Mafiya moron!
Give me back my knights!
”

Near West Salem, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9

“H
ell, I didn't like cities even before the Change. Always made me feel cramped,” Mike Havel said, reining in his horse and flinging up his clenched right fist for halt. “Now they give me the willies,” he went on. The Bearkiller column clattered to a stop, without the bunching or collisions you might expect from over a thousand tight-packed humans on horseback and on bicycles and driving wagons. A few horses snorted, and one bugled in protest, but the only voices raised were a few sharp commands. There was a massed scuffing as the infantry squeezed their brakes and each put a foot down to bring themselves to a halt. Most of them were red-faced and puffing; cycling in armor was a little less strenuous than marching, and a
lot faster
, but that didn't make it easy. The majority of the bicycles had solid rubber on their wheel rims, built up of strips salvaged from car and truck tires, which made for a rougher ride.

Havel squinted eastward, where the sun was just over the Cascades on the farthest edge of sight. It was going to be a bright day with scattered white clouds, mild and cool and damp with yesterday's drizzle—the sort of day you could have anytime but high summer here.

What did the Sioux call it? “A good day to die”? Hell with that, but it's a good day to fight, if you have to.

“Graveyards give me the willies too,” Signe Larsson replied grimly, looking south and then east.

They were just outside the brush and incipient forest that covered the wasteland that had been West Salem; wind soughed through spiky brush and tall grass, through fir needles and leaves just beginning to bud out. There was a little noise from the troops behind, bike wheels and hobnailed feet and steel horseshoes clopping on pavement or crunching in gravel, the voice of a noncom here and there blistering someone's ear about a loose strap, the flutter of a pennon crackling in the wind from the north. Below that was a deep silence, where the
gruck-gruck
of ravens was the loudest sound—they always seemed to know when a fight was in the offing, and a flock of them was gliding down from the hills.

To his left the old Salemtown Golf Course had hugged the northern edge of Wallace Road. The river was about a mile eastward, hidden from here by scrub and feral orchards and wet grassland that had once been fields. To his right were rolling hills, upscale horse farms and more orchard and woodlot before the Change; he had a lookout on Chapman Hill, the highest ground nearby at a little over four hundred feet. Beyond that were the old suburbs proper, where the bigger pre-Change trees towered over scrub and saplings where they hadn't been killed out by the fires, and an occasional chimney or snag of wall reared out of a green jungle. The treacherous net of bramble, vine, car-wrecks, twisted metal, scattered brick and glass shards made it nowhere he'd take troops willingly, but if he had to retreat the narrow cleared zone along the railroad tracks would do nicely. A few taller buildings still stood by the river, showing black trails of scorch-mark above the empty windows.

More and taller ones reared on the eastern shore, where the bulk of the old city had lain; three spans crossed over, a railroad bridge on the north and two road crossings just a little south. The Mackenzies and Bearkillers had spent considerable effort last autumn, clearing the piers of wrecked cars and logs and accumulated rubbish that were acting like giant beaver-dams and threatening to bring the bridges down. All that might be wasted effort now…

The roads were fairly clear of dead cars and trucks; the state government had managed to get that much done before it collapsed, but tendrils of vine thick as his arm crossed them except on the main thoroughfares, and sprays of brick and rubble stretched out where buildings had collapsed. The bridges were still in use for trade across the valley, and the ruins were mined for metals and useful parts. Nothing human had lived there since the last cannibal bands self-destructed late in the first Change Year, Kilkenny-cat fashion, although he supposed there might be a few lunatics hiding in cellars and living on rats and rabbits. Otherwise there were only occasional bandit gangs looking for hideouts and vantage points. The mass graves didn't stink anymore, not physically, and they'd been on the east side of the river anyway.

It still creeped him out. A world had died here in a convulsion of agony and bewildered terror, and its remains haunted the new one that he and his like were building on the bones.

And will until the last of us dies who remember the Change,
he thought.
Then this'll just be ruins, like the Pyramids to me.

A rider came up the road from the bridges, riding on the graveled verge to spare his horse's hooves at the trot. He was a Bearkiller scout, with an A-lister's mark between his brows but lightly equipped with sword, bow, helmet and a short mail shirt. His name was Bert, and he'd been a Marine before the Change, on leave and visiting family in Idaho.

“The bridges are still clear,” he said. “The nearest boats are still two miles downstream and coming on slow; the current's strong.”

“Good!” Havel said. “That confirms what the lookouts said. Signe, let them know it's OK for Ken to bring his toys up. Time for my esteemed father-in-law to strut his stuff.”

His wife took a convex mirror out of her saddlebag and angled it to the sun, blinking light across the mile to the hilltop south of them. A half minute later the reply came through:
Message relayed
and then
Confirmed. Kenneth Larsson out.

“Take care, Daddy!” Signe called softly.

“Heads up!” her brother Eric said.

Havel looked up into the sky, following his gauntleted finger. “Well, shit!” he said. “Crap and double-damn and hell. I expected this, but not so soon.”

The winged shape of a glider turned in the air a thousand feet above them—it was riding the thermal thrown up by the concrete mass of the ruins, spiraling in a widening gyre. He unlimbered his binoculars; the aircraft was a pre-Change sporting model, shaped like an elongated tadpole with long, slender wings, but those had the Protector's Lidless Eye on them, and a mirror rigged for heliograph signals stood outside the cockpit. That worked as the glider banked, the bright light a flicker of dots and dashes meaningless to him. Signe sighed regretfully—they hadn't broken the Association Air Force's latest field code yet, but there wasn't much doubt what it was telling the boats and barges coming southward on the Willamette. Starting with his numbers and dispositions.

“OK, they'll disembark their force well north of the bridges—north of here,” he said.

“You sure?” Signe asked.

“Yeah. They're not going to get them tangled up in the ruins while they disembark. And they probably want a fight here—they can't chase us, they don't have enough bikes with them. They'll try to come ashore close to here and march down River Bend Road till it joins this one, then south on that past the old radio tower. We'll move a little north—see where River Bend makes that elbow and heads more north of east? We'll anchor our line there.”

The others nodded. Havel went on: “Eric, you take the lancers and move a little north, couple of hundred yards. See those old gravel pits?”

He pointed with his right hand, a little south of east. “About a mile thataway? The ground's too soft for movement past there so I'll anchor my right on it, and straddle the roadway with the pikes and glaives, more crossbows on the west. But that leaves my far left swinging in the breeze. You cover it, be ready to move forward or back to hold 'em off if we have to pull out through the ruins—we'll use the railway line if we have to do that, and you can either follow or pull out west according to circumstances. We've got good coverage from Chapman Hill so keep your scouts just far enough forward to make theirs stay out of direct sight of the main body.”

“Right, bossman,” the big blond man said, fastening the cheek-pieces of his crested helmet under his chin.

He nodded to Luanne, and she blew a complex series of notes on the trumpet slung across her mailed torso. The banner-bearer on the other side moved with them as they kneed their horses forward over the roadside ditch with a scramble and surge. The two hundred A-lister cavalry followed by squads and sections and troops, the long lances swaying in their scabbards as they deployed onto an overgrown putting green. Havel nodded gravely to them as they passed. Some were grinning in excitement, with the older ones mostly flatly calm, although few enough here were much over thirty.

I'm starting to feel like an old man at thirty-seven,
he thought, smiling like a shark himself as he turned away.
Old enough to know how easy it is to die, at least. Old enough to know how much turns on this fight. It's amazing how much more serious you feel when you've got kids.

He turned his horse with a shift of balance and leg-pressure; Gustav was feeling the tension himself, and stamped a forefoot as he moved. The foot soldiers were the home-levy of Larsdalen, and the companies from the hamlets and steadings north and east of it in the Eola Hills and along their foot, the Field Force units he'd had time to collect on the way here—every Bearkiller adult would go to war at need, but the Outfit was a bit more selective about who went into an open-field fight. There were just under a thousand, half with polearms—glaives or the two eight-foot staves of a take-down pike—in scabbards riveted to the frames of their bicycles. The rest had crossbows, all of them the new fast-loading type, thank God. A lot of the crossbowmen were actually crossbow-women. Any sturdy farm-girl used to working in the fields could handle one, and the pointy end of the bolts hit just as hard whoever pulled the trigger; the Outfit certainly couldn't afford to leave anyone useful home just because of their plumbing. Pikes and glaives took more mass to use properly, and two-thirds of the troops holding them were men, about the same proportion as the A-list.

Many of the foot soldiers' faces were tight with conscious self-control as they stood in their ranks. The A-listers might do other things in their spare time, but fighting was their lifework. The infantry were precisely the other way 'round. On the other hand…

“Right, Bearkillers,” he said, rising in the stirrups and throwing his voice to carry. He pointed northeast. “The Protector's men are coming up the river to try and take away our homes and kill our families. We're going to fight them.” He grinned. “Any questions?”

A rippling growl went through the formation. Someone shouted
Hakkaa Paalle!
and the rest took it up, a deep, roaring chant, each stamping a foot in time to it, beating their gloved hands on the bucklers slung at their belts. Havel felt himself flush with pride; he'd brought them through the terrible years after the Change, and from starving refugees made a nation of them. Now they trusted him…The sound cut off when he raised one gauntleted hand.

“Now get ready and wait for the word,” he said into the silence that followed.

For a wonder, he and Signe had a moment to themselves. The troops put their bikes on the kickstands, then got to work—for the pikemen, that meant unslinging their weapons and fitting the two halves together with a snap and rattle as the spring-locks clicked home. A leafless forest sixteen feet high rose as they fell in four-deep along the road, facing north and east, the long steel heads of the pikes above them; the glaives waited to the rear.

“What do you think?” she said.

“Depends on how many of them get off the boats,
alskling,
” he said. “If there's more than we can handle, we pull back sharpish and wait for the rest of our call-up companies to arrive. They'll be gathering fast.”

“Why not do that now?” she asked.

“I
really
don't want to lose the bridges,” Havel said, nodding in the direction her father had gone. “If Arminger takes those, or breaks them down, he can operate on both sides of the river, and we can't help each other. And if he fortifies the crossing, it's a major blow. Worth risking a battle for, even against odds, as long as it isn't totally impossible.”

“Aren't we risking defeat in detail?”

Havel grinned at his wife, who'd been an occasional vegetarian and quasi-pacifist before the Change. “Learning the family business, eh? Nah, there can't be all that many of them, not if they're besieging Mount Angel and pushing into Mackenzie territory at the same time. Armchair generalship, like I said—he likes drawing arrows on maps. He's trying to get fancy and I'm betting he doesn't have enough men to do everything at once.”

“We're all betting that,” she said gravely, and he nodded. “Do you think it's Arminger in person? Here?”

“Nope,” Havel said. “At a guess, it's Stavarov or Renfrew. Hopefully Renfrew.”

“But Renfrew's his best commander!” Signe said.

“Exactly,” Havel said, licking a forefinger and marking the air with it. “Plus he's the only one Arminger really trusts. This would be a
good
day for the bastard to die.”

He'd been keeping an eye on the Chapman Hill lookout. Now a mirror blinked from there; he read the code as easily as he would have print.