A Meeting at Corvallis (43 page)

“Barges holding back,” he said. “Turtle boats coming forward. Now it's up to your dad.”

“We should have set the engines on the bridge up earlier,” she fretted.

“Nah, that wouldn't work,” Havel pointed out. “They would have twigged to that, even if Arminger's troops aren't long on individual initiative. But
if
you don't give them too much time to think and consult higher echelons they'll try to go through with a plan even when things have changed.”

They both looked to the river, a mile and better northward. The low, beetling shapes of the armored riverboats were hard to see at first, marked more by the white froth curving away from their bows and sloping forecastles than by the hulls themselves. The sight was a little eerie—you could believe that motors drove them, rather than dozens of dozens of bicycle cranks geared to a propeller shaft. That smooth mechanical motion without sails or oars looked unnatural, in this ninth year of the Change.

“I just hope Daddy can deal with it,” Signe said as they slid silently by and headed for the bridges. “He's not a hands-on fighter.”

“Yeah, but he's got Pam to look after that,” Havel said reassuringly. Then, harshly, as the barges and transports showed at the edge of sight: “Trumpeter! Sound
fall in
!”

Kenneth Larsson shifted under the uncomfortable, unaccustomed weight of the mail hauberk as he sat his horse beside the railcar, waiting for the signal from Chapman Hill. The armor he wore was strictly for protection-just-in-case, like the blade at his side. He'd put a lot of effort into the various weird-looking contraptions on salvaged rail-wheels that followed him, and was metaphorically rubbing his hands at the chance to use them. Right now that wouldn't be too advisable, because the leather and steel cup that covered the stump on his left wrist held a simple hook…a very
sharp
hook…rather than any of the various tools he found useful in the labs and workshops back at Larsdalen.

The heliograph on the hilltop a mile and a half north blinked at him. He nodded and waved to his own signaler to respond, then looked back along the wagon train—a phrase literally true, since the dozen flatcars were each drawn by four horses. Rail made a smooth surface, and the beasts could pull five or six times as much as they could on even the best roads, and do it faster. Here they pulled flat surfaces that bore a weight of gears and ratchets, frames and tanks and tubing; the hard angular shapes and smooth mathematically precise curves made him nostalgic for the lost world….

“Move out!” he called, waving his hook forward, neck-reining his horse to the side of the railroad tracks and bringing it up to a canter.

His personal guard followed—commanded by his wife Pamela—and the crews of the war-engines rode their charges like grinning, hunched baboons, cheering him as they went by amid a clattering rumble of hooves and whine of steel on steel. The rail line lay along the riverbank farther south, but here it turned inland through the ruins of West Salem, running five or six hundred feet from the water, amid buildings whose smoke-stained windows peered out from shattered glass and rampant vines…

“What's chuckle-worthy at this point?” Pamela asked him from his blind side.

She didn't find scorched, overgrown ruins any more cheerful than most people did. These had the further distinction of having been flooded out a couple of times. He turned his head to grin at her; the helmet and nasal bar framed her narrow, beak-nosed, brown-eyed face, and the armor added bulk to her whipcord figure. They'd met in Idaho not long after the death of his first wife and married late that year. A decade—and two kids—later, he still thought he'd gotten the better of the deal. Somehow the throttled fear that made his stomach churn with acid brought that home still more strongly. He kept his voice light as he answered: “I was just thinking that anyone else here would have said it's half a long bowshot to the river, instead of estimating it in feet,” he said, waving his right hand across the brush-grown rubble towards the blue-gray water.

“Except possibly me,” she said. “I'm an old fart too.”

“No, you were the one who belonged to the Association for Hitting Things with Sharp Pointy Things,” he pointed out.

“Hey, I wasn't one of those Society get-a-lifes,” she said, aggrieved. “I practiced the real thing in ARMA. The Association for Renaissance Martial Arts didn't spend time playing at the kings-queens-damsels-and-minstrels stuff.”

“Prancing around with swords…” he teased. “Well, it turned out to be a good career move.”

She shuddered a little. “And there was the hiking. I owe my
life
to that.”

Which was true; it had been that hobby that had taken her from San Diego to Idaho just under ten years ago. Southern California had been the worst of all the death-zones, twenty million people trapped instantly in a desert without even drinking water. Not one in a thousand had escaped; explorers who'd been there since told of drifts of desiccated corpses lining the roads for a hundred miles out into the Mojave, preserved by alkaline sand and savage heat.

Then: “Here we go.”

The railway broke out into open fields; the brush had been cleared from hereabouts last year, during the joint project with the Mackenzies to unblock the wreckage and drift-logs piled around the bridges. That had given them a good reason to do maintenance work on the permanent way, as well. The rails turned rightward, east over the water, with the tall ruins of Salem proper ahead of them on the eastern side of the fast-running spring water.

“Here comes the kimchee,” Kenneth Larsson said. His assistants looked at him curiously. “Classical reference.”

He didn't actually think that the low, beetling shapes moving upriver towards him were modeled on the Korean turtle ships that had turned back a Japanese invasion in the sixteenth century. The similarities were functional; when you covered a boat with a low sloped carapace of metal armor, it had to have a certain shape, just as a wheel had to be round. Evolution and design turned up similarities all the time, which had befuddled generations of the wishfully superstitious before the Change shot scientistic rationalism through the head.

His wife knew that bit of Asian history too. Pam grinned back at him over her shoulder, before turning to oversee the gangs fitting steel shields along the northern edge of the railroad bridge. Ken walked down the line of engines, keeping a critical eye as the crews unfolded and bolted and braced, and tested that the water-lines that carried power to the heavy hydraulic cocking-jacks were securely screwed home. Everything looked ready…

“Looks like Arminger's men can't make up their minds,” Pam said as the horses were led back westward out of harm's way, riders guiding long leading-reins of the precious beasts.

Either we win and they can come back…or we don't, and we won't need horses.
They did have some handcars for escape if worst came to worst without time to get the engines clear; those were the fastest way available to travel by land.

Ken grunted and leveled his binoculars, adjusting them one-handed. The six low, dark shapes of the armored craft
had
slowed, barely keeping station a thousand yards north against the current that curled green waves over their bows. In the center of each was a hexagonal turret with eye-slits on all sides, probably the bridge the craft was conned from. He tried to imagine the sweltering closeness within, lit only by dim lamps, the long rows of bicycle cranks geared to the propeller shafts and the near-naked, sweating human engines…

“Watch it!”

A hatch opened on the foremost turtle boat. Something within went
snap,
then
snap-snap-snap
about as fast as a man could click his fingers.

“They're ashore north of here at Rice Rocks,” Mike Havel said, looking over his shoulder at the hilltop observation post. “Deploying from the barges; horse, foot and catapults. Let's go. Signaler:
Advance by company columns, at the double
.”

The militia responded to the trumpet-calls, turning left from Brush College Road and going northeast at a pounding trot, seven columns of a hundred and fifty each; the tall grass and brush swayed and went down before their trampling boots as they moved off the roadway. Each had a mounted A-lister officer, usually an older member of the Brotherhood or one some injury had left fit enough for command but no longer quite up to the brutal demands of front-line cavalry combat.

Light war-engines went with them on two-wheeled carts, each pulled by a four-horse team, bouncing and swaying as they trotted along; the sloping shields that fronted them had words painted on them—jocular graffiti,
Hi there!
and
Knock-knock, guess who!, Many Happy Returns!
and
Eat This!

He turned Gustav eastward, cantering along with the column on the far right. Wet, brushy grassland stretched ahead, bugs springing up where the hooves passed, and occasionally a bird. A mile to the north he could just see the first little dots that were the enemy scouts meeting his light cavalry. As he watched, arrows flew between the scattered riders, and there were little flickers of pale spring sunshine off steel as the swords came out. He glanced west, and saw Eric and the bulk of the A-listers waiting ready just this side of Glen Creek, their lances a leafless forest above their heads. East, and the ground ran out in sloughs with the rank, green look of bog, patches of reeds among the tall grass and dead trees killed by the post-Change floods. The blue eyes of old, flooded gravel pits blocked the way, and beyond that the ground was even worse.

North, angling gradually east towards the Willamette, stretched the old River Bend Road, its thin pavement buckled and pitted by ten years of weather and several high floods that had left drifts of silt across it for grass and brush to root in. He spoke to the easternmost column's commander: “Captain Dinsel, get your people set up. Shuffle east until your boots start sinking in. You're the far anchor of the line; don't let them get around you. Refuse the flank if you have to.”

Her face split in a grin. “They're not likely to get any closer to the river than this, Lord Bear. Not unless they can walk on liquid mud. Another ten yards and it's too thin to plow and too thick to drink. This is a
good
position.”

“Keep an eye on it anyway,” he said.

Then he turned back towards the central column, the one advancing up River Bend Road, the pathway the enemy would use. The artillery was following it, sparing horses and wheels as long as possible.

“Sarducci,” he said.

The man in charge of the war-engines looked up; he was one of Ken Larsson's buddies, recruited from the Corvallis university faculty where he'd been teaching engineering at the time of the Change, tall with a dark, narrow, big-nosed face and a walrus mustache. Not an A-lister, but keen enough for all that, and with a very useful hobby in Renaissance history. Havel pointed westward to where the lancers waited.

“Put them about there. A little to the left of the cavalry and advance 'em say a hundred yards beyond our stopline. Dig in; they've got to come to us. I want you able to rake their flank.”

“Won't we be masking the A-listers there, Lord Bear?” the Tuscan asked.

Havel nodded; not agreeing, but acknowledging it was a fair question. “Nah. They can go in on your right, or stop a flanking attack—and they can support you if the Protector's people get too close. Go for it!”

He followed them westward down the formation, shouting: “Deploy! Deploy into line and halt!”

The columns opened like fans, with only a little cursing and adjustment as the militia infantry shouldered into position. The center was the pikes, a block eighty across and four ranks deep, with two files of glaives behind them. On either side the crossbows spread in a looser double line.

Most of them had fought before…
But nothing like this. Nothing on this scale.

“Captain!” This time to the westernmost end of the line. “Help the artillery dig in. Do it fast, then get back here.”

The company commander nodded and turned, barking the order; his unit was crossbows, and they stacked their weapons and broke open their folding entrenching tools, trotting forward to help the artillery crews. With nearly two hundred strong arms, the job went quickly; they laid out semicircular trenches, using the blades of their shovels to cut the turf in rectangular blocks, then set it aside while they piled up the soft, damp earth on the inner side, shovelfuls flying as they labored with panting, grunting intensity. When that was high enough to leave only the business end of the engine behind it exposed they laid the turf back on the surfaces of the mounds and pounded it down with the flat, folded their spades again and trotted back to their own weapons. The twelve engines settled in, each behind a chest-high horseshoe mound, each ten yards from its neighbor, each showing only the top of its metal shield split by the slot for the casting trough, what would have been the muzzle back in the days of guns.

Havel nodded at the beginning of the process and turned back to his own station, in the center where his line crossed the River Bend Road at right angles; he didn't have to handhold his people for something elementary like that.