A Meeting at Corvallis (45 page)

“At a guess, that guy's folks were gangers, not Society types,” Havel said, grinning despite himself. “It has a certain style. I used to
really
like my Harley in high school.”

“That's the Wereton family,” Signe said in a quelling tone. “Of Laurelwood Manor, up near Chehalem Mountain; they hold it by knight-service from the Barony of Forestgrove. Lord Harrison Decard's their liege. And Mr. Motorcycle out there is challenging all and sundry to single combat. Stavarov's going to let his hotheads work off some steam. Idiots.”

Havel felt his grin spread wider; here was something besides the tangled complexities and haunting fears of high command….

Speaking of gestures…and I'm not forty yet,
he thought.
Besides which, this
is
a delaying action. Playing at El Cid is delay, all right.

He ignored Signe's horrified yelp and brought Gustav up in a rear that turned into a gallop as he shot ahead, north down River Bend Road. A roar went up from the assembled Bearkillers, turning into a rhythmic chant from a thousand throats as they punched their weapons in the air:

“Lord
Bear!
Lord
Bear!
Lord
Bear!”

A swift glance showed his wife's mouth moving too, but he suspected she wasn't cheering. Her brother would be cursing enviously over there on the right, but he was too well disciplined to try anything on his own.

There's method in my madness,
alskling, he thought, and then:
I hope.

The Protectorate knight drew up, raising his lance and letting the butt rest on the toes of his right boot, and trotted towards the Bearkiller leader. Havel slowed down likewise, turning left off the treacherous surface of the road's broken asphalt. As they drew closer…

Aha,
he thought, looking at the painfully young face behind the helmet's nasal bar, and the way his eyes went wide as they darted to the snarling bear's head on Havel's helmet.
Thought so. That's a young guy's stunt, and for more reasons than what my charming wife calls testosterone poisoning.

The man was at least as tall as Havel and broader built even allowing for the effect of the hauberk and gambeson, but his light brown beard was scarce and tufty. The hazel eyes were fearless and delighted; this boy would have been a year shy of ten when the Change happened, and those golden spurs on his boots were a very recent acquisition. The horses halted, mouthing their bits and tossing their heads and making the spikes of their chamfrons glitter, pawing at the turf of knee-high grass and glaring at each other. Wet, dark soil showed where the steel-shod hooves broke through the sod, the rich, meaty green smell blending with horse sweat and leather, the old-locker-and-dirty-socks scent of gambeson padding and the slightly rancid canola oil that glistened on the mail and metal gear of the two warriors. The challenger undid the mouth-covering flap of his mail coif and let it hang free while he spoke.

“You do me great honor by meeting me lance to lance, Lord Bear!” the young knight said, grinning from ear to ear.

“Damn right I do, boy,” Havel replied. “But hell, it's a nice day for a spanking and I always did believe in corporal punishment for delinquent youth.”

The youngster looked a little affronted and more than a little bewildered. “My lord, I am Sir Jeff Wereton of Laurelwood, by rank a knight, and the son of a knight.”

“I'm the son of a hard-rock miner, myself. And your dad was a Hell's Angel,” Havel observed dryly.

Wereton nodded proudly. “A band of fearless warriors in an age of city-dwelling cowards!” he said. “Knights of the roads! I remember their great roaring steeds of steel, and everyone fleeing in fear before them—once my father bore me before him on his
Harley,
though I was only a child at the time.”

“Well, that's one way to look at it,” Havel said, letting his crooked smile show.

Let's not get into the drug-dealing, extortion and such. Nowadays they just collect a third of the crops, and labor-service and heriot fines…

“The Angels rallied to the Protector first of all, and stood like solid rock amid chaos.”

Yeah, that's the problem with bringing kids up on legends. They really
believe
them, no matter how much of a crock of horseshit they are.

“Two hundred yards suit you, boy?” he drawled, letting his tone say the
get on with it, dickweed
part.

“Yes, my lord,” Wereton snapped.

Good, got him mad. That'll make him careless,
Havel thought, reining Gustav around.
Lot of testosterone running loose there. Arminger would make him a duke with his own castle and estates to the horizon if he killed me, but he couldn't have known it would be me coming out. He's probably even more over the moon at the thought of the
glory
he'd get if he beats me in public.

The Portland Protective Association was a protection
racket,
and a rather nasty one. But when the kids asked what the family did for a living, even your average thug didn't like having nothing to say but:
Well, son, we're thugs, oppressors, vicious parasites and members of the Brute Squad in good standing.

Without Arminger and his re-creationist cronies and hangers-on the roughnecks and gangbangers who made up the rest of his following would have gradually invented an ethos justifying their rule and stories telling why they were the bee's knees. But the Society had provided a ready-made mythos to feed the younger generation. God alone knew what the
third
generation would be like…probably they'd wait at crossroads to joust all comers with a lady's glove tucked under their helmets, or make goofy vows to liberate the Holy Sepulcher and set sail for the walls of Jerusalem with Crusader crosses on their surcoats.

From what Pam and Ken had told him the whole thing wasn't more than loosely connected to real medieval chivalry; say, about the way
Treasure Island
was to real pirates. Mostly it was drawn from stories and make-believe, starting with the ones Cervantes had laughed his compatriots out of by mocking them in
Don Quixote,
and going on from there to
Ivanhoe
and
The Cid
and finishing with
Brave-heart
and Disney's Magic Kingdom. But it worked as a morale booster just as well for all that. Which was mostly a plus for the people running the Portland Protective Association, but the downside was that they had to play along with it themselves, including things like letting this valiant young idiot play at knight-errantry with real blood and real bones at stake.

Although…
he thought, as he turned the big gelding and reached back to lift the bottom four feet of his eleven-foot lance out of the tubular scabbard,
at what point does make-believe become real? When it's the way you live every day of your life? When you're prepared to die for it?

He reached down and ran his arm through the loops of his shield, lifting it off the hook on his bow-case as he let his knotted reins fall on the saddlebow. Doll-tiny, the figure of Sir Jeff dipped his lance in acknowledgment. Havel did the same with his own, then couched it loosely. Ten feet of tapering ashwood, thick as his wrist at the steel-capped butt, just wide enough to be gripped comfortably in the hand at the balance-point a third of the way up from there, a little over thumb-thick where the socket of the narrow twelve-inch knife head was heat-shrunk onto the wood. The two men's armor differed only in detail, except for the Bearkiller's shield; that was a convex circle about two feet in diameter, rimmed and bossed with metal, and made of a layer of thick leather over stout plywood.

The Protectorate knight's was of similar construction, but much larger, a curved top a yard across tapering to a rounded point four feet below. It covered most of his body now as he brought it up under his eyes and crouched forward, his feet braced in the stirrups.

“Let's go, Gustav,” Havel said to his horse, and shifted his weight.

The big gelding tossed his head again and paced forward, building to a trot and then a canter and then a controlled hand gallop; he knew this game as well as his master. Havel kept the lance loose in his gauntleted hand, trained across the horse's head so that it jutted over the spike in the middle of the chamfron's forehead. The figure of the knight grew with sudden, startling speed; he could see the divots flying from under his mount's hooves and the unwavering spike of the lancehead aimed at his throat, the skillfully sloped shield, the high metal-shod saddlebow…

Havel's knees clamped home on Gustav's barrel, bringing the last plunging bit of speed out of the great muscles flexing beneath him. His hand clamped as well on the shaft of the lance as he trained it over the horse's head, and his body tensed…

And the very last instant his left arm whipped up the shield, sweeping it out. The lighter, more mobile, round Bearkiller shield that could be used as easily as a sword, not a twenty-pound kite-shaped weight that stayed in one place.

Crack-crack!

The curved surface and the artful sideways blow flung the knight's lancehead out of line; the impact was brutal and rammed Havel back against the high cantle of his war-saddle, but not nearly so much so as the strike of his own lance. That punched the gaudily painted kite-shaped shield neatly at its midpoint, and the lancehead pierced the facing and gouged deep into the tough alder-plywood, driven by the huge momentum of a pair of armored horses and armored men. For one stomach-clenching instant Havel thought it would lever him into the air like a fly on the end of a fishing line, but then the ashwood broke across with a gunshot snap.

Sir Jeff slammed back into the cantle of his own saddle and over it, turning a complete somersault in the air and landing flat on his face as Havel galloped by and his own horse went off like a shooting star. The Bearkiller lord reined in as quickly as he could—you couldn't stop a ton of man and horse and metal on a dime—and looked around.

Wereton's conical helmet had burst free from the straps that held it and rolled away, and the mail coif beneath had come off too; the shield-strap looped diagonally across his back still held, hindering him as he rolled over faceup. Mouth and nose and ears dribbled blood and he twitched like a pithed frog, but Havel judged he'd probably recover—though not in time for the rest of this campaigning season. Not with a squashed nose, concussion, whiplash, head-to-toe bruises and probably half a dozen sprung ribs. His body would probably heal faster than his bruised ego, at that.

“Thought so,” he panted, spitting to clear his mouth of thick saliva mixed with blood where the shock had cut the inside against his own teeth. “Never jousted with anyone who wasn't using Association gear before, did you, sonny-boy?”

He gestured with the stump of his lance for Sir Jeff's friends or attendants to come and get him; a boy in his early teens galloped out with an older man in servant's clothing, and between them they caught the fallen knight's destrier, levered him over it and headed back for the shelter of the Protectorate army's lines. As the defeated champion returned draped across his saddle a long, low, disconsolate muttering came from there, plus curses and shaken fists. The Bearkiller force roared Havel's name as he cantered down the line, tossing the six-foot stave that was all that remained of his lance in good-natured mockery of the knight's flamboyant gesture before the fight. When he drew in before the A-lister cavalry the cheers grew even louder, and the horses neighed and snorted in protest.

Eric Larsson spoke: Havel couldn't hear it under the pulsing beat of the sound, but he was pretty sure it was
you selfish glory-hound son of a bitch!
shouted in tones of deepest sea green envy.

Havel grinned at his brother-in-law and tossed him the stump of the lance. Eric caught it, then reached behind, pulled his own free of the scabbard and tossed it to his commander in a casual display of strength—it took a lot of muscle to treat one of these barge poles as if it was a garden rake. Havel caught it neatly, hiding the grunt of effort under the smack of leather on wood, and slid it into the tubular socket.

Beside Eric, Luanne rolled her eyes and made a remark of her own; probably
You idiot!
Or
Men! Why does everything have to be a pissing match?

“Because in this life everything, absolutely everything, is either a challenge or a reward,” he said to himself, and turned his horse and cantered back to the Outfit's banner.

“Don't say it,” he said, as he reined in and most of the staff crowded around to pound him on the back.

One handed him a canteen of water cut with a little wine that was more like vinegar; he took a mouthful, swilled it around his mouth and winced as it hit the cuts, then drank down a dozen long swallows. Sweat was running down his face in rivulets, and the padding of his mail collar was already chafing a little under his chin, despite the coolness of the day and the silk neckerchief tucked inside it.