A Meeting at Corvallis (53 page)

“To Captain Sarducci, concentrate on the infantry as they advance—raking fire from the center of the enemy formation to the left. To Lord Eric, don't charge until you get the signal. Their cavalry is still in the game.”

“What next?” Signe said, her horse stepping sideways as an auxiliary leading a mule loaded with panniers of crossbow bolts went by.

Havel kept his voice soft. “Next they send in their foot, and we see how good we are at a fighting retreat. We can't take another attack like that, and we didn't kill enough of them to rock them back on their heels. We'd have done better if they hadn't pulled back in time, but Alexi was too smart to keep them face-first in the meat grinder after we didn't break.”

Signe nodded soberly, her eyes worried. Her voice was calm as she went on: “Report from the bridge—”

“They're burning!” Ken Larsson shouted.

“Keep
down,
” his wife screamed in his ear.

She grabbed him by the collar of his hauberk and hauled him bodily from the box he'd been standing on for a better view. He staggered, windmilling his arms and trying to keep erect on the rough footing of the railroad track, then went to one knee. Bolts went
snap-snap-snap
through the air above. They might have missed, but then again, they might not. And hurled by the flywheel-powered throwers of the turtle boats…

As if to underline the point, a bolt flashing through the space above an engine on one of the railroad cars
didn't
miss. Larsson swallowed thickly as a loader's head disappeared in a spray of red mist, and the body toppled backward to land bonelessly limp. The helmet he'd been wearing spun away with a painful
bwannggg
harmonic, and landed like a flung Frisbee in the river a hundred yards south of the bridge.

But that one is burning,
he thought, ducking for a better look through the slit between two of the metal shields.

The lead boat that had taken three of the napalm canisters at once had smoke pouring out of the ventilators and the eye-slits of the bridge. Suddenly hatches popped open and smoke billowed up in earnest, along with yellow-orange flames. A half-dozen men jumped out and threw themselves into the blue-gray water of the Willamette. The last two were burning; one more tried to crawl out and then fell back, and the boat drifted away northward in a fog of sooty smoke.

The war-engine crews along the railroad bridge gave a brief, savage cheer. A replacement for the luckless loader stepped up and grabbed the forged-steel bolt he had dropped. She slapped the giant metal arrow into the machine's trough; it was four feet of hard alloy, tipped with copper and with metal vanes like a real arrow's fletchings at the rear, as much like a tank's long-rod penetrator as he'd been able to manufacture with the machine tools he could salvage and rig to run by waterpower.

The engine traversed a little on its turntable, and then shot with a huge, almost musical crinkling. The bolt flashed out and struck almost before the thud of the throwing arms hitting rubber-sheathed metal sounded; the range was close now, no more than thirty yards. The
ptink
of its impact was so much like a BB hitting a soda can that it made him feel a little nostalgic, until he remembered what it must be like inside, with that fragment of high-velocity metal bouncing around in the dark. Two more struck, and one skidded off the curved plates but the other punched through as well. The turtle boat lost way and began to slip back northward, downstream, turning slowly as it drifted. When it came back under control it continued to retreat, moving slowly to avoid taking on water; those holes would let liquid fire in as easily as the river.

That left the rest. “Pour it on!” Ken shouted. “Let them have it!”

“Easier said than done,” Pam noted grimly.

The boats were closer now. The
snap-snap-snap
of their dart throwers sounded again and again, and the dents they made in the shields were deeper; then one punched through in a shower of sparks and went
ktinnng
off a wheel of one of the railroad cars. Smoke-trails cut through the air north of the bridge, drifting backward along with the fumes from napalm burning on the water to make the air hot and acridly choking. Ken turned angrily when one of his engines paused overlong before firing. His mouth closed when it
did
fire, the canister catching a turtle boat just as the hatch was raised for a volley of bolts, cracking on the edge and sending its load of burning jellied gasoline shooting through the entrance with hideous perfection. Something inside caught as well, and in an instant flame shot out of every opening in the hull in white-hot jets.

Then the three remaining warcraft were too close to shoot at; the engines on the railcars could not depress far enough to bear on them. Ken and his escorts jumped up on the railcars themselves. A moment later a three-round volley of the darts came up from below, one of them smashing its way through the railway ties. The crews of the engines looked at each other…

“OK,” Pamela shouted. “You two pump!”

She picked up what looked like a gun, connected to a metal tank by a hose. Two of the crew sprang to a plunger-pump and began to rock it back and forth.

Ken bit back:
What do you think you're doing?
His wife knew exactly what she was doing, and she was far more of a warrior than he.

His teeth were still on edge when she hopped casually off the railcar and looked down through the ties and the open framework of the railway bridge at the boats maneuvering below. Another
snap-snap-snap
came loud; Ken felt something hard smash into the floor of the car beneath his feet. Pamela's teeth showed in her lean face as she jammed the muzzle of the weapon down through the decking of the bridge and pulled the triggers set into the handgrips. One opened the valve, and a stream of amber-colored fluid as thick as a man's thumb began to jet down into the girders and open space below, scattering into a mist of droplets. A second later the other worked a spark-wheel set at the end of the long metal tube.

Whooosh!

The liquid stream turned into a banner of fire; smoke and hot air shot upward around the woman's feet. Ken blinked and rubbed his single eye, then peered over the edge of the car. One of the remaining turtle boats was burning itself, held by the current against a bridge pier. The others turned and started northward, white foam showing at their sterns where the propellers churned at maximum power.

“Many good-byes, you sons of bitches!” he roared after them.

Exultation brought a flush to his face as Pamela carefully raised the flamethrower and plunged the muzzle into a big metal tub of water lashed to the side of the railcar. The crews broke into cheering as well, hopping up and down and hammering each other on the back.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Ken said. “You going to let them
get away
?”

They dove back to the throwing engines. Ken hopped back to the deck of the bridge. Two of Pamela's A-lister guards saluted him; he eyed them with some surprise. Not that the Outfit's elite had ever treated him with anything but respect; he was the bossman's father-in-law, and Eric's father, and Pamela's husband, for that matter. He'd been there from the beginning, when Mike Havel's Piper Chieftain crashed into a river in Idaho's Selway-Bitterroot National Wilderness, and the long trek back to Oregon started. That was myth and legend now, and equivalent to having relatives on the Mayflower.

But those salutes were a little different….

“What?” he said to them. “It was Pamela who toasted that boat.”

They grinned back at him; both were young men. “But you designed the stuff and built it and commanded this action, Lord Ken,” one of them said.

“So…” the other continued, and they both saluted again.

He shook his head in wonderment, then looked up sharply at a hammer of hooves on the westward end of the bridge. A military apprentice was there; the youngster's horse didn't want to come onto the bridge, with its uncertain footing and stink of chemicals and hot metal and burning, for which he didn't blame it. Instead Larsson walked over, noticing that the hauberk was starting to get seriously unpleasant.

“Yes?” he said.
Uh-oh. That's a serious-news face, if I've ever seen one.

“My lord, the Lord Bear's compliments, and get your teams hitched.”

“We lost?” Ken said sharply, looking over to his right. The battlefield wasn't visible from here, but they'd heard some noise.

“No, my lord. We beat off their attack and sent them running. Lord Bear says that you should remember the words of…” She hesitated, frowning over the unfamiliar syllables. “Phyross of Ipi-something?”

“Pyrrhos of Epiros,” he said. “Thank you: message acknowledged, will prepare for departure.”

He turned, thinking through the orders necessary to get his railcars headed south once more; he might not be a soldier, but scheduling was something he was good at.

One of the A-listers who'd saluted him said: “Pyrrhos? Who's that, Lord Ken?”

“A Greek general who fought the Romans,” he said, which apparently satisfied the man's curiosity.

And who's most famous for beating a Roman army at hideous cost and then exclaiming: “Another victory like this, and we're ruined!”

His eyes went east over the river. His daughter Astrid was there, and good friends, and they were fighting the Protector's men too.

There are just too damned
many
of them! Damn Corvallis anyway. Can't they see that if we go down, they're next?

Near Mount Angel, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 6th, 2008/Change Year 9

S
ir Nigel Loring whistled silently to himself as he looked up at the walls of Mount Angel through the binoculars. Even with his slightly damaged eyes and by moonlight, even to someone who'd seen castles throughout Europe and helped rebuild more than one in England, they looked daunting. And in this light it seemed otherworldly as well, the pale whitewash shining as if carved from a single opal and lit by some internal glow.

The hill that held the monastery rose steeply half a mile northward from this patch of woods, nearly five hundred feet at its ridgelike top above the flat farmland that surrounded it; the whole mass of earth and rock was shaped like an almond, running from northwest to southeast, about a mile and a half long and half a mile wide at its widest point. The greatly shrunken town stood at its northern end, surrounded by a wall much like that he'd seen around Dun Juniper or Larsdalen. A road zigzagged up the north slope through a series of sentry towers; trying to fight your way up it would be a nightmare. But what awaited at the top…

Someone was very ingenious,
he thought.
But then, I'm told that they have an excellent library.

The walls were curved in a smooth oval, following the four-hundred-foot contour around the hillside, leaning back with a very slight camber. Building them must have been fairly simple; cut back into the hillside until the earth behind was a vertical bank as high as you wanted, and then build the wall up against it; the construction method looked like mass-concrete, big rocks set in a matrix of cement. The walls were not only thick in themselves; they were backed up by the whole intervening mass of the hill, millions of tons of solid earth and rock.

You
couldn't
knock them down, not without functioning pre-Change artillery or explosives. Even if there was no opposition, he doubted present-day technology could
tear
them down without thousands of laborers and years of effort. The towers that studded the circuit of the curtain were built out from the wall itself, starting about thirty feet up and swelling out from the surface; they were probably steel-framed. He could see the roofs of some of the buildings inside the curtain over the crenellations and hoardings, but that wouldn't matter much—with that height advantage, throwing engines inside could dominate everything for a mile around, smashing enemy catapults like matchboxes, and they'd be nearly impossible to knock out by anything trying to loft missiles back at them.

There was little or no cover on the slopes below, either; everything had been trimmed back to knee-height or less, the dirt from the excavations used to make the slopes smoothly uniform and nowhere less than forty degrees from the vertical, and some tough, low-growing vine planted to hold the surface. If things were arranged anything near to the way he'd do it, the defenders could toss heavy stone shot or pump flaming oil at any spot. The skin at the back of his neck crawled at the thought of trying to lead a storming party to the base of the walls.

And if you did get there, what on earth could you do? Raise scaling ladders eighty feet tall? Hit the wall with a sledgehammer? Jump up and down and wave your arms and shout, “I'm tired of it all, drop bally great rocks on my head?”

The light died as clouds hid the moon. A moment later it began to rain, a fine silvery drizzle, and the fortress-monastery vanished like a castle in a dream. The soldier-monk beside him looked at his watch, hiding the luminous dial with his other hand, and murmured: “Wait. Very soon now…”

Nigel waited with an endless fund of patience, despite the damp chill that worked inward, making him conscious of his joints and the places where his bones had been broken—not more times than he could count, but more than you could tally on the fingers of one hand, too. He and the others around him were dressed in dark woolens, and armed with sword and bow, but they wore no armor, and only knitted balaclava pullover masks on their heads. This was a mission where only stealth could hope to succeed; leaving a trail of dead enemy sentries would be failure even if they made it through, since they had to be able to get out as well.

Although he strained his ears he could hear nothing; the besiegers' camp was on the northwest side of the hill, two miles distant from the crest and better than three from here, just this side of Zollner Creek along the line of the old Southern Pacific railway. They were relying on mobile patrols to keep the rest of the circuit secure, but they had to send those well out to keep beyond catapult range.

“The diversion will start now,” the monk said. Grimly: “Men are dying as we speak to distract the Protector's troops. Let's go.”

The party went forward into the rainy night; the monk in the lead, as the native guide; then Alleyne Loring and his father; then Eilir Mackenzie and Astrid Larsson and John Hordle spread out in a fan as rear guard. They moved with cautious speed, across a meadow where no cattle grazed in this time of war, past a small farmstead equally empty and silent, and through a bare-branched orchard of peach trees just past bud-break. At the northern edge of it Nigel caught a flash of movement, more sensed than seen or heard; he patted the air with one hand, and they all sank down behind the weeds that flanked the fence and the laneway behind it.

Good,
the Englishman thought.
Not a sound.

He wasn't surprised at either Alleyne or Hordle; he'd helped train them himself, and knew their capacities. Astrid wasn't that much of a surprise either; Sam Aylward had taught her, and Michael Havel, and he knew the one and had a lively respect for the other. The movement had probably been nothing more than a fox or rabbit.

But Eilir
is
a bit of a startling phenomenon. I wouldn't have expected someone who couldn't hear to be able to be so quiet. She must have natural talent. I should have taken Hordle's word on it. He's not a man to let personal attachments cloud his judgment, not at all.

Lying by the fenceline, he put his ear to the muddy ground; even under the patter of the rain he could hear hooves approaching, many of them; at least a dozen riders, possibly twice that. Moments later a clot of horsemen followed the sound that heralded them, shambling along in no particular order, but with arrows on the strings of their short recurved saddle-bows or heavy machete-like sabers in their hands; one rose in the stirrups as he watched and slashed at an overhanging oak bough, bringing it down with casual ease though the wood was wrist-thick. He recognized the type; eastern mercenaries, plainsmen, the same folk he'd seen in action out near Pendleton last year, and which reports had placed in the Protector's service in this war. One had a light lance across his saddlebow and prodded at the roadside vegetation now and then.

Twenty of them, more or less,
he thought; it was hard to be certain, with the light of the moon gone and the rain getting heavier.

They halted uncomfortably near, although there was a strip of meadow between the fence and the dirt road. One dismounted to piss into the roadway, holding the skirts of his long oiled-linen duster aside; a few of the others spoke, though most kept a keen eye out. Their ponchos and slickers made them look top-heavy and somehow inhuman through the murk and drizzle as they hunched in their saddles, and their heads swept back and forth.

I suppose they're nervous in close country like this,
he thought; it was all small farms and fields here now, with new fences and hedges splitting up bigger pre-Change holdings. Not much like the great sagebrush plains and canyonlands of their homes, and doubly so in the wet darkness.

“What's got the Portland pussies all het up?” one asked. “They all tore over to the north there like it was a pretty girl spreading wide and yellin'
first man here gets a piece!
”

“Or like it was free beer on tap,” someone else said.

“Oh, it's some raid or other, the monks kicking up their heels, I expect,” a slightly older man replied; none of them sounded as old as his son Alleyne's twenty-eight. “Y'all know what the Portland pussies are like, hup-one-two-I-gotta-pike-up-my-ass. They spook easy, you ask me.”

“Goddamn cold here,” another said, wiping at the water on a face that was a blob of slightly lighter darkness. He looked up, which would only get him another face-full.

“Hey, who's the pussy now?” the older voice scoffed. “Been a lot colder, riding herd in winter.”

“Yeah, but it's usually a
dry
cold. This country's too wet soon as you get west of the mountains. A man could get mushrooms growing on his balls around here.”

“
You
could, Al, considering where you've been known to stick your dick. Rain's good for the grass, anyways,” the leader's voice said. “Hey, Frank, you finished pissing or you got an irrigation system going there?”

“That was good beer we found,” the one named Frank said, buttoning up his leather trousers. “
Damn
good. Better than any to home. I liked them little spicy sausages too, and the sweet cake with the nuts, but the beer was
fine,
with a real bite to it and a good head. Hope the monks got more for us to take.”

“You want to take it, go up and knock that hard head of yours on them walls,” the leader said, and there was a soft chorus of chuckles. “Anyway, saddle up. We got to patrol twice as much ground while the Portland pussies are away.”

“Excuse me, while the
noble knights
and their
vassals
are off there chasin' noises in the dark,” Frank said as he vaulted easily back into the saddle of his quarter horse, landing with a wet smack of leather on leather. “Christ, what a bunch of play-acting put-ons.”

“They're payin' the bills. Mebbe we should dismount and scout some more. There's a farmhouse over to there, about a quarter mile. It'd get us out of the wet, at least.”

Nigel's hand made a slight, almost infinitesimal movement towards the sword slung over his back. That farmhouse was directly in back of them; if the patrol leapt the fence, or came to tear it down—

“They ain't payin' me enough to get off my horse all the time,” Frank said. “Considering we checked that house yesterday and there's no beer
there
. If I'm going to be cold and wet, I'd rather do it moving.”

The mercenaries laughed again; then their horses rocked into motion in unison. The party waited silently until the patrol's hooves had faded into the rain; Nigel held out a hand and made them wait a moment more while he pressed his ear to the ground again. The muffled thump continued, fading steadily; they hadn't stopped to come dashing back.

“Go!” he said softly.

They crossed the road in pairs; he mentally blessed the overconfidence that had made the Protector leave only a bit over two thousand men here—enough to invest the town and the splendid fort, to be sure, but not nearly enough to encircle it, or keep small groups from infiltrating under cover of darkness. If they'd spread all their men in a thin ring around it out of supporting range of each other, they'd have been horribly vulnerable to counterattack and sally if the garrison was in any strength. Instead they'd sensibly kept most together in a single body big enough to defend.

Although in their commander's shoes I'd be screaming for another two or three thousand men, enough to put a fortified camp at each point of the compass and drive a ditch and trench all the way around. Interesting. There haven't been many sieges since the Change; nobody's quite sure of how to go about it, or how different it will be from the books.

A pruned vineyard covered the slight upward slope on the other side, the vines catching at their legs like twisted fingers in the dark. Then they went through a field, half plowed and half still in crimson clover; the disk-plow itself stood forlorn in the center of the field, abandoned when the word of war came, marking the spot where the sucking, gluey mud gave way to wet pasture. Nigel blessed the rain even as he cursed the squelching sounds their boots made and the way the ground clung to them; still, it was getting as dark as a wardrobe, and the hissing, drumming sound made a blanket of white noise around them. They were safe unless they blundered directly into another patrol; he could see less of the hill and fortress than he'd been able to half a mile back. It was fortunate the monk knew his way, because this was exactly the sort of situation that could get even experts thoroughly lost.

Ground lifted under their feet; they met a stone retaining wall about waist-high, and then scrambled up the steep slope. Whatever it was that grew there was tough, only giving a little under their boots with a ripping sound and a sharp green smell, but it was slick with rain and liquid mud from the soil below, and they had to bend double and pull themselves up with their hands as well. It was a relief to stop when they ran into the stone and concrete of the wall, to rest against the rough surface and let their hearts slow; the bad part of that was that it made him feel how the rain sucked heat out of his body. Even with the rain and the dead blackness of an overcast night, he still felt conspicuous in his black outfit against the whitewashed wall; a little light leaked out from the arrow-slits in the towers above, enough to make out his hand in front of his face.