A Meeting at Corvallis (60 page)

He was starting to look enthusiastic; Emiliano raised a cautionary hand. “My lord, let's not get a hard-on so all the blood runs out of our heads, like that little white-ass Mafiya cocksucker Piotr. We got the monks to think about too, you know.”

Jabar's brows knitted. Emiliano had worked with him a number of times over the years, and knew the brutish appearance was a false front. Nobody had stayed on top through the turbulent early years of the Association without plenty of smarts, and not just the street variety.

“We got more men than we need to keep them bottled up,” Jabar said at last. “There's no quick way to get out of the Abbey. They got to send men down the switchbacks on the north side of the hill into the town before they can sally. That takes time.”

“So let's
find
the motherfuckers, my lord.”

The round head nodded. “And then, if we can kill them before they get away, the war is over.”

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

Ooof,
Michael Havel thought, closing a jaw gone slack.
It's a pleasant surprise, but it's still a hell of a surprise.
He felt disoriented for a moment, with a whirling vertigo, as if his whole body had been prepared for a step at the bottom of a ladder and had instead run into a hard floor.
Actually, I was prepared for death.
A momentary surge of nausea surprised him, and he spat to clear his mouth.

The Bear Lord recognized the first pair of the men pulling up their lathered horses before him. Behind them troops were pouring down out of the ruins of West Salem onto Brush College Road, moving at the double-quick and making the earth shake with the uniform pounding of their boots. Pikes bristled above them, waving like ripe wheat in July, light glistening on the steel.

“Major Jones,” he said, returning the man's salute. “Let's be understated and say it's good to see you.”

“Edward Finney,” the other man said, offering a hand in a metal gauntlet.

He was in his late forties, stocky and weathered, wearing first-class armor—breast-and-back of overlapping articulated plates, lobster-style, mail-and-plate leggings and arm-guards, a visored helmet on his head—with a sword at his hip and a long war-hammer slung over one shoulder. It wasn't gear Havel would have cared to wear on horseback, but from the weapon that wasn't the way he fought, either, and the horse was for mobility. Two much younger men with a strong family resemblance and similarly armed rode behind him, probably his sons. An even younger woman followed—barely old enough to take the field—in lighter gear, with a trumpet and a crossbow slung over her back.

“Ah, you're a friend of Juney's,” Havel said. A mental file clicked:
Big yeoman farmer down south of Corvallis city, the son of old Luther. Influential guy.
“So, the Faculty Senate finally got its collective thumb out?”

“Nope,” Finney and Jones said together. The farmer shrugged and signed the soldier to go on. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in turn.

“That back there is the First Corvallis Volunteers; two thousand of them, half crossbows, half pikes and heavy infantry, a couple dozen mounted scouts. Could have had more, but we didn't want to wait, since that message you read on your veranda the other day sounded pretty time-constrained. It was obvious Turner and Kowalski would keep the Senate chasing round in circles and biting its own ass with amendments to secondary clauses to reports of special committees on the Whichness of the Wherefore, so
we
convened an overnight emergency session of the Popular Assembly—your man Hugo helped a lot getting the word around quick. That man's got contacts!”

“The Assembly can't declare war or order mobilization,” Havel said, surprised.
At least, if I know as much about the way Corvallis is set up as I think I do.

“But it
can
authorize people to go off as volunteers
without
a declaration of war.”

“It can?”

“It can now, because we just did exactly that, and it hadn't occurred to the Economics Faculty that we
could
. We rammed through a vote, and most of the people voting showed up with their armor already on, which was sort of a hint—Ed here turned out a good five hundred from south of town, and another farmer friend of Lady Juniper's did the same out around Philomath, and Bill Hatfield and I have some pull in town. Somehow nobody wanted to get in our way when we pushed our bikes up to the Northgate.”

Havel grinned, imagining the scene. “I bet they didn't!”

“Yeah. We geared up, got in the saddle before dawn this morning and started pedaling like mad while the Bobbsey Twins of the Faculty of Economics waved their arms and screeched about unconstitutional actions and threatened us with paper-armored lawyers. Christ, watching their faces was worth it all by itself! Not as much fun as smashing the butt end of a glaive there, but still worth it.”

“You didn't happen to run into
my
reinforcements on the way here, did you?”

Jones nodded. “The guy in charge there decided to go up and reinforce Will Hutton instead, since he hadn't got the last of his people in, and we were going to get to you first.”

Havel fought down a surge of irritation; he
wanted
his subordinates to exercise initiative, and it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

“Where do you want us, O Lord Bear?” Jones went on.

Havel shook his head again, looking westward along his line and then north at the enemy.
No time to be flabbergasted.
The enemy had frozen in place when they saw the reinforcements coming up behind him; there was a lot of trumpeting and flag-waving and messengers riding back and forth.

“You're already up there, so form up on my western flank.”

He put out his left arm, pointing it at the Corvallans as they poured out onto the road, then swung it around to his front. “We'll come in on them like this, and see if we can catch Alexi's nose in the door.”

“Or his thieving fingers,” Edward Finney said.

“Or his dick,” Jones added, and the younger Finneys laughed. “Let's go!”

They turned their horses around and cantered west to direct their soldiers. Havel looked around at his company commanders, who were either standing slack-faced…

…or grinning like red-arsed baboons who've just stumbled across a stash of bananas.

“Gentlemen, ladies, let's get to work.” He shrugged his shoulders as they scattered for their commands, settling himself as if preparing for a hard task. “Messengers: to Lord Eric, fall in on the extreme left flank of our friends from Corvallis, and try and get around the enemy and keep them from pulling back. To Captain Sarducci, limber up and hitch your teams. Trumpeters, sound
general advance!
”

Three-quarters of a mile westward other trumpets blew, their timbre and the sequence of notes they used different from the Bearkillers'. He understood them, though:
Pikepoints down,
and
Prepare for push of pike!

The sixteen-foot shafts came level in a quick, disciplined bristle of points. Flanked by the crossbows, the hedgehog shape of the phalanx began to walk.

Two hours later Mike Havel sat his horse and watched the Protector's men digging in. They were about two miles north of the battlefield, near Rice Rocks, where the Willamette turned north again after an east-west stretch. That was where the northern troops had disembarked that dawn. The Bearkillers and Corvallans observed from a safe distance westward. The falling sun at their backs threw their shadows before them, like goblin mockeries of men and horses; the air didn't have the stink of blood and shit that went with battle here, but it already smelled of turned earth and sweat.

“I take it back,” Havel said sourly.

“Take what back?” Major Jones said.

“I told Signe earlier today that Arminger is too much of a Period Nazi”—he looked at the Corvallan and the younger man nodded to show he grasped the phrase; he'd been a Society fighter before the Change—“to use artillery properly. I take it back.”

The barges that had landed the Association's men were still there, drawn up on the sandy-muddy beach that marked the south side of the river at the point of the curve. Their crews and the rowers who'd tugboated them south and upstream hadn't been idle. The square shape of an earthwork fort already showed on some low heights near the river, with workers and wheelbarrows and crank-powered lifts swarming over it like ants. Skeletal gantries with huge lanterns at the tops showed how they were planning on keeping going when the sun finished setting, though there would be plenty of moonlight.

Havel looked aside at Sarducci. The chief of his field artillery shook his head regretfully. “They outrange me by too much, Lord Bear,” he said. “The stuff mounted on the barges in the river is bad enough, but they've been moving some of it ashore, too. Couple of heavy, turntable-mounted trebuchets, I'd say—”

As if to draw a line under his words, there was a monumental soft
whoosh
sound from within the budding earthwork fort. The darkening twilight made the fireball that arced up from inside the walls look enormous, trailing a mane of red-orange flames. It landed and spread flame over a field already marked by circular scorches; turf smoldered as the napalm burnt itself out. The bitter reek drifted faintly to them. Steel darts glittered in the same area, half buried; the barges had some sort of machine that threw bundles of them, which came apart in midair and landed traveling almost straight down, dozens at a time.

“OK, I think everyone's agreed we can't rush them?”

The men and women around him nodded; Eric Larsson last and most reluctantly of all. “They couldn't kill all of us before we got to the berm,” he said.

The others stared at him. “Yeah,” his sister said. “They could only kill five or six hundred of us. And then we'd have a thousand crossbowmen shooting at us from behind cover. And then we'd have a thousand spearmen and, say, four hundred knights and men-at-arms standing on the fighting platform they're building waiting to noogie on us. Do you think they'd bother chasing whoever was left when they ran away?”

“All right, all right, Sis, I didn't say we
should
attack them,” the big young man said, raising a placating hand. “But we can't let them set up a base here. They could raid all along the eastern flank of the Eolas and up into Spring Valley. A lot of our farms are there.”

Sarducci pointed to higher ground a half mile westward from the Protectorate position. “We could build a fort there and keep a watch on them,” he said.

Signe made a hissing sound between her teeth. “What are we supposed to garrison this fort
with,
half the A-list? It's spring planting season. The militia have to go
home,
or even if the wheat harvest this summer is the best we've ever had it'll be a hungry winter. Unless we eat too much of our stock, and where would that leave us the year after?”

She gestured at the Corvallans; Edward Finney rubbed at his jaw—gingerly, since it had a bandaged slash on it now. One of his sons, the dark-haired one, had a bandage wrapped turban-style around his head, and was sneaking looks at himself in the still-polished inner surface of his vambrace, doubtless thinking how heroic he'd look back to home. The other was praying silently, his rosary moving through gloved fingers sticky with congealing blood, eyes still wide with what he'd seen on his first battlefield.

“And our friends here can't stay forever—most of them are farmers too, and they all have a living to earn.”

“Hey, people,” Havel said. They all looked at him. “A couple of hours ago we thought we were all going to die. This is an improvement.”

He glanced at the fort, lacing the fingers of his hands together and tapping one thumb on the other. In his mind he called up maps, and memories of riding this ground before. Few Bearkillers lived on the actual banks of the river; it was too dangerous, from floods and half a dozen other menaces. But the drier ground just to the west was cultivated for miles north of here, and strategic hamlets and A-lister steadings were plentiful; it was part of the Outfit's heartland. Eric was right; they couldn't leave an enemy base here—their own people would rightly withdraw allegiance if they weren't protected. Signe was right, too; they couldn't afford to just stick a big garrison here to
watch
the Protector's new fort. Besides the fact that they just didn't have that many full-time soldiers, if they did that the Association would turn it into a castle over the next couple of months, and that would be completely intolerable.

“But two can play at the fort game,” he said. “It's no use if they can't supply it, and that means riverboats. Hey, Ken.”

The older man looked up with a start; he'd been lost in an engineer's reverie as he stared at the earthworks, making notes on a pad now and then.