A Meeting at Corvallis (65 page)

Emiliano shook his head and handed over the glasses, indicating the Mackenzie line. “Take a look.”

White teeth showed in the brutally handsome, full-lipped face. “Sheee-it! They lookin' raggedy-ass fo' sure.”

“
Sí.
I think they're short of ammunition.”

Jabar grunted and nodded, returning the field glasses; Emiliano pulled a handkerchief out of a saddlebag and wiped the surface. It was hell getting blood out of the fine machining there if you let it dry and set. The black nobleman wiped his sword so he could sheathe it; getting blood inside the scabbard was an even worse pain.

“We better hit them fast, then, before they get more,” he said. “I can't see any coming up behind them, though. Hard to miss that many arrows…sheee-it, they shot enough!”

The pasture for three hundred yards in front of the Clansfolk bristled with goose feathers at the ends of cedarwood shafts, enough to give a silvery-gray sheen to the whole patch of land—save where bodies lay, or twitched and writhed, or tried to crawl back.

“Yeah, that was why I sent the infantry in first,” Emiliano said. “They'll do to soak up arrows.”

Jabar pulled his coif back up, fasting the mouth-protecting flap by the thongs to the brass studs riveted through the mail on the right side. His squire came up with a fresh lance as he lifted his helm and set it on his head.

Emiliano nodded and waved to the trumpeters; the long, curled instruments sang and screamed. His banner moved forward, and the Lidless Eye with it. The reserve
conrois
of lancers came up to fall in behind it, along with those Jabar had led against the CORA riders; hooves rang as they stamped, and horses snorted. The men were silent behind coif and nasal bar this time, eyes hard and set.

Emiliano slapped down his visor.
Hey, I wonder if I can get Mount Angel tacked on to Barony Dayton? Or at least a couple-dozen manors here. Young Julio is going to need an inheritance too.

The world turned into gray shadow, the eyeholes windows into a place narrowed to little more than the chamfron of his destrier. The big horse moved beneath him as he turned and reached out his hand for the lance that his squire thrust into his gauntlet. It had taken him years of practice before he could do anything more than knock himself out of the saddle with these things, and then more years to stay level with the young dickheads coming up who started with their first pimples…and it was time to mix it in.

Two days after the Change someone in the Lords had tried to move in on him with a fire-ax, figuring there weren't any rules anymore because guns didn't work. Emiliano had used a shovel on
him,
then cut his head off with the ax and hung it in a hairnet over the door. Guns, knives, chains, swords, lances…it was all a matter of your 'tude, how much of a pair you had.

He swung the point down.
“Haro!”
he shouted.
“Haro, Dayton! Haro, Portland! Holy Mary for Portland!”

The answering roar of the men-at-arms came in like surf on a windy day.

Juniper licked dry lips. The earth shook beneath her as five hundred leveled lances came across the meadows, and the rain of arrows hadn't done more than slow it a little…
two hundred yards…a hundred and seventy-five…

“Now!” she shouted, and the horns coughed and blatted.

Juniper turned and ran, the flag beside her. That was the easiest hard decision she'd ever made; when you saw that mass of armored men and barded horses coming at you behind the cruel spikes of the lanceheads, and thought what they and the pounding hooves could do to your own precious, irreplaceable self, you
wanted
to run away. Never mind that running away from a galloping horse was like running in a bad dream, where you pumped your legs and stayed nailed in one spot.

Every Mackenzie did the same. A long surge of them swarmed over the fence, over the road, over the second fence and dashed past the swine-feathers, panting. And then they stopped and turned, each with bundles of arrows ready to their hands, most working their drawing-arms and shaking out the wrist for an instant before they reached down and picked up a shaft.

“That's a relief,” she gasped, reaching for a shaft herself. “I was a bit worried they'd keep going.”

The earth trembled, and the knights came up the slight rise on the other side of the road. Their plumes and lanceheads were bright against the thinning pearl gray clouds.

“Haro! Portland!”

“On, brothers, on!” Abbot Dmwoski said.

He stood at the exit of the tunnel, and the column of armed monks poured past him and up the staircase into Mount Angel town. Some had thought him paranoid for wasting labor on a vertical stairway and sloping tunnel from the heights that bore the Abbey to a spot inside the walls of the town at its feet. He'd nonetheless insisted, and now men in armor with black robes kirted above it rushed by. When the last had passed him he followed, out into the gray light of an overcast spring day, wet air damping the scent of fear-sweat and the sour smell of oiled metal.

An aide held the reins of his horse, though almost all Mount Angel's host would be on bicycles, save for a few messengers. And the banner-bearer, with the flag that carried the image of Virgin and Child and was topped with the Cross.

“Good boy, Sobieski, sooo, brave fellow,” he crooned, stroking the big beast's arched neck; it was sweating, sensing the tension of the men about.

He swung into the saddle, armor clanking; each knight-brother slid his poleax into the carrier beside the rear wheel and bestrode his machine. The banner followed, and the formation fell in behind him in column of fours as they pedaled north and then east, towards the Jerusalem Gate. Few civilians watched from the windows of the half-timbered houses or shops on either side; some built in that style in the old days for the tourist trade, more since because it was a fairly easy style to imitate with the tools available in the post-Change world. Most of the remaining townsfolk had gone through the tunnel the other way, carrying the ill and the young children.

Those who lined the streets were the first rank of the town and country militia, who would follow him. The second and third ranks—women, the old men, all commanded by the Sisters—would hold the town walls, and the Abbey. He didn't think the enemy could take the town, even so. He was absolutely certain they couldn't take the Abbey, but if he lost this force, there would be little left…

The faces of the men waiting to follow were tight and grim for the most part; they were fighting for their homes—for their families, the fields that they worked and the workshops where they labored, and for freedom in a most immediate and concrete sense.

And because they trust me, they follow me as I hazard everything on one throw of the dice. Lord who blessed the centurion, if I lead these Thy people astray, let mine alone be the fault and mine the punishment. Give them victory, O Lord, I beseech You,
he thought one last time.
They fight for all that a man rightfully holds dear: for their women and children, for the graves of their fathers and for Your Church. Yet Thy will be done, not mine: for Thy judgments are just and righteous altogether.

Signing himself:
Mary, pierced with sorrows, all those who fall today are born of woman. Madonna, intercede for us, now and at the hour of our deaths!

At the gate, the keepers waved to show the road was still clear and the enemy still in their camp to the north. He raised a steel gauntlet to give the signal. Within the blockhouse and towers, gears ratcheted as the portcullis and its mate went up. The inner gates swung back.

As they did, one of the militiamen suddenly shouted, breaking the thick silence: “For Father Dmwoski! Jesú-Maria!”

As he rode out onto the drum-hollow boards of the drawbridge, the cry broke from twelve hundred throats:
“Jesú-Maria!”

The first fence went over with a long crackling as the steel-clad chests of the barded destriers struck it. The boards meant to confine cows and sheep were little hindrance to the heavy horse, but it slowed them; here and there a mount went down, a brief shriek of man and beast under the pounding hooves. Then they struck the asphalt of the roadway, more slippery than bare ground beneath steel horseshoes.

It wasn't until they hit the second fence that even the first rank were really aware of what awaited them—and it wasn't the backs of the broken, fleeing rabble they expected to ride down and skewer like lumps of meat. Instead long steel points bristled towards their horses beyond the fence, and near nine hundred bows were drawn to the ear, at a range where shafts would smash through shield and armor. Despite the roaring clamor, a silence seemed to fall for an instant that stretched like winter taffy.

Juniper saw Emiliano Gutierrez then, under his banner and raising his visor with the expression of a man who wakes from dream into nightmare. Beside her, as if from a great distance, she heard Sam Aylward say in a conversational tone: “And when you ride against the Mackenzies, you nasty little booger,
keep your visor down
!” Then in a great shout: “Let the gray geese fly—wholly together—
shoot!
”

The Marchwarden dropped his lance and shrieked as the arrow sprouted suddenly from his eyesocket…

“Blow the rally!” Jabar Jones shouted, reining in his horse.

He shook the blood out of his eyes; the helmet and coif had saved him from having his face transfixed, but not from a long gash on his forehead where a flap of skin hung down to show naked bone. The taste of his own blood was like tarnished copper in his mouth, the taste of defeat.

The curled trumpet screamed. Knights and men-at-arms pulled up their mounts, the horses panting and dribbling foam, those that weren't bucking or squealing from the pain of arrow wounds; one went over in a roar of metal as he watched, but the rider got free, staggered erect despite the weight of metal, and took the reins of a riderless horse that another led over to him.

Three hundred twenty,
he rough-counted.

Back south by the road over which the charge had gone—both ways—the Mackenzies were coming forward again, each of them with their spear-shovel in hand. They planted them well forward, in their original position.

And then they stood, waiting. A murmur grew from them, then a chant, as they shook their bows overhead:

The baron of Molalla ground his teeth; pain and fury blended into an intolerable knot below his breastbone. Almost, he shouted
charge!

“No,” he muttered to himself.

A scout pulled up in a spurt of gravel. “My lord!” he shouted, pointing westward towards Mount Angel. “The monks—all of them, out of the city gates without warning! What should we do?”

Sutterdown, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 8th, 2008/Change Year 9

“The Lord Protector won't be happy,” Sir Buzz Akers said, as the last of the officers left the tent.

“He's not the only one,” Conrad Renfrew said, stepping out of the pavilion and pulling on his mail-backed gauntlets.

The camp had been full of desperate, disciplined motion since the courier arrived and Renfrew gave his orders; now the headquarters support staff threw themselves at the big command tent, knocking down poles and folding fabric. Little was left of the encampment that had held twenty-five hundred men, save the ditch and bank; the supply wagons waited drawn up in columns down the principal street, and the troops themselves in neat formations with their unit banners before them, ready to mount horse or bicycle. The air was thick with bitter chemical smoke as the napalm stores went up in flames, the black pillar of smoke trailing away to the north in the warm wind that had sprung up overnight. High above, hazy white clouds drifted through a sky gone blue from the bright rim in the east to the lingering night in the west, the last stars just now fading as the sun rose opposite them.

“I thought Dick Furness was going to cry and cut out his own heart when I told him to torch the stores,” Renfrew added, with a grim smile contorted further by the scars that seamed his face. “But we're traveling light—west to the I-5, north to Oregon City. If we can, we'll cover whatever fugitives from Emiliano's force managed to make it out.”

He looked at the sky again. The peach orchards would be at their peak in the Hood River country now, and from the tower of Castle Odell he could see them scattered like blocks of pink froth between the plowlands. And April would be even better, as the cherries and pears came into bloom; he could smell them a mile off. His wife Tina loved them, and had the place stuffed with flowering branches; the scent lingered for weeks afterwards.

“So, we lost despite our numbers, my lord?”

Renfrew shrugged and set the helmet on his head. “We haven't won,” he said. “But neither have the enemy—they haven't knocked us out of the game, not if I can save this army. We still have more men, and we have the castles to fall back on. They've just pushed us back to the start-line and cost us a campaigning season.”