The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) (49 page)

The High King and his own father had been sitting at the kitchen table after the midday meal, shelling walnuts by tapping them open with the pommels of their dirks and tossing the meats into their mouths while they waited for the drinks, playing a desultory game of fidchell and discussing a man they’d known during the Prophet’s War . . . what had they said?

Aye. They said he’d have been a fine captain, save that he used anger at an enemy to avoid thinking instead of fuel to make thought flow hot. Yes, and the High King said:

“What most angers you about your enemy is the key to defeating them, and it’s that which it’s most needful to consider carefully.”

Well, Karl-me-lad, let’s see if you can use the lesson.

After a minute he spoke: “Now, if you were a bad man, one with fell and ill intent, hence denied the Lady’s gifts . . . what would bring you running, heedless, tongue out and eyes bulging and ignoring all else?”

“Ah,” Diarmuid said, glancing at one of the women.

Who had just loosed at a knot in the trunk of a dead pine a hundred and ninety paces distant. The hard thock of a shaft hitting wood cured hard by sun and wind overstepped the smacking thrum of the bowstring, and she took off towards it with a whoop, hurdling a chest-high bush without breaking stride.

“But how would we do that?” the McClintock said.

“Let’s be trying this, if the lasses agree—it’ll cost us nothing if we’re
not
being followed save a very little time. For if outlaws
are
following us, they’re being careful, which means they’ll not close in until they’re sure it’s safe. The which they will not do until we make camp, the more so as we’re playing at rovers now and hence have shafts on the string. We need them to attack, and soon, and on ground of our choosing, I’m thinking, if we’re not to fight them later on their terms.”

He listed the details of his plan. When he’d finished, Diarmuid looked at him with something between respect and alarm. He offered a flask, and Karl took a swig; it was pear brandy, distilled from perry, strong and sweet. He managed to do it with a calm face, though his heart was throbbing fast and he could feel sweat breaking out on his brow. Not at the danger ahead; he’d never been timid about that. What struck him with unexpected fear was the fact that if he failed others would pay for it. His mind winced at the thought of having to explain to his friends’ parents . . . though he could take some comfort in the thought that he’d be unlikely to survive disaster himself.

“Ye’ll go far,” the McClintock said, taking a sip himself and screwing the cap back on before he stored the flat silver vessel in his sporran. “If ye’re nae hung.”

•   •   •

The first bandit stepped out of a thicket of bearberry, only a few of the small leathery-green leaves catching on his ragged clothes; part of that raggedness was bits and pieces deliberately sewn on as camouflage. A dozen more followed him, the setting sun throwing long shadows before them. The women below were splashing about in the water of the pool, eight of them, it had been so
long
. Their clothes and weapons were on the dry ground, or hung from branch-stubs on the trees.

It took them a moment to notice him; he was thankful that the Mackenzie dogs had all gone off to hunt with the men. His eyes took in the little clearing; the four mules hobbled, their pack-saddles lifted off but still bundled—just right for throwing back on and leading away. Then they could set up an ambush to deal with the frenzied pursuit . . .

He walked confidently forward. There was just time to wonder what the naked women were picking up from the bottom of the stream.

•   •   •

Karl looked down from the tree, only a few branches below him—this was the first big enough to hold a man securely. The war-cloak was excellent concealment up here once you’d filled the fabric loops with twigs and foliage; besides that, they were easy to make from mesh netting and easy to roll up into something compact and light. All the Mackenzies had
a couple with them. He had a braided leather cord looped around the tree and his waist so that he could lean forward; the sugar pine wasn’t as thick through as he was, not up here where the branches began. There were those who liked to hunt from blinds this way, though he’d always preferred a ground stalk. . . .

But deer don’t carry weapons, so. Also they deserve more honorable treatment than these.

The
other
good thing about crossbows and their strings of stainless-steel wire, besides the fact that you could carry them cocked and loaded, was that they were more or less impervious to wet. Oh, the stocks might swell eventually, but that wouldn’t be a problem for
hours
. Four of the young women who’d been dabbling and splashing came up with them in their hands . . . loaded and cocked. The range was about a dozen paces to the foremost grinning outlaws, who barely had time to let the smiles slide off their faces.

Tung-thwack!

The first bandit bent over with an
ooof!
like a man who’d been punched in the gut; unlike that man, he wouldn’t be getting up again. It hadn’t been a fist, it had been four hundred and fifty grains of ashwood, vanes and triple-edged steel hunting head, traveling fast enough to be a blur. He couldn’t be sure from this vantage, but he thought it had lodged in bone somewhere—if it hadn’t, it would have made a double blood-splash going in and coming out and might have killed one of his friends behind him. Three other women shot within half a second of her; only one missed, which with the juices of rage and fear hopping through the system was better than good.

They’d only had four crossbows. Gwri came up out of the water with a yard-length of leather cord in her right hand, widening into a pocket in the middle. The sling blurred around her head just once and she released the end of the strap; the smooth stream-washed pebble was a near-invisible blur as it left the sling until it cracked into a face in a spurt of red and cut-off bellow of shock. The women with crossbows dropped them and came up with the larger rocks they’d selected beforehand and piled beneath the water at their feet, just right for throwing—and every one of
them had been knocking over small game with rocks since they were old enough to hit a rabbit raiding the family’s carrots and lettuce.

Those of the bandits who had bucklers raised them and came forward crouched, calling out remarks of their choice. The rest milled about for a moment, shouts of raw rage replacing whoops of lust, except for a couple of wounded men screaming their hurt to the world. Attracted by the noise, the ones they’d left as rearguard came running up too, laughing at their comrades as they did—which said something of their sense of humor, since apart from the ones down with crossbow bolts through them the rocks had left several helpless with broken jaws and others spitting out teeth and howling and holding cracked ribs. There were a bit over two dozen of the reavers, as many as the warband to begin with.

One began whirling a lariat in the style of an eastern plainsman, protected by two fellows with larger shields made of raw planks and hide. The rest clumped together, cursing and dodging and pushing each other forward with cries of encouragement that amounted to
after you with the rocks
.

Now,
Karl decided.
They’re about to make a rush.

It was the same instinct that let you judge when a group of beasts was going to stampede.

Quickly, now, boyo,
he told himself.
The lasses are the safest people on this field . . . until those spalpeens understand the danger they’re in. Then they’ll strike to kill.

He undid the catch of the war-cloak and let it fall back from his shoulders as he moved one foot out on the branch and drew, making a loud, vaguely squirrel-like chittering sound between his teeth as he did, the agreed-on signal.

It was awkward, with a heavy war-bow six inches taller than he was, and shooting down past his own knee, but he managed. The head wavered slightly, as something deep within him realized
you’re shooting at a man, not a deer
.

Then he called on Father Wolf in his mind, and felt a ruthless calm fill him: possibly there was a whisper of
Oi, mind yer work, there
. For some reason, his totem always spoke to him in the accent of the grandfather he barely remembered.

He let out a breath and drew inside the bow, waiting until the flight-feathers tickled the skin behind the angle of his jaw. Possibly one of the ten bows in the trees about creaked enough to be heard over the shouts and screams and bellows and the women’s hawk-shrieks of anger, for the bandit he aimed at looked up at the last instant. The face was a tangle of brown beard and hair more shaggy than a sheep’s arse and not as clean, but the eyes in it went wide and the mouth gaped to show teeth about the same color as the hair.

The outlaw had just long enough to scream himself, at the sight of the broadhead pointing at him from only thirty feet away. Karl’s hand was steady as he let the bow-cord roll off his three string fingers, but something deep inside winced a little. It helped that so much of his practice had been snap-shots at targets shaped like men. If you just got out of the way and let reflex do the job—

Snap!

An arrow from a longbow traveled hundreds of feet in a second. Thirty feet was a tiny
fraction
of a second, barely a flicker of motion, literally less than an eyeblink. The flat wet smack of the broadhead’s impact was tooth-gratingly familiar, the same sound any hunter heard from a close shot. The point struck just over the bandit’s collarbone and smashed downward through his lungs to lodge in his pelvis. Along the way it slashed through the knot of big veins over the heart. The outlaw dropped backward instantly and utterly limp, as if someone had hit him on the head with a sledgehammer, twitched once or twice and lay still with a diminishing stream of blood coming out of his nose and mouth. It was precisely the sort of merciful quick-killing shot—right through the body-cavity lengthwise, slanted across—that you tried for when hunting, to show your skill and please the Horned Lord and Lady Flidais. With a man walking upright the only way to achieve it would be like this.

Nine other bows snapped by the time he had the next shaft on the string. Every one hit, though not all were swiftly fatal: it was close range, the comrades he’d picked for this were all first-rate shots even by Mackenzie standards, and they had had time to be very careful about selecting their first targets among the close-bunched outlaws. Karl had put a dozen
arrows ready to hand, lightly tapped into the bark beside him and angled so that he barely had to move his string-hand to grasp one. That made up for the odd position, and he shot them off in a ripple of snarling grunting effort in the time it might have taken a man to count to six ten times, nock-draw-loose, not consciously aiming at all—if you were a real master-bowman you just thought about where you wanted the point to go and there it went. The last one took a little longer to strike, since it was aimed at the back of a running man seventy-five yards away. He flopped forward onto his face, twitched and lay still, with the arrow standing from his spine like the mast of a ship sailing into eternity.

The bandits didn’t have time to shoot back, though many carried bows; it took crucial seconds to realize where the arrows were coming from, more to spot the archers through branches and needles and war-cloaks, and anyway shooting right up was nearly as clumsy as straight down. Plus the band had aimed at the enemy archers first: a man with an axe or a spear thirty feet down might as well be unarmed. One outlaw with more presence of mind than most tried to run into the water with the women, which would be one place nobody in their band
could
shoot. Boudicca’s hands came up from below the water again, this time with her glaive.

The bandit tried to stop his headlong dash as the polearm rose dripping with the point angled towards his gut, and succeeded at the cost of teetering for a moment with his arms windmilling. One hand held a foot-long knife and the other a small hide buckler, both completely useless now. Except that the panic-stricken violence of his movements might well have sliced his own skin or bashed himself in the head.

The slope down to the water gave a perfect angle for what Boudicca did next; she snapped the razor-edged inner curve of the hook on the back of the blade around the bandit’s bare ankle and heaved. The outlaw went over backward with a shriek as the foot was pulled out from under him and the Achilles’ tendon sliced across at the same time. That grew almost unbelievably loud as the Mackenzie woman snarled, drew the shaft of the heavy weapon back, and rammed eight inches of the point into his crotch with a convulsive two-handed thrust that must have cracked bone.

Karl winced at
that
, even as he slung his bow, kicked the coiled rope off the branch, jumped, caught and slid downward. Not that you could blame her, all things considered . . .

Where followers of his faith held sway, they punished rapists by burying them at a crossroads with a spear through them, to avert the anger of the Earth Powers at the profanation of the most sacred rite, the one that symbolized the creation of all that was. If the circumstances were aggravated, they might bury the culprit quick with the spear in the earth as a warning, for it was blasphemy and a profanation of holy things, not merely a serious crime.

He whistled sharply as he slid; the rest of the Mackenzies rose from their hiding places and shot as well. Fenris and Ulf and Macmac exploded out of their nests of leaves in the hollow of a fallen tree, silence broken in a baying roar, and the rest of the warband’s beasts followed—the dogs had long since settled their own hierarchy of rank in their own fashion. Few bandits were still on their feet after hundreds of arrows landed on better than twenty-four men, and none of them were unwounded; three of them ran straight into the great dogs, and the whole went over in a snarling tumble of limbs and fur and fangs and blood and screams. Mackenzie hounds were gentle . . . with those they thought of as their own folk. Then the McClintocks hiding under their own war-cloaks behind rocks and under fallen trees where they’d crept back after loudly going out to “hunt” erupted to their feet.