The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) (50 page)

“McClintock Abú!”

The ripping scream of the McClintock
sluagh-ghairm
cut through the brabble of bewilderment and pain, which was what a war-cry was supposed to do. Diarmuid led his folk, claymore in his right fist, target on his left forearm and dirk gripped in that hand. Behind him came two men carrying
claidheamh mòr
, the four-foot blades aloft above screaming tattooed faces, and the others fanned out in a wedge. There was a brief clash of steel.

Karl whipped out his short sword and took his buckler in his left hand as he landed, crouching and shouting:

“Hectate’s Wolves!”

That was to rally the Mackenzies. Instead of the desperate fight he’d expected . . .

A man crawled away from him, the arrow through his lower back jerking and trembling as he crawled, blood and snot and tears running down his face. Boudicca walked over, glistening save for the dirt and blood on her feet, poised her glaive and thrust to the back of the neck, went on to the next. There weren’t many.

He and Mathun both whistled sharply, the commands overriding each other, and their dogs stopped their worrying at the bodies of their kills, licking their chops. They sat back and looked around with satisfaction as the rest of the great shaggy hounds joined them, thumping the ground with their tails and grooming and doing a little good-natured sniffing and jostling—their pack had done very well. The blood-and-shit stink was heavy, especially by contrast with the purity of the mountain air, rawer and heavier than slaughtering-time back on the croft or on a hunt, and with a peculiar muskiness. Flies buzzed in the sudden silence.

Many of the young warriors of both Clans were pale-faced; Ruan sat down abruptly and hid his face in his hands, with his partner’s arm about his shoulders, and their dog nuzzling and whining uncomprehending sympathy. Tair made a dash for a bush before he doubled over retching. Most doggedly went about retrieving their arrows . . . save for some so deeply embedded it would have meant cutting to a degree unpleasantly reminiscent of butchering a pig.

“Who’s hurt?” Karl called sharply; it might be his first real fight, but he was bow-captain and found that made it easier to keep steady. “Sound off your names the now!”

All his party did. The women were giving him black scowls as they dressed, and then a couple of grudging nods as it became clear nobody had worse than superficial cuts or bruises. None of them had appreciated being, essentially, bait in the trap . . . though it had been bait with sharp teeth. One of Diarmuid’s McClintocks had his sword-side forearm slashed deeply, enough that he’d have to be left at the next secure place. The tacksman’s healer was working on that almost at once, evoking a loud yelp as she swabbed and then sewed and bandaged. Even just walking with that would be no joke, though there was no alternative either.

We can leave him at White Mountain; we’re close,
Karl thought doggedly, swallowing and then spitting to clear his mouth.

Diarmuid was a bit pale himself, plunging the point of his claymore into the soft earth of the stream-bank and then wiping it carefully on his sock-hose before he sheathed it and came over.

“Well, that worked as ye said it would, Archer,” he said quietly.

Karl could hear the slight difference in the way he used the word, an emphasis that turned it into a title. Even then, there was a prickle of pride in it.

Diarmuid jerked his chin at a body wearing a kilt:

“There’s that woodsrunner we met, the loon I thought might be in league with the outlaws. So he was, and little good it did him. Mind, against real warriors we might not have done so well. They fell for your little trap like trout rising to a fly, and didn’t even sniff for a hook.”

Karl shrugged agreement, not feeling chatty at the moment. It was a fair point; men well-supplied with foresight and discipline and self-control didn’t usually end up in a raggedy-arse bandit gang.

“We might have paid a heavier bill even with these gormless shags if we’d given them a chance to come to handstrokes, or ambush
us
,” he said. “Me da always did say that surprise was like having ten times your numbers, and that against men struck blind.”

“A wise man, from what I saw of him,” Diarmuid said, then jerked a thumb northwards. “D’ye think he’s on our track?”

“That I can’t say, but I wouldn’t be surprised, at all, at all.”

“I’ll not fight him,” Diarmuid said, warning in his voice; it was the manner of a man repeating something obvious that needed to be absolutely clear.

“Neither will I!” said Karl indignantly. Then: “Mind, I’ll
run
from him with all my heart.”

“The same, master-bowman, the same. So let’s be about that, nae?”

The whole group was unwontedly subdued as they broke camp—mainly a matter of picking up packs and resaddling the mules.

Forbye it’s a reminder of how easily you might die yourself,
he thought.

He knew from listening to real veterans that everyone
tried
to make
every fight a one-sided massacre. A fair share of them actually turned out that way. That was why everyone loved an ambush when they weren’t on the receiving end . . . except that you couldn’t count on that.

And . . . not that these outlaws didn’t deserve it, but that man’s wife and children . . . how will they cope, come winter? Maybe Diarmuid can have them sent for. It’s not the wee lads’ and lasses’ fault, after all.

Someone would be willing to take them in. Pleasing the Powers aside, it was a rare household that couldn’t use another set of hands, and even a small child could do things like baby-minding or bird-scaring to free stronger backs for more important work.

I’ll mention it, casual-like, so as not to seem to think it wouldn’t occur to him on his own. Now let’s begone as soon as we may.

Gwri Beauregard Mackenzie did stop to use her lighter to kindle a small fire. Everyone fell in behind her as she stood before it and held up her arms in the gesture of prayer.

“You powerful God, you Goddess gentle and strong,” she said, tactfully naming no specific names. “To You we pray, and to the
aes dana
of this place by whatever names they most wish to hear. By Your ancient law, if a man takes up a spear against another of his own will, he consents to the shedding of his blood as an offering to You, in Your forms as the Dark Mother and the Warrior Lord. We have killed from need, not wantonness, knowing that for us also the Hour of the Hunter must come.”

“For Earth must be fed,” they all murmured in response. “And we but borrow our bodies from Her for a little while.”

She went on: “Yet these too were Your children, Mother-of-All; we ask that you make us clean of their deaths, that they may speak no ill of us to the Guardians of the Western Gate. Let them make accounting, and be healed of all ills of soul in the Land of Summer, where no evil comes and all hurts are made good. There we will greet them, each forgiving the other. So mote it be!”

“So mote it be,”
they all chorused.

Then each pricked a finger and let a drop fall on the fire, and passed their weapons through the smoke, bending and touching a pinch of dirt
to their lips and then foreheads to symbolize their acceptance of their own mortality. Earth and air and fire and the water of life in your veins . . .

“For to kill is to know your own death,” Karl murmured, an old saying of his folk, as he threw a helmetful of water across the little fire and stamped carefully, kicking dirt over any lingering ember.

“That’s true when you kill a beast,” Mathun nodded beside him as they took up the march; not one counseled that they camp here among the tumbled dead. “More so here, I suppose. If it must be done, best done quickly and well.”

Karl nodded in turn. And something inside that felt like his father’s voice noted that if the band had to be blooded . . .

Best it were an easy victory. Next time they’ll be more confident and less likely to freeze or come down with the shakes.

•   •   •

The raven had been watching for some time when the living humans left. It was a young male, part of a flock of not-yet-mated birds that roosted together, though it was foraging on its own today. In the manner of its intelligent kind it had long known that groups of humans meant food, in one way or another. Either they left you food, or they became food, sometimes both.

Cocking its head and looking down at the scattered bodies it considered heading back to the roost and alerting its companions. Sunset was approaching, and owls made the dark risky if you were alone, though two or three ravens were a match for anything short of a golden eagle. On second thoughts it was hungry, and it could always fill its croup now
and
bring the others for the riper feast tomorrow.

A careful flit around showed no other predator-scavengers yet, though some would arrive soon, drawn by the intoxicating scents of fresh blood and slashed bodies—coyotes in particular could be dangerous to a lone raven, they were more agile than wolves. By tomorrow they’d have ripped the bodies open; or a bear might come along, or wolves, or one of the big cats. The scattered pieces would make better pickings for the whole flock then and they could defend each other and run off any buzzards.

Decision firmed. It glided down, pecked at the glitter of a broken-off arrowhead out of curiosity, then approached a body with cautious hops. The eyes were juicy treats, and relatively easy to get out with a little trouble. Humans almost never took them from their kills.

The eyes opened. They were black from edge to edge, like pools of tar. The corpse’s head lifted slightly from the ground, and the limbs twitched.

The raven hopped backward, feathers bristling open, wings spread and making a startled high-pitched
keck-keck-keck
of alarm. This was
not
how dead animals were supposed to behave! There was an electric feeling of
wrongness
as well, like the taste of rusty metal.

The body slumped into motionlessness. The eyes became the lawful, tasty glassy white-and-brown. The tension faded from the air, and the raven’s feathers sleeked against its body; it nervously groomed again to put everything in place.

The eyes looked very tempting. Still, it hopped a few feet away to another body before it began to feed.

Tarshish Queen
, Pacific Ocean

Territorial waters, High Kingdom of Montival

July 8th, Change Year 46/2044 AD

T
he length of copper pipe flashed towards the back of her head, thrown with a hard snap and pinwheeling towards her, casting a shadow ahead of it. A shadow, a flicker of disturbed air, a sound, a
knowing
.

Órlaith spun leftward into it with the shield tucked up under her eyes—you learned that by practicing putting your left fist just under your chin. The sword in her right hand—the Sword—swung in a blurring cut across the narrow field of view the long vision slit in her visor left.

Clung!

The foot-long length of three-inch pipe clattered to the deck . . . cut smoothly top-left to bottom-right into two matching curved troughs. Metal formed by machines of inconceivable power in the ancient world, cut by something that was not quite matter as humans understood the term; if the engineers who’d made those machines could have seen the result, they’d have thought of lasers, or diamond saws. The blow had run up her wrist and arm, all right, but she’d had to overcome a lifetime’s conditioning to use the blade that way. A dozen more of the bisected pipes littered the deck; one of the ship’s apprentices gathered them up into a basket, looking at Órlaith with hero-worshipping puppy-eyes.

Heuradys snorted and sat down. “Well, there’s always a place for you
in the scrap-metal trade if monarchy palls,” she said. “Although I’d miss the happy times throwing chunks of pipe at you, Orrey.”

Órlaith snorted back and pushed the visor up with the edge of the shield, breathing deep and letting the wind cool the hot sweat running down her face. The visor was a smooth curve of top-pivoted brushed steel across her face, but the lower edge was drawn down into a point that suggested an eagle’s beak and reached to the level of her chin, and the whole helm above it was scored with thin lines inlaid with gold in the shape of feathers. The decoration suggested her totem bird without in the least detracting from function, nor did the sprays of real eagle feathers at either temple.

And there’s no harm in a little style. Plus your retainers
need
to be able to tell who you are at a glance, the which is not easy in full plate.

She grinned at the lad as she ducked out of the guige strap and dropped the point of the shield to the planks. He took it and proudly bore the four-foot teardrop shape over to the bench around the poop deck. Doubtless he was imagining himself a page.

The cool wind also felt good as it found the gaps in the flexible back-and-breast of overlapping steel lames she was wearing, along with sallet helm and vambraces on her forearms and armored gauntlets. Out here on the Pacific it was always cool, which made it perfect for the hard physical labor of working in armor; at that, half-armor like this was vastly better than a full suit of plate.

It isn’t the weight that’s the problem, it’s the way it holds what your body exudes against your skin, and it’s not just the sweat
.

If it weren’t for crossbows and longbows and catapults and pikes and glaives and war-hammers and Lochaber axes, and most of all if it weren’t for heat exhaustion, men-at-arms armored cap-a-pie would be invincible.

And where we’re heading, a suit of plate complete would be a sentence of death, not long delayed. Mind you, in winter armor also manages to be miserably cold. Da always said that was a miracle . . .

She and Heuradys and Reiko and Luanne Salander were taking the privileges of rank and using the part of the poop-deck between the wheel and the stern rail for practice; Sir Aleaume and Droyn were down below, working with the men-at-arms until the space was clear.

Nobody would object anyway,
she thought.
But I’m using the Sword. They’re not even
wishing
they could object.

It was never really possible to believe the Sword was just a sword. A lot depended on what the circumstances were—why the wielder had drawn it—but there was . . .

. . .
sort of a
shock
feeling, so, when you do draw it, even for practice.

As if it was too solid for the world, too
real
. She’d grown up around it, and she was the offspring of the pair who’d mingled their blood on the blade before they thrust it into the rock of Montival’s bones at Lost Lake, during the Kingmaking. In her hand it felt right, but still rather . . . alarming. Heuradys treated it like something very dangerous that she knew well; Luanne was a little more alarmed, but hid it well. Everyone else sort of avoided it, deliberately or otherwise, except for Reiko’s intent glances.

Even the way it looked as a physical . . . or sort-of physical . . . object could disturb. Right now in the bright sunlight it sparkled. Not the way polished steel did, though it was similar at first glance. There was something of the way a diamond glittered as well, and something altogether other. It was beautiful, but nothing like a creation of human hands. Reiko was looking at it with a brooding expression in her narrow eyes.

Nobody in Nihon today knew what Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi looked like. Nobody had actually seen it in well over a thousand years, except for the Shinto priests at the Atsuta Shrine charged with its care, and they had all died with the Change. Even while it rested there, Emperors were merely presented with a wrapped bundle
said
to contain it. The weapon
might
have been lost and recovered several times, depending on which epic poems or legends you believed.

And they’ve no earthly idea how it ended up here, though I have my suspicions,
Órlaith thought.
Right now,
my
Sword helps keep the deck clear for our work.

You
had
to keep it up if you were a warrior by trade, which she was among other things; if you didn’t spend sheer sweating effort nearly every day you lost speed and, just as crucially, endurance. That was quite literally a matter of life and death, and not only for yourself. If you were a liability you endangered your friends as well. Even a general leading armies had to be ready to fight with their own hands, in the modern
world—her father certainly had, even in the great battles of the Prophet’s War, much less on the Quest before that—and right now she commanded the equivalent of about one understrength company.

And while I don’t think hitting people will be the whole of this, certainly some bashing will be involved. So, work.

People in their trade usually found the whole process interesting as well, and treated it as something of a sport and tried out variations. She mentioned that, and Heuradys laughed aloud.

“Might as well be sex,” she said.

Órlaith chuckled too, but . . .

At that, the itchy discontented way you feel after going without pushing yourself physically for a few days
does
feel a bit like that particular need. Worse for men, I think, poor creatures.

Luanne picked up the basket of sliced copper, touched a finger in wonder to the liquid-smooth surface of one of the cuts, then swore mildly when the edge of the metal sliced into her skin a little. Fortunately that was on a callus, but she dropped the bisected tube back among the others hastily.

She was a friend and a relative-by-courtesy; she was the granddaughter of Eric Larsson, the man who’d been brother to the woman who married Mike Havel
after
he fathered Rudi Mackenzie in a very brief if fruitful encounter with Juniper Mackenzie while on a scouting trip to the Willamette a few months after the Change. Signe Havel-née-Larsson had never entirely gotten over that. Mainly because none of
her
children with Mike Havel, the first Bear Lord, ended up as High King of Montival. Most of the rest of her family were happy enough with it, including Mike Jr., the current wearer of the Bear Helm, who’d never made a secret of the fact that he was perfectly satisfied with what he had. The High King and Queen and their family had guested with Eric Larsson and his descendants often, and vice versa, and she’d always gotten on well with them.

With Uncle Mike too, for that matter; he
is
my father’s half-brother, after all, and kin is kin.

Still, Luanne hadn’t been around the Sword as much as Heuradys. She affected an elaborate nonchalance.

“I knew that thing was sharp, but it’s really
sharp
, isn’t it?” she said. “I mean, it’s
absurdly
sharp with a deeply absurd sharpness.”

Órlaith nodded. “It’s a
magic sword
, Luey,” she said dryly. “It’s . . .”

She pulled out a yellow hair that had wisped free of the coif under her helm, tossed it up and let the following breeze flick it against the upraised edge of the Sword. It parted cleanly, drifting on down past the wheel. No battle blade was ever honed to anything remotely approaching that. Even if you
could
get it that sharp it would make the edge impossibly fragile for something made to slam full-force into meat and bone, much less hard leather, wood and occasionally metal.

“Like an obsidian razor. But nothing harms it. Nothing. Nothing dulls it, nothing chips it, nothing
sticks
to it. You could pound it against a boulder all day long and you’d have the Sword and a heap of diced gravel. And if you dip it in oil it doesn’t get greasy. My . . . father . . .”

She took a deep breath, remembering his endless patience from her first faltering grip on the hilt of a miniature wooden practice-blade.

“. . . said that it took him most of the trip back from Nantucket to begin to grasp what it could do just
as a sword
, just as a battle-tool. You need some different reflexes to get the most out of it. And it may give you the gift of tongues and of telling falsehood from truth, but it
doesn’t
suddenly give you extra swordsmanship points. Or invulnerability.”

They all nodded soberly. Not wrecking your own weapon was one of essential points of learning the sword, and even work-of-fine-art swords from master-smiths were surprisingly delicate. Fighting with a sword that
couldn’t
be damaged, even if you weren’t at all invulnerable yourself, would be profoundly different.

“This is quite heavy,” Reiko said, hefting the shield by the grip below the middle of the upper curve.

“About fifteen pounds,” Órlaith agreed. “Larch plywood covered in bison-hide boiled in wax and then thin sheet steel. Concave so you can tuck your shoulder into it.”

Fifteen pounds was around seven times what a sword weighed; the Sword of the Lady was slightly but definitely lighter than a normal weapon of the same dimensions, a bit under two pounds. Just heavy
enough to give a blow conviction, but allowing a little extra speed and longer before you tired.

And sure, it’s lighter for me than it was for Da. When I hefted it then, it was a bit
over
two, maybe two and a half. Plus I’d swear it’s become just a little smaller overall the now, sized for me and not him.

Heuradys took the shield and began checking it over, tugging at the enarme, the loop you put your forearm through and the grip higher up and the section of rubber padding between where the forearm rested. The whole arrangement left your arm nearly but not quite parallel to the long axis of the shield. The inverted-teardrop form was about four feet long, as broad as your shoulders at the top and tapering to a blunt point below; on horseback it covered you from shoulder to shoe. In the olden days its predecessors had shrunk and then gone out of use when plate armor came in, but in modern times there were a lot more, and worse, missile weapons around than there had been in the age of Louis the Spider and the Wars of the Roses.

“You can tell a knight because he’s slightly lopsided,” Heuradys said, working her left arm to emphasize the point.

Her left deltoid and trapezius
were
very slightly larger, despite the fact that she used several routines designed to balance you.

“We Bearkillers use a smaller round shield,” Luanne said. “Not nearly as clumsy.”

She rolled hers over so that Reiko could compare them; it was a concave disk about a yard across, with the snarling face-on bear’s head of the Outfit on its sheet-metal face.

“Same construction, pretty much, but you have to remember to move it now and then. It’s perfectly adequate if you’re quick.”

Heuradys shrugged. “Girl,
you
can use that little soup-plate when someone’s coming galloping at you with the weight of a man-at-arms and barded destrier all concentrated behind a lance-point. I’ll take the kite shield anytime!”

Órlaith took the hilt of the Sword in both hands as they bickered amiably and began a set with flourish-cuts. It was a hand-and-a-half weapon, what some called a bastard longsword, with a double-lobed hilt of black staghorn
and silver that let it be used comfortably either one- or two-handed. She did the forms as much to loosen up as anything; when you carried a kite-shield the style was very tight and contained, the shield battering or levering a path clear for the blade, working over the top as often as to the side.

She ran through the guards that made up the starting-positions and the strikes and blocks that flowed from them: the Ox, the Plow, the Fool, the Roof, and the Tail. Then she finished by short-gripping the Sword and using it for a savage flurry of stepping thrusts to her imaginary opponent’s face/throat/belly/groin, blade punching in and out like the needle in a treadle-worked sewing machine. That sort of close-in finishing blow could actually penetrate armor even with a normal weapon. Reiko came half-erect with a gasp of alarm, probably expecting to see her fingers patter down on the deck when she clamped her left hand in its gauntlet on the midpoint of the blade.

“It’s all right,” Órlaith said when she’d finished.

She took off that gauntlet and bounced the blade on the skin of her palm. The impact felt like that of a metal ruler.

“It’s a
magical
magic sword, Reiko. It won’t cut or harm me—or anyone of the Royal kin.”