The Protector's War (21 page)

Behind him Alleyne paddled with smooth, quick competence, his face set with strain, and the building grew ahead of them—an old brick lockhouse, the roof collapsed but the walls still standing, with scorch marks above the empty windows. There had been other buildings round about, but none of them were more than brushy mounds; there had also been a couple of big trees near the lockhouse, but the fire that brought down the roof had killed them all, except for a few branches on the far side of one oak. The wooden doors of the mitre-built locks were slightly open, and water poured through them in a sluggish current, pooling below where the lower ones were still mostly shut, though sagging.

Curse it,
Nigel thought, as another flight of arrows came up—and fell short; the canoes were faster than the punt.
They picked their spot well.

The canoes might be faster, but not so much faster that they wouldn't be caught if they stopped to heave them past this lock. Then the pursuers would catch up and riddle them with arrows at point-blank range. They couldn't turn about, either, with the savages behind them, and it wouldn't do much good to try to don their armor—the enemy could ring them in…

…and in any case, wading around in this liquid muck with sixty pounds of steel on your back…

Past here they would be into the fens proper, first a narrow cone of them and then opening out into nearly a thousand square miles of reed and pool and mere. It had been farmland before the Change, some of the richest in the world—but kept that way only by pumps and drainage, a good deal of it below sea level because of the shrinkage of the peat soil.

The prows of the canoes slid into the soft mud of the bank. Alleyne and Nigel each leapt out of his craft, gave a swift wrench to slide it higher so that it wouldn't float away when relieved of their weight, then snatched up their personal weapons and extra bundles of arrows and ran for the lockhouse. The mud sucked at their feet, slowing Nigel's more than his son's, which were young and on the end of longer legs. Arrows whickered down behind them, hitting the bundled supplies in the canoes with dull
thud
-
shunk
sounds, and the thin aluminum of the hulls with unpleasant metallic pops. Alleyne drew ahead. Even then, with his heart pounding and lungs heaving Nigel knew an instant's pride that the younger man didn't slow—instead he did the tactically sensible thing, and sprinted up the last stretch of tall grass and brush to dive headfirst through the window.

A second later he popped up behind it, drawing his bow—from firm footing, protected to the waist, and with room to work. The arrow that he sent whickering past Nigel brought a yell from behind, faint with distance but sharp with pain. Nigel vaulted through another window himself an instant later, stumbling on the broken boards and rubble within as two arrows followed him in and vanished with snapping and cracking sounds in the tumbled wreckage of the interior, and another slapped into the window frame and stood humming with an evil descending note. Then he forced himself erect and wheeled. It was the work of a moment to string his own bow; you had to be careful with that, though, and the mental effort helped him slow his breathing. The interior of the lockhouse smelled of ancient wet ash and mold and rotting wood; he put his feet carefully on the floor, lest a foot go through the boards and trap his leg. He slung the quiver over his back, drew a shaft and shot—the bow wasn't his primary weapon, but he'd practiced a good deal since the Change and some before it.

There were two of the flat-bottomed boats now, but they were both moving backward rapidly to get out of arrow range. One halted, and a white cloth went up on top of a pole, waving back and forth. When no more arrows snapped out from the lockhouse the clumsy craft edged forward a little and halted within speaking distance.

Nigel blinked in surprise, as his breathing slowed. Sweat soaked his uniform in the muggy heat, and he ran a sleeve over his face, then looked cautiously around the edge of the window. Generally the Brushwood Men simply killed anyone from the settled zone—what they called “King's Men”—they came across. The antipathy was entirely mutual, fueled by disgust on one side and frenzied hatred on the other, born of the days when the island refuges had closed their borders to the starving masses of refugees and enforced it with pike and club and museum swords.

“Keep an eye on the other one, and around us,” he said, and Alleyne nodded silently. Then the elder Loring went on, shouting out the window: “What do you men want?”

He recognized the pack leader they'd seen in Newport Pagnell, thin-faced and slight and with his nose bristling with rings; someone had cut Archie MacDonald's stolen clothing short in arm and leg but it still hung on him like a tent. He stood and cupped his hands around his mouth, while the rest of the savages in his craft crouched behind crude shields.

“We wants our kids back! Give them us and we'll let you King's Men go!”

Nigel's eyebrows went up further.
Wouldn't have believed family affections were that strong among the Brushwood Men,
he thought.
After all, these are the people who
ate
children to survive.

“This is a bit awkward,” Alleyne said as he peered out the west-facing windows to make sure a party weren't sneaking around to take them from that direction. “Yes, our friend Grishnàkh from Milton Mordor Keynes…very awkward, seeing that we don't have their children and can't go back for them.”

“Let's hope they don't realize that the government probably
would
trade them for us,” Nigel said, thinking hard. Then: “It's fairly obvious we're fugitives ourselves. Nothing for it but the truth, or at least part of it.” He shouted again: “We don't have them with us. You can see that—there isn't room in these canoes.”

“Where the 'ell are they then, you bastards?”

“We sent them into the settled zone for fostering. They're south of Winchester and they'll be split among a dozen farms by the end of the week, where they'll have plenty to eat and wear, and a good education. And be better off than they were with you! Now get out of our way, or you'll get more of what we handed out in Newport Pagnell Church.”

The leader of the Netherfield Avengers screamed with rage and snatched a bow from one of his men. The arrow rapped off the stone wall of the building, and the two Lorings shot in return. Nigel's arrow stood quivering in a shield; Alleyne's flicked between two and set up a shouting and thrashing as the flat-bottomed craft was poled back to join its companion.

“You give me back my boy! Give me back my 'arry, or I'll eat your fuckin' liver and lights while you watch it!”

“So much for the repentance of the Netherfield Avengers,” Sir Nigel muttered, and shot back; the arrow thunked into the side of the crude barge, and the men with poles frantically redoubled their efforts.

He still felt a little uneasy at the raw grief and rage in the voice of the savage.
That is not a man who intends to give up,
he thought.

Faint and far, Nigel heard the leader shout as his boat halted again out of range: “Take 'em alive. Anyone scrags 'em, I'll scrag him myself!”

“Diplomacy never was my great strength,” Nigel said.

“And I'm afraid they're not as stupid as we hoped, eh?” Alleyne replied calmly. “They'll wait for night, then, and come in under cover of darkness. I count twenty of them, all fighting men.”

Nigel nodded; they were a blur to him, but Alleyne's eyesight was considerably better than normal. “We could probably eel our way out past them once night falls,” he said. “But we'd have to abandon the canoes—which would leave us stranded. Our ship isn't going to wait forever.”

“Let's see what Hordle comes up with,” Alleyne said, climbing a sloping section of collapsed roof for a vantage point above the level of the windows. “He's quite a resourceful chap.”

“Good man,” Nigel agreed. “Good as any I've ever served with, poor old Aylward excepted.”

 

“Hunh!”

With a last savage dig of the paddle, Hordle forced the prow of the canoe into the reed-grown mud at the stream's edge. Then he leapt over the side, instantly sinking calf-deep, grabbed the thwarts and wrestled the little craft forward by main strength, over a ridge of dirt and into a shallow water-and-mud patch the consistency of thin porridge. The sucking sounds his feet made as he struggled towards the higher ground of what had once been the stream's bank were like porridge cooking as well.

Blighty doesn't want to let me go,
he thought whimsically.

The thick glutinous mass tried to suck the boots off his feet as he waded forward with his sword and bow lying across the crooks of his arms; the sewer smell of marsh was thick around him. Reeds swayed on either side; his head would have been above them if he hadn't bent over, which made his progress slower yet. When the ground grew firmer he went down on his belly and eeled forward, over the low ridge and into what had been the field beyond. The edge of that was a ditch, and water and silt coated the front of his body like thick paint. The whole field was more like swamp than dry land, but not as bad as the river side of the bank. He stopped as the coarse grass waved over his head, ignoring the hum of mosquitoes stabbing into the soft skin behind his ears, and listened as he forced his breath to slow.

Wind in the tall stems. Voices shouting, muffled by several hundred yards' distance and the slight ridge of the former riverbank with its willows and alders. That let his mind paint a picture; the water came in behind the shallow C-shaped section of riverbank, making an embayment behind it where the savages had hidden their boats. The water there must be very shallow, less than a foot deep, but that would be enough for something flat-bottomed and broad.

Have to be ruddy careful with this,
he thought, and raised his head for an instant's scan before pulling it down again fast but smooth; jerky motions attracted the eye.

They'd left no sentries on dry land he could see, save for one in the limbs of a tree on the former riverbank who must have been their lookout. The tree was thirty yards away, and he was standing on a bough twenty feet up, hugging the tree trunk with one hand and peering out around it to keep track of the action. Hordle checked his bow, but the string was a precious pre-Change one, absolutely waterproof—not that well-waxed linen took much harm from anything but a thorough soaking. He leopard-crawled a little farther forward, trading distance for angle, then brought his feet carefully beneath him and took a deep breath. He'd have surprise on his side, for thirty seconds or a minute…

But twenty-to-one odds is a little steep, even for Little John Hordle.

Stand, feet already planted in the T he'd learned before the Change when it was just a hobby he shared with the heir to Tilford Manor, Sam Aylward instructing them both on visits. Draw…

Snap.
The first arrow took the sentry in the back of the head, slanted up through the brain and broke through his forehead from the inside; he was using the bodkins designed to punch through steel plate, and the impact was an unpleasant triple crack—bone, bone, tree trunk—less than a second after the shaft left the string.

Snap. Snap.
Two more, one in the upper torso and one through the lower back, balancing the noise of the bowstring and the sound of arrows thudding home against the attention that would be drawn when the sentry fell out of the tree. Pinned thrice to the living wood he slumped instead, twisting very slowly. The body would fall, but only when the arrowheads pulled free of the trunk, or the shafts broke, or the body's weight pulled them entirely through.

Go!

He sprang erect and raced for the low ridge, teeth showing in a mask of dark brown mud that coated him to eye level.
Though what I'm supposed to do when I get there…maybe I can take half a dozen with me…

His rush broke through a screen of young willows, the flexible stems beating at him like whips; he held his bow at arm's-length over his head, which put it nine feet up, to keep the string safe. There were the two boats full of savages, not fifty yards away…

Ah. Yes. Bloody hell, that would be ruddy entertaining, wouldn't it, then?

The hippos were between him and the Netherfield Avengers, their backs out of the water where they'd backed up, but their attention firmly on the dangerous, noisy, annoying humans in boats; pretty soon one of them would get the idea that discretion was the better part of valor and they'd all come out of the water and walk away into the fields behind him.

Unless
something hurt one of their precious calves. “I hate to do this to the little kiddie, I really do, Mabel. But it's him or me.”

Snap.

The arrow flashed out in a long shallow curve and plunged into the right buttock of the nearest hippo calf with a wet smacking sound, like a soaked towel flicked onto a man's back. The little animal opened its broad mouth and screamed as only a three-hundred-pound baby could do when it called to its mother in distress.