A bleak smile. “I’ve had messages to that effect from Portland. Very emphatic messages, carried by men with titles that would be imposing if they weren’t so funny.”
“I’m the heir,” Mathilda said quietly. “It’s not that many years from now that I come of age, either, and I’ll be the Protector then. You wouldn’t win my goodwill that way . . . and I may live and rule a long time.”
“A point,” Thurston conceded. “On the other hand, if you get your fool neck chopped on this stunt, and I could have prevented it, your mother will be . . .very unhappy with me, for as long as we both shall live.”
“And, well, that weight which you truly say swords have is why we turned out of our way to meet you,” Rudi added blithely.
He let the accent he’d learned from his mother grow a little stronger as he went on:
“There are two hundred heavy swords waiting for you the now not ten miles away. Heavy and sharp, sure, and two hundred men to carry them, and every one a long ungainly dreadful bachlach thinking on you with dark and ugly intent, the creatures. The Church Universal and Triumphant’s men—the Prophet’s Cutters in person.”
“Unit of the Sword of the Prophet, out of Corwin,” Ingolf added. “Guardsmen commanded by a High Seeker.”
Thurston’s face changed, though most observers would have been hard-pressed to say exactly how. Rudi decided it was as if a buried playfulness had withdrawn further into the forged iron core of the man.
“Is that so?” he said softly. “I suggest we all get off our high horses and talk about it.” Then : “Captain Thurston, we’ll take a short rest break here.”
“Mr. President!” barked a young officer who looked like a younger edition of the Boise ruler, then strode away shouting orders.
Thurston went on over his shoulder: “Sergeant. The map and table.”
“Got it, Captain,” a man behind him said.
Rudi dismounted and let Epona’s reins drop; she’d stay still, unless he called her. The others tethered their mounts to convenient bushes, and they crowded for ward. The man who’d called Thurston a captain came back with a folding table covered in cork, then set it out and pinned a map to it, a modern one block-printed on rather thick cream colored paper. He was fair skinned under his tan, with a graying blond buzz cut and blue eyes in a nest of wrinkles, and otherwise enough like his commander to be his brother.
“Captain?” Rudi said quietly.
Thurston considered him for a moment, then gave a very slight nod of acknowledgment.
“Captain was the rank I held on March seventeenth, 1998—Army Rangers, Seventy-fifth, out of Fort Lewis near Seattle. Sergeant Anderson was with me before the Change.”
For a moment the ruler’s eyes were distant, looking down the road of years.
“Our team was one of the ones sent out to find out what the hell was going on. . . . He’ll acknowledge my self promotion to general in-chief and president pro tem when we retake Washington and hold national elections.”
“Yes, sir, Captain,” the man said stolidly.
“Sure, and we all have our nonnegotiable points,” Rudi said gravely.
And the old Romans had a man next to a triumphant general who whispered, “Remember; you are human,” in his ear. Not a bad idea.
Then the Mackenzie traced the road they were on with a finger, down southward towards the old reservoir. “They’re making camp here—the most of them, with a net of scouts flung out. . . .”
He looked at Ritva, and Mary quickly tapped the locations, describing each lookout post in detail.
“Only two hundred?” the general mused.
“It’s an ambush,” Ingolf pointed out.
“And surprise is the greatest force multiplier left, now that nuclear weapons don’t work,” Thurston agreed, rubbing a finger on his chin. “But why would the Prophet’s men be on my territory? They’re fully occupied with their war against New Deseret, according to my reports.”
Rudi coughed into one hand. “Ah . . .as it happens, we were traveling with some folk from there, for safety’s sake. But . . .”
His finger moved on the map again. “. . . we were heading east, so, well south of here. The Cutters wouldn’t have seen us. The Deseret folk are still down there, on their way to home. We spotted the Cutters and turned north to warn you.”
Mathilda spoke: “If you know anything about the Prophet—and you’re closer to him than the Protector ate is, General Thurston—you’ll know he’s insatiable. If he gobbles up the Saints, you’re next. Why haven’t you helped them?”
And it’s not tact that you excel in, is it, Matti? Rudi thought.
Thurston stared at her, his face bleak. “Young lady, I don’t approve of theocracies—the Prophet’s, or New Deseret’s. Granted they aren’t murderous lunatics like the Unawhacker, but there’s the principle of the thing. They’ve been offered help, if they rejoin the nation and accept separation of Church and State.”
Well, there’s the little thing of the delayed elections in Boise, Rudi thought, but did not say aloud. That collection of two-score graybeards you call the Senate and the House of Representatives haven’t been chosen by anyone since before I was born, from all I hear.
“In any case, they’re here now,” Rudi said. “And I understand you claim this territory. In the immediate rather than theoretical sense, that is.”
“I do,” Thurston said shortly. “Let me think for a moment, please.”
He took a turn, boots scrutching in the dirt and rock, armor rattling. A few of his officers tried to speak to him, but he waved them curtly aside. The soldiers waited, leaning on their four foot shields or their long javelins, a few munching hardtack crackers or chewing stolidly on board-tough strips of jerky.
Then the black general nodded as if to himself. “We’ll go see about the Cutters. And then we’ll see about you youngsters.”
After a moment, he went on softly: “And perhaps we can also find out who told the Prophet’s men I was coming this way.”
Sure, and I wouldn’t want to be that man when our good General Thurston finds out, Rudi thought.
He’d known a fair number of very hard men, good and bad, starting with his own blood father and Mathilda’s dreadful sire, and he suspected he’d met another here.
“You’re walking into their trap?” Mathilda asked, curious.
Thurston smiled. “It’s only a trap if you don’t know about it.”
Rudi nodded to himself as Ingolf chuckled. “And if you know it’s a trap, it’s still a trap ... for the other guy.”
And that’s something to remember.
* * * *
The Boise wagonmaster had taken over the Cones toga with a nod of approval at the vehicle’s state as he added it to the column’s baggage train, but nobody had objected to the westerners getting their fighting gear out. The infantry marched in their armor as always, but the camp auxiliaries had put on light mail or studded-leather jackets too.
“I’m thinking this will be a footman’s fight,” Rudi said, thoughtfully shrugging to settle his brigandine and resting his longbow over his shoulder. “At least on our side.”
“Couldn’t we have an earthquake or a bit of a stampede or a flood, something of that order instead?” Edain asked. “It’s a bit soon after the last fight for my taste, to be sure.”
“It’s in total agreement I am,” Rudi said sardonically. “But I doubt the Prophet agrees.”
Edain sighed. “That’s the thing, Chief, innit?” He looked at the ground, and then the sky. “And I wasn’t asking for a flood or earthquake, understood?”
Everyone was acting nonchalant, which was surpris ingly hard when you expected homicidal lunatics to attempt your life at any instant. The high hills pulled back on the right, but to the east they were still close to the road. Rudi sang softly in Gaelic as he walked:
Oh, fhàg mi ann am beul à brugh
M’eudail fhein an donngheal dhubh . . .
“That’s your mother’s language,” Ma
thilda said.
She recognized it easily enough, but didn’t know more than the odd word or phrase most Mackenzies dropped into their conversation now and then. Those were rote copied from Juniper just as so many imitated her accent, and others imitated them. Often badly and to her exasperated annoyance, though it had grown natural enough to the second generation, who’d picked it up from their parents just as they did any other part of their native tongue.
“What’s it mean?” she went on.
“Ummm . . .”
Rudi thought hard; his mother’s mother’s birth speech was a splendid one for song and poetry and flights of fancy, but not especially easy to translate. It had always been the secret way he and his mother spoke together, at least until his younger half sisters Maude and Fiorbhinn picked it up as he had, sung to them in their cradles.
Aloud he went on: “It’s a song about a brown-haired girl. . . .”
Mathilda grinned at him and tucked one seal-colored lock under her coif with its covering of lustrous silvery-gray titanium mail. “Keep going!”
“I’d render it more or less like . . .
I left yesterday in the meadow of the kine
The brown haired maid of sweetest kiss,
Her eye like a star, her cheek like a rose;
Her kiss has the taste of pears.”
He hadn’t seen her blush often lately. She did now, and clouted him on the shoulder. Since he was wearing a padded doublet with short mail sleeves and collar under the brigandine torso armor, it was more symbolic than anything else.
“You’re just missing all the Mackenzie beauties daz zled by your looks and lineage,” she said dryly, after clearing her throat. “Well, I’m no light heeled witch-girl to be charmed onto her back with poetry.”
“Alas,” he said, rolling his eyes at her with a theatrical sigh. “What a pity. It’s such a nice strong shapely back that it’s a true pity it sees so little use.”
Then they both laughed; though Rudi acknowledged to himself there was a little truth to his anamchara’s ac cusation. There were only three women on the expedi tion, after all—and two of them were his sisters, while the third was a very good friend and determined virgin.
I hadn’t thought about it till recently, but it does look like this is going to be a mostly celibate trip. Lady of the Blossom Time, have mercy!
On her other side, Odard smiled thinly with his helmet under his arm; then his blue eyes narrowed over Rudi’s head, and his handsome dark face stiffened slightly.
“I think I saw something move,” he said softly.
Rudi saw something else; the heads of officers beginning to turn, and then carefully not doing so.
“Yeah,” he said. “Nice one, Odard.”
Ingolf gave a sigh.“You know,” he said,“I usually don’t go looking for a fight. But I would really like to meet Mr. Kuttner again. Maybe deal with his other eye . . .”
When the attack came, it was a surprise even though expected. The first arrow went thock into a shield even before the rattle of steel horseshoes on gravel reached them. A trumpeter went down, in the clump of men around the flag of the Republic; a few more fell along the line.
Then the whole formation turned left in unison, going from a column headed south to a three deep line fac ing east with a deep shout of “Oooh rah!” The big oval shields snapped up, the first rank vertical, the next slanted back, and the rest raised in an overlapping roof. Rudi blinked in amazement even as he ducked behind the corner of the wagon, with more arrows whistling over head or going thunk into the vehicle’s body and cargo or punk into the drum-taut canvas of the tilt or bouncing off the steel frame like ringing metallic rain. He’d never seen anything like that dragon scale maneuver.
Like the unfolding of a tree into leaf but a thousand times faster, or a bird’s feathers bristling, he thought.
At close range some of the arrows punched through the thick leather and plywood of the shields, and a few more men fell. One went between Ingolf and him as they peered around the wagon, and they both drew back.
“Something smells,” Ingolf said tensely. “That’s a goddamned stupid move, and the Cutters aren’t that kind of stupid.”
Rudi nodded. The horsemen in the russet-colored armor weren’t trying to turn the formation’s flanks; they were coming straight down the rough slope at the part of the Boise line ahead of the command group, shoot ing as fast as they could. Then they switched bows for lances—done with formidable speed—and bored right in, their formation a blunt wedge.
The knights of the Protector’s Guard couldn’t break that line with a balls-out hair on fire charge, Rudi thought. Not even Bearkiller A-listers. Not without artillery in support or something.
And the Boise field pieces were going off now with a series of loud metallic tunnnngggg sounds. Four foot arrows punched out in blurring streaks, nailing men to horses or smashing through two and three at a time, ignoring armor as if it were linen, ripping off limbs or slicing open bodies. Then a globe of stickfire hit, turning one rider and his mount into a pillar of flame and splash ing burning napalm in all directions. Horses screamed, but the men never broke their chant:
“Cut! Cut! Cut!”
The Boise officers shouted all together: “Ready . . . first rank pick your man . . . pilaaaaa—throw!”
The formation opened out a little as the front rank cocked their heavy javelins back. Then a hundred mus cular arms did throw, at point-blank range and within a second of one another. The Cutter charge stopped as if it had slammed into a massive glass wall, invisible but hard. Horses went over, pitching forward in complete somersaults or tripping, and more behind them reared screaming as they tried to avoid the gruesome pileup. Rudi winced as he heard leg bones snap; he always hated the uncomprehending agony of the poor beasts. They had more sense when men left them alone. . . .
“Ready . . . second . . . throw!”
The second rank lofted their throwing spears into the heaving mass, and then the third, and then the first rank used their second javelin. The volleys kept punching out until the spears were gone.
“Companies . . . charge!”
The Boise soldiers moved in unison again, to a huge crashing bark of: “USA! USA!”
Each sword hand snapped down to the hilt of the stabbing blade slung at each right hip, and then flicked it out and forward in a movement beautiful and deadly and swift. Then they smashed forward into the Prophet’s men, swarming at them like ants—punching with the bosses of their heavy shields at the horses’ faces, club bing with the edges at the legs of mount and rider, holding them up to turn the strokes of the long shetes. And stabbing, stabbing . . .
The Cutters’ trumpet wailed from higher up the slope. Every horseman who could turned his mount and spurred out of the melee, while the Boise infantry slaughtered those who couldn’t.
“The Prophet’s Guard don’t run like that,” Ingolf said.
Rudi’s skin prickled, with a nervousness that had only a little to do with the edged iron flying about. Then something caught the corner of his eye. Pure instinct moved him: he turned on his heel even as he drew the clothyard shaft past the angle of his jaw and shot. One of Thurston’s guard threw himself aside with a yell as the fletching brushed his neck.
The general wheeled just in time to see the spear drop from another’s hand where it had been driving for his back. Surprise froze him an instant, and then he snatched at his own sword as the would-be assassin plowed into the ground face first in a clatter of strip armor with an arrow driven up under the flare of his helmet. Sergeant Anderson was already between them, sword and shield ready; Rudi could see his mouth working in soundless curses as he looked around at the other guards.
Rudi had drawn and loosed again before the first man struck the ground, conscious that Edain had gotten off his first shaft less than a second later than his. Another man among the guards pitched backward with a Mac kenzie arrow standing in his face, and then a third went down—the bodkin points of two arrows driven th
rough his armor and into gut and chest. His target had been a man near the general; that one struck as he spun, slashing open the assassin’s throat to make three death wounds before he had time to collapse.
Then Rudi threw down his longbow and flung his hands in the air; barely twenty seconds had passed since the first shaft left his string.
“Peace!” he cried, pitching his voice to cut through the roar of noise around him. “They were trying to kill your general! Peace!”
An instant later Edain did the same, and the others of their band froze very still; there were probably a dozen weapons trained on them, and fingers trembling on triggers or ready to loose strings. Rudi felt a wash of cold liquid fear in his gut until Thurston himself bellowed,
“Hold!”
The last of the Cutters were out of range, sped on their way by bolts from the Boise fieldpieces. Thurston stared down at the body lying so close to his feet and then clashed his unmarked sword back into the scabbard. Men were beginning to shout and turn as word spread from one individual to the next—most had had their eyes fixed firmly on the retreating enemy.
“Silence in the ranks!” Thurston bellowed.
And a sort of silence did fall; even through his own fear Rudi admired the discipline of it.
“Officers, get your men in hand. Now!”
The beginnings of chaos died. A long moment later Thurston waved a couple of aides aside and walked over to Rudi; they’d been only a hundred feet apart. Two men followed him, the others who’d been saved from blades in the back by a ripple of Mackenzie archery. Rudi’s eyes skipped over them; both had transverse crests on their helmets, and as they took them off . . .
Yes, they’re his close kin, from the looks. Their skin was lighter, toast-brown rather than near black, and their short hair loose curled rather than woolly, but oth erwise the cast of features was the same. Sons, from their years—one’s a bit more than my age and the other’s about Edain’s.