A Meeting at Corvallis (34 page)

“Oh, you and Luanne're going with me,” Havel said easily. He leaned over and punched the big man's shoulder. “I'm gonna need someone to take care of the cavalry.”

Eric grinned, his eyes lighting dangerously. Beside him Luanne looked dourly determined, like her father.

“We'll take the two Field Force companies of infantry from here at Larsdalen,” Havel went on.

That was everyone fit to march and fight; pretty much everyone who wasn't lactating, pregnant, too old, too young, or not big enough to carry a crossbow or strong enough to work the lever that spanned it. He hated mobilizing that completely, but if he lost this fight then they were all dog-meat anyway. The tests for the militia were simple and set to take in everyone capable of being useful.

“Plus all the A-listers here, and all the ones we can sweep up on the way. We'll muster by Walker Creek. Lieutenant Smythe!”

The scout had been waiting by the head of his horse; he looked tired, but not knocked out the way the Ranger—
oh, hell, if they want to be the
Dúnedain,
they're the
Dúnedain,
and I'll buy 'em their rubber ears
—was. He would be just that tired before long, though.

“Turn out your scouts. Sweep every Spring Valley steading and west to the Eola crest. Give them the rally-point and tell everyone to turn out their A-listers and first Field Force company. We'll be moving southeast from there down the Bethal Heights and Brush College roads towards Salem. Rations for three days and basic medical supplies only, keep it light, but plenty of arrows and bolts.”

“Lord Bear!” the man said, snapping a salute and vaulting back into the saddle; he reined around and took off in a spurt of gravel.

Havel looked over at Angelica Hutton. She'd been camp boss in the wandering days right after the Change, when they were heading west from Idaho, and still handled the Outfit's logistics. It was a much bigger job, but the middle-aged
Tejano
woman handled it with matter-of-fact competence. She'd already pulled a pad out of a pocket in her long black skirt.

“Supplies?” he asked.

“We have ample in reserve,” she said, her voice warm and husky and soft with the Texas-Hispanic accent; she'd been born in the brush country between the Rio Grande and San Antonio.

Angelica was still a handsome woman, but you only had to close your eyes and listen to that voice to see the fiery young girl who'd eloped with the reckless roughstock-riding rodeo cowboy Will had been back then, with death threats from her father and brothers raining about their ears.

Briskly, she went on: “It is not fancy, but nobody will starve on the beans, cheese, dried fruit and smoked sausage. Remounts, they are sufficient also.”

Havel nodded. Will had quit the rodeo when his first child was born, reconciled with Angelica's family, and he'd put his considerable winnings into a little ranch in the Hill Country and a horse-wrangling business. Angelica had been his partner in that, too. Today they ran the Outfit's horse herds, breeding program, and training program for both mounts and riders.

One thing's not so different from the Corps. I've got good people backing me up, folks I'm tight with.

“OK,” he said, slapping his palms together. “First things first. Let's eat; we can finalize the operations orders while we do, then we'll get going.”

Peter Jones spoke for the first time. “Not me, Mike. I'm going back to Corvallis and see if I can kick enough ass to get
them
doing something.”

“Thanks, Pete,” Havel said, leaving silent:
For what it's worth.

As they went in under the high fanlights of the front doors, Havel was whistling under his breath. The tune was one he'd learned from a buddy in the Corps, a guy named Thibodeau who'd come from a parish west of New Orleans:

Waldo Hills, Willamette Valley, Oregon.
March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9

Astrid Larsson hissed slightly between her teeth. This was going to be very tricky….

“Like Faramir and the Rangers of Ithilien, when they ambushed the Haradrim on the way to the Black Gate,” Alleyn

His teeth showed white in the shadow cast by his war cloak's hood, dim through the gauze mask that covered all but his gray-blue eyes. It was a cool gray morning, but last night's rain was over and the clouds were breaking up, letting long beams of sunlight spear through, turning the early spring grass bright green. His visored helm rested on the grass beside him, and as they watched the road he plucked a stem of the candy-sweet new growth and chewed on it meditatively.

Astrid nodded, returning the smile with a brief grin of her own, then turning again to the steep slope before them.
It
is
like that, actually
, she thought.
Except they don't have any oliphants. Or even elephants.

She'd heard there
were
a couple of old zoo elephants in Portland, but they were kept for ceremonial occasions.

The Waldo Hills weren't very high; more of a rolling tableland split by abrupt gullies. Most of it had been grassland with scattered oak groves before the pioneers came west on the Oregon Trail. By the Change it had been cleared and cultivated, with patches of forest on the higher parts, and fir and willow and alder along the small streams. Mount Angel was on their northern fringe, and it had preserved an island of survival during the first Change Year; the rest had gone under in the tidal waves of refugees and Eaters. You still found human bones here and there, sometimes burnt and split in token of dreadful feasting. Nobody had returned since except occasional hunters and the odd bandit, and brush and bramble grew thick on the old fields, checked only by summer blazes set by lightning or campfires or branches rubbing. The field edge they occupied now had been planted in oaks; they'd grown taller, and seeded saplings amongst the thick, spiny Oregon grape and thornbush that had grown up around them. Pink flowers clustered on the grape-stems; the hedge-nettle wasn't flowering yet, but the stalks were already a yard high.

The horses were back a bit, under spreading trees that hid them from above, grazing hobbled among chest-high grass and brush starred with scarlet fritillary. John Hordle came that way; Astrid was amazed again at how quietly the big man could move. Then he dropped prone and crawled up beside the leaders, in a sweet-pungent cloud of crushed herbs. He might be stealthy, but he wasn't light.

“They're coming,” he said softly. “Eilir says she recognized the contact with the labor gang and passed the signal—got too close for comfort to do it, too. Their cavalry screen should be here any moment.”

Astrid nodded, looking downward. “Regular scouts?” she asked.

Hordle shook his head. “Pendleton levies, it looked like; hired light cavalry. Horse-archers. Saw the buggers myself last year, when Sir Nigel and I were east up the Columbia with the Protector's men. Fair enough riders and good men of their hands. Always ready to mix it up, but not what you'd call long on discipline.”

“And they're not used to this country,” Alleyne said thoughtfully. “That may be rather helpful.”

Poor melindo nin,
she thought, sensing the strain beneath his hard calm.
He's not used to campaigning with his beloved.

Even as she pushed the glow of that word out of her consciousness, Astrid smiled.
This was
my
idea,
she thought.
I know Alleyne loves me, but sometimes I think he doesn't think I'm very practical. This will convince him…if it works.

There was a short, steep slope below them, falling two hundred feet to the marshy banks of Puddle Creek a few hundred yards southeast; the road came looping down from her left and ran south towards the Mackenzie territories. Ten years of neglect hadn't been kind to it. Subsidence and rushing water had cut half-moon bites out of it where culverts had been blocked and ditches overflowed; vines covered it in places; silt had drifted over in others, and young saplings were sprouting in potholes and cracks, their roots working at the foundations with the endless patience of growing things. In a few lifetimes of Men water and trees would have made it a memory and a faint trace through forest, but for now it was still passable for wheeled traffic, with a little effort. The bridge over the little stream still looked solid, though streaks of rust marked the concrete where cracks exposed the rebar within.

A clatter of hooves came from the north. Slowly, cautiously she raised the binoculars to her eyes. A dozen men rode into view, and the glasses brought them close. They rode mounts of range-quarterhorse breed, which were familiar enough. Their clothes were rough leather and homespun wool, with here and there a patched pair of pre-Change jeans, the same outfits you might have seen on the cowboy-retainers of a rancher from the CORA—Central Oregon Ranchers' Association—country around Bend and Sisters, but a little more ragged. All of them had plain, round bowl helmets of steel; one of them had a horse's tail mounted as a crest in the center of his headpiece. That man also had a sleeveless chain-mail vest; the rest had cured-leather breastplates, usually strapped with chevron-shaped patterns of metal strips. Most of them carried short saddle-bows, some pre-Change compound types, more modern copies of hunting recurves; their small round shields bore the Lidless Eye newly painted. Their swords were strange, looking like a machete lengthened into a point-heavy slashing saber…which was probably exactly what the design came from.

She froze as the leader with the crested helmet stood in the stirrups and scanned around carefully. The binoculars brought his face close, broad and flattish-looking because his nose had been squashed and healed that way, with a dark beard trimmed into a fork shape and a terrible scar that curled one lip up in a permanent sneer. He shielded his eyes with a hand as he peered eastward, then turned again to look up at her. She knew that he couldn't see her—they were too far away, and in scrub like this a war cloak made you nearly invisible even at arm's length—but it was still a little daunting.

“Tough-looking chaps,” Alleyne said softly. Speech vanished into the background noise as well.

He hadn't been out east last year; the Protector had kept him hostage while his father and John Hordle were searching the old poison-gas dump at Umatilla. They'd fooled that hard and wary man into thinking they'd found what he wanted and would work for him, and then run for it…Nigel Loring's cunning had seen that the poison gas didn't fall into Arminger's hands, but the stretch of country around Pendleton had. The Lord Protector had the whole of the Columbia's south bank now, as far east as the old Idaho border.

“There's been war in the Pendleton country almost since the Change, and a cruel war at that,” she said. “They've grown up fighting, even more than we have here. That's how Arminger got them to join him, backing some of them against the rest.”

“Bad bargain,” Alleyne said.

“By then they hated their neighbors so much they'd take any help against them,” Astrid said, between pity and disgust.

At a guess, none of the men down there were older than she or Eilir, and the time before the Change had grown dreamlike to her. War to the knife would have been all they knew, that and hunger and fear and hate.

The leader with the crested helmet called an order, swinging up a hand.

“In yrch derir,”
one of the Dúnedain whispered:
The enemy stop.

The mercenary light horse shook themselves out on either side of the road, combing the bush and checking any patch of trees that might shelter a watcher. The leader and three others rode on towards the bridge, arrows ready on their bows. Just then two figures burst out from underneath it, leapt on horses tethered and hidden among brushes and galloped away southwestward. The mercenaries pursued, rising in the stirrups to shoot, arrows flicking out. Astrid caught her lip in her teeth as she watched; those were her folk, her friends…

They passed out of sight around a bend in the road. The leader of the Pendleton scouts threw up his arm again, sensibly calling off the pursuit, since the fleeing men might be leading his into an ambush; he had to shout to make one man stop, and clouted him across the helmet when he returned. The rider extended a fist with one finger raised, and they both laughed. Then they dismounted and looked at the support pillars, one of them climbing awkwardly down a little and pointing, holding something up for his leader to see. The figures were tiny in the distance, their voices insect-small as they argued and shouted. After a moment one of the easterners turned his horse and cantered back northward towards the main body of the Protectorate's column.

“They found the cut marks and the tools, then,” Alleyne said. Astrid felt a warm glow below her breastbone as he went on: “That was a remarkably clever idea, letting them find
incomplete
sabotage. Well worth all that night work.”