A Meeting at Corvallis (48 page)

They all looked at Sutterdown; that probably meant that the inhabitants and their supplies were within the town walls. Or possibly just the ones who could fight, with the others up in the eastern hills. Or possibly a mixture. That meant there could be as many as fifteen hundred of their damned archers in there, as well as the artillery, ready to deluge a storming party with arrows that went through chain mail as if it wasn't there.

Which is why they kept taking risks to delay us on the way south,
Renfrew knew.
They had plans for this and they needed time to implement them. Probably those SAS bastards are the ones who set it up. I don't think it's a folk musician's approach to the Art of War, somehow. Damn her and her fucking luck, anyway.

Then again, all the leaders who'd risen to power since the Change had a reputation for being lucky. If they hadn't been lucky, they wouldn't have been leaders, or alive at all.
Everyone
still around on the eve of CY10 was lucky…lucky so far, at least.

“Some of the ones farther south are still being held,” Baron Timmins' son said. “They're just villages with an earth bank and log palisade. We could take them one by one without much trouble, burn them out if nothing else. That would hurt them badly. And we could interfere with the spring planting, to demoralize them without hurting the long-term productivity.”

Renfrew grunted acknowledgment of the suggestion; it was a good thing for young men to be aggressive, within limits.

“But to do that, Sir Malcolm, we'd have to divide our forces
again,
” he said. “And there are still at least eight hundred of the kilties at large, maybe a thousand by now—the ones who, ah, put up such stout resistance to Lord Stavarov before he drove them off.”

Everyone nodded gravely, and all of them knew he meant
the ones who beat Piotr's ass like it was a drum
. Publicly slapping Alexi's son around might have been bad politics…
but it felt so good!
Still, he'd better be polite now.

“And there are as many again in there,” he went on, pointing at the town while he sketched the air over the map with his other hand. “If we left a small screening force here, the enemy bands still at large could attack and catch the screening force between themselves and the garrison of the town. We don't have enough men to circumvallate.”

That meant build a double wall around the besieged town; he checked that everyone caught the reference. There was a list of suggested reading, but some of the Association's baronage were what the charitable might call print-impaired.

“If we left a
large
screening force here, then they could follow any
small
force we sent against the duns and overrun them as soon as they were out of supporting range of us here. The duns aren't much as forts but they can't just be taken on the fly. Remember what happened to the dog with the bone who saw his reflection in the water. We can't afford to invite defeat in detail. Two thousand men is the minimum we need to be sure of beating off an attack by the Mackenzie forces not yet accounted for.”

“Will the Lord Protector send us more troops?” young Timmins asked. “My lord Count, from what you say we need more men to deal with the enemy here.”

“There aren't many to spare, Sir Malcolm,” Renfrew said—carefully. “Twenty-five hundred are besieging Mount Angel and the town there.”

Everyone nodded soberly. The
town
of Mount Angel was a lot like Sutterdown. The fortified monastery of the same name on its hill above made either look like a boy's toy castle made of pasteboard. Nobody had even suggested doing anything but starving it out; a siege train built in Heaven and twenty thousand men with the Archangel Michael for commander couldn't take it by storm.

“Another thousand are securing our communications all the way back to Molalla”—which the damned Rangers and stray kilties were doing their best to chop into salami—“and two thousand are facing the Bearkillers—and possibly the Corvallans—around West Salem. Another five hundred are screening the area between the Amity Hills and the Coast Range against Bearkiller raiding parties. That leaves very few back home. With essential garrisons—”

Everyone nodded again; stripping the fiefs and castles bare of armed men would invite peasant rebellion, not to mention attack from other enemies like New Deseret or the United States of Boise or the Free Cities of the Yakima League. Nobody much liked the Portland Protective Association, and that emphatically included a lot of its own subjects.

“—that means we have only about two thousand men as a mobile central reserve. If we commit our last reserve in one place and something goes wrong somewhere else, this whole war's fucked. The Lord Protector feels he should reinforce success. Hence, my lords, if we wish reinforcements, we must
succeed
.”

Bishop Mateo spoke again; some of the warrior nobles started slightly. “You have yet to
punish
the Satan-worshippers,” he said suddenly. “Let fire and sword teach humility, and show them the strength of Mother Church and Her loyal son and champion the Protector! If their walls are too stout to attack now, let them watch their lands burn!”

God, give me strength,
Renfrew thought.
He
does
talk like that all the time! I always enjoyed the tournaments and meetings before the Change, but you got to go back to the real world afterwards.

But now this
was
the real world; a reality that could be deadly. Aloud he went on:

“Your Grace, once the Mackenzies are conquered, you can lead them to the Truth, and punish any who persist in error. But my orders from the Lord Protector are to
conquer
these lands, not devastate them. The Lord Protector wants productive farmers and living towns to support fighting men and pay taxes. We already have more useless wilderness and ruins than we need.”

Despite the churchman's glare, that brought yet another chorus of nods and even a few mutters of
fucking right we do
. They'd all been impressed by the well-cultivated Mackenzie farms, and the families represented around the table were all ready to jostle for a share after the war was over. And every nobleman in the Protectorate was acutely aware of the labor shortage. The territories the Association held could easily support ten times the numbers they had now, probably twenty or fifty. Their manors were all islands in a sea of resurgent brush and forest.

Mateo pointed eastward. “You could break down the aqueduct there,” he said, waving towards the big water-furrow that directed water from the Sutter River south of town into Sutterdown, turning a number of mill wheels on the way. The mills were deserted—they were in the no-man's-land between the invader's pickets and the town walls, ground commanded by the catapults in the towers. “Let their bodies know thirst, even if their souls do not thirst for the Spirit.”

And he wasn't even
in
the Society. He was a junior social worker, for Christ's sake!

Looking into the bishop's eyes, he knew that the cleric meant every word of it, too; you could feel it, coming off of him like the heat from a banked fire.

Oh, well, half of us survivors are a few cans short. I've done plenty of things I couldn't have
imagined
before the Change, God knows. The bishop's particular breed of crazy is what Pope Leo looks for. He's that variety of lunatic himself. Smart, very smart, but the wing flew off his nut when the Eaters captured him right after the Change.

“Sir Richard?” he said neutrally.

“Easy enough,” the engineer said, tracing the way the canal took off from the river, several miles upstream to the east. “Wouldn't even have to wreck it, just block the intake here. Problem is, they've got a reservoir and deep tube wells inside the walls. I mean, they're not idiots, they wouldn't put up that wall with no interior water source and besides our spies got the plans.”

He tapped a folder. “They'll have enough drinking water, though not much extra.”

“But not enough for baths. The girls might be a bit smelly by the time we get to them,” Sir Malcolm Timmins said, and there was a general laugh until the bishop glared around at them, whereupon a few muttered apologies and the rest made their faces grave.

Furness hadn't laughed; he had an old-fashioned squeamishness in many respects. Instead he went on: “It might screw up the sanitation system, yes. Risk of an epidemic if we do that, and it might spread.”

“God and the Saints!” someone blurted.

This time everyone crossed themselves as well as nodding. Even those who'd been in their early teens during the aftermath of the Change remembered the plagues; they'd only burned themselves out when people grew scarce. Mateo took a look around and smiled sourly.

“I should not seek to advise you on your specialty, Grand Constable,” he said. “You are the man of war here; I serve the Prince of Peace.”

You are
so
right you shouldn't try to advise me, you fucking ecclesiastical commissar,
Renfrew thought, but he bent his head with the others as Mateo signed the air in blessing.
That hasn't stopped you yet, though. And you serve a fucking lunatic, if we're talking about Leo.

The bishop bowed slightly. “If you will excuse me, there is much work to be done arranging the infirmary with Sister Agatha and seeing to the army's spiritual welfare.”

Everyone relaxed slightly when the cleric left. Renfrew spoke formally: “My lords, I suggest you all get your liegemen and contingents settled in according to the plan in the briefing papers, and we'll invest the city and see what we shall see. The patrol schedule is included in the folders. Sheriff Bauer, please remain for a moment.”

When he and the Pendleton man were alone—except for Renfrew's personal guard—he raised an eyebrow.

“Well, I got all my boys answering to my orders,” Bauer said.

I hope so,
Renfrew thought.

“Only had to kill a couple-three of 'em, too.” He worked his left arm as if the shoulder were sore. “I'll be good as new in a couple of days my own self.”

The Pendleton area's spontaneous, homegrown version of neo-feudalism made the variety the Association had built out of books and Society make-believe look like Prussian centralization. The light horse from east of the mountains had come in the train of several sheriffs and half a dozen ranchers, and though they'd all theoretically been on the same side in the last civil war there, and all—equally theoretically—now accepted the Protector's overlordship, half of them had blood feuds born of previous abrupt switches of allegiances or just from the general bloody-mindedness produced by a decade of mutual slaughter.

The easterner went on: “Still, my 'chete-swingers ain't too happy. Nothing useful or pretty to pick up for the home folks, no girls to screw, not even much fightin'.”

“They're getting paid regularly, aren't they?” Renfrew said impatiently. “The usual camp followers and sutlers will arrive soon enough and they can buy amusement. Or presents for their families. We've even got the postal service working as far as Pendleton; they can mail packages home.”

“Yeah, but what's the point of a fight if you don't get to cut no throats or lift no cattle?” Bauer said.

Talk about rapid reversion to savagery!
Renfrew thought.
He's too young to have been more than a high school student, but I wonder what this back-country clod's father did before the Change?

Conrad Renfrew had been an accountant, himself, when he wasn't playing at knights.

“Where
are
the Mackenzies' cattle and sheep, then?” he asked aloud.
If anyone can follow a cow, these bastards can. Particularly if they're feeling sexual frustration.

“Near as we can tell, they drove some into town—probably salting those down to eat later—and sent some of the rest south, and quite a few head up into the mountains,” Bauer said. “Lot of their folks went up into the high country too, judgin' from the tracks. Woods're heavy up there. Bad country for riders, just right for hiding if they got supplies stockpiled.”

And our gliders are nearly useless there too,
Renfrew thought. He waved a hand; southward, east to the vast mountain forests that stretched up into the High Cascades, and then west towards the Willamette with its brush and swamp and prairie.

“They're out there somewhere, Bauer. Eight hundred to a thousand kilties, and too mobile by half. They showed that when they corncobbed Lord Piotr.”

With bicycles, they could be anywhere in the Willamette Valley south of here in a day or two; they might be hiding in the brush-grown lands between here and Corvallis, for that matter. The only good thing was that they couldn't get past him, not in any numbers, although that would be a reckless move even if they could. The mountain tracks to the east were too narrow and rough. He'd know it if they tried to go north in open country to the westward, and then he could move quickly to force battle on his own terms. Also, they didn't have any cavalry to speak of. Those were the only consolations he had, and he clung to them hard.