A Meeting at Corvallis (59 page)

He nodded, keeping the admiration off his face.
I worry enough about Alleyne now, and he's a man grown,
he thought.
I can't begin to imagine what it would have been like to have him carried off at nine. And I know full well she's thinking
But I wasn't there!
Over and over again.

Instead, he looked up at the sky. It wasn't raining anymore, this cold and windy afternoon, but it was wet enough, with wisps of fog drifting from the tops of the trees on the ridges about them. That would neutralize the enemy's air scouts, at least for a while.

Juniper took a deep breath and ducked back under the awning set up under an overhang of the gravel pit's wall. There was very little there, besides the shelter itself; a bedroll covered in hard-woven greased wool, and a small chest that mostly contained maps now spread out on a folding table. Sam Aylward was looking at one as they entered, standing side-by-side with John Brown; he dipped his head to Juniper, and then nodded to his old commander.

“Lady,” he said. “Sir Nigel.”

“What's the word?” the CORA leader said eagerly. “My guys' horses are gettin' hungry. They can't eat fir needles.”

“I had a very productive conversation with Abbot Dmwoski and his staff,” Nigel said. “A most remarkable man. We all left safely—they have a remarkable collection of secret passages and posterns, too. And now we should really begin.”

The rancher nodded. “Glad to get on with it,” he said. “Our fodder's just about gone and there isn't enough grass up here. Wouldn't want to try this if my remuda lost its edge.”

“Very well,” Nigel said. He bent over the map, and everyone else followed suit. “The encampment is here, with ditch, bank and barbed wire on top, and a surveillance tower at each corner.”

Juniper nodded, blinking her leaf green eyes. He admired the way she could put aside grief; even more, he admired the way she'd picked up the tricks of the fighter's trade without any formal training, simply by experience and by being around experts.

“First, let's poke them with a stick,” she said.

Lord Emiliano Gutierrez, Baron Dayton, Marchwarden of the South, looked down at the commander of the eastern mercenaries attached to his force.

“Sumbitch shot me a clear two hundred yards away. Wouldn't a thought any of those Sisters from Sisters could do it,” the man said. “Musta been usin' one of those fancy bows from before the Change, with the wheels at the ends. That's not fair nor right.” Then: “Shitfire!”

Words came to Emiliano's mind, but it was a bit awkward to curse a man who was having an arrow extracted from his thigh and who'd refused painkillers so he could report clear-headedly, or to tell him he was being an idiot—the only reason compound bows weren't used more widely was that so many of their parts couldn't be duplicated without computer-controlled machine tools and synthetics. Instead he rubbed a hand across his beardless brown face and rose slightly on the balls of his feet; he was a short stocky man in his midthirties, but quick-moving, full of bouncy muscle. He glanced at the medic.

The doctor wasn't a cleric, but an older man who'd been trained before the Change. His voice was crisp: “He will recover, my lord. It isn't a complex wound and the bone was not split. It will keep him immobile for a number of weeks.”

The doctor's hands had learned their skill in an era of MRI scans and laser scalpels, but they were still nimble on the spoonlike instrument that had been invented several thousand years ago to deal with wounds of exactly this sort. The hospital tent smelled of blood and bedpans and antiseptic, but not too badly; they hadn't had many casualties yet, or much sickness—and most of that was among the plainsman mercenaries, who were careless about sanitation. They'd had time to lay the prefab timber and plywood floors, as well; the war against Mount Angel had been a nice leisurely siege, with nothing beyond a little skirmishing now and then, and nuisance raids on their supply lines. That pleased the baron well enough. Less was likely to go wrong with this than with the jobs Alexi Stavarov or Conrad Renfrew had gotten.

And the monks had it coming. They'd been a pain in the arse to all the southern baronies for years, giving refuge to runaways and sticking their oars in half a dozen other rackets, not to mention letting that
puta
Astrid Larsson and her gang of lunatics set up in the woods just south of here. And those Rangers so-called and the kilties had been spreading subversion with the monks' help. That was the only reason he was backing this war, that and fear of the Lord Protector. Arminger was right about getting rid of the disturbing influences.

Nice and quiet suits me fine,
he thought.
I've got everything I want, or I will when we hang Dmwoski…no, the pope wants to burn him. I've got my good land and my castle and I just want the rest of the world to go away so my kids, they can have it too.

The man on the table gave an animal grunt and sighed as the arrow came out. It was a simple broadhead, hammered and filed down from a stainless-steel spoon into a razor-edged triangle; the doctor flipped it and a three-inch stub of the wooden shaft into a pan one of the nurses held.

“Wait a bit,” the mercenary said as the doctor's assistants came forward with bottles and tools and a curved needle and thread.

This is one hard man,
Emiliano thought with reluctant respect, as the mercenary went on.

“OK, they jumped us out of the woods. Looked like they was movin' north of us. We tried to hit 'em right away, but there was more of the bastards than we thought at first—two hundred, two-fifty, to our one-twenty, that I saw. Maybe a bit more. That's all I know.”

“Good work, Sheriff Simmons,” Emiliano said, and nodded to the doctor.

The wounded man relaxed as the nurse ran a hypodermic of morphine into the tube that was dripping saline solution into his arm; the doctor waited, then began to irrigate and close the deep fissure. Outside in the gray, damp not-quite-rain Emiliano's own guards fell in behind him as he walked to the commander's pavilion, hobnailed boots crunching and grating on wet stone; there had even been time to scrape up gravel from the monks' roads—which were very well kept, like the farms around here—and lay it down so that the laneways inside the big square camp didn't turn to bottomless mud. The guards wheeled into place at the entrance to his own pavilion, and he nodded to them as he passed.

Emiliano had learned a long time ago—in the Lords, before the Change—that you needed to keep tight with the men who had your back. The Lord Protector had run what he called a
diversity program
to make sure none of the greater lords had a following exclusively drawn from their pre-Change backers, so only a couple of the guards
were
from the Lords, or their younger brothers; a few more were Society types, or
their
younger brothers; and half were just ordinary survivors who'd worked their way up. But he still made sure that his guards were
his
men, men he could trust, and once he was sure, he
did
trust them. He'd also learned long ago that trusting nobody was just as deadly as trusting the wrong people.

He'd never trusted Norman Arminger, for example.

Lord Jabar Jones of Molalla waited for him in the outer room of the command pavilion. The big black man was brooding over the map boards, but he looked up and nodded at the Marchwarden. They were social equals—both barons, both tenants-in-chief—and the other man was his second-in-command in military rank for this expedition.

“He have much to say, Lord Emiliano?”

The former Blood's voice was deep and rich, and a lot smoother than it had been in the early days. They all were, come to that. Emiliano grinned to himself.

Dolores especially,
he thought, thinking of how his wife did the Great Lady thing these days.
Hey, pardon me, that's
Lady
Dolores of Dayton. Mother of God, but you look at her in those cotte-hardi things and nobody would suspect she used to spray the jeans on her ass out of a can they were so tight. Nobody sees the ring in her navel anymore, either, except me
.

She'd learned to play the game with the Society bitches, and went at it with a convert's zeal. Sometimes he thought she worked as hard memorizing the Table of Rank and Precedence as he did with the sword, and she was already planning the marriages of their kids to link them to the other great houses.

Aloud, the Marchwarden said: “Yes, he did. Short and to the point, my lord Molalla.”

You had to observe the courtesies; it wasn't too different from the way things had been with his
pandilleros
in the old days; you didn't diss a man unless you were prepared to meet him face-to-face and kill him. The names were fancier, but he'd gotten used to it, and there was a ring to being called “lord”; he supposed that was why they'd called the gang that back when. A servant slid forward and put a mug of hot coffee in his hands, then retired to invisibility in a corner of the big canvas room. He blew on the steaming surface and took a sip before he went on: “It's the CORA-boy types; we knew they and the kilties were tight, just didn't expect to see them this far north. Light cavalry like the ones we get from Pendleton, except not such balls-on-fire types, from what I hear. Better than two hundred of them, maybe more, and they're loose north of us.”

Jabar shut one enormous fist. “Motherfuckers.”

“Sí,”
Emiliano said. “This trouble we don't need.”

“How'd they get over the mountains without our knowing it?”

“How they got here, I don't know. Maybe over Route 20 and then the old logging trails, maybe through the reservation—we should teach the goddamned
indios
a lesson someday. Anyway, we got a problem. Plus the air cover ain't worth
mierda
right now.”

“Bet your ass we got a problem, my lord,” Jabar said. “We can guard our supply trains from small bunches of Rangers or kilties or any of that good shit. We can't guard it against no three, four hundred men on ponies. No how, no way, not without we jam everything into great big convoys with a couple hundred guards. 'Specially with God pissing on us this way.”

They looked out at the gray spring day. The sky was the color of a wet iron manhole cover, with patches like a concrete sidewalk in the rain. This time of year it could stay like that for weeks, or break up into sunshine overnight; it wasn't as if they had weather forecasts any more.

Until I got to fighting out in the
campo,
I never realized weather was so important,
he thought; he'd always been a child of cities and pavements, although his grandparents had been farmers in Jalisco and he was a lord of farmers now.

Along one edge of the camp was a long prefabricated ramp like a ski jump, with a hydraulic catapult that could throw a glider into the air. The problem was, cloud was at barely a thousand feet, with patches of mist and fog below that. Or to put it another way, the problem was Oregon.

“I got couriers out by a couple different routes,” Emiliano said, looking at the map.

It was a modern one, showing wilderness and populated zones, ruins, living towns, which roads were passable and which weren't, and right now it had colored pins showing the locations of the Association's forces, and conjectured enemy ones.

“To Count Conrad and to the Protector. But neither of them's going to be what you'd call real happy with us if we don't handle this on our own.”

Jabar grunted; he was still uncertain of his standing at court after the fiasco with Princess Mathilda. That might be forgotten now that the astonishing news about her rescue had come through; on the other hand, it might not. Nobody in their right mind expected Norman Arminger to forget a grudge, and Lady Sandra…

Emiliano hid a slight shudder with another sip of coffee. “OK, what we got to be careful of is getting mousetrapped the way that
hijo
Piotr was.”

Jabar traced lines on the map with a thick finger. “He tried stomping eight hundred Mackenzies with a hundred lancers,” he said. “Even if there's four hundred of those light horse, they're not going to ass-fuck four hundred knights. Not if we can pin them against something for a charge so they can't run away and shoot us up as they go. Those sheep-fuckers can't stand up to us hand-to-hand.”

“Yeah, but there's a chance—just an off chance—that the Mackenzies might be up
here,
too.”

The cannonball head came up, his eyes narrowing until they were white slits in the eggplant face. “You think so? The Grand Constable don't.”

“Think? Bro, I
know
Renfrew doesn't have his dick on the chopping block here, whatever the hell he
thinks.
”

Jabar rubbed his jaw; his coif rested loose over his bullock-broad shoulders and down his back. “Eight hundred archers…even with, say, four hundred CORA riders, that's still not enough to take us on. Not even close. Yeah, their bowmen are good, but there's a difference between charging eight hundred with one hundred and charging eight hundred with four hundred. Without they got some spears or pikes or something, we could smash their ass, open-field. And that's just the lancers. We got the infantry, two thousand men, and the Pendleton scouts.”