Prince of Outcasts (47 page)

The last shaft had scarcely fallen before Ruan leapt out and sprang onto a stack of ammunition boxes. He had an arrow on the string of his longbow and two more between the grip and the forefinger of his left hand. He drew and shot all three in a quick ripple of effort, the great yellow limbs of Montivallan mountain yew flexing smoothly and the flat snap of the bowstring sounding hard and fast.

John risked a peek himself. The central wooden keep of the Carcosan fort was still burning fiercely; it had been made of green wood and covered in hides, but a flurry of napalm shells and firebolt had set it alight during the last night-time bombardment. A huge plume of black smoke drifted northwestward away from them, carrying all but a bitter hint of the reek with it. The pounded dirt of the walls merely looked scorched and chewed, being immune to fire and nearly so to impacts, though the palisade on top of it had been knocked to flinders.

More to the point, that pillar of smoke meant that the Carcosans had no tall lookout post to direct the fire of their missile weapons. A man standing on the rampart doing duty for that dodged as the first of Ruan's
shafts hissed by his head, then toppled with a distance-thinned shriek as two more thumped into his upper chest.

“We are the darts that Hecate cast!”
Ruan shouted, and then something in Gaelic that John thought involved the words
your mother
.

Mackenzies didn't really speak the language of Grandmother Juniper's ancestors, but they swore in it full often. . . .

“Good work!” Deor said, cautiously looking over the parapet himself and thumping his lover's back as Ruan jumped down.

Fayard and his men cheered a fellow-shooter and the scop went on:

“Wuldor couldn't do better.”

While he spoke the crew of the catapult sprang to readiness; it was already cocked and the hydraulic lines ran back to the covered section. Locals manned the pumps, and waited ready to move the trails behind the machine if it needed to slew around more than the traversing mechanisms could handle. Despite Ishikawa's worries the frames had held up . . . so far, and with a little hammer-and-wrench work. A few others gathered in the arrow-shafts; the whole ones could be shot back by the Baru Denpasaran archers, and the broken ones would provide heads for their fletchers to use.

“I think we haven't dismounted all the enemy machines in that bastion on the left,” John said. “Give them another brace of roundshot.”

They had plenty of those; the foundry in Baru Denpasar had run up hundreds, since it needed only the ability to cast a metal sphere and they were willing to sacrifice as much as needed even if it meant melting down tools. The surprisingly small nine-pounder ball was slapped into the groove—it was about four inches in diameter—and the gunner's foot stamped down on the firing-pedal.

Tung-WHACK!

The locals finished picking up the arrows and threw themselves onto the arms of the pump as the throwing arms slapped forward into the stops and the mechanism recoiled. John flicked up his visor again, put his binoculars to his eyes and watched. The range was short and the ball didn't have time to slow down much as it covered the distance in a blurred
streak of speed. Then it plowed into the tumbled, smoldering ruins of the squared-timber bastion that had been built into the wall of the fort. Splinters and clods of dirt flew skyward.

“Again!” John snapped. “Keep it up, sustained fire.”

I hadn't realized how you can be keyed up, exhausted and terminally bored at the same time,
he thought as the next ball thumped home.
This is like overseeing a construction project while being shot at.

A hail from the guards at the point where the zigzag communication trench entered the pit was answered in Thora's unmistakable flat Bearkiller tones.

“Good to see you,” John said sincerely.

Thora pushed up the three-bar visor of her helm and grinned at him; her face was red and running with sweat like his, but unlike him she seemed totally indifferent to it.

“Tuan Anak is taking all your
advice
seriously, Johnnie,” she said with a grin and a wink. “Even when I carry the
message
.”

In fact she'd been solemnly passing on . . . her
own
opinions, with Deor helping out when the Baru Denpasaran commander's uncertain English ran into a wall. He was quite certain the whole business would have had her sword out and blood shed if it had happened back home, but since they weren't going to be here for long she regarded it all as a joke.

“Your delicate little flower has the prang-prangs ready, too,” she went on.

There seemed to be genuine respect in that, even liking, as well as a tinge of sarcasm; John decided he wasn't presumptuous enough to think that he understood how Thora's mind worked. Instead he nodded to the bosun's mate in charge of the catapult.

“Cease fire for now,” he said. “Be ready with the assault fire plan at the signal.”

The man nodded, blue eyes bright in the ruddy tan of his face. “Will do, Your Highness.”

John and Evrouin, Thora and Deor and Ruan turned into the zigzag communication trench, walking slightly bent over. The big ditches had been
dug by the local folk to suit themselves, and by that standard even Evrouin's five-foot-six was tall, and he was the shortest of the five of them. None of the Montivallans wanted to show their heads over the parapet. The Carcosan catapults were supposedly suppressed . . . but they might just be biding their time. He carried his sallet under one arm, as well. The white ostrich plumes would be just too tempting if they bobbed along over the edge.

And damned if I'm going to take them off!
In fact, he'd bought a new set in town before they left.

“They've got the trebuchets set up,” Thora went on. “And Tuan Anak is very taken with
your suggestion
about those.”

That one had been Captain Ishikawa's. John felt as if he ought to blush. Still, there was no way on God's green earth the Balinese noble was going to take
suggestions
from a foreign woman, or from an
Orang Japon
. From a Prince of a great realm in the fabled land of the Americans . . . then, if they were politely phrased, yes.

Thora grinned. “What's being a great monarch but a lifetime of getting the credit for what others do tacked on to your own deeds?” she asked.

Ouch,
he thought.

Tuan Anak was waiting in the foremost parallel, the trench facing the enemy ramparts, just beyond bowshot from the Carcosan fort.

To get there John and his party passed the row of six trebuchets. The lever-principle machines were mostly made of wood—they had plenty of good timber within reach, albeit it was green—and the metal parts had come along from the city on the carts, along with artificers. Each was sitting in a circular pit dug more than ten feet deep with a berm piled around it. As far as he could tell—more to the point, as far as Captain Ishikawa could tell—they were well designed. The principle of a heavy weight hinged to one end and a much longer throwing arm with a sling on the other was simple enough. The devil of efficient energy transfer was in the details of proportion and angle, though, and while he remembered the basic formulas he was profoundly glad someone with practical experience was along.

The Baru Denpasarans used similar machines to command their
western half of the harbor back at their capital. Without the
Tarshish Queen
's longer-ranged weapons to suppress their Carcosan equivalents they couldn't have built these massive things close enough to the fort's wall, and even so it had cost lives. Now they were ready. Each sling was loaded with a ton-weight ball of rocks the size of a baby's head, bound together with tight nets of coir rope made from coconut husk. Geared winches would pull the arms down surprisingly fast after each shot, and more bundles were ready to be rolled into the sling-cups.

There was a strong fruity odor as they passed; the nets that held the rocks had been soaked in vats of triple-distilled toddy before they were filled. No open flame was near them, but lidded clay pots of coals were standing ready. The connecting trenches leading up to the commander's position were thick with troops, crouching on their hams with their bows or spears standing up between their knees and their shields propped against the mats that revetted the earth walls. Many of them nodded and grinned at the Montivallans as they passed; it was nice to be popular, although a little alarming when some of the smiles were dyed blood-red with
paan
, the combination of lime paste and betel nut and leaf many hereabouts chewed.

They spat when they chewed, too, though in town they used wooden buckets. Nobody was taking that much care here.

Thora chuckled grimly. “Hides the blood a bit, eh, Johnnie?”

“Just what I was thinking,” he said tightly.

Tuan Anak was talking to his officers when they debouched into the forward trench. John waited quietly; it wasn't his country and he wasn't in command here. As he did, he heard Fayard talking to his men, a few last instructions and then:

“We're a long way from home. But our oaths are here, and our honor, Guardsmen, and so is the one we swore before God to protect with our lives.”

“God's enemies are here too,” one of them said quietly; his name was Ernoul, John remembered.

Fayard nodded agreement, and finished: “And we all saw what the Prince did for a shipmate. Can we do less?”

The Prince blushed, then turned and settled the plumed helmet on his head.

“And I know you're here, comrades, brothers of the sword,” he said, meeting the eyes of each. “We've come a long way together, and shed our sweat and blood side by side. I'm glad of it, and I won't forget who was here with me either.”

The squad came to attention and smacked right fist to heart in the Association's salute. John kept his face grave as he returned it, but he swallowed nonetheless. The men of the Guard would have fought for him regardless; that was their oath. But he thought he saw genuine respect for him, the individual and not just his rank and blood. The golden spurs on his heels seemed to settle in a little more comfortably.

Evrouin stepped near and murmured, “And remember, Sire: if you die, we all have to face your mother. So don't, eh?”

John chuckled. “I see your point, goodman. You've certainly done everything you could to keep me alive.”

Deor and Thora and Ruan were talking softly, their heads together.

“There'll be room for you at Hraefnbeorg, Ruan, when we make our steading,” the scop said. “If you choose.”

The young Mackenzie grinned at him and laid a hand alongside his cheek for a moment. “Sure, and there's Dun Barstow now only a few days' journey away from your brother's holding, my heart,” he said. “I could visit my own folk full often. If your oath-sister agrees, of course.”

“What, turn down another pair of hands around the place? Not likely!” she said. They all chuckled at that, having grown up as folk of the land. “If wyrd will have it so, then.”

Then she turned to Deor. They each laid a hand on the other's shoulder, covered that hand with their own free one and spoke in unison:

“Lo, there do I see our Fathers . . .

Lo, there do I see our Mothers . . .

Lo, there do I see the line

Of all our people from their beginning . . .

They do bid us to take our place among them . . .

In the Halls of Valhalla,

Where the Brave may live forever!”

Pip came up with Toa, and a few of her followers. She'd changed into her white costume with the suspenders and what she'd said was called a bowler hat, her cane jauntily over one shoulder. The big Maori was scowling; first at her, and then at John. Two of the
Silver Surfer
sailors carried local shields, fairly large ones, and they were casting the odd apprehensive glance at the blade of the great spear in the older man's hands.

Ah,
John thought.
He's told them that if she stops an arrow, they might as well kill themselves and save him the trouble. And they believe him. So would I.

“Shouldn't you be looking after the prang-prangs, Pip?” he asked.

She snorted, and used the serrated head of the cane to adjust the jaunty angle of her hat. John was glad of the secret—as a hidden steel cap was called—within, but he wished with all his heart that she was carrying more protection than a set of metal-capped boiled-leather knee and elbow pads. And he was glad Toa had had the idea for the men with shields.

“The prang-prangs? That's technician's work, darling,” she said airily.

Then, her face completely serious for once, without the usual edge of ironic mockery: “Leading . . . that's what I was
born
for, John.”

He sighed, nodded, and made himself smile.
There's absolutely nothing I can say to that,
he thought.
Not without more hypocrisy than I could get away with.

“Well, you can certainly handle yourself in a fight, I've seen that,” he said. “But I'm better equipped for a slugging match, so I hope you don't mind if I stick close? And perhaps make the point of the spear?”

“Wouldn't
dream
of objecting, my dear,” she said. “Isn't this where we came in, rather?”

“Ah . . . yes,” he said. “I won't say
we have to stop meeting like this
, but . . .”

Tuan Anak finished his briefing and his officers saluted in local fashion and trotted off to their bands. He looked at the two parties of foreigners—three if you counted Ishikawa and his sailors—and nodded approvingly.
His lancers were the only substantial group in the Baru Denpasaran force with much body armor, and they'd be following him straight in.

“Good,” he said, inclining his head to John. “We fight together, so friends do.”