The Protector's War (22 page)

Mother weighed four tons. Taken with her sisters she had about the same mass as a medium tank.

The hippos had been resting quietly, their big rounded feet touching lightly on the mud of the river bottom. The sound of the infant's pain, seconds later the scent and taste of its blood through air and water, sent them bellowing and shaking their heads, roaring out their challenge to the world. The savages probably hadn't much noticed the big beasts, with their mind on human prey. Now the shallow-draft boats rocked as they looked around, eyes going wide at the sight of the animals lashing the water into silt-choked foam less than half a bowshot away.

They responded as undisciplined men always would: keyed up for a fight and with weapons in their hands, presented with a fresh danger. At least half a dozen of them drew their bows and shot at the massive weight of enraged aquatic mammal.

“That's right, you dim Herbert, let Mum know who hurt her darling little babykins,” Hordle chortled.

The hippos lunged forward, mouths gaping as they headed towards the threat in a torrent of spray and hoarse squealing. The screams of the savages added to the tumult; half of them tried to pole their craft away, while the quicker-witted jumped overboard and swam for it, and a few simply stood and shrieked out their terror.

Behind him the sentry's body pulled loose from the tree and dropped. Nobody noticed, or saw Hordle's tall troll-broad shape as he spun and ran crouching through the trees and brush to his canoe. A heave and two lunging steps brought him into it, paddle driving him towards the locks. He gave a whoop and waved as two smaller shapes darted out of the lockkeeper's house and launched their own. There was no need for words in the quick, hard, coordinated work of getting the canoes over the locks and into the broadening stream below. Half an hour later only an endlessness of reeds surrounded them, waving well above their heads.

“That was inspired, Hordle,” Sir Nigel said as they paused in a broader open stretch, and leaned over to shake his hand.

“Just making use of opportunity, sir,” Hordle said, grinning broadly. “The hippo's great fat arse was there, me bow was to hand…”

Alleyne chuckled. “Got us out of a very sticky spot,” he said. “Speaking of which, I think my canoe is sinking. Those arrows, don't you see.”

His father gave it a quick look. “We can patch the other two, but this isn't worth salvaging,” he said. “I doubt we've seen the last of our friends from Netherfield, either; they seemed far too full of civic spirit to me. Alleyne, you take the bow position in my canoe. We'll redistribute the loads and discard most of the food—weapons and armor are the first priority.”

Hordle gave a mock whimper, but joined in tossing the rations overside. Even working hard, fit men could go several days without eating before they lost much strength, and at a pinch they could forage. When the damaged canoe had been stripped, he took a moment to smash a hatchet through the bottom in several places; there was no sense in giving the Brushwood Men a free gift of it.

Sir Nigel looked ahead, to where the tall gray tower of Ely's cathedral rose above the marshes. “We'll stop there to repair the canoes and take a look about,” he said. “I'd like to keep to the levels beyond, but…”

“But probably the river's changed course.” Alleyne nodded. “The canals are all above general ground level. Pity Hereward the Wake isn't about when you need him.”

 

Fwwwpt.

The paddles flashed as the first arrow went by, throwing drops of spray in arcs to the sky as the two canoes drove desperately northward through King's Lynn. The Lorings were propelling their canoe Canadian voyageur–style, kneeling in the bow and stern; Hordle sat in the rear of his, alternating strokes to either side and making about the same speed by raw power. All three men were gaunt and filthy and haggard, dark circles of exhaustion under their eyes, their uniforms caked with dried mud and stained white with rimes of sweat; fresh patches showed damp under arms and around their necks.

“They're gaining on us!” Hordle said, as the snap of bowstrings came from behind them.

Fwwwpt. Fwwwpt. Fwwwpt. Fwwwpt. Fwwwpt. Fwwwpt.

Nigel bit back a desire to shout:
Well, that's ruddy obvious, isn't it, man?

The flight of arrows hit the water of the Great Ouse only a few feet behind them, stuttering in like hail. About twenty of the savages were still on their track, but they had switched to another boat some time ago, one they'd had hidden somewhere. It was a pre-Change hull of some sort, cut down and rerigged for oars, and it was
fast.
Six long sweeps worked on either side, which let the Netherfield Avengers' chief steer and six of his band shoot. Which they were doing with dismaying frequency and accuracy; their only problem was range, and the rowers were about to solve that.

Nigel's head whipped back and forth as he looked for a spot they could land and make a stand, even as arms and shoulders and breath worked on automatically. Leftward was only flooded rubble with an occasional snag of wall standing, densely overgrown where it wasn't standing water covered in ten-foot reeds. Eastward the old medieval core of the little city still stood, as was often the case—most of it was on a natural levee, above the usual flood line. He could see the bulk of the old Hanseatic warehouse, and beyond it the barley-sugar columns and waterfront tower of Clifton House, which had been used as a lookout for ships in the old days, and the Purfleet Quay jutting out into the river beyond it. Ships sunken or canted at their moorings hid much of the shoreline, and others stood awash in the stream, their upperworks making obstacles the canoes had to dodge with loss of precious time.

Fwwwpt. Fwwwpt. Fwwwpt. Fwwwpt. Fwwwpt. Fwwwpt.

One of the shafts went into the bag of armor ahead of Nigel, a dull
chunk
sound as it hit a piece of his harness. It would be suitably ironic if one hit him went through and then stopped against the protection he couldn't wear. The rest fell all about them, plunking into the turgid water of the river and floating away head-down with their draggled flight-feathers bobbing uppermost.

“There!” he called. “Head in for the quay. We'll make a stand in the customshouse tower.”

In fact, we'll be shot down like dogs well short of there, but one has to try,
he thought, as he bent to the paddling.
What an end for the Lorings! Killed by swamp cannibals not forty miles from Cambridge…

It was Hordle's happy shout that alerted him, so total was the focus of his concentration. Two longboats were pulling out from behind the quay, a towrope lifting from the water as they did. At the end of it was a ship, a three-masted schooner with her poles bare. A banner broke out from the mizzenmast, a blue background with the stars of the Southern Cross on it in silver and a Union Jack in the top corner. The Australian flag, and nowadays that of the Tasmanian Commonwealth.

Her name was the
Pride of St. Helens
after her home port, and he'd last seen her tied up at Southampton when King Charles went aboard as part of the diplomatic formalities.

“We're not there yet!” he called, feeling an absurd impulse to laugh welling up under his breastbone, suppressing it lest it break the rhythm of breath and effort. Then, more quietly to his son: “Just like something out of Haggard, eh?”

“Not…if…we're…killed…at…the…last…minute!” Alleyne panted, timing the words to the stroke of his paddle. “That…would…be…entirely…too…ironic…and…postmodern…for…my…taste!”

Fwwwpt. Fwwwpt. Fwwwpt. Fwwwpt. Fwwwpt. Fwwwpt.

Something scored across his shoulder, white-hot chill, then pain and a trickle of blood. Alleyne almost looked around at the involuntary hiss of pain.

“Flesh wound,” Nigel bit out. “Ignore it.”

It hurt like fire, with the salt of his sweat running into it and the coarse cloth of his jacket rubbing the wound with each stroke of the paddle. The edge of the arrowhead had sliced the taut flesh of the shoulder muscle like a razor, and working it hard wasn't doing it any good at all.

“Keep paddling!”

The next volley would have them bracketed. Men were clustered at the rail of the big schooner ahead of them; then they stood back from around some piece of equipment that crouched there.

TUNNNG!

It was a deep metallic sound, like a huge saw blade being wobbled between the hands of a giant. Something went by overhead, moving in a blurred streak faster than an arrow. His head swiveled involuntarily to follow it. The line of its flight bisected one of the rowers on the savages' boat, and his head went tumbling overboard while his body thrashed and spouted.

TUNNNG-WHACK!

The sound was different this time, and the missile. A globe flew wobbling through the air, trailing smoke from a ring of tarred hemp. It went overhead as their eyes swiveled to track it, and then struck the surface and burst not far from the savages' prow. With a loud
whoosh!
the contents spread out on the water and roared into orange flame, trailing twists of black smoke into the bright summer air.

The improvised galley was a little over a hundred yards from the three fugitives, two hundred from the schooner. Both weapons looked as if they could shoot considerably farther than that, and the savages seemed to realize it. There was a brief squabble, and one of them pushed the chief aside from the tiller; the dead oarsman's body was tumbled overside, and an archer flung himself into the vacant position. One side of oars backed water, the other plunged theirs deep and heaved, and the new steersman threw his weight into the effort as well. The boat turned in its own length and began to flee south, the blades of the oars beating froth from the water.

And the chief stayed on his knees, staring at his escaping enemies, both fists clenched and shaking as he screamed a curse; the voice was thin with distance, but Nigel could hear sobs in it as well.

Beside him, Hordle had turned his canoe and come up precariously on one knee. His great yellow bow bent into a perfect arc as he aimed…

“No!” Nigel called.

The archer looked at him incredulously. “Sir, I swear I could put one—”

“No, Sergeant. Let him go.” At the wide-eyed question in the other's eyes, he answered, “We took his son.”

Larsdalen, Willamette Valley, Oregon

March 21st, 2007 AD—Change Year Nine

“H
akkaa paalle!”

Mike Havel screamed the ancient war cry of his ancestors as he pounced—or the war cry of about half of them, if you subtracted the Norwegians, Swedes and Anishinabe-Ojibwa from the Finns. The backsword blurred in a glittering arc, a running cut that started with the point forward, made a wide looping flourish around the head and slammed down with the advancing foot. It was a very powerful attack, but a bit slow.

Unless you had the strength and reflexes to do it very, very fast…

Crack-tinnng!

The surface of his opponent's targe was there, precisely sloped to shed the steel with minimum transfer of force—which didn't mean
no
transfer; the armored figure went back a quick sliding step to avoid being rocked off balance. A weapon just like his licked out in a economical underarm stab; he beat the blade aside with his own, flicking the parry from the wrist and then a double cut to both sides of the neck. Backswords were about a yard long, single-edged with a basket hilt to guard the hand, suited alike to a swift thrust or a solid smashing cut.

“Hakkaa paalle!”
he shouted again, driving his opponent back ten feet in three seconds, the point darting at knee and sword arm and neck.

“Hakkaa paalle!”

That barking shriek meant “Hack them down!” and the Outfit had copied it from him. Four centuries ago the same war cry had rung out behind the banners of Gustav Adolf, the Lion of the North, on battlefields from the Baltic to the Danube, from Russia to France. So had the Church's special prayer:
From the terrible Finns, good Lord deliver us!
Now the Bearkillers had made it as dreaded in post-Change Oregon as it had been when the Suomi swarmed out of their forests to lay half of Europe in ashes.

The two fighters were toe-to-toe, moving in a complex dance of movement too blurring fast for an observer to follow unless they were already expert themselves—a crashing skirling
tingggg
of steel on steel and
thwack
of sword on shield and the occasional duller sound of a blade making contact with armor.

At last he locked the other's sword with his, hilt-to-hilt. For a moment they strove, legs churning like stags; then he got room for a buffeting slam with his shield. The other armored figure went down with a crash, and he slid forward catlike to present the tip of his sword before her face.

“OK, you're still getting better,” Pamela Larsson—nee Arnstein—gasped. “I admit it.”

“Nowhere to go but up,” Havel replied. “You're the one who did this shit
before
the Change, step-mom-in-law.”

She shoulder-rolled back to her feet. He was panting too, in a controlled fashion, lungs working like bellows. He'd been drilling hard for hours before he started a round of practice bouts; the Bearkillers usually did, on the assumption that you weren't going to be lily-fresh when the manure hit the winnowing fan. And actually fighting in this Renaissance cut-and-thrust style with fifty pounds of gear on you was brutal physical labor, worse than cracking rocks with a sledgehammer, plus with an opponent at Pam's level you had to go to ten-tenths of capacity every second. The slightest holding back meant defeat.

“Besides which, I'm starting to slow down a bit,” Pamela said. “Hell, I'm
forty-one
now, Mike, and it was a
real
struggle getting back into shape after the last baby. I don't think I've got much left to teach you.”

Signe Larsson looked over from where she'd been practicing lunges at a leather target hanging from a timber frame, with an apprentice pulling on a rope to make it swing unpredictably. The point went home with a hard
crack
every time, aimed at a spot six inches behind the man-shaped rawhide cutout.

“You still beat me most matches, Pam. Mind you, I've had
three
babies to your pair since the Change,” she said. “Granted, the twins were a twofer time-wise, but the principle's the same.”

“
You're
twenty-seven,” Pamela said. “You recover faster. I'll keep sparring with you—unlike your maniac of a husband, you're not a third again heavier than me and strong enough to bend horseshoes with your hands. Whacking great bruises distract you from the finer points of swordplay. Also childbirth's easier on you because you've got better hips for it than I do.”

“You calling me wide-assed, Oh Wicked Stepmother?”

“Compared to my skinny backside and snake hips, you've got the Great Butt of China,” Pamela said, grinning as she pulled off her practice helmet. “Or Sweden.”

“There's Astrid, though…” Signe said, with a sly smile. “
She
doesn't mind sparring with Mike.”

“Your younger sister is a goddamned
mutant,
” Pam grumbled. “Some rogue virus infected her with nonhuman DNA.”

The helm had a mask of thin steel rods across the face, rather than the simple nasal bar of combat gear. The face beneath it was slender like the woman's long whipcord body, olive-skinned, with a beak of a nose and large hazel eyes; sweat plastered a lock of dark brown hair with russet highlights to her forehead.

Mike Havel let one of the apprentices help him out of his armor—he could do it himself, but it was slow and awkward; putting it on was much easier, since gravity helped there. Then he stripped off the sopping gambeson and leaned back on a bench with his back against a rough board wall, a towel around his neck and a mug of cold water in one hand, feeling the heat come off him in the cool damp air like a horse steaming after a hard ride. He'd built what Pam called the Salle d'Armes in the same style as a timber-frame barn, to give the maximum open space; the high roof of the giant building was watertight, but the plank walls let in a lot of light and weather, and the floor was packed dirt—this was where the garrison and apprentices did a lot of their advanced-skill training in winter.

Bitchin' cold sometimes, too,
he thought with satisfaction, fondling the ears of a hound that came over and laid her head in his lap.

“Good dog, Louhi,” he added, as she slapped the ground with her tail.

There was very little point in learning to fight unless you made the training conditions as realistic as possible, and the enemy—the dirty dog—often refused to meet you at a convenient time and place. Right now the weather was good, and so most of the action was in the broad fields around the building, lit by a high, hazy blue sky; only the foot-fencing and unarmed-combat classes were inside. On the bright green grass beyond riders galloped by targets, loosing arrows from their stiff recurved bows, or using sword or lance; sometimes at rings suspended on ropes, or trying to pick wooden pegs out of the ground, or at straw figures—that served to train the horses out of their fear of charging home, too. Mock mounted combat was done under careful supervision, riders hammering at each other as the mounts circled and snapped; the training was as much for the horse as the rider.

Not far away a section of newly mustered military apprentices were starting to sweat their way towards the coveted A-list status; stretching, tumbling and running courses in weighted armor, working out with free weights or practicing stances before some tall mirrors. A dozen more staggered in from the ever-loathed cross-country run in armor and pack; that included a trip up and down the steep scarp behind Larsdalen, popularly known as “Satan's Staircase.”

Havel grinned nostalgically as he listened to the distance-muffled scream of the training-cadre instructors: “…stop puking, Apprentice Latterby! You can puke on your
own
time! You make
me
want to puke, the way you'll bring disgrace on my beloved Outfit! You idle little maggots aren't home on Daddy's manor anymore! Bearkillers can fight on horseback, on foot, or while we fucking
swim
, and we don't get tired. The enemy gets tired and then we
kill
their sorry ass.
Move! Move!
”

It took him back—back to Parris Island, in fact; he'd managed to acquire several other graduates or Camp Pendleton alumni as part of his training staff.

It'll be interesting to see how performance goes when everyone's the product of the apprentice program. They've already lots of motivation; getting on the A-list means climbing into the top drawer. You can throw
anything
at these kids and they'll still kill themselves trying.

There was a damp earthy smell; pine-wood sweating tar, old sweat, horses, leather and metal; the noise was booted feet on dirt, hoof-fall from outside, the clash of metal and wood, grunts of effort—it all reminded him of a very martial health center, the sort they'd improvised in the Iraqi desert back in ninety-one, waiting for the dance to start. By now it had become homey, almost comforting.

A little stir went through the watchers as two men came in. Havel looked up, dipping another mug of water from the plastic barrel fastened to one of the Salle's posts.

“Hi, Ken,” he said, nodding to his father-in-law. “Eric,” to Signe's brother.

Father and son made their greetings. Eric Larsson straddled a bench, elbows on knees. He was Signe Larsson's twin and as tall as their father, several inches over six feet; broad-shouldered and long-limbed, but rangier in build than his male parent. Much like Havel, in fact, but scaled up—a tiger to the Bearkiller bossman's leopard, and with a similar smooth ease of movement. Scars showed as white lines in his short blond beard, or as seams against the tanned skin of hands and neck. When they'd met just before the Change, the younger Larsson had been a sullen jock teenager—but even then, he hadn't known the meaning of “quit.”

I
thought
he'd turn out to be a dangerous man,
Havel thought, reading the calm blue eyes.
We could have used him in the Corps. A natural for Force Recon. Well, he's had a lot of pounding on the anvil to test the metal since the Change. All that does not kill us, makes us stronger, as Conan said…that
was
Conan, wasn't it?

“We scouted up north around McMinnville, as per plan,” Eric said. “While Will took a troop into the Amity Hills, visiting and distracting any attention headed our way—”

Havel grinned. “Good news there, if you haven't heard. The Brigittine monks have decided to tell Arminger's pet pope in Portland to go to hell, and get square with Abbot Dmowski. Your father-in-law sort of persuaded them.”

Proving Will Hutton is twice the diplomat I'll ever be,
he added to himself.

“They've got a good little fighting force and some useful farms and craft-workers and they're right between us and the enemy,” he went on aloud.

“That
is
good news,” Eric said, but his face stayed grim. “The word from McMinnville itself is worse than we thought, though.”

“It
is
a new castle? Not just an earthwork fort?”

“It's a fucking nightmare—bad as the one at Gervais, and bigger. South of town.”

“Just north of the Yamhill River, on the road by the old gauging station, I'll bet?”

Eric looked mildly startled. “Yeah, Mike. How'd you guess?”

“It's where I'd put it,” he replied absently, his eyes hooded in thought as he called up terrain and distance. “Kills two birds with one stone: plugs the gap between the Coast Range and the Amity Hills, and gives them a base that's perfectly placed to launch raids on our farming country down south at Amityville and Rickreall; it'll be staring right down our throats. On the good side, it probably scares the bejayzus out of those idiots in Whiteson. Neutrality, my ass…they'll
have
to make up their minds now, or at least as soon as the walls start to rise.”

Signe cleared her throat. “Careful how you go at the neutrals, Mike. Honey and vinegar and all that.”

Havel shrugged and grinned. “Yup. I can control my natural disgust with their yellow-bellied wavering, you bet.” He turned his head back to her brother. “Details?”

“They're working on the foundations now, but you can see the outlines. It's concrete again; no more of those telephone-pole motte-and-bailey specials that burned so nice. Ferroconcrete. Accent on the
ferro.
We got close enough to see that they're stacking I-beam as well as rebar; they must have a couple of hundred workers on twenty-four-hour shifts. Josh”—that was Josh Sanders, an ex-lumberjack and ex-Seabee and their expert on field fortifications—“got detailed sketches and extrapolated what the finished product will look like, based on the way they're digging and standard Protectorate practice. Says he'll debrief tomorrow, he's working up his notes.”