The Protector's War (36 page)

One of the women buried her face in her hands and began to weep. Juniper suppressed an impulse to give her a hug—more likely to scare than not—and signaled Melissa to lead her away; she'd probably feel better close to the children anyway. The others seemed to slump where they sat.

“We made it,” the dark man murmured. “Before God, we actually made it.” He crossed himself again. “Even at peril of our souls, it's worth it.”

Juniper sighed. “First, Mr…. Lopez, isn't it?” He nodded. “We've got freedom of religion here; and we'll help you pass on to the university people, or the Bearkillers, or the good monks at Mt. Angel, if you prefer. Frankly I've been sort of embarrassed at how many people here have taken up the Craft, but there are still Christians among us…Why
didn't
you head for Mt. Angel, by the way? It's closer.”

“I think of that first, but too many damn soldiers in the way,” he said frankly. “Those
hijos,
they kill us all slow, they catch us, even the
niños
.”

Sam grunted agreement. “The Protectorate's got continuous cavalry patrols along there—and the border's well marked.”

Miguel nodded; he was a stocky brown-skinned man with shaggy hair so dark that it had blue-black highlights. “
Si.
So Jeff”—he indicated his lanky Anglo companion—” say we should go west first, then turn south before the river, around Salem. Nobody go near there much, too scared.
Territorio bandido.
Some of the bandidos, they do things for the Baron, too, but we figure we hide better than from soldiers.”

“That was wise of you,” Juniper said.

She flicked a hand, and Astrid and Eilir sat down on the benches across from the fugitives. Chuck went and poured mugs of beer for everyone, then resumed his stance a little behind Juniper, watchful without being tense—this
might
be a trick. With four of the most formidable warriors in the Willamette Valley at hand to protect her, Juniper didn't feel particularly threatened. She didn't want the fugitives to feel pressured either, and wasn't sure whether having Chuck behind her in full fig was a good idea, but
he
certainly thought so and she didn't want to argue about it.

Instead she teased the story out of the three of them. Miguel Lopez had actually been a resident of the town of Gervais before the Change and had managed to survive hiding near it, which was a rarity; his family had arrived a few years before from Jalisco in Mexico, migrant farmworkers like many in that town. He'd moved around hiding from Eaters and refugees and the plagues—living mainly on a pickup load of cracked oats, livestock feed his family had hidden in a woodlot—come out late in the first year, and started a small place of his own, before the Protector's men arrived.

“We didn' fight much,” he said bleakly. “Too many of them. And they promise to protect us against Eaters and bandits, get us seed and tools, at first it sound pretty good. Then—” He touched his neck where the collar had left raw patches and calluses.

His friend Jeff Dawson had been a high school student in a Portland suburb—and as he confessed, lucky to end up in one of the Protector's labor gangs rather than driven out to die with so many others. He'd come to Gervais as part of a group sent to help construct the castle, and stayed as a general worker around the place.

“But I wasn't going to take it forever,” he said. “And then there was Crystal.”

That, evidently, was his sister, who was sixteen or so and strikingly pretty, with wide blue eyes and long tawny-colored hair; she looked a little younger than her age, and she was shorter than Juniper would have expected from her brother's six feet.

She'd have been about seven or eight when the Change came,
Juniper reminded herself.
Probably undernourished since, which would limit her growth. And she can't be as much of an innocent as she looks, or she wouldn't be alive, no matter how much her brother tried to help her.

“She was working in the castle,” Jeff said. “That bastard Mack, he started sniffing around her.”

He flushed and his hands clenched into fists on the table. Juniper raised an eyebrow, though she'd heard rumor and reports. Jeff couldn't speak; it was Miguel who went on:

“
Malo,
that one.
Bastardo.
He don't just bother girls, he hurt them. The Baron, he don't give a damn.”

Why am I not surprised?
Juniper thought.

So far it wasn't an unfamiliar story; they'd had hundreds of similar refugees. But…

“But Crystal brought us something,” she said softly. “Something important. Important enough for Baron Liu to come after it in person, with such a small escort, as if keeping it all quiet was important to him. Very important.”

Sam handed her the papers. They were bound, making a bundle about the size of a hardcover book, but the spine was held with steel post-and-clamp fasteners, allowing leaves to be removed or added. She riffled quickly through it; mostly columns of numbers, written in a small neat hand—someone from Arminger's own chancery, at a guess, and they might be able to identify who from the fist.

“Sam?” she said.

“I'd wager it's an Altendorf substitution code,” he said. “The numbers'd refer to the pages, to lines, and then letters within the lines. They're a right nightmare to decode if you don't have the book, because if they're careful they don't even give things away with word frequencies—
the
and
and
and bumf like that. I'm no code breaker, but I do know enough to recognize that.”

He leaned over and turned the book to the back pages. Her lips shaped a silent whistle; those were maps. Maps of the central and southern Willamette, and the coastline—one of Newport was very detailed, with all the post-Change corrections, and that was the coastal town closest to Corvallis. It had a good pass over the mountains, too. A final foldout map covered the whole of western and central Oregon as far as Umatilla, with copious notes in the same frustrating columns of numbers.

No convenient arrows and dates. Pity the buggers aren't that stupid. All this tells us is that they're up to no good.

And there was a printed sheet of numbered paragraphs in the back cover of the booklet. There always was, in the Protector's publications intended for his overlord cadre.

Number One read:
If I capture my worst enemies, I will not stand over them gloating and boasting and telling them all the details of my secret plans and then keep them alive for torture in an escape-proof dungeon. Instead I will just kill them instantly.

For the first time the girl spoke, in a soft shy voice. “I was in the Baron's office, hiding in a closet—I knew we were going to run that night, and I wanted to steal some of the new silver money.” A flash of anger: “He owed us all of it and more!”

Then she licked her lips. “And then the Baron and…and Mack came in, and they talked, and he put this in the desk, and locked it. When they left, I came out and took it.”

Juniper's eyebrows went up. “I thought he locked it?” she said.

Crystal smiled, and reached into her blouse. She was wearing something like a housedress cinched over culottes, ragged with her trip through the brush but looking as if it had started out much better than what the others of her party wore. When her hand came out, it held a small sack of soft leather, held closed by a thong threaded into eyelets around the top. That chinked with a musical and—literally—silvery sound as she dropped it on the table.

“I had a copy of the key. He put it down where I could reach it, weeks ago, and I had Jeff copy it.”

Jeff grinned sheepishly; it made him look more his real midtwenties age. “I sort of learned how in shop class,” he said.

Juniper sipped her mead and thought. Then Crystal cleared her throat. “When the Baron was talking…he said something very strange.” Juniper nodded, and the girl went on: “He said it all depended on the Tayz Maniacs.”

“Tayz Maniacs?” Juniper said, puzzled.

“And the Brits.”

Brits I understand, but what are…wait a bit. Take out his accent and his sense of humor—so-called.
She'd always had a good ear for regional patterns of speech, and Eddie Liu's was purest New Yawk, without even a trace of Cantonese; his mother had been American born of remote Polish ancestry.
What would it sound like if Liu said it?

“Tasmanians?” she said. “But that…what would he mean by that?”

Near Amity, Willamette Valley, Oregon

May 12th, 2007—Change Year Nine

M
ichael Havel reined in and aside, dead weeds and new grass crackling under Charger's hooves. The big gelding halted in the lee of a house that was deserted but still standing, a large frame bungalow with a small red-painted barn whose walls showed gaps; someone's dream place in the country, its shattered windows gaping like eyes weeping for broken dreams. Young saplings from the ornamental trees had overrun lawn and garden, providing welcome cover. Beside him Will Hutton flung up his right hand, clenched into a fist inside its mail-backed leather gauntlet, and the little column of mounted Bearkillers came to a halt with a sway and a surge, the heads of their long lances safely hidden from anything beyond the crest line ahead as well. This was about as far north as the Outfit patrolled regularly and well beyond the settled zone, but nobody would take too much notice of the horse soldiers—except to keep well-hidden, in some instances.

Lancers have a lot of punch, but they're not what you'd call inconspicuous.

Hiding still had its uses—this operation was one—but visibility wasn't equivalent to death, the way it was when he'd learned the pre-Change art of war.

Though hiding
armies
is still a good idea, and easier than it was, no radar or sensors beyond Eyeball Mark One. But when the actual killing starts, you have to run right up to the other guy to noogie on him and he can just stand there giving you the finger until you do. It
still
feels weird.

Havel and Hutton and Signe dismounted along with Eric Larsson and his wife Luanne, handing off their reins. The patrol got their mounts into the shelter of the building. A very good eye might see the trail they'd left cross-country from some distance, but the rolling land made that unlikely. So did the combination of shaggy second growth and forest that covered a lot of it.

Havel nodded to the patrol commander and went walking forward with the others, then stooping; finally they went to their bellies as they came to the ridge ahead. That was no knife-edge crest, just a long low swelling that rose perhaps fifty feet above the level of the countryside and well below the Amity Hills to their west. A sagging board fence grown up in brush and vines marked it, and a few tall firs; they crawled into the undergrowth carefully, pushing forward with helmeted heads and armored shoulders against the thick spiky growth. An occasional muttered curse sounded as a thorn or twig slipped between the rings of chainmail and through the quilted padding beneath.

Then they all uncased their binoculars and pushed back their bowl helmets—the nasal bar made using field glasses impossible unless you did that—and looked through the last screen of tall grass and brush towards the north. There was a burned-out farmhouse not far down the slope, snags of wall reaching up through rampant vine and brush. The ruin stood in a clump of trees; those that lived at all were half dead from the heat of years past, their bare limbs stretching towards the overgrown mound with their other sides in leaf, quivering in the mild breeze from the north. A broken-down barn stood beyond, and after that neglected fields running down to a creek lined with trees; beyond
that
was another stretch of burgeoning wilderness; the edge of the Protectorate's plowland and pasture was out of sight at the north end of this stretch, what used to be called the Dayton Prairie.

Two roads ran north-south down the lowland to his right, the easternmost crossing the river on a bridge still intact; someone had gone to the trouble of clearing off the vehicles from that one.

“And that's where the Crossing Tavern is,” he said. “Just this side of where Webfoot Road crosses the creek.”

“Where the innkeeper's feeding travelers to Crusher Bailey's gang for a cut of the take. The ones who won't be missed too bad,” Will Hutton replied grimly.

“Let's not jump to conclusions, Unc' Will,” Signe said. “Crusher's gang
is
working this area, but we don't know their MO and we're not sure the innkeeper's in it with them. My people haven't been able to find out anything one way or another.”

Havel pulled a grass stem and stuck it meditatively between his teeth, enjoying the fresh sweetness and inhaling the welcome smell of new spring growth crushed under the rings of his hauberk.

My darling wife
has
come a long way,
he thought, grinning inwardly.
She was a
vegetarian before the Change, and now she's head of the CIA, as well as a mean hand with a backsword. Well, we probably suit a lot better than I would with Juney Mackenzie—that woman's conscience can make you feel
real
uncomfortable.

“You been able to find out what the hell the Protector is doing up the Columbia?” he said.

“He's back, but not with most of the troops,” she said. “Haven't been able to find out what he was doing. He just ordered a task force together and sailed out of Portland, leaving the Seal with his wife. Then he got back two days ago, headed straight out of Portland west with an escort, and while he was on the road there
Sandra
called out a hundred crossbowmen and fifty knights and their banners and sent them east over the Willamette—towards Molalla, remember? Arminger went after them hot-foot. Must be something important going on over there. Those visitors of his were involved.”

“Can you guess at anything?”

“Well, his daughter's staying with Molalla. The guy was a Blood before the Change, name of Jabar, but he's more sensible than a lot of Arminger's baronage. Firm supporter of the Protector, worse luck.”

“Well, whatever's going on over there, it
does
make it the perfect time to take care of Crusher Bailey,” he mused.

He looked carefully at the roadhouse that stood just south of the creek and the bridge, nearly hidden by the trees. He'd never been up here himself, not this far eastward at least; no sense in giving the Protector a free chance at a coup de main. There was a fair amount of traffic on the road; the Protectorate and the other Valley communities were formally at peace despite the occasional skirmish, and everyone benefited from trade in the meantime. He could see individuals on foot, mounted on bicycles or on horseback, carts of wildly varied construction ranging from wooden replicas of nineteenth-century models to cut-down pickups, small herds of sheep or cattle…

The ridge they were using for cover was the last easternmost outlier of the Amity Hills, themselves the northern fringe of the Eolas; none of the heights were over a few hundred feet, but in sharp contrast to the flat open land ahead and to his right. For a while he examined the territory, and the wisp of smoke rising from the sheet-steel chimneys of the way-stop.

“It's on the south bank of…Holdridge Creek, right?” he said.

Hutton nodded. “That runs east into Palmer Creek, an' that goes north to meet the West Fork and join the Yamhill at Dayton, then that hits the Willamette past the big east-trending bend.”

The Texan pointed slightly north of east: “That bit there, though, the sloughs over a couple-two miles thataway, they're a lot worse than they were before the Change, comparin' the maps to the firsthand look I had last week. Swamp and nothin' but. Braided channels and islands, all shifted around. What roads an' bridges there were are damn near all gone and we couldn't tell which wasn't yet, not without being pretty noticeable.”

Eric whistled agreement; he'd been on that downriver scouting mission too, drifting along disguised as a bargeload of grain.

“No shit!” he said. “Part of that area was a state park, wetland preserve. Lordy”—a trick of tongue he'd picked up from his Texas-born father-in-law—” but it's wet now! A duck could drown in there if he didn't know the pathways.”

“Yeah, and the bad guys can hide out in it,” Havel said. “They
do
know 'em.”

Signe chuckled. “It's like the Debatable Land,” she said.

“Que?”
Havel said.

“Something my esteemed stepmother mentioned. Pam says a long time ago there used to be this stretch of ground between England and Scotland; they both claimed it, and neither one would let the other put in its laws and sheriffs. So there
wasn't
any law—not even as much as the rest of the border had—and outlaws made their home there.”

“Sort of like the Hole in the Wall gang,” Hutton said meditatively.

Will Hutton had been a noted wrangler and horse tamer before the Change, with a small ranch in Texas and customers for his horses all over the Western states; a delivery had caught him in Idaho that March nine years ago. He'd never graduated high school, but he was widely read in Western history and anything to do with horses.

“Yeah,” Havel said. “Only this Crusher Bailey bastard's a lot nastier than Butch and Sundance, and too many of his hits are around here. His gang's not going to go on raiding our people and stealing our cattle and horses. Now that I've eyeballed the terrain, I say we go with the plan. The Protector's barons are having some sort of kerfuffle over on the east side of the river, a problem with raiders or something like that—less chance they'll try to interfere right now. There won't be a better time.”

Signe sighed. “Yeah, and Arminger still has some of his cadre at Bonneville, after the whatever-it-was he was doing up the Columbia. Let's get moving, then.”

“You sure you want to do this, sis?” Luanne Larsson—nee Hutton—said. “I thought you were…”

“Lost it,” Signe replied shortly. “It was only a month along, anyway.”

Eric grumbled in turn as they turned and slid down towards the Bearkillers waiting in the swale. “I still say you should let us do it, bossman.”

Havel snorted. “It's not so easy to get known by sight without pictures or TV, but there still aren't many six-foot-two blond guys with wives who look like Luanne wandering around the Valley. You two are both pretty well known by name and general description this close to Larsdalen. People would be a lot more likely to twig if they saw you side-by-side.”

Oregon had been a pretty white-bread state before the Change, particularly outside the cities, and the survivors had tended to be rural folk. You saw the odd Oriental around, some blacks and rather more Hispanics, but all were few enough that they stood out. Some contrasts would just attract the eye and prompt the memory; Luanne's chocolate-colored features were a compromise between Hutton's blunt face and the strong-boned Tejano-Mexican comeliness of her mother Angelica, all the more striking next to her husband's Viking looks. It was a pity; they wanted a woman along on this because it tended to disarm observers a little, and Luanne's skill set would have been perfect. Signe would do nearly as well, though, with a little cosmetic work.

“You just want all the fun,” Eric said.

He grinned as he spoke, but his eyes flickered to his sister in momentary unease; this would be dangerous in ways that a straight-up fight wasn't.

Havel shrugged. “It beats reading and annotating reports on sugar-beet production and having meetings about management of the mint, but then so does getting nibbled to death by giant cockroaches.”

He
did
feel a bit guilty about taking over this mission—it was really a job for an NCO—but…
Time I got away from home for a little. Maybe I'll be appreciated more that way when I get back! And anyway, the Pentagon's ruins and bones. We're back to kings leading from the front.

“And we have to do it smart,” he said. “Riding in with our lances all shiny and bright, they'll just run away again—plus the Protector's men might object; like Eric says, they claim this area too. We don't want to start that war just yet. So…let's waddle and quack like decoy ducks. Might be fun, at that.”

“So you admit it's an abuse of rank for personal gratification,” Eric said.

“Shut
up!
” Luanne said, then snorted and rolled her eyes. “Signe's got her an actual reason to do this, since her fellah's going, but
will
you please stop volunteerin' to get me kilt, husband? Men! It's like you're fighting over the right to muck out the stables!”

“It's a dirty job, but—” Havel and Eric began in unison, then grinned at each other. Luanne turned to her father and threw up her hands in exasperation:

“Idiots, every one, starting with Dumb Blondie here. I make an exception for you, Daddy.”

Hutton shook his head. “You're too easy on me, honey pie. When I was Eric's age, I was still ridin' roughstock at rodeos and it don't come no more stupid than that; the brains kick in when you get past forty and slow down a bit. You should be gettin' to your years of discretion soon, Mike, if you live that long.”

Ouch.

 

They'd hidden the decoy material several miles back, in an overgrown orchard just south of the Amityville–Hopewell road, with an observer in a tree up on Walnut Hill to make sure nobody was snooping. A group of senior apprentices waited there, and they helped Havel and Signe out of their war harness—you had to be a bit of a contortionist to shed a hauberk by yourself. The slow fall of white blossom in the mild wind made it more pleasant than usual.