The Protector's War (42 page)

“Mike!” Signe said. “They're getting close!”

He moved back; the shooter behind the cat was uncomfortably accurate, and they would have a view of the interior when it was shoved right to the window, so the only safe spot would be plastered against the wall between the window and the door. Then both cats were up against the windows, blocking them and leaving the interior of the porn store lit only by the triangular patch of light from the broken corner of ceiling. He dropped his bow, swept out his backsword, tugged at the leather strap that held his targe over his back and slipped his forearm through the loop and grip as it swung down. Signe was doing the same; they waited on either side of the door. Behind them the horses moved, shifting and rolling their eyes at the noise and stink.

“Well, it's been a lot of fun,” Havel said, making himself grin at her in the dimness.

“We still live!” she shot back; from the sound, it was only half a joke.

“Axes! Axes!” Crusher Bailey's voice called. “Shooters ready for when the door comes down! Let's have the lobster out of the shell!”

Metal beat on metal, and the door sagged. “First after you with the woman, Crusher!” someone shouted.

The door fell, half-in and half-out of the opening. Someone used the hook on the back of a guisarme to haul it back; it fell flat on the steps with an echoing crash, and Havel squinted against the flood of brightness. A blast of arrows and bolts came through, smacking into the plaster of the interior wall and standing like bristles, or punching through into the corridor beyond, but they would be shooting blind. The room would be very dark from the outside.

The shafts were intended to drive the defenders back from the opening; a first bandit ran in, shield up—and ran straight into the metal racks propped up over the space where the door had been, screaming a curse as his arms tangled in them. Havel danced in and thrust through an opening, a motion as precise and swift as the flicking of a frog's tongue. The point ran into the man's throat with a series of crisp popping and rending sounds, felt up the hilt as much as heard. Signe's sword flashed past that one's shoulder at the next, an overarm highline thrust that slammed the spring-steel point under the brim of a helmet hammered out of sheet metal. It grated and crunched against facial bones, and she freed it with a jerk.

Then they both stepped aside as more arrows came through—many bounced off the frame of the racks. Hands used that cover to drag the bodies out, and the rocking door that made the footing uncertain. There was plenty of blood to keep it slippery.

“Guard my left!” Havel said.

The bristling heads of a dozen polearms came next, spearpoints and heavy glaives and crude guisarmes with hooks, probing for the frames to push the obstruction back, but that meant the bandits were packed shoulder-to-shoulder and blocked their own bowmen. Havel and Signe stepped neatly in from the sides of the doorway; he broke one spearpoint off with a smashing blow of his shield's metal-rimmed edge, and thrust at the hands gripping another in the doorway, making one bandit drop his polearm with a clatter and a cry of alarm. Signe chopped at others, and wood splintered under her edge. Havel pressed in closer to strike at the men rather than the weapons, but that meant the bandits could see him too. Points probed for him from the second rank; they drove him out of sword range amid a volley of scatological curses and vicious threats, and the others heaved to move the piled racks.

Havel snarled and skipped free as they tilted and rocked back into the room with a jangling crunch and screech. A bold thief came through under the spearpoints, stooping and holding his shield over his head, sword ready.

“Hakkaa paalle!”
The war shriek filled the dusty room, and Signe echoed it.

“Shit,
Bearkillers!
” someone shouted, panic in his tones.

The bandit ignored it and thrust underarm with his double-edged weapon; Havel caught it on his blade, let the swords slide together until the hilts locked, and then twisted it with all the strength of wrist and shoulder. The thief's eyes were blue in a stubble-cheeked face. They flared wide, with pain and shock at the raw strength of the arm opposing his. The outlaw sword flew free, and Havel whipped his hilt up and across like a set of huge brass knuckles. Bone cracked and the man wailed, dropping as he pawed at his face. Havel knocked a spearpoint aside with his targe and another with his sword, stamping down with a spurred heel; the moaning cut off abruptly. A thrust struck him in the stomach, not hard enough to penetrate the mail beneath the leather, but winding him. He snarled, chopped sideways with the edge of the targe and cut backhanded with his sword into a neck. Blood sprayed into his face, salt and iron, but there were just too
many
of them—

Then there came a thunder of hooves from outside, and a huge ringing battle cry: “St. George for England!
A Loring! A Loring!”

“What the
hell?
” Havel shouted.

Dun Juniper, Willamette Valley, Oregon

April 15th, 2007 AD—Change Year Nine

W
hap-tunnng!

The string slapped at Juniper Mackenzie's bracer, and the longbow surged and hummed. The arrow snapped out, rising in a smooth sweet arch, seeming to hesitate at the peak as the bright afternoon sun struck the honed edges of its point, and then plunged faster and faster down towards the mark. That was a circle drawn on the grass of the meadow with an eight-foot set upright timber at its center; a two-inch-broad white stripe was painted down the middle of the post. She could
feel
the connection between them, arrow and target, bow and archer, all one in a perfect harmony, like the wind and the blue camas flowers themselves.

Thunk!

The sound echoed back, faint with distance as the arrow slammed into the massive fir-wood baulk two hundred and fifty yards away. Juniper's hand was already swinging back over her shoulder. It paused at the empty quiver; she stopped, blinked, looked around, jarred out of a centered focus that made her one with the world and her task.

“Forty-five shafts, two minutes forty-six seconds,” Sam Aylward said loudly.

A couple of people clapped. Juniper held her bow in her left hand and worked her right arm to get the strain out of muscle and tendon, then switched off to do the other. Shooting this far and fast and hard was strictly for battle drill. When you went into the woods after venison the range was usually less than fifty yards, plus the target ran away if you missed—not towards you with shield up and a sword ready to spill your guts.

The thought was melancholy, but she sternly forbade herself much nostalgia about the peacefulness she'd known before the Change. That had been sheer personal luck. War had happened then too, just not around
here,
not on her doorstep. But wherever it happened was
somebody's
home, and the consequences weren't all that different whether it was AK-47s in Somalia or halberds in post-Change Oregon.

I knew I lived in a lucky country in those days, but not quite
how
lucky,
she thought wryly.
And this is a day for practice, not real fighting, sure. Lighten up, girl!

Most of the folk of Dun Juniper were out this Sunday morning with their bows, and more up from Dun Fairfax, in clumps from the big truck gardens near the millpond at the east end of the benchland meadows to the beehives and tanner's yard at the west. There was a sweet smell of crushed grasses in the air, and underneath it the cool resinous scent of the great mountain forests stretching eastwards, together with smells she'd stopped noticing—woodsmoke both fresh and soaked into people's hair and clothing, manure, lye and tallow boiling to make soap, tanned leather, horse sweat, a whiff of charcoal and hot metal from a smithy inside the dun's walls.

Aylward handed her the gold watch he'd been using to time her; an old-fashioned oval type with a chain and a cover that snapped open to show a tiny portrait picture. The heirloom held a black-and-white photograph sixty years old and considerably younger than the instrument itself: a faded portrait of her grandmother, a sad-looking, care-worn woman in a long dress, with a shawl over her head and an infant girl in her arms—that being Juniper's mother, fresh from her baptism. Achill Island had been a hard bitter place to make a living in those days, and Juniper's own mother had left it early as most youngsters did. She'd been waiting tables in a London pub when she met Juniper's father, serving there as a sergeant in the USAF in the sixties.

No surprise that Gran looks twice her age. The wonder is that an Achill fisherman could hang on to a gold watch, and still eat!

Juniper took it back and tucked it into a special padded hard-leather pouch on her belt; the considerable sentimental value aside, it was too useful to risk, literally irreplaceable—and it couldn't be repaired if anything serious happened to it, either.

The less advanced pupils were shooting at circles on tripods or deer-shaped outlines propped up against fence posts; many of
those
archers were as young as six or seven. They included Rudi Mackenzie, just now getting grabbed and rolled in the grass by a gang of friends, most of them a year or two older, after he sank another bull's-eye with his light child's bow.

It's proud I am of him…but…
It was a little disturbing just
how
good he was at such things.
And him so young!

It was Clan law that everyone between six and sixty had to practice at arms unless they were medically unfit, but a budding custom already stronger than law meant archery had become the Mackenzies' favorite leisure-time sport as well. There were practical advantages, but shooting skillfully with the longbow had also become part of being a Mackenzie—a badge of identity like the kilt back in the first Change Year. And group identity had a fearsome power, in this new-old world where you worked and lived with the same faces every day and a mile was a long way.

I understand what “clan” actually
meant
in those times a lot better than I used to,
she thought.
I understand the old songs with my bones now, don't I just?

“Score of forty-five, forty, twenty-eight, eight,” a boy said, trotting up breathlessly with Juniper's arrows; he'd had to clamber over a board fence on the way.

All her arrows had landed within the twelve-foot circle around the post, forty within the six-foot, twenty-eight had hit the post, and eight had been in the vertical white strip—“splitting the wand,” to use the ancient term.

“Seventy-eight out of a possible one hundred,” Aylward said. “Congratulations, Lady Juniper.”

She grinned and waved at the clapping, and held the bow she'd named after the Greek archer-goddess overhead. Then she stepped back a few paces to check the heads and fletching on her shafts, wipe the broadheads and bodkins clean of dirt and slide them back into her quiver. A seventy-eight score wasn't bad at all, well above average. There were plenty of things she liked better than archery; from meditation to weaving…but archery could be a form of meditation itself, and with her mind and soul still full of the singing peace from last night's Sabbat circle in the sacred wood, she wasn't surprised that mind and hand had knit together so well.

Astrid Larsson was up next in this group, the only one on the field not using a longbow. Another thought struck Juniper. “Just how many archers do we have, exactly, now?” she said.

She leaned on her bowstave to watch Astrid, with the lower antler-horn tip resting on the toe of her boot. “A little over two thousand, isn't it?”

“In a full levy?” Sam Aylward said. “Twenty-two hundred and seventy-three as of the muster this last Imbolc. That's everyone who passed the minimum standards test for field service, of course. I'd rather the qualification test was tougher, but quantity has a certain quality too. You don't need to split the wand when you're shooting at men packed in shoulder to shoulder and sixteen deep, or cavalry moving boot-to-boot.”

She shook her head. “And we had, what, forty-five for that first brush with the Protector's men? How we've grown!”

Though the big rush of accessions was over now; most survivors in western Oregon had gravitated to one of the larger groups or another, depending on where they'd ridden out the early years and what they thought of its leadership and customs. To be sure, people were also breeding about twice the pre-Change rate, but it would be a long time before the children stepped into their parents' shoes…or took up their bows.

“Start!”

That was Chuck Barstow's voice; he was using a wind-up kitchen timer. Astrid had a slight smile on her face as she emptied her quiver. She did it with a smooth efficiency that raised eyebrows even among those who'd seen her feed the bow before, regular as a machine but infinitely more graceful. The
snap
of the hornbow's string on the young woman's bracer and the
thunk
of arrows punching into wood sounded crisply as she walked a line of shafts down the length of the “wand.” A few arrows were pushed aside by unpredictable gusts of wind, but they plunged down point-first not far away—at better than six hundred feet you had to drop the shaft onto the target, not shoot level.

She'd been an archery enthusiast
before
the Change, of course.

Astrid bowed and waved to the applause with studied graciousness, unconsciously assuming what Juniper thought of as a Tolkien-cover pose; the noise covered Eilir as she approached from the rear with an evil grin on her face and prodded her friend with the tip of her longbow.

Astrid squealed and leapt and whirled.

Show-off!
Eilir signed, and grinned as she stepped forward to the mark herself. The crowd began counting the score as she drew and loosed…

Juniper lowered her voice. There was enough background noise to let her speak privately with the stocky brown-haired man next to her.

“Any progress?” she said.

“Judy's pretty sure I was right about it being a Altendorf code,” Aylward said. “But for what, we don't know. My guess…”

She raised a brow, and he went on: “My guess would be it's an updated operational plan—a contingency order, so he only has to give a codeword and set things in motion. But that's just a bloody guess. Maybe they could work it out over to Corvallis. Judy's a bright lass, but…”

Juniper frowned. Judy Barstow Mackenzie—nee Lefkowitz—
was
bright. She was head of the Clan's healers, and had been a registered nurse and midwife before the Change, with three languages under her belt to boot, not counting English.

Not to mention a good grasp of Yiddish and Russian profanity.
She'd gotten that from her grandfather, who'd fought from Moscow to Berlin with Zhukov and then taken off his uniform and kept right on westward until he reached New Jersey.
But she isn't a cryptographer, either.

The university people would be far more likely to have someone with relevant skills. An Altendorf code was based on correlations with a book or other document, and it was infernally hard to break—you had to have not only the book it referred to, but the right edition so the page and line numbers corresponded. Or you could break it by sheer number-crunching, but
that
really required computers.

On the other hand…

“We have
some
chance of keeping a secret. Corvallis does everything by 'committees of the whole' and leaks like a sieve,” she said. “The Bearkillers can keep their mouths shut, but I don't want to get Mike in more trouble at home…And I really don't want the Protector knowing that we've got a hold of a copy of his little scheme.”

“You think his faithful marchwarden the good Baron Gervais hasn't told him?” Aylward said with a grin.

“Is a bear Buddhist? Does the Dalai Lama defecate in the shrubbery?” Juniper said.

“Tsk! Why-ever-for shouldn't he tell his old gaffer that he had a folder of plans stolen?”

Aylward spoke with a wolf's grim amusement; he was enjoying Marchwarden Liu's possible discomfiture a lot more than she was. Not that she could blame him, but…

“Arminger…Goddess, I don't like imagining what he'd do to the man if he found out—even Eddie Liu wouldn't deserve
that
.”

“I'd say it's poetic justice, Lady Juniper. Hmmm. I don't suppose we could blackmail Liu by
threatening
to grass him up?”

“Now isn't
that
the interesting thought, now!” Juniper said. “I always did prefer being sneaky to straightforward bashing…tricky, though. Perhaps we could blackmail him into giving us
more
information about the Protector's schemes? By the Threefold Shadow, I don't think he'd hesitate out of loyalty.”

“And speaking of the Threefold Hecate…” Aylward said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

Which means Judy's back from her mission of mercy.

Juniper gave him a reproving thump on the shoulder—her friend wasn't
that
terrifying—and turned to look. A buckboard wagon drawn by two horses was bumping along the gravel road westward from the watermill, with six Mackenzie archers on bicycles following along behind as escort. They peeled off for the gates of Dun Juniper as the wagon turned towards the Chief's party, whooping and increasing their speed as they pumped the pedals towards home and baths and beer. Judy Barstow was driving the buckboard—she and Juniper had been classmates in high school in Albany back when the other's name was Judy Lefkowitz, and they had discovered the Craft together in their seventeenth year.

Right now Judy looked a bit travel-worn; it wasn't an easy journey past the ruins of Eugene, especially if you were taking the overgrown back roads and dodging bandit gangs often dozens strong.