The Protector's War (47 page)

“OK, you promise?”

“Yeah, I promise.”

You get to live,
Havel thought.
The only convincing argument I've ever heard against capital punishment is that being dead doesn't hurt much. You'll haul rock and break rebar out of concrete twelve hours a day seven days a week, but you won't be dead. If you're
real
unlucky, you'll still be alive and doing it twenty years from now.

The prisoner swallowed at Havel's expression and stuttered: “OK, man, OK!”

“Signe, patch him,” he said, stepping back, sword still poised.

“Do I
have
to?” Signe asked.

“Unfortunately, yes. Hard to get information out of his corpse. Luanne, get his horse.”

The Lady of the Bearkillers ripped open the outlaw's dirty shirt and even filthier denim jacket and applied the field-dressing without any unnecessary gentleness. When he yelped, she backhanded him across the face and snarled, “You the one who yelled
‘First after you with the woman, Crusher'
?”

“No, ma'am, it wasn't me I swear…” He gabbled, then took another look at her and became more panic-stricken than before, if that were possible. “You ain't, you can't be—”

Signe shook her brown locks: “Hair by Ms. Clairol, asshole. And
I
didn't make any promise to let you live. Did you notice that, lover boy?
Did
you?”

“OK, I'll shut up!”

Havel grinned.
How we think alike, my gentle spouse and I!
The prisoner flicked his eyes away from Signe to him, but did not seem to find the expression on his captor's face reassuring. In fact, he seemed to think of it much the way a coyote would about the smile on the muzzle of the very last wolf it ever saw.

“Where's Crusher's camp in there?” he asked, flicking the sword through the air from the wrist. It made an unpleasant
vwweep!
sound.

“Ah…look, we, uh,
they,
camp a couple of different places. Mostly near the old gravel pits, you know, on the west bank downstream from Woods Landing about maybe half a mile, a bit more? There's a jetty on the east bank, Crusher keeps boats hidden both sides, sorta flat-bottomed things, so he can get stuff back and forth, you know?”

Havel nodded. That explained a good deal about how Bailey's gang had ranged so far, and been so hard to find or track, but he wondered where Crusher Bailey had gotten the boats. He didn't think they were the types who'd run them up themselves. And if they simply ran for their boats and took them all with them, there wasn't much he could do but go home and try again another day. Bailey could go look for a new hangout, in another of the burgeoning swamps along the Willamette, or in the ruins of Salem, or even farther south in Eugene, or in the mountains near one of the roads that crossed the Cascades.

“Put him on his horse. Tie his hands together and then to the reins, and lash his feet to the stirrups.”

The outlaw gave a moo of panic at that—it meant almost certain battering death if the horse fell or bolted—but went quiet again after a look at the faces around him. They put him at the head of the little column, and the Bearkillers all pulled out their recurves and set a shaft to the string. So did John Hordle; Havel looked over at him curiously. It wasn't impossible to use a longbow from horseback, just immensely awkward and difficult; he'd seen Sam Aylward and Eilir Mackenzie do it, and read about samurai using seven-foot bamboo bows from the saddle.

“Can you shoot that thing mounted?”

“No, sor, I can't, not to speak of,” Hordle said cheerfully. “But I can get off a horse right quick, I can.”

Havel nodded; the big Englishman's feet were near the ground anyway, on an ordinary-sized mount. Then he cocked an eye at the sun—it was behind them, about three hours past noon—and waved them forward, his eyes busy. They crossed an old railway embankment, a line of weeds and saplings now, with the two streaks of rusted iron mostly hidden, then down into another neglected orchard, the sweet-sour smell of years of fallen fruit strong and the spindly saplings crushed by the passage of the fugitives they were chasing.

“Halt,” he called softly in the insect-buzzing gloom. “There's a steep slope ahead of us, wooded, and then open country that was swampy even before the Change. It runs into a loop of the Willamette, the Lambert Bend, and the bar upstream broke in the floods three years ago. Easy to bog down. Eric, you did the scout, you ride right after our guide here. First time it even looks like he's leading us into a swale, put one through his gut. Asshole, your
only
chance of getting out of this alive is for us to win, understand? Rest of you, we go in fast and hard, get stuck into them and kill 'em all—I'd have preferred to take Crusher alive to hang, but there aren't enough of us. Any questions? Then
go
.”

They came out of the orchard into a stretch of woods that sloped eastward; flickers of light came through the canopy above, and the hooves pounded and then began to squelch as the land leveled out. Suddenly the trees about them were dead, bleached white ghosts, and reeds waved about them higher than a mounted man's head.

“Here!” the outlaw at the head of their column said. “Left here!”

They turned on to an old dirt road; it was muddy, and gobbets of the soft black soil flew high as the horses loped forward, but it was passable—just. Havel kept his reins knotted on his saddlebow, guiding Trooper with thighs and balance; the outlaw wasn't up to that standard of horsemanship, but the other Bearkillers were. He noted with interest that the Englishmen were too, at least the two in plate armor.

The directions kept coming, and they were making good progress. Suddenly the reeds were past; the ground was still soft and boggy in spots, but the trailled among trees, big black cottonwoods and willows and red alders, with blue ponds—probably the old gravel pits—on either side. The ground sloped down very slightly from the levee to dense woodland and brush along the river; amid the trees were tents and crude huts, and hearths smoking. Men and women boiled among them, gathering bundles with frantic haste and scurrying down towards the river's edge and the boats hidden there.

Raw screams of panic came as the Bearkillers rode into sight; then a great booming voice: “There's only seven of them, you pussies! There's better than thirty of us—do you want to lose all you've got? Take 'em!”

Uh-oh,
Havel thought, and shot.
Total mindless panic would have been nice.

Arrows and crossbow bolts came whining back at them; some distant part of his mind grinned in amusement as the first of them struck the bandit they'd captured and made their guide, leaving him flopping limp in the saddle to which he was lashed. The outlaws were shaking themselves out into a rough line or elongated clump, but there were an almighty lot of them; it wouldn't have mattered if he'd had Will's troop at his back, but he
didn't
. It wouldn't have mattered in open country, either; horse archers could peck footmen to death easily if they had room to run. This wasn't open country; he couldn't go a hundred yards in any direction without needing webbed feet, and on the muddy tracks they'd used to get here the outlaws would probably be quicker than horses.

“OK, work to be done,” he said. “Let's give them a charge.”

Get ironclad fighters in among the lightly equipped outlaws, and they could still turn it around. He cased his bow, whipped out his backsword and slid his targe onto his left arm; out of the corner of his eye he saw John Hordle slip from his mount and raise his longbow. Eric and Luanne pulled their lances free of the saddle scabbards and leveled them.

The bandits waited, grounding spears or jeering and shaking bows and crossbows. Then—

The brush can't be moving,
he knew.

That was exactly what it looked like, brush and tangled shoots standing and shaking itself along a hundred-yard line. Then he saw the kilts and plaids below the ghillie cloaks—war cloaks, the Mackenzies called them—and heard a familiar deep voice cry out:
“Let the gray geese fly!”

Forty longbows snapped, and the broadhead shafts twinkled in the mix of shadow and sun, flashing as they came out of the shade of tree and grass. The range was close, less than a hundred yards. Half of the armed bandits fell in the first volley.

The rest charged the Bearkillers, but it was less of an attack than a desperate attempt to get by them and into the swamps. John Hordle's bow snapped three times, and three men went down—two with arrows in the leg, one shot through the gut; the armored riders chased targets that dodged and squealed in panic. Havel stabbed one with a slamming thrust down by his own left leg, freed the blade and rode another down, Trooper's shoulder sending him spinning into the downward stroke of the backsword. It jarred on bone with a butcher's-cleaver sound, then came free in a great fan of blood that sparkled bright red on the rank wet grass. That put him in position to strike for Crusher Bailey, but the outlaw chief's companion threw a javelin that made Havel duck. Bailey gave a cackle of relief as he dodged past, trademark hammer held high.

It turned into a yell of alarm as John Hordle stepped into his way. The hammer beat down, but the Englishman stepped in and caught the wooden shaft just above Bailey's hand. His great red paw closed on the hickory, ripped it from Crusher's hand and threw it casually behind him. Then his bear grip closed around Bailey's torso, trapping him with his arms pinned to his side; the bandit weighed well over two hundred pounds, but Hordle raised him high and squeezed, squeezed…

Crusher screamed and thrashed, and went limply unconscious. Luanne's lariat fell around the body of his javelin-throwing companion, and she signaled her horse into a short trot, dragging any fight out of him. Mackenzie archers sent a flight over the heads of the last fleeing outlaws, the long arrows burying themselves in the soft turf with only their fletchings showing, bringing the crowd to an arm-waving stop.

Another voice called, a soprano, high clear: “Throw down! Now, every one of you! Hands high! Anyone whose hands aren't high will be shot!”

Silence stretched, and then the outlaws began to shed their weapons. Havel legged his horse forward, the others following in his wake. A red-haired figure waited for him, standing beside a broad-shouldered man leaning on his bow as Mackenzies rounded up and bound the surviving members of Crusher Bailey's gang—and protected them from a group of women clad in rags and bruises heading their way with weapons snatched up from the ground, or in a couple of cases with kitchen knives and roasting spits. A few men likewise ragged and hot-eyed came with them; those were mostly limping heavily, from smashed kneecaps or broken legs left to heal crookedly and make escape impossible. Other nonfighters, women and some children, stood uncertain or looked daggers at the warriors who'd destroyed the outlaw band.

Well, even bandits probably have families who love them,
Havel thought. Then:
This ought to be interesting,
as he reined in by the Mackenzie leaders.

“Juney, Sam, good to see you,” he said. “Lucky you happened to be in the neighborhood.
That's
why we got reports the Protector's men out east were all running around like headless chickens!”

“You always were a bit too headlong, mate,” Aylward said.

Juniper Mackenzie made a
tsk
sound. “Mike, how often do I have to tell you there's no such thing as coincidence?” she asked, grinning slyly, then nodded to Signe. “Merry met!”

“Hi,” Signe said flatly. “I'll get this organized. Looks like the gang had a fair number of prisoners here.”

She turned her horse aside, towards a series of wood-and-wire cages that gave off a stench even more noisome than the rest of the bandit camp. Eric and Luanne slid from their saddles; the young man whooped as he threw his arms around the Chief of the Mackenzies and swung her around. His wife was almost as enthusiastic; Havel snorted and turned his eyes away.

He watched Sam Aylward instead. For once, the air of hard cheerful competence deserted the ex-SAS archer. He looked at his compatriots with his eyes bulging and his jaw dropped; he stuttered for a moment before he managed: “Sir Nigel? Young Mr. Loring?
Little Johnnie?
”

The big bowman grinned at him. “It's not King Arthur and the Round Table, nor yet Robin Hood neither.” Then his eyes dropped to Aylward's kilt. “Oh, sod all, Samkin! Don't tell me you've gone Jock?”

Havel gave a snort of laughter. “Lot of explanations coming,” he said. “But this isn't the time.” He slapped a mosquito. “Or the place.”

 

The land around the Crossing Tavern was crowded; with Will Hutton's troop, twenty-one Mackenzies, a dozen freed captives from Crusher Bailey's camp babbling their thankfulness—and, beneath a great garry oak, a row of men who sat bareback on horses. The rope nooses about their necks ran up to where the ropes were fastened to the outspreading branch above; most were silent, and a few who'd babbled or begged were gagged. From where Michael Havel watched, the tall round shape of the tree was silhouetted against the sun going down behind the hills to the west; birds twittered in it, rising in a cloud when the humans disturbed them too badly—once when a bicycle-borne Mackenzie came up from the south and started calling for Juniper; the clansfolk hustled him off. Havel noted the action out of the corner of his eye and then ignored it; he had more pressing business.