The Protector's War (59 page)

I doubt that it's all that awkward for you,
Loring thought.
It's a day's travel on horseback, and railroads aren't any faster than the horses pulling them these days, but with a hand-cart you can do forty or fifty miles an hour.
They'd used them in England, in regions with enough people to keep the tracks clear; they were the fastest form of land travel in the Changed world.
You're just making the bribe more credible, my lord Protector. And a succulent one it is; land enough for me, my son, and a good farm for Hordle as well.

If they were trying to buy him, at least they weren't trying to do it on the cheap. They turned in past ivy-grown stone gateposts, under tall century-old oaks; the evening sun dazzled him for an instant as he looked down a long allée of the great trees, sinking into the heights of the Coast Range. Vineyards lay on left, and a squarish building that was probably the winery; horses grazed to the right; beyond them was plowland and pasture where the sunset cast long shadows. Closer he could see that the center of the estate was a great white-painted house, with two tall pillars supporting the portico.

Not excessively grand by British country-house standards, even with the more recent wings added and the post-Change dependencies and stables. To begin with it was wooden, not stone or brick; but the gardens were very lovely; wildflowers thick in the lawns, and roses as good as any he'd seen back home—back in England.

Oh, he's a clever one, is our lord Protector,
Loring thought.
Even on short acquaintance knows what sort of bribe to offer
me.
I wonder if Nobbes has noticed? He's a well-meaning man but not very acute, unless I've wasted six months' observation at close quarters.

“Very nice,” Captain Nobbes said.

“The chef here is marvelous,” Sandra Arminger said as servants ran out to take their horses, and the captain of the guard led his men away. “And the wines are very good as well.”

As long as there's nothing in the glass but wine,
Loring thought.
It would be a fine place to live, Lord Protector, if it weren't in
your
kingdom.

 

Crossing Tavern, Willamette Valley, Oregon

May 12th, 2007 AD—Change Year Nine

 

“Yeah, he's smart enough to know that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar,” Havel said judicously. “He just can't resist pulling the wings off, though. Two questions, Sir Nigel: Why did you turn him down, and what did he really want?”

Loring stroked his mustache. “My dear young fellow, credit me with some brains at least. ‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire' didn't appeal to me! I'd seen entirely too much of how the Lord Protector ran his little kingdom to accept his offer, however tempting. Compared to him, even His Majesty's worst…eccentricities…were rather mild. And bore hardest on the commanderies and their officers, not ordinary people. He never tried to clap ballygreat iron dog collars on the commons.”

John Hordle looked to where his longbow rested in a corner. “Charlie may live to regret making everyone keep a bow and practice with it, sir,” he said. “If he ever did incline that way, that is.” Aylward smiled grimly and nodded.

Loring went on, catching the ex-SAS man's eye: “As to why, I think it was snobbery. His barons and knights are, as his wife said, something of a bunch of rough diamonds—the reenactors being the best of the bunch, and a minority. He probably wanted a genuine English baronet, however reduced in circumstances, as a…trophy, as it were.”

I know that look,
Aylward thought.
It means,
more, later,
and
privately. Aloud, he said, “That's him to the inch, sir.”

Something in his voice made several others look at him sharply—Lady Juniper first, then Signe Havel, then her husband. Imperceptible nods went around the table as the leaders agreed.

Juniper Mackenzie's smile was genuine enough when she spoke: “Then perhaps we'd better fill you in on what we did once we were inside the Protector's border.”

But her foot kicked Aylward in the ankle, ever so lightly.

Barony of Molalla, Willamette Valley, Oregon

May 10th, 2007 AD—Change Year Nine

“
T
his way,” the farmer hissed to Juniper.

He was sweating with fear as he led the Mackenzie party down the old private road with woods and scrub close on either hand, and vines twining across the cracked surface. It was an early May dawn, and there was an intense stillness—as if life waited while the gray gloaming faded into light that trickled down through the leaves overhead. The mosquitoes were unfortunately all too active, little itching needles stabbing at the backs of her knees and face and hands as bodies brushed through dew-wet grass and bushes.

They passed the rusting hulk of a car still resting where it had swerved off the road and struck a tree nine years ago, mostly covered in vine and weed; through the dirt-encrusted window Juniper could see there were still some wisps of hair on the skull that rested against the steering wheel within. hen they left the roadway and went more slowly along a faint game trail, through older established woods. In a clearing where sun speared down through the broken canopy a ruffled grouse cock stood on a stump and went
boom
-hoot! as the yellow pouches on either side of his neck swelled and shrank amid the white downy feathers.

The grouse took alarm at the farmer's passage. She hissed impatiently at him; he was hurrying along a familiar way, and even so made more noise in his bib overalls than her clansfolk did with all their gear and weapons. Not that it should matter right now, but there was the principle of the thing. The gray look to his skin as he slowed down made her feel briefly ashamed; he was risking his family and home, not just his life.

“Should be around here I left 'em…” he whispered, as they came near the eastern edge of this patch of woods.

A bit of branch struck him on the head, and he started violently, leveling the spear he carried and glaring all around him. Juniper smiled reassuringly and pointed up.

The tree overhead was a hundred-foot Douglas fir. The farmer stared into the branches, and still started again when a rope uncoiled from one of them; the figures in their war cloaks hugging the trunk above were hard enough to notice even if you knew where to look. Astrid and Eilir and Sam Aylward came sliding down it; the young women jumped free at head-height and landed lightly as cats, grinning silently. Her First Armsman waited until his boot soles were a foot from the ground before dropping, dusting his palms and walking over to her.

“Just as this gentleman said, Lady,” he reported quietly. “The railroad's in use—wear keeping the steel bright, ox-and horse-droppings. Handcar patrol along at the intervals he mentioned, too.”

“And the local coven vouches for him and his friends,” Astrid pointed out.

She was eager to the point of quivering slightly; this was exactly the sort of trip around Robin Hood's barn that she gloried in. Eilir leaned on her bow and shrugged slightly with a smile. Her expression spoke louder than words, or Sign:
Your call, Splendiferously Supreme Clan Chieftainly Mom-person.

Juniper looked at the farmer again. He was in his late thirties, probably, or possibly half a decade older; people's looks often aged faster when they got into that range nowadays. He
didn't
look particularly starved or harried—nothing like the refugee couples they'd rescued back around Ostara. Shaggy with brown beard and hair long except for the bald patch on top, and weathered and worn like any outdoor worker, but well fed and shod. He had the spear, too, and a long hunting knife.

“You're a free tenant, and better off than most here in the Protector's lands,” she said softly, catching his eye with hers and holding it. “Is it worth the risk to you and your kin, and the loss of all you own? Do you have a particular grudge against Lord Molalla?”

“Yeah,” he said, squaring his shoulders and licking his lips. “Sitting in that goddamned concrete castle and telling me what to do and taking a quarter of what I grow! Making me take off my goddamned hat and bow when he rides by! So I'm treated like a better grade of dirt than the poor bastards who ended up as bond tenants or peons. Great! I remember what things were like before the Change; I was born a free man and an American citizen, by God. We're not starving anymore. Nobody would be going hungry, if those bloodsuckers would leave us alone. It's just—”

He lifted the short spear. It was a good enough weapon to frighten off wild dogs; against mail-clad men-at-arms on armored horses it might as well have been a breadstick. The rest of his weaponry was a knife and a pre-Change camper's hatchet.

Juniper smiled sadly.
And it's not surprising that you're the leader in this. It's the man who has a little who wants more, not the starveling with nothing but an empty belly. Also things haven't quite had time to settle down and set hard yet. A generation or two, and our friend's grandchildren here might be fighting for the baron, not against him.

Aloud she went on: “Well, most places to the south do better than Arminger, sure. And we'll help you; I just wanted to be certain you all knew what you were getting into.”

“We do,” he said. “And we've heard about what you folks did to the east last week. We're willing to take a chance.”

“Go then,” she said. “Have your people ready to join in. But be quick. Joanne, Liam, Ibar, go along. You know the signals. And
chomh gilc ie sionnach.
”

The young Mackenzies grinned silently at the play on words; they all had wisps of red fur attached to the brooches that pinned their plaids at the shoulder:
Clever as a fox
was the motto of their sept, and she knew they didn't need anything more explicit to make them alert for betrayal. They nodded, touched their bows to their helmet brims and trotted along with the local farmer to make sure he got back to his gathered friends; they would also ensure he didn't survive any treachery. The locals knew where the Mackenzies were, but only in the most general sense. She didn't doubt their hearts were in the right place, but she also didn't doubt that they'd hold back until the Clan's warriors had shown what they could do, and there might be an informer…

Juniper turned back to the brushy edge of the woodlot, going the last ten yards on her belly through the rank new spring growth. The crushed stems smelled musky-green as she carefully parted a path for sight with the horn tip of her bow—looking through cover rather than over it was always a good idea, whether you were sneaking up on an enemy or out to watch a mother fox and her cubs at play. The low swale ahead was as the locals had described it: open and uncultivated, shrubby and shabby but not too badly overgrown. The ground was common pasture, for the Baron's stock and those of his town of Molalla a little to the south. The railway ran through it from southeast to northwest, crossing Milk Creek just a hundred yards to her right, on the south; usually a trickle, but now better than waist-deep with spring. At their back floodplain woods ran far to the northwest, with the Molalla River a third of a mile away threading through them, deeper and broader than the creek. On the other side of the open ground and the old Canby-Mulino road were forested hills, two hundred feet or better above the plain.

Six pair of field glasses studied the ground, and threescore sets of keen eyes. Sam nodded to her, and she sighed silently and gave the order. Aylward took the party to the bridge himself; there was nobody else in the clan he trusted to handle the thermite properly. Juniper led six to the rail line several hundred yards farther north. As they jogged across grass rough-cropped by sheep and cattle her eyes went north and east; pillars of smoke stood there, thread-thin in the distance. Smoke by day, fire by night…

And good Mackenzies should stay out of sight,
she told herself with mordant humor.
They know we're out, but they've no idea where, not yet. When they learn, it will be
very
unpleasant.

Rowan did the honors when they reached the track; he was a smith, after all. “Lucky this isn't continuous welded rail,” he said, fitting a long wrench to the bolts where one rail joined the next. “That would be a real problem…hey, a little of that WD-40, would you?”

Old-fashioned rail like this was in forty-yard lengths, joined by butting up the sections against each other and fastening them with a fishplate bolted home on each; that was what made the
clackety-clack
as a train went over them—or had made it, when there were locomotives. There was still a bright strip atop these rails, but rust elsewhere, and a thick scatter of dung showed what the motive power was nowadays. Rowan strained at the five-foot handle of the wrench he'd forged and fitted and tested on rail closer to home, long muscles bulging in his bare arms below the short chain-mail sleeves of his arming doublet.

“Goibniu, Lord of
Iron!
” he wheezed when the first came free. Then he looked at the others: “All right, get those spikes pulled and the rail loose in the chairs, while I do this!” he said sharply.

“Channeling the Dread Lord again, Roe?” Sanjay Barstow grumbled, but they obeyed.

All that took muscle and skills she lacked. Juniper occupied herself instead with looking around, making sure nobody else was visible along the edge of the woods to either side—and taking a last sight and smell and taste of the sweet wild world, in case she passed over this day. When the clanking, clattering, cursing work was done—if the rails had had lives to blast, they'd have been in very bad trouble, and so would the ill-wishers—and the bolts and spikes and keys replaced with replicas of wood and wax, she spoke.

“Pick your spot. We're supposed to have another hour, but that's only a guess.”

Sam had selected well. Bushes and patches of tall grass attracted them like moth to a flame; quick work with knives and nimble fingers freshened and thickened the twigs and grass in the loops of their war cloaks to match the meadow. Rowan helped her, despite her grumbling that she'd been woods wise before the Change came.

“Before you were
born,
sure,” she went on.

“But you weren't wearing a war cloak then, Lady,” he said, infuriatingly reasonable.

“Neither were you. Sam taught us, and I met
him
before you did, too, so there,” she grumbled.

“Crawl in under here,” he went on.

And is it more annoying to be treated like the Goddess, or like a baby?
Juniper thought, obeying.

The cloak covered her like a tent, and like a tent it quickly grew stuffy in the bright daylight. Juniper made her breathing slow, not withdrawing from herself but instead concentrating on every sensation, every itch and tickle and buzz of insect, until she was one with everything about her…and unconscious of self, the self that worried and fretted and feared for Eilir and her people, and dreaded having to tell parents why their sons or daughters weren't coming home.

Clickity-clack…clickity-clack…

Slowly, slowly, her head turned within the hood. Her eyes blinked, bringing her back to full awareness; pupils flared and her nostrils spread to take in a sudden deep breath, but the rest of her was motionless. Motion drew her vision southwestward.

The railcar was silent save for the hum of wheels on steel, the louder clatter as it passed the joins in the rails, and the flutter of the two flags on poles at the prow, Arminger's red cat-pupiled eye on black, and the local baron's lion-and-spear. There was no engine, of course, unless you counted the four men who pumped either end of the big pivoted lever in its center. They were ragged but no more than wiry-gaunt, and not chained to the wooden handles they swung up and down with the regularity of machines, driving through gears to power the wheels beneath. That surprised her a little; it was work that by Protectorate standards should be done by peons—slaves for all practical purposes. Before them a waist-high wooden barricade hid the chair of the man-at-arms who commanded the little vehicle; the plume on his conical Norman helmet fluttered in the rapid passage of the railcar, forty miles an hour and swifter than anything else on land these days. He rested casually, one boot up on the railing, and a hand on that knee holding a pair of binoculars. At the rear four crossbowmen stood, facing out on either side with their weapons in their hands.

I bind you,
she thought.
I bind your eyes, your ears, your nostrils. See not, hear not, smell not; by Herne the Wild Hunter, so mote it be!

The massed wills of every Mackenzie must be beating on the railcar's crew. The field craft that the First Armsman had spent the last decade hammering into them didn't hurt either, of course, or the fact that this select band were all good hunters used to silent waiting.

A moment, then another…and the knight's eyes went wide, and he yelled and reached for the brake lever.

That was too late for the fast-moving weight of metal and wood, though the brakes locked and squealed with an ear-piercing shriek and sparks poured from them in a red-gold roostertail torrent. The railcar slid onto the section of rail that had been loosened, onto metal held only by stubs of punkwood and wax painted to resemble steel. The long rails slewed sideways and the railcar leapt free, plowing into the roadbed with a shower of gravel and a chorus of screams.