“Shit,” Jared said. “No, I didn’t hear that.” Connor was out patrolling down there. Jared had to hope his son was okay.
A couple of shoving, swearing men loaded another boulder into the leather sling. “We ready?” Ronnie asked. When nobody denied it, he shouted, “Let ’er go!” Away flew the stone.
It smashed a man to pieces coming down. Crimson sprayed in all directions. There were worse ways to go—he would never have known what hit him. Even so . . . A lifetime of hope and love and rage, all done before the poor sap knew the bell tolled for him this time.
But armored men on foot were banging away at the wall with a battering ram. Others protected them with heavy shields. It wasn’t quite a Roman testudo, but it came close. If they broke through . . . Houston, we have a problem. Jared scowled. He hadn’t been born the last time men went to the moon. All he’d done was see Apollo 13 with a cute girl named Gail. They wouldn’t fly to the moon again, not unless the laws of nature changed once more. They wouldn’t make any more movies, either, dammit.
The Lancers hung back, waiting to see if they could push through a breach. They couldn’t force one themselves. But they could exploit one if it came.
Two Topangans ran down the wall toward the men on the ram with a big kettle of hot oil or hot water or something else unfriendly. An arrow from the Chatsworth side hit one of them in the neck. The Topangan let out a bubbling shriek. Blood poured from the wound, and from his mouth and nose. He staggered and clutched at himself, forgetting what he carried. The kettle tilted and spilled. The other guy who was hauling it also shrieked, on a high, pure, thin note. So did fighters on both sides who got splattered by the horrible stuff.
Jared felt like shrieking himself. Burns were the worst thing that could happen to you these days. About the best treatment Doc Leibowitz had for them was tannic acid—tea, in other words. It had been horribly outmoded at the end of the twentieth century. There’d been a state-of-the-art burn center in the Valley then. But the Change set the state of the art back most of a hundred years. The guy who’d got shot was the lucky one. He’d peg out pretty fast. The other burned warriors would hurt and hurt for a long time.
And the hot stuff in the kettle didn’t come down on the bastards serving the ram. They kept pounding away at the wall. Each thud of their iron-tipped telephone pole—which was what the ram had been born as—sounded like the crack of doom.
Which, for the wall, was about what it was. The bricks and chunks of asphalt and cement and rubble that made up the works could take only so much. The wall fell down with a tired groan, as if it had been sick of standing there for so long anyhow. Topangans on the wall shouted in fear. Some of the Chatsworth men from the ram crew shouted along with them, because the garbage coming down from the wall didn’t care who got in its way.
Valley foot soldiers scrambled into the breach with spears and swords and axes and anything else they could get their hands on. The Topangans did their best to hold them back, but more Valley fighters kept coming. Bruce Delgado’s kingdom might have been little by any standard this side of Greek city-states, but it dwarfed its western neighbors.
“Well, fuck me,” Ronnie said, which was just what Jared was thinking. The boss man stepped away from the trebuchet, stuck his helmet on his head, and slid the straps of his shield over his arm. “Looks like we’re gonna have to work for a living.” He drew his sword and held it for a moment, as if wondering what to do with such an archaic killing tool. Then he trotted up toward the fighting at the breach with a shout of “Topannnnnga!”
Brawling at close quarters wasn’t anywhere near so much fun as serving the catapult. The other guys couldn’t reach you then. Now . . . “I’m getting too old for this shit,” Jared announced to nobody in particular. But he was putting on his helmet and picking up his shield, too. You always forgot how heavy the damn thing was till you had to use it.
When he drew the sword, the sun glinted off the sharp edges. He made a pretty fair martial display. All the same, he would sooner have been back in Topanga village smoking dope or drinking bad wine.
Along with the other men from the trebuchet, he trotted after Ronnie. You did what you had to do, not what you would sooner do. If they could keep the Valley soldiers from widening the breach and letting the Lancers get through . . .
If they could do that, they’d be goddamn lucky. He saw as much right away. The Valley had too many men, and too many of those men carried pikes. With a pike, you could skewer a swordsman before he got close to you. You could, and they were. Troops from a Swiss hedgehog or a Greek phalanx would have gone through them like a dose of salts, but they weren’t up against pros like that. The Topangans were odds-and-sods, too.
You did the best you could for as long as you could, that was all. Jared scooped up a handful of dirt and grit as he ran forward. Flipping it in a foe’s face might not be sporting, but this was no sport. This was the real thing.
He got the chance sooner than he’d thought he would. The Valley fighters had no quit in them, and they could see they might make a lot of progress if they pushed the Topangans back from the wall. One of them drew back his spear to finish off a downed Topangan already bleeding from a leg wound. Jared flung the stuff in his left fist with a backhand scaling motion, as if he were flipping a Frisbee. Kids still played with the plastic disks. Every so often, new ones—well, new old ones—turned up.
The Valley pikeman couldn’t fight with his eyes suddenly full of dirt. No one possibly could. He threw up one hand to claw at his face. Jared stabbed him in his unarmored belly, and twisted his wrist to make sure the blade cut guts. Without antibiotics, peritonitis and blood poisoning would kill even if the wound didn’t. The Valley man squealed like a shoat and doubled over. Just in case he was still feeling frisky, Jared kicked him in the face. He grabbed the pike, too. The guy from the Valley sure wouldn’t need it any more.
Then he hauled the wounded Topangan upright. “Here.” He pressed the pike into the fellow’s hands. “Can you get away with some help from a stick, Greg?”
“I better try, huh?” his countryman said.
“Well, unless you want the Valley guys to catch you,” Jared answered. Murdering POWs wasn’t a favorite local sport, which didn’t mean it never happened. What held people back was more a fear of revenge than respect for the Geneva Convention. That was just one more relic from a bygone age. You did what you could get away with.
Using the pike as a staff, Greg stumped away. Jared went in the other direction, toward the center of the fighting. The trouble was, the center was coming his way, too. The Chatsworth men were pushing the Topangans back from the breach and widening it.
“We won’t be able to hold on,” panted a man fighting next to Jared. He had a cut under the brim of his helmet and above his eyebrow. His face was all over blood—head wounds always bled like mad sons of bitches—but he hardly seemed to know he’d been hurt. If he didn’t catch anything worse, the gash would probably heal without much of a scar. No need to worry about lockjaw, not with that gore everywhere.
“’Fraid you’re right.” Jared turned a spear thrust with his shield. He chopped at the staff. He nicked it, but that was all. The goddamn thing was aluminum, which seemed like cheating.
“Let’s go, Valley! Let’s go, Valley!” Bruce Delgado’s fighters sounded like a high school football crowd whose team was driving. The rival shouts of “Topanga!” were fewer and more ragged. Sure as hell, this didn’t look like one of the movies with a happy ending. By post-Change standards, Hollywood was a devil of a long way from here.
Jared cut at an enemy foot soldier. The guy jerked back, so the stroke missed. Bruce Delgado was smart to have his men cheer for the whole Valley (well, the whole west end of the Valley), not just for Chatsworth. The Lancers lived up in the north, but these guys might come from West Hills or Canoga Park or Reseda or Woodland Hills or Northridge. Those had all been district names before th
e Change. They might harden into towns or even tiny countries, or they might get subsumed into Chatsworth or the Valley. Time would tell, but it hadn’t told yet.
Someone behind Jared blared something horrible on a bugle. A moment later, he blew the same call—Jared thought it was the same call—again. The high, shrill notes did pierce the battlefield din. The call rang out once more. This time, Jared actually recognized it. It was Retreat.
He didn’t want to do that. But, when he looked around, he saw that the attackers had got over or through the wall at a couple of other spots, too. If the outnumbered Topangans didn’t fall back and make a stand somewhere farther down Topanga Canyon, they’d get cut off and cut to pieces right here. Then the Lancers could advance at their leisure.
Of course, breaking away from a fight was harder than getting into one. The enemy’s tails were up. They wanted to go right on killing people here. A baseball-sized stone clanged off Jared’s helmet—luckily, just a glancing blow or it would have left him loopy even if it didn’t cave in his skull.
As the Topangans fell back from the wall, they retreated south down the highway toward the village. Topanga Canyon Boulevard had been hacked out of the cliffside. The Valley men could fight on a narrow front. Or they could go down deeper into the canyon and try to get behind the Topangans. Some did the one, some the other. The Valley had the manpower for both. The Topangans . . . didn’t.
Horns also brayed from the north. Jared was afraid he knew what that meant: the Lancers were past the wall. If facing too many foot soldiers was bad, facing homemade knights in homemade armor was worse.
Somebody’d set up a breastwork of sorts at one of the many twists in the road. Rocks, boards, old trash cans full of dirt. None of it would hold up a determined foe very long. Here were the Fernwood men at last, though, doing what they could. One of them helped haul Jared over the breastwork. “You’re Connor’s dad, aren’t you?” he said.
“That’s right. Why?” Fear twisted Jared’s gut as he came out with the last word.
“’Cause he saved Topanga village’s bacon, that’s why.” The guy from Fernwood—Jared thought his name was Lou, but he wasn’t sure—filled him in on what had been going on farther south. Jared had just enough time for a little pride. Then the fighting picked up again, and he got too busy trying to stay alive to worry about anything else.
* * *
Bruce Delgado’s lance had blood on the iron head and on the shaft. He wasn’t especially proud of the kill—he’d skewered a fleeing man from behind—but it was better than nothing. Every Topangan down was a Topangan he wouldn’t have to worry about later on.
This was building up to be the biggest victory Chatsworth had won over the hippies in a hell of a long time. Maybe the biggest ever. Eddie Epstein grinned at him from behind another catcher’s mask. “You ready to go surfing in the Pacific, boss?” he asked.
“That’d be something,” Bruce said. “I haven’t even seen the fucking Pacific since the Change.”
“Bet it’s still cold,” Eddie said.
“Ya think?” Bruce said. They both chuckled. Los Angeles, of course, got hot. The Valley, and especially the north end, got blazing hot in the summertime. Bruce had heard the ocean off places like Florida was warm as bathwater. Strangers who’d come to L.A. before the Change often figured the Pacific worked the same way.
And they’d frozen their asses off finding out it didn’t. A current from the north or something kept the water cold all the time. As long as Bruce could claim a stretch of beach as his own, he didn’t care if polar bears sunbathed on it.
He gulped mixed wine and water from his canteen. He wished that were cold, but it wasn’t. One of the things he missed most from the pre-Change days was ice cubes. You didn’t see those in Chatsworth any more.
“Come on, man!” Garth Hoskins called to him. “Let’s clean these fuckers out once and for all, y’know?”
“Sounds good to me.” Bruce waved the Lancers forward. Infantry screened them. Longbows or crossbows gave even the heaviest cavalry grief. So did barricades. You wanted your horsemen out in the open and moving fast. Momentum was a big part of what made a charging knight so formidable. Yes, you had a nice, pointy lance. But you also had a ton or so of horse and man and ironmongery behind the point. Get all that moving at fifteen or twenty miles an hour . . .
And it’s a medium-bad fender-bender in the old days. There were times when Bruce envied people like Garth. They didn’t have memories from a dead world rising up all uneasy out of the grave.
Out in the open and moving fast was what the Chatsworth Lancers couldn’t manage here. From Glenview down to the Pacific, Topanga Canyon Boulevard had always been only two lanes wide. The people who’d built it must have been proud they’d managed even that. The road wasn’t quite so winding as Pacific Coast Highway or the route along the north shore of Maui, but it wasn’t wide and it wasn’t straight. Well, if this were ideal terrain for knights, Chatsworth would have reached the sea a long time ago.
A Topangan halfway up the hillside shot an arrow that splintered on the beat-up asphalt a few feet in front of Bruce. That it splintered meant it was post-Change work with a wooden shaft. Valley archers went to war with aluminum-shafted hunting arrows made for deer and bear. Aluminum was wonderful stuff. But they had to keep reusing what they already had. Without electricity, they’d never get more.
Some Valley men shot at the Topangan. Nobody hit him. Agile as a monkey, he scrambled out of range up the steep hillside.
A foot soldier came trotting back to the Lancers. “Little trouble up ahead,” he reported, sketching a salute to Bruce. “They’ve got this chickenshit barricade across the road. It’s only, like chest high, but the way through is real narrow.”
“Well, let’s have a look.” Bruce urged Sherman up to a trot. The rest of the Lancers followed. They were content to let him take the lead—partly because he was the leader, partly because anything bad that happened would happen to him first.
He rounded one more kink in Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Sure as the devil, there it was: a chickenshit barricade. It was enough to have stalled his infantry. Knights weren’t the ideal answer to barricades. They weren’t bad on foot, either, though. The Lancers’ protection wasn’t too heavy to move in, but it was far better than anything the Topangans had. Force them back and clear the way . . . and then do it again half a mile deeper into the canyon?
Bruce was still mulling it over when he heard something and spied motion up the slope out of the corner of his eye. “Oh, shit,” he muttered—uninspired last words, but what he came up with as the avalanche thundered down on him and the rest of the Lancers packed together on the narrow road.
Not all the rocks and rock piles up at the top of the canyon had got there by themselves, he realized now, when he couldn’t do anything about it. And the Topangans hadn’t set their half-assed barricade where they did by accident or happenstance, either. No, they’d known what they were up to, all right. Oh, hadn’t they just? Plan A had been defending the works up at Glenview. This was Plan B.
Sherman snorted and reared. He knew those rocks rolling down on him—and, incidentally, on the man who rode him—were the worst news in the world. Knowing it didn’t mean he could do thing one about it, either, though. A stone the size of a table slammed into his side. Another one, smaller but nothing like small, hit Bruce Delgado in the head. The Wehrmacht’s finest manganese steel did zip against a blow like that. Bruce was mercifully unconscious as the rockslide swept him and his hopes off the road and down into the depths of the canyon.
* * *
Jared and Connor eyed the mess on Topanga Canyon Boulevard. The Topangans had cleared away their improvised breastwork. The avalanche still blocked the road, though. Under the watchful stares of Topangan guards with blowguns and bows, glum prisoners from the Valley’s failed campaign swung picks and sledges and turned big ones into little ones.
> When they got done with that, they’d repair the roadbed itself. The landslide had bitten a chunk out of it. Then the Valley men would go home. Turning them loose was cheaper and easier than feeding them. There’d been talk of putting them to work at the seaside salt pans, which wasn’t a job many locals wanted. But Topanga had avoided slavery up to now, and the old farts like Jared, who felt especially hinky about it, still had enough clout to hold the beast at bay.
Kwame Curtis came up to study the prisoners at work. “Hey, it’s the hippie Marine!” Jared said.
“Up yours, man,” the fighting Brain answered without heat. “I managed to get something to work, that’s all. We’d’ve been in deep kimchi if it didn’t.”
“Kimchi!” Connor grinned. He loved the stinky stuff. Jared didn’t know what real Koreans would have thought of Topanga’s pickled cabbage spiced with garlic and chilies, but he liked it, too. The strong flavors perked up food that was too often bland.
The breeze swung around to come from the north. Jared wrinkled his nose at a stink nothing like kimchi’s. “I hate that smell,” he said. Some men and horses still lay under the rockslide.
“Oh, me, too,” Kwame Curtis said. “I smelled it in Kuwait and Iraq, and then in the Dieoff after the Change. Brings back bad memories, you know?”
“Yeah,” Jared said. “This isn’t as bad as the Dieoff. Then you couldn’t get it out of your clothes or out of your hair or off your skin no matter how much you washed.”
“I remember. I’m not likely to ever forget. Nobody who lived through it is,” Curtis said.
Jared nodded. “You know that Lynyrd Skynyrd song?” he asked.
“‘That Smell’?” Kwame Curtis asked. Jared nodded once more. Curtis went on, “The smell of death sure as hell surrounded us, didn’t it?”
Connor looked from one of them to the other. There they went again, talking about shit from the dead world, the lost world, the world they still remembered and that still turned real for them in dreams. One of these years, the last person with memories and dreams like that would die. Then the post-Change folks, the ones who’d never known anything different from what they had now, would be able to go about their business without having to listen to Back in my day, we could do this or that or the other impossible thing.
Tales of Downfall and Rebirth Page 50