… and silvery tendrils looped around it, thinner than the finest wire. The beast gave one long squeal and then froze as they plunged beneath its skin. Then it seemed to blur, as if it were dissolving, until nothing was left but a damp patch on the ground. Involuntarily Rudi looked down at his own feet. The Mother's earth was beneath him, and he expected to feed it with his body and bones someday…
But not like that! he thought.
"Those were evil fates, lord Wanderer," he said. "And true ones, I'm thinking."
"Evil for more than men," came the reply. "Now, tell me, Son of the Bear. What would you do with a little child you saw running with a sharp knife?"
Rudi's mouth quirked. "Take it from her, lord Wanderer. Swat her backside so that she'd remember, if she were too young for words."
"And a child who took a lighter and burned down your mother's Hall and all its treasures, so that many were hurt?"
"The same, perhaps with a bit of a harder swat. And call in the heart-healers to find the source of her hurt, and I'd see that she was watched more carefully, and better taught."
Walker nodded. "You wouldn't kill her? Even if you thought she might do the same again, and all within would die?"
Rudi made a sign. "Lord and Lady bless, no!" he said in revulsion, and then wondered if he'd spoken too quickly. "What a thought! If it was necessary, we… I… would keep her guarded always."
"Some men… and some women… would have that thought. Some would act on it, and kill the child."
The single eye looked out into a world that was once again pines glimpsed through snow.
"And some would have joy in the thought; or inwardly thank the chance that gave them the argument that it was necessary."
"Lord Wanderer, I don't understand."
"You don't need to. Just remember this: the world"-somehow Rudi knew he meant more than merely Earth-"is shaped by mind. And the world in turn shapes the stuff of mind. And now a question for you: what is the symbol of Time itself?"
"An arrow?" Rudi asked.
The tall figure laughed. "A hero's answer, if I ever heard one! And I'm something of a connoisseur of heroes. That's natural enough. You're at the age for it, for war and wild faring. So… watch."
He turned and took up the great spear, its head graven with the same symbols that glowed on the brooch of his blue-lined gray cloak. Then his arm went back, paused, whipped forward with the unstoppable certainty of a catapult. The spear disappeared into the snow in a blurred streak.
"Was that a straight cast?" Wanderer asked.
"Very straight, lord; and I wouldn't like to be in its way."
They paused, in a silence broken only by the whistle of the wind. The single gray eye watched him, a chill amusement in it. Something warned Rudi, perhaps a whistle of cloven air that wasn't part of the storm's music; he turned and jumped backwards with a yell, nearly stepping on the wolf's tail. The spear flashed past, smashing a sapling to splinters as it came, and then there was a deep hard smack as the Wanderer caught it. His long arm swayed back with the impact, and then he grounded the weapon and leaned on it, the head glinting above his head as the dark wind blew flecks of ice past into the night.
"That was a straight cast," Wanderer said. "But the line only seems straight because you can't see its full course. Draw it long enough and it meets itself, like Jormungandr."
"I don't understand!" Rudi said again, baffled.
"You don't need to… yet," the gray one said. "No man can harvest a field till it is ripe, but the seed must be planted. The heroes offer to me for luck and victory. But the Kings… they ask for wisdom, if they have any to begin with."
"I'd be glad of that," Rudi said; he felt like arguing, but… that wouldn't be wise at all.
"Would you? Then know this. Fact becomes history; history becomes legend; legend becomes myth. Myth turns again to the beginning and creates itself. The figure for time isn't an arrow; that is illusion, just as the straight line is. Time is a serpent."
Rudi blinked. He noticed the bracelet around one thick wrist, where the coat rode up; it was in the form of a snake, wrought of gold so finely that the scales were a manifold shiver that seemed to spin away in infinite sets.
Wanderer stepped closer. "Your friends are waiting for you, Artos, son of Bear and Raven," the tall gray-haired figure said. "Go!"
He clapped a hand to Rudi's back. The touch was white fire, and the Mackenzie stiffened as if existence shattered about him.
"I've got it!" he heard a voice say.
Gods and holy men, never a straight answer, he thought as he bit back a groan.
The white fire still ran in his veins; it narrowed down to a patch on his lower back, and he could hear the voice again. It was Father Ignatius.
"Holy Mary and every saint and God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit be thanked. That was why!"
Shuddering, Rudi felt the sting as something swabbed at the wound, and a hand dropped a pus-stained bandage into a bucket. He could smell the sweetish odor of it, oily and with a hint of something like vinegar. Then real fire bathed it.
"I'm sorry, Rudi, but it's necessary," the priest's voice soothed.
A hand took his; he knew it was Mathilda's, and tried to remember not to crush her fingers. Then he realized he couldn't, not even if he tried; her hand was carefully gentle on his. His whole body felt like the limp blood-and-matter soaked rag, hot and weak and stiff at the same time, with localized throbbing aches in his shoulder and back. He could speak, but he simply did not wish it. Even lifting his eyelids was too much effort.
"There was a fragment of the arrowhead still in the wound," Ignatius said as he worked. "But this time the probe found it as I was debriding the dead tissue. Praise to the Lord in His infinite mercy! And Praise Him that Rudi was delirious through it. It's far too close to the Great Sciatic."
"Will he heal now?" Mathilda said anxiously.
"That is with God. But there's a better chance."
Another voice: Odard's. "He needs proper food and warmth and a real bed," the Baron said. "So does Mary. My lady, let me take a little food and try to find a settlement. Ingolf, you said-"
"-that they're not all Cutters in this part of the country, south of Yellowstone, yes," the big Easterner said. "But the operative word is not all. And my information's a year out of date-a year ago, Deseret was holding out, too."
"I'm willing to chance it," Odard said.
"Are you willing to not talk, if they do take you?" Ingolf said.
"I… think so," Odard said.
"Thank you, my old friend," Mathilda said softly.
Then a complex whistle came from outside; Ignatius' hands finished fastening the band across Rudi's back, and he heard the soft wheep of a sword leaving a scabbard, and the little rustle of an arrow twitched out of a quiver.
"Gil sila erin lu e-govaded vin!" Ritva's voice, and then in English: "I've found friends!"
Then in a strong ranch-country twang: "Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha, y'all!"
"We've got to move you, Chief," Edain Aylward Mackenzie said gently.
The blue-green eyes opened, more like jewels than ever in the shockingly wasted face, and Rudi smiled at him.
"Good… glad to be… going somewhere," he said.
Edain swallowed. "It's going to hurt."
"Means I'm not dead yet!" Rudi said.
He looks different, Edain thought. Better. But still sort of… like glass.
"Glad to have you back with us, Chief," he said.
The strangers had a stretcher with long poles on the cave floor now, next to the injured man; it could be rigged as a horse litter, and it was padded with sheepskins. Together they eased him onto it; the thin face convulsed a little as they set him down.
"Sorry, Chief!" Edain said.
"Glad… to have you… there, boyo," Rudi said.
"I don't know why," he said suddenly, as if a boil had burst inside him. "I got you wounded! And-"
Rudi opened his eyes again; he lo
oked tired, but more there. "Bullshit," he said crisply.
"What?" Edain rocked backwards, as if slapped on the cheek.
"You were going to say you couldn't save Rebecca. But you did save her, in the fight with the Rovers, remember?"
Edain shook his head. "And killed her later!"
"So you couldn't save her always. You're not going to live forever, boyo. You've saved my life more than once-but I'm not going to live forever either! Someday I'll die whatever you do, or I do. It's not just going on that makes life. That's fear talking; or the fear of losing someone. I've… wrestled Thanatos knee to knee, this last while, and I know. It's when you beat fear every day, that's when you're immortal. And I want you with me."
He reached out and caught Edain's wrist. "You're my friend… you're my comrade of the sword and my brother. My brother doesn't run out on me!"
Edain gulped, and took a deep breath. "Right, Chief. It's just.. ."
"Grief's hard."
"That it is." He straightened his shoulders. "So's the work halfway through harvest, but that never stopped me."
TheScourgeofGod
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PENDLETON, EASTERN OREGON
SEPTEMBER 15, CHANGE YEAR 23/2021 AD
"They're holding out there!" Sir Ivo said. "St. Michael must be looking out for them!"
"You're right," Tiphaine said.
She resisted a temptation to sip at her canteen, despite the dry dust blowing across the land. What you had to go through to pee in one of these steel suits…
Ivo crossed himself, and she reflected that sometimes it was a bit lonely, being one of the last agnostics.
"God grant that they're still alive when we get there," she said with pious hypocrisy.
Even my girlfriend's a believer, she thought. Just a different set of beliefs.
She raised her binoculars again, adjusting her visor as it went tick against the leather-covered metal of the field glasses. The thin chamois on the palms and fingers of her gauntlets let her adjust the screw easily enough. The action was nearly two miles west of the Pendleton city wall, on a hill about twelve hundred feet high. It was bare and not too steep, and several hundred of the enemy cavalry were swirling around it like bees around sugar, surging up the slope to shoot with their recurves and then back again in the quicksilver Eastern style.
The binoculars brought it suddenly, startlingly close; there were about a dozen Dunedain on their feet, hiding behind rocks and ridges, and as many wounded. A party of the Pendleton horsemen surged up to their position with shetes in hand, and then a giant figure rose beneath the hooves. A long blade glittered as it hacked through both a pony's forelegs to cast the rider screaming down at the man's feet, where he died an instant later. The rest of the Easterners rode away, shooting behind them as they retreated…
This is so tempting, she thought. What a song the bards would make of Astrid's Last Stand… that overgrown peasant Hordle with a circle of his foes at his feet and a broken sword in his hand… blood-stained banners, faces to the foe, eternal glory… no, no, I promised Sandra.
Her knights were out of sight from the enemy's position behind a ridge. In the little dry valley ahead waited two hundred of the CORA cowboys under Bob Brown of Seffridge Ranch. Their commander was looking back at her; she raised a gauntlet and chopped it forward with her hand extended like a blade. The cowboys had their bows out and arrows ready on the string; they started their mounts forward. The agile quarter horses managed to build speed even as they climbed the little rise ahead of them, and she could see the sudden alarm on the other side as the solid block of horses and men came over the crest.
"Yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-"
The alarm call rang out as the Easterners started to draw together to meet the CORA attack, turning westward and away from the beleaguered little party on the hill. Cow-horn trumpets blatted as the two loose swarms headed towards one another, and the Western Ranchers' shout went up:
"Cora! Coraaa!" interspersed with raw catamount shrieks.
"And about now," she murmured, and in that instant the foremost in either band rose in the stirrups and shot.
The arrowheads twinkled in the midmorning sun as they plunged downward. That was how they liked to fight out here in the cow-country, only coming in to close quarters when an enemy had been savaged by arrow-fire. Normally for heavy horse to try and strike them was like trying to beat water with a sledgehammer. Water whose spatters turned into viciously dangerous stinging wasps as it flew away.
But ah, if you can trick them into bunching up to receive a charge, she thought, with a slight cold smile, as she returned her binoculars to their padded steel case. Then it's more like using a sledgehammer on a bowl of eggs.
She turned in the saddle. "Now, my iron-heads, I'm going to do you a favor," she said, looking at the eager young faces, shadowed by raised visors or bisected by the nasal-bars of the older helms. "Now I give you a chance to die with honor!"
They cheered, shaking their lances in the air. And they actually think I am doing them a favor, she thought. It's true what they said in the old days. Testosterone rots the brain, not to mention listening to the bards when you're young.
She held out her own right hand, and Armand thrust the lance into it. Tiphaine rested the butt of the twelve-foot weapon on the ring welded to her stirrup-iron, shrugged her shield around and brought it up. The banner of the Lidless Eye came up beside her, and the destriers began to walk. They'd keep the pace slow until just before arrow range…
BD looked up from the wounded as she heard the high harsh singing of the Portlander oliphants, the long curled silver trumpets holding the sustained scream that meant charge. It was faint with distance, but the sound was as startling as it would have been to hear a chorus of girls singing a festival hymn to the Lady of the Blossom-time. She'd grown so used to the thought that she would die here amongst angry strangers and the smell of wounds that it took a moment for what her ears heard to filter through to her mind.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Eilir's eyes move. Her head was a mass of bandages, seeping red where an ear had been sliced; there was another wound on one thigh, a shete-cut.
"The Portlanders are here," BD said, and then repeated it in basic Sign in case she was too dazed to read lips.
Eilir sighed and closed her eyes. Not far away from her, Astrid roused a little and turned and tried to vomit. It was only a dry retching, and when she sank back her face was gray. One of the wounded with a splinted leg dragged himself over and helped her drink. Abstractly, BD sympathized-the pain would be savage, and a concussion like the one she'd gotten from her own sword hilt would keep her immobilized for weeks, and might cripple-but it was Astrid's plan that had gotten them into this mess. BD didn't want her dead, but she had to admit there would have been some justice in her getting hit so hard the brains spurted out of her ears.
It would have been worth it to avoid a battle, she thought. But it looks like we're going to have the battle anyway.
Part of it was taking place right below. The Easterners had better things to do than lob arrows at the little cluster of Rangers atop the hill, and she risked rising from behind a ridge of rock and clay to watch.
Most of the horsemen were fighting the CORA men, at close quarters and handstrokes now that their quivers were empty. Dust hid most of the action, but the sun glinted off the edges of sabers and shetes and axes. Eddies in the earth-mist showed men who hacked and died; she saw a doll-tiny figure topple to earth and go beneath the hooves, anonymous in ranch-country leather and wool, and another dragged from the saddle by a flung lasso.
The sound of their curses and war-shouts came up the slope that was also littered with bodies of men and horses, some still thrashing or trying to crawl away, others motionless. Overhead turkey vultures waited, sweeping in broad circles with their black-and-gray wings outstretched. Ravens skittered lower on the wind. One went over close enough for her to see the clever black eye it cocked at the ground, judging its time.
<
br /> They're always on the winning side, she thought.
Then the Association's trumpets screamed again; much louder this time, and closer. From here she could see what the men lost in dust and rage below couldn't, the line of a hundred lances catching the morning sun as they came over the low rise to the westward. The pennants were snapping with the speed of their passage, and the big horses had had time enough to build momentum.
The CORA men withdrew if they could, most of them turning north and south in clumps and ones and twos, their mission done. The wind from the west blew the dust away, just in time for the Pendleton Ranchers' men to see what was coming at them. Some tried to turn their agile cow ponies and run; some charged forward, or shot the last arrows cunningly hoarded against extremity. Shafts hammered into shields, or rang off the sloping surfaces of helmets and the steel lames of the barding that covered the horses' necks and shoulders.
But the Portlander knights were at the full gallop, their tall mounts faster over the short distance remaining, their enemies' ponies tired and confused. The long lances dipped in a shining ripple; the hammer of four hundred hooves pounded the earth like war-drums, like thunder; even here she could feel the vibration in the bones of earth, and divots of the hard dry soil flew skyward. Plumed helmets bent forward as the men-at-arms braced themselves in the high-cantled saddles, shields up under the visors to present nothing but shapes of wood and bullhide and steel to their enemies.
Even in that noise, the deep-voiced shouts of Haro! were loud.
Then they struck.
There was no crash; instead a series of heavy hard thud sounds as lance-heads slammed into flesh with a ton-weight of armored horse and armored man behind them. Men were lifted out of the saddle, rising in the air like obscene kebabs until their weight cracked the tough ashwood of the lance-shafts. The destriers bowled the lighter Eastern horses over by main force as they struck breast to breast; she saw one pony pitch over backwards and land full on its screaming rider. Then the knights were through the loose mass of their enemies, throwing aside broken lances. The swords came out, bright and long, or men snatched up the war-hammers slung to the saddlebows, and the knights went raging among their lightly armored foes like steel-clad tigers.
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