by David Weber
Strange, he thought. How can I be so certain it's hate I hear? These aren't men, after all. For all I know, they might be shouting cries of joyous welcome! He grimaced at his own fanciful thought. Of course it's hate. How could it be else when our masters have brought us here to break them into well-behaved cattle?
But this was no time to be thinking such thoughts. And even if it had been, his nagging inner honesty pointed out yet again, subduing these not-men wasn't so terribly different from what he'd planned to do to Frenchmen who, whatever their other faults, at least went about on a mere two legs, not three, and were fellow Christians and (provisionally) human.
He scanned them one more time, confirming Computer's briefing on their equipment and numbers, and snorted much as Satan had. As had become almost routine, especially as the demon-jester gained confidence in his men's invincibility, the English were outnumbered by at least six-to-one, and the wart-faces would do nothing to change those odds. Their job was to ensure that none of this world's not-men eluded Sir George's men and entered the ship through the open hold. Which wasn't going to happen.
Sir George drew a deep breath, feeling the not-men's hatred and sensing the confidence they felt in their superior numbers.
Pity the poor bastards, he thought, then slammed the visor of his bascinet, drew his sword, and pressed with his knees to send Satan trotting forward.
* * *
It hadn't really been a battle, Sir George reflected afterward, tossing his helmet to Edward and shoving back his chain mail coif as he dismounted beside one of the mobile fountains. The merry chuckle of the water splashing in the wide catcher basin made a grotesque background for the wailing whines and whimpers coming from the enemy's wounded, and even after all this time, the baron had never become hardened to those sounds. But at least there were few moans from his own wounded. Partly because there'd been so few of them, compared to the natives' casualties, but mostly because the hovering air cars had already picked up most of his injured. And all of the handful of dead, as well, he thought, and wondered if many of them would stay dead this time. Despite everything he and his troopers had seen and experienced, even Sir George still found it a bit... unsettling to see a man who'd taken a lance through the chest sit down to supper with him.
He put the thought aside yet again. It was far easier than it had been the first few times. The baron was still somewhat amused by his realization of just how much Computer's insistence that Physician's magic was, in fact, no more than a matter of huge advancement in matters surgical had helped him adjust to the reality. The "Commander" might have explained exactly the same thing, in his arrogant way, time and again, but somehow Sir George found it easier to believe what Computer told him. Perhaps that was because he had never yet caught Computer in an error, or perhaps it was because of his natural suspicion of anything the demon-jester chose to say. Intellectually, he felt no doubt that if the demon-jester commanded Computer to lie to him, Computer would obey, yet he remained oddly confident that Computer would not mislead him without specific orders to do so.
He was also honest enough to admit to himself that he was too grateful to have those men back to question the agency of their resurrection, or healing, or whatever it was Physician did to restore them to life. Any decent field commander did anything he could to hold down his casualties, if only to preserve the efficiency of his fighting force, but Sir George had even more reason to do so than most. Over the years of battle and bloodshed, he'd become ever more aware that his men were all he had. In a sense, they were all the men who would ever exist in the universe—or in Sir George's universe, at least—and that made every one of them even more precious than they would have been had he and they ever reached Normandy.
He snorted, shook himself, and thrust his head into the fountain. The icy water was a welcome shock, washing away the sweat, and he drank deeply before he finally raised his head at last to draw a gasping breath of relief. His right arm ached wearily, but it had been more butcher's work than sword work at the end. These natives, like so many, many others he'd faced in the demon-jester's service, had never imagined anything like an English bowman. That much had been obvious. Even the Scots at Halidon Hill—or the Thoolaas in that first dreadful slaughter on Shaakun—had shown more caution than these natives, and not even French knights would have pressed on so stubbornly and stupidly into such a blizzard of arrows.
But the natives of this nameless world had.
Sir George sighed and turned from the fountain, surrendering his place to Rolf Grayhame, as he surveyed the field.
There had been even more of the natives than he'd first thought, not that it had mattered in the end. Even his archers' bows had been subtly improved upon over the years. It had been a bright young lad by the name of William Cheatham who'd first hit upon the notion of using what amounted to block and tackle to increase the weight of the bow a man could pull. Young Cheatham had gotten the idea from watching a similar arrangement being used in action by crossbowmen on one of the many other worlds the English had conquered. That one, Sir George recalled bitterly, had been the most costly of all of their conquests. Twenty-three of his men and fifty precious horses had died and stayed that way before its natives had finally submitted to the demon-jester's demands. Even with the accustomed support of local allies with scores of their own to settle, the English had been forced to introduce the trebuchet, the balista, the mouse, Greek fire, and the siege tower, and Sir George's skin still crawled when he recalled hideous, underground hand-to-hand fights in subterranean galleries as mine and counter-mine clashed beneath the defenders' fortifications.
That had been terrible enough, but in some ways, the open field battles had been even worse. The local crossbowmen had been both devilishly accurate and long-ranged, and only his men's superior armor and his archers' higher rate of fire had permitted the English to defeat them. Even the demon-jester had seemed dismayed, or as close to it as someone who never showed any discernible emotion could be, by the casualties his captive soldiers had sustained before they managed to break that planet to obedience. No doubt because of their implication for Sir George's ability to sustain his forces in the service of the demon-jester's guild.
It had probably been that dismay which accounted for the demon-jester's support of young Cheatham's suggestion that it ought to be possible to apply the same advantage in purchase to the English's bows. As a rule, the "Commander" seemed oddly uncomfortable whenever Sir George or one of his people suggested some small innovation in their equipment. He had no apparent problem with incremental improvements, like the substitution of new alloys in armor plate, or the better articulation of existing armor, but the introduction of new concepts clearly discomfited him. It wasn't as if the demon-jester disapproved of the suggestions. It was more as if the notion of finding newer and better ways to do things was foreign to his nature. That possibility seemed preposterous in light of the uncountable technological marvels and devices which surrounded him and were so much a part of his sense of utter superiority, yet the more Sir George had considered it, the more accurate it had seemed.
But whatever the demon-jester's attitude towards innovation might be, Sir George had been delighted by the consequences of Cheatham's inspiration. Computer had handled the actual design work, once the young archer had explained his idea to him, and despite a certain inevitable number of complaints that the old way was best, the bowmen had adopted the new weapons enthusiastically. The sheer number of new ideas and new devices to which they'd been subjected since their "rescue" undoubtedly had something to do with that, but the fact that it gave them even more range and power, and so increased their odds of survival and victory, explained even more of their enthusiasm. Each of them could still put twelve shafts in the air in a minute, but now they could hit picked, man-sized targets at very nearly three hundred paces. Their broadheaded arrows inflicted hideous wounds at any range, and their needle-pointed pile arrows could penetrate mail or even plate at pointblank ranges.
A
gainst foes who were totally unarmored, like the natives of Shaakun or this world, that sort of fire produced a massacre, not a battle. The only true hand blows of today's entire affair had come when Sir George and his mounted men charged the broken rabble that had once been an army to complete its rout, and he grimaced at the thought of what that charge had cost.
Only two of his mounted men had been seriously wounded, and neither of them too badly for the Physician's healing arts to save them, but they'd lost five more priceless horses. All too few of their original mounts had survived. Satan was one of them, praise God, and the demon-jester had been given ample opportunity to recognize the validity of Sir George's explanation of how critical mounts were to the combat effectiveness of his troopers. If anything, the "Commander" was even more fanatical about protecting and nurturing the supply of horses than Seamus McNeely or Sir George himself. He'd even nagged the Physician to find better ways to protect them from the stresses of phase stasis and to breed and "clone" them. But unlike humans, horses took poorly to the long periods of sleep journeys between stars imposed, no matter what the Physician did. Nor did they reproduce well under such conditions, and whatever arts brought dead archers or men-at-arms back to life seemed less effective for them. The Physician was able to produce a small, steady trickle of new horses, each of which was physically mature when it was handed over to Seamus, but there was never enough time to train the replacements as they truly ought to have been before committing them to battle, and horses were bigger and more vulnerable targets than armored men. Despite occasional upswings, it seemed that there were fewer of them for every battle, and the time would come when there were none.
The thought did not please Sir George, and not simply because Satan had been with him for so long and borne him so well. Sir George was no fool. His grandfather had been the next best thing to a common man-at-arms before he won Warwick under Edward I, and neither his son nor his grandson had been allowed to forget his hard-bitten pragmatism. A professional soldier to his toenails, Sir George knew that a mounted charge against properly supported archers was madness. Well, against English archers, at any rate, he amended. True, the shock of a horsed charge remained all but irresistible if one could carry it home, but accomplishing that critical final stage was becoming more and more difficult. Or that, at least, had been the case on Earth. Although he'd never faced them, Sir George had heard of the pikemen produced in distant Switzerland, and he rather wished he had a few of them along. A pike wall, now, formed up between his archers and the enemy... that would put paid to any cavalry charge! There was no way to know what was happening back home, of course, but surely by now even the French and Italians must be discovering the cold, bitter truth that unsupported cavalry was no longer the queen of battle. He was only glad that so far he and his men had encountered no native army that could match the discipline and armament of the Swiss!
Yet for all that, he was a knight himself, and perhaps the proudest emblems of any knight were his spurs. The day when the horse finally did vanish forever from the field of battle would be a terrible one, and Sir George was thankful he would never live long enough to see it.
Or perhaps I will live long enough... now. Assuming I might ever see Earth again. Which I won't.
He snorted again and rose to his full height, stretching mightily, and then smiled at his squire. He'd had two others since Thomas Snellgrave's death, but both had since been promoted to knighthood in their own right, and neither of them had been as tall as the third. For all his own inches, Edward was bidding fair to overtop him by very nearly a full half foot once he reached his full growth. The young man stood beside him, still holding his helmet, and Sir George eyed him with unobtrusive speculation. That Edward was with him—yes, and Matilda, praise God and every saint in any calendar!—was one of the few things which made this endless purgatory endurable, yet he wondered at times how old his son truly was. He'd been almost thirteen when they sailed to join King Edward in France, but how long ago had that been?
With no way to answer that question, it was impossible to estimate his son's age. Outwardly, the young man looked to be perhaps eighteen years of age, but that was no more useful as a yardstick than his own apparent age would have been. It was simply one more mystery, yet another consequence of the extension of his troops' lifespans which had permitted the "Commander" to avoid wasting time on fresh voyages to Earth to catch still more of them. Not that voyages to Earth were the only way their masters could secure more manpower, the baron thought sourly.
He'd concluded long ago that only coincidence had caused the demon-jester to sweep up their womenfolk and children with them. Whatever else the small creature was, he had no true understanding of the humans under his command. No, perhaps that was unfair. He'd gained at least some understanding of them; it was simply that he had never and would never see them as anything more than animate property. He didn't even feel true contempt for them, for they weren't sufficiently important to waste contempt upon. They were exactly what he persisted to this day in calling them: barbarians and primitives. Valuable to his guild, but lesser life forms, to be used however their natural superiors found most advantageous.
Sir George refused to make the mistake of regarding the demon-jester with responsive contempt, yet neither was he blind to the peculiar blindnesses and weaknesses which accompanied the other's disdain. For example, the demon-jester had come to Earth solely to secure a fighting force, though even now it seemed ridiculous to Sir George that beings who could build such marvels as the ship should need archers and swordsmen. The baron had no doubt that the "Commander" would have preferred to secure only a fighting force... or that he had seriously considered simply disposing of the "useless" mouths of the dependants who had accompanied the expedition to France. But the demon-jester hadn't done that, and Sir George thanked God that the alien had at least recognized the way in which wives and children could be used to insure the obedience of husbands and fathers. What the "Commander" had been slower to recognize was that the presence of women and the natural inclinations of men offered the opportunity to make his small fighting force self-sustaining. Although Sir George's age had been frozen, many of the youngsters who'd been taken with him, like Edward, had grown into young manhood and taken their place in the ranks, and still more children had been born... no doubt to follow them, when the time came.
Although Sir George and his men might have spent eleven years awake and aware, the time had been less for their families. All of them were returned to their magical slumber between battles, of course, but their families weren't always awakened when the soldiers were. Much depended upon how long they would remain on any given world before their masters were satisfied with their control of it, and the demon-jester had also learned to dole out reunions as rewards... or to withhold them as punishment.
The result was that far less time had passed for Matilda and the other women than for Sir George and his troops, and for many years, Edward had been kept to his mother's calendar. But he was old enough now, or physically mature enough, at any rate, to take his place on the field as his father's squire, so now he woke and slept with the rest of the men. Sir George was glad to have the boy with him, yet he knew Matilda was in two minds. She didn't miss her son when she slept, but not even their alien masters could heal all wounds. They had lost men, slowly but in a steady trickle, ever since they'd been stolen away from hearth and home forever, and she didn't want Edward to become one of those they lost.
Nor did Sir George. But they had no choice; they fought and won for the demon-jester and his guild, or else they perished. That was their reality, and it was unwise to think of other realities, or how things might have been, or to long to return, however briefly, to the world of their birth.
He knew all that, yet for all his formidable self-discipline, he could never quite stop wondering how long had truly passed since he and his men had set sail for France and ended... here. What year was it, assuming that the years of Earth had any meaning so far from h
er?
He had no idea. But he suspected they were far, far away from the twelfth day of July in the Year of Our Lord Thirteen Hundred and Forty-Six.
-VIII-
The silent dragon-man stopped and stood aside as they approached the glowing wall, and Sir George glanced sideways at the creature. He'd seen more than enough of them over the years to know that they, like the wart-faced Hathori, were indeed flesh and blood, for all their oddness in human eyes, and not simply more of the guild's mechanical devices. But that was virtually all he knew of them, even now. Computer had been more than merely reticent about both the Hathori and the dragon-men, yet at least Computer had been willing to tell the baron what the Hathori were called. He'd been unable or unwilling to do the same for the dragon-men, but the baron was uncertain whether that was the result of a direct order from the demon-jester, or simply because the dragon-men had no name, even for themselves. If it were the latter, then the dragon-men were even more alien than any of the other creatures the English had met, yet he couldn't quite dismiss the possibility, for he'd never heard one of them so much as make a single sound. The wart-faces, yes. He hadn't learned a word of the Hathori's language of grunts and hoarse hoots, in large part because his masters clearly didn't want the English to be able to converse with them, but he and his men had been given ample proof that the wart-faces at least had a language... of sorts.
Of course, that was about all they had.
As the demon-jester's whip hand, the wart-faces had far more contact with the English than the dragon-men did. They were the prison guards, charged with driving and goading the English outside the ship as well as providing security within it, and they had all the imagination and initiative of the brutal, unthinking turnkeys they were. They appeared to perform their limited duties almost entirely by rote, and they had a pronounced taste for cruelty to help lend enthusiasm to their tasks. From odd bits the demon-jester and Computer had allowed to drop, Sir George had come to suspect that the demon-jester had originally hoped to use the Hathori as he had eventually used the baron's own English. If that had been the small alien's intent, however, it must have come to naught with dismaying speed.