Prince of Outcasts

by S. M. Stirling

  NOVEMBER 5TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD

  John Arminger Mackenzie dreamed that the shadow of his soul lengthened in the afternoon . . .

  He looked up from where the cloud-foam beat on the black sand, endlessly different, an intricate structure that ate meaning and changed it so that even to think was impossible in ways that were attractive and loathsome in even measure.

  Something flashed across the sky where black stars moved, something blue. A blue diamond of light, a blue mantle draped over the head of a figure taller than the horizon yet somehow shadowed with his mother’s face against a background of infinite light, and then the blue flash of a sword. A sword that was not a sword in the hand of a knight whose beauty was terror and protection, and rearing back snarling from its power a dragon that was no dragon. The substance of his mind seemed on the edge of shattering into fragments as it strained to comprehend things beyond its uttermost abilities. He knew that what he was seeing was true, but that the symbols his consciousness used were less than a child’s stick-figure scrawl compared to the unthinkable realities they tried to show.

  And there were words, thundering in his mind across gulfs where stars were like motes of dust, syllables of ringing crystal carved from the hearts of ancient suns:

  Sancte Michael Archangele—

  He woke, gasping out: “Defende nos in proelio, contre nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium!”

  There was none of the usual transition between sleep and waking. The memory of the dream vanished, leaving him with only the quickened pulse and breathing that went with danger. Ruan—it was his watch—had an arrow on the string of his bow, standing and peering about uneasily. His brows went up when he saw the Prince awake, and he nodded with visible relief at the sharp gesture with a rising hand: get them up.

  He went to Deor first, but the scop threw back his blanket as the young Mackenzie reached for him. John tapped his foot against Pip’s, which was the safest way to quietly wake someone who slept with a blade close to hand . . . which both his parents had done most of their lives. She stirred, blinked, opened eyes pale in the moonlight and gave him a quick nod as he pulled his feet into his boots. By then the others were all stirring or up, reaching quietly for weapons and harness, helping one another in darkness lit only by embers and a few distant lanterns but keeping low. The moon was down and it was as quiet as an encampment of several thousand humans, seven elephants and many score of lesser beasts could possibly be.

  Ishikawa murmured very quietly as he slipped into his light flexible seaman’s kikkō cuirass and tied the thick silk cords that secured his helm:

  “Yumi.”

  Two of his sailors strung the seven-foot asymmetrical weapon and then handed it and the quiver to him. A crewman from the Tarshish Queen began a querulous question, and there was a faint mmmmff! as Radavindraban clapped a hand over his mouth.

  “Arm,” he murmured to the Queen’s sailors. “Quick, quiet!”

  Pip’s gang of ruffians from the Silver Surfer were faster, if anything, coming awake and ready to fight with the feral intensity of so many coydogs. Evrouin helped John into the arming doublet and snapped the clips that held his back-and-breast at hip and shoulder, then pushed the helm down on his head before he started in on the rest of the armor, working from the chest down, buckling the parts together and threading the laces through the eyelets and tying them off. An expert was supposed to be able to do that with his eyes closed, and Evrouin managed it without a fumble in the darkness, his fingers flying as swiftly as a court typist.

  You certainly couldn’t do it all yourself, not without half an hour, six hands and a contortionist’s flexibility.

  Even with the visor up the helmet felt stifling as the sponge-and-felt pads within gripped John’s skull, and it made the darkness seem blacker. That was no less unpleasant for being mostly imaginary, though it did cut off peripheral vision. The fear wasn’t completely imaginary anyway, not when your testicles were making faint whimpering sounds as they crawled up into your belly for shelter, driven by the conviction that someone was creeping up on you from a direction just beyond the corner of your eye.

  Sergeant Fayard knelt beside the prince, and John made a circling motion with one hand just after Evrouin slipped the gauntlet onto it. The underofficer nodded, touched two fingers to the brim of his helm and moved crouching to set his dozen crossbowmen out in a ring. There was a multiple crink-crink-crink-crink-crink-crink-click sound as they cocked their weapons and slid bolts into the firing grooves; their half-armor was light gear by Montivallan custom, but it made them heavy infantry here.

  Think, John, he told himself, forcing his mind into tactical mode.

  He’d been educated by warriors, even if it wasn’t his first choice of occupation. Then again it hadn’t been his mother’s either, and she’d been very good at it by all accounts, and his father had always said he’d rather have kept a good inn on an interesting highway, with a horse-paddock and garden and some fishing and hunting in the neighborhood.

  If I was an enemy attacking this camp, what would I do? If I wasn’t strong enough to overrun it and kill us all, that is, which would take a major force and couldn’t be done by stealth.

  John carefully refrained from looking at the scattered red-gold dots of firelight, despite the impulse to do just that, remembering the old joke about the drunk who’d lost his house-key looking for it under a streetlamp because that’s where the light was. The last thing he needed now was to kill his night-vision. The shield slid onto his arm and he put one hand to his sword-hilt. One deep breath and then another, and another; if you forced your body to behave as if it was calm, the mind followed.

  Silence stretched as the Montivallans and their allies finished readying themselves. He shivered a little; it was far from being anything you could call cold, but it was much cooler than the daytime and the heavy moisture in the air produced a lot of dew. Drops of it ran gelid down his spine. On the one hand he was hideously afraid of embarrassment if this turned out to be a false alarm. Not to mention how everyone would resent him for getting them up in the middle of the night. On the other hand . . .

  If someone’s creeping through the dark, I don’t care about being embarrassed! Let’s see, why would they do a night attack? I’d go for the artillery and the prang-prangs. This expedition is all about them, when you come right down to it. They’re the point failure source. Even if they didn’t damage anything else, losing them would mean we couldn’t do anything but turn around and go back. You can’t attack a fortress with artillery of its own unless you’ve got catapults, even if you’re prepared to bury it under bodies.

  He started to relax, pleased with his analysis . . .

  “Wait a minute,” he murmured to himself, feeling his eyes going wide in the dark. “That means they’d be coming right at us.”

  Then something went tick and he felt a sharp rap on his shield. Not nearly as hard as an arrow hitting it, but the same sort of feeling, somehow.

  Thoughts tumbled through his mind like gearwork in a mill, and he leapt to the side and swept the shield up in front of Pip, putting her between it and his armored body and raising it so that the upper curve covered her face to the brim of her hat.

  Tick.

  Something struck the side of his helmet. In the same instant Deor shouted a warning:

  “Iban, blowguns! Tejem poison on the darts—deadly! Hold up your blankets to shield each other!”

  Tick—tick—tick—tick, as they scrambled for the cloth and someone screamed. There was something about the words poison and deadly . . .

  Blows on his shield and helmet, one heart-stoppingly close to the side of his face, striking the lower edge of the sallet helm. He swept his visor down and another tick struck just below the eyeslit. It was hard, a sharp rap like someone knocking a knuckle on a door or hail hitting a roof-tile, but not the punch-hard hammer strike of
a crossbow bolt or an arrow from a heavy war-bow. Somehow knowing that the slivers flying invisibly through the night were coated in something that would destroy his nervous system was just as frightening. He expelled a breath, and in the same moment forced terror out of his head, an almost physical sensation.

  “Agi Idup! Agi Ngelaban!” someone screamed nearby.

  War-cry, John thought, tense and waiting for more darts that didn’t come.

  And it wasn’t any of the local battle shouts, he’d made a point of learning those. There was a clash of steel on the heels of it, and a scream of pain, noise spreading like the ripples from a stone dropped in a pond. However few they were and however stealthy their approach, the attackers had roused the Baru Denpasarans now. They had only moments before they were overwhelmed . . . though the thought of a melee in pitch darkness was enough to make the hair bristle on the back of your head. A small band of infiltrators would have the advantage of being able to strike at anyone around them. Everyone else would be likely to do that too, regardless of who they hit, and might well inflict more casualties on their own folk than the foe did. There had been a battle centuries ago where an entire army had defeated itself in exactly that way.

  Toa loomed up in the darkness, visible mostly as eyeballs and a glint of steel. The Maori was wrapped in something dark, mottled and shaggy. John had assumed it was the outer cover for his bedroll, and perhaps it was, but it was also a long cloak of flax fabric sewn all over with strips of leather with the hair still attached, constructed so that it fastened at the front and covered his whole body from throat to ankles save where one hand held his great spear and the other a bundle. The garment rustled in the dark as he threw another like it to Pip.

  “Kahu koati,” he said, which might mean something to her.

  It did; she ducked out from behind John’s shield and swept the cloak about her shoulders, giving John a brief white smile of thanks in the dimness as she did so. There was a dart standing in the brow of the bowler that she wore, just visible when the tuft of feather on its base waggled. The eyes beneath the brim went wide as she looked out into the darkness and whipped up her slingshot.

  “Heads up!” Thora barked, shield up and backsword moving in a wrist-loosening whirl that shimmered in the darkness as the firelight caught the honed edge. “Here they come!”

  Things began to happen; there was another clash of weapons, and more shouts. Almost instantly, basketfuls of dry brushwood that had been left ready were tipped into the fires in a dozen places throughout the camp by the simple expedient of kicking out the sticks that supported them. Red-yellow light flared up instants later, dazzlingly bright. It was a mixed blessing as he squinted against it . . .

  Those are men coming our way! he thought.

  He opened his mouth to shout the order to shoot as the figures were silhouetted against the blaze. The enemy were short, slight brown men like the Baru Denpasarans, or several of the Montivallans for that matter—he’d felt big, pink and conspicuous ever since the Tarshish Queen made landfall here—but their fringed loincloths and circles of feathers standing up from headbands made them easy to pick out once they were upright and moving and the fires really caught.

  Fayard beat him to it. All twelve crossbows went off together, in a single prolonged tunnnggg-whap, and the sailors from the Tarshish Queen followed albeit more raggedly and an instant later than the professional soldiers of the Protector’s Guard. Ishikawa and Ruan both shot twice in the span of the sound of the crossbows loosing. Figures fell, seeming to vanish from the earth as they dropped out of the fiery background.

  Though their screams remained all too audible. Others might be dead . . . or might be crawling towards him on their bellies.

  And nearly impossible to see with this God-damned helmet on! And the bolts that missed will go off blind into the night and like as not hit one of our allies.

  The weapons the Montivallans carried could smash through armor at close range and were deadly at three hundred long paces. Against naked opponents at point-blank like this they were perfectly capable of punching all the way through a man’s body and sinking home in anyone standing behind him. He still wasn’t going to try to tell his followers not to shoot at attackers trying to kill them, and if some of their allies suffered because of it . . . well, Holy Church taught that the Fall of Man meant life was a vale of tears full of suffering. He ignored an image of his confessor gibbering in indignation at that piece of sophistry and dismissed the thought of the penances that would follow.

  The Iban were moving forward quickly now that they’d been discovered, sprinting behind snarls and the red-silver glitter of steel seen by firelight. They had probably expected to finish off men still half-asleep or paralyzed by the darts in a final burst of hand-to-hand slaughter, but they were still doing the right thing—charging home across the missile weapons’ killing ground. He thought a few of the sailors from the Queen were lying still or writhing on the ground, but there wasn’t time to check, and most of their party were on their feet and armed. And shooting. The wet crack of bolts striking flesh sounded beneath the harsh twanging of steel prods and wire string.

  A clump of the Iban were heading for his all-too-visible self; polished chrome-steel armor glittered even in the firelight, not to mention the ostrich-plumes on the top of his helmet, marking him out as a leader. They might or might not know what a suit of plate was, but they definitely knew it was conspicuous. The first few seemed to be carrying spears. He had just enough time to realize that they were spearheads on the end of eight-foot blowguns made from some iron-hard dark wood and think very clever before they were too close for anything but reflex.

  “Haro, Portland! Holy Mary for Portland!” he screamed behind the muffling visor.

  In the same instant he leapt into a full-tilt charge, sword up over his head with the hilt forward. At close quarters men-at-arms didn’t just have weapons, they were weapons, and the most deadly ones known to human-kind. Six stamping strides and he tucked the big curved kite shield into his shoulder, leading with it as he lunged in what was almost a headlong fall. The first Iban was skilled and quick as a striking weasel, stabbing for his face and ready to block the sword, but he’d never fought a knight in plate before and wasn’t going to have the time to benefit from the experience. John tucked his head a little, and the spearhead banged off the pauldron over his right shoulder with a screech of metal on metal without throwing him off his stride.

  He rammed straight forward to contact without pausing or trying to use the sword, something only the confident and well trained—or drunken or reckless—did. There was just enough light to see his enemy was surprised; his concept of normal would have been for John to slow down and use the blade. Then the sheet-steel facing of the shield struck along a quarter of the smaller man’s body, including his face and collarbone and part of an arm he’d started to fling up in reflex.

  Naked, John would have outweighed the Sea-Dyak warrior by forty pounds of bone and muscle. Armed cap-a-pie and counting the shield it was more like a hundred and twenty, and they met with their full combined velocity. Bare flesh rammed into unyielding steel. The check made John grunt as the shock ran down from shoulder into bent knees and bounced him back fully upright, but this sort of collision was a frequent experience in training to fight as a knight and he knew how to use it. Bone cracked loud enough to hear over the gathering tumult, and that included the Iban’s jaw, cheekbone, elbow and eye-socket.

  He’d just been struck very hard by a very large club.

  The wounded man’s limp body tangled up the two following him. John’s sword slashed down at the half-glimpsed figure to his right, not aiming, just trying to hit something on the bare moving form. If seeing things through a visor’s slit in the daytime was a strain, at night it was like fighting in a bad dream . . . or a crowded closet with the door closed. The longsword was a brief shimmer through the night.

  The ugly wet crac
k of impact jarred through the leather inner surface of his gauntlet and into his hand and tight-strapped wrist, with the solid chunking feel of a straight-on hit that you got used to practicing on hog carcasses. A man lurched away grabbing at his right arm with his left, and then ran shrieking for a few steps as it came off in his hand before he collapsed bonelessly limp and face-down. Evrouin stabbed past his liege’s sword-arm with the glaive, and someone half-seen grunted in shock as the heavy butcher-knife shape of the blade went home with two strong arms behind it along the mountain-ash shaft.

  “Hakkaa päälle!”

  That was the Bearkiller war-shout; probably, almost certainly, the first time it had been heard on these shores. It meant Hack them down!

  Off to his right Thora deliberately took a spearpoint on the breastplate. That was painful and risky, but left her enemy shocked into an instant’s immobility. In the same moment she caught another man behind the knee with a vicious slashing backstroke, punched the steel-shod edge of her dish-shaped shield into a third’s face just below the eyes with a crack like an axe blade striking, and then lunged with a beautiful economy of motion that sent six inches of point into the throat of the spearman drawing his weapon back for another stab. Then she withdrew into guard position with a quick twist of the wrist that opened all the large veins and probably killed the man almost as fast as cutting off his head would have done. It all took about as long as counting one-two-three, graceful as a dance and done with a hard smooth quickness.

  “Ha, Woden! Woden!”

  Deor Godulfson called on his God as he finished the man Thora had hocked with an economical chop of his Saxon broadsword; the Iban had been trying to stab her in the foot, which showed commendable focus with a leg cut halfway through at the back of the knee. Then he caught another spearpoint on his round raven-blazoned shield, stabbed underneath it and punched with the boss that covered the grip within.

  “Woden!”

  Victory-Father’s name was probably also a first for this island, and the poet’s voice rang like a trumpet. He was on Thora’s right, guarding her unshielded side, the oiled steel links of his mail hauberk gleaming like a dragon’s skin in the dark. The two of them worked together like the fingers of a single hand. Some fleeting, buried part of John’s mind—the part not focused on staying alive in this blindfolded scrimmage—was glad to see it. He was a passing part of their story, but those two were really what mattered to each other, at seventh and last.