The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series)

by S. M. Stirling

  And then one more . . .

  No. Not all Eaters. That one must be Haida. Six in all, damn.

  Not many Dúnedain had fought the northern raiders, since the PPA nobility didn’t like having the Rangers set up Staths on Association lands. But some had, and pictures had circulated from the office of Marshal d’Ath. Most of the Cut-Noses were shorter than Morfind and none were taller than Faramir, but this man was between him and Malfind, nearly six feet.

  He wore a close-fitting blackened steel helm shaped like the upper half of a raven’s head with the bill projecting over his face and a spray of feathers across the crown. The countenance beneath the bill was square and strong-boned and heavy-jawed, sparsely bearded with brown hairs and somewhere between ruddy and olive in complexion, the eyes long and narrow and nestled in a seaman’s net of squint-wrinkles. His clothes were a long leather tunic sewn with small iron rings like miniature bracelets, with trousers and boots of sealskin. A cape over his shoulders was fashioned of a mixture of wool and the soft inner pith of cedar-bark, woven with a subdued pattern Faramir couldn’t make out, and a long fringe around the edges; around his throat was a necklace of bear and beaver teeth and his hands were densely tattooed.

  All the gear looked worn with use and stained by the sea but well-kept, and of good materials and workmanship to begin with. There was a serviceable-looking sword of cutlass style in a scabbard of sinew-bound whalebone splints at his side and a sheathed dagger like a narrow triangle clipped to one of the rings on his jacket. His hand held a short carved staff shaped like an oddly elongated double-ended paddle with puffin beaks strung to it, rather than a weapon. The markings were colored and highly stylized, but Faramir thought the main shape was two orcas eating a seal, the bodies of the great sea-predators in turn carved with ravens and eagles and, oddly, frogs. Something similar was painted on the leather surface of a small round hand-drum hanging at his side over the scabbard of his sword, shaped rather like a Mackenzie bodhran.

  He doesn’t look nearly as mean as the yrch.

  The Eaters looked like vicious, half-mad killers and barely human; which of course was precisely what they were. The Haida just looked like a man, albeit a hard, formidable, competent man about a decade or a bit more older than Faramir.

  But they’re afraid of him, the Ranger realized. And it can’t be because he’s such a great fighter. That would just mean more of them would mob him.

  It sent an icy trickle even through his concentration. The Cut-Noses were openly cringing as they did to acknowledge a superior in their own band. That left a gap of yards between themselves and the Haida, and they were shooting him the odd worried glance even though they were on Ranger territory and suspected Dúnedain were hiding somewhere near. Eaters had a simple concept of social rank, what learned humorists of his people called a Great Chain of Beating. Though it also functioned as a food chain sometimes.

  If the yrch feared this man so, it was with good reason. He must be a skaga, a shaman. There were stories . . . The raven-billed helm swept back and forth.

  He can’t see me. He really can’t see me, or he’d be pointing and shouting. He’s still looking, I think.

  The thought would have been more reassuring if he’d been absolutely confident that the Haida was just looking in the conventional sense. The man took a few shuffling steps forward, stooping and lifting his feet in what was almost a dance, then went down on one knee. He slapped one end of his staff into the earth with a rattle as he did so and brought his left hand down sharply in the same motion to bang out a rhythm on the little drum.

  The sounds skittered over Faramir’s nerves like blows of a padded club inside his head, and then the man spoke. Or chanted, since it had the rhythmic feel of someone reciting, even though the language was so wholly unfamiliar that the syllables twisted away from him almost as soon as he’d heard them:

  “Gíisgaay uu k’asdláang?

  Xáldaang!

  Dáakw st’i us?

  Xáldaang!

  K’adii hláa!”

  The Haida barked it out, in a high singsong almost like a wail. The call wasn’t particularly loud, but it seemed to make the earth ripple beneath the watching Ranger in an entirely non-physical way. That was interesting, even fascinating—how could the fabric of the world flex without moving at all?—but not enough to make him pay much attention. His head was too heavy. Everything was heavy, soft, drifting, like the feeling you got the night of the Ring-bearer’s Birthday Party festival when everything was winding down. So heavy and sleepy and contented. Though he also felt like he was about to throw up, and that once he started he’d keep going until his guts were hanging out his mouth raw and red. He would feel better if he just put his head down and—

  A high shriek from above and behind him, the alarm call: “Tiro! Tiro!”

  Faramir barely managed not to scream in panic as he jerked his head back up, tasting bile at the back of his throat burning like acid.

  Thock!

  The Haida had—impossibly—jerked his little wooden staff into the path of an arrow that had come slashing down from the big oak, and the shaft spun to one side. A paler spot marked where it had taken a chip out of the wood, and the shaman looked down at it with a frown of annoyance. Morfind must have shot somehow; perhaps whatever the skaga had done hadn’t been pointed up. The Cut-Noses were bounding in a full-tilt zigzag across the ground towards the hidden Rangers, screeching every time a foot hit the ground:

  “Meat! Meatmeatmeatmeat!”

  It rose into the wordless insane trilling of the blood squeal, and the ones with bows were loosing on the run. That meant they would hit only by accident, but an accidental hit would kill you just as dead and they were putting plenty of arrows into the air, going past him with whrrrt sounds or slapping and chunking into dirt or wood. Even a mild wound meant death now if it slowed him. The skaga was walking along behind the Eaters, frowning and twirling his staff in one hand like a baton.

  “Malfind!” Faramir shouted. “Dago hon! Kill him! Dago i ngollor! Kill the magician!”

  Meanwhile the Eaters were coming straight at him, looking five times the number they were. Black-fletched arrows buzzed overhead and by his ears. Faramir rose to one knee and drew, the limbs of the recurve bending into a deep U-shape. He had only seconds until the Eaters were on him. Targets, just targets, let everything but the target zone blur out of sight . . .

  The flat unmusical snap of his bowstring sounded. There was a tick as it struck the very edge of the Eater spearman’s shield. Then at almost the same instant the wet smack of impact: tick-smack. The shaft went into and transfixed the shoulder of the Cut-Nose, not immediately fatal but slicing muscle and vein and hammering into bone, taking the man out of the fight.

  Faramir was stripping the next shaft out of the three held under his finger almost before the first struck. It had been chancy with the shield covering most of the man’s torso, but he wanted that spear out of the balance or they weren’t going to survive past the next few seconds. The decision wasn’t something he thought of; it just happened, far too fast for the waking mind.

  His eyes had shifted away from the man the instant the arrow came off the string, but his peripheral vision saw him make a neat heel-to-face turn that started with the mailed-fist impact of the arrow. Then he ran, clutching the wound and making hoarse grunting sounds. The Eaters’ habit of devouring their own wounded helped with their supply situation, but it had tactical drawbacks.

  Whap-whap, and he shot twice, even less conscious of the hard physical effort of repeatedly lifting ninety pounds weight than he had been in interminable hours on the range and the hunt. More of Morfind’s arrows went by overhead, from her invisible perch in the tree; none of the Eaters had even realized she was up there yet. Some distant part of him was mildly surprised that having cover and a steady shooting position when under direct attack was just as big an advantage as his teachers had said it would be.

  Another of the yrch went down, an arrow through the t
high next to the groin, bright blood spouting from a femoral artery slashed across—unconsciousness in seconds and certain death afterwards, the axe flying from his hand. Faramir didn’t know who’d shot that one, but he half-expected the survivors to flee. Instead the three of them came on, screeching, steel naked in their hands. Possibly more frightened of running away with their backs bare in a hundred-yard killing zone, or just crazy, or more terrified of the man behind them than they were of death itself.

  Malfind was concentrating on the skaga as Faramir had commanded. And while he wasn’t the best archer in Stath Ingolf he wasn’t the worst either, and he was shooting at less than fifty yards, point blank range, zero deflection with a target coming at him at walking pace. The Haida shaman flicked out his staff again, knocked an arrow aside with a hard tock sound, turned his torso to let another go by an inch from his chest, ducked under a third as he tossed the staff into his left hand and drew his sword. There should have been at least two solid hits.

  He wasn’t moving blurring-fast, more at a pace that was brisk enough but unhurried somehow, despite the fact that the arrows he was dodging and deflecting were streaks through the air moving at two hundred feet per second. It was as if time itself was passing at a slightly different rate for the man from the far northern isles, and even in the midst of battle it was the most terrible thing Faramir had ever seen.

  Maybe it’s at least distracting him!

  The last Eaters threw down their bows and made their final bounds. The one coming for Faramir had a knife in one hand and a hatchet in the other, spreading out in unison like the claws of a crab. The Ranger came up, drawing his knife as he did. But instead of trying to fall into a full fighting position he simply rammed himself forward, neck tensed, head tucked and chin on his chest as he head-butted the man in the middle of his screaming, contorted face with the front curve of his helmet.

  Dúnedain called it i vidh dath galen, the Kiss of Greenhollow.

  The Eater had strings of gummy froth flying from his lips; he almost certainly had too many of the juices of rage and fear in his blood to notice most ordinary wounds. Faramir was a young man of average height, a little slender though fairly broad-shouldered, but all of that was hard solid muscle and bone. He weighed a hundred and sixty pounds not counting his gear, and he was driven now by leg muscles that let him jump straight up to chest height from a standing start with a sword in one hand and a shield in the other. The head-butt effectively slammed a two-hundred-pound, metal-tipped club into the Eater’s face at their combined speeds.

  Faramir didn’t feel the blow immediately. Instead white light flashed through his brain and the universe vanished. The impact threw him back on his heels, so dazed that he almost fell over and almost lost his grip on the knife. The orch was two inches shorter and skinny, plus being naked except for a deerskin loinclout and in mid-leap off the ground rather than solidly planted. Nose, jaw, cheekbones and several teeth shattered with a crackle like breaking ice as he flipped backward in the air. He didn’t quite do a full circle around his center of mass, but he hit the ground face-first. That might well have broken his neck, but he was dead by that time anyway. The body fell so limp that there wasn’t even any final twitch.

  Faramir flogged himself back to function by sheer willpower; it was easier if you expected a hard blow to the head. And if you knew right down in your gut and groin that someone was going to kill you very soon if you weren’t at ten-tenths. And if you were wearing a steel helmet with internal padding, of course. And if you knew you had to help your kinsman right away, regardless.

  My neck’s going to hurt like a bastard in a little while, he thought. Unless I’m dead and on my way to Mandos, of course.

  When his eyes had cleared enough to see again less than two seconds had passed. He sheathed his knife, stooped to grab his bow and shove it into the case that was part of the quiver, and snatched up his shield by the central grip in mid-stride with his left hand as he stepped towards Malfind. At that instant the spear in his cousin’s hand snapped out like the tongue of a frog licking for a fly. The left-most of the pair of Eaters dodged almost quickly enough, caught the sharp edge along the side of his neck just under the hinge of the jaw where the carotid ran, and sat down to die.

  The other darted in with his machete raised; he was on Malfind’s spear-side and inside the range that the point of the weapon could be used. The counter to that involved clouting the attacker with the spearshaft, or with the butt if you were strong enough to twirl the whole weapon like the blade of a winnowing-fan . . . though both were long-shots.

  Faramir solved the problem for his cousin more directly, though it involved forcing himself to move fast when he just wanted to lie down and cry: he punched with his left hand still gripping the handle of his shield and the disk parallel to the ground. That rammed the metal-shod edge into the Eater’s neck, and the man dropped away sprattling and yammering. It also let him swing the shield up between him and the skaga as he drew his bush-sword and put the two Rangers shoulder to shoulder.

  It was only then that he noticed he was wheezing like a pump with a loose cylinder, and the point of the bush-sword was shaking a little. Morfind had run out on a waist-thick branch of the spreading oak above them and had her bow drawn to the ear. He opened his mouth to shout . . . But Malfind was already making a stepping lunge. The Haida stopped and flicked his sword up in an arc. Ting and the flat of it deflected the spear, and hard enough that the spearman was thrown off balance. Morfind shot, less than twenty feet away and she was a first-rate archer, more than good enough to aim so close to her own. The arrow should have taken the skaga in the chest; instead it deflected off the steel rings on his shoulder.

  They were close enough now that Faramir could hear the sharp ringing sound, and his enemy’s slight grunt as the force of the blow staggered him a little. Swordsman’s reflex told him to step in with a lunge to the throat before the shaman could recover.

  There seemed to be plenty of time to know what to do, but much less to actually do it. Faramir shoved his shield-arm across Malfind’s body and heaved him back in a half-stagger.

  “Noro lim!” he shouted.

  That meant run fast; it was the order for hair-on-fire flight.

  “Now! Do it!”

  The three turned and bolted into the forest.

  • • •

  Behind them the skaga looked after the fleeing Dúnedain, sighed, and looked around as he sheathed his sword. Then he knelt beside the dying Eater and grasped him by the back of the head with a hand that felt like a hydraulic grab.

  “Look . . . at . . . me . . .” he said, and his voice seemed to stretch the world, like a heavy boot on taut canvas. “Háws . . . hl . . . díi.”

  Or like a very bright light, one that left everything washed-out and unreal. The flow of blood from the severed arteries slowed as muscles clamped involuntarily around them. The Eater obeyed, and then screamed like a rabbit caught in a wire snare as he met the skaga’s eyes.

  “Just a moment, and you may die,” the shaman said soothingly. “And death is only the beginning. There is another we must speak to. Aid me, Orca-might . . .”

  The Eater’s second scream was fainter only because there was less strength and breath behind it. The whimpers that followed continued for a little while after the man had died.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Dùthchas of the Clan McClintock

  (Formerly northern California and southern Oregon)

  High Kingdom of Montival

  (Formerly western North America)

  May/Satsuki 17th, Change Year 46/2044 AD/Shohei 1

  “That looks like a training kata as much as a dance,” Reiko said to her guard commander the morning after their arrival at Diarmuid Tennart McClintock’s steading.

  I must ground myself in practicalities for now, she thought. That dream . . . I wish I could remember more.

  Heat and light, desolation, thirst, fear. Then the looming castle, and the knowledge that death or transfig
uration awaited within.

  Or do I wish to remember more? Father told me of his visions, but I also saw how they rode and drove him. Have I the strength to bear that burden without breaking? Because I must.

  A drum thuttered and a flute played. Two of the McClintocks moved in perfect unison, the broad four-foot blades of their greatswords flashing in the early sun. Every dozen or so moves they would face each other, parrying with a hard clang of metal on metal as the flats met, then turning and slashing at arm-thick wooden posts with a great shout . . . and taking a section off with each blow. Reiko blinked at the hard thock sounds—when her people used live steel in practice like this, they struck at water-soaked mats of woven rice straw rolled up and tightly bound around a bamboo post.

  “It is a kata, Majesty,” Egawa said, frowning intently. “And those things aren’t as clumsy as they look. Not as fast as a katana, of course, but then they are more than twice the weight—around five pounds, from the one I hefted. In a duel, I would be confident against either of those men, but in a melee . . . even in my armor, I would not like to be hit by one.”

  This was evidently a slack season for the local people, whose way of life didn’t involve nearly as much steady grinding toil as that of the rice-growing peasants and sea fishermen she was familiar with. The fall-planted crops here wouldn’t be ready for harvest until later, and the spring crops were in the soil and needed only weeding. At home they would be planting the first early rice; this month was named for that.

  Out in the river was a curious device like a waterwheel on an anchored boat, which operated a helix-like rotating wicker scoop that lifted salmon into holding pens. It wasn’t working now, though if you looked for a moment you could see the four-foot forms of the Chinook working their way upstream; a question had revealed there was a strict quota enforced by some religious taboo she couldn’t quite grasp on how many of the great fish could be taken in any one spot or time, to preserve the breeding stock. The allowable numbers taken from the first run were in brine-tubs and smoking-racks or waiting in wicker-fenced ponds to be eaten fresh. They did some hunting here all the year around—winter was the main trapping season for furs—but late fall was both the main salmon run and the time to hunt fat beasts migrating downward from the mountain pastures, and preserve them for the cold season by smoking and salting and pickling, in jars and in underground pits lined with ice. She couldn’t imagine wanting to live this way, but in the abstract it had its merits.