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

by S. M. Stirling

  One began whirling a lariat in the style of an eastern plainsman, protected by two fellows with larger shields made of raw planks and hide. The rest clumped together, cursing and dodging and pushing each other forward with cries of encouragement that amounted to after you with the rocks.

  Now, Karl decided. They’re about to make a rush.

  It was the same instinct that let you judge when a group of beasts was going to stampede.

  Quickly, now, boyo, he told himself. The lasses are the safest people on this field . . . until those spalpeens understand the danger they’re in. Then they’ll strike to kill.

  He undid the catch of the war-cloak and let it fall back from his shoulders as he moved one foot out on the branch and drew, making a loud, vaguely squirrel-like chittering sound between his teeth as he did, the agreed-on signal.

  It was awkward, with a heavy war-bow six inches taller than he was, and shooting down past his own knee, but he managed. The head wavered slightly, as something deep within him realized you’re shooting at a man, not a deer.

  Then he called on Father Wolf in his mind, and felt a ruthless calm fill him: possibly there was a whisper of Oi, mind yer work, there. For some reason, his totem always spoke to him in the accent of the grandfather he barely remembered.

  He let out a breath and drew inside the bow, waiting until the flight-feathers tickled the skin behind the angle of his jaw. Possibly one of the ten bows in the trees about creaked enough to be heard over the shouts and screams and bellows and the women’s hawk-shrieks of anger, for the bandit he aimed at looked up at the last instant. The face was a tangle of brown beard and hair more shaggy than a sheep’s arse and not as clean, but the eyes in it went wide and the mouth gaped to show teeth about the same color as the hair.

  The outlaw had just long enough to scream himself, at the sight of the broadhead pointing at him from only thirty feet away. Karl’s hand was steady as he let the bow-cord roll off his three string fingers, but something deep inside winced a little. It helped that so much of his practice had been snap-shots at targets shaped like men. If you just got out of the way and let reflex do the job—

  Snap!

  An arrow from a longbow traveled hundreds of feet in a second. Thirty feet was a tiny fraction of a second, barely a flicker of motion, literally less than an eyeblink. The flat wet smack of the broadhead’s impact was tooth-gratingly familiar, the same sound any hunter heard from a close shot. The point struck just over the bandit’s collarbone and smashed downward through his lungs to lodge in his pelvis. Along the way it slashed through the knot of big veins over the heart. The outlaw dropped backward instantly and utterly limp, as if someone had hit him on the head with a sledgehammer, twitched once or twice and lay still with a diminishing stream of blood coming out of his nose and mouth. It was precisely the sort of merciful quick-killing shot—right through the body-cavity lengthwise, slanted across—that you tried for when hunting, to show your skill and please the Horned Lord and Lady Flidais. With a man walking upright the only way to achieve it would be like this.

  Nine other bows snapped by the time he had the next shaft on the string. Every one hit, though not all were swiftly fatal: it was close range, the comrades he’d picked for this were all first-rate shots even by Mackenzie standards, and they had had time to be very careful about selecting their first targets among the close-bunched outlaws. Karl had put a dozen arrows ready to hand, lightly tapped into the bark beside him and angled so that he barely had to move his string-hand to grasp one. That made up for the odd position, and he shot them off in a ripple of snarling grunting effort in the time it might have taken a man to count to six ten times, nock-draw-loose, not consciously aiming at all—if you were a real master-bowman you just thought about where you wanted the point to go and there it went. The last one took a little longer to strike, since it was aimed at the back of a running man seventy-five yards away. He flopped forward onto his face, twitched and lay still, with the arrow standing from his spine like the mast of a ship sailing into eternity.

  The bandits didn’t have time to shoot back, though many carried bows; it took crucial seconds to realize where the arrows were coming from, more to spot the archers through branches and needles and war-cloaks, and anyway shooting right up was nearly as clumsy as straight down. Plus the band had aimed at the enemy archers first: a man with an axe or a spear thirty feet down might as well be unarmed. One outlaw with more presence of mind than most tried to run into the water with the women, which would be one place nobody in their band could shoot. Boudicca’s hands came up from below the water again, this time with her glaive.

  The bandit tried to stop his headlong dash as the polearm rose dripping with the point angled towards his gut, and succeeded at the cost of teetering for a moment with his arms windmilling. One hand held a foot-long knife and the other a small hide buckler, both completely useless now. Except that the panic-stricken violence of his movements might well have sliced his own skin or bashed himself in the head.

  The slope down to the water gave a perfect angle for what Boudicca did next; she snapped the razor-edged inner curve of the hook on the back of the blade around the bandit’s bare ankle and heaved. The outlaw went over backward with a shriek as the foot was pulled out from under him and the Achilles’ tendon sliced across at the same time. That grew almost unbelievably loud as the Mackenzie woman snarled, drew the shaft of the heavy weapon back, and rammed eight inches of the point into his crotch with a convulsive two-handed thrust that must have cracked bone.

  Karl winced at that, even as he slung his bow, kicked the coiled rope off the branch, jumped, caught and slid downward. Not that you could blame her, all things considered . . .

  Where followers of his faith held sway, they punished rapists by burying them at a crossroads with a spear through them, to avert the anger of the Earth Powers at the profanation of the most sacred rite, the one that symbolized the creation of all that was. If the circumstances were aggravated, they might bury the culprit quick with the spear in the earth as a warning, for it was blasphemy and a profanation of holy things, not merely a serious crime.

  He whistled sharply as he slid; the rest of the Mackenzies rose from their hiding places and shot as well. Fenris and Ulf and Macmac exploded out of their nests of leaves in the hollow of a fallen tree, silence broken in a baying roar, and the rest of the warband’s beasts followed—the dogs had long since settled their own hierarchy of rank in their own fashion. Few bandits were still on their feet after hundreds of arrows landed on better than twenty-four men, and none of them were unwounded; three of them ran straight into the great dogs, and the whole went over in a snarling tumble of limbs and fur and fangs and blood and screams. Mackenzie hounds were gentle . . . with those they thought of as their own folk. Then the McClintocks hiding under their own war-cloaks behind rocks and under fallen trees where they’d crept back after loudly going out to “hunt” erupted to their feet.

  “McClintock Abú!”

  The ripping scream of the McClintock sluagh-ghairm cut through the brabble of bewilderment and pain, which was what a war-cry was supposed to do. Diarmuid led his folk, claymore in his right fist, target on his left forearm and dirk gripped in that hand. Behind him came two men carrying claidheamh mòr, the four-foot blades aloft above screaming tattooed faces, and the others fanned out in a wedge. There was a brief clash of steel.

  Karl whipped out his short sword and took his buckler in his left hand as he landed, crouching and shouting:

  “Hectate’s Wolves!”

  That was to rally the Mackenzies. Instead of the desperate fight he’d expected . . .

  A man crawled away from him, the arrow through his lower back jerking and trembling as he crawled, blood and snot and tears running down his face. Boudicca walked over, glistening save for the dirt and blood on her feet, poised her glaive and thrust to the back of the neck, went on to the next. There weren’t many.

  He and Mathun both whistled sharply, the commands overridi
ng each other, and their dogs stopped their worrying at the bodies of their kills, licking their chops. They sat back and looked around with satisfaction as the rest of the great shaggy hounds joined them, thumping the ground with their tails and grooming and doing a little good-natured sniffing and jostling—their pack had done very well. The blood-and-shit stink was heavy, especially by contrast with the purity of the mountain air, rawer and heavier than slaughtering-time back on the croft or on a hunt, and with a peculiar muskiness. Flies buzzed in the sudden silence.

  Many of the young warriors of both Clans were pale-faced; Ruan sat down abruptly and hid his face in his hands, with his partner’s arm about his shoulders, and their dog nuzzling and whining uncomprehending sympathy. Tair made a dash for a bush before he doubled over retching. Most doggedly went about retrieving their arrows . . . save for some so deeply embedded it would have meant cutting to a degree unpleasantly reminiscent of butchering a pig.

  “Who’s hurt?” Karl called sharply; it might be his first real fight, but he was bow-captain and found that made it easier to keep steady. “Sound off your names the now!”

  All his party did. The women were giving him black scowls as they dressed, and then a couple of grudging nods as it became clear nobody had worse than superficial cuts or bruises. None of them had appreciated being, essentially, bait in the trap . . . though it had been bait with sharp teeth. One of Diarmuid’s McClintocks had his sword-side forearm slashed deeply, enough that he’d have to be left at the next secure place. The tacksman’s healer was working on that almost at once, evoking a loud yelp as she swabbed and then sewed and bandaged. Even just walking with that would be no joke, though there was no alternative either.

  We can leave him at White Mountain; we’re close, Karl thought doggedly, swallowing and then spitting to clear his mouth.

  Diarmuid was a bit pale himself, plunging the point of his claymore into the soft earth of the stream-bank and then wiping it carefully on his sock-hose before he sheathed it and came over.

  “Well, that worked as ye said it would, Archer,” he said quietly.

  Karl could hear the slight difference in the way he used the word, an emphasis that turned it into a title. Even then, there was a prickle of pride in it.

  Diarmuid jerked his chin at a body wearing a kilt:

  “There’s that woodsrunner we met, the loon I thought might be in league with the outlaws. So he was, and little good it did him. Mind, against real warriors we might not have done so well. They fell for your little trap like trout rising to a fly, and didn’t even sniff for a hook.”

  Karl shrugged agreement, not feeling chatty at the moment. It was a fair point; men well-supplied with foresight and discipline and self-control didn’t usually end up in a raggedy-arse bandit gang.

  “We might have paid a heavier bill even with these gormless shags if we’d given them a chance to come to handstrokes, or ambush us,” he said. “Me da always did say that surprise was like having ten times your numbers, and that against men struck blind.”

  “A wise man, from what I saw of him,” Diarmuid said, then jerked a thumb northwards. “D’ye think he’s on our track?”

  “That I can’t say, but I wouldn’t be surprised, at all, at all.”

  “I’ll not fight him,” Diarmuid said, warning in his voice; it was the manner of a man repeating something obvious that needed to be absolutely clear.

  “Neither will I!” said Karl indignantly. Then: “Mind, I’ll run from him with all my heart.”

  “The same, master-bowman, the same. So let’s be about that, nae?”

  The whole group was unwontedly subdued as they broke camp—mainly a matter of picking up packs and resaddling the mules.

  Forbye it’s a reminder of how easily you might die yourself, he thought.

  He knew from listening to real veterans that everyone tried to make every fight a one-sided massacre. A fair share of them actually turned out that way. That was why everyone loved an ambush when they weren’t on the receiving end . . . except that you couldn’t count on that.

  And . . . not that these outlaws didn’t deserve it, but that man’s wife and children . . . how will they cope, come winter? Maybe Diarmuid can have them sent for. It’s not the wee lads’ and lasses’ fault, after all.

  Someone would be willing to take them in. Pleasing the Powers aside, it was a rare household that couldn’t use another set of hands, and even a small child could do things like baby-minding or bird-scaring to free stronger backs for more important work.

  I’ll mention it, casual-like, so as not to seem to think it wouldn’t occur to him on his own. Now let’s begone as soon as we may.

  Gwri Beauregard Mackenzie did stop to use her lighter to kindle a small fire. Everyone fell in behind her as she stood before it and held up her arms in the gesture of prayer.

  “You powerful God, you Goddess gentle and strong,” she said, tactfully naming no specific names. “To You we pray, and to the aes dana of this place by whatever names they most wish to hear. By Your ancient law, if a man takes up a spear against another of his own will, he consents to the shedding of his blood as an offering to You, in Your forms as the Dark Mother and the Warrior Lord. We have killed from need, not wantonness, knowing that for us also the Hour of the Hunter must come.”

  “For Earth must be fed,” they all murmured in response. “And we but borrow our bodies from Her for a little while.”

  She went on: “Yet these too were Your children, Mother-of-All; we ask that you make us clean of their deaths, that they may speak no ill of us to the Guardians of the Western Gate. Let them make accounting, and be healed of all ills of soul in the Land of Summer, where no evil comes and all hurts are made good. There we will greet them, each forgiving the other. So mote it be!”

  “So mote it be,” they all chorused.

  Then each pricked a finger and let a drop fall on the fire, and passed their weapons through the smoke, bending and touching a pinch of dirt to their lips and then foreheads to symbolize their acceptance of their own mortality. Earth and air and fire and the water of life in your veins . . .

  “For to kill is to know your own death,” Karl murmured, an old saying of his folk, as he threw a helmetful of water across the little fire and stamped carefully, kicking dirt over any lingering ember.

  “That’s true when you kill a beast,” Mathun nodded beside him as they took up the march; not one counseled that they camp here among the tumbled dead. “More so here, I suppose. If it must be done, best done quickly and well.”

  Karl nodded in turn. And something inside that felt like his father’s voice noted that if the band had to be blooded . . .

  Best it were an easy victory. Next time they’ll be more confident and less likely to freeze or come down with the shakes.

  • • •

  The raven had been watching for some time when the living humans left. It was a young male, part of a flock of not-yet-mated birds that roosted together, though it was foraging on its own today. In the manner of its intelligent kind it had long known that groups of humans meant food, in one way or another. Either they left you food, or they became food, sometimes both.

  Cocking its head and looking down at the scattered bodies it considered heading back to the roost and alerting its companions. Sunset was approaching, and owls made the dark risky if you were alone, though two or three ravens were a match for anything short of a golden eagle. On second thoughts it was hungry, and it could always fill its croup now and bring the others for the riper feast tomorrow.

  A careful flit around showed no other predator-scavengers yet, though some would arrive soon, drawn by the intoxicating scents of fresh blood and slashed bodies—coyotes in particular could be dangerous to a lone raven, they were more agile than wolves. By tomorrow they’d have ripped the bodies open; or a bear might come along, or wolves, or one of the big cats. The scattered pieces would make better pickings for the whole flock then and they could defend each other and run off any buzzards.<
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  Decision firmed. It glided down, pecked at the glitter of a broken-off arrowhead out of curiosity, then approached a body with cautious hops. The eyes were juicy treats, and relatively easy to get out with a little trouble. Humans almost never took them from their kills.

  The eyes opened. They were black from edge to edge, like pools of tar. The corpse’s head lifted slightly from the ground, and the limbs twitched.

  The raven hopped backward, feathers bristling open, wings spread and making a startled high-pitched keck-keck-keck of alarm. This was not how dead animals were supposed to behave! There was an electric feeling of wrongness as well, like the taste of rusty metal.

  The body slumped into motionlessness. The eyes became the lawful, tasty glassy white-and-brown. The tension faded from the air, and the raven’s feathers sleeked against its body; it nervously groomed again to put everything in place.

  The eyes looked very tempting. Still, it hopped a few feet away to another body before it began to feed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Tarshish Queen, Pacific Ocean

  Territorial waters, High Kingdom of Montival

  July 8th, Change Year 46/2044 AD

  The length of copper pipe flashed towards the back of her head, thrown with a hard snap and pinwheeling towards her, casting a shadow ahead of it. A shadow, a flicker of disturbed air, a sound, a knowing.

  Órlaith spun leftward into it with the shield tucked up under her eyes—you learned that by practicing putting your left fist just under your chin. The sword in her right hand—the Sword—swung in a blurring cut across the narrow field of view the long vision slit in her visor left.

  Clung!

  The foot-long length of three-inch pipe clattered to the deck . . . cut smoothly top-left to bottom-right into two matching curved troughs. Metal formed by machines of inconceivable power in the ancient world, cut by something that was not quite matter as humans understood the term; if the engineers who’d made those machines could have seen the result, they’d have thought of lasers, or diamond saws. The blow had run up her wrist and arm, all right, but she’d had to overcome a lifetime’s conditioning to use the blade that way. A dozen more of the bisected pipes littered the deck; one of the ship’s apprentices gathered them up into a basket, looking at Órlaith with hero-worshipping puppy-eyes.