“Shield!” Heuradys d’Ath barked, pushing ahead of her and bringing her own up to protect her liege; she had Órlaith’s slung over her back. “Shield now, Orrey, by Athana! You’re not going to stop that bunch with one quiver, not if you hit with every shaft you’re not.”
The Crown Princess blinked, pushed out of the diamond focus of concentration, handed the bow over and took the curved four-foot teardrop of plywood and wood, leather and sheet metal emblazoned with the sigil of House Artos, then ducked her head beneath the guige strap, adjusted its buckle to snug it tighter and ran her left forearm through the loops and took the grip in her hand.
“I’m going to helm you, too,” her knight said. “You’re sort of the point of all this, you know!”
She stepped up, unhooked the sallet helmet from her liege’s belt and pressed it down on Órlaith’s head, quickly snapping the chin-cup of padded varnished leather in place.
The visor was up, shading the princess’ face like the bill of a cap, and the sun was high enough now that it wasn’t directly in her eyes anyway, though the light on the water made the whole scene glitter. The familiar pressure of the sponge-and-felt pads gripped around the sides and top of her skull. The sallet muffled sound a bit—the sides came down to her jawline and a broad flared tail covered the neck—but that seemed less this time than what she remembered from innumerable previous times she’d worn a helm, as if the Lady’s gift was magnifying what her ears took in.
The helm was graven with thin lines of gold inlay that mimicked the feathers of her totem spirit, the Golden Eagle. Sprays of that great raptor’s feathers stood upright in holders on either side, as if to counterpart the black-and-white Harfang crest Heuradys wore, and the usual smooth curve of the visor was drawn down at the bottom into a beaklike point. Her father had done the same; you wanted your retainers to be able to see where you were at a glance.
“Sir Aleaume, let’s discourage them and then start falling back,” Órlaith said tightly.
About ten of the Eaters for every one of us, she thought.
The Sword let her make the calculation effortlessly. There was something to be said for ignorance, if the alternative was perfect knowledge of a sledgehammer swinging unstoppably for your head.
If they can swarm us in the open we’re doomed. If we can get to that hill we’re doomed a bit more slowly unless that help arrives and arrives in time . . . Faolán and Vuissance are back in Todenangst with Mother, she can hold the reins until they’re of age.
An arrow banged off her shield without doing more than scoring the facing. Most were still falling short—drawing a bow in a canoe was even less practical than making love in one, and some of them were falling overboard when they tried to stand and draw properly.
The fourteen crossbowmen in the black harness of the Protector’s Guard stood in their staggered double rank behind the wall of shields, their weapons at the port-arms. Droyn was in charge of them; nominally, since they had their own underofficer, but he knew the business.
They’re Associates, they’ll be happier with a nobleman standing there giving the orders and looking calm.
“Range ninety, sights down to battle setting. Fire and withdraw by ranks,” he said.
The stocks came to the shoulder in a single smooth jerk, then the points swung upward a very little. Their position behind the kneeling shieldsmen left them covered to the midriff, exposing only the cuirass-clad chests and vambrace-clad forearms and heads in their light open-faced sallets.
“Take aim . . . shoot!”
Tung!
A brief massive unmusical chorus of vibrating steel. The short heavy bolts with their fins cut from salvaged credit cards were barely-visible blurs as they left the crossbows at three hundred and fifty feet per second, and you couldn’t dodge in a boat.
She could see several canoes and boats pitch and roll over when they tried anyway. Unfortunately the rest kept coming as the crossbowmen pumped the cocking leavers, shot, pumped . . .
Sir Aleaume set the pace as the men-at-arms paced backward in an oil-smooth maneuver to the head of the pier. Órlaith and her brother and Heuradys fell in on the right flank, where the Montivallan line joined that of the Japanese. That put her next to Reiko; the Nihonjin woman spared her a single glance, nod, and slight smile; she returned all three. This was Órlaith’s second battle, after the one with her father in the spring. From what Reiko had let drop she’d had considerably more experience in her people’s ceaseless war. And it was their first fight together, of course.
Órlaith did a quick check that nobody had their feet in the spreading black pool of boat soap—some of it was dripping off the edge of the wharf where the enemy weighed it down, but that was all to the good, since it would float.
Crossbows and higoyumi snapped and spat, and the front turned into a semicircle that contracted in size as they backed onto the narrower pier. The chant of the Eaters changed: now it was a word.
“Meat! Meat! Meat! Meeeeeeeeeeee!”
A crashing bark broke out from the Montivallans that cut through the rising shrilling of the blood squeal, eerily muffled by the visors of the men-at-arms:
“Órlaith! Órlaith! Órlaith and Montival!”
Pride warred with an unexpected twist of pain; for all her life until this spring the High Kingdom’s war-cry had been Artos and Montival!
“Auntie Tiph told me this would come in useful,” Heuradys said.
She let her shield fall on its strap and raised a crossbow of her own, one more like an attenuated skeletal sketch of a crossbow, a pre-Change thing made of something called carbon-fiber composite.
It fired, a flatter sharper sound than the others, with a rattle beneath it from the pulleys. “Damn!” she said.
“You got him,” Órlaith said.
“No, I was aiming for the one beside him, the thick-built one with the axe, he grabbed the man and yanked him in front. I think he’s a chief, he’s yelling orders from that boat and the others are listening . . . well, some of them.”
“’Tis a crossbow, not a magic wand.”
Órlaith looked to her right. Egawa raised his sword and shouted as the katana glittered in the sun:
“Tenno Heika banzai!”
That meant literally to the Heavenly Sovereign Majesty, ten thousand years! Or Long Live the Emperor, more colloquially. Nihongo was a remarkably compact language in some respects . . .
The Japanese ranks screamed out their response in a tearing guttural shriek:
“Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”
“Adjust your fire!” Droyn said sharply. “Drop the bolts on the ones behind the leaders until they start their rush!”
The noise of onset was mounting, a blurring bestial snarl that spoke to something far below thought or custom or belief, as old as the ages when her ancestors had fought with stones chipped to fit the hand and the thighbones of zebra. Then the men-at-arms began to beat the flats of their longswords or the shafts of their glaives against their shields, and the rhythmic booming was louder than the Eater’s drum, echoing within her chest and gut. There was a hard menace to it, a come and die! more convincing than any words.
The foremost Eaters were packed crouching under the lip of the wharf now, dipping it towards them with their weight, clambering forward to the innermost boats to lie flat with the first arrivals or even just waiting in the water with only their hands showing gripping the edge and knives between their teeth. She could hear a black hot hatred in their chittering and squeals, and then the front rank boiled up over the long lip of the wharf’s outer bar in a wave of contorted faces, snaggle teeth and fantastic ornaments—one had a huge mass of hair woven with diamonds and emeralds and sapphires from ancient jewelry stores, glittering like colored stars in a dome of hard mud.
Usually they don’t—didn’t—fight straight-up like this. Something drives them. The Malevolence . . .
&nbs
p; “They’re coming! Point-blank, point-blank!” Droyn shouted; his voice rose a little as he sensed the building charge.
And sure, he’s very young too, younger than I.
A blast of arrows and bolts hammered into the Eaters as they leapt to the boards or heaved themselves out of the water, and the metallic copper-salt stink of blood suddenly overlay the sharp medicinal tang of the boat soap. But now they could plant their feet solidly to draw their bows of ancient ski-tips and modern wood, and dozens of shafts were coming at the Montivallans and Japanese. More and more of them crawled out, building into a mass of scars and stink and murderous intent.
Heuradys reached over and flicked Órlaith’s visor down, and the princess raised her shield and crouched as the world shrank to a narrow band of light. Her head began automatically scanning side to side. One of the Nihonjin archers took a shaft through the eye and fell backward with boneless finality. Another arrow smacked into her helm, just above the left brow, and her head twisted to one side—transmitted through the metal and padding and straps, it felt like getting slapped upside the head by someone’s palm. That had her looking at the Japanese for an instant.
She blinked as Egawa actually slapped another arrow out of the air with a sideways twist of his sword, sending it pinwheeling away. That was possible, but she’d always considered it more of a parlor trick than something you could really do in war, like the way her father could cut a buzzing fly in half with a flick of the wrist.
Blows landed on her shield like an irregular scattering of claps with a hammer as arrows struck, but nothing too bad yet. A few more banged and rang off her plate. They were only a dozen paces apart now, far too close for an exchange of arrows to go on for more than instants.
“Crossbows back!” Droyn snapped.
The more lightly armored Montivallan missile troops shot again and retreated; two were being helped along, one swearing at the shaft in his shin, the other with a tourniquet around one arm, rigid with agony until a comrade stuck a hypo of morphine into his thigh below the half-armor and pressed the plunger. Sailors dashed forward with stretchers, lifted them and a wounded Japanese onto the canvas and carried them back to the priest-doctor at the landward base of the pier. The shieldwall rose and rippled as they fell back by ranks with their shields up. Beneath taut readiness, a little irony ghosted through her mind: the Association forces had developed this tactic as a counter to the longbow arrow-storms of the Clan Mackenzie in the old wars . . .
The Japanese archers to her right slung their bows and drew their katanas in a swift hissing glitter, points skyward in the two-handed grip by the right side of the head. Perhaps it was the Sword, but she could hear the almost inaudible murmur as one young samurai’s lips moved, repeating the same phrase over and over, the sword rock-steady in his armored gloves:
“Rin pyou tou sha kai chin retsu zai zen . . . Rin pyou tou sha kai chin retsu zai zen . . .”
That meant: Heavenly ones who watch over warriors, stand before me!
Reiko accepted her naginata and swept it forward into guard position and spoke as if to herself. Órlaith’s mind stuttered slightly. The language was Nihongo, but not the living tongue; the words had the taste of the ancient to them, like copper green with patina:
“On the high heavenly plain
Primeval Kamurogi and Kamuromi live.
And in accord with them, my ancestor Izanagi,
In a grove of pine at Tsukushi . . .
Give us your favor, divine spirits,
Legions of heaven and earth,
Answer our plea!”
More and more of the Eaters piled onto the wharf, dancing and screeching with froth on their lips, encouraged by the fact that their foes were retreating. Ancient blades and hatchets were brandished, spike-studded clubs and crude spears made of whittled wood and ground-down knives. The mass began to pulse forward and back, a little farther forward each time as if an invisible barrier was being strained and was about to crack. And . . .
“Now!” Órlaith shouted, and the two Rangers stepped forward. “Lacho Calad!” Morfind shouted as she drew.
Half the Dúnedain war-cry: Flame light!
“Drego morn!” Faramir completed it, as the arrow left his string. “Flee night!”
The first two shafts struck neatly in the shattered heads of the half-empty barrels of boat soap mixture. The second pair landed in broken-open hogsheads at each end of the T-wharf. Volcanic white flame speared upward from each arrow’s impact, with a core intolerably bright even in the sun and loud as a dragon’s hiss. It left dots and bars fading across her sight, spattering and throwing gobbets of burning metal and wood and tar in all directions. The thermite in the heads made from salvaged beverage cans was as close to an explosive reaction as the Changed world allowed, burning hot enough to melt hard steel instantly and make it run like water.
This was a hot clear summer’s day not long after noon, and the barrels had been in the sun since dawn. Spilled, the honey-thick liquor had had just enough time to develop a film of violently dangerous vapor and the heat smoked out more. A flicker of nearly invisible blue combustion ran across the layer on the planks faster than the eye could follow. Then fire caught with a bellow like the indrawn breath of a dragon.
She had expected something spectacular, but not quite this.
Nearly a hundred Eaters were standing packed together in pools and puddles, and it flared up around them just as they began their forward leap. Screams of rage and bloodlust turned to howls of pain and terror, but the instinctive gasps merely drew superheated air into their lungs and scorched them to char. In seconds the flames were roof-high, and Órlaith could feel it drying her eyeballs and making her blink even through the vision slit of the visor. A few managed to leap into the water, with their hair and loincloths and feet on fire, but the water close to the wharf was burning too. The war-shrieks of the rest died away for a moment of stunned silence, as the stink of burnt flesh filled the air along with bitter metallic black smoke. There weren’t even many screams. The throbbing roar of the fire overrode what there were.
“Let’s go!” Órlaith said, coughing and glad of the visor that hid her wince.
The Eaters were vile enough . . . but she’d been close enough to see their eyes as the world exploded in flame beneath them. It was necessary, but . . .
I wish I hadn’t seen that.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CÍRBANN RÓMENADRIM
(FORMERLY CHINA CAMP)
CROWN PROVINCE OF WESTRIA
(FORMERLY CALIFORNIA)
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)
JULY/FUMIZUKI/CERWETH 14TH
CHANGE YEAR 46/FIFTH AGE 46/SHOHEI 1/2044 AD
The Montivallans and the Japanese turned and jogged up the steep slope of the jointed, hinged section that linked the wharf to the pier and then along the pier itself, a surface just wide enough. The planking of the pier sounded different beneath their boots, more of a hollow drumming, though it was easily solid enough to bear their weight.
There was no point in getting winded trying to outrun the unburdened enemy. Armor was a massive deadly advantage . . . right up to the point where you fell down wheezing and feebly batting at whoever pushed a knife-point through the slit in your visor.
Canoes were spreading out on either side now, swinging around the pyre of the wharf that poured yellow flame and a towering shaft of black smoke into the sky with a hard stench of burning bone. It would be visible for miles already. The smell itself wasn’t so very bad; she had attended enough funeral pyres since so many of the Old Faith followed that rite—though her father’s had just been hot, no scent at all.
It was the knowledge that the bones had walked only moments before that made her swallow.
An Eater lunged up over the deck ahead, shrieking through filed teeth, then swung a rusty machete into the b
are ankle of a sailor from the Tarshish Queen, dashing back towards them with an empty stretcher. The sailor yelled in shock and horror as much as pain as she topped over, then again twice as hands and blades greeted her below in a snarling flurry. Half the crossbowmen shot reflexively. Most of them missed, being on the move and startled. One bolt sank to the vanes in the Eater’s forehead with a popping wet crunch, and he toppled back to jerk and sprattle in the soupy mud below.
Two of Ishikawa’s crewmen rushed over and struck downward with their naginata, full-armed sweeping strokes driven by fury and fear, and the two-foot curved blades on the ends of the polearms sent sprays of blood-drops arcing into the air as they came up.
Órlaith was finding that fighting made you unpleasantly aware that on the inside you were mostly . . . various soft wet things. Very much like what came out of a pig at the fall butchering. And the pier was like running in an evil dream, with unclean death right beneath your boots.
Morrigú! she realized suddenly. There are slits between the boards, wide enough for a knife or a spearhead!
“Keep moving! No stopping!” Órlaith shouted, knocking her visor up again and forcing herself not to look down.
There weren’t any arrows flying in just now, and the helm was like having your head in a metal bucket with a narrow strip cut in it. With the visor up it was like having your head in a metal bucket with a face-sized patch cut in it, which was better if not good. And there wasn’t anything she could do about sharpened steel being shoved up into the soles of her boots—the metal of the sabatons didn’t cover them, and stopping and trying to peer between the boards would just make you more vulnerable.
The mental effect was still like running over white-hot coals, and she could have sworn she could feel her feet sweating and her toes trying to curl.
The Desert and the Blade Page 22