A Meeting At Corvallis

by S. M. Stirling

  "OK, they'll disembark their force well north of the bridges—north of here," he said.

  "You sure?" Signe asked.

  "Yeah. They're not going to get them tangled up in the ruins while they disembark. And they probably want a fight here—they can't chase us, they don't have enough bikes with them. They'll try to come ashore close to here and march down River Bend Road till it joins this one, then south on that past the old radio tower. We'll move a little north—see where River Bend makes that elbow and heads more north of east? We'll anchor our line there."

  The others nodded. Havel went on: "Eric, you take the lancers and move a little north, couple of hundred yards. See those old gravel pits?"

  He pointed with his right hand, a little south of east. "About a mile that-away? The ground's too soft for movement past there so I'll anchor my right on it, and straddle the roadway with the pikes and glaives, more crossbows on the west. But that leaves my far left swinging in the breeze. You cover it, be ready to move forward or back to hold 'em off if we have to pull out through the ruins—we'll use the railway line if we have to do that, and you can either follow or pull out west according to circumstances. We've got good coverage from Chapman Hill so keep your scouts just far enough forward to make theirs stay out of direct sight of the main body."

  "Right, bossman," the big blond man said, fastening the cheek-pieces of his crested helmet under his chin.

  He nodded to Luanne, and she blew a complex series of notes on the trumpet slung across her mailed torso. The banner-bearer on the other side moved with them as they kneed their horses forward over the roadside ditch with a scramble and surge. The two hundred A-lister cavalry followed by squads and sections and troops, the long lances swaying in their scabbards as they deployed onto an overgrown putting green. Havel nodded gravely to them as they passed. Some were grinning in excitement, with the older ones mostly flatly calm, although few enough here were much over thirty.

  I'm starting to feel like an old man at thirty-seven, he thought, smiling like a shark himself as he turned away. Old enough to know how easy it is to die, at least. Old enough to know how much turns on this fight. It's amazing how much more serious you feel when you've got kids.

  He turned his horse with a shift of balance and leg-pressure; Gustav was feeling the tension himself, and stamped a forefoot as he moved. The foot soldiers were the home-levy of Larsdalen, and the companies from the hamlets and steadings north and east of it in the Eola Hills and along their foot, the Field Force units he'd had time to collect on the way here—every Bearkiller adult would go to war at need, but the Outfit was a bit more selective about who went into an open-field fight. There were just under a thousand, half with polearms—glaives or the two eight-foot staves of a take-down pike—in scabbards riveted to the frames of their bicycles. The rest had crossbows, all of them the new fast-loading type, thank God. A lot of the crossbowmen were actually crossbow-women. Any sturdy farm-girl used to working in the fields could handle one, and the pointy end of the bolts hit just as hard whoever pulled the trigger; the Outfit certainly couldn't afford to leave anyone useful home just because of their plumbing. Pikes and glaives took more mass to use properly, and two-thirds of the troops holding them were men, about the same proportion as the A-list.

  Many of the foot soldiers' faces were tight with conscious self-control as they stood in their ranks. The A-listers might do other things in their spare time, but fighting was their lifework. The infantry were precisely the other way round. On the other hand …

  "Right, Bearkillers," he said, rising in the stirrups and throwing his voice to carry. He pointed northeast. "The Protector's men are coming up the river to try and take away our homes and kill our families. We're going to fight them." He grinned. "Any questions?"

  A rippling growl went through the formation. Someone shouted Hakkaa Paalle! and the rest took it up, a deep, roaring chant, each stamping a foot in time to it, beating their gloved hands on the bucklers slung at their belts. Havel felt himself flush with pride; he'd brought them through the terrible years after the Change, and from starving refugees made a nation of them. Now they trusted him … The sound cut off when he raised one gauntleted hand.

  "Now get ready and wait for the word," he said into the silence that followed.

  For a wonder, he and Signe had a moment to themselves. The troops put their bikes on the kickstands, then got to work—for the pikemen, that meant unslinging their weapons and fitting the two halves together with a snap and rattle as the spring-locks clicked home. A leafless forest sixteen feet high rose as they fell in four-deep along the road, facing north and east, the long steel heads of the pikes above them; the glaives waited to the rear.

  "What do you think?" she said.

  "Depends on how many of them get off the boats, alskling," he said. "If there's more than we can handle, we pull back sharpish and wait for the rest of our call-up companies to arrive. They'll be gathering fast."

  "Why not do that now?" she asked.

  "I really don't want to lose the bridges," Havel said, nodding in the direction her father had gone. "If Arminger takes those, or breaks them down, he can operate on both sides of the river, and we can't help each other. And if he fortifies the crossing, it's a major blow. Worth risking a battle for, even against odds, as long as it isn't totally impossible."

  "Aren't we risking defeat in detail?"

  Havel grinned at his wife, who'd been an occasional vegetarian and quasi-pacifist before the Change. "Learning the family business, eh? Nah, there can't be all that many of them, not if they're besieging Mount Angel and pushing into Mackenzie territory at the same time. Armchair generalship, like I said— he likes drawing arrows on maps. He's trying to get fancy and I'm betting he doesn't have enough men to do everything at once."

  "We're all betting that," she said gravely, and he nodded. "Do you think it's Arminger in person? Here?"

  "Nope," Havel said. "At a guess, it's Stavarov or Renfrew. Hopefully Renfrew."

  "But Renfrew's his best commander!" Signe said.

  "Exactly," Havel said, licking a forefinger and marking the air with it. "Plus he's the only one Arminger really trusts. This would be a good day for the bastard to die."

  He'd been keeping an eye on the Chapman Hill lookout. Now a mirror blinked from there; he read the code as easily as he would have print.

  "Barges holding back," he said. "Turtle boats coming forward. Now it's up to your dad."

  "We should have set the engines on the bridge up earlier," she fretted.

  "Nah, that wouldn't work," Havel pointed out. "They would have twigged to that, even if Arminger's troops aren't long on individual initiative. But if you don't give them too much time to think and consult higher echelons they'll try to go through with a plan even when things have changed."

  They both looked to the river, a mile and better northward. The low, beetling shapes of the armored riverboats were hard to see at first, marked more by the white froth curving away from their bows and sloping forecastles than by the hulls themselves. The sight was a little eerie—you could believe that motors drove them, rather than dozens of dozens of bicycle cranks geared to a propeller shaft. That smooth mechanical motion without sails or oars looked unnatural, in this ninth year of the Change.

  "I just hope Daddy can deal with it," Signe said as they slid silently by and headed for the bridges. "He's not a hands-on fighter."

  "Yeah, but he's got Pam to look after that," Havel said reassuringly. Then, harshly, as the barges and transports showed at the edge of sight: "Trumpeter! Sound fall in!"

  * * * *

  Kenneth Larsson shifted under the uncomfortable, unaccustomed weight of the mail hauberk as he sat his horse beside the railcar, waiting for the signal from Chapman Hill. The armor he wore was strictly for protection-just-in-case, like the blade at his side. He'd put a lot of effort into the various weird-looking contraptions on salvaged rail-wheels that followed him, and was metaphorically rubbing his hands at the chance t
o use them. Right now that wouldn't be too advisable, because the leather and steel cup that covered the stump on his left wrist held a simple hook … a very sharp hook … rather than any of the various tools he found useful in the labs and workshops back at Larsdalen.

  The heliograph on the hilltop a mile and a half north blinked at him. He nodded and waved to his own signaler to respond, then looked back along the wagon train—a phrase literally true, since the dozen flatcars were each drawn by four horses. Rail made a smooth surface, and the beasts could pull five or six times as much as they could on even the best roads, and do it faster. Here they pulled flat surfaces that bore a weight of gears and ratchets, frames and tanks and tubing; the hard angular shapes and smooth mathematically precise curves made him nostalgic for the lost world …

  "Move out!" he called, waving his hook forward, neck-reining his horse to the side of the railroad tracks and bringing it up to a canter.

  His personal guard followed—commanded by his wife Pamela—and the crews of the war-engines rode their charges like grinning, hunched baboons, cheering him as they went by amid a clattering rumble of hooves and whine of steel on steel. The rail line lay along the riverbank further south, but here it turned inland through the ruins of West Salem, running five or six hundred feet from the water, amid buildings whose smoke-stained windows peered out from shattered glass and rampant vines …

  "What's chuckle-worthy at this point?" Pamela asked him from his blind side.

  She didn't find scorched, overgrown ruins any more cheerful than most people did. These had the further distinction of having been flooded out a couple of times. He turned his head to grin at her; the helmet and nasal bar framed her narrow, beak-nosed, brown-eyed face, and the armor added bulk to her whipcord figure. They'd met in Idaho not long after the death of his first wife and married late that year. A decade—and two kids—later, he still thought he'd gotten the better of the deal. Somehow the throttled fear that made his stomach churn with acid brought that home still more strongly. He kept his voice light as he answered: "I was just thinking that anyone else here would have said it's half a long bowshot to the river, instead of estimating it in feet," he said, waving his right hand across the brush-grown rubble towards the blue-gray water.

  "Except possibly me," she said. "I'm an old fart too."

  "No, you were the one who belonged to the Association for Hitting Things with Sharp Pointy Things," he pointed out.

  "Hey, I wasn't one of those Society get-a-lifes," she said, aggrieved. "I practiced the real thing in ARMA. The Association for Renaissance Martial Arts didn't spend time playing at the kings-queens-damsels-and-minstrels stuff."

  "Prancing around with swords … " he teased. "Well, it turned out to be a good career move."

  She shuddered a little. "And there was the hiking. I owe my life to that."

  Which was true; it had been that hobby that had taken her from San Diego to Idaho just under ten years ago. Southern California had been the worst of all the death-zones, twenty million people trapped instantly in a desert without even drinking water. Not one in a thousand had escaped; explorers who'd been there since told of drifts of desiccated corpses lining the roads for a hundred miles out into the Mojave, preserved by alkaline sand and savage heat.

  Then: "Here we go."

  The railway broke out into open fields; the brush had been cleared from hereabouts last year, during the joint project with the Mackenzies to unblock the wreckage and drift-logs piled around the bridges. That had given them a good reason to do maintenance work on the permanent way, as well. The rails turned rightward, east over the water, with the tall ruins of Salem proper ahead of them on the eastern side of the fast-running spring water.

  "Here comes the kimchee," Kenneth Larsson said. His assistants looked at him curiously. "Classical reference."

  He didn't actually think that the low, beetling shapes moving upriver towards him were modeled on the Korean turtle ships that had turned back a Japanese invasion in the sixteenth century. The similarities were functional; when you covered a boat with a low sloped carapace of metal armor, it had to have a certain shape, just as a wheel had to be round. Evolution and design turned up similarities all the time, which had befuddled generations of the wishfully superstitious before the Change shot scientistic rationalism through the head.

  His wife knew that bit of Asian history too. Pam grinned back at him over her shoulder, before turning to oversee the gangs fitting steel shields along the northern edge of the railroad bridge. Ken walked down the line of engines, keeping a critical eye as the crews unfolded and bolted and braced, and tested that the water-lines that carried power to the heavy hydraulic cocking-jacks were securely screwed home. Everything looked ready …

  "Looks like Arminger's men can't make up their minds," Pam said as the horses were led back westward out of harm's way, riders guiding long leading-reins of the precious beasts.

  Either we win and they can come back … or we don't, and we won't need horses. They did have some handcars for escape if worst came to worst without time to get the engines clear; those were the fastest way available to travel by land.

  Ken grunted and leveled his binoculars, adjusting them one-handed. The six low, dark shapes of the armored craft had slowed, barely keeping station a thousand yards north against the current that curled green waves over their bows. In the center of each was a hexagonal turret with eye-slits on all sides, probably the bridge the craft was conned from. He tried to imagine the sweltering closeness within, lit only by dim lamps, the long rows of bicycle cranks geared to the propeller shafts and the near-naked, sweating human engines …

  "Watch it!"

  A hatch opened on the foremost turtle boat. Something within went snap, then snap-snap-snap about as fast as a man could click his fingers.

  * * * *

  "They're ashore north of here at Rice Rocks," Mike Havel said, looking over his shoulder at the hilltop observation post. "Deploying from the barges; horse, foot and catapults. Let's go. Signaler: Advance by company columns, at the double."

  The militia responded to the trumpet-calls, turning left from Brush College Road and going northeast at a pounding trot, seven columns of a hundred and fifty each; the tall grass and brush swayed and went down before their trampling boots as they moved off the roadway. Each had a mounted A-lister officer, usually an older member of the Brotherhood or one some injury had left fit enough for command but no longer quite up to the brutal demands of frontline cavalry combat.

  Light war-engines went with them on two-wheeled carts, each pulled by a four-horse team, bouncing and swaying as they trotted along; the sloping shields that fronted them had words painted on them—jocular graffiti, Hi there! and Knock-knock, guess who!, Many Happy Returns! and Eat This!

  He turned Gustav eastward, cantering along with the column on the far right. Wet, brushy grassland stretched ahead, bugs springing up where the hooves passed, and occasionally a bird. A mile to the north he could just see the first little dots that were the enemy scouts meeting his light cavalry. As he watched, arrows flew between the scattered riders, and there were little flickers of pale spring sunshine off steel as the swords came out. He glanced west, and saw Eric and the bulk of the A-listers waiting ready just this side of Glen Creek, their lances a leafless forest above their heads. East, and the ground ran out in sloughs with the rank, green look of bog, patches of reeds among the tall grass and dead trees killed by the post-Change floods. The blue eyes of old, flooded gravel pits blocked the way, and beyond that the ground was even worse.

  North, angling gradually east towards the Willamette, stretched the old River Bend Road, its thin pavement buckled and pitted by ten years of weather and several high floods that had left drifts of silt across it for grass and brush to root in. He spoke to the easternmost column's commander: "Captain Dinsel, get your people set up. Shuffle east until your boots start sinking in. You're the far anchor of the line; don't let them get around you. Refuse the flank if you have to."<
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  Her face split in a grin. "They're not likely to get any closer to the river than this, Lord Bear. Not unless they can walk on liquid mud. Another ten yards and it's too thin to plow and too thick to drink. This is a good position."

  "Keep an eye on it anyway," he said.

  Then he turned back towards the central column, the one advancing up River Bend Road, the pathway the enemy would use. The artillery was following it, sparing horses and wheels as long as possible.

  "Sarducci," he said.

  The man in charge of the war-engines looked up; he was one of Ken Larsson's buddies, recruited from the Corvallis university faculty where he'd been teaching engineering at the time of the Change, tall with a dark, narrow, big-nosed face and a walrus mustache. Not an A-lister, but keen enough for all that, and with a very useful hobby in Renaissance history. Havel pointed westward to where the lancers waited.

  "Put them about there. A little to the left of the cavalry and advance 'em say a hundred yards beyond our stopline. Dig in; they've got to come to us. I want you able to rake their flank."

  "Won't we be masking the A-listers there, Lord Bear?" the Tuscan asked.

  Havel nodded; not agreeing, but acknowledging it was a fair question. "Nah. They can go in on your right, or stop a flanking attack—and they can support you if the Protector's people get too close. Go for it!"

  He followed them westward down the formation, shouting: "Deploy! Deploy into line and halt!"

  The columns opened like fans, with only a little cursing and adjustment as the militia infantry shouldered into position. The center was the pikes, a block eighty across and four ranks deep, with two files of glaives behind them. On either side the crossbows spread in a looser double line.

  Most of them had fought before … But nothing like this. Nothing on this scale.