"That was one beautiful horse, though."
Tail and mane like flags, it paced away northward.
Near Mount Angel, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 6th, 2008/Change Year 9
"Nigel!" Juniper said, and seized him for a quick, fierce hug before stepping back.
"My dear," Nigel Loring said, slightly shocked at how haggard Juniper's face had grown. "I heard. I seriously don't think they'll hurt him, though. They'll want to make use of him."
Juniper nodded. "They'll expect fear for him to wear me down, the which I will not allow," she said stoutly. "And since there's nothing we can do about it now, let's attend to what we can do."
He nodded, keeping the admiration off his face. I worry enough about Alleyne now, and he's a man grown, he thought. I can't begin to imagine what it would have been like to have him carried off at nine. And I know full well she's thinking But I wasn't there! Over and over again.
Instead, he looked up at the sky. It wasn't raining anymore, this cold and windy afternoon, but it was wet enough, with wisps of fog drifting from the tops of the trees on the ridges about them. That would neutralize the enemy's air scouts, at least for a while.
Juniper took a deep breath and ducked back under the awning set up under an overhang of the gravel pit's wall. There was very little there, besides the shelter itself; a bedroll covered in hard-woven greased wool, and a small chest that mostly contained maps now spread out on a folding table. Sam Aylward was looking at one as they entered, standing side-by-side with John Brown; he dipped his head to Juniper, and then nodded to his old commander.
"Lady," he said. "Sir Nigel."
"What's the word?" the CORA leader said eagerly. "My guys' horses are get-tin' hungry. They can't eat fir needles."
"I had a very productive conversation with Abbot Dmwoski and his staff," Nigel said. "A most remarkable man. We all left safely—they have a remarkable collection of secret passages and posterns, too. And now we should really begin."
The rancher nodded. "Glad to get on with it," he said. "Our fodder's just about gone and there isn't enough grass up here. Wouldn't want to try this if my remuda lost its edge."
"Very well," Nigel said. He bent over the map, and everyone else followed suit. "The encampment is here, with ditch, bank and barbed wire on top, and a surveillance tower at each corner."
Juniper nodded, blinking her leaf green eyes. He admired the way she could put aside grief; even more, he admired the way she'd picked up the tricks of the fighter's trade without any formal training, simply by experience and by being around experts.
"First, let's poke them with a stick," she said.
Lord Emiliano Gutierrez, Baron Dayton, Marchwarden of the South, looked down at the commander of the eastern mercenaries attached to his force.
* * * *
"Sumbitch shot me a clear two hundred yards away. Wouldn't a thought any of those Sisters from Sisters could do it," the man said. "Musta been usin' one of those fancy bows from before the Change, with the wheels at the ends. That's not fair nor right.'' Then: "Shitfire!"
Words came to Emiliano's mind, but it was a bit awkward to curse a man who was having an arrow extracted from his thigh and who'd refused painkillers so he could report clearheadedly, or to tell him he was being an idiot—the only reason compound bows weren't used more widely was that so many of their parts couldn't be duplicated without computer-controlled machine tools and synthetics. Instead he rubbed a hand across his beardless brown face and rose slightly on the balls of his feet; he was a short stocky man in his midthirties, but quick-moving, full of bouncy muscle. He glanced at the medic.
The doctor wasn't a cleric, but an older man who'd been trained before the Change. His voice was crisp: "He will recover, my lord. It isn't a complex wound and the bone was not split. It will keep him immobile for a number of weeks."
The doctor's hands had learned their skill in an era of MRI scans and laser scalpels, but they were still nimble on the spoonlike instrument that had been invented several thousand years ago to deal with wounds of exactly this sort. The hospital tent smelled of blood and bedpans and antiseptic, but not too badly; they hadn't had many casualties yet, or much sickness—and most of that was among the plainsman mercenaries, who were careless about sanitation. They'd had time to lay the prefab timber and plywood floors, as well; the war against Mount Angel had been a nice leisurely siege, with nothing beyond a little skirmishing now and then, and nuisance raids on their supply lines. That pleased the baron well enough. Less was likely to go wrong with this than with the jobs Alexi Stavarov or Conrad Renfrew had gotten.
And the monks had it coming. They'd been a pain in the arse to all the southern baronies for years, giving refuge to runaways and sticking their oars in half a dozen other rackets, not to mention letting that puta Astrid Larsson and her gang of lunatics set up in the woods just south of here. And those Rangers so-called and the kilties had been spreading subversion with the monks' help. That was the only reason he was backing this war, that and fear of the Lord Protector. Arminger was right about getting rid of the disturbing influences.
Nice and quiet suits me fine, he thought. I've got everything I want, or I will when we hang Dmwoski … no, the pope wants to burn him. I've got my good land and my castle and I just want the rest of the world to go away so my kids, they can have it too.
The man on the table gave an animal grunt and sighed as the arrow came out. It was a simple broadhead, hammered and filed down from a stainless-steel spoon into a razor-edged triangle; the doctor flipped it and a three-inch stub of the wooden shaft into a pan one of the nurses held.
"Wait a bit," the mercenary said as the doctor's assistants came forward with bottles and tools and a curved needle and thread.
This is one hard man, Emiliano thought with reluctant respect, as the mercenary went on.
"OK, they jumped us out of the woods. Looked like they was movin' north of us. We tried to hit 'em right away, but there was more of the bastards than we thought at first—two hundred, two-fifty, to our one-twenty, that I saw. Maybe a bit more. That's all I know."
"Good work, Sheriff Simmons," Emiliano said, and nodded to the doctor.
The wounded man relaxed as the nurse ran a hypodermic of morphine into the tube that was dripping saline solution into his arm; the doctor waited, then began to irrigate and close the deep fissure. Outside in the gray, damp not-quite-rain Emiliano's own guards fell in behind him as he walked to the commander's pavilion, hobnailed boots crunching and grating on wet stone; there had even been time to scrape up gravel from the monks' roads—which were very well kept, like the farms around here—and lay it down so that the laneways inside the big square camp didn't turn to bottomless mud. The guards wheeled into place at the entrance to his own pavilion, and he nodded to them as he passed.
Emiliano had learned a long time ago—in the Lords, before the Change— that you needed to keep tight with the men who had your back. The Lord Protector had run what he called a diversity program to make sure none of the greater lords had a following exclusively drawn from their pre-Change backers, so only a couple of the guards were from the Lords, or their younger brothers; a few more were Society types, or their younger brothers; and half were just ordinary survivors who'd worked their way up. But he still made sure that his guards were his men, men he could trust, and once he was sure, he did trust them. He'd also learned long ago that trusting nobody was just as deadly as trusting the wrong people.
He'd never trusted Norman Arminger, for example.
Lord Jabar Jones of Molalla waited for him in the outer room of the command pavilion. The big black man was brooding over the map boards, but he looked up and nodded at the Marchwarden. They were social equals—both barons, both tenants-in-chief—and the other man was his second-in-command in military rank for this expedition.
"He have much to say, Lord Emiliano?"
The former Blood's voice was deep and rich, and a lot smoother than it had been in the early
days. They all were, come to that. Emiliano grinned to himself.
Dolores especially, he thought, thinking of how his wife did the Great Lady thing these days. Hey, pardon me, that's Lady Dolores of Dayton. Mother of God, but you look at her in those cotte-hardi things and nobody would suspect she used to spray the jeans on her ass out of a can they were so tight. Nobody sees the ring in her navel anymore, either, except me.
She'd learned to play the game with the Society bitches, and went at it with a convert's zeal. Sometimes he thought she worked as hard memorizing the Table of Rank and Precedence as he did with the sword, and she was already planning the marriages of their kids to link them to the other great houses.
Aloud, the Marchwarden said: "Yes, he did. Short and to the point, my lord Molalla."
You had to observe the courtesies; it wasn't too different from the way things had been with his pandilleros in the old days; you didn't diss a man unless you were prepared to meet him face-to-face and kill him. The names were fancier, but he'd gotten used to it, and there was a ring to being called "lord"; he supposed that was why they'd called the gang that back when. A servant slid forward and put a mug of hot coffee in his hands, then retired to invisibility in a corner of the big canvas room. He blew on the steaming surface and took a sip before he went on: "It's the cora-boy types; we knew they and the kilties were tight, just didn't expect to see them this far north. Light cavalry like the ones we get from Pendleton, except not such balls-on-fire types, from what I hear. Better than two hundred of them, maybe more, and they're loose north of us."
Jabar shut one enormous fist. "Motherfuckers."
"Sí," Emiliano said. "This trouble we don't need."
"How'd they get over the mountains without our knowing it?"
"How they got here, I don't know. Maybe over Route 20 and then the old logging trails, maybe through the reservation—we should teach the goddamned indios a lesson someday. Anyway, we got a problem. Plus the air cover ain't worth mierda right now."
"Bet your ass we got a problem, my lord," Jabar said. "We can guard our supply trains from small bunches of Rangers or kilties or any of that good shit. We can't guard it against no three, four hundred men on ponies. No how, no way, not without we jam everything into great big convoys with a couple hundred guards. 'Specially with God pissing on us this way."
They looked out at the gray spring day. The sky was the color of a wet iron manhole cover, with patches like a concrete sidewalk in the rain. This time of year it could stay like that for weeks, or break up into sunshine overnight; it wasn't as if they had weather forecasts any more.
Until I got to fighting out in the campo, I never realized weather was so important, he thought; he'd always been a child of cities and pavements, although his grandparents had been farmers in Jalisco and he was a lord of farmers now.
Along one edge of the camp was a long prefabricated ramp like a ski jump, with a hydraulic catapult that could throw a glider into the air. The problem was, cloud was at barely a thousand feet, with patches of mist and fog below that. Or to put it another way, the problem was Oregon.
"I got couriers out by a couple different routes," Emiliano said, looking at the map.
It was a modern one, showing wilderness and populated zones, ruins, living towns, which roads were passable and which weren't, and right now it had colored pins showing the locations of the Association's forces, and conjectured enemy ones.
"To Count Conrad and to the Protector. But neither of them's going to be what you'd call real happy with us if we don't handle this on our own."
Jabar grunted; he was still uncertain of his standing at court after the fiasco with Princess Mathilda. That might be forgotten now that the astonishing news about her rescue had come through; on the other hand, it might not. Nobody in their right mind expected Norman Arminger to forget a grudge, and Lady Sandra …
Emiliano hid a slight shudder with another sip of coffee. "OK, what we got to be careful of is getting mousetrapped the way that hijo Piotr was."
Jabar traced lines on the map with a thick finger. "He tried stomping eight hundred Mackenzies with a hundred lancers," he said. "Even if there's four hundred of those light horse, they're not going to ass-fuck four hundred knights. Not if we can pin them against something for a charge so they can't run away and shoot us up as they go. Those sheep-fuckers can't stand up to us hand-to-hand."
"Yeah, but there's a chance—just an off chance—that the Mackenzies might be up here, too."
The cannonball head came up, his eyes narrowing until they were white slits in the eggplant face. "You think so? The Grand Constable don't."
"Think? Bro, I know Renfrew doesn't have his dick on the chopping block here, whatever the hell he thinks."
Jabar rubbed his jaw; his coif rested loose over his bullock-broad shoulders and down his back. "Eight hundred archers … even with, say, four hundred CORA riders, that's still not enough to take us on. Not even close. Yeah, their bowmen are good, but there's a difference between charging eight hundred with one hundred and charging eight hundred with four hundred. Without they got some spears or pikes or something, we could smash their ass, open-field. And that's just the lancers. We got the infantry, two thousand men, and the Pendleton scouts."
He was starting to look enthusiastic; Emiliano raised a cautionary hand. "My lord, let's not get a hard-on so all the blood runs out of our heads, like that little white-ass Mafiya cocksucker Piotr. We got the monks to think about too, you know."
Jabar's brows knitted. Emiliano had worked with him a number of times over the years, and knew the brutish appearance was a false front. Nobody had stayed on top through the turbulent early years of the Association without plenty of smarts, and not just the street variety.
"We got more men than we need to keep them bottled up," Jabar said at last. "There's no quick way to get out of the Abbey. They got to send men down the switchbacks on the north side of the hill into the town before they can sally. That takes time."
"So let's find the motherfuckers, my lord."
The round head nodded. "And then, if we can kill them before they get away, the war is over."
Near West Salem, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9
Ooof, Michael Havel thought, closing a jaw gone slack. It's a pleasant surprise, but it's still a hell of a surprise. He felt disoriented for a moment, with a whirling vertigo, as if his whole body had been prepared for a step at the bottom of a ladder and had instead run into a hard floor. Actually, I was prepared for death. A momentary surge of nausea surprised him, and he spat to clear his mouth.
The Bear Lord recognized the first pair of the men pulling up their lathered horses before him. Behind them troops were pouring down out of the ruins of West Salem onto Brush College Road, moving at the double-quick and making the earth shake with the uniform pounding of their boots. Pikes bristled above them, waving like ripe wheat in July, light glistening on the steel.
"Major Jones," he said, returning the man's salute. "Let's be understated and say it's good to see you."
"Edward Finney," the other man said, offering a hand in a metal gauntlet.
He was in his late forties, stocky and weathered, wearing first-class armor— breast-and-back of overlapping articulated plates, lobster-style, mail-and-plate leggings and arm-guards, a visored helmet on his head—with a sword at his hip and a long war-hammer slung over one shoulder. It wasn't gear Havel would have cared to wear on horseback, but from the weapon that wasn't the way he fought, either, and the horse was for mobility. Two much younger men with a strong family resemblance and similarly armed rode behind him, probably his sons. An even younger woman followed—barely old enough to take the field— in lighter gear, with a trumpet and a crossbow slung over her back.
"Ah, you're a friend of Juney's," Havel said. A mental file clicked: Big yeoman farmer down south of Corvallis city, the son of old Luther. Influential guy. "So, the Faculty Senate finally got its collective thumb out?"
"That back there is the First Corvallis Volunteers; two thousand of them, half crossbows, half pikes and heavy infantry, a couple dozen mounted scouts. Could have had more, but we didn't want to wait, since that message you read on your veranda the other day sounded pretty time-constrained. It was obvious Turner and Kowalski would keep the Senate chasing round in circles and biting its own ass with amendments to secondary clauses to reports of special committees on the Whichness of the Wherefore, so we convened an overnight emergency session of the Popular Assembly—your man Hugo helped a lot getting the word around quick. That man's got contacts!"
"The Assembly can't declare war or order mobilization," Havel said, surprised. At least, if I know as much about the way Corvallis is set up as I think I do.
"But it can authorize people to go off as volunteers without a declaration of war."
"It can? "It can now, because we just did exactly that, and it hadn't occurred to the Economics Faculty that we could. We rammed through a vote, and most of the people voting showed up with their armor already on, which was sort of a hint—Ed here turned out a good five hundred from south of town, and another farmer friend of Lady Juniper's did the same out around Philomath, and Bill Hatfield and I have some pull in town. Somehow nobody wanted to get in our way when we pushed our bikes up to the Northgate."
Havel grinned, imagining the scene. "I bet they didn't!"
"Yeah. We geared up, got in the saddle before dawn this morning and started pedaling like mad while the Bobbsey Twins of the Faculty of Economics waved their arms and screeched about unconstitutional actions and threatened us with paper-armored lawyers. Christ, watching their faces was worth it all by itself! Not as much fun as smashing the butt end of a glaive there, but still worth it."
"You didn't happen to run into my reinforcements on the way here, did you?"
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