A Meeting At Corvallis

by S. M. Stirling

  Juniper started to duck at a sinister hiss. The crossbow bolt struck her on the collarbone, and she nearly dropped her bow at the sharp stabbing pain; but the short, thick shaft bounced back, turned by the riveted plates within the brig-andine and the distance from which it had been sent. Lightly armored and without shields, outnumbered two to one by the Clan's bowmen and carrying weapons that shot far less quickly, few of the Protectorate army's crossbowmen had lived to come within a hundred yards of the Mackenzie archers. Survivors formed a ragged line behind the blocks of spears, lofting their bolts at the archers on high arcing trajectories, but the stubby darts lacked the aerodynamic efficiency of a thirty-inch arrow.

  She reached behind her shoulder for another arrow. Her hand froze. Trumpets wailed behind the Protectorate line. The blocks of spearmen halted; then they began to walk backward; she could hear file-closers and sergeants counting cadence, their voices harsh and loud enough to carry through distance and racket, keeping the ranks solid and the shields up for their lives' sake. For the arrows did not stop, and the trail of bodies they'd left coming south was added to as they went north.

  Juniper lowered her bow, panting; her shooting was more of a symbol than anything else, to show her clansfolk the Chief was with them. She was as accurate as most, and quick. But the heaviest weapon she could draw was barely within the minimum set for marching with the levy, a good deal lighter than Eilir's eighty-pound mankiller, and nothing like the smashing power of Sam Aylward's war bow, much less the monster stave John Hordle could pull to the ear. Instead she stepped back to turn her head either way, caught the eye of bow-captains, grabbed the signaler by the mail collar and shouted in his ear: "Sound the first halt!"

  He put the horn to his mouth: "Huu-huu-huu-huuuuuuu!"

  Every third archer stopped shooting. Some of them busied themselves helping the wounded to the rear; one passed her with another man's arm held around his shoulder, the hurt Mackenzie swearing luridly every time his right leg touched the ground and the plastic vanes of the bolt in his shin waggled. Others dashed forward recklessly to pull arrows from the ground, from abandoned shields, even from the bodies of the dead.

  "Ooooh, look 'ow short we are," Aylward said—he was still shooting, choosing every target with a second's care. "Bloody sad, isn't it, how we're running short. Eat this, you evil sodding shite!"

  The enemy crossbowmen were backing up too, but stopping to shoot as they went as long as they were in range, not running away. She noted distantly how Nigel had quietly stepped between her and the enemy as soon as she lowered her bow, raising his heater-shaped shield; a last bolt hit it, and sank an inch deep into the tough bullhide and wood, quivering like a malignant wasp. If that had hit her in the eye … a body lay on its back nearby, a young woman with hair as red as Juniper's own and a bolt sunk halfway to its vanes in one eye, the other open and blue and staring. There was a surprised expression on her face beneath the raven painted on it, and only the slightest trickle of blood down the black design; she had the same totem, then …

  The Hunter comes for us all in our appointed hour, she reminded herself, letting sights, sounds, stenches flow over and through her without giving them purchase to linger and leave horror behind.

  Ravens and crows of the flesh hovered overhead, riding the slow, chill, wet wind, and eagles, falcons … all waiting. They had learned quickly what such doings as this meant, after the Change.

  Ground and center, she told herself. Then she raised her bow and waved it to either side again. The silver mouthpiece of the long ox-horn went to the signaler's lips, and he blew round-cheeked.

  This time the arrowstorm slackened to nearly nothing; that was the signal for only the chosen marksmen, the ones with the best scores and the heaviest draw-weights, to shoot. More went out collecting shafts, rushing desperately from one to the next in a great show of haste.

  See, Juniper thought, looking to where the Marchwarden's banner hung beside the Lidless Eye and driving her will behind the glance like an arrow in itself.

  Her hand moved in a gesture. See and believe, Emiliano Gutierrez. By the keen sight of Brigid and the long hand of Lugh, by the silver tongue of Ogma, by the power of the blood shed this day upon the Mother's earth, by every soul here sent untimely to the Lord of the Western

  Gate, by the grief of children orphaned and the sorrow of lovers' tears, I bind your thought, your hand, your loins, your eyes, blinding the inward sight of your mind with the lust of your heart! So mote it be!

  It would be easy enough for an outsider to believe that they'd run short of arrows. Few who hadn't been under a Mackenzie arrowstorm before could believe just how many shafts they could lay down. The Protector's men had crossed the three-hundred-yard mark only ten minutes ago; in that time nine hundred archers had sent a hundred and thirty thousand arrows onto the killing ground. And when near a thousand men came marching at you shoulder-to-shoulder, it was hard to miss …

  Let them think we're spent, easy meat for the men-at-arms. We've fought the Protector's men often enough, but mostly in skirmish and raid and ambush rather than pitched battles. Sam is right—massed shooting like this is … different. And they won't know we brought bundles of arrows in plenty.

  Hooves clattered behind her on the roadway. She looked around, walked back; it was John Brown, his helmet knocked awry, long dents— swordstrokes—in his breastplate, his left hand a blob of bandages where spots showed sopping-red. His face was red-brown now, drenched with sweat; a younger kinsman rode by his side, looking ready to catch him if he started to slide out of the saddle.

  "We can't hold the knights," he said. "Sorry, Juney. Not any longer, not hand-to-hand. We'll hang on their flank, use our bows, try to keep 'em from getting around, that's all we can do. Lost better'n a hundred riders trying. They've got too much weight for us."

  "The Mother-of-All bless you, John, you've done splendidly. Now it's with the Luck of the Clan."

  * * * *

  Emiliano Gutierrez stood in the stirrups and focused his binoculars. The infantry were coming back faster than they'd gone forward, even walking in reverse, and a lot less of them than had started out. They were shot for now …

  Sí, shot up good, he thought with grim indifference, listening with half an ear to the screams as monk-surgeons and ordinary medics operated on the tables set up behind his position, cutting steel and cedarwood out of flesh—morphine took time to work, and seconds could mean the difference between life and death. Horse-drawn ambulances trotted westward, taking those who could endure it to the field hospital.

  Lord Jabar rode up; he had his sword across his saddlebow, running red, and the shield hung from his shoulder was battered and hacked, with a broken-off arrow standing in the spear-wielding lion there and splinters showing white-brown through the facing. He'd hung his helmet by the saddlebow and pushed back his coif, panting as sweat rolled down his shaven head in rivulets.

  "Got the cora-boys to pull back," he panted. A squire handed him a canvas waterskin; he gulped, and then squirted water on his face, washing a thin reddish film from the ebony skin as the blood spattered there sluiced off. "Couldn't make them stand long enough to finish them, they kept pulling away and shooting, but we hurt them bad. Lost about twenty men, twice that wounded too bad to fight; I think we killed three, four times that many of them—they couldn't get their wounded away from us, either. Should I try to swing in behind the kilties, my lord?"

  Emiliano shook his head and handed over the glasses, indicating the Mackenzie line. "Take a look."

  White teeth showed in the brutally handsome, full-lipped face. "Sheee-it! They lookin' raggedy-ass fo' sure."

  "Si. I think they're short of ammunition."

  Jabar grunted and nodded, returning the field glasses; Emiliano pulled a handkerchief out of a saddlebag and wiped the surface. It was hell getting blood out of the fine machining there if you let it dry and set. The black nobleman wiped his sword so he could sheathe it; getting blood inside the scabbard was an even wor
se pain.

  "We better hit them fast, then, before they get more," he said. "I can't see any coming up behind them, though. Hard to miss that many arrows … sheee-it, they shot enough!"

  The pasture for three hundred yards in front of the Clansfolk bristled with goose feathers at the ends of cedarwood shafts, enough to give a silvery-gray sheen to the whole patch of land—save where bodies lay, or twitched and writhed, or tried to crawl back.

  "Yeah, that was why I sent the infantry in first," Emiliano said. "They'll do to soak up arrows."

  Jabar pulled his coif back up, fasting the mouth-protecting flap by the thongs to the brass studs riveted through the mail on the right side. His squire came up with a fresh lance as he lifted his helm and set it on his head.

  Emiliano nodded and waved to the trumpeters; the long, curled instruments sang and screamed. His banner moved forward, and the Lidless Eye with it. The reserve conrois of lancers came up to fall in behind it, along with those Jabar had led against the CORA riders; hooves rang as they stamped, and horses snorted. The men were silent behind coif and nasal bar this time, eyes hard and set.

  Emiliano slapped down his visor. Hey, I wonder if I can get Mount Angel tacked on to Barony Dayton? Or at least a couple-dozen manors here. Young Julio is going to need an inheritance too.

  The world turned into gray shadow, the eyeholes windows into a place narrowed to little more than the chamfron of his destrier. The big horse moved beneath him as he turned and reached out his hand for the lance that his squire thrust into his gauntlet. It had taken him years of practice before he could do anything more than knock himself out of the saddle with these things, and then more years to stay level with the young dickheads coming up who started with their first pimples … and it was time to mix it in.

  Two days after the Change someone in the Lords had tried to move in on him with a fire-ax, figuring there weren't any rules anymore because guns didn't work. Emiliano had used a shovel on him, then cut his head off with the ax and hung it in a hairnet over the door. Guns, knives, chains, swords, lances … it was all a matter of your 'tude, how much of a pair you had.

  He swung the point down. "Haro!" he shouted. "Haro, Dayton! Haro, Portland! Holy Mary for Portland!"

  The answering roar of the men-at-arms came in like surf on a windy day.

  * * * *

  Juniper licked dry lips. The earth shook beneath her as five hundred leveled lances came across the meadows, and the rain of arrows hadn't done more than slow it a little … two hundred yards … a hundred and seventy-five …

  "Now!" she shouted, and the horns coughed and blatted.

  Juniper turned and ran, the flag beside her. That was the easiest hard decision she'd ever made; when you saw that mass of armored men and barded horses coming at you behind the cruel spikes of the lanceheads, and thought what they and the pounding hooves could do to your own precious, irreplaceable self, you wanted to run away. Never mind that running away from a galloping horse was like running in a bad dream, where you pumped your legs and stayed nailed in one spot.

  Every Mackenzie did the same. A long surge of them swarmed over the fence, over the road, over the second fence and dashed past the swine-feathers, panting. And then they stopped and turned, each with bundles of arrows ready to their hands, most working their drawing-arms and shaking out the wrist for an instant before they reached down and picked up a shaft.

  "That's a relief," she gasped, reaching for a shaft herself. "I was a bit worried they'd keep going."

  The earth trembled, and the knights came up the slight rise on the other side of the road. Their plumes and lanceheads were bright against the thinning pearl gray clouds. "Haro! Portland!"

  * * * *

  "On, brothers, on!" Abbot Dmwoski said.

  He stood at the exit of the tunnel, and the column of armed monks poured past him and up the staircase into Mount Angel town. Some had thought him paranoid for wasting labor on a vertical stairway and sloping tunnel from the heights that bore the Abbey to a spot inside the walls of the town at its feet. He'd nonetheless insisted, and now men in armor with black robes kirted above it rushed by. When the last had passed him he followed, out into the gray light of an overcast spring day, wet air damping the scent of fear-sweat and the sour smell of oiled metal.

  An aide held the reins of his horse, though almost all Mount Angel's host would be on bicycles, save for a few messengers. And the banner-bearer, with the flag that carried the image of Virgin and Child and was topped with the Cross.

  "Good boy, Sobieski, sooo, brave fellow," he crooned, stroking the big beast's arched neck; it was sweating, sensing the tension of the men about.

  He swung into the saddle, armor clanking; each knight-brother slid his poleax into the carrier beside the rear wheel and bestrode his machine. The banner followed, and the formation fell in behind him in column of fours as they pedaled north and then east, towards the Jerusalem Gate. Few civilians watched from the windows of the half-timbered houses or shops on either side; some built in that style in the old days for the tourist trade, more since because it was a fairly easy style to imitate with the tools available in the post-Change world. Most of the remaining townsfolk had gone through the tunnel the other way, carrying the ill and the young children.

  Those who lined the streets were the first rank of the town and country militia, who would follow him. The second and third ranks—women, the old men, all commanded by the Sisters—would hold the town walls, and the Abbey. He didn't think the enemy could take the town, even so. He was absolutely certain they couldn't take the Abbey, but if he lost this force, there would be little left …

  The faces of the men waiting to follow were tight and grim for the most part; they were fighting for their homes—for their families, the fields that they worked and the workshops where they labored, and for freedom in a most immediate and concrete sense.

  And because they trust me, they follow me as I hazard everything on one throw of the dice. Lord who blessed the centurion, if Head these Thy people astray, let mine alone be the fault and mine the punishment. Give them victory, O Lord, I beseech You, he thought one last time. They fight for all that a man rightfully holds dear: for their women and children, for the graves of their fathers and for Your Church. Yet Thy will be done, not mine: for Thy judgments are just and righteous altogether.

  Signing himself: Mary, pierced with sorrows, all those who fall today are born of woman. Madonna, intercede for us, now and at the hour of our deaths!

  At the gate, the keepers waved to show the road was still clear and the enemy still in their camp to the north. He raised a steel gauntlet to give the signal. Within the blockhouse and towers, gears ratcheted as the portcullis and its mate went up. The inner gates swung back.

  As they did, one of the militiamen suddenly shouted, breaking the thick silence: "For Father Dmwoski! Jesư-Maria!"

  As he rode out onto the drum-hollow boards of the drawbridge, the cry broke from twelve hundred throats: "Jesư-Maria!"

  * * * *

  The first fence went over with a long crackling as the steel-clad chests of the barded destriers struck it. The boards meant to confine cows and sheep were little hindrance to the heavy horse, but it slowed them; here and there a mount went down, a brief shriek of man and beast under the pounding hooves. Then they struck the asphalt of the roadway, more slippery than bare ground beneath steel horseshoes.

  It wasn't until they hit the second fence that even the first rank were really aware of what awaited them—and it wasn't the backs of the broken, fleeing rabble they expected to ride down and skewer like lumps of meat. Instead long steel points bristled towards their horses beyond the fence, and near nine hundred bows were drawn to the ear, at a range where shafts would smash through shield and armor. Despite the roaring clamor, a silence seemed to fall for an instant that stretched like winter taffy.

  Juniper saw Emiliano Gutierrez then, under his banner and raising his visor with the expression of a man who wakes from dream int
o nightmare. Beside her, as if from a great distance, she heard Sam Aylward say in a conversational tone: "And when you ride against the Mackenzies, you nasty little booger, keep your visor down!" Then in a great shout: "Let the gray geese fly—wholly together—shoot!"

  The Marchwarden dropped his lance and shrieked as the arrow sprouted suddenly from his eyesocket …

  "Blow the rally!" Jabar Jones shouted, reining in his horse.

  He shook the blood out of his eyes; the helmet and coif had saved him from having his face transfixed, but not from a long gash on his forehead where a flap of skin hung down to show naked bone. The taste of his own blood was like tarnished copper in his mouth, the taste of defeat.

  The curled trumpet screamed. Knights and men-at-arms pulled up their mounts, the horses panting and dribbling foam, those that weren't bucking or squealing from the pain of arrow wounds; one went over in a roar of metal as he watched, but the rider got free, staggered erect despite the weight of metal, and took the reins of a riderless horse that another led over to him.

  Three hundred twenty, he rough-counted.

  Back south by the road over which the charge had gone—both ways—the Mackenzies were coming forward again, each of them with their spear-shovel in hand. They planted them well forward, in their original position.

  And then they stood, waiting. A murmur grew from them, then a chant, as they shook their bows overhead:

  "We are the point—we are the edge

  We are the wolves that Hecate fed!"

  The baron of Molalla ground his teeth; pain and fury blended into an intolerable knot below his breastbone. Almost, he shouted charge!

  "No," he muttered to himself.

  A scout pulled up in a spurt of gravel. "My lord!" he shouted, pointing westward towards Mount Angel. "The monks—all of them, out of the city gates without warning! What should we do?"