The Sky-Blue Wolves

by S. M. Stirling

  It’s not as if I’m running from shooting someone in the back from ambush. He did hit me first and he outweighed me by fifty pounds. What was I supposed to do? Not pull a knife and just try to punch him back? Yeah, I called him an asshole before he hit me, but then, he was an asshole, and what business of it was his in the first place?

  The problem was that some people, who were idiots but still there they were, thought he’d had a good reason for that, and she’d never really gotten to tell her side of the story. That was another reason her uncle had advised a quick departure; not letting it develop into a feud.

  And Unk did have a point; the guy may have been an asshole, but he’s a very dead asshole, and seeing me all the time was going to remind his friends, if he had any, and certainly his relatives of that.

  Winter camps could get very boring up on the makol, plenty of time for brooding, and the Lakota had a very decentralized form of government by consensus. It was a chief’s job to keep divisions under control and he couldn’t look as if he was giving her a break because she was his niece, or some people would just stop listening to him.

  On the good side, they were all a long way from home here—a very long way, she knew, looking around. This open area—she’d seen a faded, flaking sign, obviously at least fifty years old, reading Pu’uloa Beach Park—was surrounded by what had probably been housing before the Change; you could still see the remains of building pads here and there, or where the roads had been before the Hawaiians levered them up to remelt the asphalt and use it elsewhere, a familiar form of salvage. Smashed-up concrete made a good material for a rammed earth wall, too.

  Modern houses had been scattered through it, mostly of light construction with palm roofs. Each had been surrounded by a large garden and usually an orchard of orange trees and lemons and mangos and breadfruit and bananas, some of the fences still incongruously gay with masses of flowers on bush violet or bougainvillea.

  The houses had all been burned by the invaders, which given some of the things she’d seen might be a mercy to anyone passing by. The enemy apparently liked to get humorously structural with body-parts. Some of them had been very small body parts, and there had been a lot of grilled bone split for the marrow; goats, pigs, cattle and people all mixed, all adding to the scorched-rotten stink heavy in the warm perfumed air. There must have been a fair number of livestock around, too, or the rampant tropical growth would have been even more rampant.

  The three of them drew up before the Lakota standard, which was a dark red flag with seven white tipis set base-to-base in the center to make a circle. Faramir and Morfind got some curious looks, since there weren’t many Ranger Staths as far east as the Lakota country yet.

  “Théhaŋ waŋčhíŋyaŋke šni,” Susan Mika said, raising her hand; it was literally accurate, if you took “long time, no see” as “several years.”

  “Backatcha, Susie,” the Lakota commander Ivan Mat’o Gi replied, returning the gesture.

  He was also an Oglála, an older cousin of hers, and fortunately a rather sympathetic one; a couple of his akicita were giving her hard looks, though not the especially honored one who bore the Eagle Staff beside him, like a shepherd’s crook wrapped in otter skin with feathers along the outside. Most of the band were Húŋkpapȟa or Sihásapa or whatever and hadn’t known her from a prairie dog until the ones who did know her realized she was here and the gossip mill got going.

  “Still living it up, I see,” he continued, looking at her companions.

  She didn’t reply to that; as far as she was concerned, she considered Morfind and Faramir as settling down rather than living it up. She wasn’t nineteen and fancy-free anymore.

  “Mae Govannen, blotáhunka Mat’o Gi,” the two Dúnedain Rangers said, giving him the Dúnedain salute, right hand to heart combined with a slight bow, and getting a nod and:

  “Hiya, pleased to meet ’cha,” in return.

  Susan hid a smile—in Eryn Muir she’d been the exotic outlander girlfriend, and now it was their turn. Though she had to admit the Dúnedain Rangers were more open-minded than her own folk, possibly because they lived scattered all over among outsiders rather than in a single shared place that was a world in itself.

  The Ranger cousins were slightly mispronouncing the word for war-leader and the man’s name—Brown Bear—despite her coaching, but would get props for trying and coming close. He usually went by Ivan, anyway, and as kids they’d all called him Big Nose, since it was a truly commanding beak that had only grown as he approached thirty.

  But good enough. My Sindarin is still lousy too, and I’ve had a lot more practice.

  “Not that we don’t appreciate the rest, but we were just getting stuck in and we didn’t come here to watch a battle,” Ivan said to her, lounging at ease in his light saddle like someone who’d grown up that way, which of course he had. “So, what does Golden Eagle Woman want us to do now?”

  Lakota generally referred to the Crown Princess by that name; the Golden Eagle was her totem by Mackenzie custom, and she’d gotten the same protector’s call when she spent time up on the makol. It helped that the waŋblí was a symbol of warrior power and courage among the Lakota, and they’d been impressed with her along those lines even as a teenager.

  “Well, first she wants to double check your horses are good and recovered,” she said.

  And ran her eye over them, with the benefit of an experience that started as a toddler and had been refined even more as a Crown Courier, riding two hundred miles a day at times.

  “Look fine to me,” she added.

  “Yeah, though they could have used some more free grazing and exercise than we got over on that other island,” Ivan said. “Being shut up in those floating wooden boxes is even harder on horses than people . . . unless sailors count as people, which I doubt. But basically we’re okay, though I’d like some more remounts.”

  She grinned at him. “Since when were there ever enough horses? I mean, even counting the ones we hadn’t stolen yet?”

  He laughed at the reference to their national sport and looked at the sleek dappled gray Arabs the two Dúnedain were on.

  “Are those ones your friends ’r riding as good as they look? They sure are pretty.”

  “Better than they look. Fast, real staying power, especially in hot weather, scary smart, and they turn even sharper than a quarter horse.”

  “Nice to know,” he said, like a horse-breeder making notes. “So, action? Getting sort of boring.”

  Susan swung her arm to the northwest.

  “If you’re good on the horses, the Crown Princess wants you to cautiously develop the enemy’s position there.”

  “Translation?”

  “They’re pushing ahead there, or will be. In a big column. Shoot ’em up and slow ’em down and make ’em spread into line.”

  “That’s what I thought you said, but it pays to be sure. Wašícu sure do like to talk fancy,” Ivan said.

  “But don’t get tangled up. She’s got someone else in mind for the heavy lifting. The Japanese will be along, and some Portlander knights.”

  “Well, the crawdads have their uses,” Ivan said, using the eastern slang for Association heavy cavalry. “Ramming their heads into walls, for one. When they don’t have ’em somewhere else.”

  “And the enemy shoot back pretty well, so be careful.”

  “Yeah, we noticed. Their bows look funny but there’s nothing wrong with the performance. Okay, tell Golden Eagle the Guardians of the Eastern Gate are on it.”

  He swung his helmet on, a steel cap topped by buffalo horns and fur with a long tail of pelt that fell down his back, and turned to his command, several hundred wild youngsters, grinning faces painted with red and black and white for war. Here and there a few gray-streaked braids with more of the feathers of accomplishment in them showed veterans . . . who’d been wild youngsters themselves in the Prophet�
�s War where they got the varicolored scalps sewn to the outer seams of their leggings or dangling from lances.

  They were mostly in short-sleeved shirts of light riveted mail or leather jerkins sewn with steel scales or washers, with round shields of buffalo-hide taken from the neck-humps of bulls and faced with sheet metal from ancient autos, armed with bow and shete, knife and tomahawk and now and then a rawhide-bound stone-headed war club, which was nicely traditional. And on a yard-long shaft of springy laminated horn it also cracked skulls just as effectively as any alternative.

  “Hoka hey, Lakota!” Ivan shouted, and waved his shield; it had a buffalo head on it facing out, divided into four quarters and painted white, yellow, black and red.

  “Let’s go! It’s a good day for those shits over there to die! We’ll sting ’em and slow them down and skip when they try to punch back.”

  The warriors all started forward, and broke into a canter within a few paces in fluid unison. Their yelping war cries split the air with a shrill menace. Susan and her companions joined them; her instructions were to observe, but she definitely intended to do some shooting. For the sake of the thing, and because she already had a lot of grudges piled up against these people from the High King’s death, and then the expedition to South Westria where they’d come uncomfortably close to killing her several times, not to mention her friends. And now from doing all this nasty stuff here in Hawaiʻi: they managed to give her more reasons to kill them every time they met, personal and principled together.

  And I’ll go along because what I see, Orrey knows, what with the Sword. Which is sorta creepy, but way useful.

  She reached over her shoulder to her quiver and checked the shafts there and the bow in the case by her knee. Her bowstave wasn’t very thick; the general rule was that the draw on a war bow should be about two-thirds to three-quarters your body weight, and she was five-foot-one and built in a way she thought of as whipcord or graceful and unkind people called skinny like a rattlesnake. But nobody had ever complained about her accuracy, on foot or on the back of a šúŋkawakȟáŋ.

  “C’mon, Big Magical Dog, we’ve got work to do,” she said, and leaned forward slightly; the horse took the hint and speeded up. “Forward the Lakota and the Dúnedain!”

  The terrain they were heading into was flattish and open and had been cleared of pre-Change ruins except for an occasional snag; mostly it was covered in well-grazed grass and low shrubs, though there were blue-green hills on the edge of sight ahead that looked as if they were densely wooded. Here and there were coconut palms, whose feather-duster shape she was still getting used to. Patches of younger trees had the pruned look that meant they were coppiced regularly for small wood or more likely for charcoal and planted amid stretches of ruin too stubborn for anything else, to get some use out of otherwise useless ground while the patient roots ground brick and concrete back into soil.

  She’d seen the technique often enough in Montival with very different types of tree. It was usually the sign of a large settlement nearby or of some sort of smelting industry, or both.

  “You know,” she said to her companions, and waved around. “If it weren’t all fucked up, this would be even prettier than the country around Hilo. And the weather’s great—like the air was kissing you. Like you guys’ home down in Westria, but not as dry.”

  “Well, yes, meleth e-guilen, but right now you can tell it’s a battle,” Morfind said from her right.

  “Most of the songs leave the . . . the mess out,” Faramir said grimly from her left.

  Neither of them said more; one of the many things Susan liked about both of them was that they weren’t chatterers. They left that to her, mostly.

  “Yup, messy,” she said, as she clapped her light helmet on and fastened the chin-cup. “Like I said, seriously fucked up. It’s worse somehow because it’s so pretty otherwise. I like the flowers. Like home in the springtime, only I think it’s all year-round here.”

  They were close enough that the snarling brabble punctuated by shrieks and scrap-metal-on-cement sounds, which went with a big fight, was fairly loud, but still blurred by distance into a seamless whole.

  It was astonishing how far thirty thousand yelling voices carried, but then, that was more people than most cities had. Battles were even more densely packed than cities, too; the line ahead was less than a mile long west to east from one end to another.

  She could see the low black string that marked where the armies made contact, and the sparkling ripple that was its movements. Bolts and cast-steel roundshot and napalm shells from the Montivallan field-catapults firing over their own troops’ heads made flickering streaks or lines of black smoke in the distance amid the ratcheting clatter of the cocking pumps and the TUNG! of release.

  Occasional dead bodies littered the fields as they rode north over the ground where the fight had gone; mostly Koreans in their spiked helmets, but a fair scattering of Montivallans too, since the stretcher-parties took only the wounded until the post-battle cleanup.

  Here and there a dead horse lay, which she admitted in strict privacy bothered her too. Lakota were mostly nomad herders, who raised cattle and sheep and horses and managed the buffalo herds that had returned since the Change, and they couldn’t afford to be sentimental about animals . . . even less than most people could, in the modern world. They all calmed theirs down when they began to roll their eyes and snort at the smells and noises, even though if you thought about it from their own point of view the beasts were totally right to convey:

  You absolutely sure you’re absolutely sure about this, boss?

  But you couldn’t depend on horses for your life and live with them from colt-hood on without feeling something for them; they weren’t machines, after all. They had a spirit, like people.

  “The horses cannot choose to stay at home,” Faramir said, which proved they’d gotten to the point of thinking alike.

  “Neither can humans, most of the time,” Morfind answered.

  “Yeah, but at least we have some idea of what’s going on,” Susan said. “Of course, that makes things worse too, sometimes.”

  Arrows bristled from the ground, with clusters where a flight had come down before the lines shifted, and there were bent javelins, broken pikes, bits and pieces of gear such as water bottles, little pools of blood that attracted some of the swarms of flies from the bodies when a hungry kite or gull landed and disturbed them with its flapping wings—they went to work on the faces first, since those didn’t have armor. That was why the Montivallan dead were all rolled onto their stomachs with a jacket or shield or whatever laid over their heads by the medical squads that had checked they were goners.

  Charred patches still smoldering showed where napalm shells had landed, and added burnt meat and a chemical reek to the stink.

  Not all the bodies looked much like bodies anymore. The results when a catapult bolt designed to punch through a foot of hardwood hit living people wasn’t very pleasant at all, and when roundshot struck human beings at close range the target splashed.

  They passed the Japanese contingent double-timing forward, their lamellar armor clattering and the long blades of their higo-yari spears rising and falling; sunlight gleamed from the almost liquidly intense brightness of their lacquered armor, red and black and yellow, protection and boast at the same time. There was a leashed eagerness to them that Susan could sense, even though their faces had a stone restraint; this was an enemy they’d fought all their lives, usually at a disadvantage, and they were looking forward to the boot being on the other foot and risk be damned.

  Empress Reiko rode at their head, with a few mounted commanders and standard-bearers. Susan cast a critical eye; the Nihonjin leaders were competent in the saddle, but . . .

  Not bad . . . for farmers. That about sums it up, she thought, which confirmed her earlier experiences.

  When they got close enough to see individual banners,
beehives and honeybees made it clear that the far left of the Montivallan infantry line was the Deseret regiment that had passed them on the beach.

  Three blocks of pikemen with crossbowmen between held the end of the line, with a fourth phalanx in reserve; evenly-spaced ridges of dead about fifty yards behind showed that the Koreans had fallen into the trap of trying to push into what looked like holes between the blocks of pikes and get at their flanks, not knowing how fast the rear files in a good formation could turn ninety degrees and ram right into you like a wall of high-speed points, flanking you in turn like the steel jaws of a bear trap.

  Right now the long shafts of the first four ranks of pikes were leveled, held so that they all extended to the same length, and the long heads of spring steel were locked into the shields of the Koreans where they formed an overlapping wall.

  “Push of pike,” Morfind murmured.

  The phrase was technical and evocative too, because this was like a giant lethal football scrum, a grunting heaving snarling shoving match of armored bodies with braced booted feet churning at the dirt. Dust hovered over them as the hobnails ripped up the grass, adding an odd mineral tang of volcanic soil to the stink of sweat loaded with rage and fear, and blood and wastes from the dead and wounded.

  Behind them the fourth line had their weapons held overarm, snapping forward in punching two-armed stabs aimed at men’s faces, hard enough to smash all the way through to the spine if they hit. Farther back still was a forest of pikes held upright by the rear ranks, rattling together occasionally or making sharper sounds and swaying when an arrow struck them, or bobbing when a man stepped forward to replace a casualty. The Koreans jabbed back when they could with their shorter weapons, or hacked at the heads of the pikes with swords; now and then one would try to crawl forward beneath the points, which usually ended badly. Mostly they took the pike-points on their shields, keeping them as an overlapping wall, and now and then the whole formation would heave a few steps back or forward in rippling panting unison.

  Occasionally a chant would break out, shatteringly loud until there wasn’t enough breath and it died back down into massed grunting and cursing: