The Sky-Blue Wolves

by S. M. Stirling

  “Juche! Juche!” from the enemy, or something like: “Jug-ida! Meogda!”

  And from the Deseret soldiers a huge crashing bellow, resonant and blurred from being shouted out behind lowered visors:

  “COME, YE SAINTS! COME, YE SAINTS! COME, YE SAINTS!”

  The half-armored crossbowmen—and women, unlike the pike formation with their sixteen-foot weapons—were shooting in a kneeling-standing two-deep line in the intervals between the pike-blocks, well back from the close-quarter action: leveling their weapons and firing, then pumping the cocking-levers built into the forestocks, taking another thick stubby pile-headed bolt from the cases at their belts and clipping it into the groove ahead of the bent string and repeating the process. It was more like labor in a water-powered linen mill than what Susan thought of as fighting, with a lot of extra danger thrown in, but it certainly worked.

  Many of the bodies behind the line had bolts in them, rather than the bigger wounds the heads of the pikes made; the vanes that guided the bolts were mostly cut from pre-Change credit cards, though thin varnished leather was increasingly used as the plastic aged and crumbled.

  The noise—which included the near-continuous heavy tung! of crossbow prods made from salvaged leaf springs releasing, a tooth-grating sound not quite in synch—was too loud to hear their noncoms’ commands, but they’d be chanting, or screaming:

  First rank, take aim . . . fire! . . . reload in nine times: reload! . . . second rank, take aim . . . fire! . . . reload in nine times: reload! . . .

  Or if the line went forward: Company will fire by advancing ranks. . . .

  Arrows came flicking and whistling back from the rear ranks of the Korean formation; not an overwhelming mass, but a steady whickering flow arching across the sky, enough to give a continuous rattling chorus of bang! sounds as they deflected or shattered on the plates of the heavy infantry’s armor, or a shriek or curse as they went home in flesh. They weren’t running out of shafts yet, though with their fleet sunk they wouldn’t be getting any more, either. Arrows went fast in a battle, and they were bulky if not heavy to lug around.

  “You know,” Susan said to her companions, “I went through Deseret a lot as a Courier. Nicest people you’d want to meet, I mean, mostly—you get the odd hard look or cold shoulder for being a gentile, or some guy who’s absolutely a no-go tries to get into your pants, or you run into one who’s bound and determined you’re going to hear about Joseph Smith and the angels and the golden plates and the Lost Tribes, which is how I found out I was really Jewish.”

  The two Dúnedain chuckled indulgently at the odd beliefs some isolated folk had. Susan went on:

  “But nine times in ten they’re real friendly—after a while I had families in all the towns I touched who treated me like little sis, home-cooked meals and all. Mostly they don’t drink, they don’t brawl, they hardly even cuss or cheat. But put them on a battlefield . . .”

  “They are doing well,” Faramir agreed. “I wouldn’t want to be taking what they’re dishing out.”

  The Lakota column, or mass or band, swung wider westward to avoid the field ambulances and stretcher-parties and pack-mules bringing up more bolts and the trickle of walking wounded helping one another towards the nearest field hospital. This wasn’t Susan’s first fight by any means, but it was her first big set-piece battle. Montival’s last major war had petered out in guerilla skirmishes about the time she was born, or a few years earlier depending on how serious you considered the final scuffles with holdouts hiding in caves in the Bitterroots living on camas and the odd gopher and what they could rustle and steal and harder and harder to tell from plain old-fashioned bandits.

  But she’d grown up on the descriptions of the storm-and-thunder parts of the Prophet’s War as told around the fires, and one of the things the oldsters all agreed with was that in a mounted skirmish you could be killed anytime, but in set battles things were dangerous only for about half bowshot on either side of the line of contact. Beyond that it was only mildly risky.

  An extended line of light cavalry guarded the flank; they were on quarter horses too, and equipped much like the Lakota, with a few differences such as wearing chaps instead of leggings and high-heeled boots instead of the simpler moccasin-like gear her folk preferred. Their guidon-flags had a bucking horse on them, or spiky rancher’s brand-signs. That meant they were from the territories of the Pendleton Round-Up, with its capital at the little city of that name: ranchers and their retainers from the arid lands south of the Columbia bend and around the Blue Mountains, east of the better-known Central Oregon Ranchers’ Organization with its center at Bend.

  A lot of them had volunteered, and were anxious to demonstrate their loyalty. For reasons of chance and if-they’re-against-it-I’m-for-it local squabbles and the dynastic foibles of their ruling Bossmen they’d been on the wrong, losing side during most of the Prophet’s War a generation ago. The second wave from back home would probably include a lot of riders from the Crown Province of Nakamtu, what had been the core territories of the Church Universal and Triumphant and before that Montana, for the same reason. The distance from the coast was the only reason they weren’t here already.

  A few genial shouts of:

  “Well, if it ain’t the Injuns come to rescue the cavalry!” rang out.

  They were answered by elevated Lakota middle fingers and cries of:

  “Every damn time, cowfuckerboys!” or “Get off that poor mangy dog and get a horse, why can’t you?”

  To which some wit replied: “’Cause you Sioux horse-thieves stole them all.”

  “While you were riding them! And you never noticed!”

  An officer came galloping up to Ivan Brown Bear, flanked by a signaler with a brass trumpet slung across her chest and holding a light lance flying a pennant of dark blue with a yellow brand shaped like deep U whose left arm was drawn out at the top to make a 7, and whose right merged into a capital P. The man wore a breastplate of overlapping steel-rimmed lacquered bull-hide segments, and had a scabbed-over cut on a red sweating cheek that he rubbed at absently with the back of one of his rawhide gauntlets. He also had a long blond beard braided into a fork and the skull of a cougar minus the lower jaw mounted on his light sallet helm, snarling endlessly. His high-horn saddle was liberally adorned with tooled leather and silver accents and rested on one of the colorful patterned blankets for which his realm was famous.

  The broken-off stub of an arrow stood in it, too.

  The man was in his thirties. The signaler was around Susan’s age, had freckles, and looked enough like him to be close kin and probably was. She gave the Dúnedain and the Lakota woman a curious look and a nod. Both their horses were sweating, and had flecks of foam on their necks and chests, evidence of hard work; their round metal-faced shields had the same brand symbol as the banner. Ranchers throughout the interior of Montival used them much like an Association knight’s coat of arms.

  Coat of arms you burn into a cow’s ass, Susan thought to herself; she considered the habit absurd.

  “Hi, Ivan, finally come out to do some work, right?” the stockman-officer said with a smile that showed gaps in his teeth. “Late to the dance, as usual.”

  They leaned over in the saddle to slap the palms of their hands and then the backs of their fists together, two rangy tough-looking men with the weathered appearance of a life spent in the saddle, and both in their prime.

  The Lakota leader grinned back. “Thought I’d check whether you were asleep or just jacking off behind a bush, Red Bull,” he said and pointed at the other man’s face. “But say, wašícu, look out! You’ve got a dead pussycat biting on your head!”

  “That’s Cap’n Red Bull Anderson sir to you, you idle bastard,” the rancher replied. “And I kilt this catamount my own self! With a kitchen knife! When I was six! And asleep.”

  Then seriously: “What’s up?”

  “Golden
Eagle Woman says the savages are going to hit this flank with a column,” Ivan said. “So we Lakota are going out to completely fuck up their day.”

  “Yeah, we got a runner with that news ’bout the enemy a little whiles ago and didn’t like it one damn bit—not enough of us to stop a big column. Ain’t been nothin’ but a few pokes and slaps at us so far, they’re all afoot and we cut ’em up bad, but Lordy they’re mean as snakes, this bunch! Can’t say I enjoy fightin’ ’em all that much, lost some good boys, but killing them’s just a pleasure, it purely is.”

  “You don’t fucking say,” Ivan replied. “Okay, so we’re going out to develop the position.”

  “What?”

  “Shoot ’em up, make ’em spread out.”

  “Then why in seven hells didn’t you say so?”

  Ivan chuckled and said: “Expect the Japanese and some Portland crawdads along in a bit, so don’t get in the way—the crawdads, they’re not much on looking where they’re going once they drop their visors and swing those barge poles down.”

  “God give you good shootin’,” Anderson said. “We’ll switch to our remounts while you do, and thank you kindly for the chance.”

  “Don’t take too long. Remember, blanket first, then the saddle, and both of them go on the top side of the horse.”

  “Dang, who’d a thunkit? Thanks for that there deep Injun wisdom, good luck, and kill a few extra for me.”

  “Same to you, and glad to oblige.”

  The rancher and his signaler galloped off. The Lakota moved forward at a faster trot, over ground littered with the byproducts of what Anderson had called pushing and slapping. That included a fair scatter of enemy bodies with arrows sticking in them that bore the distinctive Pendleton fletching, made from the iridescent blue-green tailfeathers of the black-billed magpie. All of the enemy dead had been archers, judging by the gear and by the dead quarter horses with arrows in them littered here and there. The Round-Up fighters had removed their own fallen, including the dead.

  The Lakota didn’t gallop yet. You did that only when you were within bowshot of the enemy; a horse could keep up a gallop only about as long as a man could run flat-out, so you didn’t waste it. When you needed the speed, you needed it to be there and you needed it bad.

  Susan leaned down to her left as they cantered past one clump of bodies, hooking her right heel around the horn of her saddle, using one hand to keep the arrows from falling out of her quiver. With the other she scooped an enemy bow off the ground and flicked herself back into the saddle with a flex of leg and torso, foot finding stirrup as she examined the Korean weapon.

  It was about the same four foot in length as hers, and likewise made of a sandwich with wood in the center, horn on the belly and sinew on the back, but it was much rounder in section, rather than flat strips. The grip was merely a stiffer section wrapped in hide strips, instead of a rigid hardwood grip with a shelf cut in so that you shot through the centerline of the bow. And the ends were rigid forward-canted levers of hardwood tipped with bone, with a notched string-bridge to hold the cord off them. She tried a draw, and found it too heavy for her as she expected, but the pull was quite smooth.

  It was covered in fine leather. . . .

  A closer inspection of the leather covering and the bone tips of the levers made her shudder and hold it out between thumb and forefinger; also the string-bridges were made from human teeth. Morfind leaned in, looked, and grimaced.

  “Yrch,” she said, as Susan threw it away and wiped her hands on her doeskin breeches.

  In the Histories, that word meant orcs, though from her recent immersion in Dúnedain society what exactly orcs were or had been in the first Three Ages was something you could chew the fat about endlessly around the fire on winter evenings, which at least beat the crap out of horse genealogies and buffalo-hunt anecdotes on the boring scale.

  Though maybe that’s because I haven’t been listening to it all my life.

  In MSS, Modern Spoken Sindarin, yrch just meant the enemy—especially enemies who ate human flesh or did other things that were . . .

  Well, orc-like, I suppose?

  . . . like working for evil sorcerers.

  “Yrch? You said it, girlfriend!” Susan said fervently.

  It certainly fit the bill pretty precisely here, or close enough for government work.

  “No dirweg, hirillath!” Faramir said quietly: Watch out, ladies!

  Susan let out a long breath. She and her companions pulled their shields off the hooks on their bowcases and slung them over their backs with their leather straps, then set arrows on their strings. She opened the steel-lined leather case that held her binoculars too, which she had a lot of practice doing one-handed, and stood a little in the stirrups with bent knees as she leveled them—you had to compensate for the up-and-down motion of your horse or the magnification flicked your vision all over the landscape.

  The enemy column was coming towards them at a uniform pounding trot to a hammer of drums, successive blocks ten men across and twenty deep one after another, driving forward like a steel fist. They had banners with them too, a flag with a central red panel with a white circle around a five-pointed red star, bordered above and below by narrow white stripes and broader blue ones. That was innocuous enough, but the human skulls with the red-painted teeth of dogs or wolves added on top of the poles rather spoiled the effect.

  So did the skulls bobbing on the sides of the horse-litter in the center of the formation. She couldn’t see much of the person sitting cross-legged in it; the intervening cavalry was in the way. But she thought she’d seen that baggy costume of many colors and strips of cloth before, and the fringed mask, and the tall three-peaked crown of gold filigree. Two more in similar but simpler costume capered on either side, waving open fans and carved wands.

  “Uh-oh,” she said. “Take a look there!”

  She handed the glasses to Faramir, who did and then passed them to his cousin Morfind, moving their horses around each other as easily as they would have their own bodies.

  “One of the kangshinmu,” Susan said.

  Órlaith had told her—knowledge courtesy of the Sword of the Lady—that originally the word had just meant shaman possessed by a spirit, part of the traditional beliefs of Korea and no more good or evil than anyone else’s faith. Only after the Change had it come to mean possessed by a particular spirit, as the Prophet of the Church Universal and Triumphant and his magi had been taken over and twisted by the same entity back home. Only in Korea, they’d won.

  “Morgul,” Faramir called grimly over the drumming hoofbeats: black magic. “Tego ven i Melain am mand!”

  Susan most certainly didn’t mind the thought of the Valar keeping them safe, but . . .

  “Tunkasila, le iyahpe ya yo!” she murmured as she recased the binoculars, just in case Grandfather needed reminding; and there did seem for a moment to be a strong hand on her back, though she couldn’t have sworn it wasn’t her own mind.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PEARL HARBOR

  AUPUNI O HAWAIʻI

  (KINGDOM OF HAWAIʻI)

  DECEMBER 4TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD

  “Hoka hey!” Ivan screamed, and the rest of his band echoed it hundreds-fold.

  The Lakota burst into a gallop and swerved in towards the head of the enemy column, stretching out as they did so, then angling for the corner in unison like a flock of birds. The warriors leaned forward along the necks of their horses, faces close to the manes, as arrows began to wicker out at them.

  Hitting moving targets was hard. The square corner of an infantry block was where it was hardest for the people in it to shoot back.

  Susan leaned forward and rose in her turn, the movement rippling down the formation like a wave as they all aimed at the corner-point of the enemy formation, drew and loosed, which would give three or four arrows for every
enemy soldier under the lash. She was timing it to the floating motionless moment the horse had all its hooves airborne; she shot at a banner-bearer, ducked again . . .

  . . . and the Korean ranks went by in a blur of motion and the nerve-wracking whupt of arrows driving by in return, and then they were swinging wide and angling in towards the next block. There was more return fire this time, since the enemy had more warning.

  A man ahead of her pitched sideways off his horse with a black-fletched arrow through his neck, an O-mouthed expression of shocked surprise on his face she suspected she’d be seeing for a long time, then hit the ground and bounced. Another leapt free as his horse was hit in the hock of its left fore, and tumbled to the ground in a crackle of breaking legs. He struck the ground rolling, came upright and ran; one of his comrades swung in and extended a hand and he bounced up behind his rescuer.

  Something banged into Susan’s back just as she started to straighten up to shoot again, painfully hard and right over the kidneys, below the part the shield on her back covered.

  “OOoooohfSHIT!” she said.

  The arrow wobbled off her bow and she got a mouthful of Big Magical Dog’s mane and a painful bump on the nose as the upward motion of his neck met the downward plunge of her face.

  She pulled in a breath—the stab of raw fear she dealt with by ignoring it, the way you did—and felt around with her right hand.

  It scratched on a few broken links in the mail lining of her jacket, protruding through the ripped surface of the leather.

  Glancing blow, she thought. But two inches lower, and that arrow would have skewered me all the way across.

  Light mail wouldn’t stop a hard-driven bodkin at close range . . . and she’d seen people dying with an arrow through the kidney. It always killed, but never as quickly as the victim wanted to go by then.

  “Fuck you, you evil dickweeds!” she wheezed.