by James Axler
It was a rare thing to see bemused defiance on Doc’s face. “But First Mate, are we not still ashore?”
“What are you saying, Doc?”
Skillet stormed forward with his thick fingers through the handles of a set of teacups. “He’s saying he’ll share his loot with his shore mates and let’s us have a tot against the cold!”
“That is exactly what I am saying, friend Skillet.”
“I don’t drink.” Miss Loral raised an eyebrow at Ryan. “And you’re acting shore commander.”
Ryan eyed the bottle. As loot, predark booze ranged from pure pleasure to gut-busting horror. “What is it?”
Doc caressed the bottle with pleasure. “Why, it is a ten-year-old Glenmorangie single-malt whisky.”
Jak made a noise. “Be least hun’erd.”
“It was ten years aging in the cask, dear Jak, and then bottled at its finest. Though many spoke of the twelve and eighteen year olds with deserved reverence.”
Jak eyed the bottle. “Still good?”
Doc gave a rare deep smile as he cracked the bottle and expertly poured two fingers in each cup. “I believe it should be nearly immortal and fit for one.” Several frowns met him as he cracked his water bottle and gave each cup a splash. The crew did not want their grog watered while ashore. “I beg of you to trust me—if you have not had scotch before, it is a great aid in discerning the subtleties.”
Hardstone snorted. “I’ve had corn whiskey, Doc. Back in the Deathlands, in the hill villes, deep southeast. Ville stilled. Wasn’t much fine, fit or subtle about it, ’cept its power to crack a man’s skull. I’ll give it that.”
Ryan had too, but he knew Doc was in his element.
“Oh, good Hardstone.” Doc smiled. “Many a man has crawled into a jar of whiskey and never returned, but now, a man who drinks scotch is as different as is his choice of drink. He rarely if ever drinks it simply to get drunk. Good Scotch was expensive back in the day. In my experience, a man opened a bottle of scotch at the birth of a child or at another great, portentous event. It was an accompaniment to fine reading, fine conversation or contemplation. You might pour a splash for a friend who came to you with his troubles, or enjoy a dram after a fine meal with a cigar and bosom companions. It was salutary, celebratory. Many believed that Scottish whisky was the penultimate form of the distiller’s art. The techniques derived over untold centuries of trial and error, from that first clear liquid the ancient Celts called uisce beatha, the water of life.”
The shore party stared at Doc in awe.
Doc raised his teacup. “And I can think of no better fate for this fine bottle than to be shared with my shipmates.”
Strawmaker was openly moved and raised his mug. “¡Salud, amigo!”
The shore party clinked cups. “Salute!”
Jak snapped his back, gave one short hard cough and licked his lips. “Good.”
Doc deliberately unbunched his brows and poured Jak another dram.
Ryan sipped his. It had been a while since Ryan had gotten drunk. His friends’ lives depended on him too much. But he did enjoy a good drink, or even a bad one in his few moments of leisure. He felt the burn and let the flavors play across his tongue. A small, nostalgic corner of his heart yearned for a better past he had never known. Ryan knew without a doubt he tasted it now. “Thanks, Doc.”
“You are welcome, my dear Ryan. Scotch was born to be shared with friends.”
Manrape called down the staircase. “Company, ma’am!”
Ryan was leader of the shore party, but he let it slide for the moment. “Everyone stay down here! Miss Loral?” Ryan and Loral strode up out of the quarantined time capsule. Manrape had his shotgun to shoulder. Ryan snapped out his longeyes and observed the armed convoy staring down at them along the hill line.
“Strawmaker! Get up here!”
Chapter Eighteen
Ryan counted more than two score of gaucho bird riders. Each had a lance resting in a stirrup cup, and each had a blaster across his saddle bow as well as a bolas, a whip and the ubiquitous giant Argentine knife. Each gaucho also had a spare bird tethered behind him. The gauchos were eyeing Ryan, Manrape, Miss Loral and Strawmaker with a great deal of interest. Several had binoculars. They had two wags drawn by oxen laden with supplies. Ryan scowled at the twenty men linked by forked boughs of wood bound to their necks in a coffle. They were tall, and all had long black hair. They wore little besides ponchos and tattoos, and most were hobbling on bloody bare feet. Behind the wags a number of gauchos herded what looked to be fifty creatures that to Ryan’s eye looked like a cross between a camel and a goat. “Slavers?”
“Si, Ryan. You might loosely cut this country into north and south, pampas and Patagonia. The north? Ranchos, estancias and plantacións. It is a place of ñandús and cows. The south? Hotter in summer and colder in winter. Nearly a desert. It is hard, dry country. The people are, how would you say, semi-nomadic? They are horsemen, and hunt the wild boars, the ñandú’s smaller cousin, and herd scrub cattle and guanacos.”
Ryan gazed on the giant goat creatures. “They’re like llamas.”
“Very much like a llama,” Strawmaker agreed.
“You said the north preys upon the south.”
“Si, Ryan. A horse stands no chance against a ñandú, except that they can live and thrive where the ñandús cannot.” Ryan watched the caravan form a hostile arc on their side of the vale. Gauchos were pointing at Strawmaker. Miss Loral was attracting attention as well.
Ryan frowned. “Manrape, how’d they see you?”
Manrape shrugged carelessly. “I let them.”
Miss Loral’s voice dropped to a hiss. “Bos’n, I will see your spine.”
Ryan very reluctantly came to Manrape’s defense. “I see what he sees.”
“And what is that, Mr. Ryan?”
Ryan stared at the slaves. “Twenty able-bodied men who might prefer to be sailors than slaves. Forty plus sets of capes and winter garments. There’s got to be maté in the wagons, and every gaucho is carrying his own personal supply as well. Half a hundred hoofed animals to salt away for the Horn, and their woolen pelts. More ñandú meat than anyone can eat for the next three days before it rots. We need them more than we need anything in that cellar. I say we take both and use their wags to carry it.”
Manrape grinned. “We are of a mind, shore commander.”
“There are lots of them,” Miss Loral observed.
“Si.” Strawmaker chewed his lip. “And while I am sure Ryan and Manrape have already surmised this, when you fight a gaucho, you must fight him and his bird.”
Ryan scowled as he heard the sound of Doc’s boots at the top of the stairs.
“Hmm,” the old man observed. “Speaking of birds, I believe—”
“Doc...” Ryan grated. “I didn’t ask anyone else to come up. I want our numbers unknown.”
“Oh, bother.” Doc was crestfallen. He’d been doing well at not making mistakes since coming down from the shrouds.
“What do you believe about birds, Doc?” Ryan hoped it was something useful.
Doc pointed at the rear wag. “Oh, well, that fellow, the one riding shotgun, as it were. Notice the birdcage beneath the buckboard and—” The man riding shotgun threw up his hands and a pigeon erupted from between them, flapping hard for lift.
“Ryan, I believe that pigeon is carrying a message, and I strongly believe it is about us.”
Ryan was aware of carrier pigeons, though given what they had to survive once they were released, most people in the Deathlands simply raised them in coops for food.
“Good eye, Doc.” Ryan snapped his Scout longblaster to his shoulder. When he’d first found the weapon in Canada, J.B. had enthused that before skydark it was claimed a good man with a Scout could take a clay pigeon out of the air. Ryan had needed that explained to him, but he’d become deadly adept with the Scout. The pigeon raced across the vale between the two parties. With the forward mounted scope the bird was both a spec in Rya
n’s peripheral vision and a well-detailed bird in his reticule. He put his crosshairs on the racing bird and tracked.
Miss Loral made a noise. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Ryan led his target by another hair and squeezed the trigger. The longblaster bucked and the pigeon tumbled in mid-air. The bird’s head fell away as its body tumbled.
“You knocked its head off!” Miss Loral was awestruck. “In flight!”
The slavers regarded this feat of marksmanship with a stony silence. Miss Loral snapped open the stock on her AK and threw the selector lever from safe to semi-auto. “You think that might’ve been enough for them?” The bird riders suddenly fanned out to either side of the vale, taking their tethered birds with them.
“No,” Ryan answered. “They’re circling us.”
“¡Comer!” the gauchos shouted. “¡Comer!”
Manrape cocked his head. “They want us to come there?”
“Comer means eat,” Strawmaker corrected. “They are talking to the ñandús, and they are talking about us.”
The riders released the tethers of the riderless birds. The ñandús dipped their heads low, and their talons ripped up turf as they streaked down into the vale. The mounted gauchos disappeared into folds in the land. “The spare mounts are meat shields!” Ryan snarled. “The gauchos will be coming in right behind them!”
“Correct, Ryan!” Strawmaker confirmed. “Ammunition is precious here in the south! They want you to waste ammunition! They want to count your guns!”
Ryan was mildly surprised. “They’re willing to waste mounts like that?”
“A ñandú reaches maturation in six months. It is winter. Untold numbers of last spring’s hatchlings are being trained to the saddle in the north as we speak.”
“Down the stairs!” Ryan ordered. “Let them think we’re holing up!”
Ryan liked that the Glory’s officers and crew snapped to orders without question. He crouched at the bottom of the stairs and checked the grens he’d been issued. He had five. J.B. had ascertained they were Dutch and had probably been obtained in the Antilles. One was OD green, shaped like a ball and clearly a fragger. Another was shaped like a short, fat, black water bottle and was an offensive gren. The other three were shaped like ancient gray soda cans with flaking red, purple and white paint on the top, indicating a smoke gren. Ryan heard the strange, booming hoots of the riderless ñandús closing in. He yanked the pin on the fragger and the cotter pin pinged away. “Gren!”
Ryan heaved the deadly egg up onto the foundation.
Nothing happened.
Three riderless ñandús craned their scimitar-beaked heads down into the stairway and peered at Ryan.
The one-eyed man yanked the pin on the offensive gren and hurled the bomb. “Gren!”
The birds turned their huge heads to look back at what had been thrown, then returned their attention to Ryan as he stuck his thumbs in his ears and squeezed his eyes shut. The concussion gren went off like a thunderclap. Heat and blast washed down the staircase. Ryan opened his eye and watched the three ñandús collapse with their necks flopping against the sides of the stairwell and their eyes rolling back.
Ryan shouted over the ringing in his ears. “Loral! Manrape! Doc and Strawmaker! With me! Everyone else wait for it!”
The Deathlands warrior charged out of the staircase. Three more ñandús lay smashed onto their sides. About another half dozen on the periphery staggered about in mortal devastation from the blast wave. The rest of the giant ratites streaked out of the vale in all directions at nearly fifty miles per hour. Guachos waved their hats and whistled piercingly. Some of the ñandús stuck out their stub wings and spread their feathers like braking airplanes and started to bank back toward the fight. At the lip of the vale a gaucho with a wider black hat and more silver jack on his belt than the others appeared and swung his bullwhip in a huge arc and cracked it.
Every fleeing ñandú jumped at the sound and turned.
Ryan whipped his longblaster off his shoulder and shot the man out of the saddle. For a moment there was no sound other than the fwap-fwap-fwap of the ñandús’ webbed talons tearing up the soft earth and the echo of the shot. In Ryan’s experience, slavers didn’t like a stand-up fight. They were bushwhackers and night creepers. He’d hoped the death of their leader would send the raiding gauchos into retreat, leaving most of their gear behind. He clenched his teeth as the gauchos screamed in bloodlust. They had flanked the shore party’s position, and now they charged from all directions. The birds that had fled followed their angry flock back into battle by instinct.
“Take cover! Crew below, wait for it!”
Manrape walked up to a pair of concussed ñandús. They had found each other and wrapped their necks, and like two drunks, each appeared to be the only thing holding the other up. The bosun slashed his red painted bayonet across their entwined throats, and arterial scarlet sprayed. The giant birds’ legs folded, and they fell beak-first to the hard concrete. Manrape jumped between them and went prone like a man taking cover behind his horse.
“Ryan!”
The one-eyed man ran forward and jumped into the avian revetment. It stank of wet feathers, blood and dying, bowel-releasing bird. The wind and the rain were picking up. Miss Loral and Strawmaker ran for the cover of what appeared to be three stories’ worth of collapsed brick chimney.
“Doc!” Ryan shouted. “Take cover!”
The old man stalked to the middle of the plague house’s foundation. The wind whipped his white hair and his frock coat back to reveal the blue uniform coat beneath. He swept his swordstick behind him in his left hand and held his LeMat revolver in his right as if he were in a duel. Ryan knew where this was going. Doc had been held prisoner in the most horrible conditions, had suffered the most profane indignities. The old man despised human bondage in every form.
Doc wasn’t taking cover this day.
He cut a rakish figure as he exposed his perfect teeth, and moral outrage put color in his cheeks. Gaucho blasters began to crack as the bird riders closed. Doc ignored the incoming fire and took careful aim. The hat of the closest charging gaucho flew off as Doc shot him in the head. The ñandú kept charging forward. Doc cocked his revolver again, flicked the hammer cone and fired the LeMat’s shotgun barrel. The bird squawked horribly as it took a palm-full of buckshot to the chest and collapsed in the road. Doc’s rakish figure was also turning into a blaster magnet.
Ryan scanned and fired.
The gauchos were good. Not only were they adept at loading and firing in of the saddle, they also used every fold of ground to their advantage as they circled, and the ñandús were as fast as most wags with the pedal floored. Ryan picked off three riders and then knocked down their birds. Manrape waited for them to come within range of his scattergun. Bullets thudded into the corpses of the giant birds they were using for cover.
Strawmaker stood up from behind the crumbling masonry with his bolas whirring. He cast and his target ñandú honked as its entangled legs got left behind and it went beak-first into the ground. The rider expertly leaped from the saddle and landed on his feet. Strawmaker extended his new blaster in a fair imitation of Doc and pulled the trigger. The troubadour’s first shot fired in anger knocked his opponent to his knees, and his second shot left the attacking gaucho facedown dead in the dirt.
Miss Loral’s AK cracked in rapid semi-auto. “Strawmaker, take cover! Take Doc with you!”
Manrape’s scattergun began to boom. Blood burst and feathers flew.
Ryan began pulling pins. “Gren! Gren! Gren!” Ryan hurled his smoke grens. Multicolored smoke began to billow in the ruins. The ñandús began honking and recoiling. They had been bred not to mind blasterfire, but Ryan had bet that like the thunderclap of a concussion gren, the giant birds did not like roiling opaque clouds of colored, brimstone-smelling smoke. The gauchos swore and dug in their spurs. Their birds shook their short wings and bobbed their heads in hesitation.
“Cellar team!” Ryan shou
ted as he shot. “Now!”
Jak charged out of the basement with his .357 in both hands. His first shot blasted the nearest gaucho from atop his bird. The ñandú leaped ten feet in the air like a fighting rooster splaying its talons for the kill. Jak’s second shot shattered the bird’s scything beak and most of what lay behind it. Hardstone came up out of the cellar firing well-aimed, short bursts that shattered man and bird. Manrape bounced up and leaped over his meat shield.
Ryan snarled as he fired his magazine empty. “Bos’n!”
Manrape charged for the purple cloud ahead and the riders behind it. “In through the smoke, Ryan! It is the fighting sailor’s way!”
Ryan clawed for a spare magazine. A gaucho burst through the roiling red smoke on the flank Manrape should have been covering. The ñandú rolled its eyes and honked in terror, but it obeyed the savage spurring of its owner. The altered avian fixated on Ryan and surged single-mindedly toward its prey. The gaucho raised his lance for the kill.
“Fireblast...” Ryan shoved up his empty longblaster to block the attack.
“This is for you, gaucho boy!”
The gaucho turned his head to see the startling sight of Skillet emerging from the cellar. The cook’s giant harpoon longblaster belched smoke and fire, and half a pound of barbed iron smashed the gaucho from the saddle.
“This is for ya buzzard!” The second iron hit the ñandú just behind its wing. The giant bird made a sound like a burst balloon and fell bonelessly on top of its rider. Skillet shook his head at Ryan’s bird fort.
“Quit laying on my barbecue, Ryan!” The cook dropped his spent weapon and yanked his two-handed, carcass-breaking cleaver from over his shoulder. “In through the smoke like an able seaman!”
Ryan rose, muttering as he reloaded. “In through the smoke...” Fire discipline had gone to hell. He had to remind himself that once the hulls touched, sea fights devolved in large-scale brawls. Regardless of the fact that they were on land, the Glory crew followed its hard-won fighting instinct to dominate any fight or lose their ship. Ryan advanced firing. Despite their numbers, the gauchos were outgunned and now struggling to control very reluctant birds. Being riders from the cradle, they did not want to jump from the saddle until it was too late.