"Go, or I will call on the Dread Lord, and curse you in the name of the Devouring Shadow. You and all with you. And that curse will follow you to all the ends of Earth, run you never so fast. So mote it be!"
Uh-oh, Eilir thought. Mom's in Maximum-spooky mode. She really means it. Juniper Mackenzie didn't even swear at people, normally; she took the Threefold Law and the perils of ill-wishing far too seriously for that. On the other hand, there's the self-defense exception... and on the arrows-and-swords level, the fact that we now outnumber them four to one won't hurt…
Liu backed his horse, wrenching at the bit with a savagery that made the beast squeal, stabbing a glance at his men to judge their mettle as the prisoners stumbled forward. Several of the mounted crossbowmen were zealously helping their friends to mount behind them or hitching the poles of the travois to a saddle, thus making it impossible to fight.
"I'll get you for this, bitch," he spat.
Eilir grounded her bow and leaned it against her shoulder; the motion caught Liu's attention, and her hands moved: You keep saying you'll make us pay, she signed, grinning. But you never do it.
Chapter Five
River Great Ouse, Cambridgeshire, England
August 20th, 2006 AD—Change Year Eight
Why is it called adventure," the elder Loring asked. "Instead of—"
"Discomfort? Fear? Unending toil?" his son called back over his shoulder.
"Being stuck in the middle of a complete balls-up?" John Hordle grunted in agreement and took a hand off his paddle long enough to swat a mosquito. "I'd rather be sitting in a good pub with a girl, sir," he said. "Say that Gu-drun from Bob's place. Talking about me adventures."
The three men paddled in silence for a moment; the three canoes were traveling roughly abreast, usually close enough for easy conversation as the winding banks of the Great Ouse passed by slowly on either side—except that those banks were far less firm and definite than they had been a decade earlier. Most of a millenium of banking and diking and drainage had been undone in eight years, as the waters broke the bonds men laid on them and sought their own level.
Then Hordle chuckled. "What a bunch of bloody liars we are," he said. "If we wanted it all that much, we'd be in the bloody pub right now. Nice enough now and then, but right boring if you do too much of it."
"Speak for yourself, Sergeant," Nigel Loring said. "I'm at the memoir-writing phase of life's progress. Good God, man, I was writing my memoirs just last month. Maude said—"
He halted abruptly, but there had been a hint of returning life under the mock severity of his tone.
Glad to hear that, Hordle thought. I can understand it and all, but I don't half like the way he's acted so… not quite there when nobody's trying to kill us. A smile: Of course, someone's been trying to kill us far too bloody often just lately.
"You and Alleyne are still young enough to be accumulating interesting incidents," Nigel went on, visibly pushing memories away.
"Interesting like this bloody swamp, sir?" Hordle asked. "Reminds me of some book my mum read me when I was small—well, when I was young—what was it called? Swans and Amazons?"
"That'd be 'the Coot Club' in Swallows and Amazons, Sergeant," Sir Nigel said.
"About a bunch of kiddies mucking about in boats around here, any rate," Hordle said. "Certainly has changed a bit, eh?"
They all smiled. Even in the dry months of late summer, the stream's course was often not where twentieth-century convenience had put it, and the land on either side showed the glint of shallow open water and patches of green reed bed—patches that had grown larger as they passed ruined Bedford and came closer to the Wash. The standing water and warm weather also bred mosquitoes in stinging swarms, not to mention gnats, and a pervading smell of rotting vegetation filled the hazy air.
"I blame you, Father," Alleyne Loring said. "Watch out, there's a dead tree trunk just under the surface ahead."
They all slowed and carefully swerved to the right; the tree was a large oak that had tumbled downstream in one of the floods that had ripped uncontrolled through the Ouse basin in the years since the Change, and planted itself with the root-ball upstream. That held a dozen sharpened spikes waiting just below the surface.
"You blame it on my bad example, eh?" Nigel said.
"No, it was all those copies of the Boy's Own Paper you kept in the attic for me to discover when I was eight," Al-leyne said. "Not to mention the stack of Henty, and the Haggard and Kipling. Other boys of my generation learned to be sensitive and socially conscious, and I was marching to Kabul with Roberts or finding the caves of Kor and She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed."
If you'd met my grandmother, you wouldn't have needed Haggard for the latter, Nigel muttered, but under his breath.
"That's right, sir, and he loaned the books to me too," Hordle said. "Fair turned our heads, they did. I'd have been a Labor MP, else."
"Oh, rubbish," Nigel replied. "It's your own dam' fault, my boy; I inherited all that from my father. I didn't make you take up all those books with the wizards and elves, at least—you came to that entirely on your own."
"Oh, I'd say those were rather useful. Certainly the hobbies they encouraged were."
It would be a bit intimidating having Sir Nigel as your dad, Hordle thought, not for the first time. Maybe that's why young Mr. Loring would hang out with those reenactor burkes.
He'd gone along with that himself, rather than being very enthusiastic. At least until he'd learned the events were good places to pursue his real hobby.
Some of the girls looked good in those low-cut blouse things, even if the boys were a right bunch of pillocks, and the beer was better than passable. Even the mucking about with swords was good for a laugh, before it turned serious after the Change.
He dug his paddle in to turn his canoe aside from a sunken cabin cruiser whose crumbling prow reared above the slow-moving brown water, trailing long streams of algae.
Thank God my dad just owned a pub. Talk about pop-u-larity!
"At least it's an open swamp around here," he said aloud. "Less stressful-like, when you can see what's coming."
Dead trees stood in the fields about, their roots killed out by winter's spreading water, and the floods had kept brambles at bay as well; the more so as this had been corn-growing land, much of it in great hedgeless fields. Most of the lowland was tall open grass; taller brush and trees survived and thrived rankly on bits of higher ground—ground that often showed the snags of ancient buildings, built in an earlier era where experience showed floodwaters were less likely to reach. Birds swarmed overhead and on the water—mallards the most numerous, but also tall gray herons and snowy swans, grebe and the Canada geese that seemed to flourish like bindweed everywhere on the island. Their gobbling and honking was occasionally loud enough to drown the sound of the water and wind; overhead a hawk floated with the noon sun on its wings, feathered fingers grasping the air. Native otter and alien mink slid down the banks with a plop and flash of sleek fur as the canoes ghosted by.
There weren't any of the feral cattle and Pere David's deer in sight that they'd noticed off and on the past few days, but something was cropping great stretches of the tall grass.
"Watch out!" Alleyne Loring called again, but there was excitement in his voice this time.
A snorting sound followed, like a great bellows being pumped—or pumped slightly underwater, because there were splashes with it.
"Ahead, to the right, about two hundred yards," the younger Loring said.
Hordle gaped, then shut his mouth with a snap and a deliberate effort of will. Ahead was a section of bank still standing, the left a cluster of buildings and the right now a curving island in the midst of marsh. In the deeper water just below the middle of the curve structures topped by gray knobs and pits floated, like some uncouth driftwood sculpture; for a long moment his mind rejected the sight, despite having seen it before.
Seen it in Kenya, he thought, feeling his inner voice gibber slightly. But... hi
ppo in Cambridgeshire!
"I'm surprised they can endure the winters," Nigel Loring said, curiosity in his voice.
"Anything that lives in the water most of the time must have good insulation," Alleyne pointed out; as you drew closer you could see the massive tubby bodies below the surface. "I don't know how well they'll do in the long term, but these seem to be flourishing as of now. We'd best be careful—that female has a couple of… what do you call them? Calves? Cubs?"
"Call them bloody dangerous, sir," Hordle said fervently.
He'd visited Kenya before the Change at the Crown's expense—the British army had long-standing arrangements there to secure open space for training unavailable in the then-crowded homeland. He'd mixed enough with the locals to learn that the comical-looking animals were in fact as belligerent as wild boar, and when you scaled one of those up to five tons and gave it four giant teeth like ivory pickaxes a foot long… the fact that it ate grass by choice and would spit you out after it bit you in half was no consolation at all.
Just then another sound rolled across the open ground to their left, one he recognized from the same memories as the hippo. A hoarse grunting moan, oouuughh… oouu-ugh…, building up to a shattering roar.
"Lion. Just what the country bloody needs," Hordle said disgustedly. "Not to mention all the lovely sweet wolves and cuddly little bears noshing on our ruddy cows."
"God damn all safari parks," Sir Nigel said crisply. "And double damnation to their curators for living long enough to set all the beasts loose."
"They make good hunting," Alleyne said judiciously. "On the whole, I can't disagree, though."
Hordle nodded. That's the Lorings for you, he thought. None of this "Let's hunt it, and damn the farmers" for them.
"Watch out below," he added. "They can walk on the bottom and come up right beneath you, hippo can."
Now that people were thin on the ground again and most worked the land for their livelihood, nearly everyone had adopted the farmer's fiercely protective attitude towards his crops and stock. Not to mention that the carnivores had all turned man-eater during the first Change year when the wandering masses of starving refugees were the main food supply available, and many hadn't lost the habit yet. A big animal with teeth and claws was no joke, when all you had was a spear or a knife.
Hordle drove his paddle into the water, angling over northward, towards the left bank of the river. One of the hippos raised its head and forequarters out of the water as they came closer, opening its barrel-shaped head in a raw bellow of warning, the four giant yellow teeth framing the huge red gullet. The others rotated their heads like submarines swiveling a periscope, their twitching ears showing the focus of their attention. Hordle grinned and ducked down to get a better look at the infants—at that stage, even a hippo could be cute.
Fwwwwtp.
The arrow went through the space he'd occupied an instant earlier. Reflex kept him crouched as he dug the paddle into the muddy water of the Ouse with all his strength. The tough wood bent and the canoe surged forward as the skin crawled up his spine and his gut twisted. Being shot at by people he couldn't see was among the many familiar experiences he had no desire to repeat.
Fwwwtp. Fwwwtp. Fwwwwtp.
"Shit!"
The last hiss of cloven air ended in a ptank! as an arrow arched down and slammed down into the bottom of the canoe not far from his right foot, standing in the thin aluminum. Water began to rill in around the edges, and along the slit the broad triangular arrowhead had cut. Hordle dug harder at the water, switching the paddle back and forth from right hand to left to keep the canoe on a steady path, and looked behind him. A boat had come out from around the stretch of island bank, a crude flat-bottomed thing of planks and plywood and plastic sheeting. It was large enough for a dozen men—just—half of them poling it along with long wooden rods, and the rest with bows, shooting as fast as they could draw.
Maybe they'll ram a hippo…no such sodding luck, Johnnie. Not quite that stupid.
Luckily between the crowding and the uncertain foot-ing, they couldn't shoot very well—the range was respectable, over a hundred yards. Another flight rose from the punt as he watched, twinkling in the sun, then fell all around the three canoes. The hissing of the shafts ended in a series of sharp, wet, slapping sounds, like hailstones in a pond. He thought about reaching for his own bow; he'd have to draw awkwardly, underarm, and the canoe's rocking would throw his aim off. Still…
"I can plink a few, sir!" he called.
"Not here!" Nigel Loring snapped. "We'll draw them to the buildings. You flank them on the right. Go!"
Nigel Loring drove his paddle into the water, gasping slightly with the effort, feeling the burning strain in his back and shoulders, the thudding of his heart at the literally life-and-death effort, the hissing wheep of passing arrows. The teeth beneath his graying blond mustache were bared in a snarl of effort; you might not think you cared much what happened to you anymore, but the body had its own logic and its own priorities.
Behind him Alleyne paddled with smooth, quick competence, his face set with strain, and the building grew ahead of them—an old brick lockhouse, the roof collapsed but the walls still standing, with scorch marks above the empty windows. There had been other buildings round about, but none of them were more than brushy mounds; there had also been a couple of big trees near the lockhouse, but the fire that brought down the roof had killed them all, except for a few branches on the far side of one oak. The wooden doors of the mitre-built locks were slightly open, and water poured through them in a sluggish current, pooling below where the lower ones were still mostly shut, though sagging-
Curse it, Nigel thought, as another flight of arrows came up—and fell short; the canoes were faster than the punt. They picked their spot well.
The canoes might be faster, but not so much faster that they wouldn't be caught if they stopped to heave them past this lock. Then the pursuers would catch up and riddle them with arrows at point-blank range. They couldn't turn about, either, with the savages behind them, and it wouldn't do much good to try to don their armor—the enemy could ring them in…
… and in any case, wading around in this liquid muck with sixty pounds of steel on your back…
Past here they would be into the fens proper, first a narrow cone of them and then opening out into nearly a thousand square miles of reed and pool and mere. It had been farmland before the Change, some of the richest in the world—but kept that way only by pumps and drainage, a good deal of it below sea level because of the shrinkage of the peat soil.
The prows of the canoes slid into the soft mud of the bank. Alleyne and Nigel each leapt out of his craft, gave a swift wrench to slide it higher so that it wouldn't float away when relieved of their weight, then snatched up their personal weapons and extra bundles of arrows and ran for the lockhouse. The mud sucked at their feet, slowing Nigel's more than his son's, which were young and on the end of longer legs. Arrows whickered down behind them, hitting the bundled supplies in the canoes with dull thud-shunk sounds, and the thin aluminum of the hulls with unpleasant metallic pops. Alleyne drew ahead. Even then, with his heart pounding and lungs heaving Nigel knew an instant's pride that the younger man didn't slow—instead he did the tactically sensible thing, and sprinted up the last stretch of tall grass and brush to dive headfirst through the window.
A second later he popped up behind it, drawing his bow—from firm footing, protected to the waist, and with room to work. The arrow that he sent whickering past Nigel brought a yell from behind, faint with distance but sharp with pain. Nigel vaulted through another window himself an instant later, stumbling on the broken boards and rubble within as two arrows followed him in and vanished with snapping and cracking sounds in the tumbled wreckage of the interior, and another slapped into the window frame and stood humming with an evil descending note. Then he forced himself erect and wheeled. It was the work of a moment to string his own bow; you had to be careful with that, though, and the me
ntal effort helped him slow his breathing. The interior of the lockhouse smelled of ancient wet ash and mold and rotting wood; he put his feet carefully on the floor, lest a foot go through the boards and trap his leg. He slung the quiver over his back, drew a shaft and shot—the bow wasn't his primary weapon, but he'd practiced a good deal since the Change and some before it.
There were two of the flat-bottomed boats now, but they were both moving backward rapidly to get out of arrow range. One halted, and a white cloth went up on top of a pole, waving back and forth. When no more arrows snapped out from the lockhouse the clumsy craft edged forward a little and halted within speaking distance.
Nigel blinked in surprise, as his breathing slowed. Sweat soaked his uniform in the muggy heat, and he ran a sleeve over his face, then looked cautiously around the edge of the window. Generally the Brushwood Men simply killed anyone from the settled zone—what they called "King's Men"—they came across. The antipathy was entirely mutual, fueled by disgust on one side and frenzied hatred on the other, born of the days when the island refuges had closed their borders to the starving masses of refugees and enforced it with pike and club and museum swords.
"Keep an eye on the other one, and around us," he said, and Alleyne nodded silently. Then the elder Loring went on, shouting out the window: "What do you men want?"
He recognized the pack leader they'd seen in Newport Pagnell, thin-faced and slight and with his nose bristling with rings; someone had cut Archie MacDonald's stolen clothing short in arm and leg but it still hung on him like a tent. He stood and cupped his hands around his mouth, while the rest of the savages in his craft crouched behind crude shields.
"We wants our kids back! Give them to us and we'll let you King's Men go!"
Nigel's eyebrows went up further. Wouldn't have believed family affections were that strong among the Brushwood Men, he thought. After all, these are the people who ate children to survive.
"This is a bit awkward," Alleyne said as he peered out the west-facing windows to make sure a party weren't sneaking around to take them from that direction. "Yes, our friend Grishnakh from Milton Mordor Keynes… very awkward, seeing that we don't have their children and can't go back for them."
The Protector's War Page 15