Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  Guy had not expected to find troops lying in wait here, after he’d specifically told Rhys that they would be going through Gloucester. Any sane commander would have let him get through the Snowdon Forest first, so he would not easily be able to retreat to the sea. Lord Lancashire had predicted that Rhys Llewelyn would lie in wait for Guy on the Gloucester road, at which time Guy would be well on his way to Brighton. And maybe that’s what Rhys would have done if he had any experience at this sort of thing. But he did not. And here he was.

  The furze stabbed Guy’s legs in the gaps between the pads of his flight suit. Somewhere higher up the mountain a lark was singing. Melancholy touched him. Elan was a pretty little village, built on the bank of the River Elan, ruddy slate roofs nestled among the trees. Guy had come here with Piers and Ran three years ago for the ground-breaking ceremony when work on the tunnel was started. Piers and old Lord Llywelyn had given speeches, and a brass band had marched around the village square, leading a parade of construction workers who twirled their spades and threw them up and caught them again. Afterwards there had been high tea and children’s athletics. Guy had been bored out of his mind, and had sloped off to smoke a bomber.

  All his life he had been waiting for the playacting to be done, waiting for his noble friends to show their true colors and call him bastard to his face. He was almost grateful to Rhys Llywelyn for inviting him, at last, to hit back.

  “If they move out now, they’ll reach the tunnel before we can get through,” he said to the signaler behind him. “Stay here and observe their movements.”

  They were no longer bothering with radio silence, since the enemy obviously knew they were coming. However, they had a shortage of secure comms equipment. The rucksack-sized set propped against the outcropping was one of only four in the whole battalion. The signals officer tapped his headphones back against his skull. “Battalion says Lieutenant-Colonel O'Scolaidhe and Captain Cork are in position, sir.”

  “Thanks, Sparks. Tell them I’m on my way.”

  Guy scrambled up the slope to his waiting dragon.

  They skimmed low over the mountainside, one mighty wing-flap at a time. Although the shoulder of Mynydd Craig Goch now hid the village, Guy would have scouts out if he were in Rhys’s position. He rode hands-free, rifle at the ready. Blooming Monday’s shadow blurred over a rocky spur and then a gulch choked with forest. Guy guided the dragon upslope, keeping below the skyline of the gulch. At the top, they lifted over a beetling head of granite. This was not the summit of the mountain but close to it.

  Tibs Cork and Alan O'Scolaidhe waited on the rock. Each of their dragons carried an extra burden: four rust-spotted cylinders cradled against their sides in canvas slings.

  Blooming Monday crouched obligingly as they manhandled his own complement of bombs onto his back.

  “My grandfather flew a couple of dragon missions during the war,” Alan said. “They were out of aircraft, sending up anything with wings. Gramps had two beasts killed under him. The second time he was captured, but managed to escape.”

  “The Russians didn’t take prisoners,” Tibs said. “Ow, you bastard!” A bomb had rolled on his foot.

  “No, but they took relics,” Alan said. “They packed them alive into railway cars. Miracles on the hoof; process as time allows.”

  Guy wrenched the last sling into position across Blooming Monday’s withers, making sure it wouldn’t get trapped in the harness. The Llywelyns were not a Russian horde. They were his friends. What was he doing? He snapped his goggles down and hauled himself into the saddle. “Let’s go. Stay low.” He looked at his watch: five past noon.

  One by one, the heavily laden dragons bumped into the air. Flapping hard, they flew up the valley, over farms and orchards. The River Elan snaked along the bottom of the valley. People waved. Alan waved back. Guy wished he had some way to warn them to run.

  Back in the tunnel, the last charges would have been fired. The Overwhelm would be working like mad to clear the fallen rocks. And when they got through …

  … Rhys’s men will be waiting to shoot them like rabbits in a hole. If we don’t succeed.

  At the head of the valley, the mountain crooked around like the hanging sleeve of an old-fashioned tunic, fringed with shabby pines. In the ‘elbow,’ the river gushed over a rampire, brown water glistening like butter combed by a fork. This was the Craig Goch Dam, tamed by the hydroelectric plant that provided the whole valley—in fact, much of Wales—with power.

  From a distance, the installation looked negligible in size. But as they approached, glimpses of vehicles and men on the concrete skirt below the dam illustrated the true scale of the plant. Behind the dam, the forest cupped a vast reservoir as still as glass.

  It no longer mattered if they were seen. It was too late for the dam operators to do anything about it. “Remember, the powerhouse!” Guy yelled across the gap between their dragons. “It’s on the left, the left!”

  The three dragons stooped, the wind screaming over the bodies of the riders flattened to their necks. Workers stopped in their tracks, stared up, close enough for Guy to see that this one had a blue feather in his hatband and that one was eating an apple. The powerhouse bristled with pipes and antennae. Guy saw the shadow of an airshaft.

  One of the most popular aerial events in tourney was mixed quoits. You dropped the rings from a height of no less than five yards, while your men and your opponents vied below to catch them on their lances. Blooming Monday had flown dozens of events with those spears jostling a short throw below his belly. The dragons soared over the spiky thicket of pipes, clearing the roof of the powerhouse by a scant few yards. Guy wrestled with the quick-release catch of his bomb sling. The rope whipped through his glove, lashed him in the face. Blooming Monday leapt skywards.

  Turning to look back, Guy saw that Thyme’s Running Out had veered away from the powerhouse. Alan’s bombs tumbled, sling and all, towards the car park. Before they touched the ground, the powerhouse blew apart in a filthy fireball. Ballistic pieces of roof and wall shot out of a cloud so thick it looked solid. A tempest buffeted Guy from behind, shoving Monday further aloft. Debris buckshotted the dragon’s flanks.

  A white jet of water arced from the rampire, knocking down workers who were still running, trying to escape the chaos of the explosion. Within seconds, the sheer weight of the water penned up in the reservoir gnawed the gap to river-size.

  The three knights circled and soared down the valley, exhorting their dragons to fly for their lives. Below and behind them, the Elan River mounted its banks, snapping trees and stealing anything that wasn’t tied down. Guy prayed that the mouth of the Mynydd tunnel really was above the floodline. Exultation filled him when he got close enough to see his sappers waving.

  * * *

  Guy’s command jeep bounced and skidded downhill, intermittently coming in sight of the low-loader tank transport ahead, which swung so wide around the bends that its rear end swiped over the construction cones and danger signs abandoned on the sides of the muddy, half-graveled road. In time, this would have become the brand-new motorway leading to the tunnel. The road crews had fled. So, evidently, had the Llywelyn troops. Many of them lived in this valley. No threats or promises would have been enough to hold them when their homes and families were in danger.

  A siren shrieked plaintively from the direction of Elan Village, whoop-huh, whoop-huh, like a child sobbing.

  Where fields should have been, water glimmered under the trees, weirdly placid in the sunlight.

  The column had crossed the valley and reached high ground ahead of the flood. Guy had waited at the mouth of the tunnel for the last of his men to emerge, while sending Blooming Monday, riderless, with Tibs and Alan to the far side of the valley, where this road rejoined the A470, their original objective. His friends hadn’t liked leaving him, but he had reminded them that even if they had been knights for a little while, doing glorious solo deeds, now they had to be army officers again, and get the battalion reorganized
after its helter-skelter dash across the valley floor. Guy’s own duty was to bring up the rear.

  Now, standing in the back of the uncovered jeep, clinging to the roll frame, he assumed the rest had made it. He couldn’t see any of their vehicles ahead except for the cumbersome low-loader that carried the two half-tracks.

  Which was now ploughing into the tide of water across the road, going too fast to brake, and too heavy for the driver to control.

  Dirty brown spray arced tree-high. The low-loader jackknifed and halted at a severely canted angle.

  “Stop!” Guy leapt out of the jeep. “We’ll have to leave the low-loader.”

  The water slurped over the tops of his boots. Although the surface looked still, a vicious current underneath threatened to push him off balance. He splashed up to the cab of the low-loader, swung onto the step and opened the door. The driver was trying to restart the engine.

  “Leave it! It doesn’t matter. Everyone else is already on the far side of the valley. We can afford to lose the half-tracks.” They couldn’t really, but the low-loader was clearly not going any further.

  Gy led the driver to his jeep. The water frilled over the wheels, dashed itself against the doors. Ahead, the new suspension bridge humped out of the flood like an island. The water did not look placid anymore. It looked like a horizontal landslide, carrying along trees, chicken coops, fenceposts, furniture. There was a smell as of freshly turned earth after rain. An entire prefab house, torn off its foundations, had washed against the side of the bridge and was stuck there, breaking up bit by bit.

  The water went over the jeep’s doors. The engine coughed, burbled, stopped. Something pinged sharply against the roll frame.

  Guy grabbed the low-loader driver and his own adjutant, pulled them out of the other side of the jeep. “Some of the Llewelyn troops must have stayed behind! They’re shooting at us.”

  They crouched in the rushing water. Guy braced his rifle on the door of the jeep. He could feel the vehicle lifting under him, trembling like a steed eager to be away. He scanned the flood on the near side of the bridge. Something glinted in a tangle of mulberry bushes. He shot at it.

  A dead body swam past, face down.

  “Must try for the bridge,” Guy’s driver said. Guy trusted this man. He shoved his adjutant at him. “Adjutant” was the military euphemism for squire, a teenager with whom one was saddled as a matter of protocol. They constantly came and went, vying to burnish their names by serving the most renowned knights. Guy had not had this one—a weedy kid with an enormous adam’s apple – for long; he couldn’t even remember his name at the moment.

  The kid’s adam’s apple jumped like a frog. “S-sir, you aren’t staying behind?”

  “Go!” Guy shouted at him.

  Bullets pocked the brown, oily skin of the flood. The jeep’s windscreen hazed in star patterns. The low-loader driver jumped up and emptied his service pistol into the trees, then sagged against Guy, his face turning putty-grey.

  The jeep moved, nudging them back. Guy hauled the driver’s arm across his neck and dragged him out from behind the vehicle. It swung ponderously and nosed downstream. The water was up to their chests. Guy struggled to keep his footing and walk in his waterlogged boots. His driver and adjutant were swimming. Bullets scored trenches in the water. Guy balanced the low-loader driver against his chest to free up his hands. He shot back, wishing he’d worked harder at marksmanship, and something heavy kicked him in the torso. He sat down. When he surfaced, spitting, and hauled the driver upright, blood netted the driver’s chin, red threads gleaming on the wet skin. Swearing, Guy slapped him. Some large submerged piece of debris swept into his legs, knocking him over and tearing the driver away.

  He swam. He was being swept diagonally downstream. His fingertips brushed the twigs of a tree jammed in the submerged suspension cables at this end of the bridge. He held on and hauled himself inch by inch along the branch. Heaved himself out of the sucking mouth of the flood onto solid asphalt.

  The bridge had shrunk to a very small island. It shuddered as if dynamite was going off underneath it. The corporal and the adjutant crouched, shooting through the gaps in the guard rail.

  A speck appeared in the blue and separated into two dragons.

  Blooming Monday landed on the bridge, shaking it. Roger Cork’s roan cow Rawkous tried to land on the rail, which crumpled and peeled away from the bridge. Circling, Roger threw down a rope ladder that whipped and skipped across the asphalt until it caught in the twisted rail. Monday bent his head and nipped at Guy’s smock. Guy looked up into the dragon’s face, that mixture of thoroughbred horse and reptile, so familiar and yet strange. Dragons were manmade, bred from fey. They had once been called abominations. Now, they were man’s best friends. Didn’t that say something good about the world?

  “Are you hurt, Guy?” Roger yelled down.

  “No.” He hauled himself up Monday’s harness.

  Rawkous soared skyward, the adjutant clinging on behind Roger, the driver still swinging from the ladder. Guy and Blooming Monday circled over the flood. The reason the Llywelyn snipers had stopped shooting was because they had been lurking in a house, which the flood had now swallowed to the tops of the second-storey windows. Rather a nice house, probably a knight’s, tucked amid ancient trees that now sported a colorful foliage of debris caught in their branches. The snipers, two of them, had climbed onto the roof. Their uniforms were still dry enough for Guy to make out the Llewelyn-purple flashes on their sleeves. He had lost his rifle but he still had his revolver. Leaning over Monday’s neck he carefully aimed and shot. Like shooting deer from the air, like in the old days.

  Monday staggered higher in the air, valiant, wounded.

  * * *

  “He was the spy. These are his carrier jays. There were three; when we released one, it flew straight to Cardiff, to warn the Llywelyns of our feint. Low-tech but effective. We did not detect any illicit radio signals because there were none.” Alan put down the birdcage. Two blackjays—a species fancied by hobbyists as an improvement on carrier pigeons—scolded crossly until someone threw a tarp over them. “Besides, he’s confessed.”

  “Then there’s no more to be said,” Guy agreed.

  His adjutant knelt before him on the shoulder of the A470, adam’s apple quivering. The battalion watched, crowded on the steps of their transports to get a better view, like urchins at a parade. They had not lost a single man or vehicle apart from the low-loader and its driver. But that was no thanks to this boy, who was a Rakehollen from Cornwall, but his mother turned out to be a Llywelyn.

  I should have been paying more attention. I should have found out who he was and dismissed him before we started. It was his duty to inform on us. He only did what he was compelled to.

  All the same, it had been done.

  “You are aware that the punishment for treachery, under battlefield law, is death.”

  “Y-yes, lord.” The boy’s nose was running. His eyes reproached Guy with the panic of the utterly hapless.

  Lord, I am not your lord, or anyone’s, Guy wanted to say. “Then, prepare yourself.” He unsheathed his sword.

  A wind seemed to pass through the watching men, bending them towards him. The column was lined up in good order, ready to roll on, taking up one lane of the highway. Traffic snarled in the other lane, refugees from the flood tangling with emergency vehicles speeding the other way. None of them stopped to enquire what Guy’s men were up to. It was quite possible they assumed Guy was coming to their aid.

  No other provincial regiments lay between here and London. If the Crown Army stayed in its barracks, the Overwhelm could reach Heathrow by evening. They hadn’t a minute to spare.

  Guy lifted his sword. The worn, polished oak grip felt cool in his sore hands. If only this whole war could be fought with swords and dragons instead of tanks and guns, he knew he would win.

  “Lord—” Panicking, the boy started to scramble up.

  “On your knees,” Guy bellowe
d.

  As he brought the blade down, he glimpsed Dierdre on the bonnet of a transport lorry, clapping her hands wildly.

  44

  Oswald

  At The Same Time. London

  In the lord’s solar on the top floor of Lancashire House, in London, Oswald was talking to his former liege lord, who was now merely another of the old men hindering his triumph.

  “York and Norfolk have seen sense. Why don’t you?”

  This was a lie. Lords York and Norfolk, whom Oswald was also holding under house arrest, remained obdurate. But Murdo, Lord Lancashire, had no way of knowing that, since the varlet who had been smuggling his messages in and out of the mansion was now in jail, recovering from a racking and hopefully reflecting on the folly of misplaced loyalty.

  “If they’ve capitulated, they’re cowards,” Lord Lancashire said. “If they haven’t, you’re a liar.”

  “I assure you I’m not.”

  “Is that a threat? I knuckle under, or—or what? You’ll murder me the way you murdered my son Philip? Have at it. Prove your knavery.” Murdo Lancashire’s old face puckered with disgust.

  In slippers and a bedrobe, his grey hairknot apparently not having been redone since Oswald had deprived him of his varlet, Murdo Lancashire measured up in no way to the commanding figure who’d watched his minions planting the hot branding iron on Oswald’s seven-year-old chest.

  You’re a clever one, they tell me. You’ll go far …

  And so he had.

  He moved to the window and gazed down into the courtyard. House Lancashire was an eighteenth-century pile in Mayfair, with a toy moat connected to a stream that ran into the Thames. That was how the varlet had got the messages out. In bottles, God’s truth, which an accomplice had later scooped out of the rubbish banked against the nearest drain. The stream was presently being rerouted. Jackhammers dinned beyond the walls..

  “I am doing what I have to do for the sake of the country,” Oswald said, turning back to Murdo Lancashire. “Those who support me have been and will be rewarded. Those who do not should understand that their behavior constitutes treason, and only my mercy preserves their lives.”