The Protector's War Read online

  "After them!" Nigel wheezed, suddenly aware of how his breastplate seemed to squeeze at his chest as he heaved for air. "Get them running fast—"

  Alleyne went by him, blade raised high, shouting something that sounded like Wait for me, Grishnakh.

  Hordle followed, snatching his longsword free as he passed the man it had killed; more shrieks and screams sounded outside. Nigel leaned against a pillar with his sword hand, then let his shield fall free with a clatter and raised his canteen to his lips, swilling a mouthful and spitting it out to clear his mouth of gummy saliva, then drinking. Light flared up again; Archie MacDonald had collected some of the coals and dropped them in the piled brushwood the savages had collected.

  Then he limped over to Sir Nigel, peering anxiously with the one eye not swollen shut. "Are y' injured, sair?" he said.

  "Not—" Nigel coughed, took a deep breath and held out his canteen. "Not as much as you, my friend. Just rattled about a bit inside my shell. I'm getting a little long in the tooth for this sort of thing, I fear."

  MacDonald took the canvas-covered metal in a hand that suddenly started shaking. "I've no bones broken," he said, steadying it with both hands and putting it cautiously to his mouth, where the lips had been bruised and torn against his own teeth. "And I'm better than I was before I heard ye're voice, sair."

  The crackling light threw their shadows high on the walls. MacDonald huddled closer to the fire, seeking the warmth his naked skin and the fringes of shock needed. Nigel went around the bodies lying about, counting and making sure that the dead savages were undoubtedly and permanently so with quick, merciful, sword stabs; distasteful work, but necessary—he'd be responsible if they crawled off and recovered enough to be dangerous again. By the time he was finished his son and the archer were back.

  "Got another one, but they scattered fast in the dark," Alleyne said. "Most of them ran for the riverbank. I think they had boats there, from the marks in the mud."

  "We got about half of them, or a little better," Hordle said. "But—"

  A whimper interrupted him. The children of the Nether-field Avengers were huddled together in their filthy nest of tattered blankets. Nigel looked at them and sighed.

  "This is going to be complicated," he said. And then to the children: "Don't worry, little ones, we're not going to hurt you."

  Alleyne snorted: "They're not going to believe that, Father, any more than a fox cub would."

  MacDonald muttered something under his breath, on the order of Nits breed lice.

  Nigel gave him a quelling glance, but the man was right in the literal sense—the youngsters would be lousy. At least they were young enough to forget the horrors of their upbringing in a couple of years. The new England needed all the hands and backs it could get.

  Hordle grunted as he cleaned his sword on a rag, then rubbed it down with a swatch of raw wool. "This is like the one about the fox, the cabbage and the sheep," he said.

  Nigel yawned convulsively, politely covering his mouth—although that was a bit risky, considering what clotted his gauntlets. "I think the best thing would be to put them on the horses and get them back to Jamaica Farm tonight," he said. "Then of course we'll have to come back here ourselves… and someone will have to come with us to take the horses back… the gear here will have to be guarded too… I'll give Mr. Bramble some names of people around Tilford who'll take them in. Thank goodness there's no more of that bumf with identity documents."

  "No rest for the wicked," Hordle said. "There goes a night's sleep. Of course, it's just a merry cruise down the Ouse afterward. With one big bastard of a problem."

  "Yes?" Nigel said. There seemed to be sand in the cogs of his brain.

  "The kiddies' dads have boats too."

  Chapter Four

  Salem, Willamette Valley, Oregon

  March 17th, 2007 AD—Change Year Nine

  Juniper Mackenzie scowled slightly as she looked down at the pilings of the bridge that ran over the Willamette and into Salem's Center Street—the ruins where Salem had been, rather. The piles and the spaces between them were thick with rubbish: logs, brush, general trash, wrecked cars and trucks and campers. Now the spring water was foaming high over that barricade, water blue-green and then surging white in the bright noon sun, throwing waves half the distance up to the deck of the bridge, and spray high enough to strike her lips with the chill wet smell of it. The roaring power of the spring freshets made the pavement tremble beneath her feet and the ponded-back water spread, flooding streets on both banks and covering the low islands just upstream where the waste ponds had been. It also brought more rubbish tumbling down to join the growing dam every day, and the vehicles made the assemblage too strong for the water to just push downstream. One of the few sensible things the state government had done in the brief months between the Change and its own total collapse had been to get the stalled cars off the main roads in and around the state capital. Otherwise the number and nature of its manifold idiocies had surprised even a former unwed teenaged mother who'd kept and home-schooled her profoundly deaf daughter in the teeth of welfare officers, bureaucrats and Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all; they'd disregarded how much in the way of useful metal and springs and formed parts an automobile had in it, and also the cargoes in the trucks.

  Except the food, she thought. Even they weren't that stupid.

  So those on the bridge had just been shoved over the side, including one eighteen-wheeler full of perfectly good blue jeans. Perhaps not a great fault, when their other mistakes had denied so many who might have survived any chance of life, but…

  Rudi looked down through the railings and then solemnly up at her. "The river spirit's angry, Mom," he said. "Really angry, 'cause She's all tied up with stuff. We oughta quiet Her."

  She put a hand on her son's small hard head. "That She is, mo chroi. We should also get that wreckage out of the way, come summer, and free the waters."

  "That's what I said, Mom," he replied, looking as if he'd like to stamp a foot but too well mannered for tantrums.

  And sometimes I get a bit of a chill at the things you say, my heart, she thought, beneath her chuckle.

  She remembered presenting him to the altar in the nemed, at his Wiccanning near nine years ago. And the words Someone had spoken through her:

  Sad Winter's child, in this leafless shaw—Yet be Son, and Lover, and Horned Lord! Guardian of My sacred Wood, and Law—His people's strength—and the Lady's sword!

  Perhaps it was her imagination that he was… sensitive to things. But perhaps it wasn't, too. The Gods knew, but they hadn't told Juniper Mackenzie, High Priestess or no. Not yet.

  "Nothing I can do about that, sure," she muttered to herself, looking down again. "The bridge, now… if we don't clear the piles the next time a dam breaks"—and several of the upstream ones had already, as locked spillways and lack of maintenance took their toll—"this bridge is going to go bye-bye, taking the other and the rail bridge with it. And that will be a royal pain in the arse."

  Then they would have to go miles out of their way south to cross the river, and back north again on the other side to get to Bearkiller territory, which meant an extra day's travel on bicycle or horseback and four to six with wagons. Or hiring people from Corvallis to do it, at vast trouble and expense. So they should fix the problem before the utterly irreplaceable bridges went down. The problem with that was that it would take hundreds of workers a month of hard graft and considerable danger to life and limb, plus scarce equipment like winches, and there were a dozen other things more immediately important to be done between now and the harvest, and why should her clansfolk bear all the burden of doing something that would benefit everyone in the Valley?

  That's what they'd say—or yell loudly—at the clan assembly, and she hadn't let the system become an autocracy. More of a town-meeting anarchy, tempered by the fact that most survivors of the Change years tended to outbreaks of hard common sense now and then…

  Deal with that later, she thought, and
raised her head to look east.

  You could see the snow peaks of the High Cascades from here, floating on the eastern horizon with a tattered veil of cloud streaming from their tops, blue and white and disturbingly lovely over the corpse of the city. Fire-scorched, the forlorn pride of the capitol stood off to the right, with its bearded, ax-bearing pioneer atop the drum-shaped dome. Little else that was human remained in the old state capital except bare-picked bones. Whatever could burn had gone up in the great fires, and the quick-growing lowland brush and vines crawled over the blackened rubble, spreading out from park and lawn, roots prying at concrete and stone with the long slow strength of centuries. For the rest, roaches and rats had multiplied beyond belief, then eaten each other and died in a ghastly parody of the human dwellers' fate.

  Or the fate of not quite all the dwellers.

  The Mackenzies had halted here because on the bridge nobody could sneak up on them; it would be otherwise in the narrower streets. The city wasn't altogether dead; nor were the only folk to be met those using the bridges or scavenging for useful goods. She grimaced at memories of her own—clutching hands and mad screaming-grinning faces and breath stinking of shreds of human flesh caught between rotting teeth.

  Eaters aren't the problem, not anymore, thanks be to the Lord and Lady. Perhaps a last few skulking solitary madmen remained, but the shambling terror of the cannibal bands was mostly a memory of the Dying Time now, passing into folklore.

  No, the real risk around Salem this ninth year of the Change is from plain old-fashioned bandits, who are a lot smarter and better-armed.

  As travel and trade revived a bit and farms grew worth raiding there were always those who thought stealing easier than working; and there was little law in the Valley now save what communities like hers enforced within their own bounds. That the bandits would leave your stripped carcass for the Goddess' ravens instead of eating it themselves wasn't much of a consolation to the victims. Nor was the prospect of being sold for a slave in some of the less civilized areas if captured; ironically enough, places that had fought to turn away refugee hordes in the months after the Change were now nearly as desperate in their desire for more hands to do all the things machines had once accomplished.

  She also strongly suspected that the Protector slipped the reiver bands help to distract the southern valley while he prepared for war; it was just the sort of thing Arminger and the Portland Protective Association would do. Some of the outlaw gangs used the taller buildings in Salem as bases for bicycle-borne raids, with their binocular-equipped lookouts lurking about the top-floor windows like maggots hiding behind the empty eye sockets of a skull. It was a lot harder for pursuers to run them to earth here in this stone-and-steel wilderness, too, so that noose and blade could put an end to them.

  And to think I was once strong against capital punishment… to be sure, I'd never seen people killed by bandits, then. Plus Salem plain gives me the willies.

  The physical stink of death was long gone, but surely Earth herself bore the memory of despair and terror, in the place where so many had passed untimely to the Other-world. She thought Eilir felt it too, and Rudi more strongly than either—though he simply set his lips and endured it, with composure beyond his years.

  "So, Sam," she called to the First Armsman of the Mackenzies, and nodded towards the ruins. He'd picked her escort, and ridden with it. "Fast and loud or slow and cautious?"

  "About equal risk, Lady Juniper," he said.

  Sam Aylward's voice had a slow south-country accent from deepest rural Hampshire, a yokel burr as thick and English as clotted cream. An adventurous life in the SAS and sheer chance had landed him in Oregon when the Change came, hiking the mountain paths. She'd stumbled across him while she was hunting for meat for the pot, lying trapped and injured after a tumble into a ravine in the Cascades above her cabin.

  Cernunnos sent luck to him and us both that day, she thought, watching him nod thoughtfully, his gray eyes narrowing as he scanned the ruined city. Praise and thanks, Lord of the Forest!

  "I'd say go for loud and fast," he concluded, running thick fingers through short, curly brown hair now showing a few streaks of gray; he'd been just turned forty the year of the Change, and newly retired from the British army, traveling on an unexpected inheritance. "There's no bandits in the middle valley that'll tangle with this many of us, if they know the odds."

  The square Saxon face was calm as he waited for her answer, the thick-armed, barrel-chested body utterly at ease. He looked slow, to someone who hadn't seen him move when speed was called for.

  "Fast and loud, then," she said. "We'll go down Center, turn south out of town on Twenty-fourth, go past Turner and Marion… We can make Lebanon before nightfall, if the horses all hold up. But lunch first."

  A packhorse carried food in two large baskets strapped to its cargo saddle; round loaves of good brown bread still slightly warm from Larsdalen's kitchens, butter, hard cheese and sausage salted and dried and smoked until eating it was like chewing rather tasty steel-belted radial tires. Plain food, but riding long hours was hungry work, and most of them remembered times when this would have been better than a feast.

  She drew the little sgian dubh knife from its sheath in her right boot top—eating with a ten-inch fighting dirk like the one at her belt was not advisable, unless you really disliked the shape of your nose—and sketched a figure on the surface of a loaf, chanting:

  "Harvest Lord who dies for the ripened grain—Corn Mother who births the fertile field—Blessed be those who share this bounty; And blessed the mortals who toiled with You Their hands helping Earth to bring forth life."

  Everyone present was a Dedicant at least; many echoed her, and they all joined in the final "Blessed be" before pitching in.

  Mom? Eilir signed, with her mouth full. Remember when you used to busk at the state fair in Salem before the Change, and we'd go to that Jaliscan place on Silverton Road? Lord and Lady, but those shrimp in garlic butter!

  Ah, that was fine indeed, mo chroi/ Juniper replied.

  Carefully, she did not wonder what had happened to Jose and Carlita. If you didn't know someone's fate by Change Year Nine, the probabilities ranged from a quick death to something really bad.

  Eilir's face fell a little, probably at a similar thought. She got up to join the other youngsters but stopped for a second to say: Mostly that all seems like a dream—the old days—as if it was just a story someone told me. Other times just for a moment, it's this that doesn't seem real.

  Juniper smiled and ate in friendly silence, listening to the water's roar and the wind's whisper, watching Eilir and Astrid and their friends chaffing at each other; watching a young man take the time to groom his horse, and a girl pick wildflowers growing in cracked pavement, weav-ing some into the mane of her horse and tucking one behind her ear.

  Aylward munched stolidly, his eyes never leaving the road they'd take, scanning methodically. The horses bent their heads to piles of cracked oats and alfalfa pellets, and drank from buckets hauled up from the river.

  At last he dusted crumbs off his hands and raised a brow at her. She nodded at his unspoken query.

  "Right, you lot." He turned to the rest of their party, who'd repacked the panniers and stood by their horses. "Gear up and string bows, if you haven't already."

  Gearing up meant stuffing the flat beret-like bonnets in a saddlebag and putting on helmets—round steel bowls with hinged cheekpieces that clipped together under the chin. They were already wearing their brigandines—rows of small metal plates riveted between the layers of a double-ply jerkin, the outer layer green and carrying the clan's sigil, the crescent moon between branching antlers. Many wore padded arming doublets underneath them, with short mail sleeves and collars attached. All the adult Mackenzies also bore short broad-bladed swords in the Roman style on their left hips and long fighting dirks at their right; hooked over the scabbards of the swords were round steel bucklers the size and shape of soup plates, ready to be snatched up by
their single handgrips.

  But you didn't string a yew longbow until you had some prospect of using it. Wooden bows tended to "follow"—to develop a permanent weakening bend—if left strung too long. Even the reflex-deflex models Sam had taught them to make, with their subtle, shallow double curve heat-treated into the staves. Archery and hunting had been his hobbies for decades before the Change.

  Juniper watched with fond pride as Eilir pulled her longbow from the carrying loops beside the quiver slung over her back. Then she put the lower tip's nock-piece of polished antler against the outside of her left boot and stepped through between string and stave. That let her brace the riser handle against her right buttock; she pulled down sharply with both hands as she flexed her body against the heavy resistance of the seasoned wood, using one hand to slide the cord's loop up into the grooves of the polished elkhorn tip. The movements had the easy, practiced grace of an otter sliding down a riverbank.

  That left her with a smooth shallow curve just under six feet long, D-section limbs of oiled and polished yellow yew on either side of a black-walnut riser grip; forty-five arrows jutted over her right shoulder, fletched with gray goose feathers and armed with a mixture of delta-shaped broad-heads and narrow six-sided bodkins designed to punch through armor. Juniper bent her own bow as well; it had a fifty-pound draw, which was the lightest in the group. Ayl-ward's was more than twice that; she'd seen him put a shaft right through a bull elk's ribs and have it come out the other still going fast—and once knock an armored man off a galloping horse at two hundred paces.

  Lord and Lady, it doesn't even disturb me to think about that anymore, she thought with a slight mental shudder. Not that I was ever really a pacifist, but…

  She cut a last section of sausage so that Rudi would have something to worry at, cleaned and sheathed the knife and swung into the saddle with a creak of leather, tucking up her kilt into a comfortable position—she wore good woolen boxer-style underwear anyway—and signaled to the bannerman.