The Protector's War Page 6

  His face went tight. "Except for Maude, of course. His Varangians have ensured that she stays."

  Knolles blinked at the savagery of Loring's momentary expression and winced slighty. "How on earth are you going to leave Europe?" he asked. "Where else is there to go? Norland—"

  "Is part of Europe. Come now, Tony. You didn't think I was going up the Ml just to join the Brushwood Men, did you? And of course I can't tell you the details or destination, because you'd have to report it and the king might try to stop me."

  "I have definitive orders," Knolles said.

  Nigel smiled. "You had very emphatic orders from the politicians not to cross the border that time in South Armagh, Tony," he said. " 'Eighty-five, wasn't it? We didn't pay much attention then, either of us."

  A smile struggled to break through the other man's craggy features for a moment, then he shook his head.

  "You always were stubborn… I have to bring you back, Nigel. You know that." He sighed. "You should have accepted the governorship of Gibraltar when they offered it you last spring. You'd have got a gong with it, too."

  "Which would have put me conveniently out of the way until I retired," he said dryly.

  "I cannot simply let you go!"

  "No. You can try to personally capture me, Tony. As I said, if you win, you return with your mission accomplished. If not… well, you can honestly say you did your best and took losses in the trying."

  "You're better at this King Arthur business than I,

  Nigel, and you know it," Knolles said. "I still feel like an actor waving this stick about, sometimes. Don't you?"

  "Not recently. More sporting than guns, what? And you have knocked me off my horse in practice bouts, you know."

  "Not as often as the reverse," Knolles grunted sourly.

  "You could bring me back," Nigel pointed out. "And without endangering any of your men. It was pure luck that shaft didn't go through your archer's throat. There aren't so many Englishmen left we can afford to waste them—or their sons and daughters yet unborn."

  Knolles looked over his shoulder; his men were grouped around their wounded comrade.

  And you know they're not enthusiastic about this, Loring thought. They're good soldiers, they'll do as they're told, but you can't make them like it.

  "Very well, Sir Nigel," Knolles said formally. "There aren't many men whose bare word I'd take, but you're one."

  "Thank you, Tony," Loring said. "And Tony? Whatever happens, look after the princes."

  Knolles's face changed slightly; backing the king didn't mean he liked the new queen any too well.

  "Here? Or up on the Ml?" he said. "No rabbit burrows there."

  "We can check before we run the course. The footing's better for the horses on grass than on tarmac and I'd prefer to come off on dirt, if I'm going to come off at all."

  Knolles nodded assent and turned his horse. Sir Nigel did the same, riding two hundred yards along the side of the low slope at a slow walk, checking the ground for rabbit burrows and foxholes beneath the yard-high growth of grass and thistles. At the end of it the horse turned in its own length at the pressure of his thighs, superbly trained and willing. He felt a pang of absurd loss; not only was he going to have to part with it soon, but it would be spending the rest of its life pulling plows and harrows on Rasta Bob's farm. Doubtless well-treated, but… he ran a gauntleted palm down the smooth hard curve of the yellow gelding's neck.

  Four hundred yards away Anthony Knolles was a tiny figure of steel and menace on his big black warmblood. Nigel bared his teeth; now he could stop being responsible and rational, and hit someone. He'd been wanting to do that very badly for a day and a half now.

  With identical gestures they reached up to snap their visors shut; the world darkened, sight limited to the long narrow slit ahead. He squeezed his thighs, and Pommers broke into a walk, a trot, a canter… and then a hard hand gallop. Nigel braced his feet in the long stirrups, brought the shield around under his eyes, the lance down—held loosely at this stage. Hooves thundered, throwing divots of turf and brown earth high under the uncaring blue arch of the sky. The world shrank down to two bright lance heads and a shield marked with a silver wedge.

  Two and a half tons of horseflesh, human bone and muscle and steel armor hurtled at each other. He slanted the lance across Pommers's neck, clenching his legs against the horse, locking himself into the high-cantled saddle.

  And I don't much care whether I live or die, he knew. Alley ne and Hordle escape in either event. If Maude's waiting for me… and if there's nothing beyond... then sleep.

  Suddenly the other armored lancer was close. Loring clenched his legs and leaned forward, the lance tight under his arm, the point unwavering. At the very last instant his knees pressed, and the yellow horse swerved slightly, leaning away. Loring's lance head stayed glued to its target, the narrow spot where the bevoir laced to the breastplate…

  Crannng! Then crack! like a miniature roll of thunder as the tough ashwood of a lance shaft broke.

  Nigel Loring swayed drunkenly in the saddle at the massive impact hammering on his shield and smashing his hips backward against the cantle; the curved sheet metal shed most of it, cunningly held to glance the point, but it was enough to tear him half out of the saddle and lose one stirrup; the warhorse itself staggered and nearly fell. The taste of iron and copper filled his mouth as his head snapped violently forward and back, rattling his brain in the skull and cutting his lips against his own teeth. He threw aside the broken stub of the lance before he realized what had happened to his opponent.

  Knolles's black horse galloped on. Loring sprang down from the saddle, fell flat on his face, levered himself erect and staggered over to the spot where the other man lay fallen. For a moment he thought he was dead—gone gray-pale, with blood flowing from nose and mouth and one ear. The helmet was gone completely, the laces burst by the terrible leverage when Loring's lance head caught it under the bevoir. One of the captain's archers dashed up and fell on his knees on Knolles's other side, dabbing at his face with a square of linen soaked from a canteen.

  "Oh, hell. Oh, bloody hell, sir, you shouldn't have done it—"

  Knolles's eyes fluttered open; they were green, and wandered vaguely for a moment. Then he turned his head to spit blood and what was probably a bit of tooth, and the archer gently raised his head to let him drink from the canteen. He spat the first of that out, tinged pink, then drank thirstily and moved feet and hands and fingers to check that they still functioned.

  "Glad you're all right, old chap," Loring said; the relief was genuine, a warm surge that melted some sliver of the glacier within.

  "All right? You nearly tore my ruddy head off, Nigel!" Knolles said, then winced in pain at his own voice. "I think you've broken my collarbone, too, damnit. This isn't nearly as much fun as doing it with blunted practice lances, is it?"

  Nigel put a hand gently on the battered armor of the other's shoulder. "The harness will hold it until you get to a doctor," he said. "And we're even for Armagh, eh, what?"

  "I have to explain this to His Majesty," Knolles grumbled.

  "Your collarbone will argue for you," Loring said. "And Tony… I meant it about looking out for the princes."

  He rose, feeling a stab in his back and a ringing in his ears. I really am getting a little old for this, he thought. It was hard enough to learn a whole new way of war in my forties.

  The pain seemed to make him feel better, somehow. Al-leyne came up, leading Pommers by the reins. "Do you need a hand mounting, Father?" he said, as Knolles's men carried him away.

  "You insolent pup… of course I do, boy!"

  Hordle came up and made a stirrup of his hands, lifting with gently irresistible strength as Nigel swung into the saddle again with a grunt.

  "That was a joy to be'old, sir," he said. "Fe, fi, fo, fum, bang in the oc-u-lari-um!"

  Nigel snorted. "We're not out of England yet," he said. "It's a long wet way to the Wash, and longer still to… wherev
er we're going."

  Alleyne looked around. "I know we have to do it," he said. "Still, leaving England forever…"

  "Better than looking over our shoulders at Osborne House," Nigel said stoutly. "And there's nothing more English than leaving England and finding land elsewhere."

  Chapter Two

  Larsdalen, Willamette Valley, Oregon

  March 17th, 2007 AD—Change Year Nine

  Gunpowder Day

  Oometimes you have to break heads," Michael Havel said.

  "To be sure, Mike, that's the way of it in this wicked world," Juniper Mackenzie replied.

  She gave him an urchin grin, and tossed back curls whose bright copper glinted in the fresh morning sun. More of the lilt and burble of her mother's people crept into her voice as she went on: "But I'll be pointing out once more that it's cheaper to break them open from the inside. And they're of more use afterward that way, sure. We'll find ways to tweak his nose, never fear, but this grand alliance you've been wanting won't happen soon."

  Havel gave a snort of unwilling laughter. "Ah, the hell with it, Juney, I'd rather subvert the bastard than kill his grunts too. I just don't know if we can. Anyway, we've been talking politics for days. Now I've got some gunpowder to test."

  The other visiting dignitaries formed up, in no particular order: Abbot Dmowski from Mt. Angel in his brown Benedictine robe; a group of self-appointed SCA nobility from just east of there; Finney and Jones from the Corvallis Faculty Senate a raggle-taggle of the smaller communities. He sighed and put on the helmet he'd carried tucked under one arm; it was a plain steel bowl with a riveted nasal strip in front, hinged cheek guards and a leather-lined chain-mail aventail behind to protect the neck. This particular one had a tanned bear's head mounted on it, the snarling muzzle shading his eyes.

  His wife, Signe, came up on his right side, ignoring Juniper's friendly nod. She flicked at the capelike fall of fur that spread back from the bear head, to settle it on his mailed shoulders. Even though he'd killed the bear himself—with a spear, right after the Change—he still felt mildly ridiculous wearing it; it had been Signe's younger sister, Astrid Larsson, who came up with the idea.

  The first of her crimes against common sense, he grumbled inwardly. But not the last.

  The crowd below cheered at the sight of the ceremonial helm, and started chanting; some drew swords and waved them in the air to the beat of the words.

  "Lord Bear! Lord Bear! Lord Bear!"

  "You deserve it, O Lord Bear," Signe Havel said, smiling at his tightly controlled embarrassment. "And so do I—I was shooting arrows into it while you shish kebabed its liver, remember? Sort of our first date…"

  "I remember it better than I like," he said, with a smile that drew up one corner of his mouth.

  He touched a finger to the scar that ran up across his forehead from the corner of his left eye, remembering the hoarse roaring that sprayed blood and saliva in his face, the blurring slap of the great paw and the glancing touch of one claw tip, agony and black unconsciousness coming up to strike him like the ground itself.

  Just an inch closer, and there'd've gone my face and eyes.

  "Let's get on with it," he went on, his voice a 'little rougher, letting his left hand fall back to its natural position on the hilt of his backsword.

  She put on a helmet that sported a crest of yellow horsehair from brow to nape, almost the same color as her own wheat blond mane. An attendant handed her a small metal tray with half a dozen smoldering pine splints on it, and they stepped out. The skirts of their knee-length chain hauberks clashed musically against the steel splints of their shin guards, and the plate of the vambraces on their fore-arms met with a dull link as they linked hands, his right to her left.

  Their path led down the broad staircase that led from the upper garden to the great lawn where the ceremony would be held, between banks of Excel early lilac already showing a froth of lavender blossom. Militia with sixteen-foot pikes lined the route, their mail shirts and kettle helmets polished for dignity's sake. The crowd was hundreds strong and good-natured, cheering as they saw the leaders, ready for the barbeque and games and entertainments that would follow throughout the day—it seemed a little odd that they'd turned the memorial day of humanity's worst disaster into a holiday, but things had turned out that way. It was a brilliant spring morning, the air washed to crystal by yesterday's rain, and cool.

  Around sixty, he thought. Perfect.

  The flower banks nearer the house were just starting to bloom—sheets of crocus gold and blue, rhododendrons like cool fire in white and pink and purple around the tall oaks—he caught faint wafts of their scent, and the smell of crushed grass was strong and sweet, stronger than that of massed, indifferently clean humans or the occasional tang of livestock and their by-products. You could see clear across the Valley from up here in the Eola Hills, right over to the snow-peaks of the Cascades floating blue-and-white against the horizon, but the sunlight still had a trace of winter's pale glaze. If you distilled spring and poured it over a landscape like spray from a mountain river, this would be it.

  All the same he was already sweating under the armor. Over the last nine years he'd gotten so used to its heat and constriction and weight he scarcely noticed it anymore unless something called it to his attention; the gear'he'd carried as a marine back in the early nineties had been much heavier, and awkward to boot.

  Trouble is, I'm being reminded.

  Juniper Mackenzie looked indecently comfortable in her tartan kilt and saffron-dyed shirt of homespun linsey-woolsey, a brooch holding her plaid at the shoulder, a flat Scots bonnet on her head with a raven feather in a clasp shaped into the antlers-and-crescent-moon sigil of the clan. The Chief of the Mackenzies was eight inches shorter than his five-eleven, a slender woman, perhaps a year or two older than Havel's midthirties. She had the long, sharp-boned, triangular face that often went with Scots-Irish ancestry, softened by an expression that seemed to bubble laughter even at rest. She'd told him once that the pale freckled complexion, green eyes and fox red mane were from her mother, who'd been Irish plain and simple—born and raised on Achill Island off the west coast at that.

  She smells better than I do, too, he thought: soap, clean female flesh, an herbal hair wash of some sort and a hint of woodsmoke. Better than Signe right now too, for that matter.

  Even with the leader's luxury of more than one gam-beson—so that they could be switched off and washed occasionally—you never really got the old-socks-and-locker-room smell out of the thick quilting you wore under armor. Mingled with horse sweat soaked into leather and the oil you rubbed on the metal of the armor to keep it free of rust, it was the smell of a trade: the trade of war in the Changed world.

  He walked to the center of the stretch of grass; sheep kept it cropped now, not so neatly as it had been when this was a rich man's toy, Ken Larsson's summer place. The others dropped back; the troopers who stood to keep a circle cleared here were from the Bearkiller A-lister elite, armored as he was, their long single-edged swords drawn and points touching the grass before them. Sunlight flashed and glittered and broke from the honed edges as they flourished them upright in salute.

  He approached the brass bowl that stood on a stone plinth; it was heaped with a gritty gray-black powder. A hush fell over the crowd, broken by the susurrus of breath, the voices of children running around on the fringes, somewhere the neigh of a horse. Birds went loud overhead—honking geese, tundra swans, V's of ducks heading north—and a red-tailed hawk's voice sounded an arrogant skree-skree-skree.

  Signe offered her tray of pine splints. Havel took one and waved it through the air until flame crackled, sending a scent of burning resin into the air along with a trail of black smoke.

  Then he tossed it neatly into the bowl of gunpowder.

  Fumphsssssss…

  The powder burned slowly, black smoke drifting downwind with a stink of scorched sulfur. The flame flickered sullen red; an occasional burst of sparks made people skip back w
hen clumps were tossed out of the bowl like spatters from hot cooking oil. There was none of the volcanic woosh it would have produced before the Change; the sharp fireworks smell was about the only familiar thing involved. When the sullen fire died, nothing was left but a lump of black ash; a gust of wind swept it out in feathery bits to scatter across grass and clothes and faces.

  "Well, shit," Mike Havel murmured softly under his breath.

  They did this every year on the anniversary of the Change, just to make formally and publicly sure that it hadn't reversed itself; it had grown into something of a public holiday, too—more in the nature of a wake than a celebration in the strict sense, but boisterous enough for all that.

  The watching crowd sighed. Some of the adults—men and women who'd been adult that March day nine years ago—burst into tears; many more looked as if they'd like to cry. The children and youngsters were just excited at the official beginning of the holiday; to them the time before the Change was fading memories, or tales of wonders.

  Though by now we wouldn't get the old world back even if the Change reversed itself, he thought grimly. Too many dead, too much wrecked and burned. And would we dare depend on those machines again, if we knew the whole thing could be taken away in an instant?

  He felt a sudden surge of rage—at whoever, Whoever, or whatever had kicked the work of ages into wreck, and at the sheer unfairness of not even knowing why. Then he pushed the feeling aside with a practiced effort of will; brooding on it was a short route to madness. That hadn't killed as many as hunger and the plagues, but it came a close third, and a lot of the people still breathing weren't what you could call tightly wrapped.

  "Sorry, no guns or cars or TV, folks," he said, making his voice cheerful. "Not this ninth year of the Change, at least. But a pancake breakfast we can still manage. Let's go!"

  "You're supposed to eat it, my heart, not smear it all over your face," Juniper Mackenzie said to her son; she spoke in Gaelic, as she often did with him, something to keep her mother's language alive a little longer.