Dies the Fire (85 page)

The face of the man behind the handles of the lead plow in the field to her left was calm and intent, with the slight frown of someone concentrating on his work. The plowman jerked in surprise, startled as he broke the focus of his effort and looked up, leaning back to halt his team with the reins knotted around his waist and a long
whoa.
Two more teams followed him, and the furrows lay neatly parallel, stretching off towards the distant fence and line of trees. The dark brown earth curled up behind the moldboards, moist and soft; the green clover sod went under amid a sweet scent of cut roots.

The other plows kept going for a moment more, making more acres ready to be planted with wheat.

Doing a lot better than we managed this spring,
she thought, as all of the plowmen halted to shout greetings.
And we need to; it's those fields we'll harvest by next Lughnassadh. The Wheel of the Year, and the wheel of worries!

Every day since the Change had reminded her why her ancestors had so celebrated getting a season's work done successfully.

“The bicycle corps is half a day ahead of you,” one of them called, and added a little awkwardly—he was still in jeans, not a kilt—“Blessed be! Goddess with you, Lady Juniper!”

“Blessed be, and She's with us all!” she called back. “And She is, you know! Merry meet, merry part, merry meet again!”

Beside the buggy Eilir and Astrid were deep in conversation:

“—we're finishing off late because we sent a lot of teams to get you guys' land plowed and seeded over at Larsdalen, us and the University Council people—”

Which had been the essence of the deal; the Bearkillers' military services, and grain stored over winter in Bend and Madras to be paid next spring, in return for the plowing and planting they'd been too late to do this year themselves.

“Not to mention we and Corvallis acknowledge that Lord Bear owns a great whacking chunk of the valley west of Salem and rules all those on it,” she murmured to herself, too softly to be heard.

That sort of conversation could help you organize your thoughts, and it was a habit she'd fallen into through long years mostly alone or with Eilir.

“Not that Mike isn't the charming lad”—she smiled reminiscently and laid a hand on her stomach—“and not that we don't need him to help against the Protector, for he's a very Lugh of the Long Spear come again in splendor and in terror, but still, the precedent of the thing. . . .”

“Talking strategy to yourself?” Chuck Barstow said.

He was riding close by her right hand; looking nervous, too, if you knew him very well.

“Who better?” she replied. “We're none of us professionals at it, Chuck.”

“I wish Sam Aylward were here,” he said, looking to check that the scouts were busy, out on the edge of sight and beyond. “It takes more than nine months to learn all I need to do
his
job.”

“Well, the man's neither a god nor an electron, to be in two places at once,” Juniper said. “And with luck, we'll but have to look imposing; over the mountains, they have to fight for certain-sure.”

“You ever play poker, Juney?”

“No. Bridge, a little . . . Why?”

“I do play poker, and I
hate
bluffing.”

Juniper's mouth firmed into a pale line. “But we're not, Chuck. And that's the best sort of bluff there is. I'm not going to have that gang of bandits a half day's travel from my home and kids and clan, or controlling our access over the mountains.”

He nodded. “That's why I wish we had Aylward with us.”

The road wound northeast up into forested hills as the day wore on; occasionally they came in sight of the main Mackenzie war party on their bicycles, but the horses had to rest more often than the humans. About noon they halted for an hour; horses bent their heads over oats and pellets of clover hay, and the Mackenzies ate bread and cheese, smoked sausage and dried fruit. The bread was still soft and crumbly-fresh; tomorrow they'd be down to twice-baked crackerlike waybread—what they'd called hardtack in seafaring days.

A challenge-and-response came from the sentries up the winding road, and then Dennis, puffing as he pushed his bicycle up to them; it was downhill from here to Sweet Home. He'd acquired a length of the sausage from someone and was munching on it as he came up. What with kilt, jack, bearded ax and longbow, bicycle and helmet pushed back he looked like . . .

Like nothing from the twentieth century or any other!
she thought.
But it's good to see him, nonetheless.

He looked at her as she chomped her way through her share, and grinned. “God, Sally would howl and throw things if she could see us stuffing ourselves like this!”

Juniper snorted: Sally was about as enormous as she was, but unlike the original Mackenzie, she'd had so-called morning sickness at unpredictable and frequent intervals since her second month. She was also safely back behind the palisade at Dun Juniper, and the Chief of the Mackenzies frankly envied her.

“What do you know about these mysteries of the Goddess, male one?” she said.

“As much as you, iron-gutted female one,” Dennis pointed out with irritating calm. “More. I was holding the bucket for her all these months.” Then he sighed.

“The news isn't bad, I take it?” Juniper said.

“No. Met the Corvallis guys outside Lebanon, and the Protector's men did just what the Bearkillers said they would—bugged out fast.”

She relaxed with a sigh of her own. “That's what the Bearkillers
hoped
they'd do,” she said. “They're relying on those castles further east on Route 20. Those have Route 22 to link them to Portland. There's no point trying to hold the towns; besides which, we outnumbered them fifteen to one.”

Dennis frowned. “Why bother to put men in Lebanon or Sweet Home at all, then?” he said.

“The Protector's greedy, and he was expecting us to sit and wait until
he
was ready,” she said. A deep breath. “Let's hope it's an omen.”

Dennis hesitated. “There are still a couple of hundred civilians there. . . . They're in pretty bad shape, Juney.”

But for once we can do something for them without worrying,
she thought.
With the grain we'll be getting from the Bearkillers. That
was
clever of Mike, to realize we could still use the railroads, for a few years at least, until there are too many washouts.

“Let's be about the work of the day, then,” she said, and nodded to Chuck. “There's no point in just chasing the rest back to Portland; we'd just have them back at us again next year.”

 

 

 

“Crawl faster!”
Mike Havel shouted again.

Another fireball rippled overhead. Then Signe screamed.

“Christ Jesus!” Havel hissed.

The crossbow bolt had hit her high on the left shoulder, slanting right down through the meat and leaving the head sticking out the other side. She screamed again when Eric grabbed her under that arm; Havel took the other, and they ran crouching to the shelter of the catapult. Aylward hit the release toggle one more time, then snatched the arrows out of Signe's quiver.

“We're cutting it too bloody tight,” he said, turning and shooting. “You two take the north approach; we'll cover the blockhouse.”

Havel grunted agreement, taking the remaining loops of rope from Eric and Signe and fastening them to the bailey's outer palisade, dropping the long knotted cords down the wall and into the moat. Pamela bent over Signe, then pulled out a hypodermic, stripped it with her teeth and stabbed it dagger fashion into the back of the younger woman's thigh. The morphine brought a long hissing sigh, and relaxation.

“I don't know how much damage there is inside, but she's not in immediate danger,” the veterinarian-swordswoman said.

“Oh, yes she is,” Havel snarled, crouching behind the throwing engine's cover. “We all are.”

The ballista was in a horseshoe-shaped embayment in the castle wall, and it was mounted on a turntable about six feet across. There was a sloping steel shield with a slot for the throwing trough; that was pointed towards the burning tower right now. Crossbow bolts were pattering off it at about one a second, each one with a nerve-wracking
ptinnng
sound and a spark as the points hit the quarter-inch sheet plate and the bolts pinwheeled off into the night.

It was crowded, too; they had to get right up against the shield because the upper floors of the tower overlooked them and the crossbowmen there could shoot down . . . at least until the fire got that far. The tower's own moat and the bellowing fire in the main gateway meant they were cut off from the tower otherwise, though; its garrison could shoot—until the fire drove them out—but they couldn't come out on foot. The heat of the burning tower was enough to dry the sweat it brought out on Havel's face.

Unfortunately, there was no cover at all on either side, where the fighting platform of the eastern wall ran, and everyone else
could
get at them that way.

“Get here fast, stalwart ranchers,” Mike snarled to himself, and slid the recurve bow free from its case over his shoulder. “Real fast. Eric, you fit to fight?”

A drift of wind down from the mountains and the pass blew smoke over them, thick and dense and sooty-hot.

Eric coughed. “I'll manage,” he said.

“Good,” Havel snapped. “Shoot when I do.”

By the increasing light of the tower's fire he could see more of the Protector's men dashing across the open ground from the barracks and up ramp-ladders to the palisade. A few of them were already trotting towards the ballista; Havel coughed again as he saw their heads weaving.

Trying to figure out what's going on,
he thought, carefully not thinking of the probability that he'd be dead in a few minutes.
Got to get closer before the impossible becomes visible.

At about fifteen yards they goggled and halted. Havel came up to one knee and drew, the familiar push-pull effort.

Snap.
An instant later, the crack of a bodkin point on sheet metal as the arrow punched into a black-painted shield.

A soldier yelled and danced, shaking his shield and screaming—four inches of arrowshaft had pinned his forearm to the plywood. Havel ducked back as another crossbow bolt went by with an eerie
whuppt
of cloven air, close enough that he felt the wind of it on the sweat-wet skin of his face.

Movement brought his head around, with the bow rising behind it. He lowered it again as he saw the COSA fighter lever himself over the palisade.

“Get down, you fool!” Havel shouted, crouched back under the ballista's shield.

The rancher's man looked at him, then jerked and grunted as two bolts hammered into his chest. He toppled backward, but three more heads followed, and then hands held up a pair of thick shields. . . .

Eric shot once more and then slowly toppled over backward in a dead faint.

“I am getting too old for this shit,” Havel wheezed, suddenly exhausted beyond bearing. Then he shouted:

“Corpsman! Stretcher party, here!”

 

 

 

“I'll look like a football!” Signe said. “All over stiches!”

“Actually, you look more beautiful than a sunset,” Havel said. “See? I'm learning!”

She smiled back at him from the cot, then winced as motion pulled at the shoulder wound. She drifted back off to sleep.

Aaron Rothman sighed. “Thank God for morphine,” he said. “I really, really hope someone is planting opium poppies!”

The big hospital tents were crowded; mostly CORA ranchers and their men, but more Bearkillers than he liked—it would have been politically dicey to hold them all back. There was a smell of disinfectant and blood, faces waxy and pale under the light of the Coleman lanterns. Gasoline stoves kept it fairly warm, but the air was close and stuffy as well.

“Her brother was just faint from loss of blood,” Rothman said. “I gave him some plasma and a painkiller; he'll be sore with all those superficial cuts and punctures, but he had his tetanus shots, thank
God.
”

“What about Signe?” Havel asked, his face impassive.

“I used the pin test,” Rothman said, holding one up. “She's got feeling and movement in all the fingers and no numb spots on the arm, so there isn't any nerve damage to speak of. The clavicle's cracked, though, and the cut muscles will take some time to heal. Full function, or nearly, but not for a while, and she'll need physical therapy.”

Havel gusted a sigh. “Could have been a lot worse,” he said.

Then he went down the rows of cots; for many of them it
had
been a lot worse. He talked with those who could use it, gave a nod and a touch to others.

“Thanks!” a young Bearkiller they'd picked up in Grangeville said, with a smile despite the broken leg.

“Been there, done that,” Havel said, grinning back.

The grin died as he ducked out of the tent's entrance, pulling on his armored gauntlets and settling his helmet; for one thing, the blanket-wrapped bodies of the dead weren't far away, waiting for friends and relatives to take them away, or for time to free up for burial details. For another, out here the smoke of the burning castle still lay thick, in the cold gray light just before dawn. The tower had fallen in a torrent of flame and sparks hours ago, and most of the rest of the palisade still smoldered.

Also present were the prisoners taken, two score of them; all the guards were Bearkillers or Mackenzies, most of them lightly wounded.