The Protector's War (14 page)

God knows I've done water work before, and
mostly
at night. Not to mention Borneo and Belize. But the Ouse will be difficult. Full of obstacles and winding about, breaking its banks and retaking the old floodplain, and it's a long journey. I wouldn't care to try it in the dark, not when losing a canoe would be a disaster. We can afford the time: the king won't send pursuit overland. It's too late to do any good, and he'd have to arrest Knolles, and he certainly can't afford
that,
politically—it would touch off revolt for certain if he turned on one of his most loyal officers. A night's delay will give him more time to set something up at sea, but that's less of a risk than blundering about exhausted in the dark.

They turned in past the great silvery gray bulk of the church; the moon was up now, and it seemed to make the ancient limestone glow. Hordle lit a lantern from their baggage, adjusting the wick and then lifting it on the tip of his bowstave as the two Lorings pushed the tall doors open. Inside the hundred-foot length of the nave things were less orderly than the nearly untouched exterior suggested. The pointed arches and pillars along each side still stood, but in spots the white plaster had been discolored by smoke, probably from the missing pews. There were ashes and fragments of bone near the altar, where the rood screen had been, and blasphemous, incoherent graffiti scrawled over the walls. Hordle reached up to hook the wire loop of the lantern over one of the dead electric candles around a pillar, then knelt, taking a pinch of the ash between thumb and forefinger and bringing it to his nose.

“This isn't eight years old, sir,” he said. “Nor one, neither, I'd say. Early this spring?”

The two Lorings joined him. Alleyne leaned over the discolored stone where the fire had been, his blue eyes bright with a hunter's keenness. “You're right, Hordle. Hmmm. That knucklebone there, it's pig. And these…that's a red deer's leg bone, by God. Someone's been using this place since the Change, not very recently, but several times at long intervals.”

His father wrinkled his nose slightly. “Someone with a very elementary sense of hygiene,” he added. The smell wasn't all that obtrusive after months, but it was still detectable in this damp climate.

Archie MacDonald called from the entrance: “What's there?”

“Someone's been using this as a campsite,” Nigel said. “Brushwood Men,” he went on. “But not just lately, I'd say.”

That was the standard euphemism for those who'd made it through the Change on the mainland—usually by devouring the less successful—the handful who'd merely hid in remote places and been very, very lucky had come in and joined the resettlement in Change Year Two. There weren't very many of the Brushwood Men, but they lingered in the unsettled zones—and even a few in the vast, tumbled, half-flooded ruin of London, by rumor, surviving now on rats and rabbits and what they could scavenge from park and riverbank.

“Filthy buggers,” MacDonald said, with a shiver.

“Right,” Alleyne Loring said, returning from a brief tour outside. “The fencing around the churchyard's intact, and there's plenty of grass down towards the river. We'll hobble the horses, and you can start back with them tomorrow morning, MacDonald. A little luck, and nobody will be any the wiser.”

The two warhorses were Irish Hunters, seventeen hands and towards the heavier end of that mixed breed; they'd do well enough as draft animals, especially on an isolated frontier holding. Hordle's cob was an unremarkable beast and would fit in with Jamaica Farm's trio very nicely. Three good horses were as many as most farms could afford; six would enable them to get a good deal more done, with less human exhaustion.

“What about the harness, sir?” Hordle asked.

Nigel nodded at the heavy war saddles, specialist gear of no use to anyone who didn't intend to ride to war armored cap-a-pie and carrying a lance.

“We'll take those along to a deep place in the river and sink them. No sense in dragging a hundred pounds of tack around the world. Your saddle's standard issue, Hordle, so your farmer friend can have it with the horses.” He looked at MacDonald. “Which watch do you want to take, and where?”

They were standing near the church doors; the Scot looked up the ruined length of Newport Pagnell's High Street. The slumped front of the Cannon pub was only fifty yards east; the canoes and traveling gear were hidden in the function room at the back. From there it was easy carrying distance down to the stone bridge over the Great Ouse.

“If it's all the same, I'll take first watch here,” he said, looking at the stout stones of the church. “Forbye, could I keep the lantern?” The three ex-SAS men looked at him blankly.

“Whatever for?” Nigel asked, curiously.

Hordle snorted. “It might not do any harm 'ere. But Jock…if there was anyone lurking about…well, you might as well hang up a sign, ‘Sneak Up and Kill Me,' mate. All a light does at night is blind you and mark you out.” More kindly: “I'll be back to relieve you in three hours, and we'll save you dinner.”

Nigel reached for a canvas duffel bag; it held the rest of his armor. But Hordle was before him.

“I'll take that, sir,” the giant said, and took them both, besides the war saddles, hefting the two-hundred-pound total without visible effort, despite his own gear.

Nigel and Alleyne followed, eyes wary in the dark and hands on their sword hilts. The front of the Cannon had collapsed into the street; they had to climb a long sloping surface of rubble before wiggling through between a section of half-collapsed ceiling and the top of the mound into the function room.

The door to that had survived; Buttesthorn and his men had been hard at work there, as they saw when they let the section of blackout curtain fall to hide their entrance and turned up the lantern. The rubble had been pushed back from a section of stone-flagged floor, and any cracks in the mostly intact rear and side walls had been roughly patched with mud and planks, from the inside. Three aluminum canoes waited, with bundles of gear neatly packed and trussed beside them. Trail food, extra arrows, two more longbows—Nigel and his son were both excellent shots, but neither could bend Hordle's monster stave—sleeping bags, clothing, fishhooks, lines…

There was also a little spirit stove. Hordle grunted appreciation and lit it as he rummaged through the sack of supplies they'd brought from Jamaica Farm.

“Right, I knew that Gudrun was a kind-'earted girl. Pity we couldn't stay a little longer, but needs must. Sausages…bacon…bread…butter…onions…tomatoes…spuds…mushrooms, even! We can do a proper fry-up. Fair scrammed, I am. It'll be salt horse and Old Weevil's wedding cake on the
Pride of St. Helens,
I'll wager. Ah! She put in four bottles of Scarecrow Best Bitter, all the way from Arreton; it must be love. Bob'll be livid.”

“I'll take first watch outside, then,” Alleyne said. “Give me a shout when it's ready, Hordle.”

Sir Nigel sat, unlacing the bag with the rest of his suit, going over the pieces—pauldron and vambrace, spaulder and sabaton and greave—checking for nicks in the enamel, flexing the leather backing and straps and buckles. The armor didn't need nearly as much maintenance as the medieval originals. They'd used some of those in the first year or two, taken from museums and country houses; after that the armorers had rigged water-powered hydraulic presses to stamp copies out of sheet metal salvaged from warehouses and factories. The Lorings' suits were of the best, and the nickel-chrome-vanadium alloy was much, much stronger than the rather soft medieval steel; besides that it didn't corrode easily, if at all. Still, it was best to take no chances, and it was as important as ever to keep the leather supple.

And the homely, familiar task let his mind wander while he kept it on impersonal things.

He looked around the ruined pub; how long would it be until this was a town again? At least it
would
happen; there had been times in the first Change Year when he feared it would all collapse, that England would be totally wrecked as most of Europe and the Middle East had been, beyond hope of recovery. There
was
an England again, however tiny and impoverished; and at least he could comfort himself that he'd played some part in building it. Perhaps in laying the foundations of a new age of greatness. The Irish might have had the starring role this time if they hadn't indulged their taste for bashing in each other's heads so wholeheartedly, but as things were old England had the field to herself…

And how will they think of these years, in that age to come?

When this was a pub again, or housed a weaver or a merchant or a blacksmith, how would the chronicles fit this age into the long, long vista of the island story? Beside the Black Death, he supposed, or the Viking invasions; a great catastrophe, long ago, which ushered in a new age. But there would be none of his blood in it, for the first time in many centuries. There had been Lorings at Tilford before the first stones of Woburn Abbey were laid, although for a time the land had passed through a female line before the name returned through marriage to a distant cousin.

Lorings had carried their blazon of five roses to Crecy and Agincourt; one had gone ashore at Cadiz in the first Elizabeth's time, beating a drum in the surf as his men put King Philip's Armada stores to the torch—and drank up an amazing cargo of sherry found on the beach. A scion of the house had died under Rupert's banner at Marston Moor, and the mother of his infant son had stood siege as commander at Tilford against Cromwell's Ironsides—Charles the Second had made the Lorings baronets shortly after the Restoration, as a cash-free way of paying off the debt. Others of his ancestors had left their bones from Delhi's gates to the Crimea. Nigel's own father met his end leading a jungle patrol in Malaya against communist guerillas in the 1950s, and his mother died of a fall while pursuing Charlie James Fox over a hedge not long after. Nigel himself been raised mainly by his grandmother, whose young husband Lieutenant Eustace Loring had vanished under a storm of German shells in the retreat from Mons in 1914. She'd lived long enough to see him married…

Maude…

The wound was still raw, but it didn't scrape at his whole mind quite as much, now. The first pain had subsided just enough to let him feel lesser hurts.

The fact of the matter is that we were very happy, these last few years, politics aside—if Alleyne had settled down and produced some grandchildren, it would have been perfect.

He wouldn't have chosen the Change—no sane man would—but…

To be completely honest, I'm more at home in an England of farmers and squires and parsons than one of cities and motorways and the Internet
, he acknowledged ruefully.
If it weren't for the…eccentricities…of the king…a dozen hitch of Shires couldn't have dragged me out of the country again.

Maybe I
should
have taken the offer of Gibraltar,
he thought, accepting a plate from Hordle with a word of thanks, and beginning to stoke himself methodically.

Gibraltar wasn't quite an island, but the only connection to the mainland was a narrow peninsula. The town and garrison there had managed to barricade themselves against the hordes and live off the huge stores cached in the tunnels of the Rock, plus a providential bulk carrier full of Argentine wheat that drifted by just close enough. Expansion into the empty spaces of southern Spain and northern Morocco had required help from the mother country, though—men and tools and leadership. An intriguing challenge; a job worth doing.

I might have accepted if I were a bit younger—and then I wouldn't have been involved in politics here and Maude would be alive. There was a hint of a title, too…I'd have retired quietly in another decade—and all that was Queen Hallgerda being cunning.

Alleyne returned from his watch at Hordle's soft-voiced imitation of a barn owl. The archer loaded another plate with eggs, sausage, fried potatoes and buttered bread.

“I'll take this over to Jock and send him back when he's finished,” he said.

Alleyne smiled—a charming expression that reminded Nigel forcefully of his wife for a moment. “Excellent fry-up, Sergeant.”

“I take a good bit of feeding, sir,” Hordle said. “So it pays to do it right. Maybe a bite to eat will cheer up that mournful Jock git. I think the ruins put him off, like.”

“You were always the best field cook I knew. Something Sam Aylward
didn't
teach us, eh?”

“Christ, no, sir. Samkin could burn water. I swear a can of bully beef tasted worse if he opened it.”

“I'll relieve you in four hours, then.”

The two Lorings settled down in comforting silence for a moment as Nigel prepared to take his own turn; the younger man had a thick hardcover book out. It was his copy of the
Fellowship of the Ring,
of course, a signed edition salvaged from Oxford in CY2. He'd brought along all three volumes.

Nigel was reaching for his sword belt when they heard Hordle's owl hoot, repeated twice.