The Protector's War (40 page)

Nobody mentioned Crusher Bailey until the two disguised Bearkillers brought up bandits in general, which was natural for their
persona
of outsiders traveling through strange territory. Probably the locals had been subconsciously afraid that talking about the man would make him more likely to appear.

“Yeah,
muy malo,
that one,” a traveler from Gervais said. “Likes to break your knees and legs and leave you to die, I hear.”

“
I
hear he
sells
people…up north,” a woman declared.

Travelers from the Protectorate looked uneasy, or shrugged. “He certainly sells stock and stuff there,” one of them said, spitting into the hearth; it made a sharp
fissst
sound. “Or his fence does, he doesn't show his face there. Baron Emiliano ought to get off his ass and do something about him, or the Bearkillers ought to. There'd be more trade on this road, and less wasted on guards, if he were gone.”

“The Protectorate and the Bearkillers probably won't
let
each other take care of it,” another commented. “Dog-in-the-manger stuff.”

The spitter spat again. “Useless bastards, for all their armor and swords,” he said, which was sufficiently ambiguous about who precisely he meant that he wouldn't get in trouble for it back home in the Protector's territory. “Goddamn it, what is this, America or Guatemala?”

“After the
Change,
you doorknob?” the woman said, and got a wry chuckle. “It's fucking
Braveheart
country now.”

“Always preferred
Rob Roy,
myself,” someone else said. “More realistic—and don't we know it, nowadays?”

The people who'd been adult at the time of the Change settled in to the ever-popular rhythm of a 'remember that scene' conversation, and the younger ones tried to change the subject.

 

Havel took a cup of the chicory the next morning as he sat yawning in his booth; the effect might be psychosomatic, but it did help pop the eyelids open. Signe looked disgustingly fresh; she'd slept like a baby. Apprentice Kendricks had too, but
he
was sixteen and sleeping on the floor hadn't bothered him.

Everyone's gotten less finicky about privacy,
Havel thought.
But there are still limits.

Sarian came over to them after the waitress had dropped off their plates—bacon, scrambled eggs, toast, sausage and home fries. Havel cocked an eye up at him as he ate; the stocky, bearded man seemed to be hesitating, torn, as his guest mopped his plate with a piece of toast.

Which on short acquaintance I'd say is not his usual MO. I'd peg him for a can-do sort,
Havel thought.

Decision firmed behind the heavy bearded face. He looked around, and bent over to speak quietly:

“I would go right now, friend, if I were you. Or wait until more are leaving, so you can go together.”

Havel opened his mouth to ask a question, but Sarian shook his head and turned away.

“Aha,” Signe said, lifting a spoonful of fried pickled green tomatoes onto her plate. “Now
that
was interesting, bossman.”

Havel nodded. “And I think we should do precisely the opposite of what he advised. Take your time with breakfast, and we'll head out alone. If people are bunching up that way, the road'll be temptingly empty.”

“And we'll be trailing a broken wing.” Signe grinned back, but there was a tightness around her mouth.

Sarian didn't come to say good-bye as they left; a serious breach of good business sense with a newly won and valuable customer. Havel whistled silently as they left the Crossing Tavern's northernmost perimeter, marked by another set of signs nailed to a telephone pole. It was comforting to know that Will and the patrol would be hanging on their left, just out of sight to the west.

It was six miles to the edge of cultivation around Dayton, at the north end of the Dayton Prairie; two hours travel at the gentle walking pace they were using, much less if you pushed your mount. The grass and quick-growing bush were tall on either side of the road, turning most of the abandoned cars and trucks into mounds of vegetation; now and then bits of a burnt-out building showed above a similar hillock.

He frowned at the cars as the herd rumbled and clattered along; Charger's hooves clopped slowly, insects buzzed, and small fleecy clouds drifted through deep blue sky. In Bearkiller territory the dead vehicles hadn't just been pushed aside; they'd all been dragged off and systematically stripped of everything useful—particularly the leaf springs, invaluable for swords and knives and edge-tools of all sorts; they'd stored the surplus in old buildings, greased for protection, supplies sufficient for generations of smiths.

Then they were in a section where the fields had burned last fall, and the new grass was only knee-high, shot through with blue camas flowers. What had been a small store of some sort stood by the side of the road not far ahead to the left, and a line of willow and alder and oak on the right showed where Palmer Creek swung close. The two Bearkillers pretending to be ranchers cantered about, using shouts and waving lariats and occasionally the whirled end of a rope to remind the horses that spreading out through the rich meadow wasn't on the agenda for today.

“Heads up,” he said softly, as seeming chance took them closer together.

Adrenaline dumped into his bloodstream like a jolt of electricity in the old days, and he seized control of his breathing. Movement…

Two mounted figures…and three more behind them, and a dozen on foot. He looked right; sure enough, half a dozen more coming out of the fields there, angling in towards the road behind them. He reached into a saddlebag for his field glasses—carrying a pair of binoculars around was a rather too obvious way for someone of his pretended identity to invite robbery—and leveled them, turning the focusing ring with his thumb.

Aha.

“It's the guy from Crossing Tavern, the one with the cut-down sledgehammer,” he said. “Three guesses…Why waste time? It's Crusher Bailey, all right.”

Grinning now as he waved and whooped his men on, and the grin looked less friendly and less fake than his expression back at the wayside inn. The horse herd was nervous, tossing their heads and turning back and forth as shouting humans closed in from three sides.

“Why am I not surprised?” Signe said. “Wait a minute…Crusher…didn't he call himself
Grettir?
”

“Yeah?”

She slapped the heel of her palm on her forehead. “
That's
what I was trying to remember! Dad told me about it ages ago, when we were kids and he was reading us those old squarehead stories.” At his glance she went on: “It's what Grettir means in Old Norse.
Crusher.
You know how those Viking guys all had nicknames, Iron Fist or Blood Wolf or Skullsplitter or whatnot? There was a saga hero named Crusher—Starkad, Starkad Grettir.”

“Big chuckle, ha, ha, a bandit with some education,” Havel said. “He's probably going to try to get us to surrender, which gives us an opportunity. Kendricks! Ready!”

The apprentice threw back the tarpaulin that covered the back of the two-wheeled cart; below was a complicated piece of machinery, most of which consisted of coil springs from the suspensions of heavy trucks, all screwed down tight. In the middle of it all sat a rocket-shaped projectile. Kendricks flicked open the top of his lighter, an old-style model with a wick, alcohol reservoir and little steel wheel that ground against a flint. A quick motion of his thumb, and a pale blue flame topped it.

“Wait for it,” Havel said without looking around. “Wait for it…”

His right hand went over his shoulder for an arrow. Crusher's men were behind them, spread across the road, and getting closer to the right; Bailey himself was only fifty yards away ahead and northward, rising in the stirrups to cup his hands around his mouth and shout across the milling horses.

“Now!”

Kendricks touched his lighter to the stub of fuse on the side of the finned dart and then jerked a lever. There was a huge metallic
crunnng—WHUNNNG!
as the springs uncoiled, and the dart vanished skyward in a streak too fast for the eye to follow. At the top of its trajectory two seconds later there was a muffled
fump
as the little parachute deployed, and orange smoke billowed out a thousand feet above the surface of the Willamette.

Explosives didn't explode anymore. Lower-speed combustion, for example the type in a smoke flare, still worked like a treat.

Crusher Bailey had no leisure to watch. Even as the apprentice worked the machinery Ken Larsson had made, Larsson's daughter and Mike Havel drew their recurve bows to the ear. Horn and sinew and the thin sandwich of yew wood between them creaked as the curved staves bent into smooth C-shapes, and the long shafts slid backward through the arrow rests. Havel's bow drew at a hundred and ten pounds, and he'd worked with its like most days since the Change; Signe's was lighter, but she was an even better shot.

Whap-whap,
as the strings slapped the inside of their left forearms; the chain mail and leather absorbed most of the force, but not as well as the metal bracers he was accustomed to; they'd have bruises, if they survived the day. The broadheads twinkled as they blurred downrange, the curve of the fletching twirling them like rifle bullets. They covered the fifty yards to the bandit chief in less than a second.

Bailey had excellent reflexes, and he was moving even as the two Bearkillers raised their bows. He threw himself flat on his horse's mane as Signe's shaft went through the space his chest had occupied an instant before. Then he screamed, as Havel's sliced across the outside of his left thigh; screamed and threw himself out of the saddle and onto the ground. The man behind him jerked as Signe's arrow went through the space where Crusher had been and thumped into the center of his chest, smashed through the shirt of braided rawhide, through his breastbone and into his spine. Then he slid boneless out of the saddle—a shaft thrown by these heavy recurves would cut the best chain mail like cloth at close range, and it ignored anything less.

Plenty of people carried saddle bows these days, but not many had that sort of eye-punching accuracy from horseback, or could drive a shaft so hard.
That
required constant practice.

Shit. I wanted Crusher.

The highbinder was lying in the long grass, hidden from Havel by the same horse herd that prevented his men from charging right in, and he was screaming orders.

As the two adults shot, Hendricks had been busy too: he snatched up his bow with one hand, and flicked the carriage whip across the cart horse's back with the other.

“Make for the ruins!” Havel shouted.

The boy did just that, yelling and whacking the beast across the rump; the cart drove off the road, one wheel bouncing high and nearly throwing it over, then heaving and jouncing through the meadow. Havel turned his horse with thighs and balance and shot again, at the bandits who'd swung onto the road south of the ruins. A man screamed and began hopping around, waving an arm with an arrow through it, but things came back at the two Bearkillers as well—the unpleasant
whhht
of a crossbow bolt, and the whickering
whissst-whissst
of arrows. Most of the bandits carried blades or polearms, but at least half a dozen had missile weapons as well.

“Go!” Havel shouted, and leaned forward as he clamped his legs to Charger's sides.

Signe followed suit. The superbly trained warhorses broke into a gallop from a standing start, leaping the roadside ditch and breasting the tall grass in the field beyond. Havel turned in the saddle and shot three more times in the thirty seconds it took to reach the ruined building; two misses, and one hit a horse in the shoulder. The beast screamed, a huge hurt sound of bewildered, uncomprehending pain; that was one of the manifold evils the Change had brought back into the world—Humvees didn't shriek in agony when they got shot up.

They pulled up their mounts and got out of the saddles in a hurry. Signe slid to the ground like a seal down a wet rock, or like someone who'd been riding for fun since she was six. An instant later she had the two horses inside the gutted building; their eyes rolled and they snorted at the slippery linoleum under the layer of debris and dirt and sprouting weeds beneath their hooves, but they obeyed. Hendricks snatched things out of the cart and dove after her. Havel turned, saw the bandits trying to push their way through the crowd of horses from three directions, deliberately set himself in the archer's T.

The arrows punched out in a steady rhythm, whickering away in smooth shallow arcs blurred with motion; the bright midmorning sun glinted on their sharp-edged heads.

Snap.

A mounted man took one in the shoulder and started to shriek; he slid out of the saddle, then clutched at it as his feet touched the ground—if he went down here, a large herd of horses would walk all over him.