The Protector's War (65 page)

“You're really a very wicked man,” she said with a smile, after he explained. “Dreadful. A monster.”

“Part of my charm, darling.”

“Why do you think I married you?”

“You mean it
wasn't
the professor's salary and the faculty cocktail parties? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.”

He put his arm around her waist; they laughed together as they walked out the door and into the corridor.

 

Nigel Loring had seen many rivers, from the homely little streams of England to the Rhine and the Zambezi; before the Change he'd kayaked down the Amazon, and paddled his way up the Sepik in New Guinea—Sam Aylward had been with him, and insisted on calling it the “Septic” River, for good reason. The mile-wide Columbia Gorge was impressive even so. The water was bright blue this April day, with a wind out of the west beating the surface to whitecaps in the morning, dying away to a glassy calm as the day wore on. Black basalt cliffs closed in on either side, broken by the silver threads of waterfalls and bright-green ferns on the southern shore, then gave way to tall hills forested in somber firs and pines, towering thousands of feet above. When the galley's course brought it close to shore he could see sheets of purple lupin and bright yellow flowers he didn't recognize. And there were glimpses of Mt. Hood's perfect white cone to the south.

“Striking,” he said. “A land for giants.”

Norman Arminger nodded, apparently taking that as a personal compliment; there was pride in his eyes as he watched the landscape inch past. Some of the small settlements on the shore were abandoned; more were shrunken, but there was a lively traffic of fishing boats and sailing barges and the odd oared craft.

They all gave way as the Lord Protector's fleet went by, the galley
Long Serpent
in the lead, with thirty oars to a side, rowing
a scaloccio
with three men to each of the great shafts. Catapults squatted on turntables on the low plankedin forecastle and quarterdeck; the middle of the ship was open save for a cat-walk down the center. The long looms rose and fell, rose and fell, every blade striking the water at a precise angle and breaking free in a trail of spray, to the slow
boom…boom…boom…
of the hortator's mallets on the drumset under the forepeak. The rowers were big brawny men, hugely muscled, wearing only short leather pants, their torsos and shaven heads gleaming with sweat, silent save for the explosive
huuuuff!
of breath as they rose and fell, rose and fell with the rhythm of their work. Half a dozen boys went back and forth with canvas water bottles, directing a squirt into open mouths when they were called. The smell of the rowers was rank and somehow surprisingly dry, like oxen who'd been working in the sun. A score squatted on the forecastle, waiting to relieve the next section due for a rest.

“Row well, and live,” Loring murmured under his breath.

Classical reference,
he thought—though in fact the film had been wrong about that. Greek and Roman rowers were free men; galley slaves were a medieval and Renaissance invention. To his surprise, Norman Arminger caught the quote.

“No slaves,” the Protector said dryly, pausing as several attendants armed him. “That isn't really practical for warcraft, I've found.”

Nigel nodded; he'd seen the swords and axes and bucklers clipped to the bulwarks between the benches on the trip up from Portland. From the sewer smell, less fancy tow boats pulling barges loaded with troops and horses and supplies
did
have crews chained to their benches. They'd passed other arrangements, one where bicycle pedals drove a propeller, and one where a big windmill whirling amidships did the same. Probably they were too complex and failure-prone to be practical just yet. Or the Lord Protector just thought galleys made a good show.

“And now if you'll excuse me…unless you'd care to spar yourself?”

“Not just now, thank you,” Sir Nigel said.

Normally he tried to get in at least a little practice every day, usually with his son—who'd taught
him
the sword, after all—but Alleyne wasn't there. Wasn't with the flotilla, at all, although John Hordle was leaning on the railing not far away, left hand tapping idly on the long hilt of his sword. Loring didn't intend to let a potential enemy get a close-up look at his personal style with a blade. Or perhaps not so
potential
an enemy, either.

Nobody called Alleyne a hostage,
Nigel thought, with fury that didn't reach his face.
Not quite.

Arminger pulled the practice helm with its protective face screen over his head and nodded to the commander of his troop, a squat muscular man with cold blue eyes peering out of a face ugly with thick white scar tissue; that and the shaved head made it difficult to tell his age, but Loring estimated it at about forty.

“Salazar! Johnson!” Conrad Renfrew barked. Then to Arminger: “The usual reward, my lord?”

Arminger nodded again, taking up a practice sword—a yard of oak with an iron core, probably rather heavier than the two pounds or so of the real thing. The two young guardsmen did likewise. One was a little below six feet, the other a trifle above, one fair and one dark, but otherwise they were similar; in their early twenties, broad-shouldered, long-limbed, moving with deft ease in their throat-to-ankle armor despite the light pitch and roll of the deck.

“Let's see if either of you can win that horse,” the ruler of Portland said. “Salazar first.”

The man raised his shield and advanced; Arminger pivoted on his right heel as they circled, sword over his head with the hilt forward and blade back, the rounded top of the big kite-shaped shield up under his eyes. Then the younger man sprang. The thump and clatter of the match made good cover for a private conversation, especially when you added in the chuckle of water and the hoarse mass breathing of the rowers and the dull boom of the drum; and they both knew how to talk softly without obviously whispering. Loring leaned on the rail beside Hordle, his mild eyes blinking at the sun-sparkles off the water.

“Notice we're not on the same boat as Nobbes's folk,” Hordle said. “Keeping us separate on shore too, like, as much as he can without being too obvious about it.”

“He's no fool,” Loring said.

“Thinks highly of himself, though, just a bit,” Hordle said.

“I hope we can make something of that,” Loring replied.

“Think he'll scrag us, sir? If we get the VX for 'im.”

“I wouldn't put it past him,” Loring replied. “But I think he'll try to enlist us first.”

“But with Mau-Mau conditions.”

“Quite.”

That terrorist movement in Kenya had made its recruits break their own culture's taboos, acts so obscene and horrible that they felt cut off from everything but their new allegiance. They weren't the only ones who used that trick, either; it had the dual merit of securing loyalty and weeding out those with inconvenient scruples. Cannibal bands had done the same during the terrible period right after the Change.

I'm
almost
glad Maude didn't live this long. Things would be very awkward if she were here.

“Still, there's opportunities,” Hordle said.

His eyes took in the countryside.
And we've heard something about Mr. Arminger's enemies,
they both thought. Anyone who disliked the Lord Protector had to have something to be said for them, and it would be strange if men with their skills couldn't make an escape.
Which is why Alleyne is somewhere they can keep an eye on him.

Hordle sighed. They both knew that, too. His wide froglike slit of a mouth quirked at Sir Nigel.
He and I rescued you—now you and I will have to rescue him!

They looked up at the mountains to the south. A heliograph blinked from the top of one, a code but not Morse:
blink…blinkblink…blink-blink-blink…

They looked casually down at the water sweeping by. “That's quick. Six knots.”

And the heliographs would be quite quick enough to report our absence and order Alleyne killed.
Their eyes met.
We're going to have to be very careful about this.

“I'm sure the Lord Protector will have
nothing
to complain about for some time.”

 

The white water of the Columbia broke over the snagged ruins of Bonneville Dam with a toning roar that shook the world, the bright noon sun making the froth shine like cataracts of lace fringed with diamonds as it surged between the remaining fangs of ferroconcrete. Nigel Loring shaped a silent whistle; there was no doubt at all that things were simply
bigger
in this part of the world, starting with the mile-wide expanse of river. The dam itself spanned that breadth across an island; the central portion with the sluicegates was the core of the ruined portion. It wasn't hard to see why, either; the rusted wreck of a big river tug rested halfway through, prow high in the air. The huge barges it had been pushing lay tumbled before it at the base of the dam's low wall, except for one tilted against its side and showing the gravel that had been its cargo; the combined weight must have been thousands of tons, and traveling fast on the crest of a flood wave from the looks of it. What the steel-and-stone battering ram of the barges had begun, the wild water of eight years had continued, until the rapids were not much worse than they'd been before the river was tamed.

“Goddamned inconvenient,” Norman Arminger said from not far away, using the point of his wooden sword to indicate the broken dam and then lowering it to the deck. “For transport, that is.”

The two young men-at-arms he'd been sparring with stepped back as Arminger pulled off the practice helmet with its facial mask. Below it his flushed countenance ran with sweat, and he was breathing hard; he'd just spent a goodish while sparring in relays with two men who were at least twenty years his junior, trained to a hair, and obviously not holding anything back. Nigel Loring was moderately impressed; he wouldn't have lasted quite so long before tiring dangerously himself, but then he was in his fifties rather than the Protector's midforties. The standard of swordsmanship had been high as well, though the style was different from the one the royal forces used in England, rather more edge and less point, and more use of the bigger shield.

He looked at Hordle, and the big man nodded, seconding his impression:
Quite good, but not
quite
of the very first rank.

Arminger tossed his gear to an attendant and pointed to their left, towards the south bank and the locks. A swarm of men and animals and cranes labored around it; their shouts and the clatter of gears came faintly through the distance, until the unearthly scream of a water-powered saw grinding rock cut through the blurring thunder.

“Repairing and adapting the locks is taking
years.
It was a domino effect—dams started breaking up on the Snake in the first Change Year, and when one let go the flood would go downstream, picking things up as it went. But I've got the locks at the Cascades back in operation; those were easier, built in the nineteenth century. At least it's improving the salmon catch. That's been noticeable the last couple of years.”

I think the Protector is a lonely man,
Nigel mused, with cold appraisal.
Doesn't have many people he can talk to. And he probably thinks it's safe to talk to me, the simple straightforward soldier.

He'd been a soldier, yes. But a soldier of a particular sort; the SAS was
supposed
to operate behind enemy lines, and in contact with foreigners. You had to be a good judge of men, and not just of your own countrymen or the sort you'd invite to the Club.

Big Chinook salmon were thick in the water below the dam, their fins cutting through the smoother water below. Dozens leapt at the white torrents every second, falling back to rest and try once more or making it through the froth and into the solid surge above. Birds hovered and struck, ospreys and bald eagles and types he couldn't identify. A half-dozen substantial fishing boats were dipping nets slung out on booms, hauling up mounds of struggling silver.

They paused as the Protectorate's fleet came into view: sailing barges full of troops, horses, supplies; and more pulled against the current by rowing-tugs with fifteen oars a side. The Lord Protector's
Long Serpent
was something different, a real warship, long and low slung.

He looked around; the northern bank was hilly but fairly low, closer than most places on this enormous river; the south was steeper, rising to low mountains—or what the Yanks might call big hills, somewhere around two thousand feet or a little less—sparsely forested in pine. One about a quarter of a mile from the water held the turreted concrete-gray bulk of a castle on a shoulder spur. Banners flew from the turrets, and the drawbridge over the dry moat was down. Lances twinkled as toy-tiny figures trotted down towards the small town that lay beside the locks. You could cover the whole area to the other bank from there, with heavy trebuchets, and most of it with dart-throwers.