The Protector's War (66 page)

The town had a wall under construction—timber forms for the concrete, and he could see wheelbarrows of head-sized rock fill going up board ramps.

“Transportation chokepoint,” he said to Arminger. “But you must have a threat nearby?” The castle would have been expensive.

“The Free Cities of Yakima,” Arminger said. “North of here. They survived the Change annoyingly well, all that irrigated land, and they've been even more annoyingly independent since.”

Nigel nodded.
Which leaves the Columbia as a long, thin corridor of your territory between hostile forces to the north and south.

 

Crossing Tavern, Willamette Valley, Oregon

May 12th, 2007 AD—Change Year Nine

 

“Not exactly,” Mike Havel said judiciously, methodically demolishing another fried egg and loading more hashbrowns on his plate. “He holds the Hood River Valley and the Mount Hood country. It's Renfrew's fief—he's Count of Odell, as well as grand constable of the Association.”

Juniper pursed her lips. “Even so, he's not going to send many men much farther east than that, not for long, not while we're at his backs. The Yakima towns are safe as long as we stand—not that they've ever helped
us,
the creatures.”

“Don't know how long the Pendleton folks can hold him off, now that they're fightin' amongst themselves,” Hutton observed.

“Or he could be relying on those castles,” Havel said. “Sorry, Sir Nigel. Old strategic discussion.”

Loring nodded. “We saw that—”

 

Near Boardman, Columbia Valley, Oregon

April 12th, 2007—Change Year Nine

 

The small earthwork fort had been in a strong position, near the crest of a low hill, with a canal between it and the Columbia, and a stretch of irrigated farmland dark-green against the lighter olive of the higher land southward. The hilltop position hadn't helped it, or the people living in the little town near it. Bodies lay tumbled between the burnt-out snags of frame houses and double-wide trailers, or in the empty corrals. The corpses had been here for several days and that made unsightly tumbled death worse; despite the coolish weather the meat-gone-off stink was fairly bad, sweet and musky and foul at the same time, like having rancid spoiled soup spilled down the back of your throat. Nigel Loring had been fairly case-hardened even before the Change, and he had watched the death of a world after it. He still let his eyes slide slightly out of focus, which was easy for him and one of the few advantages of advancing years and the rock dust in that wadi long ago. From the look of things, by no means all of the people had died fighting, or quickly. Many still bore the broken-off stubs of arrows, or lay near the black fan of blood left when sword or ax struck. Some of them had been clumsily scalped—the whole of the hair removed, rather than the proper coin-sized patch, the work of someone who'd heard about scalping but never seen the real thing done in the old style. Some of the bodies were very small. Flies buzzed in clouds, also not as bad as they would have been in high summer, but bad enough.

The local man cursed at the sight; his horse shifted uneasily under him. They were well outside the Portland Protective Association's territory now, and they'd picked up local auxiliaries from one of the several warring parties ripping up northeastern Oregon. Sheriff Bauer had sixty riders with him, a wild-looking crew and mostly younger than his thirty-odd. Like him they wore crude helmets of hammered sheet metal, small shields—most of them with metal covers cut from old traffic signs—and breastplates of leather boiled in wax or tallow and picked out with riveted straps of metal on the more vulnerable points. Their weapons were horn-and-sinew recurve bows, knives, and heavy-bladed sabers that looked like scaled-up machetes slung from their belts or over their shoulders.

“It's them murdering redskin devils,” Bauer said; the remarks from his followers tended more to scatology. Then he looked up sharply as Arminger snorted, and barked: “You think that's
funny,
mister?”

“No, no, not at all, Sheriff Bauer,” Arminger said, rather obviously fighting down a smile, and holding up a hand when his guards bristled at the local leader's tone. “It's just…that I've never actually heard anyone
say
‘murdering redskin devils' before. Not…not in real life, that is.”

The leader of the horsemen visibly restrained himself.
Arminger can't resist taunting,
Loring thought.
Bad tactics, Lord Protector. You need this man.

The sheriff's restraint was hard won, but it was there. The Protector's personal guard probably helped, twenty knights in their black mail, mounted on big glossy-coated horses. The little army of four hundred men marching along the graveled road up the slope behind helped even more, their spears neatly aligned and glittering in the spring sunshine, the ripple of lancepoints, slung crossbows swaying, the beat of booted feet and ironshod hooves. Light carts followed behind, some carrying supplies; a few bore dart-throwers on two-wheeled carriages. The roadway was gullied in spots where flash floods had struck or culverts blocked, and some of the bridges were down, but it was still passable for wheeled traffic if you weren't in a tearing hurry.

“I suggest you go look for the, ah,
murdering redskins,
Sheriff,” Arminger said. “Take some of my scouts with you.”

The sheriff did; the scouts were on range-stock quarter horses, lightly armed with horn bow and sword and dagger, wearing only mesh-mail vests and open-faced helmets beside their wool-and-leather uniforms. They spread out in a broad web and trotted off; Bauer's riders shook themselves out into clumps and bands and straggled away after them over the rolling country eastward, some of them whooping and showing off with riding tricks, standing in the saddle for a moment, or running along beside their trotting horses and leaping back up.

“What are they fighting about?” Loring asked, as the Protector and his men fell in at the head of the column, heading eastward and a little south of the river.

“Who's to rule, essentially,” the lord of Portland said. “This is harder country to make a living off than the Willamette, particularly without powered farming machinery or pumps or hybrid seed or fertilizers. And there were more survivors here initially, so the rare good bits like this irrigated land are precious. It's just sinking in that the only way to avoid a lifetime of very, very hard work is to skim off somebody else's hard work and nobody wants to volunteer to be skimmed. That's it when you boil it down and subtract the personal feuds and the slogans.” He smiled. “I've acquired quite a few valuable followers from around here in the past year or so.”

One of the Protectorate scouts rode up: a small, wiry young man on a light, fast horse; the binoculars at his saddlebow marked him as an officer.

“About three miles that way, my lord, and coming fast when they don't get in each other's way,” he said. “Four hundred strong, give or take fifty. The locals are mixing it in with them, but not doing too well.”

He pointed eastward and offered a folded map with his thumb marking a place. The Protector's guard captain grunted and glanced a question; the Protector gave a slight jerk of his head, and a volley of orders and trumpet calls followed. The force from the west shook itself out from column into a line that straddled the road—blocks of spearmen alternating with crossbows, with the lancers on the right where the ground was more open. The men's faces were mostly blankly impassive under the helms, sweat cutting runnels through the road dirt; a few grinned eagerness or the semblance of it, and a few others looked tightly nervous.

Arminger smiled and reached for the helmet slung at his saddlebow. “And I think you might want to suit up, Sir Nigel.”

And I don't like the looks he's been giving me,
Loring thought.
I think that his lady wife may have been giving him advice before we left.

He swung down from the saddle while John Hordle acted as squire and helped him into his suit of plate. He'd been wearing only the back-and-breast for the road, which was one advantage it had over the chain hauberks the Portlanders used; you could shed part of it without taking everything off. As the big young man helped strap the bevoir—the chin protector—to the breastplate, he whispered in the older Loring's ear—he had to lean far down to do it, anyway: “I don't feel right about fighting for this git, sir.”

Nigel nodded as he lowered the sallet helm over his head, tested that his scalp fitted snugly in the padding, fastened the chinstrap and flicked the visor down and then up again.

“Think of it as fighting
against
the people who did
that,
Hordle,” he said, inclining his head back in the direction of the village and the little fort.

“Ah. That's so, sir.”

Loring had had a month to get used to the horse, and vice versa, and it had been well-trained for years before. It knew what the clank of armor meant, and even more what Hordle's deft fingers portended when they fitted the peytral to the leather straps on its breast and the chamfron to its face. The big yellow gelding tossed its head and mouthed the bit, lips blowing out over the great square teeth, a puff of dust coming up from the road as it stamped its foot, along with a dry earthy smell under the hard, musky, horse sweat and oiled leather and the sharp scent of metal. Medieval men-at-arms had ridden entire stallions, but that was taking machismo to absurd lengths and Pommers had plenty of aggression. Loring settled himself in the massive war saddle with its high cantle and cradling saddlebow, steel-shod feet braced in the long stirrups. Hordle handed the reins of his own stout cob to a helper who led it to the rear and strung his long bow with a wrench and a twist and a push of his hip.

“The real old-fashioned way,” he said, reaching over his right shoulder to flip the cover off the top of his quiver. “Always makes me feel me English roots, as King Charlie says.”

“Not really,” Loring said, grinning down at the calm, round red face by the poleyn that covered his right knee. “Victorian roots, at best. They didn't use back quivers at all when the longbow was in flower. In flower the first time, I should say. They used arrow bags, or pushed them through the belt.”

“Sodding fools, then,” Hordle grunted. “I mean, where's your bloody right hand, when you've loosed the string? Over your right shoulder, in course.”

Then he began to whistle to himself, softly and cheerfully. Nigel recognized the tune, a jaunty little ditty with a chorus that went:

The Protector's force halted just behind the crest of a low rise; the dust their hobnailed boots had raised drifted on ahead of them, spreading and falling in a khaki-colored mist. It was a bit nostalgic for Nigel Loring, given the amount of time he'd spent in dry dusty places before the Change. The command group and their guests came forward a few more paces, enough to put their heads over the ridge and reveal the slopes beyond. Other plumes of dust covered the expanse of scrubby grass tufts and sagebrush ahead of them, where knots of men fought, with only an abandoned farmhouse and trees that had died when the pumps failed to break the monotony. Men and horses were insect-small at a thousand yards or better, vanishing into little hollows and then appearing again, the clatter of weapons like faint memory, a twinkle of edged metal throwing sun-bright blinks through the curtain of powdery soil hammered up by the hooves. Arrows arched between galloping clumps and saddles were emptied, or horses went down thrashing and shrieking; then bared steel crashed on steel, thudded on shields or armor, smacked home in flesh.

The chaotic swirling suddenly took form: Sheriff Bauer's force was riding pell-mell for the ridge, dropping the odd wounded man or injured horse behind; the pursuers clumped together more tightly as they followed, their whoops and screeches loud even over the thunder of hooves. Fewer arrows slanted out from either force; their quivers were mostly empty, and neither had the organization for resupply.

Loring leveled his own binoculars. His brows rose behind them. Bauer's men had looked wild enough; those they fought were…
Well, painted savages, perhaps,
he thought. Feathers in the braided hair or feather bonnets, fringed beaded leathers, face paint. Weapons and gear looked very similar to those of Bauer's men under the ornamentation, though some were bare to the waist.

Hmm. Not all really Indians, unless that one's bleaching his hair. Including his chest hair.

The sheriff's men managed to put some distance between themselves and their pursuers, spurring their horses ruthlessly.

The Indians probably think they're heading for that little fort,
Loring mused, as the defeated men dashed by, some clutching wounds, some fleeing mad-eyed and heedless, but most reining in and turning their horses a hundred yards behind the Protector's force. The medics with the baggage train saw to their wounds; servants brought canvas water bags and bundles of arrows. Bauer himself paused only for a drink and to let the water run over his upturned face, then cantered back to Arminger's side.