Dies the Fire (86 page)

The CORA fighters and camp followers gathered glaring in the dark chill of morning, bundled up in down jackets and muffled in wool scarves. Breath steamed. Enough could be seen of their faces to know their mood, though; some were bandaged, and all had lost friends or family in the swarming, confused fight through the Protector's burning fort.

“
String the bastards up!
” sounded again; the Bearkillers turned their horses' heads outward, and a few of the kilted clansfolk reached over their shoulders for arrows.

Havel opened his mouth. Before he could speak, another voice sounded—John Brown, the CORA delegate.

“Go on!” he shouted, waving his hands. “These folks fought for us—do you want to start a battle with them, too? Go on—go on back to your tents. We're civilized people here, by God; we're Americans, not a lynch mob. Git!”

Then the leathery bearded rancher turned to Havel. “Sorry about that.”

“No problem, but we'd better get under way,” Havel said.
Everyone's gotten a bit rougher-edged since the Change.

“Well, we've got the roadway through the fort cleared and the bridge is ready,” Brown said. “Pretty hot and smoky, though.”

Havel shrugged. “Well over half of them got out of the castle. We need to make sure of them before they get west to their other fort.”

Josh Sanders came up, leading Havel's horse. Havel swung into the saddle with a clink and rustle of chainmail; the horse was a strawberry roan mare, not quite as well-trained as Gustav. He quieted it and stroked a gloved hand down its neck.

“No sign of a rear guard?”

The Hoosier grinned. “Boss, once they bugged out of the castle, that bunch straggled so bad I'm surprised they managed to get
anyone
together. But they're closed up into one group now, more or less, and less the wounded they've been leaving behind. Stopped about two hours ago, but not for long is my guess. They remembered to take their bicycles, at least.”

“Good work, Josh,” he said. “Aywlard's people are in position?”

“Got into place about the time the fight was over here. That Brit's pretty damn good in the woods.”

Will Hutton was ready at the head of the Bearkiller column, a hundred armored riders with Sanders' scouts in a clump before, and their supply echelon on wagons and packhorses behind. Havel trotted down the column of fours and into position at the front beside Luanne Larsson, where she rode with the outfit's flag drooping from her lance in the still, cold air.

A sudden gust snapped it out, brown and red in the soot-laden breeze; humans coughed, and horses stamped and snorted, tossing their heads in a jingle of bridles.

Ahead was the column of smoke from the castle, bending towards them like a reaching hand. On either side the mountains reared steep and rugged; to the north the dawn sun gilded the snowpeaks, leaving the blue slopes below in shadow.

“This part ought to work fairly well,” he said.

Will Hutton nodded and spat thoughtfully aside. “Whole strategy feels sort of . . . odd, Mike.”

“Lady Juniper
is
odd.” Havel grinned. “And it's her idea. Yeah, it's not my own first impulse—I was always the kill-'em-all-let-God-sort-'em-out type by natural inclination, and God knows life is cheap these days—but I can see her point, long-term. And she put this whole deal together.”

He raised his arm and chopped it westward. With the sun at their backs, the long shapes of horse and rider lay before them, and the hooves trod the shadows down as the Bearkillers advanced. The honed edges of the lanceheads above caught the dawn light with a rippling sparkle like stars on the sea.

 

 

 

“Here,” Sam Aylward said.

West of Santiam Pass, Route 20 wound between forested hills that crowded close to the roadway. Eventually it swung north and east for a while before turning west and then south again, like a long U around an outthrust ridge of the mountains that reared ever higher to Three Fingered Jack on the north and Mount Washington to the south.

Creeks brawled down from the steep slopes on either hand; they were west of the Cascade crest here, and the extra moisture showed—more Douglas fir and western hemlock, less lodgepole pine. The forest was dense, dark green, seeming to wait eagerly for the heavy snows to come, breathing a cold clear scent of pine and moist earth.

The Englishman cocked an eye at the sky; about noon, not quite time for the party to begin, but getting there, and he didn't like the look of the clouds. It was chilly enough to make him think that might mean snow, too—they were four thousand feet up here, with wet air sliding in from the Pacific, and it was December, albeit only just.

Just enough to make me doubt me sanity, wearing this Jock skirt,
he thought wryly.

In fact, the kilt wasn't all that uncomfortable—the Jocks
had
worn them in all seasons in the Scottish Highlands, after all, with a climate that made western Oregon look like Barbados. The colors were good camouflage, and the boost to morale was more than worth it. Few of these people had been fighters before the Change, any more than they'd been farmers; wearing strange clothing helped them adjust to doing things strange to them.

There was a clatter and rustle as the Mackenzies moved into position; a lot of them were puffing from the night march in full gear, but nobody had fallen out. He grinned slightly to himself at the thought; after the past eight months, most of them were stronger and fitter than they'd ever been in their lives—Yanks had tended to lard before the Change, but he hadn't seen a fat one for months now.

Now if only they were better shots,
he thought.

About a dozen out of fifty were what he'd call passable archers, and as for the rest . . .

He looked up and down the stretch of road. There were four abandoned vehicles in sight, all shoved off the road—courtesy of the Protector's men when they moved in on Route 20—but one was impossible, a heavy truck. The other three included two ordinary four-doors and a Ford Windstar van, and should do nicely.

“That one, that one, that one, and put them there. Move your arses, Mackenzies!”

A platoon's-worth flung themselves on the vehicles. They weren't easy to move, with months for the transmission fluid to solidify, and resting on the rims of the flat wheels, but enough musclepower served. Once the cars were in place, more hands rocked them until they went over on their sides, spanning the whole width of the road and its verges, presenting their undersides to the enemy. Those would stop a crossbow bolt well enough, and they were too high to easily climb over. Of course, that meant they were also too high for defenders to shoot or stab over the top.

“Right, get rocks and dirt and logs; get a fighting platform in behind them,” Aylward went on. “Move it!”

The section leaders gathered around him, shaggy in their war cloaks, leaves and twigs pushed into the netting of the hoods drawn up over their bowl helmets.

“Look up there,” Aylward said, pointing northwest up the road. “We're a good five hundred yards down from that curve. I want two sections”—eighteen archers—“behind the barricade. The rest of you, get your people up on the slopes either side—no more than fifty yards total, but I want each and every one to have a good tree to hide behind and a clear field of fire. Go do it!”

Everyone did. Aylward watched, which made him itch; circumstances and the growth of the Mackenzies had pushed him into an officer's boots, much against his will. He comforted himself by walking back up the road and looking to either side. You
couldn't
see far; the verges at the edge of the road's cleared swath were thick with Pacific rhododendron, vine maple and bear grass.
His
eye could trace the Mackenzies settling in, but once they were motionless, only knowing where they were let him see them.

“Good enough,” he muttered to himself. “In a couple of years, they'll be
bloody
good, if I do say so myself.”

A check behind the barricade showed that everyone there had a good step, high enough to shoot over the metal, but convenient for ducking down. They also all had a spear to hand, if things got close and personal; he'd picked two sections with people who'd fought the Protector's men back before Lughnassadh. . . .

“Christ, they've got me doing it,” he muttered to himself again, as he climbed up into the woods. “It didn't even occur to me to think
August.
”

There was a little more work for him here. The archers were spaced about three paces apart, with a tree or bush to conceal each—and with the hoods of their cloaks pulled up over their helmets and shadowing their faces, they were
hard
to see. A few had picked spots that would block their fields of fire, though. He patiently corrected those, with a quick explanation why and how to check—he wanted them to do better next time—and made sure that each had two bundles of extra arrows from the packhorses, which made a hundred and twenty arrows altogether, counting those in the quivers. Most of the archers had a dozen or so pushed point-down into the dirt or a convenient fallen log, which was a good trick—faster than reaching back over your shoulder.

“Listen for the horn calls, lad,” he repeated again and again, or variations, with the odd slap on the shoulder. “Just do what you've practiced, and it'll all come right.”

All done, he settled down to wait behind a hundred-foot-tall lodgepole pine on the west side of the road, taking out a hardtack and gnawing quietly at it, his bow across his knees. It took him half an hour to eat it—if you went too fast, you risked damage to your teeth, which since the Change was no joke. It was about two o'clock when the scout stationed at the northward curve of the road stepped out onto the pavement, waved her bow overhead, then vanished back into the undergrowth.

“That's that, then,” Aylward said, standing and dusting a few crumbs off the front of his jack.

 

 

 

“How many's that?” Havel asked, as they stopped to pick up a wounded straggler.

“Twenty,” Luanne said. “Not counting the three deaders.”

Havel made a
tsk
sound as he looked at the steep slopes on either side. In theory the Protector's men could have set an ambush; Josh's scouts were only a couple of hundred yards ahead, and the only way to get a horse into the forest would be to dismount and lead it. The enemy still had half again his numbers. In practice . . .

“The Protector thought he had a real army because they had weapons and ranks,” he said to her father. “Big mistake.”

Will Hutton nodded; he had his helmet pushed back, and now he pulled it back down by the nasal bar.

“Sure was,” he said, looking as a Bearkiller stretcher party carried the wounded prisoner back towards the ambulance wagons. An abandoned bicycle lay tumbled not far away.

“What was that you said about these here?”

“Low unit cohesion,” Havel said with a grin. “Aka, bugging out on your buddies. Gunney Winters would have been livid. Still, they may improve with time, if we let them.”

He looked around, matching the terrain to the maps. “All right, people!” he said, louder. “Dismount by squads, water and feed the horses, and final equipment check. We're going to be caught up to them pretty soon.”

“Timing's going to be tricky,” Hutton said. “Don't want too much of a battle goin' before we get there.”

Havel shrugged. “Well, that wasn't Lady Juniper's plan,” he said. “We'll see what happens.”

 

 

 

Aylward made a sound of disgust between his teeth. “Straight into it,” he said contemptuously.

“You'd rather they were alert?” someone muttered.

He snorted; the Mackenzies had learned to do what the one in charge told them when a fight was brewing, but they weren't long on deference. And they
did
love to talk; probably picked it up from Juniper and her original crew.

The column of Protectorate troops halted and milled around when they saw the barricade; through binoculars he could see some of them looking over their shoulders.

There was shouting and shoving before they all got off their bicycles; eventually a banner eddied forward, black with the lidless eye in red, hanging from a crossbar on the pole. The enemy opened out into a deep formation, sixteen across and eight or nine deep, and began to trot forward; the man beside the flag had a plumed helmet, and was almost certainly the leader—the baron, in Protector Arminger's terminology. Besides the plume and the position, he was wearing a chain mail hauberk, and that was officer's garb in the Portland Protective Association's forces.

Probably
has
to lead from the front this time,
Aylward thought.
Or the others won't follow at all.

Lady Juniper's plan depended on demoralization. It was time to help that along. . . .

He rose, throwing a wisp of dried grass in the air to gauge the wind direction, and looking at the extremely helpful banner to do the same for the target area. Seventy-five yards, give or take a foot; not too far . . .

“Now,” he said, throwing off his cloak and plucking an arrow out of the ground to set it on the string of his war bow.