“No one did,” Walker said, remembering the smooth low cut in the fields outside the settlement. “A machine did it. So the fighting men here didn’t need to. And if they’re gone even from this pissant little place close to the frontier—”
Isketerol’s eyes bulged. “The Fiernans could be mobilizing
all
their fighting men—right now, while we thought they were still working on the harvest!”
Walker turned and walked up to the top of the embankment, facing north, unshipping his binoculars, and looking carefully from horizon in the east to horizon in the west until he caught the
blink . . . blink . . .
from the hilltop two miles away.
“What
is
that?” the Iberian asked.
“Heliograph. Signals by flashing lights off a mirror in code. With good binoculars, it’s almost as fast as radio—and harder to detect.” He had a continuous radio watch kept on the equipment
Yare
had brought over; a bicycle rig for charging batteries had been part of the cargo. “And we, my friend, have been suckered. Let’s torch this shitheap and get going. Time to get the army together.”
Isketerol nodded thoughtfully. “Perhaps . . . we should take some, ah, what’s the word,
precautions
?”
Walker nodded. “Just in case.”
Andy Toffler swore softly under his breath as he stooped, pushing the goggles up on his forehead.
Bad one,
he thought. The buildings and grain were all burning, and the raw harsh scent made him cough as he flew through it. Lower, and he could see bodies lying between the burning huts, and more scattered outside the enclosure. Some of them were moving.
“GHU
here. Hamlet has definitely been destroyed,” he said. “Doesn’t look like much is left. Over.”
“Central here. Any sign of wheel tracks?”
“That’s negative, Central. Ground’s too hard anyway. I’m going in.”
“Negative on that. Return to base. Over.”
“Sorry, transmission breaking up. Over.”
He eased the ultralight down, into the stubble field next to the hamlet. The soft balloon wheels touched as he flared the nose up a little, killing speed, and the machine ran itself to a stop in scarcely twelve feet. There was a shotgun in a scabbard on the frame next to his seat. He racked the slide and made his way cautiously toward the fires.
“Damn,” he said softly. “Gawd damn.”
The first thing he ran into was sheep, savagely hacked and stabbed, as if by someone in a very bad mood. Then people, together as if they’d been herded into a bunch. Women mostly, and some children. A lot of the women lying on their backs naked, with their throats cut, or curled around a spear wound. Toffler swallowed a mouthful of spit and made himself look at the ground. In the stretch about the hamlet’s embankment there was sign of horses—dung, and the imprint of a shod hoof where one of them had stepped in it. More bodies just within the wall, these looking as if some of them had gone down fighting. Many of them had Nantucket-style crossbow bolts in them, or the broken stubs, or gaping holes where they’d been cut out for reuse.
“Walker,” Toffler said, as if the word made his mouth feel dirty.
The heat within the enclosure was savage, as the wooden frames of the buildings went up. Walls collapsed, and he could hear voices . . . and there was
nothing
he could do.
“God damn me if there isn’t,” he muttered, and turned on his heel.
The track of the cattle was obvious even on this hard ground, pointing southeast toward the lower wooded ground and the river valley. He ran back toward the ultralight and flung himself into the seat, ignoring the faint squawking from the headphones of the radio. The run was downhill and into the wind; the little fabric-and-struts aircraft hurled itself aloft as if angels were pulling on strings from the cloudless sky. Toffler took it recklessly low, the tricycle undercarriage virtually brushing the tops of the big oaks and beeches. He remembered things from his boyhood in the knob country of Kentucky.
Driving cattle like that, you’d have to . . . yes!
A faint track, more like a deer trail than a road—just barely visible through the lush late-summer leaves. They couldn’t have gone far, even by the plodding standards of this abortion of an aircraft—oh, God, for his Phantom and a mixed load of snake and nape! Nothing like white phosphorus and napalm for chastising the evildoers. He did have a helmet with a holder for a pair of binoculars. He used it, and blurred closeness appeared.
There
. Cattle, and men on horseback, glimpsed in flickering instants through the leaves and branches. He throttled back the engine and pushed up the glasses with a
snick,
ghosting down through the air as quietly as he could. His left hand held the yoke while his right was busy with the racked glass bombs by his seat, unlatching the safety fastener and making ready. They’d put in some improvements since he flew against the Olmecs, including a friction primer and fins to guide the fall. Plus he’d practiced.
Ahead, the enemy were coming out into a small almost-clearing, littered with the trunks of dead trees and briers, grass, brush—second growth. The herd of small hairy cattle bawled and churned with panic at being driven so fast from their accustomed range, and even expert herdsmen were having their hands full. His eyes flicked back and forth; forty, fifty men, pehaps a few more. No chariots. They were all on horseback, riding with regular saddles and stirrups, leading packhorses as well. All in metal armor . . .
Jesus, maybe that’
s Walker himself down there!
Ease back on the throttle, engine noise sinking to a low buzzing drone. The ultralight was almost like flying a parachute; when you headed into the wind the stall speed was near zero.
Careful. If the wind dies down you could drop like a rock.
Closer, closer, coming down as if he were falling along an inclined plane. A few of the men had time to look up at the last moment.
Snap
. The first bomb soared away in an arc, trailing smoke. It shattered a dozen feet up on the trunk of a sapling and fire sprayed in all directions. Horses went berserk, and men tumbled on the ground screaming as clinging flame ran under their armor.
Toffler rammed the throttle home and hauled the nose of the little arrowhead-shaped craft skyward, banking.
Sorry about the horses,
he thought. This time he came in fast and level, adjusting by eye.
Long way from computerized radar bombsights, aren’
t we.
“Eyee-yeeeeee-
haaaa
!” he screamed, a yell his Rebel great-grandfather might have used when he charged behind Nathan Bedford Forrest. “Take that, you motherfuckers!”
Snap. Snap
.
Snap.
More of the bombs tumbled away and slashed knives of flame across the clearing. Cattle scattered into the woods, and horses. Men died, and the brush itself was catching alight. This late in summer it might well turn into a full-fledged forest fire. Then something winked bright at him from the ground.
Pttank!
A hole appeared in the aluminum framing not far from him, with a fleck of sparks that licked his own neck in stinging fire. Hands and feet hit yoke and pedals with automatic skill, and the ultralight jinked from side to side with the agility of a hummingbird.
Crack. Crack. Pttank!
Another hit, and gasoline was leaking from the tank behind him.
“Uh-oh,” he muttered, pushing the throttle forward to the stops.
I know what uh-oh means,
he thought.
Uh-oh means “I fucked up.
”
Walker fired a last round on the off chance, then lowered the rifle and looked around. A scream died off into a gurgle and then silence as a comrade’s knife gave a man burned over half his body the mercy stroke.
“How many?” he called. “Let each man answer his name.”
They did, as horses were caught and brought under control. Three dead, five badly wounded, another half-dozen burned to some degree. And the woods around them were going up . . . while the men looked at him. The smell of singed hair and burned flesh was heavy, and heat prickled sweat across his skin under the armor.
“That flying thing can kill you, but no deader than a spear,” he said quietly. “I warned you that we would be making war against wizards . . . but my magic drove it off.”
“It
flew,
lord. A great bird, with a man in its talons.”
“The man ruled it. I’ve flown so myself, in the past.”
Murmurs of awe. He went on: “Are you men and warriors? Do you fear death because it wears a new face?”
Of course you do
, he knew. But they couldn’t possibly admit or show it, and that put new strength into them. They might have fled screaming a few minutes before if he hadn’t fought back, but now they would be all the fiercer for that moment of weakness.
“Ohotolarix,” he said. “Rig horse litters for the ones too badly wounded to walk.”
The war band grew busy. Isketerol got his horse under control and led it over.
“
That
must have been shadowing me all the time I moved against the
Eagle,
” he said bitterly. “That’s how they knew my attack was coming. Why haven’t they used it to drop death from above before?”
“At a guess, they only have the one. And probably they were saving it for a surprise,” Walker said tightly. He clicked the magazine out of the rifle and inserted a fresh one. “It’s too low and slow to be a great threat if there’s someone with a rifle waiting.”
Which means I have to black out Walkerburg against air raids, and keep Cuddy and one of the Garands there.
“Oh, but there’s payback time coming.”
“There he is!”
Swindapa reined in and stood in the stirrups. Beside her Marian lowered her binoculars and passed them across. The Fiernan focused them. Yes, the flying thing had landed, and Toffler lay unmoving in the harness. The air of a summer afternoon enfolded her, warm and sweet with the smells of horse and crushed grass, but she shivered a little.
The party urged their horses into a trot and then a gallop. Even then she enjoyed that a bit; it was like being a bird, flying to the drumbeat of the hooves. The horses blew and stamped as they reined in, and the American physician ran across to the injured man.
“Alive!” he said, and others crowded around to help him lower the man to a blanket. “Cracked rib, hole in his side—lost a lot of blood.”
He looked up, hands busy and red. “Who’s Type O?”
Several hands went up, and one of the volunteers dismounted and lay down beside the injured man, baring her arm. Swindapa looked over at Marian, remembering how they’d been joined that way on
Eagle,
after the battle with the Jaguar People. The black woman was frowning at the flying thing, leaning close to examine it.
“Thirty ought six,” she said. “Or near enough. One of those Garands Walker had with him. Probably him, then. Smith, Valenz, you take six and stay with the medic and Toffler. Message to forward HQ, we need a wagon, a mechanic, spare parts, and reinforcements. The rest of you, follow me.”
She drew the pistol at her side. Swindapa brought up the crossbow that hung at her knee, checking to make sure the quarrel was seated properly, and noticed the others doing the same. They spread out into a line across the fields and cantered slowly forward, examining the ground as they went, checking every hollow and patch of trees. In one small copse they found a body, a woman lying facedown in the litter of oak leaves and acorns, not far from a spring that bubbled slowly out of a moss-lined hollow.
Swindapa dismounted. The body was cool but not stiffened, and there was a wound under the ribs, and blood turning black all down the side and flank. Despite the shade, flies were busy already, walking over drying eyeballs and swarming around the rent flesh.
She would have been very thirsty
, the Fiernan girl thought sadly, with a touch of anger like a bronze gong rung far away.
So she was crawling to the water.
She closed the staring eyes, then brought her head up sharply at a sound. A
squeaking
sort of sound. . . .
“Wait,” she said when Marian motioned impatiently. “Wait.”
Casting back and forth, she caught a smell familiar to anyone who’d grown up around infants. She followed it, and another squeaking sound. The baby was swaddled in a pair of wool shawls, hidden in the roots of a half-fallen oak. She opened the bundle, cleaned the infant and her hands with leaves and springwater—it was a girl, she saw—and rewrapped it.
“The mother must have run this far with it,” she said to Marian. “It’s not hurt, just hungry.”
Marian nodded grimly. “You’d better stay here with it, then.”
“I will not!” Swindapa said hotly. Then, remembering she was supposed to keep the
discipline
: “Ma’am.”
Marian snorted; the Fiernan could see her smile struggling to break free, and wondered again why she kept the lovely thing caged so often. It should fly like a bright bird.
“All right then,” she said. “Let’s be on the alert, people.”
They rode farther. The low smoldering told them the fire had had its way with the hamlet. Swindapa looked down in bewilderment at the dead sheep; somehow they seemed almost as bad as the people. Ravens rose in a protesting storm of black wings as the horses came near, except for a few too busy with their feasting.
“Why . . . why kill like this?” she said.
“Because they were interrupted, at a guess,” Marian said, her face like something carved from basalt. “That made them angry. Stevenson, Hamid, Cortelone, scout the enclosure. Everyone else, keep your eyes moving.”
They did, but nothing moved. Nothing but the wind drifting scraps of bitter smoke across the sun-faded fields, and the grass, and birds and insects. One of the Americans raised his crossbow and shot a raven perched on a body and trying for an eyeball; it died in a spatter of blood and long glossy feathers, and that made her feel worse. The baby fretted.