Dies the Fire dtf-1

by S. M. Stirling

  Crack.

  Havel struck again, with his left palm this time. The man spun to the ground and hugged it, rising only when Havel encouraged him with the toe of his boot.

  “Now, where were we?” Havel said, when the bowmaker was back on his feet, swaying a little. He went on, his voice flatly cold: “Yeah, we were talking about how a real man acts. Reuben, now, he tried to defend his mother against long odds, which is a pretty good example. God knows where he learned it, since he didn’t get the idea from you! I think we’ve established that a real man doesn’t punch little kids in the face, though. Haven’t we? I’m waiting for an answer, Billy.”

  “Yes, Lord Bear.”

  “Now let’s move on to the subject of how a real man treats his wife. A real man doesn’t slap even a ten-dollar hooker around, if he’s got any self-respect, much less hurt his own woman. Much less ten times over the mother of his kids. A real man busts his ass to feed his family, fights for them if he has to, dies for them if he has to. And he treats his wife with respect every day of his life, treats her like a queen-the queen of the home she makes for their children.”

  Crack. Crack.

  Havel struck again with both sides of his open hand, forehand and back. Waters slumped to his knees, blood pouring from his nose and the corners of his mouth where the lips had cut on his teeth.

  “Chuck that bucket of water on him,” Havel said, without looking around.

  Someone did, and awareness came into Waters’s eyes once more. Havel bent, forearm on thigh, so that he could speak close to the man’s face, more quietly this time.

  “By now, you probably feel a bit hard-done-by, Billy. Just remember this: anytime you want, you can be treated with respect by me and everyone in the outfit. All you have to do is earn it! Now get out of my sight. Go puke out the booze and clean yourself up. I’m giving you this one last chance, for your kids’ sake.”

  Havel turned to the assembly as Waters scuttled away. His voice was hard and pitched to carry, but calm: “I cannot abide trash behavior. I will not tolerate it in the Bearkillers. Remember, we’re supposed to look out for each other; so don’t let this sort of thing get started. Lights-out in an hour, people. We’d all better get ready to turn in.”

  The crowd dispersed, murmuring, as he walked back towards the command tent; most of the murmurs were approval. More than a few slapped him on the back; he answered with polite nods, but stayed wordless. Signe followed, leading their horses.

  “Mike-” she said.

  He turned with a wry smile. “Sorry, askling, but I’m not fit company for man or beast right now.”

  The smile turned into a grimace. “I feel like I need a bath-and a strong drink, to get the taste of that out of my mouth.”

  She smiled and leaned forward, kissing him with brief gentleness. “Well,” she said, “It’s not as if either of us is going to fly off to the Cote d’Azur tomorrow, right? What say we make a date for the next nice sunset?”

  He grinned suddenly. “I’ll look forward to it.”

  “And you’ll treat me like a queen, hey?” she asked, smiling impishly.

  He swept an elaborate courtly bow. “And so will everyone else,” he said. “If I have anything to say about it.”

  When she’d left, he stood smiling his crooked smile for a moment.

  “And maybe, just maybe, I will,” he murmured to himself.

  For Ken Larsson was right; he had been very damned lucky indeed, so far. And…

  “How did your dad put it, Signe? Yeah. People live by myths, but myths change… the Change threw ‘em all up for grabs. And the first king was a lucky soldier.”

  Twenty-six

  “Complicated plan,” Sam Aylward whispered. “Depends on the enemy doing what we want.”

  Juniper nodded. “It also allows a good chance for us to run away if things go bad,” she replied softly, concentrating on the view through her binoculars.

  “It also depends on the Sutterdown folk doing what they promised.”

  “Ni neart go cur le cheie,” she said. “There’s no strength without unity. We can’t do this by ourselves.”

  She lay at the edge of a patch of woods that covered a low rise in the valley floor. Beyond that was a narrow strip of plowed land grown with weeds, earth turned before the Change but never seeded. Beyond that was a wire fence, now down and derelict, and a narrow two-lane road; beyond that was a fair-sized wheatfield, reaped but with the grain still lying in windrows, and beyond that a line of trees along the irregular course of a small creek.

  The sight of the grain lying out disturbed her, even though the land was well beyond the clan’s borders and into Sutterdown territory. Every night it lay out was one more for the birds and animals to eat more, and the risk of it spoiling was unbearable. In fact, she could see jays at it now, and crows, and a rabbit hopping through looking for good bits.

  The waste of war, she thought. Bad enough before the Change. Worse now.

  She laid the glasses down and turned her head, looking through a fringe of cloth. The long hooded poncho they’d christened a war cloak was light fabric, splotched in gray-green-brown, and sewn over with loops that held twigs or served to break her outline; Sam called it a ghillie suit. All the Mackenzie fighters wore one, and even though she knew where they were, she could see no more than a few-Dennis, lying with the ax blade beside his head, and John Carson beyond him.

  The Englishman had taught them that trick; he was willing to give advice, or train, or fight, or even lead a small group, but not to command overall, though they’d offered him that. What had he said?

  Hasn’t been an Aylward ranked higher than sergeant in seven centuries, Lady. I wouldn’t want to break the tradition.

  She didn’t look behind herself.The horses were safely on the other, eastern side of the woodlot; Eilir and half a dozen other kids too young to fight but old enough to be trusted held them, ready for retreat. If worse came to worst, most of her people could probably flee… but she didn’t expect that.

  I’ve never felt like this outside the Circle, she thought, but the musing was distant. It wasn’t that she was brimming with confidence; she just… waited.

  The first Sutterdown men to come by were running, and for real; weaponless, some leaking blood, but not too badly to keep them from making good speed. They came down the road and vanished around the corner as it curved eastward, to her left. The rest came in a clump; many more wounded or limping, some lying in a cart drawn by a single horse. She knew that meant others were dead; that a rear guard was spending their lives buying time for the rest to retreat and make their stand.

  Even wondering if they’d stop didn’t make her feel anxious-just a slight tension, like a tight string on a guitar.

  They did stop. Reverend Dixon was there, the only man on horseback, but sharing his parishioners’ danger. She could hear his voice, though not make out the words: harsh, hectoring, shaming the men into halting and turning to face the foe once more. But she could feel the power in it, as he gestured with the Bible in his hand.

  I’ll never like him, and we may be enemies someday, but respect him I must, however reluctantly. He’s no hypocrite.

  There were a hundred or so of the Sutterdown militia, working with frantic speed to make an improvised barricade where the road turned east, hauling fence posts with a tangle of wire and shoving a couple of abandoned cars into place before rocking them over on their sides; forty of her Mackenzies waited along the edge of the woods. Silence fell again, more or less; birds sang with cruel indifference, and insects burrowed and bit.

  And the braying sound of a trumpet came from the northwest, towards Sutterdown, faint but menacing. A man on a bicycle came from that direction too, stopped on a straight section of the road just beyond bowshot of the militia’s barricade and looked about with binoculars of his own.

  She lowered her own lest the reflection give her away and waited; he seemed to give only perfunctory attention to the side of the road. The barricade got a clos
e going-over, and the scout wrote in a spiral-bound notebook. Then he extended a fist with all but one finger clenched into a fist, pumped it in an unmistakable gesture, and pedaled off towards Sutterdown again.

  When he returned, the whole band was with him. Only two of them were on horseback, one who seemed to be the leader-he had a tall feather plume on his helmet-and a standard-bearer beside him. The flag that hung from the crossbar on the pole was black, with a catpupiled red eye on it; her mouth quirked slightly, at the evidence that someone-perhaps this Protector-had a nasty sense of humor.

  Or as Mike said, a weak grasp on reality; possibly both.

  The rest were on bicycles. Her lips moved again, in a silent curse. With bicycles and good roads, raiders could travel fifty miles in a day and strike without warning; and in the short run bicycles required neither the skilled care nor the expensive feeding of horses. That alone made things different-and worse-than in any of the history everyone was mining for clues on how to live in the Changed world.

  Take bandits, add bicycles and shake, and what do you get? Instant Mongol!

  Now someone seemed to have figured out how to apply the same advantage on a large scale. You couldn’t fight from the saddle of a bicycle, but then, nobody around here could fight from the back of a horse either. Not yet.

  Sixty-three, she counted; that didn’t include the banner man. Thirty with crossbows.

  Pre-Change crossbows, or made well since; they also wore short sleeveless tunics covered with metal scales, helmets, and had small shields slung across their backs; and they all seemed to have long knives or shortswords at their belts. Many carried hatchets as well.

  The remaining dozen had knee-length hauberks of rings or scales; their armor had sleeves, and they wore steel-splint protection on their forearms and shins. Their shields were thick and broad, strapped with metal, and they were armed with heavy spears, long swords or axes. The mounted commander halted them along the eastern side of the road, and Juniper felt a stab of anxiety-had they seen her folk?

  No, she decided. He’s just holding them there ready to charge.

  She could see them laughing as they dismounted from their bicycles, leaving them on their kickstands, forming up in a column shield to shield; a few paused to piss by the side of the road, holding the skirts of their armor aside.

  The invaders had a supply wagon with them as well. It wasn’t horse drawn, though: men powered it, seated on six bicycles bolted into a frame. Scrawny men clothed in rags, whose feet were chained to the pedals of their machines.

  Now, are these the Good Guys, or the Bad Guys? she thought grimly. Nice to know your first impression isn ‘t mistaken. Cernunnos, Lord of the Gates of the Underworld, make ready!

  The crossbowmen formed up in a double line and began walking towards the Sutterdown position; they moved in open order, leaving gaps for the second rank to shoot through. Archers and crossbows opened up on them as they came within a hundred yards, but they ignored them-and ignored the man of theirs who fell kicking with a bolt in his thigh, except that they shuffled their ranks to close up the empty space.

  At eighty yards they stopped with a single long shout. The first rank leveled their crossbows and fired, a harsh unmusical snapping of strings and whistle of bolts; then they dropped the forward ends of their weapons to the ground, unshipped the cranks at their belt, hooked them to cord and butt and rewound.

  The second rank fired as they reloaded; then the first raised their weapons again, steady and methodical…

  They’ll keep shooting until the militia are badly shaken, she thought.

  Behind them the full-armored fighters were shouting and slapping their weapons on their shields, waiting their turn.

  Then the heavies will go in. Morrigan witness, nobody really knows how to fight this way. A hundred Romans or Normans could wipe the floor with the lot of us. But the Protector’s bunch are a little less ignorant than most.

  “But perhaps not so wise as they supposed,” she murmured to herself, and whistled softly in signal.

  BOOM!

  The deep throbbing note of the drum echoed out across the empty fields, seeming to quiver in the hot still air, fading into distance. The noise from the road dropped away; the crossbowmen halted their mechanical rhythm of aiming and firing, looking over their shoulders. So did the heavy infantry preparing to charge.

  BOOM!

  It was the sound of a four-foot Lamberg drum, beaten two-handed with split canes; the instrument her Scots ancestors had employed to shatter the spirit of their enemies. She had only one here, rather than massed ranks, but the sound rippled up her spine and seemed to jolt in her skull.

  BOOM. BOOM. BOOM-

  “And now for the second great instrument of Celtic psychological warfare,” she muttered.

  Her voice sounded distant and muffled in her own ears, as if the part of her mind that dealt with rational thought and speech was withdrawing from the waking world.

  Dorothy’s bagpipes started then. It wasn’t the mannered, cultured version you could hear on most CDs before the Change, or at a festival in Edinburgh. This was a raw eerie wailing; the same music the old Gaels had used to lash themselves into frenzy, until they ran heedless into battle, stark naked and shrieking and sheerly mad.

  That too played along her skin; yet the anger that followed was not hot, but cold: as if a wind blew through her from a place of ice and bones, sweeping away all that was human and leaving only incarnate Purpose.

  Six months ago, what had these men before her been? Criminals? Perhaps; or perhaps auto mechanics and computer salesmen and clerks.

  But now they come to kill, to rape and steal and destroy, to starve our children and take the works of our hands and the Goddess’ blessings and drive us out on the road to die or turn cannibal.

  Her voice was a whisper; cold and small in her own ears:

  “In the name of the babe beneath my heart, I curse you. And Your curse upon them: you Dread Lord, wild huntsman; you Dark Goddess, raven-winged and strong! Come to me, in power and in wrath! May Anwyn take them, and ill may be the house to which You lead them!”

  The rage was enormous, beyond all bearing; her hand scrabbled at the catch of her cloak as if it choked her. She cast it off and rose, ignoring Sam Aylward’s cry-this wasn’t in the plan. She ignored his second cry, as well, of stark terror when he saw her face: turned bone-white, white as the rim all about her staring eyes. The pupils expanded to swallow all else, depthless pools of night. Teeth showed bright beneath lips drawn back in a she-wolf’s killing grin.

  When she shouted the sound was huge, loud enough to strain even her trained singer’s throat, loud enough to shock the drummer and piper into silence for a moment:

  “Scathach!”

  Even her coveners recoiled in horror, as she invoked the Dark Goddess in Her most terrible form.

  Scathach, the Devouring Shadow.

  She Who Brings Fear.

  Shrieking it, standing with feet planted wide apart, her red hair bristling like the crest of a fox at bay, bow in one hand and arrow in the other as her spread arms reached skyward and completed the double V.

  “Scathach!”

  Eyes turned in her direction from all across the battlefield-in-the-making.

  “Scathach! As they have wrought, so it shall be returned to them, threefold!”

  She put the arrow through the ledge of her bow’s riser and drew, drew until the stave creaked and the kiss-ring on the string touched her lips. When she released it was into the air without aiming, but she knew where the shaft would fall.

  It came whistling down out of the sun, and the banner-bearer of the enemy had barely time to look up before the chisel-headed bodkin point sank into his face and he fell, the black flag toppling to cover him as he struck the pavement.

  “SCATHACH! They are Yours!”

  Her hand stripped another arrow from her quiver; and all along the woodland edge the Mackenzies shed their war cloaks and stood, longbows in their hands.

/>   Few of them were really masters of their weapons as yet, but the target was massed and stationary and nowhere more than fifty yards away. They had all shot at marks further than that for an hour or more most days since the Change, under Sam Aylward’s merciless tuition, and everyone here could draw a bow of fifty pounds weight or better.

  Now the strings began to snap against the bracers, and the gray-feathered arrows flickered across the weed-grown field. Cloven air whistled under a hail of steel points and cedarwood. Juniper’s was among the lightest bowstaves, but it seemed she could not miss and that two more shafts were in the air before her first had struck.

  Then she reached over her right shoulder and her hand grasped at emptiness. There had been forty-five arrows in the leather cylinder on her back, and as many in every other quiver. Near two thousand shafts had flown, in the brief minutes while the Protector’s soldiers wavered between the Sutterdown men before them and the clan’s warriors to their left. Those who tried to charge the line of archers along the woods simply made better targets of themselves, attracting the eye as they came running into the teeth of the Mackenzie arrow-storm.

  Many of those shafts had missed, and stood upright in earth or broken on asphalt; many were turned by shields or armor. Still horror wailed and crawled and writhed across the ground, and death lay still with the arrows still quivering.

  “At them!” Juniper screamed, dropping her bow and ripping out her shortsword. “At them, Mackenzies!”

  She snatched up her buckler and ran forward, keening a wordless saw-edged ululation. The armor seemed no more than a cotton shirt on her back, and the rough ground merely gave strength to her feet as she bounded forward like a deer.

  Dennis ran beside her on the right, bellowing and flourishing his great ax; Chuck was to her left, snarling and intent behind the point of his spear; Aylward came behind, with an extra quiver slung over his shoulder and a shaft nocked to his terrible hundred-pound bow.

  Chaos greeted her, as the Sutterdown men came out from their barricade in a roaring wave. Most of the invaders threw away their weapons and ran. It did them little good. The armor which had guarded them also slowed them, and vengeful spears and axes ran behind in the hands of those whose homes they’d seized.