“What’s the draw?” he asked.
“Eight-five,” she said, waggling a thumb to show she hadn’t had the time to put it on a tillering frame to check, and meant more-or-less. “Yours?”
“A hundred and three,” Ruan said; he was a slender young man, but had the broad shoulders, thick wrists and corded arms that came of training to the longbow all your life. “Broadheads?”
“Didn’t see much armor,” Thora agreed. “Just some helmets and shields. Let’s take the catapult crew on the nearest galley . . . you left, me right.”
They pulled shafts from their quivers and set them through the centerline cutouts in the risers of their bows and the nocks to the string. The triangular heads glittered a little ruddy along their razor-honed edges, with the lowering sunlight from the west catching on metal from salvaged stainless-steel spoons hammered and cut to a vicious point.
“On the count,” Thora said; they’d both pop up at the same time to spread the risk. “One . . . two . . . three!”
They both came smoothly to their feet, drew, shot upward at forty degrees and crouched again in a single movement without pausing to aim; aiming was for beginners and amateurs. Ruan was a little grim but steady; Thora was grinning broadly.
She doesn’t enjoy killing, John thought. But she does enjoy fighting and the killing doesn’t bother her much as long as it’s armed fighters trying to kill her. Which is a sensible attitude but it isn’t the way it hits me. Or Deor, come to that.
Shrieks of rage came from the galley, faint but audible even over the two-hundred-odd yards of distance and through the clamor of battle.
“In the eye?” she chaffed. “Showing away, Ruan! That’s a field-day shot at this distance, and it can jam in the bone with a broadhead. For the center of the chest, that’s the mark when you’re doing real work.”
He shook his head, relaxing a little. “I was trying for his chest,” he said. “The eye was what I hit when he looked up at the sound. You hit exactly what you wanted.”
“That’s a Mackenzie for you, acting thunderstruck when someone else knows how to shoot,” she said easily. “Let’s displace and try again.”
They duckwalked a few feet and popped up again. John turned to Fayard. The underofficer nodded, signed to his men, and they rose kneeling above the bulwark, leveled their crossbows, shot and ducked down to pump the levers in the forestock, came back up, shot. . . .
John chanced a look himself. The remaining galleys were shockingly close now, only a little over two hundred yards. Several of them looked battered and one was listing, but they were still coming. Men were raising tall bows from their decks, unencumbered by masts or rigging, and the first flight of arrows fell only a few yards short of the Tarshish Queen, dimpling the water like a sudden flurry of very hard rain. It went on for quite some time because the four remaining galleys were still twenty yards or so apart and the shooting wasn’t quite in unison. But there were a lot of arrows, and that meant—
“Down!” he shouted.
Everyone who could ducked or rolled into the shadow of the slight inward tumblehome of the bulwarks, or both; Thora and Deor put their round shields up over Ruan where the three knelt together, and John raised his kite-shield and put his shoulder under the curve, knocking his visor down as he did. That left nothing but the vision-slit vulnerable, which meant that only sheer bad luck could kill him. He didn’t think any local archers were a menace to one of the finest suits of plate in Montival, and they certainly weren’t going to get through the shield.
The arrows sleeted down, mostly standing quivering in the deck or impaling ropes. Some struck flesh.
He looked back at the quarterdeck, and his blood froze for a moment until he saw Captain Feldman stand again; he had an arrow through the fleshy part of his left arm, but he was still shouting orders briskly. The ship’s healer dashed up, examined it, snipped the shaft across with a pair of odd-looking clippers evidently intended for just that, pulled the stub through, slapped on a dressing and jumped back to his station on the main deck in a single flurry of movement. One of the crossbowmen pitched backward with an arrow sunk through the bridge of his nose, thrashing like a pithed frog until he went limp, and John felt a brief flash of guilt that he couldn’t remember his name until he imagined the written roster and Bors came to his mind.
“Fire canister!”
The sound of the catapults discharging had a whining bee-like undertone now. John raised his head to look, the narrow slit in his visor focusing his gaze. An arrow shattered as it struck the brow of his helmet, knocking his head backward like a punch with a grunt of shock and pain. He still saw the massed darts sweep across the decks, hundreds of them, and wished he hadn’t. You couldn’t really see them, not moving so fast that they were barely streaks, but you could see where they hit—red splashed, and the sheer impact of a tenth of a pound of steel traveling at hundreds of feet per second made men flex like whips when they struck. Some killed three men in a row.
The sound of them striking the decks and hulls was like hail on a shake roof. Except that the roofs didn’t scream.
“Load grapeshot!” Feldman shouted. Then as he swept out his cutlass: “Lash the wheel! Here they come!”
The last of the sailors aloft thumped down on deck, wounded or filling in the gaps in the catapult crews. Save for a brace at the maintops with telescope-sighted crossbows, who were carefully and methodically targeting anyone who looked like an officer.
The killing machines shot one last time, and the crews snatched up boarding axes and half-pikes and cutlasses. The sound was different, a great shrrrusshh as the steel ball-bearings cut the air and then almost immediately a hail-patter as they struck. Or a sound very much like a ball-peen hammer in the hand of a maniac hitting a dead chicken.
Fayard and his remaining men were shooting stolidly at the Guard’s steady bolt every six seconds.
“Into the brown!” the underofficer yelled as he worked his own weapon. “You can’t miss, just fucking shoot and shoot fast!”
Ruan and Thora where drawing and loosing continuously now. The darts and grapeshot sweeping the enemy decks had broken their massed volleys of arrows, but the long bamboo shafts were coming over in a sustained flicker. Two hit the Montivallan archers in the chest almost simultaneously; they both took a step back and grunted. The one striking Thora’s articulated breastplate shattered; the other hung for a second in young Ruan’s brigandine, stopped by the little steel plates riveted between the twin thicknesses of leather.
John could see the young man—he was a little older but John felt more mature—turn red and gulp for wind. Then he forced himself back into action by sheer willpower, doubtless feeling as if he’d been punched in the gut.
Time, the Prince of Montival thought, and surged erect with his shield up. His sword flared free, up in the knight’s position, hilt-forward above his head. It was simple steel, and he was simply a man, one who would have been a musician first if his fate had been otherwise. But he would do what he could.
“Haro, Portland!” he shouted, his voice hollow from within the helm and visor and bevor. “Holy Mary for Portland!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
HARBOR OF BARU DENPASAR
CERAM SEA
OCTOBER 21ST
CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD
“Shoot!” Pip called.
They’d crossed the bow of the new ship and lay broadside-on to the galleys attacking under the banner of the Pallid Mask.
She grimaced a little. Nobody knew exactly what the Pallid Mask was, except that he, or possibly it, worked for the Yellow Raja—prisoners from the Carcosan side of the harbor had called him the fore-bringer or the emissary. Sometimes before biting their own tongues off and inhaling the blood. There were also rumors that the Mask actually was the Yellow King, somehow.
But he’s not invincible. Here’s evidence of that!
Even then she blinked in astonishment at the sheer amount of damage the Montivallan broadsides had wrought, ships sinking or turning turtle, bodies thick in water turned red, glutted sharks striking over and over again in a frenzy. The three survivors were boring in though, the long boarding gangways rising up and ready to topple over on the foreign ship and their oars backing water to avoid a hull-crushing impact.
And all I wanted to do was make a really smashing deal in nutmeg and mordant and show Daddy I wasn’t born to be a deb in Winchester. And live up to Mummy’s legend, she thought. Well, I may manage that, perhaps! Because here I’m marooned on an island that has a genuine Eldritch Horror running half of it and turning people into . . . things that aren’t really people.
Then aloud, loud but carefully not screeching:
“Maximum fire!”
Her prang-prangs opened up. They were basically huge crossbows with a set of leaf-springs at the front like a massive bowstave, but the devil was in the details and the engineers of Townsville Armory had come up with something quite devilish. Each had a simple hydraulic cocking mechanism that pulled a traveler back against the half-ton resistance of the springs and then released it if the triggers were held down. A hopper above fed six-inch steel darts machine-cut from rebar, given a crude point and spiral grooving to make it spin and provide some stability, letting one drop into the slot each time the traveler came back.
The power was provided by pairs of men sitting on the deck to either side of the weapon below the level of the bulwark, the soles of their feet against each other and their hands on the bars of a rocking pump as they surged back and forth. Prang-prangs didn’t have the range or ship-killing battering power of conventional catapults. What they did have was speed.
Prang. Prang. Prang—
The whole cycle took about as long as it took to say one hundred and one. Sixty darts a minute or a little better, and there were four of the prang-prangs able to bear, each with two men slapping new bundles of darts into the hoppers.
A ripple of pointed steel rods sprayed towards the Yellow Raja’s ships . . . and his men . . . at the rate of four or five a second, into the boarding parties packed ready to swarm forward. Most of them were naked except for loincloths or sarongs. A few carried hide shields and rather more wore helmets; even fewer had torso armor of steel plates joined together by patches of chain mail. None of that had the slightest effect when the darts struck except to produce a spark and ping sound on impact, and the Silver Surfer’s weapons were aimed across the front of the formation, if you could call the three crowded mob-blobs that. Military types called it defilade fire; basically it meant targets in depth, so that if a bolt missed one man it was much more likely to hit another.
The wind was pushing them towards their enemies broadside-on, as the boarding ramps fell and locked the whole mass together in the shark-swarming sea. When her ship touched, the fight would be at knife-length.
Toa jumped down from the quarterdeck and gave a huge guttural cry as the deck boomed beneath his weight:
“Ke ma-te! Ke ma-te!
It is death! It is death!
Ka-ora! Ka-ora!
I may live! I may live!”
He danced as he sang, astonishingly agile on the crowded deck—not simply agile for a man of his size, but moving through the packed space like a ghost, the huge muscles rippling beneath his tattoos like mating pythons in a jungle. Stamping straddle-legged, kneeling, springing back into the air, his tattooed face a horror of lolling tongue and glaring rolling eyes as he whirled the great spear about himself or held it out rigid and trembling as he slapped chest and thighs and belly and screamed rhythmically in the tongue of his ancestors:
“This is the hairy man
Who brought the sun and made it shine!
It is death! It is death!”
The crew of the Silver Surfer looked at him with a mixture of fear and respect—not much of a difference, with most of the sort willing to ship on a venture like this. The Raja’s soldiers had no idea what was going on, but they knew Toa wasn’t in the least afraid of the Pallid Mask—you’d have to be a lizard or dead not to hear the brutal strength and arrogant menace in the war-haka.
Certainly when Toa does it. Mummy said she nearly wet herself, that time they first heard it outside the ruins of Auckland.
Pip looked quickly westward. The wind was from the south, favoring neither side, and the Raja’s boats were straggling towards her in no particular order. That would get some of them here before the more disciplined Carcosans arrived en masse. It would be very close. . . .
“Ready, all!” she called.
Prang-prang-prang . . .
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BARONY HARFANG
COUNTY OF CAMPSCAPELL
(FORMERLY EASTERN WASHINGTON STATE)
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)
SEPTEMBER 20TH
CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD
“Oh, stop smiling like that,” Órlaith said, half-serious in her irritation.
Heuradys extended her face forward, slitted her eyes and smiled again, this time in self-caricature as if she were a cat basking in the mellow golden afternoon sunlight of a long autumn day.
The Harris’s hawk on her gauntlet bated slightly, extending its wings and turning its hooded head with an air of what-are-you-doing? The courser she was riding shifted slightly too.
Órlaith felt the talons of her own hawk tighten through the thick supple leather of the gauntlet.
“Looks aren’t everything,” she replied. “And pay attention to your hawk. Macmac, stay.”
The weather had broken; it was fall now, days in the seventies, nights crisp. The first rains had fallen, harbinger of the wet months of winter, and a ghost of green went over the yellow-brown hills around them. It was perfectly comfortable, even warm with a coat, but you could smell the cold coming somehow. An odor like damp leaves and the taste of springwater. Macmacon sat obediently, his eyes on the brush and his nose wrinkling. The breeze was from their backs, which wouldn’t matter much since the quarry they were after were birds and didn’t have a sense of scent to speak of.
“Looks aren’t everything,” Heuradys said. “But combined with charm and wit and being a good dancer and having a nice sense of humor . . . then good cheekbones and shoulders and a nice tight butt don’t hurt at all. Help quite a bit, in fact.”
“Oh, that’s right, rub it in,” Órlaith said gloomily.
Dust smoked off the fields southward, tiny plumes in the distance. Teams of big draught horses were drawing the three-furrow riding plows and disk-harrows and seed-drills along the curving contour-strips, turning under the previous year’s close-mown alfalfa or sweet clover to plant the winter wheat and barley; the massive and costly equipment was owned jointly with the demesne and used on each peasant’s strips in turns drawn by lot. Birds followed the plowmen, attracted by the insects thrown up—or the seed grain in other spots, but children with slingshots and noisemakers deterred them there, as well as scarecrows. It was hard work, but not quite the round-the-clock scramble of harvest, since the planting would go on for a month yet.
Heuradys sent her an apologetic glance. “Sorry, Orrey. I tease too much sometimes.”
“That you do, and I your liege, the black shame and disgrace of the world it is.”
The hunting-party were well outside the fenced and hedged inner core of the manor, though this area was part of the stinted commons and regularly grazed. A long snaking swale ran between the hills, and a generation ago horse-drawn scrapers had shaped the light soil to turn it into a series of earth dams and ponds; ponds for about two thirds of the year, and thicker patches of green grass and reeds the rest, and some water was showing through the vegetation now from last night’s rain, like little glints of silver in moving green. Willow-trees and cottonwoods lined it, dense with bushy und
ergrowth of black hawthorn, wild rose, wax currant and bright-crimson smooth sumac and more, with purple-flowered thistle tight beneath. It was designed to provide food and shelter for game, among other things.
“It helps not being Crown Princess, too,” Órlaith said a bit sourly.
She was trying not to let it spoil a lovely day.
“Even a roll in the hay is political for me, much less anything serious. Oh, Anwyn take it.”
Ironically, it would have been easier if Alan Thurston wasn’t born to a family of high estate, except that then she’d have been unlikely to find him as attractive. It wouldn’t matter and she wouldn’t care in many places, but here in the Association territories she’d never liked dalliance with people far down the pole of rank; it gave her an odd and disagreeable feeling, no matter how enthusiastic they were.
That had never bothered Heuradys, but then she was an Associate. And Sir Droyn had begged off the hunt today. Officially he was indisposed; unofficially it was a girl, she thought. The tall, handsome, dashing and well-spoken young son of a Count back from a fabulous adventure of magic and battle at the side of the Crown Princess (who had knighted him personally with the Sword of the Lady) wasn’t likely to lack for company.
“That does suck, Orrey,” Heuradys said sympathetically. “Not fair at all.”
“I can’t ask you to be like a Christian nun just because of that,” Órlaith sighed. “It wouldn’t help me, now would it?”
Prince of Outcasts Page 23
