Morfind and Faramir ran up swearing, their recurve bows drawn as they fanned out to either side of her. Two arrows slammed into the big cat’s neck and chest and sank deep, deep enough to touch the white gull-feather fletchings to its hide; the tiger moaned, sank down and bit at the ground for a moment as blood flowed out its nose and mouth, then went limp save for a little twitching.
“Enough!” Órlaith wheezed, but loud enough for her voice to carry in the sudden quiet.
None of them was inclined to babble just because their hearts were pumping.
“It’s good as dead, leave it! Check for who’s hurt.”
A quick glance around showed that none of the humans seemed injured, beyond bleeding grazes and bruises and wrenching. The falconer and his assistant were in front of the hawks, which was very creditable considering that they were armed with nothing but the hunting knives in their hands. She clashed the Sword back into its scabbard—blood simply fell off it, and it never needed to be sharpened or checked for nicks. A brief nod and sign of the Horns to the tigers acknowledged their courage, and that they had a right to fight for their lives just as she did for hers.
Then she ran over to Macmaccon. Her heart lurched for a second as the greathound lay so still. Then she saw he was still breathing, and knelt to examine him. There were four deep gouges down one flank, bleeding freely, and the left shoulder and forelimb were canted in ways they shouldn’t be. The brown eyes rolled towards her as she touched him gently, but the tongue lay limp out of the fanged mouth.
“There, Macmac, my faithful one, hero of a thousand. Beidh lá eile ag an b’paorach. We’ll live to fight another day.”
Then a little louder. “Fetch the kit! Quickly!”
“Here,” Heuradys said, and handed it to her; it was of stiff black leather, with an embossed golden winged staff circled by a serpent on the top.
Órlaith opened it, pulled out a hypodermic of morphine, and adjusted the dose—Macmac was easily as heavy as most men, but dogs were more vulnerable to opiates. He sighed deeply as the needle took effect and lost a tension that hadn’t been obvious before.
“The leg’s broken and the shoulder . . . no, it’s dislocated but the bone’s whole,” Órlaith said after a moment. “Hold him, Herry. And by the way, thanks.”
Heuradys shook her head as she took Macmac’s muzzle in the crook of one arm and braced the other against his chest.
“I wasted a good thirty seconds trying to get that slug of a horse under control,” she said. “I didn’t think.”
“Don’t second-guess yourself, knight,” Órlaith said sharply. “I’m here and not in bite-sized gobbets because you cut a bloody great tiger’s spine with a sword, and not a magic sword at that! The result answers for the act, so.”
She pulled sharply and twisted slightly, careful to keep her grip well above the break and not stress it; besides formal instruction she’d been helping with injuries in the hunting field and elsewhere since she’d been old enough to go along, and that was over a decade ago. The joint clicked back into position and moved naturally when she manipulated it.
“That’s got it,” Heuradys said, and shook her head again. “We never get tigers this early. In a month or two, yes. They follow the game down from the mountains, dodging around ranches and settlements and then sometimes start sniffing around the herds on the common here. But never this close to the manor and village!”
“These two decided to get an early start,” Órlaith said.
Then they swabbed and stitched the cuts, shaved and splinted the simple greenstick fracture in the dog’s forelimb, and wound on bandages that would also serve to keep the joint immobilized. There were only a few whimpers, and she thought it likely that somehow the greathound knew they were tending his hurts. There was a slight difference in the size of the pupils in his eyes, and she took his head in her lap to keep it elevated. On balance it was probably for the best that he’d been dazed.
She was conscious of snarling in the background, then sharp calls to heel in Mackenzie voices. When she looked up Karl Aylward Mackenzie was there twisting his bonnet in his big hands, swallowing and visibly making himself not look away.
Heuradys stood in a single graceful motion. Her face was white around the lips with fury and her voice tightly controlled.
“Thank you so very much, master-bowman, for near as Hades getting the Princess killed. You drove them right onto us!”
“It’s most sorry I am, Lady Heuradys,” he said, with a hitch in his voice. “We stumbled across them—they were laying up on a deer carcass and they just took to their heels—we ran after—”
“Which was just the worst possible thing to do!” she snapped.
Morfind and Faramir were there too, and also shaken by what might have happened.
“And blowing your horn as if this was fucking Helm’s Deep,” Faramir snarled, in a voice very unlike his usual pleasant tone, while Morfind muttered liquid Sindarin scatology.
Órlaith held up a hand. “Enough, all of you. Done’s done, and we were all taken by surprise, just somewhat! Karl, cut some poles out of the brush and make a stretcher, and get something to keep his head up. I think you’ve some dog-nursing in your future, as Macmac took these hurts in my service, and he knows you well enough to obey.”
He nodded silently and trotted off, happy to escape so easily. Susan was coming back leading several horses by their reins.
“Thanks, Suzie. Would you run over to the manor the now, to tell them we need a wagon? And to have the healer ready to check people, that’d be best.”
Alan Thurston limped up as she heeled her horse off and up to a hand gallop, gingerly touching his face where it had plowed into the dirt and was bleeding freely.
“Here, let me see to that,” Órlaith said, signing him to lie down.
Karl returned with horse-blankets, and she folded several under Macmac’s head and spread another over him for warmth against shock. Alan lay down not far from the semi-comatose greathound.
“Sorry,” he said, as she swabbed at the grazed area.
The pain had to be fairly intense—skin was hanging from the edge in shreds, and she had to get all the bits of dirt out of the raw flesh lest it fester—but he only blinked as she swabbed and used the tweezers and trimmed the edges with the razor.
“I saw you jump between me and a tiger with a spear,” she said dryly. “The which you did when I was lying flat with the wind knocked out of me and a nasty belt to the elbow making my arm buzz. Not much cause for apology, I’d say.”
He smiled a little as she applied iodine and a pad and wound fabric tape to keep it in place. “I . . . ah, I sort of prayed that I’d have an . . . opportunity to show my loyalty to you, Princess. That’s the problem with asking for something—you may get it. And in spades! So this is, umm, sort of my fault.”
Órlaith raised a brow. He means that, too, she thought; the sincerity had an unmistakable tone, when you bore the Sword. Of course, that only meant he believed it, and he’d just had a hard thump on the noggin. Her own was aching a bit, and she took one of the twists of willow-bark extract and washed it down with a gulp from her canteen, then offered one to each of them.
Heuradys chuckled. “You can petition, but the Powers dispose, Alan,” she said, declining the medication. “No thanks, Orrey. I was just scared witless, not thrown by a horse or tossed about by tigers.”
Then she took a deep breath as he swallowed his portion. Órlaith suspected she was about to say she had to go visit her own manors, or her brothers and father over at Castle Campscapell.
Which is noble self-sacrifice, Órlaith thought. The which I will not forbid at all, at all. Though Alan and I both need a day or two to recover, lest we end up rubbing wounds on wounds!
Approaching hooves brought their heads around. Someone was riding out from Athana Manor, someone with a remuda of two remounts on a leading
rein, and Susan Mika was coming back with him. When he drew rein and saluted she saw that it was a small wiry man in brown leathers and a broad-brimmed hat hanging down his back. The sigil of House Artos was on his jacket beneath a stylized galloping horse, and his mounts were rough-coated garrons of quarter horse stock, not showy or even more than middling fast in a sprint, but bred for toughness and endurance. He might have been any age between thirty and forty, with skin tanned to the color and consistency of leather, bright blue eyes and tow hair sun-faded to a white color.
Crown Courier Corps, she thought, rising. Well, well, well. ’Tis the story of the three wells!
Barony Harfang was tied into the heliograph net and had been for years; you could put a message through from here to Portland in a few hours, day or night. Or to Corvallis on the south in scarcely a little more. Using a Courier meant . . .
The man confirmed her suspicion by swinging down and going to one knee; as he did he reached into the flat pouch that hung by a shoulder-strap over his left hip and produced a tube of tooled boiled leather, whose cap was bound by a knotted ribbon and a blob of red wax stamped with the Royal seal.
“Your Highness,” he said in a round-voweled New Deseret accent that turned each s to sh.
He bowed and kissed the hand she extended. The Couriers were a body sworn directly to the Crown, which meant to her as well as her mother.
“Thank you, Courier,” she said, taking the message tube and touching it to her lips. “Your task is performed.”
He grinned, showing a gap where a tooth had probably met a fist, or a horse’s hoof, or a fall. “Not until I have your reply, Your Highness,” he said.
She broke the seal and read. While she did she heard the Courier say casually:
“Hi, Suzie. Good to see you again.”
“Han, mis eya, Charlie,” she replied, which meant much the same thing. “Life treating you OK?”
“Could be worse,” he replied, looking around and his eyes settling on the two very dead tigers, now buzzing with flies that lifted in a cloud as the falconers and the clansfolk began skinning. “Not bad. At least nothing’s tried to eat me. Just lately, not since that fucking grizzly down by the San Luis last year.”
Órlaith chuckled as she rolled up the Chancery writ and the short personal note inside it.
“The response is: The High Queen’s will shall be done in every particular.”
Then aloud to the group: “Friends, it looks like our exile here is short-lived. We’re to make tracks back the way we came. From the sound of it, I’d say Reiko made plain she wanted me involved in this war that’s brewing. Probably arguing that the Sword is needed, and I come with it.”
She looked at Alan Thurston. “And you’re welcome to come along, my friend, if you don’t mind trailing in my fighting-tail. It could be that there’ll be ways to show your loyalty that don’t require fighting big cats with a knife on the end of a stick.”
He smiled—gingerly, given how sore his face must be—and bowed. It was extraordinary how well he looked, even rolled in dirt and with a stained bandage over one cheek.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
HARBOR OF BARU DENPASAR
CERAM SEA
OCTOBER 21ST
CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD
Prang-prang-prang . . .
The nearest of the galleys was frantically trying to get its bow-catapult trained around on the Silver Surfer, but the carriage wouldn’t bear easily with the long narrow ship pinned to the Montivallan merchantman by its own boarding-ramp. Many of the archers on its deck were shifting around to shoot at her, though the prang-prangs had cut swaths through them. Pip looked down towards the Raja’s men on deck and slashed the air with her cane towards the target. Their officer in his engraved spired helm glanced back at her, a scar-faced local grandee named Anak Agung.
“Tembak, Tuan Anak!” she shouted. “Shoot!”
He echoed her and the archers drew. The local Balinese used a recurve made of laminated bamboo, and they often shot while sitting cross-legged. It looked odd to her, but it worked and it took up remarkably little room. Forty or so of the Royal guardsmen immediately began pumping arrows towards the Carcosans. The Carcosans shot back, which had the advantage of directing their black-fletched arrows away from her and her crew. The spearmen squatted and leaned forward on their left hands, a position that would have tied her in knots but left them mostly sheltered and ready to spring into action. As she watched they began to slap their hands on the deck and chant, at first a few and then all of them, the whole body of men presenting a sea of mostly naked and leanly muscular backs rippling in unison to the sound of:
“Amok! Amok!”
The tone rose, shriller, hysterical, edging up into the blood squeal:
“Amok! Amok!—”
And the prang-prangs went prang-prang-prang . . .
The last bursts shredded the crew around the galley’s bow-catapult and left a dozen bodies blocking the boarding-gangway that had dropped on the Montivallan’s forecastle; then they tilted the weapons up to rake the other two galleys beyond this one. Pip looked over her shoulder to the westward; the rest of the Raja’s men were finally making some progress towards the spot where the action was, and shouting and waving their weapons as the oars flashed.
Pip took another deep breath, ignoring the rank stinks, flipped the cane over her shoulder into the loop sewn to her suspenders and flicked open the forearm brace of her pistol-grip slingshot. Three steel balls from the bag went into the pouch and she took up enough tension to just stretch the rubber a little. Soon, very soon, pump air into your lungs, make them hold it, don’t let the muscles in your back and neck tense up, stay loose but alert—
“Ready, all!” she shouted.
The grapnels flashed across the gap—some crunching into the deck of the Carcosan galley, some into the Montivallan’s bow-netting. Winches spun and hauled the Silver Surfer into a hard contact that made the deck lurch beneath her feet, their stern tucked against the other ship’s bow and their bow midway along the galley’s flank, with a triangle of water full of wreckage and bodies between. The sea right here was literally pink with blood, and it flowed out of the galley’s scuppers in long red streams. Raja Dalem Seganing’s men rose up with a final united scream of:
“Amok!”
They threw themselves in unison across the rail of the galley. The archers dropped their weapons, drew their parangs and followed.
The Carcosans still on their feet met them, with a shout of: “Untuk Raja Kuning!”
That was brave, or at least sensible; the alternative was to jump into the water with the sharks and hope they were stuffed to the gills already and not in a mood to nibble.
Pip shouted herself: “Tally-ho! For the roast wallaby of Old Townsville! Silver Surfers, attack!”
Toa was first across to the Montivallan’s forecastle, making a huge leap into the rear of the Carcosan boarding party with his great spear flashing as he gripped it near the base and swung it in a circle like the propeller of a legendary helicopter of the ancient times, or a reaper using a scythe. Three of the Carcosans who’d just stormed onto the deck there died; only one had time to scream before blood choked his throat. The scream was overridden by Toa’s lion roar, shocking even in the tremendous brabbling noise of the battle. Quite literally a lion roar, something she could recall vividly; the beasts haunted the hills at the edges of Tanumgera Station and she’d heard them after dinner often enough, not to mention hunting them.
The spear darted out like a frog’s tongue flicking, and withdrew leaving a huge wound beneath a man’s ribs. Toa grabbed another by the throat with his left hand, crushing his windpipe as he jerked him up off his feet and into the path of a Carcosan parang like a shield, then dropped him and used the steel-shod butt of the weapon to crush the parang-wielder’s skull. For an instant the Carcosans recoiled, stunned and horrified.
/> She leapt after him, and the rest of the crew who weren’t working the prang-prangs followed—by now she was pretty confident they would, if only because they knew she’d gotten them into a situation where they had to win or die, and they were pretty well all self-starters anyway. She pulled the slingshot across her body and released just as her feet touched the planks, and three Carcosans toppled backward from the rail into the water and the waiting jaws.
No bloody problem hitting something with so many targets! Or this close.
Then she went to one knee and switched to single shots, draw-spot-loose as fast as she could from a few paces behind her second-in-command and concentrating on the ones he didn’t have time for. One punched into the eye of an archer drawing a bead on Toa, the next broke a kneecap, the third thumped into the side of the head of a spearman in the soft spot just up and forward of the ear, and the fourth went crack into the breastbone of a half-naked man running screaming at her with a wave-bladed keris in hand.
He stopped and looked down at his own chest. Then his eyes rolled up and he fell to the red-running deck with a sort of boneless splat as his heart was shocked into stillness. Her mother had been very fond of this slingshot. . . .
She snapped it shut and pulled the cane out of its sling, suddenly conscious of how the Carcosans were retreating from this part of the ship. Then her eyes went wide as she saw why.
A steel man was fighting his way towards her. His armor glittered like fire in the afternoon sun, painful to the eyes, from feet in articulated metal shoes to the tall ostrich-feather plume on top of his helmet. A long double-edged sword was in one hand, and a big shield like an elongated round-edged triangle was on the other arm, marked with the Crowned Mountain and Sword. His face was a blank curve of steel with only the shadowed horizontal eyeslit breaking the line of the visor.
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