Pip laughed. “Common as dirt where I come from. The Mexicans call us bananalanders, in fact,” she said.
“Mexicans?” John asked.
Mexico . . . that was what the realm south of the old Americans was called, wasn’t it? But the Change hit them even harder.
There were a few shadowy groups of dusty villages and ranches in remote parts there that claimed to be the heirs of the Mexican realm, the way Boise had with the United States, but he couldn’t see what that had to do with Australia.
“Mexicans are what we bananalanders call people in Oz from points south, the Tasmanians and so forth, and all the dozens of little whatevers that’ve sprung up in the last couple of generations. Mostly we call them that because they hate it, even if they don’t remember why they hate it.”
After a moment John groaned at the geographical pun, then winced as he began the standard loosening-up exercises. You did not want to pop a tendon. Not at any time, and especially not in a foreign country where killers could be waiting under every brush.
“Neck stiff?” Pip asked, cocking an eye at the way he hitched for a second halfway through a stretch.
He nodded cautiously; it hurt, in fact. She knelt behind him and kneaded the muscles skillfully with strong slender fingers. That hurt even more at first, then he whimpered as the iron cords started to relax, and the incipient headache faded to a throb. That made the effort in the offing less ghastly.
“Knock on the noggin last night?” Pip asked sympathetically.
“Deliberate one,” John replied. “An Iban got far too close with a very sharp knife, so I embraced my outer savage and head-butted him unconscious. It hurt me, but a lot less than it hurt him.”
“Ah, the fabled Glasgow Kiss of legend,” Pip chuckled, drumming the edges of her palms into his deltoids. “Even more charming with a helmet on.”
“Are you all right, chérie?” he asked, feeling a little guilty. He would have noticed if anything was really wrong, but . . .
“Oh, fine. Just a few scratches. Though I loathe those poisoned darts. Not cricket at all.”
She grinned and patted the prang-prang behind them waiting to be harnessed to its team. “Of course, neither are these, and I absolutely adore them.”
John looked over at the wounded. Nobody had actually died from the darts; evidently that was only likely if they struck you somewhere like the neck, and the paste on them was very fresh. But all four of the men who’d been hit were unconscious—or possibly suffering from paralysis—and very sick indeed, with a tendency to long pauses in their breathing. The locals had been giving them concoctions that included belladonna and other dangerous stimulants, and they were going back under guard in wagons when the main force went forward. That was very light losses, but the fact that they’d been awake, alert, armed and in their gear when the enemy struck accounted for it. The Baru Denpasarans hadn’t been, and they’d suffered several score dead or crippled besides losing their High Priest and Priestess. He’d been carefully vague about why he’d woken up.
Not least because I’m not really certain myself.
“There, all better?” Pip said.
“Much better, and thank you, sweetie,” John said. Then he looked up: “Ah . . . good morning, Thora.”
The Bearkiller nodded to him, a slight smile on her face. Then she looked at Pip, who was returning her stare with a raised brow and an implacable politeness.
“Talk a bit?” the Bearkiller said.
“Of course,” Pip said; he knew her well enough now to see that there was caution in her courtesy.
They walked a little aside. There was little privacy in a war-camp, and that had been awkward. If only a few spoke your language you could have a conversation, though. John watched warily, caught a stare from both women, and turned away to ostentatiously go over his longsword. It didn’t need it—Evrouin saw to it—but it gave him something to look at, and anyway you should check your own gear. He remembered to be conscientious about that . . . most of the time. When he’d been a squire, the others had played a game of substituting a hilt with a stub blade on those they thought were slacking, which could be extremely embarrassing if a knight barked draw in an unannounced inspection.
Toa was sitting crosslegged nearby, going over the blade of his great spear. There was a nick in it; bone could be surprisingly resistant, and the file made a steady wheep-wheep sound as he worked on it.
“I wonder what they’re talking about?” John said after a moment, then cursed silently.
Toa laughed, a sound like a lion grunting in the bushes, and rolled his eyes in the direction of the two women. He had a better angle to observe them.
“What the fuckin’ hell do you think they’re talking about? You, mate. And not just the length of your donger. Though I figure if they were going to have a knockabout over you, it’d have happened by now.”
. . . and John suddenly noticed that he was sitting in a way that meant he could rise very fast. Neither Pip nor Thora were the type of shy retiring maiden you heard about in some of the romaunts, looking wistfully out of a castle tower and waiting for other people to make events happen. It would take an ogre on Toa’s scale to separate them if things went wrong.
Suddenly he laughed—softly, and facing away from them. Toa looked at him with an expression of gargoyle curiosity.
“I’ve heard a lot of songs where knights fight for a fair lady’s favor,” he said. “Not all that many about two fair ladies fighting for a knight’s.”
Toa’s bellow was loud enough to make a nearby yellow-and-blue bird that was pecking at something on the trampled dirt fly up cheeping in an aggrieved tone. Then he cocked an eye at Thora and Pip again.
“Well, bugger me blind,” Toa said. “They’re shaking hands.” Dryly: “No hug or kiss on the cheek, though.”
Pip returned, looking more relaxed; in fact, the contrast made John suddenly realize how tense she had been. He almost blubbered in relief for a moment. It also showed that Pip was taking Thora seriously, which was a very good idea. Toa went back to honing the nick out of the blade of his spear.
“That was odd,” Pip said, frowning a little. “I think we were talking about you, darling.”
“You think?” John said, feeling a little indignant.
“Well, first she said I handled myself fairly well last night,” she said, and frowned a little more. “Fairly!”
Toa grunted. “You’re a natural and quick like a taipan,” he said.
John made a puzzled sound.
“Taipan . . . snake that likes to hide in sugarcane fields,” the Maori explained. “First thing you know it’s bit you six times and you’re not breathing anymore. Seen it happen.”
Pip preened a little. “Well, then.”
Toa went on: “She’s a natural and she’s got a lot more experience. That fairly bit’s a compliment from someone like her, straight up. Don’t get too full of yourself. She’s fucking dangerous and no mistake.”
Pip blinked thoughtfully. “Well, if you say so. I did the pleasant thing, of course. Then she said . . . ummm, some things were worth fighting for and some weren’t, and you should know when you’ve got what you’re going to get out of something.”
Toa laughed again. “That’s the voice of experience, too,” he said. “Different type but it still helps.”
The younger pair glared at him. “What’s that supposed to bloody well mean?” Pip said. “That we’ll understand when we grow up?”
Toa shrugged. “Pretty much,” he replied, grinning at her throttled fury. “Because you’re just a nipper yet,” he said. “And you’re bloody right to be relieved. It could have gotten bad.”
John met her gray eyes. “I don’t entirely understand that either,” he said, and shrugged.
“Oh,” Pip said. “And she said that she’d wanted more than one thing and gotten all she wanted of that and now she’d go
off and set up house, after this fight was done, and to thank you very much for the gift.”
This time Toa’s laugh was more like a snigger, an alarming sound from someone his size. He shook his head as they glared at him again.
“Oh, not for the sodding world,” he said. “Mum’s the word! Right, mum’s the word!”
That set him off again as he slung his modest bundle into one of the ammunition limbers and the locals brought up the six-horse teams that would pull the artillery.
“Let’s hope we get the chance to get older and be initiates of all these mysteries,” Pip said soberly.
Then she laughed, young and beautiful and arrogant. “And I expect we will.”
* * *
“Yes, seeing . . . I see?” Tuan Anak said later that day.
I hope you do, and I hope I remember those lessons well enough, John thought.
The Carcosans had pulled back into their fortress when the Baru Denpasaran force arrived, or at least all the ones they’d seen had done so—those jungle hills on either side of the rolling open land of the valley weren’t far away, and quite a bit could be hiding there. The fortress itself had a deep water-filled ditch around its perimeter and a thick sloping wall of compacted earthwork about twenty feet high pounded down around a lattice of bamboo rods. The outer surface of the pentagonal construction was covered in turf that was patched with yellow but mostly the green that showed it had taken root to guard the soil against the washing of the rains.
Higher sections marked the corners, with breastworks of earth-filled bamboo baskets and firing ports for the catapults there; John thought there were probably four in all, and from the descriptions they were nine- or ten-pounders. There was a tall wooden tower on a mound in the center, made of logs notched together and acting as a sort of keep; the fort as a whole was big enough for about a thousand men, and it strongly resembled the motte-and-bailey castles the Association had built just after his grandfather seized power there in the early days after the Change.
Though there was no way of telling if that many garrisoned it. Or of how many had just faded into the surrounding hills.
There was a sparkle of steel on the ramparts, the brightness of spearheads. The black-and-yellow flag of Carcosa fluttered at the highest peak of the tower, and elsewhere on the walls. John blinked at it and then away. There was something wrong about it . . .
Looking at the steep ground that ran in ridges from southwest to northeast and a tangle of cross-grained hills wasn’t much more reassuring. All was covered in three-layer jungle a hundred and fifty feet high, bound together with liana and vine. Tags and tatters of mist filled the folds as far as vision reached, until it faded away into blue distance. Occasionally a flight of birds went by calling raucously and then settled down into the rustling green silence again. It was a loud quietness somehow, lingering there in the background despite the chatter and hum and rattle and thump of several thousand men.
Ruan said the ground was fairly open once you were into the deep woods—the upper layers shaded the ground densely—but the outer surface was dense as a hedgerow for several hundred yards. The young Mackenzie found the interior oppressive too; a fine mist drizzled down much of the time, or there was a long olive-green gloom occasionally speared by beams of brightness. Where a giant had fallen life roared in, twisting in slow vegetable war for light.
John realized now that most of his local allies hated and feared the jungle and were no more able to operate in it than he was. Less so, if anything, because he was at least well used to hunting in hilly woodlands. Temperate forests with completely different trees and plants, but the basic principles were the same, and the Baru Denpasarans were peasants who tilled cleared land, most of it rather flat. And then stayed within the gates of their villages after dark, believing—rightly—that the forest-dwellers hated them as invaders and would kill them on sight.
Tuan Anak said he had specialists who understood the wildwoods and that they were out there checking. John believed him, but it still made him nervous.
The hills hung brooding over the valley, the arched concrete of the pre-Change dam, the lake that snaked northward from it, and the new-built fort at its foot. A fair stream of water ran foaming over the spillraces and down into a river that hugged the eastern edge of the valley; the enemy were drawing the lake down to deny it to the takeoff for the canal upstream whence water flowed to the western coastal lowlands of the island.
From Baru Denpasar’s point of view that had to be stopped, and soon. He sympathized and understood their fear and rage. Rice needed a great deal of water, and anything that interfered with the round of the farming year was a mortal threat, one that hit you on a visceral level every time you looked at your family eating or felt hunger in your own belly. More to the point, he couldn’t really expect the Raja and his folk to make a major effort to get the Montivallans and Townsvillians free of Carcosa’s threat unless they helped him end this menace. A ruler’s duty was to his own folk before strangers.
Anak used his parang to point. “Scouts say forest empty. We outnumber garrison. Fuf . . .”
He looked down at his hand and moved his fingers to recall the English numeral. “Five to one.”
Then he made a side-to-side motion with the blade. “No rice here, comes long-long way on bad road for enemy, much up, much down.”
Hilly, John thought; the local noble’s English was very basic, but it got meaning across. And he understood logistics.
“No big rice, no big army men,” Tuan Anak said as if to confirm the thought.
The Baru Denpasaran commander scowled, a thoughtful expression exaggerated by the scars and lopped nose.
“But we no stay long, same for us, too must cut rice soon. Must take quick but lose too many men, if we try to take walls while engines shoot us from this side, that side.”
“They’re there, and we’re here,” John said, pointing to the fort. “It will cost, taking those works, but not ruinously if we can suppress their catapults and then rake the ramparts with our prang-prangs when the assault goes in.”
And every one of the non-ruinous losses lying gaping at the sky with sightless eyes is someone’s beloved child. Holy Mary, Mother of God, Lady pierced with sorrows, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our deaths!
“You have such fort, many,” Anak said; it was a statement rather than a question, but a request for reassurance too.
“Yes, many,” John said, and didn’t continue aloud:
And most of them make that look like a pimple, unless you count Mackenzie duns.
For one thing, it was very fortunate indeed that the enemy fort was rather small and improvised. He couldn’t tell Tuan Anak how to take a major Protectorate castle or a walled city anywhere in the High Kingdom, because to the best of his knowledge nobody in Montival ever had, save by treachery or starving it out. Smaller works, yes, though at terrible cost . . .
He put calm confidence into his voice, copying his instructors:
“Now we have to work forward, establishing sheltered positions, until we can dominate their fort and suppress its fire.”
He sketched a standard siege operation, with trenches zigzagging forward, parallels dug, redoubts established, and then the whole procedure repeated. His instructors had called it a Vauban Approach, after some great French warrior of the ancient world. The problem was that even the best modern catapults weren’t as powerful as the black-powder cannon Vauban had used, and the ones they had were light warship machines turned field pieces, not a battering-train meant for siege work. Even the Tarshish Queen’s eighteen-pounder bow and stern chasers were only just in that class, and the prang-prangs were for use against troops only.
“Then it can be stormed,” the Montivallan prince finished confidently. “Getting up the walls of an earthwork like that isn’t the problem; it’s getting the troops to the foot of it.”
Not that I
’ve ever done anything of the sort.
He’d never really enjoyed learning fighting much, but it was good to be fit and he did like doing well in tournaments—it was a quick route to popularity with girls well-born and otherwise—and he’d realized long ago that it might well keep him alive at some point. That had happened about the time that he grew old enough to imagine what the scars so common in his parents’ generation actually meant.
But while jousting and sparring could be at least not terminally tedious, lessons in siegecraft had bored him like a hydraulic drill. It made his breath catch to think all these people depended on his remembering it right.
Then he glanced across to Thora. She gave him a single slight nod to signify fine so far and he managed not to slump in relief—if you slouched in armor it clattered, and looked ridiculous. She’d talked of sieges she’d seen here and there, without much detail on her own role; but he was absolutely confident that she knew how to do it far better than he did. Fortunately he had her with him and so didn’t have to do it alone. And Captain Ishikawa was standing tactfully behind her, looking preternaturally calm, which was also reassuring. From what he’d said, he’d both defended and attacked forts as well.
The Baru Denpasaran lord wouldn’t take orders from any outsider whatsoever, which was reasonable enough. And he wouldn’t listen well to advice on warcraft from a Japanese stranger or a woman of any variety, even if he grudgingly respected both as individual fighters. He would take suggestions from a Prince, provided the Prince was from very far away in the land of the fabled American ancients, and provided the Prince had brought equipment he couldn’t do without and most of all provided his ruler had ordered him to do so, point-blank and in public. Especially now that he was desperate for victory to make up for a stinging loss.
He’s no fool, but custom is king over all lands, John thought, trying to be charitable and tolerant though he thought the basic attitude idiotic. Still, I’d like to see even the stiffest Associate noble treat Grandmother Sandra like that, or Baroness d’Ath!
He almost smiled at that, then sobered. From what he’d heard—heard whispered, it wasn’t spoken aloud—a number of them had tried to do just that after his grandfather died and Nonna Sandra became Lady Regent of the Protectorate. Somehow they’d all come to bad ends in ways that left their heirs no way to strike back, or sometimes left them with no heirs at all. The survivors had learned wisdom, or at least how to act as if they had wisdom, motivated by a miasma of fear, until the pretense had become reality. His grandmother had said to him once, smiling slightly, that if you compelled people to behave as if they believed something eventually all but the strongest-willed really did start to believe it, because it was easier on their pride than admitting every moment in the privacy of their soul that they were pretending.
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