The Miocene Arrow

by Sean McMullen

  “So?”

  “So we have something to eat or trade. You can ride the cart while your leg heals.”

  “I want to fight, not flee!” declared Feydamor, brandishing his carbine in the air.

  They regarded the dead vendor lying behind the cart. Glasken selected a length of preserved sausage and nibbled at it. He raised an eyebrow and nodded, then offered the sausage to Feydamor.

  “Nice, and this will be worth more than gold soon,” Glasken pronounced. “Jeb, if you’re alive and free you can return to fight. Stay here, and you’re dead.”

  “But we need to slow the Bartolicans now, else they will be at Forian before the week is out.”

  “We can help Yarron better by going to Sartov and advising him.”

  “Sartov? He’s just been made chancellor, he’ll not listen to you. Sair Glasken, in a day or so new track will be laid, and galley carts can leave for Forian.”

  “Bartolican gunwings will be shooting up anything that moves on the tramway.”

  “You can never convince me—” began Feydamor, but Glasken seized him and spun him to the ground.

  Kneeling on his back, he tied the guildsman’s hands, then gagged him. Once his legs were tied as well, Glasken heaved him up into the sausage cart and spread his field cloak over him. He started down the road north, and they were not alone as they fled Kennyville. A refugee column of merchant carbineers, guild and warden families formed quickly. At first progress was easy, but in the evening there was a thunderstorm that turned the desert road to mud. When Glasken finally stopped and untied Feydamor they were twenty miles from Kennyville.

  “You should have fled without me, there was no need to share your cowardice,” grumbled Feydamor as they sat eating the chicken sausage and some cold roast potatoes that Glasken had bartered for among the other refugee guild families. “Tomorrow I take my carbine and I return to Kennyville to do serious shooting.”

  “At anyone I know?”

  “One dead Bartolican carbineer is one less invader on Yarron’s back.”

  “And one dead guildmaster engineer is one massive loss to Yarron and an equally big gain for Bartolica. Yarron needs your skills with compression engines to fight back.”

  “What?” shouted Feydamor. “Us fight like Bartolicans? Never—and even if we did, I’d never be part of it.”

  “Not like the Bartolicans, better than that. With my strategies—”

  “Your strategies? Pah! Take cover, run away, wear a disguise, loot food, sleep by day and run by night. You even escaped the Prefect’s building in Median behind the skirts of an enemy woman.”

  “Aye but who rogered that same enemy woman in that orchard near—”

  “How did you know—”

  Feydamor clamped a hand over his own mouth. Glasken drew a small telescope from his coat, extended it, and turned it upon Feydamor’s eye.

  “Why patrol the ground when a tree will provide a better view of what may attack and what is being guarded?”

  Feydamor sat in silence, unmoving. After some time Glasken began to pack the cart. Slowly Feydamor lowered his hand to join the other in his lap. Glasken sat down in front of him.

  “What was she like?” asked Glasken with a leer as he clasped his hands and rested his chin on them.

  “None of your business.”

  “Jeb, I was serious when I said that I need to see Chancellor Sartov. I could help Yarron save itself, I could help Yarron the same way that … other people are helping the Bartolicans.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell someone earlier, if you’re so very wise?”

  “I did!” snapped Glasken, his face coloring as his patience ran down to nothing. “Why do you think I went to the Palace of the Inspectorate in Median, then the Prefect’s building? Alas, the infiltrators were there before me, and I was lucky to escape alive. Sartov I already know, and trust. He will listen.”

  Feydamor crawled under the cart with a blanket. He clipped his Call tether to the frame of the cart, then tried to get comfortable.

  “In the morning I’ll be gone,” he declared.

  “Then go,” Glasken replied after nearly a full minute, as if he had taken time deciding whether Feydamor was worth the trouble.

  The sky was still quite bright, and some people were still tramping along the road. Glasken began to clean his carbine.

  “Do you have a family?” asked Feydamor, who had expected more argument, and was uneasy with the silence.

  “My family thinks I’m dead, they think I died three years ago. Both of my wives betrayed me, Jeb, could you imagine that? Semme Laurelene is like a combination of their worst features.”

  “Both? Are you a Mormon?”

  “No, a Gentheist.”

  Feydamor rolled over and scratched his head at the word. Glasken clipped his Call tether to the wheel of the cart. High above them a sailwing droned smoothly across the darkening sky.

  “Mortical Guild,” said Feydamor automatically.

  “Uh, sorry?”

  “The engine: it was made by the Mortical Guild of Bartolica.”

  “Ha ha, a wing spotter,” Glasken said, shaking his head.

  “A what?”

  “In my homeland, there are wind train and galley train spotters: people who stand by the tracks and note down what rolls past.”

  “For enemy intelligence?”

  “No, for diversion. Like with you and gunwing engines, they can tell a train in darkness, just by the sound it makes and its running lights.”

  “What are trains?”

  “They are … like many trams chained together. Only one has an engine.”

  “Pah, what a lie. Even two steam trams together would bring down the fire of the Sentinels.”

  Glasken chuckled. Feydamor hawked and spat.

  “Why are they killing us, Sair Glasken? Do the Bartolicans want Yarron as an empty land, sponged clean of my people?”

  Glasken lay back with his head resting on his hands, looking up at the stars. “It’s worse than that, Sair Feydamor,” he replied, but did not elaborate.

  Feydamor scratched his thinning hair and shrugged. The man seemed to come from a very advanced dominion, but where was it?

  “Why do your land’s trams use wind to drive them?” Feydamor asked.

  “Trains, not trams. It is a very flat land, only a little wind power is needed to drive the rotors of a train and keep it moving. Besides, most of our religions prohibit steam or compression engines. There’s a strictly enforced death penalty as incentive to obey.”

  “I have never heard of such a land.”

  “Indeed. Its main names are Australica, Austranian, and Centravas.”

  “So how was the journey here?”

  “Don’t know. I was asleep.”

  It sounded like the ravings of a lunatic, yet Glasken had a steady confidence that made his words convincing. His stories were somehow too grand in their scope to be lies.

  2 September 3960: Casper Wingfield

  “It’s too late in the season for war duels,” Serjon told the other flyers as they left the refectory tent of Casper wingfield.

  “You sound disappointed,” said Ramsdel.

  “I want a dead Bartolican for every cold hand that I touched at Opal. That means a lot of dead Bartolicans.”

  It was a windy evening in early September. Kumiar had the serving girl Liesel on his arm as the group set off for the nearby town. Refugees had started to arrive in Casper along the road from Kennyville, and the streets were filled with shabby, ragged guild families and Yarronese carbineers. The young flyers, who by now had been officially made part of the chancellor’s new Air Carbineers, were booed several times by angry but exhausted men, and one carbineer shouted at them to ascend and fight. Serjon began to give away the coins in his pockets, and by the time they reached a coffee tavern he had to borrow the price of his drink from Alion.

  “I feel very lower-class being in the Air Carbineers,” muttered Alion. “I am a warden-heir, and I once ca
rried the colors of a princess fifteenth in line to the Bartolican throne.”

  “Seventeenth,” said Ramsdel, “and it’s your choice to be with us.”

  “If I had my own wing I’d be with my father in Forian.”

  “Oh but you will have a new Air Carbineer gunwing soon,” said Liesel. “Serjon and Bronlar will get them too. Newly built gunwings.”

  For some moments there was shocked silence. Liesel had acute hearing, and she spent her working day serving very senior people who were discussing highly secret matters. This time she had heard the adjunct talking.

  “I shall name mine Princess!” exclaimed Alion eagerly.

  “It’s bad luck for anyone but a female to name your wing,” said Serjon just as eagerly.

  “To the Call with luck. Princess it stays.”

  “Are you sure Serjon is included?” asked Bronlar. “He’s crash-landed every gunwing he has ascended in.”

  “For that I name your gunwing, ah, Slash,” said Serjon.

  “You can’t, you’re a boy.”

  “You wear my colors.”

  “Then I name yours Starflower.”

  “Starflower? That sounds like I’m a night courier.”

  Liesel knew some of the nurses who were at a nearby table. Although pale and wrung-out from tending countless injured refugees all day, they joined the group of flyers. A rangalin fiddler began playing, and some couples began to dance. To everyone’s surprise Alion departed early with a pretty nurse who was half a head taller than him.

  “What happened to true love, faithfulness, and class distinction?” Bronlar asked Ramsdel as they watched the others dancing.

  “They’re no match for a girl who offers a tour of her underwear. The nurses see lives slipping away all day, now they want to celebrate life.”

  Bronlar spun her empty cup on its edge, then pressed it between her two thumbs, spun it in the air, caught it between her thumbs again, and set it on the table upside down.

  “Jealous?” asked Ramsdel.

  “I’m—I’m a girl among all you males. I must be one of you, I can’t be a girl. Do you understand?”

  “I understand, but that’s no excuse for not looking smart. Can I borrow your shirts to take them in at the waist and under the arms? You look to be wearing flour sacks as they are.”

  “Ah, er, why not?” replied Bronlar, unsure whether or not to be insulted.

  “I’m seeing a very nice girl, a smart dresser who tailors her own uniforms. Oh, and she has a wonderful figure and incredible brunette hair that sets off simply anything she wears. It might be hard to get her to parade, though, because she’s the wingfield medic and very busy.”

  Bronlar realized that Ramsdel was friendly with the only female wingfield medic in North Yarron. Just then the sound of an argument reached them. Serjon was having words with a nurse around whose back he had had an arm draped only minutes earlier. Bronlar stared through the dim light: sure enough, there were thirteen buttons down the back of her blouse. The nurse snatched her coat from a chair, then took a jar of soy cream and emptied it into Serjon’s open collar. She flounced out of the coffee tavern alone.

  “And he wonders what girls don’t like about him,” sighed Ramsdel. “I keep telling him, but do you think he can be told?”

  “I hope fate spares him,” Bronlar replied. “Who else could make us laugh in these times?”

  3 September 3960: Laramie Mountains

  Feydamor decided not to return to Kennyville. In spite of the mud, he and Glasken managed to maintain their place in the column. Glasken pushed the cart and Feydamor stubbornly swung along on crutches. They passed people frantically trying to repair broken carts, and others who had just stopped, their spirits broken. The abandoned debris from those ahead of them littered the roadside everywhere, and every so often there were the dead. Those that disturbed Feydamor most were the young, pretty women and the children. They looked as if they should have been alive, they did not seem old, diseased, or guilty enough to be dead. Glasken’s stories about his homeland played on his mind. The place was so real and consistent.

  “Wish I was riding,” Glasken said after they had been walking for three hours.

  “What is ride?”

  “Ride? Just sit on a horse and—ah, I’m forgetting. You have no horses or camels in America. No big animals at all.”

  “You use the name America, the old name for Mounthaven.”

  “That was our only word for this place for two thousand years.”

  “How did you discover us?”

  “By accident, while testing a new weapon during our last great war.”

  “What weapon?”

  “You’d not understand.”

  “I’m a master guildsman!”

  “It was a modulated induction transceiver.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  A Bartolican gunwing droned overhead, observing the column from a thousand feet above. The miserable stream of humanity had no military significance, so nobody gave the gunwing much heed. Presently the gunwing broke off and flew away to the west. Feydamor and Glasken stopped beside an overturned cart and traded wurst for dried fruit and curd that the owner was bartering.

  They were near the top of a large, low hill, and as they ate and rested they watched a flock of nine sailwings flying out of the west in a V formation. Slowly the V was transformed into a long line.

  “Get away from the cart!” warned Glasken suddenly. “Hurry! It’s a target.”

  He was right. The sailwings lazily cruised up the refugee column, reaction guns blazing. People screamed and shouted as they dived for cover, and within moments the road was clear. Glasken fired several shots from his carbine, and by the time the fifth sailwing was passing overhead Feydamor had his carbine out and was shooting too.

  “They can’t do this!” shouted the guildmaster as the last sailwing passed.

  “They’ve done worse, you of all people should know.”

  The flock was circling in a wide, lazy arc as Glasken stood up and began shouting at the top of his voice, in Old Anglian.

  “Everybody with a carbine, over here! Hurry! Ten carbines together are as good as a reaction gun!”

  There were shouts of assent, and carbineers began to stand up alongside the road.

  “Come on, over here!” Glasken cried, waving his carbine. “Show we can hurt them.”

  A scatter of men came loping over, some with the dustcloths still over their carbines. A few more just had heavy-caliber pistols. Glasken organized them into rows and told them to aim slightly ahead of the sailwings. The flock had circled around by now, and was on a second strafing run.

  The first sailwing roared over, and Glasken’s cart shuddered and splintered as the reaction gun shots ripped through the wooden boards. The scratch force of carbineers opened fire, but it passed unharmed. Some turned to shoot at its tail.

  “Leave it, always shoot at the next one!” shouted Glasken, but the second sailwing swooped over with hardly a shot fired at it

  They were united again as the third sailwing approached. The carbines fired in a staccato rattle, and abruptly the sailwing nosedived into the road and blew up, showering dirt, rocks, and burning compression spirit over huddled refugees. Cheers pealed out amid the cries from those beating out flames in their clothing. The next two sailwings tore through the cloud of smoke; then Glasken’s force was shooting again. A sailwing flew off trailing smoke from its compression engine but managed to stay in the air. The flock did not return for another pass.

  Glasken abandoned the cart after packing as much wurst as he could into his pockets and sling bag. Now people pointed him out and cheered as he passed, and a lot more carbines were in evidence among the refugees. In the days that followed there were several more attacks on the refugee column, but at the cost of five Bartolican sailwings. In a small and subtle way, the war had changed direction.

  7 September 3960: Casper

  On the Casper wingfield it was as if there were no war go
ing on. Even though refugees were streaming into the town and Bartolican sailwings made occasional flights overhead, there were no ascents in anger. The wingfield was a staging and refueling point between the artisan shops of Sheridan and the capital.

  “I heard about your father dying,” Ramsdel said to Alion as they sat ready for Call patrol near the sailwings. “I’m sorry.”

  “He was shot down in a war duel, he died with honor,” Alion replied, then lapsed into thought and the silence that went with it.

  “So you’re a warden now,” Ramsdel said eventually.

  “Yes, I have that burden.”

  Ramsdel sat embroidering a starflower on a black ribbon. He was hopeful that Bronlar would give colors to Serjon, and that he would accept them.

  “I could make you a set of colors for that tall nurse to give you,” Ramsdel suggested as an idle thought flashed into his mind.

  “Her? She’s nothing to me,” Alion said smoothly, but the color had left his face. “She’s just a nurse.”

  “Warden Alion, really! And after you played humpy-jig in the dormitories with her.”

  “That’s a lie,” said Alion, just as smoothly as before.

  “I have it from nurses who were woken as she cried out ‘Warden Alion, fly me again! Fly me! Fly me!’”

  “Who knows about that?” quavered Alion, losing all guile. “If Samondel should learn—”

  “The whole wingfield knows!” snapped Ramsdel, who was becoming impatient with his attitude, and had poked his fingertip with a needle. “Look, Alion, Princess Samondel once gave her colors to the Governor who is said to have launched this hideous invasion of our dominion. The next Bartolican warden that you ascend to fight may be wearing her colors and be shooting at you!”

  Alion clasped his hands and hung his head. “Then how could I shoot back?” he said in dreamy anguish. “It would be like shooting at Samondel.”

  Ramsdel finished the starflower, corked his needle, and put both ribbon and needle into his flight jacket pocket. He stood up, stretched, and sucked the end of his finger.

  Compression engines sounded in the distance and they both jumped to their feet. No siren wailed, however, so they were not Bartolican. Presently three triwing gunwings came into view, circled the wingfield, and landed. An adjunct’s clerk came running up and told Alion to report to the pennant pole at once. When he arrived he found Serjon and Bronlar already there and being briefed.