Everyone was looking at him. He thought of what the boss would say if he came back and found Walkerburg burned��� and without Walker, there was no place at all for him in this world now.
Okay, he thought. Let’s see what we can do. “How’s the rahax’s place holding out?”
“The stockade holds, but they ravage among the holdings outside. A strong band is coming this way-they must know where you are.”
“We’ll deal with them first, then,” he said. “All right, get the ergastula filled. The rest of you, get your weapons and fall in.”
There were twenty free men left here, half and half Iraiina and Americans. The slaves had learned their lesson, though, the ones left alive after the past year; they turned and shuffled toward the low-set building at the sound of the settlement bell rung three times and then three times again. Nervous hands shoved and prodded them down into the odorous darkness.
The women were running out of their houses, or from the workshops. “Fuck this,” Cuddy muttered, then shouted: “All of you, back to your houses!”
Ekhnonpa appeared beside him. “I will deal with them, and see that a meal is prepared for the warriors, and the first aid equipment”-that was in English-“is made ready.”
“Thank you, lady,” he said in Iraiina. In his mother tongue: “Charlie, John, Sam, c’mon. We’ve got to get the Mule ready.”
They slung their shotguns and dragged open the doors of the carpenter’s shed where the catapult rested. The men he’d named ran to hitch the four-horse team. That reminded him.
“Shaurshix, Llankwir, you get your horses and scout down the track to Daurthunnicar’s place.” He pulled out a key and unlocked the door of a new storehouse, a small stoutly timbered one standing some distance off by itself. Inside were shelves with rows of small ten-pound kegs. He grabbed one under each arm and ran toward the Mule with them. “Get over to the smithy and get me some scrap iron. And I want some bigger barrels, about twice this size-doesn’t matter what’s in them as long as it’s dry-dump it and bring them. Fast!”
Swindapa ran to deliver the message to her waiting countrymen, her feet jolting on the hard sheep-cropped grass. The forty pounds of jointed steel she was wearing did not hinder her much, not after nearly a year of practice almost every day. It was the sight of the Zarthani that squeezed at her chest, the leather kilts and long tomahawks and the yelling snarling faces so close on her left. Sweat poured down her face and flanks, and memories opened and bled. When she reached the waiting band of her people she could scarcely gasp out the command.
The wheeze was enough. Only conviction that strong magic was involved had kept them still. They trembled too, and sweat dripped from them, but it was eagerness. With a single long, savage scream they leaped up and swarmed past her, the bright metal of their weapons gleaming in the light of noon.
She followed, feeling her feet weighed down as if with heavy stones. The enemy had lapped around the right end of the Eagle People’s line; the ones there were fighting back to back. Convinced that they each carried the mana of two, the Fiernans struck into the backs of the Zarthani and pushed them back, and now the Sun People were squeezed in turn. It all seemed curiously remote, something happening far away. All she could remember was the flexing, pounding feeling of fists hitting her, the world whirling away, herself strengthless as they threw her down.
Trotting past bodies writhing or still; Fiernan, Sun People, a few of the Eagle People as well. No lines now. A figure turning on her, a young Zarthani warrior snarling past a sparse brown beard clotted with blood from a light slash along his jaw. He had a shield painted with a bull’s head, the sun between its horns, and a long one-handed ax with a bronze head that drooped like a falcon’s beak. He nearly ran onto the point of her katana, bounced back, and came at her again. Her sword came up but the movement seemed dreamlike. Invisible hands twisted inside her stomach, shooting pain, and she tasted sour vomitus at the back of her throat. Parry, parry, wrists crossed on the long cord-bound hilt; the steel rang under the fast savage blows of the ax. Her heel caught on a clump of grass, and she staggered. The tomahawk rang off the curved surface of her breastplate, leaving a line of bright steel where it scored through the enamel. Again, again, three times in five seconds the armor saved her life. The shield slammed into her and she was over backward, down, hitting with a thump that knocked the wind out of her and drove the edges of the armor into her skin. The sword flew spinning.
Everything was still very slow, except the Zarthani warrior. He alone moved quickly, leaping forward to stamp a bare foot down and hold her in place while the ax went up for a looping chop at her neck. The muscles of his chest and arm knotted as the weapon went up; she could smell him, sweat and greased leather and smoke.
Don’t let me down.
No. Her left arm came off the ground and slammed into the back of the Zarthani’s knee. I won’t leave you alone.
The man heaved backward with a yell. She surged half upright and hammered a gloved right fist up under his kilt. The yell turned to a high yelp of agony. Swindapa kicked her legs free and shoulder-rolled, sweeping the katana up from where it lay. The Zarthani was up too, gray-faced and sweating but still fast. She lunged forward, and the point jammed through wicker and into the warrior’s arm. He croaked rage and swung the ax. Her hands pushed up and her wrists crossed, presenting the blade at a precise forty-five-degree angle, the point near her own shoulder blade. Tough ashwood, the shaft of the ax slid down the metal and the force of the blow turned the Zarthani half around. She planted her feet and lashed the sword back at him; a frantic leap and twist still left him with a gash leaking red along the outside of his right arm, a flap of skin and flesh dangling. She moved in, iodan no kame, sword up over her head.
Cut, and a section of the wicker shield spun away. Strike up from the follow-through, and her blade met the descending arm, already weakened by the first cut. This time the edge jarred solidly into meat, and she pivoted from the hips, a snapping twist that grated the blade into bone and past it. The follow-through sent a fan of red drops across the grass, and the sword seemed to fly of itself back into the high-stroke position for the killing blow.
“Quarter!” the Zarthani yelled, falling back and putting up a hand against it in a futile warding gesture. “I yield!”
For a long moment Swindapa stood, feeling fire torrenting through her blood.
“I won’t let you down,” she whispered, in her lover’s tongue.
The Zarthani swarmed into the breach howling, striking at Americans still dazed on the ground, or still cumbered by their long spears. The bang and clatter and crash of hand-to-hand combat sounded all around them, like a load of scrap metal dropping on a concrete floor.
“Follow me,” Alston said firmly, as Swindapa dashed off to bring the Fiernan reserve into action.
The standard-bearers fell back a little as the command party moved forward, and the dozen sword-and-shield guards closed up in a blunt wedge behind her.
“Rally!” she shouted. “Rally, there!”
The American line was starting to reform, yielding flexibly without breaking ranks, rallying about the flag. But too many of the barbarians were through; a knot of them hacked and trampled their way to the rear of the formation. Alston led her band directly at them, forcing them to turn and meet her. At their head was the chieftain with the chain-mail hauberk; he carried a small shield painted with paired thunderbolts and a long steel-shod spear whose head was surrounded by a collar of white heron feathers. Armored, he still moved lightly, a lithe fast knot of bone and gristle and tough muscle.
The spear punched at her. Worry fell away; you couldn’t think, not in a fight. You reacted. He leaped backward frantically as her katana slammed down in a blurring arc, but the tip still burst links; without the armor it would have gashed his shoulder to the bone. Pale eyes went wide��� and he’d gotten his first real look at her face.
“Night One!” he said in his own tongue.
Beside her one
of his followers struck, and the ax boomed off an American shield. That trooper stepped in, stabbing and punching the shield forward. The whole wedge of guards was pushing forward, stepping into place and sealing the breach in the line.
Alston thrust two-handed at the chief’s face, shrieking the kia. He yelled back and caught the blade on the face of his shield, short-gripping the spear and stabbing underarm. The point skittered off the lower part of her breastplate and the thigh guards. He backed again, but she followed closely, keeping herself too close for his longer weapon to be fully useful. The brass cap at the base of the katana’s hilt punched up at his face, taking him at the angle of his jaw. Bone broke, but the Zarthani’s shield edge whipped around and struck her across the head and shoulder. She tasted the iron and salt of blood in her mouth and went with the stroke, letting her right knee loose. Weight and momentum pushed her down on one knee, and the long curved blade took the warrior on the back of the leg, just above the knee. He fell backward with a scream, one that ended in a gurgle as the katana came down across his neck.
Alston spat blood and came to her feet. The fight was ending, knots and clumps of the Zarthani turning and running lest they be caught between the Fiernans swinging in from the right and the Nantucket line. Training pays off, she thought, dragging her mind back to the chessplayer’s state a commander needed. True for the Romans, true for us.
“Shall we pursue?” Lieutenant Nyugen said.
“No,” she replied.
No point; they couldn’t possibly chase down unarmored men, not without cavalry, and those took years to train.
She shook her head. “Let the locals do it.”
The Fiernans were hallooing off across the stretch of pasture, spearing running Zarthani in the back or wounded ones on the ground with the ruthless enthusiasm bred by old, old scores that they’d never had a chance to pay off before. That reminded her���
“See to the prisoners.” Where the Fiernans had passed, there simply weren’t any-which was a pity but also a load off her mind; there weren’t any facilities for them. “We’ll need a few for interrogation.”
Stretcher-bearers were taking the wounded off to the circle of wagons where the doctors waited. There were already birds circling above, ravens and crows, waiting for the living humans to get out of the way. And���
Swindapa. For an instant she could be an single human being, not the head of a hundredfold body. Fear and love roiled under the shell of control. The Fiernan girl wasn’t far away, cleaning her sword and standing over an enemy prisoner. As Alston came up she pushed back the cheekpieces and removed her helmet, turning a wondering look on the American.
“I beat him. He gave up,” she said. “I beat him, and he gave up.”
Alston put an arm around her shoulders. The armor made it like embracing a statue, but she squeezed anyway. “Damn right,” she said, grinning in relief and fierce pride. “I didn’t waste all that teachin’ time.”
“I didn’t let you down.”
“Never.”
The Zarthani warrior lay not far away, rough field dressings on a couple of bad wounds on his right arm. His look of sullen fear turned to amazement, doubled as Alston bared her head to the cooling breeze and his suspicious eyes studied her throat.
“Women?” he blurted, horror in his voice. “I surrendered to women?”
Alston and Swindapa looked at each other for a long moment. Then they began to laugh.
“Here they come,” Ian said.
“Get down from there,” Doreen said nervously, pulling at the back of his bush jacket as he stood above her on the floor of the wagon.
“I really don’t like battles,” she said.
Ian nodded, climbing down, his eyes still glued on the onrushing��� barbarian horde. A real, live, very ugly barbarian horde.
He didn’t like battles either. He remembered the one with the Olmecs all too vividly-in dreams, at times. Not that he’d seen much of it, from his post well to the rear, but he’d seen the aftermath close up��� and smelled it. Right now all he could smell was his own sweat, the fairly powerful odor of the threescore Fiernans massed in the forward part of the ring of wagons, and the strong disinfectant the medics were getting ready.
The doctors and orderlies were pulling their steel-tube folding tables out of the supply wagons and setting up, lighting a fire to heat the pressure cookers that would sterilize their implements. The Arnsteins helped them; it felt rather odd, since the orderlies were in armor.
“Periods all jumbled up,” Doreen said, holding the platform of a table while an orderly spun the wing nuts that secured it to the frame.
“Bronze Age, medieval, twentieth,” Ian agreed.
“Excuse me, sir,” a petty officer said. “Is that loaded?”
“What loaded?” Ian said.
“The gun, sir,” the noncom said, her voice heavily patient. “The one you’re wearing slung across your back.”
“Oh, that gun,” Ian said.
It was a 12-gauge double-barrel model, cut down. He clicked open the breech; empty.
“You should load it, sir. We’re not supposed to need ‘em here, but you never know.”
The shells were double-ought buckshot, and had an unpleasant weight and solidity as he slid them into the breech; the snick and click as he closed the weapon had an evil finality to it. He could hear the crossbows firing now, and the shrieks and screams of the enemy were much closer. Stretcher-bearers came trotting in with the first of the wounded, an American with an arrow through the biceps and into the bone. He was cursing, a steady flat-toned stream of obscenity and scatology, until the painkiller took effect. As he went limp an orderly cut the shaft of the arrow off an inch above his skin with a pair of pruning shears. The surgeon pulled an instrument from a tray, one Ian recognized-an arrow-extractor spoon, an ancient model that probably hadn’t been used in centuries��� or wouldn’t be invented for millennia, depending on how you looked at it.
He looked away, himself, as the doctor’s intent face bent over the wounded man. As he did there was a long whirring shoooosshh sound from the east-facing side of the wagon fort, underscored by a flat twanging. Bows, he realized; he was hearing massed archery. Here and there a slinger stood in a circle of open space, flicking his leather thong around his head with a one��� two��� throw motion; he’d seen Swindapa do it, in practice. The lead eggs the Americans had provided their allies as ammunition blurred out almost too fast to see. From here he couldn’t see the action, but he could still hear the steady metronomic whunnng sound of the crossbows volleying. Then he couldn’t, and a few seconds later there was a long rasping slither, a deep shout, and then a frantic multiple clang and thump and snarling brabble of voices.
“And the din of onset sounded,” he quoted to himself. He was coming to have a deeper appreciation of Homer than he’d ever imagined��� or wanted.
The Fiernan archers standing on the wagon beds were still shooting, but carefully now-picking their targets, holding the shaft, and then loosing. Occasionally one would stop to yell a taunt, or pull up his tunic and slap his buttocks at the enemy.
What do I do now? The answer to that was “nothing”; he couldn’t even shout for news, his Fiernan wasn’t up to it and it wouldn’t really be tactful to use the Sun People tongue right at this moment. Casualties trickled in, not all that many of them; more than half came from the Fiernans fighting along the forward edge of the wagons. Amazing how important armor is. The noise grew greater, and there were high-pitched screams, piteous and astonishingly loud. Wounded horses. Somehow they sounded even worse than the human beings; their pain was without comprehension or recourse.
“Look out!”
That was the petty officer who’d reminded him to load the shotgun. Ian whipped around. A couple of Zarthani were climbing through the wagons almost directly behind him, trampling Fiernan corpses.
The battle suddenly seemed very close indeed. The non-com and an orderly snatched up their big
oval shields, and Doreen reached for her oak staff. One of the Zarthani made a flying leap and hit a shield feet-first. The sheet metal boomed under the impact of the callused heels and the collision sent them both down. Less burdened, the barbarian was back on his feet first; his spear slammed down, scoring the enameled eagle on the shield. The American had no chance of getting back on her feet, not with the armor on. Instead she curled up under the shield as she’d been trained, keeping it between her and the barbarian with the tip of the gladius ready around the edge if his unprotected legs came too close. Screaming frustration, the warrior danced around his prone opponent, his spear darting out like the flickering of a frog’s tongue. The fallen noncom’s companion was backing up himself, desperately trying to fend off two Zarthani who were edging out to take him in the rear, their axes moving continually in blurring, looping arcs. The edges glinted, razor-sharp. Even if they couldn’t cut through steel, they could still break bones under mail.
“Oh, shit,” Ian muttered, looking frantically around.
Nobody else here but the doctors and nurses, so frantically busy with the wounded that they didn’t even look up. The rest of the stretcher-bearer-cum-orderlies were back along the line, bringing in more wounded. Nobody else in reach.
Doreen had come to the same conclusion a split second earlier. She swallowed, took a firmer grip on the bo, and stepped forward.
“Wait!” Ian croaked, hands fumbling on the shotgun.
Goddammit, this isn’t my field!
The Zarthani didn’t seem to consider any of that important. He caught the movement of Doreen’s staff out of the corner of his eye and struck, turning almost as fast as the outflung head of his long tomahawk. The axhead sliced through the upper part of the bo, but the staff saved Doreen’s life even as a third of its length went flipping end over end. Deflected, it was the flat of the ax rather than its edge that glanced off the side of her head. Blood welled up from a torn scalp, and she dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. The barbarian crowed triumph and swung the bronze ax up again.
Island in the Sea of Time Page 56
