Dies the Fire

by S. M. Stirling

  He went on aloud: "What I'd like you to do, Sheriff, is push them, since most of your people are riding lighter than mine."

  Havel waved ahead towards the fleeing enemy. "Don't try to engage them, just get their horses lathered and blown, and stay on their right hands so they've got to keep heading south instead of right for St. Hilda's."

  Woburn settled the Bearkiller-style helmet he'd bought. "That we can do," he said.

  Whooping, he rode over to his men and shouted to them. They spurred their horses, pulling ahead of the double column of armored fighters, closing rapidly. The Devil Dogs flailed at their own mounts with their heels and the loose ends of their reins, pulling ahead again.

  The whole clot of horses and men disappeared over one of the long low swellings; there wasn't much dust, but the rumble sounded loud through the warm air. A canter made enough wind to dry some of the sweat that runneled down his body, but not enough to get through most of the quilted padding under the armor.

  Time crept by at a walk-trot-canter rhythm; he started to wonder whether he should step up the pace himself.

  No. Remember the horses. They're not Humvees and ours are carrying a lot of weight.

  Over the next rise, and a black clump showed in the distance. Down another shallow dip in the prairie, through fields of clover that smelled candy-sweet when crushed underhoof—that required a little discipline, because the horses saw no pressing reason not to stop and eat—and through a shallow creek fringed by pines, and then up another swale. The tracks of the Bearkillers and Woburn's men showed clearly, black against the poplin-green of wheat and the crimson-starred clover. This time they could see both parties; the Devil Dogs had slowed to a jog-trot.

  Closer still, and he could see the streaks of foam on the necks and flanks of their horses, hear the wheezing bellows panting. They were tiring quickly; not in as good condition as the Bearkiller mounts to begin with, and badly ridden. Havel slowed, dropping down the column.

  "Be careful when we catch up," he repeated over and over. "Remember, we don't want to let them close in too soon. Listen for the signals and keep alert."

  "Yes, Mother," Eric muttered.

  Havel rang the knuckles of his armored glove off the younger man's helmet.

  "Hey!"

  "Shut up!" Havel said. The white noise of the hooves would cover the words. "People are going to start dying right about now."

  That won't work, he thought. This kid's still eighteen. He's seen people die since the Change but he still doesn't really believe it could be him, not down in the gut.

  Inspiration struck: "Luanne there could die."

  That got through; he saw Eric flush and then go pale.

  "So let's all keep fucking focused, shall we?" he concluded grimly.

  Havel tightened his thighs and shifted his balance, bringing Gustav up to a hand gallop. Woburn came alongside when he came back to the head of the line.

  "What now?" he asked.

  Havel cocked an eye at the sheriffs horse, and those of his posse. Not bad. About as worn down as ours, much less than the bad guys' nags. Woburn's men weren't wearing much armor, and they were a lot easier on their horses than the Devil Dogs.

  "Hang back," he said. "You can't help with the next part. Stay in range—get ready to pile in if you have to, or chase 'em for real if they scatter."

  "They're going to scatter?" Woburn asked.

  "Well, if they don't there won't be any problem," Havel said. "Because then they'll all be dead. It'll take a while, though."

  The sheriff peeled off to the loose array of his posse. Havel reached over his shoulder for a shaft and slid it through the arrow-shelf in his bow's riser, thinking hard.

  The Devil Dogs weren't riding in any particular order; more like a loose mass that anything resembling his staggered column of twos. Havel waved his right arm and chopped it forward, brought the Bearkillers up level with their opponents and to their right, no more than forty yards away.

  A few of the Devil Dogs had loaded their crossbows, and tried to shoot them one-handed like huge pistols; mostly they ended up sinking shafts into the ground at their horses' feet, or in wild arcs up into the air.

  That bought a few derisive shouts from the Bearkillers, and elevated-finger salutes. Then they drew their bows. The sound that went up from the Devil Dogs as the first slashing volley of forty arrows arched out towards them was as much frustration as fear, but there was a lot of terror in it too. Two men went down when their horses were struck; the range was much closer this time, and more of the horse-archers were in the firing line.

  Havel looked behind. One of the enemy fighters was down under his thrashing horse; the other was crawling on hands and knees, stunned, as Woburn's posse trotted towards him.

  Hope he remembers we could use some prisoners, Havel thought. Then he shouted aloud: "Aim at the horses! Dismounting one is as good as killing him!"

  Though that had the disadvantage that the horses didn't deserve it and their masters most certainly did—but the world wasn't fair. The Change certainly proved that, if there was any doubt.

  The Devil Dog leader in the horned helmet screamed out an order and turned his horse, waving his long sword overhead as he charged. Havel didn't bother to give Signe a verbal command, just jerked a hand in the opposite direction; she put the trumpet to her lips and sounded: Parthian retreat and Form line abreast on the commander.

  They all turned their horses right, a unified surge of motion at ninety degrees to their previous course; that gave him a fierce satisfaction. A lot of hard work was paying off. The Devil Dogs rode in a dense clump as they pursued the neatly spaced Bearkiller line; they were roaring again, gaining on their tormentors …

  . and then the Bearkillers turned in the saddle and began to shoot again, back over the horses' rumps.

  Forty bows snapped. This time the range was close. Close enough to see men shout, close enough to see blood fly in sun-bright drops when an arrow punched into flesh. Close enough to hear the high shrill screams of wounded horses, unbearably loud.

  Half a dozen Devil Dog mounts went down as if they had run into an invisible wall, throwing riders or rolling over them. Even then, Havel winced inwardly. He hated having to hurt the horses, but there really wasn't any alternative.

  And then the enemy broke; one moment attacking, the next spurring off in every direction, like spatters of butter dropping on a hot skillet. For once, panic was making people do the less-bad thing—stop being a big clumped-up target at point-blank range.

  "Sound Pursuit by squads, and Rally in one hour," Havel said, and Signe gave the call.

  Woburn's men led, whooping with bloodthirsty glee; Havel's followed more sedately. He drew rein himself, turning his head to make sure all the Bearkillers were sticking to their four-fighter squads rather than hairing off individually. Unconsciously he made a slight shrug with his shoulders and a hunff sound as he looked back over the battlefield.

  They were the same gestures his father had used back on the Havel homeplace when he shifted a big rock from a field drain, or got a tree down just the way he wanted. Hard dangerous work, done right.

  Eric was part of the headquarters squad, along with Lu-anne and Signe.

  "Well, that was easier than I expected," he said, flexing his right hand with a creak of leather and rustle of chain mail; pulling a bow to full draw over and over again was hard work.

  "It's not over yet," Havel replied. "But yeah, so far. We surprised them badly. That always makes things a lot easier. Get inside someone's decision loop, and he's always reacting to what you do—usually badly—instead of doing something himself and making you react."

  Luanne spoke: "Was there anything they could do?"

  "Couple of things," Havel said. "Scatter right away; a fair number of them would have escaped. Fort up on a rise until dark—maybe kill their horses for barricades. Once the sun went down, we couldn't find most of them, and it's only about six hours' walk to their base. Or … well, they didn't have the
leisure to think about it, and they got spooked when we showed 'em we could hit them without their being able to hit back. Plus I suspect their honcho just wasn't very bright. Anyone stupid enough to put horns on their helmet, where they'd catch a blade … "

  "Ooopsie, speak of the devil," Signe said, pointing. "I think that's their command group, and they've stopped."

  "No rest for the wicked," Havel said, turning Gustav forward.

  They spread out into a loose line abreast. The wind was from Havel's right hand, hot and full of grassy smells.

  That also made it possible for Signe to speak to him without the others hearing:

  "Are we the wicked, Mike?" she said; he could hear a shiver in her voice below the steady beat of the hooves. "I'm … I couldn't have imagined doing … this … before the Change."

  He looked at her with a crooked smile. "Nah, askling, we're not the wicked. We're the people who keep guys like Duke Iron Rod—who really is wicked—away from people like … oh, Jane Waters and her kids."

  His smile grew to a grin: "Like Aragorn son of Arathorn, in those books of Astrid's. Or those two guys in the Iliad."

  "You read the Iliad?" she said, surprised.

  "Some of it, a long while ago. And your dad and I were talking about it, just the other day. There's this bit, where two guys—soldiers—are talking, and one of them says something like … "

  He paused to think: "Why is it, my friend, that our people give us the best they have, the vineyard and the good land down by the river, and honor us next to the immortal Gods? Because we put our bodies between our homeland and the war's desolation."

  "Speaking of which," he said in his ordinary voice.

  Five of the enemy had halted—one because his horse had keeled over, with arrow-feathers showing against its side behind the girth; as they looked it gave a final kick, voided and died.

  A horse took a surprising amount of time to bleed out, if you didn't hit something immediately vital.

  The rider looked to have come off unexpectedly and hard. Two others were trying to get him up, and nearly succeeding. Another two were riding double, seemingly arguing with each other.

  All of them were too busy to keep lookout. When they saw what was approaching, the man on the double-ridden horse struck backward with his head, throwing his partner half-off, then pushing and shoving and beating at him with one fist as the horse swung in circles, rolling its eyes and getting ready to buck.

  It did buck once as the second man came loose, and then starfished and crow-hopped sideways across the knee-high wheat; that spooked the mounts of the two trying to lift their fallen commander. They let him drop for a second to snatch for their reins, while the Devil Dog who'd shed his friend hammered at his mount with his heels until it lumbered back into a weary gallop.

  Havel snorted. "Hope to God I never have to depend on a buddy like that," he said. "Eric, Luanne, take him. Be careful."

  "You said it," Eric said grimly. "Haakkaa paalle! Let's go!"

  He drew his backsword; Luanne reached behind and lifted the lance from its tubular scabbard at the right rear of her saddle, hefting it with a toss to grab it by the rawhide-wound grip section. Their horses rocked into a lope after the diminishing dot of the fleeing outlaw.

  Havel squinted against the sun, shading his eyes with one hand and considering the three Devil Dogs grouped around the enemy commander. He was on his feet again, if a little shaky, and he'd kept one of the big kite-shaped shields his gang favored, decorated with the winged skull and twin runic thunderbolts. The other two had only their swords; one had lost his helmet.

  "How are you doing for arrows?" Havel asked.

  "Twelve left," Signe said, reaching over her shoulder to check with her fingers; you couldn't see them, of course.

  "I've got eight," Havel said.

  He looked around; nobody close—in fact, nobody in sight, except for the balloon. A cavalry battle in open country was a lot like one at sea; distances could open out fast.

  "Ummmm … Mike, shouldn't we offer them a chance to surrender?" Signe said, nodding towards the three men a hundred yards away.

  "I wish they would surrender," Havel said. "We could get some useful intelligence. But they won't."

  "Why not?"

  "Woburn, for starters. Remember that gallows he's building, in front of the county courthouse?"

  "Yeah," she said, wincing slightly. "You know, before the Change, I was big against capital punishment."

  "Well, we've all had to give up luxuries," he chuckled. "And considering these guys' records in the armed robbery, murder, arson and rape department … "

  "Yeah," she said, her face hardening. "There is that."

  They were two hundred yards away now. Worth a try, Havel thought. It really would be useful to get one for interrogation before we try conclusions with Duke Iron Rod. Is he really going to sit still while we trundle the doorknockers up to his front porch?

  "Give up!" he shouted. "Give up, or your ass is grass!"

  The reply came back thin across the distance: "Fuck you!" and the three men waved their swords and shook fists.

  "You guys called it," Havel said with a shrug, pulling out an arrow. "Geeup, Gustav."

  The horse was tired, but not worn out. He could feel it gathering itself as he leg-signaled it; it was getting so he was as comfortable riding with the reins knotted on the saddlebow as with them in his hands. And the Devil Dogs hadn't tried to skewer him with a crossbow bolt, which meant they probably didn't have an intact weapon between the three of them.

  The horse went trot-canter-gallop. He went close this time, watching carefully and picking his target. The two shieldless men tried to duck under the cover of the dead horse …

  * * * *

  "I don't fucking believe it," Ken Larsson said, staring at the steam engine.

  Randy Sacket darted a triumphant glance at his father, who was about Ken's age; the younger man was in his twenties, with dark hair slicked back into a ponytail and tattoos on his forearms. His hands were big and battered as he traced the water and steam lines on the miniature traction engine—it stood about four feet high at the top of its boiler, with a disproportionately large seat.

  "You're sure it's not some sort of mechanical failure?" Pete Sacket said.

  The older Sacket ran a garage-cum-machine-shop on the edge of Craigswood, or had before the Change—it wasn't far from the spot the Bearkillers had picked to camp. Now he and his son and daughter-in-law cultivated a big truck garden and helped improvise plows and cultivators that could be drawn by horses or newly broken oxen. The steam engine stood in the dirt parking lot behind the sheet-metal buildings, along with a good deal of other abandoned equipment … much of it valuable for the heavy springs it contained.

  You could throw things with springs and gears; he'd fired up the steam engine for curiosity's sake, and to keep his mind off the fact that his children were out fighting, and him not there.

  Its boiler was hissing merrily, and wisps of steam escaped as more and more fuel oil was fed to the boilers—the machine was meant for tourists, and shoveling in coal would have been more authenticity than most at the county fair wanted.

  What's happening is that the goddamned pressure isn't going up like it should, Larsson thought, wiping his hands on an oily rag.

  He looked up at the setting sun, feeling a little guilty; there was a working day gone.

  "No, it's in perfect working order," he said. "It's just that no matter how much fuel you put through, the pressure doesn't get high enough to do more than—"

  He pointed to the flywheel, which spun—very, very slowly—in its mount on the top right of the boiler. Suddenly he threw the rag down and stamped on it, startling both of them; he wasn't a demonstrative man, and they'd both picked up on that even on short acquaintance.

  "I told you, Dad," Randy said. "It's something to do with the Change!"

  All three of them glared at the big toy. "How the hell could anything make steam engines stop?" the olde
r mechanic said.

  "How the hell could anything make radios and gasoline engines stop? All we can do is guess," Larsson said bitterly. "We're like King Arthur trying to make sense of a cell phone. This tears it, though—I'm morally certain it's some intelligent action. Alien Space Bats are stealing our toys. Someone or some-thing's sucking energy out of anything that meets certain parameters. And they're doing it selectively—just on the surface of the earth."

  He shook a fist at the sky. "If we ever get a chance at payback, you sick sadistic bastards, you'll regret this!"

  "I regret it already," Randy Sacket said mournfully. He pulled a package of cigarettes from the pocket of his denim vest. "These are my last smokes. And man, I miss my Harley real bad."

  All three men sighed. Peter Sacket snapped off the feed to the little engine's firebox, and the hissing died. The flywheel took another few turns and stopped, and the pressure gauge dropped down from its pathetic figure towards zero.

  "You know," Ken said thoughtfully, "you could build a steam engine to operate at the pressures we got here."

  "You could?" both the mechanics said.

  "Yeah. Sort of like the first ones ever built, we studied them in our history of engineering courses. The problem is that they'd weigh about half a ton per horsepower with cylinders ten feet long and they'd gobble fuel so fast you could only use them where it was pretty well free—that's why the first ones were used to pump out coal mines. For doing any useful work, and particularly for pushing a locomotive or a boat or a road vehicle . forget it. You'd be better off with an exercise wheel full of gerbils."

  He nearly asked for one of the younger man's cigarettes, but restrained himself. Getting readdicted to a drug about to disappear for good from this part of the world would be extremely stupid.

  "So much for the Chinese being better off than the rest of us," he said.

  "Why should the Chinese be better off?"

  "They still use a lot of coal-fired steam locomotives … or did, before the Change. Apparently whoever did this to the human race was quite thorough."

  He sighed and turned back to the weapons he and the mechanics had been working on; gas cutting and welding sets still worked, and would as long as the acetylene held out. They'd already done the frames, wheels and parts to his specifications.