Sword of the Bright Lady

by M. C. Planck

  “I don’t know,” Christopher said. He’d patterned it after the old Sharps .50 caliber from the Civil War, which he knew had become popular with big-game hunters afterwards. “It’s supposed to kill large animals.”

  “It probably won’t kill me in one shot,” Gregor said. “Let’s try it out on me.”

  Christopher was too stunned to speak at first. “Absolutely not,” he finally got out, grabbing the knight’s shoulder before he walked over to the stump.

  “Why not?”

  Christopher was hard-pressed to answer. Why shouldn’t he let one of his friends shoot one of his other friends with a buffalo rifle? Because it’s insane didn’t seem like it would convince these lunatics.

  “It might kill you in one shot. I don’t know, Gregor. It might be that strong.”

  Gregor nodded, dubious but not completely reckless, while Karl took another shot at the stump. He hit it this time, sending a shower of splinters into the air.

  Gregor wasn’t overly impressed. “I would have survived that. But still, a strong weapon, I agree.”

  “There’s really only one way to tell,” Karl said, turning to one of the smiths. “Your uncle has a bull ready for slaughter, does he not?”

  Christopher had no idea how Karl would know such a detail, but the man nodded.

  Work was over for the day, apparently. His shop emptied, the younger men running ahead. By the time they got to the farm in question, a crowd was gathered around it.

  The bull was in a fenced pasture with its herd. It watched silently while the farmer drove the cows out. Then it walked to the center of the pasture and pawed the ground.

  “It’s almost like he knows what’s going to happen,” Christopher said, saddened and surprised at the same time.

  “He does,” Karl said. “He is old and wise, for a bull.”

  “He has had a good life,” the farmer said to the crowd, reciting some kind of formula. “But now he must contribute to the greater good.”

  “Who comes to end his days?” the farmer asked, and a number of men with spears moved up to the fence.

  “Whoa,” Christopher said. This was no painless slaughter, this was a bullfight. Dangerous to the men and inhumane to the animal. “You can’t do that. Just put him in a stall and use a sledgehammer.” They could get an adequate ballistic report by shooting the carcass.

  “We cannot,” the farmer said. “He already knows.” After a second, Christopher realized the man was talking about the bull.

  “He’ll not let us drive him to slaughter, Pater,” said another man. Then he grumbled something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like “city folk.”

  “So the lot of you are going to go out there and stab him?” Christopher asked.

  The crowd was mystified at his horror.

  “Of course,” the farmer said. “We are no knights, to face the bull in single combat.” The man apparently thought that what Christopher was objecting to was their ganging up on the bull. Christopher was at a loss to cross the gulf. “Unless Ser wishes to do the honor,” the farmer added as he nodded respectfully at Gregor.

  “Not particularly,” Gregor said. This was the cue Karl had been waiting for.

  “I will.” He jumped the fence.

  “Karl, you idiot! Get back here!” Christopher was terrified. The bull was huge. Gigantic, even.

  “Would you like assistance?” Gregor called, grinning. He always approved of courage, even the suicidal kind.

  “Not yet, Ser,” Karl answered.

  Christopher wanted to argue some sense into the young man. What if the rifle misfired? What if he missed or the gun couldn’t kill a creature of that size? There were a thousand things that could go wrong. This wasn’t a scientific test; it was a spectacle.

  And a compelling one. The crowd was mesmerized, all attention on Karl.

  “Karl,” Christopher called, knowing it was futile.

  “Have a little faith,” Karl called back, and then he bowed to the bull.

  The animal snorted, pawed the ground again, and lowered his head in return. Karl brought the rifle to his shoulder, aimed at the bull.

  “To arms,” he said, and the bull charged.

  The massive creature pounded across the pasture in a growing thunder of hooves, its head bowed and its terrible horns pointed directly at Karl. Christopher panicked and closed his eyes. A buffalo skull could bounce a .30-caliber rifle bullet. Who knew what powers this strange world had given this beast? And what madness made Karl think he could hit a moving target with only his third shot from a rifle?

  Karl waited until the last second, letting the bull get so close that missing was hardly an option. The gun barked, and Christopher opened his eyes in reflex.

  The animal sank to its knees like a battleship, majestic but silent, two paces from where Karl stood. It fell in a heap and did not twitch. Karl had shot it right between the eyes.

  “I wouldn’t have survived that,” Gregor said, finally impressed.

  The crowd watched in a subdued murmur, staring at the white cloud of smoke as it dispersed, as if it bore a message they might comprehend if only they studied hard enough.

  “I don’t understand,” Gregor said, on the way back to their own village. “It does not seem like magic but more like a weapon. Striking the bull in the head seemed important. It’s as if it matters where you aim it.”

  “Well, of course,” Christopher said. “How could it not matter?”

  “A wand of missiles does not care. It never misses, regardless of how you aim.”

  Great. They already had magical guns.

  “Mine does,” Christopher conceded dispiritedly. “It’s not a magic weapon. It’s just a better version of a crossbow.”

  “The smoke and noise are not desirable,” Gregor argued, “but then, it does possess more power than even the biggest arbalest.”

  “And it reloads faster,” Karl added.

  “Still, if you think to change the world with expensive, noisy crossbows,” Gregor said, “then I fear you are in for a bit of a disappointment. Why not arm your knights with wands of missiles?”

  “What knights?” Christopher said, confused. “And why don’t they arm all the men with these wands, if they’re so great?” He was upset that magic equivalents to guns already existed and nobody had bothered to tell him. True, he hadn’t exactly asked, but still.

  “The knights you promote to wield your rifles,” Gregor said, equally confused. “Unless you are going to squander such weapons on your mercenaries, like you have plate and masterwork swords.”

  “The rifles aren’t for the mercenaries. They’re for the boys.”

  Gregor got it. “I see. Very interesting. Yours are not as good as magical wands, but you’ll have a dozen of them.”

  “Not my boys,” Christopher said in exasperation. “All of them. The whole draft.”

  Gregor blinked.

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh my.”

  Karl actually snickered.

  Gregor finally said good-bye.

  “I wish you well, Pater,” the blue knight said, “but I think I’ll get no more tael in your service.” He was joking, of course. He wasn’t really in it for the money.

  “As long as you stay in your own lands,” Lalania explained, “you should be safe. Bart’s allies seem to have deserted him; you no longer have anything the guild wants to steal. And I do not feel you are a danger to the people. At least, not intentionally,” she clarified. “Your shopkeepers are now busy all week. I am unable to explain how your taking their money makes them richer.”

  “So you want to know my secrets? Very well, but someday I will come to your College seeking my own answers and expect you to pay.” Christopher grinned at her, but the more he thought about it, the less it sounded like a joke. He really did want to talk to whatever passed for a scholar around here. Wizards and priests just didn’t seem interested in mundane ideas. “They use my paper like gold. I suspect you had a liquidity problem, not enough gold pieces
to go around. And since prices are fixed, deflation can’t correct it. And you won’t allow forgery”—the classic medieval solution to illiquidity—“or adulteration of the metal. So short of digging up more gold, there’s no way to increase the money supply.”

  “That’s what monsters are for,” Gregor said. “We import their gold, though not at prices favorable to them.”

  “That only lines the pockets of the lords,” Lalania said. “It doesn’t help the peasantry.”

  “It does if the lord spends it,” Christopher said. “In fact, if he spent more than he had, that would help too, at least temporarily.”

  That was what Christopher was doing, spending money he didn’t have, a trick no other lord could match. The increase in demand was making everybody rich, at least until he had to figure out how to pay it all back.

  “You have strange ideas,” Lalania said, looking at him carefully.

  He winked. “You’re not the first person to tell me that.”

  27.

  BOOT CAMP

  Once the first dozen guns had rolled off the assembly line, Christopher started a boot camp, calling the entire draft for five weeks of training in a rotating schedule that saw fifty or more boys in the village at any given time. The village would have crumbled under so much teenage energy, but for Karl.

  Karl was born to be a leader. Instinctively he assigned the boys in batches to the mercenaries and handed out prizes to the teams that performed best. Their eyes on the gold, the men drove their charges mercilessly. The boys hated them blackly, of course, but all Karl got was worship.

  He treated the original crop like subalterns, junior officers, and eventually they became them—extensions of Karl’s hands, eyes, and ears. Christopher watched as Karl stole the army, turning it into his own, and said nothing.

  The boys had to share rifles for the first class. Christopher was frantically trying to get production up. The smiths didn’t understand why until he showed them his other drawings. Rifles wouldn’t be enough.

  The days slipped into autumn, unnoticed. The chaos of the drill yard turning slowly into order drowned all other signals of passing time. Christopher trained with them, too—all the skills Karl thought they would need to know. They all had to be able to drive a wagon, cook a meal, bind a wound, pitch a tent, build a fort, and a hundred other things they would have to do on their own from now on. Of course, most of that they could already do, the bulk of them being farm boys used to self-reliance. The cooking was the one real sticking point.

  “We’re not taking a bunch of women to cook for us,” Karl told them. “And you can’t walk home to your mama’s every night for dinner. So unless you want to starve, pay attention.”

  His lecture didn’t take until he forbade Helga’s girls from cooking for a week, and it was learn or go hungry.

  But mostly Karl taught them to work together, to trust each other and their officers. Out of random boys he made teams, squads, platoons, finally . . . an army.

  And then there was quiet, except for the cool autumn winds, the boys gone home for the harvest break. Christopher found himself in the fields, like everyone else. Backbreaking labor, but he was stronger now than he had been when he first came to this world. It had shaped him, kneaded him like dough to a different consistency. Only when the trees turned red and gold did he remember that he was once a subtly different person, a man whose life included more than horses, men, and guns. He held a crimson maple leaf in his hand and thought of scarlet hair.

  What was she doing now? What must she think? Was it years or months before they declared you dead—not just missing, but gone, irretrievably lost to the people who once loved you? He had not reached for a phone at the sound of a bell, tried to put leftovers in the fridge, or stretched his hand out for the light switch in ages. Eight days a week wasn’t funny anymore, just an easy workweek.

  He could not remember what chocolate tasted like.

  It was with relief that he welcomed the next class of boys, plunging once more into the task at hand.

  “You’re lucky,” he told them. “Some of you will become gunners.”

  They didn’t know what the word meant yet, but they got excited anyway.

  The boys, of course, loved the cannons. Boys everywhere, for all of history, have always loved cannons. Even the mercenaries could be found hanging around the range during practice time. Christopher wished Gregor were here to give his assessment of the weapon’s utility, but Karl’s gleam of approval would have to be enough.

  Later, Karl demonstrated his wisdom and intimate knowledge of the battlefield with nothing more than an approving twitch of his eyebrows. Christopher grinned to himself, ignoring the whooping boys. The boys and men were thrilled merely with the new toy, but Karl understood it was more than merely another way to go bang.

  “Layers,” he said to Christopher that night, during dinner in the chapel. The stone room had become the center of a building, as wooden extensions sprouted around it. Helga ran a whole crew of young women now, and with shameless hypocrisy kept them from fraternizing with the troops. But she still ate dinner at the officers’ table, along with Svengusta. Christopher wanted that, needed that sense of family, of home. The mercenaries were transformed from hardened veterans into polite but taciturn guests by the mere presence of Helga.

  “You have layers,” Karl explained. “At long range you use the cannon. At medium range you use the rifles. At close range, you use the grenades.” The rifles also came with bayonets, for extreme close-range work, but that was a weak weapon. As weak as those silly short spears he’d made the boys carry, what seemed like so long ago.

  “We’ll still get slaughtered by cavalry,” Christopher said. “Unless they break and run.” Cavalry was his nightmare, his constant nagging thorn.

  “Cavalry is not that popular amongst the monsters,” said one of the mercenaries. He was the one with the third Apprentice rank, so the others deferred to him automatically. They called him Bondi, but Christopher had never figured out if that was a name or a title. “Some kinds don’t even have any.”

  “Ulvenmen don’t need it,” said another. “They can run like the Dark on their own. Begging your pardon, miss,” he added, apologizing to Helga for his coarse language.

  “Our best bet is a wall,” Christopher said. “That’s why I stress fortifying so much. If they have to stop, even for a second or two, we can break their rush and then we have a chance. So we should always strive for a defensive position.”

  “Yes,” Bondi agreed, “that’s what we should do, all right.”

  Christopher stopped himself before he corrected the mercenary. He appreciated the solidarity, but these men weren’t actually going to go to war with him.

  But Karl was silent and pensive the rest of the meal.

  Winter came on, inexorable, inching up on them day by day. Christopher had withdrawn as much as possible from his businesses in town, preparing for his departure. The shops could not look to him for problem solving very much longer. His visits to town were only social now.

  Tom had come to him, a few weeks ago, in desperate straits. He wanted an advance on his salary for the next few years so he could buy a house. It was an unexpected request from the severely competent young man, especially since Christopher had already given him so many well-earned raises. He agreed only because he could pay in bonds, although printing money on demand gave him a queasy feeling.

  “I’m not in a position to be a bank, though, so don’t tell anyone else,” he told the young man.

  “Pater, they’ll just think you’re sweet on me. They won’t expect you to do the same for them.” Tom grinned at Christopher’s lack of political savvy.

  Christopher laughed back at him.

  “But I am sweet on you, Booming Tom Fool. Isn’t everybody?”

  “So it would seem,” Tom said with uncharacteristic sourness. But he didn’t explain.

  Now Christopher was having dinner in Tom’s fine new house and meeting his girl for the first
time. She wasn’t very articulate, and she was obsequious to a fault, afraid to meet his eyes. But she was a good cook, thank goodness, so he could honestly praise the meal.

  “She’s not used to royalty,” Tom explained when she cleared the dishes and left them to have a manly ale.

  “Neither am I.” Christopher looked around the spacious room. “It’s a nice house you have here. Am I really paying you that much?”

  Tom laughed. “Yes, Pater, you are. But you’ll not regret it when you’re out there in the field, freezing your arse off. You’ll think of Tom, warm and snug in his fine house, and be glad somebody is getting the use of all your money.”

  “As long as your wagons come running when I whistle, I won’t begrudge you a warm bed.” They’d built a whole fleet now, and Fingean had hired a crew.

  “Too warm, perhaps,” Tom said, and then Christopher understood.

  “You have to look out for Fae for me,” he told the young man, baiting him. “Protect her from Flayn.” Although this seemed unnecessary. The wizard had apparently decided to pretend Christopher and his people didn’t exist. “Try to keep her honest on the books. And make sure she doesn’t get into trouble with any young men, get in over her head or anything like that.”

  Tom turned a different shade. Red, Christopher suspected, although in the firelight it was hard to be sure.

  “A little double dipping?” Christopher said quietly.

  “A lot. Enough that a man might have to buy a house three sizes too large to make up for.”

  “Be careful,” Christopher said sadly. He hated to see people make wrecks of their lives. “Her veins run pure ice. She’ll break your heart in the end.”

  “It’s not my heart she’s breaking,” Tom said. “But I’ll not fail you, Pater, you needn’t worry about that. I can keep my hens out of your shoes well enough. There will be no egg on your feet.”

  Christopher had to trust him, just as he had to trust Jhom, and Fae, and all the people who would stay behind and manage his industrial empire while he was far, far away. He would depend on them utterly: a technological army required constant deliveries of ammunition, spare parts, and new equipment. If they failed him, he would die; if the guns failed him, he would die; if the monsters turned out to be immune to bullets, he would die. Sticky feet hardly seemed like a sufficient metaphor.