The Sunrise Lands

by S. M. Stirling

  “Something stinks here,” Ingolf said grimly.

  A sound from Kuttner interrupted him, and then Kaur’s cry of alarm an instant later. Ingolf vaulted into the saddle and got out his binoculars. The sun was wink ing on more lance heads, and beneath them the distant dots of riders. He rough counted. . . .

  “At least thirty,” he said. His head twisted around. The ground here was flat as a tabletop and devoid of cover, no place to make a stand. “We’ll head south for the river—there’s broken country there.”

  “Wait!” Kuttner said. “Give me two more horses and I’ll lead a drag.”

  The three Villains looked at him, surprised. Leading a drag was a standard trick of plains-country warfare, to raise a plume of dust and deceive watchers. Volunteering for it here was also suicide....

  “Better me than all of us. You can escape and tell the bossman in Des Moines what happened to his expedition.”

  Nodding in grudging respect for the man’s loyalty, In golf started to help. It took only a few seconds to rig some gear on the end of a rope; Kuttner took the lead ing reins of the two packhorses and spurred his mount straight east. He didn’t even bother to take his remount. Ingolf felt a slight pang—one of those horses was carrying the bundled proceeds that Jose had left for them back in Innsmouth—but living through this and find ing out who was responsible for the massacre was more important.

  The three of them paused only to sling spare quiv ers to their saddlebows and then turned south at a gal lop, each leading a single remount. Grass whipped at his thighs and the horse’s face; Boy ran with his head lifted, and the sound was a constant shhhsshsh beneath the drumbeat of hooves. Distantly behind them a bugle blew; the enemy, whoever they were, had spotted them. Now everything depended on how fresh the killers’ horses were and how their luck went.

  They went flat-out for two miles, just outside the line of burned ground, then reined in to a canter; the horses were beginning to blow, fruits of two thousand miles of hard work. Luckily they’d all been reshod recently, so they’d be less likely to go lame unexpectedly. They all looked over their shoulders as well. Kuttner’s dust plume was clear, where his drag scratched the ashy soil of the burn. And behind him . . .

  “A bunch of them split off after Kuttner,” Kaur said. “At least a dozen are still after us, though, Captain.”

  “A dozen’s better odds than thirty.” Ingolf grunted thoughtfully.

  It puzzled him; the stunt Kuttner had pulled was the sort of thing you did for comrades-in-arms or close friends, and the man had never even tried to be that, despite their going all the way to the Atlantic and back together. He’d always been a disagreeable bossy son of a bitch; they’d come to grudgingly respect him, but no more.

  They turned onto the burnt ground—trying for the river would be impossible otherwise, but it made their dust plume a lot worse. As they switched horses Singh and Ingolf exchanged glances; they both rode a lot heavier in the saddle than Kaur, by at least thirty or forty pounds. Her horses were less tired to start with and would last longer in a stern chase. Useless to try to get her to bug out, though.

  Ingolf’s next glance was over at the sun. Three hours to dark, he thought. Just low enough to get in our eyes, not enough to do us any good.

  A few instants after that the extra plume of gray ash told him their pursuers had crossed onto the burned ground too. Canter-trot canter-walk . . . the dust grew closer; the enemy were pushing their horses hard, or they had lots of fresh remounts, or both. Probably both.

  “Uff da,” Ingolf swore.

  That they couldn’t hope to win an arrow duel was so obvious none of them had to say anything about it. There weren’t any good options when you were outnumbered by five to one, but riding over an open plain and shooting was about the worst possible choice. If you had any choices.

  “Which we don’t,” Ingolf muttered to himself.

  “They think they can pin us against the river before we can cross,” Kaur said clinically.

  It turned out they were right; the riders were in close sight before the fingers of lower land stretching down to the Illinois River came in reach, no more than three or four hundred yards behind. Ingolf peered over his shoul der again; there were fifteen of them and all had helmets on, and of the same variety—low rounded domes with a central spike and cheek flaps. He made a hissing sound between his teeth. Even most full-time paid soldiers didn’t usually wear uniform equipment. That was the sort of thing you saw only on a Bossman’s guards.

  And not the Bossman of Des Moines. His folk’s gear is different, shaped more like the old army helmet.

  He couldn’t see for sure what they were wearing for armor, but he could be certain it wasn’t the bright polished chain mail favored by the household troops of Iowa’s ruler.

  They carried lances, little upright threads tipped with an eyeblink of metal. The bottom four feet or so of each was probably resting in a scabbard—a tube of boiled leather slung at the right rear of the saddle, which kept it out of the way when you were doing something else. Right now the something else was drawing their bows. . . .

  “Incoming!” Kaur shouted and ducked, hunching in the saddle so that the shield slung across her back covered the largest possible share of her body.

  A dozen arrows fell in a hissing sleet, mostly five or ten yards short but uncomfortably well aimed and bunched. A single exception slammed into the back of a remount with a hard wet thmack sound, and the animal collapsed behind them, its hind legs limp, screaming like an off-key bugle as it struggled and jerked and the shaft in its spine waggled.

  As one, they all signaled their horses up to a gallop and turned in the saddle to shoot back, rising in the stir rups and clamping their thighs hard against the leather in the moment they loosed. The surviving pair of re mounts galloped ahead as their reins were dropped, herd instinct keeping them from doing the sensible thing and scattering. Ingolf exhaled as he drew, the thick muscles of his right arm bunching against the sinew and Osage-orange wood and horn of the recurve. Thousands of hours of practice starting when he was seven guided the angle to which he raised the bow before letting the string roll off the fingers.

  Snap of bowstring against the scarred steel surface of his bracer, and the recoil slammed him back against the high cantle of his saddle. Snap-snap, and the brother and sister fired as well.

  The arrows slapped out, seeming to slow as they arched towards the distant dot-sized figures of the pur suers. More came back, and those seemed to go faster as they approached. Two went by with unpleasant vvvvvptttt sounds before burying themselves in the ash-black ground, shunk shunk.

  This wasn’t the first time he’d done something like this. It was just as unpleasant as he remembered, and would have been worse if he hadn’t been so caught up in surviving moment to moment. That sound of arrows going by was the sort you remembered years later, leav ing you depressed and sweating just when you were about to kiss a girl or bite into an apple.

  Assuming I ever get to do either again, he thought, hearing Boy’s valiant laboring beneath him as he shot and shot again.

  Then the lip of the ravine leading down to the river was close. Another flight of arrows came in just as they urged their mounts over the edge. The animals went down it fast, sometimes squatting on their haunches, then hit the old path at the base running until they were around a corner two hundred yards eastward, with tall oak and maple all around and thick brush between the trees, the steep bank close to the water’s edge.

  Kaur’s gasp of pain was bitten off. Ingolf didn’t look over until they’d stopped. When he did his stomach lurched. Not that the wound was mortal in itself; the chain mail and the padded canvas underneath had ab sorbed most of the force of the arrow, leaving only a few inches of it sticking into her hip. Red was leaking out through the mail already, and running down her leg, though not the arterial pumping that spelled a swift end. With nursing and care she could recover. But with the arrowhead lodged in bone, it would be impossible for her to ri
de fast, or to run and fight.

  Right now, that meant death. He saw her accept it, biting her lip until the blood flowed; then her brother did as well.

  “We will see pitaji again,” she said. “I knew when we saw their faces again in the place of magic that we were fated. Karman.”

  Singh nodded, then turned his face to Ingolf: “This is as good a place as any. We’ll hold them as long as we can. Ride hard, my friend.”

  They leaned over to clasp hands for an instant. “It has been an honor, Captain. Avenge our blood.”

  Ingolf nodded, not wasting time on saying what they both knew. Singh swung down and handed him the reins of his horse.

  His teeth were bared as he turned and got Boy back to a gallop, and clods of earth flew up from the hammering hooves. No point in holding back now; he had to try to break contact before the enemy caught up with him, and he ignored the low branches and brush that flogged at his face or rang off his helmet as he ducked and wove. The Illinois River was to his right, flowing from east to west here as he rode upstream, a long bowshot across—call it three hundred yards. It flowed quietly, with only a little gurgling chuckle at the edge. His own harsh breathing sounded louder in his ears.

  A yell came from behind him, faint and far now. Then another, a man screaming in astonished pain, and then a clash of steel on steel. That followed him for perhaps a hundred of Boy’s long strides; then it stopped, and he knew the two Sikhs were dead. He glanced behind as he went down a long straight stretch, and caught the first glitter of steel.

  “Shit!” he snarled, and reached over his shoulder for an arrow. “They must have sent men around Singh.”

  The pursuers dropped back as he shot again, dropped out of sight, though that wouldn’t last for more than seconds. The path twisted around and split. He made an instant decision and turned right, throwing aside the leading reins of Singh’s horse and slapping it on the rump with his bow as it went by. Then he took the righthand branch, down to the edge of the water.

  It was nearly under the piers of the Spring Valley bridge; Boy gave a single are you sure-boss snort and jumped into the water, striking out strongly for the op posite shore. Ingolf let himself slip out of the saddle, holding his bow above the surface with one hand and clinging to the saddle horn with the other. Water sloshed into his clothing with a cold shock, and he could feel the dragging weight as the padding under his mail shirt soaked it up. You could swim in war gear . . . but not for long.

  He was three quarters of the way across and in the shadow of the bridge when the first of the enemy went pelting past the spot he’d left, galloping flat out. That meant the men in the lead were either very brave or completely reckless; there were any number of nasty tricks you could play on a narrow trail.

  One . . . two . . . three . . .

  The total had gone up to nine before one of them reined in, bringing his horse up on its hind legs. That took skill; so did avoiding a tangled collision by the two behind him, who split around the rearing horse. The too alert one pointed to the ground, then across the river. Yelling, the three horsemen spurred down to the water’s edge, and into it.

  “Shit!”

  That had been a long shot, and it hadn’t panned out. But three-to one was a lot better odds than twelve-to one. As Boy came out of the water he thought quickly while hooves went clattering on rock and making wet sucking sounds in the muck. The horse shook himself, spattering more water around; Ingolf got into the saddle and headed east again, on the south side of the river this time, urging the most out of his mount. The trees grew thicker as they blurred past; this path had been graveled once, but it had seen only the hooves of deer and elk, mustangs and feral cattle for the past generation.

  One hour to sunset now, he thought. Only an hour.

  Rock grew higher south of the river, layers of banded sandstone that caught the dying sun bloodred. They made sound echo, and sometimes treacherously die off or seem more distant than it was. The more so as he bore south and high walls closed around him on both sides, dark where the rock blocked the sun. Hooves clattered on stones and thudded on sand, where the ancient floods had carved this passage.

  There.

  The right spot, where a bulge of rock narrowed the passage through the canyon. His bow went into the sad dle scabbard, and he brought his shield around from his back and slid his left forearm into the loops.

  He reined in and slid from Boy’s saddle while the animal was still moving; it carried on around a curve in the canyon wall, slowing down and looking back. The man plastered himself flat against the rock; in the same motion he drew his shete, holding it high with the point back, suddenly conscious of his own panting breath, and how paper dry his mouth was, while the rest of him streamed water. The pursuers’ gallop hammered at his ears, bouncing off the stony walls around him, making it hard to judge just where they were.

  He could hear their barking, yelping cry, too: “Cut! Cut! Cut!”

  “I’ll give you a cut, you son of a bitch,” he snarled to himself.

  A lance point flashed as it came around the corner, giv ing him a fractional second’s warning and showing where the man’s arm must be—poised to thrust it into his back as he fled.

  “Richland!” he bellowed.

  As he shouted Ingolf pivoted with tiger precision and swung, whipping the long cutting blade forward with every ounce of strength his shoulders and back could muster. Combined with the speed of the galloping horse the sharp metal cut through a mail shod gauntlet, through flesh and bone and flesh and then through the tough shaft of the lance itself. The mounted warrior rode on for a dozen paces, screaming in shock and staring at the stump where his hand had been, the blood spurting out with fire-hose speed, then toppled and lay flopping and twitching.

  The one following him slugged his mount back on its haunches with desperate brutality, dropping his lance and going for his shete. Ingolf ignored it, dropping his own weapon and darting in to grab one booted foot and heave with all his strength. The rider flew out of his saddle and into the rock wall of the canyon as if springs had pulled him. The helmeted head went bonnnngggg on the rock and the neck snapped beneath it. That horse went past too, riderless, buffeting Ingolf back with a force that brought a grunt as he was slammed into the canyon wall.

  The third rider had an arrow on his bowstring. He drew and shot, in the same instant that Ingolf’s hand whipped up across the small of his back and forward in a throw. Tomahawk and arrow crossed each other in flight. The arrow banged painfully off Ingolf’s mail-clad shoulder, and the head of the tomahawk sank with a meaty smack and crunch into the rider’s jaw. He toppled backward over his horse’s crupper, trying to scream and succeed ing only in gobbling. Gauntlets beat at the ground in futile agony as Ingolf pounced. The back of the wounded man’s neck was protected by an aventail of steel splints fixed to rings on the helmet brim, but they bent and snapped as Ingolf drove his boot heel down again and again.

  Silence fell, except for the sound of the wind hooting through the rock, and the horses stamping and moving restlessly. Ingolf limped back to his shete—where had that small cut on his left thigh just below the mail shirt come from?—and sheathed it. That gave him a chance to examine his opponents for the first time. They were young men, younger than he was, of middling height but with the broad shoulders of bowmen and dressed alike in coarse blue woolen pants and tunics and high horseman’s boots. They’d all been armed with dagger, shete, bow and lance, and all wore the same equipment, not just the helmets; back-and-breasts of overlapping leather plates, chaps of the same protecting their legs, mail sleeves. In fact . . .

  That’s like the gear Kuttner was wearing!

  Things went click behind Ingolf’s eyes. He’d been fu rious before. Now the rage went coldly murderous. For certainty’s sake he examined one of the shetes; it was a twin to the one he’d taken from the wild-man chief near Innsmouth, though not quite as good.

  “Time to get out,” he muttered to himself.

  Boy had stop
ped a hundred yards down the canyon, and the other horses were milling around, unable to get past him. He didn’t bother to investigate the gear; time enough for that later. Instead he simply looped the stirrups of each up over the saddle horn and improvised a leading rein. Taking them in hand he looked up at the sky; it was turning dark blue in the east, nearly nightfall.

  There was just enough sunlight to gild the arrowheads, when he came out of the eastern mouth of the canyon and found a semicircle of the enemy waiting for him, their stiff horn-and-sinew recurve bows drawn to the ear.

  Kuttner sat his horse behind them, grinning....

  * * * *

  Flying M Baronial Hunting Preserve,

  Near Yamhill

  Portland Protective Association,

  Oregon

  January 30, CY22/2021 A.D.

  The fire had died down to coals while he told Ingolf’s story. When Matti spoke her voice was as quiet as the blue and-yellow flickering over the embers.as the blue-and-yellow flickering over the embers.

  “That would be hard, to lose your best friends all on the same day, and then be betrayed like that.”

  “Yes,” Rudi said somberly. Then he smiled. “But you know what Mom said to him?”

  “What?”

  “She told him what his friends’ names meant—the Sikhs. He hadn’t known. . . . She said—”

  His gaze went beyond the wall, recalling that night in Dun Juniper.

  * * * *

  “Lion,” the Mackenzie chieftain said softly. “And Lioness.”

  Ingolf looked up, startled out of memory. “Ma’am?”

  “That’s what Singh means: Lion. And Kaur means lioness. Your friends died faithful to their ancestors, Ingolf.”

  * * * *

  “We’ll have to get by the . . .Cutters? The Cutters, yes . . . when we go east,” Mathilda said thoughtfully.

  She picked up the poker and stirred the embers; they crackled and let a few dull red sparks drift upwards. The hall was silent now; they were alone, though there were servants within calling distance.