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    It was the comfort of that knife, perhaps, which kept her mind blank for so many seconds after wonder appeared. Or, perhaps, it was simply the peculiarity of the wonder itself.

 

    Gretchen had heard, once, a tale of knights in shining armor. Her grandfather had read her a story from a borrowed book. She had been ten years old. The war had just begun, and was only a rumor out of mad Bohemia. Yet even at that age, Gretchen had thought the tale was ludicrous.

 

    She did not believe in knights. Armed and armored beasts, yes. Knights, no.

 

    So it was hardly surprising that she found nothing strange in the four bizarrely costumed boys who raced toward her on the most bizarre—and
noisy—
contraptions she had ever seen. Nothing.

 

    Devils, perhaps. She was not afraid of devils.

 

    She fingered the knife.
Chapter 18

    The first thing Jeff Higgins saw clearly, in the chaos of the camp ahead of him, was the figure of a woman. Alone, among the hundreds of people shouting and scurrying about, she was standing still. Still, silent, and very straight. Her hands were tucked under her armpits, and she was staring at him.
    Jeff’s motorcycle hit an unseen obstacle in the field, and he almost lost control of the bike. For a few frantic moments, he could concentrate on nothing else. Fortunately, his skill with a dirt bike was not much less than his boasts, and he kept himself from a very nasty spill.
    When his eyes came up, he immediately looked for the woman.
    She was still there. Still standing, still silent, and still staring at him.
    There seemed to be no expression at all on her face, from what Jeff could tell at a distance. But something about her drew him like a magnet, and he steered his motorcycle toward her. Behind, his three friends followed faithfully.
    Afterward, his friends would tease him about that instant reaction. But their jests were quite unfair. What drew Jeff toward her was simply that she seemed to be the one island of sanity in a world gone mad. A serene statue, towering over a horde of squealing people, scuttling through a rabbits’ warren of makeshift tents and shelters.
    It wasn’t until he actually brought the bike to a skidding halt, not more than fifteen feet away, that he finally got a good look at the woman herself.
    
Goddam. She’s— Goddam.
    He was suddenly overwhelmed by shyness, as he always was in the presence of very pretty young women. Especially tall young women with an air of self-confidence and poise. The fact that the woman in question was wearing a dress that was not much more than a collection of sewn-together rags, was barefoot, and had a streak of dirt on her forehead, didn’t matter in the least. All that registered on Jeff, and closed his throat, was the face itself. Long, blondish hair; light brown eyes; straight nose; full mouth; strong chin; and—
    
Oh God she’s so lovely.
    Choke.
    Larry Wild’s voice, coming from behind, didn’t help a bit.
    “Leave it to Higgins to spot her,” his friend snickered. “Now watch him blow his opening line.”
    “Hey, lady,” whispered Jimmy Anderson, loud enough to be heard in China, “you wanna see my computer? I got a really great Pentium—”
    Jeff flushed. “Shut up!” he snapped, turning his head. The movement brought his eyes to bear on the Protestant soldiers they had swept past on their way to the camp. The mercenaries were much closer, now. Not more than fifty yards away and charging forward like—
    He didn’t want to think about that
like
. Jeff Higgins, for all his precocity, was still a small-town boy at heart. But he wasn’t
that
innocent.
    Neither were any of his friends. All three of them were turned around in their bike saddles, staring at the mercenaries pounding toward them.
    “What do we do?” asked Eddie Cantrell.
    “Mike said warn ’em off,” muttered Larry. “But I don’t think those guys are gonna listen to any warning.”
    Jeff brought his eyes back to the woman. She was still staring at him. Her face was totally expressionless. For all that he could tell, she hadn’t moved a muscle since he first spotted her. Her mind seemed to be a complete blank. Was she mentally retarded or something?
    Then—finally—Jeff noticed the women kneeling in a circle around her. Young women. All of them were babbling something. Prayers, he thought. And all of them were weeping.
    His eyes rose back up and met the gaze of the standing woman. Light brown eyes. Empty eyes. Blank.
    Understanding came, and with it a rage he had never felt in his life.
    
Over my fucking dead body!
    Deliberately, slowly, he lowered the bike’s kickstand and climbed off. Then he removed the shotgun slung over his shoulder. A twelve-gauge pump-action, it was, loaded with buckshot. It had belonged to his father, just like the 9mm pistol holstered to his waist.
    Jeff began stalking toward the oncoming mercenaries. They were thirty yards away. He pumped a round into the chamber.
    He heard Jimmy shout something about Mike, but he didn’t catch the words. His ears were too full of the sound of his own rushing blood. He did hear Larry’s response, and felt a moment’s rush of comradeship.
    “Mike can kiss my ass! Hold on, Jeff—I’m coming!”
    Jeff didn’t hold on. He didn’t even think. When the first mercenary was fifteen yards away, he brought the shotgun to his shoulder. The mercenary stumbled to a halt. The ten or so men with him did likewise.
    Jeff moved the shotgun, waving it slowly back and forth to cover the entire little crowd. Dimly, he sensed a tide of other mercenaries breaking around the knot he had stopped. They were spilling around the edges, moving toward other parts of the camp. But they were slowing, he thought. He caught a glimpse of several of them, off to the side, staring at him. One of them was reloading his arquebus. The other two were fingering their pikes.
    The men in front of him were all pikemen, fortunately. They could run him down, but not before he killed several.
    Then, Larry was standing at his left, his own shotgun leveled. And then, not a second later, Jimmy and Eddie were bracing him on the right. Both of them had their own shotguns up also.
    Jeff heaved a sigh of relief. He had acted without thinking, on impulse. Now that some time had elapsed, he realized how insane his situation was.
    
Their
situation, actually. Even with his three friends—even armed with pump-action shotguns—Jeff could no more have held off that mob of several hundred mercenaries than he could have stopped a stampede.
    Yet—
    He raised his head a little, taking his eye off the barrel of the shotgun, and swept his head around.
    The mob
was
stopped.
    Well . . . in a manner of speaking. The Protestant mercenaries had poured around the group which Jeff had halted in its tracks. The four American boys were now, for all practical purposes, surrounded. Dozens of mercenaries in the inner ring were staring at them. Others were pushing forward to look over their shoulders. Jeff had a sense that other mercenaries were starting to tear at the edges of the Catholic camp, but he wasn’t certain. Everything was very chaotic.
    “So what’s the plan,
kemo sabe
?” hissed Larry.
    Jeff hesitated. He had no idea what to do. He was amazed that the mercenaries hadn’t already attacked them. He decided that they were simply too confused by the situation to know what to do.
    
So am I, for that matter.
    Then, Jimmy’s squeal of glee came. And then, the bellowing hoot of the first truck’s air horn. And Jeff Higgins found himself fighting not to tremble.
    The Seventh Cavalry had arrived, so to speak. In the proverbial nick of time.

    The coal-hauling trucks which Mike and his men had converted into armored personnel carriers were not really off-road vehicles. But they would do well enough, on flat ground, as long as rain hadn’t turned the soil into mud. The drivers were pushing their vehicles at a reckless pace, under the circumstances. It didn’t help that the steel sheeting which had been welded over the cabs left them with only narrow slits to steer by.

 

    In the cab of the lead truck, Mike was holding on for dear life. The driver had an air-cushioned seat, but all Mike had was a thinly upholstered one which provided almost no protection from the jolting ride.

 

    The driver yanked on the cord over the door, blowing another blast through the air horn. “You want me to slow down?” he asked.

 

    “No!” shouted Mike. He squinted through the slit in the steel plate over the window. “Damn those kids,” he muttered. “Warn ’em off, I said. Instead—” An unseen furrow sent him lurching half off the seat. “They’re making like Davey Crockett at the Alamo.”

 

    But for all the grousing in the words, his tone was not hostile. Not in the least.

 

    Mike caught another glimpse of the four boys, staring down a huge mob of thugs with leveled shotguns, and felt a surge of pride.

 

    
My kids, goddamit!

 

    “Hit that horn again,” he commanded. “Just lean on it, lean on it. And step on the gas.”

 

    The ride got worse. “Where do you want me to park the truck when we get there?” asked the driver.

 

    Mike laughed. “Don’t park it at all. Just drive right into that crowd of goons and start circling the boys.” Seeing the driver’s frown, he laughed. “What? Are you worried about getting a ticket?”

 

    Harshly: “I don’t give a damn if you crush fifty of those bastards. Just do what I say.”

 

    He caught a glimpse of a man on horseback, floridly dressed. Ernst Hoffman. The mercenary leader was in the middle of the crowd, giving some kind of speech.

 

    “You see him?” Mike demanded. The driver nodded. “Aim right for him. Try to run him down.”

 

    The driver looked startled. Then, seeing the grim and implacable look on Mike’s face, he forbore any protest. A moment later, he even grinned.

 

    “Yessir. One road kill coming up.”

 

    By the time the truck arrived, none of the mercenaries were staring at Jeff and his friends any longer. They had turned around and were gaping at the—
monsters?
—charging toward them.

 

    In truth, few of those soldiers really thought the oncoming trucks were monsters. Men of their time were already accustomed to machinery and manufacture. Wagons, wheels, gears, crankshafts, glass—everything except rubber and the internal combustion engine. The Bohemian Hussites, more than a century earlier, had even developed their own version of armored personnel carriers. The machines of the time were primitive, of course, and the mercenaries wondered where the horses pulling the things were hidden. But they were still able to recognize the trucks for what they were. Vehicles, not magic beasts.

 

    Still, the oncoming
things
were larger than elephants and they were charging forward faster than any vehicles those mercenaries had ever seen. As they neared, the armored cabs of the trucks loomed up like battlements.

 

    Then the mercenaries spotted the slits in the front of the
things
—and the bigger slits along the steel sides—and they knew.
War machines.
Those slits would be spouting gunfire any moment—the same gunfire which had shattered Tilly’s tercio.

 

    They broke even faster than they had when Tilly’s pikemen charged. In an instant, all thought of plunder and rapine vanished. The mercenaries were simply scrambling to get out of the way.

 

    Jeff didn’t start laughing until he realized what the driver of the lead truck was doing. Then, for the next several minutes, he and his friends were howling with glee. Their shotguns—on safety; they had all been well trained by their fathers and uncles—were lowered, held in loose hands.

 

    The lead truck—and then another, and then another—were playing “tag” with Ernst Hoffman. The scene was utterly comical, for all its deadly potential.
None
of those truck drivers was trying to miss.

 

    The portly mercenary leader’s horse pitched him after the first truck roared past. Thereafter, Ernst Hoffman was waddling on his own. He lasted for five minutes, scampering through the torn-up fields of what had once been fertile farmland, before he collapsed from fear and exhaustion.

 

    One truck roared up and stopped just a few feet short of crushing him. A figure clambered down from the passenger’s side of the cab and stalked over to Hoffman. The mercenary leader looked like a pig, lying on his side, flanks heaving.

 

    Even from the distance, Jeff could recognize Mike Stearns. He couldn’t make out the face, but Mike’s athletic stride was unmistakable. He saw Mike lean over, something glinting in his hand. It was the work of seconds to haul Hoffman’s arms around to his back and put on the handcuffs.

 

    
“Yes!”
shouted Jeff, his fist pumping.
“My man!”

 

    He looked around. All of the mercenaries within sight were surrendering. There had been twelve trucks in that charge. Three of them were near the Catholic camp, protecting it. The rest, except for Mike’s truck, had formed a wide circle around the milling mob of Protestant soldiers. Some of the mercenaries, Jeff suspected, had managed to escape the encirclement. But most of them were lowering their weapons and raising their hands.

 

    “A nice day’s work!” exclaimed Larry. The boy—the young man, rather—was filled with elation. “Just like Mike planned. The Catholic mercenaries are whipped, and these so-called Protestant bastards—” He jeered at the huddling knots of soldiers, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder, pointing to Badenburg. Some of the surrendering soldiers were staring at the town also, obviously longing for the safety of its walls.

 

    Too far, too far. They had been well and surely trapped.

 

    Jeff stated the obvious. “Ernst Hoffman’s reign of terror is
over.
”

 

    Then, she was there. Jeff had quite forgotten her, in the excitement of the standoff.

 

    She didn’t say anything. Her face still seemed as blank as ever. She just stared at him. Light brown eyes.

 

    She extended her hand. Her hand was large, for a woman, and not at all delicate. The fingernails were blunt, worn short by labor. When she took Jeff’s shoulder and squeezed it, he was astonished by her strength.