Califia's Daughters (38 page)

The room was filled with men, moreover, a group of men surrounded by the clear, taut aura of violence. It was a scene few women living could have witnessed: a small male army, armed to the teeth, knives and clips of ammunition strung around their bodies. It was a scene straight out of Before, when men were the warriors, something out of a storybook or the grainy, flickering movies Margaret liked, although Dian had always found the idea of a male army so unlikely as to be amusing, and slightly embarrassing. It did not strike her that way now. She found these men noble, determined, and very impressive; they smelled of power and death.

The impression lasted only a moment, until she blinked and saw before her twenty-seven edgy, self-conscious, out-of-shape, overarmed men, but the vision stayed with her and erased the last traces of her doubt and condescension. These were hardly prime male specimens. A few of them had muscles, but several were distinctly pudgy, and all of them were typical overfed and underworked pampered city-dwellers. However, she would now trust them to know roughly what needed doing.

She straightened, realized that she was gripping her half-raised gun with unnecessary fervor and let it droop, and scanned the faces for Robin. She missed him at first, started to open her mouth with an angry protest, and then her eyes snapped back to a familiar woman: Robin, in a padded vest as of old, dressed as an Angel. All the men wore black, some more successful imitations of the Angel uniforms than others. Two of them held helmets, all had false wands—reasonable facsimiles—and the variety of guns was sufficiently Angelic to pass. However:

“Couldn't you find black boots?” she asked. Some of them looked taken aback, and she had to admit it was an odd note on which to begin a heroic evening.

“Oh, my dears,” a voice drawled from the back. “If only I'd known the proper fashion for a revolution. This is just too humiliating.”

Laughter woke the little passageway, nervous, basso, and relieved, but Dian did not join it.

“The brown ones will pass in the dark,” she persisted, “but you'll have to do something about the lighter ones. You'll be spotted from a mile off. At least rub some lampblack into them, anything.” A pot of some black greasepaint was produced and depleted, and at last Dian was satisfied.

“Robin, the supplies?” She handed him the Angel knapsack she'd secreted away. “Put whatever you have in here with some grenades on top in case it's checked. Now, who's heading this?” Glances gave her the answer, an unassuming middle-age bookish sort with implacable eyes behind wire spectacles. She held out a scrap of paper that held a few lines of names and numbers. “I've given you everything you asked for,” she told him. “In another ten minutes the Center will be virtually empty, and the route Robin gave you is the safest and most direct. I can't do anything about the door lock, but you knew that, and I assume you have something in mind. I've done my part,” she stressed. “What I want in return is these twelve lives spared. These women do not deserve death, and if you deal with them honestly, they could be of great value to you. Also, I suggest that you consider sparing anyone whose number is higher than eight hundred. Anyone over that has only been here for a year or so, and a lot of them are new recruits under sixteen. Children. And all the numbers above one thousand are servants, whose only sins were to cook and do Angel laundry. If you refuse to save these women and girls, there is nothing I can do. But I ask it of your honor to try.”

The man studied her eyes and then took the paper from her hand, looked at it, and buttoned it into a pocket. He nodded once, and she told him, “I probably don't need to mention that, if you are captured, that piece of paper would be the end of those twelve.”

“No,” he said, and again she was, irrationally, reassured. She held out her hand to him, and he took it.

“Good luck,” she said. She slung her rifle again across her back and moved to the door, then stopped. “Two more things. One, none of you saw me tonight. I am missing, dead, but you never heard of me. Second, I suppose it doesn't much matter what you think of me, but I'd like you to know that I'm not a traitor. I came to Ashtown to get Robin out, and that's what I'm doing. I've never been an Angel in anything other than appearances. I tell you this so you know that the information you have and the names on that list are clean; they come from someone whose word is solid.”

The man smiled then, just a little with his eyes, and he was no longer unassuming.

“Good luck to you too, Dian,” he said, and laid his hand in a brief blessing on Robin's shoulder. “Good-bye, Robby. We'll name a street after you,” and he pushed them out the door. The false Angel put his head through the archway.

“Anything?” she asked him.

“Half a dozen Vam—Angels running by a minute ago, nothing since.”

“Good.” She pulled off her helmet and gave it to Robin, shook her head again at his shoes, and showed him how to drop the visor. “I don't suppose that jacket is armored,” she asked.

“No, just warm.”

“Well, stand behind me if bullets start flying. And if anyone comes up to us, do something to keep them from looking at your feet. Ready?”

“As I'll ever be.”

“Are you scared?”

“Be a fool not to be.”

She laughed happily and slapped him on the shoulder. Call her a fool, then, but she felt like she was crawling out of the grave, more alive every minute.

“Come on, then,” she said, and strode off big-bellied down the middle of the deserted boulevard with Robin at her heels.

In January she had reassured herself with the wan thought that escape from within the walls would be an easy thing, and to her surprise it proved to be true, particularly for an Angel of the streets who had spent hundreds of hours patrolling every twist, turn, niche, and pile of builder's rubbish with precisely that goal in mind. Dressed as they were, no citizen questioned them, though many an eye peered out of curtains at them; the few Angels they passed made only the most cursory and preoccupied of greetings. She came to a point where the wall formed an angle and pushed Robin into a doorway that she knew to be boarded up from within. She looked at her watch.

“We made good time,” she whispered. “Now, if your engineering wizard knows his stuff, the lights will go off in five minutes. If not, we get to climb over the wall in full light. Can't risk shooting them out.” Guns had been heard from the north for the last few minutes, single shots, a few automatic bursts, and two explosions of grenades, but there had been nothing closer yet.

“You have a rope?' asked Robin.

“A gorgeous one, cost me two weeks' pay. I'll go up and tie it to that standard there, you see?”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, Dian. I know I'm just a man and no Angel, but I can climb and I'm not seven months pregnant. I'll go up, drop the rope down for the pack and then you.”

“Well, all right,” she said reluctantly, “but I want you to wear this jacket as well as the helmet.”

“Agreed. But you take it back on the other side.” They made the exchange and then settled to wait in silence. After a while the wind shifted, and it smelled of smoke and something more pungent: tear gas.

“How long do you think they'll hold out, in the north?” she asked.

“Hours. They're well entrenched and supplied. Been collecting stuff for this move for years, ever since Howard saw the failure of the last one.” Howard was the man with the wire glasses. “He's an unlikely- looking revolutionary, but the perfect combination of chess player and assassin. The other day—”

The lights went out. Dian never did find out what had happened the other day, because Robin was already edging out of the doorway, blind but with the terrain firmly planted in his woodsman's eye. Dian followed his progress with her ears: up a drainpipe, along the top of a bay window, onto the roof, over to the next roof, and finally a scramble onto the building whose end formed part of the perimeter wall. There were voices coming from the upper floor of the middle building, and candles were lit there and in the ground floor of the end one, but in the darkened street she and Robin were invisible.

She heard a faint slithering noise and the nylon rope was there. The pack went up with only two thumps; the rope returned. She tested it, found it secure, and pulled her way up it, slowly but silent. Once on the top they reversed the process, and Robin ended by climbing down the doubled rope (which Dian had bought long for just that reason, in order to reach twice the height of the wall) and pulled it down after him.

They were out. They were free. Now there was only the getting away.

Dian led him along the wall, skirting shacks and dwellings, freezing at dogs and voices that were beginning to be raised as the disturbance inside the wall built. Finally they were at one of the Angels' three stables. The guard there was awake, until Dian strode up to the woman in full riot gear while Robin came up from behind and cracked her on the head. They left her tied, drove off all the horses but two, and stole every bit of gear they could manage, chucking most of it into a ditch outside the town.

They stopped only once, while Robin took out the alcohol, needles, and the scalpel he'd somehow got his hands on and subjected Dian to a quick, messy, and unanesthetized surgery on her upper breast. It hurt like hell, but at the end of it, she was no longer an Angel.

[CALIFíA] HAD MORE BOLD ENERGY AND
MORE FIRE IN HER BRAVE HEART
THAN ANY OF THE OTHERS.

T
HIRTY

T
HE SUN SHONE; THE RAIN REFUSED TO FALL; THEIR
tracks lay open on the soil for all to see.

Late on the third morning the maps failed them. Where there should have been the gentle slope of a creek bed and the Remnants of a narrow roadway, there was only an apparently endless expanse of boulders and scree that stretched around the corner half a mile away, debris that once had been part of the overhanging hill. Bomb, earthquake, or natural landfall, it hardly mattered, for the way was impassable. They filled their bottles from the trickle's pools and turned back to follow the ridge.

An hour later they were leading their horses along the shaky, sparsely treed ridge when some vaguely remembered urge caused Dian to look over her shoulder. At that distance she might have dismissed the figures as a herd of elk fleeing wolves, or a group of wild horses, but they were not.

“Robin,” she said. Startled, he slipped and nearly lost his footing, recovered, and looked at her. She tipped her head at their pursuers, and saw the bones of his face emerge, taut in fear. She looked away.

“Shit,” he said. “So soon. I thought we'd throw them with that business at the creek and the rocks. All that delay for nothing. They must've picked up one of Queen Bess's trackers; I don't think there's anybody that good in Ashtown.”

“No, it's not one of Bess's,” she said, her voice quiet and even and filled with rage and despair. “It's the Captain herself. She's using Tomas.”

“No,” he exclaimed. “It can't be, she'd never come herself, not with the city burning.”

“No? What can she do about the city but put it under siege and wait for reinforcements from Portland? She might as well come after us. Pride, you know. And I imagine the touch of using Tomas to track me down proved irresistible.”

Wordlessly, Robin took the binoculars from his saddle and focused on the specks ten miles away, but Dian did not need glass lenses to see her dog. He was there, on a long lead, no doubt, fastened to the wrist of Captain Breaker. She turned back to the ridge, and after a few minutes Robin followed.

They made it past the slide, and once they had regained firm hillside Robin called a halt and made her eat some bread and dried fruit. It tasted like sand, but she obediently chewed and swallowed while she sat with her eyes studying the opposite hilltop. Robin ate silently and put the food in the bag when they had finished, then came to stand beside her.

“So,” he said. “You know the dog better than I do. How do we shake him? Short of flying?”

“We don't. I take up a position on that hill with the gun. You go on ahead.”

“No.”

“Oh, Robin, please. No heroics. There's only the one rifle. I'm a better shot than you. I can pick off . . . I can kill Tomas and the Captain when they come up to the base of the slide, and probably three or four others, depending on how they're arranged. Chances are better than even that without her they'll turn back home. Even if they don't, they're still three hours behind us. I'll catch up with you and we can set up a second ambush. Guerrilla warfare.”

“No.”

“Robin, damn it—”

“I have the right to choose, Dian,” he said evenly, and she could not insist, could not help seeing that were she to force him, it would be as if he had not left Ashtown, and she—she would be stamped irrevocably as an Angel. She squinted at the opposite ridge for a moment, and then held out her arm.

“This wand,” she told him. “Its charge stays full for over a week. Everyone believes that a wand only works for its owner, but actually all it needs is for her thumb to be on the indentation—see here? This is the power adjustment; top is full power. At that setting it kills, fast. They say there's no pain. Surer than a rifle bullet. You just have to be sure my thumb is on the dent. Doesn't matter if I'm alive or not. It should have two minutes of full power. One second kills.” She snapped the wand back into place, and looked up at him to see if he had understood. He had. Neither of them would return to Ashtown. Not alive.

Forty minutes later they were on the opposite knoll. Robin led the horses down the hill away from the creek to tether them while Dian trimmed the brush to make an overhanging shelter. She lay down at full length under them, grunted at the pain in her breast, and set about creating a bowl for the globe of her stomach in the hard ground. She had to settle for a doughnut of branches, and then when that threw off her position at the rifle, she devised more rocks and branches to hold her elbows up at the proper level. Robin returned with a pair of blankets, which helped, and shoved in beside her under the scrub. He set out their bottles and a leather bag of food, took up the binoculars and lay quietly next to her, looking downstream while she fiddled with the telescopic sight and the props. She felt as if she were lying on a basketball and her breast burned like the living hell, but it was the best she could do. She brushed the hair back from her forehead and took a long pull from her water bottle, then she too lay quietly. The air was hot and still, and after the months of breathing concrete and tarmac, the odors were sweet and subtle.

“You know,” she mused after a while, “I was lying under a bush with a pair of binoculars when this whole thing started.”

“This is not the end,” said Robin, without taking his eyes from the binoculars.

“You don't think so?” she said softly, and for the seventh time reached out to rearrange her meager supply of long bullets. He did not answer, and they lay, silent and invisible companions, and waited for the end to begin.

It did not seem long, although it was nearly an hour, before Robin stirred.

“Something startled a jay.”

Dian wiggled her fingers rapidly to limber them up and bent to her gun. One minute stretched out, two, infinitely slow now, and when large and abrupt figures loomed into her scope it was a shock, as if the already familiar arrangement of boulder, brush, and tree had suddenly given birth to a dragon. She shook her head free of all thoughts, and put her finger on the trigger.

Tomas. Tomas first, a stout lead connecting her to—damnation, not the Captain! An Angel, but not Breaker. Donna, usually in charge of the duty roster? What the hell was she doing out here, a city girl? Dian ran the scope across the growing crowd of Angels and strangers milling about excited on their horses, gesturing and miming their exclamations at the landslide, until suddenly a ripple spread through them like a boulder dropped into a pond and Captain Breaker was there. The Captain, looking—sweet Mother of God, look at her face. Rage, controlled but visible, the lust for murder mixed with pleasure and anticipation. And complete confidence. Dian shivered at the thought of what those hands would do to her, and to Robin, and waited for an opening.

None came. The women moved up the hillside, Tomas disappeared and reemerged, never near the Captain, never both of them clear, and it had to be both. Agony, frustration, near premature tightening of her forefinger before Robin spoke.

“They'll have to follow our way up the ridge, and they'll be strung out then. It's further away, though. Will that make a difference?”

Dian released a breath, let go of the gun, eased her rigid neck.

“No problem,” she said. “No problem.”

She squirmed backward out of the bushes, got to her feet, went off to urinate in the brush, drank some water, thought of nothing at all. After fifteen minutes she went back to her hiding place, rested the smooth gun comfortably into her shoulder and her cheek, and began the last wait. Her mind remained mercifully blank, with no past, no future, only necessity and the open hillside across from her, and the gnats whining in her ears.

Forty-five minutes after leaving the slide, the pursuers appeared on the hillside. Tomas was surging up the hill in the lead, bounding eagerly at the freshness of Dian's scent, his muscles yanking at the arm and shoulder of the human he was yoked to as she stumbled up the rough slope trying to keep up with him. A few riders were still on their horses, most were on foot. No sign yet of the Captain. Tomas was halfway up the open patch of hillside, eighteen or twenty women straggling behind him. Dian and Robin both lay taut, waiting for Breaker to appear. Tomas was twenty yards from the first trees now. No Captain. Fifteen yards. A drop of perspiration ran down Dian's face, and she dropped her head to her sleeve to clear her eyes. Robin stiffened and Dian snapped back up to see her Captain's unmistakable gray stallion with a pair of legs behind his belly. Too canny, the Captain. It would have to be Tomas first, then, and hope for the best. No thinking now, and Dian shifted to the dog, her dog, the dog she had bred and helped to whelp, the dog she had held from the hour of his birth, who had taken his first meat from her hand and received her training and become her partner, who had saved her life more than once, who loved her so much he would betray her and the man she was responsible for, the dog who was eight yards from safety and straining happily against the leash, smelling her nearness, and she centered his chest in her crosshairs, gently squeezing the ridge under her finger, aiming at where the fullness of his chest would be in the instant it took the bullet to travel the distance, and the trigger went back, back, and the gun jolted against her shoulder.

Dian slammed another round into the chamber, but Tomas was down and tumbling, thrown aside by the force of the impact, brought up short by the taut lead attached to the wrist of the Angel, a woman with much faster reactions than Dian would have credited her with because she followed his pull by throwing herself to the ground and lying still, but there was no time for her now, not with the Captain loose, and the scope's vision stuttered across the confusing litter of moving people until it found the gray horse, half-rearing and being pulled down from the off side, the woman's legs mingling with the horse's. Right, then, have to take the horse out first, and when he had come full around to face downhill, she put two rapid bullets into his chest and neck and he collapsed, kicking, but the Captain was still not exposed, she went with him, huddled behind him and invisible but for a hand here and a glimpse of hair there. The hillside had erupted into movement, women diving for cover and hauling their horses up and down the hill, a scurry of body parts in the powerful scope. Dian aimed at any woman who came near enough to the Captain to be of any help, so it was not until Robin made a noise that she realized that something other than her rifle bullets was happening below. She had hit three women, but there were at least six absolutely still bodies, including Donna where she lay with her arm outstretched toward the body of Tomas. Dian lifted her eye from the limited field through the scope and saw a guard on a horse tumble limply to the rocks, another one stand up from behind a boulder, put a hand to her chest or throat, and collapse as if poleaxed. All Angels, she could see, none of the Queen's guards. The men of Ashtown still held the city and had finally managed to boost the transmitter's signal enough to reach here. Too late to save Tomas. Too late.

Within two minutes, silence had descended opposite, the silence of dead Angels and bewildered Queen's guards clutching the reins of their mounts among the trees as if the horses could save them from this terrifying plague. Another minute, and a voice through the utter, shocked silence, the words unintelligible but the personality and intent unmistakable: the Captain, mustering the remnant of her troops. Figures began to assemble along the top of the hill, then at a signal they all moved down at once, horses protecting bent-over women, moving in front of and around the gray stallion's body. Dian kept her sights on the Captain, although short of slaughtering every horse on the hill, which she did not have the ammunition to do, she could not prevent Breaker from gaining the protection of the trees. However, just before she disappeared into them, the hated face peered incautiously over the withers of her four-legged barricade and seemed to look straight into Dian's eyes. There was madness there, and wild laughter and rage, and Dian had the pleasure of seeing her duck at the last shot.

The battle was over. Looking a last time at the tawny figure among the black-clad ones, Dian could not say it was won.

The dust settled. Crows began to call. Within a very few minutes the first vulture had begun to circle overhead. Robin finally put down his binoculars, dropped his head onto his arms, and took a shaky breath.

“Will she come after us?” he asked finally.

“No. She'll be halfway to Ashtown by now, to see what she can save. She's crazy, but she's not stupid. We're safe.”

“I'll go down there after dark to get Tomas's body.”

“No. We leave now. There will be one of the Queen's guards sitting very still and waiting for us to come down, and probably two working their way in this direction.”

“How do you know?”

“It's what I would do. No, we're safe from Breaker now, unless she finds Ashtown totally lost to her and Bess unwilling to support her. Then she'd come after us, but not before. Let's go.”

“Dian, I am so utterly sorry.”

“Shut up, Robin. Just shut up. Bring the water, and let's get out of here.”

. . . WE DECLINE TO SAY MORE OF WHAT BECAME OF THEM, BECAUSE, IF WE WISHED TO DO SO,
IT WOULD BE A NEVER-ENDING STORY.