Island in the Sea of Time (75 page)

Alston thrust two-handed at the chiefs face, shrieking the
kia.
He yelled back and caught the blade on the face of his shield, short-gripping the spear and stabbing underarm. The point skittered off the lower part of her breastplate and the thigh guards. He backed again, but she followed closely, keeping herself too close for his longer weapon to be fully useful. The brass cap at the base of the
katana
’s hilt punched up at his face, taking him at the angle of his jaw. Bone broke, but the Zarthani’s shield edge whipped around and struck her across the head and shoulder. She tasted the iron and salt of blood in her mouth and went with the stroke, letting her right knee loose. Weight and momentum pushed her down on one knee, and the long curved blade took the warrior on the back of the leg, just above the knee. He fell backward with a scream, one that ended in a gurgle as the
katana
came down across his neck.

Alston spat blood and came to her feet. The fight was ending, knots and clumps of the Zarthani turning and running lest they be caught between the Fiernans swinging in from the right and the Nantucket line.
Training pays off,
she thought, dragging her mind back to the chessplayer’s state a commander needed.
True for the Romans, true for us.

“Shall we pursue?” Lieutenant Nyugen said.

“No,” she replied.

No point; they couldn’t possibly chase down unarmored men, not without cavalry, and those took years to train.

She shook her head. “Let the locals do it.”

The Fiernans were hallooing off across the stretch of pasture, spearing running Zarthani in the back or wounded ones on the ground with the ruthless enthusiasm bred by old, old scores that they’d never had a chance to pay off before. That reminded her . . .

“See to the prisoners.” Where the Fiernans had passed, there simply weren’t any—which was a pity but also a load off her mind; there weren’t any facilities for them. “We’ll need a few for interrogation.”

Stretcher-bearers were taking the wounded off to the circle of wagons where the doctors waited. There were already birds circling above, ravens and crows, waiting for the living humans to get out of the way. And . . .

Swindapa.
For an instant she could be an single human being, not the head of a hundredfold body. Fear and love roiled under the shell of control. The Fiernan girl wasn’t far away, cleaning her sword and standing over an enemy prisoner. As Alston came up she pushed back the cheek-pieces and removed her helmet, turning a wondering look on the American.

“I beat him. He gave up,” she said. “I beat him, and he gave up.”

Alston put an arm around her shoulders. The armor made it like embracing a statue, but she squeezed anyway. “Damn right,” she said, grinning in relief and fierce pride. “I didn’t waste all that teachin’ time.”

“I didn’t let you down.”

“Never.”

The Zarthani warrior lay not far away, rough field dressings on a couple of bad wounds on his right arm. His look of sullen fear turned to amazement, doubled as Alston bared her head to the cooling breeze and his suspicious eyes studied her throat.

“Women?”
he blurted, horror in his voice. “I surrendered to
women?
”

Alston and Swindapa looked at each other for a long moment. Then they began to laugh.

 

“Here they come,” Ian said.

“Get
down
from there,” Doreen said nervously, pulling at the back of his bush jacket as he stood above her on the floor of the wagon.

“I
really
don’t like battles,” she said.

Ian nodded, climbing down, his eyes still glued on the onrushing . . .
barbarian horde. A real,
live, very ugly barbarian horde.

He didn’t like battles either. He remembered the one with the Olmecs all too vividly—in dreams, at times. Not that he’d seen much of it, from his post well to the rear, but he’d seen the aftermath close up . . . and smelled it. Right now all he could smell was his own sweat, the fairly powerful odor of the threescore Fiernans massed in the forward part of the ring of wagons, and the strong disinfectant the medics were getting ready.

The doctors and orderlies were pulling their steel-tube folding tables out of the supply wagons and setting up, lighting a fire to heat the pressure cookers that would sterilize their implements. The Arnsteins helped them; it felt rather odd, since the orderlies were in armor.

“Periods all jumbled up,” Doreen said, holding the platform of a table while an orderly spun the wing nuts that secured it to the frame.

“Bronze Age, medieval, twentieth,” Ian agreed.

“Excuse me, sir,” a petty officer said. “Is that loaded?”

“What loaded?” Ian said.

“The
gun,
sir,” the noncom said, her voice heavily patient. “The one you’re wearing slung across your back.”

“Oh,
that
gun,” Ian said.

It was a 12-gauge double-barrel model, cut down. He clicked open the breech; empty.

“You should load it, sir. We’re not supposed to need ’em here, but you never know.”

The shells were double-ought buckshot, and had an unpleasant weight and solidity as he slid them into the breech; the
snick
and
click
as he closed the weapon had an evil finality to it. He could hear the crossbows firing now, and the shrieks and screams of the enemy were much closer. Stretcher-bearers came trotting in with the first of the wounded, an American with an arrow through the biceps and into the bone. He was cursing, a steady flat-toned stream of obscenity and scatology, until the painkiller took effect. As he went limp an orderly cut the shaft of the arrow off an inch above his skin with a pair of pruning shears. The surgeon pulled an instrument from a tray, one Ian recognized—an arrow-extractor spoon, an ancient model that probably hadn’t been used in centuries . . . or wouldn’t be invented for millennia, depending on how you looked at it.

He looked away, himself, as the doctor’s intent face bent over the wounded man. As he did there was a long whirring
shoooosshh
sound from the east-facing side of the wagon fort, underscored by a flat twanging.
Bows,
he realized; he was hearing massed archery. Here and there a slinger stood in a circle of open space, flicking his leather thong around his head with a one . . . two . . .
throw
motion; he’d seen Swindapa do it, in practice. The lead eggs the Americans had provided their allies as ammunition blurred out almost too fast to see. From here he couldn’t see the action, but he could still hear the steady metronomic
whunnng
sound of the crossbows volleying. Then he couldn’t, and a few seconds later there was a long rasping slither, a deep shout, and then a frantic multiple clang and thump and snarling brabble of voices.

“And the din of onset sounded,”
he quoted to himself. He was coming to have a deeper appreciation of Homer than he’d ever imagined . . . or wanted.

The Fiernan archers standing on the wagon beds were still shooting, but carefully now—picking their targets, holding the shaft, and then loosing. Occasionally one would stop to yell a taunt, or pull up his tunic and slap his buttocks at the enemy.

What do I do now?
The answer to that was “nothing”; he couldn’t even shout for news, his Fiernan wasn’t up to it and it wouldn’t really be tactful to use the Sun People tongue right at this moment. Casualties trickled in, not all that many of them; more than half came from the Fiernans fighting along the forward edge of the wagons.
Amazing how important armor is.
The noise grew greater, and there were high-pitched screams, piteous and astonishingly loud.
Wounded horses.
Somehow they sounded even worse than the human beings; their pain was without comprehension or recourse.

“Look out!”

That was the petty officer who’d reminded him to load the shotgun. Ian whipped around. A couple of Zarthani were climbing through the wagons almost directly behind him, trampling Fiernan corpses.

The battle suddenly seemed very close indeed. The noncom and an orderly snatched up their big oval shields, and Doreen reached for her oak staff. One of the Zarthani made a flying leap and hit a shield feet-first. The sheet metal boomed under the impact of the callused heels and the collision sent them both down. Less burdened, the barbarian was back on his feet first; his spear slammed down, scoring the enameled eagle on the shield. The American had no chance of getting back on her feet, not with the armor on. Instead she curled up under the shield as she’d been trained, keeping it between her and the barbarian with the tip of the
gladius
ready around the edge if his unprotected legs came too close. Screaming frustration, the warrior danced around his prone opponent, his spear darting out like the flickering of a frog’s tongue. The fallen noncom’s companion was backing up himself, desperately trying to fend off two Zarthani who were edging out to take him in the rear, their axes moving continually in blurring, looping arcs. The edges glinted, razor-sharp. Even if they couldn’t cut through steel, they could still break bones under mail.

“Oh, shit,” Ian muttered, looking frantically around.

Nobody else here but the doctors and nurses, so frantically busy with the wounded that they didn’t even look up. The rest of the stretcher-bearer-cum-orderlies were back along the line, bringing in more wounded. Nobody else in reach.

Doreen had come to the same conclusion a split second earlier. She swallowed, took a firmer grip on the
bo,
and stepped forward.

“Wait!” Ian croaked, hands fumbling on the shotgun.

The Zarthani didn’t seem to consider any of that important. He caught the movement of Doreen’s staff out of the corner of his eye and struck, turning almost as fast as the outflung head of his long tomahawk. The axhead sliced through the upper part of the
bo
, but the staff saved Doreen’s life even as a third of its length went flipping end over end. Deflected, it was the flat of the ax rather than its edge that glanced off the side of her head. Blood welled up from a torn scalp, and she dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. The barbarian crowed triumph and swung the bronze ax up again.

Everything seemed to move very slowly after that. He took two steps forward. The Zarthani turned toward him, lips peeled back from his teeth, the ax whirling. For an instant his finger froze on the trigger.
I’m not a killer.
He never knew just what it was that released him; perhaps it was the crooked cross painted on the man’s shield. The barbarian wasn’t a Nazi, but he was near enough to an original-article Aryan as no matter.

Thudump.
He’d fired at less than four feet distance, with the butt of the shotgun clamped between elbow and ribs. Recoil spun him around and wrenched at his arm, nearly tearing the weapon away. He turned back with desperate speed, bringing it up to his shoulder. His finger tightened even as he saw the chewed red ruin the deershot had made of the man’s chest.
Thudump.
A bruising, hammering blow to his shoulder, and the muzzles twisted skyward. Momentum had put the barbarian’s contorted face less than a yard from the business end of the shotgun. He flipped backward, his face
splashing
away from the shattered bones of his skull. Bits of it struck, spattering on Ian’s face and chest, a lump of something gelatinous slapping into his open mouth. He dropped to his knees and vomited in uncontrollable reflex, shuddering and spitting to clear his mouth.

Even then he clutched the shotgun to his chest, and tried to open the breech to reload it. Fortunately, that wasn’t necessary. The retreating American had stopped when the odds against him dropped to even. The other Zarthani faltered, shocked by the thunderous sound and the sudden death beside him. While he goggled the American sheathed his short sword in the man’s belly, ripped it out, and bowled the dying barbarian over with a slamming blow from his shield. The petty officer levered herself back erect, and it was the last Zarthani’s turn to retreat helplessly before numbers. He was far more vulnerable, though. A moment’s clatter and boom, and he was down on his knees, coughing blood and clutching at his chest. A short hard chop put the edge of a
gladius
into the back of his neck with a tooth-grating wet
chunk-crack
sound, like an ax going into damp wood.

“God bless the Ginsu,” the American wheezed, freeing his blade with a jerk. “Slices, dices, julienne-fries.”

Ian wiped his mouth on his sleeve and dropped his weapon, fumbling at Doreen’s head with trembling fingers. “Oh, God, she can’t die,” he mumbled, knowing that he lied.

The wound was bleeding freely, leaving his hands red to the wrist, but he couldn’t find any crack in the bone. That didn’t mean there wasn’t internal damage, pressure on the brain. He peeled back one eyelid and then the other; the left pupil was larger, and didn’t shrink as much.

“Oh, God.”

He put an arm under her shoulders and another behind her knees and straightened up, not feeling the strain, and walked over to the aid station.

The doctor there had splashes of blood on his gown. “Head wound?” he said. Ian nodded, afraid to speak. The gloved fingers probed, washed, and probed again.

“Not too bad,” the medic said. Ian felt an enormous shuddering sensation of relief, so strong that he had to grip the edge of the table as his knees loosened.

“I think,” the medico added. “No fracture . . . concussion . . . probably be sick as a dog for a couple of days. This scalp wound is superficial, doesn’t even need a stitch.” He looked up to his assistant. “Bandage it. Next!”

He followed while Doreen was laid out on a blanket, with another over her. People bumped into him. At last an orderly spoke:

“Sir, you’re in the f . . . goddam way. She’s going to be out for hours. Couldn’t you move?”

He did, getting a drink of water and trying to force his mind back into action. He found the captain standing with her helmet under one arm, talking with a knot of her officers and a worshipful-looking pair of Fiernan Spear Chosen.