Prince of Outcasts (10 page)

He almost spat on his palms as he stepped up to his position, and then
caught himself—everything was sopping wet anyway, including the thick callus on his hands. His fingers closed on the polished ashwood of the handle. Thora and Deor and Ruan joined him, almost anonymous in their sou'westers and slickers.

“Cock and lock!” Feldman said.

“Junbi shimasu!”
Ishikawa barked in Nihongo.

John pulled down against the soft, yielding resistance of the pump arm, throwing his weight on it as well as the strength of his arms and shoulders when it sank past the level of his waist. Thora called the time with a simple
one-two . . . one-two
. It was hard work, but no more so than running and wrestling and sparring in armor, or hitting a pell-post with a practice blade for hours at a time with a twenty-pound kite shield on his left arm.

A dozen strokes, with a tooth-grating
cring . . . cring . . .
from springs and gears, and then a hard
chunk
as the trigger mechanism locked. The other catapult did the same at an interval so close that the sounds overlapped, almost but not quite perfectly. John waited with his hands resting on the bar at waist-height and turned his head to look. He blinked when he did; a few feet away beyond the stern bulwark was the dark-blue rushing surface of the wave whose face the
Tarshish Queen
skidded down, with the white tumbling crest above them. They must have just come through it, and he hadn't even noticed foam seething around his sea-boots.

Down into the trough, and the dropping note in the wind in the rigging as the crest sheltered them a little from the wind, a slowing of the feeling of rushing speed. The Korean's bow burst through the crest as they reached the bottom, close enough that he could see the odd squared-off look just below the bowsprit. And then the menace of their bow-catapult, as the ship nosed down and began its race after them.

“Two thousand five hundred!” Radavindraban called. “Two thousand two hundred! Closing most fast!”

They started up the forward slope of the next wave, the shriek of the wind rising in pitch again, the taut sails giving a huge creaking groan as the full force of the gale stretched them and threw more strain on the
standing rigging that transmitted the force to the hull. It blew more rain and spray into their eyes as they peered southward, too, and harder.

“Ready!” Feldman called.

He and Ishikawa worked the elevation wheels, and the parts of the catapult with the springs and throwing troughs tilted up at the maximum, forty degrees. John ducked his head as the wind battered at his sou'wester, and suddenly realized:

That's why they're not using firebolt or napalm shell, it's not just the rain and spray. The wind would blow them off course. Especially at long range.

The
Queen
raced upwards. John caught a glimpse of the Korean ship down in the trough as they passed the crest and the swirl of foam burst from the bows and raced down the length of the ship. Then the gray-blue wall reared above the stern again, and they sped downward. His hands tightened involuntarily on the pump handle, and he forced himself not to pant.

There!

Shockingly closer this time, close enough to look
big
, not like the model ships he'd played with in the bath as a child anymore. Hundreds of tons of wood and cloth and ropes and metal, probably a hundred or more men. Close enough to see movement from the enemy bow-catapult as it shot, and a blurred streak as the bolt arced out towards them and then disappeared, plunging unnoticed into the wild waters somewhere.

“Twelve hundred!” Radavindraban shouted, his voice a little higher.

Silence, if you could call the tense moment full of the moan and whistle and creak and roar of the ship silence. Then Feldman's foot jammed down on the release lever, and:

Tunnng-WHACK!

Both the eighteen-pounders cut loose within a second of each other. The cutter-bolts vanished as the paired throwing-arms slashed forward through hundred-and-sixty-degree arcs, transmitted the scores of tons of draw-weight through the cables to the bolts and rammed home into their stops of steel lined with hard rubber.

He could feel the quiver through the handle as the recoil began the
process of recocking the mechanism, salvaging part of the energy. The four of them flung their strength into the bars in a grunting frenzy. Not until the machine clicked into the locked position did he have a chance to snatch a glance northwards. Now they were down in the trough, for a moment horizontal again, and the Korean was closer still and racing down the slope towards them. Its bowchaser shot again, and this time he could see the blurred streak of the bolt.

It
didn't
miss.

There was a shuddering crash he felt through the soles of his boots, and for one horrific instant he thought it had smashed the rudder and they were all going to die in the next minute. Then Feldman barked:

“Mr. Mate! Take damage control!”

Radavindraban left at a run, throwing the range finder over his shoulder by its strap as he went. The enemy was close enough that the catapults' own sights and Eyeball Mark One would serve.

Tunnng-WHACK!

Both the
Tarshish Queen
's cutter-bolts hit; one punched a neat slit in the enemy's foremast topsail, and the other took out a chunk of railing not far from the bowchaser. John
thought
it had bisected one of the enemy on the way, but the visibility was too poor and the time too scant and then he was heaving at the bar again. Forty-two strokes, forty-three, forty-four, forty-five and
clack
.

Tunnng-WHACK!

Closer still, and even pumping for all his worth he saw one of their bolts strike the enemy catapult's shield and heard the hard metallic
bang
. The sloping steel bent but didn't crack. It shed the bolt, which broke into two pieces. Each killed men like a flying buzz saw as they pinwheeled across the forecastle and into the waist of the ship. The other bolt ploughed into the deck and sank until only the fins stood out.

And the return shot took the head off one of Ishikawa's sailors at the pump opposite, only six feet away, close enough that the hard wet thump of impact was clear. One instant the man was rising and falling to the rhythm of the pump, and then next body
and
head were sliding down the tossing
deck. Two of the Nihonjin sailors who'd been crouching in reserve leapt with tiger speed, one grabbing the body by its jacket and the head by its topknot and dragging them out of the way, the other flinging himself onto the pump-handle so quickly that the reloading was less than a second late.

At least the blasts of spray and spume and rain got rid of the blood quickly. . . .

The bolt went on down the length of the ship, scarcely slowed at all. Ropes whipped free, and the ship began to lurch as a sail turned. A sailor made a reckless flying leap for one severed end, and nearly went over the side before another managed to get her arms around his legs. Two more drew them back, callused hands latched onto the rope and shouted directions from the First Mate and the Bosun directed the swift trim of the sail and spliced a new end onto the line.

“Load roundshot!” Feldman half-screamed. “Point-blank, point-blank!”

Hands slapped the lever to leave the throwing trough at full diameter and shoved the eighteen-pound balls into position, over a spring-loaded retaining clip called
the nose
from its shape. The balls were surprisingly small, less than six inches in diameter, but heavy enough to soak up all the frightful kinetic energy built up in the springs.

Through the crest again, wild wind and tumult and spray enough to make you choke, the beginning of the long swoop downwards. And the Korean on their heels, close enough to see men now, close enough to see one in a plumed peaked helmet pointing a sword at them and screaming something, mouth open and teeth showing below his mustache as he yelled. Yet the sound was lost in the hugeness of the sea.

Feldman's hand spun the elevating wheel and the trough sank. His foot slammed down on the release triggers.

Tunnng-WHACK!

A moment's gap as Ishikawa twisted the handwheel a fraction more and his foot shot out—

Tunnng-WHACK!

At this distance there was less than a second between launch and impact. One ball smashed into the base of the enemy's bowsprit, just
where the forestay ran back to the first of her masts. The thick cable curled and cracked like a giant's bullwhip, and the end struck the man with the crested helm. He disappeared into the rain and murk like a rag doll thrown out a window in a child's fit of temper. The mast began to twist instantly, the enormous forces playing on it wringing it like a stick in the hands of a boy playing at swords. Then the second roundshot cracked into the timber of the mast itself, right where the strain was bending it.

The Korean's mast wasn't a single tree; instead it was a composite of interlocked smaller timbers grooved and fitted together and held with shrunk-on steel bands. Normally that was about as strong as the trunk of a big Douglas fir. But when it failed, it failed all at once and catastrophically.

The whole lower half disintegrated into its parts, spinning apart and vanishing or spearing men like lumps of meat on a kebab. The upper forty feet of the mast flew into the air and hit the limits of the cables and hawsers holding it like a gigantic kite that was trying to snatch the hull's hundreds of tons into the air. The bow of the warship slewed around as if yanked by a giant's hand, and the rest of the sails caught the wind broadside-on and slammed downward in a maelstrom of flying ropes and bits of broken spars and human figures pinwheeling off into the storm. The ship spun three-quarters over, showing the white patches of barnacles and long fronds of weed on her bottom. . . .

And then the crest of the great wave curled and broke and came down on her like the Fist of God. The whole fabric shattered as a cheap pine box would under a boot, and then it was gone.

Just . . . gone,
John thought, feeling his stomach knot.

The
Queen
was still tearing away at speed; the others were whooping against the scream of the wind and hammering each other and him on the back. The Nihonjin began a chant of:

“Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”
as they pumped their fists into the air and bowed again and again to Ishikawa, their usual gravity forgotten for a moment.

“Two hundred men,” John whispered to himself in a tone empty of everything but wonder.

The spot where the Korean had vanished didn't even show any wreckage, and the sight leached everything but a wondering awe.

“My God, two hundred men just
gone
, like a cockroach under a boot!”

Slowly he crossed himself.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, Lady pierced with sorrows. . . . All of them were born of woman. Intercede for them, for us, all of us, foeman and comrade. Now and at the hour of our deaths—Madonna,
intercede!

C
OUNTY
P
ALATINE
OF
W
ALLA
W
ALLA

T
O
B
ARONY
H
ARFANG

C
OUNTY
OF
C
AMPSCAPELL

(F
ORMERLY
EASTERN
W
ASHINGTON
S
TATE
)

H
IGH
K
INGDOM
OF
M
ONTIVAL

(F
ORMERLY
WESTERN
N
ORTH
A
MERICA
)

S
EPTEMBER
16
TH
C
HANGE
Y
EAR
46/2044 AD

“T
hanks, cousin,” Órlaith said absently, taking one of the loaded plates Faramir offered.

She'd learned to eat on swaying trains as a child. Lunch was gendarme—also called man-at-arms—sausage, air-cured and fermented links made from equal portions of pork and beef with pepper, cumin, and a little honey. It was named that because it kept well, and was common in military rations and travelers' food generally. She knew from personal experience that this tasted a
lot
better than the mass-produced version handed out to the troops, because her father had started a tradition that in the field commanders ate what came out of the common mess like everyone else.

With it went a sweet-nutty Fol Epi cheese from Barony Gervais or a soft spreadable Tillamook with bits of hot pepper worked in, cracker-like rye flatbread, pickles and some bottles of garlic-cured mushrooms. Last was a maida cake of fine flour, eggs, clarified butter, sugar, petha, marmalade,
hazelnuts and walnuts, ginger and fennel, also famous for keeping well, and bottles of fizzy mild cider still fairly chilly though the ice had melted by now.

Macmac sighed loudly, his head moving with every transit of her hand from plate to mouth and deep sadness in his eyes. She relented and tossed him half the sausage, not being all that hungry anyway despite putting in most of the morning on the treadmills with the horses.

The recently-built line they were using as they curved north under the noon sun was modern steel strip on wooden rails. It crossed the broad County Palatine of Walla Walla, which was basically most of the area from the loop of the Snake River southward to the borders of the Pendleton Round-Up, founded long ago to anchor and protect the Association's eastern marchland in her wicked grandfather Norman's time. But they went well west of the great walled city of Walla Walla itself, which was tactful and why she'd done it.

Count Palatine Felipe de Aguirre Smith was a loyal supporter of House Artos, but also a battle-comrade and guest-friend of Baroness Tiphaine d'Ath since an episode in the Prophet's War. Her family visited here fairly often on their way to their estates in the Palouse, and the Count had given her a hunting-lodge in the Blue Mountains as a mark of his esteem. If Órlaith had shown up in the capital city of his County honor would have demanded that he extend her daughter Heuradys—and the daughter's liege—full public hospitality.

And Mother would feel that he was poking at her with a Disapproval Stick, though she'd know better.

The rising sun had lit the rich rolling valley-land west of the city as they passed, with the low massive line of the Blue Mountains on the horizon to the southeast just visible. Fields edged with Lombardy poplars were patterned with strips of reaped yellow grain-stubble or green with alfalfa; vineyards and orchards drew geometries over hillsides; manors and villages could be glimpsed amid gardens and woodlots.

Now and then the great stucco-covered concrete bulk of a baron's castle loomed with banners flying from the witch's-hat peaks of the machicolated towers and a town huddling beneath their shadow, or a
monastery or convent stood solid and square amid gardens and almshouse-hospice. The plane-tree-lined macadamized roads smoked white dust as trains of ox-wagons crawled and carriages clipped along, or nobles rode in gaudy brightness. Peasants and peddlers, monks and pilgrims went trudging afoot or pedaling on bicycles between rows of roadside trees showing a hint of tattered autumnal lushness, and under the drowsy warmth somehow came a hint of the coming rain and snows.

At one stop some enterprising soul handed up a basketful of fruit for a silver half-tenth while the teams were being changed: crisp apples and ruby-red late cherries and dripping-ripe pears. For a while the young clansfolk and Susan and the Dúnedain cousins engaged in a cherry-stone-spitting contest out the windows aiming at the trees planted along the right-of-way. Karl had stood on his dignity as bow-captain for about five minutes before crowding forward to take a try.

“Were we ever that young?” Órlaith said softly, as a cheer marked a bull's-eye.

Heuradys chuckled quietly as she strummed her lute, lying back with her boots off, her chaperon hat pushed forward over her eyes and her feet up on the opposite seat. Where Macmac seemed to find them a never-ceasing source of olfactory interest but needed to be poked occasionally to keep him from absently starting to nibble.

“Oh, possibly, just possibly, I say to the girl who had us run away from home on a Quest to find the Super Man in his Castle of Ice beyond Drumheller when she was eight.”

“I was impressed by that story Lord Huon told us about his mission to the north, but I wasn't really up to understanding it then.”

“I told you it wouldn't work, but noooooo . . .”

“You're never going to let me forget that little slip the now, are you?”

“No, I'm not, my liege. Though now we're the oldest ones in this crowd . . . and it feels very strange.”

“Tell me.”

Droyn wasn't participating in the pit-spitting, being a belted knight now, but he was watching and grinning.

“Or,” Heuradys went on, “possibly you're just still in a bad mood, Orrey. Relax. After all we've been through in the past few months some time lazing around with nothing more strenuous to do than falconry and sparring and music . . . and maybe chatting up some handsome huntsman . . . has some appeal.
Against Necessity, even Gods do not fight.
The
morai
spin, and that's it.”

“Yes, Atropos,” Órlaith grumbled with a sigh, and laughed unwillingly when her knight made crisp snipping motions with two fingers.

She laid aside her book—it was
The Broken Sword
, a pre-Change historical novel of grim gritty realism by a knight named Sir Béla of Eastmarch, and more accessible to modern tastes than the more fanciful efforts of the time. Then she looked out the window again, the warm wind fluttering wisps of hair that had escaped her braid, a breeze that smelled of dust and straw. It was odd to feel impatient with a journey to someplace you were
supposed
to sit and be bored once you arrived.

The domains of the Counts Palatine ended at Castle Lyon, guarding the bridge across the Snake. Northward the Palouse proper began, barer and higher and far less peopled, mostly within the frontier County of Campscapell that marked the boundary between the Protectorate and the United States of Boise. The hills were like an endless beach of low undulating dunes occasionally rising into a ridge, except that it was all covered in rippling knee-high summer-dry grass, studded here and there with bushes of snowberry and wild rose green against the tawny pelt.

Órlaith reached out and touched the Sword, where it was lashed to the car's wicker inner wall with rawhide ties. There was less of human kind to the feel of the land here, and what there was had an edge like a knife, with an undertone of grimness and old sorrows.

For generations this had been a borderland between the PPA and the United States of Boise, claimed by both and ruled by neither; raid and skirmish had gone back and forth across the marches along with the banditry that always sprang up in debatable lands. In the Prophet's War the wild horsemen from beyond the Rockies had poured through with fire and sword. Peace had found it a wasteland.

A herd of pronghorn stood and watched the train from a ridgeline, then fled like fawn-and-white streaks over the yellow-brown hills. A group of a dozen mounted Nez Perce in red-dyed deerskin shirts and otterskin collars accompanied by a chuck wagon passed them on a broken, potholed ancient road, driving a herd of their prized Appaloosa horses southward. A lobo pack trotted by in the middle distance, dark dots against the grass. Birds swarmed, from clouds of Barrow's Sparrow to hawks hanging in the air above watching for rabbits and ground squirrels. Glimpses showed mule deer and elk, scattered clumps of buffalo, and once a sounder of wild boar grubbing for camas roots in a low patch, ignoring the train with surly indifference. Nothing of human-kind, save here and there the burnt-out snags of an ancient farmhouse or some huge piece of farm machinery that sat rusting as it had since before her parents were born.

Heuradys was smiling slightly and affectionately as she looked out at the lion-colored hills.

“I remember Mom One saying that getting Barony Harfang in fief as a
reward
was like being given a free grant of seventeen million tons of undelivered Arizona sand FOB origin,” she said. “Though when I was little I always got sort of excited when we packed up for the yearly trip out here. I can just remember when it meant camping in tents.”

Delia had been Tiphaine's official Châtelaine for three decades, and as such general business manager of her estates while Lady d'Ath fulfilled public duties in war and at court. Heuradys went on:

“Mom Two always liked it here—lots of hunting and falconry and best of all
quiet
, like a vacation, she says. Mom One does too, I think, because there's been so much work for her overseeing the development. She also said that at least sand in Arizona wouldn't reach out and swallow all the revenue from your established estates for twenty years.”

“A gross exaggeration,” Órlaith teased. “You can't hunt or fly falcons on sand.”

“Or collect share rents and labor-service from the antelope and prairie chickens. The only thing that's consistently turned a profit here is the wool, and we can't fulfill our baronial obligations with a sheep ranch.”

“Speaking of obligations, House Ath never did get around to the castle,” Órlaith said, unhelpfully teasing and putting on a mock-monarchic frown. “A barony is scarcely worthy of the name without one!”

Heuradys rolled her amber eyes. “Have you got any idea of what those monsters cost? A castle is a heavily fortified bottomless pit you shovel money into. Diomede can do it when he's baron.”

The first sign they were on Harfang was a wooden heliograph relay tower sprouting from a higher-than-usual piece of Palouse; then a mounted patrol of light cavalry armed with sword and recurve bow who raised their hands in salute.

Big flocks of white Corriedale sheep appeared, and herds of red-coated, white-faced cattle, and mare-and-colt clumps of horses, all under the eye of armed and mounted buckaroos. Here and there winding strings of earthen check-dams had been built across swales to turn them into a series of ponds and marshes edged with willows and cottonwoods, and planted woodlots of black locust, fir, lodgepole pine, hybrid poplar and chestnut oak showed on some of the ridges or north-facing slopes and along the banks of streams. Most of the trees were thriving but still spindly with youth, though some had already been coppiced to supply poles and fuel on a regular basis.

Then they could see the four big windmills that served the home-estate where they stood on the nearest hillcrest eastward, slender distance-tiny tapering towers with their great airfoil vanes rotating with majestic deliberation, powering everything from flour-mills to wool-presses. They also pumped at need from deep tube wells into a big concrete-lined tank set at their base, so Athana had running water now, still uncommon in most of Montival outside the cities, and piped sewage delivered to a biogas plant for lighting the manor and the public buildings.

Then they were among the tilled land of what was officially
Saint
Athana Manor. The Five Great Fields of the peasant tenants were vast squares edged with neatly trimmed hedges of head-high black hawthorn and tall poplars; within each was a swirling pattern of broad strips laid out along the contours. Two held the dun-gold of reaped grain pimpled with
stooked sheaves, two the vibrant green of sweet clover or alfalfa, one the variegated patterns of root crops. Closer to the center were bench-terraced orchards and truck gardens, and off to the south was the demesne, the lord's home-farm.

“That wheat looks better than I'd have expected in a place too dry for forest,” Karl said thoughtfully as they passed close enough to estimate the weight of the grain in the ears and he counted the number of sheaves in a section. “What do you get here, Lady?”

“Forty bushels an acre on the demesne in a bad year, better than sixty in a good one, usually,” she said. “The tenants the same, unless they all turn up on rent-day beating their breasts and sobbing in heart-rending unison that it's less because they wore themselves out on the demesne, poor lambs.”

She shrugged. “We don't fuss if it's close enough for feudal work. Nobody really tries to push the line with Mom One. Not twice.”

By now lord and peasant both throughout the Association lands were used to that dance and trod the steps without thinking about it much.

“Sure, and that's not a bad yield, not at all! 'Twould be thought fine even in the dúthchas,” Karl said; and the Willamette was a byword for lush fertility.

“The soil here is wonderful and it retains water. We've even got a vineyard going, on a south-facing slope with good frost drainage. And my brother Diomede has been putting in some sugar beet on the demesne, just small patches on trial, seeing if it goes well enough to justify building a refinery. Dionysus knows there's always a market for sugar.”