Prince of Outcasts (27 page)

Unfortunately the first generation had survived mainly by eating humans, a habit never entirely lost even after other game became common again, and
Siberian
meant
big
.

This pair were just under four feet at the shoulder and weighed as much as a smallish pony or three large men each. Seen from ground level as they came rapidly forward they looked even bigger, their massive wedge-shaped heads low, bellies to the ground and tails lashing. One snarled, and she had an excellent view of the inches of white fang and the pink-and-crimson gape of the mouth.

Órlaith managed to take a quick glance to either side. Her friends were spread out in exactly the wrong way—a semicircle so the tigers couldn't get past without charging directly at a human; and with the best of motives the Mackenzies were keeping up their shouts and horn-blowing and crashing through the brush as they came on at speed, ensuring that the animals wouldn't be turning back.

Órlaith managed to suck in a whooping breath and started to shout
everyone together!

The tigers were running from a threat, not hunting. They wouldn't try to hunt an alert group of humans in the open anyway unless they were utterly starved, and these were glossy with health; just to start with they were usually perfectly well aware of what bows could do. If she could get everyone in one clump shouting and waving things, they were likely to dash past and then go looking for somewhere to hide.

No time.

Even a tiger moving away from a threat was very dangerous; they didn't like being frightened, and they had top-predator reflexes towards anything that got between them and where they wanted to go. The big cats' tails stopped lashing and went rigid. They were staring at her with
fixed glares, and she was on the ground and looking vulnerable. That was . . .

Bad sign.

Then the claws on the tigers' forepaws came out and retracted again, and they worked their hips to settle their hind feet into the earth.

Oh, very bad sign.

Once while she was hunting in a swamp near the ruins of Eugene she'd seen a tiger leap fifteen feet up into a big oak . . . with the body of a fair-sized yearling boar in its mouth. Ground-to-ground they could cover thirty feet in a bound. And these two were only about fifty or sixty yards away, albeit downhill.

Heuradys spent a moment fighting the terror of her horse out of the reflex of someone virtually reared in the saddle, then flung herself off and landed crouching, her sword coming out in a silver flash as she dashed towards her liege. It was very swift, but it seemed to take forever. There were only . . .

Seconds,
Órlaith thought.
Seconds before they reach me.

She shoulder-rolled, sprang to her feet and drew. The shock of holding the Sword of the Lady ran through her; everything was
there
, balance and breath and muscle in cool harmony. She fell into the
nebenhut
position: knees crooked, left foot forward, blade back and point down and edge angled for a rising strike, with the right hand just at the guard and the left on the lower lobe of the hilt firmly up against the pommel.

She knew she was very accurate and very quick; yet nothing human could out-quick a tiger. But cats could be predictable—

Motion slowed. Her own with it, but she could
see
it all with crystal clarity, as if she was watching everything including herself from a distance through a powerful telescope. The cat-brothers leapt almost in unison but not quite, long low arcs like the stave of a strung longbow, landing with all four paws together and back curled in a horseshoe shape and then springing off the hind legs again. Dust and fragments of grass and dirt spurted back explosively as they launched into the second leap.
The third began the same, but both animals spread their forepaws in the air, and the dagger-length claws slid out as their mouths opened for the killing bite.

Órlaith stepped forward
into
the leap just as the lead tiger left the ground towards her. Her right boot slid forward, gliding sure-footed over the tussocky grass. The Sword came up in the long diagonal cut with the same motion, rising and then sweeping across with a snapping twist that put the strength of gut and back as well as arms and shoulders into swinging the not-steel.

The Sword of the Lady could do many things; her father had thought it wasn't matter at all, really, but instead a thought in the mind of the Goddess made material enough to touch. Órlaith believed it—when it had passed to her she'd noticed with a prickle of awe that it unobtrusively became the ideal length and weight of a longsword made for
her
.

When you wielded the Sword
as a sword
, as a thing meant to cut and stab, three things were important and very different from ordinary steel, however fine. It was sharp as an obsidian scalpel, able to cut a drifting hair that merely touched it, far sharper than battle swords were ever made or even
could
be made. The blade was a thin-sectioned and utterly rigid shape invulnerable to all harm, unlike the surprisingly fragile nature of a war-sword. And it was completely frictionless, smoother than wet ice, incapable of jamming or binding in anything whatsoever.

The rising blade moved in a blurring arc and struck the tiger's right forelimb just above the elbow-joint. It was thicker than her own thigh; she felt the jarring thud of impact, and then a harder cracking shock through her wrists as the edge met bone. Then something struck her and sent her spinning to the ground again, harder this time, and the Sword flew out of her fingers as her elbow rammed down and numbed her right arm.

The tiger was five yards away, thrashing and biting frantically at itself and giving an earsplitting and piteous high-pitched squeal. The limb hung by a tiny shred of hide . . . and then came free. For an instant the glass-smooth surface of the wound simply glistened meat-red and bone-
white and gristle-yellow, and then disappeared in a gout of blood as the momentary shock that squeezed the veins shut vanished. The copper-salt odor was overwhelming, vanquishing the musky-sour-vinegar tomcat stink of the beast itself.

The second tiger landed with an audible thump where she would have been; no matter how broad and soft the paws and resilient the legs, it
did
weigh something like six hundred pounds and it had been expecting to land on her, not the ground. Even lying stunned before it, some remote corner of Órlaith's mind still felt a mad impulse to giggle at the I-meant-to-do-that look that flickered across its face for an instant, exactly the same as that a household moggie wore when it missed a leap from a sofa to a windowsill.

Sure, and it's more sympathetic to mice I'm becoming, by the moment!

Then the tiger whirled in a way that ought to have been impossible for something so big, a twisting S-curve through space that left it towering over her with its paws raised to pin and rend. She tried to reach for the hilt of the Sword; it was only about a foot away. For a moment she was chiefly conscious of an agonizing frustration as her right arm refused to do what she told it. Then something gray shot by in a galloping blur; Macmaccon, leaping in a frenzy of silent effort for the tiger's belly with his jaws gaping. The tiger hop-jumped backward, drawing in its stomach and batting with one immense paw; there was a thud and yelp and the greathound pinwheeled away.

Two arrows flickered over her head, amid a rippling hammer of hooves. Susan Mika had managed to get her horse under control and rode by shooting. The shafts thudded into the animal's breast and shoulder, but only sank in a handspan or so, which meant they'd struck bone. The Lakota girl's bow was too light in the draw for the sort of smashing power that could crack armor, or ribs and shoulder blades. But the tiger felt it, giving a coughing roar and shaking itself and looking around with a bewildered rage as attack piled on attack and things stung and hurt it. The smell of its littermate's blood would be priming it for battle too.

Órlaith's hand closed on the black staghorn hilt of the Sword, and she
was in command of her body once again. She rolled up to one knee, but Alan Thurston was between her and the tiger now, the hunting spear braced in his hands. The head was a twelve-inch blade with a crossbar welded at the base, but the shaft was only seven feet long. That meant getting within range of murderous paws that could gouge you open like so many flensing knives, or break a bison's neck. Alan's face was gray-pale beneath his natural tanned olive, but there was no hesitation as he ducked in crabwise and jabbed the point forward with hard precision.

“Yaahhhhhhh!” he shouted. “Heee! Yaaaaahhh!”

The tiger snarled again, batted at the spearpoint, backed a little and then lunged. Alan went to a knee and frantically butted the spear into the ground. It held for a moment, the point sinking into the beast's shoulder, but then the tiger bit the shaft and shook it savagely. It snapped across and Alan went tumbling, his hundred and eighty pounds lifted off the ground and tossed by the tiger's neck-muscles and his own death-grip on the ashwood shaft. As he did Heuradys d'Ath darted in behind the beast and swung her longsword down two-handed across the animal's spine in a shining arc of speed, just behind the shoulders.

The tiger screamed, a high-pitched sound, and whirled on her in a blur. But its hindquarters went limp and it collapsed for a moment as it tried to charge. She backed carefully, a little crouched with her sword up in the Ox, the two-handed guard position. Locking eyes with the dying beast and leading it away from Órlaith as it dragged itself along on its front paws, moaning and snarling at the same time. Her face was pale beneath its tan, but set in a mask of concentration.

Morfind and Faramir ran up swearing, their recurve bows drawn as they fanned out to either side of her. Two arrows slammed into the big cat's neck and chest and sank deep, deep enough to touch the white gull-feather fletchings to its hide; the tiger moaned, sank down and bit at the ground for a moment as blood flowed out its nose and mouth, then went limp save for a little twitching.

“Enough!” Órlaith wheezed, but loud enough for her voice to carry in the sudden quiet.

None of them was inclined to babble just because their hearts were pumping.

“It's good as dead, leave it! Check for who's hurt.”

A quick glance around showed that none of the humans seemed injured, beyond bleeding grazes and bruises and wrenching. The falconer and his assistant were in front of the hawks, which was very creditable considering that they were armed with nothing but the hunting knives in their hands. She clashed the Sword back into its scabbard—blood simply fell off it, and it never needed to be sharpened or checked for nicks. A brief nod and sign of the Horns to the tigers acknowledged their courage, and that they had a right to fight for their lives just as she did for hers.

Then she ran over to Macmaccon. Her heart lurched for a second as the greathound lay so still. Then she saw he was still breathing, and knelt to examine him. There were four deep gouges down one flank, bleeding freely, and the left shoulder and forelimb were canted in ways they shouldn't be. The brown eyes rolled towards her as she touched him gently, but the tongue lay limp out of the fanged mouth.

“There, Macmac, my faithful one, hero of a thousand.
Beidh lá eile ag an b'paorach.
We'll live to fight another day.”

Then a little louder. “Fetch the kit! Quickly!”

“Here,” Heuradys said, and handed it to her; it was of stiff black leather, with an embossed golden winged staff circled by a serpent on the top.

Órlaith opened it, pulled out a hypodermic of morphine, and adjusted the dose—Macmac was easily as heavy as most men, but dogs were more vulnerable to opiates. He sighed deeply as the needle took effect and lost a tension that hadn't been obvious before.

“The leg's broken and the shoulder . . . no, it's dislocated but the bone's whole,” Órlaith said after a moment. “Hold him, Herry. And by the way, thanks.”

Heuradys shook her head as she took Macmac's muzzle in the crook of one arm and braced the other against his chest.

“I wasted a good thirty seconds trying to get that slug of a horse under control,” she said. “I didn't
think
.”

“Don't second-guess yourself, knight,” Órlaith said sharply. “I'm here and not in bite-sized gobbets because you cut a bloody great tiger's spine with a sword, and not a magic sword at that! The result answers for the act, so.”

She pulled sharply and twisted slightly, careful to keep her grip well above the break and not stress it; besides formal instruction she'd been helping with injuries in the hunting field and elsewhere since she'd been old enough to go along, and that was over a decade ago. The joint clicked back into position and moved naturally when she manipulated it.

“That's got it,” Heuradys said, and shook her head again. “We
never
get tigers this early. In a month or two, yes. They follow the game down from the mountains, dodging around ranches and settlements and then sometimes start sniffing around the herds on the common here. But never this close to the manor and village!”

“These two decided to get an early start,” Órlaith said.

Then they swabbed and stitched the cuts, shaved and splinted the simple greenstick fracture in the dog's forelimb, and wound on bandages that would also serve to keep the joint immobilized. There were only a few whimpers, and she thought it likely that somehow the greathound knew they were tending his hurts. There was a slight difference in the size of the pupils in his eyes, and she took his head in her lap to keep it elevated. On balance it was probably for the best that he'd been dazed.

She was conscious of snarling in the background, then sharp calls to heel in Mackenzie voices. When she looked up Karl Aylward Mackenzie was there twisting his bonnet in his big hands, swallowing and visibly making himself not look away.