Prince of Outcasts (28 page)

Heuradys stood in a single graceful motion. Her face was white around the lips with fury and her voice tightly controlled.

“Thank you so very much, master-bowman, for near as Hades getting the Princess killed. You drove them right onto us!”

“It's most sorry I am, Lady Heuradys,” he said, with a hitch in his voice. “We stumbled across them—they were laying up on a deer carcass and they just took to their heels—we ran after—”

“Which was just the worst possible thing to do!” she snapped.

Morfind and Faramir were there too, and also shaken by what might have happened.

“And blowing your horn as if this was fucking Helm's Deep,” Faramir snarled, in a voice very unlike his usual pleasant tone, while Morfind muttered liquid Sindarin scatology.

Órlaith held up a hand. “Enough, all of you. Done's done, and we were all taken by surprise, just somewhat! Karl, cut some poles out of the brush and make a stretcher, and get something to keep his head up. I think you've some dog-nursing in your future, as Macmac took these hurts in my service, and he knows you well enough to obey.”

He nodded silently and trotted off, happy to escape so easily. Susan was coming back leading several horses by their reins.

“Thanks, Suzie. Would you run over to the manor the now, to tell them we need a wagon? And to have the healer ready to check people, that'd be best.”

Alan Thurston limped up as she heeled her horse off and up to a hand gallop, gingerly touching his face where it had plowed into the dirt and was bleeding freely.

“Here, let me see to that,” Órlaith said, signing him to lie down.

Karl returned with horse-blankets, and she folded several under Macmac's head and spread another over him for warmth against shock. Alan lay down not far from the semi-comatose greathound.

“Sorry,” he said, as she swabbed at the grazed area.

The pain had to be fairly intense—skin was hanging from the edge in shreds, and she had to get all the bits of dirt out of the raw flesh lest it fester—but he only blinked as she swabbed and used the tweezers and trimmed the edges with the razor.

“I saw you jump between me and a tiger with a spear,” she said dryly.
“The which you did when I was lying flat with the wind knocked out of me and a nasty belt to the elbow making my arm buzz. Not much cause for apology, I'd say.”

He smiled a little as she applied iodine and a pad and wound fabric tape to keep it in place. “I . . . ah, I sort of prayed that I'd have an . . . opportunity to show my loyalty to you, Princess. That's the problem with asking for something—you may get it. And in spades! So this is, umm, sort of my fault.”

Órlaith raised a brow.
He means that, too,
she thought; the sincerity had an unmistakable tone, when you bore the Sword. Of course, that only meant
he
believed it, and he'd just had a hard thump on the noggin. Her own was aching a bit, and she took one of the twists of willow-bark extract and washed it down with a gulp from her canteen, then offered one to each of them.

Heuradys chuckled. “You can petition, but the Powers dispose, Alan,” she said, declining the medication. “No thanks, Orrey. I was just scared witless, not thrown by a horse or tossed about by tigers.”

Then she took a deep breath as he swallowed his portion. Órlaith suspected she was about to say she had to go visit her own manors, or her brothers and father over at Castle Campscapell.

Which is noble self-sacrifice,
Órlaith thought.
The which I will not forbid at all, at all. Though Alan and I both need a day or two to recover, lest we end up rubbing wounds on wounds!

Approaching hooves brought their heads around. Someone was riding out from Athana Manor, someone with a remuda of two remounts on a leading rein, and Susan Mika was coming back with him. When he drew rein and saluted she saw that it was a small wiry man in brown leathers and a broad-brimmed hat hanging down his back. The sigil of House Artos was on his jacket beneath a stylized galloping horse, and his mounts were rough-coated garrons of quarter horse stock, not showy or even more than middling fast in a sprint, but bred for toughness and endurance. He might have been any age between thirty and forty, with skin tanned to the color and consistency of leather, bright blue eyes and tow hair sun-faded to a white color.

Crown Courier Corps,
she thought, rising.
Well, well, well. 'Tis the story of the three wells!

Barony Harfang was tied into the heliograph net and had been for years; you could put a message through from here to Portland in a few hours, day or night. Or to Corvallis on the south in scarcely a little more. Using a Courier meant . . .

The man confirmed her suspicion by swinging down and going to one knee; as he did he reached into the flat pouch that hung by a shoulder-strap over his left hip and produced a tube of tooled boiled leather, whose cap was bound by a knotted ribbon and a blob of red wax stamped with the Royal seal.

“Your Highness,” he said in a round-voweled New Deseret accent that turned each
s
to
sh
.

He bowed and kissed the hand she extended. The Couriers were a body sworn directly to the Crown, which meant to her as well as her mother.

“Thank you, Courier,” she said, taking the message tube and touching it to her lips. “Your task is performed.”

He grinned, showing a gap where a tooth had probably met a fist, or a horse's hoof, or a fall. “Not until I have your reply, Your Highness,” he said.

She broke the seal and read. While she did she heard the Courier say casually:

“Hi, Suzie. Good to see you again.”

“
Han, mis eya,
Charlie,” she replied, which meant much the same thing. “Life treating you OK?”

“Could be worse,” he replied, looking around and his eyes settling on the two very dead tigers, now buzzing with flies that lifted in a cloud as the falconers and the clansfolk began skinning. “Not bad. At least nothing's tried to eat me. Just lately, not since that fucking grizzly down by the San Luis last year.”

Órlaith chuckled as she rolled up the Chancery writ and the short personal note inside it.

“The response is: The High Queen's will shall be done in every particular.”

Then aloud to the group: “Friends, it looks like our exile here is short-lived. We're to make tracks back the way we came. From the sound of it, I'd say Reiko made plain she wanted me involved in this war that's brewing. Probably arguing that the Sword is needed, and I come with it.”

She looked at Alan Thurston. “And you're welcome to come along, my friend, if you don't mind trailing in my fighting-tail. It could be that there'll be ways to show your loyalty that don't require fighting big cats with a knife on the end of a stick.”

He smiled—gingerly, given how sore his face must be—and bowed. It was extraordinary how well he looked, even rolled in dirt and with a stained bandage over one cheek.

H
ARBOR
OF
B
ARU
D
ENPASAR

C
ERAM
S
EA

O
CTOBER
21
ST

C
HANGE
Y
EAR
46/2044 AD

P
rang-prang-prang . . .

The nearest of the galleys was frantically trying to get its bow-catapult trained around on the
Silver Surfer
, but the carriage wouldn't bear easily with the long narrow ship pinned to the Montivallan merchantman by its own boarding-ramp. Many of the archers on its deck were shifting around to shoot at her, though the prang-prangs had cut swaths through them. Pip looked down towards the Raja's men on deck and slashed the air with her cane towards the target. Their officer in his engraved spired helm glanced back at her, a scar-faced local grandee named Anak Agung.

“Tembak, Tuan Anak!”
she shouted. “Shoot!”

He echoed her and the archers drew. The local Balinese used a recurve made of laminated bamboo, and they often shot while sitting cross-legged. It looked odd to her, but it worked and it took up remarkably little room. Forty or so of the Royal guardsmen immediately began pumping arrows towards the Carcosans. The Carcosans shot back, which had the advantage of directing their black-fletched arrows away from her and her crew. The spearmen squatted and leaned forward on their left hands, a position that would have tied her in knots but left them mostly
sheltered and ready to spring into action. As she watched they began to slap their hands on the deck and chant, at first a few and then all of them, the whole body of men presenting a sea of mostly naked and leanly muscular backs rippling in unison to the sound of:

“Amok! Amok!”

The tone rose, shriller, hysterical, edging up into the blood squeal:

“Amok! Amok!—”

And the prang-prangs went
prang-prang-prang . . .

The last bursts shredded the crew around the galley's bow-catapult and left a dozen bodies blocking the boarding-gangway that had dropped on the Montivallan's forecastle; then they tilted the weapons up to rake the other two galleys beyond this one. Pip looked over her shoulder to the westward; the rest of the Raja's men were
finally
making some progress towards the spot where the action was, and shouting and waving their weapons as the oars flashed.

Pip took another deep breath, ignoring the rank stinks, flipped the cane over her shoulder into the loop sewn to her suspenders and flicked open the forearm brace of her pistol-grip slingshot. Three steel balls from the bag went into the pouch and she took up enough tension to just stretch the rubber a little. Soon, very soon, pump air into your lungs, make them hold it, don't let the muscles in your back and neck tense up, stay loose but alert—

“Ready, all!” she shouted.

The grapnels flashed across the gap—some crunching into the deck of the Carcosan galley, some into the Montivallan's bow-netting. Winches spun and hauled the
Silver Surfer
into a hard contact that made the deck lurch beneath her feet, their stern tucked against the other ship's bow and their bow midway along the galley's flank, with a triangle of water full of wreckage and bodies between. The sea right here was literally pink with blood, and it flowed out of the galley's scuppers in long red streams. Raja Dalem Seganing's men rose up with a final united scream of:

“Amok!”

They threw themselves in unison across the rail of the galley. The archers dropped their weapons, drew their parangs and followed.

The Carcosans still on their feet met them, with a shout of:
“Untuk Raja Kuning!”

That was brave, or at least sensible; the alternative was to jump into the water with the sharks and hope they were stuffed to the gills already and not in a mood to nibble.

Pip shouted herself: “Tally-ho! For the roast wallaby of Old Townsville!
Silver Surfers, attack!
”

Toa was first across to the Montivallan's forecastle, making a huge leap into the rear of the Carcosan boarding party with his great spear flashing as he gripped it near the base and swung it in a circle like the propeller of a legendary helicopter of the ancient times, or a reaper using a scythe. Three of the Carcosans who'd just stormed onto the deck there died; only one had time to scream before blood choked his throat. The scream was overridden by Toa's lion roar, shocking even in the tremendous brabbling noise of the battle. Quite literally a lion roar, something she could recall vividly; the beasts haunted the hills at the edges of Tanumgera Station and she'd heard them after dinner often enough, not to mention hunting them.

The spear darted out like a frog's tongue flicking, and withdrew leaving a huge wound beneath a man's ribs. Toa grabbed another by the throat with his left hand, crushing his windpipe as he jerked him up off his feet and into the path of a Carcosan parang like a shield, then dropped him and used the steel-shod butt of the weapon to crush the parang-wielder's skull. For an instant the Carcosans recoiled, stunned and horrified.

She leapt after him, and the rest of the crew who weren't working the prang-prangs followed—by now she was pretty confident they would, if only because they knew she'd gotten them into a situation where they had to win or die, and they were pretty well all self-starters anyway. She pulled the slingshot across her body and released just as her feet touched the planks, and three Carcosans toppled backward from the rail into the water and the waiting jaws.

No bloody problem hitting something with so many targets! Or this close.

Then she went to one knee and switched to single shots, draw-spot-loose as fast as she could from a few paces behind her second-in-command and concentrating on the ones he didn't have time for. One punched into the eye of an archer drawing a bead on Toa, the next broke a kneecap, the third thumped into the side of the head of a spearman in the soft spot just up and forward of the ear, and the fourth went
crack
into the breastbone of a half-naked man running screaming at her with a wave-bladed keris in hand.

He stopped and looked down at his own chest. Then his eyes rolled up and he fell to the red-running deck with a sort of boneless splat as his heart was shocked into stillness. Her mother had been very fond of this slingshot. . . .

She snapped it shut and pulled the cane out of its sling, suddenly conscious of how the Carcosans were retreating from this part of the ship. Then her eyes went wide as she saw why.

A steel man was fighting his way towards her. His armor glittered like fire in the afternoon sun, painful to the eyes, from feet in articulated metal shoes to the tall ostrich-feather plume on top of his helmet. A long double-edged sword was in one hand, and a big shield like an elongated round-edged triangle was on the other arm, marked with the Crowned Mountain and Sword. His face was a blank curve of steel with only the shadowed horizontal eyeslit breaking the line of the visor.

Arrows stood in the shield; they splintered on the surface of the body-armor as she watched. He moved as if the harness was no heavier than cloth, smacked the shield into a face with an impetus that knocked the victim backward like a rag doll, stabbed, chopped, a swift economical piston-like succession of moves.

“At 'em!” Pip shouted again, and pulled the cane into her right hand and a kukri into her left.

*   *   *

Now, there's a girl of parts!
John thought.
Or at least, she leaves a trail of parts.

The view through the vision slit of his visor was necessarily limited to
the barely necessary, and concentrating on the men trying to kill him was the first priority—a good suit of plate made that process very difficult but didn't make him invulnerable, a fact teachers had made painfully clear to him years ago. But he could see the figure in the white shorts and shirt moving through the chaos of the deck-fight like a dancer who was never still for an instant; one of the more lively dances, a volta or a leaping and twisting galliard.

She sank nearly to a knee and smashed a foot with the knob on the end of her cane, blocked a downward cut with the odd back-curving knife in her other hand, flicked the cane straight up into the man's chin, cut sideways and took off most of a hand, twirled in a three-quarter circle and smacked the end of the cane into the angle of a jaw in passing with a force that left a spray of blood and teeth in the air as the man fell backward.

The huge man beside her had more tattoos than a McClintock and was using his spear—enormous even for his size—as a combination stabbing and cutting and clubbing weapon, one with immense leverage at the end of his long thick arms and the long shaft.

John went forward, with Thora and Deor on one side of him and the Fayard and his surviving half-armored crossbowmen on the other with sword and buckler, and the point of Evrouin's glaive poised at his liege's sword-arm shoulder ready to stab and hook and cut. The slightly-built and lightly-armed locals were terribly vulnerable to that ironclad violence. And Ruan was barely a step behind the foremost trio, shooting with deadly skill so close to them that sometimes the fletching brushed his friends as the arrows went by—not one of the enemy archers managed to live long enough to raise a bow behind their own hand-to-hand fighters.

“Keep at 'em!” Thora wheezed past the three-bar visor of her Bearkiller helm. “They're back on their heels, I can feel it. Don't let 'em get set!”

She's right,
John thought, and cut a man across the neck and chest as he tried to dodge backward and couldn't because his comrades were too close behind.
They had their peckers up but the Aussie shocked 'em.

Thora went in under the point of a spear, levering it up with the edge
of her shield as she slammed into the man bearing it body-to-body and then cracked the basket hilt of her backsword into his face in a quick hard jab while he was off-balance.

“By the Aesir, it's nice to be bigger than average for a change,” she grunted as she recovered into guard.

Another tried to stab her in the side with a
kris
while her sword-hand was busy and had just enough time to see the point skid off the steel surface of her cuirass before Deor's broadsword slammed down and cut three-quarters of the way through his arm.

“Woden! Ha,
Woden!
”

The enemy fighters surged back from the wedge of Montivallans, some trying to crowd back down the nearest boarding ramp; he realized he didn't even know what to call them, apart from these-people-trying-to-kill-us. It was time to charge them, turn them into a mob trying to escape and too tightly packed to use their weapons or even run.

John tucked his armored shoulder into his shield and sprang . . .

. . . and bounced back from the tall figure that stood before the place where the ramp's spikes had crunched deep into the
Tarshish Queen
's bulwark. A white robe covered him from shoulders to feet, but there was armor underneath it, and a sword much like a Montivallan knight's weapon in his gauntleted hand. A helm covered his head, but the front of it was a mask. John couldn't tell exactly what it was made of; ceramic or ivory, at a guess. Certainly it was pale—not white, but some indefinable off-white color that gave the impression of being like flesh, but not living flesh. A three-armed sigil rested between the brows.

The features of a face were there in the mask, but smoothed and flattened, more suggested than shown. The eyes were empty sockets. . . .

And there aren't any eyes behind there either. It's just . . . yellow.

He couldn't move his gaze from those golden pits. He was on the deck of the
Queen
, but he was also somewhere else, as if two places and times had merged. More
there
than
here
with every breath.

His armored feet rang on flags as he walked between shuttered buildings of pastel-colored stone, beneath a pale sky and paler moon and black
stars. A child looked at him between the convoluted bars of a balcony, a face elfin and huge-eyed framed in pale hair, then turned and flowed away like a snake on its belly. A tall structure like a church glowed from within like a furnace. Its stained-glass windows cast shadows that danced and capered across the square before it, making a play where stick-thin mantis figures whirled around another tied to a stake, one that burned and screamed silently.

Beyond the not-church, broad stairs led down to a blue-black lake, where waves like pale mist beat on the stone. A boat waited there, a slender double-ended thing with curling stem and sternposts and a hooded boatman holding a tall pole.

His shadow went before him, more terrible with every step as it showed the shape of his soul. Then it turned to look him in the eyes . . .

Thock.

Something hard struck the man in the mask on the side of his helm—a ball-bearing from a slingshot—and John was back on the deck of the
Tarshish Queen
. Evrouin lunged with the point of his glaive; the masked man swayed aside and seized it just below the head. The valet-bodyguard dropped it with a yell as his opponent yanked it forward, nearly throwing him off the deck. The longsword moved
before
Ruan loosed, and the bodkin point went
ting
off the watered steel and shattered. Then it went up with smooth menace.

“St. Michael with me! Holy Mary for Portland!” John bayed as his sword went up, his shield raised to just below his eyes.

A sword I can deal with.

He took a step forward, feeling a transport of anger born of fear. Thora and Deor were at his side, she calling on Almighty Thor, he on Victory-Father. The three swords cut air as the Pallid Mask leapt backward with tigerish agility, onto the boarding ramp and back down it. The boarding parties had fled behind him, all but the ones twitching on the deck as the sailors finished them or tipped their bodies overboard.