Prince of Outcasts (41 page)

A clump of the Iban were heading for his all-too-visible self; polished chrome-steel armor glittered even in the firelight, not to mention the ostrich-plumes on the top of his helmet, marking him out as a leader. They might or might not know what a suit of plate was, but they definitely knew it was conspicuous. The first few seemed to be carrying spears. He had just enough time to realize that they were spearheads on the end of eight-foot blowguns made from some iron-hard dark wood and think
very clever
before they were too close for anything but reflex.

“Haro, Portland! Holy Mary for Portland!” he screamed behind the muffling visor.

In the same instant he leapt into a full-tilt charge, sword up over his head with the hilt forward. At close quarters men-at-arms didn't just
have
weapons, they
were
weapons, and the most deadly ones known to human-kind. Six stamping strides and he tucked the big curved kite shield into his shoulder, leading with it as he lunged in what was almost a headlong fall. The first Iban was skilled and quick as a striking weasel, stabbing for his face and ready to block the sword, but he'd never fought a knight in plate before and wasn't going to have the time to benefit from the experience. John tucked his head a little, and the spearhead banged off the pauldron over his right shoulder with a screech of metal on metal without throwing him off his stride.

He rammed straight forward to contact without pausing or trying to use the sword, something only the confident and well trained—or drunken or reckless—did. There was just enough light to see his enemy was surprised; his concept of normal would have been for John to slow down and use the blade. Then the sheet-steel facing of the shield struck along a quarter of the smaller man's body, including his face and collarbone and part of an arm he'd started to fling up in reflex.

Naked, John would have outweighed the Sea-Dyak warrior by forty pounds of bone and muscle. Armed cap-a-pie and counting the shield it was more like a hundred and twenty, and they met with their full combined velocity. Bare flesh rammed into unyielding steel. The check made John grunt as the shock ran down from shoulder into bent knees and bounced him back fully upright, but this sort of collision was a frequent experience in training to fight as a knight and he knew how to use it. Bone cracked loud enough to hear over the gathering tumult, and that included the Iban's jaw, cheekbone, elbow and eye-socket.

He'd just been struck very hard by a very large club.

The wounded man's limp body tangled up the two following him. John's sword slashed down at the half-glimpsed figure to his right, not aiming, just trying to hit
something
on the bare moving form. If seeing things through a visor's slit in the daytime was a strain, at night it was like
fighting in a bad dream . . . or a crowded closet with the door closed. The longsword was a brief shimmer through the night.

The ugly wet crack of impact jarred through the leather inner surface of his gauntlet and into his hand and tight-strapped wrist, with the solid chunking feel of a straight-on hit that you got used to practicing on hog carcasses. A man lurched away grabbing at his right arm with his left, and then ran shrieking for a few steps as it came off in his hand before he collapsed bonelessly limp and face-down. Evrouin stabbed past his liege's sword-arm with the glaive, and someone half-seen grunted in shock as the heavy butcher-knife shape of the blade went home with two strong arms behind it along the mountain-ash shaft.

“Hakkaa päälle!”

That was the Bearkiller war-shout; probably, almost certainly, the first time it had been heard on these shores. It meant
Hack them down!

Off to his right Thora deliberately took a spearpoint on the breastplate. That was painful and risky, but left her enemy shocked into an instant's immobility. In the same moment she caught another man behind the knee with a vicious slashing backstroke, punched the steel-shod edge of her dish-shaped shield into a third's face just below the eyes with a crack like an axe blade striking, and then lunged with a beautiful economy of motion that sent six inches of point into the throat of the spearman drawing his weapon back for another stab. Then she withdrew into guard position with a quick twist of the wrist that opened all the large veins and probably killed the man almost as fast as cutting off his head would have done. It all took about as long as counting one-two-three, graceful as a dance and done with a hard smooth quickness.

“Ha, Woden! Woden!”

Deor Godulfson called on his God as he finished the man Thora had hocked with an economical chop of his Saxon broadsword; the Iban had been trying to stab her in the foot, which showed commendable focus with a leg cut halfway through at the back of the knee. Then he caught another spearpoint on his round raven-blazoned shield, stabbed underneath it and punched with the boss that covered the grip within.

“Woden!”

Victory-Father's name was probably also a first for this island, and the poet's voice rang like a trumpet. He was on Thora's right, guarding her unshielded side, the oiled steel links of his mail hauberk gleaming like a dragon's skin in the dark. The two of them worked together like the fingers of a single hand. Some fleeting, buried part of John's mind—the part not focused on staying alive in this blindfolded scrimmage—was glad to see it. He was a passing part of their story, but those two were really what mattered to each other, at seventh and last.

He glared around, shield up under his vision-slit and head turning in the automatic side-to-side motion you used to compensate for the loss of your peripheral vision. Then he staggered, and staggered again as something grabbed at his ankle and tried to jerk his foot out from under him, probably failing only because they underestimated his weight.

Evrouin tried to get a clear path for a stab at whoever it was and cursed foully as he couldn't and then had to take on another attacker, glaive to blowgun-spear. John kicked reflexively as he swung the shield to balance himself and felt the rounded toe of his sabaton hit
something
, but not hard enough to break bones.

He was blind downward, and flicked his visor open with the back of a gauntlet as he jerked the shield up to chop down with its lower point, the standard move against someone on the ground—a kite shield was heavy enough to make a very effective bludgeon. That gave him a view as an Iban came erect off the ground like something on springs, rising up between the shield and John's body and dropping the wavy-bladed knife held in his teeth into one hand. The stab at John's face was quick as a lizard's tongue.

Someone
had learned the lesson of the last Iban's attempt to fight a knight on his own terms, and learned it very quickly indeed. That someone went around in a fringed loincloth, but it didn't mean they were stupid.

A wasp had darted at John's eyes once when he was a child. The memory flashed as he tossed his head back and to the side with frantic speed and the point flashed by his eyes close enough to part a lash.

Too close!

The motion made his visor click down, blinding him again. He pulled the Iban into a frantic bear hug, which was like embracing a large, very strong writhing anaconda, and smashed his head forward in a butt with the forehead of the low-crowned sallet helm again and again. Even with the padding between him and the steel that hurt his head and neck and lights starred in front of his eyes, but in his current state he ignored it. The Iban didn't have that option as metal pounded into his face, though he stabbed twice and the knife screeched off the breastplate and the faulds over John's thighs. Blood spattered over the front of the Montivallan's helmet and visor, a hot, salty, metallic smell. The wild man made one last faltering try for the vision slit before he went limp.

One of his teachers—it had been John Hordle of the Dúnedain, still bear-strong at sixty, scarred and jovial and immensely experienced—had told him that in a fight to the death technique was good but raw aggression, a living will to do harm and always going forward made up for a great deal. The hearts of the Sea-Dyak warriors were definitely in the right place by those standards. Against locals—or the Montivallans and Japanese and the
Silver Surfer
's cosmopolitan gang of toughs, if he hadn't been woken by that nightmare he couldn't remember anymore—they might have broken through to the catapults.

Something isn't right,
he thought as he let the one he'd clubbed into a daze with the head-butts drop.

Evrouin finished his man in the same moment with a sweeping two-handed overhead slash that put seven feet of leverage behind his blow. Glaives were about as effective as a battle-axe that way; they were designed to give infantry a chance against mounted men-at-arms, and they could cut a knight's armor if it was one of the thinner parts and they hit it just right. When it came down on the unprotected junction of neck and shoulder . . . well, bad things happened.

John knocked up his visor again, and they stood side-by-side panting as rivulets of sweat poured down their faces and more oozed out of the padding of their helmets. Nobody seemed to be fighting at that instant;
Ruan slung his bow and attended to the wounded, who seemed to be mercifully few.

How were they planning to
destroy
the catapults in a few moments in the dark, even if they'd overrun them? Especially when they've probably never seen one before?

His sister Órlaith had wiped out a battery of Korean field catapults back in south Westria, in the time it took her to walk between them and swing a two-handed cut for each . . . but she'd known exactly what to hit. And she'd used the Sword of the Lady, whose razor-sharp invulnerable blade really could be used over and over again on thumb-thick steel rods and springs. He looked around, with shield and sword in hand. There was a cracking, crunching sound as Evrouin thoughtfully smacked the steel cap on the other end of his glaive's haft into the fallen Iban's head a couple of times, much like someone pounding herbs in a mortar and pestle.

“There!” Pip shouted.

She must have eyes like a cat. The end of her double-headed cane dripped blackly as she pointed, the serrated gold alloy hidden. Toa stood a little ahead of her, crouched with the great spear rotating smoothly in his ham-sized hands and a scatter of bodies—and parts of bodies—lying in front of him. There were feather-tufted darts sticking in the cloak that hung from his shoulder, and he seemed . . .

A bit peeved,
John thought as the Maori grimaced like a gargoyle and bellowed:

“Tika tonu mai

Tika tonu mai

Ki ahau e noho nei

Tika tonu mai I a hei ha!”

If that isn't some version of
Step right up and lay right down!
I'm a McClintock,
John thought; it was heartening, to have someone like that on your side.

Another band of Iban came running out of the darkness; Pip dropped the cane and whipped out her slingshot from its holster on her thigh,
flicking the brace open against her forearm with the same movement. There were at least a score of them and they all seemed to be carrying something besides their personal weapons . . .

Follow-up squad,
went through his mind in an instant.
The others were supposed to clear the way. It would have worked, if they'd surprised us, but they don't know it didn't work . . . or they're going to try anyway. But even if it had worked perfectly, there's no way they could have gotten
out
again, not most of them. It's a forlorn hope, and a very forlorn one at that.

According to
Tuan
Anak the Iban here fought for Carcosa as mercenaries sometimes and according to him and Deor and Thora all three, they were fierce warriors by nature and custom to boot, but this wasn't the sort of plan you expected of men fighting for pay. Or that anyone with their wits about them would expect hired men to follow with this sort of headlong sacrificial valor. Not just because some master resting someplace safely distant told them to do it. He'd heard his father say more than once that physical courage was simply not that rare a quality, and you could often hire men to
risk
their lives. To pour out their lives like water they had to be fighting
for
something of transcendent value—though that might be an intangible, like honor or reputation or their given oath. Or their employer might have something their families needed for their lives, or held hostages they loved more than life.

All that flashed through his mind in wordless instants. There was only one way this could be worth
anything
to the attackers, and that was—

“Thermite charges!” he yelled; it was the only thing capable of destroying large steel machines quickly. “Stop them!”

Pip stopped one; she drew and loosed with her slingshot. Pure accident smacked the ball-bearing into the nose of the pointed cylinder one of the Iban was carrying under his left arm, with his parang in his right hand. It was a warhead from a firebolt, something substantial made for a twenty-four-pounder catapult or bigger, and the half-inch steel ball hit the detonator pin to smash it back against the friction igniter and the magnesium booster within. Evidently the safety lock had been removed, or this model didn't have one.

The warhead flared into blue-white actinic brightness instantly, spewing
stuff hot enough to melt steel in an eyeblink all over the upper half of his body in the most destructive chemical reaction the Changed world allowed. The man carrying it barely had time to begin a scream amid a stink of scorched meat and acrid burning bone. His skull cracked open along its seams as brains and blood boiled within the rigid cage.

A few of the crossbowmen shot, but not enough to blunt the second charge—there hadn't been enough time to reload after they slung their crossbows and drew sword and buckler. Ishikawa loosed a shaft from his
yumi
, and after a moment Ruan rose and drew and loosed as well; both hit at least one man. The first dropped straight down and the point of the warhead clutched in his arms hit the ground hard enough to trigger it. It was trapped between the Iban's midsection the ground when it ignited and the result was . . .