Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (60 page)

Suddenly, Connor realized he'd killed three men himself. He swallowed bile again, even though the screams were gone. That blowgun was good for something besides bagging rabbits and doves for the pot. He wouldn't have wanted a big old nail driven hard into his head.

There was something in the Bible about that, but he couldn't remember what. Maybe he'd look it up when he got the chance. He was glad his father'd taught him to read. It was a good way to kill time when nothing else was going on. It was even useful every now and then, though it wasn't such a big deal as it would have been before the Change.

He hoped Pop was okay. Right this minute, all he could do was hope.

*   *   *

“Let 'er go!” the boss of the trebuchet crew shouted.

Jared sprang away from the windlass, along with all the others who'd been raising the heavy counterweight. Down it thumped. Up flew the long throwing arm. Away went the hundred-pound boulder from the leather pouch at the end of the arm. It flew through the air with the greatest of ease. The Chatsworth Lancers and their friends on foot all did their best not to be under it when it came down a quarter of a mile away.

A quarter of a mile . . . That was about the best you could do without explosives to help. “Crank it up, boys!” the crew boss yelled. “Shoulder to shoulder, we'll fling another boulder, and fight for the town we adore!”

“Stick a sock in it, Ronnie!” That wasn't Jared, but only because somebody else came out with it first. Ronnie, predictably, went on singing. If he couldn't inspire his men into action, he'd annoy them into it.

Jared didn't know how much the counterweight weighed. A ton or two, anyhow. The men wrestling it up again with the windlass sweated and strained and swore. This was the kind of hard physical labor that would give you a coronary if you sat around on your middle-aged duff all day.

But, post-Change, who sat around on his middle-aged duff all day? There was always gardening and chopping wood and hunting rabbits and simply walking anywhere you needed to go. No hopping in the car to visit the store two blocks away. Cars were metal mines, nothing more. There wasn't so much food these days, either, and what there was had less fat. Doc Leibowitz said he saw far fewer heart attacks and strokes than he had just after he got his M.D.

A good thing, because he couldn't do much for the ones he did see. Yes, knowledge survived. Drugs mostly didn't. And no gauging pulses past a stethoscope and a watch and a trained index finger. No EKGs. No X-rays. He had ether, sometimes, and brandy for a disinfectant. You were better off if you didn't get sick or badly hurt. Doc Leibowitz was the first to admit it.

Which meant you were smarter not going to war. Unfortunately, that wasn't an option. Jared's sword banged on his hip as he heaved at the windlass. His helmet and shield lay close by, along with his comrades' gear. If the Chatsworth Lancers broke through, they'd do what artillerymen always did when things went south: fight as hard as they could till they bought a plot.

“Boy, this is fun,” Jared grunted, straining to raise the weight a little more with every yank.

“As a matter of fact,” said one of the other sweaty, smelly men doing the same thing, “no. How many men do the fucking Lancers have, anyway?”

“Too many,” Jared said, which was always the right answer. The Valley would always have a big lead in manpower. Topanga's advantage lay in geography. Fortify the narrow place and hang on tight—that was Topanga's strategy. “Where are the clowns from Fernwood? Shouldn't they be here by now?”

“Didn't you hear?” the other man said in surprise. “They'll be late if they show at all. There's some kind of dustup back at Topanga village.”

“Shit,” Jared said. “No, I didn't hear that.” Connor was out patrolling down there. Jared had to hope his son was okay.

A couple of shoving, swearing men loaded another boulder into the leather sling. “We ready?” Ronnie asked. When nobody denied it, he shouted, “Let 'er go!” Away flew the stone.

It smashed a man to pieces coming down. Crimson sprayed in all directions. There were worse ways to go—he would never have known what hit him. Even so . . . A lifetime of hope and love and rage, all done before the poor sap knew the bell tolled for him this time.

But armored men on foot were banging away at the wall with a battering ram. Others protected them with heavy shields. It wasn't quite a Roman testudo, but it came close. If they broke through . . .
Houston, we have a problem.
Jared scowled. He hadn't been born the last time men went to the moon. All he'd done was see
Apollo 13
with a cute girl named Gail. They wouldn't fly to the moon again, not unless the laws of nature changed once more. They wouldn't make any more movies, either, dammit.

The Lancers hung back, waiting to see if they could push through a breach. They couldn't force one themselves. But they could exploit one if it came.

Two Topangans ran down the wall toward the men on the ram with a big kettle of hot oil or hot water or something else unfriendly. An arrow from the Chatsworth side hit one of them in the neck. The Topangan let out a bubbling shriek. Blood poured from the wound, and from his mouth and nose. He staggered and clutched at himself, forgetting what he carried. The kettle tilted and spilled. The other guy who was hauling it also shrieked, on a high, pure, thin note. So did fighters on both sides who got splattered by the horrible stuff.

Jared felt like shrieking himself. Burns were the worst thing that could happen to you these days. About the best treatment Doc Leibowitz had for them was tannic acid—tea, in other words. It had been horribly outmoded at the end of the twentieth century. There'd been a state-of-the-art burn center in the Valley then. But the Change set the state of the art back most of a hundred years. The guy who'd got shot was the lucky one. He'd peg out pretty fast. The other burned warriors would hurt and hurt for a long time.

And the hot stuff in the kettle didn't come down on the bastards serving the ram. They kept pounding away at the wall. Each thud of their iron-tipped telephone pole—which was what the ram had been born as—sounded like the crack of doom.

Which, for the wall, was about what it was. The bricks and chunks of asphalt and cement and rubble that made up the works could take only so much. The wall fell down with a tired groan, as if it had been sick of standing there for so long anyhow. Topangans on the wall shouted in fear. Some of the Chatsworth men from the ram crew shouted along with them, because the garbage coming down from the wall didn't care who got in its way.

Valley foot soldiers scrambled into the breach with spears and swords and axes and anything else they could get their hands on. The Topangans did their best to hold them back, but more Valley fighters kept coming. Bruce Delgado's kingdom might have been little by any standard this side of Greek city-states, but it dwarfed its western neighbors.

“Well, fuck me,” Ronnie said, which was just what Jared was thinking. The boss man stepped away from the trebuchet, stuck his helmet on his head, and slid the straps of his shield over his arm. “Looks like we're gonna have to work for a living.” He drew his sword and held it for a moment, as if wondering what to do with such an archaic killing tool. Then he trotted up toward the fighting at the breach with a shout of “Topannnnnga!”

Brawling at close quarters wasn't anywhere near so much fun as serving the catapult. The other guys couldn't reach you then. Now . . . “I'm getting too old for this shit,” Jared announced to nobody in particular. But he was putting on his helmet and picking up his shield, too. You always forgot how heavy the damn thing was till you had to use it.

When he drew the sword, the sun glinted off the sharp edges. He made a pretty fair martial display. All the same, he would sooner have been back in Topanga village smoking dope or drinking bad wine.

Along with the other men from the trebuchet, he trotted after Ronnie. You did what you had to do, not what you would sooner do. If they could keep the Valley soldiers from widening the breach and letting the Lancers get through . . .

If they could do that, they'd be goddamn lucky. He saw as much right away. The Valley had too many men, and too many of those men carried pikes. With a pike, you could skewer a swordsman before he got close to you. You could, and they were. Troops from a Swiss hedgehog or a Greek phalanx would have gone through them like a dose of salts, but they weren't up against pros like that. The Topangans were odds-and-sods, too.

You did the best you could for as long as you could, that was all. Jared scooped up a handful of dirt and grit as he ran forward. Flipping it in a foe's face might not be sporting, but this was no sport. This was the real thing.

He got the chance sooner than he'd thought he would. The Valley fighters had no quit in them, and they could see they might make a lot of progress if they pushed the Topangans back from the wall. One of them drew back his spear to finish off a downed Topangan already bleeding from a leg wound. Jared flung the stuff in his left fist with a backhand scaling motion, as if he were flipping a Frisbee. Kids still played with the plastic disks. Every so often, new ones—well, new old ones—turned up.

The Valley pikeman couldn't fight with his eyes suddenly full of dirt. No one possibly could. He threw up one hand to claw at his face. Jared stabbed him in his unarmored belly, and twisted his wrist to make sure the blade cut guts. Without antibiotics, peritonitis and blood poisoning would kill even if the wound didn't. The Valley man squealed like a shoat and doubled over. Just in case he was still feeling frisky, Jared kicked him in the face. He grabbed the pike, too. The guy from the Valley sure wouldn't need it any more.

Then he hauled the wounded Topangan upright. “Here.” He pressed the pike into the fellow's hands. “Can you get away with some help from a stick, Greg?”

“I better try, huh?” his countryman said.

“Well, unless you want the Valley guys to catch you,” Jared answered. Murdering POWs wasn't a favorite local sport, which didn't mean it never happened. What held people back was more a fear of revenge than respect for the Geneva Convention. That was just one more relic from a bygone age. You did what you could get away with.

Using the pike as a staff, Greg stumped away. Jared went in the other direction, toward the center of the fighting. The trouble was, the center was coming his way, too. The Chatsworth men were pushing the Topangans back from the breach and widening it.

“We won't be able to hold on,” panted a man fighting next to Jared. He had a cut under the brim of his helmet and above his eyebrow. His face was all over blood—head wounds always bled like mad sons of bitches—but he hardly seemed to know he'd been hurt. If he didn't catch anything worse, the gash would probably heal without much of a scar. No need to worry about lockjaw, not with that gore everywhere.

“'Fraid you're right.” Jared turned a spear thrust with his shield. He chopped at the staff. He nicked it, but that was all. The goddamn thing was aluminum, which seemed like cheating.

“Let's go, Valley! Let's go, Valley!” Bruce Delgado's fighters sounded like a high school football crowd whose team was driving. The rival shouts of “Topanga!” were fewer and more ragged. Sure as hell, this didn't look like one of the movies with a happy ending. By post-Change standards, Hollywood was a devil of a long way from here.

Jared cut at an enemy foot soldier. The guy jerked back, so the stroke missed. Bruce Delgado was smart to have his men cheer for the whole Valley (well, the whole west end of the Valley), not just for Chatsworth. The Lancers lived up in the north, but these guys might come from West Hills or Canoga Park or Reseda or Woodland Hills or Northridge. Those had all been district names before the Change. They might harden into towns or even tiny countries, or they might get subsumed into Chatsworth or the Valley. Time would tell, but it hadn't told yet.

Someone behind Jared blared something horrible on a bugle. A moment later, he blew the same call—Jared thought it was the same call—again. The high, shrill notes did pierce the battlefield din. The call rang out once more. This time, Jared actually recognized it. It was
Retreat
.

He didn't want to do that. But, when he looked around, he saw that the attackers had got over or through the wall at a couple of other spots, too. If the outnumbered Topangans didn't fall back and make a stand somewhere farther down Topanga Canyon, they'd get cut off and cut to pieces right here. Then the Lancers could advance at their leisure.

Of course, breaking away from a fight was harder than getting into one. The enemy's tails were up. They wanted to go right on killing people here. A baseball-sized stone clanged off Jared's helmet—luckily, just a glancing blow or it would have left him loopy even if it didn't cave in his skull.

As the Topangans fell back from the wall, they retreated south down the highway toward the village. Topanga Canyon Boulevard had been hacked out of the cliffside. The Valley men could fight on a narrow front. Or they could go down deeper into the canyon and try to get behind the Topangans. Some did the one, some the other. The Valley had the manpower for both. The Topangans . . . didn't.

Horns also brayed from the north. Jared was afraid he knew what that meant: the Lancers were past the wall. If facing too many foot soldiers was bad, facing homemade knights in homemade armor was worse.

Somebody'd set up a breastwork of sorts at one of the many twists in the road. Rocks, boards, old trash cans full of dirt. None of it would hold up a determined foe very long. Here were the Fernwood men at last, though, doing what they could. One of them helped haul Jared over the breastwork. “You're Connor's dad, aren't you?” he said.

“That's right. Why?” Fear twisted Jared's gut as he came out with the last word.