The Protector's War (13 page)

The apprentice stood stiffly at the foot of the stairs, eyes front, left hand on her sword hilt, right hand carrying her targe—small round shield—tucked across her chest. She was a little pale around the mouth; listening to a chewing-out from Mike was alarming at the best of times.

Another mumble, and Havel's voice was kinder: “Look, Mark, you've been with me since Idaho. We fought Iron Rod together. I
know
you can do better than this. So what's the problem? Tell me, for God's sake, and I'll help you.”

Larsson grinned, taking a deep breath of the cool air.
Think I'll go visit my newborn, or my grandchildren,
he thought, and ambled off. He'd had his bellyful of being CEO back before the Change and had never liked it one little bit. It was
good
to have someone else to handle that stuff.

I'm a pretty good engineer, and I was passable as a businessman, but I really don't think God gave me what it takes to be a warrior king.

Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, England

August 13th, 2006 AD—Change Year Eight

T
he M1 motorway that ran north from London was still passable beyond the edge of cultivation in the commandery of Whipsnade, in the sense that you didn't need to hack your way along it with a machete or ax; the six lanes and thick deep foundation under the pavement were putting up more resistance to the encroaching armies of revengeful Nature than most of man's works.

Nigel Loring still found it eerie to ride down it with walls of vegetation taller than the tip of his lance on either side, the more so as evening fell and his borrowed remount's hooves dragged beneath him. The sun was a red ball on the horizon, filtered through canes and branches. Runners and growth from the median strip and the verges were most of the way across the pavement; many of the autos and trucks were mere mounds of foliage. A fox sat on the roof of a pantechnicon and watched him until he was close enough to see the sun gilding its rufous fur and its tongue lolling through its sharp white teeth, then dropped to the ground and disappeared into the tangle of tree and shrub and bramble west of the roadway. There was a brief whiff of the dog-fox's musky scent as they passed, rankly feral beneath the warm green sweetness.

“Four men riding by and it's scarcely bothered,” Alleyne Loring said. “You can tell there's not many riding to hounds in this county just of late. I hope those antifoxhunting fanatics were pleased, in the short interval before their hideous deaths.”

The joke was sour, but Nigel Loring smiled; his son had been brooding alarmingly, and most of the remaining youth had left his handsome features, though he was still two years short of thirty.

“Watch out, Reynard,” John Hordle called after the departing animal, as they rode under two overpasses. “You'll get scragged for sure if you 'ead that way—it's Milton sodding Keynes.”

Nigel Loring chuckled.
Odd. I'd have thought his cheerfulness would be irritating, under the circumstances, but it isn't. Maude always liked him, of course. She'd have given one of those gurgling laughs of hers if she were here now. I remember that was the first thing I noticed at that do of the vicar's—she was talking to him across the garden and I heard her laugh. She was wearing one of those absurd floppy hats…it was seventy-three…enough!

“I think we cleaned it out fairly thoroughly, back in CY3,” he said. “There weren't many of the poor devils left by then, anyway.”

“It's like cockroaches,” Archie MacDonald said. “Ye'll no get the last of 'em, not with a whole kettle o' boiling water to the floorboards.”

The farmworker was sweating a little, and he kept his bow across the saddle despite its awkward length for a mounted man. He started when three red deer rose up from the shade of an Aston Martin that must have cost three hundred thousand pounds once; the big russet animals poised for a moment, then turned and trotted swiftly away with their muzzles up and their horns laid on their backs, bounding over a three-car pileup of wrecks and running northward until they vanished from sight. Hordle looked at them and thoughtfully twanged the string of his bow.

“Not worth the trouble,” Sir Nigel said. “We've got enough food to reach the Wash.”

“Wasn't thinking of that, sir—though that yearling hind looked fair tasty. I was thinking they looked like they'd been hunted before. You do much deer hunting around here, Jock?”

MacDonald squinted after the vanished animals. “We've no seen any, near the farm—not Bob's, nor the ones Gunnar and I have filed for, we've done a bit of work on both, keeping the access roads clear and the buildings tight, ye ken. Hunting around here's mostly birds, rabbits, wild pig, fallow deer, and those little muntjacs—the ones that bark like dogs—they do love a bramble thicket. And you see some gey strange beasties from the Safari Park—there's rhino about yet—but no the red deer.”

“The nearest herds of red deer were in Cornwall,” Alleyne said thoughtfully. “Fairly remote areas, mostly. The Lake District.”

“Aye, an' Scotland, the Highlands. And they'll no ha' gotten a lift south on the
Cutty Sark,
the way we crofters did from Skye.”

“I would expect them to spread south, though.” Alleyne said. “Or it could be red deer from the Woburn herd, if any made it through. They'd be likely to move north for the grazing, and to get away from the settlers, this last little while.”

He rubbed his chin, fingers rustling on soft blond stubble; there hadn't been much time for shaving. Like his father he was riding one of the farmer's horses, an undistinguished cob of about fourteen hands, and like the elder Loring he'd removed all his armor save for breast-and backplates and the helmet dangling at his saddlebow. Their own mounts followed behind, carrying the gear in sacks slung over the war saddles.

“But if they haven't spread to the edge of the farming country, why should they be wary of men?” he went on. “That bally fox wasn't.
Ergo,
they
have
been hunted.”

Hordle and Nigel exchanged glances. That was a good point…

“We should be getting near the turn,” Nigel said aloud, consulting the map in his head.

It was disconcertingly easy to lose your sense of place and distance, when the landscape looked so different from the way memory painted it. He'd driven through here countless times…

“Isn't there a Welcome Break sign about here? Has a flying goose or something of that sort painted on it.”

“Nae, ye've gone too far if ye see that,” Archie said. “It's three miles north o' here. Junction Fourteen—yes, that's it.”

He pointed to a sign that rose thirty feet in the air with the upper part of its rusted, pitted surface above the vegetation; it was blue with a white band ending in a pointed tip at the top, and another line pointing leftward. A mile went by, steady riding at a fast walk—the stalled vehicles made it difficult to go faster. They were on the right side of the motorway, the southbound lane before the Change; Junction Fourteen was on their own right, curving up from the main thoroughfare. Another sign loomed.

“‘Milton Keynes, Newport Pagnell, A509,'” Hordle read. “And ‘The North,' at the top—that's original, innit? Specific, too. Better be careful, sir,” he went on, as they turned their horses up the eastward-leading access road. “This is the slip road for oncoming traffic. We'll cop a ticket if we're seen going down it the wrong way.”

“You are incorrigible, Sergeant,” Nigel snorted.

There was no need for him to ask why he got so much encouragement; and they
were
careful as they passed a blue-and-white sign with an arrow directing drivers to the M1 for Luton, London and points south. The lesser road that led to the town itself was far more densely overgrown save for the narrow path Buttesthorn's men had hacked, and a good deal of it had been ripped at by heavy floods, starting with the wet spring in the year of the Change. There were sections where only a scalloped edge of pavement remained above overgrown mud and there they had to dismount and lead the horses. Nobody was maintaining levees anymore; even in late summer he could see patches of reed and livid green marsh grass to his left as they rode. The arched 1920s roof of the Aston Martin plant had slid quietly into the silt…

Stay alert,
he told himself. The bubble of misery sitting below his breastbone threatened that; it would be so easy to plunge into gray apathy—or worse, tormenting memories of Maude.
Work is the best remedy for care. You have other lives depending on you now, including Maude's son.

The graceful arch of Tickford Bridge was still clear of vegetation, save for vines crawling along the railings and up the cast iron lampposts; the bridge itself was iron, built in 1810 when that was still a novelty. The tiny Lovat ran below, thick with reed and sedge, flanked by tall willows and oaks that had spread upslope in both directions in waves of saplings. Over their tops ahead and to the right he could just see a slip of the tower that crowned St. Peter and St. Paul Church, looming above Newport Pagnell town as it had since the Wars of the Roses. But when he looked directly ahead, up St. John Street…

“Not much left,” he said.

Fire had passed through the little market town, fire and flood. The buildings to his left were nothing but mounds under second growth; the forest was reclaiming them faster than it was the open fields, and tall saplings reared among the rampant bramble and thorn. To the right, on the higher triangle of ground between the meeting point of the rivers where the original settlement had stood, occasional snags of wall or even roofs remained—though many of the newer frame buildings had simply been ripped apart by Russian vine pressing on their joists. Under the scent of vegetable decay and silt was a fainter one of wet ash and crumbling, moldy brick—the taint of corruption was probably his imagination.

Insects and rats had picked the bones clean long ago.

“Major Buttesthorn's men said it was clear to that pub where they hid the canoes, sir,” Hordle rumbled. “But tricky in the dark.”

It was eight thirty, and the long twilight of an English August was drawing to a close. Nigel felt the drain of exhaustion, sand in his eyes and the feel of it in his joints.

John Hordle gave a low whistle as they walked their mounts forward, cautious on the bad footing. “This is a good place to hide something, and no mistake. It looks like it's been abandoned for a hundred years, not less than ten.”

“Why's it called a
port
?” MacDonald said suddenly. “Odd name for a town sae far inland. Na'er seen it before, mind you.”

“It wasn't named a port, originally,” Nigel said. “It was
porta,
that's Latin for a trading post. This was the border with the Danes, in those days.”

“Danes?” the Scot said, turning in the saddle to look at him.

Nigel smiled and inclined his head towards his son; perhaps a friendly voice would keep the farmworker steady.

The younger Loring said, “Founded in 917, before Edmund Ironside completed the reconquest of the Danelaw. Then given to Sir Fulk Paganell by William the Conqueror for services rendered at Hastings in 1066.”

MacDonald grunted. “Ah. Like this Commandery business of the king's.”

He spat aside to show what he thought of
that.
Sir Nigel winced a bit behind his impassive face; the bones of the idea had been his as much as the monarch's—a quick and simple way of organizing and defending the resettlement of the mainland, with the existing guards and SAS units as a framework. He hadn't meant to take it quite so
far
towards outright neofeudalism, of course…

Alleyne smiled. “The labor levies, you mean?”

“Aye, that in particular,” MacDonald said. “It's a nuisance that drives you fair mad, when there's so much wants doing to haime.”

The younger Loring pointed over his shoulder at the path Buttesthorn's men had hacked through the vegetation on Tickford Street. “Of course, without the levy, all the roads south of here would look like
that.
”

“Weeeel…” MacDonald said reluctantly. “Perhaps ye've a point.”

They rode up the curving High Street; many of the two-story Georgian storefronts had collapsed into the streets, from fire and subsidence and sheer decay, but there was enough brick and pavement to keep the trees and brush from growing too thick yet, though saplings and shoots showed where its infinite vegetable patience was at work. The horses snorted and rolled their eyes as their hooves clattered and crunched through the uneven footing; there were scuttlings and scurryings through the piles of rubble and wreck, behind the blind windows like sockets in skulls where a piece of wall survived.

“Where'll we put the horses?” Archie MacDonald said. “This is no' good for their hooves.”

Sir Nigel nodded; the three beasts they'd borrowed to supplement their own were a substantial share of Jamaica Farm's capital assets, and the man was entitled to be worried. In fact, he felt a sudden liking for the wiry redhead. Archie MacDonald had no particular reason to feel any loyalty to the Lorings. He could simply have gone to his local Commandery and turned them in, and gotten a good farm ready-stocked out of it, rather than breaking his back for years to earn one. Instead he was risking his life in this tangled, sodden wilderness to help a man he'd never met before, for his friends and because he thought it was right. And if he seemed a bit nervous, well, he wasn't a professional soldier as were the Lorings and Hordle.

“The churchyard,” Nigel said. “If the fencing's still intact—it should be, it was iron palings. Hmmm…one watch here with the horses, the other up the street with the canoes. We'll want to get an early start.”

Despite his exhaustion, he would have preferred to start now, if the sky weren't already turning purple-blue in the east, and the first stars appearing. They'd be following the river, north and then eastward to the Wash and King's Lynn where the ship was supposed to meet them. But…