Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (15 page)

“That’s true?” Woburn whispered, with the gut-punched look of a man who’d been trying to avoid believing something he knew was so.

“Damn
right
it’s true; I was there; I saw it.”

“The…government release…said she’d been kidnapped.”

“She was
begging
us to get her out. And I was with her all the way back west and she said—”

Mary touched her sister on the shoulder and dropped back into Sindarin:

“I think we should leave him and Ian to talk, Sis. You were there too, but I think he’ll listen more to your fellah. Seeing as we’re Rudi’s sisters and all and might be biased.”

“Only my identical could be right as often as you are,” Ritva grumbled; neither of them were naturally the keep-quiet-and-wait types.

Woburn gave them a glance.

“
Iston peded i phith i aníron, a nin ú-cheniathog
,” Ritva said sweetly.

I can say what I want, and you can’t understand me
, Mary thought/translated, and hid her grin again.

Damn, it’s good to be back with Sis for a while
, she thought happily.
When she settles down and the war’s over, we’ll really have to set up somewhere close to each other. We can babysit each other’s kids and swap cookies and stuff. Maybe we could found a new Ranger station somewhere…somewhere
warm.
Somewhere warm with good vineyards.

That half-giggle turned to a shout of alarm as she turned. Something was diving out of the sun that had just cleared the horizon, silent and very swift.

“
Yrch!
” someone shouted. “Enemy!”

“Errrk!” Mary called; or it might have been Ritva talking, she couldn’t tell. “No shit!”

The glider was like a flying tadpole with long slender wings, a sleek melted-looking metal shape out of the pre-Change world, gleaming polished metal beneath the plastic bubble of the pilot’s canopy. A red-and-white shark’s mouth was painted below the nose, and
USAF
and a star on the wings. Something tumbled down from it…

Uncle Alleyne was looking over his shoulder while he stood at the tiller, feet braced apart on the tiny plank of decking beneath him.

“
Flank speed!
” he shouted.

The rowers moved up to sprint pace, throwing themselves forward and back with gasping effort. The cylinder came closer and closer, something like a big elongated
pill
, tumbling around its axis and trailing a very faint line of smoke.

Uh-oh,
Mary thought.
Napalm.

She’d had it shot at her from catapults and seen it pumped from flamethrowers,
and it was very nasty indeed. Never dropped on her head from the air before, though…

“
Now!
” Alleyne snarled, and swung the tiller far over.

The slender form of the little galley heeled. Mary’s eyes went wide as a thin sheet of water began to curl over the side. There was a shout as everyone threw themselves the other way, herself included, leaning overboard as far as she could with her boots braced and hands locked on the bulwark and the frame that supported one of the oars and the cold water of the Columbia running just under her straining back. The galley fell back, rocking onto an even keel, and she slid forward amid a clatter of gear and thud of people hitting people and things and a clanking rattle as the sweeps tangled like a heap of jackstraws.

“Row! Row!” Alleyne barked.

His handsome aquiline face looked wholly alive for the first time since he’d come back from the mission to Boise.
Not good, but alive.

A gout of flame rose far too close on the starboard, as the napalm spread itself over the still surface of the river. The oarsmen flung themselves back into their seats and got going; the glider went by overhead—her mind automatically estimated that it was at least twice long bowshot up and moving faster than a galloping horse—and skimmed over towards the bank of the river. Her head swiveled to follow it, hoping desperately that it would drop into the water like a landing goose or crumple in the steep rock that rose from it.

Instead it seemed to strike something invisible in the air, turning and banking and rising upward as if thrust by a hand.
It must be updrafts along the cliffs
. She’d flown gliders herself, but only a few times for sport in a double-seat model, off a cliff and then gently down. The pilot attacking them must be an artist at reading the invisible currents of the air.

“Well, shit,” she said, spitting out blood from where her teeth had cut the inside of her mouth.

For emphasis, she repeated it in English, with embellishments:

“Well,
shit on toast
!”

“Double damn!” Ritva agreed.

“
Bother!
” Mary finished.

“Where the
Utumn
o are
our
gliders?” someone shouted.

“Shut up and row, you son-of-a-she-warg!” the man behind him snarled.

The oars were moving in unison again. The other galley was a hundred yards ahead of them, rippling through the water like a centipede. The glider rose until the low sun in the east sparkled on its canopy, breaking out of the relative gloom of the river and its girdling cliffs, then turned like a stooping hawk.

“It will be coming in lower this time,” Alleyne said, his voice crisp and steady.

To aim better,
Mary thought.
And it was far too close the last time. That one would have landed right on us if Alleyne hadn’t turned us out of it.

Alleyne went on in the same businesslike tone: “And he’s coming head-on. Get ready to shoot, it’s a no-deflection aiming point. Oarsmen, listen for the word of command.”

There were twenty at the oars and six who weren’t, not counting Uncle Alleyne with his hands full of tiller or the prisoner. Mary reached over her shoulder and pulled the recurve out from the harp-shaped scabbard that rode between her back and the quiver, then flipped out a bodkin-pointed arrow and set it through the cutout in the curly-maple riser and on the string.

Dave Woburn slumped down a little more into the curve of the bow, giving them a clear shot. Which was strictly in accord with his parole, of course. He’d agreed not to hinder them. Plus, if they burned, so did he. Black smoke was still rising from the patch where the first canister had struck.

“Never did like those air force pukes,” he said and unexpectedly smiled at her. “Even when they weren’t trying to kill me. Friendly fire isn’t.”

Mary chuckled. Ritva did too, and then said:

“Ian, you get between us and a little forward, you’ve got a heavier draw.”

She looked over her shoulder; the Rangers who had their hands free were putting arrows to their strings as well.

“Just as heavy as yours, Hírvegil, and he’s just as good a shot too, so don’t crowd him.”

“
Ego, mibo orch
,” he muttered; he’d been very standoffish with Ian.

Which was rude, as was
go kiss an orc
, but then he had had a crush on Ritva even before the Quest. Or Mary. Or both. But he settled back a little into the crowded forepeak of the galley.

The Rangers can be awfully like any other village sometimes,
she thought, making herself calm. There was the target and there was the bow and nothing else mattered.
Nowhere to get away. I got used to moving on while we were on the Quest.

She’d talked to people in big cities with tens of thousands of people, and many of them thought life in places like a Dun of the Clan or a Ranger steading or a Bearkiller strategic hamlet or a Portlander manor was like one big, close happy family.

Family, yes,
she thought.
Close, yes. Happy, sometimes, but not necessarily. And if you get to quarreling with someone, you are
so
stuck with them anyway. Until I saw cities I never realized you could live any other way.

The glider had finished its banking turn, graceful and silent and frightening. Now it turned into a dot in the middle of a thread as it came at them nose-on, much clearer this time as it dove out of the fading purple of the western sky instead of the dawn. Aiming the bow was like breathing, since she’d been doing it nearly as long as she’d been walking; all she had to do was decide to do it.

But correct for the speed
, she reminded herself.
It’s getting faster and faster as it gets closer and closer and it’s already faster than anything you’ve ever shot at.

She took a long breath and let it out, then pulled in another. The string lifted off the ends of the staves as the recurve bent; the double-curve shape let her bend it into a deep C, the secret of drawing a long arrow from a bow only four feet long. The kiss-ring on the string touched the corner of her lip as the muscles in arms and shoulders and belly levered against the springy power of the laminated stave.

Ritva was calling the shot; she was a little better at estimating distances, now that they had three eyes between them.

“Wait…wait…
now!
”

Mary’s fingers rolled off the string.
Whstp
, and the surge of recoil that was always a surprise when you were doing it right. A little cloud of arrows lifted from the galley; the other one was too far ahead. The glider didn’t swerve, though Mary thought some of the arrows at least punched into the thin metal of its hull. The pilot was boring in regardless, determined to plant his last napalm canister where it would do the most harm.

Then a shout from the rear:

“
Back oars!”

The prow surged down and then up in a burst of spray as every one of the rowers stood and dug in their oars. The galley’s speed dropped as if a kraken had caught the keel in its tentacles and yanked hard. The archers dropped as the sudden halt yanked their footing out from beneath them. Two people landed on top of Mary, and the horn nock on the end of a bowstave poked painfully into the sensitive flesh behind her left ear, breaking the skin.

Flame roared at her. She shouted in involuntary alarm as it broke around the bows of the galley, heat that made her face crinkle and a choking chemical stink not like anything else she’d ever smelled. Then someone not far away started screaming, and she smelled something quite different. Cloth burning, and hair.

One of the people who’d landed on her was Ritva. They were used to that—they’d been sparring partners since they were little girls pulling each other’s hair over who got the last scoop of blueberries and cream—and they’d developed a routine for it. This time it involved heaving Ian up off their backs with a united buck and twist, but that was all right too. The prisoner, Dave Woburn, had blood running down one side of his head where he’d bashed it against a thwart.

His arm was also on fire where a stray gobbet of clinging liquid flame had come over the gunwale. They reacted with smooth precision; Ritva grabbed the man by the front of his tunic and jerked him up so the limb thrashed free, and Mary pulled it against her and wrapped herself around it, careful to keep her hands and any bare part of her body away from it. You couldn’t put napalm out by splashing water on it; you had to smother it completely. The flames died down, enough that she could grab the
cloth above it with her left hand and slash at the seam with the dagger she flipped into her right. Linen thread parted, and she pulled the thick linsey-woolsey cloth of the sleeve free and tossed it into the river. An instant later they had the man maneuvered over the bulwark too, and plunged the limb into the cold Columbia. There hadn’t been an obvious burn, but the skin looked a little red.

That gave her a good view as the glider banked.
It can’t have
more
fire-bombs, can it?
she thought.
Gliders can’t lift much weight!

Whether it did or not, this time it didn’t catch an updraft on the edge of the river. Instead it headed straight in towards the bluffs, then slowly heeled to one side. More and more, until the wingtip touched the surface, and then there was a sudden whirling, splashing chaos. When it ended the glider was broken and resting on the rocky shore. She felt a moment’s pang; it had been so graceful, and so old and alien.

After an instant, the canopy opened. A man emerged, doll-tiny with distance, slithered out and stood propped against the side of the broken craft, slipped down prone, laboriously stood again and shook a fist at them.

Mary laughed as they manhandled Woburn back into the bow and the oars took up their rhythm; Ian assisted, since it was surprisingly difficult to move a man with his feet bound.

“I’m glad he lived,” she said, offering him more of the willow-bark powder. “Hope he keeps on doing it, too.”

“Why?” the prisoner asked bluntly, taking it and applying some of the burn ointment Ritva handed him to the red patch on his arm. “Thank you, by the way.”

“You’re welcome,” she replied. “Why? He’s a brave man doing what he sees as his duty.”

“We’d kill him if we had to, but why shouldn’t I be glad we didn’t? Have to kill him, that is.”

“And he’s out of this fight,” Ritva put in, handing Mary back her bow.

“Which applies to you too,” Mary said.

“You’re…strange,” Woburn said.

Ian grinned at him. “Tell me. But wait until you meet their big brother. The one with the magic sword.”

Woburn snorted. “Oh, a
real
magic sword? You expect me to believe that?”

“No, we expect you to
see
it, soon,” Mary said.

All three of them looked at him and smiled.

“You’re not…kidding, are you?” Woburn said, his eyes going a little wider. “You really believe that.”

“Oh, you have
no
idea,” Ian said helpfully.