The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change (50 page)

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Authors: S. M. Stirling

Tags: #Fiction - Science Fiction, #Alternative histories (Fiction), #American Science Fiction And Fantasy, #Alternative History, #General, #Regression (Civilization), #Science Fiction, #Science Fiction - General, #Dystopias, #Fiction

BOOK: The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change
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Ritva nodded; they were making a loop southward before they approached the pass. Threading the steep route through the mountains would be the difficult part; once they were over the Rockies they’d be in the Okanogan country, Association territory and part of Montival now.
Say what you like about the Spider of the Silver Tower and Lady Death, and Count Renfrew for that matter, they’ll have everything organized to rush us south fast. By the Valar and Maiar, it will be good to see Montival again!
The ground grew more rolling, and the railroad crossed a few gullies or small rivers. Sometimes that was on the pre-Change embankments or bridges. Once or twice it was on more recently built and more flimsy timber trestles that made them sway and rattle alarmingly as the railcar shot across.
Something teased at her as they slowed down to take one of those. Nothing she could have put a name to, nothing heard, something
felt
. They were the advance party, after all.
Who scouts for the scouts?
she thought.
Her father had used an expression,
Polish Mine Detector
, for the people he put on point—she could just barely remember him laughing about it when he’d come back from that duty himself, and not understanding at the time.
And . . . All right, Aunt Astrid, Uncle Alleyne and Aunt Eilir and Uncle John, a Ranger is supposed to pay attention to
everything
. What is it that’s nagging at me? Relax, take deep breaths, feel your legs moving, empty your mind . . .
“Do the birds usually shut up this time of day around here?” she asked suddenly.
Until a few minutes ago there had been yellow-breasted meadow-larks chattering and singing, bluebirds swooping after grasshoppers, and dozens more. Even the occasional red-tailed hawk or falcon or eagle only made them scatter for a little while. Also there had been more than a few prairie dogs, waddling about or sitting in the entrances of their burrows going
eeek-eeek-eeek
at the passing humans and their machinery. Now there was silence save for the ticking of insects.
“No, they don’t,” Corporal Dudley said suddenly, throwing her a respectful look. Then: “Squad, rest easy!”
The vehicle coasted to a halt. “I think it’s maybe
too
quiet,” Ritva murmured, and suppressed an inappropriate giggle as most of the redcoats nodded solemnly.
There were hatches on the roof of the railcar. She opened the one above her seat and got out her binoculars, and so did Corporal Dudley. There was nothing but the rolling swells of the prairie, though through the glasses the Rockies were definitely visible now.
“No game, either,” she said. “Nothing moving but the bugs and those ravens over by that ravine.”
Minutes ticked by. Kovalevsky jittered a little, but he was the youngest of his band; the others had stayed quiet after checking their fighting gear. Ritva smiled and glanced down at him, then quoted a training mantra of John Hordle’s:
“
Who dares, wins. Who gets the wind up and buggers about like a headless pillock, loses. Know when to wait, know when to kick them in the goolies, and you’ll be the one telling lies over your beer.
”
Corporal Dudley looked at her again. “You really aren’t just somebody’s relative, are you, ma’am?”
“No,” Ritva said flatly. “No, I’m not.”
Normally she’d have embroidered on the theme, but the sense of something
wrong
was building instead of fading. From the way his head swiveled back and forth with the binoculars, so was the corporal’s.
“I think we should turn the railcar around,” Ritva said after a longer wait. “Just in case.”
“My thought exact—”
The first horsemen came out of the ravine ahead of them before the word ended; evidently they’d decided that their prey wasn’t going to walk into the parlor. Corporal Dudley shifted in mid-syllable.
“—
squad reverse railcar!
”
The eight scarlet-clad men and one woman in gray-green flung themselves out of the vehicle and at the handgrips built into its sides. Ritva grunted as the weight came on her arms and back and the corrugated metal bit into her palms; there was a trick to throwing your whole body into an effort like this, like drawing a bow. The same lightweight construction that made the railcar fast also made it possible to lift, if you worked carefully and in coordination. They did, feet churning to avoid tripping on the rusty rail or splintered, obtruding ties where gravel had washed away.
Clung
.
The flanged wheels came down on the pitted steel of the rails again.
“Hup!”
The redcoats threw their shoulders against the open doors of the car and pushed to get it going; a fractional second later so did she. It was a good idea, overcoming the inertia faster than they could have by pedaling alone. In a few seconds they were moving it at a pounding run.
“Middle seats in . . .
now
!” the corporal barked. “Outer seats in . . .
now
!”
She hadn’t practiced this maneuver the way the men of the Force had, but she was a Ranger, and she’d spent endless hours climbing and tumbling and doing gymnastics. Her body thumped down in the left front seat beside Constable Kovalevsky about the same time as the others, though it took her an instant longer to get the soles of her elf-boots on the pedals. They were all pumping hard in unison, and then the corporal’s voice barked as speed built:
“Shift gears . . .
now
. And shift gears . . .
now
. And shift gears . . .
now
!”
The sound of the wheels built to a thrumming whine, interspersed by the
clickity-clack
as they crossed the joints. Her eyes went to the mirror outside the window.
The helpful little
objects in the rearview mirror are closer than they appear
printed on the convex surface was deeply unwelcome, because the onrushing horsemen were far, far closer than was comfortable in any case. More and more of them were pouring up out of the ravine as she watched as well, laboring over the steep lip or traveling north and south for shallower exits, then crowding back until they formed a reverse crescent behind the railcar. Was it her imagination, or could she already feel the earth shaking beneath the impact of hundreds of hooves?
“A thousand yards and gaining,” she said.
Corporal Dudley grunted agreement; he had a mirror too. “The lightest men on the fastest horses,” he said. “They’re getting strung out.”
She hadn’t had time to be afraid before; you didn’t, when you were scrambling to meet an emergency, or fighting. Now she was just running away, and she found her breath coming faster than the exertion would justify. She slowed it by a practiced effort of will; if you made yourself act brave, you were. That was what being brave
meant
. She’d met a few people—all of them men, which didn’t surprise her—who really didn’t feel fear. Every single one had been a dangerous lunatic, useful mainly to stop spears or arrows which might otherwise have hit a real human being.
Hrolf Homersson, for example
, she thought snidely.
“Still gaining,” she said, in a dry matter-of-fact tone.
“They will for a while,” Dudley said in a bass version of the same tone, and she nodded.
A horse could gallop at over thirty-five miles an hour for about as long as a man could run at top speed, allowing for condition and feeding. A quarter horse could hit fifty or a little more for very short sprints. Bicycles had far more endurance but they weren’t as fast in a dash, though the lower rolling friction on steel and the low-drag housing of the railcar and the fact that they were going slightly downhill helped; this was a courier and mail vehicle and built for speed.
We’ll either get to the Anchor Bar Seven homeplace before they catch up with us, or we won’t . . .
There wasn’t any point in talking; they needed all their wind. The harsh sound of their deep breathing dominated the interior. Her eyes flicked to the speedometer, which thankfully was in miles and not the other system they sometimes used here. Thirty-two miles per hour and rising slightly, as fast as she’d ever gone for any length of time except in a glider. A trestle went by rattling beneath them, and she managed a wheeze of excitement as she looked in the mirror and saw the horsemen check as they guided their horses into the dry creek-bed it spanned and then up again. That slowed them, but less than trying to pick their way over the ties. Then she cursed silently as the rails stretched into a long shallow curve ahead; the pursuers cut across the cord and regained the lost ground. Eight hundred yards now between them and the foremost spray, with the rest stretching back to the original hiding place.
“Christ, there’s hundreds of them. Maybe thousands,” Corporal Dudley said.
“That’s why . . . the birds and animals . . . were so quiet,” she said, timing the words to her breath. “They hid very well . . . but there were so many of them . . . it spooked the wildlife.”
No more talk for a while. She caught glances going up to the ceiling; their shields were all in racks there, forming a second roof beneath the outer shell of the vehicle. The Force used one much like the Dúnedain model she carried, a shallow convex disk about a yard across, made of birch plywood covered in bullhide and then with thin sheet steel. It was much better protection than the body of the railcar, but there were gaps between the shields.
Corporal Dudley began to turn the crank of a siren mounted beside him; its horn was flush with the exterior of the car. The sound built, an earsplitting rising-falling wail that drove into the ears like ice picks. The homeplace would hear that long before they arrived. Workers outside the walls would hear it and head home too, or ride for safety if they couldn’t. Ritva looked at the speedometer again; thirty-five miles an hour, more than a horse could maintain for any distance but less than it could do in a flat-out rush. The interior of the railcar was thick with panting and rank sweat; it ran stinging into her eyes. Then she glanced back to the mirror, and bit back a curse.
Four hundred yards.
That large a group was bound to have some very light men—no women, not in a Cutter war band—riding without anything but their clothes and weapons on very fast horses. As she watched, one of them stood in the stirrups and bent his recurve, aiming high for a long-distance shot.
“In your dreams, maybe, fool,” the corporal hissed. “It’s a bow, not a catapult.”
The arrow disappeared from the mirror’s view, but her mind’s eye could see it, arching up, hesitating at the peak, turning and rushing downward. A little bit of trivia from an early lesson back at Larsdalen came to her, from the schooldays before she and Mary got bored and exasperated past bearing with Mother and moved out to Mithrilwood to become Rangers. It might even be from before Father died in his duel with Norman Arminger at the end of the War of the Eye; the facts came with a feeling of sleepy boredom and warmth and the smell of chalk.
An arrow shot upward at forty-five degrees hit the ground going at seventy percent of its initial speed. Some part of her mind did a quick calculation:
Say two hundred feet per second when it leaves the string, so that’s a hundred and forty feet per second when it hits
you
and does nasty things.
The shaft reappeared as a blurred streak across the mirror for a fractional second, and then again quivering in the dirt as it fell away behind the speeding vehicle. The man who’d shot it had lost some ground while he did; now he was hunched forward in the saddle, beating his horse on the rump with the bow stave and probably screaming curses. They wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Twenty, twenty-five minutes since we sprung their ambush—they can’t keep this up much longer. Their horses must be foaming out their lungs
, she thought.
We’ll be in sight and hearing of the ranch in about another seven minutes. Or I’ll be dead.
Being captured would be worse, of course. Even with ordinary bandits, and infinitely more so with Cutters, but there were ways to avoid being taken alive. Usually. If you didn’t lose your nerve. There were ways to stop yourself thinking, too: she used one, focusing tightly on the feel of the burning muscles in her legs,
push
and
push
and
push
—
The pursuers were much closer now, a long dark column rising and falling with the roll of the land behind them; even over the wail of the siren the dull rumble of the hooves was loud. Three hundred yards, extreme effective range for longbowmen in still air. Most saddle bows didn’t shoot quite as far. Closer, closer . . .
This time a dozen of them rose in the saddle at the same time, probably to someone’s order or signal. The tiny figures in the mirror seemed to writhe in unison, drawing long and then jerking backward as recoil made them sway. The Change had changed a good many things, but not the equal and opposite reaction when you threw something away fast and hard.
“For what we are about to receive—” Corporal Dudley began.
A rising whistle even through the whine of gears and the song of steel on steel from the wheels beneath them. The sound of arrows striking in dirt or railroad ties or banging off the rails was lost, but not the
shink-thack!
of one punching through the thin sheet aluminum of the roof and hammering into the more resistant surface of a shield.

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