The Protector's War (20 page)

“Baron Liu,” he said courteously, inclining his head slightly. “My lord, I hear your man there is very strong. Is he strong enough to live with a dozen arrows through his chest, do you think?”

He politely didn't mention what the same shafts would do to the man in the cloth coat. Juniper rode out, stopping to Eilir's right—careful not to mask her shot. Behind Liu the other man-at-arms and the crossbowmen were coming up, close enough to see faces. They'd been busy, loading short heavy bolts into the arrow grooves when they'd bent the thick spring-steel bows back and hung the spanning cranks at their waists. Now they slowed and faltered, as they saw who awaited them.

“Go,” Juniper said. “Take your men, leave our land, and go.”

Her eyes were fixed on Liu, and Eilir gulped slightly at the look in them. The Lord and Lady had ten thousand thousand aspects, and meeting some of them was…stressful. Liu felt it too, but he snarled with the courage of a cornered rat, and Mack raised his iron club. It was the crossbowmen behind who looked most rattled; some of them were clutching crucifixes or muttering prayers as they realized who it was they faced.

Juniper Mackenzie.

The Witch Queen.

“Go,” Juniper said, and stood slightly in the stirrups, her eyes unmoving, hands raised upright and palms out, arms making a V, face pale as milk.

“
Go,
or I will call on the Dread Lord, and curse you in the name of the Devouring Shadow. You and all with you. And that curse will follow you to all the ends of Earth, run you never so fast. So mote it be!”

Uh-oh,
Eilir thought.
Mom's in Maximum-spooky mode. She really means it.
Juniper Mackenzie didn't even swear at people, normally; she took the Threefold Law and the perils of ill-wishing far too seriously for that.
On the other hand, there's the self-defense exception…and on the arrows-and-swords level, the fact that we now outnumber them four to one won't hurt…

Liu backed his horse, wrenching at the bit with a savagery that made the beast squeal, stabbing a glance at his men to judge their mettle as the prisoners stumbled forward. Several of the mounted crossbowmen were zealously helping their friends to mount behind them or hitching the poles of the travois to a saddle, thus making it impossible to fight.

“I'll get you for this, bitch,” he spat.

Eilir grounded her bow and leaned it against her shoulder; the motion caught Liu's attention, and her hands moved:
You keep
saying
you'll make us pay,
she signed, grinning.
But you never
do
it.

River Great Ouse, Cambridgeshire, England

August 20th, 2006 AD—Change Year Eight

“W
hy is it called
adventure
,” the elder Loring asked. “Instead of—” “Discomfort? Fear? Unending toil?” his son called back over his shoulder. “Being stuck in the middle of a complete balls-up?” John Hordle grunted in agreement and took a hand off his paddle long enough to swat a mosquito. “I'd rather be sitting in a good pub with a girl, sir,” he said. “Say that Gudrun from Bob's place.
Talking
about me adventures.”

The three men paddled in silence for a moment; the three canoes were traveling roughly abreast, usually close enough for easy conversation as the winding banks of the Great Ouse passed by slowly on either side—except that those banks were far less firm and definite than they had been a decade earlier. Most of a millenium of banking and diking and drainage had been undone in eight years, as the waters broke the bonds men laid on them and sought their own level.

Then Hordle chuckled. “What a bunch of bloody liars we are,” he said. “If we wanted it all that much, we'd be in the bloody pub right now. Nice enough now and then, but right boring if you do too much of it.”

“Speak for yourself, Sergeant,” Nigel Loring said. “I'm at the memoir-writing phase of life's progress. Good God, man, I
was
writing my memoirs just last month. Maude said—”

He halted abruptly, but there had been a hint of returning life under the mock severity of his tone.

Glad to hear that,
Hordle thought.
I can understand it and all, but I don't half like the way he's acted so
…not quite there
when nobody's trying to kill us.
A smile:
Of course, someone's been trying to kill us far too bloody often just lately.

“You and Alleyne are still young enough to be accumulating interesting incidents,” Nigel went on, visibly pushing memories away.

“Interesting like this bloody swamp, sir?” Hordle asked. “Reminds me of some book my mum read me when I was small—well, when I was young—what was it called?
Swans and Amazons?
”

“That'd be ‘the Coot Club' in
Swallows and Amazons,
Sergeant,” Sir Nigel said.

“About a bunch of kiddies mucking about in boats around here, any rate,” Hordle said. “Certainly has changed a bit, eh?”

They all smiled. Even in the dry months of late summer, the stream's course was often not where twentieth-century convenience had put it, and the land on either side showed the glint of shallow open water and patches of green reed bed—patches that had grown larger as they passed ruined Bedford and came closer to the Wash. The standing water and warm weather also bred mosquitoes in stinging swarms, not to mention gnats, and a pervading smell of rotting vegetation filled the hazy air.

“I blame you, Father,” Alleyne Loring said. “Watch out, there's a dead tree trunk just under the surface ahead.”

They all slowed and carefully swerved to the right; the tree was a large oak that had tumbled downstream in one of the floods that had ripped uncontrolled through the Ouse basin in the years since the Change, and planted itself with the root-ball upstream. That held a dozen sharpened spikes waiting just below the surface.

“You blame it on my bad example, eh?” Nigel said.

“No, it was all those copies of the
Boy's Own Paper
you kept in the attic for me to discover when I was eight,” Alleyne said. “Not to mention the stack of Henty, and the Haggard and Kipling. Other boys of my generation learned to be sensitive and socially conscious, and I was marching to Kabul with Roberts or finding the caves of Kôr and She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.”

If you'd met my grandmother, you wouldn't have needed Haggard for the latter,
Nigel muttered, but under his breath.

“That's right, sir, and he loaned the books to me too,” Hordle said. “Fair turned our heads, they did. I'd have been a Labor MP, else.”

“Oh, rubbish,” Nigel replied. “It's your own dam' fault, my boy; I inherited all that from
my
father.
I
didn't make you take up all those books with the wizards and elves, at least—you came to that entirely on your own.”

“Oh, I'd say
those
were rather useful. Certainly the hobbies they encouraged were.”

It would be a bit intimidating having Sir Nigel as your dad,
Hordle thought, not for the first time.
Maybe that's why young Mr. Loring would hang out with those reenactor burkes.

He'd gone along with that himself, rather than being very enthusiastic. At least until he'd learned the events were good places to pursue his
real
hobby.

Some of the girls looked good in those low-cut blouse things, even if the boys were a right bunch of pillocks, and the beer was better than passable. Even the mucking about with swords was good for a laugh, before it turned serious after the Change.

He dug his paddle in to turn his canoe aside from a sunken cabin cruiser whose crumbling prow reared above the slow-moving brown water, trailing long streams of algae.

Thank God
my
dad just owned a pub. Talk about pop-u-larity!

“At least it's an open swamp around here,” he said aloud. “Less stressful-like, when you can see what's coming.”

Dead trees stood in the fields about, their roots killed out by winter's spreading water, and the floods had kept brambles at bay as well; the more so as this had been corn-growing land, much of it in great hedgeless fields. Most of the lowland was tall open grass; taller brush and trees survived and thrived rankly on bits of higher ground—ground that often showed the snags of ancient buildings, built in an earlier era where experience showed floodwaters were less likely to reach. Birds swarmed overhead and on the water—mallards the most numerous, but also tall gray herons and snowy swans, grebe and the Canada geese that seemed to flourish like bindweed everywhere on the island. Their gobbling and honking was occasionally loud enough to drown the sound of the water and wind; overhead a hawk floated with the noon sun on its wings, feathered fingers grasping the air. Native otter and alien mink slid down the banks with a plop and flash of sleek fur as the canoes ghosted by.

There weren't any of the feral cattle and Père David's deer in sight that they'd noticed off and on the past few days, but
something
was cropping great stretches of the tall grass.

“Watch out!” Alleyne Loring called again, but there was excitement in his voice this time.

A snorting sound followed, like a great bellows being pumped—or pumped slightly underwater, because there were splashes with it.

“Ahead, to the right, about two hundred yards,” the younger Loring said.

Hordle gaped, then shut his mouth with a snap and a deliberate effort of will. Ahead was a section of bank still standing, the left a cluster of buildings and the right now a curving island in the midst of marsh. In the deeper water just below the middle of the curve structures topped by gray knobs and pits floated, like some uncouth driftwood sculpture; for a long moment his mind rejected the sight, despite having seen it before.

Seen it in Kenya,
he thought, feeling his inner voice gibber slightly.
But…hippo in Cambridgeshire!

“I'm surprised they can endure the winters,” Nigel Loring said, curiosity in his voice.

“Anything that lives in the water most of the time must have good insulation,” Alleyne pointed out; as you drew closer you could see the massive tubby bodies below the surface. “I don't know how well they'll do in the long term, but these seem to be flourishing as of now. We'd best be careful—that female has a couple of…what do you call them? Calves? Cubs?”

“Call them bloody dangerous, sir,” Hordle said fervently.

He'd visited Kenya before the Change at the Crown's expense—the British army had long-standing arrangements there to secure open space for training unavailable in the then-crowded homeland. He'd mixed enough with the locals to learn that the comical-looking animals were in fact as belligerent as wild boar, and when you scaled one of
those
up to five tons and gave it four giant teeth like ivory pickaxes a foot long…the fact that it ate grass by choice and would spit you out after it bit you in half was no consolation at all.

Just then another sound rolled across the open ground to their left, one he recognized from the same memories as the hippo. A hoarse grunting moan,
oouuughh…oouuugh…
, building up to a shattering roar.

“Lion.
Just
what the country bloody needs,” Hordle said disgustedly. “Not to mention all the lovely sweet wolves and cuddly little bears noshing on our ruddy cows.”

“God damn all safari parks,” Sir Nigel said crisply. “And double damnation to their curators for living long enough to set all the beasts loose.”

“They make good hunting,” Alleyne said judiciously. “On the whole, I can't disagree, though.”

Hordle nodded.
That's the Lorings for you,
he thought.
None of this
“Let's hunt it, and damn the farmers”
for them.

“Watch out below,” he added. “They can walk on the bottom and come up right beneath you, hippo can.”

Now that people were thin on the ground again and most worked the land for their livelihood, nearly everyone had adopted the farmer's fiercely protective attitude towards his crops and stock. Not to mention that the carnivores had all turned man-eater during the first Change year when the wandering masses of starving refugees were the main food supply available, and many hadn't lost the habit yet. A big animal with teeth and claws was no joke, when all you had was a spear or a knife.

Hordle drove his paddle into the water, angling over northward, towards the left bank of the river. One of the hippos raised its head and forequarters out of the water as they came closer, opening its barrel-shaped head in a raw bellow of warning, the four giant yellow teeth framing the huge red gullet. The others rotated their heads like submarines swiveling a periscope, their twitching ears showing the focus of their attention. Hordle grinned and ducked down to get a better look at the infants—at that stage, even a hippo could be cute.

Fwwwwtp.

The arrow went through the space he'd occupied an instant earlier. Reflex kept him crouched as he dug the paddle into the muddy water of the Ouse with all his strength. The tough wood bent and the canoe surged forward as the skin crawled up his spine and his gut twisted. Being shot at by people he couldn't see was among the many familiar experiences he had no desire to repeat.

Fwwwtp. Fwwwtp. Fwwwwtp.

“Shit!”

The last hiss of cloven air ended in a
ptank!
as an arrow arched down and slammed down into the bottom of the canoe not far from his right foot, standing in the thin aluminum. Water began to rill in around the edges, and along the slit the broad triangular arrowhead had cut. Hordle dug harder at the water, switching the paddle back and forth from right hand to left to keep the canoe on a steady path, and looked behind him. A boat had come out from around the stretch of island bank, a crude flat-bottomed thing of planks and plywood and plastic sheeting. It was large enough for a dozen men—just—half of them poling it along with long wooden rods, and the rest with bows, shooting as fast as they could draw.

Maybe they'll ram a hippo…no such sodding luck, Johnnie. Not quite that stupid.

Luckily between the crowding and the uncertain footing, they couldn't shoot very well—the range was respectable, over a hundred yards. Another flight rose from the punt as he watched, twinkling in the sun, then fell all around the three canoes. The hissing of the shafts ended in a series of sharp, wet, slapping sounds, like hailstones in a pond. He thought about reaching for his own bow; he'd have to draw awkwardly, underarm, and the canoe's rocking would throw his aim off. Still…

“I can plink a few, sir!” he called.

“Not here!” Nigel Loring snapped. “We'll draw them to the buildings. You flank them on the right. Go!”

 

Nigel Loring drove his paddle into the water, gasping slightly with the effort, feeling the burning strain in his back and shoulders, the thudding of his heart at the literally life-and-death effort, the hissing
wheep
of passing arrows. The teeth beneath his graying blond mustache were bared in a snarl of effort; you might not think you cared much what happened to you anymore, but the body had its own logic and its own priorities.