Nigel snapped his visor up. Some scattered coals still glowed redly, enough to show him shadowy figures clawing at each other in the doorway, and others diving through the broken window. Hordle roared and flung his sword with a sweeping two-handed motion like a hammer toss; it turned in the air and drove point-forward into the back of the last savage, sending him forward on his face with the blade and hilt sticking up like the mast of a ship.
"After them!" Nigel wheezed, suddenly aware of how his breastplate seemed to squeeze at his chest as he heaved for air. "Get them running fast-"
Alleyne went by him, blade raised high, shouting something that sounded like Wait for me, Grishnakh.
Hordle followed, snatching his longsword free as he passed the man it had killed; more shrieks and screams sounded outside. Nigel leaned against a pillar with his sword hand, then let his shield fall free with a clatter and raised his canteen to his lips, swilling a mouthful and spitting it out to clear his mouth of gummy saliva, then drinking. Light flared up again; Archie MacDonald had collected some of the coals and dropped them in the piled brushwood the savages had collected.
Then he limped over to Sir Nigel, peering anxiously with the one eye not swollen shut. "Are y' injured, sair?" he said.
"Not-" Nigel coughed, took a deep breath and held out his canteen. "Not as much as you, my friend. Just rattled about a bit inside my shell. I'm getting a little long in the tooth for this sort of thing, I fear."
MacDonald took the canvas-covered metal in a hand that suddenly started shaking. "I've no bones broken," he said, steadying it with both hands and putting it cautiously to his mouth, where the lips had been bruised and torn against his own teeth. "And I'm better than I was before I heard ye're voice, sair."
The crackling light threw their shadows high on the walls. MacDonald huddled closer to the fire, seeking the warmth his naked skin and the fringes of shock needed. Nigel went around the bodies lying about, counting and making sure that the dead savages were undoubtedly and permanently so with quick, merciful, sword stabs; distasteful work, but necessary-he'd be responsible if they crawled off and recovered enough to be dangerous again. By the time he was finished his son and the archer were back.
"Got another one, but they scattered fast in the dark," Alleyne said. "Most of them ran for the riverbank. I think they had boats there, from the marks in the mud."
"We got about half of them, or a little better," Hordle said. "But-"
A whimper interrupted him. The children of the Nether-field Avengers were huddled together in their filthy nest of tattered blankets. Nigel looked at them and sighed.
"This is going to be complicated," he said. And then to the children: "Don't worry, little ones, we're not going to hurt you."
Alleyne snorted: "They're not going to believe that, Father, any more than a fox cub would."
MacDonald muttered something under his breath, on the order of Nits breed lice.
Nigel gave him a quelling glance, but the man was right in the literal sense-the youngsters would be lousy. At least they were young enough to forget the horrors of their upbringing in a couple of years. The new England needed all the hands and backs it could get.
Hordle grunted as he cleaned his sword on a rag, then rubbed it down with a swatch of raw wool. "This is like the one about the fox, the cabbage and the sheep," he said.
Nigel yawned convulsively, politely covering his mouth-although that was a bit risky, considering what clotted his gauntlets. "I think the best thing would be to put them on the horses and get them back to Jamaica Farm tonight," he said. "Then of course we'll have to come back here ourselves: and someone will have to come with us to take the horses back: the gear here will have to be guarded too: I'll give Mr. Bramble some names of people around Tilford who'll take them in. Thank goodness there's no more of that bumf with identity documents."
"No rest for the wicked," Hordle said. "There goes a night's sleep. Of course, it's just a merry cruise down the Ouse afterward. With one big bastard of a problem."
"Yes?" Nigel said. There seemed to be sand in the cogs of his brain.
"The kiddies' dads have boats too."
Chapter Four
Salem, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 17th, 2007 AD-Change Year Nine
Juniper Mackenzie scowled slightly as she looked down at the pilings of the bridge that ran over the Willamette and into Salem 's Center Street -the ruins where Salem had been, rather. The piles and the spaces between them were thick with rubbish: logs, brush, general trash, wrecked cars and trucks and campers. Now the spring water was foaming high over that barricade, water blue-green and then surging white in the bright noon sun, throwing waves half the distance up to the deck of the bridge, and spray high enough to strike her lips with the chill wet smell of it. The roaring power of the spring freshets made the pavement tremble beneath her feet and the ponded-back water spread, flooding streets on both banks and covering the low islands just upstream where the waste ponds had been. It also brought more rubbish tumbling down to join the growing dam every day, and the vehicles made the assemblage too strong for the water to just push downstream. One of the few sensible things the state government had done in the brief months between the Change and its own total collapse had been to get the stalled cars off the main roads in and around the state capital. Otherwise the number and nature of its manifold idiocies had surprised even a former unwed teenaged mother who'd kept and home-schooled her profoundly deaf daughter in the teeth of welfare officers, bureaucrats and Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all; they'd disregarded how much in the way of useful metal and springs and formed parts an automobile had in it, and also the cargoes in the trucks.
Except the food, she thought. Even they weren't that stupid.
So those on the bridge had just been shoved over the side, including one eighteen-wheeler full of perfectly good blue jeans. Perhaps not a great fault, when their other mistakes had denied so many who might have survived any chance of life, but:
Rudi looked down through the railings and then solemnly up at her. "The river spirit's angry, Mom," he said. "Really angry, 'cause She's all tied up with stuff. We oughta quiet Her."
She put a hand on her son's small hard head. "That She is, mo chroi. We should also get that wreckage out of the way, come summer, and free the waters."
"That's what I said, Mom," he replied, looking as if he'd like to stamp a foot but too well mannered for tantrums.
And sometimes I get a bit of a chill at the things you say, my heart, she thought, beneath her chuckle.
She remembered presenting him to the altar in the nemed, at his Wiccanning near nine years ago. And the words Someone had spoken through her:
Sad Winter's child, in this leafless shaw Yet be Son, and Lover, and Horned Lord!
Guardian of My sacred Wood, and Law His people's strength-and the Lady's sword!
Perhaps it was her imagination that he was: sensitive to things. But perhaps it wasn't, too. The Gods knew, but they hadn't told Juniper Mackenzie, High Priestess or no. Not yet.
"Nothing I can do about that, sure," she muttered to herself, looking down again. "The bridge, now: if we don't clear the piles the next time a dam breaks"-and several of the upstream ones had already, as locked spillways and lack of maintenance took their toll-"this bridge is going to go bye-bye, taking the other and the rail bridge with it. And that will be a royal pain in the arse."