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"I don't know why," he said suddenly, as if a boil had burst inside him. "I got you wounded! And-"

Rudi opened his eyes again; he looked tired, but more there. "Bullshit," he said crisply.

"What?" Edain rocked backwards, as if slapped on the cheek.

"You were going to say you couldn't save Rebecca. But you did save her, in the fight with the Rovers, remember?"

Edain shook his head. "And killed her later!"

"So you couldn't save her always. You're not going to live forever, boyo. You've saved my life more than once-but I'm not going to live forever either! Someday I'll die whatever you do, or I do. It's not just going on that makes life. That's fear talking; or the fear of losing someone. I've… wrestled Thanatos knee to knee, this last while, and I know. It's when you beat fear every day, that's when you're immortal. And I want you with me."

He reached out and caught Edain's wrist. "You're my friend… you're my comrade of the sword and my brother. My brother doesn't run out on me!"

Edain gulped, and took a deep breath. "Right, Chief. It's just.. ."

"Grief's hard."

"That it is." He straightened his shoulders. "So's the work halfway through harvest, but that never stopped me."

TheScourgeofGod

CHAPTER ELEVEN

PENDLETON, EASTERN OREGON
SEPTEMBER 15, CHANGE YEAR 23/2021 AD

"They're holding out there!" Sir Ivo said. "St. Michael must be looking out for them!"

"You're right," Tiphaine said.

She resisted a temptation to sip at her canteen, despite the dry dust blowing across the land. What you had to go through to pee in one of these steel suits…

Ivo crossed himself, and she reflected that sometimes it was a bit lonely, being one of the last agnostics.

"God grant that they're still alive when we get there," she said with pious hypocrisy.

Even my girlfriend's a believer, she thought. Just a different set of beliefs.

She raised her binoculars again, adjusting her visor as it went tick against the leather-covered metal of the field glasses. The thin chamois on the palms and fingers of her gauntlets let her adjust the screw easily enough. The action was nearly two miles west of the Pendleton city wall, on a hill about twelve hundred feet high. It was bare and not too steep, and several hundred of the enemy cavalry were swirling around it like bees around sugar, surging up the slope to shoot with their recurves and then back again in the quicksilver Eastern style.

The binoculars brought it suddenly, startlingly close; there were about a dozen Dunedain on their feet, hiding behind rocks and ridges, and as many wounded. A party of the Pendleton horsemen surged up to their position with shetes in hand, and then a giant figure rose beneath the hooves. A long blade glittered as it hacked through both a pony's forelegs to cast the rider screaming down at the man's feet, where he died an instant later. The rest of the Easterners rode away, shooting behind them as they retreated…

This is so tempting, she thought. What a song the bards would make of Astrid's Last Stand… that overgrown peasant Hordle with a circle of his foes at his feet and a broken sword in his hand… blood-stained banners, faces to the foe, eternal glory… no, no, I promised Sandra.

Her knights were out of sight from the enemy's position behind a ridge. In the little dry valley ahead waited two hundred of the CORA cowboys under Bob Brown of Seffridge Ranch. Their commander was looking back at her; she raised a gauntlet and chopped it forward with her hand extended like a blade. The cowboys had their bows out and arrows ready on the string; they started their mounts forward. The agile quarter horses managed to build speed even as they climbed the little rise ahead of them, and she could see the sudden alarm on the other side as the solid block of horses and men came over the crest.

"Yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-"

The alarm call rang out as the Easterners started to draw together to meet the CORA attack, turning westward and away from the beleaguered little party on the hill. Cow-horn trumpets blatted as the two loose swarms headed towards one another, and the Western Ranchers' shout went up:

"Cora! Coraaa!" interspersed with raw catamount shrieks.

"And about now," she murmured, and in that instant the foremost in either band rose in the stirrups and shot.

The arrowheads twinkled in the midmorning sun as they plunged downward. That was how they liked to fight out here in the cow-country, only coming in to close quarters when an enemy had been savaged by arrow-fire. Normally for heavy horse to try and strike them was like trying to beat water with a sledgehammer. Water whose spatters turned into viciously dangerous stinging wasps as it flew away.

But ah, if you can trick them into bunching up to receive a charge, she thought, with a slight cold smile, as she returned her binoculars to their padded steel case. Then it's more like using a sledgehammer on a bowl of eggs.

She turned in the saddle. "Now, my iron-heads, I'm going to do you a favor," she said, looking at the eager young faces, shadowed by raised visors or bisected by the nasal-bars of the older helms. "Now I give you a chance to die with honor!"

They cheered, shaking their lances in the air. And they actually think I am doing them a favor, she thought. It's true what they said in the old days. Testosterone rots the brain, not to mention listening to the bards when you're young.

She held out her own right hand, and Armand thrust the lance into it. Tiphaine rested the butt of the twelve-foot weapon on the ring welded to her stirrup-iron, shrugged her shield around and brought it up. The banner of the Lidless Eye came up beside her, and the destriers began to walk. They'd keep the pace slow until just before arrow range…

BD looked up from the wounded as she heard the high harsh singing of the Portlander oliphants, the long curled silver trumpets holding the sustained scream that meant charge. It was faint with distance, but the sound was as startling as it would have been to hear a chorus of girls singing a festival hymn to the Lady of the Blossom-time. She'd grown so used to the thought that she would die here amongst angry strangers and the smell of wounds that it took a moment for what her ears heard to filter through to her mind.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Eilir's eyes move. Her head was a mass of bandages, seeping red where an ear had been sliced; there was another wound on one thigh, a shete-cut.

"The Portlanders are here," BD said, and then repeated it in basic Sign in case she was too dazed to read lips.

Eilir sighed and closed her eyes. Not far away from her, Astrid roused a little and turned and tried to vomit. It was only a dry retching, and when she sank back her face was gray. One of the wounded with a splinted leg dragged himself over and helped her drink. Abstractly, BD sympathized-the pain would be savage, and a concussion like the one she'd gotten from her own sword hilt would keep her immobilized for weeks, and might cripple-but it was Astrid's plan that had gotten them into this mess. BD didn't want her dead, but she had to admit there would have been some justice in her getting hit so hard the brains spurted out of her ears.

It would have been worth it to avoid a battle, she thought. But it looks like we're going to have the battle anyway.

Part of it was taking place right below. The Easterners had better things to do than lob arrows at the little cluster of Rangers atop the hill, and she risked rising from behind a ridge of rock and clay to watch.

Most of the horsemen were fighting the CORA men, at close quarters and handstrokes now that their quivers were empty. Dust hid most of the action, but the sun glinted off the edges of sabers and shetes and axes. Eddies in the earth-mist showed men who hacked and died; she saw a doll-tiny figure topple to earth and go beneath the hooves, anonymous in ranch-country leather and wool, and another dragged from the saddle by a flung lasso.

The sound of their curses and war-shouts came up the slope that was also littered with bodies of men and horses, some still thrashing or trying to crawl away, others motionless. Overhead turkey vultures waited, sweeping in broad circles with their black-and-gray wings outstretched. Ravens skittered lower on the wind. One went over close enough for her to see the clever black eye it cocked at the ground, judging its time.