The Mackenzie commander came up, running afoot with one hand on the stirrup leather of his mounted opposite number from the CORA contingent, the longbow pumping in his left hand. ?Montival?s secret weapon strikes again, you might be after sayin?,? the grinning leader of the Mackenzie archers said; he was an olive-skinned young man named Beech, after the tree.?We?ve only a few hurt. They should all make it.? ?Stung?em bad,? the rancher said.?We paid for it, but they?re busted for now. Bastards won?t have as many men to go raiding after our herds next time!?
His name was McGinty, and he had a bullhide breastplate with his own Bar Z brand pyrographed on the boiled leather. The horsehair plume on his helmet bobbed as he chuckled.
He?s younger than me, too. So many are these days. Forty?s not old! Well, forty-two.
That thought marked her age itself. These days, forty was fairly well along. Not many people beyond their first youth had survived the generation since the Change; she?d been eighteen then, herself. It was some consolation that she looked a lot younger than her age by today?s standards, since she didn?t pass her days in field labor. ?Get your people heading east to camp,? she said to the Mackenzie. ?Don?t get settled in there, either.? ?We?re leaving?? he said.?After this fine and glorious thrashing we gave them, and the kicking of their arse so hard their teeth came marching out like little pikemen on parade??
Signe nodded towards the fort; a century of Boise infantry were double-timing out of the gates… and they had a fieldpiece with them. ?With that as a base, this isn?t a healthy locality,? she said grimly.?Move. We?ll accompany and the Bar Z men will cover us both. Eat, get your gear packed, get on your bicycles and clear out to the next rally point. And could you get that so-called musician to stop torturing that poor agonized pig?? ??Tis scarcely war at all without a piper!?
The clansfolk moved in a ground-eating trot that made it easy for the cavalry to hang behind them. The allied force?s hasty encampment was four miles up the road-where another small bridge had spanned a gulch that scored the rolling plain, muddy save for patches of snow now, potentially a torrent. There was no glimpse of the Cascades on the western horizon… not quite, unless you used binoculars. Her horse picked its way across the streambed, hooves clotting with temporary boots of black sludge. The Mackenzies took the stretchers with the wounded on their shoulders, cheerfully trudged through the glop themselves, and manhandled the empty ambulance carts over.
They even found energy to sing, as they strutted into camp with their piper sounding off, a rollicking tune with a chorus that went: ?Gather the sheaves of harvest-time lightly
Many a day will they strengthen our kin;
Gather the sheaves of arrow shafts tightly
Many a battle their feathers will win!
Call the names of the clansmen who?ve fallen;
Let them be carried like seeds on the wind!?
The bridge had been as thoroughly destroyed as thermite, metal saws and enthusiastic sledgehammers could manage in the time they?d had. ?That?ll delay them,? Will said as their mounts surged up the low slope on the other side of the stream.
Rock rattled down as hooves pushed them out of the damp sandy earth. His cousin snorted. ?Yah. Just as long as it takes Thurston?s engineers to bring up materials to build a replacement,? Mike said.?While they also bring up enough troops to hold us off.?
His face turned to her.?Moth-I mean, Ma?am, why aren?t we bringing up enough force to stop this? They?re nailing down Highway 20 like someone tacking down a strip of carpet. At this rate, they?ll be at the gates of Bend by springtime. After that there?s nothing to stop them short of the forts in the passes over the Cascades.? ?Trooper, we?re not doing that because they?re doing something like this in half a dozen other places as well. If we put more troops here, they?d push west faster somewhere else.?
Greasewood fires were burning under big aluminum kettles cut down from old trash barrels; the smell made spit run into her mouth as her stomach unclenched. Signe swung down from her horse, wondering where several suddenly painful incipient bruises and wrenched joints had come from-except for the ones under her shield arm, and the wrist of her sword hand, which she knew about full well. Military apprentices attended to the Bearkillers? chores, taking the barding off the A-lister horses, packing it on mules, handing out food. They were young men and women of Will and Mike?s age, and this was part of their training.
Was this really more exciting when I was campaigning with Mike? she wondered.
She quickly spooned down thick barley-and-mutton soup, gnawing on a tasteless wheatcake with alternate bites from a raw onion and a lump of rocklike cheese that bit back at the inside of her mouth. Then she used the last of the flatbread to mop out the bowl before she tossed it back.
Or am I just getting nostalgic? Nostalgic for a war, of all things. Frigga witness, I was a fucking vegetarian before the Change, and the next thing to a pacifist. Though that didn?t last long after I met Mike. ?Was this ever better, Aaron?? she said aloud.?I remember it as being… fresher back in the War of the Eye, and before that. Not as boring, not as uncomfortable, not as frightening either.?
The slim sixtysomething physician didn?t look up from his work with splint and bandages, his hands moving with a swift, impersonal gentleness as the man whose leg had been pulped by a war hammer stirred and moaned beneath the drug. He hadn?t taken the field lately either, having been the Outfit?s chief doctor since before they arrived back in Oregon in the first Change Year. Supposedly his jobs were training and administration. ?No, it was mostly about like this,? he said shortly.?You?re just remembering being young and hormonally optimistic and in love, and retrospectively you know we won. More or less. So yes, you are just getting senile nostalgia. Enjoy the mild case now. It gets steadily worse as age and sagging bits and tits and those wrinkles at the corners of your blue, blue eyes accumulate.? ?Fuck you, Aaron,? she said, smiling. ?I?m afraid not. You were never quite butch enough for me, Signe darling,? he replied. ?And they call me a superbitch!? ?Unjustly. Women just can?t manage bitchery with any style, so I?ve got you outclassed. Besides, I was always madly jealous, which justifies it.?
She laughed; that was a running joke between the two of them, and actually true. Aaron Rothman had been hopelessly in love with Mike Havel too, from the day he?d been rescued from a band of Eaters not long after the Change; not that that unrequited longing had ever kept him from a love life surprisingly varied for their staid little rural community at Larsdalen. He finished off, signaled to the stretcher-bearers and limped over to her-the cannibals had made a start on him by taking his left foot off a few days before the nascent Bearkillers arrived. He was looking over her shoulder. ?Oh, oh, oh,? he murmured.?It?s our stylishly brutal neofeudal friends, with their banners unfurled.?
She turned, and recognized the colorful split-tailed pennant of a high PPA noble at the head of the party coming down from the northwest, almost before the outposts reported it. Her brows went up as she removed her helmet and tucked her armored gauntlets into her sword belt and waited. They went higher as she saw the blazon on the forked pennant and the quartering on the big kite-shaped shields northern knights used-the Portland Protective Association?s Lidless Eye with sable, a delta or over a V argent.
The Grand Constable herself, she thought, keeping her lips from showing teeth. After the loathsome Sandra Machiavelli-in-a-skirt Arminger, my unfavoritist of all our dear Associate allies. A lance of bodyguards, Baroness Tiphaine d?Ath, some hangers-on, and two other nobles. Wait, no, that?s a knight-brother of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict with her. And I know the other guy?s face. He?s Sir Ivo Marks. ? Hell -o,? she murmured.?Ivo is seneschal of Castle Campscapell out east of Walla Walla these days,? she said quietly to Aaron. ?That?s on the front lines, and Boise is pushing hard there. What the hell is he doing back in the West?? ?Lady d?Ath,? she said courteously as they drew rein and dismounted, handing the reins to their followers. ?Lady Signe,? came the reply in that water-over-ice voice.