Island in the Sea of Time (92 page)

The men before him were fewer, but they gave a low growl at his words.

“Lord, we are your handfast men,” Ohotolarix said, a note of protest in his voice. “We have eaten from your board, taken weapons from your hands, our blood is sworn for yours. Lead us anywhere—even to the Cold Lands beyond the sunset and the grave.”

“Right,” he replied.
Touching, you fools.
“This battle is lost. Now those who would follow me, follow. We’ll have to fight to do it.”

Slowly, wearily, he began to climb aboard the horse. They just
might
make it off the field before the enemy caught them—Daurthunnicar was still there with the reserves, after all.

 

“Orders? Ma’am, orders?”

Marian Alston shook her head in wonder. “The poor brave bastard,” she whispered.

“Orders, ma’am?”

That brought her back to herself. She looked northward; the surviving enemy were running as fast as their feet could take them. “North, and then we do to them what they were going to do to us. Runner! Notify Commander Rapczewicz that the enemy is broken on this flank and I’m swinging in on them. Commit the reserves—general advance, and pursuit when they break.”

The Americans were climbing to their feet, gazing in an awe almost as great as their allies’. “Hard pounding, this,” Alston murmured under her breath. A chilly feeling of purpose filled her. “We shall see who pounds the hardest.”

 

“I thought . . . I thought vengeance would feel better,” Swindapa said quietly, looking at the mound of dead. “But I just feel . . . like it’s over.”

Rain clouds scudded across the low plain, dimming it even more than the early-autumn twilight. The battle was breaking up into clumps of men who stumbled with fatigue, blundering into each other and hacking in a weary frenzy. Bands of the Earth Folk and their American allies pursued easterners. Some fled in blind panic, wailing; others stood shield to shield and retreated toward the woods to the southeast. The wounded screamed and moaned, calling for their friends; those farther gone toward the waiting darkness called for their mothers, whether they were Sun People, Fuinan, or Nantucketer. Thrashing around the wreckage of chariots, horses added their louder note to the agony that sounded across trampled stubble and muddy pasture. The chill air kept the smell down, a sickly sewer stink under the whetted wind.

“So this is war,” Swindapa said, her voice hoarse and quiet. “O Moon Woman, what have we earth dwellers done, that we deserve each other?”

Alston braced herself erect and reached for the water bottle at her belt. It still held a little; she raised it, then saw how it—and her whole arm, and the front of her armor—were splashed with red. Blood, and bits of . . . matter, and hair. She drank regardless, and handed the bottle to her friend.

“I’m afraid it is,” she said gently.
The most disturbing thing about it is how numb I feel
, she thought. Only a faint generalized nausea. . . .

She looked around. A dozen of the reserve were still with her, and the banner. “It isn’t over yet,” she said. “We have to make sure. If too many get away, we may have to do this all over again.”

Swindapa shuddered and closed her eyes for a second. Tears had worn streaks down through the blood and dirt on her cheeks, but the cerulean eyes were steady. She nodded.

They formed up and moved across the muddy plain, collecting stragglers as they went. The ground rolled, hiding one band from the next; in a few minutes they were away from the spindrift of bodies that marked where the opposing hosts had met. “This is about as far—”

Alston stopped. The group that came over the slight rise was unquestionably enemy; several on horseback, many others in leather kilts and jerkins. They were still in fairly good order, and they outnumbered her own band by about three to one; sixty of them, say. A number were in Nantucketer armor; surviving members of Walker’s traitors . . .
Thank you, God. That’s Walker himself.

“Saunders,” she said to the only one of the command group still leading a horse. “We need some help, and we need it fast. Go.”

The cadet threw herself across the back of the shaggy pony and drummed her heels into its flanks. A horseman from the enemy group began to pursue, then turned back at a shouted order. She spared a moment to touch hands with Swindapa as the little group of allied warriors spread out into a line and moved to cut the easterners off from the forest.

“Can we hold them?” Swindapa asked. She leaned her sword against her armored thigh for a moment, clenching and unclenching each hand and shaking out her wrists.

“They outnumber us, but they’ve been beaten and run once,” Alston said. “On the other hand, we’re between them and safety. We’ll see.” She paused. “By the way, I love you.”

“Me too,” Swindapa said. Her face was radiant for an instant through dirt and weariness. It changed, clenching in. “Here they come.”

“Halt!” Alston called, when they came in earshot. “Lay down your weapons and you won’t be harmed.”

Alston ground her teeth slightly as she saw the familiar boyish grin . . . although it looked more twisted now. Walker himself looked older, a little thinner in the face.

“What, even me, Skipper?” he gibed.

“You get a rope around your neck,” Alston replied.

“
Not
interested,” he replied jauntily. “How’s this—you get out of
our
way, right now, and I’ll let you and your squeeze there live.”

His hand began to creep toward the rifle at his knee.
Oh, damn
, she thought, taking a closer look. It was the Island-made flintlock.
Androwski must be dead. Dammit to
hell.

She blinked, rigid in shock for a second. How to delay them, how, how—

“I challenge you,” she said—in Iraiina. The men behind Walker were mostly locals, all from the Sun People. “If you have the courage, meet me blade to blade and let the gods decide between us.”

Her smile was cruel as she saw his face whiten.
Gotcha,
she thought. He had to keep these men with him if he wanted to get out alive—and if he refused a challenge to single combat, they’d turn on him like wolves on a crippled pack leader.
Particularly a challenge from a woman.
There was a certain satisfaction to catching him out this way.

Neither of them wasted time on words after that. Walker swung down, murmured a few orders to the men around his horse, and walked forward drawing his sword. Alston swung hers in a few practice arcs to loosen the arm muscles and came to meet him at the same measured pace.
I’m tired. I’m better with the sword—ought to be, lots more training—he’s stronger and younger and has the reach on me. And he’
s . . . ahhh, favorin’
the left arm, by God. Now let’s
do
it, woman. Empty the mind. Don’t think, just
do.

The
katana
came up to
chudan no kame
, the middle guard position. Alston let the breath slide out through half-open lips, felt her attention focus down to the man alone, hands and eyes and blade and feet. In a way this was homelike, like a
kenjutsu
match in the dojo back by the Bay, even the style of the armor.
Throat, waist, hips, underarm, inside of the thigh, face,
she remembered. Bad habits had crept in from fighting near-naked opponents.

Now. Walker cut, smooth and very fast . . . but there was a tiny grimace, a tensing, first. She parried, contact on the flat—you never parried edge to edge. A long musical
scring
sound and they were circling again, the tips of their blades almost crossing.

Again. Again.
Hard attacking style
, Alston thought dispassionately.
He likes overarm strikes
. Safer for him, with his longer reach. A bit of a tremor in her arms, but just as much in his—whatever that injury to his left was, it must be hurting him badly. Good. You took what was offered and used it.

“Very well, Master Musashi,” she murmured, trancelike. Just words. You had to
do
.

She lunged forward with a two-handed stab, cutting edge up—very difficult to counter, since you exposed the wrists. He jerked his torso backward from the waist and snapped his blade across and down. She followed with an attack, overarm, the pear-splitter. The response to
that
was automatic . . . but it put the strain of holding the block on your left arm as the swords clashed and slid and locked at the guards.

They stood
corps à corps
, and his arm began to buckle. Another leap back, and she stepped in, the last thing he expected, leaving her vulnerable to his greater weight and strength . . . and able to hammer the pommel of her sword two-handed into his arm, six inches above the elbow.

Walker screamed, as much rage as pain, as his left hand spasmed open on the long hilt of the
katana
Martins had forged for him. Momentum spun him half around, setting the sight path for her stroke. The sword seemed to float along the line of its own volition, angling up and to the right—under the flared brim of his helmet, his first-model helmet without the hinged cheek guards she’d had added after the Olmec war. The move had a dreamy slow-motion inevitability, even as her breath came out in a rasping
kia
to add force to the blow.

So did his response, dropping the sword, punching out with the bladed fingers of his right hand. Mail coif and padding took some of it, but the impact threw her off enough that she felt her blade grate glancingly on bone instead of sinking into the soft flesh under the jaw. Walker fell backward as her sword flew free trailing a line of red droplets. She was down in the dirt, choking, trying to suck air through her impacted larynx, trying and failing.

A voice, in the Sun People’s tongue: “
Save the chief! Save him, Hwalkarz’s men!
”

Vision flickered. Americans driving forward past her. Walker’s native guards throwing themselves onto the points, selling their lives for time with furious gallantry as others of their band dragged away the man whose salt they had taken. Grayness closing in around her vision as Swindapa knelt above her, hands scrambling under the coif, thumbs pressing on either side of the dented section of cartilage. A
pop
and a shooting pain, and unbelievable fainting relief as air flooded back into her lungs. Then the pain hit, enough to bring a breathless scream. Blood thundered behind her eyes, turning the rain-misted landscape reddish.

The power of will could substitute for strength. Her right hand scrabbled at her hip and pulled the Beretta; Walker wasn’t ten paces away.

A shadow loomed over them both, the bleeding figure of one of Walker’s troopers, his ax raised in both hands over Swindapa’s neck. An instant to alter the point of aim, and the man’s kneecap exploded into ruin. A crushing weight fell—two bodies on top of hers. She dropped the pistol and locked her fingers into the man’s windpipe. He drew his knife and stabbed clumsily, wheezing; Swindapa grabbed the flailing arm.

Alston poured herself into the gripping hand. Fingers sank in behind the windpipe as awareness faded, and with the last strength in her she
wrenched.
There was a scream from very far away, and a warm soft falling.

 

“W
ill the chieftain live?” Ohotolarix said, his voice shaking.

“He’ll live,” Alice Hong said, completing the bandaging. “Bad scar, and that eye’s gone, I’m afraid. Still, it’s clean and the stitching was neat if I say so myself,” she added, twiddling her fingers before she washed them in the bowl.

The little log surgery-clinic was empty except for the tools she’d just finished using; her assistants were cleaning and packing them as she laid them aside, and she’d been working in her custom-made traveling leathers, black with silver studs. A few more bloodstains wouldn’t harm those. She paused to pat Walker’s cheek; he was out with the ether, but he’d be awake soon enough. With a nostalgic sigh she looked around the board-and-split-log room, and the cheery little fireplace with its built-in rack for heating irons.
Ah, well, there will be other places,
she thought.

“Take him out to the wagon,” she said, picking up her shotgun and slinging it muzzle-down over her back.

It was raining again outside, so she added a hooded cloak as she stepped out the door and watched the warriors carry the litter to the waiting Conestoga. Drops pattered on the veranda above her and on the canvas tilts of the wagons; people were still running around with crates and barrels, loading the last of the stuff they’d stripped out—what hadn’t gone with the first caravans, back before that damned battle.
You’ve got to hand it to Will—he thinks ahead.

Bill Cuddy came up with the big black ex-cadet. “It’s Ygwaina,” the young man from Tennessee said. “She’s . . . isn’t it taking too long? Why doesn’t she open her eyes?”

“Bad labor,” Hong said absently. “Aneurysm, possibly—it’s quite a strain, you know.”

“How are we going to move her?” the young man said.

He’s actually
wringing his hands,
by the Divine Marquis,
Hong thought. She’d never actually seen anyone do that before—but then, she’d been having a
lot
of new experiences lately.

“We aren’t, of course,” Hong said. “First, it would be too much trouble, and second, it would kill her—if she isn’t brain-dead already. I’ll leave that local midwife, what’s-her-name.”

“No—” McAndrews began. Then he heard the soft
snick
of an automatic’s slide being pulled back behind him and froze.

Hong brought out the hypodermic from under her cloak and stabbed it through the wool of his jacket, sending the plunger home with her thumb. Two men caught the unconscious form as it slumped; she carefully retrieved the hypodermic and examined it to make sure the needle wasn’t bent—no disposables
here
.