Analog Science Fiction and Fact - July-Agust 2014 Page 6

  A sudden plume of black smoke rose over the Windy Gap trail, followed shortly by a tremendous thunderclap. A pause came over the fight by Joojen's Creek as everyone, legionnaire and green, looked toward the location of the plume. Teodorq did not know what the omen portended. But the greenies seemed perturbed by the sight and a number of them pointed and jabbered.

  A second thunderclap heralded a smoky plume over Middle Gap, followed shortly by a third just inside the forest line on the west. Now the greens showed evidence of panic, and their officers' whistles evidently signaled a general disengagement, because the squares reformed and began to back away. The big tubes covered the retreat with deadly efficiency, spewing swarms of pellets against the legion while the foot withdrew. When it was no longer possible to light them off, their captains drove spikes into the fire holes in the barrels to ensure no one else could use them. One paused long enough to kiss his tube before pulling a hand-tube and joining the retreat.

  As the greenies conducted a fighting withdrawal toward Middle Gap, Teo kept up harassing swoops, as did the legionnaires armed with shorter-ranged crossbows, and the invading army left a litter of dead behind them as they jammed into the road up to the gap. Once the enemy reached the forest line, Yar Yoodavig flagged disengagement. The greenies had lost half their strength and all four of their big tubes—but the legion had likewise been cut in half, and the yar dared not suppose there were no green reserves behind the ridge. Beside, the continued thunders from the direction of Cliffside Keep did not fill him with calm.

  Atglen's people seized one of the abandoned thunder-tubes and hitched it to one of the wagon teams. They also took several kegs of the black powder that the greenies had stuffed into the tubes along with some of the canisters full of stones. "Perhaps the Wisdom can make sense of it," the yar said.

  The dead, they piled into the remaining wagons or strapped across their own horses, for the legion, when they could help it, never left their own behind.

  "Least we won," said Teodorq.

  "Wonderful," said Yar Yoodavig. "One more win like that and there won't be no more legion."

  Teodorq sunna Nagarajan found Karakalan sunna Vikeram sitting cross-legged in the grass, facing west. In his dying moments, the Serp had pulled himself upright and turned his face toward his home pasture and past it toward the never-ending sky, as one of the Folk ought to do. Teo located 'Dosh and told him to build a pyre from one of the wrecked wagons the greenies had abandoned. "On the grassy sea," he told his lieutenant, "we do not bury our great warriors. We raise them on a platform and make them a light to the Folk." 'Dosh, who had his own brother in his arms, nodded and said, "Perhaps that shall be the custom of the Horse Bows, too."

  Teodorq took a squadron of Bows scouting toward Middle Gap and found the greenies gone, though a few of their wounded had been left behind to take last desperate shots at their pursuers. One of these shot Bosh Atwood and was hacked to pieces by Atwood's comrades.

  "Ill luck," the Bosh said as he bound a poultice over the wound. "To catch the last wound after the fight is over."

  "Someone's coming!" whispered Porter Appletree. "Counter attack?"

  "Into the trees," Teo told them, and they led their mounts off the Middle Gap road and into the shelter of the surrounding forest, where they crouched with bows at the ready and a calming hand on their mounts.

  "What stupid plainsman looking for?" asked Sammi o' th' Eagles over Teodorq's shoulder.

  Teodorq jumped and turned to see the hill-man squatting behind him. "Where'd you come from?"

  In answer, Sammi made a call like a bird and other voices in the forest cried out, "Tiger! Tiger!"

  It proved to be a mixed group of foresters and point guards that had been operating in the greenies' rear. They emerged slowly from the trees and the Horse Bows just as slowly relaxed their draws. "Welcome back," said Teodorq. "Yuh missed all the fighting."

  "We find supply wagons," Sammi explained. "Good food, good wine. Not many wagon guards. Hey, these forest men really don't like greenies. Take nasty souvenirs. Hate have them mad at Sammi. We find kegs of funny powder. Runners come get them, take to big battle. They put him in thunder-sticks and—ka-poof! So Belepo and Thewèhdarosh and me, we wonder what happens if we light all of it same time. We scout around, find all powder wagons; then Belepo get foresters make fire-arrows for crossbows. Once all in place, Belepo loose fire-arrows on wagons at Windy Gap to signal others do same. That make big smoke, loud thunder. Real loud thunder. Sammi's ears still ringing. Teddy, how they pack all that thunder into tiny little grains?"

  Teodorq clapped him on the shoulder. "That's not the important thing."

  "No, important thing is Sammi win your battle. No more powder, greenies pull out right quick before use up all have on them."

  But Teodorq thought that the most important thing was that Sammi had survived, though he did not tell the hillman this.

  A Book in the Hand

  It was a two-day march back to Cliffside Keep, but well before the legion returned, the thumping had ceased and a dull brown cloud hung over the location of the sawak.

  The smoke wafted as strange, astringent wisps over the corpse-laden ground that had been the Great Meadow and the autumn fields. Teodorq sniffed the odor of thunder-tubes to which he had become all too accustomed at Joojen's Creek. Black smoke billowed from the still-burning Keep. The village and crops were cinder and ash.

  Yar Yoodavig halted the legion while still at a distance from the Keep and studied the carnage with his look-glass. "Point guards!" he called as his shoved the tube closed. "Thewèhdarosh, send scouting parties off toward the Moose Creek Gap and other trails east. And throw a sweep up west of the cliffs, too. We don't know whether the greenies pulled back or pushed on."

  "Pulled back," said Teodorq. "If they'd come to stay, we wouldn't have to hunt for 'em." The glittering came from the armor of the kettleheads, who lay scattered across the croplands like a frozen wave. As the yar and his subyars picked their way through the killing field, Teodorq could trace it from where the line of battle must have been. The eridzars had been blasted there by the big thunder-tubes. And then, when they could stand it no longer, they had couched their lances and charged madly into the mouths of the tubes, hoping to cover the distance before the greenies could reload. The steel wave had grown thinner as it had progressed. It formed something like a spearhead on the ground where they had fallen as fewer and fewer made the distance. Pennons flew among them: Tigers, Foxes, Lynexes. And then, when they were close enough, the greenie footmen with the thunder-sticks had let loose, and the wave of steel had broken on a shore of lead.

  Some had made it through. A thunder-tube lay amidst the wreckage of its carriage, the mouth of it peeled back like a banana. Teodorq remembered that had happened to one of Jamly's stone-throwers.

  The east wall of the Keep was tumbled down, as if a giant had hammered on it with fists of steel, and the great stones of which it had been built were tumbled and broken into a great pile of rubble. There was another mound of bodies there. Teo suspected that there were more and larger thunder-tubes than the ones the greens had sent in their southern force.

  "Clever putzes, them," Teodorq suggested. "They wave their arms and jump up and down over by Joojen's Creek, burn some villages a good two, three days' ride for you eastern men, and all our best fighters rush down there to make battle. Meantime, their main force slips through..."

  The yar shook his head. "You mean they sacrificed six of their battle squares just to hold our attention?"

  "I don't think they expected to lose, down by the Creek. But they only cared that we stayed there long enough that their... their heavies could do their work here. We beat their reconnaissance force last year, and I think that scared 'em. They didn't expect what they found when they entered the Nobeshtinny. They thought it'd be all villages and wooden stockades."

  "So they had to come out and find what was here, but... they weren't ready to come this far to stay."

  "N
ot when they weren't sure what they faced. They just needed to tell you not to get in their way." Teodorq paused in thought. "Yoodi? Why ain't there no Moose on the field?"

  "You noticed that, too. Guess they didn't answer the call."

  "Me, I guess the greenies came though Moose Creek Gap with a long carpet rolled out for them."

  The yar's lips set into a thin line. "I wish she hadn't called him 'zit-face.'"

  Hegge subyar called out, "We got a live one!"

  They trotted over to where the foresters and the other legionnaires were going through the dead. He lay on the ground beside his horse, his armor smashed and puckered with holes. It was the eridzar Matyas who had gone with Teodorq and the princess to Top-of-World that day. Sammi o' th' Eagles was kneeling beside him with a water-skin and gave him short sips.

  "Gave you up," Matyas managed. "You won?"

  "For some meanings of 'win,'" Yar Yoodavig told him. "We lost half the legion."

  Belepo subyar rode up to the group and slid off his horse. "They left by Moose Creek," he announced.

  Matyas coughed and nodded. "Dzha. Caught us with half already... on road... join you. But we pressed them hard. Crossbows... did good work, and some of our men got into them. But... day looked like theirs when the Moosehead came charging in. We all... cheered. But... attacked our own flank." Matyas managed to spit. "Traitors."

  The eridzar fell into a fit of coughing. Yar Yoodavig unloosened one of the straps on his armor, but Matyas grabbed his wrist. "No. Leave be. Die with spurs on."

  "What about the kospathin?"

  "And princess?" added Sammi.

  Matyas twitched his head toward the bodies behind him. "Fell. Somewhere. In charge. Moose took Princess." He sighed, and Teodorq waited for him to say something more; but he never did.

  Teodorq found the shaman in the gap where the Keep's wall had collapsed. He was surrounded by the armsmen of the garrison. Nearby lay the Wisdom Mikahali Fulenenbirk. His aged eyes would peer no more through brass look-glass tubes. He would collect no more animals to stuff, no more herbs to test. Teodorq wondered if he had realized at the end how the shortgrass men had felt when the iron men had come off the cliffs to take their land.

  Survivors—mostly common folk, a few armsmen, a handful of shame-faced kettle-heads—were huddled inside the Keep, crouching under blankets, staring dull-eyed into makeshift campfires. "Shaman carried the sacred relics into the gap-of-danger," said a man Teodorq remembered as having been a baker in the village.

  "Why haven't you seen to the dead?" Teodorq demanded, but the man only shrugged.

  "Everyone else ran west. To Kezzer's Town."

  The shaman—Teodorq remembered his name had been Sharèe Thawèteri—had fallen face down. His hands still gripped a golden reliquary and the plainsman pried it from his cold, stiff fingers only with some difficulty.

  "The gold is ours, foreigner," the ex-baker said, shivering to some resemblance of liveliness. "It belongs to the House."

  Teodorq found the latch and popped it open. He removed the book and tossed the reliquary to the baker. "Then keep it."

  The man looked puzzled, then doubtful, as if suddenly unsure whether he had demanded the right thing. Teodorq wondered how long it would be before some other survivor slit the fellow's throat for the gold.

  Teodorq found Sammi on the killing field turning over bodies. "Yo, Sammi?"

  The hillman looked up, cocked his head, and waited.

  "Seen enough of this place?"

  Sammi pursed his lips. "How much more World left to see?"

  "Dunno. Thought I'd look over the other side of the forest. Maybe the starmen villages are there." Iabran and Varucciyamen, Jamly had called them. The greenies had weapons like Jamly's shuttle. More primitive, but clearly the same kind of weapon. Wherever the star men had built their villages had to lie to the east.

  "Okay. Sammi tired of taking other men's risks. Beside, iron men not let Sammi keep toy." He opened his riding pouch and gave Teodorq a glimpse.

  It was the kospathin's jewel-encrusted mace.

  "Hoofs trample into dirt. No one see. Clean off blood and hair and brain, good as new."

  "He took that into battle?"

  "Sure. Not just for pretty. What you got there?"

  Teodorq showed him the book that the Wisdom had claimed had once belonged to the star men. It was inconceivably old, but seemed as if new. The runes were graceful and curved, like those he and Sammi had seen in the wrecked shuttle, and they marched in perfectly regular lines across each page. Whoever had written it had owned a remarkably steady hand. "Shaman had it."

  Sammi raised his eyebrows. "He take that into battle? Even mace-of-jewels make more sense. Why you take him?"

  "Dunno," said Teodorq. But he had the gnawing sense that it might be a very important thing. Maybe more important than the mace. Maybe more important than Cliffside Keep.

  Yar Yoodavig rode up to Teodorq and Sammi while they were packing their mules and horses. He held his reins slack and leaned forward with his arms crossed over his mount's neck and watched them tie down bundles for a time.

  "It's desertion, you know," he said at last.

  But Teodorq shook his head. "Who we deserting? Your First is dead, the Wisdom, the shaman, half the villagers. Nearly all the eridzrs, most of the militia. Half the legion. 'Dosh can lead what's left of the Bows. Southern villages burned. Keep smashed. I figger Lynex or Losse will step in and pick up the pieces. I never swore an oath to House Lynex, and I sure as hell never swore one to the Moose."

  "The kospathin has two cousins at his western outposts. One of them is kospathin now. Or maybe his brother up on the thoogu."

  "Good," said Sammi o' th' Eagles without looking up from cinching the mule-pack. "Cousins can fight over ruins."

  "The Keep will be repaired."

  "Harder for greenies knock down second time?"

  "We could go west, to House Lynex or House Fox or one of the others..."

  "Why?" said Sammi. "Their keeps stronger?"

  "The rest of the legion wants revenge on House Moose."

  Sammi looked at Teodorq. "Thought only stupid plainsmen made useless, doomed gestures."

  Teodorq told Yoodavig he didn't see no chances for heroic deeds in such a venture. "If the Moose made kissy-face with the greens, yuh gotta expect the greens have their back." He reached in his scrip and removed a roll of moose hide. "I wrote 'The Stunts o' Karakalan sunna Vikeram' on this in all-prairie signs."

  Yoodavig took the roll and turned it over in his hands. "He was a good soldier."

  "He was a great warrior," Teo said. "If yer heading west, pass this along. There'll be shortgrassers heading farther west. Tell 'em to keep passing it on. Find Clan Serpentine of the Gudawan Adyawan and give 'em this."

  Yar Yoodavig took the roll, looked at it. "You're not going back?"

  "I been there. Figure to keep going east."

  The yar darkened. "To the greens?"

  "That's where they keep 'em." Teo pointed to the three red stripes on his arm. "I promised Jamly-the-ghost I'd find the villages of the star men. Ain't found 'em yet."

  Yoodavig looked to Sammi, who said, "Stupid plainsman need someone hold hand."

  The yar gusted a sigh. "Can't stop you, I guess. But you're wearing that, too." He pointed to the tattoo of the yowling tiger on Teodorq's chest. "Least you can do is find out all you can about the greenies. Where they live, how many there are, and so on, and send back word."

  Teodorq nodded his agreement. Sammi nudged him.

  "Stupid plainsman. You no write yazhiq and no one here read all-prairie signs. How you send back word?"

  A little later Chum Varòwanop joined them. He led two pack mules hung about with pigeon cages. "Just so you won't be deserting," he said, "the yar is ordered us to scout greenies east of the forest."

  "Lucky us," said Sammi.

  Teodorq studied the cages of pigeons. "Yuh packin' it in, too?"

  The battle engine-maker shrugged. "I'm a
swamper, me; but way I figure, those greenies won't know the shortgrass plavver even if they got tame mooseheads to translate the yazhiq. 'Sides, these be 'racing pigeons' that I breed. You two are bodyguards I hired down in the paiute country."

  When the party was ready to move out the yar came to wish them well. "Which way you plan to go? Straight across the ridge and the Nobeshtinny?"

  "No," said Chum. "Best we swing south across edge of swamplands then cross the badlands."

  Sammi looked at Teodorq. "Badlands?"

  Teodorq shook his head. "That can't be good."

  (EDITOR'S NOTE: Teodorq sunna Nagarajan the Ironhand and Sammi o' th' Eagles has appeared previously in "The Journeyman: On the Short-Grass Prairie" [October 2012] and "The Journeyman: In the Stone House" [June 2014].)

  * * *

  Mind Locker

  Juliette Wade | 6914 words

  She's a night-walker, she's a child-stalker. Won't see her coming, no use running hands'll snatch you, she'll catch you She's the night-walker, she's the mind-locker.

  1. Hub Girl

  Fingers comes to see me. Scared in her skin, she is, I can see it in the whites of her eyes. I hug her tight, and bump heads to touch-link our CustomEyes settings. Blue and green flash over the recycled plastic slum-tunnels, junk piles, trampled cardboard; that's what she likes. Me, I overlay orange, with guardian flamingos at the tunnel junctions. Most days, seeing them makes her smile. Not today.

  "Bad news, Hub Girl—" Fingers looks over her shoulder at Tabby-face. "Tabby got Locked."

  Tabby-face bursts out crying.

  "Oh, crap. Tabby, hon, let me look at you." We bump heads—nothing. I glance left/left/down to turn on local Arkive portal view, but hers doesn't even show. She's dark, fact. Like a sock to the stomach after how long I spent cleaning out that weird "test population" malware she straggled in with. "Did you reboot?"

  Tabby-face nods, mod-whiskers quivering. Rich parents, what she ran from—she got the best mindware, it shouldn't've happened. Wouldn't've, but the Locker's no noob.