“Who are we fighting, Chief?” Edain asked as their feet splashed through a slough.
Wish I’d painted up, now, he thought to himself. It’d be . . . comforting, like.
His father disapproved of the custom of painting your face for war, but few Mackenzies under thirty agreed.
“They’re Haida,” Rudi said absently.
Cold water sloshed into his shoes, and then they were on dry land again; he could sense a river to their left, and the loom of the low Coast Range beyond that, but their path was wet pasture. Fairly soon his knee socks were as sodden as his feet. They moved at a steady jog-trot, as fast as was practical in unknown country with dense fog about them, spread out in a loose triangle.
“Haida, that’s Indians, right, Chief? From somewhere up north?” Edain went on; he liked to get things tidy in his mind.
The Indians he’d met had all been folk much like any one else, just with different customs; the Clan got along well with the Warm Springs tribes, who were allies of the CORA and had always been friendly to the Mackenzies. That wasn’t always the case everywhere. . . .
“A lot of them are Indians and that’s where they got the name,” Rudi agreed. “From the Queen Charlotte Islands. Their ancestors used to raid like this in the old days, too, for plunder and slaves—long, long ago, before white men came here. Great seafarers and boatbuilders they were, back then. And things were . . . very bad . . . where they live, I hear, after the Change. So they probably remembered the old tales. Now, quiet.”
Traveling through a fog like this when there might be enemies at hand in any direction made your balls try to crawl up into your belly; sometimes he could see a hun dred yards, sometimes barely well enough to place his feet, and it muffled sound and smell. He wished Garbh were still with them.
At first they found nothing; then a two-wheeled ox cart tumbled empty. The oxen had been speared, what ever was in the cart carried off. A child’s body lay by one wheel, picked up by the heels and with its head beaten in against the steel. The child’s mother lay dead beside it, her skirts rucked up around her neck, legs spread and a stab wound low in her belly to show how she’d died.
The Mackenzies stopped as if halted by an invisible wall. Edain felt his stomach try to rise as his eyes went round in disbelief; all the parts of the picture were there, but he couldn’t force his mind to take them in—and he didn’t want to. Eithne was making a sound deep in her throat, a growl that would have done Garbh credit. Rinn did bend and spew. Otter backed away, making protec tive signs with his left hand and shaking so badly that he obviously didn’t think they’d do much good.
And maybe they won’t, Edain thought, fighting blind panic and feeling the hair bristling on his neck. A curse, a curse, seven times a curse just to see it!
Rape was bad enough, a dirty profanation of the Mys teries, of the loving union between Lord and Lady that made all creation. But there were evil men in any people and such things happened sometimes, especially in war. To kill a woman’s child and then force her and then kill her through the womb, though—he half expected Earth Herself to open up and swallow him and everything else male and breathing within a mile, down to the hedge-hogs, and at a gulp.
The thought made him look down uneasily and shud der, but at least it distracted him enough to let his stomach settle.
Rudi winced and looked aside and began to speak, to wave them all forward, but Eithne held up a hand and stopped him. Her face was white and set as well, but in fury rather than fear. She moved forward and bent quickly to rearrange the dead woman’s clothes. When she straightened again there was blood on her hand; the woman’s blood, and the child’s.
“Stand still!” she snapped as he and the other men began to back away. “We don’t have time for nonsense! You first, tanist of the Chief.”
Rudi bent to receive the defiled blood with a face like iron. Edain shuddered again as she touched his fore head and cheeks, then repeated it quickly with the other men.
“You who bear the Lord’s semblance—avenge this His Lady’s blood, and make Earth clean of it,” she said. Suddenly her lips skinned back over her teeth and white showed all around her eyes. “Kill!”
She was an initiate and priestess; Edain was still sim ply a dedicant, but he knew the voice of the Mother when he heard it . . .and She was angry. There was blood and death in that sound, and his skin rippled like a restive horse’s at the midnight magic in it.
Rudi nodded grimly. “Let’s go, Mackenzies!”
They did. Rinn and Otter dropped back a little to trot beside Edain.
“Your girl,” Rinn muttered, tracing a sign. “The Night Face has her. The Dark Mother.”
“That means we’ll win this fight,” Otter said, snarling eagerly. “Good!”
Edain shook his head. The Mackenzie herself had stood as Goddess-mother at his Wiccaning—and Dun Juniper was the center of the Mysteries. Also his mother was high priestess of a coven. He knew more about it all than most young men his age.
“No, it means the other side’s going to lose this fight,” he said grimly. “That’s not the same thing as us winning, boyos, and you’d better believe it. Nobody’s safe when the Devouring Shadow shows up.”
Rinn winced. “The manure’s hit the winnowing fan for true.”
Whether the kettle hits the pot, or the pot hits the kettle . . . Edain thought, but did not say.
“Lord Goibniu, shelter us with Your arm,” Otter prayed; his family were smiths, and favored the Iron master. “Goddess Mother of-All, gentle and strong, be gracious to Your warriors.”
Fire showed through the murk. They stopped, fitted arrows to string, then moved forward at a walk. Mud squelched beneath his brogans, and the pleated wool of his kilt shed beads of wet as it swayed about his thighs. Edain took a deep breath and let it out, another and another; ground and center, ground and center.
Dad was right; waiting’s hard. The fighting just past spun through his mind in a welter of foul images, like butchering time but with people, and then there was the horror near the cart. Lugh Long-Spear, spare me to avenge that!
The mud smell was starting to yield to that of burning timber, but the fog was thicker than ever close to where the river ran into the bay, like having wool pushed in your nose and ears. The firelight was like a candle seen through glass thick with frost.
“Good as a beacon,” Raen said to Rudi, softly.
“Probably why they did it, to show their raiding par ties the way back. The fog works for them, but not if they get lost themselves.”
The Haida had scouts out, but the fog that had helped them hindered now. One loomed out of the dimness, started to level his spear, started to yell, a high thin sound. Rudi killed him with a snapping lunge to the throat and it ended in a gurgle. More yells came out of the fog, from the direction of the burning light. The raiders there knew something was wrong.
Rudi turned and vaulted into Epona’s saddle.
“Hit them hard and keep moving,” he said to the Mackenzie warriors. “They won’t know how many we are if we don’t let them have time to think, and by the time they do the Tillamookers will be here.”
Then he filled his lungs and called, a great brass cry like a chorus of trumpets given words:
“We are the point—”
Edain drew a deep breath and joined in as the others took it up:
“We are the edge—
“We are the wolves that Hecate fed!”
“At them, Mackenzies! Follow me!”
A knot of Haida warriors loomed out of the fog, standing guard over a clot of several dozen locals, men and women and children bound and sitting on the ground; bundles of tools lay beside them—adzes and broadaxes and two man saws and drills and the rest of what you used for working wood.
The whole party dashed forward. A sudden banshee wail from beside him made Edain start; Eithne had been quiet since they left the dead woman. Now she wrenched a spear away from one of the Sutterdown men as she gave that appalling cry, a sna
tch so hard and swift he yelled in turn from the pain of his bruised fingers as she dashed past.
It was what the Clan called a battle spear, six feet of ashwood with a foot of double-edged blade on one end and a heavy steel butt cap on the other. There was an art to using one. . . .
Eithne charged into the knot of guards with the spear blurring over her head like the fan of a winnowing mill, shrieking, face contorted into a gorgon mask of horror, striking with butt and blade edge and point, leaping and using the torque of the spinning length to whirl herself around in midair. The guards were taken by surprise; one died in an instant splash of red as the blade whipped across his throat, and another as the butt crashed between his brows with a smack like a maul splitting oak and his eyes popped out of their sockets. . . .
Too many of them for her to handle, Edain thought grimly, setting his feet and ignoring everything else. Got to—
The string of his longbow went snap on his bracer. A man about to swing a war-hammer with a head of pol ished green stone into the back of Eithne’s skull went down as the arrow tore through his throat in a double splash. Another, another . . .
Dimly he was conscious of shooting better than he ever had before, even at Sutterdown at the Lughnasadh games just past, when he’d carried away the silver arrow. Not much distance, but bad light and moving targets—and some of the arrows were passing close enough to Eithne to brush her with the fletching, a shaft for every two quick panting breaths.
Things burned behind them: sheds and houses and the ribs of a fair sized ship on a slipway. Four big boats of cedar and fir were grounded bow-first on the mud nearby, shark-lean flat bottomed things forty or fifty feet long, their prows carved in blocky angular depictions of ravens and orcas and hawks colored black and white and bloodred. Heads were spiked to the wood below their grinning jaws.
Edain was even more distantly aware that Rudi and the others were doing something . . .cutting the bonds of the first set of prisoners, and the men were snatching up their tools—a maul or a broadax made a weapon, if you were strong and full of hate.
The freed captives swarmed over the last of the Haida guards. But more raiders were coming in, driving peo ple before them, often laden with huge bundles of their own goods; and then armed Tillamookers started arriv ing themselves in dribs and drabs, hunting through fog for the flames and the sounds of battle. Village militia with hunting spears and crossbows and farming tools, the town guard with glaives and poleaxes, a snarling scrambling brabbling fight amid burning buildings and ankle-deep mud and shoreside rocks that shifted underfoot as the fog began to lift. Some of the Haida tried to keep them off while others heaved to push the boats back into the water.
The core of them broke only when the baron came with his knights and their menies behind them, their fighting tails of men whose trade was war; barded des triers, lances and men-at-arms and wet-gleaming gray chain-mail hauberks.
He remembered seeing Rudi racing down the beach with gobbets of mud flying out from under Epona’s hooves, throwing torches into the Haida boats. Three of them were burning, black choking smoke as the oiled cedarwood caught. Then the last started to slide free, and there was a savage scrimmage around its bow. A Haida chieftain with a raven’s wing on his helmet thrust a spear down at Rudi and Raen and Juhel de Netarts, and swords were scything up at men along the ship’s side who clubbed back with oars and tried to row it out deeper. Raen fell back wounded and Rudi reached down to pull him out of the red stained water, throwing him across his horse’s crupper, and Edain put the last arrow in his quiver through the Haida as he thrust downward at Rudi’s face.
A few raiders jumped into the water and swam into the bay, but the others threw down their weapons. . . .
Edain staggered as silence fell, suddenly aware of his chest heaving against his brigandine as he struggled to suck in air, and the stink of his own sweat mixed with the tacky iron smell of blood. Or what felt like silence fell; there was still the crackle of fire—and the shouts of men trying to put it out, and others from the wounded, and a great crowd of people. A Catholic priest came up with a wagon, the red cross on its side and a load of bandages and salves within, and a brace of women in plain dark dresses and wimples—nuns, they called them. They began setting up a field hospital. The baron’s lady and his mother and a round dozen of others in cotte hardis and ordinary women in double tunics pitched in beside them.
The people cheered the Mackenzies, waving scythes and pitchforks and spades, some of them dripping red; people were pounding him on the back, harder than he’d been hit in the fight.
And they cheered Baron Juhel and his men as well, and harder, holding up their children to see the good lord who would not leave his people to the terror from the sea. Rudi looked around, visibly thought for a moment and then dropped back from where he’d been riding at the baron’s side....
To leave the cheers for Juhel, Edain realized suddenly, blinking and feeling as if his mind were floating up from deep water into the sun. Well, that’s the sort of thing a Chief has to think about, eh?
The sun was out now, burning away the last wisps of fog; he blinked against that, and the harsh smoke stung his eyes and made him cough, conscious of how dry his mouth was.
Juhel de Netarts had his plumed helmet off, hanging from his saddlebow, and pushed the mail coif to fall back on his shoulders. The smile he’d worn as he waved to his people slid off his face, and though he was well short of thirty he looked a lot older.
“God’s curse on them,” he swore, looking up at the burned ribs of the ship on the slipway. “I put money I couldn’t afford into this, and borrowed more against Lady Anne’s inheritance, and so did a lot of her subjects, at my urging. We were going to send it far south—down the coast to the Latin countries, and deal for coffee and sugar and cochineal on our own, make Tillamook a real town again with its own traders, with jobs for craftsmen and cash markets for our farmers. Those bastards in Corvallis and Newport skin us on every deal, and the Guild Merchant in Astoria and Portland aren’t any bet ter. Now . . . now I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.”
“Petition the Lady Regent,” Rudi said promptly, dabbing at a long shallow slash on the angle of his jaw and holding a swatch of bandage to it. “Get Lady Anne to deliver it. Say if you get three years’ relief of the mesne tithes from your barony, you’ll promise to put all of it into rebuilding. She wants people like you to do well. It’s good for revenue, and it gives her more bargaining power with the Guild Merchant as well. That should let you repair the shipyard as well as the rest of the dam age—it’s just wood that burned, mostly, and you didn’t lose many of your skilled workmen or their tools.”
“Thanks to you for that,” Juhel said, and looked at him dubiously. “They’d have gotten away otherwise, and taken a lot with them. But the Spider’s awful tight with a coin. Happier taking it in than giving it out. Usually bleating about the tithes just gets you what the sheep gets at shearing time.”
“Yeah, she’s not what you’d call openhanded. But she knows you have to spend to get, believe me . . . and I know the Princess Mathilda, and that her mother listens to her.”
Juhel grinned delightedly and clapped the younger man on the shoulder.
Ah, Edain thought. And the tanist doesn’t even have to come right out and say he’ll urge the princess to advise her mother. What a Chief he’ll make for the Clan someday!
Rudi lowered his voice: “And if I were you, I’d be very careful. The Haida knew too much about just where and when to hit you. Something smells there, and not like attar of roses, either.”
Juhel nodded, then walked his horse a few steps over to where the other Mackenzies were grouped. Raen’s friends and kin from Sutterdown had laid out his body and those of three others; they weren’t keening them, being among strangers, but they’d put the coins on their eyes and laid holly on their breasts, and were chanting softly:
We all come from the Mother
And to Her we shall return;
Like a stalk of wheat
Falling to the reaper’s blade—
Otter and Rinn were a little way off with nothing worse than nicks and bruises, accepting basins of water, soap and towels and bits of food and mugs of beer from an admiring crowd that seemed to include a lot of teen age girls, starting to grin as the relief of surviving their first hard fight sank in. Eithne leaned on her spear, still white and tense, sweat like teardrops making tracks through the blood on her face.
“Lord who holds this land,” she broke in, her voice with an edge like sharpened silver. “What will you do with your captives?”
There were about a dozen of them, mostly wounded, bound and under guard. Juhel looked at her oddly, and shrugged.
“Take off their heads and send them to Portland, I suppose, mistress,” he said. “Easier than sending all of them.”
“No,” she replied. She pointed with the spear.
The whole length of it still glistened dark red as the blood grew tacky. Juhel looked at her . . . but over her head, rather than in the face.
I wouldn’t like to meet her eyes right now, either, Edain thought as she went on, giving orders like a queen:
“Is it that there’s an ash tree there, not far from your castle, tall and great?”
The nobleman nodded, and his look grew odder still and more sidelong.
“Put your men about it—about it in a circle, wearing iron and carrying spears and the emblems of your god. Bring your dead and lay them beneath a cairn with the blessings of your Mass priest. Then hang the evildoers from the tree in sight of the dead and leave them for three days and nights. Do that, and you’ll have . . . luck, luck for you and your land. Do that, or bury them living at a crossroads with a spear driven in the earth above.”
“Ahhh . . .” Juhel swallowed, crossed himself and looked aside, shivering a little.
Rudi gave him a nod, short but sharp, and the baron drew a deep breath.