Sunrise Lands

"Down and stay down," he shouted to Gaston, throw ing the boy flat in the roadside ditch. "Garbh-guard! Stay!"

Then he had his own bow out, slanting it to keep the lower tip off the ground as he knelt. As he whipped an arrow out of his quiver, he was suddenly and wildly certain that someone out there was trying to kill him, and felt an indignation he knew even then was absurd.

A high screaming rose from the misty field west of the road, and spears and axes glinted through the fog.

" Haiiiii- DA!" they called, a rhythmic screeching. " HaiiiiiDA!"

His father had told him that it was the waiting beforehand that was the time of fear, and you were too busy for it when the red work began. It turned out to be not quite that way for him; he was aware of being afraid, but he didn't have any attention to spare for the emotion.

Most of the strangers' arrows hit the Protectorate men on that side of the road, or whistled past into the fields and fog. Then there was a roaring onrush of half-seen figures, ru

Edain drew and shot and drew, shot and drew and shot again, the deadly fast ripple he'd been taught from infancy, something else he didn't have to think about, and the other Mackenzies were with him. His quiver was half empty when a man in a helmet with a raven beak covering half his face came at him no more than arm's length away, spear drawn back for a thrust, a shield cov ered with blocky angular patterns in his other hand. Edain dropped his bow and snatched for shortsword and buckler, feeling as if he were moving through thick honey…

The snarling tattooed face behind the mask's beak went slack with shocked surprise as a horse floated by behind him with a flash of steel.

"Morrigu!" Rudi Mackenzie shouted in a voice like brass and steel as he struck.

He swung the long blade in an arc that crunched into someone who staggered back in ruin on the other side. His black horse reared, its milling forefeet smashing heads and shoulders as he called again on the Crow Goddess.

"Morrigu! Morrigu! "

Edain had his own sword out now, and the buckler in his left fist. His friends were with him and they rushed across the road, shouting their totem war cries; some where he could feel part of his mind gaping in bewil dered horror, but he was too busy for that, too busy howling and hitting, spi

Shapes loomed up out of the fog, a man swinging an ax at a fallen crossbowman. Edain punched him with the buckler before he could look up and felt a shivery sensation as a jaw broke beneath the steel.

There were shouts all around him. Haiiiii -DA; calls of Haro! and Saint Guthmund for Tillamook! Farther off a church bell started to ring, and a hand-cranked siren wailed from the castle's tower.

Then suddenly there was nobody within sight standing up except the people he'd started with. A man sprawled in unlovely death at his feet, dark eyes wide in surprise at the arrow in his chest. A broad built broad-faced man not much older than he was, very dark, with blood in his black hair, wearing a jacket of sealskin sewn with bracelet-sized steel rings. A short thick bow of yew and whalebone and sinew lay near his hand and a dented steel cap not far away.

Edain stood panting and glaring around; Eithne handed him his bow, and he checked it automatically be fore sliding it back into the loops. He still had half of his arrows left. The fight had been too brief and too brutally close-quarters to shoot them all away.

Rudi cantered up, the visor of his helm up, and the baron with him.

"They must have come in before dawn," Juhel Strange ways de Netarts said, and then swore lividly: "Satan's arsehole, with piles like fat acorns! They'll be all over the country between the bay and the hills by now, stealing and kidnapping-"

"So we'll cut them off from their boats, before they can get back with loot and prisoners," Rudi snapped. "Where will they have come ashore?"

"Over there," Juhel replied, pointing a little south of west with his red ru

"Juhel, we Mackenzies will keep them busy. You get your people together and relieve us-get them ready, but for the sweet Lady's sake, don't take too long!"

He swung down from Epona's back and looped up the reins to the saddlebow; the horse followed him like a dog, but this wasn't the weather for playing at knights, nor were there many Mackenzies besides Rudi who could. Edain and the clansfolk fell in behind him, his friends and a round dozen from the wagons, led by a lanky man named Raen with the twisted gold torc of a married man around his neck; he was old Tom Bra

"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. Ri

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!