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"Give me back my knights!" the Grand Constable roared. "That's what I'd have you do, you Mafiya moron! Give me back my knights!"
Chapter Twelve
Near West Salem, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9
"H ell, I didn't like cities even before the Change. Always made me feel cramped," Mike Havel said, reining in his horse and flinging up his clenched right fist for halt. "Now they give me the willies," he went on.
The Bearkiller column clattered to a stop, without the bunching or collisions you might expect from over a thousand tight-packed humans on horseback and on bicycles and driving wagons. A few horses snorted, and one bugled in protest, but the only voices raised were a few sharp commands. There was a massed scuffing as the infantry squeezed their brakes and each put a foot down to bring themselves to a halt. Most of them were red-faced and puffing; cycling in armor was a little less strenuous than marching, and a lot faster, but that didn't make it easy. The majority of the bicycles had solid rubber on their wheel rims, built up of strips salvaged from car and truck tires, which made for a rougher ride.
Havel squinted eastward, where the sun was just over the Cascades on the farthest edge of sight. It was going to be a bright day with scattered white clouds, mild and cool and damp with yesterday's drizzle-the sort of day you could have anytime but high summer here.
What did the Sioux call it? "A good day to die"? Hell with that, but it's a good day to fight, ij you have to.
"Graveyards give me the willies too," Signe Larsson replied grimly, looking south and then east.
They were just outside the brush and incipient forest that covered the wasteland that had been West Salem; wind soughed through spiky brush and tall grass, through fir needles and leaves just begi
To his left the old Salemtown Golf Course had hugged the northern edge of Wallace Road. The river was about a mile eastward, hidden from here by scrub and feral orchards and wet grassland that had once been fields. To his right were rolling hills, upscale horse farms and more orchard and woodlot before the Change; he had a lookout on Chapman Hill, the highest ground nearby at a little over four hundred feet. Beyond that were the old suburbs proper, where the bigger pre-Change trees towered over scrub and saplings where they hadn't been killed out by the fires, and an occasional chimney or snag of wall reared out of a green jungle. The treacherous net of bramble, vine, car-wrecks, twisted metal, scattered brick and glass shards made it nowhere he'd take troops willingly, but if he had to retreat the narrow cleared zone along the railroad tracks would do nicely. A few taller buildings still stood by the river, showing black trails of scorch-mark above the empty windows.
More and taller ones reared on the eastern shore, where the bulk of the old city had lain; three spans crossed over, a railroad bridge on the north and two road crossings just a little south. The Mackenzies and Bearkillers had spent considerable effort last autumn, clearing the piers of wrecked cars and logs and accumulated rubbish that were acting like giant beaver-dams and threatening to bring the bridges down. All that might be wasted effort now:
The roads were fairly clear of dead cars and trucks; the state government had managed to get that much done before it collapsed, but tendrils of vine thick as his arm crossed them except on the main thoroughfares, and sprays of brick and rubble stretched out where buildings had collapsed. The bridges were still in use for trade across the valley, and the ruins were mined for metals and useful parts. Nothing human had lived there since the last ca
It still creeped him out. A world had died here in a convulsion of agony and bewildered terror, and its remains haunted the new one that he and his like were building on the bones.
And will until the last of us dies who remember the Change, he thought. Then this'll just be ruins, like the Pyramids to me.
A rider came up the road from the bridges, riding on the graveled verge to spare his horse's hooves at the trot. He was a Bearkiller scout, with an A-lister's mark between his brows but lightly equipped with sword, bow, helmet and a short mail shirt. His name was Bert, and he'd been a Marine before the Change, on leave and visiting family in Idaho.
"The bridges are still clear," he said. "The nearest boats are still two miles downstream and coming on slow; the current's strong."
"Good!" Havel said. "That confirms what the lookouts said. Signe, let them know it's OK for Ken to bring his toys up. Time for my esteemed father-in-law to strut his stuff."
His wife took a convex mirror out of her saddlebag and angled it to the sun, blinking light across the mile to the hilltop south of them. A half minute later the reply came through: Message relayed and then Confirmed. Ke
"Take care, Daddy!" Signe called softly.
"Heads up!" her brother Eric said.
Havel looked up into the sky, following his gauntleted finger. "Well, shit!" he said. "Crap and double-damn and hell. I expected this, but not so soon."
The winged shape of a glider turned in the air a thousand feet above them- it was riding the thermal thrown up by the concrete mass of the ruins, spiraling in a widening gyre. He unlimbered his binoculars; the aircraft was a pre-Change sporting model, shaped like an elongated tadpole with long, slender wings, but those had the Protector's Lidless Eye on them, and a mirror rigged for heliograph signals stood outside the cockpit. That worked as the glider banked, the bright light a flicker of dots and dashes meaningless to him. Signe sighed regretfully-they hadn't broken the Association Air Force's latest field code yet, but there wasn't much doubt what it was telling the boats and barges coming southward on the Willamette. Starting with his numbers and dispositions.
"OK, they'll disembark their force well north of the bridges-north of here," he said.
"You sure?" Signe asked.
"Yeah. They're not going to get them tangled up in the ruins while they disembark. And they probably want a fight here-they can't chase us, they don't have enough bikes with them. They'll try to come ashore close to here and march down River Bend Road till it joins this one, then south on that past the old radio tower. We'll move a little north-see where River Bend makes that elbow and heads more north of east? We'll anchor our line there."
The others nodded. Havel went on: "Eric, you take the lancers and move a little north, couple of hundred yards. See those old gravel pits?"
He pointed with his right hand, a little south of east. "About a mile that-away? The ground's too soft for movement past there so I'll anchor my right on it, and straddle the roadway with the pikes and glaives, more crossbows on the west. But that leaves my far left swinging in the breeze. You cover it, be ready to move forward or back to hold 'em off if we have to pull out through the ruins-we'll use the railway line if we have to do that, and you can either follow or pull out west according to circumstances. We've got good coverage from Chapman Hill so keep your scouts just far enough forward to make theirs stay out of direct sight of the main body."