S. Stirling - Dies The Fire

The remaining dozen had knee-length hauberks of rings or scales; their armor had sleeves, and they wore steel-splint protection on their forearms and shins. Their shields were thick and broad, strapped with metal, and they were armed with heavy spears, long swords or axes. The mounted commander halted them along the eastern side of the road, and Juniper felt a stab of anxiety-had they seen her folk?

No, she decided. He's just holding them there ready to charge.

She could see them laughing as they dismounted from their bicycles, leaving them on their kickstands, forming up in a column shield to shield; a few paused to piss by the side of the road, holding the skirts of their armor aside.

The invaders had a supply wagon with them as well. It wasn't horse drawn, though: men powered it, seated on six bicycles bolted into a frame. Scrawny men clothed in rags, whose feet were chained to the pedals of their machines.

Now, are these the Good Guys, or the Bad Guys? she thought grimly. Nice to know your first impression isn 't mistaken. Cernunnos, Lord of the Gates of the Underworld, make ready!

The crossbowmen formed up in a double line and began walking towards the Sutterdown position; they moved in open order, leaving gaps for the second rank to shoot through. Archers and crossbows opened up on them as they came within a hundred yards, but they ignored them- and ignored the man of theirs who fell kicking with a bolt in his thigh, except that they shuffled their ranks to close up the empty space.

At eighty yards they stopped with a single long shout. The first rank leveled their crossbows and fired, a harsh unmusical snapping of strings and whistle of bolts; then they dropped the forward ends of their weapons to the ground, unshipped the cranks at their belt, hooked them to cord and butt and rewound.

The second rank fired as they reloaded; then the first raised their weapons again, steady and methodical:

They'll keep shooting until the militia are badly shaken, she thought.

Behind them the full-armored fighters were shouting and slapping their weapons on their shields, waiting their turn.

Then the heavies will go in. Morrigan witness, nobody really knows how to fight this way. A hundred Romans or Normans could wipe the floor with the lot of us. But the Protector's bunch are a little less ignorant than most.

"But perhaps not so wise as they supposed," she murmured to herself, and whistled softly in signal.

The deep throbbing note of the drum echoed out across the empty fields, seeming to quiver in the hot still air, fading into distance. The noise from the road dropped away; the crossbowmen halted their mechanical rhythm of aiming and firing, looking over their shoulders. So did the heavy infantry preparing to charge.

It was the sound of a four-foot Lamberg drum, beaten two-handed with split canes; the instrument her Scots ancestors had employed to shatter the spirit of their enemies. She had only one here, rather than massed ranks, but the sound rippled up her spine and seemed to jolt in her skull.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM "And now for the second great instrument of Celtic psychological warfare," she muttered.

Her voice sounded distant and muffled in her own ears, as if the part of her mind that dealt with rational thought and speech was withdrawing from the waking world.

Dorothy's bagpipes started then. It wasn't the mannered, cultured version you could hear on most CDs before the Change, or at a festival in Edinburgh. This was a raw eerie wailing; the same music the old Gaels had used to lash themselves into frenzy, until they ran heedless into battle, stark naked and shrieking and sheerly mad.

That too played along her skin; yet the anger that followed was not hot, but cold: as if a wind blew through her from a place of ice and bones, sweeping away all that was human and leaving only incarnate Purpose.

Six months ago, what had these men before her been? Criminals? Perhaps; or perhaps auto mechanics and computer salesmen and clerks.

But now they come to kill, to rape and steal and destroy, to starve our children and take the works of our hands and the Goddess' blessings and drive us out on the road to die or turn cannibal.

Her voice was a whisper; cold and small in her own ears:

"In the name of the babe beneath my heart, I curse you. And Your curse upon them: you Dread Lord, wild huntsman; you Dark Goddess, raven-winged and strong! Come to me, in power and in wrath! May Anwyn take them, and ill may be the house to which You lead them!"

The rage was enormous, beyond all bearing; her hand scrabbled at the catch of her cloak as if it choked her. She cast it off and rose, ignoring Sam Aylward's cry-this wasn't in the plan. She ignored his second cry, as well, of stark terror when he saw her face: turned bone-white, white as the rim all about her staring eyes. The pupils expanded to swallow all else, depthless pools of night. Teeth showed bright beneath lips drawn back in a she-wolf's killing grin.

When she shouted the sound was huge, loud enough to strain even her trained singer's throat, loud enough to shock the drummer and piper into silence for a moment:

"Scathach!"

Even her coveners recoiled in horror, as she invoked the Dark Goddess in Her most terrible form.

Scathach, the Devouring Shadow.

She Who Brings Fear.

Shrieking it, standing with feet planted wide apart, her red hair bristling like the crest of a fox at bay, bow in one hand and arrow in the other as her spread arms reached skyward and completed the double

"Scathach!"

Eyes turned in her direction from all across the battlefield-in-the-making.

"Scathach! As they have wrought, so it shall be returned to them, threefold!"

She put the arrow through the ledge of her bow's riser and drew, drew until the stave creaked and the kiss-ring on the string touched her lips. When she released it was into the air without aiming, but she knew where the shaft would fall.

It came whistling down out of the sun, and the banner-bearer of the enemy had barely time to look up before the chisel-headed bodkin point sank into his face and he fell, the black flag toppling to cover him as he struck the pavement.

" SCATHACH! They are Yours!"

Her hand stripped another arrow from her quiver; and all along the woodland edge the Mackenzies shed their war cloaks and stood, longbows in their hands.

Few of them were really masters of their weapons as yet, but the target was massed and stationary and nowhere more than fifty yards away. They had all shot at marks further than that for an hour or more most days since the Change, under Sam Aylward's merciless tuition, and everyone here could draw a bow of fifty pounds weight or better.

Now the strings began to snap against the bracers, and the gray-feathered arrows flickered across the weed-grown field. Cloven air whistled under a hail of steel points and cedarwood. Juniper's was among the lightest bowstaves, but it seemed she could not miss and that two more shafts were in the air before her first had struck.

Then she reached over her right shoulder and her hand grasped at emptiness. There had been forty-five arrows in the leather cylinder on her back, and as many in every other quiver. Near two thousand shafts had flown, in the brief minutes while the Protector's soldiers wavered between the Sutterdown men before them and the clan's warriors to their left. Those who tried to charge the line of archers along the woods simply made better targets of themselves, attracting the eye as they came running into the teeth of the Mackenzie arrow-storm.

Many of those shafts had missed, and stood upright in earth or broken on asphalt; many were turned by shields or armor. Still horror wailed and crawled and writhed across the ground, and death lay still with the arrows still quivering.