S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

“At least I’m getting back in shape,” she said, in a more normal voice. “Sort of a drastic exercise program!”

“Let’s go,” he said, nodding grudging agreement. “Not much farther now.”

There was a groan and clank and rustle as everyone levered themselves to their feet. Rudi pushed himself up with the point of his shield-he hadn’t bothered to take his right arm out of the loop on the inside of the big teardrop construct of plywood and bullhide and metal when they paused to catch their breath. It was a twenty-pound nuisance, but you only had to look at the stubs of arrows in its surface to see why even full-armored men carried them.

They turned a corner. Corwin was almost all built post-Change, laid out in a manner that Rudi found rather attractive in its way, buildings grouped around small squares. Broader avenues divided the squares in turn; in the central zone they were lined with larger buildings, three or even four stories. Everyone kept a wary eye on them, but apparently the assault groups tasked with it were keeping the inmates busy. This street they’d just entered gave into the central, grander open space where the half-finished ziggurat bulk of the Temple rose in a mass of dark stone and scaffolding.

And it never will be finished, Rudi thought grimly.

They’d managed to overrun the labor camps before all of the slaves who’d been building it could be killed. He wasn’t altogether sure how much of a mercy that had been. Many of them were quite mad.

Gliders circled overhead, occasionally darting down to drop message containers with colorful pennants attached; there were a pair of tethered balloons north and south of the city with heliographs, and messengers on foot or horseback or on bicycles dashed about. Mostly it was a matter of small bands hammering their way forward, or even worse of men fighting and dying in the closed spaces of the underground warren, daggers and short-gripped spears and fists and feet and teeth in the dark.

Ahead was one last barricade, this one apparently mainly made of rough sacks filled with something lumpy-he guessed that it was potatoes, from the size. Hooves clattered behind him, and he looked around: it was a battery of three Bearkiller scorpions, medium fieldpieces each drawn by three pair of horses, with the snarling red bear’s head on the shields.

More surprisingly, Eric Larsson was with them at the head of a squad of Bearkiller A-listers in their plain good armor, a big blond man with a steel prosthetic where his left hand had been until a few years ago. The Bearkiller war-leader reined his horse in and looked at the barricade; an arrow shot from behind it sparked on the stone blocks of the road’s pavement not far in front. Knights of the Protector’s guard formed up before the leaders, one line kneeling and the other standing with their shields raised to form a wall of overlapping protection.

“It’s not a cataphract’s battle,” Eric said at Rudi’s raised eyebrows as he dismounted and his troops followed.

He turned reins bridle over to his military apprentice, who was also his son William, a tall youth of nearly eighteen with an arresting combination of skin on the cusp between light brown and very dark olive, midnight blue eyes and curling brown hair. Rudi nodded to the young man, who responded with a slight crisp inclination of the head and then stood in silent, focused readiness in the Bearkiller manner. His father went on:

“Hell, it’s more of a giant brawl, most of our A-listers are fighting dismounted. Good practice in being flexible. The Norrheimers are coming up, I pulled them out of reserve before they mutinied at being left out. Gotta be careful with those Asatruar types. They tend to start baying at the moon if you keep ’em from a fight. Something about the Nine Impulsive Vices or something like that. I just tune Signe out when she gets on about it.”

Rudi nodded; the words were only slightly in jest. Eric and his son both had crucifixes around their necks-he had become a Catholic when he married his half-Tejano wife Luanne just after the Change-but Signe’s branch of the family followed those Gods.

“Ah, excellent,” he said. “Bjarni and his band are good at this.”

“Yeah, he’s hell on wheels in a close-in fight, and no mistake, and so are all his merry band,” Eric said with complete seriousness.

Then he grinned; it made his face look younger than his forty-four years. When he leaned forward he whispered a little:

“As my sister could testify, especially about Bjarni.”

Rudi looked a question and he went on:

“Signe’s expecting and refuses to say who’s the other party. . to the very few who dare to ask, of which I was one. Only by letter, though. But just between me and thee, I strongly suspect. .”

Rudi chuckled; he wouldn’t have expected it, but he supposed she was still beneath the Moon. . his own mother had been older when she bore Fiorbhinn. Motherhood had never mellowed Signe before-she was as fierce as a she-wolf with her cubs-but one could hope.

The crews had been putting the scorpions into operation as they spoke, lifting the trails off the limbers and swiveling them around before splaying them open. Sledgehammers rang as they hammered spikes into the cracks between paving blocks to anchor it-the usual method of digging in the hinged spades at the ends of the trails wouldn’t do for absorbing the recoil here. A clanking tramp sounded behind, and the Norrheimers were there, with their standard at their head.

That banner had been that of Bjarni’s father, Eric the Strong. The flag had a stiffener jutting out from the top of the pole at right angles, and a curved outer edge bore bullion tassels. The rim of the cloth was black, the center white, and on it a stylized black raven-for the birds Thought and Memory who sat on the shoulders of Odhinn Father of Victories and whispered wisdom in his ears. On the bird’s breast was a double letter A, the outer strokes curved and the inner straight and parallel. The flag commemorated a band of pre-Change warriors Eric had fought with as well as his faith; he had borne it north with his followers and friends into what had once been Maine right after the Change, from which much had followed.

The redbeard had his four-foot axe over his shoulder; the outer edge had been hastily wiped so that a nick could be ground out and the edge redone, but the rest of it was thickly clotted. His followers came up behind him in a bristle of spears and swords and eyes glaring beneath nose-guarded conical helms, their big round shields making a wall. Their byrnies of chain or scale mail clinked as they moved.

“Awkward as hogs on ice are these Cutters, when they fight on foot,” the king of Norrheim said cheerfully. “Still, warm work.”

Rudi held out a hand, and he clasped wrists in the fashion of the folk of that far bleak land, and then both did the same with Eric.

“This may be our last battle together, blood brother,” Rudi said to Bjarni.

“Good. We’ve been doing a man’s work, but it’s time for us to go home.”

He looked admiringly as the Bearkiller crew worked the levers of the hydraulic pump that cocked their weapon and loaded a globe of cast steel into the trough. His shrewd blue eyes took in the barricade. Rudi could guess why he grinned; if there was one thing someone from Norrheim-what had once been northern Maine-was going to recognize at first glance, it was a sack of a certain root vegetable. He called over his shoulder to his followers:

“They want us to peel their potatoes for them! Then we’ll have meat with the mashed, boiled and fried!”

A roar of hoarse laughter went up; that was just the sort of jest to tickle a Norrheimer funny bone. Rudi glanced around, nodded crisply, and spoke:

“Now!”