That half-giggle turned to a shout of alarm as she turned. Something was diving out of the sun that had just cleared the horizon, silent and very swift.
“Yrch!” someone shouted. “Enemy!”
“Errrk!” Mary called; or it might have been Ritva talking, she couldn’t tell. “No shit!”
The glider was like a flying tadpole with long slender wings, a sleek melted-looking metal shape out of the pre-Change world, gleaming polished metal beneath the plastic bubble of the pilot’s canopy. A red-and-white shark’s mouth was painted below the nose, and USAF and a star on the wings. Something tumbled down from it…
Uncle Alleyne was looking over his shoulder while he stood at the tiller, feet braced apart on the tiny plank of decking beneath him.
“Flank speed!” he shouted.
The rowers moved up to sprint pace, throwing themselves forward and back with gasping effort. The cylinder came closer and closer, something like a big elongated pill, tumbling around its axis and trailing a very faint line of smoke.
Uh-oh, Mary thought. Napalm.
She’d had it shot at her from catapults and seen it pumped from flamethrowers, and it was very nasty indeed. Never dropped on her head from the air before, though…
“Now!” Alleyne snarled, and swung the tiller far over.
The slender form of the little galley heeled. Mary’s eyes went wide as a thin sheet of water began to curl over the side. There was a shout as everyone threw themselves the other way, herself included, leaning overboard as far as she could with her boots braced and hands locked on the bulwark and the frame that supported one of the oars and the cold water of the Columbia running just under her straining back. The galley fell back, rocking onto an even keel, and she slid forward amid a clatter of gear and thud of people hitting people and things and a clanking rattle as the sweeps tangled like a heap of jackstraws.
“Row! Row!” Alleyne barked.
His handsome aquiline face looked wholly alive for the first time since he’d come back from the mission to Boise. Not good, but alive.
A gout of flame rose far too close on the starboard, as the napalm spread itself over the still surface of the river. The oarsmen flung themselves back into their seats and got going; the glider went by overhead-her mind automatically estimated that it was at least twice long bowshot up and moving faster than a galloping horse-and skimmed over towards the bank of the river. Her head swiveled to follow it, hoping desperately that it would drop into the water like a landing goose or crumple in the steep rock that rose from it.
Instead it seemed to strike something invisible in the air, turning and banking and rising upward as if thrust by a hand. It must be updrafts along the cliffs. She’d flown gliders herself, but only a few times for sport in a double-seat model, off a cliff and then gently down. The pilot attacking them must be an artist at reading the invisible currents of the air.
“Well, shit,” she said, spitting out blood from where her teeth had cut the inside of her mouth.
For emphasis, she repeated it in English, with embellishments:
“Well, shit on toast!”
“Double damn!” Ritva agreed.
“Bother!” Mary finished.
“Where the Utumno are our gliders?” someone shouted.
“Shut up and row, you son-of-a-she-warg!” the man behind him snarled.
The oars were moving in unison again. The other galley was a hundred yards ahead of them, rippling through the water like a centipede. The glider rose until the low sun in the east sparkled on its canopy, breaking out of the relative gloom of the river and its girdling cliffs, then turned like a stooping hawk.
“It will be coming in lower this time,” Alleyne said, his voice crisp and steady.
To aim better, Mary thought. And it was far too close the last time. That one would have landed right on us if Alleyne hadn’t turned us out of it.
Alleyne went on in the same businesslike tone: “And he’s coming head-on. Get ready to shoot, it’s a no-deflection aiming point. Oarsmen, listen for the word of command.”
There were twenty at the oars and six who weren’t, not counting Uncle Alleyne with his hands full of tiller or the prisoner. Mary reached over her shoulder and pulled the recurve out from the harp-shaped scabbard that rode between her back and the quiver, then flipped out a bodkin-pointed arrow and set it through the cutout in the curly-maple riser and on the string.
Dave Woburn slumped down a little more into the curve of the bow, giving them a clear shot. Which was strictly in accord with his parole, of course. He’d agreed not to hinder them. Plus, if they burned, so did he. Black smoke was still rising from the patch where the first canister had struck.
“Never did like those air force pukes,” he said and unexpectedly smiled at her. “Even when they weren’t trying to kill me. Friendly fire isn’t.”
Mary chuckled. Ritva did too, and then said:
“Ian, you get between us and a little forward, you’ve got a heavier draw.”
She looked over her shoulder; the Rangers who had their hands free were putting arrows to their strings as well.
“Just as heavy as yours, Hírvegil, and he’s just as good a shot too, so don’t crowd him.”
“Ego, mibo orch,” he muttered; he’d been very standoffish with Ian.
Which was rude, as was go kiss an orc, but then he had had a crush on Ritva even before the Quest. Or Mary. Or both. But he settled back a little into the crowded forepeak of the galley.
The Rangers can be awfully like any other village sometimes, she thought, making herself calm. There was the target and there was the bow and nothing else mattered. Nowhere to get away. I got used to moving on while we were on the Quest.
She’d talked to people in big cities with tens of thousands of people, and many of them thought life in places like a Dun of the Clan or a Ranger steading or a Bearkiller strategic hamlet or a Portlander manor was like one big, close happy family.
Family, yes, she thought. Close, yes. Happy, sometimes, but not necessarily. And if you get to quarreling with someone, you are so stuck with them anyway. Until I saw cities I never realized you could live any other way.
The glider had finished its banking turn, graceful and silent and frightening. Now it turned into a dot in the middle of a thread as it came at them nose-on, much clearer this time as it dove out of the fading purple of the western sky instead of the dawn. Aiming the bow was like breathing, since she’d been doing it nearly as long as she’d been walking; all she had to do was decide to do it.
But correct for the speed, she reminded herself. It’s getting faster and faster as it gets closer and closer and it’s already faster than anything you’ve ever shot at.
She took a long breath and let it out, then pulled in another. The string lifted off the ends of the staves as the recurve bent; the double-curve shape let her bend it into a deep C, the secret of drawing a long arrow from a bow only four feet long. The kiss-ring on the string touched the corner of her lip as the muscles in arms and shoulders and belly levered against the springy power of the laminated stave.
Ritva was calling the shot; she was a little better at estimating distances, now that they had three eyes between them.
“Wait…wait…now!”
Mary’s fingers rolled off the string. Whstp, and the surge of recoil that was always a surprise when you were doing it right. A little cloud of arrows lifted from the galley; the other one was too far ahead. The glider didn’t swerve, though Mary thought some of the arrows at least punched into the thin metal of its hull. The pilot was boring in regardless, determined to plant his last napalm canister where it would do the most harm.