"Keep paddling!"
The next volley would have them bracketed. Men were clustered at the rail of the big schooner ahead of them; then they stood back from around some piece of equipment that crouched there.
TUNNNG!
It was a deep metallic sound, like a huge saw blade being wobbled between the hands of a giant. Something went by overhead, moving in a blurred streak faster than an arrow. His head swiveled involuntarily to follow it. The line of its flight bisected one of the rowers on the savages' boat, and his head went tumbling overboard while his body thrashed and spouted.
The sound was different this time, and the missile. A globe flew wobbling through the air, trailing smoke from a ring of tarred hemp. It went overhead as their eyes swiveled to track it, and then struck the surface and burst not far from the savages' prow. With a loud whoosh! the contents spread out on the water and roared into orange flame, trailing twists of black smoke into the bright summer air.
The improvised galley was a little over a hundred yards from the three fugitives, two hundred from the schooner. Both weapons looked as if they could shoot considerably farther than that, and the savages seemed to realize it. There was a brief squabble, and one of them pushed the chief aside from the tiller; the dead oarsman's body was tumbled overside, and an archer flung himself into the vacant position. One side of oars backed water, the other plunged theirs deep and heaved, and the new steersman threw his weight into the effort as well. The boat turned in its own length and began to flee south, the blades of the oars beating froth from the water.
And the chief stayed on his knees, staring at his escaping enemies, both fists clenched and shaking as he screamed a curse; the voice was thin with distance, but Nigel could hear sobs in it as well.
Beside him, Hordle had turned his canoe and come up precariously on one knee. His great yellow bow bent into a perfect arc as he aimed :
"No!" Nigel called.
The archer looked at him incredulously. "Sir, I swear I could put one-"
"No, Sergeant. Let him go." At the wide-eyed question in the other's eyes, he answered, "We took his son."
Chapter Six
Larsdalen, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 21st, 2007 AD-Change Year Nine
"Hakkaa paalle!"
Mike Havel screamed the ancient war cry of his ancestors as he pounced-or the war cry of about half of them, if you subtracted the Norwegians, Swedes and Anishinabe-Ojibwa from the Finns. The backsword blurred in a glittering arc, a running cut that started with the point forward, made a wide looping flourish around the head and slammed down with the advancing foot. It was a very powerful attack, but a bit slow.
Unless you had the strength and reflexes to do it very, very fast :
Crack-tinnng!
The surface of his opponent's targe was there, precisely sloped to shed the steel with minimum transfer of force- which didn't mean no transfer; the armored figure went back a quick sliding step to avoid being rocked off balance. A weapon just like his licked out in a economical underarm stab; he beat the blade aside with his own, flicking the parry from the wrist and then a double cut to both sides of the neck. Backswords were about a yard long, single-edged with a basket hilt to guard the hand, suited alike to a swift thrust or a solid smashing cut.
"Hakkaa paalle!" he shouted again, driving his opponent back ten feet in three seconds, the point darting at knee and sword arm and neck.
"Hakkaa paalle!"
That barking shriek meant "Hack them down!" and the Outfit had copied it from him. Four centuries ago the same war cry had rung out behind the banners of Gustav Adolf, the Lion of the North, on battlefields from the Baltic to the Danube, from Russia to France. So had the Church's special prayer: From the terrible Finns, good Lord deliver us! Now the Bearkillers had made it as dreaded in post-Change Oregon as it had been when the Suomi swarmed out of their forests to lay half of Europe in ashes.
The two fighters were toe-to-toe, moving in a complex dance of movement too blurring fast for an observer to follow unless they were already expert themselves-a crashing skirling tingggg of steel on steel and thwack of sword on shield and the occasional duller sound of a blade making contact with armor.
At last he locked the other's sword with his, hilt-to-hilt. For a moment they strove, legs churning like stags; then he got room for a buffeting slam with his shield. The other armored figure went down with a crash, and he slid forward catlike to present the tip of his sword before her face.
"OK, you're still getting better," Pamela Larsson-nee Arnstein-gasped. "I admit it."
"Nowhere to go but up," Havel replied. "You're the one who did this shit before the Change, step-mom-in-law."
She shoulder-rolled back to her feet. He was panting too, in a controlled fashion, lungs working like bellows. He'd been drilling hard for hours before he started a round of practice bouts; the Bearkillers usually did, on the assumption that you weren't going to be lily-fresh when the manure hit the winnowing fan. And actually fighting in this Renaissance cut-and-thrust style with fifty pounds of gear on you was brutal physical labor, worse than cracking rocks with a sledgehammer, plus with an opponent at Pam's level you had to go to ten-tenths of capacity every second. The slightest holding back meant defeat.
"Besides which, I'm starting to slow down a bit," Pamela said. "Hell, I'm forty-one now, Mike, and it was a real struggle getting back into shape after the last baby. I don't think I've got much left to teach you."
Signe Larsson looked over from where she'd been practicing lunges at a leather target hanging from a timber frame, with an apprentice pulling on a rope to make it swing unpredictably. The point went home with a hard crack every time, aimed at a spot six inches behind the man-shaped rawhide cutout.
"You still beat me most matches, Pam. Mind you, I've had three babies to your pair since the Change," she said. "Granted, the twins were a twofer time-wise, but the principle's the same."
"You're twenty-seven," Pamela said. "You recover faster. I'll keep sparring with you-unlike your maniac of a husband, you're not a third again heavier than me and strong enough to bend horseshoes with your hands. Whacking great bruises distract you from the finer points of swordplay. Also childbirth's easier on you because you've got better hips for it than I do."
"You calling me wide-assed, Oh Wicked Stepmother?"
"Compared to my skinny backside and snake hips, you've got the Great Butt of China," Pamela said, grinning as she pulled off her practice helmet. "Or Sweden."
"There's Astrid, though: " Signe said, with a sly smile. "She doesn't mind sparring with Mike."
"Your younger sister is a goddamned mutant," Pam grumbled. "Some rogue virus infected her with nonhuman DNA."
The helm had a mask of thin steel rods across the face, rather than the simple nasal bar of combat gear. The face beneath it was slender like the woman's long whipcord body, olive-skinned, with a beak of a nose and large hazel eyes; sweat plastered a lock of dark brown hair with russet highlights to her forehead.
Mike Havel let one of the apprentices help him out of his armor-he could do it himself, but it was slow and awkward; putting it on was much easier, since gravity helped there. Then he stripped off the sopping gambeson and leaned back on a bench with his back against a rough board wall, a towel around his neck and a mug of cold water in one hand, feeling the heat come off him in the cool damp air like a horse steaming after a hard ride. He'd built what Pam called the Salle d'Armes in the same style as a timber-frame barn, to give the maximum open space; the high roof of the giant building was watertight, but the plank walls let in a lot of light and weather, and the floor was packed dirt-this was where the garrison and apprentices did a lot of their advanced-skill training in winter.