This was bad, but a wild hope was born in me. Maybe foraging and fighting were two separated things in a Half-Ax tally. Maybe this muster would just let us go by, having no orders to block our passage.
Then they knelt down to make a smaller target, and in the same movement drew their bows and let fly. Arrows flicked by us on all sides – and then came the hollow boom of some shot landing. They had tech.
We had the advantage in number, but our position was poor. The Half-Ax tally were above us, looking straight down into the cut. The far bank gave us a little cover for now, but the next turn of the river would deliver us up to their fire with no protection at all.
“Dead stop,” I told Challenger.
I jumped up to tell Catrin what was what, but she was already peering in at me from the roof of the turret. “We got to take these down before we go any further,” I shouted. “Can Fer—?”
“Fer’s only got the one bolt left. I’m going to bid the runners take cover behind them rocks we just passed. You go on in Challenger and drive those bastards off the hill. I know you can’t fight them, but if you run straight at them they’ve got to move or else be crushed. And when they move, we’ll catch them in a crossfire.”
It was a good plan. As soon as Catrin and the rest slipped down off Challenger’s flank, I told Elaine to heel hard and come up from the river bed onto the hillside.
“Sir, yes, sir!” she said. “Let’s go pick some daisies.”
The Half-Ax fighters saw us coming and broke before us, but they did it with the same carefulness and order they gave to everything. They didn’t scatter but divided into two groups, still firing on us as they drew back. So then we had to choose which ones to follow, and as soon as we did they divided again. I saw that we wouldn’t shift them off the hillside so easily. Even faced with a battle wagon from the world that was lost, they didn’t flinch or falter.
Of a sudden, something hit our side and exploded, making Challenger rock and lean like a hen coop in a storm wind. “One of them has grenades,” Elaine said.
“Challenger, show me!”
The view in the magic mirror broke in two again, one half of it showing the way ahead and the other a close-up of one man among the Half-Ax muster. He was holding a thing like a slug of clinker you might use for a doorstop, and as I looked he threw it.
This time, the explosion was right in front of us, which was better. We shook a little, but we didn’t rock from side to side and it didn’t seem like we’d taken much damage.
“Run on him,” I told Challenger. “Run him down.”
The man was taking another one of those slugs out of his belt, where there were a whole row of them, and then he was wrestling with it as if it wouldn’t do what he wanted it to. The soldiers around him scattered, but he was taken up with his tech.
In Challenger’s mirror, where he was bigger than life, I saw the moment when he looked up at last and saw us bearing down on him. He knew it was his death, and he knew it would not be a good one, but he didn’t cry out and he didn’t try to run. His face was calm. He looked a little like Haijon. He had the same blue eyes anyway, and the same yellow hair.
He used the last moment of his life to pull something loose from the slug – a piece of string or a loop of wire. He stood and faced us, with the slug in one hand and the wire in the other. The last thing I saw as we rolled over him was a ring he wore in a braid of his long hair, that caught the sun and flashed gold as he fell down under Challenger’s wheels. It looked like the sort of thing a lover might have given him. A token to keep him safe in the fight, or just to keep his thoughts on home.
The explosion hit us as we turned and caught us at a bad angle. For a second, as we pitched, I thought Challenger would be lifted off the hillside and come down on his back like a tortoise.
That didn’t happen. But as the sound of the blast died down, I heard a tearing and a rending of metal, a high sound almost like a scream. We slowed and stopped as some of the smoke from outside drifted down at last into the cockpit.
“We got to keep moving!” I said, not realising.
“We cannot,” Challenger said. “My left tread has taken heavy damage. I’m immobilised.”
“Does immobilised mean—?”
“It means we’re not going anywhere until the tread’s fixed,” Elaine said. “Can’t move, can’t fight. We’re deep-fat fried.”
I looked in the mirror. The Half-Ax fighters were slowing as they saw we weren’t coming on any more. Then they backed away again as the turret swivelled from left to right and back.
“Just traversing the gun,” Elaine said. “Can’t hurt to show our teeth, even if we can’t bite.”
It would work for a little while. These people had trained with tech, so they knew what a gun as big as Challenger’s could do to them. But they would realise quicker than anyone that if we were not firing on them it was most likely because we couldn’t.
“Show me the river bed,” I said.
The magic mirror shifted. I saw that our people had spread themselves out among the rocks of the cut bank, making themselves as difficult a target as they could. Catrin was playing her firethrower over the nearest trees, and some were already alight. The smoke would give them some cover from Half-Ax fire, but if she thought it would stop Berrobis’s soldiers in their advance I could already see she was mistaken. They were picking their way carefully through the forest that still hadn’t stirred from its sleep in the watery light – circling to the west, where Catrin didn’t dare to go for fear of being fired on from the hillside above. On the other side of the hill, some of them had already crossed the river out of reach of our arrows and were taking up positions in the long grass and scrub in case our column tried to retreat.
We had failed.
We were surrounded.
All we could do now was to fight until we fell.
Koli
66
I packed myself a bundle that same night after Cup and Ursala was asleep. I didn’t take too much, just some bread and dried meat, a water skin and a spare knife. I meant to be away before anyone knowed I was gone, and back again before they started worrying. Or else the forest would take me and I wouldn’t come back at all, but in any case I felt like I had got to try.
I had asked Monono to wake me when the sun was just under the horizon. In the time before Sword of Albion she would of done it by playing me a song. Now she done it by bumping the drone against my shoulder until I stirred. She didn’t say anything. In the narrow space of the cab, however soft she spoke it would of sounded loud.
I slipped out of the cab and closed it softly behind me, picking up my bundle from where I’d left it tied to one of the crawler’s many rungs and rails. I climbed down the side of the wagon as quietly as I could, watching where I put my feet.
When I got to the bottom, I found Cup waiting for me, along with two of the drudges. She had a bow slung on her back and a knife and a sword at her belt.
“I was just…” I said. “I thought I’d…”
“You was going to Mythen Rood,” Cup said. “Monono already told me.” She slapped the side of the nearer drudge. “You’ll make better time if you ride. And if I ride with you then you’ll actually get there. Alive.”