Short fiction complete, p.299
Short Fiction Complete, page 299
“Now!” Arthur bellowed.
With every atom of strength in me, I ran down into the ditch, lugging the trunk with me. The other squires followed my lead, although two more of them went down with arrows through their bodies.
We rammed the tree trunk against the embankment. Most of the squires ducked under it for protection as the knights clambered atop it and rushed straight across the ditch to the top of the embankment. I drew my sword and climbed up the sloping earthwork to be with Arthur.
Lancelot dashed forward, straight onto the crest of the embankment, where the barbarian warriors waited with their axes and swords. Arthur was rushing up behind him. He caught an axe thrust on his shield and took off the arm of the axe-wielder with a stroke from Excalibur. The man shrieked and fountained blood.
I dove in beside him as the other knights rushed into the fight, slashing and killing with the maddened fury that rises when blood begins to flow. Sir Emrys took a spear in his gut but sliced out his killer’s throat before he died. The knights were forming a wedge of steel, slowly pushing the barbarians back, down the rear slope of their embankment. We were outnumbered by perhaps a hundred to one, but the knights-protected by their chain mail and shields-were weaving a web of death with their dripping swords.
Lancelot pushed deeper into the swarming mass of barbarian warriors, his sword a blur, men screaming and stumbling as he stroked the life out of them. Arthur struggled to keep up with him, wielding Excalibur like a bloody buzz saw that took off arms, heads, split bare-chested warriors from shoulder to navel.
I tried to stay close behind Arthur, but he and Lancelot were driving deeper into the mass of roaring, screaming warriors and I had my hands full keeping barbarians off their backs. More and more of them came swarming up the embankment, eager to get to the handful of knights. The whole barbarian army seemed to be surging toward us.
Lancelot’s squire went down, an axe buried in his skull, and Arthur stumbled over the body.
I saw it all in agonizing slow-motion: Arthur falling forward, thrusting his shield out in front of him to support himself as he went down. A huge barbarian, blond braids flying as he swung his axe in a mighty two-handed chop at Arthur’s unprotected back. Lancelot nor more than three feet away, but with his back turned to Arthur, hacking other barbarians to pieces. And me, separated from Arthur now by a good five yards, with half a dozen bloodied fighters between us.
“Arthur!” I screamed, driving through a flailing wall of fighting men.
Lancelot turned at the sound of my shout. Without an instant’s hesitation he swung his shield toward the descending axe. I cut down two men trying to stand before me and pushed on toward Arthur, knowing I could not get to him in time. Lancelot caught the axeman’s forearm with the edge of his shield, knocking the blow away from Arthur. His axe thudded harmlessly into the ground as Lancelot split his skull, helmet and all, with a tremendous slash of his sword.
Arthur got to one knee as I reached him. A spearman tried to get Arthur, but I yanked the spear out of his hands and drove my sword into his belly.
At the top of the earthwork we could see the entire mass of the barbarian army, hundreds of them rushing up the dirt slope to get at us, eager to wipe out our small force of knights and squires. There were far too many of them for us to have any hope of surviving.
It was like fighting against a tidal wave. We stood at the crest of the rampart and fought for what seemed like hours. No matter how many we killed, more warriors charged up the slope at us. Knights and squires went down as the barbarians shrieked their battle cries and surged up at us with their spears and axes and swords.
We were only a handful to begin with. Our numbers were being whittled away. We slew three, four, seven men for every one we lost. But for every barbarian who went down, ten more charged up the earthen ramp at us. It was only a matter of time before we all were killed, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, three hundred men against an army. And we were far fewer than three hundred.
Then it happened. A bellowing roar came up from the woods on both sides of the road as the bulk of Arthur’s knights and footmen charged out from the trees into the flanks of the surging torrent of barbarians. The knights were afoot, but I recognized them by the emblems on their shields: Sir Ector’s red badger, young Tristram’s Celtic cross, and the black hawk of Sir Bors, who was hacking through the surprised barbarians like the angel of death himself.
All through history, troops that have withstood withering frontal assaults have broken and run when assailed from their flank or rear. Humans are made to look directly ahead; attacks from the side or from behind unnerve even the most battle-hardened soldiers.
Suddenly assaulted on both flanks, the barbarians broke and tried to run. They knew that a few miles down the Roman road was another defensive ditch, another entrenchment that could shelter them from these sword-wielding Celtic knights who seemed to be pouring out of the woods.
They still outnumbered us greatly, but they were shattered by surprise and sudden fear. From the top of the earthen rampart I saw them break and flee down the road.
But not far. Galloping up the road toward us came the rest of Arthur’s knights, on their charging steeds, Gawain in the lead. They lowered their spears and smashed into the broken, disheartened barbarians.
It was soon finished. The paving stones were littered with bodies, slick with blood. A few of the barbarians had managed to slip away through the woods, but very few. The heart of their army lay dead and dying at the feet of Arthur’s victorious men.
Victorious, but battered. Sir Bors was limping badly, his hip bleeding from an axe blow. Most of the other knights who had fought on foot were also wounded. To my surprise I found that I had taken a spear thrust in my side. I hadn’t noticed it in the heat of battle. Now I automatically clamped down the blood vessels to stop the bleeding and lowered the pain signals along my nerves to a tolerable level.
I smiled tiredly as I watched the men patching each other’s wounds. No need to bind my side; I could control my body well enough, and accelerated healing processes had been built into me.
Arthur slumped down beside me, resting his back against a tree, looking weary and grim. He was nicked here and there. Blood trickled from a slice along his right forearm.
“It’s only a scratch,” he said, when he noticed me staring at the wound.
Lancelot came up, all brightness and zeal. He was totally unharmed, untouched, his tunic not even muddied. Only the dents in his shield revealed that he had been in battle.
He squatted down beside Arthur. “We can gallop down the road and catch the few who got away.”
Arthur shook his head.
“Why not?” Lancelot asked, surprised. He almost looked hurt. “It’s not much past noon. We have plenty of time to dispatch them.”
“They have another entrenchment up the road,” Arthur said. “And still another after that.”
That dimmed Lancelot’s enthusiasm for less than a second. “What of it? We took this one, didn’t we? We made great slaughter of them! Let’s go on!”
“No,” Arthur said, his voice low. “The cost was too high.”
Arthur reached out and put a hand on Lancelot’s shoulder. “We have gutted their army. They won’t be raiding our villages and farmsteads now. We’ve taught them a lesson that they will remember for a long time.”
“But we haven’t driven them into the sea!”
“No, and we’re not going to. Not now. We’ve lost too many men. We need to rest a bit and recruit more men. Then we move north against the Jutes.”
Lancelot looked shocked. “And leave the Angles in their villages? Without driving them into the sea?”
“We don’t have the strength to drive them into the sea. Not yet.”
Shaking his head in disappointment, Lancelot murmured, “That’s not the path to glory, my lord. Leaving them chastened isn’t the same as a glorious victory.”
With a tired smile, Arthur said, “I’m not interested in glory, my young friend. I’m interested in power.”
It was clear that Lancelot did not understand, but I thought I did. The Angles would huddle behind their defensive earthworks and stay in their villages, the cream of their manhood killed. It would be a long time before they ventured out again to raid Celtic farms and settlements. Arthur would use that time to draw new recruits to his army, to march north and defeat the Jutes there, to drive the Scots back behind Hadrian’s Wall and secure the northern kingdoms.
He would win great power for Ambrosius Aurelianus, making the old man a true High King among the Celts. And perhaps, I thought, Arthur himself would in the end become the High King. He was certainly showing that he understood the workings of power.
Aten wanted him dead, but it seemed to me that Arthur was actually on his way to uniting the fractious Celts. Maybe he would one day truly drive the barbarian invaders out of Britain. I vowed anew to help him all I could.
Then I thought of Lancelot, so eager for glory. Aten had meant for Lancelot to lead Arthur to his death in the battle. Instead, Lancelot had saved Arthur’s life. I felt glad about that.
Yet I thought I heard, in the far recesses of my mind, Aten’s cynical laughter. Lancelot will still be the agent of Arthur’s death, the Golden One seemed to be saying. Wait and see. Wait and see.
2001
The Precipice
When trouble comes on more suddenly than you expect, there are two basic ways to react. . . .
Part I of IV
MEMPHIS
“Jesus,” the pilot kept murmuring. “Jesus, Jesus.”
The helicopter was racing north, Sucking, jolting between the shattered land below and the thick dark gray clouds scudding just above, trying to follow Interstate 55 from the Memphis International Airport to what was left of the devastated city.
You could not see the highway; it was carpeted from horizon to horizon with refugees, bumper to bumper traffic inching along, an unending stream of cars, trucks, vans, buses, people on foot swarming like ants, trudging painfully along the shoulders of the road in the driving, soaking rain, women pushing baby carriages, men and boys hauling carts piled high with whatever they could salvage from their homes. Flood water was lapping along the shoulder embankment, rising, still rising, reaching for the poor miserable people as they fled their homes, their hopes, their world in a desperate attempt to escape the rising waters.
Dan Randolph felt the straps of his safety harness cutting into his shoulders as he stared grimly out the window from his seat behind the two pilots. His head throbbed painfully and the filter plugs in his nostrils were hurting again. He barely noticed the copter’s buffeting and jouncing in the choppy wind as he watched the swollen tide of refugees crawling sluggishly along the highway. It’s like a war zone, Dan thought. Except that the enemy is Mother Nature. The flooding was bad enough, but the earthquake broke their backs.
Dan put the electronically boosted binoculars to his eyes once again, searching, scanning the miserable, soaking-wet throng below for one face, one individual, the one woman he had come to save. It was impossible. There must be half a million people down there, he thought. More. Finding her will take a miracle.
The chopper bounced and slewed wildly in a sudden gust of wind, banging the binoculars painfully against Dan’s brow. He started to yell something to the pilot, then realized that they had run into another blustery squall. Fat, pounding raindrops splattered thickly against the copter’s windows, cutting Dan’s vision down almost to nothing.
The pilot slid back the transparent sanitary partition that isolated Dan’s compartment. Dan suppressed an angry urge to slam it back. What good are sterile barriers if you open them to the outside air?
“We’ve got to turn back, sir,” the pilot yelled over the thrumming thunder of the engines.
“No!” Dan shouted. “Not till we find her!”
Half turning in his seat to face Dan, the pilot jabbed a finger toward his spattered windscreen. “Mr. Randolph, you can fire me when we land, but I ain’t going to fly through that.”
Looking past the flapping windscreen wipers, Dan saw four deadly slim dark funnels writhing across the other side of the swollen Mississippi, dust and debris flying wherever they touched the ground. They looked like coiling, squirming snakes thrashing across the ground, smashing everything they touched: buildings exploding, trees uprooted, autos tossed into the air like dry leaves, homes shattered into splinters, RV parks, housing developments, shopping malls all destroyed at the flick of the twisters’ pitiless, mindless malevolence, blasted as completely and ruthlessly as if they had been struck by an enemy missile attack.
The enemy is Mother Nature, Dan repeated silently, numbly, as he stared at the advancing tornadoes. There was nothing he could do about them and he knew it. They couldn’t be bought, bribed, flattered, seduced, or threatened into obedience. For the first time since he’d been a child, Daniel Hamilton Randolph felt totally powerless.
As he locked the partition shut again and fumbled in his pockets for his antiseptic spray, the chopper swung away, heading back toward what was left of the international airport. The Tennessee National Guard had thrown a cordon around the grounds; the airport was the Memphis region’s last link with the rest of the country. The floods had knocked out electrical power, smashed bridges, covered roads with thick muddy brown water. Most of the city had been submerged for days.
Then came the earthquake. A solid nine on the Richter scale, so powerful that it flattened buildings from Nashville to Little Rock and as far north as St. Louis. New Orleans had already been underwater for years as the rising Gulf Of Mexico inexorably reclaimed its shoreline from Florida to Texas. The Mississippi was in flood all the way up to Cairo, and still rising.
Now, with communications out, millions homeless in the never-ending rains, aftershocks strong enough to tumble skyscrapers, Dan Randolph searched for the one person who meant something to him, the only woman he had ever loved.
He let the binoculars drop from his fingers and rested his head on the seat-back. It was hopeless. Finding Jane out there among all those other people—
The copilot had twisted around in his seat and was tapping on the clear plastic partition.
“What?” Dan yelled.
Instead of trying to outshout the engines’ roar through the partition, the copilot pointed to the earpiece of his helmet. Dan understood and picked up the headset they had given him from where he’d dumped it on the floor. He had sprayed it when they’d first handed it to him, but now he doused it again with the antiseptic.
As he clamped it over his head, he heard the metallic, static-streaked voice of a news reporter saying, “. . . definitely identified as Jane Scanwell. The former President was found, by a strange twist of fate, on President’s Island, where she was apparently attempting to help a family of refugees escape the rising Mississippi waters. Their boat apparently capsized and was swept downstream, but snagged on treetops on the island.
“Jane Scanwell, the fifty-second President of the United States, died trying to save others from the ravages of flood and earthquake here in what remains of Memphis, Tennessee.”
LA GUAIRA
It was raining in Venezuela, too, when Dan Randolph finally got back to his headquarters. Another hurricane was tearing through the Caribbean, lashing Barbados and the Windward Islands, dumping twenty-five centimeters of rain on the island of La Guaira and Caracas, on the mainland, with more to come.
Dan sat behind his big, bare desk, still wearing the rumpled slacks and pullover that he had travelled in from the States. His office smelled musty, mildewed from the incessant rain despite its laboring climate-control system. He wasn’t wearing the protective nose plugs; the air in his office was routinely filtered and run past intense ultraviolet lamps.
Leaning back into the softly yielding caramel brown leather of his swivel chair, Dan gazed out at the windswept launch complex. The rockets had been towed back into the assembly buildings. In this storm they could not dare to launch even the sturdy, reliable Clipperships. The launch towers were visibly shaking in the gale-force wind, lashed by horizontal sheets of rain; roofs had already been peeled off some of the smaller buildings. Beyond the launch towers, the sea was a wild madhouse of frothing whitecapped waves. The wind howled like a beast of prey, rattling even the thick double-paned windows of Randolph’s office.
Third storm to hit us and it’s not even the Fourth of July yet. Business isn’t lousy enough, we’ve got these doubledamned hurricanes to deal with. At this rate I’ll be broke by Labor Day.
We’re losing, Dan thought. We’re in a war and we’re losing it. Hell, we’ve already lost it. What’s the sense of pretending otherwise?
The dampness made him ache deep in his bones, an arthritic-like reminder of his age and the dose of radiation sickness he’d contracted years earlier. I ought to get back to Selene, he told himself. A man with a broken-down immune system shouldn’t stay on Earth if he doesn’t have to.
Yet for hours he simply sat there, staring out at the pounding storm, seeing only the face of Jane Scanwell, remembering the sound of her voice, the touch of her fingers, the soft silkiness of her skin, the scent of her, the way she brightened a room, they way she had filled his life even though they were never really together, not more than a few quick hours now and then before they fell into bitter argument. There was so much separating them. After she had left the White House, they had managed to spend a couple of days together on a tropical atoll. Even that had ended in a quarrel.
But for once they had seen things the same way, had the same goal, fought the same fight on the same side. The greenhouse cliff meant war, a war pitting humankind’s global civilization against the blind forces of nature. Jane understood that as well as Dan did. They were going to fight this war together.
And it killed her.
Should I go on? Dan asked himself. What’s the use of it? What’s the sense of it? He wanted to cry, but the tears would not come.
