Kingdom River Page 30

  Though it had seemed to Martha the perfect time for it....

  The battle had been going on — the Queen had been assured by Captain Dearborn — for a day and a night, as reported by little ice-boats hissing along fast as birds. But a battle scattered over miles and miles of river ice, so only faint formations — looking, it seemed to Martha, like spilled ground pepper on a glittering field — appeared and disappeared, and left no trace. Except once, when the Mischief, rumbling along fast as a fast horse could gallop, its great skates leaving plumes of ice-powder behind, sliced its way over sheets of frozen blood and frosted slaughtered Kipchak men and horses that crunched and thumped beneath the ship's blades as its tons sailed over them.

  "Well done!" the Queen had shouted, and danced on the narrow poop. She'd hit Captain Dearborn on the arm with her fist. "Well fucking done!" as if the Mischief had killed those horse-riders.

  The captain had said, "So far, ma'am, matters do seem to go our way." He appeared to be a cautious man.

  Too cautious. By the next morning, the Queen had noticed.

  Martha followed her up from breakfast — oat cakes and hot apple juice brought to the captain's cabin. The main deck was ice-slippery, but the Queen, wrapped in a lynx cloak, a slender circlet of gold at her brow, stomped over it sure-footed, past coiled lines and awkward devices. Ship's officers bowed as she went past; crewmen stood aside. She climbed the narrow ladder up through the poop-deck's railing, to where the captain was standing, observing the set of the sails.

  "Captain...." The frost clouding from Queen Joan's breath seemed like smoke from a story dragon's.

  "Ma'am?"

  "Don't you 'ma'am' me! I want to know what messages, what orders you and your yellow dogs have been passing back and forth to those packets. Have you — have you dared to keep me back from my soldiers? Keep this fucking boat — ship, whatever — back from the fighting?"

  "I do... I do as I'm ordered, Your Majesty." Martha thought Captain Dearborn looked pale. The Mischief hit a low ice-reef, and he had to reach to the rail for balance, but the Queen stood as if she were nailed to the deck.

  "Give me a better answer," she said, no longer shouting, and put her hand on her knife.

  "It was felt…. Admiral Hopkins feels that Your Majesty, while viewing aspects of — "

  "I'm losing patience," the Queen said, in a very pleasant way.

  "He felt... you should not be put in danger."

  "And ordered so?"

  "Yes, ma'am — Your Majesty. Lord Monroe had also asked special care for you."

  Then the story dragon was on the poop, roaring, and a steel fang out and brandished. Martha stepped away. The captain clutched the rail.

  Below, the Mischief's main deck seemed frozen as the river, and all the men stood as still, until slowly... slowly the Queen grew calm and quiet, took a deep breath, and sheathed her knife.

  "Now you listen to me," she said to Captain Dearborn. "You turn this fucking boat in whatever direction is needful to get to my soldiers — and my brave sailors — who are fighting."

  "Yes, ma'am. As you command." Captain Dearborn ran down the poop's steep ladder quickly as a boy, shouting orders as he went, so sailors raced to do this or that, and climbed to shift the sails.... It seemed to Martha as if the ship, that had been drowsing, now sprang awake. The Mischief leaned and leaned with its swollen canvas, until the great port-side steering skate lifted from the frozen river. And in a long, curving reach, the great ship took course to the northwest, running angled to the wind.

  It was the fastest that Martha had gone anywhere.

  And remained the fastest into a sunny middle of the day. The Queen, leaning on the port rail, was eating a cold sausage and one of the ship's brittle biscuits — Martha had already finished hers — when the lookout called, "Deck there! More dead'ns!" And a moment later: "Nothin' she can't run over."

  The Mischief skated from perfect ice, bright as snow-dusted mirrors, onto a field of the dead... its massive blades cracking shallow sheets of frozen blood, rumbling, jolting first over heaps of fallen fur-cloaked men, and horses — then one... then another rank of East-bank infantry slain, their burnished green armor beautiful in sunshine. This armor bent and broke as the ship sped over.

  The Queen stared out over the rail. "My boys," she said — then turned and called, "Stop! Stop! One moved! Captain, stop, there are wounded there still alive!"

  "No, ma'am," Dearborn said. "We cannot. Those men are frozen already — stuck hard in blood and ice. We'd be hours getting any aboard, and very few to live."

  "My boys... my boys." The Queen was weeping, tears odd down a furious face. "Del..." she said, a name Martha didn't know.

  The Mischief, which knew no regrets, no losses, sailed on over the dead and dying at great speed, only shrugging where they'd fallen thick.

  Though no officer, no sailor, said so, there was relief as the ship left that field, and sketched its way again over ice bare of anything.

  The Queen turned from the rail, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. "Martha, we'll go below, and you'll arm me."

  "Majesty," Dearborn said, "I swear not necessary!"

  "Then," the Queen said, "I will be disappointed."

  ... They ran and ran into afternoon, the sails handled for the wind, and saw dead here and there. The Queen, cloaked in her lynx, the ends of a blood-red scarf flowing with the wind, stood on the Mischief's high poop full-armed in mail, leather, and boots, her light steel helmet hanging by its laces down her back. She watched near the scorpions with two assags in her hand, her long Trapper knife at her belt. And though standing at the ship's stern, she seemed a figurehead of war.

  They heard the battle before the raven's-nest saw it. There was a sound as if distant different songs, sung by many people, were echoing over the ice.

  Dearborn called an order, and sailors climbed fast to set a triangular canvas. "Staysail," he said to Martha as they watched the sailors work above them, the winter sun blazing over their shoulders.

  "Ship!" the lookout called, and as they sailed into those battle sounds — coming clearer, harsher now on a bitter wind — a ship appeared on the ice horizon. Mischief approached fast off what Martha had learned was starboard, and soon they could see that the ship was not a ship any longer. Once, judging from the massive side-skates and smaller steering blades still boomed out for a turn, it had been Mischief's size. Now it lay burned to the ice, stuck in a lake melted by fire then frozen again, its charred timbers and charcoaled masts absolutely black against a world so white. Many smaller things, the size of persons, had burned with the ship. And others, dead men and dead horses, unburned, sprinkled the ice around it.

  First Officer Neal stared as they passed. "It's the Chancy."

  "Perhaps not, Jim," the captain said.

  "I know the ship. Steer-skates always rigged elbow off the beams...." Neal turned away and went down the ladder to the main deck.

  "Has a brother on her," Dearborn said. "... Had a brother on her. Younger brother."

  Now, as if the burned Chancy had been an introduction, they could see the battle.

  It stretched, like a great shifting black-and-gray serpent, as far as could be seen from the Mischief's decks. More than a mile… almost two miles away, huge rectangles of bannered infantry in East-bank's green armor formed and reformed on the ice — nine, ten of them, and each, it seemed to Martha, made of maybe a thousand men. These formations stood offset, some slowly turning, wheeling ponderous as barges — but barges in a flood of horsemen that shifted and flowed about them as if to wear their ranks away as fast water wore stone. The distant infantry seemed coated by a sort of glittering fur, that Martha thought must be bristling pikes — and long, swift shadows fleeted away from them over the ice.

  "What are the shadows?" Martha said.

  "Bolts volleyed from their crossbows." The Queen set one of her assags against the rail, and stretched to ease her muscles. "If you have to pee, dear, do it now."

  "I don't have to."<
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  "A lot of Kipchaks," Dearborn said, looking out over the ice. "Thousands."

  "But not thirty thousand," said the Queen. "The fucking Khan has gone south, and taken half his savages with him!"

  Martha heard a trumpet, and saw another great ship skating, sailing fast enough to port to draw even with the Mischief. Though far across the ice, the men aboard her must have seen the Queen's banner at the mast-head. Tiny figures waved from her rigging. Martha heard them cheering.

  "The Ill Wind." Captain Dearborn smiled. "Old Teddy Pelham...."

  The Queen stood clear at the poop's port rail, raised an assag's gleaming head, and waved the weapon in great sweeping strokes. The cheers came even clearer then. And Martha saw, past that ship, another... then a third came skating to run side by side across miles of ice. And more ships, and more distant, came sailing up and abreast, port and starboard, until there were warships skating in a massive line of stripe-painted hulls and hard-bellied white heights of sails, sun-flashing skates and bright banners. Drums, drums were thundering along the line of great ships stretching so far to the left and right that they diminished into distant, seeming-toys, bright as jewelry.

  "My darlings," the Queen said — the first time Martha'd heard that copybook word used. "My Fleet!"

  Captain Dearborn said, "Ladies, step away," and called, "Fighting stands! .... Fighting stands!"

  That cry was taken up by officers, bosuns, and rattling shaman drums — and the Mischief's decks, which had looked to Martha busy enough before, suddenly stirred as ground wasps stirred in summer's last week. Sailors snatched pole-arms and axes from chain-loops at the masts, as marines, in band armor enameled half-blue, half-green, marched to their places along the rail, or climbed rope ladders to the fighting tops, and the huge crossbows waiting there.

  Sailors came jostling up the two narrow ladders to the poop, saying, "Pardon... pardon," as they shouldered Martha and the Queen aside, then bent to winches and began to wind the two scorpions' giant steel bows slowly back... and back, the machines' captains calling, "Faster — faster!"

  Two men unfolded tall, hinged mantelets — stood the heavy rectangles of linden-wood in four places to shield the scorpions' crews — then fastened them by thick steel hooks to thicker steel rings set into Mischief's deck.

  "Back from these bows!" One of the machine captains hustled Martha and the Queen forward, past the mantelets and against the poop's railing, paying no attention to majesty. Martha saw the Queen enjoyed it, and went where she was told, perhaps pleased by moments of not being a queen at all.

  She and Martha stood watching as the great steel arcs were drawn back to a final solid clack, so the machines lay fully cocked — both already loaded with five slender steel javelins, each a little longer than a man was tall.

  Now the noise of battle, no longer odd and distant, sounded near, hammered from shouts and screaming.

  Martha was looking down the line of ships, racing, trailing long plumes of powdered ice behind their runners — and saw men galloping small horses right between Mischief and the nearest ship, the Ill News, but going in the other direction. Twenty, perhaps thirty horsemen, galloping over the ice.

  "Look!" Martha called — and the Queen and one of the sailors looked — but the riders were gone, and no one seemed to have noticed, or shot at them.

  "Kipchaks," Martha said. "I saw them."

  "More where those came from," the sailor said, and pointed forward along the port rail. The Queen and Martha leaned out to see along the ship's side. The ice lying a distance before the Mischief's bow was not white, but as deep a stirring gray as storm clouds.

  Horsemen.

  The ship jolted, then ran on, and Martha saw a great ball of blazing pitch heave up from the Mischief's bow catapult, and rise… rise into the air.

  "Bow chaser," a sailor said, and his machine's captain said, "Be silent for orders."

  Martha watched through tangles of rigging as the burning thing went. It seemed to arc away like a rainbow, though with no color but hot fire. Then, very slowly, it fell... and fell out of sight. Men were cheering at the Mischief's bow.

  The Queen unfastened her long lynx cloak, and spun the fur away, out over the ice as the Mischief skated. "To Floating Jesus," she said, then loosened her long Trapper knife in its sheath, and twirled the shaft of an assag over her fingers.

  "Ma'am." Martha was breathless as if she'd been running. "Please... you should go below."

  The Queen just looked at her, and smiled.

  Martha sighed, unfastened her cloak, draped it over the poop's low railing, and reached over her right shoulder to lift her ax from its scabbard.

  "You're a good girl." The Queen looked comfortable in her chain-mail. Comfortable leaning on a spear's shaft. Her blue eyes, narrowed in the wind, seemed to Martha a tribesman's, some warrior down from the ice-wall. Which, of course, was really so. " — A good girl," the Queen said. "I'm... fond of you."

  "And so you should be! She's a wonder with that ax." Master Butter, his cloak's fur hood thrown back, climbed the last ladder rungs to the poop, and bowed. "... Just your humble postilion, Majesty — with a flatter purse after paying boatmen to follow your galley north, and a sore ass from that damn sled horse's back." Butter stood squatly massive in heavy mail, belting two straight swords, one long, one short. The wind had reddened his round cheeks.

  "You...." The Queen turned a cold look. "You have no business here. You were ordered — "

  "I know. You said to keep away for a year, my dear." Master Butter glanced around the poop's deck, narrowed by the great scorpions and their warding mantelets. "But this year has proven exceptionally short, so I came to keep you company."

  "Company I don't want. Stay away as you were fucking told to stay. At least... at least go elsewhere on the boat!"

  "Of course, Majesty, as soon as possible." Master Butter went to the rail, leaned over, and looked toward the bow. "Dearborn's going to ram them!"

  "I won't tell you again — " But the Queen said no more as Master Butter turned, caught her and Martha in his arms — left and right — lifted them, and drove them back behind a mantelet as a snake-hiss of arrows came. One cracked into the mantelet's linden, humming, its bright head just peeping through.

  "A sort of punctuation," Master Butter said of the arrow, and let the Queen and Martha go as the Mischief's crew roared a cheer. The great ship seemed to leap ahead, borne by hard-gusting wind — then crashed, shuddering, driving up and into a low hill of impacts, horse screams and men's screams, the multiplied faint crackle of breaking bones.

  Blood jetted onto the snow along Mischief's hull as she drove on and over, huge skate-runners slicing packed cavalry that then was knifed aside, fanning in a fur-lumped blood-red skirt as the ship sailed through them.

  And as the Mischief — so every other warship of the racing line.

  The scorpions began their slow-paced slamming from the poop — noise loud enough to hurt Martha's ears — and at each release of those mighty bows, five steel javelins whipped whining away over the ice, to flash like magic through drifts of mounted Kipchaks the battle-ships had shrugged aside.

  The mast-head's smaller scorpions, the heavier machines along the main-deck rails, the chasers at the bow — all hurled steel, clustered stone, or molten pitch as the ship skated on, its massive blades brisk on bloody ice, then muffled, crunching where they met men and horses.

  The Queen shoved clear of Master Butter and went to the rail for a better view. Kipchak arrows still came, but sighing, failing with distance.

  Butter stepped to the Queen's left. Martha to her right.

  "Joan — " Master Butter leaned to shield her.

  "Edward, I have to see." The Queen pushed at Martha. "Girl, get behind those things." Meaning the mantelets, apparently.

  "No, ma'am," Martha said, and stayed close to keep the Queen's right side safe.

  A single horseman galloped past the other way, just beneath their rail. He looked up — showing a young
face and black hair in several braids — drew a short bow, and shot it as Master Butter reached to hold his hand in front of the Queen's throat. But wherever that boy's arrow went, it came not to them.

  "Oh, for my bow," the Queen said.

  Orders were shouted amid other shouts, and the Mischief leaned, skating... leaned more, and took a wide curving course north and easterly. The long line of warships to port and starboard, each fluttering bright little signal flags, leaned as she'd leaned, and raced with her into the turn.

  "Ah, my Fleet, my dear ones...." The Queen turned almost a girl's face, beaming. "Martha, do you see them?"

  "Yes, ma'am," Martha said, though she winced as a crushed horse shrieked beneath them. She'd wondered about battle, found it dull... then found it dreadful. Now, she hated it — hated more than anything the slaughter of horses, who never meant harm to anyone.

  "We're cutting the Khan's people off from West-bank." First Officer Neal stood just behind them; Martha hadn't noticed him come up. An arrow, or falling tackle, had cut Neal across the forehead, and blood had run down into his left eye. "These seem to be their right-wing regiments." He pointed out across the ice, where drifts of gray maneuvered in bright afternoon light. "Another pass — and they'll have to run farther east."

  "And the army?" The Queen shaded her eyes to look north. "Where's Aiken — where is he?"

  "West, ma'am." Neal pointed almost behind them. "West — and from the signals we're passed, doing very well."

  "Then Lady Weather bless that man! — And we chase?"

  "We chase," Neal said, and smiled. His left eye-socket was full of blood.

  A wind gust suddenly thudded into the sails above them, rattled the tackle and gear aloft so Martha was startled, and ducked a little.

  "And you," the Queen said to Neal, and raised her voice to be heard above the wind, the harsh swift sliding of the Mischief's skates, " — you've lost your young brother on that Chancy ship?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Officer Neal," the Queen said, and seemed to Martha to become even more a queen, "I will see that boy is remembered... as I will see you and all your family remembered, and favored by the Crown."