Worlds That Weren't

More arrows were whickering past him now, on to thud into the dry oak timbers of the palisade; luckily the marks-manship wasn’t good, with the sun in their eyes and shooting while they ran. Breath panted hard and dry through a parched throat, and his muscles were one huge ache. He threw his bow up over the palisade-it was lined with cheering spectators-and bent, making a stirrup of his hands. Sonjuh covered the last ten yards in her old bounding deer-run, then leapt high for the last; her foot came down into his hands, and he flung her upward with all the strength that was in him. She soared, clapped hands around the pointed end of a log, and eager hands dragged her over it. Slasher whined as Robre’s hands clamped on his fur ruff and a handful at the base of his tail, and he made a halfhearted snap. The man ignored it, swung him around in two huge circles and flung him upward likewise; he did bite a couple of the people who pulled him over. Then a rope dangled down for the man. He jumped, caught it three feet above his head-height and swarmed up; the wound in his left arm betrayed him, and he would have fallen at the last if Sonjuh had not leaned far over and grabbed the back of his hunting shirt.

He gasped for a moment as he lay on the fighting platform inside the little log fort that made up the Station; three families lived here usually, but now it was crowded with refugees, their faces peering upward awestruck at him.

“Get those idjeets under cover!” he shouted; a few arrows were already arching over the walls to land in the mud-and-dung surface of the courtyard.

Winded, he still forced himself back erect, took his bow, looked to right and left. The swamp-men were pouring out of the woods, a black insect tide in the lurid light of the sunset. Some stopped to prance and flaunt bits of loot at the defenders-a woman’s bloodstained dress, the hacked-off, gnawed arm of a child. Others were cutting pine trees, bringing them forward, trimming off branches to use them as scaling-ladders.

“What are you waiting for?” he bellowed, to the men-and a few women-who crowded the fighting platform. “We’ll need torches up here, water, more arrows. Move!”

The horde poured forward. A sleetstorm of arrows, crossbow bolts, and buckshot met it; the howling figures pressed on, and a counterstream of black arrows hissed upward

There had been fighting all along the Three Forks River, fierce fighting before the walls of Dannulsford. The tents and brush shelters of refugees clustered thickly all about it, and the eastern horizon was still hazy with the burning cornfields, and the air heavy with the smell of it. More tents sprawled to the west, where fresh war parties of wild young fighting-men from all the clans poured in each day-the war-arrow had been sent throughout the lands of the Seven Tribes, by relays of fast riders. Other aid poured in as well, wagons filled with shelled corn, hams, bacon, wheat, jerked beef, cloth, and whiskey. By the western gate the skulls of bear, bison, wild cow, cougar, plains-lion, and wolf stood high beside the alligator, the standards of many a clan Jefe. No heads on poles were there now, but many were being set up along the river-hanging in bunches rather than impaled singly, to save work. Canoes and ferries went back and forth without cease. Noise brawled surflike through the stink and crowding, voices, shouts, songs, war whoops, the neighing of horses and bellowing of oxen; the wind was out of the west, cool, dry, and dusty.

And in the middle of the stream floated a steamboat; not the little wooden stern-wheeler of a few weeks ago, but a steel-hulled gunboat, likewise shallow-draft but bristling with Gatling guns behind shields, an arc-powered searchlight, and a rocket launcher. The Empire’s flag floated over the bridge, and the bosun’s pipes twittered as the chiefs left. Or most of them-one young war-chief, newly come to fame as a leader, stayed for a moment. Beside him stood a young woman in the garb of a male woods-runner; she clung to his hand with a half-defiant air, and her dog bristled when crewmen came too close. The captain of the craft and the colonel who commanded the Empire’s garrison in Galveston had discreetly withdrawn, as well.

“Yi-ah,” Robre Devil-Killer said. “We heard how this-” He gestured about at the Imperial warcraft, which rather incongruously bore the tile Queen-Empress Victoria II in gilt on its black bows. “-turned ’em back when it steamed up the Black River. We might have lost all the east-bank settlements, without that. The ones who got across ’fore you came back weren’t enough to do that, or cross the river and take Dannulsford.”

“Glad the Empire could help,” Eric King said sincerely.

He was in uniform again, his turban freshly wrapped, although he also carried a stick and limped heavily. He looked at their linked hands, smiled, and murmured, “Bless you, my children,” in Hindi.

“What was that?”