A Wizard In Absentia

CHAPTER 10

Gar had taught him how to use the curry comb, so Ian was able to see to both animals. He mucked out the horse’s stall too, since no one had done so recently, then took the saddlebags back to the barracks.

He remembered the corporal’s advice, though, so he stayed near the curtain wall, and did indeed move more quickly, even though the route was longer. When it joined the keep, he turned to follow that wall, so he passed by the stairs at the doorway again. “Boy.”

Ian halted and looked around.

“Boy!” the voice called again, demanding. It was high-pitched and clear, an imperious treble. Looking up, Ian saw a girl about his own age leaning over the stone stair-rail. She wore rose-colored satin, and her skirts spread out in a prodigal display of cloth. “Come here, boy—I want you.”

Ian swallowed and climbed the stairs toward her—she was clearly a gentleman’s daughter, at least. But as he came up to her, she smiled eagerly, and her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Oh, good! I was hoping you would hear me!”

“Yes, miss—uh, ma’am … uh, ‘selle … uh …if—” She laughed, a clear cascade. “Oh, don’t be so silly! Don’t you know who I am?”

“No, miss … uh, ma’amselle…”

“Milady,” she corrected, rather primly. “You must call me ‘milady,’ for I am Lord Aran’s granddaughter, the Lady Heloise.”

“Yes, milady,” Ian said, relieved to know how to address her, and in a near-panic at the thought that he had made a mistake.

She saw his confusion and laughed again. “Oh, you must not worry so! I think it’s all silliness anyway, these titles and bowing and all, especially since you’re the first child I’ve seen in a year! You will play with me, won’t you?”

Ian’s heart sank; he had seen girls’ games in his village, and didn’t relish the thought of being a mock father to a doll. In a last, desperate attempt at salvation, he asked, “Wouldn’t his lordship be angry? ”

“Not at all, if I command you to do it.” She glanced at the saddlebags. “But you’re on an errand for your master, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, go do it, then come right back!” she said firmly. “And if anyone tries to stop you, tell them you’re running an errand for the Lady Heloise!”

“Yes, milady! Surely, milady!” Ian bobbed his head and turned away in relief, but also in trepidation. There was hope, though—perhaps, before he came back, Heloise’s mother would have found her and set her to her lessons or embroidery, or something.

He found out later that Lady Heloise didn’t have a mother—the Lady Constantina had died not long after Heloise was born. She had died from nursing serfs—there had been an outbreak of disease, and she had caught it herself, on her errands of mercy. Heloise’s father, Lord Aran’s son, had died of a broken heart, some said—but others pointed out that he had devoted himself to the welfare of his people, working night and day to take care of the serfs in tribute to his wife’s memory, and had died protecting them from robbers—though some said he had been hoping for death all along, not wanting to live without her.

All of that was in the future, though. For the present, Ian duly deposited the saddlebags beneath the bunk that would be Gar’s, in the little private room at the end of the barracks, then dodged and twisted his way through the crowd (hoping it would take longer that way) and arrived back at the keep stairs, crestfallen to see the little figure in rose-colored satin still waiting for him.

Though, truth to tell, he could have been more crestfallen than he was. Heloise had long blonde hair, huge blue eyes, a button of a nose, and a wide, full-lipped smile. Ian couldn’t help noticing the skip in his heartbeat, couldn’t help thinking she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen—but then, he reminded himself sternly, he had never seen a lady of his own age before.

“Come!” she demanded imperiously, and swept in through the keep door.

The conference of war was over; Lord Aran nodded at his captains and said, “To your places. They cannot be long now.”

The officers bowed and turned to file out. “Captain Pike,” Lord Aran said, “remain a moment.”

Magnus looked up, startled, then turned back to the white-haired nobleman, ignoring the jealous glances of the local captains. “Yes, my lord?”

Lord Aran glanced at the door, waited till it closed, then turned back to Magnus. “My granddaughter tells me that she commanded your apprentice to be her playfellow yesterday.”

Magnus stood stock-still a moment, letting it register. Then he said, “Indeed, my lord!”

“Indeed,” Aran confirmed. “I see the lad has not told you of this.”

“No, my lord.” Magnus could understand why. “It will not, of course, interfere with his duties to you,” Lord Aran said, “and I am glad to learn of it, for she has had few enough playmates in her life.” Magnus relaxed.

“Indeed, from her reports, he is a wondrously polite little fellow,” the old lord said, “and quite attentive to her desires.”

“I am glad to hear it,” Magnus murmured.

Lord Aran nodded. “Still, I would wish that he were reminded not to forget his place.”

Small chance of that, Magnus thought as he bowed his head in assent—but Lord Aran was thinking of Ian as a gentleman’s son, not knowing that he was a serf, and overawed by nobility.

Lord Aran misinterpreted Magnus’s expression. “No, no, do not misunderstand, he shows no sign of such impudence! But it would not hurt to remind him.”

“I shall, my lord.”

“It is well.” Lord Aran relaxed. “Of course, with the battle come upon us, it does not grieve me to have a freelance’s apprentice near my daughter—she might give the slip to her bodyguards, but she would be apt to take him along.”

Magnus smiled. “True, your lordship. I had not thought of that.”

There was a commotion in the hall, and a sentry burst in. “My lord! They come!”

“To the battlements, at once!” Lord Aran strode out of the room. Magnus followed in his wake.

From the top of the keep, they could see the entire plain, with the ridge line to the southeast and the rocky outcrop to the north. Below them, the last few peasants were straggling across the drawbridge with their carts and livestock. Magnus knew they had been coming in all night, and that the causeway had been so jammed last evening that many of them had had to wait until it cleared. These were the last and most exhausted, and as they came, the drawbridge rose behind them.

“Where?” Lord Aran demanded.

“Yonder, my lord!” The captain of the guard pointed. “From the southeast.”

A file of men had begun moving down the slope. Lord Aran nodded. “They will be here by sunset.” He turned to his officers. “While we wait, drill your men. Warn them that there will likely be no work for them until the morrow—it would be a foolish enemy who would attack with tired troops.”

The officers glanced at one another, then back at Lord Aran, waiting for the command that had not come.

“Be about it,” Lord Aran said, with a slight smile. “Yes, my lord!” The captains saluted and turned away.

But the enemy did not wait for the morrow—in the middle of the afternoon, a loud noise reached the sentries, and they sent for Lord Aran. Seconds later, a foot-thick ball of rock splashed into the lake not far from the drawbridge. A few minutes later, another explosion sounded, and hard on its heels, a ball crashed into the curtain wall. It bounced off with no damage they could see from the inside, but another followed it, and another.

Lord Aran came out into the battlements, saw a fourth ball hurtling through the air as the explosion echoed in the distance, and grunted. “Bombards,” he said. “They are staying in period for the beginning, at least.”

Puzzled frowns answered him, but Magnus knew what he meant. The enemy surely had modern big guns at their disposal, as well as energy projectors.

The ball cracked into the castle’s granite and bounced into the lake.

“The wall will break if they keep that up long enough,” Lord Aran said. He glared off toward the southeast. “Captain Pike, I hope you are as good as your word.”

“Well, it may take me several shots, my lord.” Magnus went over to one of the huge bombards that poked between crenels. “Load, men!”

A serf crew poured in gunpowder and heaved a ball into the cannon’s mouth.

A distant boom sounded again.

Magnus looked up, gazing toward the southeast, then saw the speck of darkness appear against the sky. He gauged its trajectory and called, “Everyone down!”

“Clear the bailey!” a sentry bawled, and other voices took up the cry. Open space appeared in the center of the courtyard as if by magic, as serfs took cover against the walls—but in orderly fashion, with none in danger of being trampled.

Magnus was impressed. Lord Aran had good officers, who saw to it that there was good discipline. The cannonball landed with a flat crack, burying itself in the turf of the parade ground.

Everyone was silent.

“How good of them to send us ammunition,” Lord Aran rumbled.

A howl of laughter answered him, and the old lord smiled.

Grinning, Magnus turned back to his cannon, laying hold of the crank and raising the muzzle a touch, then cranking it around just a few minutes clockwise. It was all for effect, though—he had fired such antique bombards before, and knew they were scarcely precision instruments. He watched the horizon and saw a sudden puff of smoke. “Fire!”

A huge explosion rocked the battlements. The cannon slammed back against its chain, and smoke streamed out over the courtyard. Magnus waited for it to clear, gazing anxiously at the sky, trying to find his cannonball, hoping it hadn’t gone astray.

There it was, diminishing even as he watched. He reached out to touch it with his mind, changing its trajectory just a little, feeling the pressure of wind against it, resisting…

Another puff of smoke appeared on the horizon. Magnus guided the ball straight toward the puff. It sank down right where the smoke had been. Whatever noise it made was too little to be heard from where they were, but Magnus felt the first stab of pain in the minds of the gunners before he managed to turn his attention away.

Lord Aran was staring after the ball. “I do believe you may have hit them.”

“Or come close enough to scare them, at any rate,” another captain said.

“I hit them,” Magnus said, with grim certainty. Another puff of smoke appeared—but quite some distance from the first.

A cheer went up from the battlements. “You hit them, you must have hit them!” The lieutenant slapped Magnus’s shoulder, grinning. “Why else would a new gun answer us?”

The other was, indeed, silent.

The boom of the new gun sounded, and its ball splashed into the lake far from the castle.

“Loaded and ready, sir,” the serf sergeant said. Magnus nodded and cranked the gun around. “Fire!”

Another explosion rocked them, another cloud of smoke hid the climbing ball—but Magnus already had contact with it, was guiding its flight with telekinesis.

A puff of smoke appeared from the new gun, none from the old.

Magnus guided the ball right down on top of the smoke. At the last minute, he felt someone’s relief that the ball would pass over the gun, and dropped it sharply. Again he felt a stab of pain and alarm; and closed off his mind.

“Again!” The lieutenant slapped his shoulder. “Two bombards out, with two shots! What a gunner you are!”

“Aye.” Lord Aran fairly beamed at Magnus. “How do you manage such wonders, Captain Pike?”

“I learned calculus,” Magnus explained—which was true, but really had very little to do with the issue.

The guns were silent for the rest of the day, and Magnus began to worry. What were they cooking up?

So he did a little mental eavesdropping—not unethical, since they were the enemy—and discovered that they were moving their energy projectors up. Yes, the projectors had greater range than the cannon—but they needed a clear line of sight, which the cannon did not, so they, too, had to be brought up to the ridge line. Magnus relaxed—he was fairly confident when it came to dealing with energy in any form.

The infantry pressed onward across the plain. Plumes of smoke began to appear, and the sentries reported it, grim-faced. The word spread to the peasants below, and women wailed and men cursed, for the smoke was that of their villages burning.

As dusk came, the army was only a mile away, and the plumes of smoke turned to the glow of flames. Lord Aran looked out across his ravaged estates and nodded grimly. “Fire the causeway.”

Runners with torches sped out across the causeway to the bank, then came back, lighting the piles of tinder laid ready at the sides of the bridge. Flameflowers blossomed behind them; then the pitch caught with a roar, and the landward drawbridge went up in a blaze. The flames raced toward the castle, a line of fire arrowing out toward the stronghold but stopping short where the drawbridge had been drawn up. Great clouds of greasy smoke filled the air, making the sentries cough and wheeze atop the battlements. Between fits, they stared, their isolation coming home to them at last—and serfs jammed the stairs, striving for a look, then passing word to their fellows below. “ ‘Tis a bridge of flames!”

“ ‘Tis a curtain of fire!”

“ ‘Tis as the Judgement Day itself!”

Then they fell silent, awed and shivering as they realized they were committed more fully than they had ever been.

Magnus knew that other lords might have left half their serfs or more to the mercy of the enemy—certainly the women, children, and old men, so that they would not be a drain on the castle’s supplies—but Lord Aran cared for his people’s welfare, and they cared for him in return.

“Let them make of that what they will, the nobles who beset our lord!” one captain said stoutly. “What do they think, I wonder?” a lieutenant answered.

But Magnus knew. The lords had been sure Aran would burn his bridges, and the gentlemen had suspected it—but the serfs in the ranks were awed and fearful at the sight, so reminiscent of the Hell of which their preachers had told them.

Then lightning struck, horizontal lightning, stabbing out across the plain to score the curtain wall with a huge thunder-crack, echoing for seconds, away to the ridge line.

Women screamed, serfs howled, all dove for cover. “ ‘Tis the anger of God!”

“Or the spite of the lords!” Magnus bellowed in answer, ducking down behind a wall. “Only of the noblemen who would bring down our Lord Aran for his charity!”

He knew he had at least thirty seconds, probably a few minutes—the energy projectors might be antiques, were certainly anything but state-of-the-art; their capacitors would need time to recharge—that is, if there were only one, yet; it would be quite like these spiteful aristocrats to start hurling lightning bolts the second they could, rather than waiting till all their forces were in place. Peering over the wall, he probed with his mind toward the ridge, listening for the gunners’ thoughts.

There! The officer in charge of the energy projector, thinking about his task, preening himself on having hit the castle wall with his first shot. But he was thinking about his other artillery pieces, too. Sure enough, there was only the one gun in place, though there were seven more coming.

Seven! Magnus could see he was going to have a busy night. He probed the projector to see if it was constructed as he had thought. But he found no capacitor; this projector wasn’t working on electricity! There was a battery, true, but it only fed current to the coils that lined the barrel, to direct the beam—and at the base of that tube was the open mouth of a plasma bottle, a set of extremely powerful magnetic fields that held in a plasma of ionized hydrogen and heated it to the point of fusion! The idiots had brought an H-bomb to discipline their renegade member; they had brought a sun to earth! Plasma cannon were for space heaters, not for surface warfare!

One way or another, he had to disable that monster. He followed the circuits, found and traced the huge cable that led to the power source—a fission reactor, heavily shielded. The idiots! If that shielding cracked, they could die of radiation poisoning.

No. Serfs would die, gentlemen would die—but lords wouldn’t go anywhere near that thing. Grimly, Magnus speeded up molecules inside a current-bearing wire. They grew hotter and hotter, melting insulation, flowing, touching the ground wire…

He felt the shock, both from the electrical explosion he had triggered and from the minds of the men near it. There was a raw, mental scream of pain—one serf had been burned—but the gentleman was only surprised at the short circuit, then suddenly afraid of what would happen when the lord found out. He began to snap out quick orders to disconnect the cable and begin repairs.

Magnus relaxed; they weren’t exactly long on skilled labor, these people. It would be an hour or more before that gun could work again—and it wouldn’t last that long. He rose from his crouch and nodded to his gun crew. “Ready?”

“Loaded and waiting, sir.” But the serfs stayed down below the wall, staring at him with huge, frightened eyes.

“Good.” Magnus turned cranks, shifting the gun’s aim slightly, then stopped back and nodded to the lieutenant. “Fire.”

The man jumped up, touched his match to the hole, and dropped back down below a crenel as the gun blasted. Magnus stayed on his feet, knowing he had nothing to fear, narrowing his eyes as he watched the ball arc away toward the ridge, adjusting its flight, guiding it with faint nudges…

There was a flare of light on the horizon, and mental shrieks of alarm and fright, then a black anger from the gunnery officer—and relief; he wouldn’t have to try to explain that short circuit, after all.

Magnus smiled, finding satisfaction in the irony of an antique bombard taking out a high-technology energy projector.

“What … what was that flare, Captain?” the lieutenant asked.

“You know full well, Lieutenant,” Magnus answered with asperity. “It was the energy projector being crushed.” He turned to the Officer of the Watch. “We won’t have to worry about that gun again—but they’ll bring in others. It’s going to be a long night.”

“Not if you can shoot that well with all the others, Captain,” the man said with a grin.

“Only when I’ve light—it will be much more difficult at night.”

The officer’s smile vanished. “So, of course, they will wait till night to give us any more bolts.”

“Quite likely,” Magnus agreed, “so I’m going to the barracks to catch some sleep, while I can—it’s going to be a long watch from dusk till dawn. Wake me if there’s any sign of trouble, will you?”

“Oh, you may be sure of that!”

“Thank you.” Magnus smiled and turned away. Serf eyes tracked him as he came down the stairs—then, all about him, the simple folk began to relax, and turned to salvaging what they could of their tents and lean-tos. Women lighted their fires and went back to preparing the evening meal. Magnus looked about him as he walked to the barracks, amazed at the resiliency of these people, who so quickly began to reestablish some semblance of normality. Of course, they were descended through generations of folk who had done the same down through the centuries, through wars and natural disasters; they had learned to take advantage of the peaceful moment, when it came. For folk still had to eat, and still needed shelter and warmth, and took as much of it as they could when they could, for who knew when it would come again?

In the dark of the night, lightning bolts stabbed all at once and from every direction—north, south, east, west, points in between, and two from straight overhead.

“Down!” Magnus shouted, taking cover behind the curtain wall, but his yell was drowned by the thunder of the energy projectors, then by the chorus of screams as peasant tents and lean-tos blazed. The smell of burning flesh rose in the air, smoke boiled forth, and the lightnings stabbed again with the thunder about them. By their light, Magnus saw boats shooting out from the shore, crammed with quaking serf soldiers whose sergeants drove them with whips while officers stood behind with muskets, ready to kill any sergeant who hesitated.

Then he had to duck down again—and this time, he sought with his mind. Moral qualms had drowned in screaming, and the time for deftness and delicacy was past. He probed into the engine of the flier overhead and wrenched. Above him, he heard an explosion; then a meteor plunged toward the lake, spitting fire. He let it go, searched, found the other, and gave it the same treatment. As soon as he heard the explosion, his mind was out and questing toward the horizon, orienting on the mind of a gunner, then sliding into the machine he tended, altering the angle of a coil so that the magnetic bottle inside tilted, its mouth swerving against the side of the breech, instead of being open to the muzzle…

A miniature sun rose on the ridge line, and the gunners’ thoughts ceased. Then a huge explosion echoed about them all, and Magnus’s mind was out and searching for the next gun. Once again a bottle tilted, plasma fused into helium, and a new sun lit the night.