Farrell lurched into the seat beside him, asking, “Does Simon know? He was throwing a major hissy last night because you weren’t coming. Does Sia know?”
Ben said, “Sia sent me to keep you out of mischief. Okay now? Shut up and put that shirt on, you’ll need it.”
The drive to Lake Vallejo took a little more than an hour, and the sky was thinning when they parked the van near a concrete-block lavatory and walked the rest of the way down to the lakeshore. Farrell saw a dozen other cars and pickups parked among the cottonwoods and a rowboat plying toward the island, bearing four knights, their cloaks flaring in the dawn wind and their armor the color of the lake. A golden banner with two black swans on it flapped stiffly above them.
It was no great distance to the island, but the boat went back and forth three times before it came the turn of Farrell, Ben, William, and their companions. As a result, they arrived at the plywood fortress just as Simon Widefarer was ending a passionate and furious harangue of encouragement to his drowsy, dispirited-looking troops. He broke it off and led the cheering as Ben, with Farrell following, slipped hastily into the ranks of variously caped and armored men grouped around their household banners. Farrell joined Hamid under the blazon of one Mathgamhain of Cliodhna, but Simon Widefarer took advantage of his position as captain to call Ben personally to his side. He went with odd reluctance, looking back at Farrell to say, like Julie, “Be careful. You hear me, Joe? Be really careful.”
Mathgamhain of Cliodhna was well pleased to have both Farrell and Hamid ibn Shanfara in his service. “No lord of Ireland would go to the fighting without his bard and his harper, surely,” he said. “And can you play The Silkies in the Green Sea for us?”
“We can fake it,” Hamid said. Simon Widefarer said loudly, “Nor is there need for any but a dunghilly poltroon to fear the girl. Twice over, both as witch and woman, is she forbidden to set foot on this island today, and it is known to every man that her power may not cross the water. Banish her from your fears, therefore, and attune your souls to victory. For Bohemond and St. Whale!”
“That’s running water,” Farrell said softly, “not a lake,” and Hamid nodded. The last shout drew a sharp answering cheer from the knights—though not as triumphant a one as the sight of Ben had raised—and they wandered off to their assigned positions with some gaiety and swash. The sun was rising now, making their armor seem to slide like water, running crimson, ebbing into silver, eddying black. Three of the men were harmonizing zestfully on The Agincourt Carol, their strong, rough voices still clear to Farrell after they had disappeared among the alder bushes.
The first attackers did not appear on the opposite shore until the sun was well up. Farrell sat in a tree and watched the enemy knights climbing into half a dozen rowboats and being pushed off toward the island by their barelegged squires. The sunlight on their plumes and visors made them into faceless, fire-headed beings—torch-arrows at the string. Farrell called to Hamid waiting below, “Twenty-six, I make it,” and Hamid turned away to report the count of Mathgamhain’s lieutenant.
The boats angled away from each other, two aiming for each of the accessible landings. Farrell had meant to begin staying out of the way, as he felt became an unarmed musician, at the first sight of Garth’s forces; but he retreated only a little way as the boats drew in, taking shelter behind the first and slightest barbican, no more than a shoulderhigh plywood windbreak tacked hurriedly across a couple of trees. Three knights already crouched there, their helmets beside them on the ground, and each man held a bow. Farrell noticed that two of the bows were wooden, expertly crafted, while the other was of fiberglass, with a sighting device and a rest for the arrow. But it was a knight with a wooden bow who was chewing bubble gum.
Under their motionless gaze, two boatloads of the raiders glided through the gap in Garth’s barrier reef to beach among vines. Farrell heard the oarlocks clanking and the boats’ bottoms grinding thickly on the shore. The knights began to scramble out, moving awkwardly, shields held high before them. Several had their swords out as well, and most carried flail-crowned maces—the morgensterns—tucked into their belts, the studded heads dangling from chains and wire cables. The heads were supposed to be built up around tennis balls, reinforced with cloth, rubber, and leather; but to Farrell’s eyes, they swung a good bit more like icy snowballs with rocks in them. He recognized the foxy brightness of their leader, Brian des Rêves, Garth’s closest crony, and heard his soft commands as the detachment pushed forward. The three waiting men chose arrows from their quivers.
Even before they stood up together, fitting arrows and firing over the barricade almost in one motion, Brian—perhaps warned by the rattle of the quivers—had wheeled away, shouting to his knights to scatter, to get to the sides. The blunted arrows clacked off the wooden shields, bonked when they found armor. Farrell would have expected at least five official casualties among the nine invaders, but only one man fell, struck full in—and presumably through—his gorget, and again in the side as he went down. Another knight turned back to help him, was shot in the sword arm, and lunged into the bushes, out of range. The others had vanished; Farrell could hear them shoving their armor through the wiry scrub, moving to outflank the barbican. The defending knights put down their bows and drew their rattan swords, though the undergrowth barely gave them room even to stand on guard. Farrell began thoughtfully to fall back, thinking that Lord Mathgamhain might like to hear The Silkies in the Green Sea again.
A thin young man wearing a black shirt and black trousers pushed past him toward the knight who still lay sprawled before the barbican. He carried a clipboard of yellow paper and called loudly as he went, “Ramon of Navarra, arm wound—the MacRae, arm and leg—Olivier le Setois, arm wound—Sforza of Lombardy, slain.” The knight sat up, then got to his feet. The man in black said, “Go on over to Glendower’s Oak, you know where that is? They’ve got beer and sandwiches—check yourself off the big roster, first thing.” He turned briskly back toward the sudden clatter of swords and garbage-can racket of whirling flails that had erupted behind the barrier. Farrell, easing discreetly away into the deeper woods, got a glimpse of two defending knights standing back to back, each one assailed by at least two men. Sforza of Lombardy marched by, slain in combat and heading for neutral territory until the end of the war. He was whistling softly and snapping his fingers.
Behind Farrell, Hamid clucked his tongue disapprovingly. “Now you see, that man is not serious. The serious ones, they lie right where they fall, all day.”
Battle had apparently broken out on all three beachheads. Knights of Simon Widefarer’s army went leaping past Farrell, waving their swords and tangling their cloaks in the shrubbery, all hurrying to reinforce the besieged outworks. Simon’s lone semblance of a campaign plan involved the archers’ keeping off the landing parties for as long as possible, and then giving ground slowly, digging in at every fortification, until it came time for the last stand in the castle and the hope of sundown.