Patriots

26. More Local Politics

Mark leaned on the dirigible's railing to peer forward past the cabin. He could see Blind Cove's forty-odd dwellings clearly, because Greenwood 's third moon was at mid-sky, but the only artificial light in the community was the lamp hanging above Magistrate Saunderson's two-story house.

Twenty dirigibles were packed with nearly three hundred Woodsrunners. Two more airships approached the community from the sea, carrying only a few marksmen each.

Blind Cove was a fishing village. There was a chance that the locals would try to escape in the boats hauled up on the shore. Yerby didn't intend to allow anybody to get away.

The Woodsrunners weren't using flyers, since the attack was timed to arrive at Blind Cove at midnight. To Mark's slight surprise, the armada had managed to keep together and wasn't running more than ten minutes late.

Most of the dirigibles landed beyond the outer buildings of the community. As planned, Desiree brought the Bannock vessel down in the small park fronting Saunderson's house. "Come on!" Yerby called, vaulting over the rail with his flashgun in his free hand.

The overload of militiamen followed as suddenly as a dump of ballast. Nobody was waiting to grab the mooring lines, so the airship bounced skyward again.

By the time Mark reached the gate-he wasn't about to go over the railing when he was burdened with a heavy-duty nerve scrambler-the deck was ten feet in the air. He jumped anyway. The shock of landing drove the breath from his lungs, but at least he didn't lose his footing and fall flat.

The last man off the deck cannoned into Mark and knocked him flat. The shoulder-stocked nerve scrambler flew out of Mark's arms like a javelin to spear the ground at Yerby's feet.

If Yerby even noticed he'd almost been crippled by the sharp muzzle, he didn't seem to care. "All right!" he ordered. "Let's wake them up!"

Militiamen pulled the igniters of light spikes, thermite/paraffin candles that gave five minutes of brilliant illumination even in a thunderstorm. The spikes' rippling glare turned the sleepy village into a suburb of Hell.

The Wily brothers were in one of the dirigibles that had landed on the beach. They tossed the bombs they'd prepared into the fishing boats whose empty holds would magnify the blasts.

The bombs flashed white in quick stuttering succession. It seemed to Mark that they'd have been plenty noisy without the cavernous echoes. Three of the eight went off almost simultaneously. The villagers would have been justified in expecting the next sound to be that of buildings falling into a huge crack in the earth.

The pole supporting one boat's net-stretching boom shot skyward, nearly skewering an airship on the way up. It plunged back down through the thick plastic roof of Saunderson's house.

"Yee-ha!" Yerby cried. "Come on out, you Zenith land-robbers! The law's just caught up with you!"

Lights went on in most of the houses, though Mark noticed some of the locals had realized that there was nothing good to be gained by illuminating themselves. It wasn't going to matter in the long run. Eight or ten Woodsrunners were breaking into every dwelling. Yerby had brought such overwhelming numbers that none of the villagers would even think of resisting.

Mark wiped at the muzzle of his nerve scrambler as he ran with Yerby to Saunderson's door. He'd gotten the discharge needle dirty and he was afraid he'd bent it besides.

It might not matter. Mark wasn't sure he was willing to shoot somebody even with a weapon that wasn't supposed to be lethal.

Yerby kicked the lockplate. He bounced back as the panel boomed. In Blind Cove the settlers built their houses of stone or concrete; whatever the magistrate used for his front door was a lot sturdier than wood. Yerby hobbled away on one foot, swearing a blue streak as he tried to squeeze life back into the numbed heel of the other.

"Let me get it, Yerby!" Troll Larsen bellowed. Troll was barely five feet tall, but he weighed as much as Yerby and was reputed to be equally strong. The other thing everybody knew about Troll was that he was the ugliest man on Greenwood.

He ran toward the door, adding his forward speed to the velocity of the twenty-pound sledgehammer he was swinging with the strength of both enormous arms. "I've got-"

The door opened from the inside. "What's the meaning of this?" demanded an erect, middle-aged man wearing a nightgown.

Troll spun through the open doorway, dragged by the inertia of the heavy hammer. Saunderson stepped back. "Yeeeeeeee!" Troll screamed. He hit something out of Mark's sight with a crash like another noise bomb.

The woman standing on the stairs behind Saunderson screamed also. That was a pretty common reaction for women meeting Troll for the first time, but this one had more reason than most.

"Mr. Ardis Saunderson?" Yerby boomed. "I hereby arrest you as a traitor to the citizens of Greenwood! George, hold him while we ferret out other miscreants."

Amy had waited for Desiree to set the airship down properly before she followed the armed Woodsrunners, but she was now on the ground recording events. At the moment the way Yerby stood like a stork on one leg rather spoiled what would otherwise have been an impressive scene.

"You have no authority whatever, you villain!" Saunderson cried.

George, one of Yerby's loggers, snatched the magistrate out of the way enthusiastically. Yerby skipped by them, using the toe only of his right foot. Mark, Amy, and half a dozen Woodsrunners jogged along behind.

The house's interior partitions weren't as sturdy as its outside walls. Troll lay in the wreckage of an imported sideboard and the dishes it had held. He still gripped the handle of his sledge. The twenty-pound head had knocked a huge hole into the kitchen. The dent beneath the hole was from Troll's head, judging from the paint sticking to his bare scalp.

The woman threw herself at Yerby, screaming and clawing. He grabbed her wrists and tossed her to another of the men, saying, "Take her outside, Elmont, and mind she don't blood you!"

"Mama!" cried a three-year-old child who appeared at the stairhead. He put his hands over his eyes, though he was still peering through the gaps between his fingers.

Child and mother wailed together. "I'll get him!" Mark said, glad of the excuse to drop the gun that made him feel so uncomfortable. "He's all right!"

He swept the boy into his arms and stood aside so that three Woodsrunners-man, wife, and a boy who couldn't be more than twelve-could thunder past. In the room below, Yerby plucked a Zenith flag from the wall and tossed it through the front door to be collected. There were two holoviews of New Paris, the Civil Affairs Building and the statue of the first Protector in the central park. They followed the flag.

Mark walked outside, carrying the child. Elmont held Saunderson's wife while a woman bound her.

"No," said Mark. "Not her." He gave the child to Mrs. Saunderson. Mother and son wrapped their arms around one another. They continued to cry, but not quite so noisily.

The first light spikes were burning low; drops of blazing wax dribbled down the support rods. Woodsrunners lit replacements. The airships carried enough spikes to illuminate the park until dawn if necessary.

Mark found he was standing beside Amy. He hadn't consciously worked through the crowd to find her; or maybe he had. She recorded the scene in twenty-second takes, focusing on a face or an incident that gave meaning to what was chaos if you tried to view the whole thing at once. Her expression was set, withdrawn.

The villagers had been dragged from their beds and tied. Most were half naked. The night wasn't dangerously cold, but they were at a terrible psychological disadvantage compared to their captors.

Torchlit Woodsrunners walked in and out of the houses, emptying them of weapons and anything associated with Zenith. A father and son staggered from a house on the square, almost hidden behind the pile of clothing they carried.

"Hey!" Yerby cried from the Saundersons' doorway. Most people turned to look at him, but the pair with the garments continued to sidle toward an airship.

"Cooch Jezreal?" Yerby said. "You'll stop now or you'll wish you had! What's that you're carrying?"

The men halted. The father peeked from behind a mound of lace and velvet. "Aw, Yerby," he said. "You know my wife-"

"I know how to deal with a damned thief when I find one, Jezreal!" Yerby said. "We're the instruments of justice, not a gang of brigands."

The Jezreals obviously had a notion of how Yerby would deal with a thief. They hunched back to the house they'd come from, moving rather faster than before.

Yerby walked into the park. Zenith paraphernalia was heaped in one corner. The cowed villagers stood beside it, more threatened than guarded by the crowd of militiamen.

Yerby held a sealed and embossed document in his left hand. He waved it under the magistrate's nose and said, "Ardis Saunderson, you're charged with being the agent of a foreign power, the Protector of Zenith. This very paper convicts you! How do you plead?"

Saunderson stood as straight as he could with his arms tied behind his back. "I am a magistrate appointed by the Protector of Zenith," he said in a clear voice. "You have my commission there, yes. The only thing I'll plead with you, Yerby Bannock, is that you spare my family and neighbors. They have no part in any actions I've taken in discharge of my duties."

Light from the illuminating spikes pulsed across Saunderson's face. He blinked. "It's the smoke!" he cried. "It's only the smoke!" There were tears on his cheeks.

The child was whimpering in his mother's arms. Mrs. Saunderson watched Yerby in silent terror, looking like a rabbit in the headlights.

Yerby wrenched a half-burned spike out of the ground, ignoring the occasional flaming droplet. He tossed it onto the pile of everything the villagers had brought with the name or a view of Zenith on it. Thick smoke rose as fire twisted down through frames and fabrics. Even metal burned at the touch of the spike's thermite core, throwing flickers of ghostly color over the conflagration.

Yerby hurled the magistrate's commission onto the fire. "Citizens of Greenwood!" he roared. "Do you find this man guilty of treason?"

"Guilty!" shouted the flame-shot night. Deep in the chorus were other shouts: "Hang 'em!" and "Burn them all alive!"

Mark shivered. His eyes stared straight ahead. His hand gripped Amy's. "They attacked us," he whispered. "They might have killed us all."

"That was them," Amy said. She'd stopped recording, but now she raised the camera again. "This is us."

"Ardis Saunderson!" Yerby said. He took an unlit spike from Dagmar Wately. "You stand convicted before the court of your fellow-citizens. I sentence you to have your house burned and all your possessions with it!"

Yerby turned and jerked down the igniter tape. As the illuminating spike sputtered to life, he spun it twice above his head and flung it onto Saunderson's roof. The device rolled halfway down the moderate slope before heat softened the dense plastic roof plates. Tendrils of the molten surface gummed the spike to a halt. Sparks and the paraffin's yellow softness began to raise the plastic into low, smoky flames. They were the color of drying blood.

The other villagers had moved as far from Saunderson as the Woodsrunners let them. Most of the dozen children were crying. A man sobbed in abject terror. Another man, perhaps his brother from their similarity of features, watched him with mingled distaste and concern.

Saunderson's wife knelt, crooning to the child with her head bowed so that she didn't have to look at the house. The magistrate moved closer to them. He stood with his feet planted firmly, watching the red flames creep across his roof like gangrene on an injured limb.

Yerby looked from Saunderson to his wife and son. "Ah, Christ almighty and His holy saints!" he said. He gestured to Mark and Amy. "You two-come cast me loose, fool that I am!"

Yerby shouldered his way through the crowd. By staying close, Mark and Amy were able to follow. Mark didn't have the slightest idea of what the frontiersman intended.

Woodsrunners passed around bottles, some of which resembled those the Blind Cove flyers had cascaded onto the dirigible the day before. Mark had the feeling that Yerby and the rest of the settlers considered liquor as much a necessity of life as air, so prohibitions on looting didn't apply.

"… ought to burn a few more of them out!" somebody said louder than he needed to speak to a neighbor. "And you know-"

"Holophernes Maynard?" Yerby shouted over the sound of the crowd. "I know that if you do light off another house against my orders, I'll use your fat ass to smother the flames!"

He swung himself onto the deck of the Bannock dirigible. Mark started to follow. "No!" Yerby ordered from the control cabin. "Cast off the lines fore and aft!"

The airship was tied to a pair of trees the settlers had planted in the park. They weren't species native to Greenwood; Mark thought he'd seen similar ones, much larger, around the Civil Affairs Building in New Paris.

It took him a moment in the flickering light to decide which end of the clove hitch to feed back through the loop to release the tension. By the time Mark found it, Yerby was already bleeding hydrogen from the storage tanks into the ballonets where it could expand. The dirigible lurched upward, snatching the line from Mark's hands.

"Yerby?" a Woodsrunner called. "What the hell are you up to, Yerby?"

The dirigible lifted only forty feet in the air. The props were spinning at coarse pitch as Yerby cranked the big vessel sharply to starboard. Because it had no forward motion, the airship turned with surprising nimbleness.

"I don't know what he's doing," Amy said close to Mark's ear. "Do you?"

"I've no idea at all," Mark said, his eyes on the dirigible. The nose continued to swing. The updraft from Saunderson's burning roof shook it.

Mark's chest tightened. He cupped his hands into a megaphone and shouted, "Yerby! You're drifting over the fire! Watch the fire!"

Hydrogen had much greater lifting ability than any other gas, and because it was cheap an airship's tanks could be vented whenever water vapor started to weigh the ballonets down. The only thing that kept hydrogen from being perfect rather than simply the best choice was that it oozed through any container and burned with a hot blue flame if ignited. Normally that wasn't a problem, since leaking hydrogen rose… but so did sparks popping from bubbles of roof sheathing.

The dirigible slid forward, over the fire.

Half the roof was now covered in flames no higher than moss growing from rocks in a slow stream. The plastic didn't burn easily, but the thermite torch had raised it to ignition temperature. The blaze would continue until the trusses collapsed and poured a gout of red fire through the building's interior.

Yerby dumped his ballast. The dirigible shot skyward in a booming mushroom of steam. Mist and hot water sprayed over the crowd. Frontiersmen screamed and cursed-

And started laughing, most of them, as they usually did after a surprise. And resumed drinking, as they always did. Woodsrunners started to untie villagers.

It took Yerby ten minutes to recompress enough of his hydrogen to bring the dirigible back to the open square. Forty or fifty people grabbed the drag ropes to haul the vessel the last of the way down. By that time, the bottles were passing to villagers as well.

Yerby stepped from the gondola and walked to Saunderson. The bonfire gave off a smudgy light. The magistrate had been holding his wife and child since Desiree untied him. He moved away from his family to face Yerby.

"Saunderson," Yerby said, "I'm going to give you a chance to stay here. I warn you, though-from now on act like a good citizen of Greenwood, Do you understand? If this is where you live, then this better be where you're loyal to."

He waved toward Saunderson's house. The thick roof sheathing hadn't burned through at any point, but the plastic sagged inches-deep between trusses at the center of the blackened, bubbled patch.

"Go on," Yerby ordered. "Clean it up. Go back to your houses, all of you. And pray neither you nor your neighbors bring me back here, for you'll regret that if it comes!"

Villagers edged, then trotted from the square, as eager to get away from the Woodsrunners as they were to return to their homes. Militiamen clapped their former captives on the back; friendly enough to look at, but also a warning of where the power continued to lie.

"I'm glad you did that, Yerby," Mark said in a low voice. "But it was very dangerous."

"Don't guess I'll do it again sober, leastways," Yerby said. He watched the Saundersons reenter their house. The roof still smoldered, and they'd have a job getting the boat's mast out of the hole it had punched in the other side.

"But you know?" Yerby continued so softly that Mark had to lean close to hear. "There ain't so many brave men that I want to chase one off Greenwood unless I have to."