The Storm - eARC Read online

  Table of Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  THE STORM – eARC

  David Drake

  Look for the final version on January 1, 2019

  Advance Reader copy

  Unproofed

  Baen

  The Storm

  David Drake

  THE THRILLING RE-TELLING OF ARTHURIAN LEGEND FROM MASTER OF SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY DAVID DRAKE CONTINUES! A young Champion must rescue a friend and battle an enemy at the heart of a chaotic world.

  The universe has shattered into chaos and monsters. Jon, the Leader, is dedicating his life to reuniting the scattered hamlets into a Commonwealth where all humans can live protected against the darkness and the things that live in that darkness.

  But no man can reshape the universe by himself. Jon has Makers to build weapons and clerks to handle the business of government--but he also needs Champions to face the powers of chaos which will not listen to any argument but force.

  Lord Pal of Beune is one of those Champions. He has fought monsters and evil on behalf of Mankind, and he will fight them again. But now Guntram, the man who transformed Pal from an ignorant rube into a bulwark of the Commonwealth, has disappeared. Pal must locate his friend and mentor--and then he must battle an entity which may be at the core of the splintered universe!

  Pal of Beune: A humane man in a universe full of inhumanity.

  Pal of Beune: A strong man in a universe where some recognize only strength.

  Pal of Beune: A hero who will keep going until something stops him--and who hasn't been stopped yet!

  BAEN BOOKS by DAVID DRAKE

  Time of Heroes Series

  The Spark

  The Storm

  The RCN Series

  With the Lightnings • Lt. Leary, Commanding • The Far Side of the Stars • The Way to Glory • Some Golden Harbor • When the Tide Rises • In the Stormy Red Sky • What Distant Deeps • The Road of Danger • The Sea Without a Shore • Death’s Bright Day • Though Hell Should Bar the Way • To Clear Away the Shadows (forthcoming)

  Hammer’s Slammers

  The Tank Lords • Caught in the Crossfire • The Sharp End • The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, Vols 1–3

  Independent Novels and Collections

  All the Way to the Gallows • Cross the Stars • Foreign Legions, edited by David Drake • Grimmer Than Hell • Loose Cannon • Night & Demons • Northworld Trilogy • Patriots • The Reaches Trilogy • Redliners • Seas of Venus • Starliner • Dinosaurs and a Dirigible

  The Citizen Series with John Lambshead

  Into the Hinterlands • Into the Maelstrom

  The General Series

  Hope Reborn with S.M. Stirling (omnibus) • Hope Rearmed with S.M. Stirling (omnibus) • Hope Renewed with S.M. Stirling (omnibus) • Hope Reformed with S.M. Stirling and Eric Flint (omnibus) • The Heretic with Tony Daniel • The Savior with Tony Daniel

  The Belisarius Series with Eric Flint

  An Oblique Approach • In the Heart of Darkness • Belisarius I: Thunder Before Dawn (omnibus) • Destiny’s Shield • Fortune’s Stroke • Belisarius II: Storm at Noontide (omnibus) • The Tide of Victory • The Dance of Time • Belisarius III: The Flames of Sunset (omnibus)

  Edited by David Drake

  The World Turned Upside Down with Jim Baen & Eric Flint

  To purchase any of these titles in e-book form, please go to www.baen.com.

  The Storm

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by David Drake

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4814-8369-8

  Cover art by Todd Lockwood

  First printing, January 2019

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  t/k

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  To Gil and Mary Ann Bagnell

  Who made the time I spent in the Army much less unpleasant than it otherwise would have been for my wife and myself.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Every text I complete goes off to Dan Breen and to my webmaster, Karen Zimmerman. They are my back-up and support system, and they’re necessary to my comfort in writing quite aside from the practical help which they provide me.

  My son Jonathan has been a godsend with nagging software glitches. It’s beyond me how people get along nowadays without a geek in the family.

  All the members of my Army language school class were smart and well educated. There was a test to get in, and you had to have a college degree to even take the test. The only couple my wife and I socialized with, however, were the Bagnells. (We were both recently married, which is part of it.)

  While Gil and I were In Country in different elite units (173d Airborne and 11th ACR respectively) our wives lived together in Durham. I knew Jo had support near at hand, so that was one fewer thing for me to worry about. Goodness knows there were enough other options.

  And Jo continues to support and feed me. This is the core of what makes it possible for me to write stories—this one included.

  Dave Drake

  david-drake.com

  APPROACHING THE TERRITORY

  The tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table lend themselves well to realistic, modern treatment. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King did this effectively for the nineteenth century, and TH White did another take in the twentieth with The Once and Future King, which the musical Camelot followed closely. In both cases the focus was on the love triangle of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot, though the authors had very different views of the subject.

  The love triangle is a great story, and Tennyson and White were great writers; but there are other ways a modern writer can approach the material. Proust near the beginning of Swann’s Way imagines that instead of travelling through the modern countryside, he’s questing through the Forest of Broceliande. This is a reference to Yvain, by Chretien de Troyes, who composed his Arthurian Romances in the twelfth century. This is slightly earlier than three anonymous authors created the Prose Lancelot. The Prose Lancelot provides the source material for most later treatments, including those of Tennyson and White.

  The Forest of Broceliande is a wondrous place which a knight enters for the sake of adventure. There he may find a holy hermit with a secret to impart, or a powerful knight who takes on all comers, or a thousand other
marvels. In Chretien a hero may become the champion of a daughter whose sister plans to cheat her of her share in their father’s estate, a situation in which a modern reader might find him or herself. Alternatively, the hero may have defend the chatelaine of an isolated castle from the lust of a giant who drags behind him a coffle of knights whom he’s defeated.

  Beasts and monsters lurk among the trees. There are castles which can be entered only upon issuing a magical challenge. Beautiful women become the prey of powerful villains—and the prize of heroic warriors. An enemy may become a friend, or honor may force a friend to become your dangerous opponent.

  This is Romance in the broad original sense of the word. This is what fascinated Proust, and it is what fascinates me.

  In The Storm I’m trying to evoke that sense of Romance in a modern reader. I’m using material from Chretien, and from the Prose Lancelot, and from folktales. My sources aren’t “history” in the sense we mean today, nor even “history” as a scholar in the High Middle Ages would have meant it.

  I intend The Storm to be true to the mindset of Chretien and his twelfth-century readers. And I mean it to be a good story, which was certainly Chretien’s intention as well.

  Dave Drake

  david-drake.com

  CHAPTER 1

  The Great and Good

  Jon, the Leader of the Commonwealth of Mankind, sat at the center of the high table. His seat was raised slightly above the rest of ours. Jon was a big man and powerful, even though he wasn’t the trim warrior he must’ve been thirty years ago when he’d turned the Commonwealth which his grandfather had founded into something real. His Consort, Lady Jolene, sat in delicate radiance beside him.

  Most of the other men at the high table were members of Jon’s Council: the leading warriors in the Hall of Champions. On a level floor, all of them but me would have hulked above Jon. I was one of several at the table to fill in for Councillors who weren’t present in Dun Add, or who had died since Jon last raised members to his Council.

  One of those missing was Lord Baran, whom I’d killed in a joust. I’d refused to take Baran’s place on the Council permanently, but I was attending while I was in Dun Add anyway.

  I’d been glad at the invitation to sit at the high table tonight, because I knew that Lady May would love it. May isn’t vain, not really, but status meant something to her in a way that it doesn’t to me.

  But May wasn’t here tonight. She’d gone to Madringor to attend her Uncle Albrecht’s birthday. I didn’t blame her—Uncle Albrecht was the only member of May’s family that she genuinely liked—but it meant I was here at a banquet celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the founding of the Commonwealth, when I would much rather have been somewhere else.

  Pretty much anywhere else.

  I’d seen more people in one place than the four hundred dining in this temporary structure, but not often—and not till I’d come to Dun Add. I don’t know how many people were living at Beune when I left it last year, but probably not this many all told.

  I wished I was back in Beune now. I wished a lot of things—but my dream had been to become a Champion of Mankind. For that I’d had to come to Jon’s capital.

  “Some more wine, sir?” asked a servant with a pitcher walking in front of the table. “Oh—what is this?”

  I was drinking from a jack of tarred leather rather than the metal or crystal at the other places here at the high table, mostly to keep the servants from topping me off with wine without asking. As the evening wore on, mistakes were likely to happen. The attendants—this one was male—had been sampling the beverages in the service area behind the temporary enclosure.

  “I’m all right with what I’ve got,” I said. “And it’s beer.”

  “Oh, Pal,” Lady Hippolyte said, putting her fingers on the back of my right hand. The attendant was filling her goblet. “I really shouldn’t have any more either, but this is such good wine that I can’t stop myself.”

  I was sure that the Leader had arranged that the high table was being served vintages that the folks who cared about wines would approve, but I’d already figured that if pushed for an answer, Hippolyte approved pretty much any vintage. She was one of the Consort’s ladies in waiting, like Lady May; and she was my partner for the evening, since Lady May was absent.

  I missed May, and I knew how much she’d regret missing the Founder’s Day banquet. This was really May’s sort of event. Still, her Uncle Albrecht was the one relative she’d been close to before she came to court in Dun Add, so when he’d made a point of inviting her to his birthday celebrations, she’d decided to go.

  May had borrowed my boat for the trip. The boat turned a ten-day journey by the Road into two days. so she’d hoped that she’d be able to get back before the banquet. I’d surely hoped that. It hadn’t worked out, though.

  “Lord Pal?” Hippolyte said. She pointed toward the nearest column with the hand that wasn’t touching the back of mine. A blob of light was rising from the base of a twelve-foot rod, throwing a soft pink glow around it. At the top of the rod it would turn blue and descend. “Do you know how they make the lights?”

  “Master Guntram found an Ancient artifact,” I said. I wondered how much Hippolyte knew about my involvement in the light columns. “He copied it a lot of times so that the whole enclosure could have light without torches.”

  There was a line of light columns down each of the three aisles between rows of smaller tables, each with four to six people. The original bloom of light had been shaped like a stubby monkey—or maybe a human dwarf. Guntram had simplified his copies, and I’d simplified further the twenty-odd that I’d made to fill out the set.

  The copies were easier to make, but also the little monkey or whatever it was got on my nerves if I watched it for very long. We didn’t want that sort of feel for the fancy banquet.

  May wouldn’t be thrilled to learn that I’d escorted Hippolyte—blond like May and very pretty—here, but to tell the truth, I wasn’t best pleased that May hadn’t showed up. Right now I wouldn’t have been in Dun Add at all if May hadn’t insisted I come to tonight’s banquet—back before Albrecht had summoned her.

  I guess she’d have liked me to go with her to Madringor. I’d rather not have been in Dun Add, but I had friends here and was respected. Neither of those things would be true in a rural county like Madringor. The local nobles would either resent me or patronize me, and I didn’t like it when either of those things happened.

  Attendants were carrying in another course, this time beef. I still had chicken on my platter and I didn’t need more food. I waved the fellow off when he got to me.

  “Oh, we’re so lucky to live now,” Hippolyte said. “When we have all this.”

  “Well, we have,” I said, taking a drink of beer as a way to move my hand away from Hippolyte’s. “This sort of do wouldn’t happen anywhere except at Dun Add, though, and not very often here.”

  Hippolyte had more right than not, though. Until Jon and Lord Clain cleared the bandits from Dun Add and made the Commonwealth of Mankind more than a high-toned phrase, there was nowhere that so many people could have gathered in safety and comfort.

  Things had generally been quiet in Beune while I was growing up, but that was because we didn’t have much of anything that folks would want to steal—and we’d been lucky. Once something huge had swept in from the Waste that could have eaten all Beune down to bedrock. I could claim that I’d chased it back into the Waste with the weapon I’d cobbled together out of Ancient artifacts—and maybe I had. What I’d really thought at the time was that I was bloody lucky that the thing had turned around for no more reason than had made it stumble into Farmer Jimsey’s field to begin with.

  “Oh, Pal…” Hippolyte said, more breathing the words than speaking them. She closed her left hand firmly on my wrist as I held the jack. “With a Leader like Jon and heroes like you to act for him, it will be this way for everybody.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said, crossing m
y left hand over to take the beer so that she wouldn’t spill it. There wasn’t much left in the jack, fortunately.

  I let Hippolyte guide my hand down to the table—but not onto her lap as it seemed she’d hoped to do. “There won’t be much need for Champions then, so maybe I can go back to Beune and find a plot of land to farm.”

  “Oh, Pal, you’re always joking!” Hippolyte said. “You’re rich. You don’t have to farm anywhere!”

  I wondered what she’d say if I told her that I kinda liked guiding a plow, at least in decent weather and the soil wasn’t too rocky. Plowing a field was a good place to think, because your body does the work once you’ve trained it to the job, and that frees up your mind.

  But I didn’t see Hippolyte worrying much about finding a place to think.

  The hand holding my wrist now started to stroke it. “You’ve got such a wonderful sense of humor, Pal,” Hippolyte said, bending closer. “You’re always so alive. I really like that about you.”

  I turned to her and used the motion to pull my wrist free. “Lady Hippolyte…” I said. “My companion Lady May will be back soon, maybe even yet tonight—”