A little farther off the landscape still looked peaceful and prosperous despite its aridity, surprisingly so to someone reared west of the Cascades. Here it was two months before the winter rains were due and it seemed dubious that it had ever rained at all. Reaped grain fields stood sere and yellow-brown, shedding ochre dust to the occasional whirling wind-devil, with the odd remaining wheat-stack like a giant round thatched hut of deeper gold. Poplar trees made vertical accents along a canal, more conspicuous for the general lack of trees, with here or there the intense green of vines or fruit trees or alfalfa and sweet clover in blocks startling against the dun landscape. Rippling distant hills quivering with heat haze were the brown of summer-sere bunchgrass. The creaking sails of tall frame windmills circled, grinding grain or pumping water, and villages of rammed-earth cottages stood each with its church steeple, clustered around the gardens and groves of manor houses often based on pre-Change farms.
You couldn’t see how few folk remained, or how the ones who did worked at a frantic pace with spears close to hand, under the protection of mounted guards. The smell right here made it obvious that peace had flown, though. She took a deep breath through her nose. War did have a set of smells all its own, like the varied bouquets of wine. She liked wine well enough; Sandra had put her through an informal course in telling the various types apart. But she was a connoisseur of the bouquet of lethal conflicts.
Even when you weren’t fighting in a miasma of copper-iron blood and the unique scent of cut-open stomach, or marching past the week-old bloated bodies of dead livestock and smoldering burnt-out houses. Mostly war smelled of old stale sweat soaked into wool, unwashed feet and armpits and crotches, horses, and canola oil smeared on metal and leather and long since gone rancid. A big camp like this added the woodsmoke of campfires, salt pork and beans and tortillas cooking, the charcoal and scorched metal of the little wheeled forges the field farriers used, and latrine trenches. It was all the smell of her trade, the way manure was to a groom or dye-vats to a clothier or incense to a cleric.
Getting the expeditionary force detrained and ready to march had gone fairly smoothly, but she’d been at it all day. Too often dealing with various noble scions who insisted on quarreling over precedence and citing cases right back to the day Norman Arminger proclaimed himself Lord Protector, and who considered themselves too important to listen to anyone but the Grand Constable in person.
That was the drawback of calling out the arriere-ban, the full levy of the Association; you got everyone who had military obligations to the Crown, which meant mobilizing a lot of contumacious, well-and-high-born pricks who hated taking orders from anyone, even if their lives depended on it. Some of the great families had followed their medieval models all too seriously.
I haven’t had to kill any of them. Yet. Which is almost disappointing. Though it’s fun bringing home that the rules in the Schedule of Ranks really, really, really do apply to the ones who think they can’t possibly be expected to go on campaign without three pavilions, a chef and hot and cold running mistresses.
A very small bleak smile turned her lips; she had a long straight-nosed regular face, but at that moment it looked very like a predatory bird. She’d had any baggage found over the established maximum for a man’s status pitched off the barges on the Columbia or the railcars as they turned up later and left for the fish, the coyotes, the camp followers and anyone who had a use for a down mattress or six sets of court dress or a knock-down bathtub or a crate of Domaine Meriwether Cuvee Prestige ’15 with bottles of pickled oysters on the side. Excess servants had been shed with a little more ceremony, but not much.
The fingers of her left hand touched the twelve silver-inlaid notches on the hilt of her long sword, the metal smooth and cool against the callused skin. Nobody had argued much, however purple their faces turned.
A party rode up from the camp. A nobleman in gear that looked to have seen hard use in the last few days led them, and over their heads a fork-tailed baron’s pennant flew from a lance. A squire behind him carried a shield that had been recently and roughly field-repaired after being hit repeatedly with things sharp and hard and heavy.
“My lady Grand Constable,” Rigobert Gironda de Stafford said, thumping his breastplate with his right fist in salute before he dismounted.
“My lord Marchwarden,” she replied, returning the gesture. “Your horses look hard-used. I suppose screening us up there required a lot of riding.”
She turned and gestured for a squire. “Get my lord de Stafford and his party fresh coursers, and have these seen to. Bring water for his men, and bread and cheese and raisins if they want it.”
The nobleman nodded his thanks. “We’ve been busy, my lady. Just got in, in fact. It’s quieted down up towards Castle Campscapell a bit now or I wouldn’t have been able to make this meeting, but it’s the stillness before the storm. I’m extremely glad to see you’ve brought us a substantial force.”
He cocked his head and looked at her. “You were smiling a most evil little smile just now, my lady.”
Tiphaine let it grow… just a little. This particular campaign would probably be a preliminary to the main event, and she was going to use it to toughen up some of the feudal levies who hadn’t seen the elephant in this war yet. Toughen them up or kill them off; either would do.
“I know that expression, Grand Constable,” the lord of Forest Grove said with a grin of his own, offering his canteen. “Someone who deserved it suffered, eh, my lady d’Ath?”
“Suffered the loss of oversize tents and silk sheets and overweight private rations, my lord Forest Grove,” she said, putting the canteen to her mouth and tilting it. “And the services of various doe-eyed beauties.”
It was field-purified water, cut one-to-six with harsh coarse brandy to cover the chemical taste and kill any bacteria the chlorine missed. The mixture cut the gummy saliva and dust in her mouth quite nicely; she swilled it around, spat and drank.
“But they can’t say I didn’t warn them,” she finished, handing it back.
“Thirty lashes with an acerbic tongue and an icy stare, too,” Rigobert said. “The novel experience of having to bow their heads and stand silent while their arses are roasted in public will be good for them. It’ll rectify their humors, though not as much as a good bleeding and purge would.”
They were both in half-armor, the articulated lames of the back-andbreasts covering their torsos, pauldrons and faulds on shoulders and thighs; with their junior squires standing by, the rest of the gear could be donned in less than two minutes. Sweat and dust clung to their faces beneath the peaked Montero hats-the type she’d always thought of as a Robin Hood hat, from an old movie she’d watched on TV before the Change. Nobody put their head in a steel bucket if they didn’t have to right that moment. She could feel more sweat trickling down her neck and flanks and between her breasts, itching and chafing in the padded arming doublet and her underwear as it baked to a rime of salt in the hot dry air and then more dripped in, long-familiar and still irritating. The interior was hot this time of year, and its mountain-fringed geography made the Walla Walla valley warmer still.
“Is the Count due?” de Stafford asked.
He was seven years older than she, in his mid-forties, a tall broad-shouldered man with pale blond hair like hers worn in the usual nobleman’s bowl-cut, eyes of a blue that was startling against his tanned face, and an unfashionable short-cropped beard that emphasized his square chin and ruggedly masculine good looks.
In fact, we look enough alike to be brother and sister. Rigobert might actually have been a tolerable sibling, unless he was a lot less bearable as a teenager.
The thought was oddly wistful; she’d been an only child.
A few of the less experienced or more naive staff officers and messengers in the group around her looked surprised that he dared to bandy words with the Grand Constable, who had a reputation for a cold, distant masterfulness. Tiphaine’s mouth quirked a little more as she jerked her head s
lightly and the circle around them widened to allow more privacy.
Or to put it differently, I have a reputation for being a murderous evil reptilian unnatural bitch who’s inhumanly good with a sword and under the Lady Regent’s protection, she thought. Rigobert’s a special case, though.
She looked at her watch, a self-winding mechanical model from the old world.
“Not for about another fifteen or twenty minutes, my lord, assuming he’s punctual. We got the encampment settled just a bit faster than I anticipated and told him we would.”
“Any news from Delia?” he asked.
“A letter just in,” she said, fishing it out from where she’d tucked it into her thigh boot. “She’s well, Diomede sends his love and wishes he were here and not in Tillamook, where incidentally he’s going to stay if I have to tell Baron de Netarts to chain him to a dungeon wall, Heuradys has learned to say ‘no’, and our beloved Delia herself feels like an overripe watermelon about to split, she says. Also she sends greetings to my beloved beard.”
“I’m her beard, she’s mine,” de Stafford laughed as he took it and read it eagerly.
Her Chatelaine and lover of fifteen years, Delia de Stafford, was married to Lord Rigobert. The Barony of Forest Grove was the next tenant-in-chief holding north of her manors, and its lord had about as much erotic interest in women as Lady Delia de Stafford did in men, which was even less than Tiphaine did. Fathering Delia’s children had involved what passed for hightech medicine these days, namely a pre-Change turkey baster.
“Ah, I see Countess Odell has arrived for the accouchement, with her girls. That will be a comfort,” he said happily. “To them both. Valentinne will worry less about Conrad and her sons with something else to occupy her time and Delia will feel better with company and mothering, she’s always been a social sort and makes friends easily.”
So do you, Rigobert, she thought. Including people like me, who really aren’t easy to be friendly with.
“I hope it’s a daughter,” he went on. “Delia does so want a matched set of four, Lioncel, Diomede, Heuradys and…”
He glanced at her with a raised eyebrow.
“Yolande if it’s a girl, Rigobert for a boy, we thought,” Tiphaine said.
The Lady Regent had arranged the marriage a little after the War of the Eye and not long after Tiphaine was given the title and estates of Ath as grounding for a rising succession of military commands. It was one of Sandra’s classic kill-three-ducks-with-one-bolt political rim shot maneuvers, at one swell foop turning Delia from Tiphaine’s plebeian and clandestine girlfriend into a noblewoman eligible for a post such as Chatelaine of a baron’s household, giving public cover to Tiphaine, Delia and Rigobert all three against sheet-sniffing clerics and similar vermin, and giving Sandra a valuable two-way source on the distaff side of the nobility’s gossip-and-intrigue pipeline.
She’d sized Delia up quickly, and foreseen that her spectacular looks, fashion sense, personality and organizing skills would make her a star of the castle and manor house feast, hunt dinner, ball and masque circuit in jig time with a little discreet patronage. The social order hadn’t jelled as hard then, either; it would have been a bit more difficult to bring off in the increasingly Changeling-dominated present, the time of the second generation’s flowering.
“You’d name the boy Rigobert? Why thank you!” Delia’s husband replied sincerely, with a winning smile. “I’m flattered.”
But the Baron of Forest Grove genuinely liked Delia; they had become close friends, and he had been a good if slightly long-distance father to the children she insisted on. He was also extremely capable, and not only in the straightforward head-bashing style of most Association nobles; he’d been a junior spook of some sort for some agency that didn’t officially exist before the Change, as well as an SCA fighter, and valuable enough that Norman Arminger had put aside his-literally-medieval prejudices on the subject of gay people to make use of him.
Odd. In retrospect as an adult rather than a creeped-out and perpetually seething-angry teenager, I don’t think Norman really hated us, not in the visceral loathing sense.
Rigobert folded the letter, handed it back, and then raised a brow at her expression.
“Just thinking of Norman,” she explained.
“My sympathies, my lady. I hope you recover quickly and don’t lose lunch.”
He raised the canteen in another toast. “May his bigoted, sadistic, rotten soul roast in Hell to the cheers of his innumerable victims,” he went on-quietly-and drank.
She took the canteen and sipped herself. “Though to be fair, as far as the bigotry goes I think he just thought he should hate queers because he was such a fucking Period Nazi purist Society geek, killer psychopath academic subdivision. Sort of like wearing hose and houppelande. He was playing a role twenty-four/seven. And he scared me, frankly.”
“Me too. Not much of a difference on the receiving end whether he was sincere or not,” he said a little sourly. “What was that ancient Greek saying? The boys throw stones at the frogs in sport, but the frogs die in earnest? When Norman cut someone dead, he didn’t do it metaphorically. Usually it involved him laughing hard with blood up to his elbows. I’ve never met a man who enjoyed killing more and I’ve known some ripe evil throat-cutting bastards in my time. Been one myself, at need.”
“True. But you have to grant that at least he didn’t have any racial prejudices. Gender yes. Us, yes. Race, no.”
Which was true; about one in five of the Association’s nobility were what the old world would have called members of a visible minority, as opposed to about one in twenty-five of the general population. Not that anyone gave a damn about that sort of thing anymore; things like class, kin and religion were vastly more important now.
“That’s probably only because William the Bastard and King Roger II of the Two Sicilies didn’t have racial prejudices either,” Rigobert said sardonically. “Hanging around Sandra so long has made you inhumanly rational, my lady.”
“It is catching, my lord Forest Grove,” she admitted. “Though as far as excess rationality goes, remember that Sandra truly loved Norman.”
To herself: And he had it in for gay men much more than women, which makes it easier for me to be objective. But that’s standard. It’s even authentically medieval, from what I’ve read; without a dick involved somehow it wasn’t real sex, or not real enough to be a serious sin, even a perverted variety, back during the Reign of the Penis.
“Oh, well, I got a happy marriage out of it in the end,” Rigobert said lightly. More seriously: “And the kids, which I find in retrospect I wouldn’t want to have missed.”
“Me too. And I was never a rug-rat fan either; as usual when Delia insists on something, she turns out to be right.”
She sighed slightly. “How long are we going to be haunted by Norman’s ghost?”
“Up until about the time Rudi and Mathilda’s eldest takes the throne,” Rigobert said. “And he or she will be Norman’s grandchild.”
He drained the canteen and tossed it to a page. “So may the Lord Protector get an occasional day off from the furnace. He did some good too, even if unintentionally.”
The arrangement had started as pure and rather resented protective coloration as far as she was concerned, but it had eventually made Tiphaine and Rigobert…
I think you could say friends, she thought. Though I don’t have many, never did, except for Sandra and Conrad and that’s a liege-vassal thing too. Certainly we’re colleagues and close allies. He’s fun to go hunting and hawking with, too, and I’ve had some very pleasant times just hanging out with him and Delia and the children and sometimes his current boyfriend. It’s only taken fifteen years for us to reach the stage of exchanging BFF confidences. Delia must be mellowing me at last.
“Which reminds me,” she said to him. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, when there was time. There won’t be any unless I make the time, so… Rigobert, stand witness for me, would
you? Since we’re waiting for the Count anyway.”
“At your command, my lady,” he said, doffing his Montero and bowing slightly; they were of roughly equal status as nobles, but her appointed Crown office as Grand Constable was higher than his as Marchwarden of the peaceful southern flank of the Association.
She glanced around and called sharply: “Armand! Rodard! Attend me!”
The most senior of her squires looked up from the papers in their hands, handed them over to clerks and then hurried over, bowing formally and standing at the Association equivalent of parade rest, with their left hands on their sword-hilts and their right tucked behind their backs. Both were dark-haired boldly handsome young men in their twenties, with slightly hooded blue eyes… and nephews of Katrina Georges, Tiphaine’s first lover, who’d been killed in the run-up to the Protector’s War fifteen years ago. The parents hadn’t long survived the Change, but thanks to Katrina and Tiphaine their children had. She’d handled their training as pages and squires since her own knighting.
“Kneel!” Tiphaine said.
They did, going down on one knee with their eyes wide. Tiphaine drew her long sword and tossed it a little to settle the grip. The gesture attracted more attention; as a baron and as commander of the Association’s armies she had the right of the High Justice twice over. There were probably some people here who knew her only by reputation and thought she was going to start beheading with her own hands. Though that sort of thing wasn’t done as much these days.
When she spoke, it was pitched to carry beyond her bubble of privacy. “Esquires, knights, and all gentles of the Association who are within hearing of my voice. Know that these men are of good birth and Associates of the PPA. For some years they have served me as esquires, and have proven valiant in battle, faithful in service-”
And extremely efficient in some covert ops work, but let’s not break the flow. “-and skillful and courteous in those arts and graces which become gentlefolk. I am therefore minded to dub them knights, which is my right as their liege-lady, as baron and tenant-in-chief, as Grand Constable of the Association and as myself one who wears the golden spurs and belt of knighthood. Do any here dispute my right or know of an impediment in these men? If so speak now, or hold your peace thereafter, for you may be called to court under oath as witnesses of this ceremony.”
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