by SM Stirling
Artos gave him a considering look. “I’m thinking, Fred, that it’s odd your father didn’t do more of that. Offensive campaigns, that is. He was strong for reuniting all the old America, and he was an able man and a forceful one, and he certainly put enough effort into preparing for such. That army he built is a wonder and no mistake.”
“Team Four!” Fred called. “Remember to keep your interval . . . ready . . . go . . . now.”
Then he looked down at the greasy rag in his hands. “I . . . don’t know. I think . . . I think the reason was that he didn’t want to fight other Americans. Not really, not all-out. Yeah, bandits, Rovers, scum like that, sure. But not whole . . . whole countries like your people, or New Deseret, or, ummm . . .”
He stopped and looked at Mathilda for an instant before glancing away.
“The PPA.”
Now, he was going to say even the PPA, sure and he was, Artos thought, nodding helpfully. Matti’s wincing a bit. For the Association was everyone’s boogeyman, until we had Corwin and the CUT to concern us. And at that, the Association today is not what it was in Norman’s time.
“I think he really expected to have the others join in freely as soon as he got Idaho really organized. But that took so long, and by then . . . well, by then things had sort of set in other places, like concrete going hard. It ate at him, I know, and really disappointed him. And—” He stumbled and went on. “I think that’s one reason why so many younger officers were ready to back my broth . . . to back Martin. They’d spent all their lives training for Reunification, and then it looked as if it wasn’t going to happen.”
Grimly: “Martin doesn’t mind fighting anyone. Everyone knew that, too.”
Artos nodded sympathetically. Though it wasn’t just that Martin Thurston was coldly ambitious, and ruthless in a way that made him equal even of Mathilda’s father. To a man like the elder Thurston it still was America. To those born after the Change, or too young to remember much of the old world, it was natural to think of those over the next river or mountain range as strangers, the more so if they followed different Gods or customs. And the Gods knew enough strange little enclaves and cults and tribelets had spawned in the last generation, crystallizing around someone with a strong will or vision . . . or just luck, or all three.
Like my own mother, to be sure. Or my blood father. Or Matti’s parents.
The young man drew a deep breath. “Well, we’re ready for you, sir . . . Your Majesty. Your Majesties, I should say.”
Artos looked over his shoulder. Epona was hitched behind one of the horse-drawn wagons on a leading rein, and not looking happy about it, but it would be work enough for the destriers to keep up with nothing on their backs. He strode forward and grabbed the lifting handle on the front right side of the next pedal-cart. Mathilda took the front left; that had the added advantage that each of them had the shield arm facing out. Edain was behind him, and Asgerd beside the bowman. Ignatius, and three of the Southsiders—Tuk and Samul and Rattlebones—were on the rear pair of cycles.
The assemblage thumped down on the rails; the deep rust of a generation already showed a glinting strip where it had been worn away to show the untouched metal. Left to itself a few more generations and this would just be a long mound with a ruddy streak in the soil; already it was far too weak to have borne the huge engines and loads of the ancient world. But it would serve this time; it would serve . . .
Their gear was prepacked, and it was the work of a moment to lash it down. Garbh leapt up and curled to rest on Edain’s sleeping bag. The huge half-mastiff was a little plumper; even a dog could be a hero of the Battle of the Six Hills, and trade on it for many a rib or titbit.
“I swear that beast looks smug,” Mathilda said, smiling. “She’s going to ride at her leisure, most of the way!”
“Team Five!” Fred called. “Remember to keep your interval . . . ready . . . go . . . now.”
Artos swung into the saddle of the bicycle. “Hup!” he called, letting his left foot bear his weight down on the pedal. Everyone else in the team did likewise. “Hup! Hup!”
Steel grated on steel; one wheel skidded amid Southsider curses not intelligible to anyone who hadn’t grown up with their little tribe in the Wild Lands of Illinois. Then the weight of the cart moved forward, slowly at first and then faster and faster. His long legs pushed at the soft steady resisting force. He’d pedaled carts before back home, but this wasn’t quite like the streamlined aluminum pods used in most of Montival for fast transport. The wind in his face was colder with the speed of their passage, but not too uncomfortable for any of them, accustomed as they were to hard labor of one type or another outdoors in all weathers.
Behind Mathilda, Asgerd blurted in a tone halfway between shock and exhilaration:
“This is as fast as skiing downhill! Faster than a galloping horse!”
“Not quite.” Edain grinned. “Still, it’s better than walking, eh? And no more effort.”
Better if you’re in a hurry, Artos thought. And to be sure, better than mud!
There was plenty of that to either side as they covered the stretch of open fields southward; doubtless in a month or so they’d be planted to grain or buckwheat or potatoes or timothy and clover, but right now they looked the sort of glutinous quasi bog that would suck the boots right off your feet or break a horse’s heart. Then they flashed into the woods, with dapples of shade running across their faces and blinking brightness in the intervals; it was colder where there was shade, and most of the ground was still snow-covered. Occasionally the framework would shake and sway as they hit a patch where some gravel had washed out below the ties or rails had bent a little in a storm, but mostly their passage was smooth.
The sugaring party they’d seen looked up from emptying buckets of wood or old-time galvanized metal into the tank on a sled, moving their spears or bows to stay in arm’s reach as they went from tree to sled and back. A black-and-white dog with them dashed in a circle and barked at Gharbh, who turned her head away in ladylike indifference, and a boy or girl of around seven called from the box of the sled, waving with the hand that didn’t hold the reins.
Artos waved back, and Asgerd called a greeting lost in the speed of their passage.
“My family has a fine stretch of sugar-woods,” she said. “They’re a little east and north of here. Nearer to New Sweden. It’s a good farm; my mother’s family held it before the land-taking. Good woods for timber and firewood and sugar, good pasture, good land for grain and spuds and flax, and fishing rights on a lake.”
“Your mother’s?” Edain asked.
“All her kin were killed by outlaw reivers before Erik the Strong came in the first Change Year. My father, Karl, was one of his followers . . . joined him after the Change but far south of here, in a place called New Hampshire where he was a warrior who kept the peace . . . a policeman, that was the word . . . and he helped rescue her. There are six of us children—my brothers, Grettir, he’s twenty-four summers and just wed, Hauk and Erik, and me and then Brynhildr, she’s fifteen, and little Tóra’s ten. Tóra loves sugaring time. When we make candy by dropping the hot syrup from the boiler in the snow.”
The words were plain enough, but there was an undertone of longing. Glancing over his shoulder, Artos saw her head turned as well, with wisps of honey-colored hair escaping from her knit cap. Doubtless she was thinking that she might well never see it again, or the land where she’d been raised and had thought to live all her life and her children after her.
“Why didn’t you stay?” Edain asked, a little more bluntly than Artos would have phrased it.
“My oath,” she said flatly. “You were there when I swore it at the sumbel, master-bowman.”
Artos faced forward again; Mathilda glanced at him and winked.
Edain shook his head. “You swore to kill ten of the enemy to pay for your man,” he said. “Ten followers of the red-robes.”
Asgerd Karlsdottir’s intended husband had been killed by the Bekwa befor
e the open war started, while he was on a trip to find salvage goods in the dead cities to the northwest; what her people called going in Viking.
“And I think you’ve killed the half-score you promised your God,” Edain went on; Asgerd had the three interlinked upright triangles that were Odin’s mark on a pendant around her neck. “Met it or bettered it at the Six-Hill Fight.”
“That’s not certain,” she said bleakly.
It wasn’t absolutely certain. Often in a pitched battle there was no way of knowing if your blow went home, the more so with arrows; everything was a whirling shifting chaos. But he’d be surprised if it wasn’t a moral certainty, given the way the pursuit and merciless slaughter had gone after the Bekwa broke.
“And . . .”
She was silent for a long moment; when she spoke again it was hard to hear beneath the creak and rattle and hum of the pedal-cart. Then softly:
“That’s near where Sigurd and I were to make our homestead. I don’t care to live where we spent so much time planning our life together.”
Louder: “Besides, I made oath to Artos Mikesson too. He’s my lord until he releases me, and he hasn’t.”
“That I have not,” Artos said, hiding kindliness under the stern tone.
The rails stretched on ahead, rising and falling, winding through rolling hills and patches of forest that gradually grew larger; now along a small river still mostly frozen, then by a lake with black water showing between chunks of rotting ice. On a straight stretch he could see two teams before them toiling away in front, and a quick look over his shoulder showed five more behind. The woods grew thicker still, until they were traveling through a tunnel, green with pine and spruce or showing the writhing bare branches of hardwoods whose buds were putting out their first faint swelling. The air had an intense cleanliness that you got only at some distance from men’s dwellings—no dung or woodsmoke.
“Your folk don’t use this part of the country much?” he said.
“No, lord,” Asgerd answered. “The farmland’s better north and eastward, that’s the heart of Norrheim. All the folk in these parts who didn’t die in the Change Year moved up to join us. Ayuh, where there were enough people to help defend each other and do the work. And over there”—she pointed westward—“is land that was dedicated to the forest wights by a godhi of the old Maine-folk whose blood I share. He was a chieftain hight Baxter. There, nobody lived even before the Change. But the hunting’s very good—deer and boar and bear and moose. Wolf and catamount for their skins, and tiger too, but they’ve only become common these last few years.”
“Isn’t it a little far to pack out meat?” Edain asked with interest. “Or do you stop to smoke and salt it?”
“We wait for the frost so it’ll keep,” Asgerd said. “Or even later until first snowfall, when the beasts are still fat but we can sled it back home. Don’t you Mackenzies?”
The master-bowman shook his head. “Not near where we live. You can’t count on it staying cold there—chilly and wet, to be sure, but not freezing-cold; it’ll keep the flesh from spoiling a while, maybe, but not long. Up in the mountains, yes, but it’s too dangerous to go there much into snow season; you can get buried fifteen or twenty feet deep in a few hours with no more warning than the first flakes.”
He grinned. “The chief and I and Ingolf the Far-Traveler did get buried just like that, two years ago less about a fortnight, when we crossed the High Cascades going east.”
The smile faded a little. “Just away from home we were, and spring blooming hard around Dun Fairfax down in the valley.”
“How did you survive?” she asked.
“Built a quick hut of saplings and pine boughs against an overhang in the cliff face and waited out the storm, telling tales and sleeping,” Edain said. “ ’Twasn’t even very cold, once the snow blanket piled up, and we had plenty of food and firewood. And Garbh was warm!”
The dog lifted her broad head at the sound of her name, then laid it back on her paws.
“We had a chimney of bark to keep the air fresh, pushed up through to the surface, d’you see.”
She nodded; snow made good insulation, if you had something to keep it away from your skin, and plenty to eat to stoke the inner furnaces. But it could still be deadly in a dozen ways if it trapped you far from home or help.
“And how did you get out afterwards?”
“Tunneled out, then walked over the pass on snowshoes we’d made while we waited. The snow wasn’t near as deep once we were over the crestline; the peaks block the wet winds from the sea however much she blows. Not a comfortable pair of days, but no great danger.”
His tone was offhand, which was the most effective type of boasting.
“Well . . . I’m glad to see that your rich warm land hasn’t made your folk soft,” Asgerd said.
Artos grinned to himself. Every word of what Edain had said was the truth. What his fellow clansman hadn’t mentioned was that it was Ingolf Vogeler who’d shown them what to do when the storm struck, with a trick from his Wisconsin home; they’d probably have died without him. The Kickapoo country around Readstown in the Free Republic of Richland was nearly as bleak in winter as Norrheim.
The Clan Mackenzie’s territories were not, not down in the valleys where their farms and duns lay and where they spent the Black Months in rain and fog with only occasional brief snow cover. You could pasture stock outside right through most winters, with only about thirty hard night frosts in all. His people dealt with the huge mountain snowfalls of the High Cascade range by simply not going there from Samhain to Beltane, for the most part. His own experience of mountain snows had been limited to downhill skiing at Timberline Lodge, a possession of Mathilda’s family on Mt. Hood, with great hearths and well-stocked pantries for stormy days.
I somehow doubt the kilt would have caught on in Norrheim the way it did among us, regardless of fashion!
Despite the mid-forties chill they were all sweating a little after an hour or two. Water bottles made the rounds occasionally, and cold pancakes rolled around jam fillings.
“This is a rest,” Artos murmured to Mathilda as Edain and the Norrheimer girl chatted behind him.
“Rest?” she said, wiping a dab of blueberry jam off her chin with her thumb and licking it. “Well, it’s not as hard as pushing sleds through snowdrifts on the shores of Superior and wondering if we’d have to eat the horses.”
“Rest it is, like a downy bed.”
And you beside me in it, he didn’t add aloud.
That would have been a natural joke among Mackenzies, but not among Associates in mixed company. Instead he went on:
“All we have to do is pedal. The future runs ahead on rails, and I don’t have to decide a single bit of it! The knottiest problem we’re to be confronted with the now is whether to heave a log off the track bodily or cut it up first.”
She laughed a little, but nodded. “And we’re headed home,” she said with longing.
He nodded. “And . . . the Sword seems quieter. It’s whispering to me, rather than talking with an annoying insistence in a language I can’t really understand.”
Mathilda reached over and touched his shoulder. “Perhaps it does what’s, um, necessary. And not more. And it will leave you alone when, when all this is over.”
“It’s hope you give me, Matti,” Artos said. Then he smiled. “But you always did.”
CHAPTER TEN
NORRHEIM, LAND OF THE BJORNINGS
(FORMERLY BROWNVILLE JUNCTION, PISCATAQUIS COUNTY, MAINE)
APRIL 1, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
Three days later they camped not far from the abandoned town of Brownville Junction. Bjarni was frankly incredulous:
“Ninety miles in three days! Five hundred men and seventy horses and all their supplies!” he said, shaking his head and looking out over the disorderly array of tents.
They had been hastily erected amid scattered snags of brick and cinder-block ruin overgrown with saplings and brush, equally hastily
cleared. The corroded lumps of cars and trucks stood among them, or tangles of wire where telephone and power lines had fallen in some storm or fire. Woodsmoke and cooking smells predominated, with badly washed warrior and horses and their by-products a close second, but water was heating for hasty baths. You didn’t want to expose more of yourself wet to the air than you had to, even if it was merely chilly muddy spring and not winter now.
Artos was checking Epona’s feet; there was some wear on the Norrheimer horseshoes from the gravel and the railroad ties—they shod with rather soft metal here, hand-hammered from rebar, rather than the harder machine-made types common in Montival. They’d do for a few more days, though, and the hooves and legs were fine, which gave him a gut-deep feeling of relief. He didn’t quite know what he’d do if she started to break down when they were so committed to an unrelenting schedule.
Actually, you do know what you’d do, boyo. That’s why you’re relieved. And she’s toughening up again nicely after the winter’s rest, but this isn’t stressing her so badly as the trip east. So far.
He put her left forehoof down, slapped her neck and watched her mooch off towards the rest of the herd.
“Fred’s idea seems to be working”—so far—“and that’s the truth,” Artos agreed.
“You’re fortunate and well served in your companions,” Bjarni said.
“And that’s the truth, Bjarni King,” he replied, feeling an inner glow. “No man better.”
The Norrheimer was thinking hard. “When I come back, I’m going to see what more we can do with railroads. Though I don’t see how we could ever make rail once it rusted or wore away, and I don’t like to think what it would cost to buy from the English.”
“You wouldn’t have to,” Fred Thurston said. “The old Americans used steel rail because it was easy for them, and because they ran giant engines and cars moving fast as arrows on the rails. To support a horse-drawn wagon or a pedal-cart all you need is wood with a metal strip spiked on top. My father had some of that worked up by our engineers in Boise for test purposes. It does just as well and it’s a lot simpler to make.”
