by SM Stirling
They explored cautiously, until they were close enough to the windows to see out. They did come across some bones before then; a woman’s, he thought, though it was hard to be sure when they were scattered a bit by birds. The human skeleton curled around a smaller one, certainly a cat’s.
“Sedatives,” Father Ignatius said, taking up a cylindrical plastic pill bottle from the finger bones.
The same type of container was still used and reused over all the world they knew, for everything from fire splints to spare needles; or even for pills.
“May God have mercy on her,” he said soberly, signing the air over the remains. “I do not know if this could be strictly construed as suicide. Perhaps . . . but I hope not.”
Ritva sniffled a little. “And she brought her cat. That’s sad, that’s really sad.”
Artos shook his head silently. They were looking out over the graves of four or five millions who’d died quickly if they were lucky, and more often in slow bewildered fear and agony and dread; the whole ruined city was a tomb, like a thousand others. Yet while the deaths of six billion were a story too hard for a mind to grasp, the death of one and her cat could move folk even a generation later.
We humans are made so, he thought. We’re creatures of the pack, and our packmates or those we can imagine as such are more real to our hearts than any number of nameless strangers.
Then he came to the edge and leaned against the rope; the windows had slanted outward here, so you could look directly down as well.
“Oh, my,” he said after a while. “Oh, my. By flower-faced Blodeuwedd’s all-seeing owl!”
It was different from a glider or balloon, yet oddly as if he were hovering suspended by a sheer act of will half a mile above the earth. The next surprise was how fair the view was. Water stretched south and east and west, white-ruffled blue beating in light surf on the curving shore, empty of sails but dense with birds nesting on green offshore islands. They rose in skeins like twisting trails of smoke as he watched, and other flights went honking through the air not far away—black-white-gray Canada geese for the most part. The ruins of the skyscrapers formed a huge cross, but soon they gave way to a mantle of green that must have started as tree-lined streets and gardens and now was a burgeoning forest with only occasional snags of brick peeking through; more birds flew raucous through the branches, and he could imagine deer and boar beneath, and rabbit and fox and badger and raccoon. From that wood of oak and maple, fir and spruce and locust, occasional apartment towers reared like monoliths, often more than half overgrown in a shaggy coat of climbing ivy.
Here there was none of the sense of brooding menace that filled the heart down among the buildings, the closed-in sense of hostile eyes always watching, and the awareness of the great dying beneath that. Here you could see how root and branch and leaf and burrowing beast were slowly reclaiming the land, and it gave you a detachment where the lifetimes of men waxed and vanished like morning light on the leaves. The air that blew in through the shattered glass smelled of the silty-wet lake and was otherwise clean.
“Does the Middle Earth of men look thus, from the halls of the Gods in Asgard?” Asgerd said quietly. “Does the All-father’s eye see so, the gaze that roams the Nine Worlds from his high seat?”
She turned to Edain: “I came up here because I was ashamed not to, Edain. Thank you for bringing my heart to it. I’d not want to have missed it.”
His arm went around her waist. “It’s a sight, and no mistake, eh? Something to tell the grandkids.”
They stood looking outward. Ritva and Mary went the circuit of the round observation deck, pointing things out and exclaiming, the liquid trills of excited Sindarin marking their passage. Ingolf stood with his arms crossed.
“So damn many,” he said in a brooding tone. “Madison, Chicago, Cincinnati, Albany, Boston . . . I’ve seen dozens of ’em and there’s always more.”
Father Ignatius meditated for a while, and then pulled a pad out of one of his robe’s capacious pockets and began to sketch. Virginia merely blinked, then blinked again; Artos suspected she was trying to fit what she saw into a mind shaped by twenty years of Powder River ranch life, and succeeding only slowly.
“Well, I always thought the old folks mighty foolish when they talked about things before the Change,” she said. “Maybe I was . . . sorta wrong about that. If they could do this ...”
Fred nodded slowly. “I think I understand Dad a bit better now. They had this, and they lost it. It was all taken away. No wonder he was wild to get it back—get some of it back at least, the big country even if he couldn’t get the stuff like this.”
“But they left this!” Asgerd said. “For us to see, and sing of in our sagas.”
Then, chanting:
“Yet all is not lost
For memory sinks not
Beneath the mold;
Till the Wyrd of the World
Stands unforgotten
High under Heaven
The hero’s name!”
There was another moment of quietness. “And yet they died,” Edain said. “And they’re gone, almost as if they never were.”
Artos shook his head. “They left us. We’re not the ancients, but we’re their children. Children of their seed, children of their dreams.”
The dark young man from Idaho spoke:
“Rudi . . . Artos . . . do you think we can ever do something as, as magnificent as this? Or are we always going to be living in their shadows, tearing down their wonders and using them to build sheep-pens or hammer into spearheads?”
Artos put his hand to the hilt of the Sword, feeling the blur of possibility like currents beneath the surface of the world.
“No,” he said. “We won’t do anything like this. We’ll do different things. Things just as grand! And maybe when we’ve proved we can, we’ll get the power to do such as this back as well. Someday, when we’re ready.”
Mathilda took his free hand. He squeezed hers gratefully, and she said:
“I’m glad we saw this. But I’m glad it’s only once. We can’t let this sort of thing, umm, intimidate us. We Changelings have a world to make—our own world.”
There was a murmur of assent, as they looked around at the bones of glory.
“And that’s what’s important,” Artos said. “Important to us and our children and theirs after them. It’s been an hour. Best we be going.”
The nine of them collected their gear. Ignatius paused for a second, ripped out a page from his sketching pad, wrote his name on it and then folded the whole into a winged dart like a hang glider. Then he gave a dexterous flick of the wrist and sent it out the window; the wind took it and snapped it upward. The white fleck shrank into a dot that spun away.
The soldier-monk grinned; when he did you remembered he was still barely thirty, and saw the smallholder’s boy who’d walked barefoot down the little dusty lanes below Mt. Angel.
“I used to do that when I was a scholarship student in the abbey’s junior secondary school,” he said, chuckling ruefully. “Before I decided I had a vocation. Mt. Angel’s walls are high enough on its hilltop, though not as high as this. Sister Agatha would crack me over the knuckles with her rosary for wasting paper, and my confessor would set me penances for wasting the labor of those who made it—and made it for a tool of learning, not a boy’s game. But I had trouble truly repenting.”
His smile grew reminiscent. “One landed five miles away—and I got another switching from my father when he had to pay the man who brought it to us. It was worth it.”
“And with that, let’s take our leave of this wonder,” Artos said.
When they were all in the stairwell he carefully shut the steel door once more and wedged it against wind and storm with a bit of metal that he drove in with a blow of his heel. It made the door boom like a drum, echoing down the confines of the concrete passage.
“Why?” Ingolf said. “Won’t keep the water out forever.”
“Very little is forever,”
Artos replied. “It’ll keep it out for a while, and that may mean the tower stands for another year. Which is not such a little thing, eh?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE WILD LANDS
(FORMERLY SOUTHERN ONTARIO)
APRIL 14, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
Two more days took them well out of the last of the Toronto suburbs; those were now mostly forest anyway, with the roadways showing as patches of asphalt. Then they were in what had once been rolling farmland towards the center of the peninsula between Lake Erie and Lake Huron, with here and there a long ridge of glacial moraine covered in scattered oaks and beeches.
Twenty-five years after the end of the old world the farmland was forest too, of an odd transitional type that had never existed before in all life’s history, for there had never been a time when tens of millions of prime acres were abandoned overnight. You could see where patches of woodlot had been, often on a bit of high ground. There the trees stood tall, massive hardwoods and scattered evergreens towering up a hundred feet or better, hinting at the majesty that would rear here one day if men left it be. Here and there was a smaller clump where a farmhouse had stood, or a line of them along what had been a road or a field boundary. From there waves of saplings had spread outward, fair-sized trees near to where their seeds had first fallen, rippling downward as the distance increased.
There were still open stretches, sometimes grassland where fire or grazing beasts had kept growth down; tangles of vine and ivy and bramble elsewhere; now and then the livid green and dried-reed brown of burgeoning marsh dotted with mallard ducks sticking their rumps in the air as they fed on the tender shoots pushing up from the mud, and grubs and bugs.
“Here,” Artos said, signaling the halt.
That branch was broken; it’s Ranger-sign. It points past the dead hedge.
It was about an hour past noon, the sky bright blue with some high thin clouds, and warm enough to make just a shirt comfortable when you were working. He swung the plaid back on and pinned it as they used the brakes and then he settled the flat Scots bonnet on his head; the two Mackenzies had switched back to their kilts, and so had the Southsiders, who took immense pride in the imitations of the Clan tartan they’d had made up in Iowa last year. Artos took a horn that hung from the handlebars of his bicycle and blew four long blasts, a blatting huuuuuuu-huuuuuuuu-huuuuuuuuuu-huuuuuuuuuu.
Then they all jumped off to run a few last paces beside the pedal-cart before they grabbed the carrying handles and lifted it with a grunt and moved in lockstep through dead crackling canes of last year’s scrub, hauling it a hundred paces, through a gap in the dead spiny growth of the onetime hedge and towards a section of brick wall that stood up from thick thorny scrub. That would make it the spot from which the practiced routine of pitching camp would start. Dense silence fell, broken mostly by the ticking of insects and birdcall—quarrelsome robins and fox sparrows, black watchful crows, fleeting wood ducks going wak-wak-wak. Small white flowers were blooming beneath their boots, trillium and snowdrops, and the new shoots of grass through the brown mat were dotted with yellow dutchman’s breeches.
There was a small scrap of blue cloth snagged to the ruin at arm’s length above head height, Ranger-sign for here. Roses had overgrown the brick, hiding almost all of it from sight in a thick tangle of bushy cane just showing their buds; the rest of the building had fallen into the cellar. The house had burned first, judging from the scorch marks he could see here and there, and from trees beside it that were dead stumps or dead on one side. In the years since, mud had flowed down into it until it was an overgrown depression in the dirt more than a hole, albeit one he wouldn’t have chanced walking on if he could avoid it.
Bjarni hopped down from his cart as it pulled in next and walked over to him. “So soon?” he said.
“There’s no break on the line for another day’s travel beyond this, the twins say,” Artos said. “We’ll strain the horses if we go any farther today.”
“A man can walk farther than he can run, I know, but—”
The Norrheimer lifted his floppy-brimmed leather hat and scratched his hair, which was just the color that showed where one of the bricks had cracked across. He’d taken a bit of the sun in the last few days of warm cloudless weather, and his face was tending that way too.
“It’s odd, traveling like this. We’re moving so fast, but often we halt so early. I feel guilty somehow!”
“Guilt I leave to Christians,” he said, and Mathilda stuck out her tongue at him. “We can always use more time for weapons training and drill! For now let’s get our bows and look around. Take the lay of the land, and maybe get some fresh meat.”
Rank had some privileges; that was necessary work, and who was to say they shouldn’t be the ones to do it this time? There was an old well near the ruin, a circle of mortared stone with an iron top, and a piston-pump rising out of it. The rotted handle had been replaced with a new one roughly shaped from an ash branch; that would be Mary and Ritva’s work as they came through scouting, and from the muddy section under the spout it had been successful. He took the handle and threw his strength against it. The first few up-and-down strokes were reluctant and ancient metal squealed amid falling flakes of rust, but soon water was gushing from the spout. He cupped his left hand under it and sipped. The water was icy-cold on his fingers and very clean, with only a slight iron tang added to the mineral tastes of the glacial sand and gravel far beneath their feet. He dumped another few handfuls over his face and neck, enjoying the feeling of the trickles cutting through sweat and dust.
“That’s a stroke of luck,” Edain said. “They stopped using these before the Change for some reason in most places, the eejits. Forebye they’re the best way of getting good water I know. Or the surest. Even with a mountain brook, you can never tell if there’s not a dead sheep rotting in it a few bends upstream waiting to give you the runs.”
“My mother has one of these pumps in the kitchen of our house,” Asgerd said, slightly boastful. “They had it there before the Change, she said, from her mother’s mother’s time. Water for the pumping, even in winter, and cold and good on the hottest day.”
“Mine has one too,” Edain said equably. “We make ’em, in Montival.”
Strictly speaking they make them in foundries and machine shops in Corvallis and we Mackenzies buy them, Artos thought. Though of course we could make them; it’s just cheaper that way.
They dumped their canteens and refilled them; the water they’d had was flat-tasting stuff, taken from a slow stream and boiled into harmlessness the day before. It was healthy and wet, and that was all you could say for it, but the well water made drinking a pleasure. From the flow, there would be plenty for their whole party. The next pedal-cart had pulled up; he turned and thrust one arm up with the fingers bunched into a spear, rotated it at the wrist, then made a fist and pulled it down.
Ingolf waved back to show his comprehension of the signals: It’s yours, take over and we stop here. Bjarni beckoned to a Norrheimer and had him take the same message to his second in command, Syfrid of the Hrossings.
Then Artos stepped through his unstrung bow, braced the lower tip against his left boot, and flexed down with his thigh as he slid the string into the upper nock with his right hand. The rest did likewise. Edain reached into the plain brown leather sporran he wore—the fancy models with silverwork and fur trim were for special occasions—and rooted around for a lump of beeswax.
“In Norrheim, we teach men not to scratch there in public,” Asgerd said. “Or are you bragging?”
“Mackenzie men have more to brag about, by the Dagda’s favor which we enjoy,” Edain said, and handed the wax to Mathilda.
They all gave their bowstrings a quick rub with it. As he did, Artos quoted, thickening his accent and adding a Scots roll to the “r’s”:
“Och, laddie, I dinna ken where y’ve been . . . but waur ’ere it was, ye won first prize!”
The two Mackenzies laughed, and Mathilda groane
d. When the Norrheimers looked puzzled, she gave them the ancient joke. Bjarni bellowed laughter, checking himself with an effort; they were hunting, after all. Asgerd groaned in turn and threw the lump at Edain’s head; he caught it with a quick snap and dropped it back in the pouch.
They set out, Artos and Mathilda, Edain and Asgerd and Bjarni, with Garbh quartering ahead of them. All were hard to see in their roughly practical clothing; the green-brown of the Clan’s tartan made good camouflage in this lush country too, and the little slivers of dull orange actually helped with that. Their swords hung at their waists, and their fighting-knives and belt-knives, but nobody bothered with armor or helm, or shields beyond the little soup-plate-sized steel bucklers clipped to the scabbards the three from Montival wore.
A space of bluegrass meadow only a little scraggly with brush sloped southward, past the remains of a swing and teeter-totter overgrown by a sprawling clump of lilac and a rotted rope hanging from the branch of an oak with the remains of a big tire lying on the ground beneath it. Then came an overgrown laneway, and after it a long-neglected orchard, grown into a tangle of dead trees, spindly saplings where fruit had fallen, and others run wild. A few of the apple buds were showing the first blossoms, and black-and-white-striped butterflies burst upward from around their feet as they walked. A jay with the long tail of the eastern tribe scolded and then flew away, sounding satisfied with work well done.
“I know the apples, but what are those?” Bjarni asked, pointing to another overgrown field that had been short trees in regular rows.
Edain glanced up from looking at the ground ahead for game-sign .
“Peaches over there. Cherries beyond that I think, and . . . by Brigid of the Sheaf, apricots! I haven’t seen any of those for a while. Ah, my mother’s apricot tarts! With good thick whipped cream.”
“I’m beginning to think no woman could rival her, with you,” Asgerd said dryly.
