The Scourge of God c-2

by S. M. Stirling

  "-arguing who paid what to whom and who was responsible for doing the other thing. Attending meetings. It's not so much being Chief I mind, or even Goddess-on-Earth, it's being a bureaucrat."

  Sir Nigel Loring chuckled; he had been a leader of men before the Change-lieutenant colonel in the Blues and Royals and before that the SAS. Then one of the powers behind the throne after the Change, helping save a remnant of civilization in England before Charles the Mad had driven him into exile.

  "And dealing with bumpf," he said, using a rude word for paperwork he'd taught her.

  She sighed and quieted her mind as they stood for a moment in the open gateway of the fortress-village that was her home, letting the grateful heat sink into her bones and fill her tired body with an animal contentment.

  "There are times I feel old indeed," she said. "Old and overworked." Then: "Well, the job doesn't grow easier for the waiting."

  The day was drowsy with warmth as the sun sank towards the thin blue line of the Coast Range on the western horizon; a last few bees buzzed homeward, and a flock of Western bluebirds went over, like a chirring flutter fashioned from bits of living sky. The world was a wonder greater than any magic she'd ever made, and she had her place within it.

  Ground and center. War may be coming, but it is n 't here yet. My son is over the mountains among enemies, but no harm's come to him that I know. Plan for the future, yes, but live every moment as if it were forever, because it is. There is only now. Ground and center.. .

  She sighed and blinked leaf-green eyes that were a little haunted even in times of joy, for they had witnessed the death of a world.

  A few weeks ago the long mountainside meadow below Dun Juniper had been crowded with the tents and bothies of her clansfolk, come for the Lughnasadh rites and the games and socializing that followed-starting with shooting the longbow and on down to prize lambs and enormous hand-reared beets and Little League softball games. Now they bore the tents of outland visitors, and their hobbled horses grazed the lush green meadows; they and their followings were too large to all guest within the dun's walls… and with some, it was more politic to keep them separate.

  Largest was the great striped many-peaked pavilion that flew two banners. One was easy to make out; it was the crimson-on-black Lidless Eye of the Portland Protective Association, and not often seen on Mackenzie land. The other grew clearer as they approached and the wind caught at the heavy dark silk, a blue-mantled Virgin Mary standing on a depressed-looking dragon with drooping ears.

  That was Sandra Arminger's personal banner, and Juniper suspected it was a joke in a subtle way; her household guards stood beneath it. Well-born young men in black armor of articulated plate and mail, graceful and arrogant as cats… though much better disciplined, and under the eye of a grizzled veteran who bowed and bent the knee to the Mackenzie chief and her spouse with punctilious Association courtesy. He had the golden spurs of knighthood on his boots.

  "Lady Juniper," he said. "Sir Nigel. You are expected, and most welcome. Bors, Drogo, announce our noble guests."

  Even so there was an indefinable bristling from the men-at-arms, and the same from the kilted Mackenzie armsmen behind her. A few of them touched the yellow yew staves of the longbows slung over their backs beside the quivers… perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not.

  "Silence in the ranks," Nigel Loring said quietly, and it subsided.

  Juniper looked over her shoulder. How young they are! she thought. Changelings…

  They'd been children when the new-made Clan fought the PPA in the War of the Eye twelve years ago; few had been so much as toddlers at the Change, many not even gleams in their parents' eyes.

  "Sacred is the guest upon our soil," she said softly, and saw them blush and shuffle a bit; the new world was all they'd ever known. "To even think them harm is geasa so long as they keep the peace. Even if we were at feud with them, the which we are not."

  They touched the backs of their hands to their foreheads at that, and then managed to smile in friendly fashion at the household men of the Regent. One of those held the flap of the tent open. They went through, into the stillness of an anteroom hung in gray silk, and then into the main chamber. A ripple ran through the two-score of guests, everything from elaborate curtseys to casual waves.

  She looked around, nodding. This being a formal occasion and she fifty-three, she'd decided to forego the kilt and wear a tartan arsaid, a long cloak wrapped around the waist like a skirt and then pinned at her shoulder with a broach of silver knotwork, over a shift of linsey-woolsey dyed in saffron and embroidered at the hems. Her belt was linked silver worked in running patterns, and she had a diadem with the Crescent Moon on her forehead. Even so, she felt a bit underdressed compared to some of the guests.

  And this whole pavilion is so Sandra, Juniper thought. She's gone camping… with a palace wrapped around herself, so.

  The ground was covered in softly glowing not-quite-Oriental rugs, and the walls with tapestries, both made in the workshops of Newberg and Portland; flowers and vines, lords and ladies hawking or hunting boar and tiger or dancing stately pavanes in pavilions out of dream. Lamps of fretwork in gold and silver and carved jewels hung from the peaks of the ceiling. The light folding furniture was inlaid with mother-of-pearl and rare woods. A prie-dieu and icon of the Virgin stood in one corner; Juniper made a gesture of respect to the Madonna and Child there.

  "You can tell the economic pyramid up North comes to a demmed sharp point," Nigel drawled under his breath, echoing her thought.

  "And that we've been married so long we're starting to finish each other's sentences," Juniper replied. "Even the unspoken ones!"

  A minstrel wearing a great hood with ridiculously long liripipes and tippets elaborately decorated with foliated dagges strummed a lute and sang softly from a corner:

  "Her only will I sing

  Who, challeng'd by the Boy

  Or bids him wing or crowns him King

  In courtesy and joy."

  Serving girls in tabards and double tunics were carrying around trays of drinks and nibblements, salty cured sturgeon roe on crackers and bits of caper and smoked salmon and goose-liver paste-what Sandra insisted on calling canapes-and pyonnade, fabulously expensive because the main ingredient was candied pineapple shipped in from Hawaii or the Latin countries.

  Juniper grinned as she accepted a glass of white wine from the Lady Regent's demesne estates and a little sausage on a toothpick. She'd heard that when she was being informal Sandra Arminger referred to this sort of thing as faculty fodder. Her gossoon of a husband, Norman, had been a medieval history professor, of all things-specializing in the Norman duchy and its offshoots-as well as a Society fighter before the Change. After March 17, 1998, he'd branched out into warlording, conquest, torture, murder and general wickedness, with the gleeful relish of a man at last living out the dreams of his heart.

  Though it's true he saved many a life in that first year, if only so they'd be alive to serve him.

  "Speak of the devil's widow," Juniper murmured beneath her breath.

  Sandra came towards her, hands extended, the silk of her pearl-gray cotte-hardi skirts rustling, her face framed by an elaborately folded noblewoman's wimple of white satin confined by a net of diamonds and platinum. The buttons from waist to high lace collar and down the long sleeves were carved from old ivory and mother-of-pearl.

  "Juniper, dear, it's wonderful to see you again," she said with a smile. "And to visit your home at long last."

  For the rest she was no taller than Juniper, and her face was quite unremarkable except for the care which made her look younger than her mid-fifties… and the depth of thought in her brown eyes, like a shifting complex pattern at the edge of sight, never quite glimpsed.

  They exchanged the air-kiss of peace; Nigel bowed over her hand. "I like your little twelve-bedroom pup tent," Juniper said. "It takes the rough out of roughing it, sure and it does. Though a little heavier than a sleeping bag on a trip, I'd think."


  Sandra chuckled. "Getting in touch with nature or back to the land always struck me as more a matter of wallowing in the dirt with the bugs. And the railroad runs most of the way here now."

  Which was a point; horses could pull fifteen times more on rails than on the best road.

  And why do I suspect Sandra would have brought the pavilion just the same even if she had to have it carried on the backs of porters?

  There were two grandees with her. Juniper was glad to see she hadn't brought any of the ordinary Protectorate nobility along-the Stavarovs in particular gave her the crawls. But she could tolerate Conrad Renfrew, Count of Odell and now Lord Chancellor of the Association. He was a thickset, shaven-headed man in his fifties, with a face made hideous by old white keloid scars. His arms of sable, a snow-topped mountain argent and vert were in a heraldic shield embroidered on the breast of his T-tunic.

  "I never managed to haul as much freight this way during the Protector's War," Renfrew said, grinning like something squatting on a cathedral's waterspout. "Even with an army of two thousand men to feed. The logistics were hell."

  Nigel gave the man who'd commanded the Association's armies in the War of the Eye a nod of wary respect.

  "We didn't expect you to besiege Sutterdown so quickly," he said.

  Renfrew chuckled. " I didn't expect you to corncob me by looping through those damned mountains and cutting our siege lines at Mt. Angel and beating Lord Emiliano's army." A pause. "Though he was a complete idiot, granted. Most of those jumped-up gangbangers never did learn a war isn't an enlarged drive-by."

  Juniper shivered slightly, remembering the earth shaking as the knights charged into the arrowstorm, and the sound of the horses screaming, louder and more piteous than men in their uncomprehending agony.

  "Their sons, however, have learned better," Tiphaine d'Ath said. "Conrad and I have seen to that."

  The woman in her thirties on Sandra's left was in what the PPA considered male dress, which was a rare thing in the Protectorate. And she was a Baroness in her own right rather than by marriage or inheritance, which was still more uncommon, her arms of sable, a delta or over a V argent self-chosen. Before the Change she'd been named Collette Rutherton, a Girl Scout and up-and-coming junior gymnast of Olympic caliber at Binnsmeade Middle School in Portland. Sandra had seen her potential.

  And took the girl under an elegant, batlike wing. Better to be Sandra's girl ninja and hatchetwoman than starving or being eaten by cannibals or dying of plague in those camps around Salem, I suppose.

  Together she and Conrad were the Regent's right hand, and a portion of the left.

  Both sides exchanged equally courteous murmurs in a protocol that sounded ancient and was no older than the Change, cobbled together out of novels and remembered stories and playful Society anachronisms turned deadly serious. She knew Nigel found it all hilarious, despite his poker face; his family had come to England in the train of William the Conqueror.

  Sandra clapped her hands twice. The minstrel fell silent with a final stroke of his fingers across the strings, and the buzz of conversation died.

  "Thank you all for your company, my lords and ladies," she said. "And now, if you will forgive us…"

  The heads-of-state and their closest advisers went through into an inner room with a table clad in white damask; servants set out a cold collation. Juniper took a chair near Sandra's and waited politely while Abbot Dmwoski of Mt. Angel spoke:

  "Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen."

  Half the people around the table joined in as he signed himself with the Cross; Eric Larsson the Bearkiller war-chief did, for example. His sister Signe Havel made the sign of the Hammer over her plate as Juniper spoke:

  "Harvest Lord who dies for the ripened grain Corn Mother who births the fertile field Blessed be those who share this bounty;

  And blessed the mortals who toiled with You

  Their hands helping Earth to bring forth life."

  "I'm Church of England, myself," Nigel Loring added dryly, and there was a general chuckle. "All this sincerity gives me hives, rather."

  Dmwoski shook his finger at him. "And the Anglicans have returned to Holy Mother Church," he said in mock reproof.

  "Taken it over, in fact, from all I've heard, Padre," the Englishman said. "After Alleyne and John and I left, of course."

  Juniper bit into a sandwich, shaved ham and a sharp Tillamook cheese on a crusty roll. The bread was made from hard Eastern wheat, and fresh-almost warm-which meant the Regent had managed to drag a portable bake-oven along with her…

  John Brown of Seffridge Ranch and the Central Oregon Ranchers' Association spoke first. "I suppose Juney's told you all, her son Rudi and the, ah, Princess Mathilda-"

  He sounded a little uncomfortable using the title; terminology was different over east of the Cascades, away from the influence of the PPA and the Society for Creative Anachronism. They used the old-time words there, even if Sheriff and Rancher meant pretty much the same as Count and Baron these days.

  "-and the others were at my place back around the beginnin' of May. Went East with my son Bob and some hands and a big herd of remounts I was selling to the Mormons, and got into a scrap with some Rovers. Haven't heard much of them since they headed East with the Deseret folk."

  Tiphaine d'Ath cleared her throat and went straight to the reports of the Battle of Wendell, flashed westward by the chain of heliograph stations in the PPA that ran from castle tower to mountain outpost down the Columbia and over the whole of the Association's territories.

  "And there are rumors that one or more of the late General Thurston's sons have been intriguing with the Church Universal and Triumphant."

  "Place might as well be one of our baronies," Renfrew said with a gargoyle grin at the tale of treachery and sudden death.

  "And the Princess Mathilda, Rudi, Mary and Ritva Havel, Baron Odard Liu and the others were definitely there-guests of General Thurston before then, for about a week, and with him during the battle," she continued, leaning back with a nod to the Regent.

  " And a certain knight-brother of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict was there with my daughter," Sandra added, giving Dmwoski a slow look. "A Father Ignatius, I believe."

  The head of the Order's warrior-monks spread strong battered hands a little gnarled with the beginnings of arthritis.

  "My lady, he did not conspire with Princess Mathilda when she planned to… ah… abscond."

  Sandra snorted. "Plausible deniability, Your Eminence? Casuistry? Jesuitical casuistry?"

  The prelate winced; the Benedictines and their militant post-Change offshoot had never been all that fond of the Society of Jesus. And Mt. Angel was independent, but tiny next to the PPA…

  Sandra raised a that point to me finger and went on: "He certainly seems to have strongly suspected she and Odard were going to run off and join Rudi on his… his quest. And he just happened to turn up and join her when she absconded from Castle Odell."

  The Count of Odell looked abashed. Dmwoski replied calmly:

  "Yes, and now he is with her, with sword and counsel. Would you rather he was not there to help?"

  "I do so hope his help doesn't include the last rites," Sandra said pleasantly. "And I would rather Mathilda was safely in Castle Todenangst or in the palace in Portland."

  Her voice was calm; you needed to really know her to hear the deadly seriousness beneath.

  "It was fated, probably," Astrid said.

  Faces turned towards the Dunedain leaders. There were four; Astrid Larsson and her husband, Alleyne, Nigel's son by his long-dead English wife, Juniper's own eldest daughter, Eilir, and her man, John Hordle-universally known as Little John, from his massive size. The same ship had brought the two younger Englishmen and Sir Nigel himself to Oregon, back during the War…

  Astrid was the senior, the one who'd founded the Rangers with her anamchara Eilir, when they were both teenagers. She
was as tall as Tiphaine, and as lithe and slender-strong with a face framed in a long fall of white-blond hair; her great turquoise eyes were rimmed and veined with silver as well.

  "Why fated?" someone asked.

  "That brought the number up to nine," she said. "Nine is the… canonical… number for a Quest."

  There was a moment of silence, as everyone wondered whether she was serious or not; you could hear the capital letters in her voice. Juniper didn't doubt it for a moment, and wouldn't have even without that momentary exalted look, as if she was being carried beyond the world of every day to the realm of legend and hero-tale.

  I love Astrid like a daughter, and her children are a delight, but Nigel is right. She is, quite definitely, barking mad.

  "And nine is a very practical number," Astrid went on. "Just enough to keep a good watch and be able to fight off a band of bandits or win a skirmish with a patrol, but not so many they stand out like an army to anyone looking."

  But she's also quite functional, Juniper told herself. Though it's a good thing she's had Eilir around all these years. And Alleyne, to be sure, and John has enough common sense for three, as well as enough bulk.

  "We know that Rudi and the others survived the battle," Juniper said. Thank You! she added silently, not for the first time.

  Half the people around the table nodded. Dmowski looked troubled at participating in augury, even secondhand… and Sandra a little angry.

  " Pardon me if I don't find hints seen in a pool of water too reassuring," she said dryly.

  "My lady," Tiphaine said, and then whispered in her ear.

  Sandra looked grudging, then nodded. Juniper met the Grand Constable's cool gray eyes for a moment, and then the younger woman looked away. Tiphaine had been there twelve years ago when Raven came to her son in the light of common day, and Juniper thought it had shaken the cynicism she'd learned from her mentor a little. Not Sandra's of course; that would take more than the Change itself.

  "And the Prophet certainly seems to take the whole business of the Sword seriously," the Regent said thoughtfully. "Of course, he's likely as insane as his stepfather."