And then the crest of the great wave curled and broke and came down on her like the Fist of God. The whole fabric shattered as a cheap pine box would under a boot, and then it was gone.
Just . . . gone, John thought, feeling his stomach knot.
The Queen was still tearing away at speed; the others were whooping against the scream of the wind and hammering each other and him on the back. The Nihonjin began a chant of:
“Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!” as they pumped their fists into the air and bowed again and again to Ishikawa, their usual gravity forgotten for a moment.
“Two hundred men,” John whispered to himself in a tone empty of everything but wonder.
The spot where the Korean had vanished didn’t even show any wreckage, and the sight leached everything but a wondering awe.
“My God, two hundred men just gone, like a cockroach under a boot!”
Slowly he crossed himself.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, Lady pierced with sorrows. . . . All of them were born of woman. Intercede for them, for us, all of us, foeman and comrade. Now and at the hour of our deaths—Madonna, intercede!
CHAPTER SIX
COUNTY PALATINE OF WALLA WALLA
TO BARONY HARFANG
COUNTY OF CAMPSCAPELL
(FORMERLY EASTERN WASHINGTON STATE)
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)
SEPTEMBER 16THCHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD
“Thanks, cousin,” Órlaith said absently, taking one of the loaded plates Faramir offered.
She’d learned to eat on swaying trains as a child. Lunch was gendarme—also called man-at-arms—sausage, air-cured and fermented links made from equal portions of pork and beef with pepper, cumin, and a little honey. It was named that because it kept well, and was common in military rations and travelers’ food generally. She knew from personal experience that this tasted a lot better than the mass-produced version handed out to the troops, because her father had started a tradition that in the field commanders ate what came out of the common mess like everyone else.
With it went a sweet-nutty Fol Epi cheese from Barony Gervais or a soft spreadable Tillamook with bits of hot pepper worked in, cracker-like rye flatbread, pickles and some bottles of garlic-cured mushrooms. Last was a maida cake of fine flour, eggs, clarified butter, sugar, petha, marmalade, hazelnuts and walnuts, ginger and fennel, also famous for keeping well, and bottles of fizzy mild cider still fairly chilly though the ice had melted by now.
Macmac sighed loudly, his head moving with every transit of her hand from plate to mouth and deep sadness in his eyes. She relented and tossed him half the sausage, not being all that hungry anyway despite putting in most of the morning on the treadmills with the horses.
The recently-built line they were using as they curved north under the noon sun was modern steel strip on wooden rails. It crossed the broad County Palatine of Walla Walla, which was basically most of the area from the loop of the Snake River southward to the borders of the Pendleton Round-Up, founded long ago to anchor and protect the Association’s eastern marchland in her wicked grandfather Norman’s time. But they went well west of the great walled city of Walla Walla itself, which was tactful and why she’d done it.
Count Palatine Felipe de Aguirre Smith was a loyal supporter of House Artos, but also a battle-comrade and guest-friend of Baroness Tiphaine d’Ath since an episode in the Prophet’s War. Her family visited here fairly often on their way to their estates in the Palouse, and the Count had given her a hunting-lodge in the Blue Mountains as a mark of his esteem. If Órlaith had shown up in the capital city of his County honor would have demanded that he extend her daughter Heuradys—and the daughter’s liege—full public hospitality.
And Mother would feel that he was poking at her with a Disapproval Stick, though she’d know better.
The rising sun had lit the rich rolling valley-land west of the city as they passed, with the low massive line of the Blue Mountains on the horizon to the southeast just visible. Fields edged with Lombardy poplars were patterned with strips of reaped yellow grain-stubble or green with alfalfa; vineyards and orchards drew geometries over hillsides; manors and villages could be glimpsed amid gardens and woodlots.
Now and then the great stucco-covered concrete bulk of a baron’s castle loomed with banners flying from the witch’s-hat peaks of the machicolated towers and a town huddling beneath their shadow, or a monastery or convent stood solid and square amid gardens and almshouse-hospice. The plane-tree-lined macadamized roads smoked white dust as trains of ox-wagons crawled and carriages clipped along, or nobles rode in gaudy brightness. Peasants and peddlers, monks and pilgrims went trudging afoot or pedaling on bicycles between rows of roadside trees showing a hint of tattered autumnal lushness, and under the drowsy warmth somehow came a hint of the coming rain and snows.
At one stop some enterprising soul handed up a basketful of fruit for a silver half-tenth while the teams were being changed: crisp apples and ruby-red late cherries and dripping-ripe pears. For a while the young clansfolk and Susan and the Dúnedain cousins engaged in a cherry-stone-spitting contest out the windows aiming at the trees planted along the right-of-way. Karl had stood on his dignity as bow-captain for about five minutes before crowding forward to take a try.
“Were we ever that young?” Órlaith said softly, as a cheer marked a bull’s-eye.
Heuradys chuckled quietly as she strummed her lute, lying back with her boots off, her chaperon hat pushed forward over her eyes and her feet up on the opposite seat. Where Macmac seemed to find them a never-ceasing source of olfactory interest but needed to be poked occasionally to keep him from absently starting to nibble.
“Oh, possibly, just possibly, I say to the girl who had us run away from home on a Quest to find the Super Man in his Castle of Ice beyond Drumheller when she was eight.”
“I was impressed by that story Lord Huon told us about his mission to the north, but I wasn’t really up to understanding it then.”
“I told you it wouldn’t work, but noooooo . . .”
“You’re never going to let me forget that little slip the now, are you?”
“No, I’m not, my liege. Though now we’re the oldest ones in this crowd . . . and it feels very strange.”
“Tell me.”
Droyn wasn’t participating in the pit-spitting, being a belted knight now, but he was watching and grinning.
“Or,” Heuradys went on, “possibly you’re just still in a bad mood, Orrey. Relax. After all we’ve been through in the past few months some time lazing around with nothing more strenuous to do than falconry and sparring and music . . . and maybe chatting up some handsome huntsman . . . has some appeal. Against Necessity, even Gods do not fight. The morai spin, and that’s it.”
“Yes, Atropos,” Órlaith grumbled with a sigh, and laughed unwillingly when her knight made crisp snipping motions with two fingers.
She laid aside her book—it was The Broken Sword, a pre-Change historical novel of grim gritty realism by a knight named Sir Béla of Eastmarch, and more accessible to modern tastes than the more fanciful efforts of the time. Then she looked out the window again, the warm wind fluttering wisps of hair that had escaped her braid, a breeze that smelled of dust and straw. It was odd to feel impatient with a journey to someplace you were supposed to sit and be bored once you arrived.
The domains of the Counts Palatine ended at Castle Lyon, guarding the bridge across the Snake. Northward the Palouse proper began, barer and higher and far less peopled, mostly within the frontier County of Campscapell that marked the boundary between the Protectorate and the United States of Boise. The hills were like an endless beach of low undulating dunes occasionally rising into a ridge, except that it was all covered in rippling knee-high summer-dry grass, studded here and there with bushes of snowberry and wild rose green against the tawny pelt.
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Órlaith reached out and touched the Sword, where it was lashed to the car’s wicker inner wall with rawhide ties. There was less of human kind to the feel of the land here, and what there was had an edge like a knife, with an undertone of grimness and old sorrows.
For generations this had been a borderland between the PPA and the United States of Boise, claimed by both and ruled by neither; raid and skirmish had gone back and forth across the marches along with the banditry that always sprang up in debatable lands. In the Prophet’s War the wild horsemen from beyond the Rockies had poured through with fire and sword. Peace had found it a wasteland.
A herd of pronghorn stood and watched the train from a ridgeline, then fled like fawn-and-white streaks over the yellow-brown hills. A group of a dozen mounted Nez Perce in red-dyed deerskin shirts and otterskin collars accompanied by a chuck wagon passed them on a broken, potholed ancient road, driving a herd of their prized Appaloosa horses southward. A lobo pack trotted by in the middle distance, dark dots against the grass. Birds swarmed, from clouds of Barrow’s Sparrow to hawks hanging in the air above watching for rabbits and ground squirrels. Glimpses showed mule deer and elk, scattered clumps of buffalo, and once a sounder of wild boar grubbing for camas roots in a low patch, ignoring the train with surly indifference. Nothing of human-kind, save here and there the burnt-out snags of an ancient farmhouse or some huge piece of farm machinery that sat rusting as it had since before her parents were born.
Heuradys was smiling slightly and affectionately as she looked out at the lion-colored hills.
“I remember Mom One saying that getting Barony Harfang in fief as a reward was like being given a free grant of seventeen million tons of undelivered Arizona sand FOB origin,” she said. “Though when I was little I always got sort of excited when we packed up for the yearly trip out here. I can just remember when it meant camping in tents.”
Delia had been Tiphaine’s official Châtelaine for three decades, and as such general business manager of her estates while Lady d’Ath fulfilled public duties in war and at court. Heuradys went on:
“Mom Two always liked it here—lots of hunting and falconry and best of all quiet, like a vacation, she says. Mom One does too, I think, because there’s been so much work for her overseeing the development. She also said that at least sand in Arizona wouldn’t reach out and swallow all the revenue from your established estates for twenty years.”
“A gross exaggeration,” Órlaith teased. “You can’t hunt or fly falcons on sand.”
“Or collect share rents and labor-service from the antelope and prairie chickens. The only thing that’s consistently turned a profit here is the wool, and we can’t fulfill our baronial obligations with a sheep ranch.”
“Speaking of obligations, House Ath never did get around to the castle,” Órlaith said, unhelpfully teasing and putting on a mock-monarchic frown. “A barony is scarcely worthy of the name without one!”
Heuradys rolled her amber eyes. “Have you got any idea of what those monsters cost? A castle is a heavily fortified bottomless pit you shovel money into. Diomede can do it when he’s baron.”
The first sign they were on Harfang was a wooden heliograph relay tower sprouting from a higher-than-usual piece of Palouse; then a mounted patrol of light cavalry armed with sword and recurve bow who raised their hands in salute.
Big flocks of white Corriedale sheep appeared, and herds of red-coated, white-faced cattle, and mare-and-colt clumps of horses, all under the eye of armed and mounted buckaroos. Here and there winding strings of earthen check-dams had been built across swales to turn them into a series of ponds and marshes edged with willows and cottonwoods, and planted woodlots of black locust, fir, lodgepole pine, hybrid poplar and chestnut oak showed on some of the ridges or north-facing slopes and along the banks of streams. Most of the trees were thriving but still spindly with youth, though some had already been coppiced to supply poles and fuel on a regular basis.
Then they could see the four big windmills that served the home-estate where they stood on the nearest hillcrest eastward, slender distance-tiny tapering towers with their great airfoil vanes rotating with majestic deliberation, powering everything from flour-mills to wool-presses. They also pumped at need from deep tube wells into a big concrete-lined tank set at their base, so Athana had running water now, still uncommon in most of Montival outside the cities, and piped sewage delivered to a biogas plant for lighting the manor and the public buildings.
Then they were among the tilled land of what was officially Saint Athana Manor. The Five Great Fields of the peasant tenants were vast squares edged with neatly trimmed hedges of head-high black hawthorn and tall poplars; within each was a swirling pattern of broad strips laid out along the contours. Two held the dun-gold of reaped grain pimpled with stooked sheaves, two the vibrant green of sweet clover or alfalfa, one the variegated patterns of root crops. Closer to the center were bench-terraced orchards and truck gardens, and off to the south was the demesne, the lord’s home-farm.
“That wheat looks better than I’d have expected in a place too dry for forest,” Karl said thoughtfully as they passed close enough to estimate the weight of the grain in the ears and he counted the number of sheaves in a section. “What do you get here, Lady?”
“Forty bushels an acre on the demesne in a bad year, better than sixty in a good one, usually,” she said. “The tenants the same, unless they all turn up on rent-day beating their breasts and sobbing in heart-rending unison that it’s less because they wore themselves out on the demesne, poor lambs.”
She shrugged. “We don’t fuss if it’s close enough for feudal work. Nobody really tries to push the line with Mom One. Not twice.”
By now lord and peasant both throughout the Association lands were used to that dance and trod the steps without thinking about it much.
“Sure, and that’s not a bad yield, not at all! ’Twould be thought fine even in the dúthchas,” Karl said; and the Willamette was a byword for lush fertility.
“The soil here is wonderful and it retains water. We’ve even got a vineyard going, on a south-facing slope with good frost drainage. And my brother Diomede has been putting in some sugar beet on the demesne, just small patches on trial, seeing if it goes well enough to justify building a refinery. Dionysus knows there’s always a market for sugar.”
The gearing hummed as the train swayed and clicked onto the siding by the Athana station. There was a brief metal-on-metal screech of brakes as they stopped, a feeling of surging forward and a falling whine as the treadmills sank back to horizontal. Karl strung his longbow and set the other Mackenzies doing likewise, which was an interesting operation for those sitting down. Heuradys joined him at the door as he twitched back the cover on his quiver, sliding her longsword into the frog-sling at her belt and working her hands to full suppleness with a set of brief exercises that were so automatic she probably wasn’t consciously aware of what she was doing.
They opened the door and hopped down together and spread out to either side, and the rest of the party followed. This part of the rail platform was unwalled, a concrete pavement covered with bricks set in a herringbone pattern and a tiled roof supported on wooden posts. Órlaith rose and stretched before she buckled on the Sword of the Lady and came out last, save for Macmac at her heels. She’d been accustomed to bodyguards all her life. Though it was disturbing to know that so many people—whether ones you knew and liked or ones you knew only as faces, you passed them braced to attention in front of walls or doors—were ready to throw their bodies between you and a blade to stop that hypothetical enemy. The more so now that she’d seen real battle and some had died in her place.
A man she recognized as one of Baroness d’Ath’s light horse commanders waited outside, in half-armor and with his well-trained mount standing motionless behind him over the dropped reins. He had the golden spurs on his heels, a wagon and a few saddled horses standing b
y, and ten mounted troopers behind him in open-face sallets and short-sleeved mail shirts riveted inside their jerkins, quivers on their backs and four-foot horn-and-sinew bows in the boiled-leather cases before their right knees. Their shoulders had badges in the same black-gold-and-silver arms as he wore on his breastplate, the sigil of House Ath, sable, a delta or over a V argent. There was a group of locals in the background gaping and slowing down and stopping in the middle of shifting stacked pallets of boxed Mason jars onto a cart as they recognized her.
Obviously the news of who was visiting hadn’t leaked, which was good.
They doffed their hats and fell to one knee anyway when they saw who got off the train and the soldiers saluted fist-to-breast, since she was well-known by sight here. She absently made the gesture—hand out at waist height, then turned palm upward and fingers curled slightly—that meant you may rise. She found it all slightly absurd, but custom was king of all.
The knight was a grizzled dark man tanned and windburned to leather with a patch over his left eye, a short stub middle finger on the left hand, and thinning bowl-cut black hair shot with silver like his clipped beard and mustache. She noticed that two of his command were around his age and scarred too, and the rest in their teens and disconcertingly fresh-faced. Including a pair of youngish but tough-looking girls who were shooting glances of adolescent admiration at either Heuradys, herself, or both, or both of them and Suzie and Morfind and some of the Mackenzies too. For women to take up the trade of arms was less uncommon on the d’Ath domains than elsewhere in the Protectorate.
He noticed her noticing the makeup of the horse-archers.
“My lord Diomede has most of the regular garrison and the vassals doing their annual forty days over at Castle Campscapell for the post-harvest maneuvers, Your Highness,” he said. “These are what’s left.”
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