He took a knee for a moment and inclined his head. She extended her right hand for the kiss of homage.
“Rise, Sir Savaric,” Órlaith said, when he’d made it.
Then he bowed to his liege’s daughter with the leg-forward gesture that involved touching his right-hand fingers to his brow and then sweeping them outward with the bend so that it nearly touched the ground. Faramir and Morfind got a salute and small stiff bow, which did duty for Suzie as well. He nodded casually to Sir Droyn as one equal to another, which made the very-recently-knighted nobleman fight down a grin of pure pleasure. The younger man was the son of a Count and hence much better-born than a landless retainer, but knighthood had its own hierarchies and brotherhoods and he’d just been welcomed into a select company.
“God give you good afternoon, Lady Heuradys,” Savaric said. “My lord your brother and his good Lady Ysabeau send their love, and Ygraine and Gussalin and Ismay and young Morgause as well.”
“Morgause said that?” Heuradys said. “I knew the little beast was precocious, but . . .”
“Well, she said, ‘Wanna see Auntie Herry!’”
Savaric’s rather stark single brown eye went gentle for a moment. Then he went on briskly:
“They bid you visit the keep of my lord your father at Campscapell if your duty to your liege permits, since my lord Sir Diomede intends to keep the winter season at Barony Ath in the west with his lady mother and the Baroness. There’s word of a muster and he wants to be at hand if . . . when . . .”
“When,” Heuradys said flatly to his raised and questioning eyebrow.
“When the ban of the Association is called to arms.”
Órlaith nodded to herself, mentally noting that she would see that Heuradys got time to visit.
She enjoys her nieces so!
It had been a while since Ysabeau’s difficult last pregnancy, after a close-set series; there would probably be no more.
So Ygraine’s the heir of Ath in her generation, and she idolizes Herry and wants to follow in her footsteps to knighthood, too, and her parents sound as if they’re reluctantly willing. I can have her attached to my household when this thing with Mother is cleared up, that’ll mean her seeing the Kingdom beyond the Protectorate too.
Associate pages were expected to put up with a certain amount of hazing and hardship as part of their training; getting them out of their own privileged family settings and on their own among their peers while still young was part of the reason for the system, as well as forging bonds between families. A page was a very lowly form of life in a noble household, in practice if not theory subordinate to most of the commoner servants and run off their feet between drill, classes and duties. The baboon-troop jostling and bullyragging among the pack of pages in a castle could be quite a bit worse for a girl, though.
Easier to keep a close eye on her in a small menie, which mine will be until I come of Crown age, and Herry will be there to help. Maybe she could be Herry’s squire in a few years, or mine if we get on and she shapes well. I’d like to do her family a favor.
She swung into the saddle of the waiting courser with a half-skip and a vault; it was good to be on a horse again after the ordeal of sitting still for a day and night, and feel the lively interaction between rider and mount as the great muscles moved between her knees. The rest of her party did likewise, except for the Mackenzies who slung the gear into the waiting wagon and trotted along on foot. Children who’d been playing in the slightly scruffy soccer field and baseball diamond and tournament track that separated the train station from the village stopped to stare, many running back home as fast as they could accompanied by barking mutts and yelling shrilly themselves.
Athana Manor was bigger and more complex than most, since it was the heart of a barony and provided specialist services for the other settlements on Harfang. In fact, by now it was trembling on the verge of being a town. That was marked by the fact that a second church was under construction behind a maze of scaffolding, and confirmed by the multiple workshops of smiths and carpenters and wheelwrights and leatherworkers and more, and the fact that there were actual full-time stores rather than traveling peddlers on market-days. It was also neater, more uniform and more efficiently laid out than many, because it had been purpose-built on vacant land to a set plan by experts starting well after the Change, rather than cobbled together by fumbling amateurs in a desperate emergency from whatever was to hand and then improved later catch-as-catch-can.
I’m more at home in the dúthchas among Mackenzies, at seventh and last, but this is a good place, Órlaith thought.
A roadway of compacted crushed rock ran from the sheds and stables of the railway station through the village proper on its way to the manor house, lined with copper beeches now casting a welcome shade beneath their reddish-purple leaves on this hot dry summer’s day. The whitewashed, tile-roofed, rammed-earth cottages of the peasants and craftsmen were on dusty-brown tree-lined lanes, each steading in its rectangular toft with sheds and gardens and chicken-coops at the rear and flowers or perhaps a trellised rose or honeysuckle in front.
Folk in coarse homespun were busy about the day, the ceaseless chores and working on things like roofs and fences and general tidying-up after the shattering all-hands labor of the Harvest. Most just bobbed their heads, but Boudicca jumped in cat-quick to rescue one basket of eggs dropped when a towhead girl barely old enough for the double tunics, headscarf and wooden clogs of womanhood suddenly recognized the Crown Princess. The air was full of the scents of pickling and canning and bottling and smoking and drying foodstuffs to be packed away in cellars and sheds for the cold season, as well as the inevitable smells of horse and woodsmoke.
They clattered through a stone-paved central square with its church in the Italo-Gothic style still bedecked with sheaves from the Harvest mass, tavern sporting a creaking low-relief sign carved and colored to show a drunken owl lying on its back with a mug in one claw, and shops and worksteads and the long weaving-shed that doubled as town hall and site for dances.
The houses grew larger and the gardens broader and brighter as you went south towards the lord’s dwelling, until there were some quite substantial ones built around courtyards for the married gentry staff like Sir Savaric who didn’t live in, and a square of barracks set by itself with stables and corrals.
The manor-house proper sat on its own gentle south-facing slope some distance away and a bit higher for the view. They entered through a fretted metal gate; there was a whitewashed wall topped with wrought-iron work and lined with cedars that enclosed lawns and terraced gardens, banks of flowers and clipped shrubberies and scattered trees and a swimming pool behind hedges and windbreaks. A small herd of ornamental white-spotted fallow deer stood in a clump and stared in horror at the Mackenzie greathounds, who in turn covertly looked back as they padded along at heel and let their tongues lap at their noses in interest. A peacock glared with offended aggression, gave its raucous cry and then stalked off past a row of espaliered fruit-trees. Gardeners stood and bowed as they clattered through the gates, busy getting ready for the cold season after the Harvest rush.
The E-shaped Great House was rammed earth too, the more expensive variety with five parts in a hundred of cement mixed in, three stories covered in a warm cream stucco with just a hint of reddish gold, picked out by colored tile arches over the doors and windows. The drive that led to the main entryway curled around a burbling fountain surrounded by elongated leaping bronze greyhounds. A five-story square tower at one corner had an open top floor to accommodate the heliograph, and also had tracks for mounting a nine-pounder usually kept disassembled in the basement.
The whole rather Iberian-Gothic composition was so charming that you took a minute to realize that there was a dry moat disguised by a ha-ha, and the fact that all the exterior windows were too narrow for a man to climb through, and could be slammed closed in moments by loopholed steel shutters
just as strong and fireproof as the yard-thick walls. It wasn’t a castle, but it was definitely defensible against anything short of a formal attack with artillery and siege gear.
A fortyish man in a black-and-white tabard holding a white staff of office stood at the front doors, which were high blond oak over a steel core and studded with octagonal bosses of black lacquered iron. He made a knee to Órlaith and bowed deeply to Heuradys as they dismounted and handed off their reins to the grooms, with the heads of the various staff divisions doing the same in the background.
“Your Highness. My lady Heuradys,” he said, with a slightly strained smile.
He contemplated a somewhat out-of-favor Princess who nonetheless was heir to the throne, accompanied by more than a dozen rowdy young warriors, mostly pagans from beyond the Association lands with God-knew-what uncouth customs and unreasonable expectations. All this just when he’d expected months of having the place to himself while he put everything in painstaking order.
“Sir Droyn. My . . . ah . . . honored guests of the house.”
Heuradys grinned. “Don’t worry, Goodman Paein,” she said. “This is the last disruption for a while, I promise.”
“Shining pearl within the crimson sky
Guide me in the coming night—
Perfect seed within a humble husk
Ground my feet in soil so I may rise—
Patient leaf within the endless pool
Calm me when the torrent falls—
Gentle wind within the slanting grass
Bear me ever on until I rest!”
Órlaith lowered her arms and slid the sheathed Sword of the Lady she’d laid across her palms back to her swordbelt’s frog-sling; since her father died she’d taken up his habit of holding it so when she made the Farewell to the setting Sun. Then she turned from the balcony and stepped back into the suite, looking around the bedchamber’s expanse of smooth pale tile.
The floor was a geometry of cream squares edged with green vines, and the French doors she’d just used opened onto balconies with their decorative wrought-iron balustrades overlooking the fountain, walkways and gardens in the courtyard below. She sighed happily at the comforting familiarity. This was the suite the Royal family usually got on visits. Like many modern manor houses, it was made up with interior inner-facing windows and glass doors for the light excluded by solid exterior walls. There was a big fireplace with a carved stone surround of owls and vines, swept and garnished with dried wildflowers for summer, but discreet bronze grill vents showed a central heating system, and the frosted globes of the gaslights glowed brightly now that the sun was on the horizon westward.
The large bed had been replaced by two slightly smaller ones, probably last night when the heliograph message came in. She didn’t mind sharing with Herry at need, of course. . . .
Despite the fact that she thrashes about and snores and hogs the covers and has cold feet.
But it was nice to be in one place in the Protectorate outside her family’s homes that actually understood they weren’t lovers. Instead of elaborately pretending they didn’t know something that wasn’t so in the first place, and which she would have scorned to conceal if it was so.
Strange folk, Christians. Though it’s wicked of Herry to take advantage of those who think she’s a Royal favorite just for giggles.
“Remember the first time we met?” Órlaith said. “That was here, I think.”
“Not the first time we met,” Heuradys said, coming out of the bath suite still combing her damp and slightly frizzy hair.
There was a very nice sunken marble tub, salvaged long ago by one of her Nonni Sandra’s programs and stored against the time of some favored noble’s need. Norman Arminger had died before she was born, but the Spider of the Silver Tower had always been the brains of the Armingers in her opinion. Certainly the better long-term planner; her schemes were still producing useful things or skills or opportunities long after her death. Norman had been the Brute Squad and the obsessive dream and driving savage will in the first, terrible years of the modern world.
“It was just the first time I thought of you as a potential human being and someone of interest, my liege, not just a snotty little brat with interesting parents.”
“Sure, and we were both snotty little brats then, for all your pretensions to the wisdom of age!” Órlaith said, and looked around. “I remember the house was a lot plainer then. In fact I think I remember you could still smell the walls curing.”
The murals here now were classical-themed mosaics done in tiny squares of iridescent favrile glass, a method invented by the semi-legendary master-craftsman Tiffany in the time of the ancients and redeveloped by artisans under her grandmother Sandra’s patronage. The colors glowed in a way that was intense and delicate at the same time, with a surprising sense of depth; one mural showed a trio of dancing Graces in a flowering meadow that suggested Botticelli without imitating. The other had a long view of a white- columned temple on a blue-tinted rocky hill above a wine-colored sea, with a sacrificial procession in the foreground leading a garlanded bull up a narrow path between olive trees and pencil cypress to the music of double-flutes and cymbals.
Órlaith remembered seeing it for the first time about ten years ago. It was Delia de Stafford’s taste, but aimed at Tiphaine’s interests; like her adopted daughter she followed the Olympians, and Athana in particular. Delia was a witch, more or less of Órlaith’s branch of the Old Faith though with less of the Gael.
She grinned as she buttoned her Montrose jacket and watched Heuradys struggling with her hose—it was particolored, of cotton knit and skin-tight, which made it an irritating struggle to get on unwrinkled when your legs were still slightly damp from the baths.
“Sure, and I’m glad I like kilts,” she said. “Why not a kirtle?”
Various types of headdress and kirtle over a blouse-shift were what Associate noblewomen wore in casual or semi-formal country settings rather than the formality—and discomfort and difficulty—of the close-fitted court cotte-hardie, which needed skilled help to get you into and out of.
Rather like plate armor, which is a good metaphor, she thought, looking over at the armor-stands that bore their suits and shields, looking rather like the harness of invisible warriors.
The most elaborate versions of Protectorate court dress required on-the-spot sewing to don and pricking-out of seams to take off. They looked pretty when done well and were more varied than the Clan’s quasi-uniform and Órlaith had enjoyed wearing them . . . just long enough for a ball or masque.
“I would, except that there’s no formal guard here with you, and I’m not going to put on anything that might slow my movements,” Heuradys said.
When she’d donned the snowy full-sleeved shirt and brown suede jerkin and rust-colored houppelande coat with its dagged sleeves she opened the leaves of the shrine that stood before the scene of sacrifice; it was much like a big Catholic prie-dieu, except that it was taller and designed for those who prayed standing rather than kneeling. The doors held a round disk of thin hammered gold worked around the edge with olive branches and a silver owl in its center, the design taken from an ancient Athenian drachma.
The wood into which it was set was highly polished olive itself, inlaid with images of the moon and a frieze of feathers patterned on the wings of a harfang, done in mother-of-pearl. When they were opened you saw the carved form of a standing woman, ivory flesh and golden robe. Against her thigh rested a shield painted with a grimacing snake-haired head, and a serpent coiled inside it; one hand held an upright spear, and the palm of the other supported a winged figure of Victory. On her head was a tall triple-crested helm, and her eyes were the shimmering gray of moonstone.
“Athana, great Goddess, ever have I, Heuradys d’Ath, prayed to You foremost of all, and unto You have I made the acceptable offerings. . . .”
Heuradys murmured the form
ula as she cleansed her hands and face with ritual drops of khernips, lustral water, lit dried olive twigs and incense in the offering bowl on its golden tripod, scattered a little barley in it and passed the owl feather through the smoke and touched it to eyes and lips. Then she poured wine and oil from the libation chalice on the flames, raised her arms with palms upward and softly chanted, her face rapt amid the scented smoke:
“I sing now of Thee;
Blessed and fierce, warlike Pallas, whose Olympian kind,
Bright and clear we ever find:
Thy far-famed altar upon the rocky height,
And olive groves, and shady mountains Thee delight:
In cunning plan rejoicing, who with subtle art and dire
And wild, the souls of mortals does inspire.
Maiden of the awesome mind,
Gorgon’s bane, ever-virgin, blessed, kind:
Patron of piercing thought and craft well-understood,
Rage to the wicked, wisdom to the good:
Sprung from the head of Zeus, of splendid mien,
Purger of evils, all-victorious Queen.
Hear me, O Goddess, when to Thee I pray,
With supplicating voice both night and day,
And in my latest hour, give peace and health,
Propitious times, and necessary wealth,
And ever present, be shield and aid,
Much worshipped, art’s parent, gray-eyed maid.”
After that and a moment of silent prayer she wiped the vessels clean, replaced everything and shut the doors with their shimmering mother-of-pearl inlay. Everyone here knew the split religious allegiances of House Ath—her brothers were Catholics—but sticking a thumb in the majority’s eye would have been both unwise and discourteous. There were pagans in the Association and probably more than usual on this barony, but they stayed discreet.
“You know,” Órlaith said when they’d both completed their devotions, “after all that happened down south, it’s a comfort to think that so many great Powers of the otherworld are inclined to us, and only one to the other side. Granted, it’s a formidable One, and it turns out the Prophet was just one string on Its bow, but still . . .”
Prince of Outcasts Page 11
