“Throughout my life I’ve led my men
Where Crown and Prince command
And always does my Lady tend
To children, hearth and land.
My wife and I are much the same:
Our actions swift and sure . . .
A husband fair, a home to share
The life I gave to her.”
They started a little as she came into the room. She inclined her head, then gestured Valentinne to continue playing. She did, and Sandra sang the next verse by herself, with a few modifications: she was a contralto, and her voice was larger than you’d expect from someone several inches below average height:
“To those who thought our lack of sons
Would end my Norman’s line
I laugh and toast my daughter
Who upon her throne shall shine.
My child and I are much the same:
Our actions swift and sure . . .
A privilege rare, a crown to bear
The life I gave to her.”
Conrad grinned at her, the hideous old white scars knotting on his face, and all three finished together:
“So every passing year preserves
Familiar rhythms and the new
And through it all I lead and serve
With joy—as I was born to do.
My land and I are much the same:
Our spirits swift and sure . . .
Each oath I swear, each shouldered care
The life I give to her.”
“It’s good to see you again, old friend,” she said to Conrad, taking both his hands for an instant.
“And you too, Tina,” she went on, exchanging a kiss on both cheeks.
Valentinne was in her early forties, twelve years younger than Conrad. The Countess of Odell was of average height, with the beginnings of a double chin and warm green-flecked brown eyes that were usually happy and a little distracted; there were faint paint-stains on her fingers, from the art whose results hung on walls and stood on the big easel beneath the eastern window of the solar: it was a redoing of her classic Raoul of Ger and the Easterlings.
“You haven’t been able to talk him out of this folly, and convince him he’d be more useful here?” Sandra said. “He’s my Chancellor, after all!”
Valentinne looked as if she’d been crying last night, and she was in the formal cote-hardie that she usually managed to avoid, a pale blue-and-gold affair.
“No, Sandra,” she said, a determined smile on her face. “I knew it wouldn’t work, anyway.”
“Didn’t keep you from trying,” her husband observed.
“And good to see you, Lady d’Ath,” the Countess said; though in fact Tiphaine’s cold coiled violence had always made her a little nervous. “How’s Lady Delia? She’s six months along now, isn’t she?”
Tiphaine smiled slightly; the Countess of Odell and the Châtelaine of Barony Ath were good friends.
“Delia’s well, but growing huge, and sends her regards. And she’d like you to be there for the accouchement, Lady Odell, particularly since neither I nor Lord Rigobert are likely to be able to take the time.”
“Of course, if . . .”
If we’re not all under siege in our castles by then, Sandra filled in. Or dead.
“. . . if circumstances allow,” Valentinne finished.
“No reason they shouldn’t,” Conrad said. “You could take the girls. This campaign’s going to start a long way east of here.”
The Count of Odell was already in full armor except for the helmet, which showed his fireplug build; he’d put on some flesh since he resigned as Grand Constable to be Chancellor full-time a decade ago. Now he snorted and rose with a slight grunt and clank, tucking his helmet upside down under his left arm with the gauntlets thrown in the bowl; the bevoir hid his chin and neck, giving his cannonball head an oddly detached look.
“I’m still stronger than a lot of the men I’ll meet,” he said, slapping the hilt of his rather old-fashioned, Norman-style chopping broadsword. “And age and treachery beat youth and gallantry most times.”
Tiphaine d’Ath raised both eyebrows. “Still stronger, yes, Conrad,” she said. “Also stiffer, fatter and slower these days. I’d hate to lose the man who helped shape me into the murderous, evil bitch I am.”
“Blame Sandra for that,” he laughed.
And he’s looking positively carefree, Sandra thought. Men and their games!
“Besides, I’m planning on directing the levy of County Odell, not fighting with my own hands,” he pointed out. “Not unless I have to. Worry about Érard and Thierry more, they’ll be at the head of their men-at-arms. And Ogier is at the reckless age.”
From the haunted look in her eyes, Lady Valentinne had been thinking along the same lines. Conrad paused to glance out the west-facing windows in their Gothic tracery; he’d be looking down on the rolling orchards and fields of the Hood River Valley, off to Mt. Hood’s snow peak, towering dreamlike and huge and distant.
What’s he thinking? Sandra mused. Of how we fought and worked to build this new world? Of what we were, and are, and what we might have been if the Change hadn’t come? Or just that it’s a beautiful day?
Then he bowed them out into the other room, and extended a hand; his wife rested her fingers on the back of his, and they followed. He smiled at his children, as they gravely bowed or curtsied.
“Kiss your sisters and make your devoir to your lady mother, boys,” he said, thumping their shoulders as they straightened and grinned back at him. “We have a war to fight. And you girls give me a kiss as well, eh?”
They did, and then the whole assemblage trooped down to the courtyard. The Castellan was there, with an older nobleman—
Lord Akers, Baron de Parkdale, Sandra’s mind supplied. Lamed in the Count’s service back when we were doing the first salvage run on Seattle. Son down with the Three Tribes, helping patrol against the enemy occupation forces in the CORA territories. I should mention that.
There was some ceremony; Lord Ramón passed over the white baton of his office to Lord Akers, who would command the skeleton garrison of oldsters, the halt, the lame and those really too young to take the field; the castle chaplain blessed everyone, though doubtless they’d already had morning Mass; and Lady Valentinne bound a favor on her husband’s arm, a ribbon she’d woven from flax grown in her herb garden, prepared with her own hands. Her daughters did the same, and for their brothers as well, except for young Melisant, who shyly showed them a book-sized triptych of St. Michael she’d painted in a stiff, glowingly sincere style. She’d dedicate that for them in the Cathedral and burn candles before it until they returned.
At last Conrad stood pulling on his gauntlets, ready to hand her up into the carriage and swing into the saddle of his own traveling rouncy. He chuckled as he slapped fist into opposite hand on each side to settle the leather-palmed metal gloves.
“What’s the joke?” she asked.
“That even if . . . that whatever happens now, I’m a lucky man. Lucky in my wife, my children . . . lucky in my whole life. Thanks, Sandra.”
“Thank you, old friend, and take care of yourself. I need you still, your loyalty and your wits and the fact that you were never afraid to tell us when we’d made a mistake. Mathilda will need you, too.”
“I’ll do my best. I haven’t seen my grandchildren yet, though Érard’s little Alaiz is expecting! To tell you the truth, I don’t know how much the kids need any of us fogies anymore, Sandra. It’s their world now, and they’re more at home in it than we can ever be. Let’s give it to them in good condition.”
CHAPTER SIX
SUTTERDOWN
DÙTHCHAS OF THE CLAN MACKENZIE
(FORMERLY THE EAST-CENTRAL WILLAMETTE VALLEY, OREGON)
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)
AUGUST 1, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
Frederick Thurston was the second son of the founding General-President of the new United Sta
tes—the country everyone else called the United States of Boise. He wasn’t in its green uniform, though. He’d insisted on that, wearing a nondescript outfit of coarse-cloth shirt and trousers and brown boots instead, and he was unarmed except for the beltknife that virtually everyone carried as an all-purpose tool. He took a deep breath, and drew calmness on himself like a cloak; this wasn’t going to be any easier if he waited.
I’ve made my decision. Now I’ve got to do it.
“You should be fancied up a bit,” his wife said. “Your uniform, or somethin’ to show you’re someone.”
There was a Powder River rasp in her voice; Virginia Thurston (née Kane) had been born and raised there in the grassland country of what had once been eastern Wyoming, until the Church Universal and Triumphant and its local allies killed her father and seized her family’s Sweetwater Ranch and she’d stumbled into Rudi Mackenzie’s camp on the edge of the Sioux country on a blown horse. The two of them were nearly of an age, not quite twenty-one, but their looks were very different. Virginia was middling-tall for a woman, slender but whipcord-tough and tanned, with long brown hair worn in a braid, a narrow straight-nosed face and blue eyes.
Fred was a lithe, long-limbed broad-shouldered young man a little over six feet, with bluntly handsome features; his skin was a light toast-brown color, and his short black hair curled naturally. He grinned at his wife; they’d been together just over a year, and married for less than half of that—a handfasting ceremony in Norrheim, on the borders of the Atlantic.
“You look good enough for both of us, honey,” he said.
She snorted. Her costume was full-fig formal for a prosperous Powder River rancher’s daughter in this twenty-fifth year of the Change, acquired here since they got back to Montival and at some trouble and expense. Linen blue jeans with copper rivets, heeled riding boots of tooled and colored leather, a buckskin jacket worked with colored quillwork and fringed along the seams, a colorful bandana about her neck and a broad-brimmed black Stetson on her head. Her belt was covered in worked silver conchos, and a smaller strip of the same went around her hat; the hilts of her shete and bowie knife were jeweled, if also perfectly functional. More silver and tooling made the saddle and bow case and tack on her gray Arab match the arch-necked mettlesome horse itself, with ribbons woven into its mane. He’d noticed that when it came to horseflesh she was cheerfully rapacious in a way that was probably influenced by the close contact her family had had with the Sioux to the east of them. Or possibly just the obsessive focus on horses natural in a place where they were the difference between life and death.
“You made me drop the chaps, honey,” she pointed out. “Those were good chaps.”
“You look like there’s a sheep in your family tree with those things on. And anyway, this is the best way to approach them, believe me. They’re going to be sensitive as a singed wildcat, seeing me on the other side.”
“OK, darlin’, you know your own folks best.”
They mounted outside the front gate of Brannigan’s Inn, where they were staying like most visitors to the Clan’s only large town, and rode through the crowded streets and out from Sutterdown’s west-facing gate. Fred looked up at the walls; Sutterdown wasn’t very large, no more than five or six thousand people, but the defenses were strong. There were still scars beneath the stucco, where cast-iron shot and steel darts had struck in sieges long ago, in the wars against the Association.
Beside the gate on either side were two great statues twice man-height, wrought from the trunks of whole black walnut trees and cunningly carved in the likeness of a woman with long golden hair standing on a seashell on the left, and a naked man holding a bow and crowned with the sun on the right.
He’d been with Rudi and Edain on the Quest all the way from Idaho to Norrheim on the Atlantic and back; he understood something of the theology of the Old Religion, the faith nearly all Mackenzies followed. Sutterdown worshipped the Lord and Lady in the form of Apollo and Aphrodite; that didn’t stop them from being just as obsessed with Celtic paraphernalia as the rest, but then the Clan regarded consistency of that sort as small-minded. The smile died on his lips as he looked up at those forms.
Even in the bright warm sunlight of a summer morning there was something disquieting about the face of the Lady of the Doves. At first glance a welcoming beauty as of a woman grown, a mother and lover, but underneath it a childlike wonder, and behind them all a sternness—something not evil or wicked, but as implacable as a winter storm or a glacier grinding its way down a mountaintop. And the face of the God was clear and bright as the sun-rays above it, but in the eyes was a darkness and a mystery, something that you could meet alone in a nighted wood.
“Man, but the fellah who carved that knew somethin’ about his business,” Virginia said soberly. “I like the Mackenzies well enough, but they’re sorta spooky sometimes. You think you’ve got ’em pegged . . . and then you don’t.”
“I know what you mean,” Fred said, touching the Valknut around his neck.
“Now, that was spooky, too,” Virginia said. “OK, the Old Man likes you. But him showin’ up and saying so, that was just a mite scary, you ask me. Methodists don’t have that problem and I like it that way.”
Fred nodded. He’d acquired the sign of Odin in Norrheim, when the seidhkona sat on the Chair of Magic in the hall of Bjarni Eriksson and the spirit of the High One had possessed her.
Before then, I was looking for a faith. That’s when I really found it. Not the most reassuring one, but . . .
Then he grinned. “Remember what Father Ignatius went through? So Methodists don’t have that problem . . . not yet.”
Virginia laughed too, and then suddenly her face went serious. “Well, dang, that would be funnier if it was funny, you know?”
They crossed the bridge beyond the gate, where the Sutter river curled around two-thirds of the town named for it, in a natural moat. Rudi Mackenzie and his guard were waiting for him at the edge of the tented encampment east of town; a dozen had sprung up around the little city as the Clan’s levies mustered and moved northward, amid the orchards and reaped fields. Most of the High King’s Archers were with him, their racked bicycles behind them, leaning on their unstrung bows or against the trunks of the cherry trees.
Their commander Edain was playing a long side-blown wooden flute bound with silver bands, what the Mackenzies called a Patten, a slow wild smoky sound. His wife Asgerd and Mathilda were standing as Rudi sang to the tune, looking halfway between abashed and laughing-happy:
“From far away I’m coveting
Your white violet skin
And missing the fall of your hair
Worlds away I’m courting your everything
And giving you all that I dare
The wild foxes danced
When you laughed in your cradle
The magpies fell silent
When you learned to sing
Imagine my luck
To be part of your fable
Where you hold my heart
Like the fruit in your hand . . .”
Fred wasn’t much surprised. Most people sang or played; it was the only way to have music, unless you were able to hire specialists or acquire the fabulous rarity of a windup phonograph. Mackenzies made more music, and better, than any group he’d run across in very extensive travels; they’d been founded by a musician, after all, and they associated it with both holiness and leadership.
The song ended, and Edain wiped down the flute and tucked it away in a boiled leather tube.
“Merry met, Fred, Virginia,” Rudi said, seriousness dropping over him like a veil.
He was in plain Mackenzie gear, kilt, plaid over one shoulder, knee-hose and green-dyed shirt and flat bonnet with a spray of raven feathers in its silver clasp. And at his right hip, the Sword of the Lady. Fred found his eyes skipping aside from that, and made them steady. After all, if there was one phrase which summed up his faith, it was “don’t flinch.”
“Let’s be
going, then. Do I need guards for this?”
“No,” Fred said.
“Yes,” Edain said, simultaneously.
They looked at each other, Fred glaring in frustration; Edain folded his arms over his barrel chest and the green-leather surface of his brigantine armor.
Rudi looked at his follower. “I need to persuade them, Edain,” he said mildly. “They’re fighting men, and you know how such react if you point an arrow at them.”
“That’s your job, Ard Rí. My job’s to be in a position to kill any evil bastard who might take it into his head to win the war at a stroke by killing you. And that, by the Dagda, I will do if I have to knock it into your head with His club.”
“All right. A score, no more; there are the camp guards, and the prisoners aren’t armed.”
“No, they’re not supposed to be armed. And by your own word, they’re fighting men. The only time such aren’t armed is when they’re dead.”
Edain turned and barked an order; twenty archers fell in, and strung their bows with the left tip against one boot and the leg over the risers to bend the heavy staves. The High King’s Archers were the hundred-odd best in the Clan and the pick of the followers the quest had acquired along the way, and Fred doubted that the fabled weapons of the old world could have done much better than their bows at a pinch.
“I’d better not come at all,” Mathilda said thoughtfully. “There was a lot of tension between the Association and Boise, even if we never fought, and Fred’s father used us as a boogeyman. Feudal isn’t a word with, mmmm, positive connotations over there.”
Fred shot her a look. Before he could speak Rudi did, grinning: “Mo bòidheach, back then you . . . collectively speaking . . . really were the boogeyman.”
“Hmmmf. Well, anyway, they don’t have any history with Mackenzies, except recently. And you and Edain saved Fred’s father’s life during that brush with the Cutters, right after we met them out east over the mountains.”
“Right you are, acushla. It’s not as if you had nothing to do, sure!” Fred blinked and took a deep breath. His father’s death still hit him, occasionally. He remembered that occasion just after Rudi and the others had showed up in Boise territory vividly; it was barely two years ago. The last time the world was right, before what he thought had been solid dissolved beneath him into a morass of treachery. The desert road in the bright sunlight, the taste of dust, the steady tramp of the troops, his father a grimly competent tower of strength, and still the man who’d been there all his life, the private man the iron reputation didn’t know. Then the sudden paralyzing horror as he realized there were assassins hiding in the guard detail itself, and the cloth yard shafts going by with a whippt and driving into armor with hard ringing impacts . . .
Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun Page 13
