At least I’ll have those, she thought, only briefly regretting the seven novels on her bookshelf.
“Everything is in order here. Let’s go to the chapel. I’ll have to check everything you wish to bring.”
He stood and turned to his men. “Ranulf, Digory, take four men-at-arms. Mount the girl on her own horse; make sure you bring her other one. Get some pack mules for these; pick ones that can keep up. Each of you take a remount as well from our string. Master Johannsen will help you. It’s twenty miles, give or take, to Todenangst. I expect you to arrive around midnight. You’ll take care of the girl; she’ll not be able to mount on her own with her arm injured. See that she’s treated with the proper respect due a young Association noblewoman or I’ll have someone’s ears.”
He escorted her down the stairs and to the pretty chapel off the great reception room. It was late and the stained-glass window was dark, only the wavering light of the votives dancing over the nave. Garrick snapped his fingers and Yseult stifled an improper giggle as two oil lanterns appeared like genies. He placed them on the altar. She picked up her rosary from next to the saint’s votive; a confirmation gift from her mother—pink quartz beads carved in the shape of roses, with an amethyst cross carved with doves dangling from it.
Suddenly timid, she pushed it into her pocket as she shot a look at the knight, and then knelt on the rose velvet cushion before her special prie-dieu. She looked up into the tapestry she had worked years before when she decided to give her devotion to the Saint and Virgin. The compassionate face of the Immaculata and her saint, kneeling below, steadied her.
“I don’t know what to ask for, Lady, Saint. Help me find the strength to walk down this valley of fear, I guess.”
She stood, pillow in hand. Garrick had one of the bags opened and stuffed the pillow in. He gestured to the rest of the setup.
“All of this?” he asked, a slightly ironical note in his voice.
She sighed and shook her head. “No, just this porcelain of the Saint and the picture of the Virgin and her Basilica.”
She passed them to the knight and he carefully packed them in the duffels, muffling them in layers of cloth and padding. He finished fastening the bags and stood.
“Does all your family give their devotion to Bernadette and the Immaculata?” he asked, standing.
She looked up, startled and shook her head, thinking his eyes were a surprisingly light sage green next to his dark skin.
“Just me. Dowager Phillipa gave me the child’s book. And I’ve been on the lookout for older books about her ever since. Years ago, Mama set up my own oratorio here so I could have all my things just so. I learned tapestry stitch making that arras.”
The man nodded. “My family has a special devotion to these two, and to the healing arts. Adolphus is my cousin. Well, time to go. Come, young Gervais, your horse awaits.”
He took her out to the courtyard. The callused hand took her chin and tilted her face up.
“I can give you no hope, daughter of Gervais. I will pray to God and do you pray to Lady Sandra as well as the Virgin. You are caught deep in this coil. Hope, faith, humility, might bring you free, if you are innocent. I will do my best for your people here.”
Then she was walking down the steps, glad of the warm wool riding skirt, the heavy jacket and the cloak draped over her. Torches flared in the courtyard but she didn’t see her uncle’s body, though the stink of sudden death lay heavy.
Yseult looked up as she finished the tale. There was warmth in Mathilda’s brown eyes as she pressed a hand on the younger woman’s shoulder.
“That was very hard,” she said.
Yseult nodded thanks, then burst out: “My mother and uncle, they were so stupid!”
The High King snorted. “That they were. It was stupidity and no more ambition than many another has shown before them, at first, before the . . . enemy . . . took advantage of the door they’d opened. But stupidity is often punished more heavily than mere wickedness, the world being what it is. I don’t suppose it’s any consolation, but many another has made the same mistake. In this war, they usually pay heavily for it.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BOISE
PROVISIONAL CAPITAL, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(FORMERLY BOISE, IDAHO)
AUGUST 10, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
The leaders of the Dúnedain sat around the table and stared glumly at the map of Boise city. John Hordle ate another bite of his roast-beef sandwich, but with a gloomy air as if he were going through the motions, his huge body hunched over and his mop of reddish-brown hair tousled from having his sausagelike fingers run through it once too often. Ritva stayed back a little, standing easily and keeping a discreet silence.
The room was fairly big and dusty-disused, set in a far corner of the Drover’s Delight. With only one alcohol lantern on the table there was a puddle of light and faces in a surround of gloom. Alleyne was carefully measuring distances on the map with a pair of compass needles; he’d always been a detail man. Eilir was lying back in her chair, her arms crossed on her chest and eyes closed, either thinking very hard about the rounds of fruitless discussion or asleep.
“Sod this for a game o’ soldiers,” John said, finishing his sandwich and wiping his hands on the red-and-white checked cloth it had been wrapped in. “Woburn promised us she went out, ’er and the kiddies. Without that, it’s not just ’ard, it’s bloody impossible.”
“Old information,” Charlie Gleam said, rubbing an exasperated hand over his pate. “Last three weeks, Mrs. Thurston doesn’t go out except by day, and always without her daughters Shawonda and Janie.”
Charming youngsters, Ritva remembered. And I liked their mother Cecile too.
“They go out without her. Always heavy guards, all from the Sixth Battalion, which is not only Martin’s pet but a lot of the men have become Cutters just lately.”
Eilir opened her eyes and Ritva filled her in. Is it a leak? she Signed when the younger Dúnedain was finished. About us, that is.
Ritva said the words aloud; she was officially in the inner circle because she was translator between Eilir and the locals, and Ian was here because he was the Drumheller representative. The other eight Rangers were on guard in strategic places. Being inside a walled city made everyone nervous. You could lose yourself in a crowd here, but actually getting out would be hard.
“No,” Gleam said. “No, I don’t think so. I think it’s just that they’ve been getting less ready to put up with Martin. He’s really antsy about anything they might say that could get spread around. So now they don’t talk at all when they go out. The word from my contact in the Presidential Compound is that it’s gone beyond quarrels. Now there’s just this icy silence, they tell me. Even Martin’s given up talking, though he insists on having dinner with them every Friday. Martin’s wife Juliet is the only one who still tries and she’s been drinking a lot lately. Mrs. Thurston . . . Cecile Thurston, sorry . . . talks to her a little, about young Lawrence Jr. Only to be expected since he’s her grandson.”
“Wait,” Astrid said, holding up a finger.
She had been sitting silent with her elbows on the table and her chin on her paired fists, her silver-rimmed eyes looking at the map from under heavy lids.
“Alleyne?” she said after a long moment. “Possibilities? What can we do without getting the targets out of the compound? Is any form of direct assault possible?”
“Even if we infiltrate, there aren’t enough of us to try anything resembling a face-to-face fight, even for a few moments. We could go in on the airship,” he said thoughtfully. “Rappel down from the gondola, and then—”
John Hordle made a sound like a hippo with a stomachache.
“Are you bloody barking mad? Rappel down into the courtyard of a bloody fortress, with the buggering blimp on a level with the towers, which will be shooting bloody flaming bolts at an ’ydrogen-filled bag, then fight our way through a couple of ’undred guards, all sodding sixteen of us, and the
n fight our way back and climb up the ropes? But before we try this lark we all bend over and kiss our arse good-bye, roit?”
“Sorry, old boy. Just taking a shot into the blue sky. It wouldn’t do, would it?”
Astrid nodded. “I’m afraid so, bar melindo. If we get Mrs. Thurston and Janie and Shawonda onto the airship, they almost certainly won’t shoot at it. But before then . . . very big target. If we do it at all, it has to be a lightning strike. Even so, we would need more swords than we have now. There would probably have to be a sacrificial rearguard, now that I’ve looked at the ground myself.”
Major Hanks was there too, still looking worn from his own swift journey south, though he’d done some of it on the rails.
“I’m afraid Lady Astrid is right. The hydrogen isn’t quite as inflammable as you might think; it has to be mixed with air to burn quickly, and when it leaks it leaks up. But an incendiary bolt or a spray from a flamethrower . . . sorry. And it’s only really dirigible, steerable, in a dead calm. But about the rearguard, ah, that might be done.”
“Let’s concentrate on how we’re going to get the people we want out of the compound first. And we can’t take just Cecile or just her daughters,” Eilir said through Ritva. “That wouldn’t do at all. Almost better to do nothing.”
“Wait,” Astrid said again. “Wait . . . what was that you said about Juliet Thurston drinking a good deal?”
Gleam nodded. “That’s the rumor. Well, the complete rumor is that she and Martin had some hellacious fights. Then he beat her, and she stopped fighting and started drinking.”
“Wait a minute,” Ritva blurted. “He beat her?”
She obviously wasn’t translating and the leaders stared at her.
“Hiril, I was here, remember,” she said. “I have relevant observations.”
Astrid nodded and raised a hand in permission, and her niece went on: “Two years ago, they were very close. The rumor then was that Martin was ambitious, and that she was right behind him pushing with all her weight and fitting herself for a consort’s crown. I only met her in passing, but she was . . . impressive. Hard, very intelligent, I thought probably quite ruthless too, though maybe not cruel for the sake of it. Not the I-deserve-it type.”
Gleam nodded. “Yeah, that’s how it was then.”
Astrid rested her chin on her hands again, something stirring in her moon-shot eyes.
“And when was this change? When she had her child?”
“No, a good long while after that. Just lately, since he got back from Bend in May. That’s where he had his conference with Sethaz. He’d done that before but this time . . . there was something different about him. A lot of people noticed it, and apparently the First Lady did more than most. Which makes sense.”
“Let me think.”
Astrid closed her eyes; there was silence except for the tapping of a venetian blind against the frame of an open window in the cool night breeze. The street outside was quiet too, and then the tapping of a Natpol’s truncheon against the walls rattled through the silence as he walked his rounds.
“It’s risky,” she said at last. “But it’s our best chance. We have to get someone into the compound and get more information about this. It’s that or go home, and the fate of the High Kingdom may depend on this.”
Everyone turned and looked at Ritva.
Dulu! Ritva thought. Help!
Ritva had her hair hidden under a kerchief, and she wore a longish brown wool skirt, brown because it hadn’t been dyed. Keep your eyes down, slump a little, don’t swing your legs, hesitate a bit before you move your hands. Those minor things added up; they changed the gestalt that people recognized as much or more than they did faces, especially faces they weren’t very familiar with. The best protection was to look bored, though. Boredom was like a magical force pushing people’s attention away.
“Delivery from Ayers for the President’s mother at the Brick House,” she said to the guards in a singsong monotone.
The soldiers at the entrance to the Presidential Compound were standing to attention; she watched a fly crawl over the face of one of them, and he didn’t move even when it reached his eyeball, merely blinked. There was a Natpol doing the actual examination of documents. Ritva smiled nervously through an impulse to sweat. These documents weren’t even improvised fakery; they were just someone else’s, quickly stolen by a Dúnedain team who’d snatched the bearer and had her tied up in a warehouse. The black-and-white picture was of a tallish blond woman of about her age, and there was about the degree of general resemblance Ritva bore to half the young women in Boise. But she wouldn’t have been fooled herself if she made an effort to compare picture to features, not even briefly. Luckily not even Boise’s obsessive devotion to order and regulation extended to using color pictures. And it was natural to be nervous around a document check outside the dwelling of a ruler.
Act like a peasant who’s bringing something to Regent Sandra at Castle Todenangst, Ritva thought. You’ve watched the poor devils sweat there, often enough.
“Pass,” the Natpol said in a tone as bored as the expression on Ritva’s face. “Next!”
The Presidential Compound bore the marks of haste in its construction. This had been the citadel from which Lawrence Thurston extended his realm, in the chaos of the first Change Years; there had been chaos and fighting in Boise, and then typhoid and cholera and the Black Death, until he came and gave men a name and a flag to rally around.
The walls were high and thick, but they’d been roughcast and smoothed only enough to give no easy handholds. They followed the lines of a block across from the State capitol, with what had been the Williams Office Building as their core; it was the Citadel now, bulking high with cranes and machicolations above. Other buildings had been incorporated into the outer wall, sometimes simply used as forms into which concrete was poured. It gave the fortifications a weird angular look, jagged and irregular. Most of the interior was a concrete-floored parade ground, where soldiers and bureaucrats and their various hybrid offspring clattered back and forth to the offices around the periphery amid the odd horse or mule-drawn cart.
It is a castle, just a strange-looking one, Ritva told herself. It does all the things a castle does.
The General-President was not at home right now. They’d checked that carefully.
I am brave. I am very brave, in fact. But I am not stupid and I don’t want to die, she thought.
She walked to the Brick House; it was an ordinary two-story dwelling of red brick with a shingle roof, substantial but not really large, disassembled in some wrecked suburb and rebuilt here. The current General-President had a much more extensive suite in the Citadel, and another in a fortress south of town. A pair of soldiers stood at the steps that led up to the verandah, big concave oval shield on shoulder and six-foot javelins braced to the side, armor and the brass eagles and thunderbolts on the shields polished blazingbright. Their eyes followed her, but neither moved until she reached the steps.
Then they both turned in, and the spears moved out to make an X in front of her.
“Name and business,” one of them said crisply.
“Wanda Meeker,” Ritva said. I’ve got more names than the Lady these days! “Delivery from Ayers Produce.”
They looked her over, checked the basket with its two dozen eggs in straw and bricks of butter wrapped in coarse paper on a lump of ice in a clay cup, and one of them said: “Pass.”
Then they turned back, with a crisp stamp of hobnails and a toss that sent their spears turning and then slapping back into the callused hands. It was discipline for discipline’s sake, but oddly impressive. Ritva remembered how she’d walked up these steps the last time—in Dúnedain formal blacks with the crowned silver Tree and Seven Stars on her jerkin, Mary and the other questers at her side. Then she’d been Lawrence Thurston’s honored guest after Rudi and Edain saved his life, about to set out on a path that led to the battle at Wendell and the ruler’s own death.
Now . . . she
pulled the bell-handle. The string attached to it yielded with a feeling of weight on the end that ran through a copper tube into the house. Bells tinkled, and she heard slow footsteps and a shadow behind the beveled glass panels of the door before it opened.
“Did I order this?” Cecile Thurston said. “I suppose I did. Come in, come in.”
Ritva blinked, shocked. She remembered Lawrence Thurston’s wife as a quiet woman who’d radiated both strength and warmth and showed a flash of cutting wit now and then; she’d been educated in some profession that the Ranger didn’t remember, before the Change. Now there was little of the light brown left in her hair as she stood in the door of the Brick House, and the gray that had spread to most of it seemed dull. So did her own blue eyes.
Lawrence Thurston helped build this house with his own hands—she told me that, and he shrugged and laughed and they looked at each other. Hard enough to lose your man like that, but to have him killed by one of your sons would make it altogether worse. It’s probably a good thing she has daughters to worry about.
And there was little energy in the way she walked. In the kitchen her two daughters were sitting at the table busy at what looked like schoolwork; one of them jumped up to take the basket and transfer its contents to a big icebox, made from a cut-down refrigerator in the usual way. They didn’t look much different from what she remembered, skins of dark-olive shade and tightly curled hair, the elder round-faced and the younger thinner. Their faces were drawn with worry, though, and there was a wariness to their eyes that hadn’t been there before. The kitchen smelled pleasantly of soap and wax and the roses and dahlias which stood in vases on the window-ledges, and faintly of cooking.
And there was a pregnant blond woman sitting at the table too, with a two-year-old boy squatting on the tile floor by her side and a cup of chicory non-coffee before her. She was extremely pretty, but slightly puffy around the eyes, which were a little bloodshot too.
Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun Page 30
