“Well, of course,” Mathilda said. “That’s much worse than death. Potentially. Worse than oblivion, I mean. It raises the stakes of everything.”
They looked at each other with perfect mutual bafflement for a moment.
Sandra broke it with a laugh. “You know, darling, I have exactly the opposite problem with this than many people used to have with religion. When I was your age.”
Mathilda raised an eyebrow, and Sandra made a graceful gesture with one small well-manicured hand, tapping her own temple with a finger that just touched the white silk of her wimple.
“Now I know up here that it’s all true. Including the parts that are flat-out mutually contradictory, but leave that aside. Oh, well, a great many very intelligent people always did believe it, and I’m not going to reject the evidence of my own senses.”
She put the hand over her heart. “But the difficult part is making this part of me believe it. . integrate it into my worldview, as we’d have said in the old days. . my heart rebels against my mind. And here I thought I was a complete rationalist!”
“You are impossible, Mother!” Mathilda laughed.
“Not impossible. Improbable, yes. Anyone who’s lived my life and done what I’ve done would have to be highly improbable at the very least, my darling. Now let’s go. It wouldn’t do to keep people waiting, even now that you’re Lady Protector.”
“Particularly now that I’m High Queen too,” Mathilda said, with a slight quirk in her smile. “I always knew that the higher your rank the more firmly you were bound by custom. I hadn’t quite realized. .”
“Just how high a High Queen is,” Sandra finished for her. “But there are compensations, dear.”
They walked out through the semipublic part of the Regent’s suite arm in arm. Technically Mathilda was Lady Protector now; the peace after the Protector’s War had provided that she’d come of legal age at twenty-six. In practice. .
In practice, being High Queen of Montival in the middle of a great big war doesn’t leave me the time to be Lady Protector of the PPA! And being a new mother, which cannot be completely delegated and I won’t anyway. . having Mother handling the administrative routine and a lot of the politics in the north-realm territories not only lets me do other things, it buffers me from Associates who’d presume too much. I don’t want to alienate the Protectorate’s nobility. But I’m High Queen of all Montival, not just the PPA, and I have to be seen to be so people will know I mean it. Ruling is as much about seeming as being. If there’s a difference at all.
So she’d firmly turned down her mother’s pro forma offer to relinquish the suites that occupied the upper stories of the Silver Tower and shuffle off to some manor. Sandra Arminger had been the Spider of the Silver Tower for far too long. Even her virtues were a political problem; everyone knew how effectively she’d rebuilt the PPA after the shock of Norman Arminger’s death in the Protector’s War and the Jacquerie rebellion and the reforms and purges that followed it. If the Prophet hadn’t come along that might have caused real trouble with fearful neighbors.
Mathilda would have felt uneasy calling these her own chambers anyway, though of course her bedroom had been here before she turned twelve and got her Associate’s dagger and her own household and retinue. Like much of the great fortress-palace they’d been designed by Sandra, or at least she’d directed the terrified architects and interior decorators and artists she and Norman had swept up after their coup.
They were well over a hundred feet high here, and on the side looking out southward over the central keep, so the windows could be large-sets of triple pointed-arch portals at intervals, their upper fifth filled with stained glass and stone tracery in the Protectorate’s version of Venetian Gothic style. The sashes below were thrown open on the fresh early summer afternoon amid a scent of roses and Sambac jasmine from the planters. A torrent of light shimmered on walls and floors of pale stone, on tables of inlaid rare woods and mother-of-pearl, the carved surrounds of arched open doorways or tile above hearths, on spindly chairs and sofas upholstered in cream silk and on tapestries of war and the hunt and high ceremony.
The vivid colors of the hangings and those of the rugs on the floor were a deliberate contrast. Walls and niches held art commissioned new or scavenged from museums and galleries all across the west of the continent. Some were as familiar as her own face: Leighton’s Pavonia for instance, which had been there in the background so constantly she’d assumed for years it was a modern portrait of Delia de Stafford until she embarrassed herself by saying so at a reception here. But there was always something that surprised even her: this time it was a bronze statue of a youth, a slimly perfect athlete standing hipshot and about to crown himself with a wreath of laurel vanished twenty-four hundred years ago.
Classical but not Roman, Mathilda thought. Greek, and of the great years. And undamaged except for the feet. Oh, my. .
“That’s new,” she said. “Well, you know what I mean.”
“Not so very,” Sandra said, stopping for a moment and seeming to caress the figure with her eyes. “This one is. . probably. . by Lysippos, Alexander the Great’s court sculptor. But it was in storage for a long time, since that last expedition I sent to southern California just before the war. . my goodness, three years ago now! I’ve had some experts working it over and mounting it on that pedestal. It’s amazingly fragile, for something that’s lasted so very long.”
Mathilda looked at it and sighed, then sighed again rather differently as they walked on. She’d gone through a phase of guilt about her mother’s art-collecting activities when she’d been a teenager and in the first incandescent sureness of her faith. Some of the men in the teams sent to retrieve these treasures had died horribly in the desolate Eater-haunted ruins of the lost cities, in Seattle and Vancouver, San Francisco and Los Angeles and places like San Simeon and the Getty Villa. And the revenues to finance it all came out of the incomes of peasants and craft-folk and traders, eventually.
When you were in a position to spend the fruits of other people’s sweat, not to mention their blood, prudent thrift became a cardinal virtue.
But should we be concerned only with food and shelter and the weapons to protect it? she thought. Mom saved so much that was beautiful. And she made it fashionable for the other nobles and the wealthy guildsmen to do the same thing; and to give patronage to our own makers. That kept knowledge and skills alive through the terrible years when everything might have been lost. How many generations will thank her for both? And if she did it so she could have this. . stuff. . does that matter? The realm gets it just the same, and all the people in times to come. That’s good lordship too.
Two separate holy men had pointed that out to her-Father Ignatius had used Sandra’s art collecting as an example of how God’s plan turned all things to good in the end. The Rinpoche Tsewang Dorje had phrased it a little differently, but it amounted to the same thing. Though her private confessor at the time had simply and sternly admonished her that her own sins were a heavy enough burden to carry up to Heaven’s gate without adding the spiritual pride of assuming someone else’s.
I’ve never quite understood why my confessors and tutors were all so sincere. Not since I realized. . or let myself realize. . that Mother wasn’t, that she was playing at it. Which I only really accepted when she stopped playing and started trying it for real. And now I’m High Queen-
She asked the question bluntly, and was a little astonished when her mother wiped at one eye until she caught a glint through the tear that was neither entirely false nor altogether genuine.
Absolutely Mother, in other words.
“My little girl is all grown up, and just as smart as I am!” she said.
Then, in utter seriousness: “Because I wanted you to fit in this world, darling. I can fake it. . sometimes for days or weeks at a time, I don’t notice. . but then everything, all this-”
She waved a hand.
“-is suddenly like a dream, and I expect to wake up and p
op another tape in the VCR.”
Mathilda looked around and shook her head. Todenangst was about the most solidly real place she knew. Her mother went on:
“I survived by playing a game in deadly earnest I’d always liked to pretend to do for fun-I was in the Society but not the type who pulled their persona around them like a security blanket after the Change and never let go. Possibly I could play it so well because something deep down in me never entirely believed it, which meant I could be more objective. But it’s your life and you deserve to live it with a whole heart.”
Mother is troubling, but she’s rarely dull, Mathilda thought. Then with a rush of anguish: Oh, Rudi, I wish I was with you! Not safe here, but there where things are happening!
She couldn’t tell if it was normal worry, or her new sense of being linked to everything, but she could feel peril approaching, and that had to mean Rudi was in danger far from the strong walls that surrounded her.
• • •
Seven Devils Mountains
(Formerly western Idaho)
High Kingdom of Montival
(Formerly western North America)
June 15th, Change Year 26/2024 AD
Cole Salander and his captors moved mostly in single file through mountainside meadow and forest, with the dogs weaving back and forth to keep an eye and nose on the surroundings. Occasionally he caught one cocking an eye at him in a considering manner, as if to remind him of something.
After a while Talyn pulled out sticks of jerky from his sporran and handed them around. Cole got one, which surprised him slightly, though Artan and Flan weren’t left out either. It was a not-too-odd variation on the usual fibrous salty not-much, better than nothing, and it made him thirsty.
They’d left him his canteen, and they all stopped to fill up at a spring-fed pool. He noted that they used water purification tablets like his, too; no matter how clear and cold and inviting it looked, any open water could have giardia in it, or for that matter a dead animal under a rock or dollops of dissolved deer-crap. You didn’t drink it untreated unless there was no choice, and the slight chemical tang was the taste of safety. The dogs didn’t drink at all until their master gave them a nod of permission.
The Mackenzie held out his hand before they started out again: “Talyn Strum Mackenzie, of Dun-village, you’d say-Tàirneanach; the totem of my sept is Lynx. And this fair but tight-lipped warrior maid is Caillech Carlson Mackenzie, a neighbor of mine and oath-sister. And a Raven like the Ard Rí himself, as you might be guessing from the paint.”
“Ard Rí?” he said.
“High King,” Alyssa said. “That’s what it means. Artos the First, High King of Montival. AKA Rudi Mackenzie, my cousin, sorta.”
Whoa, wait a minute, a cousin, “sorta”? What’s that mean?
“And you talk too bloody much, Talyn, the which is beyond question or doubt,” Caillech said, but smiled.
Cole shook the offered hands; to his surprise Alyssa extended hers, too. Then he hesitated. You weren’t supposed to talk. . but nobody had asked him any military secrets. Plus there were things he really wanted to know. And after all, they were all Americans. That was the official line too, which enabled him to feel a slight glow of virtue about not keeping his mouth completely shut. Talyn and Caillech might be the children of people who’d gone so batshit insane after the Change that they just barely managed to hang on to the side of the planet with suction cups, but they were also working countryfolk caught up in the gears of war even if they were on the other side. Very much like him.
“I’m Cole Salander-”
What the fuck is the equivalent of what he said?
“-and, uh, I’m from Cottonwood Ranch, about half a day’s walk from a town called Bruneau. Which is a little pimple of a place with thirty, forty people a hundred-odd miles west of Boise City. My folks run a few cattle and sheep and crop a little bit, they and my brothers. . before the war. . and sisters and a hand or two.”
They were probably having a hell of a time just getting by, with his elder brothers missing in action and him away in the Army, but he tried not to think about that too much. There wasn’t anything he could do about it, anyway, except try to keep foreign armies away from them.
“You might say the same of us, in reverse,” Talyn said cheerfully. “Adding in a bit of smithing and weaving and the like. Save that her ladyship here is by way of being a princess and above such low and mean pursuits.”
Alyssa snorted. “What he means is that my dad is Eric Larsson. And we’re Bearkillers, not Associates, Talyn; I’ve done chores all my life and I made the A-list on merit, not birth.”
After a moment Cole missed half a step. Eric Larsson was the military commander of one of the western outfits in the enemy alliance. They were from the Willamette valley near the Mackenzies and called themselves the Bearkillers. His sister Signe Havel-née Larsson-was their civilian leader. Though from the briefings, they didn’t make much of a distinction that way, they’d been founded by a former Marine right after the Change. And Eric Larsson was related by blood or marriage to a whole clutch of other VIPs including the enemy’s big bossman, the one calling himself High King Artos these days.
I am a toad, Cole thought mournfully. I am one dead toad. I didn’t just miss handing over an intelligence asset, this is high-up political stuff. I am a dead toad that got run under a road-roller and left in the hot sun. Oh, I am such a dead, flat toad.
“And my mom is Luanne Larsson,” the glider pilot went on gloomily. “Who is going to have an absolute cow when she hears I crashed and got banged up. She didn’t want me to be a pilot.”
“Instead of a lancer so shiny in armor and all?” Talyn asked innocently. “Your mother being Horsemistress of the Bearkillers.”
That got him a scowl from Alyssa and a laugh from Caillech; the Bearkiller woman was obviously much too slight for fighting in plate armor on horseback, though quick and very strong for her size. The briefings said the Bearkiller elite force were most of them cavalry, as good as the knights of the Portland Protective Association and more versatile and better disciplined. They called them the A-List.
“Mom thought I’d be more useful to the war effort helping with the remount program. But I took the Gunpowder Day barrel-riding cup,” Alyssa snapped. “And the mounted archery prize for the under-eighteens, one year. I could have made cavalry scout, easy. I just. . like flying.”
Being a shrimp wasn’t a handicap for a glider pilot, of course; the opposite, if anything. Cole was a bit above medium-sized. He’d asked about pilot training himself when he turned eighteen back just before the war started, in the old General’s day, and had been told that the only way to make the weight limit would be to amputate both his legs above the knee. Or his head.
“And if I was stuck-up, would I hang out with lowlifes like you two?” Alyssa said.
“Ah, it’s the bonny long curling golden locks, the lassies can’t resist ’em,” Talyn said.
He took off his Scots bonnet for a moment to run a hand over his shaven head and waggle the ordinary brown pigtail at the back.
“Beating them off with sticks I am three days in four, a trial and a troublement and a weariness.”
The women looked at each other and mock-kicked in unison towards the bowman’s backside. Cole stepped unobtrusively forward to let Alyssa steady herself against his shoulder. Having an arm in a sling interfered with your balance; he remembered that from his own experience with cracked bones.
“Wait ’til we get back,” Caillech said. “I’ll punish you good and proper then.”
“Something to look forward to! Or I might be the one making you beg for mercy, eh?”
Caillech laughed and winked. Cole reflected gloomily that all he had to look forward to now was a POW camp. He supposed it was easier to be cheerful when your side was winning. Talyn might be a friendly sort, but he didn’t relax his vigilance one iota; neither did his companion, or their dogs, and Alyssa was keeping an eye peeled too. Cole hadn’t
given any parole, so he kept his eyes open without being too conspicuous about it, and-
I am a skilled wilderness scout. It says so right there in my paybook that they took away from me after I fell asleep.
That meant he could expertly evaluate his chances of making a break, and the probability of getting anything but an arrow in the back and/or two sets of really large fangs ripping bleeding chunks out of his ass were somewhere between absolutely nothing and fucking zip right now.
And the fact that I’m feeling a little relieved at that analysis is neither here nor there. Or that I don’t want to be the last man to die in a lost war.
Surrendering on your own was risky-everyone knew that even if both sides were playing by the official rules you were as likely as not to be finished off if you just put up your hands one-on-one at the point of the spear. When the other guy’s blood was up or he’d just lost a buddy rules were a thin way to avoid becoming another anonymous body.
But Cole had made it past that stage, and the grapevine, as opposed to official propaganda, said the enemy treated POWs pretty well. Better than his own side did, these days. He was prepared to risk his life for the mission. But there was a distinct difference between a hero’s honored grave and a hole in the dirt for a damned fool.
Mrs. Salander hadn’t raised any fools.
“Ah. . OK if I ask a question?” he said.
The three looked at each other. “Ask away,” Talyn said. “I won’t promise to answer, mind.”
“That lady with the staff. . she’s a witch, right?”
Unexpectedly they all laughed. “They’re all witches, Cole,” Alyssa said.
“That we are,” Caillech said, striking a mock-spooky pose and making passes through the air for a moment with her free hand. “My other horse is a broomstick!”
He absently noted that Alyssa had used his first name instead of private or soldier or Salander or combinations thereof; evidently shaking hands made it all right. He shook his head.
The Given Sacrifice c-7 Page 9
