It’s breaking out all over, Mathilda thought whimsically. Well, replenish the earth and all that. At least this miserable war is cementing a lot of new relationships between the noble houses who support the Crown. Delia and Anne and Ermentrude between them have connections all over the Association, and their opinions really matter on the manor-house grapevine telegraph. If they’re all pulling in the same direction, it’ll make things a lot easier.
Signe looked down at the heir to the crown of Montival and chuckled as she tickled her, a little unexpectedly. . but she was a mother as well as a political leader, of course.
“They’re so cute at that age,” she said. “They have to be, or we’d strangle them. After two sets of twins and a singleton I should know.” She looked around. “Aren’t the Thurston kids here at Todenangst? Fred’s sisters?”
“Shawonda and Jaine? They’re at their lessons with my lady-in-waiting, Yseult Liu,” Mathilda said.
“Studying falconry, was what I heard,” Juniper said. “Diomede is giving them a tour of the mews.”
Delia smiled fondly at the mention of her younger son. “Diomede is just getting to the age when showing off to girls is something a boy likes,” she observed.
Mathilda nodded. “I’m keeping them close for security reasons, but this is going to be a bit boring for teenagers, they’re good friends of Yseult, and. .”
“You don’t want them too closely identified with Court,” Signe said; she was a politician too, after all. A wolfish grin. “Especially with Associate court stuff.”
Sandra nodded coolly and sipped at her tea; partly in recognition, partly an unspoken tsk, tsk. She would never have said that aloud at a public gathering, even a small one like this. Not that she’d give Signe any notice of it, either.
Mathilda could read her thought: those with wit enough will realize, and why point out to the gullible and dim what they can’t see for themselves? Part of being clever is not needing to prove it all the time.
Juniper snorted and rolled her eyes.
“They’re nice kids,” Virginia said. “And their Mom is one smart lady.”
Everyone nodded and took a sip of their tea. Anne of Tillamook had been visibly waiting to speak, but she deferred gracefully to Ermentrude. The flat, slightly drawn-out vowels of the Peace River country were still audible in her voice as she spoke slowly:
“Thank you for inviting me, Your Majesty. I’ve written, but it’s always better to speak face-to-face if you can. And Felipe. . well, he’s very busy with leading the County’s contingent in the field, of course. The thing is. .”
She took a deep breath. “I’ve been touring all the areas of the County Palatine the enemy overran, helping with the reconstruction. It’ll be years. . we lost so much livestock and equipment. Though we’re not actually facing famine thanks to what you’ve shipped in. And the damage to the manor houses and villages was very bad. . the castles held, almost all of them, but. .
Her calm broke a little. “A generation of work wrecked in a year!”
“I said after the Horse Heaven Hills that the Association looks after its own,” Mathilda said. “We’ve already sent a good deal.”
Everyone nodded. About a quarter of the Protectorate’s manors had been damaged in the war, ranging from cattle raid level to burned to the ground. Castles were nearly invulnerable if well provisioned and strongly held-that was the whole point-but villages and manor houses were easy meat to an enemy who held the open country. The untouched ones farther west had agreed to doubled mesne tithes and even better had mostly actually paid them, with no more than a token amount of grumbling. That was over and above the lawful reliefs they owed in war anyway and the lost labor when the full levy was called out, and it was going to hurt. That response had made her proud to be an Associate and an Arminger.
“We’re grateful. But?” Ermentrude said. “Your Majesty, I can hear the but in your voice. My father always said that but is the killer.”
Mathilda sighed. “Have you seen the reports from south of the Columbia? The CORA territories?”
She pronounced the acronym in the usual way, as if it were a woman’s name. Technically it stood for the Central Oregon Rancher’s Association, the ad hoc group that had gotten the area west of the Cascades through the first years of the Change down there.
Ermentrude winced a little. “Yes. There’s. . really not much left, is there? We were hurt, they were wrecked.”
Juniper sighed, suddenly looking older. “The people got out two years ago, the most of them, and some of their stock, and what they could carry with them on packhorses moving fast through the Cascades to the Willamette. Nothing else.”
The Mackenzie chieftain nodded to Signe. “You Bearkillers helped cover the retreat well, after the lost battle at Pendleton.”
Signe shrugged. “From what Eric tells me it’s a total mess there.”
Her brother Eric Larsson had led the Montivallan forces following the retreating enemy south of the Columbia; he was a hard man, but there had been an undertone of horror in his reports.
“Pure meanness,” Virginia Thurston said with deep sincerity. “Christ. . or the Aesir. . but the CUT needs to be burned off the face of the earth.”
She obviously sympathized with the Ranchers; she was fierce, but not vicious. And the CORA were very much like her own folk, though perhaps a little less. .
Rustic, Mathilda thought charitably. The Powder River country is very. . rustic. Or within wiping distance of the arse-end of nowhere, as Edain put it.
“Most of the CORA fighting-men are with the host,” the High Queen said aloud. “And the King will need them badly in the east, they’re fine light cavalry. But they’re also proud folk, the Ranchers and their cowboys both. They’ve fought well, and their guerillas did good service tying down enemy troops south of the river. They don’t like being refugees living on the charity of others.
“They want to go home, and make a start on rebuilding, even while their warriors are away.”
Looked at coldly, it would make more sense to resettle the folk elsewhere. Morality and practical politics both made that out of the question, of course. Her own consciousness of the land-all the land of Montival-made that part of it feel like a raw bruise.
Some of the conversation that followed was by prearrangement. The Mackenzies had always had close links with the CORA, and she suspected it hadn’t been too hard for Juniper to get the Clan’s Óenach Mór, the Great Assembly, to agree to more help; Father Ignatius had assured her that Mt. Angel would do the same. Signe offered to join the effort, and hinted that she’d get Corvallis to cough up too. They all promised longer-term aid to the County Palatine as well.
“Lady Ermentrude?” Mathilda said, when they’d gone around the subject long enough.
“I. . yes, we’ll accept that some of the aid from the western and northern parts of the Association goes to the CORA rather than immediately to the County Palatine. Felipe will agree, after he shouts and kicks the walls a little.” More firmly. “Yes. Ruling means setting priorities and you can never satisfy everyone.”
Juniper handed the little princess to Sandra; Mathilda smiled to herself at her mother’s well-concealed eagerness. The Mackenzie went on:
“I’d suggest that we find some excuse to take folk. . including some of yours, Lady Ermentrude. . on a wee bit of a tour of the CORA lands, to see for themselves what’s been done there. Forbye that will show them the extent of the damage and that they weren’t the only ones to suffer. And remind them why we’re fighting, to be sure, to be sure.”
Sandra nodded. “Excellent idea, my dear Juniper. Now, about the details-”
Halfway through the discussion Mathilda found herself standing at the edge of the balcony, making a tactful withdrawal of her High Queenly presence and sipping her fourth cup of tea and nibbling a scone rich with hazelnuts. She smiled a little as she looked out over the great castle. The Association’s barons affected a plate-armored machismo; the unkind said they tended to
be solid iron from ear to ear whether their helmets were on or not. But it occurred to her, not for the first time, that this group here was making a lot of the real decisions among themselves. . and every single one of them was female.
From here you could see most of Todenangst, the south side at least. The great circuit of the outer bailey, a tall granite-faced wall studded with machicolated towers bearing tall witch-hat roofs of green copper, lined on the inner surface by a linear town of tiled homes and workshops, barracks and stables and armories and inns and churches. A ring road and terraced gardens marked the bailey’s boundary; the gates there were tunnels into the hillside that bore the inner keep, and could be blocked by portcullis-like slabs of steel falling at the push of a lever. Inside access was via spiral roadways that were death traps to an invader in themselves.
Then the keep itself, itself far larger than most castles, a hill topped with wall and tower, courtyard and cathedral and endless little nooks and surprises, all the way down to the dungeons below and the secret passages that laced the whole. Above them all the Silver Tower and the Onyx, rearing sheer hundreds of feet into the air and flaunting their banners beneath the blue cloud-speckled sky. It had been so all her life that she could remember-the main structure had been completed by ten thousand men working in round-the-clock shifts and finishing when she was about five, though furnishing and fitting was still going on in some parts, and probably always would be.
Mother kept that copy of Gormenghast close at hand when she was designing the place. Though it’s much prettier than Steerpike’s stamping grounds. Gormenghastian but not Gormen-ghastly. And say what you like about father, he had a will like forged steel, and he dreamed grandly.
Perhaps it was what Juniper and Sandra had said earlier, but it struck her now that virtually everything in the landscape she could see save the bones of the earth-things like the tiny perfect white cone of Mount Hood off to the west, the lower blue line of the Coast Range westward-was not much older than she. Todenangst looked as if it had reared here for centuries amid its surroundings of river and woodland, manors and the multihued green of field and vineyard, woodlot and orchard, the spires of churches, railroads thronged with horse-drawn trains, dusty white roads thick with oxcarts and peasants on foot, monks and men-at-arms, merchants and bicyclists or Tinerant caravans.
In fact the lower bulk of the castle was steel cargo-containers from trains, and from barges and freighters stranded in the Columbia by the Change, filled with crushed automobiles and rubble and cement and all locked together and set in cast mass-concrete. The heights were girders and lead-coated rebar and more concrete; the very stone sheathing had been stripped from skyscrapers in Portland and Vancouver and Seattle. Only the roofing-tile and some of the woodwork and textiles had been made for it. Parts of the enormous complex were still faintly warm with the heat of curing cement.
I don’t think this way very often, Mathilda reflected, sipping at the delicate acridity of the tea.
She’d received a good Classical education, including elements of the pre-Change sciences. Some of them were still useful, but it had all never seemed really real to her until she’d been whirled through the depths of time at Lost Lake. Still. .
Will any of this ever occur to Órlaith at all? she thought.
Something hit the bronze bars of the trellis with an enormous whung sound. Mathilda whirled around in a flurry of skirts and dagged sleeves. A man had flung himself out of a window sixty feet above the balcony, spread-eagled to distribute the impact. It should still have broken half his bones, but his face was as empty of expression as an insect’s as he rolled off the metal and onto the tile of the floor. He wore a servant’s tabard and livery, but a curved knife glittered in his hand, with the rayed sun of the Church Universal and Triumphant etched into the steel.
The mark of the CUT’s assassin-priest-mages.
Two more figures were hurtling downward even as he shambled erect, lurching away from her towards the tables with one leg turned at an impossible angle.
Now she could feel them. As an emptiness, a lack of presence, a hole in her link with the land.
“Órlaith!” she shouted.
Mathilda snatched up the silver tea tray, the pot and cups flying over the edge of the balcony unheeded. She gripped it by the edge, twisting and flinging it with a snap that sent the disk skimming through the air. It struck the assassin in the back of the neck with a heavy chunk that would have been instantly fatal to any normal man. The cultist staggered, fell. . then twitched and began to rise again.
A fourth figure fell, and a fifth. Her heart froze, though these were in armor. One was just dead; the other managed to draw his sword and push it towards her before his head fell slack.
“Guard Órlaith!” she called, snatching up the heavy blade as she ran, taking it in the two-handed grip.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Seven Devils Mountains
(Formerly western Idaho)
High Kingdom of Montival
(Formerly western North America)
June 15th, Change Year 26/2024 AD
By the time the lingering summer sun was well down behind the peaks, Cole Salander had had a chance to wash and get outside a satisfactory amount of cowboy beans, some sort of griddle biscuit and a couple of pounds of strong-tasting pork with a very satisfactory BBQ sauce. Someone opened a sack of nuts and dried fruit that was quite tasty too, and there was wine though nobody was drinking very much.
“Sip, man, sip! Don’t swill it! That’s a Larsdalen red!” Talyn said as a small straw-covered jug went around the group by the little fire not far from the tent-flap. “It’s not beer!”
There were only the two Mackenzies, the Bearkiller pilot and him; the Clan used a nine-man squad, but the rest of Talyn and Caillech’s outfit were still off on their scout. Evidently they and Alyssa were old friends.
“Alyssa gets treats from her parents, and it makes up for the sharpness of her personality, so to say,” Talyn said.
Caillech threw a dried apricot at him, which he caught and ate, and Alyssa made a rude noise with her lips.
Cole sighed. He missed his friends and buddies, too, although he hadn’t been in the special-ops unit enough to make really close ones. Still, sitting round the fire eating BBQ ribs and drinking wine after a ten-mile hike on mountain tracks was a hell of a lot better than some of the other things that could happen to a prisoner. He hadn’t ended up full of arrows this morning, for example, which was also a definite plus, and he wasn’t sitting in a cage in chains.
And it was good wine, or at least a lot smoother than Army-ration issue or what you got in the bars around base camps. Cole had grown up on water and milk, with beer once he was past his mid-teens and diluted whiskey on special occasions, but there were vineyards closer to Boise City.
“Good ribs,” he said.
He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and tossed the stripped bone to Talyn’s dogs. They’d looked towards their master for permission to take the treat the first time. It made him slightly homesick; he’d had a dog before he reported for duty, one he’d had since they’d both been pups and hand-trained up himself and let sleep on the foot of his bed despite his mother’s scolding. They’d been inseparable until poor creaky smelly half-blind old Bob ran into a catamount that had been sniffing around the sheep-pen and died doing his valiant best. He’d hunted the cougar down with his crossbow, blind with rage, and its hide was now gracing the floor in front of the fireplace back home, but even at a heedless eighteen he’d known a milestone in his life when it happened.
“Not bad, but the sauce is a bit mild,” Alyssa said, wiping her face with a cloth-eating them one-handed was messier than the usual way. “Mackenzie cooking is pretty good but they go lighter on the peppers than most Bearkillers like.”
It had been about as hot as Cole liked. When he raised his eyebrows at her she went on:
“My grandmother. . on my mother’s side, Angelica Hutton. . was the Bearkiller quartermaster wh
ile Mike Havel led the first of us back to Larsdalen. She’s Tejano. We got a war-cry from Finland from the Bear Lord’s family, and Tex-Mex cooking from her. From what the books say about Finnish food it was a hell of a good bargain.”
A hair-raising squeal brought Cole’s head and attention whipping around. Talyn laughed and tilted back the flask.
“The pipes!” he said, toasting the harsh droning sound as it modulated into something resembling music.
“They’re not torturing a pig or biting a cat’s tail, honest,” Alyssa said. “Mackenzies are a tuneful bunch, always playing something. Including bagpipes, if you can call that a musical instrument. Especially the Píob Mhór, the war-pipes.”
“And a war-camp is the place for war-pipes,” Talyn said. “But it’s true, we’re a musical lot, having Brigid’s blessing.”
Cole nodded, a little puzzled. Everyone but the very rich made their own music or did without most of the time; he’d heard a wind-up phonograph once at a county fair, but hadn’t been impressed and anyway they and the records to play on them cost the earth. His parents had complained all his life about how you couldn’t just snap your fingers and have first-class music in the modern world, which was even more annoying than the rest of the stories about the old times.
He understood more of what Alyssa meant when half a dozen flutes and stringed instruments and little hand-held drums played with a stick came in faultlessly, weaving around the hoarse wild song of the drones.
Cole could pick out “All You Need Is Love” or “Old MacDonald” or “Riders on the Storm” with a six-string guitar and one of his uncles was pretty fair with a lute and he had an aunt who played a mean fiddle at barn dances, but everyone he could hear was better than that. As good as the professionals you heard at county fairs or parades, and better than the neighborhood favorites who played weddings and funerals.
The Given Sacrifice c-7 Page 12
