Mathilda’s eyes opened. “No need to make much of this,” she said quietly, looking deliberately at the three of them in turn. “As the good Sister said, it’s not a life-threatening wound.”
Not now, Lioncel thought, and fought an impulse to fall to his knees in awe, or at least to cross himself.
He wasn’t entirely surprised; he’d seen the Sword of the Lady, after all. . and there was something beyond the human in an anointed monarch, everyone knew that from the stories.
In theory. It’s a lot more alarming in practice. But I know keep your mouth shut about this from someone of high rank when I hear it, even if it’s. . tactfully put.
He and his liege stood, bowed deeply to Mathilda, and backed away. Lioncel met the Grand Constable’s unreadable gray gaze and nodded very slightly: I understand. She almost-smiled in approval before she turned away. He was almost shaking with relief himself, now that there was time to appreciate just how bad the situation had been, but that helped to steady him.
Signe Havel was swearing mildly as the other medic-a layman-probed at her ribs and pronounced that several were probably cracked, but only slightly.
“I could have told you that without your sticking fingers into it,” she snarled. “Do you think it’s the first time I’ve had a sprung rib?”
He heard Virginia Thurston speaking in a similar tone to someone else, her Powder River accent much thicker than usual: “I’m pregnant, not sick, y’ durned fool, and I didn’t get hit. Leave me be and tend to them as needs it!”
Things were getting set to order; more of the d’Ath menie had shown up, and some of the Lord Chancellor’s men, and attendants of the Countesses, who were giving crisp quiet directions of their own.
“Scrub down the blood from the assassins and then burn the rags and the instruments,” Tiphaine d’Ath said. “Then wash yourselves and burn your clothes. Burn Her Majesty’s dress once she’s out of it. No, don’t touch those knives with your bare hands, you idiot! Take them to Lord Chancellor Father Ignatius, in a box, he knows how to deal with them. The assassin’s bodies will have to be burned. Prepare a pyre outside the castle walls. . a big one. With no people downwind.”
The servants gulped and paled and set to following her instructions with exaggerated care, and she went on to her household knights:
“Armand, get this troop of armored. . people. . out of the Queen Mother’s chambers, get up there with enough men and see to disarming the Guard detachment. Obviously most of them weren’t in on this but some of the ones who were may still be alive. Rodard, immediate message to Sir Tancred via the heliograph net and courier that he’s to have the High King comb the ranks of the Guard in the field.”
“Separate cells, preliminary interrogation, kid gloves, my lady?” Armand asked, clarifying.
“Right. Get going. Rodard, once that dispatch is off, go brief Conrad, he’ll be having kittens. The last thing we need is him wheeling his chair through this mess waving his cane and roaring.”
“Yes, my lady.”
She made a small exhaling sound as the knights departed briskly, glanced around to see if there was something else time-critical that needed doing immediately, and decided there wasn’t. The Queen Mother gave her an inclination of the head and mouthed: well done, which straightened Lioncel’s spine even further.
I was right, my liege is a strong right arm of the Crown! he thought proudly. And so will I be, one day!
He remembered to sling his crossbow, and tossed the cleaning-cloth and the glove he’d been wearing onto a growing pile of to-be-burned with gingerly care before he followed her and slid her sword efficiently back into the scabbard. She’d headed straight for his mother, who was holding Heuradys and Yolande and sitting on a bench. When she saw Tiphaine d’Ath approaching and Lioncel obviously unharmed beside her something seemed to go out of her, a stiff tension in her very bones.
“Good job, sweetie,” Tiphaine said quietly.
“You too, darling,” Delia said, then shuddered. “May I have hysterics now?”
“You earned them.”
His mother handed the infants to the nanny, hugged Lioncel hard enough to wind him through the mail shirt, then threw herself into the Grand Constable’s arms, sobbing.
CHAPTER NINE
Siege lines before Boise
(formerly southern Idaho)
High Kingdom of Montival
(Formerly western North America)
June 25th, Change Year 26/2024 AD
“Hello, love,” Rudi Mackenzie said. “I’m back from the fields, ready to sit by the hearth and talk over the day’s doings while you stir the stewpot.”
Mathilda laughed and waved without taking her eye from the focusing piece of a telescope whose tripod stood on the rosewood of the room’s main table. One wall of the tent had been rolled up, which gave her a view as far as the City of Boise itself.
The great striped canvas pavilion had started out life as one of Sandra Arminger’s, of the type she used for tours and presiding at the tournaments that were such an important part of Association life.
And for intimidating the bedamned out of fractious noblemen, Rudi thought, handing his shield to Mathilda’s squire Huon Liu de Gervais with a smile and a nod.
Huon was still moving carefully, but fit enough for light work, and had insisted on coming with the High Queen with an exquisitely deferential stubbornness. It was hard to say no to a lad who’d thrown himself without hesitation between a walking dead man with a cursed knife and your daughter. . and who was visibly determined to do the same again should the need arise.
Mathilda had taken Huon and his sister Yseult under wardship and into the Royal Household for their brother Odard’s sake, and despite their mother’s proved treason. That had turned out to be a very good idea.
I never entirely trusted Odard, for all that we’d fought and hunted and sung songs and drunk wine together for years, Rudi thought. He was one of those men whose inwardness is always a secret, full of unexpected things like a forest at night. Until at the last. . now, did I do him an injustice earlier, or did he grow on the Quest into the man he was when he died? For that man I miss, and badly.
The Baron of Gervais had gone with them not quite all the way to Nantucket, and fell on the shores of the Atlantic like a knight from an old song, with a broken sword in his hand, a circle of dead foemen around him and a jest on his bloodied lips. Mathilda had promised the dying man that she’d look after his family, but his younger siblings had since more than justified the grace of her favor by their own deeds.
And Matti has squires old enough to fight as men-at-arms; it’s not as if the boy will be overburdened.
The raised tent wall let in light-though the setting sun was behind them-and mildly warm air, along with some dust and the usual livery-stable-outhouse-and-sweat smells of an army camp, heavily seasoned with cook fire. They’d stripped out most of the comforts from the big tent to cut the weight for the transport train’s sake, but the sheer space was useful since the High Kingdom’s government had to be dragged around with it, as well as Montival’s military headquarters.
That meant a lot of meetings and a fair number of clerks, cartographers, typewriters, adding machines, reference books and knock-down filing cabinets. And a lot of the original folding furniture was perfectly practical, light and strong and compact even if given to parquetry and mother-of-pearl inlay. The chair he chose did nothing more than creak a little at his armored weight; he was spending most of his days in harness, to help keep fit and to set a good example. Fortunately it wasn’t really hot yet; if you had to fight, this sort of seventy-degree weather was the best for it. The main drawback of a suit of plate wasn’t the weight, it was heat exhaustion.
Huon helpfully fished another crock of mild cider out of a bucket and placed it not far from Rudi’s hand after he poured him a glass. The High King didn’t have any squires himself, as yet. He’d been knighted by Association ritual before the Quest, but that had taken him away soon after and
since his return he’d been too busy. And he had spent enough time in the Protectorate in his youth to take the obligations involved seriously; he wouldn’t take a squire’s oath if he didn’t have time to fulfill them. The king hung the Sword over the back of his chair himself; he didn’t like anyone else to touch it anyway except Mathilda. . and generally speaking others liked touching it even less themselves.
“I know Órlaith will be safer with mother at Dun Juniper than anywhere else on the green breast of Earth,” Rudi said to his queen.
He was continuing a conversation they’d been having for some time. Even he could hear that there was a little fretfulness in his tone, not to mention downright fear. Edain’s dog Garbh stopped her vigorous scratching and nibbling at recalcitrant parts of her shaggy fur to come over and put her gruesome head in his lap by way of comfort, rolling her eyes up at him and looking as meltingly sympathetic as a hundred and forty pounds of scarred gray-muzzled man-killing wolf-mastiff mixture could.
High Kings shouldn’t be fretful, he told himself, ruffling the great beast’s ears; the dog had walked all the way to Nantucket and back with them, and knew him well. On the other hand, I’m a father too-and someone just tried to kill my child. I can’t even declare war on those responsible, because I’m already fighting them. But possibly I can bash someone tonight with my own hands, the which will be an immense comfort.
“She’d be just as safe at Mt. Angel,” Mathilda said, sighing and sitting back from the telescope.
That had been her first choice, and it was indeed a mighty fortress in more senses of the word than one. They both knew she referred to the safety gained from what might be called sanctity more than physical protection; the threat to their daughter wasn’t from armies, or even ordinary knife-men. He met her eyes for a moment and she shrugged ruefully.
“Agreed. But. . well, I would say my mother is better at looking after children,” he said. “Didn’t she raise both of us?”
“That’s a point. No insult to the good monks of your order, Father Ignatius,” Mathilda went on hastily.
The warrior-monk, and now Chancellor of the High Kingdom, looked up from his folding desk in one corner of the chamber for an instant and nodded, solemn but with a twinkle in his slanted dark eyes. He was a man of middle height, slim but broad-shouldered and with a swordsman’s wrists, who looked graceful even sitting on a camp stool and dressed in the rather voluminous black Benedictine habit.
“None taken, my daughter,” he said, carefully signing a document and blotting the ink before peeling the paper off one of a little stack of wax disks, applying it to the paper and stamping it with his seal. “The Shield of St. Benedict is not primarily a nursery order. When the Crown Princess is a little older, my brotherhood will be delighted to assist with her education at our university. I hope to delay my senile decline until then.”
They all chuckled. Ignatius was a few years older than them, though a Changeling for all practical purposes, and he had a natural dignity that wasn’t all incompatible with his dryly ironic sense of humor. Beneath her amusement Rudi could feel the underlying anguish in Mathilda at deciding to leave their daughter in the care of others. Even an other as beloved and competent as Juniper Mackenzie. It was the spiritual equivalent of a constant low-level toothache, stoically endured.
There were times when the Sword was a burden; sometimes even the link to each other and the land that had come with the Kingmaking was. He didn’t know how much of that went with being a ruler in other times and places, but it was most assuredly true if you were High King of Montival-or High Queen. For that matter, he could sense a muted hint of Ignatius’ longing to be back at the hilltop monastery of Mt. Angel, to lose himself in the ancient round of prayer and toil and meditation. He hadn’t become a cleric to seek secular power.
The monk’s sense of duty was like a blade of forged steel, though; he didn’t have to give speeches to be an inspiration. Rudi sighed.
Time to be Artos, he thought, as he drew up his chair. Or as the good Father would say, take up your cross.
“Here, look at this,” Mathilda said, pushing over the telescope. “We both need distracting. Come get a good military reason to be depressed.”
He did, turning the focusing knob. Rudi had first seen Boise’s fortifications a few years ago, on the Quest to Nantucket, and more recently from the observation balloons that now ringed it. Like many, the modern city had contracted to its original core, which here meant a rectangular block to the east on the far side of the river and a little back from it. Three bridges crossed the water, heavily fortified at both ends, virtual castles on the western shore surrounded by clear land worked as vegetable plots and running into massive complexes of towers on the wall.
Unlike most still-inhabited cities the sprawl of buildings around Boise’s edges had been thoroughly torn down in old General Thurston’s day. Many places left their suburbs to the attentions of time, vegetation, scavengers and fire, but around Boise even the foundation pads had mostly been broken up for reuse in the fortifications and cellars filled in for truck gardens-Lawrence Thurston had been a man with a very strong sense of order, among other things.
The walls he’d built reflected the other, bleakly pragmatic part of his nature. They were mass concrete reinforced with girders but they included some of the pre-Change high-rise buildings, themselves in-filled with cemented rubble, and it gave the fortification an odd mottled, angular look. They weren’t as elegantly historic as Todenangst or the walls of Portland, or as brilliantly sited as Mt. Angel, and they didn’t have the snarling cyclopean menace of Larsdalen’s Bear Gate, but. .
“We’re not going to batter those down, or storm them,” he said.
There was a click from the sentries as he spoke, the High King’s Archers touching their bowstaves to the brow of their helmets in salute, and Frederick Thurston came in. He was in the hoop-armor of a Boise regular, with a red-white-and-blue crest running fanwise from ear to the ear of his helm. It gave his tall form an extra element of menace-which was one point of the gear, of course. He took it off and laid it down on the table, throwing his metal-backed gloves beside it and unbuckling his cavalry saber.
“Thor’s mighty goats, no,” Fred said, answering Rudi’s last comment. “Can you imagine trying to land on that nice inviting strip of land between the east bank of the river and the walls, for example?”
Rudi could; he winced at the thought of the sudden rain of bolts and round shot and balls of flaming napalm among troops crowded into the narrow band-it was a deathtrap masquerading as an opportunity, even more than the moat-encircled remainder of the ramparts. It said something of Fred’s father as a soldier that he’d done that, and not put the wall at the water’s edge.
“No, you’d have to try it from the other side,” he said. “Which we won’t, but it’s essential they think we’ll try.”
Fred nodded, family pride in his face for a moment. “That’s why Dad put the wall as far back as West River Street.”
Rudi turned the instrument from the city to his own siege lines, a ragged but substantial line of trenches and earthworks, some of them smoking faintly where stick-flame had landed. It was amazing how much dirt you could move in a week with fifty thousand sets of reasonably willing hands, spades, wheelbarrows, Fresno Scrapers, horses, mules, oxen and some well-trained field engineers. A crew in a pit a little behind the front were sweating at a trebuchet, grunting as they levered a four-hundred-pound block of stone into the throwing cup; the boulder had been shot at them by a similar machine on the walls and landed in the soft earth of the berm protecting them and was about to be sent home postpaid.
An officer barked a command, they all stood back, and the lanyard was pulled. A trebuchet was the simplest of siege engines in principle, if the strongest, just a great lever pivoting on an elevated axle about a fifth of the way from one end. You put weight-tons of weights-on the short end and a metal-mesh and cable sling arrangement on the long one, and you were in business apart from a
few incidentals like the supporting frame to hold the axle high in the air and the winches to haul the long arm down and the general massiveness needed to withstand the stress. This one was about the height of a three-story house, the product of a foundry and machine shop in Corvallis, and in knocked-down form it took twelve eight-horse wagons to transport it.
The triangular block of weights in a steel frame box on the upper, shorter end of the arm began to fall as the catch released the restraints. The long throwing-arm between the two giant steel upright A-frames started to move, slowly for the first few instants then more quickly as it whipped up, dragging the sling along the alignment trough on the ground.
The loop of the sling swung skyward above the giant beam and lifted free in a blur of speed; the free end came loose from the carefully shaped hook at the top of the arc, and the machine lofted the boulder at the city with the casual ease of a boy shying an apple core at a crow in the fields at sowing-time. It rocked back and forth with the cup and sling dangled down as the crew hooted and jeered at the defenders-probably variations on eat this! — and a few ran up to the top of the berm before turning to bend over and rhythmically slap their arses in derision.
Corvallans tended to be vain of their city-state’s scientific accomplishments and manufacturing prowess; the university there ran the place, more or less, and had since the Change. Its far-travelling merchants and skilled artisans and ingenious factory-owners were numerous, energetic and shrewd too, shrewd enough to use that accumulated knowledge well. A third of his artillerists and half his engineers were Corvallans. Their bankers were equally famous but far less liked, though Rudi had reluctantly found them as indispensible as the troops.
The roughly shaped boulder tumbled away into the distance, turning to a dot. Then there was a puff of dust from the great ramparts above the blank steel surface of a gate, and the hard tock sound of impact echoed back. At this distance imagination had to fill in the way the wall would shake underfoot, and the deadly whine of fragments of shattered rock and concrete like flying gutting-knives. A rock that size packed a lot of energy into its travelling mass, and when you stopped it all at once. .
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