The point of the gladius crunched into the High Seeker’s ribs. The skull-like shaven head pivoted to stare into the soldier’s eyes. For a moment the two stood immobile, and then the Boisean threw aside shield and blade and turned, screaming as he ran over the edge of the ramparts. The scream trailed away all the way down and cut off abruptly.
Bows snapped behind Rudi, and the High Seeker’s body staggered under the impacts of the longbow shafts. Some passed completely through him in double splashes of red; others hammered into bone. The red-robe flexed and recovered and advanced, grinning as strings of blood and spittle drooled down from his lips.
“No farther,” Rudi said quietly, advancing with the Sword of the Lady poised. “You end here.”
The man-or the thing that had once been a man-tittered. One soldier dropped his weapons and started hitting himself on the ears, trying to block the sound of it.
“Oh, hardly a beginning,” it wheezed. “Not this plan, bungled into wreck. . by fools. . only a beginning of eternity. .”
Behind him, someone was retching, and others clapped their hands to their ears and whimpered. The Sword of the Lady protected him, but he could feel that shielding flexing like steel armor under the pressure of heavy blows.
Finish it, he thought. Let the man who was at least die free of that.
“I. . see. . you. . forever,” the thing said, and turned and leapt from the parapet before his lunge could begin.
The sleeves of the red robe fluttered all the way to the earth beneath, where he sprawled to lie beside his victim with his brains leaking out of his burst skull.
There was a rumbling that made the stone quiver beneath his feet. The great steel gates were sliding into their grooves, opening the way. Below on the banks of the river barges were being shoved into the water and lashed together, and moments later the first century of troops marched across at the double-quick, shields overhead and to the sides to make a tortoise. A few catapult bolts flicked out from the walls to either side, but the assault party was fanning out on them, and the column was an endless stream with a standard at its head-a starry flag topped with a wreathed eagle.
Roaring, the soldiers of the Republic crashed through the gates and into their city.
• • •
Well, there’s a good deal to be said for Boisean discipline, Rudi thought at the end of the day.
He looked down at the hollow; the smell was fairly strong, with that many men crowded together. They glared back at him, some afraid, more defiant, most simply blankly impassive. He was in full plate now and mounted; Edain had insisted, and it was a useful touch as well. Gentler means would come later; right now he had to talk to them in the language they’d been taught to respect.
Several thousand of the Prophet’s riders had survived the day, though many of them had improvised bandages. The folk of the city had gone for them with a concentrated rage that meant torn to pieces was far more than a metaphor. Fred’s men had used the butts of their spears and their shield-bosses to protect those who surrendered, and they’d been ready to use the points too-which was why they hadn’t had to. The fact that they hated these men just as much as the civilians did hadn’t mattered a damn, nor the fact that some of the civilians were their own families. So far as he could tell, not one unit had lingered accidentally-on-purpose or gotten “lost” to arrive too late when a knot of easterners was in danger of being mobbed.
Old General Thurston built well, and Martin didn’t have enough time to wreck it. There’s a strength here in Boise that will strengthen us all.
“You men have served the enemies of humankind,” he said, pitching his voice to carry-a trick his mother had taught him. “But that’s mostly an accident of where you were born. Since you’ve asked for quarter, you will have it. You’ll be kept under guard until this war is over; you’ll have food enough, if no more-we’re short ourselves, thanks to your ravaging-and no more work than is needful to earn your keep. When the Prophet and all his works are gone, you can return to your families and your herds and your steadings and take up your lives, provided you give oath to live in peace. . and believe me when I say that I can tell a man false to his word, for I can. Or you can go elsewhere in Montival, to any community that will take you in.”
One of them shouted: “The Prophet will never fall! The Ascended Masters will bear him up!”
Rudi grinned, a hard expression though not cruel. “Then you’ll be in a prisoner-of-war camp a very long time,” he said.
A couple of the men’s neighbors nudged him; from the way he staggered and cursed booted feet had been in use as well. One snatched off his fur cap and beat him on the head with it by way of encouraging tact. Their captor suppressed a grin.
These are men too. It wasn’t their fault that they’ve been corrupted by the world’s enemy.
Then Rudi went on, bleakly: “Do as you’re told and you’ll be treated well. If you try to escape or fight or injure my folk further, my men will hunt you down like rabbits, and there will be no mercy then. For mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”
He drew the Sword and held it high. The setting sun gleamed on it, a fire in the crystal pommel, and the prisoners swayed back; a moan ran through them.
“You’ve been given another chance at life, and to live as men should. Don’t waste it. Do some thinking, for you’ll have time for it.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
High King’s Host
Near Ashton
Liberated New Deseret
(Formerly eastern Idaho)
High Kingdom of Montival
(Formerly western North America)
August 15th, Change Year 26/2024 AD
The map had originally been from a publication called National Geographic, often a source of useful knowledge. The older collections particularly were eagerly sought after. Rudi’s cartographers-a mixture of Boiseans, Corvallans and obscure clerks from the PPA’s Chancellery-had done up an excellent large-scale transcription of one covering the core territories of the Church Universal and Triumphant and its marchlands, pyrographed on bleached deerhide, with a few modern additions like puff-cheeked faces blowing from the four quarters.
Now it was tacked to a piece of ancient plywood, itself set on an easel for easy reference. Rudi stood beside it, waiting with his left hand tucked through his sword belt and his right resting on the pommel of the Sword. The wall of the tent was rolled up, to delay the necessity of lighting the lamps. It wasn’t very hot even at the tail end of a summer’s day, since the easternmost part of the Snake River plain here was a mile above sea level, but the High King thought the view of the smoking ruins of the town were instructive as well for the assembled contingent commanders and their aides. The CUT’s forces were retreating, but doing as much damage as they could-not that this area hadn’t been badly wrecked anyway, in the long CUT-Deseret war that had been going on for most of the last decade before the greater struggle started.
In a way it’s weirdly comforting that they’re doing it, so. The Powers behind the CUT are trying to weaken Montival in every way they can, which means we’re a threat to them in the long term. At least I think so; I’m dealing with beings I cannot understand, any more than a coyote can understand a man. But try as they might, even with the tools of the ancients, men have never been able to kill all the coyotes. . and we have Those who help us as well as those who hunt us, that we do.
The air held a fair bit of dust as well as the smell of the camp and the reek of things not meant to burn, but this area got more rain than most of the Snake River valley, which was one reason he was pausing to regroup here. The grazing was better, which helped when you had so many horses to feed. The more he spread out, though, the more he was vulnerable to the swift slashing counterattacks the enemy specialized in. They were retreating, but they weren’t going willingly and they weren’t running witless.
More’s the pity; I want this war over, he thought, and began:
“As usual, it’s the logistics that are t
he problem-the more so as we’re far from home,” he said when everyone had settled and the orderlies had handed around cups of chicory to those who wished it.
“We aren’t, Your Majesty,” Donald Nystrup said.
He was technically a Brigadier in the army of New Deseret, and in fact had been the leader of the guerillas who’d been making the CUT’s occupation of the eastern Snake River country less than a delightful experience. The riders who’d been under his command were still trickling in from their hidden lairs in canyon and side-valley and badland, in groups from companies to little handfuls of men and women as desperate and lethal as so many starved wolves. Rudi had met their leader going east on the Quest, and he looked much older now than those few years would account for, with streaks of gray in his cropped brown beard and new scars, and hammered-out dents and nicks in his breastplate. He also looked like a man who’d had a pile of rocks taken off his back recently; relief mingled with an awareness of pain long suppressed and harder to bear for that.
“Yes, Brigadier,” Rudi said gently. “This is your home, and now truly yours again.”
What was that word Ingolf used, in his ancestors’ tongue? he thought. Heimat, yes. This is Nystrup’s heimat, his little homeland of the heart, what some call the patria chica. Where his ancestors are buried, a landscape rich and alive with their woven memories and stories, where his blood and sweat and theirs have watered and made sacred the soil that fed them. As the dùthchas of the Clan is to me. And it’s badly hurt. He must bleed with its wounds. Best be careful of his pride.
He met the eyes of the soldier of Deseret, his hand on the pommel of the Sword. There was an odd inner flash as he did, of something that was there but not to the unaided eyes of the flesh.
As if another man stood behind the seated Nystrup, slender work-battered hands resting on his shoulders. A big man in a blue uniform, high-collared and fancifully ornate with gold braid and buttons and epaulettes in the manner of the middle nineteenth century. The figure had a shock of unruly fair hair and bright humorous blue eyes shaded by long thick lashes, and a smile showing a chipped front tooth. It was a Yankee farmboy’s face, oval and long-nosed. At first glance a yokel out of an original America long generations gone even at the Change, save for a sense of a glowing golden charm that could bring the birds out of the trees. Full of shrewdness and good nature. . and yet a touch of something other about it, a power and a wisdom and a deep sadness.
He blinked the moment aside. Nystrup looked startled for just an instant, then squared his shoulders as if new power had flowed into him from a familiar reservoir.
Rudi went on: “But it’s a badly ravaged part of your home. Can you provide much in the way of fodder and provender?”
“Well. . not until we get the rail line to the south repaired, from down by the old Utah border. Our farmlands there are still productive, but. . and we’ve lost a lot of our working stock.”
“Not this campaigning season, then,” Rudi said.
“My troops don’t need much. We’ve gotten used to doing with very little, and we’re not going to stop until the enemy is utterly cast down.”
“And it’s a great help your lads and lasses have been and will be, but we have a large force here, and it limits our options.”
He stood to one side and tapped the eastern part of the map so that they could all see where his finger fell. “The armies of the League of Des Moines reached Casper in old Wyoming a month ago, and took it from the CUT garrison by storm after a brief siege, though with some loss.”
Sober nods from everyone. Storming a fortified position. . the antiseptic phrase covered a multitude of sins. Men falling off ladders screaming as boiling canola oil splashed into their faces and ran under their armor, for starters.
“The Bossman of Fargo will fill us in on the details.”
The League powers had a liaison officer here, who’d come over the mountains to the southward as a small party could do in summer; a high-ranking one, the Bossman of Fargo no less, one Daniel Rasmussen.
He strode confidently up to the map, a tall lean man in his forties in plain leather and linen and wool, an equally plain shete at his belt, with two fingers missing from his left hand and gray in his cropped yellow beard. He’d been notably cool when the alliance called the League of Des Moines was formed as Rudi went through Iowa on his way back west. Not least because he enjoyed being entirely sovereign in his family’s Red River bailiwick-he’d seized power from his elder brother in a coup, originally, and ruled as an iron-fisted though competent and reasonably popular dictator. The thought of mighty Iowa awakening from its inward-looking sleep wasn’t one he found delightful.
A concern for which Artos the First has an underwhelming sympathy, I will not say aloud.
His eyes were gray and very cold, with the wary bitterness you often saw in those who’d come to adulthood in the terrible years right after the Change, those damaged in their souls but not outright mad. Though they’d had a considering respect in them since he rode into the Montivallan camp and seen the size of it, and the good order and fine weapons and most of all the tough veteran faces of the troops. He hadn’t altogether believed in the High Kingdom as anything real, until then, but he was a man who believed in armies if nothing else and knew a good one when he saw it. He was casting the occasional considering look at young Rick Three Bears, the head of Rudi’s token Lakota contingent-a useful token, though most of their forces were out east of the mountains.
Rasmussen lost those fingers fighting the folk of the Seven Council Fires as a young man. And unlike Ingolf, he hasn’t let the fire of his anger die; he’s a man of cold enduring hatreds, I think. Here I thought things were complicated two months ago! Rudi mused. The Iowans are keeping that kettle off the boil, Lady bless them and the Lord guide their hands, but once the war is over I’m going to have to spend some time out east, settling things with the Lakota and their neighbors, if we’re to have real peace there and not just a truce until a new generation gets an itch in its collective sword-hand.
The number of contingents in his army had increased once again now that the US of Boise territories were secured. There was even a Nez Perce battalion; very likely and useful light horse they were, but touchy about the increased degree of autonomy Fred had given in their new charter, suspicious of Boise under anyone’s rule and needing a fair bit of stroking. It hadn’t helped when he’d thoughtlessly spoken to their commander in the Nez Perce language, and found that the man had only a few phrases of it himself; evidently only a few score people still knew it, most of them elderly. That had put him in a sulk for days, convinced it had been done to embarrass him before his followers.
Sure, and it’s like juggling porcupines! Wiggling ones intent on nibbling each other!
His blood brother and guest-friend King Bjarni of Norrheim winked at him. The burly redbeard with the axe was the least troublesome member of the war-council; all he was interested in was hacking his way through the CUT to get back to his distant realm. And absorbing every useful bit of information he could along the way; his baggage-train contained mostly crates of books and diagrams and models, not to mention a careful selection of experts in a dozen skills enticed to make the trek with offers of rank and reward. Norrheim was a bit backward now, but he suspected it would be much less so by the time Bjarni’s son was hailed on the Thingstone.
Bossman Rasmussen stepped up to the easel and spoke as Rudi moved politely aside:
“Casper’s where we started running into hard trouble. We came west up the North Platte valley as soon as the ground was dry enough and the grass was up this spring, eighty thousand strong, horse, foot and catapults, not counting the screening forces we’d had securing the approaches since last fall, or the Sioux.”
Respectful nods; that was a great many fighting-men. A great many to muster and equip, and a very great many to feed away from the farms producing the grain and meat. Eighty thousand men meant tens of thousands of draught-horses, rail and road wagons, teamsters and
roustabouts, crates of boots and harness, barrels of salt pork and sacks of flour and cornmeal and beans and oats and bale after bale of blankets and socks. .
Armies ate wealth like drought or locusts.
“That was fairly straightforward; Nebraska’s forces joined us and they had everything organized, supply dumps and plenty of fodder and replacement horses. After that we had to re-lay some of the rails as we came, sending scrap back east to the rolling mills in Des Moines. We’ve been doing that all summer, because there certainly wasn’t enough on hand once we were out of the settled zone, and every mile of track we fixed was another one we had to guard against Cutter raiding parties. We sent a secondary force along here to the south-”
His finger traced a line through Cheyenne and then far westward and north into the Powder River basin.
“And the people all joined in, the ones still free were scared stiff of the Cutters and happy to see us, the independent Ranchers and the tribes both. And the occupied zone rose against the CUT as soon as our scouts arrived, and the, ah-”
“Chenrezi Monastery,” Master Hao said.
His voice was still strongly accented despite twenty-eight years in what had become the Valley of the Sun when the Change stranded a convention of Buddhist monks at an off-season tourist hotel there. Fortunately for the other inhabitants, since most of the monks had started their lives as mountain peasants and remembered those skills.
“The Monastery of the Most Compassionate Bodhisattva. And those in the Valley who accept our advice.”
“Yeah, I’d heard you guys ran the place.”
Hao was a stringy man in some indeterminate place between middle aged and elderly, apparently naturally hairless and assembled out of rawhide and sticks, the sort of old man who looked as if he’d never die or had some time ago and didn’t let it slow him down to speak of. He was dressed in a set of lamellar armor, lozenges of metal laced together, with a dao at his side. In the Valley’s position, Rudi would have hesitated to refuse any advice he gave; from his time there he knew that was in fact the attitude of most. Not that Hao was a bad or violent man, and the Monastery’s rule had been almost comically tolerant and benevolent from all he had seen. But the High King remembered his tutelage during the winter he’d spent there, recovering from wounds. Even old Sam Aylward had never worked him harder.
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