The Given Sacrifice c-7

by S. M. Stirling

  “Chenrezi Monastery helped get things organized,” Rasmussen said. “The Powder River people all jumped when they said frog.”

  The particular order Hao had represented at the conference so long ago emphasized the Way of the Warrior. How exactly they reconciled that with Greater Vehicle Buddhism was a matter of theological complication Rudi wasn’t much interested in, but Hao had been in charge of the training and leading of the Valley’s hosts since the beginning. The Valley had not been protected by its geography alone.

  “There is much respect for the holy Rimpoche Tsewang Dorje,” the old Han said a little severely, naming the abbot of Chenrezi.

  “As there should be,” Rudi said, quite sincerely.

  In an entirely different way the Tibetan abbot was even more formidable than his warrior subordinate. The Rimpoche had sworn him fealty in impeccable style; then winked, and they’d both shared a chuckle as the old bonze’s face turned into a network of wrinkles like an ancient merry child. You got that sense that most of life was a game he played punctiliously out of an innate courtesy. .

  Tiphaine d’Ath had been standing like a gray-steel statue of a warrior Goddess, Lioncel de Stafford behind her with a stack of documents. Now she used her silver baton of office to sweep from east to west along the lower edge of the map.

  “That’s all very well, Bossman, but going that way is like running your little finger up your own nose; limited possibilities of advance and you’re not likely to reach anything useful. Unless you’re going to fight your way over the Tetons, where it can snow any damned month of the year, July included.”

  “They’ll have to guard the passes, but yeah,” Rasmussen said, nodding. “Thing is, the supply situation was even worse than we thought it would be, and we realized we had more troops than we could feed on the axis of main effort, so we might as well have them do something instead of just going home. Whoever we picked to turn around and march back, the rest of the troops wouldn’t like that, to put it mildly. A lot of the League’s army. . the Iowans particularly. . well, they were drilled troops and well equipped and ready enough to fight, but a lot of them hadn’t realized how much time in the field you spend being so bored and miserable that fighting’s a relief.”

  That brought some chuckles; everyone here had been fighting for years, and not a single summer campaign each year on someone else’s fields, either. Whatever else you might say about him, Rasmussen had been there. Someone murmured poor babies! Nystrup looked angry rather than mocking; what his people had been through was beyond conception.

  “And once we got the CUT out of the area, the Ranchers there could spare stock to be driven north, we got some from as far south into old Colorado as the San Luis valley. Gratitude, gold and fifteen thousand men with shetes can produce a big herd. That helped a lot with our transport bottleneck. Horses too, and war eats ’em fast.”

  A bad man is Bossman Rasmussen, in my opinion, but a fair sound general, and a realist, Rudi thought. Hmmm. I must see to that area in old Colorado after the war. . another bit of work to add to the plate!

  The Midwesterner went on: “Our main force turned north at Casper. There’s more support for the CUT there as you head north, more people who actually buy that loony line of goods they peddle, and we started getting serious harassment. God tailor-made the Bighorn country for a cavalry guerilla. Horse-archers are a pain in the ass that way to an infantry army. I told them in Des Moines to take more light cavalry, but. .”

  There were mutters from the ranked commanders, along the lines of tell me about it. The CUT’s armies were mostly plainsmen with recurves, and with a string of several ponies for each man they could move. Trying to force them to give battle when they didn’t want to fight was like trying to punch smoke with your fist, too; even a little carelessness and they’d ride around you and burn the country behind you while you stood scratching your head, or arse, or both, and wondering where they were.

  Though there were answers to that. Rudi grinned like a wolf. “We’re approaching things that they must stand and fight for,” he said. “For all that they put their capital in a land so remote, they still have one.”

  Rasmussen nodded, with an identical expression, and went on:

  “The Lakota-”

  This time his nod to Rick Three Bears was genuinely polite instead of hostility masked by a politic pretense of courtesy. He also gave them their own name for themselves, too, which best translated as friends or allies. The name Sioux more commonly used among outsiders to name those tribes was derived from what their bitter rivals the Anishinabe-Ojibwa people had called them long ago, filtered through French and then English, and had originally meant something like little snakes.

  That hadn’t been intended as a compliment or taken as one.

  “-have been invaluable keeping them off our backs.”

  Rick shrugged and drew on his cigarette, the cheeks of his narrow hook-nosed face pulling in for a moment and his braids swinging.

  “We have lots of practice with the Cutters,” he said in a not-quite-insolent manner, blowing the smoke upward.

  And with your gang, white-eyes, went unspoken; his father John Red Leaf had been a leader in the Sioux War, when the resurgent Lakota tunwan had tried to take back their ancestral lands in the Red River valley. It hadn’t worked, but they had ended up once again dominating what had been the western Dakotas.

  Though I’ve met his mother as well, and she’s suspiciously red-haired, Rudi thought whimsically. Our tribes and clans and nations are stories we tell-though none the less real for that. But real because we believe in them, not because they’re written in natural law. . and as we Changelings know, even natural law isn’t as unchanging as our parents thought.

  Mathilda coughed at the tobacco smoke with resigned disgust, where she sat with a stack of reports from the staff and Huon Liu de Gervais at her elbow. The Midwesterner lit one of his own, the habit being much more common where he came from than in Montival, ignored the High Queen’s glare and several others, and went on:

  “But the harassment slowed us down-we kept having to deploy from march column to line of battle, and occasionally fight a set-piece engagement. We shoved ’em back every time, but the Cutters always broke off before we could really wreck them.”

  More moderately sympathetic nods. Montival had wrecked the CUT and Martin Thurston at the Horse Heaven Hills, but mainly because the enemy had stood and fought there beyond the point of reason in an attempt to win the war at one throw.

  “It would have been fu. . frankly impossible if there had been twice as many of them, I grant that, so you and us hitting them at the same time was crucial. But while that went on they had labor-gangs ripping up the rail, piling it up over heaps of ties, and setting those on fire-we could see the flames against the sky for weeks and smell the burning creosote. That meant we had to re-lay everything as we advanced into the Bighorn Basin and went west, except the actual grading, and some of that’s washed out since the Change so we had to shove the dirt back. Not to mention bridges. Plus they set grass fires wherever they could, and drove every head of livestock out of our path. Right now we’re here-”

  He tapped the map south of Billings, the old Montana capital and mostly ruins now. “Only a few hundred miles left to go. Damn bad miles, though, and the Cutters are thick as grass. Infantry, not just their ranch and Rover levies, and the Sword of the Prophet, what’s left of it. I understand you guys wiped out most of that crowd of maniacs in the red armor last year, for which many thanks.”

  Tiphaine gave a small chilly smile. The Grand Constable had brought the Association’s chivalry down on Corwin’s elite troops like a war hammer on a skull, with hideously perfect timing. Rudi gave her a small crisp inclination of the head. He’d spent most of that long and ghastly day setting the move up, but she’d carried it out faultlessly and deserved to be proud of it.

  “Thank you for the summation, Bossman,” Rudi said, and tapped the map himself. “And the Dominions, Drumheller and M
oose Jaw and Minnedosa”-the old Canadian prairie provinces, which had come through the Change with only the loss of their larger cities, like the Upper Midwest-“are here, around Great Falls.”

  “Hurrah,” Tiphaine said dryly, holding up a fist, extending her index finger and moving it in a very small circle of celebration.

  Rasmussen gave her a look and then an unwilling grin as he resumed his seat. Mathilda snorted in agreement; Great Falls wasn’t so very far south of the Dominion of Drumheller’s prewar border. And the Dominions were rich and populous, by the standards of this continent in the twenty-sixth year of the Change, and they didn’t have as far to go as the other combatants.

  “It’s mountains there,” Rudi said mildly.

  Ian was bristling back where he stood in the Dúnedain contingent, but far too junior and too polite to say anything at the aspersion on his native land.

  “Also they didn’t have to intervene in this war at all. We’d have beaten the CUT eventually anyway if they hadn’t, and they’d have gotten all the benefits of victory without any of the costs.”

  “Every Cutter they engage is one we don’t have to,” Mathilda put in judiciously; when she thought politics, you could hear her mother in her voice. “Corwin was a bad neighbor, but they’d never taken any territory they considered their own. The Association took the old Canuk territory west of the Rockies, which is now part of Montival. It was really quite forethoughtful of the Dominions to come in on our side.”

  “So, how are we going to get at Corwin, Your Majesty?” Tiphaine asked. “And do it before snow closes the passes, and get the bulk of our troops back in time? So that all our neighbors can go home for Yule?”

  “That is the question,” Rudi agreed.

  You’re the High King, you’re the man with the magic sword, so you tell us what to do. . and you’d better be right, he thought sardonically.

  In the end you had to decide; you never had enough information and what you did have might be wrong. That, and the sheer work involved, were among the reasons he’d always found it surprising that so many wanted power. He’d read the philosophers, Plato and Aristotle and Jefferson and the others, and there was something to be said for republics; but the great asset of a monarchy was that you could put men in office who weren’t obsessed with a ruler’s power, wanting it so much so that they twisted their whole lives into a search for it.

  Who knows, Bossman Rasmussen’s grandson may be a fine fellow.

  “We’re going to follow the old Highway 20 route, east over the Yellowstone Plateau and north then up Highway 89,” he said after a moment’s echoing silence; he saw shoulders relax as the dice were cast for good or ill. “Then down from the old park territories and into Paradise Valley. We have to take Corwin within the next month, and then get the bulk of the troops out to somewhere we can feed them through the snow season. The number who we can overwinter there without producing a famine, or even in the Bitterroot country as a whole, is strictly limited. Even in what passes for lowlands hereabouts.”

  Tiphaine pursed her lips. “It’s direct, and it doesn’t give them the chance to get off their back foot,” she acknowledged. “Given the time constraints. .”

  “Least bad,” Rudi replied. “The western part outside the old park was cut over about thirty years ago, and the remainder burned hard just before and then just after the Change; it’s grassland and shrub now for the most part, good grazing-and heavy with game, buffalo and elk, deer and boar and feral cattle. That will help a fair bit; we’d send light cavalry and scouts first anyway, and they can shoot as much as possible and rough-gralloch it. The troops can eat roast meat and save the iron rations for later.”

  Everyone looked at the map. That route meant hauling everything they couldn’t forage with wagons on roads that had spent a generation getting worse, repairing where essential as they went. And even on a good road a horse or ox could pull less than a tenth of what it could on rails, and more slowly too.

  He tapped the map again. “We have to guard our line of communication here, at Henrys Lake and up to the ruins of West Yellowstone town; there’s a possible approach from Corwin to the north, where they could flank us. I want the bulk of the remaining Association foot there, Grand Constable, to patrol and block the possible approaches from the north. Delegate the command as you see fit. You’ll keep. . two thousand of your lancers with the main field force advancing on Corwin. We’ll take the light horse, fifteen thousand of the pike-and-crossbow infantry from Corvallis and the Free Cities, three brigades of Boiseans-Fred, you pick which ones-the Bearkillers, the Mackenzies, and field artillery in proportion. Most of the siege train we can leave west of here, and all the heavy pieces; Corwin isn’t heavily fortified, much less so than Boise, though there are forts, especially to the north.”

  The staff at their tables began frantically scribbling, to translate that into the movement orders.

  “It’s doable,” Tiphaine said. “But only just. And that’s provided we don’t get locked up skirmishing and breaking ambushes on our way through the Park. That’s mainly still forests, according to the reports. I’ve fought in similar country before, and it’s dead easy to end up chasing each other around in circles for weeks while your main column sits and eats. Or starves.”

  Rudi smiled. “I have. . contacts there. They’ll deal with it.”

  Hopefully, he added to himself.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Morrowlander Scout Pack Domain

  (Formerly Yellowstone National Park)

  High Kingdom of Montival

  (Formerly western North America)

  August 15th, Change Year 26/2024 AD

  The glider blazoned with the crimson bear’s-head whispered by overhead. Sunlight blinked from the canopy as the wings waggled, once and twice and thrice; then it banked off, caught an updraft, and spiraled up into the sky.

  “OK, cousin Alyssa, message received,” Mary Vogeler said, waving broadly with her sword in one hand for emphasis and to catch the light as well. “Company’s coming.”

  Then she repeated it aloud and in Battle Sign, and the word was passed on from mouth to mouth, quietly and without visible stir. The Dúnedain Rangers were out in force for the great hunt, along with the other scouts and light troops. The day was only just warm even in high summer, for this rolling volcanic plateau rose seven thousand feet above the level of the sea; nights would make bedrolls and fires very welcome, though actual hard frost was unlikely for another month.

  Somewhere a work party was singing at their labors, in the Noble Tongue:

  “East and west of the Misty Mountains

  North and south of the sea-”

  Mary smiled; it was good to be back among her own folk for a while. She’d been travelling and adventuring among strangers for a long time by the time they got back from the Quest, and even since. Spending some time in Mithrilwood would be even better, badly though Aunt Astrid’s absence was felt there. . though she had to admit that this part of Montival was just as comely. Mountaintops winked eastward, icy teeth stretching towards a sky aching blue and streaked with high white mare’s-tail cloud.

  The rolling ground around was mostly grass tall and lush and green, starred with yellow sand lily and thick drifts of crimson Indian paintbrush, yard-high purple bunches of fringed gentian and more. There were occasional stumps or the remnants of logs in the grassland, charred and rotting; this land had a natural burn cycle that pushed it from forest to prairie and back. Already there were clumps of aspen and tall slender lodgepole pine up to forty feet high on the most favorable locations on south-facing ridges. They’d cut some of those and erected tripods to hoist up the carcasses of the bison and elk and black-tail deer; if gutted and drained they would keep acceptably for days in this climate.

  There were dozens of the tripods in use within sight, and teams of horses dragging in more bodies. This was strictly killing for meat, just methodical hard work like farming. Very much like slaughtering season in the fall, in fact, down to the
collective thanks-and-apology prayer. They’d used screens of beaters to drive the herds onto the waiting spears and bows. Even upwind the smell of blood was strong, though clean enough, mingled with the smell of grilling kidney and liver, the strong-tasting organ meats that went off so quickly and were the rights of the hunter. They’d dug trenches for the guts, once the dogs had gorged themselves into a stupor, and the hides were stacking up, to be used to wrap around butchered, quartered carcasses for easy transport.

  Mary still felt slightly guilty, since they’d be wasting so much valuable sausage casing, horn and fat and leather and sinew and bone, not to mention the brains that could be used for tanning. The Valar recognized that humankind had a right to eat just as the other carnivores did, but they disapproved of wantonness with the gifts of Arda and Eru the Creator.

  This is rich land and we’re not taking the calves or young females, she thought a bit defensively. The herds will bounce back quickly. For that matter, the way the herds are composed shows that someone is cropping the wildlife here, and someone who knows what they’re doing, too. You see the same thing in Mithrilwood or our other steadings. I think I know by whom, too.

  The Lakota had been most impressed; they lived by ranching as much as anything these days with a little gardening here and there and some crafts, but they managed the swelling buffalo herds of the makol, the high plains, very carefully.

  Nobody was alarmed at the message from the glider; she wasn’t the only one tasked with waiting for it, and anyway they had a perimeter of guards out and everyone was on the alert. If nothing else, the killing had brought every opportunistic predator in the area out hotfoot, and when wolf-packs and grizzlies and tigers got the scent of blood, you had to be cautious.