“Yah. You learn that stuff from your folks or uncles or whatever, like farming or hunting or smithing. Or at school.”
From their sixth year to around twelve kids in Richland went to school, at least between fall and spring, which was when they could best be spared from chores. Enough to get their letters and how to do sums and a bit of this and that; children of Farmers and Sheriffs usually stuck with it a little longer so they could keep account books and deal with the outside world, especially merchants and tax-collectors. That was about the way most civilized, advanced places worked, with arrangements running downhill from that to wildmen bands in the death zones who’d forgotten that there ever had been such a thing as writing. Modern life just didn’t demand much book learning for most.
He went on slowly, marshaling his thoughts: “But say there were a couple of hundred of these. . Scouts. . flying through the air on that thing over there, and most of them lived through the crash. They’d mostly be. . oh, teens or a little younger.”
“Ah, I knew I didn’t marry you just for your looks. So they wouldn’t have started having children until a bit later, would they? That’s why the born Changelings are all younger than me, nobody Rudi’s age, or even Ian’s.”
“Right, and no grown-ups to raise them, probably. None still around, at least. And you know how kids get notions and run with them.”
“And they’d be isolated from the outside world. By the Cutters, and by distance. Who’d come here if it weren’t for the war?”
“Oh, afterwards they’ll get a trader and some mules every year. Or every two or three, fur traders maybe. Or hunters. It’s nice country if you like the woods.”
“Yup, but there’s plenty of places with pretty scenery and good hunting somewhere closer to somewhere, if you know what I mean. They haven’t got anything anyone outside would want, they’re not on the best road between anywhere and anywhere, and they’re the only people at all in ten or twenty thousand square miles. I can see how they’ve turned out strange,” Mary said solemnly.
What’s that saying Edain likes? My, how grimy and sooty is your arse, said the kettle to the pot? Ingolf thought behind a poker face.
The Dúnedain had been started by a couple of teenagers, and look how they’d ended up. Though in his private opinion the PPA and the Mackenzies were just as weird, and adults had been responsible for that. Not adults who’d have ended up running countries before the Change, granted. You saw a lot of that if you travelled far, places where some charismatic lunatic or small bunch with some set of bees in their bonnets had ended up on top in the chaos and then shaped everything like a trellis under a vine. Most people had been ready to grab anything that looked as if it worked with the desperate zeal of a drowning man clutching at a log.
Like the Church Universal and Triumphant, he thought with a shiver. The way it turned out after the Change. Of course, something. . else. . is at work there.
The three Council representatives came to meet them. They were back in full formal fig, and there were a dozen more behind them in the same, with carved staffs if they didn’t have spears. After a solemn exchange of greetings-the Morrowlanders were a ceremonious folk-one of them handed over a document written on something he recognized as a sort of paper made from birch bark.
“We didn’t want to tire you excessively,” the member of the Council said.
Ingolf looked down the list of Badges they were supposed to earn and wondered what it would have been like if they had wanted to tire them out.
“I’ll take the Tomahawk Throwing,” he said, briefly remembering that night in Boise. “And Wrestling.”
You never knew when keeping up a skill would save you grief. Mary and Ritva were looking over his shoulder.
“Dibs on Storytelling!” Mary said.
“We can do that together,” Ritva said. “We’ll do Riddles in the Dark and Conversations with the Dragon, and switch off the speaking roles, how’s that? And then one of us can do Shelob’s Lair. Those all come across pretty well in the Common Tongue.”
“OK, I’m cool with Identifying Plants and Their Uses,” Cole said thoughtfully. “I aced that part of Special Forces training and it shouldn’t be too different around here. And Field Shelters.”
“I’m for Snowshoes and Skis,” Ian said decisively. “My dad taught me that, my family had a sideline in making them and swapped them for our blacksmith work back on the farm. And Camp Cooking.”
Everyone looked at the Mackenzies. “Well, Folk Song, and Musical Instruments,” Mary said. “What else?”
Talyn grinned and slid the longbow out of the loops beside his quiver and made a flourish with it. Caillech just strung hers with a step-through and a wrench.
“Need y’ ask?” the young man said. “For let me tell you-”
“You talk too much,” Caillech said, grinning herself. “Let’s show instead.”
• • •
It took a while to get to the archery, but the reception was all that could be asked when they did. A cheer went up as Talyn and Caillech straightened and leaned on their bows, panting and their faces running with sweat. The shooting range was overlooked by informal bleachers made by cutting seats into the hillside and cultivating turf. The cheering came mostly from the younger element-what the Scouts called cubs. The older spectators were enthusiastic too, but a lot of them were looking rather thoughtful.
I would be too, Ingolf thought.
The range included pop-up targets of various sorts and even some rigged to move, but final test had been straight speed-and-accuracy shooting at a hundred yards. Both the round wood targets bristled with gray-fletched cloth-yard shafts. Many had punched their heads right through the four-inch thickness of pine. The ground below was littered with the ones that had been broken by more recent arrivals simply because there wasn’t any more room in the bull’s-eye. The Clan warriors had emptied their big forty-eight arrow war quivers in less than five minutes of concentrated effort, and not a single shaft had missed the targets; most were tightly grouped in the centers, though admittedly there wasn’t any wind to complicate matters.
I couldn’t have matched that, Ingolf thought. Oh, accuracy, sure, but not the speed.
Cole Salander smiled as he fingered the new badge sewn to his camouflage jacket; it turned out to be made of beautifully tanned and colored deerskin, and sported a red leaf against a green background.
“Makes me ever more glad I wasn’t at the Horse Heaven Hills with you guys shooting at me,” he said. “But I’d have figured these guys here for good shots, too. That was some impressive, yeah, but should they be this impressed?”
“I know why they’re startled,” Ingolf murmured. “They’re hunters, not war-archery specialists like our Clan friends.”
Mary nodded, though Cole still looked a little puzzled; his folk mostly used crossbows for distance work, at least when fighting on foot.
Hunting. . particularly hunting on foot in woodland. . you very rarely shot more than once or twice at any particular animal. After that you’d either hit it or it had run away, so there wasn’t much point in carrying more than half a dozen arrows. And you got just as close as you could; Ingolf would have bet the Scouts were good enough stalkers that they ended up shooting from point-blank more often than not. They were fine archers with their light handy recurves within that envelope, and he certainly wouldn’t want to try and force his way through this rugged, forested country with them stalking him from ambush.
Mackenzies did a lot of hunting too; you had to in the Willamette, as in most places, if only to protect your crops from animals breeding fast in a world where humans were scarce. But the Mackenzie longbow was a battlefield weapon first and foremost. On a battlefield you were shooting for your life, not your supper, and your steel-clad targets came at you, screaming and waving sharp pointy things with ill intent. The training regime that old Sam Aylward had instituted right from their beginnings was aimed at shooting very fast with very powerful bows from the maximum possible dista
nce, not taking your time.
To get into the Clan’s First Levy, you had to be able to shoot twelve arrows in sixty measured seconds, and hit a man-sized target at a hundred yards with eight of them; that was the minimum standard, not the average. With a bow of at least seventy pounds pull as measured on the tillering frame; Talyn’s drew a hundred-odd, and Caillech’s a mere eighty. Both of them were well above the entry level in speed and accuracy, too.
When they were serious, Mackenzie archery contests started at a hundred yards.
The badges were presented; the Dun Tàirneanach pair got carried around the bleachers shoulder-high, too. Then everyone stood before the Council.
Andrew, called Swift, came forward again. “You have proven to be people of skill and merit, worthy of badges,” he said. “You are worthy to speak with the Last Eagle, our Akela. So will your King be, when he can come here.”
The Montivallans looked at each other. “Well, about that, Andrew of the Council.” Mary said. “We didn’t want to presume before you’d decided, but there is a bit of a hurry. .”
• • •
The glider banked out over the water and turned in towards the shore; the pennant on a tall pole showed the wind to be directly out of the south. The long slender wings on either side of the tadpole shape flexed visibly, and the speed slowed. Suddenly it turned from a bird-sized dot out over the sun-glinting chop of the waters into something of visibly human make. It slowed, slowed, dropped. . and then it was trundling over the grass, stopping, dropping one wing to the ground.
A long ahhhhhhh came from the Morrowlanders. Flying wasn’t something they’d ever seen in their own lives; they didn’t travel much, and the Cutters who were their neighbors regarded balloons and gliders as abomination. But flying was important in their founding myth.
Ingolf and the others walked forward. The transparent upper front of the fuselage tilted to one side; the glider was a two-seater model. Alyssa Larsson hopped out, and a second later Rudi Mackenzie did likewise and stood with the wind from the lake ruffling his plaid and long sunset-colored hair and the spray of raven-feathers in his bonnet.
“Hail, Artos! Artos and Montival!”
The cry was sincere enough, though Ingolf could see a glint of humor in Rudi’s blue-green eyes. They all saluted, and he walked forward. Mary and Ritva fell in on either side of him, giving him a rapid précis in the Noble Tongue; Ingolf caught about half of it. Behind him he could hear:
“Cole, we’re going to have to stop meeting this way.”
“Well, at least you didn’t crash-land upside down on top of a bear.”
“That was only once. .”
Rudi nodded to his half sisters and looked at Ingolf.
“Yeah, he’s. . strange, the Last Eagle,” the Richlander said. “Not exactly wandered in his wits, but strange. And he’s not a well man. I got the feeling he’s hanging on with his fingernails because he thinks he has to get a job done first.”
Rudi’s smile was crooked; not for the first time Ingolf reflected that he seemed older than his face would indicate, sometimes.
“I suspect I know how he feels, and will the more so as time goes on,” the High King said quietly.
A drum was thuttering in the background as the party paced towards the Council; there were flutes too, and flags. Rudi halted for a moment, went to one knee, and raised a clod of the dirt to his lips before he stood again.
“I greet the Morrowland Pack in the name of the High Kingdom of Montival and all its peoples and the kindreds of earth and sea and sky,” he said, his beautiful almost-bass carrying clearly through the still cool air. “I step upon the Pack’s territory by its leave, obedient to its Law, making no claim without the free consent of its folk.”
The Council formed up on either side of them, and they not-quite-marched into the House of the Council. The big interior room was a little dim, but comfortably warm despite the lingering chill of the night, from the stoves in the corners more than the crackling fire on the big hearth at the north end. The figure in the fur cloak sitting waiting for them struggled to his feet, helped by the anxious hands of a young man and woman on either side of him. They put a staff whose head was carved in the form of a wolf’s head in his hand and he leaned on it, breathing a little harshly.
The Morrowlanders all stopped and called: “Akela!” They added a chillingly realistic collective wolf-howl. The Montivallans saluted in their various fashions, and Rudi Mackenzie inclined his head briefly.
And yeah, this is a man to respect, Ingolf thought.
Ingolf Vogeler had never seen anyone burned so badly who’d lived to heal-heal after a fashion. One blue eye looked out of the ruined face, and it was obvious that the Aklela’s left knee hadn’t bent properly for a very long time.
Twenty-six years, to be precise, Ingolf thought. I’ve seen a lot of people hurt in the Change, but usually they’re not only a little more than my own age. Children mostly either made it or they didn’t.
The High King and the Last Eagle Scout stood for a quiet time, meeting each other’s gaze. Then the single eye closed for an instant, with a long sigh.
“Sit,” he said when he looked up again. “Sit, everyone. . I have waited so long. . ”
They did, and then the Last Eagle spoke to the king, as if they were alone. “Captain Morrow got us down, but he died the next day, he was all broken inside, and burned so bad. I went forward with Scoutmaster Wilks to get him out, it was all burning. . that’s why we’re the Morrowland Pack. When the ground thawed we buried him up on the high place, and every year on that day we go there and sing for him.”
Rudi nodded. “Fitting indeed,” he said quietly. “A great honor, but well earned. There are far worse ways to die.”
“It was so cold, and we got so hungry. . Scoutmaster Wilks was hurt too, but he got us through. We chopped holes in the ice to fish, and we dug pine nuts, and made bread from whitebark, and found animals in their dens, and then we got a buffalo, we were so happy about it. . I could help by then. . And Ms. Delacroix knew so much, she was like our mom. . Mr. Androwski left to get us help in the spring, but he never came back, he went north and I think. . I think he met the Prophet, the first Prophet, in Corwin, and. . and then three years later Scoutmaster Wilks was killed by a bear. And Ms. Delacroix had this cough, it got worse and worse, after a while the herbs didn’t help anymore. She said I’d have to be brave for the little ones, be a real Eagle Scout. We buried her next to Scoutmaster Wilks and the Captain on the high place, that was the year we saw the first tiger.”
A long silence and then: “Sometimes I dream about them, dream they’re back and then I wake up. . ”
The story rambled on. Ingolf had heard much of it yesterday, and it gave him an odd lost feeling anyway, as if he was one of those children alone in the dark as the plane fell and broke open to the cold and the fire. Or the hurt boy ignoring his constant pain, working and teaching, holding himself and them to a dream. Instead he looked at the rack of books on the wall behind the hunched figure: The Boy Scout Handbook, Best of Ernest Thompson Seton, The Jungle Book, books on crafts and ecology and some he didn’t recognize at all. Most of those would have been on the 747, though there were a few modern leather bindings that must have trickled in from the outside world.
“Did I do the right things?” the Last Eagle said finally to the King. “I tried, but sometimes I just had to make things up. . I hated to help the Prophet, I bargained as hard as I could, I never let them send their priests here, said we’d die first, but. .”
“You saved your people,” Rudi said, leaning forward for a moment and putting a hand on the older man’s shoulder. “More than once, you saved them, from perils to body and to soul. You did what you could, and what you knew you must do, and you fought the good fight, Scout.”
He nodded to the books. “What those men dreamed in the ancient times, you have become in truth. Now we will free your people.”
He raised his voice slightly: “We will throw down Corwin t
ogether, and then all this land will be the Morrowlander Pack’s, forever; to hold in trust for all the kindreds of fur and feather and scale, for the very grass and trees and the rock beneath, as guardians and helpers. None of humankind shall come on it without your permission, nor harm it, while the line of my blood lasts.”
The cheer rose to the carved rafters of the House. The Last Eagle rose to cheer with the rest of them, then staggered. Rudi frowned in concern, and the two young attendants stepped forward.
“Our father is tired. Akela should rest. He’s worked so hard.”
Rudi nodded. “Indeed he has,” he said softly. “Hard and well, and well he has earned rest from the Powers. Rest and blessing, in the land where no evil comes and all hurts are healed.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Valley of Paradise, near Corwin
(Formerly western Montana)
High Kingdom of Montival
(Formerly western North America)
August 28th, Change Year 26/2024 AD
“Hold them off, by Our Lady of the Citadel!” Rudi heard Tiphaine d’Ath mutter. “Don’t chase them, just hold them and look like it’s killing you with the effort.”
“They’ll do it long enough, Grand Constable, long enough,” he said. “And the effort is killing some, to be sure.”
Mathilda swept the horizon northward. “Nothing that the gliders missed. Everyone’s here, and the Volta can begin.”
They sat their horses on a slight rise about long catapult shot from the action, surrounded by the usual staff and couriers and guardsmen; and they were out of the woods, literally if not metaphorically. Well behind them lay the arched stone gate that had For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People on it-another of the old American ruler Roosevelt’s works, like Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood; the man had certainly left his mark on the world and usually in a way Rudi admired.
The Valley of Paradise opened out before them. As far as looks went, it lived up to its heavenly name. To the west were the Gallatin Mountains, to the east the Absarokas, blue in the distance and tipped with white. The lowland ran north-south, opening out in a broad diamond shape with the Yellowstone river running through it in a broad swath of gallery forest, aspen and willow and big cottonwoods. Up from the valley flats rose buffalo-hump foothills, dark where tongues of spruce and fir and pine thickened amid the grass, fading into the endless mountain forests. Even with the heights upon every hand it felt. .
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