The Given Sacrifice c-7

by S. M. Stirling

  Slowly, Rudi bowed his head in thought. “What is a man, if he should leave those he loves?” he said at last.

  “I am here,” Mathilda said. “We all are. Time is different here, and choices.”

  Rudi raised his eyes to the stars again, feeling himself begin to fall out among them. As one himself, a star in glory. . but that was only a symbol, a thing his mind clutched to give him words for something beyond words.

  Then he lowered his eyes again, his smile crooked. “What is a man, if he puts aside his work?” he said. “I don’t ask you, Ladies, if it is finished. Just that I be given the time to do it, needed or no.”

  Silently they rose and passed him, each pausing to press her lips to his forehead.

  • • •

  Sethaz staggered back, snarling. The Sword moved once more, and he gasped as the not-steel transfixed him, then half fell backward off it and dropped his shete as he went to one knee. A hand pressed to the blood welling out through the slit in his armor.

  “I. .” he began.

  Then the rage left his face, and he looked at the blood on his hand. “So. . pure. I wanted it to be. . pure.”

  And he fell, features slack against the bloody stone, years seeming to melt from them. Until he was merely a man, dead among so many.

  Rudi raised his eyes to the blue of the sky, and let the tears well past his closed lids.

  PART TWO

  THE SPRING QUEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Barony Harfang

  County of Campscapell

  (Formerly eastern Washington State)

  High Kingdom of Montival

  (Formerly western North America)

  August 28th, Change Year 32/2030 AD

  Órlaith Arminger Mackenzie wasn’t bored with the train ride, though they’d been travelling for days. There were too many interesting things to watch outside the windows. Besides, she was with her mother, and her father, and they were the most fun people in the world. And Butterball, her new pony, was in a car of his very own at the end of the train, and she could go and visit him any time she wanted, and ride him when they stopped to change teams or visit.

  Also her puppy Maccon was back there. Maccon meant Son of a Wolf, but Maccon’s grandmother was Garbh. Garbh had been Uncle Edain’s dog on the Quest, and bards had made songs about her, which hardly ever happened with dogs, though it had with Da’s famous horse Epona. Maccon would be just as brave and loyal and fierce as Garbh had been, when he was big, and go on adventures with her. He was already brave for a puppy, and smart, too-he already knew her and licked her face whenever she came. Uncle Edain had said that he’d train them both up, and teach Maccon not to chew her shoes, which he’d done with her best shiny red silk ones.

  She folded up her book, which was about Dorothy of Oz with pictures, put it neatly away in the bookshelf with the strap as Dame Emelina had taught her; Dame Emelina was wonderful, but strict. Then she knelt on the seat and looked out of the window with her elbows on the sill; the leather cushion made a sort of sighing sound. She liked the story, and she could read now.

  Well, read a bit, she thought, with stubborn honesty. Some of the words are still too hard.

  But after a while she wanted to move. The window was pushed up, so she could put her head out and let her long yellow hair fly in the breeze of their passage, and the air was hot with summer and smelled like dust and dry hay and a little like thunder somehow-she was glad she was in a kilt and shirt, though they were here in the north. The new girl’s kirtle she’d gotten for her birthday was very pretty, with little birds around the hems in silver and gold thread that sparkled, but it could be too warm for anything but sitting around. She had to sit around sometimes, but she didn’t like it.

  There were hills outside, odd smooth-looking ones, this was a place called the Palouse that was all hills but no rocks, and the railroad wound like a snake through them, staying on the tops of the ridges mostly. A little while ago she’d seen a herd of Appaloosa horses running across them, with their manes flying in the bright sunshine and their coats all spotted against the brown of the summer pastures. Da had taken her up the ladder onto the roof of the car, where a couple of the archers rode, and stood with her on his shoulders so she could watch and wave and whoop. Now the ground was sort of a dark yellow where the wheat had been, and there were rows and rows of sheaves piled up together in tripods curving across the hills, brighter yellow than the stubble, looking like. .

  “Tipis!” she said. “They look like tipis! Like the La-ko-tah had when they came on the visit. Chief Three Bears said I could sleep in a tipi sometime!”

  Her father looked up and smiled, his blue-green eyes crinkling. He was the handsomest man in the world, and the bravest knight, and he was King. It was wonderful that he was King, though it meant he was busy a lot of the time. Now he put down the paper he’d been reading and came across and knelt down on the floor by the seat so that their eyes were level as he looked out the window.

  “Well, by the Powers, so they do!” he said.

  “Can I really sleep in a tipi?”

  He nodded solemnly. “That you can, if Rick promised you could, for he is a great warrior and a wise chief and a man of honor; also he has little girls your age and knows their ways and how important a promise is.”

  “Can I sleep in a Lakota tipi?” she said, thinking of the stories about the lords of the high plains. “Chief Three Bears fought with you in the great battles, didn’t he?”

  “Not only that, he aided me on the Quest, when we used a stampeding buffalo herd to hide us from the Cutters who pursued us.”

  “I remember that story!” she said, eyes shining. “That must have been the most fun ever!”

  There was something a little odd in his laugh. “It was. . exciting, that it was in truth. And so the Seven Council Fires are also among our peoples. In a few years you’ll come with your mother and I when we go east for the summer buffalo hunt. You can see the Sun Festival where the camps of the Lakota carpet the prairie, and the dancers, and the great stone faces carved by the old Americans into the Black Hills, the kings of the ancient world. They’ll give you a Lakota name, and perhaps you will become one of the girls who apprentice to the White Buffalo Woman’s Society or the Sacred Shawls, and you will indeed sleep in a tipi. Though the Lakota themselves sleep in ger, most of the time now-tents on wheels with round tops. Tipis are for ceremony, to respect their ancestors.”

  She laughed and clapped her hands at the thought of the tipis and the gers, and put an arm around his neck; his hair was redder than hers and had less yellow, and smelled like summer.

  “That sounds like a lot of fun!”

  “It will be.” He turned and kissed her cheek, his mustache tickling a little so that she giggled. “But it will be important too, for these are sacred things. You understand?”

  She nodded solemnly. Then something occurred to her.

  “Da,” she said. “I was wondering. The horses make the train go, don’t they? Walking on that treadmill thing up at the front.”

  “Indeed they do.”

  “But how can we go so fast? This is like a gallop. Horses can’t go this fast for long. Horsemaster Raoul told me so, that it would hurt them if you made them go fast for too long.”

  “Very true, and when he speaks on horses Sir Raoul is a man to listen to most carefully. It’s the gearing that lets them do it, so that they walk at their best pace and the wheels are made to go faster.”

  He held up a hand. “I’ll show you later, and you can help grease the gears, but don’t expect to understand it right away. ’Tis a mystery of the mechanics, and requires mathematics to really know.”

  “Oh.”

  She pouted a little. She wanted to understand it now, and usually her father and mother would explain things to her, though the greasing part sounded like fun. Math was. . OK, she supposed. She could already add some numbers, but the times table was too difficult for now. Then something else occurred to her.

>   “Why does the train go more clackety-clack now than it did yesterday?”

  “Ah, well, that I can explain. In the ancient times, the trains were much bigger and heavier than they are now, and they needed rails of solid steel, which we still use where they remain and which are very smooth. But now in modern times, when we lay more track we make wooden rails and then fasten a strip of steel on top. That’s fine for our trains, and takes less of the metal, which has many uses. The rails here were torn up during the war, and now we’ve fixed them. . the Lady Tiphaine and the Lord Rigobert have, their folk. . and that’s why the noise is different.”

  She nodded happily; she liked knowing why things were the way they were. Her father sat back in the seat, and she sat back in his lap; he put an arm around her. His arms were long, and you could feel how strong they were, almost the way you did when you touched a horse; when he threw her up in the air it was fun-scary, like being a bird and flying until she swooped down and he caught her. When she watched him practicing at arms with the guards, it was almost really scary sometimes, but when he held her like this it made her feel very safe, like pulling up the covers in winter when a storm was lashing against the windows and draughts made the candles flicker.

  Her mother was in the seats across from them, which were like a big sofa; she was in a travelling habit, brown hakama divided skirt and a green jacket with pretty jade buttons over a blouse, not the High Queen’s court dresses that shimmered. But the little golden spurs on her boots showed she was a knight too, who’d ridden with Da on the Quest and his adventures.

  Her little brother John was curled up with his head in their mother’s lap, snoring a little. John was only four, and still napped a lot; he had brown hair like their mother and looked more like Mom, when he wasn’t just looking like a baby. But he could sing already, better than her at least; the court troubadour said he had perfect pitch, which meant he could listen to a note and make the same one.

  Sometimes that drove her crazy, because he’d pick two or three and do them over and over and laugh. She loved him but he could be a jerk and of course he was still so young.

  Mom was dozing too. There was going to be a new sister around Yule, and that made her sleepy a lot; Órlaith couldn’t remember much about when John came, she’d been just a two-year-old herself then. The High Queen opened her eyes and smiled at Órlaith and then closed them again, letting her head fall back against the cushion. Her round hat with the trailing veils was hung from the back of it, the peacock feathers standing up.

  The railcar swayed and clacked. It was just like a nice room on wheels, there were chairs and sofas, rugs with flowers and vines, and a table where they’d had lunch, and where she sat with picture books and coloring books and did her lessons with Dame Emelina. There were ten more cars in the train, including the one with the little beds that folded down, which she liked.

  “Will Heuradys and Yolande be there when we get to Lady Tiphaine’s manor?”

  “Yes, they will; and their father, and their mother.”

  “Oh, good,” Órlaith said.

  She could feel her father’s deep chuckle through his tunic-he was wearing shirt and jerkin and breeks and a T-tunic, the way people did up here, rather than a kilt the way he did down in the Mackenzie lands.

  “Indeed, and it’s good for you to have some your own age to play with.”

  “They’re nice, but they’re not my age. Well, Heuradys isn’t. She’s older.”

  “Not so much.”

  “Two whole years older,” she said. “And don’t say it isn’t important. It is, and Heuradys thinks so too.”

  He laughed, his beard tickling her neck. “To be sure, darlin’ girl, that’s the third of a lifetime, isn’t it? I was forgetting.”

  “I like their Mom, though. Tell me a story. Tell me how you snuck into Boise and opened the gate!”

  “I and some others. Well, if you must, though you’ve heard it before.”

  “I want to know all the stories! I need to hear it a lot so I’ll remember all the parts. You have the best stories, anyway.”

  “It’s my life, darlin’ girl, but I suspect it’s your story the now.”

  She wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but she settled back to hear his voice.

  “There we were, sitting outside Boise, and no way of getting through the walls. Well, now, if you can’t go through, you must go around; but there’s no way around a city wall, for the wall itself goes around. And if you can’t go through, and you can’t go around, you must go over or under. Men holding a wall watch for you to try over-so, we thought, what about under? Now, Fred’s father-”

  • • •

  Rudi set Órlaith down and sent her to Dame Emelina as the whine of the locomotive’s gearing died, more conspicuous by its absence for a moment. Mathilda’s lady-in-waiting and tirewoman appeared as if by magic to tidy her up as the train coasted into the village of St. Athena-theoretically named for a virgin martyr who’d died in Thrace about seventeen hundred years ago, though Rudi had his doubts; the other train of the Royal party was already there, having put on a sprint, and the two-score of the High King’s Archers were already double-timing over to line up before he got down and stand in ranks with their longbows in their arms. Through the window he heard Edain say:

  “Now, let’s show these haughty northern lords that we know how to. . Talyn, for Lugh of the Long Hand’s own sake, try to look like you didn’t spend the afternoon muckin’ out a byre, man!”

  Mathilda yawned a little as she checked that her habit was tidy and let the tirewoman redo her braids and put them up under the broad-brimmed hat and scarf.

  “How are you feeling, my love?” he said.

  “Worn out, but no worse.” She crossed herself and made a gesture of steepling her hands. “But thanking God and the Virgin that the morning sickness is over,” she said; she was pious, but not sanctimonious. “Though why they call it morning sickness. .”

  “A wishful hope, perhaps,” he said, making the sign of the Horns.

  He was thankful to the Mother as Brigid, she Who watched over childbirth, and as Matti’s blue-mantled patron too that her births had all been-relatively-easy, with no complications. Hopefully this one would be too, and he had reason to so hope. . but no certainty.

  Dame Emelina had the children in hand; literally, with a hand to each. He gave her a friendly nod. She had dark freckles across skin a few shades lighter, handsome full features and keen black eyes; she’d been Órlaith’s wet-nurse, having lost her own babe about the time Mathilda was brought to bed, but she’d also been a scholar of sorts before her husband-a belted knight and an Associate, but the third-son-of-a-second-son variety-was killed at the Horse Heaven Hills.

  Between her own good birth and years of being Órlaith’s wet-nurse it had been possible to appoint her to the governess position without offending any of the great houses in the old Protectorate who’d have schemed to get the job for protégés or daughters unlikely to do it with half her skill or devotion. They’d put out that Matti was deeply attached to her, which was simply true. Sandra had arranged the whole thing to start with, and that triple-play was like her.

  “There will probably be a chorus of children and a bouquet,” he said.

  “I’ll bear up,” Mathilda said as she took his arm. “Let’s not disappoint the audience.”

  “And my mother says a travelling bard’s job was hard back before the Change,” he said. “Always putting on a show. At least nobody gave her a second glance when she was driving her wagon around the Willamette between performances!”

  He’d sent instructions for minimal ceremony, and he knew the Grand Constable shared his sentiments on that sort of thing most exactly. Her Châtelaine. . not necessarily so much, but she would do her best.

  A cheer went up as they descended from the train; varlets were bustling about, unloading gear down to Órlaith’s pony, and Maccon in a basket-quite a substantial one, for the young beast had huge ears and paws already.
A bright eye and pulsing black nose were visible through the wicker, wiggling with the desire to get out and smell and taste and acquire new admirers. This was an informal visit-up here in the Protectorate he generally used the full fig of a Crown visitation only on nobles he didn’t trust, that being a polite way to use up resources they might otherwise put to mischief. They couldn’t even complain, since it was an honor.

  D’Ath was there, leaning on a stick, and Lady Delia with a lacy parasol protecting her creamy skin. Rigobert de Stafford was too, his bowl-cut blond hair and short dense beard showing a little more nearly invisible gray as he doffed his chaperon hat. So was his current partner, Sir Julio Alvarez de Soto, a slim handsome swarthy man in his thirties, quiet and dangerous-looking in dark country-gentry clothes that contrasted with Rigobert’s peacock fashionability of blue velvet, black satin and crimson linings on the sleeves of his houppelande. He still had the lean erect broad-shouldered build to carry it off, though, and Rudi hadn’t the slightest doubt that when he didn’t he’d switch to something more appropriate.

  That’s six years they’ve been together, since the tag end of the war, so perhaps Rigobert is settling down in middle-age.

  He hoped so; he liked the Baron of Forest Grove, both as a man and a valuable servant of the Crown, and had sensed a loneliness under his good humor and active social life.

  Lord Maugis de Grimmond, Baron of Tucannon, was there too, and his wife Lady Helissent, and their son Aleaume, now a likely-looking lad of twelve just home for a holiday from page service in Walla Walla to Lord Maugis’ overlord Count Felipe.

  And taking after his mother, save for that rusty-nail hair-which is to the good because Maugis is, frankly, a homely man. It’s also a very good thing they haven’t far to come from Grimmond-on-the-Wold, which keeps this all looking completely casual and social, which it is, only not totally.

  Mathilda made a gesture-hand palm-down and then turned up, which was Associate court etiquette for don’t kneel. The noblemen and women responded with deep sweeping bows and curtsies respectively, except for the Grand Constable who bowed as well. The assembled commons behind the gentlefolk knelt anyway, several hundred of them in their best Sunday-go-to-Church outfits, splashes of embroidery on hems and necks, bright printed wimples for the women. The village priest signed the air.