“Speak to me, they speak to me
Of orcas gliding through the deep
Of eagles balancing the wind
Above the waves where salmon leap. .”
Threescore voices and a troubadour’s mandolin across Heuradys d’Ath’s saddlebow carried the swooping melody, everybody in the party who could sing and wasn’t too self-conscious to do so in the High King’s presence. Crown Princess Órlaith Arminger Mackenzie carried the tune effortlessly; she had a fine and well-trained contralto. There was the slightest tinge of envy in her enjoyment of the song; it was one of her Aunt Fiorbhinn’s, her father’s youngest half-sister and commonly thought to be the finest Mackenzie bard of her generation, if not the best in all Montival.
Órlaith had tried her own hand at composing songs and decided she was never going to be better than middling at it. That there were people who’d praise anything she did made it worse. Fiorbhinn was the daughter of one Mackenzie chieftain and the sister of another, but those weren’t positions that made you the target of would-be flatterers.
“Speak to me, they speak to me
Of deer that browse the twilight fields
Of stony heron keeping watch
For what the silver sea might yield.”
She couldn’t even feel very envious; she’d always regarded Fiorbhinn as more of an elder sister-something she didn’t have, being the oldest of five herself. John was the closest to her in age, and they were close in other ways, shared a lot of interests. . he actually was a talented troubadour. . but he was male. And a Christian at that. There were things you just didn’t discuss with a brother, or a sister in her early teens. And having the said sisters confide in you just wasn’t quite the same, glad though she usually was to serve as sounding board and wailing wall.
Thank the Lord and Lady for Herry, she thought, not for the first time. We’re near enough the same age-two years don’t matter anymore-and we’re both of the Old Religion, but she’s an Associate not a Mackenzie. She really understands.
“Speak to me, they speak to me
Of what has been and what endures
Of summer’s bloom and autumn’s fade
In the circling of the years.”
The valley was a flattish plain on either side of the south-flowing river, bounded by low mountains to the west and lower ones to the east, opening out irregularly like a funnel southward towards the great Bay. She looked about as she sang, their voices startling flights of birds out of the brush and long grass, sometimes dense enough that they looked like climbing, twining skeins of air and smoke.
“Speak to me, they speak to me
In voices humming in my bone
In whispers rising on my breath
In languages that tell of home!”
The inland hills of the Vaca Range were distant; you could just see how they were covered in rippling grass just turning from deep green to gold with tongues of woodland stretching up the ravines that scored them and clumps of blue oak and chaparral. Closer and westward the heights of the Mayacamas were dense-shaggy with forest, fir and pine and more. The air was warm and scented with smells stronger and spicier than the northern lands of her birth, arbutus and thyme and fennel. The broken remains of terraces showed here and there under the foothill brush.
“What do you think of Fiorbhinn’s latest?” the High King asked her, as they finished.
“Wonderful, and spreading like a grass fire in the Palouse,” she said. “Of course!”
“Your mother has told me for years that we need. . what did they call it in the old days. . a national anthem. A song everyone in Montival can like, that speaks to our love for the land itself. I think this may be it, and I’ll talk to Fiorbhinn about that. . hmmm. . perhaps a few more verses about mountains and deserts. .”
“And a proud castle with banners or two, Your Majesty,” Heuradys said with an irrepressible grin. “For the north-realm.”
“That too, Herry,” he laughed.
Her fingers strayed to another tune, then to an occasional plucked note and to silence. They rode quietly for a while, to enjoy a land strange and foreign to them all; he was an easy man to be quiet with.
“Go n-ithe an cat thú,” Órlaith cursed mildly as her horse stumbled, bringing the animal up with light hands and a firm grip of thigh and knee. “May the cat eat you, Dancer, and keep your mind to what you’re about!”
Her black courser had caught a hoof on what was left of an old dead grape-vine, one of the innumerable thousands hidden by hock-high wild mustard. The main north-south road down the Napa Valley had suffered generations of summer wind and sun, winter flood and frost before the first Montivallan settlers arrived a few years ago, and they’d not yet done more than patch a few of the more manageable holes with dirt and gravel. Where the gaps in the ancient sun-faded asphalt were too wide traffic simply swerved westward away from the river, leaving ruts and trampled patches.
“That’s harsh, a stór,” her father chuckled. “Mind, my treasure, it’s not Dancer’s fault.”
They were speaking Gaeilge, for practice sake; there weren’t many people in Montival who could, though Heuradys had learned it for friendship’s sake. Her father’s mother Juniper, the founder and first Chief of the Clan Mackenzie, had learned it from her mother, who’d been born across the eastern sea, and taught it to her son and granddaughter both. It was a family tradition, and many clansfolk took the odd word or phrase from it, just as they’d copied her way of speaking in the early years and taken up the faith she and her core of early followers practiced. Over the generations the origins of customs and speech both had evolved from memory to legend for most.
Which is fair enough, Órlaith thought, remembering things her grandmother Juniper had said to her. For what is the world of humankind, if not a story we tell each other so that we may live in it together?
“This is a difficult patch, for horses,” he went on.
“The ancients must all have been drunk as Dáithí’s pig seven days of the week and blind drunk the whole of Beltane month,” she said, stroking the mare’s neck. “I like a glass of wine as well as the next, but this is ridiculous! The whole valley must have been solid vineyards from east to west and north to south!”
“Now there’s an elevating thought!” Heuradys said.
The High King laughed. “You just might think so,” he said, with a wave of his arm. “Still, it’s a bonny stretch of land, and at least they didn’t cover the fields with buildings.”
Some of the innumerable vines on the flat were still alive, monstrous house-sized tangled ground-hugging networks of shoots green with leaves or bone-hard and bare, sometimes climbing over a tree or snag of old building like a cresting vegetable wave caught in midmotion. More were dead gnarled knotted stumps, lurking among the tall grass and wild mustard and dense drifts of flaming gold California poppies, the brush and eucalyptus and oak and spreading feral olives. Even dead they lasted like iron.
A sound came from the southward, a deep rhythmic moaning coughing grunt, building to a shattering roar, loud even miles distant. The horses all shied a little. The humans frowned or grinned according to their natures. Something deep down in you whispered what that call meant: man-eater.
“And perhaps that was just a wee bit of an unfortunate way to swear,” Órlaith’s father chuckled. “Seeing as cats with a voracious and unreasonable appetite for horseflesh swarm upon the earth hereabouts.”
Órlaith had been well tutored in ecology-which she’d enjoyed far more than the rest of the Classical curriculum inflicted on her, since that science still worked as it had before the Change. Tigers were common in most parts of Montival that weren’t too dry and open, descended from zoo and park and private specimens sentimental owners had turned loose as the ancient world went down in wreck. Lions were not, being less common before the Change and much less able to adapt to cold winters after it. Down here in what had been California you met them more and more often as you went south, since they did like warm, d
ry open landscapes.
“Now, that would make an interesting rug,” Heuradys said speculatively. “You up for a lion-hunt, Órry?”
“Now it is not as lion-food I have raised the Princess,” her father said, then raised a hand: “But if lions were to try for our horses, of course, that would be another matter.”
They’d seen mule deer, tule elk, feral horses and cattle, a troop of baboons, wild boar and flocks of emu and ostrich since they left the half-built castle at Rutherford, as well as scat and prints of tiger and wolf and distant glimpses of grizzly. A herd of lyre-horned antelope with tan coats and pale bellies had been grazing in the middle distance but giving the humans alertly nervous looks now and then. They took flight when the lion’s roar added an extra dose of fear and white tails flashed as they bounced away like rubber balls in astonishing near-vertical leaps that she’d read were called pronking, ultimately derived from the same distant land as the lions via curious institutions the ancients had called safari parks.
Órlaith smiled at the sight, and Heuradys strummed the mandolin in time to the leaps, as if giving them musical accompaniment. The springboks lifted your heart to watch, and they looked as thoroughly at home as the flocks of yellow-breasted chats that rose like handfuls of flung gold coins as they passed, going wheet-wheet-wheet in protest.
More soberly, her father added: “And there were so many of the ancients. More in just one of the cities on the Bay south of here than in all our Montival even today. More than enough to drink the fruit of all these vines.”
She nodded. She knew that, and unlike some of the tales she believed it down in her gut. Anyone did who’d seen the ruins and thought a little rather than just treating them as part of the landscape, though her generation was less haunted by it than their parents, and infinitely less than those who’d survived the great dying. That was why this land was empty. When the machines stopped hordes had eaten the countryside bare everywhere close enough to reach, then turned on each other amid plague and fire and horror. A few of their savage descendants still haunted the land, but only a handful of tiny civilized settlements tucked away in remoteness had greeted the explorers from the north. Mostly they’d been touchingly joyful to rejoin humankind.
“I’m glad we’re not so crowded today,” she said. “Portland and Boise are bad enough; you start to itch after a week or so.”
He made a sound of agreement and Heuradys nodded emphatically; they were all countryfolk by raising and preference, which was something they shared with the overwhelming majority of their people. She’d gone far east once years ago, on a diplomatic visit to the Republic of Iowa with her parents, where mighty Des Moines had more than a hundred and fifty thousand folk within its walls. It had been a marvel and she was glad to have seen it, the largest city on this continent in this age but. .
But once was enough, she thought. And to think of towns ten or twenty times that size. . brrr! Aloud she went on:
“Bad for human folk to live as the ancients did, and worse for the land and the other kindreds.”
“Truth,” her father said, then dropped back into English. “Or at least that’s my truth, and yours.”
Órlaith began to nod, then gave her father a sharp glance, suppressing an impulse to scratch under her flat bonnet with its spray of Golden Eagle feathers in the clasp.
“It’s a little disconcerting you can be at times, Da,” she said in the same language; her voice held the musical Mackenzie lilt, though less strongly than her father’s.
“What, and didn’t I just agree with you?” he said blandly, then winked. “Most sincerely, too.”
“Mother says you can be more aggravating by agreeing with her than any other dozen men can by arguing.”
“Sure, and I have no idea what you might be on about. And you’ll note she laughs when she says that.”
Around a corner of the road, and a broad stretch of the renascent wilderness had been cleared save for some scattered valley oaks; winter wheat rippled waist-high across it, only a month or so from harvest and already showing heads. About the field young pencil cypress had been planted in a border. Beyond it southward the settlers were working on getting more land ready for plow and pasture, with a team of six big oxen leaning into their yokes.
A chain ran from them to a pit dug around a vine-root. Half a dozen folk were prying at the stump with long iron bars, and two men in kilts and little else leapt out of the hole, tossing before them the axes they’d used to chop roots halfway through. The teenaged girl in charge of the team yelled shrill encouragement and cracked her long whip, and the beasts leaned forward, pulling until their hooves sank deep and the muscles stood out beneath their red hides like cast bronze. The humans sang a working chant as they strained at their levers, and she could catch a bit of it, a hymn to the Maiden of Spring and Her consort:
“Far down the roots bind
The heart’s joy to summer’s tide-”
Then the oxen staggered forward as the grip of the dead vine parted with thunderous rippling brack-kak-kak sounds. The heavy knotted black form of the stump was dragged to join a windrow of other thigh-thick shapes amid laughter and cheers.
Several dogs had been lying in a patch of shade, of the big shaggy breed Mackenzies kept as companions and guards of hearth, hunt and war. They sprang to their feet and barked as the mounted column came in view, a deep baying that carried through the spring air like a bugle. Several padding along with the travellers answered in kind. The workers threw down their tools and turned towards the nearby spots where their longbows and quivers and sword belts rested, then relaxed as they saw men-at-arms and archers, not a skulking gang of wildmen. Glances turned to smiles and waves as they saw who it was; Órlaith and her father both wore plaids in the Mackenzie tartan pinned across their torsos over their saffron-dyed shirts.
“Oak, you’re looking hale!” the High King called as he drew rein and raised a hand. “Merry meet!”
“Merry meet, and merry part, and merry meet again, Ard Rí,” Oak Barstow Mackenzie replied. “Your scouts told us you’d be by, but not when.”
“We’re not in any haste. It’s hard you’re working, and that on the holy eve.”
Oak was nearly sixty now, a tall man gone stringy and tanned to the color of his namesake tree’s wood but still knotted with strong muscle moving under the sweat-wet skin. A long queue of graying blond hair hung down his back wrapped with an old bowstring, warrior-fashion; he’d been First Armsman of the Clan Mackenzie for long years before leading a party south to found a new settlement. A grin split his bearded face:
“We set ourselves a goal to be met before the festival, and when it looked like we wouldn’t meet it our High Priestess-”
“That would be your daughter Rowan?” her father the High King said.
“So it is, her own self. She lost her temper, just a wee bit, and made it gess to stop before it was done, feast or no. This was the last stump we were scrambling at, cursing it to a Christian Hell the while, and your coming at its demise a good omen.”
There was a little teasing in his voice as he went on:
“And doubly so since you brought our Golden Princess, and her so grown-up and lovely now, a fair young maiden like a vision of the Maiden of Spring herself!”
Órlaith blushed a little; that was what her name meant, but it sounded a bit embarrassing in common English. Also she hadn’t been a maiden, technically speaking, for some time now; four Beltane Eves to the day, to be precise.
Ah, Diarmuid, she thought reminiscently.
Heuradys caught her eye and winked, obviously reading the thought-natural enough, she’d teased Órlaith about it at the time. Also, she’d renewed the acquaintance as they passed through the McClintock territories and guested with their Chief. His current leman hadn’t minded-though as she’d said bluntly, that was not least because the Royal party was just passing through. In a way it was a pity he’d settled down, she was going to need a consort someday. . no need to think of that right now, th
ough.
It’s a good friend you’ve been, Diarmuid, and a more than pleasant companion. I wish we saw each other more often.
“Merry met, Uncle Oak,” she said, trying for a casual dignity; they weren’t related by blood, but younger Mackenzies usually addressed the older generation that way, unless they were unfriends or the occasion formal. “How does Dun Barstow fare this fine day?”
“We’re doing well, with Her blessing and the Lord’s favor.”
He made the Invoking sign. High King Artos-who was also Rudi Mackenzie-echoed it, and so did Órlaith and the others of the Old Religion behind them; some of the Christians crossed themselves politely.
Some of the clansfolk raised a brow in surprise when Heuradys echoed their gesture. Even apart from the arms of the Ath embroidered in a heraldic shield on the breast of her rust-colored T-tunic with a crescent of cadency, the rest of her garb left no doubt of what she was. She wore a teal-blue chaperon hat on her braided brown-red hair with the liripipe over her shoulder and a golden High Crown livery badge on it, sapphires on the buckle of her sword belt, tight leather breeks and folded thigh-boots, flared gauntlets and the small golden prick spurs of knighthood. Catholicism wasn’t technically required by law among Associates these days-hadn’t been since shortly after Órlaith’s grandfather Lord Protector Norman Arminger died at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, in fact-but it was overwhelmingly the most common faith there, especially among the nobility.
Oak tossed a leather drinking-skin to her father, who uncorked it, spilled a drop in libation and took a swig before he handed it around; it was water cut with wine or possibly vice versa, and made them all formally guests on the Dun’s land. The old clansman went on:
The Given Sacrifice c-7 Page 36
