The Given Sacrifice

by S. M. Stirling

  “Not in a report, Lord,” she said. “But they’re a bit . . . fancier than the one I saw three years ago. I suppose because it’s a diplomatic mission.”

  “I was one myself once,” he murmured. “Before the Change. I wonder if I should mention it or not? It seems another world.”

  The three halted. The redhead smiled at Ritva. “We meet again, woman worthy of badges,” he said, then gave a broader smile and nod to Ian’s scowl.

  The man with the spear frowned himself and stepped forward and grounded the weapon with a formal gesture, raising his right hand shoulder-high, three fingers up, thumb crooked and holding the little finger. The other two copied the movement and the spearman spoke:

  “I am Andrew, called Swift, a Scout of thirty-one badges, a bearer of the Eagle, of the Keen Spear Patrol of the Snow Tiger Troop, and I speak for the Council of Troops of the Morrowland Pack,” he said.

  “I am Sheila, called Dauntless, a Scout of twenty-eight badges, a bearer of the Falcon, of the Thrown Hatchet Patrol of the Otter Troop, and I speak for the House of Girls and the Council of Troops of the Morrowland Pack,” the freckled woman said.

  “I am George, called Tracker, a Scout of thirty badges, a bearer of the Eagle, of the Bright Lightning Patrol of the Wolverine Troop, and I speak for the Council of Troops of the Morrowland Pack,” Ritva’s old acquaintance said.

  The spearman went on: “You have come on the Pack’s land and hunted our game without our consent, game that we need to feed our cubs in the cold months. Who are you, to make free with what is ours?”

  Alleyne bowed slightly, with hand over heart; the other Rangers copied the gesture, and the rest made salute in their own fashions.

  “Mae l’ovannen,” he said, in the formal mode. “Well-met, Scouts of the Morrowland Pack. I am Alleyne Loring-Larsson, Lord of the Dúnedain Rangers, vassal and kin to Artos the First, High King of Montival. We have come onto your land as part of the Host of the High Kingdom, for we are enemies of the false Prophet of Corwin. High King Artos needs this meat for his army, and passage to the north . . . and you have served the Prophet. Are you our enemies? Or our allies? Or will you stand aside and take no part in this war?”

  The Morrowlanders . . . whatever that meant . . . looked at each other. Mary would have been very surprised indeed if they hadn’t been following events outside their bailiwick, and even more surprised than that if they didn’t know the approaching Montivallan army down to the nearest battalion.

  “We have heard of your war and we have scouted your great army,” the spearman named Andrew said, confirming her guess. “But the Prophet’s men . . . the red-robes . . . can find us in the forests. Find our cubs and our dens. There are not enough of us to fight their soldiers, if the woods cannot hide us. Nor can we live entirely without trade; we need metal for tools, and salt and cloth. But we could hurt them badly, so they leave us be in return for Scout service.”

  “We come to cast the Prophet down, destroy his city of Corwin, and free all his slaves,” Alleyne said. “Then this will be part of Montival, and under the High King’s peace none will trouble you in your own land if you keep his law.”

  The three looked at each other again. “We must test your words,” their spokesman said. “Send us emissaries, and we will see if they are worthy to speak with the Last Eagle.”

  The woman spoke: “Send us emissaries, and your she-wolves among them. We see that you are not as the Prophet’s men, who seek to turn Girls—”

  I can hear the capital letter there, Mary thought.

  “—into sheep.”

  Well, good for you, Scout of twenty-eight badges! I know everyone’s entitled to their own customs, but some are just plain creepy about that. At least we can beat some sense into the Cutters.

  The dark spearman frowned; he seemed to be the senior here, but primus inter pares rather than commander.

  “We must see that you are worthy of badges, folk of merit,” he said.

  Alleyne raised his brows. “You want us to send our people among you without guarantee of their safety?”

  “If you wish us as allies, there must be trust,” the woman said.

  “And I will stay as hostage,” the spearman said proudly. “A Scout is trustworthy!”

  The redhead grinned. “And you hold our best hunting-ground hostage, too,” he said irreverently, looking at the parties of horsemen and butchering-camps scattered for miles to the westward.

  I think this one has gotten out of the woods more, Mary thought. Then to Alleyne, in the Noble Tongue:

  “Lord, I think this is a time for . . . for the sort of gesture Lady Astrid would have made.”

  He looked at her quickly, his sky-blue eyes blinking thoughtfully. Ritva made a small private sign: Good call, sis!

  Uncle Alleyne had always been affectionately respectful of the founder of the Rangers, but while he was the husband of the living woman he’d been a mixture of chief-of-staff and Reality Anchor. He’d always loved The Histories, that was how he and Astrid had first come together, but he hadn’t had the fire she did. Since she’d died, though . . . since then, he’d lived her dream for her, meticulously.

  “You’re right, woman of Westernesse,” he said quietly. Then he replied to the Morrowlanders, with the air of a man quoting from a sacred book, the way bards did from The Histories around a winter hearth in Mithrilwood:

  “For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf,

  And the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.”

  They looked at him sharply, obviously recognizing it. “I need no hostage, Andrew, called Swift,” he said. “For a Scout is, indeed, trustworthy.”

  • • •

  “Well, thanks,” Ingolf muttered. “For this glorious heartwarming display of trust and so forth your Uncle Alleyne made. He’s back there, I note.”

  “We need to take chances,” Mary said back, quietly. “We’re in a hurry.”

  She’d seen hints some of their . . . guardians was a more tactful way of putting it than guards . . . knew Sign. If they really needed to be secret they could use the Noble Tongue, but Ingolf wasn’t really fluent yet, and Ian could follow simple sentences but not really talk it at all, beyond stock phrases. Cole had none at all, and Talyn and Caillech only a few words. So far everyone had been impeccably polite to them anyway.

  In the meantime the seven of them followed the trail at a wolf-pace, which was what the Morrowlanders called it too: a hundred yards at a jog, a hundred at a fast walk, a hundred at a normal walking pace, then repeat, with a ten-minute rest every hour. You could really cover territory that way. If you could keep it up, which they all could without much trouble. The Morrowlanders seemed slightly surprised, which they might well be if their standard of comparison was Cutter cowboys who thought they lost caste if they got out of the saddle. The Dúnedain didn’t think that way, nor Mackenzies, nor Cole’s service, and Ingolf was just plain versatile.

  The game trail wound as their boots made a dull thudding on the soft pine duff. It took the easiest way through the hilly woods with the unerring skill animals had for a slope and for the least-effort way between two points. The land it led through varied, from open flower-meadow to dense pine forest and Engelmann spruce and pockets of aspen, and there were almost always mountains in view. The thin air was crisp in the mouth and lungs, like a dry white wine, scented with sap and meadowsweet and an intense green savor. Once she stopped for a moment with a gasp as they turned a corner and came into the open.

  A river lay well below the hillside trail, winding in S-curves through a meadow intensely green and starred with blue and crimson and gold like one of Sandra Arminger’s neo-Persian carpets, only at this distance the color was more of an is-it-there mist flowing over the velvet, teasing the edge of vision. Beyond was the darker green of forest, turning to blue distance rising to the white teeth of the Absaroka Mountains.

  It wasn’t a painting, though: it was full of life. A bison bull shook his bearded head and snorted as red-and-white musta
ngs swept by with their tails raised like plumes. A pack of lobos had started the horses moving, but they skirted the bison warily as they followed, their heads held high to keep them over the level of the grass. From a twisted spruce below the hillside trail two golden eagles launched themselves into the cool limpid air, banking out over the murmuring white water with the feathers splayed like fingertips on their yard-long wings. Waterfowl rose up in a cataract from a quiet stretch surrounded by willows where a bear nosed through the shallows, climbing like a twisting spire of smoke.

  “Now that’s pretty,” Ian said, and everyone nodded agreement; several whistled softly.

  Nearby tiny hummingbirds with iridescent orange-red throats circled each other in a buzzing blossom-war.

  “Even compared to the Drumheller Rockies, that’s pretty,” he went on. “Even compared to Banff, that’s pretty.”

  “Damn, yes,” Ingolf agreed. “I bet the winters here are something to behold, though, even compared to where I grew up.”

  “Oh yeah,” Cole said. “Lucky to get two months without a frost around here, probably, up this high.”

  He was a native of the interior, if considerably south of this, drier and at a lower altitude. Ian nodded too, looking around at the vegetation. He had a right to be a connoisseur of winters, since the Peace River country lay a thousand miles to the north. The two Mackenzies and the Dúnedain winced a little. They were from the Willamette, off west of the Cascades. Where winter meant chilly and rainy and muddy, not howling weeks of freezing blizzard that could snatch you dead. Campaigning and travel had shown them the difference.

  “I’ve done winter training, ski and mountain stuff, in country a lot like this,” Cole said. “And it’s no joke. But it’s pretty then, too. Sort of . . . pure.”

  They all took a moment to absorb the quiet. The two Mackenzies drew their pentagrams and nodded, then opened their water-bottles and poured libations. Mary put her hand to her heart and bowed. It was actually difficult to say what part of what she saw was prettiest, like a complex piece of music; she’d heard that people came from far away just to walk these woods before the Change, and she could believe it.

  The three representatives of the Morrowland Council halted too; they didn’t say anything directly, but they did make that salute gesture again.

  “A Scout is reverent,” one of them added.

  The whole group—less the unseen but definite escorts who were pacing them out of sight of the trail—stopped at a shelter built into the side of a hill for the night. It wasn’t elaborately camouflaged, but it was fairly inconspicuous anyway, being three-quarters sunk into the slope. There was a bark-shingled roof extending a bit outward over walls of notched logs; a trickle of spring had been turned into a rock pool. A corral stood not far away with stone posts and wooden rails, and a lean-to packed with hay—baled hay tied with straw twists, which was an oddly advanced touch for the backwoods.

  Aha, they do use horses, at least sometimes, she thought. Those horse apples are about a day old. This run is a test, too.

  The interior of the shelter was interesting, when they spread their bedrolls; neatly folded robes of tanned wolverine fur tied to the bottom of the bunks, mattresses of fresh spruce boughs, clean polished wood table and benches, and a puncheon floor. The stove was an ingenious little affair of stone and metal sheets at the rear with a water heater of salvaged aluminum around the flue, and the food-store was built into the wall where the natural temperature-control of the earth would help it, lined with more aluminum to keep the vermin out.

  There was also an arrangement for a block of ice to be inserted above and a water-drain below, and within Ian found a dozen two-foot cutthroat trout, neatly gutted, and bundles of greens and roots. He looked at the contents, at what in the way of herbs and ground roots was racked beside the stove in the usual miscellany of salvaged glass and some rather attractive glazed modern pottery, and rubbed his hands.

  “Nothing like running all day to work up an appetite,” he said. “Anyone else volunteering for dinner detail?”

  “Caillech is a monstrous fine hand with trout,” Talyn said helpfully, peering over his shoulder and smacking his lips.

  “Volunteer yourself, man!” she said, taking his bonnet off for a moment and whapping him with it playfully.

  “Well, if it were duck or grouse, I would,” he replied reasonably, adjusting the headgear. “I’m better at those. It’s respectful to make the most of the Mother’s bounty, isn’t it, now? If it’s my part to enjoy eating it, then that I’ll do, as my duty.”

  “I hereby volunteer you to go fetch the wood, I do,” she said, then went with him.

  “Nobody else?” Ian said, stripping off his jacket, rolling up his sleeves and beginning to scrub his hands. “All right, then.”

  “I’ll take first watch,” Ingolf added.

  Mary had seen any number of small groups stranded in the wilds by the Change, though most had headed in to more civilized climes as soon as they could; apart from the Eater bands of the death zones, of course. But . . .

  “A Scout apparently knows what the hell they’re doing,” Ingolf said to her as she sat beside him on a rock. “I’ve seen plenty of wild men but not many who knew their way around the woods as well. Old Pete’s folks, yeah, though they weren’t as . . . as tidy. Remember the Southsiders that Rudi picked up east of the Mississippi, Jake sunna Jake’s crew? They didn’t know anything.”

  “You took the words out of my mouth; they barely knew what made babies. Or the London Bunch, north of the lakes? They were pathetic. At a guess, the Morrowlanders have a lot of these little places as bases for hunters and people working the woods for foods and medicinals and whatnot,” she said. “We have something similar in the Ranger staths, though the climate’s a lot nicer in the Willamette.”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t like to go through February here in a flet. This dugout thing would be comfy enough even in winter . . . even in the winters they’re supposed to get around here . . . but you’d go crazy after a while if you couldn’t get out. Notice the ski-racks, and the second entrance up on the roof section? Back in Richland we do a lot of our heavy hauling in winter—frozen rivers are best of all. Maybe that’s how they keep from going crazy, spend all their spare time studying for Badges and such.”

  She nodded. He’d picked a good spot to overlook the little way station; from the tracks he wasn’t the first to do so.

  “You took the words out of my mouth again, lover,” she said. “When he was chasing us for the Cutters, George called the Tracker . . .”

  “Followed us over ground where you’d swear an eight-hitch yoke of plow oxen wouldn’t leave a trace,” Ingolf agreed.

  “They’d make valuable allies,” Mary said, her enthusiasm growing. “Not just getting out of our way, I mean.”

  Her husband nodded, but frowned as well. “Hmmm. There’s a drawback there.”

  “What?”

  “We’re supposed to be impressing them. I think these folks make knowing how to do stuff a real big part of their opinion of someone.”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Yah, but they’re more . . . more formal about it.”

  The three Council members were at least impressed with Ian’s pinion-nut crusted trout, accompanied by twice-boiled burdock and roasted arrowroot and bannocks of sweet camas flour studded with dried huckleberries, with a side of Miner’s Lettuce salad with wild onions. The representative of the House of Girls shooed the men out after the meal; evidently a Scout was clean, too, and women got first crack at the hot water and essence of soaproot.

  Much later, Mary murmured to Ingolf in the darkness:

  “And a Scout likes privacy. Or at least this Ranger does.”

  He sighed.

  • • •

  Ingolf looked down on the Scout headquarters not long after dawn; the air was still chill and a little damp.

  “Well, that explains how they got here,” he said.

  It was on the shores of a g
reat lake, so broad that the water stretched north almost beyond sight even from this elevation, with occasional small islands and a few sails visible on fishing boats and a landing-stage for big birch-bark canoes. There had been some buildings on the rocky edge before the Change, but it was obvious they’d burned that very night. Mostly because the midsection and tail of the great flying machine still stood, with the scorched and crumpled ruins of the nose stuck into the green scrub that covered the ruins. Bits and snags stood up, and most of a stone chimney. Parts of the aircraft were skeletal where the sheathing had been torn off; aluminum was easy to work and had dozens of uses.

  Ian frowned. “That’s a . . . 747,” he said. “I think. You can still see the sort of hump thing at the front, it’s not all burned.”

  “What?” Talyn said. “Those numbers would mean what, precisely?”

  “A type of big flying machine. They could carry hundreds of people.”

  They all looked at him; it wasn’t the sort of remark you expected of a Changeling like themselves.

  “We had a recognition course for recruits to the Force,” he said, a little defensively. “I don’t know why. Nobody ever thought to change it, eh?”

  Talyn snapped his fingers. “Yes, in the ‘Song of Fire and Grief.’ The Chief, the Mackenzie Herself, she saw one such fall and burn in Corvallis on the night of the Change! And made the song about it later.”

  Cole whistled softly. “Alyssa goes on about what a great pilot the Bear Lord was, to get a little plane with six people in it down safely. And he landed in a river. Whoever was flying that thing must have been . . . something. I’d have expected it to fall like a brick.”

  They all nodded somberly. They all knew that the ancients had been able to make huge things fly, but suddenly seeing this—as big as a northern baron’s hall—made you feel it all of a sudden.

  The modern buildings became clearer as they approached. From a few remarks their close-mouthed hosts had made Ingolf had gathered that there just weren’t all that many Morrowlanders, less than a thousand and possibly much less, and that this was their winter HQ. Certainly there was plenty of space in the building they were shown to; a room for each couple and one for Cole, and a big dining chamber with only a few other people to share the camas griddle cakes with spicy caramel-tasting birch syrup and—what seemed to be a special treat for guests—French fries, followed by wild blueberries and—another treat—cream. They were courteously shown to a bathhouse afterwards too, before strong hints brought them out again.