The Given Sacrifice

by S. M. Stirling

  Now in summertime most of the Morrowlanders were probably spread out through this vast stretch of wilderness, laying in the food and other goods they’d need in the long deep-snow winters. That made what they’d done here all the more impressive, not least the inconspicuous but substantial storage cellars and icehouses, recognizable mainly by the doors set into what looked like low mounds.

  The buildings scattered amid raised-bed gardens and pruned bushes and corrals and many trees were deep-notched logs on fieldstone, carefully set into the south-facing sides of the low hills. The largest reared like a whale among minnows, and from the color of the carved and varnished wood it was the newest, but like the others it had a steep-pitched roof covered in sod. That gave them an intensely green look, like great plants, colored with flowers that must be carefully cultivated despite their wild exuberance.

  “Looks just a wee bit homelike,” Talyn said in fascination. “But more spread out than one of our Duns. No wall. And no grain fields and not much in the way of herds, either, just these little bits of garden. They must live mostly from the hunt and what they gather.”

  The carving was less ornate and less colorful than, say, Dun Juniper, though there was plenty of it, mostly themed on animals and plants, and including inlays of different woods and colored stones. There were totem-pole-like erections in front of a collection of smaller but still big buildings surrounding the main one.

  “What are those?” Ingolf asked.

  “Those are the Houses of the Troops, and each Patrol has its Den,” George Tracker said; they seemed to use their epithets as surnames, more or less. “They stand around the House of the Eagle.”

  Then, taking over the role of tour guide for a moment, he went on:

  “That is the Hall of Boys, and that the Hall of Girls, where they meet for special ceremonies. There are the smithies, and the woodworking shop, and the library. That log flume brings springwater for drinking and washing and to turn wheels; it was finished the year I became a Bearer of the Eagle. That long building is—”

  Nice composting toilets, too, Ingolf thought; that had impressed him most of all. Same system we used back in Richland.

  The first Bossman of the Free Republic of Richland had been a gadget enthusiast, always pulling a new notion out of his books or someone’s memory or from some traveller. He had sent artisans around to show people how to build the composting thunderboxes a couple of years after the Change, and met warm agreement among a people no longer living in fear of starvation and ready for something better than smelly, dangerous makeshifts. The Bossman had been a self-important fussbudget and easy to mock—Ingolf and some friends had gotten a memorable whaling with a hickory-switch from Ingolf’s father the Sheriff for carving a roadside stump into a caricature of him just before a visit to Readstown—but he’d had some good ideas. And he’d been a much harder man than you’d think to look at him or listen to him burbling about how to rig a side-delivery hay rake or a silage chopper, though he’d used others to do the bone-breaking and head-knocking parts of the job.

  Ingolf wouldn’t have expected something so sophisticated in a place so rustic as this, though. The settlement smelled clean, too, with less stink and flies than nearly any warm-season farming community. To be sure, they didn’t have much livestock, which were inescapably messy no matter how careful you were. The water and forest were the strongest odors; there was wood smoke, of course, and cooking, and the scorched metal, glue, leather and sawdust of crafts. His nose didn’t detect the unmistakable reek of a tannery, either, which meant they must have put it elsewhere.

  The people were out to see the newcomers when they emerged from getting settled, outsiders obviously not being something that were seen very often here. They were all dressed pretty much like the three representatives of the Council, though less elaborately. Apparently everyone wore knee-length pants in warm weather, roughly the way Mackenzies all wore kilts; many of the young children had nothing on but the shorts. There was a lot less jostling, pointing or exclaiming than he’d have expected from backwoods villagers—probably less than there would have been in Readstown, and certainly than in some other parts of Richland he could name. The hunting dogs that were fairly numerous were well-mannered too, hardly any barking and most staying close to their people even while their noses followed the stiff-legged strut Artan and Flan put on in a strange pack’s territory.

  Speaking of children and older people . . .

  “Notice something about these folks?” he said to Mary.

  “Lots,” she said. “What in particular?”

  “There are plenty of kids, but the adults are all my age or a bit older, and the Changelings, the born Changelings—”

  Strictly speaking, Changelings were people born since the Change, of course. More loosely the term included people like Ingolf who’d been young children at the time; he’d been six going on seven. If you used both senses together Changelings were a majority of the population now nearly everywhere, or would be soon. Here they were apparently everybody.

  “—just coming full-grown, only a few with babies of their own.”

  She blinked and he could sense her focusing, counting and averaging—numbers were something you had to be able to do well on reconnaissance.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Like a clump, and their kids, and only a few people in between. It’s a bit odd. And you don’t expect a lot of really old people but there aren’t any. Nobody even as old as Uncle John and Uncle Alleyne, who were about my age at the Change. I’ve never seen anything exactly like it, and we’ve been from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back. Odd.”

  “No it ain’t,” he said. “Scouts, before the Change that is, they were kids and youngsters.”

  In Readstown these days you were a baby up until you could get around, use the outhouse on your own and do simple chores, then a kid until puberty, and then a youngster until you grew enough and learned enough to do the things a grown man or woman did. After that you sort of slid into being a full adult over the next few years, capping it off when you got your own house and a job or farm or workshop or whatever and started your own family.

  Most places were roughly the same, though he was vaguely aware that they’d seen things differently before the Change when being a kid had lasted a lot longer. That Scouting business had been part of the way they stretched things out back then. It must have been irritating, since as he remembered it he’d been eager to grow up.

  “My dad was a . . . what did they call it . . . Scoutmaster. And my older brother was a Scout, and they talked about it a little now and then. And they had some books about it that were real useful, practical stuff. Nobody kept it up after the Change where I come from, though. Too busy.”

  “No need, either, I imagine,” Mary said thoughtfully.

  “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 distance, 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 p
ennant 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.”