The Given Sacrifice

by S. M. Stirling

  Graber looked blank for a second, and then astonished when Rudi leveled a finger at him; so did some of the others. Rudi chuckled.

  “I’ll have to spend more time here than I wish, Major . . . hmmm. We’ll come up with some title . . . Range Boss, perhaps? Lord of the Eastern Mark? I’ll be wanting a man who understands the land and the folk, for I’ll have other calls upon my time, even though this will be Crown land. It’s not an easy job I’m offering. The lands long under the CUT have been badly harmed, not least in the minds and souls of those dwelling here. It’ll be a lifetime’s work to even begin to repair the damage. Will you take it?”

  Graber hesitated for a second or two, then nodded decisively. “Yes,” he said. “It’s necessary.”

  Then, shrewdly: “And having a local man in charge will make a lot more Ranchers likely to come over willingly—it’ll be a sign that bygones are to be bygones and that they won’t be excluded from power and office as long as they renounce the CUT.”

  “Exactly,” Mathilda said. “And I don’t think anyone will doubt you mean what you say . . . my lord. We found you a very determined man when you were chasing us!”

  Rudi covered a yawn as the Questers all nodded. “First we must take Corwin. After that . . . more work. But building is more enjoyable than tearing down, even when that’s necessary. Even when the building involves cracking a few heads!”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Corwin, Valley of Paradise

  (Formerly western Montana)

  High Kingdom of Montival

  (Formerly western North America)

  August 29th, Change Year 26/2024 AD

  Corwin was falling.

  The Earthly House of the Ascended Hierarchy was falling in fire, falling in blood. Everyone who felt like defecting or just absenting themselves had done so, or been killed trying; those who remained were mind-bound or more often the core of real believers who were simply determined to die in the last ditch for their faith. The Montivallan forces were in no more forgiving a mood, after what they’d seen on the way or in the Prophet’s capital itself and what had happened to those of their comrades unlucky enough to fall into the enemy’s hands.

  I would of course prefer that the beithacheen had a change of heart and surrendered, Rudi thought, coughing to clear his lungs, leaning back against a broken table and working his left hand where it ached from clenching on the hilt. But if they won’t, I would very much prefer that the irreconcilables die fighting here, rather than taking to the hills.

  The city was smallish and had no wall, but the buildings were stout and mostly stone-built, windowless on their first floors, and all interlinked both by tunnels and enclosed overhead bridges. Many had nothing but slit windows, no other entrance save the tunnels, and every house had to be reduced and then held lest enemies emerge from hidden exits and attack the assault parties from the rear.

  Edain turned, cursed and shot in one movement. A figure above them dropped the rock he’d been hefting to shatter on the granite-block pavement and then followed an instant later, breaking himself and lying limp. The narrow spike of the bodkin head stood up from between his shoulder blades, driven through rear plate of the leather armor by the fall. His helmet clattered away and rolled

  “This is like me mother goin’ after cockroaches,” he said. “Cursing and splashing boiling water to get the last of the little boogers. Wish we could have just stood off and shot at the place with artillery.”

  “If it wouldn’t take forever and a day,” Rudi grunted agreement.

  He swigged from his canteen and passed it to the master-bowman. They had their backs resting against a barricade of broken furniture, with the bodies of its Cutter defenders still sprawled around them. The troops with them were a mixture—Boisean regulars, dismounted men-at-arms and crossbowmen from the Protector’s Guard and Bearkiller A-listers, the High King’s Archers and even some of Graber’s Montanans. Under their varied gear the faces were much the same, filthy and streaked with soot and sweat and blood and lined with strain and exhaustion. Stretcher-parties had taken the last of the wounded to the rear a few moments ago.

  “Water,” Matti croaked.

  He handed her the container, and she splashed a little on her alarmingly red face before she drank, coughed, drank some more. Huon trotted up from somewhere with a collapsible leather bucket that had probably started its life watering horses, and she plunged her head into it for a long moment to emerge blowing.

  “If you’re too tired to fight, don’t try,” he snapped. “I need you alive, not to mention Órlaith. We’ve enough troops to rotate.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she wheezed. “Just needed to cool down for a bit. Mother of God but that felt good. Thank you, Huon; hand it around.”

  It wasn’t very hot, even with the soot and flames from a few structures that had caught fire, though that caught at the throat. He was in full plate as well, though—there was nothing like it for close-quarter work—and he could feel how the heat buildup inside dragged at your strength. Even the very fit just tired faster with this carapace strapped all over the body.

  “At least I’m getting back in shape,” she said, in a more normal voice. “Sort of a drastic exercise program!”

  “Let’s go,” he said, nodding grudging agreement. “Not much farther now.”

  There was a groan and clank and rustle as everyone levered themselves to their feet. Rudi pushed himself up with the point of his shield—he hadn’t bothered to take his right arm out of the loop on the inside of the big teardrop construct of plywood and bullhide and metal when they paused to catch their breath. It was a twenty-pound nuisance, but you only had to look at the stubs of arrows in its surface to see why even full-armored men carried them.

  They turned a corner. Corwin was almost all built post-Change, laid out in a manner that Rudi found rather attractive in its way, buildings grouped around small squares. Broader avenues divided the squares in turn; in the central zone they were lined with larger buildings, three or even four stories. Everyone kept a wary eye on them, but apparently the assault groups tasked with it were keeping the inmates busy. This street they’d just entered gave into the central, grander open space where the half-finished ziggurat bulk of the Temple rose in a mass of dark stone and scaffolding.

  And it never will be finished, Rudi thought grimly.

  They’d managed to overrun the labor camps before all of the slaves who’d been building it could be killed. He wasn’t altogether sure how much of a mercy that had been. Many of them were quite mad.

  Gliders circled overhead, occasionally darting down to drop message containers with colorful pennants attached; there were a pair of tethered balloons north and south of the city with heliographs, and messengers on foot or horseback or on bicycles dashed about. Mostly it was a matter of small bands hammering their way forward, or even worse of men fighting and dying in the closed spaces of the underground warren, daggers and short-gripped spears and fists and feet and teeth in the dark.

  Ahead was one last barricade, this one apparently mainly made of rough sacks filled with something lumpy—he guessed that it was potatoes, from the size. Hooves clattered behind him, and he looked around: it was a battery of three Bearkiller scorpions, medium fieldpieces each drawn by three pair of horses, with the snarling red bear’s head on the shields.

  More surprisingly, Eric Larsson was with them at the head of a squad of Bearkiller A-listers in their plain good armor, a big blond man with a steel prosthetic where his left hand had been until a few years ago. The Bearkiller war-leader reined his horse in and looked at the barricade; an arrow shot from behind it sparked on the stone blocks of the road’s pavement not far in front. Knights of the Protector’s guard formed up before the leaders, one line kneeling and the other standing with their shields raised to form a wall of overlapping protection.

  “It’s not a cataphract’s battle,” Eric said at Rudi’s raised eyebrows as he dismounted and his troops followed.

  He turned rei
ns bridle over to his military apprentice, who was also his son William, a tall youth of nearly eighteen with an arresting combination of skin on the cusp between light brown and very dark olive, midnight blue eyes and curling brown hair. Rudi nodded to the young man, who responded with a slight crisp inclination of the head and then stood in silent, focused readiness in the Bearkiller manner. His father went on:

  “Hell, it’s more of a giant brawl, most of our A-listers are fighting dismounted. Good practice in being flexible. The Norrheimers are coming up, I pulled them out of reserve before they mutinied at being left out. Gotta be careful with those Asatruar types. They tend to start baying at the moon if you keep ’em from a fight. Something about the Nine Impulsive Vices or something like that. I just tune Signe out when she gets on about it.”

  Rudi nodded; the words were only slightly in jest. Eric and his son both had crucifixes around their necks—he had become a Catholic when he married his half-Tejano wife Luanne just after the Change—but Signe’s branch of the family followed those Gods.

  “Ah, excellent,” he said. “Bjarni and his band are good at this.”

  “Yeah, he’s hell on wheels in a close-in fight, and no mistake, and so are all his merry band,” Eric said with complete seriousness.

  Then he grinned; it made his face look younger than his forty-four years. When he leaned forward he whispered a little:

  “As my sister could testify, especially about Bjarni.”

  Rudi looked a question and he went on:

  “Signe’s expecting and refuses to say who’s the other party . . . to the very few who dare to ask, of which I was one. Only by letter, though. But just between me and thee, I strongly suspect . . .”

  Rudi chuckled; he wouldn’t have expected it, but he supposed she was still beneath the Moon . . . his own mother had been older when she bore Fiorbhinn. Motherhood had never mellowed Signe before—she was as fierce as a she-wolf with her cubs—but one could hope.

  The crews had been putting the scorpions into operation as they spoke, lifting the trails off the limbers and swiveling them around before splaying them open. Sledgehammers rang as they hammered spikes into the cracks between paving blocks to anchor it—the usual method of digging in the hinged spades at the ends of the trails wouldn’t do for absorbing the recoil here. A clanking tramp sounded behind, and the Norrheimers were there, with their standard at their head.

  That banner had been that of Bjarni’s father, Eric the Strong. The flag had a stiffener jutting out from the top of the pole at right angles, and a curved outer edge bore bullion tassels. The rim of the cloth was black, the center white, and on it a stylized black raven—for the birds Thought and Memory who sat on the shoulders of Odhinn Father of Victories and whispered wisdom in his ears. On the bird’s breast was a double letter A, the outer strokes curved and the inner straight and parallel. The flag commemorated a band of pre-Change warriors Eric had fought with as well as his faith; he had borne it north with his followers and friends into what had once been Maine right after the Change, from which much had followed.

  The redbeard had his four-foot axe over his shoulder; the outer edge had been hastily wiped so that a nick could be ground out and the edge redone, but the rest of it was thickly clotted. His followers came up behind him in a bristle of spears and swords and eyes glaring beneath nose-guarded conical helms, their big round shields making a wall. Their byrnies of chain or scale mail clinked as they moved.

  “Awkward as hogs on ice are these Cutters, when they fight on foot,” the king of Norrheim said cheerfully. “Still, warm work.”

  Rudi held out a hand, and he clasped wrists in the fashion of the folk of that far bleak land, and then both did the same with Eric.

  “This may be our last battle together, blood brother,” Rudi said to Bjarni.

  “Good. We’ve been doing a man’s work, but it’s time for us to go home.”

  He looked admiringly as the Bearkiller crew worked the levers of the hydraulic pump that cocked their weapon and loaded a globe of cast steel into the trough. His shrewd blue eyes took in the barricade. Rudi could guess why he grinned; if there was one thing someone from Norrheim—what had once been northern Maine—was going to recognize at first glance, it was a sack of a certain root vegetable. He called over his shoulder to his followers:

  “They want us to peel their potatoes for them! Then we’ll have meat with the mashed, boiled and fried!”

  A roar of hoarse laughter went up; that was just the sort of jest to tickle a Norrheimer funny bone. Rudi glanced around, nodded crisply, and spoke:

  “Now!”

  Whung-whap!

  The catapults spoke one after another, the wheels coming up a little and then thumping down again. Long bowshot to the west top of the barricade fountained up in a shower of burlap and fragments of root vegetable . . . and men. They waited while the throwing-machines worked their way along the parapet, knocking it down into a slumped chaos in a steady rhythm of one shot every four seconds, and then the bowmen trotted forward.

  “Let the gray geese fly!” Edain barked. “Wholly together—shoot!”

  A hundred bows snapped, and the arrows sleeted down. For once, Rudi felt little of the grim urgency of impending battle, only a smoldering anger at the necessity of it.

  I’ve done this too often for too long, he thought. I’m . . . not quite bored with it, but nearly. It’s time to finish it. This isn’t the climax of my life, it’s something I have to get out of the way before I get on with my life.

  One thing the bards usually didn’t talk about was the essential sameness of battle; there was more variety to farming. He judged, knocked down his visor, glared through the vision slit at a world like a bright distant painting. . . .

  “Morrigú!” he shouted, and charged.

  “Ho la, Odhinn!” Bjarni roared.

  “Haro, Portland! Holy Mary for Portland!” Mathilda shrieked, not a step behind.

  “Haakaa päälle!”

  “Artos and Montival!”

  The catapults and the longbowmen kept shooting as long as they could—beside Rudi a knight swore and ducked as a cloth-yard shaft zipped by and clipped the last ostrich plume from the rather ragged assembly on his helmet. The Bearkiller artillerists had all the self-confidence that common wisdom said their folk showed—some called it arrogance—and the last ball thumped home in the tumbled arrow-studded sacks when the front rank of the Montivallans was only thirty yards from their goal.

  It was good to keep the enemy’s heads down; bad to have yours smacked right off your shoulders by a six-pounder ball fired from behind you. That last one left a Boisean white-faced and sweating as it went overhead so fast that it was a mere blurred streak and so close that the wind of its passage made him stagger. Then Frederick Thurston’s men threw their heavy javelins and drew their short swords.

  The surviving Cutters popped up again, but they had time for only one volley of arrows from their powerful horn-backed bows as the Montivallans stormed up the obstacle in a roaring wave of shields and blades. One whistled by Rudi, another went thwack into his shield with a hard sound and a feeling like a blow from a club. The High King sprang up the remains of the barricade, agile as a great hunting tiger in the sixty pounds of steel despite the shifting footing. A shete tried to stop the Sword of the Lady, and the tough spring steel was shorn straight through. The man beneath spun away clutching at his severed throat . . .

  When he fought with his own hands, there was a . . . going away, since the Sword came, a madness that was completely lucid. Black wings bore him up, amid a storm of buffetings. More of the guardsmen crowded ahead as the fight tumbled down the inner side of the barricade. Their shields came up to protect the monarchs and Rudi shoved his visor up again as he came back to himself and stood on a sack to give himself a better view. Across the square a snarling scrimmage of fighting at the entrance to an avenue broke apart, and a walking wall of leveled pike-points came through, marching to a hammer of drums and a wordless chant o
f ha-ba-da, ha-ba-da . . .

  A flick of his glance right and left, and only the details were different; the Cutters had been pushed back into the open space at last, where the westerners’ numbers and drill could take effect.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  • • •

  He’d been afraid they’d have to dig the Prophet out of some underground lair, or wall him in and never be completely sure there hadn’t been some path of escape. Instead Sethaz stood at the last step below the platform where scaffolding and scattered blocks of stone told of decades of labor. His shete was in his hand; he was protected by two men with great round shields, but every now and then the steel would flick out and come back red.

  This high up the pyramidal structure the artillery couldn’t be elevated enough to fire, but archers could. Carts were carrying bundles of shafts in a ceaseless stream from the reserves, and sighing clouds of gray-feathered cloth-yard arrows and stubby crossbow bolts went by overhead, sweeping the upper steps, their impact like the sound of hail on tile roofs. The dead were thick despite shields and what armor they had, and blood ran down the granite and made it slippery beneath the foot. The stink of it was thick, iron and copper and salt, the butcher’s smell of battlefields redoubled—this was a huge building, but still more packed and smaller than any open field could be. The noise was stunning, individual voices and even the hammering pulse of the Mackenzie Lambegs lost in an all-consuming white roar.

  The heavy-armed troops of the High King’s Host fought their way upward, shields up against spears and blades stabbing and beating from above—the steps of the structure were around three feet tall, just enough to make the business as difficult as possible, like always fighting against mounted men in the perfect position to strike downward.

  “Ready—now!” Rudi called. “Follow me!”

  Pikes slanted forward from behind, jabbing over their shoulders. He turned a spearhead with his shield—the fourth he’d had that day—and chopped. A young man in red armor blocked desperately with his shield, bringing it awkwardly across to face the left-handed attack; the Sword cut through a section of the bullhide and wicker and into his leg above the knee and through the bone.