Rudi snarled, “Morrigú!”, crouched and leapt.
The dark wings of the Crow Goddess indeed seemed to bear him up. He landed, buffeted one man aside with his shield, took off a hand at the wrist and shoved his way into the gap made when that man turned shrieking and sprayed blood into the eyes of his comrades. Blades hammered at him, thudding on his shield and cracking off the smooth steel of his armor.
“Jesu-Maria,” Ignatius wheezed, somehow beside him.
An arrow flashed between them and into the face of a spearman, Edain shooting from recklessly close. Matti was back at the base of the Temple, directing operations and feeding in reserves with a wrenched knee—some distant walled-off part of him was glad of it. One more step, and the Cutters would be forced back onto the flat unfinished top, where there was no protection.
Moving with a unison like one man monarch and monk hacked down the shieldmen protecting the Prophet and went in to kill.
Sethaz blocked a Bearkiller backsword hacking for his leg, kicked out and sent Eric Larsson tumbling backward with a yell and a dented breastplate, killed a Boisean with a slash that laid his arm open from elbow to wrist, launched a flurry of strikes at Ignatius that sent the warrior Benedictine down on one knee, guarding frantically.
Rudi lunged. The Sword slid along the Prophet’s shete, the counter cunningly sloped to keep the supernal edge from chopping through mere steel. Sethaz’ other hand snapped out and took him by the throat like a grab made of steel and gears. The metal of his bevoir began to grate and crumple.
“I . . . see . . . you . . .” he grated, in a voice like the death of stars.
And the world vanished.
• • •
Too big, Rudi thought.
He was nowhere, and everywhere. It was dark and utterly cold and all that was material had vanished so long ago that even the memory of it was gone, but there was order here, complexity, a structure that vibrated at a level next to which atoms were coarse and chaotic as a lump of horse-dung. There was a beauty that he could not grasp, that left him weak with longing, and thoughts rushed by like huge glowing matrixes of the pure sublime. He could not grasp them, but if he could, even the least of them, he knew he would be utterly transformed, lost and yet fulfilled beyond all reckoning. . . .
They vanished, and he was Rudi Mackenzie once again, crying out with grief and loss for an instant.
Then he gained command of himself; what he had . . . not seen, there was nothing for light to reflect off in that place, but somehow apprehended, fled like a dream. It was too big to remember.
Instead he was in a forest. A real forest, as far as he could tell, though not of trees he was very familiar with; he could see the great trunks rising around him like reddish pillars upholding the sky, smell a green spiciness, hear the trickle of falling water. Light speared down between the needled boughs so far above, and smaller plants reached for it. Birds whistled and chirped, and insects buzzed; a hummingbird circled him in blue iridescence and then departed. He turned and walked along the creek that tumbled over lustrous brown stream-polished stones, conscious that he was no longer wearing the battered, blood-spattered armor or the sweat-stinking arming doublet below; instead he was in kilt and knee-hose and schoon, saffron-dyed linen shirt and plaid pinned over his shoulder.
The sun was slanting to the westward, and the air grew a little colder. The light was golden—somehow, more real than a nugget of the metal itself, be it polished never so bright. He walked in a dream, but it was more real than the waking world. Suddenly he dropped his hand to the pommel of the Sword of the Lady at his right hip. It was thee, but . . .
It feels . . . at home. Without that sense that the world might rip around it. Here, the world itself is like that. More real, more itself. Myself it is that feels fragile and not-quite-real.
A fire flickered through the gathering dusk. He walked into the circle of its light, his feet soft on the duff and fallen ferns.
“Ladies,” he said, with a deep bow.
As once before on Nantucket, there were Three. This time he knew all the faces. The youngest was his sister Fiorbhinn, a maiden of a little more than twelve summers; slender but strong, breasts just beginning to bud beneath her pale gown, white-blond hair torrenting down on her shoulders, and a small harp on her knee. The huge pale blue eyes met his, depths within depths. . . .
He took a deep breath and looked at the others; Mathilda, her slightly irregular face beautiful as she looked down at the swaddled form of Órlaith on her knee, and his mother Juniper—but not the hale, graying figure of eight-and-fifty that he knew in this twenty-eighth year of the Change. This woman in tunic and arsaid was Juniper Mackenzie as she might be in the years of her deep age, hair snowy, face deeply lined, a little stooped as she leaned on the carved rowan staff of a High Priestess topped by the silver moon waxing and full and waning. The leaf-green eyes were nearly the same, warm and kind.
“Are—” he began, then stopped. Maiden, Mother, Crone, he thought. Of course. How otherwise?
Fiorbhinn laughed. “Of course we are who we seem. All our seemings. And not. Time is different here.”
“And there are no words for it all,” Rudi said patiently. “I’m no longer angry at that. Irritated, perhaps.”
All three of the Ladies smiled. The youngest spoke again:
“If we could explain—”
“You would, yes.” A thought occurred to him. “Was that place . . . that place I was . . . was that how this really is?”
His nod took in the forest, and the frosted glory of stars that was showing overhead, brighter and more colorful than any he had ever seen, even in glimpses beneath the black swaying shapes of the treetops.
His mother spoke. “No. That was the . . . heaven, you might say . . . the dream of the Powers behind the CUT. Behind many another dream of men. Dreams of order and of knowledge . . . in the beginning.”
He blinked, shocked. Mathilda spoke: “You’ve been told before, that here this is not a war between good and evil.”
“It most certainly is in the world of common day!” Rudi said, and they all looked at him with fondness clear in their eyes.
“Yes, it is,” Juniper said. “That is the shadow it throws there, and those in the cave see it upon the wall. And it is true, what they see. But . . . let me ask you: which is better, the utterly particular, or the absolutely infinite? Immanence or transcendence?”
“I’m tired of shadows!” Rudi said. “And—with respect—tired of moving amid forces the which I cannot understand!”
“You may understand if you will, brother,” Fiorbhinn . . . possibly Fiorbhinn said, her voice as her name, truesweet. “That is why you are here, to make that choice.”
He looked up again, and the stars spoke; if only he could read that vast slow dance it would be everything. Rest that was high adventure, infinite knowledge that was just a beginning, home and a journey without end . . .
Mathilda spoke. “You have done everything you were born to do, my beloved,” she said. “Thus is the will of God fulfilled.”
“You have sung a good song,” Fiorbhinn added. “One that echoes even here.”
“You have earned homecoming, if you choose it,” his mother said, and there were tears in her eyes. “Homecoming beyond all sorrow, beyond all loss.”
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 t
o 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 thi
ngs 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.
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