Lord of Mountains

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

NEAR BEND

CAPITAL, CENTRAL OREGON RANCHERS ASSOCIATION TERRITORY

(FORMERLY CENTRAL OREGON)

HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

NOVEMBER 30TH, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

The Montivalan army-or to be more precise, a detachment of several thousand including Bearkiller lancers and pikemen and crossbowmen, field artillery, CORA refugee horse-archers, and Mackenzie longbowmen-came marching southward to Bend, under the command of Eric Larsson.

It was a cold winter day in the high desert, with little flecks of hard grainy snow falling out of a sky milky gray from horizon to horizon and darkening as the short day drew to an end. Clouds hid the peaks of the Cascades westward; in that direction there was only a hint of forest and rising rock-ridges, and the dull glow of the setting sun. The passes there were closed to anyone who wasn’t on skis and traveling light and fast at this time of year, but the Columbia Gorge was always open, and they had come south from Hood River. That had taken them through County Odell, and the lands of the Three Tribes of the Warm Springs Confederation, with supply dumps and warm welcomes.

That was long behind them now, into land where the enemy’s hand had lain heavy for most of the war. The sights around them left spirits bleak as the weather. Hooves and hobnailed boots rang on the patched pavement, pikes swayed rhythmically, but there was no singing, and the commands of voice and trumpet and drum echoed with a flat dullness.

“Hurrah, we win a great big fucking victory, and this is the prize we get,” someone said.

Mike Havel the younger hid his shock as best he could, but he understood the grumbler perfectly.

“Hard winter hereabouts,” he said quietly instead.

His cousin Will Larsson snorted. “Bloody devastation hereabouts,” he replied. “If it weren’t for the shape of the river I wouldn’t recognize it at all. It looks like even the buzzards have given up and moved on.”

“Larsson and Havel, attend!” the commander called.

They moved their horses up with a shift of balance, reins in left hand and right hand on hip as the scabbards of their backswords clattered against the stirrup-irons. Mike’s uncle Eric pointed to a breast-shaped hill that dominated the eastern approaches to the city, its base showing the stumps of ponderosa pine and aspen that must have previously relieved its bleakness.

“See that hill outside the city wall? What are the salient features, Havel?”

“Yessir,” Mike replied. “Pilot Butte. Elevation around forty-one hundred absolute, just under five hundred above the general level.”

“Why wasn’t it fortified? Looks like it could dominate the town.”

“No water, sir.”

“Good,” Eric said. “Larsson?”

His son nodded. “No water because the soil’s very porous, sir. Lots of caves around here, volcanic tubes, and the water table is low because it drains so freely. Wells tend to collapse, too, you have to line them. You’d need very deep tube wells to supply a fort on top of the hill and it would require heavy pumping all the time and concrete reservoirs. Expensive, sir.”

Since he was an A-Lister now, Mike dared to put in: “And the light soil would make the footings for a curtain wall and towers difficult too, sir. Relatively easy for mining and sapping operations in a siege, too.”

“Good. Carry on.”

Mike mimed wiping his brow as they fell back to near the tail end of the command party; their official tasking was as couriers, and unofficially they were supposed to be learning by example. Will grinned back at him.

They were both very young for the Outfit’s A-List, jumped through the usual long candidacy for good service in the field; not far from here, and over a year ago, during the initial invasion. In the regular way of things, in the peacetime he was starting to think of as a children’s story like trolls or rockets, they’d just be thinking of putting down their names for the testing and probably be a year or two of failure away from ultimate success.

Those two years seemed like forever to the cousins; they were both within a few months of eighteen, both around six feet, and both long-limbed with the hard whipcord looks of those trained to ten-tenths of capacity but not beyond. Otherwise they were not much alike for looks. Will was Afro-Anglo-Hispano-Indio on his mother’s side, which mixed with Eric Larsson’s Nordic heritage had given him exotic good looks, bluntly regular full-lipped features, skin the smooth pale light-brown of a perfect soda-biscuit, eyes midnight blue and hair curling from under the edge of his helmet in locks of darkest yellow. Mike Havel’s pale chiseled handsomeness might have steered a dragon-ship across the Kattegat a millenia ago, with only a trace of his Anishinabe great-grandmother in the set of cheekbone and eye.

Their kinship showed in the underlying structure of bone and the gangling height they shared. More still in the way they stood and moved and rode.

“Jesus,” Will said quietly as they looked around, and crossed himself.

“Loki on a stick,” Mike concurred, and made the sign of the Hammer, as was customary in his branch of the family.

The strip along the Deschutes River where it ringed the city of Bend on three sides, and upstream and down, had been under the furrow since before the Change, irrigated land in the middle of the dry plains of ancient lava and volcanic ash and sagebrush desert. If anything it had become more densely settled in the past generation, producing for its tillers and the shrunken city rather than markets far away, a little green world of small densely-cultivated farms in a land mostly sparse grazing and great estates where the Rancher was lord.

Small poplar-bordered fields of fruit-trees and vegetables and grain and fodder marked it, and the rammed-earth, shake-roofed cottages of the cultivators, or the odd clutch of church and smithy and tavern at a crossroads. Even in the cold season it had always seemed reasonably prosperous to Mike, even by the standards of the Willamette, and you were never far from the smell of woodsmoke or the sound of voices and the sight of cattle or sheep.

The smell of smoke was still there, the harsh and bitter stink of things not meant to burn. Nothing moved except the odd crow or raven. The only animals larger than a jackrabbit he’d seen in hours were dead, picked-over bones. And once a litter of skulls by the side of the road, some of them with bits of hair still fluttering ragged in the cold wind.

The contrast was more stark because he’d seen the district many a time, on visits stretching back to his childhood; the nascent Bearkillers had come this way a decade before he was born on their trek from Idaho. The memories were vivid. In spring the land smelled sweet, with blossom shed in drifts across the narrow rutted roads and often with roses trained up the walls of the houses. Now only the trampled remnants of the irrigation ditches and the stumps of trees showed where the land had lain under the hand of man; fruit tree and windbreak alike had been burned where they fell. The rafters of the houses had burned hotter, and even the tough pisé de terre walls had mostly collapsed inward. Pre-Change frame buildings were just scorch-marks and charcoal collapsed into the foundations.

“Worse than we expected,” he heard Lord Chancellor Ignatius say ahead of him. “So much for the possibility of basing forces here against Boise. Or even Pendleton.”

“A lot of this is recent,” another man said bitterly; it was Rancher Bob Brown, one of the CORA magnates. “They knew they couldn’t hold it, not after the Horse Heaven Hills, and they spent the time they had left to wreck it. Goddamn it, it’ll take generations to rebuild this! A lot of it was from before the Change and we’ll have to redo it with hand shovels and horses!”

Ignatius made a soothing gesture. “The biggest assets were the dams in the Cascades and the reservoirs. Those are intact. This land will blossom again, Rancher. No, I misspoke. The biggest assets were the people and their skills, and of those we saved most.”

“They need something to work with, or who in their right mind will come back? It’s no better further out,” Brown said. “My son took a patrol into Seffridge Ranch’s home-place last week to see about resettling my family and our people. Nothing. Everything my father spent twenty years building up burned and wrecked, houses and workshops and barns, fences gone, our little dam broken down and the irrigation channels filled, the fruit trees killed…They wrecked the wells out in the grazing lands. And the wind-pumps. The water’s mostly deep around there.”

The leathery man in his thirties nearly spat that; to dwellers in these dry lands that particular form of destruction was nearly blasphemy. Without water, cattle and sheep couldn’t use the natural growth; water and winter fodder were the secrets to successful ranching.

“We’ll be the next thing to Rovers,” he finished bitterly.

That was the settled Ranchers’ term for those who wandered seasonally with their flocks and herds farther east, living in tents and dwelling in the driest sections. It wasn’t intended as a compliment; filthy savages was a good translation from the local dialect.

“The grass will grow next year, and that’s about it,” Brown finished. “And the only good thing is that we’ve lost so much stock we won’t be overgrazing, even after we’ve lost all the hay and fodder land. We’ve got the breeding stock, but we won’t dare restock to anything like the levels we had before the war.”

“Everyone will help,” Ignatius said. “That is the point of the kingdom.”

“We will,” Eric said promptly. “We’re behind Rudi…High King Artos…on that. And we’ll lean on the Corvallans, and the Clan will kick in.”

“God knows they’ve helped us already,” Brown said. “I don’t like depending on charity.”

“It isn’t charity, it’s caritas,” Ignatius said forcefully. “Rancher Brown, the blow of the enemy fell earliest and hardest here. You have a right to expect the kingdom’s help, just as you shielded the lands to the west. We all contribute as we can and must.”

“But that’s long-term stuff,” Eric said a little impatiently.

Ignatius nodded. “A major capital investment project. Nor is this the only area to have suffered so.”

“Yeah, and until then our logistics stink like an outhouse in August,” Eric said. “A crow flying over this territory would have to carry its own food wrapped up in a sack. We can’t move anything more than a few strong patrols for more than a day’s journey from the Columbia, with the way they wrecked the railroads.”

“Which means our movements become predictable, my son.” Ignatius said. “That is…unfortunate.”

“Arrow right in the ring and you collect the prize goose, Father,” Eric said. “We’ll have to ram straight down their throats. After breaking their teeth and paying the butcher’s bill for that. The roads are in better condition but-”

“- draught animals would eat everything they could haul,” Ignatius said. “And repairing the rails? Not practical for some time.”

Mike Havel found himself nodding. Bearkiller education emphasized engineering at the higher levels-it was useful in both war and peace, and his mother’s father had been an engineer in any case, and had helped set the system up.

“St. Michael’s sappers might know a quick way to do it, but mine don’t,” Eric agreed. “It’ll have to be done a mile at a time, starting with the railheads in the inhabited zones. Let’s see what’s left of the city. Enough to shelter a garrison, hopefully. Armies will have to stick to the Columbia, but unless we plug the gap the enemy could send raiding parties behind our lines. Their horse-archers are too damned mobile for comfort and they can live off even this wilderness for a while.”

Bend’s city wall had been fairly thick but low, the usual thing towns still inhabited after the collapse had run up out of concrete and rubble and salvaged I-beams in the years after the Change. The mass of it had been left in place, removing that would have taken years and thousands of laborers, but more effort had gone into slighting the gates and they were down to chest-level on a horse.

The main force spread out on the empty ground outside, pitching tents and starting campfires; Bearkillers had a set plan for overnight encampments, with ditch and dirt wall and temporary palisade and they enforced it on anyone they were operating with. Eric Larsson dumped his Spartan personal gear where the command pavilion would go up, and heard out the scout commander’s reports.

“Short form, fuck all, sir. They’re gone, that’s the best that can be said,” the man said at the end, tapping the city map, one compiled three years ago with hand-drawn notes on developments since. “This thing’s a work of…what did my old man call it…historical fiction now. Most of the outer wall’s still standing, but I think that’s only because the sons of bitches couldn’t tear it down. They certainly hit everything else-even dug up and trashed a lot of the water system. And…”

The man swallowed; he was a scar-faced cavalryman in his thirties, looking as tough as the leather of his boots. Mike felt a creeping unease at the expression on his face.

“Spit it out,” Eric said.

“They chopped up bodies and threw them into the waterworks wherever they could, sir. Animals, people…kids, too. They seemed to have a couple of hundred kids-”

“The Church Universal and Triumphant levies children for their training and breeding camps from all their subject peoples,” Ignatius said, stone-faced. “If they had already gathered them before the news of the battle arrived and thought they couldn’t remove them east in the winter season…”

“Well…Sir, Lord Chancellor, it’s pretty bad in there,” the scout finished. “Ah…permission to go get stinking drunk, sir.”

“I need to take a look myself,” Eric said, studying the man narrowly. “HQ staff, get us set up here for now, standard procedure. Lord Chancellor, Rancher Brown, you come with me. Eyes-on is always best if you’ve got the chance. Oh, and Murchison, if you feel the need that badly, permission granted.”

He took a bottle from his own modest wicker-and-leather chest of baggage and tossed it to the scout before they mounted again.

“That’s Larsdalen brandy. The hangover won’t hurt quite as much when you arrive and you feel better on the way.”

Mike Havel removed his helmet and wrinkled his nose slightly as they came through the city gate and into the pool of still air held by the walls. He was accustomed to the smell of death, or he’d thought so. There was more of it in the ruins of Bend than he’d ever scented before, and it had everything from the lingering stink of ancient corruption to bodies burned in the fires that had swept the town when the Cutter garrison withdrew a day and night ago.

Their horses skirted another pile of smoldering rubble that had slumped into the street when a building collapsed, bricks and bits of charred two-by-four and miscellaneous fragments. The setting sun behind the clouds threw gray-on-gray shadows around them, and the wind was growing colder as it flicked wet ash and snow from the patches of colder ground around them.

Ahead of him his uncle turned to Rancher Brown.

“Your own patrols find any survivors yet?” Eric asked. “I know we got most of the people out before the city fell, but there must have been someone here or in the area besides enemy troops and camp-followers. Nobody ever makes a completely clean sweep.”

“A few thousand prisoners were kept for labor,” Chancellor Ignatius said from Eric’s other side. “Scouts didn’t report a column on foot when they withdrew. I fear…”

Messengers had been coming and going since the Montivalans forced the unguarded gates. Most of them were local men, refugees picked because they knew the city. All of them looked even more stunned and lost than Mike felt, and some were weeping openly. Bearkillers and cityfolk and ranchers’ men alike walked or rode with weapons poised, but Mike thought that the sense of threat that hung over the ruins was not something cold steel or arrowheads could assuage.

“Survivors? A few. All raving mad, except for some kids who hid out in attics and sewers and such,” the rancher replied. Suddenly his face woke from the calm of shock. “What’s the point of all this?”

Chancellor Ignatius spoke with a calm grimness.

“To deny us a base for operations and to make reconstruction harder in the long term, Rancher Brown,” he said. “And from pure malignance, the desire to inflict pain for its own sake.”

Brown shook his head. “Our intelligence from before…before this said the Cutter garrison had their HQ up ahead, in…”

“A church dedicated to St. Francis,” Ignatius said, nodding at the brick structure ahead of them.

It was on a slight rise, with stone steps leading up to the front doors and a big rose window over them.

“They didn’t burn that, looks like,” Brown observed. “Not like them to be respectful.”

“They were not,” Ignatius snapped, his eyes questing. “They took it for their own uses.”

“I’ll take a look, then,” Eric said, swinging down from the saddle.

Ignatius sighed and said: “Is that wise, Lord Eric?”

Eric shrugged. “It’s quick…don’t worry, I’m not going alone.”

His guards formed around him; Ignatius did too, and put his shield on his arm and drew his sword. Even then, Mike smiled a little to himself. If his uncle had a fault as a war-leader, it was the same headlong courage that made him so formidable and feared. He exchanged a grin with Will Larsson. He and Eric’s eldest son stayed mounted and ready behind.

Asking permission just gives someone the chance to say no, he reflected. One of the unofficial lessons.

The Bearkillers-and one Knight-Brother of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict-formed up and walked up the stairs into the church. The tall windows would provide enough light, even at this time of day. There was a pause, and then…

Eric Larsson, called Steel-Fist, stumbled out. The battle-hardened guard detail followed, backing frantically, their shields raised but the swords slack in their hands. Ignatius followed them; he had sheathed his blade and slung his long shield over his back, and he had his rosary and crucifix in his hands instead.

Appalled, several of the Bearkiller A-Listers started towards Eric. He waved them back. They could hear the clank of armor as the big man staggered around a snag of ruin and fell to his knees, retching noisily. Men and women were looking at each other. The war chief of the Bearkillers was notoriously a hard man; not cruel, but sometimes short on mercy, and the product of a generation’s fights.

“What was in there?” Will Larsson asked, and Mike nodded.

That is the question.

“What was in there that did that to Uncle Eric?” he added thoughtfully.

Eric Larsson returned, accepted a canteen from one of his followers, rinsed and spat and then drank.

“No,” he barked when heads turned towards the entrance to the church. “Stay out. Christ have mercy…right after the Change, Mike and I-”

Even then, Mike Havel had the usual moment’s twinge at his father’s name. There were drawbacks to being the son of a legend, especially to one who’d died too early for you to remember him.

“-smoked out a nest of Eaters. That was almost as…but they were just crazy. This-”

The rayed sun had been painted across the doors there, and the cross that had stood above lay smashed some distance from it.

“No indeed, my sons,” Ignatius said slowly in agreement, walking over to push the doors closed. “There are things no man should have to see.”

“Yes,” Eric agreed. Very softly: “They’re too hard to forget. Twenty-five years won’t do it. Don’t anyone ask me. Ever. And burn this. Get some combat engineers in here and burn it now.”

He was silent as they rode back to the Bearkiller encampment. Ignatius excused himself with a simple: I must pray. Eric brooded until the camp cooks handed around their plates of salt pork stewed with beans and rolled wheat tortillas. Then he pushed his food around the plate for a moment before he looked up at his son and nephew.

“There’s one good thing about this,” he said quietly; the camp-fire underlit his face, showing how grooves had begun to seam it.

“Yes, sir?” Mike asked.

“It’s a good thing to know why you’re fighting,” Eric said. “And that it isn’t just because the other guy’s as big a son of a bitch as you are.”

COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK

BARONY OF TUCANNON

(FORMERLY SOUTHEASTERN WASHINGTON STATE)

PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

DECEMBER 12TH, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

“I am sorry, my lord Tucannon,” Rudi Mackenzie said gently.

Castle Tucannon stood on its hilltop, a spur of land reaching out from the foothills of the Blue Mountains. There were scorch-marks on the dark walls, but looking at the slope-and the way the spur had been severed off into an island by a deep cut across the neck that connected it to the higher lands-Rudi wondered that anyone had been foolish enough to try. Only someone truly desperate, or utterly mad or both would have sent men against those frowning battlements. It was a fairly big castle, a doubled mirror-keep, and high enough that the catapults on its crenellated walls would have commanded every inch of the approach. A ponderosa-pine signal spire on the tallest tower had kept it connected to the heliograph net centered on Walla Walla all through the siege.

The manor of Grimmond-on-the-Wold below had suffered much more. Few roofs were left and the barns and winery and gristmill, sawmill and stables at the end of the long village street were wrecked. The Baron’s house in particular had been utterly demolished, its thick pise walls pushed in to make an irregular mound that the winter rains were turning into mud; the High King was surprised to see his sister Mary wiping at her one eye as she came out of the empty gates.

“The gardens were so beautiful,” she said. “When Ingolf and I were here in the tail-end of summer. Like something out of the Histories, gardens in Lothlorien or Dol Amroth.”

The Baron’s mother, Lady Roehis de Grimmond-who’d been born Jenny Fassbinder, more than sixty years before-smiled distantly and patted her shoulder. She was in a plain kirtle and wimple of brown and gray, her face gentle and thin.

“I started them, dear,” she said. “My lord Amauri and I, two years after the Change. I can do it again. The damage isn’t really as bad as it looks; remember, this is winter. Most of the roots and bulbs will have survived. The house was timber and soil and we have lots of both.”

“It can wait, Your Majesty,” Baron Maugis said, looking at the thick stumps of the oaks and maples that had lined the town square here in front of his dwelling. “We can live in the castle for a few years. My father did before he built the manor. He planted these trees for me; I can plant more, for my son’s sake. The war’s not over, for that matter, even if we’ve kicked them out of this district.”

He was a young man in his twenties, of medium height and gaunt now, but strong-looking, with a pleasantly ugly face, bowl-cut reddish hair and prominent ears. He and the fighting captains behind him were worn as the patched leather and wool of their gear, but they’d held out in the mountains for months, and their raids had made their occupier’s lives less than pleasant and the supply situation a nightmare. More folk crowded behind, retainers and ordinary craftsfolk and peasants down from the mountain refuges where they’d lived in tents and caves and old forest-ranger cabins in the heights that lay blue and jagged eastward. This was a fine spot for a town, though none had lain here before the Change; good water, shelter from the worst winter winds, and plowland and pasture and timber all available close at hand.

Not to mention a very bonny view, of the mountains…the dawn sun will be a fine sight there…and of the plains away to the east. I think this man’s father chose wisely, and his son seems of no less wit and of great heart besides. I’m usually easier with lords in the Protectorate who are Changelings. Though from what Mary said, this one’s father came here to get away from Matti’s sire, the which is a strong argument in his favor.

A wagon train was also curled up the main street; the drovers and the escort and the local folk were unloading crated hardtack, barrels of salt meat and dried fruit and sacks of beans and flour, bales of blankets and tools and sausages of tent-canvas. Some of the locals were wrapping themselves in blankets, or their children; it was a dry cold day, with the wind carrying particles of grit that made you blink if you faced into it.

“What really worries me is that we didn’t get the winter crop planted this fall,” the Baron said, nodding to the rolling fields to the north and east. “We stripped out most of our gear before we took to the hills, but nothing can roll the seasons back, here or at my vassals’ manors.”

You could see the layout of the Five Great Fields where the strips of the peasant holdings had lain, and the demesne fields of the manor-holder’s home farm; there was a biggish vineyard on a south-facing slope that looked to have survived, and most of the trees in the orchards hadn’t been harmed. The sweet clover and alfalfa planted in the Great Fields as rotation and fodder crops were there yet, though heavily grazed by the occupiers; but the potatoes had been dug and stolen, and the fields that should have been green with the young winter wheat were under nothing but a scurf of weeds and incipient bush. That was enough to worry anyone.

Mathilda pulled up and dismounted, passing her reins to a squire with a word of thanks as her guardian men-at-arms and mounted crossbowmen backed out of the crush. She was in civilian riding garb, a divided skirt and jacket of russet brown, with a plumed Montero cap pulled over her brown braids.

“Lord Maugis, you’ll have seed corn and working stock enough by spring,” she said, as the commons touched a knee to the ground and the nobleman bowed and kissed her extended hand in fealty. “As Lady Protector-”

That’s right, Rudi thought with a blink of surprise. Matti’s twenty-six this coming year, and inherits. Not that Sandra will be going to a nunnery or dower-house; we need her too much, and sure, she’d die of boredom without administration and intrigues and secrets.

“-I’m going to order a capital levy on every intact manor and Chartered town in the Protectorate to help rebuild the County Palatine. The Association takes care of its own.”

There was a murmur of delight from the commons crowding behind the knights and their retainers; they had crossbows and shields and spears in their hands, swords at their belts, but their eyes lit at the thought of more plow-oxen and earth curling away from the harrows and seed-drills. A cheer went up from them all, for Mathilda and the prospect of sacks of grain and beans resting secure in their barns come next August.

“And you have the High Kingdom behind you,” Rudi said when it died down.

He laid a hand on the Baron’s shoulder; some things should be said and done publicly.

“I give you my thanks as well, and all Montival’s,” he said firmly. “The enemy troops you and your fellow lords of the Palatinate tied down may well have made the difference between victory and defeat at the battle in the Horse Heaven Hills. It was a close-run thing, there at the end, and there were all too many of them as it was. I say to you and your vassals and all your followers well-done, and very well-done. You sacrificed much for the Kingdom, and the King will not forget it.”

Maugis flushed out to his prominent ears and went to his knees; Rudi took the man’s hands between his. Behind them there was a pleased buzz at the honor done to all through their lord.

“I am your man, of life and limb and all earthly worship, my King,” he said. “God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost and the Holy Virgin witness it!”

That was an abbreviated version of the usual ceremony of homage, but nobody could doubt the sincerity. The Count of the Eastermark was in Rudi’s train at the moment, and he was the Baron’s immediate feudal superior, but he smiled and nodded as Rudi replied, also shortening it:

“I accept your homage, Maugis de Grimmond; your enemies shall be mine and none shall do you wrong save at their peril; my sword shall be yours to call upon; I will hold your honor dear as my own and give you fair justice and good lordship.”

Maugis was smiling as he rose and stepped back, though there was a very odd expression on his mother’s face, happiness mixed with some strange detachment or incredulity. Rudi looked at her and shrugged mentally; he would never really or wholly understand the generation that had been adults before the Change, even the ones he’d grown up with. The lord of Tucannon was smiling even more broadly as he brought his lady forward by the hand. She was in a riding habit much like Mathilda’s, a slim young woman with tilted eyes of a very pale blue and raven-black hair falling in a silk torrent down her back from beneath a light headdress, her face lovely but tired with an exhaustion that had little to do with sleep. An infant and a toddler were in the care of a nurse behind her, but she led a six-year-old boy by the hand herself.

“My lady wife, Helissent de Grimmond, your Majesties,” Maugis said proudly. “And the war-captain who held Castle Tucannon for me…and your Majesties…all through the siege, while we harried the enemy.”

She sank down gracefully, hands spreading her habit slightly as she knelt and bowed her head; the boy did a creditable imitation of his father’s reverence.

“Rise, my lady Helissent,” Rudi said, and Mathilda gave the other woman the kiss on both cheeks that was also a mark of favor. “I am in your debt as well, then.”

The boy beamed. “I fired a catapult! Lots of times. I turned the wheel and pulled the lanyard when Captain Grifflet said to and everything! Squished ’em like bugs!” he said with an innocently murderous glee. Then hastily: “Your Majesty.”

“Did you indeed, young sir?” Rudi said, grinning.

“He did,” Helissent said. “As often as we’d let him! My son Aleaume, Your Majesty.”

The young heir of Tucannon had his mother’s eyes. That prompted something as the High King rested his hand on the moonstone pommel of the Sword…

“Lady Helissent, you’d be from Skagit, originally? Your brother Adhémar de Sego holds as a vassal of the Barons of Skagit?”

“Yes, Your Majesty, he holds Sego Manor by knight-service to the Delbys,” she said, obviously pleased. “As my father did while he lived.”

“Sir Adhémar gained much honor at the Horse Heaven battle with the menie of House Delby, Lady Helissent. He was wounded capturing an enemy banner, but he’s healing well and expected to be on his feet in a few weeks. And your younger brother Sir Raymbaud-”

“Raymbaud’s been knighted?” she said, startled into a broad grin.

“By the High Queen’s own hand, for his valor in the charge against the Prophet’s guardsmen. They’re both at Walla Walla now with the main body. They should be able to visit you soon, perhaps over Christmas.”

“My thanks, your Majesties!” she said. “You honor us.”

“Not beyond your worth,” Mathilda said.

Young Aleaume decided that there had been enough conversation about people he didn’t know.

“Is that the Sword of the Lady, Your Majesty?” he asked. “The one from Heaven, like Excalibur in the stories?”

“Indeed it is, young lord,” Rudi said, making a slight motion of his hand to halt the shushing his mother hadn’t quite started. “Here.”

He went down on one knee himself and pulled the sheathed Sword free of the frow on his belt, resting it across his palms at about the boy’s height. The young face went serious as the boy tentatively extended a hand and rested it on the glowing stone for a moment. Then he snatched it back, but his face lit up as he met Rudi’s gray-green-blue gaze.

“Did a lady give it to you in a lake? Or did you pull it from a stone?” The boy frowned. “Arthur did both, didn’t he?”

Rudi nodded. “Accounts differ. Now, this was given to me by three holy ladies, and that on a forbidden island in a distant sea guarded by pirates and awful magic. And it has lain in a sheath of stone beside a lake here in our land of Montival, and worked wonders.”

Aleaume nodded in satisfaction. “And you won the great battle with it!”

“I did indeed,” Rudi said gravely. “With this and the aid of many brave men like your father.”

Cocking an eye at Mathilda and then his sister Mary: “And many a brave woman as well.”

“When I’m big I shall fight for you too, Your Majesty!” Aleaume said. “I’ll be your man, and slay dozens and dozens…and, and hundreds of cruel and wicked enemies for you!”

“You may indeed fight by my side someday,” Rudi answered him, putting a hand on the boy’s head for an instant before he rose and reseated the Sword. “Or by the side of my heir, who’s expected along in spring, and we’ll be well served if you prove as brave a knight and as good a lord as your father.”

The Baron of Tucannon and his lady offered congratulations. Rudi grinned at Mathilda, the wonder still on him.

“I thank you, my lord, my lady, though sincere as it is, you’re not half so happy as we! Now-”

There was a clatter of hooves, a challenge and response, and Ingolf swung down from his horse and came towards them with a look of intense predatory satisfaction on his battered face, slapping mud off his breeches with the gloves in his left hand.

“Good news?” Rudi asked, as Mary came over to lay an arm around the big man’s waist.

“Damned good! The Boise commander in Castle Campscapell just turned on the Prophet’s men there. Did it real neat and tidy in the middle of the night, too. A few of them are still holding out in the central keep, but they’re bottled up tight, and Hauken, that’s his name, he’s declared for Fred and opened the main gates and our men are inside.”

The news ran through the crowd and there was a rolling cheer; Aleaume was jumping up and down, certain that the foe’s doom was upon them.

The which is not so far from at least a local truth, Rudi thought, smiling with a slight show of teeth and tapping his right fist into his left palm in three slow strokes. His mind went on, weighing factors:

Campscapell is a great keep and in a notable bottleneck. Now the cork is in our hands and we can keep it closed or go east through there just as we choose. Losing the castle was a bad blow, and regaining it a wind at our back. I must…no, let Fred reward this Hauken. He’ll know how to do it properly.

Rudi raised a hand for silence after the cheers started to fade.

“Well, my friends, I’d been planning a feast of celebration here-for which we brought slaughter stock, cattle and sheep, doubly sweet for being doubly stolen as the saying goes-”

Another cheer rose on a different note, less carnivore glee and more straightforward hungry happiness; the local folk hadn’t actually starved, but they’d gone short and nobody either noble or commons had been eating their fill of roasted fresh meat lately.

“-and some most promising barrels. We’ll feast this night and drink to your homes reclaimed and to this news of a victory won without blood-”

None of ours, at least

“-as an omen of things to come.”

Maugis de Grimmond stepped back and drew his sword. “Artos and Montival!” he shouted, holding it high.

“Artos and Montival!”

LARSDALEN, BEARKILLER HQ

HALL OF REMEMBRANCE

(FORMERLY WEST-CENTRAL WILLAMETTE, OREGON)

HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

DECEMBER 19TH, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

The Bearkillers held feast for their dead in the great hall of Larsdalen.

The long rectangular room fell silent, the buzz of conversation and laughter that had filled it during the feast dying as the ceremonial drinking-horns were set out in their wrought stands, rimmed and tipped with gold or silver and carved with running interlaced animal-patterns. The central hearth flickered and boomed beneath a hood of burnished copper that led the smoke upward; snow fell against the tall windows, whispers of cold white in the darkness, but within all was warmth and light-an image ancient in the poetry of their peoples.

A fair place, this Larsdalen, Bjarni Eriksson thought. No fairer than my mead-hall, but larger and richer…and strange, like its dwellers, full of things alien and familiar and mixtures of the two, like stories seen in dreams.

Firelight and lantern-light shone on the oak wainscoting between the tall windows, wrought in sinuous forms from tales he remembered and some he’d never known; he recognized Sigurd and Fafnir, Burnt Njal, Orm the Strong, Odhinn’s quest for wisdom and his old friend Thor wrestling with the World Snake. It was hung with weapons and shields as well-round concave ones marked with the Bear, backswords and lances and recurve bows, stands of plate armor and captured trophies and banners.

The fire scented the air with the subtly alien smell of burning Douglas fir, not quite like the pinewood blazes he knew, and the fine beeswax of candles from the wrought-iron chandeliers overhead; his folk used tallow mainly. Rather than young maidens, it was military apprentices who brought round the jugs, and they were full of wine from the local vineyards rather than the honey-mead that was the drink of ceremony back home, for those who could afford it.

Now wine, there’s a thing of which I approve, he thought, grinning to himself and smacking his lips a little. The vineyards are full of gnarled and ugly plants, but what they make…ah, that’s a different matter!

Back in Norrheim, wine was something they knew only from bottles Vikings salvaged from the dead cities-hardly familiar enough to really tell what was still good from what had spoiled in the long years since the Change. They called the tipples made from berries and herbs wines, but here in Montival he’d come to know the difference. The feast had been fine too, smoking platters of beef ribs, roast pork, made dishes more complex than they used in Norrheim and fantastical desserts of pastry and ice cream and fruits like cherries and apricots that were only names in the cold land that he ruled.

One thing that was the same was the roistering, roaring defiance in the face of death and grief. Even if some of these folk followed the White Christ, they knew the Nine Virtues, of which courage was the first.

He stayed quiet as the Bearkillers remembered their fallen, as was respectful, and kept an eye on young Halldor Syfridsson beside him to make sure he did as well.

“Easy, easy,” he said to him quietly, while Eric Larsson invoked the White Christ for those of the fallen who had followed Him. “This isn’t mead. It’s stronger. Drink it more like whiskey, not for thirst like beer.”

The young man’s grin was a little foolish. A woman at the table across the open space from theirs was giving him cool considering stares; she was a little older, which still made her young enough-Halldor was in his late teens yet, and had come at his father’s side on the great journey west. His father, Syfrid Jerrisson, had laid his bones fighting the CUT in Drumheller, and now the youngster was godhi of the Hrossings, though they didn’t know it yet.

If they hail him when he stands on their Thingstone, Bjarni thought. But they will; he’s his father’s son, and shrewd, and already a fell fighter. I’ll be glad of it, and of a strong ally as chieftain of another tribe, a man who’s seen the wider world and understands my thoughts. Syfrid and I were rivals more than friends; he never forgot seeing me as a child in my father’s hall when he was a man grown, and thought he should be king in Norrheim. Halldor will be no man’s puppet, but we’ll deal more easily, I think. Hmmm. Perhaps when my sister Gudrun is old enough to wed…better to wait on that, perhaps throw them in each other’s way and see how they suit. Still, a good thought. I’ll talk it over with Hallberga when I get back.

“I drink to our glorious dead,” Signe Havel called from the high table where she and the Bearkiller leaders and Bjarni sat.

She raised a horn carved and wrought with silver runes at mouth and tip, her voice as fiercely comely as her face as she looked down the long chamber, mourning and pride as naked as a she-wolf’s.

“May they feast with the High One this night. May His daughters bear them the mead of heroes, and greet the new-come einherjar thus at the gates of Vallhöl:

“Drink hail!” she finished.

“Wassail!” ran down the tables in a roaring shout.

When the toast and ceremony was finished, Bjarni Eriksson stood and raised his own horn of wine.

“To our alliance,” he called. “True folk, shoulder to shoulder and shield to shield against our foes-from here to the eastern sea. Drink hail!”

“Wassail!”

Eric’s beard and mane were bright against his dark clothing as he went on after Bjarni sat:

“Brothers and sisters of the A-List; Bearkillers of the Outfit; friends and allies from far away,” he said. “The last time we feasted our dead, we celebrated a fighting retreat.”

He grinned and held up his steel fist; the burnished metal caught the flame-light and sent it back.

“And I left this hand on that battlefield. Now we celebrate a great victory. To victory-drink hail!”

“Wassail!”

This time the cheer made the roof shake. Not long after the first of the feasters left; Bjarni noticed that Eric and Signe, and their young sons, were drinking lightly however many times their horns were raised. A few minutes later Halldor was gone, and the one he’d been trading glances with like whetted swords. It was not long until the leaders were nearly alone at the high seat and could talk privately; this was a feast, but held after far faring and hard fighting and wounds for many. That bred a weariness that didn’t go away with a few nights’ rest. Shadows gathered as lamps burned down, as if to keep the talk cloaked, and the banners stirred overhead with a whisper of thick cloth.

“So,” Bjarni said, putting down his horn in the wrought silver rest; the wine buzzed a little in his ears, but only enough to speed wits. “How long do you think this war will go on?”

Eric and Signe exchanged a look. Signe inclined her head to her brother and he answered:

“There will be little bands of horse-bandits raiding stock and calling on the Prophet and the Ascended Masters for a generation in the far interior,” he said, looking down into his wine. “But how long until we take Corwin and burn it to the ground and gut or hang the last of the High Seekers? No more than two years at most.”

Signe signed the Hammer for luck, and Bjarni touched the silver one around his neck; Eric nodded to acknowledge that he was tempting fate a little, but went on:

“One year, if Boise goes as well as looks likely; possibly before the snow falls next year, if the League of Des Moines pushes hard.”

“Good,” Bjarni said. “Then my revenge for the attack on my people will be taken and my oath to Artos Mikesson will be fulfilled, and I have my own kingdom to see to.”

“After the Horse Heaven Hills, no-one in the Nine Worlds could deny you’ve done what you swore,” Signe said. “The enemy dead were piled before your men’s shields; I saw it when we were riding next day all along where the battle line had stood. The ravens and coyotes and lobos feasted well. For its size, your force did as well as anyone on that field.”

“Or better!” Bjarni said with a fierce grin. More slowly: “I’ve done more than fight and feast here. I’ve seen that you in Montival…and the Midwesterners…have arts that we in Norrheim lack. Machines, tools, knowledge. I want them for my folk. A king’s might is the wealth and strength of his people.”

The two Bearkillers looked at each other, then back at him.

“Good fortune to you, Bjarni Ironrede,” Signe said. “That shows a proper spirit in a ruler. But hasn’t the High King promised you aid?”

“Yes, and he’ll fulfill that,” Bjarni said. “He and I swore blood-brotherhood in my own hall, and he’s a man who keeps his oaths. But I would not have Norrheim dependent on one man’s bounty, even a blood-brother who is a mighty king. A king so mighty that he doesn’t need anything I have.”

“Or you could seek more traffic with the Midwesterners, they’re closer,” Signe said.

Bjarni grinned in his red beard. “Too close for comfort and entirely too numerous. I want them to think as little of me and mine as they may. Let them look west, or north, or south, anywhere but towards me and mine. You, on the other hand, are not only friends…you’re distant friends.”

“Easier to stay friends when there’s nothing to quarrel over,” Signe observed.

“What do you want of us, then?” Eric added bluntly. “We’re friends, I hope, and battle comrades. But we have our own problems here, our duty is to the Outfit and Montival, and Norrheim is very far away. Until Rudi got back, we hadn’t even heard you existed or that there was anything but bones and Eaters left in Maine.”

Bjarni stroked his beard. “Good! No weasel words between us, then. Norrheim is far away, but we have treasure. Our Vikings scour the dead cities, and those of the east are greater than those of the West, and fewer have plundered them. Artos and I showed that men could cross the continent, and in some numbers and without taking many years about it. After the war, things will travel that way again, things and men.”

“I can’t see much trade. Not for a very long time, centuries, if ever. Too much wilderness and wild-men in the way, too few people at either end,” Signe said.

Bjarni nodded. “Not many merchants, not heavy goods, and not often. But a few things of great price, now and then, yes. We used the rail-lines coming back with Artos; and there are the inland seas, that come almost as far west as the Dominions. We have skillful sailors in Norrheim and light boats that can be portaged. You’d have to trust my promises, of course, and we’d have to settle things in detail before we put our hands to the oath-ring.”

“You’re a hard man, but one to trust when he pledges an oath,” Eric said, and his sister nodded. “Take it as given that we’ll accept your word if we reach an agreement.”

“So what do you want in return for this treasure?” Signe added, sipping from her horn.

“Men,” Bjarni said. “And women, for that matter. Those with knowledge of your arts; metalworking with machines, fighting from horseback, catapults, balloons, spinning-mills, railroads, all of it. Books are good, but not enough. Tools, samples, and…what do you call them, diagrams, yes. But above all, folk with the skills to use them and teach others. Perhaps apprenticeships here for Norrheimers.”

Eric smiled. “No insult, friend, but I’ve listened to your tales of Norrheim. Why would anyone leave the Willamette for a place where the growing season is two months shorter? And where there aren’t even any hops for the beer? We’re not crowded. There’s good land untilled not five miles from Larsdalen. It’ll take a long while to fill the Willamette alone. And later, there’s the whole of California and much else besides.”

Bjarni made a gesture of acknowledgment with one spade-shaped, red-furred hand.

“Norrheim is cold and poor compared to your land here; but on my journey with Artos Mikesson I saw much land that wasn’t. Rich land around the inland seas; what they called Quebec and Ontario in the old world, and the south shore is good too. Rich land thinly peopled, and the dwellers ignorant savages who lost all arts in the Change, who live on rabbits and freeze in the winters. Fine farmland, timber, plenty of ruins for salvage and the lakes for fishing and trade.”

“The savages are Eaters,” Eric said, and Signe made a slight moue of disgust.

“Not all of them; some are just poor and backward, like the South Side Freedom Fighters that Artos befriended, Jake Jakesson and the others, who’ve settled in the Mackenzie lands now. And my own folk grow in numbers. We live wide-scattered, but that’s from choice and because good plowland is scattered too, and our farms raise many strong sons and daughters along with the barley and rye. It’s in my mind that Norrheim could take much of that land around the Great Lakes. Settle some of our people there, and by their might and their craft bring the dwellers…or their children…back to the life of real men, with fields and farms and homes. They’re of blood kindred to our own. And we could bring them seemly ways and knowledge of the true Gods, not just the edge of an ax. And I could make those I favored lords and chiefs there, who have no such prospects here, with broad lands and followers. In time…in time, a realm as great as Montival, or nearly. For my descendants, if I lay the foundations.”

“You’re not afraid to dream grandly,” Signe said, giving him a long look.

Eric laughed. “You and I might disagree on the true Gods,” he said, touching the cross around his neck. “But otherwise, yes, I see what you mean. There might be some here who would find your offer attractive; some Bearkillers, though I warn you any willing to take such a leap would likely have big eyes and be troublesome. Broken men elsewhere who’ve lost everything in the war and need a fresh start anyway. You wouldn’t have the time or knowledge to find them, or not many of them and not the right ones, but…”

“But we Bearkillers would, since we have the contacts,” Signe said thoughtfully. “And I wouldn’t mind seeing those true to the Aesir spread their rule, if it didn’t cost my own folk much and we had recompense from that treasure you mention. We’ve won much glory in this war, and we’ll get much more, but not much plunder. More, we-the Outfit, not the High Kingdom-don’t stand to acquire more land, either.”

“All we’re likely to get in Corwin is hard knocks and some scrawny cattle,” Eric said as he stretched his thick-muscled arms. “It needs doing but that’s all you can say.”

Signe nodded. “Revenge is good, but you can’t eat it or make shoes for your children out of it. Yes, Bjarni King, we should talk further about this. There will be time, over the year to come.”

Eric abandoned his restraint and drained his horn, then turned it over to show that there was nothing left inside.

“It’s wonderful how victory opens possibilities,” he said. “It enlarges men’s minds, like good wine. And sometimes makes them drunk, too.”

“The end of one saga is the beginning of the next.” Bjarni nodded. “And the hanger-on of one can be the hero of another.”

“And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a wife waiting,” the big man said.

“So do I,” Bjarni mused when he’d left. “But unfortunately, she’s a continent away. She has our children and our household to occupy her, too; only memories and hopes for me.”

“Your wife will have you back, and you’ll dwell with her all your days,” Signe said thoughtfully, and raised her horn. “I toast her luck.”

Then she raised it again to the vacant chair at the center of the high table, with the Bear Helm laid on it and a great sword across the rests.

“I’m a lonely widow, and my man is dead these fifteen years. There will be no homecoming for me, not in this life.”

Bjarni toasted it as well. “But life goes on, and we make the best of it.”