The Desert and the Blade Page 14

  He knew Dúnedain customs well enough. They guarded the High King’s peace when there was no war, and were scouts and raiders when there was, and by preference they lived in woods and waste places. The Rangers thought it better than tilling the earth, and it certainly had its excitements and air of mystery, but it meant living a bit like full-time warriors under the discipline of command all your life, albeit it was also a family business.

  “We’re not to press on to China Camp the now?”

  “What people don’t see, they don’t have to take official notice of,” Susan amplified. “That’s what Faramir and Morfind said.”

  “Ah,” Karl said, and Diarmuid grunted.

  Both of them meant the same thing; what the rulers of Stath Ingolf—which was to say the Dúnedain pair’s parents—didn’t officially see they wouldn’t have to report to the High Queen. They might know, what with their own children involved; they might suspect; or they might just be very busy elsewhere. Nobody could tell for sure, which was pretty much the point.

  “We’ll get you a bit farther west, camp you out, and then rush for Círbann Rómenadrim when the ship comes in. Nobody actually lives there full-time, there’s just the wharf and some boats and some sheds for storing stuff when a ship comes in, but folks go back and forth from there to the Eryn Muir all the time.”

  “Aye, that’s fair ca’canny,” Diarmuid said. “Good sensible caution,” he added, when he saw how the others were baffled by the dialect term.

  “And we’ve set up a campground here on the Finney farm—there’s firewood, a spring and pool of good water, and supplies,” she said.

  Then she smiled. “Fresh-risen bread, vegetables. And a case of the red wine they make at Tham en-Araf. And a pig ready to over the fire, plus Faramir kicked in some of his mother’s chipotle BBQ sauce—it ain’t buffalo hump steak at the fall hunt, but I won’t kick.”

  “Tham en-Araf?” Diarmuid said.

  “Wolf Hall,” she added. “Where Morfind’s parents live—Lady Mary and Lord Ingolf—over the other side of the valley. The Prancing Pony in Eryn Muir brews damn good beer, too, now that some of the settlers here are growing hops, and Faramir brought some crocks.”

  Karl could feel ears perking up among his followers and Diarmuid smacked his lips; they were hungry, weary, and thirsty in more ways than one. That nasty little skirmish with the bandits had blooded the band without too much loss, no dead and only a few badly wounded who’d had to be left in the clinic at White Mountain. It had still left them all a bit shaken by the speed and brutality of the fighting, and they could all use a bit of a rest and a revel. His own ears pricked as well, but he turned an eye on Gwri. She was still frowning, and she shrugged reluctantly.

  Maybe it’s Da at our heels. I’m too old for him to grab by the ear and wallop on the backside the now . . . but my guts are shriveling at the thought of him, that they are.

  • • •

  White Mountain town was named for the towering peak just visible to the northwards, a volcanic cone whose top was still snowclad in July, tinged red now as the sun sank westwards; the ancient world had called it Shasta.

  The commander of the High King’s Archers found that cool pale sight a bit of a taunt by the Powers, given the way the hot dry air was sucking at the sweat it brought pouring from your skin down here in the lowland, leaving a rime of salt behind to itch in sensitive places. There was a green smell in the air from the irrigated fields that started twice long bowshot ahead and a densely forested strip along the river to their left, but white salt-tasting dust coated his face and hands, and it was hotter than he could remember the Willamette ever being. For a moment homesickness was bitter.

  Not hotter than deserts across the mountains in summertime, though, he thought sturdily. And Balor of the Single Eye knows I’ve seen enough of that country, on the Quest and in the war time and afterwards. Easier to take heat when it’s dry like this, too. Now the sunrise lands in summer, Iowa and the rest, that was hard to take. You felt as if mushrooms would sprout from your crotch and armpits at any moment.

  “Nearly there, sir,” the mounted scout who’d met them said; his comrade had galloped on towards White Mountain to alert their officers.

  Edain grunted in reply as he jogged along the road between pale fields of faded golden grass and patches of eucalyptus and Valley oak with his unstrung bow pumping in his left hand.

  The outpost itself was not far south of the ruins of Redding, a settlement of the ancients at the northward end of the great central valley of Westria Province. The city had emptied in the year after the Change—it was just remote enough that the agony had probably been more prolonged than in the megalopolis farther south. What was left after the fires had largely been swept away in the floods since, especially the monstrous crests that poured like tidal waves of water and rock and rubble down the valley of the Sacramento as the great dams in the mountains lost their battle with earthquakes and corrosion in the spillways and cresting waters in wet springs.

  The rammed earth fort was new, and the earth mound it stood on, and the little town at its foot, all laid out since the Montivallans came. It was well back from the tree-covered floodplain, safer since the natural rhythm of retreat and advance had resumed, though there was a floating dock out into the water of the broad river with several craft tied up that ranged from canoes to sailing barges.

  The two squat towers of the modest fort rising into sight as they jogged bore the Stars and Stripes as well as the Crowned Mountain and Sword of Montival, both of course flying at half-mast just now. When the High Kingdom reached its hand out to this part of the new province the particular finger was in the form of a battalion of troops from the United States of Boise—what some stubborn traditionalists in that inland member-realm of Montival insisted was the United States of America.

  Edain admired the Boiseans wholeheartedly as warriors—he’d seen them fight on both sides in the Prophet’s War, which had been a civil strife for them—and they certainly worked like well-organized beavers, or bullocks, at whatever they turned their hands to. Their ruler for the first generation after the Change, Lawrence Thurston, had been a commander in the old American army, a Ranger in a different sense from the modern use of the term. Edain had met him once shortly before his death: a man very hard, and very able, and very much concerned with order and system. It had struck deep into the souls of his folk, under him and his son Fred.

  People generally didn’t mention his elder son Martin, the parricide, usurper and traitor who’d become the Prophet’s puppet in Boise for a time.

  Fred I like, what with the Quest and hence living in each other’s sporrans for a year the way we did, and fighting the war in company with him; you know a man well after that. His folk in general, though . . .

  The Boiseans assigned here had thrown up the fort almost overnight, then sent for their families or made their own while they built much else; they called such settlements coloniae. It had been less than a decade, but now there was a ring of modest but comfortable-looking farmsteads stretching out in a checkerboard, rambling low-slung whitewashed dwellings with red-tile roofs set in colorful little gardens and each with its wind-pump spinning. The square fields of yellow reaped stubble or green-and-gold tasseling corn were interspersed by roads and irrigation ditches, surrounded by pasture where horses and cattle and sheep grazed. There were ancient but newly pruned silvery-gray olive groves cleared of the thickets of spindly saplings that had grown up in the long years of neglect, and young green vineyards and orchards of peach and fig and more.

  All amid a pleasant bustle of carts and children and the clatter and hum of folk about the close of their working day. Woodsmoke scented the air, a little different from what he was used to because much of it was eucalyptus burning, and the good smells of cooking. The oddest part was that there were few adults over thirty. Or children past their early years, though full plenty of those.
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br />   A column of troops perhaps two-score strong came trotting out of the fort to greet the newcomers, to the thutter of a drum and a complex bugle-call from the hoarse tubae on the gatehouse wall. An officer marched at their head, a red crest cross-wise on his helm and a vine-stock swaggerstick in his hand. The soldiers following behind him wore a plainer version of his armor of polished hoops and bands over chest and shoulders and belly, with big curved oval shields marked with the eagle-and-thunderbolts, short leaf-shaped stabbing-swords worn high on the right hip, and heavy six-foot javelins with iron shanks.

  Their legs moved in perfect unison like a centipede as they jogged along at the quickstep, chanting:

  “Yanks to the charge! cried Thurston.

  The foe begins to yield!

  So strike—”

  —and each hobnailed right boot struck the road.

  “For hearth and nation!

  So strike—”

  —another stamp.

  “For the Eagle Shield!

  Let no man stop for plunder,

  But slay, and slay, and slay;

  The Gods who helped our fathers

  Fight by our sides today!”

  —and they stopped with a final uniform crash of hobnails against the rock pavement.

  They came to attention, rapped their long iron-shod javelins against their shields, then turned and made ranks on either side of the roadway, shield held against the left shoulder and spear to the side, the butt braced against the right foot, tanned faces like shapes carved from oiled wood and every point in precise alignment.

  It was discipline for discipline’s own sake, formal as a dance, but with an undertone of grim relentless intent. He’d seen them, or more likely with this lot their fathers, maneuver just like that during real fights with arrows thudding into their shields and globes of hard steel and liquid fire arching across the sky from catapult batteries. While the wounded screamed like the Woman of the Mounds on a rooftree . . . And it worked, chewing through the murderous bewildering complexities of battle like a power-saw in a mill through tough wood.

  He tapped his bow to his brow, thus returning the punctilious salute of the officer of the detachment; the Boisean form was the right fist to the chest, then thrust out at eye-height. Enlisted men in full gear did it with their spears to the shield, then the spear held out.

  It was all rather impressive, given how far they were from home—or how close they were to the arse-end of nowhere-in-particular—and what they’d had to work with.

  But for all their virtues they mostly have a serious pickle up the back way, that they do, besides being just wrongheaded about a good deal and stubborn withal, he thought. They’re an easier folk to respect than to like, and that’s the truth of the matter.

  “Commandant von Sydow will be anxious to see you, Bow-Captain Aylward,” the young officer said. “Your command is welcome in our mess hall and the Commandant extends an invitation to dinner for you and—”

  “It’s in a bit of a hurry I am,” Edain said.

  Though the thought of a decent meal and a bath and a full night’s sleep in a good bed did arouse longing. The plain fact of the matter was . . .

  That I am after getting a wee bit old for this shite, he thought. Or have gotten, so.

  He went on to the Boisean: “A party of Mackenzies and McClintocks? Coming through here also in a hurry, just now? My son Karl would be one of their leaders, and the tacksman Diarmuid Tennart McClintock the other.”

  “Why, yes, they left yesterday morning,” the officer said with enthusiastic helpfulness; he had a faint blond fuzz on his upper lip, probably meant for a mustache.

  Either that or a wee little caterpillar has crawled there and died and he didn’t notice. Sweet Blodeuwedd’s blossoms, they all look so young these days, like puppies, Edain thought.

  Then, with a hunter’s thrill at a successful chase: Ah, good, we’re still gaining on Karl!

  “Did they get bicycles here?” he asked.

  One of the duties this outpost owed the High Kingdom in return for help and the land-grant was acting as a relay post on the overland route down to the Bay. It kept horses beyond its own needs for the messenger service as well as for official travelers, and stocks of bicycles salvaged, repaired and fitted with modern solid wheels. Elsewhere a stath of the Dúnedain might serve the same purpose, or a daughter-house of the Order of the Sword of St. Benedict with its surrounding hamlets, or a Mormon village, or a feudal grant to an Associate noble, or some other group willing to tame a strategic part of the wilderness.

  “Well, not just bicycles . . . what they took south was our new rail pedalcars,” the lieutenant said helpfully. “Our engineers made them up after your party and the Crown Princess passed through earlier on their way north after the terrible news about the High King. So that bicycles can work on the rails, you see, the way you did in the Quest.”

  “The line down the west side of the valley hasn’t been repaired, has it?”

  He would most certainly have heard of a major project like that, one with military implications. Especially since this province was Crownland.

  “Oh, no, sir. It’s dry country, mostly, which helps, but still it’s broken in a dozen places at least, flash floods and subsidence. Trampling by herds of mustangs, quite likely!”

  For a moment the young man looked offended by the sheer messiness of nature; he was a Boisean, right enough. And probably by the way nature had reclaimed most of California-that-was. There was wilderness in Boise’s territories, but a lot of it had been wilderness before the Change. Uniquely in Montival, there were probably nearly as many people in what had been central and southwestern Idaho as there had been fifty years ago. They didn’t use the land there nearly as intensively, since it wasn’t producing food for distant cities anymore, but it was all at least theoretically occupied.

  Compared to the new Crownland of Westria, or even parts of the Willamette and Columbia Valleys, it was densely populated.

  “It’ll be a long time before it’s worth the effort to repair that railroad,” the young Boisean went on. “Generations. But your story about the Quest gave the engineers in our machine-shop an idea about how we could use the intact sections anyway, for some things. Light knock-down frames to hold the bicycles, so the whole thing can be taken apart and carried around breaks . . .”

  Edain flushed and snatched the Scots bonnet off his head and clenched it in one knobby fist. They had done that on their way back from Nantucket. The idea had come to Rudi in Norrheim, and it had gotten them through the empty lands far faster than they could have otherwise despite all the damage a generation of rain and fire and landslip had made to the rails of the ancients; he doubted it could be done again, not back there at least.

  Most people were familiar with the story, Karl and Mathun more than most. They’d have seen the chance.

  “Well, we need your takedown railcars too,” he barked. “And that at once.”

  The lieutenant’s face fell. “Oh, I’m very sorry, sir—the first group of your party took them all. We’re making more, but it’s not the first call on the machine-shops . . . we don’t have the right salvage metals on hand right now, we used up all our stock of aluminum pipe. . . .”

  Something about the way the Boisean had said first group of your party struck Edain as ominous, somehow. Now he was fumbling in a pouch on his belt.

  “As a matter of fact, sir, your sons said you’d be paying for the equipment he commandeered, since it isn’t part of the fort’s usual obligations. Here’s the receipt he . . . Karl . . . signed. It was a bit irregular, but since it was them—”

  The Boisean settler froze in shock as Edain threw his bonnet on the ground and stamped on it

  “Go mbeadh cosa gloine fút agus go mbrise an ghloine!” he shouted. “With the toe of me boot to your arse, Karl, and the flat of me hand to Mathun’s ear!�
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  Báirseach laughed until tears tracked dark and slightly muddy paths down through the dust on her face, leaning on her bow lest she collapse. A moment later Edain burst into laughter himself, picked his bonnet up again and dusted it off by slapping it against his kilted thigh. The Boisean was looking shocked and trying unsuccessfully to hide it. Mackenzies had a reputation for being open and carefree, but this was obviously beyond what he’d expected.

  They wouldn’t be getting to Stath Ingolf before Karl and Mathun, no matter how hard they pedaled. Now all depended on when the Tarshish Queen made the Bay, which depended on the weather; or on how fast the frigate Stormrider came in pursuit, which depended on the Navy . . . and the weather. As for his own chase, Karl had beaten him fair and square, whether his sons were stuck waiting for the Princess while he caught up or were sails below the horizon when he arrived.

  Or they beat me trick for trick. And such a trick!

  “Well, we’ll be taking up Commandant von Sydow’s invitation, lieutenant. That we will, and a dinner will be welcome, though no more welcome than a bath first. And in the morning we’ll be off at dawn, on plain bicycles.”

  It’s never a joy to be outdone, he thought. But when a man’s outdone by his own child, there’s a pride to it nonetheless.

  For a moment he missed Rudi Mackenzie with a keenness that bordered on physical pain.

  How the Chief would have laughed!

  CHAPTER NINE

  GOLDEN GATE/GLORANNON

  CROWN PROVINCE OF WESTRIA

  (FORMERLY CALIFORNIA)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  JULY/FUMIZUKI/CERWETH 14TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/FIFTH AGE 46/SHOHEI 1/2044 AD

  The orange-red towers climbed out of the curling tendrils of sun-brightened mist, like sculptured pillars in the temples of some high God, and the long graceful swoop of the cables between them linking headland to headland, all still hints glimpsed as the mist thinned.