Tales of Downfall and Rebirth Read online

  The Hopping Toad tavern just after the early sundown of November was a good place to have a private conversation, mostly because it was so crowded; the noise level was such that you could barely hear someone sitting across from you unless you leaned close and shouted, which the mostly young clientele were doing on every subject under the sun. Often waving their arms and hammering mugs and cups on the battered tables in accompaniment or shaking a finger—or in one case she could see, a half-eaten sausage on the end of a fork—under someone’s nose. The Faculty Senate election provided a lot of the material, just as if it were really important.

  The gaslights on the walls were turned down for the same thrift’s sake that had shunned incandescent mantles, until everything was a sort of wavering umber shadow. Between crowds, noise and dim light even a five-foot-eleven blond princess just turned eighteen could be at least quasi-anonymous as long as she didn’t set out to attract attention. Which would have required stripping naked and dancing on the table. Plus a lot of Corvallans were stubbornly republican and went out of their way to be unimpressed by royalty, even though the city-state had been part of Montival since the beginning.

  The heir to the High Kingdom felt free to half-shriek at her best friend.

  “No, Herry, no! Tell me you’re not banging my annoying jerk of a little brother!” she moaned.

  “I’m not banging Prince John, Orrey,” Heuradys d’Ath said agreeably, folding the letter and tucking it back into a pocket in the long sleeves of her houppelande.

  The words went with a charming smile. Heuradys was two years older, just a hair shorter and a trifle more full-figured than the Crown Princess; her birth mother was a notable beauty and her father a big ruggedly handsome man, and both showed in face and build. Her dark mahogany hair, amber eyes and pale slightly freckled complexion were unlike either of them.

  “You aren’t? He’s talking about your tits in that letter, woman, that he is!”

  “I’m not doing it right here and now, am I? And he’s using much more elegant terminology than tits. Rose-tipped pearls is sort of a sweet, poetic way to say I’m so horny, really. Besides, you’re my liege-lady and you told me to say that I wasn’t. So say it I must, regardless.”

  “You mean you actually did?”

  “Yup. And a good time was had by all.”

  “Euuuw!” Órlaith struggled to find words. “Herry . . . euuuw. He’s sixteen! He’s a virgin!”

  “He’s a sixteen-year-old boy, which means he’s a penis with feet. I’m only three years older —”

  “Four!”

  “OK, four. And he was a virgin.”

  “He’s Catholic!”

  “They do it too, you know, they just feel guilty afterwards. As I remember it—”

  She cast her eyes upward in an obviously false searching of memory.

  “—you lost yours at that Beltane festival in Dun Juniper when you were sixteen. Diarmiud Tennart McClintock, wasn’t he? Everyone has to start somewhere, and there’s nothing written in the stars saying the boy has to be the older one.”

  “Beltane . . . that was a sacred rite,” Órlaith said a little weakly; it was among her more pleasant memories.

  “All acts of love and pleasure are sacred rites.”

  Órlaith had to nod at that, for it was simple truth for her variety of the Old Faith. Heuradys was of a slightly different branch, but the principle held.

  Perhaps my repulsion is illogical. Still and all, it’s mine.

  Heuradys went on: “It’s amazing Johnnie made it to sixteen and three months; he is a prince, after all. I’d have expected some calculating Court lady or ambitious servant girl to kick his legs out from under him long before this. Probably he knew I wasn’t after anything; he’s no fool, your little Johnnie. And cute, and charming, and he has a really good singing voice, and he isn’t intimidated by me, which is a nice change, and I really like him as a person. But I’ll stop the banging if you want me to.”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “All right then, my liege. I hear and obey.”

  Heuradys half-rose and made a parody of a northern Court bow, doffing her chaperon hat. Its circular roll-edged form and dangling liripipe were markers of her new status as a knight, as were the discreet little gold spurs on her half-boots. Then she pushed it to the back of her mahogany curls and leaned back, waving her beer mug to attract a server.

  They were drinking the excellent house premium brew, Guaranteed Tenure Ale—whose official slogan was Three Mugs and Set for Life—a richly amber-colored beer with taste like toasty caramel to start and a bitter, herbal finish.

  “Mind you, I was going to stop anyway. That’s why I showed you the letter, so that you could help me let him down easily.”

  “Why didn’t you say so!” Órlaith said in relief.

  She also made a note to switch to the lighter small-ale called Sophomore after dinner. Being grown-up meant you had to make your own decisions on things like that and stick to them, rather than just taking what was brought to the High King’s table with a score of eyes on you.

  “Because it’s so much fun making you run around in circles waving your hands in the air and screeching in horror,” Heuradys said, grinning and wiggling her eyebrows for a moment. “And now you’re so relieved you’re in a cooperative frame of mind. He is still a bit callow for anything unbrief. ’Twas one of those impulsive things in a hayloft. Over a stable at Kore Manor.”

  Technically Heuradys had three manors on Barony Harfang up there in County Campscapell in her own name—in what had once been called the Palouse—as part of her inheritance, but two were still empty rangeland, and Kore was only a small village and modest newly built country house. She’d been taking an interest in the land for some years now, and getting to know the people her mother—both her mothers—had working on the new settlement. Also the hunting and hawking were good there.

  “Not a hayloft, that’s a cliché. Stop, for the love of Lady Flidais of the White Deer!” Órlaith begged. “No more details!”

  Heuradys smiled in a heavy-lidded way. “Callow, but there’s something to be said for frenzied untutored enthusiasm, though, this absolute panting thrashing eagerness to get—”

  “Euuuw! I so did not want that image in my head, that I did not! John cooties!”

  “Well, he’s your brother,” Heuradys said generously. “It would be odd if you thought he was attractive.”

  “How would you feel if I was sleeping with Lioncel or Diomede?”

  “Surprised; they’re both extremely married and very Catholic. And I assure you no sleeping was involved.”

  She grinned, continuing the teasing: “Cliché? It was classic—prickly alfalfa hay and a smelly horse-blanket, a mad grapple, clothes raining down into the stalls . . . All right, all right, sorry, no more.”

  Órlaith made a sound of revulsion that was half laughter and drank more of her beer. She was in jeans, canvas-and-leather shoes—what Corvallans called sneakers, for some reason—and a roll-topped sweater, with her academic robe thrown over the back of her chair. That was standard garb for studying at the University, the city-state’s ruling institution and pride and joy; she was attending for a few semesters, as much for the experience and of course for politics as anything. Not trying for a degree; only a minority of students did that anyway, and she didn’t have anything like enough time. It had been deeply interesting . . . for a while. Especially the course on post-Change ecological trends, and she’d worked doggedly on law and finance though they bored her like augers.

  But city living wore on you, she found, even when you could walk to green fields and woods in a half-hour. It helped that she could spend the weekends outside the wall at the Finney steading. They were prominent Corvallan yeomen and old guest-friends of the Mackenzie chieftains, a link that went back generations, even before the Change.

  The tavern was a long L-shaped
room crowded with tables to the extent that getting to the jakes at the rear required dancing skills. The day’s selections were chalked on a board over the flickering fire of the hearth in the middle of the longer wall, and though the tables nearest it must be sweating half the customers howled close it! whenever someone went through the outer door and let in a blast of the cold damp. There were even patrons on the dais where musicians sometimes played. That had a small brass plaque on the wall behind it, reading:

  Lady Juniper Mackenzie, first Chief of the Clan Mackenzie, was performing here at the time of the Change, 6:15 p.m. March 17th, 1998, beginning the long friendship between the Clan Mackenzie and the People and Faculty Senate of Corvallis.

  Which made it a family affair, since Juniper was her grandmother, mother of her father the High King; Corvallans were a little old-fashioned and still used the ancient calendar even after most folk had shifted to the Change Year count for everyday use—currently it was the tag-end of CY 41. Though from what she’d heard from Juniper only the location, name and floor plan remained of the pre-Change hostelry. Half of the other patrons in the taproom were in student garb too, though some of the jeans and robes were patched; the air was thick with the scents of beer, wine, mulled cider, hot chicory drinks and herbal teas, damp wool—it was raining outside, as it did most of the Black Months of winter in this part of Montival—moderately clean humanity and cooking.

  The rest of the crowd wore wildly varied garb from all over the High Kingdom and beyond; Corvallis was a center of trade and manufacture as well as education. There were plenty of Mackenzie kilts and plaids since the dùthchas of the Clan was just on the other side of the old Highway 99, and rather fewer of the baggy Great Kilt (and tattoos) worn by their McClintock cousin-rivals whose stamping-ground was in the hill country south of dead Eugene. Benedictine robes marked a warrior-scholar-monk from Mount Angel, a Rancher from the eastern plains flaunted gaudily embroidered and embellished fringed leathers, the picturesquely uncomfortable archaic jacket and tie some Boiseans still favored marked the self-declared heirs of the ancient Americans, and brown Bearkiller quasi-uniforms ostentatiously drew attention by their grim understated modest practicality. Indian garb of several varieties identified various autonomous tribes; some of it was stuff she knew they took out only for festivals and impressing outsiders with their authenticity. Plus plenty of variations on the rough and rather shapeless linsey-woolsey homespun that was what most folk actually wore.

  Quite a few were from the north-realm, the Protectorate as the lands of the Portland Protective Association were known. The old border was only about fifty miles north up the navigable Willamette River and the railway, and trade and traffic were lively within Montival under the High King’s long peace. Most of those were merchants or artisans or the rougher types who crewed riverboats, though, and unlike them Heuradys d’Ath was in the nobility’s full fig.

  In her clothes-conscious case that meant skintight claret hose, loose-sleeved white silk shirt closed at the wrists with sapphire-threaded ties, a thigh-length black doeskin jerkin edged with gold thread and a long fawn-colored houppelande coat of superfine merino wool with amber ties and long dagged sleeves revealing a pale gold lining. A jeweled Associate’s dagger gleamed on the tooled leather belt looped over the back of her chair that also held a severely plain long sword with sweat-stained rawhide bindings on the hand-and-a-half hilt.

  “Did you have to show up in Court dress?” Órlaith asked.

  It was attracting a few hostile glances, since not everyone had forgotten the old wars against the Association in the days of the first Lord Protector of the PPA, her maternal grandfather. Who had been, she had to admit, by all accounts an all-around murderous evil tyrant bastard, if also a great man and mighty conqueror. It wasn’t everyone who could claim that their grandfathers had killed each other in battle . . .

  “Court dress? Nonsense,” Heuradys said loftily. “This is afternoon dress suitable for informal social activity. For court dress I’d be wearing that white-work shirt and the sea-green houppelande my lady-mother just finished. It’s trimmed with embroidery three inches deep! And a plume in the hat, and those really dumb shoes with dagged tops and upturned toes and bells that look like a quarter of a jester’s hat, not these fetchingly tooled half-boots. And this year parti-colored hose is back. Except when I was going girly in a cote-hardie, of course. My lady-mother and her tirewomen came up with this absolutely heavenly rose-and-azure concoction for me to wear at the Twelve Nights balls this Yule, the two-peak headdress has these tails of woven silk and feathers; I’ve got to show it to you. Stunning, if I say so myself.”

  “That does sound interesting,” Órlaith said.

  The Royal household would be keeping this Yule in Portland, and the thought of the round of balls and masques and routs suddenly seemed attractive. It would be the first time she’d done that as more or less an adult.

  “Though you are such a clothes horse,” she added quellingly, while making a mental note to consult Lady Delia about her own dresses.

  “Given my parents, I come by it honestly.”

  Lord Rigobert de Stafford, Count of Campscapell, was noted for dressing elegantly, as well as having been a famous warrior in his day. Lady Delia de Stafford had been a leader of Associate women’s fashion for decades and a legendary beauty. Though her other, adoptive mother . . .

  “Tiphaine d’Ath giving a damn about clothes? Pigs will fly, lead will float, water will burn . . .” Órlaith said.

  “With my lady my mother as her Châtelaine she doesn’t have to. Mom sees that it all happens without her noticing.”

  She was getting some curious glances too. Few Portlander aristocrats attended Oregon State University even now; they tended to go to the Protectorate’s own college in Forest Grove, or to Mount Angel. And what she was wearing was emphatically male clothing up north, and women knights were rare. Not hen’s-teeth rare, but uncommon, more than one in a hundred but much less than one in ten even now.

  The waitress bustled up holding two mugs and balancing plates on her arms with an acrobat’s ease. She was young and slim and darkly pretty, about their age, and in Corvallis wasn’t necessarily poor; there was a tradition here of people from respectable backgrounds working at humble tasks while they were young. Ways of thinking about rank varied even more than local styles of dress in Montival’s many lands, from the Clan Mackenzie—which, apart from the Chief didn’t have much distinction of rank—to the Protectorate, which had a great and intricately detailed deal of it, to Corvallis, where there was a bewildering combination of money and academic status. Understanding such things first-hand was one reason she’d been spending time living in as many communities as possible. Lately Órlaith had been doing some of that living on her own; her parents worried, but they were also determined not to raise her completely enclosed in a bubble of State.

  “One bacon cheeseburger done medium-rare with onion and pickled tomato, side of onion rings, one beer-battered fish and chips, two pumpkin pie with whipped cream,” the server said.

  “Ah, Demeter of the Shining Hair be thanked, I’m starving,” Heuradys said to her cheerfully, touching a finger to the foam to flick a tiny drop aside as a libation to the face of the Mother she had named. “My gratitude, O servant of the Good Goddess.”

  She tossed a small silver coin in the air and added: “No change.”

  The server snapped it up neatly as a trout rising to a fly; it was nearly half again the bill. The lordly unconcern with pennies was typical enough of the northern nobility, but most Associates would have crossed themselves and used the prayer that started Bless us O Lord through these thy gifts, they being largely Catholics. The server caught the gesture and phrase, looked at Heuradys sharply, and then turned her eyes to catch the arms embroidered on her jerkin in a small heraldic shield over the heart.

  There were a hundred and seventy-odd barons in the Protectorate and several thousand
knights with their own blazons, but the d’Ath arms of sable, a Delta Or on a V Argent, were distinctive and well known even outside the lands where heraldry prevailed. Tiphaine d’Ath had been Grand Constable of the Association during the Prophet’s War back around the founding of Montival, and Marshall of the High King’s Host for the last decade. The latter position had involved a lot of traveling outside the Association lands.

  Heuradys went on to Órlaith as she applied mustard:

  “I like the way they’ve done this, with the onion slice in the cheese so it melts in and caramelizes.”

  She shrugged her coat over the back of the chair, tied back her sleeves and tucked the brown linen napkin into the neck of her jerkin—even the daughter of a Count, a Countess and a Baroness wouldn’t risk that much imported silk—and took an enormous but careful bite, mumbling something on the order of damn that’s good through it.

  “I told you it was the best student hangout in the city. But you just like the name of the place,” Órlaith said; she’d sent a message up the heliograph line to Forest Grove yesterday.

  “I’ve always liked the word ‘toad.’ It has a . . . resonance. Toad . . . toad . . . toad.”

  Órlaith chuckled: “Remember that first winter you were at Court, we were staying at Dun Juniper that Yule, and Grannie Juniper told The Wind in the Willows to all the kids in the Hall? You went around muttering toad, toad, toad for days and hopping now and then. I liked Badger and Rattie better,” she added reminiscently.

  “All right, but toad is still a noble word,” Heuradys said. “And Toad of Toad Hall was a knight-errant.”

  “I thought he was a self-absorbed idiot with his head in the clouds, that I did.”

  “What I said. Even if he was from England and not La Mancha. But I meant it about the food. I caught the Portland-Corvallis train at Forest Grove and they stopped for lunch so-called just north of Larsdalen, while they switched the horses. The soup was vile and still too hot when they blew the all-aboard whistle. I think they just dump it back into the vat and sell it over again to the next lot of captives.”