Sunrise Lands Page 6

  Harvest Lord who dies for the ripened grain—

  Corn Mother who births the fertile field—

  Blessèd be those who share this bounty;

  And blessed the mortals who toiled with

  You Their hands helping Earth to bring forth life.

  Then she poured out a portion into a bowl and raised the horn high: “To the Lord, to the Lady, to the Luck of the Clan—drink hail!”

  “Wassail!”

  Fifty voices roared reply as she drank; Nigel took a sip of his wine. Knolles senior and junior did the same, and then looked down at their glasses with identical surprised respect.

  “And to the Clan’s guests, come across the sea from the lands of our ancestors—may there always be peace and friendship between us—drink hail!”

  “Wassail!”

  As she sat, Knolles leaned close to whisper in Nigel’s ear: “Whatever else I expected, it wasn’t to find you playing at king of the Picts, old boy.”

  Nigel looked down at his ruffled shirt, jacket, kilt, plaid pinned at his shoulder with a brooch of silver knotwork and turquoise.

  “More the prince consort of the pseudo-Celts, I’m afraid. Make no mistake, Tony, Juniper is the Chief, not I. I’m one of her military advisors—armsmen, we say—in my official capacity, and that’s all.”

  Juniper leaned forward to look around him at the Count of Azay, mock indignation in her tone.

  “Pseudo-Celts, is it? I’ll have you know my mother was born on Achill Island in the Gaeltacht, no less. And my father was an American of Scots descent . . . mostly Scots. So . . . nil anon scéal eile agam.”

  Nigel knew that his old friend could understand the Gaelic: there’s no other story, translated literally. He also knew that Knolles had learned the language for the same reason he had; the Provos had used it as a sort of code.

  Both the Englishmen had commanded small and extremely clandestine SAS teams in Ulster during the Troubles, mostly in South Armagh—and occasionally, highly illegally and unofficially, across the Irish border. By her sly grin Juniper was recalling exactly the same thing, and by his snort Knolles had realized that she knew, and knew that he knew.

  She went on: “And you’re probably wondering—”

  Then she dropped impishly into a creditable imita tion of the upper-class public school-cum-officer’s-mess drawl that was the native dialect of Nigel and his friend both:

  “Are all these people utterly barking mad?”

  “Not in the least,” Knolles said, obviously lying stoutly.

  “The kilts weren’t my idea,” she said. “Honest. And the rest of it . . . sort of grew, like Topsy.”

  Nigel saw the other man’s reserve crack a little; Juni per had that effect on people. There was a creak of dry amusement in Knolles’s voice when he spoke:

  “I did have thoughts along those lines in Portland . . . those bizarre castles! The titles, and the way they dress and speak! Were they all struck on the head at birth by copies of Ivanhoe? Although the regent, Lady Sandra . . . she was disconcerting, to say the least, and impressive, in a rather terrifying way. Still, how did all that happen?”

  Knolles’s voice was a little plaintive by the end. Nigel chuckled.

  “The man who founded the Association was a history professor, you see—a medieval specialist—and one of those re-creationist Johnnies, like Alleyne. The most charitable explanation is that the Change sent him mad.”

  “Or that he was always an evil weasel of a man and the Change gave him the opportunity to show it,” Juni per said. “It caused no end of trouble, and it didn’t die with him.”

  “Ah, re-creationists,” Knolles said. “Very useful some of them were in England as instructors, as you’ll recall, Nigel. Where is young Alleyne?”

  “Uncle Alleyne is married to Aunt Astrid,” Maude Loring said from the other side of her mother.

  Juniper amplified: “Astrid is Signe Havel’s younger sister, the widow of the Bearkiller lord . . . the people over on the western side of the Willamette, between the Association and Corvallis. Astrid is Lady of the Dúnedain Rangers, with my daughter Eilir.”

  Maude’s grave face suddenly broke out in a smile as she abandoned the struggle to be adult for a moment.

  “If you think we’re weird, Lord Count, you should meet them. They live in the woods, and they speak Elvish to each other. All the time.”

  Knolles blinked, obviously wondering if his leg was being pulled. Nigel gave him a grave shake of the head: It’s quite true, old chap. Aloud he added:

  “Although Alleyne acts as a moderating influence and so does my stepdaughter Eilir. She’s married to John Hordle now. You’ll remember Hordle—SAS just before the Change, promoted to battalion sergeant major just before we . . . left . . . England.”

  “Ah, yes. Big chappie, carried a bastard longsword,” Knolles said.

  Then he harrumphed diplomatically before going on; Hordle had also put an arrow through one of Knolles’s men during Nigel’s escape.

  “Ah, well, considering all that’s gone on back Home, we’re not in a position to judge. Have you been following events out there at all, Nigel?”

  “In outline; news does travel, if slowly, and Abbot Dmwoski forwards some of the Church’s reports to us. I know Charles died—”

  “Hallgerda killed him when he finally refused to disinherit his older sons in favor of her brood, though it was never proved,” Knolles said flatly.

  His knobby fist clenched. “And then tried to seize power herself. Colonel Buttesthorn and I and a few others put a stop to that. And put William on the throne.”

  “We heard that he’d beaten the Moors. Good show, that.”

  Though to most here, it didn’t matter much more than hearing how Prince Piotr of Belgorod and Hetman Bohdan of the All Great Kuban Cossack Host defeated the Tartars outside Astrakhan last year, Loring thought. How one’s horizons shrink . . .

  Knolles nodded. “We and a coalition beat them—the Norlanders, the Umbrian League, the Kingdom of Sicily, the Republic of Shannon—we even had ships and men from the Cypriot Greeks. Defeated them at sea off the Canaries, then burned out the nests they’d established along the coast of Morocco, then chased them south and gave them a damned good drubbing at home. There’s been the odd dustup with Berber raiders from the Atlas since, but nothing significant.”

  The fierce hawklike green eyes kindled. “Mind you, about six years ago I was with a party exploring the ruins of Marrakech, and—”

  “And we heard that William called a new Parliament,” Nigel said dryly.

  Knolles flushed; it was for advocating that move that Nigel and his wife, Maude, had been put under arrest by Charles the Mad and his Icelandic ice queen in the first place, while Knolles had still been satisfied with the Emergency Regulations.

  “Yes, yes, yes, you were right, you were right, you were bloody well right, Nigel. And we’ve set up a new House of Lords along the old lines,” Knolles went on. “Quite old . . .”

  “Not altogether the way our ancestors did it, I hope!” Nigel said.

  “Very much in the manner our grandfathers would recognize. Things have worked out quite nicely since. The capital’s still in Winchester, the Icelanders and Faeroese are settling in and marrying out, their grandchildren will be English to the bone—”

  His son grinned and made a gesture towards his own chest; his mother’s name was Dagmar, and she’d come from Torshavn along with a flood of others from the northern isles in the earliest Change Years.

  “—and we’ve resettled Britain—thinly—as far as the Midlands, and made a good start on the Continent.”

  “That’s quick work!” Nigel said.

  “Well, you can’t move for tripping over the next generation, that’s true; everyone’s breeding like damned rabbits. And we’ve been getting a steady trickle of immigrants from the east Baltic, and from Ireland, too—easier since we’re all bloody beadsqueezers again. No offense,” he said hastily to Juniper.

  “Non
e taken,” she said, laughing. “I was raised Catholic myself, of course, but”—she waved a hand around—“you might say it didn’t entirely take.”

  “There’s understatement of positively English proportions,” Nigel said.

  “You’ve corrupted me with your Sassenach ways, my love. Sure, and I can feel my upper lip stiffening the now.”

  Knolles went on: “And we’ve agreed to divide things with the Norlanders along the old German border, and with the Umbrian League along the old Italian one . . . that’s a trifle theoretical, when all we’ve got is a few out posts along the coasts and rivers. It’ll be centuries before we’re back to even the medieval era’s numbers.”

  Nigel nodded. He’d helped develop the initial ap praisal and plans, and had led expeditions to feel out that vast eerie wilderness.

  “That’s where the ‘King of Greater Britain’ and ‘Emperor of the West’ come in?”

  “The imperial title was the late Pope Benedict’s idea,” Knolles said. “He and the archbishop sprang it on William at the coronation, after the Moorish War, in 2010.”

  “Rather the way his predecessor did with Charlemagne ?” Nigel mused.

  “Precisely. Benedict was there for the Church reunion talks, you see. They both preached a Crusade. . . .”

  “And the coronation was with your connivance, Father,” Robert Knolles said.

  Knolles senior harrumphed and poked his fork at a slice of roast beef, cut a piece, administered horserad ish and took a bite. He coughed slightly after that—the sauce was nuclear strength. Then he continued:

  “Ah . . . well, that brings us to the reason for the visit, Nigel. We didn’t know your situation here in any detail, you see, except that you and Alleyne had landed on your feet as might be expected of Lorings, and His Majesty is deeply grateful for your saving his life—”

  “Several times,” Robert Knolles put in, unabashed when his father gave him a quelling glance. “And setting up the contacts that put him on the throne instead of his late unlamented stepmother when the time came.”

  “Late unlamented?” Loring asked, with an arched brow.

  The elder Knolles continued: “She shuffled off eight months ago, from the effects of house arrest, idleness, curdled venom and lashings of strong drink. And His Majesty has asked me to inform you that it pleases him to offer you . . . well, he’s made you an earl, you see. Earl of Bristol. With the estates appertaining thereunto, as well as your family land at Tilford, of course.”

  Nigel felt his jaw drop, and closed it with an effort of will. “Good God.”

  “He’d like you to return; earnestly requests it, in fact, and sent a ship we really can’t spare all the way here to fetch you. Confidentially, he’d also like you to have min isterial rank with a roving commission, and both Houses concur.”

  “Father is one of the top nobs of the Tories, these days,” Robert added. “And note that His Majesty hasn’t given you a continental title, godfather, nor the proverbial ‘estate in France.’ Good English farms, fully tenanted.”

  At Nigel’s raised brow, the young man amplified: “In England ‘an estate in France’ is a synonym for ‘dubious gift,’ or ‘white elephant,’ these days, sir—land that gives you a position in society and then prevents you from keeping it up. Father repented and came over to the side of the righteous, but rather late.”

  Knolles snorted. “Nonsense. The land at Azay is first rate; better climate than anywhere in England proper, and there are the vineyards—”

  “Bushy, overgrown vineyards, half-dead . . .”

  “—and the château—”

  “The ruins of the château.”

  “Ruins? Nonsense; it never really caught on fire . . . not completely . . . and half the roof was still intact. It just . . . well, it needed a spot of work.”

  “And still does, I rather think, Father ... work for my grandchildren.”

  “Silence, whelp. In any case, Nigel, I’ve got a belt, a sword and an ermine cloak for you, and a bally great parchment to go with it. Thing’s festooned with enough seals and ribbons for a publican’s license, too.”

  Nigel began to laugh, quietly at first, then wholeheartedly. Mopping at an eye with his napkin, he replied, “I’m truly sorry to disappoint King William, and you, Tony, but my life is here now. Not to mention my wife, and my daughters; and my son, and his children—a grand son and two granddaughters, so far. This is where we’ll leave our bones. Give His Majesty my regrets and my best wishes for a long and prosperous reign. I thought the lad would turn out well.”

  He turned his head to meet Juniper’s bright green eyes for an instant; they crinkled in the face that loved his line for line, and their hands linked fingers beneath the covering tablecloth.

  “Not tempted by the prospect of being Countess Juniper, my dear?”

  “Chief’s bad enough. I’d scandalize your William’s court, that’s beyond doubting.”

  Knolles sighed. “I thought that was the reply I’d get, as soon as I walked in. Your stepson warned me; we met outside the gates. Remarkable young fellow, even on brief acquaintance. Usually one feels an impulse to kick a man with good looks of that order, but I didn’t this time.”

  “Remarkable young scamp,” Juniper said. “He didn’t warn us you were here, the creature.”

  Knolles hesitated. “There is one thing more, Nigel. And Lady Juniper. You haven’t had much contact with the Atlantic coast of North America, have you?”

  “None at all; we know more about East Asia, or even the Indian Ocean countries,” Juniper said. “Scarcely even rumors from east of the Mississippi.” She winced slightly. “Just enough to know that it was . . . very bad there. As bad as California, or what Nigel tells of Europe, or mainland Britain.”

  Knolles nodded somberly. Nobody who had lived through the Change as an adult would ever be quite free of those memories. It had been worst of all in the hyper-developed zones.

  “On the American mainland, yes, it was very bad. But some islands did much better. Prince Edward Island best of all; rather as the Isle of Wight or Orkney did in relation to Britain. After the, ah, after King William came to the throne, they established close ties with the old coun try—in fact, they’ve MPs in Parliament at Winchester now, and seats in the Lords.”

  “William isn’t repeating George the Third’s mistakes, eh?” Nigel said, savoring the joke.

  Though it wasn’t like Anthony Knolles to waffle around a subject. The other Englishman cleared his throat.

  “Among the places they’ve landed . . . or tried to . . . is Nantucket.”

  He shot a glance at them from under shaggy brows to see if the name of the island off southern New England meant anything to them. They both looked back soberly.

  “Then the rumors were true?” Juniper asked softly. “I’ve talked to those who were listening or watching the news services, right at the time of the Change. To some who were listening while they flew a plane over moun tains, sure! The reports were of something extraordinary going on there on Nantucket, just before . . .”

  All three nodded. The flash of light that wasn’t really light—even the blind had seen it—and the intolerable spike of pain felt by every creature on Earth advanced enough to have a spinal cord. And then the world was Changed; explosives no longer exploded, electricity wouldn’t flow in metal wires, combustion engines si lently died, nuclear reactors sat and glowed below their meltdown temperatures until the isotopes decayed and became inert. A civilization built on high-energy tech nologies writhed and died as well. There had been little time then for anything but sheer survival, but in all the years since no slightest hint had been found to account for the why of it.

  Eventually a few scientists had measured the effects with what crude equipment could be cobbled together within the new limits; all they’d found was how eerily the Change was tailored, to make a generator impossible but leave nerves functioning as they always had . . . and that beyond the immediate vicinity of Earth everything seemed to be procee
ding as normal. You couldn’t even prove that the Change hadn’t happened before. Prior to gunpowder, who would have known? Most of human ity put it down to the will of God, or gods, or the devil; a stubborn minority held out for inscrutably powerful aliens from outer space or another dimension.

  “A dome of lights miles high and miles across, and the water boiling around the edge of it, yes,” Knolles said in a flat matter-of fact tone. “Multicolored lights, crawling over it like lightning . . . that’s quite definite. We’ve collected hundreds of testimonies, and found some eyewitness records written down right afterwards, even a photograph or two. I do not believe it is a coin cidence such a thing happened just seconds before the Change.”

  “So what did they find there, your Bluenose explorers?” Juniper asked.

  Nigel could feel the pulse beat faster in the hand he held, and his own matching it. This wasn’t just a rumor, that was proof . . .though of what, only the Powers could say.

  Juniper went on: “Not the dome of lights, still there—that we would have heard of. They’d have heard of that in Tibet, sure!”

  Knolles turned to his son. The young officer was in the red coated dress uniform into which he’d changed when he shed his armor, but he’d also brought a small rectan gular box pierced with holes from the diplomatic party’s baggage. Nigel had assumed it was a gift of some sort.

  Now he brought it up from the floor, and folded back the covers around it. A soft crooo-cruuuu came from it, and behind wire mesh strutted a bird, cocking its head at the light and looking with interest at a piece of bread nearby.

  Juniper’s breath was the first to catch. She’d been a student of the wilds all her life, long before the Change, and had read widely then and since about the life of other lands and times.

  It was an unremarkable bird at first glance; a long-tailed pigeon with a bluish-gray head, the back and wings mottled gray with black patches, paler underparts blush red at the throat and fading to rosy cream. The only thing startling about it was the bright red eyes. . . .