The Sky-Blue Wolves Page 6
“No, it isn’t. You know perfectly well we’re elf-friends,” the young man named Kovalevsky clarified with sardonic helpfulness. “Folk of the West. Númenóreans, though our blood is sadly mingled with Common Men here in the Fifth Age.”
Common, like you, went unspoken.
“I’d forgotten because there aren’t any pointy-eared types around for you Dúnedain to hang with,” Heuradys said. “Assuming they’d have anything to do with you, that is.”
“Elves don’t have pointy ears, or the Histories would say so, Lady,” Morfind said.
The Histories were what Dúnedain Rangers called a series of hero-tales from before the Change that their founder Lady Astrid Larsson had been obsessed with from an implausibly early age. She was a martyred hero of the Prophet’s War now, but her surviving Bearkiller brother Eric still referred to her as Princess Leg-o-lamb now and then, to the scandal of the younger generation and any visiting Rangers. You usually couldn’t tell just how serious the Dúnedain were when they claimed that the stories were gospel true . . . literally gospel, as in divinely inspired by the Valar. Even with the Sword she couldn’t be entirely sure, though she thought she felt ambiguity—what she often sensed, if irony was involved.
“The pointed ears are just a superstition,” Morfind added, absently rubbing at the axe-scar that seamed her cheek; it still itched a little now and then, having been suffered less than a year ago. “The Edhellen are tall and noble-looking, and graceful as cats and handsome or beautiful, but otherwise outwardly like the race of Men, unless you have eyes to see into the Other Realm. So they look rather like us Folk of the West”—she pointed a finger at her own chest—“only even more noble and beautiful and graceful than we are.”
Órlaith smiled at the byplay. There was a certain amount of inherent irony when Dúnedain Rangers and Associate nobles got into a mutual I-can-be-more-haughty-and-sneering-than-thou contest, though it was even more entertaining when they were serious about it rather than this teasing between friends. Growing up in the High King’s family had taken her all over Montival, and exposed her to many different folk and their ways . . . and their myths about themselves.
It’s good to have a Household of my own generation with me, she thought; Heuradys and Diarmuid were the oldest, and they had only a few years more than her. If I had to be with nobody but my parents’ generation, the Changelings, I’d run melancholy-mad in short order.
Sir Droyn cantered over on a tall courser—the alternative breed for knightly combat, a bit lighter and longer-limbed than destriers proper, what they’d called a Warmblood or Irish Hunter in the ancient world. He led two more for her and Heuradys.
“Here comes Sir Wet Blanket de Propriety a l’outrance,” Heuradys murmured.
Órlaith clucked disapprovingly; Droyn was far more conventional than either of them, but he’d been fiercely loyal and a fine fighter. And he’d sworn allegiance to her—his arms were quartered with hers, like Heuradys’—and come off on their adventure to south Westria with Reiko, when he could have stayed home as the third son of a wealthy Count and spent his days hunting and gambling and dancing at parties and riding in the tournament circuit and basking in the admiration and embraces of the local femininity.
He did look slightly baffled when Susan Mika called out, to a chorus of snickers:
“How’s your olifant doing there, my lord?”
Olifant being elephant in the Old French with which Associate nobles peppered their conversation, particularly the ones more caught up in the mythos, much the way Mackenzies did with Gaelic. She was fairly sure that Droyn’s own grandfather had actually been a leader of some sort of bandit gang before the Change, recruited by Norman Arminger in the early days of the Portland Protective Association. And married off to one of his Society for Creative Anachronism followers to give him a little polish, which had succeeded with his descendants if not with the old rogue himself, who’d at least died bravely leading his men in the Protector’s War.
Nowadays the Counts of Molalla claimed, via well-subsidized troubadours and heralds, to be descended from a long line of African kings, including several Órlaith knew for a fact had never come within six thousand miles or several thousand years of one another—that was a very big continent and as old as anywhere—and from French aristocrats through Droyn’s grandmother. Who’d been something called a dental hygienist when she wasn’t playing at being a noblewoman . . . though admittedly she’d done the real thing quite well, diving into her Society persona and never coming out again.
Grandmother Juniper says a lot of them did that, Órlaith thought. As a way of going mad and surviving at the same time.
“This is my courser Roland, Lady Susan,” he replied gravely, giving her credit in north-realm terms for being the daughter of a prominent Lakota chief. “He’s in fine fettle and ready for deeds of honor!”
A sixteen-hand roan with a blond mane whickered as he caught Órlaith’s scent, and Droyn grinned as he looped its reins to the high pommel and released the animal. It trotted over and paused, and Órlaith took a hopping skip, put her hand on the leather, sprang into the high-cantled saddle men-at-arms used and braced her feet in the long forward-canted knight’s stirrups.
“Back to work again, eh, Wardancer?” she said, and slapped its neck; coursers were less specialized than destriers, but about as big. “You must be deadly bored.”
Vaulting onto your mount in full armor and shield was another of the tests of knighthood; Heuradys did it moments later with her tall black mare. Sometimes Órlaith sympathized with men meeting that particular challenge; getting it just right was even more important for them, and doing it wrong was apparently very painful indeed, and a source of much merriment to the other squires when a bunch of candidates were practicing, along with expressions of false sympathy and offers of ice packs.
The three horse-archers spread out before them, and those on foot formed to either side and behind her and her two full-armored companions. The Mackenzies and McClintocks paced along effortlessly with the slow trot of their mounted companions. Not even clan warriors could keep up with a galloping horse . . . but a horse couldn’t gallop for very long, and they could maintain a swinging lope like this from dawn to dusk. A light-riding Crown Courier like Susan with a string of four or five remounts on a leading-rein or changes at substations and nothing but open grassland to cross could leave them behind for a good long time, but not a rider on a single burdened horse, not for long. That was why infantry could run cavalry to death, over a week or two, and why armies usually left a trail of horses foundered or dead in their wake.
Besides moving faster, a warhorse gave you a better view. She could see troops landing now up and down a mile of the beach, rallying, and heading off where couriers and officers directed.
Just north a regiment of foot from the Theo-Democratic Republic of New Deseret was forming up, men in three-quarter armor fitting their knock-down pikes together and raising them in blocks to their full sixteen-foot height, and light troops in half-armor in thinner formations between with crossbows. The banner borne before them was of golden bees on black, and a beehive shone on every breastplate. A battery of horse-drawn field-catapults, twelve-pounders, wheeled up and trotted along behind them as they double-timed forward with feet hitting the ground in earthquake unison, the glittering foot-long heads of the pikes rising and falling rhythmically.
They raised a cheer and a shout of:
“Princess Órlaith! Long live Princess Órlaith!”
House Artos had saved Deseret in the Prophet’s War, led them to victory over those who’d laid their land waste, and brought much-needed aid in its aftermath, food and cloth to feed and warm the hungry and seed-grain and stock and tools to rebuild ruined farms and towns. The folk there remembered it still, being a breed much given to solid virtues like hard work, gratitude and keeping their oaths. Órlaith admired and liked them on the whole, but found them eve
n duller than other Christians.
She saluted with gauntleted fist to breastplate at the loyal cry, and they burst into an earth-shaking chorus:
“The morning breaks, the shadows flee;
Lo, Zion’s standard is unfurled!
The dawning of a brighter day—
The dawning of a brighter day—
Majestic rises on the world!”
A field hospital was in the process of setting up on the beach with gear and staff from the expeditionary force’s hospital ships and was already treating a steady flow of wounded brought in by stretcher-bearers and the first field ambulances. A difference of minutes in treatment could mean the difference between life and death, or saving and losing a limb. One of her less agreeable duties later would be to tour it and talk to the hurt. Her parents had both sworn that it genuinely helped them.
The headquarters table was just inland beyond that, with a canvas windbreak already up, ranks of mounted messengers, and a skeletal launch rack for lofting observation gliders half-assembled and growing fast; Boiseans were very good at things like that, with the folk from the city-state of Corvallis their only real rivals for the title of best field engineers in the High Kingdom. In the interim, a heliograph snapped out Morse to the ships offshore and took it in return, getting the viewpoint from their kite-borne lookouts.
That efficiency was appropriate, because the land commander of the expeditionary force was General-President Frederick Thurston, a tall handsome middle-aged man with a light-brown complexion and loosely-curled black hair worn short in the way his folk favored. His staff—which included two of his children of about Órlaith’s age, Alice, in light-cavalry leather and mail shirt, and Lawrence in the same heavy-infantry armor as his father—and a clutch of other contingent-commanders were grouped around him and messengers came and went. Reiko and Kalākaua arrived just as she did, though they were on foot.
Captain Edain of the High King’s—
High Queen’s, she reminded herself; her father’s enormous absence still caught her now and then, like a root tripping you in a darkened forest.
—Archers was there, giving her a salute followed by a bow and smile and dryly amused look; her father’s old right-hand man and Guard-Captain had spent several months earlier this year trying to chase her down in the wilds of Westria—what had once been California—and express the High Queen’s extreme displeasure that she’d gone haring off with Reiko to find the Grasscutter.
Despite the fact that she did pretty much the same on the Quest of the Sunrise Lands when she was younger than I, and Grandmother Sandra raged about it spectacularly. I was right and she was wrong and I get to sing the “I was right” song. Though I won’t . . . not aloud, at least. And maybe I’ll rage likewise, when I’m her age.
Heuradys’ brother Lord Diomede d’Ath, heir to Barony Ath and Captain-General of the Associate men-at-arms for the expeditionary force was there too; he had black hair and pale blue eyes like their birth-mother Lady Delia, the theoretical Countess de Stafford and actual Châtelaine of Ath, a serious-looking man in his late thirties. He nodded and gave her a grave fist-to-chest, one knight to another.
Certain things had to be said, and said publicly, for reasons both personal and political—if there was any difference, in the world her birth had handed her. Órlaith returned Fred Thurston’s salute.
“General Thurston”—rather than Mr. President, since he was here in a military capacity, in the service of the High Kingdom—“please let me console you on the death of your nephew, Captain Alan Thurston. We know the enemy in this war, as it was in the Prophet’s War, can twist men’s minds. Your nephew fought valiantly against that infection, and killed himself rather than let himself be forced to harm me. That was truly death in battle, fighting a brave and lonely fight for the High Kingdom against overwhelming odds. Surely he feasts among the einherjar in Odhinn’s hall tonight.”
That had the benefit of being substantially and generally true, though the reality was complex enough it would have taken hours to cover it all; for instance, it wasn’t at all clear if the enemy who’d crept into Alan’s mind was the same one who’d been behind the Prophet in their own country a generation ago and was the same to the Kim dynasty in Korea now. There were hints it was some new Power, equally malign.
She didn’t make any reference to Alan briefly being her lover either, though of course Fred Thurston had known about it, and wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t hoped something on the order of a marriage alliance might come of that between the Thurstons and House Artos. The more so because he’d been a Quest-companion and longtime friend of her father, a comrade and valued commander in the Prophet’s War.
He probably wasn’t too deeply or directly grieved for Alan’s personal sake; the young man was the posthumous son of his usurping parricide of an elder brother, and had been raised deep in the country. Alan’s mother had been given a good ranch after the war in a very remote area, and then strongly advised to stay there for the rest of her life. He’d visited to show he didn’t bear the children a grudge—his sister-in-law had switched sides in a public, spectacular and very helpful way, albeit for her own reasons—but not enough for a personal bond. The wounds of civil war healed slowly, even with the best will in the world.
“Thank you, Your Highness,” the elder Thurston said.
He sighed. “Though at times I think it might be better for the family if Jokin’ Joe had won the last election and we could retire to our ranch.”
Most of those present smiled, though a few of the foreigners or Montivallans who hadn’t been much outside their own member-realms before this war looked puzzled. The United States of Boise was rather old-fashioned, and had free and fair democratic elections for President every seven years, though nobody not named Thurston had ever won one.
In the latest the main challenger to Fred Thurston had been a young man who’d officially changed his name to Jokin’ Joe the Jokey Jokester, and campaigned as head and sole member of the Gibbering Lunatic Party, wearing a large red nose, floppy shoes, and a fright wig, along with a fake carnation in his lapel that shot water into the faces of the unwary.
His speeches had consisted mostly of things like reading the Boisean constitution backward ostensibly as a prayer for electoral aid from Satan, a proposal to substitute royalties from the Big Rock Candy Mountain mines for all other taxes, and promises to decree that all the railroads in the Republic run downhill both ways to reduce the cost of horse-feed.
Punctuated by fist-waving screams of: “I’m the most serious alternative you’ve got!” and “We need honest government—elect someone who admits that he’s an absolute clown!”
She reflected that you couldn’t say Boiseans had absolutely no sense of humor; he’d gotten fully ten percent of the vote, after all.
Then Thurston cleared his throat and spoke with flat sincerity:
“Thank you also for the timely information about the enemy counterattack. That let us contain it much more quickly, and it saved lives.”
Órlaith nodded and touched the hilt of the Sword of the Lady to show where the credit was due. Thurston had already glanced that way; he’d been one of her father’s commanders at the Horse Heaven Hills and the long march to the Church Universal and Triumphant’s capital of Corwin, and he knew what the Sword meant from firsthand experience, as much as anyone not of House Artos could.
She swung down from the saddle and examined the map, with Heuradys at her side and Diarmuid taking a keen interest too, though both were silent.
Órlaith looked at the commander’s map carefully; she’d been taught to read the like from an early age. And then she blinked. For her, suddenly the symbols on it were alive, they were moving . . . and she could see them as if she were in truth in the sky above, as if in a glider or balloon. Knowledge slid through her mind, the summation of what all her folk facing the enemy knew.
Lord
and Lady, but that feels strange, like empty rooms in my head suddenly furnished! And no wonder Da had a reputation as a tricky demon of a commander! Though to be sure, many of those he fought were actual demons.
“What are their numbers?” she asked, more for time to think than information.
“About like ours when all three armies are deployed, we think, or a bit more—say twenty thousand. Archers, spearmen and swordsmen. Very little in the way of cavalry, though, just mounts for some officers, and no field catapults to speak of since the Navy very efficiently sank them all.”
Kalākaua hissed in dismay. “I’d have trouble matching that with a month to mobilize!” he said. “And that would be everyone in the islands who could carry a spear or draw a bow, from the big kids who think they’re grown to the graybeards who babble about TV and airplanes and computers!”
Reiko nodded politely. “It is very fortunate that the bakachon—”
Chon was a very impolite word for Koreans, but older and not quite as packed with murderous loathing as jinnikukaburi. Baka meant something like imbecile or moron. There was no precise equivalent in modern Montivallan English for the compound, but a whisper at the back of her mind translated it as dumb gooks.
“—did not come this far before you had powerful allies, Your Majesty.”
Kalākaua nodded agreement, but he still wasn’t happy about it. His people had suffered from Korean piracy when they sailed abroad anywhere near northeast Asia, but not from longshore raids or direct confrontations before this . . . and pirates were, after all, fairly common everywhere and were never very nice people to their victims.
“Or perhaps they have come this far because of the arrival of . . . allied . . . forces,” he said dryly.
Reiko’s Imperial Guard commander, Egawa Noboru, was one-handed and scar-faced from a lifetime fighting the same enemy, and he stirred slightly and scowled, his armor clattering. His sovereign made a very small gesture with her folded tessen, the steel war-fan she carried and used for verbal emphasis . . . and sometimes for slitting throats . . . and he bowed.