The Sky-Blue Wolves Page 8

  Which means pounding your arse to sausage.

  The Royal train was much more comfortable than that. Despite her complaints it was actually quite warm inside . . . if you thought sixty degrees Fahrenheit was a good indoor temperature; there were excellent incandescent mantle lanterns and even a hot-water shower in the rear car, and the food had been a welcome relief from shipborne rations when she wasn’t too wrought-up to eat.

  Even more impressive than that, however, was the extent of the softly green-and-brown tilled land and cow-and-sheep dotted pasture and leafless but flourishing-looking orchards and vineyards surrounding manor houses and villages outside the windows, in the intervals between conifer-forested hills. It was the ultimate source of all wealth, after all, of which all others were at seventh and last merely symbols.

  Montival held, or at least claimed and held in part, the western third of this continent from Baja to Alaska, which made it a bit smaller than Australia. Unlike Australia it wasn’t a rim of habitability clinging to the edges around an empty desert heart, and it hadn’t permanently split up into dozens of squabbling statelets either. John’s father had brought the local successor-states together a generation ago, and while there was supposedly plenty of ruin and wilderness here they did have nearly five million people—at least twice what Oz did. This great river and the valleys running into it were the heart of things, evidently.

  And those castles . . . my God! Talk about picture books!

  This subunit of Montival here was the Portland Protective Association, where Associates were the top-drawer and built castles and manors, and the rest were the common herd. Apparently Associate ladies didn’t wear swords on public occasions, though she’d already heard there were exceptions; she just didn’t feel familiar enough with the local customs to be one of them yet. She’d barely managed to hang on to her cane, a yard of black super-hard Ireng wood with grooved gold heads on both ends; which she privately called Bash ’em and Thrash ’em.

  Fortunately Associate ladies all carried a knife much like their menfolk—again, some sort of warrior-caste thing—and the one she’d been given was a solid poniard with a ten-inch, double-edged blade of watered steel kept very sharp and a jeweled but practical hilt, which kept her from feeling entirely naked, although her mother’s twin kukri-knives would have been better.

  Deor had hung up his coat and was comfortable in his long tunic of fine Merino twill dyed deep green, and embroidered with crimson and gold thread at hem and neck; an arm-ring of worked gold showed clearly around the sleeve, and his black breeks were cross-gartered below the knee above elegantly buckled shoes. There were silver-and-turquoise plaques on the belt that held his seax and Saxon-style broadsword, currently hung with his coat, and a silver-and-gold valknut on a chain around his neck, showing his allegiance to Woden, who was apparently Lord of poetry and music, as well as running a celestial retirement home for old soldiers complete with booze, bints and roast pork.

  “You’re too bloody right, Pip!” the big man beside her said. “This makes Dunedin down in South Island look like fuckin’ Tahiti. And it bloody snows in sodding Dunedin, regular as clockwork, nearly once every year.”

  Toa was very big—a full foot on her five-six—and very broad and very brown, including his stiff roach of hair drawn back through a bone ring, his eyes and his skin. It made a striking contrast to her gray-eyed, tawny-haired cat-build; Uncle Pete had once said she was a perfect Hyborian, whatever the hell that meant.

  Usually Toa didn’t wear much but two feathers thrust into his topknot, a broad belt of patterned flax to hold his loincloth and knives, and a sort of short string apron before and behind. Almost all the rest of him was covered with a swirling pattern of tattoos, including his thick-featured face, contrasting with the scars he’d picked up in an adventurous forty-odd years. Perforce he’d left his broad-bladed seven-foot spear on the baggage rack above their heads, but he got to keep his personal ironmongery.

  Pip smiled thinly. He hadn’t objected to wearing more than a breechclout in this climate, but his comments had been memorable when they’d offered him a getup like John’s—she’d taken a very quick lesson in the local terminology, courtesy of the Guild of Seamstresses—of skintight particolored hose, puffy-sleeved Robin Hood shirt with a drawstring neck, high-collared jerkin and a houppelande coat with wide dagged sleeves and a chaperon hat with a liripipe. Particularly at the sight of the shoes with upturned toes topped with silver bells; he was in a plainer version of Thora’s clothes now.

  John looks scrumptious in that outfit, I admit, even with the jerkin and coat hiding his delectable bum.

  “It snows five or six times a year this far north,” Deor laughed. “Much more than we have down in Mist Hills barony in Westria, where I come from; we see the white feathers once every few years.”

  California, Pip thought.

  Mist Hills was an odd little survivor’s colony tucked away just far enough north of the Bay that good luck and good leadership had brought it through the Change, and like many of those everywhere it had been founded by the extremely eccentric—it had been a time of madness, which gave the mad an advantage. She’d always thought of herself as an Anglo-Saxon with Norman antecedents, but Deor’s folk (a word they were extremely fond of) took the Saxon part very literally indeed, looking down on people like Harold Godwinson and Alfred the Great as mere deracinated cosmopolitan modernists.

  North of where San Francisco used to be. They’ve got bad Biter . . . Eater . . . infestations there but my God, think of the salvage! Pete and Fifi would piss themselves at the thought of it.

  “There is rain there in winter, but sun and fine spring-like days too, much of the time. Just enough frost now and then that we can grow good apples, and every other goodly fruit, as well as have fine vineyards. This is cold compared to where I was born . . . but Thora and I have seen Norrheim—”

  “Where?”

  “What they called northernmost Maine in the old world.”

  Pip remembered maps and blenched at the latitude.

  “Why’s it called that now? Apart from being very . . . northern.”

  It turned out to be a bunch of Odin-worshippers washing down the moose-meat and potatoes with mead and ale.

  “And we’ve been to England . . . and Iceland . . . and we spent a winter on the Trondheimsfjorden once. And it’s mild here compared to those.”

  “Hela’s realm is mild compared to Norrheim in February, and the Icelanders eat rotten shark and mutton they call wind-cured because there isn’t anything else, but Norway was fun,” Thora said affectionately. “Once your body temperature dropped eight degrees and you learned to cross-country ski and you grew fur like a polar bear. I learned why the sagas have so much feasting on roast pork—you need the fuel!”

  Thora and Deor had been mates in the Australian sense of the term since they were younger than her current twenty years, and as close to the other meaning as was allowed by the fact that they both preferred the company of men in bed; Deor’s lover, Ruan Chu Mackenzie, had temporarily parted company with them, off to someplace a little south to tell his family he’d be moving out. Together they’d literally been around the world; it made her recent adventures seem . . .

  Well, not tame. But smaller-scale, and they were there for that as well.

  Pip was reluctantly resigned to the fact that Thora was pregnant too, and from the same source—it had happened before John and she met.

  The thirsty bastard. Well, it makes us a good match; it’s not as if shagging wasn’t a hobby of mine too.

  She’d ruthlessly detached him, without much resistance, and suspected Thora had gotten precisely what she wanted out of it, and all she wanted.

  Still, I’m glad we all agreed to pretend it’s not so.

  Thora went on complacently: “Now, Larsdalen, where I grew up down in the Willamette in the Bearkiller Outfit’s territory, is a perfect compromi
se—yes, we get the Black Months and nice crisp weather perfect for a good muddy boar-hunt and enough snow to be interesting. The summers are lovely and warm, but not too hot. Still”—she glanced at Deor and smiled—“Mist Hills will do. Good place to raise kids. And horses, on that land your elder brother gave us.”

  “There are much warmer spots close to my home,” Deor said, taking mercy on her. “I’m sure Órlaith will give you and John an estate from the Crown lands in Napa to winter on, with olive trees and orange groves. There’s even eucalyptus trees. Some Associates have already settled there, along with Mackenzies and Corvallans and folk from Deseret and Boise.”

  “That sounds . . . nice,” Pip said, a little grudgingly.

  It did. Rather like, say, the Republic of Goorangoola in the Hunter Valley, which she’d visited with a friend from Rockhampton Grammar School for Girls in her teens.

  None of them except she and John seemed upset at the prospect of meeting his mother, High Queen Mathilda Arminger Mackenzie. Objectively, Pip knew that New Mum wasn’t going to start screaming “Off with their heads!” though apparently John’s granddad on that side had been very given to that sort of thing, being a tyrant’s tyrant whose name still made people shudder. His grandmother Sandra had been if anything worse than her ghastly spouse, being considerably smarter as witnessed by the fact that he perished by the sword only ten years after the Change, while she died old, rich, powerful and universally honored and respected . . . or feared, as if there was a difference . . . and in bed of natural causes. And that people still glanced both ways and checked behind the curtains when they mentioned her name.

  Objectively I know it’s going to be socially stressful at most. My emotions aren’t as convinced.

  Then the train turned a long curve and Castle Todenangst showed ahead, rearing on its great mound with a few villages huddled about at discreet distances, and a road thronged with traffic even in the winter wet leading up to a massive gatehouse that was a fortress in itself. That helped to snap it all into scale for her; the people and wagons were like ants under the cyclopean bulk.

  “Bloody hell!” Pip blurted.

  It wasn’t just that it was huge. She’d seen a few bigger buildings, but only as empty ruins of the ancient world, and this had been built since and was very much in use.

  It was the fact that it had been built since the Change, a building the size of a town, that was a town as well as a fortress-palace; a great crenelated wall studded with machicolated towers topped with witch-hat roofs, and above that the towering curtain wall of the inner keep . . .

  I’m thinking the word towering a lot, her mind gibbered.

  . . . eighty feet and looking like more because it crowned a shaved-down hill and with more towers yet in its circuit, and above it all the two real towers . . .

  There’s that word again.

  . . . that made the others seem small—one of shining black tipped with gold, and the other gleaming silver. Banners flew from the roofs and from poles above tower and gate, and edged steel glittered wetly on the battlements. She could imagine the catapults and crossbowmen crouching behind the narrow slit windows. . . .

  “Hardout fa!” Toa exclaimed obscurely; occasionally he reminded you he hadn’t grown up in the former Queensland, though the time he’d spent there had rubbed off on his accent.

  Then he continued with a quotation: “Towers and battlements, tall as hills, founded upon a mighty mountain-throne above immeasurable pits; great courts and dungeons, eyeless prisons sheer as cliffs, and gaping gates of steel and adamant.”

  At the surprised glances he went on: “Pip’s mum lent me the book.”

  John sighed. “I think that was exactly what my mother’s father had in mind; hence the Lidless Eye as the Arminger arms. And the name of the castle.”

  Pip didn’t speak any German, which was more or less a dead language in the modern world; the Change had hit very hard there. She did have enough to know that Castle Todenangst meant Fortress of Death-anguish.

  John went on: “I never knew him, of course. . . . He and my other grandfather killed each other in single combat when my parents were still about ten. But my grandmother Sandra told me once he picked out the location and had this place planned even before the Change.”

  With a grin that made her heart turn over: “It’s concrete and cargo containers underneath. The black marble sheathing on the Dark Tower and the white on the Silver Tower mostly came from some banks in Seattle. Granddad Norman laired there in the Enormous Black Phallic Thing . . . where else? And he was indeed a gigantic dick, to use an old-fashioned term, but it’s full of bureaucrats now, and parts of my grandmother Sandra’s art collection.”

  “She collected?” Pip said; it seemed an unlikely occupation for Madame Tyrant.

  “Yes, she . . .” John began.

  “Plundered,” Thora cut in.

  “Looted,” Deor supplied.

  “Stole,” they said in slightly overlapping tones.

  John cleared his throat. “Not stole, exactly. The owners were mostly already dead from the Change. Sometimes her expeditions had to fight the people who ate the previous owners. She was a fanatic about it, though, and carried off everything she could grab for decades.”

  “The thing is bloody huge, though,” she said. “How could anyone have built this right after the Blackout . . . I mean, the Change?”

  An embarrassed silence fell; embarrassed on the part of John, she thought, and more in the nature of tactful from Deor and Thora.

  “My grandfather Norman . . . really wasn’t a very nice man,” John said at last. “Great, terrible, a genius with a deep vision, a devil in battle and a fine swordsman personally and cunning to a fault, but . . . not very nice.”

  Or in translation, Pip thought, Norman was a murderous lunatic and built this with hordes of starving slaves dying under the whip and his architect probably sweated blood while he was making his reports and cried and grabbed a bottle and got totally legless afterwards. Oz was lucky, comparatively speaking.

  And Darwin luckiest of all.

  King Birmo just sort of talked people into helping themselves. And Mummy and Fifi and Pete got rich helping him do it.

  Although, she would admit, the kukri blades her mother had bequeathed her did some fast talking in those days too.

  The big State capitals like Sydney and Melbourne, and the areas within a couple of day’s walk of them, had died hard and gruesomely, but it was over quickly except for the degenerate gangs of Biters who haunted them to this day. Most of the outback and the smaller centers like her home in Townsville had pulled through without much strain, protected by sheer distance.

  Townsville, home to a huge army base, and the center of the cattle industry, had skated through. Food and discipline, the magic totems to ward off any apocalypse.

  And some places, Tasmania or the South Island of New Zealand, for example, hadn’t even gone particularly hungry, not having big cities to drain off the fruits of their agricultural hinterlands anymore, so that even drastically reduced production was more than enough.

  There were more sheep than people in the outback of Oz. And more kangaroos than both combined. It was good eating meat of the roo, as long as you spiced it up and didn’t dry the steaks out. Between the old farmers and the tribes, there had been plenty of lore to draw on about how to live well on bush tucker.

  You just had to develop a taste for grubs and roots, was all.

  Unless you were Lady Julianne Balwyn, of course.

  My mother was on an airplane over the Great Barrier Reef when the Blackout hit! She survived the crash, the overland trek, a dustup with a gang of “bikers” and not once did she ever ever eat a bloody witchetty grub.

  Pip glowed quietly with pride at the thought that her mother would approve of all that she’d achieved. . . .

  Lady Jules had been on the Reef partly as
a tourist, but really as an extended vacation from England after a series of unfortunate financial misunderstandings between the authorities and her father.

  We Balwyns can survive anything!

  She mentioned the airplane, though not the fraud, and Thora grinned.

  “So was Johnnie’s spear-side grandfather Mike Havel, the first Bear Lord of my folk, the Outfit,” she said. “He was piloting a small flying machine over the Bitterroot Mountains. That was a thousand miles away; we Bearkillers have epics about their trek west.”

  One look at the walls of Todenangst told you they’d gone through a much rougher patch here after the Change than in her homeland. Trumpets blared as they passed through the thickness of the outer wall; it was a dedicated railway entrance, but when they rolled into the tunnel-darkness, if you squinted a bit you could see where massive steel slabs hung ready to slam down, probably stronger than the walls themselves and doubtless with various forms of lethal ingenuity of the boiling-oil and red-hot sand variety ready to shower on anyone trapped between them.

  “Home. And back to living over the shop,” John said.

  That surprised a chuckle out of her, and reminded her of why she’d fallen for him in the first place—besides the broad shoulders and narrow waist and long legs and flat stomach and dreamy brownish-hazel eyes and lovely shoulder-length brown hair and regular features and beautiful singing voice and very, very sensitive hands.

  Pip found herself taking a deep breath and relaxing. Granted, it wasn’t quite the relaxation you’d expect before meeting friendly in-laws, and more the feeling she’d had on the quarterdeck of the Silver Surfer as they came coasting into catapult range of a proa full of unfriendly buggers waving blowguns and kris-knives, but at least she felt her self-control snapping back.

  The train came out of the tunnel, up an incline that had the horses laboring and the gearing of the hippomotive whining on a deeper note, and rumbled to a stop. John rose, and she saw him consider slinging on his lute, then decide not to be the Troubadour Prince just now, leaving it for the staff to bring, and extended an arm to her instead.