The Given Sacrifice (32 page)

He added that deliberately, just to drive the point home that Graber’s folk—and all
the dwellers here not in arms against them—were his subjects now too. He didn’t think
there was anyone in the Host who still doubted that he meant what he said about things
like that. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Mathilda nodding approval, which
was reassuring; he had the most profound respect for his wife’s political judgment.

“—and I will hold your honor as precious as my own. This oath I will defend at need
against all men, and any who do you wrong do also so to me, and at their peril. So
I swear by the Lady of Stars and by the Lord Her Consort, and by all the Gods of my
people; by Earth, by Sky; and so I bind the line of my blood and yours until the sky
fall and crush us, or the sea overwhelm the land, or the world end.”

Most of the officers made formal greeting and left; a few came forward to shake Graber’s
hand. All of the ones who’d been on the Quest did so, and Rudi led them to the open
flap of his tent, with a quiet word to have the needs of Graber’s subordinates seen
to.

“How many in your band?” Rudi asked, when they’d been seated and the plain stew and
flatbread brought.

Graber ate with wolfish intensity; he and his were well equipped for the sort of war
they practiced in these parts, as far as Rudi had been able to tell, but evidently
they hadn’t been eating high off the hog. Or the rangeland steer, in this country.

Mind, with years of war levies and now fighting on their own territory, it’s going
to be touch and go to keep famine out of this land as it is.

“Fifteen hundred, not counting about five hundred women and kids brought along because
there wasn’t anyplace safe to put them.”

Out of the corner of his eye Rudi noted Ignatius making a note and handing it off
to a staff messenger who stepped forward at his crooked finger. The quartermasters
would be attending to feeding the newcomers by morning.

“Including both my wives and my children; friends helped to get them out before the
hunt started. My wives are women of excellent character and acted quickly,” Graber
added. “The . . . High Seekers seemed curiously blind about what I was doing.”

“They would, my friend, after you were touched by the Sword; and they’ve grown careless
about using ordinary means. It’s good that you rescued your little ones and their
mothers. There are some prices that are steep even for honor; I’m glad you weren’t
forced to pay so high.”

Graber nodded. That had been another risk he’d taken. “And about three times as many
have taken up arms against the CUT here and there on their own, once I showed it wasn’t
just suicide,” he said. “I’m in contact with their leaders; that’s not counting areas
we . . . the Prophet, that is . . . overran in the last few years, they’ve just gone
back to how they were before.”

“Not entirely,” Father—or in this context, Lord Chancellor—Ignatius said. “The CUT’s
occupation has left many grudges, many feuds. And the reprisals going on right now
against collaborators, or people who their personal rivals and enemies can paint as
collaborators, will make for more. We’ll be long years settling them.”

Graber shrugged; those lands weren’t his affair. “A lot more of the Prophet’s levies
have just gone home—or gone home to defend their ranches and neighborhoods—as they
were driven back into the lands they came from. Not to defend from the invading . . .
liberating . . . armies, so much, as from bandits and deserters and each other. And,
ah—”

“From the Lakota, the ones who aren’t riding with the armies,” Rudi said ruefully.

He liked and respected the folk of the Seven Council Fires, but they had their own
grudges to pay off—and raiding for horses was an ancient tradition with them, one
they’d revived gleefully after the Change. Nor did what passed for their central government
have all that much control over the individual tribes and clans or for that matter
individuals. It operated by consensus, or not at all.

“I’ll tend to that, but there’re other things must be done first, and I’m afraid some
damage will be done.”

Graber spread his hands in acknowledgment; it was a cost of finishing the job, and
you did what was necessary for that.

Consideringly, Rudi went on: “Fifteen hundred riders . . . that’s more than I expected.”

Graber gave a rare smile: “For a while I was hiding in the woods with about four men,
two of them brothers of my eldest wife, while the Prophet’s hunters beat the bush
for us and we put our hands over the children’s mouths to keep them from giving us
away,” he said.

“You wouldn’t be the first to win back to power and fortune and victory from such
a state,” Rudi observed. “When we’ve more time, I’ll tell you of a man named Temüjin . . .
it means The Iron One . . . in a land far away, but not unlike this in some respects.
Cold mountains and vast plains, at least.”

Graber looked interested, then returned to business: “But it’s been obvious for a
while now the Prophet is going to lose the war, especially after news got back of
the Horse Heaven Hills, and the Midwesterners started heading our way. The Church,
the Church United and Triumphant, that is, got a lot of credit for the way they reestablished
order right after the Change, but that ran out some years ago. What they had left
was fear.”

“And fear alone is a chancy basis for a realm,” Rudi said; leaving unsaid that Graber
and his ilk had been among the main instruments to instill that terror.

Mathilda nodded decisively. “Fear leaves you with nothing to fall back on when the
bad times come,” she said, echoing things Rudi had long heard her mother say.

Graber inclined his head; apparently he’d overcome any feeling of shock at a woman
speaking in a council. Or wearing breeks and boots, which Matti was.

“True, your Majesty. And I had some other good arguments. Not least, that if we wanted
to have any say in how things are arranged here after the war, we’d better show we’re
willing to fight for the High Kingdom now.”

“Good,” Rudi said. “A most cogent point. I’m going to need a commander here to keep
order, and eventually to rule as my vassal. I’ve no desire to import battalions of
unpopular alien bureaucrats, and more battalions of soldiers to enforce their writ
at the sword’s edge, and then spend the rest of my days reading and annotating the
reports of both. Montival isn’t that sort of realm. After things settle down here,
the form of rule must arise from the folk themselves, as the years since the Change
have shaped them in their hearts. For that I need a man born of these lands who also
has a record the rest of Montival will respect, and I think I’ve found him.”

Graber looked blank for a second, and then astonished when Rudi leveled a finger at
him; so did some of the others. Rudi chuckled.

“I’ll have to spend more time here than I wish, Major . . . hmmm. We’ll come up with
some title . . . Range Boss, perhaps? Lord of the Eastern Mark? I’ll be wanting a
man who understands the land and the folk, for I’ll have other calls upon my time,
even though this will be Crown land. It’s not an easy job I’m offering. The lands
long under the CUT have been badly harmed, not least in the minds and souls of those
dwelling here. It’ll be a lifetime’s work to even begin to repair the damage. Will
you take it?”

Graber hesitated for a second or two, then nodded decisively. “Yes,” he said. “It’s
necessary.”

Then, shrewdly: “And having a local man in charge will make a lot more Ranchers likely
to come over willingly—it’ll be a sign that bygones are to be bygones and that they
won’t be excluded from power and office as long as they renounce the CUT.”

“Exactly,” Mathilda said. “And I don’t think anyone will doubt you mean what you say . . .
my lord. We found you a very determined man when you were chasing
us
!”

Rudi covered a yawn as the Questers all nodded. “First we must take Corwin. After
that . . . more work. But building is more enjoyable than tearing down, even when
that’s necessary. Even when the building involves cracking a few heads!”

Corwin, Val
ley of Paradise

(Formerly western Montana)

High Kingdom of Montival

(Formerly western North America)

August 29th, Change Year 26/2024 AD

C
orwin was falling.

The Earthly House of the Ascended Hierarchy was falling in fire, falling in blood.
Everyone who felt like defecting or just absenting themselves had done so, or been
killed trying; those who remained were mind-bound or more often the core of real believers
who were simply determined to die in the last ditch for their faith. The Montivallan
forces were in no more forgiving a mood, after what they’d seen on the way or in the
Prophet’s capital itself and what had happened to those of their comrades unlucky
enough to fall into the enemy’s hands.

I would of course prefer that the
beithacheen
had a change of heart and surrendered,
Rudi thought, coughing to clear his lungs, leaning back against a broken table and
working his left hand where it ached from clenching on the hilt.
But if they won’t, I would very much prefer that the irreconcilables die fighting
here, rather than taking to the hills.

The city was smallish and had no wall, but the buildings were stout and mostly stone-built,
windowless on their first floors, and all interlinked both by tunnels and enclosed
overhead bridges. Many had nothing but slit windows, no other entrance save the tunnels,
and every house had to be reduced and then held lest enemies emerge from hidden exits
and attack the assault parties from the rear.

Edain turned, cursed and shot in one movement. A figure above them dropped the rock
he’d been hefting to shatter on the granite-block pavement and then followed an instant
later, breaking himself and lying limp. The narrow spike of the bodkin head stood
up from between his shoulder blades, driven through rear plate of the leather armor
by the fall. His helmet clattered away and rolled

“This is like me mother goin’ after cockroaches,” he said. “Cursing and splashing
boiling water to get the last of the little boogers. Wish we could have just stood
off and shot at the place with artillery.”

“If it wouldn’t take forever and a day,” Rudi grunted agreement.

He swigged from his canteen and passed it to the master-bowman. They had their backs
resting against a barricade of broken furniture, with the bodies of its Cutter defenders
still sprawled around them. The troops with them were a mixture—Boisean regulars,
dismounted men-at-arms and crossbowmen from the Protector’s Guard and Bearkiller A-listers,
the High King’s Archers and even some of Graber’s Montanans. Under their varied gear
the faces were much the same, filthy and streaked with soot and sweat and blood and
lined with strain and exhaustion. Stretcher-parties had taken the last of the wounded
to the rear a few moments ago.

“Water,” Matti croaked.

He handed her the container, and she splashed a little on her alarmingly red face
before she drank, coughed, drank some more. Huon trotted up from somewhere with a
collapsible leather bucket that had probably started its life watering horses, and
she plunged her head into it for a long moment to emerge blowing.

“If you’re too tired to fight, don’t try,” he snapped. “I need you alive, not to mention
Órlaith. We’ve enough troops to rotate.”

“I’ll be fine,” she wheezed. “Just needed to cool down for a bit. Mother of
God
but that felt good. Thank you, Huon; hand it around.”

It wasn’t very hot, even with the soot and flames from a few structures that had caught
fire, though that caught at the throat. He was in full plate as well, though—there
was nothing like it for close-quarter work—and he could feel how the heat buildup
inside dragged at your strength. Even the very fit just tired faster with this carapace
strapped all over the body.

“At least I’m getting back in shape,” she said, in a more normal voice. “Sort of a
drastic exercise program!”

“Let’s go,” he said, nodding grudging agreement. “Not much farther now.”

There was a groan and clank and rustle as everyone levered themselves to their feet.
Rudi pushed himself up with the point of his shield—he hadn’t bothered to take his
right arm out of the loop on the inside of the big teardrop construct of plywood and
bullhide and metal when they paused to catch their breath. It was a twenty-pound nuisance,
but you only had to look at the stubs of arrows in its surface to see why even full-armored
men carried them.

They turned a corner. Corwin was almost all built post-Change, laid out in a manner
that Rudi found rather attractive in its way, buildings grouped around small squares.
Broader avenues divided the squares in turn; in the central zone they were lined with
larger buildings, three or even four stories. Everyone kept a wary eye on them, but
apparently the assault groups tasked with it were keeping the inmates busy. This street
they’d just entered gave into the central, grander open space where the half-finished
ziggurat bulk of the Temple rose in a mass of dark stone and scaffolding.

And it never will be finished,
Rudi thought grimly.

They’d managed to overrun the labor camps before all of the slaves who’d been building
it could be killed. He wasn’t altogether sure how much of a mercy that had been. Many
of them were quite mad.

Gliders circled overhead, occasionally darting down to drop message containers with
colorful pennants attached; there were a pair of tethered balloons north and south
of the city with heliographs, and messengers on foot or horseback or on bicycles dashed
about. Mostly it was a matter of small bands hammering their way forward, or even
worse of men fighting and dying in the closed spaces of the underground warren, daggers
and short-gripped spears and fists and feet and teeth in the dark.

Ahead was one last barricade, this one apparently mainly made of rough sacks filled
with something lumpy—he guessed that it was potatoes, from the size. Hooves clattered
behind him, and he looked around: it was a battery of three Bearkiller scorpions,
medium fieldpieces each drawn by three pair of horses, with the snarling red bear’s
head on the shields.

More surprisingly, Eric Larsson was with them at the head of a squad of Bearkiller
A-listers in their plain good armor, a big blond man with a steel prosthetic where
his left hand had been until a few years ago. The Bearkiller war-leader reined his
horse in and looked at the barricade; an arrow shot from behind it sparked on the
stone blocks of the road’s pavement not far in front. Knights of the Protector’s guard
formed up before the leaders, one line kneeling and the other standing with their
shields raised to form a wall of overlapping protection.

“It’s not a cataphract’s battle,” Eric said at Rudi’s raised eyebrows as he dismounted
and his troops followed.

He turned reins bridle over to his military apprentice, who was also his son William,
a tall youth of nearly eighteen with an arresting combination of skin on the cusp
between light brown and very dark olive, midnight blue eyes and curling brown hair.
Rudi nodded to the young man, who responded with a slight crisp inclination of the
head and then stood in silent, focused readiness in the Bearkiller manner. His father
went on:

“Hell, it’s more of a giant brawl, most of our A-listers are fighting dismounted.
Good practice in being flexible. The Norrheimers are coming up, I pulled them out
of reserve before they mutinied at being left out. Gotta be careful with those Asatruar
types. They tend to start baying at the moon if you keep ’em from a fight. Something
about the Nine Impulsive Vices or something like that. I just tune Signe out when
she gets on about it.”

Rudi nodded; the words were only slightly in jest. Eric and his son both had crucifixes
around their necks—he had become a Catholic when he married his half-Tejano wife Luanne
just after the Change—but Signe’s branch of the family followed those Gods.

“Ah, excellent,” he said. “Bjarni and his band are good at this.”

“Yeah, he’s hell on wheels in a close-in fight, and no mistake, and so are all his
merry band,” Eric said with complete seriousness.

Then he grinned; it made his face look younger than his forty-four years. When he
leaned forward he whispered a little:

“As my sister could testify, especially about Bjarni.”

Rudi looked a question and he went on:

“Signe’s expecting and refuses to say who’s the other party . . . to the very few
who dare to ask, of which I was one. Only by letter, though. But just between me and
thee, I strongly suspect . . .”

Rudi chuckled; he wouldn’t have expected it, but he supposed she was still beneath
the Moon . . . his own mother had been older when she bore Fiorbhinn. Motherhood had
never mellowed Signe before—she was as fierce as a she-wolf with her cubs—but one
could hope.

The crews had been putting the scorpions into operation as they spoke, lifting the
trails off the limbers and swiveling them around before splaying them open. Sledgehammers
rang as they hammered spikes into the cracks between paving blocks to anchor it—the
usual method of digging in the hinged spades at the ends of the trails wouldn’t do
for absorbing the recoil here. A clanking tramp sounded behind, and the Norrheimers
were there, with their standard at their head.

That banner had been that of Bjarni’s father, Eric the Strong. The flag had a stiffener
jutting out from the top of the pole at right angles, and a curved outer edge bore
bullion tassels. The rim of the cloth was black, the center white, and on it a stylized
black raven—for the birds Thought and Memory who sat on the shoulders of Odhinn Father
of Victories and whispered wisdom in his ears. On the bird’s breast was a double letter
A, the outer strokes curved and the inner straight and parallel. The flag commemorated
a band of pre-Change warriors Eric had fought with as well as his faith; he had borne
it north with his followers and friends into what had once been Maine right after
the Change, from which much had followed.

The redbeard had his four-foot axe over his shoulder; the outer edge had been hastily
wiped so that a nick could be ground out and the edge redone, but the rest of it was
thickly clotted. His followers came up behind him in a bristle of spears and swords
and eyes glaring beneath nose-guarded conical helms, their big round shields making
a wall. Their byrnies of chain or scale mail clinked as they moved.

“Awkward as hogs on ice are these Cutters, when they fight on foot,” the king of Norrheim
said cheerfully. “Still, warm work.”

Rudi held out a hand, and he clasped wrists in the fashion of the folk of that far
bleak land, and then both did the same with Eric.

“This may be our last battle together, blood brother,” Rudi said to Bjarni.

“Good. We’ve been doing a man’s work, but it’s time for us to go home.”

He looked admiringly as the Bearkiller crew worked the levers of the hydraulic pump
that cocked their weapon and loaded a globe of cast steel into the trough. His shrewd
blue eyes took in the barricade. Rudi could guess why he grinned; if there was one
thing someone from Norrheim—what had once been northern Maine—was going to recognize
at first glance, it was a sack of a certain root vegetable. He called over his shoulder
to his followers:

“They want us to peel their potatoes for them! Then we’ll have meat with the mashed,
boiled and fried!”

A roar of hoarse laughter went up; that was just the sort of jest to tickle a Norrheimer
funny bone. Rudi glanced around, nodded crisply, and spoke:

“Now!”

Whung-whap!

The catapults spoke one after another, the wheels coming up a little and then thumping
down again. Long bowshot to the west top of the barricade fountained up in a shower
of burlap and fragments of root vegetable . . . and men. They waited while the throwing-machines
worked their way along the parapet, knocking it down into a slumped chaos in a steady
rhythm of one shot every four seconds, and then the bowmen trotted forward.

“Let the gray geese fly!” Edain barked. “Wholly together—
shoot!
”

A hundred bows snapped, and the arrows sleeted down. For once, Rudi felt little of
the grim urgency of impending battle, only a smoldering anger at the necessity of
it.

I’ve done this too often for too long,
he thought.
I’m . . . not quite bored with it, but nearly. It’s time to finish it. This isn’t
the climax of my life, it’s something I have to get out of the way before I get on
with my life.

One thing the bards usually didn’t talk about was the essential
sameness
of battle; there was more variety to farming. He judged, knocked down his visor,
glared through the vision slit at a world like a bright distant painting. . . .

“Morrigú!”
he shouted, and charged.

“
Ho la
, Odhinn!” Bjarni roared.

“Haro, Portland! Holy Mary for Portland!” Mathilda shrieked, not a step behind.

“Haakaa päälle!”

“Artos and Montival!”

The catapults and the longbowmen kept shooting as long as they could—beside Rudi a
knight swore and ducked as a cloth-yard shaft zipped by and clipped the last ostrich
plume from the rather ragged assembly on his helmet. The Bearkiller artillerists had
all the self-confidence that common wisdom said their folk showed—some called it arrogance—and
the last ball thumped home in the tumbled arrow-studded sacks when the front rank
of the Montivallans was only thirty yards from their goal.

It was good to keep the enemy’s heads down; bad to have yours smacked right off your
shoulders by a six-pounder ball fired from behind you. That last one left a Boisean
white-faced and sweating as it went overhead so fast that it was a mere blurred streak
and so close that the wind of its passage made him stagger. Then Frederick Thurston’s
men threw their heavy javelins and drew their short swords.