The Given Sacrifice (38 page)

“They do say that it’s bad luck to use the one you set up.”

Órlaith hiked her skirts to get at the boots and squeaked when Diarmuid let himself
fall like a tree next to her on the hay tick.

She yanked them off and he laughed. . . .

“Something borrowed!” he said holding up a pair of socks.

She was laughing, but it seemed to catch in her throat as Diarmuid leaned over her.
“Shall I put them on you?”

She blushed furiously. “Not, not, not now. Diarmuid!”

He was bending for another kiss, but pulled back: “Yes, Golden Girl?”

“Bah!” she said, her embarrassed mood breaking, “You would tease on that! Diarmuid,
have you? I mean, I, ah . . .”

He sat up abruptly. “Haven’t,” he said shortly.

Órlaith opened her mouth, looked at the tense back and flopped back. “Oh, thank goodness.”

He turned swiftly, “Thank goodness?”

“Thank Goddess. It seems right to learn with somebody. All my tutors
teach
me, but this, this should be different and special.”

His dark blue eyes lightened and he stroked a hand down her cheek. “Can I kiss every
inch of your body?”

“Well, you can, but from all I’ve heard, it’s not going to last very long.”

“Yes, that’s what Da told me, and all the older boys say the same.”

“And the girls to me!”

“So if we can’t make one time last, let’s see how many times we can do! And that will
take us to the dawn!”

County of Napa, Crown Province of Westria

(Formerly California)

High Kingdom of Montival

(Formerly western North America)

April 29th, Change Year
46/2044 AD

“Speak to me, they speak to me

Of sky and wind, of sea and stone

Of moss and fern and cedar tree

Of cliffs where wild arbutus grow!”

Hooves beat through the mild spring warmth beneath the song as the Royal party and
its escort of lancers and longbowmen and train of pack-beasts and varlets made their
way south. It was as small a group as the High King of Montival and his heir could
get away with on such a long trip to the wild frontier and not have Lord Chancellor
Ignatius make yet another attempt to retire to his monastery in protest. The air was
thick with birdsong, and swirls of Tortoiseshell butterflies rose before the hooves
of the mounted party.

“Speak to me, they speak to me

Of orcas gliding through the deep

Of eagles balancing the wind

Above the waves where salmon leap . . .”

Threescore voices and a troubadour’s mandolin across Heuradys d’Ath’s saddlebow carried
the swooping melody, everybody in the party who could sing and wasn’t too self-conscious
to do so in the High King’s presence. Crown Princess Órlaith Arminger Mackenzie carried
the tune effortlessly; she had a fine and well-trained contralto. There was the slightest
tinge of envy in her enjoyment of the song; it was one of her Aunt Fiorbhinn’s, her
father’s youngest half-sister and commonly thought to be the finest Mackenzie bard
of her generation, if not the best in all Montival.

Órlaith had tried her own hand at
composing
songs and decided she was never going to be better than middling at it. That there
were people who’d praise anything she did made it worse. Fiorbhinn was the daughter
of one Mackenzie chieftain and the sister of another, but those weren’t positions
that made you the target of would-be flatterers.

“Speak to me, they speak to me

Of deer that browse the twilight fields

Of stony heron keeping watch

For what the silver sea might yield.”

She couldn’t even feel
very
envious; she’d always regarded Fiorbhinn as more of an elder sister—something she
didn’t have, being the oldest of five herself. John was the closest to her in age,
and they were close in other ways, shared a lot of interests . . . he actually
was
a talented troubadour . . . but he
was
male. And a Christian at that. There were things you just didn’t discuss with a brother,
or a sister in her early teens. And having the said sisters confide in
you
just wasn’t quite the same, glad though she usually was to serve as sounding board
and wailing wall.

Thank the Lord and Lady for Herry,
she thought, not for the first time.
We’re near enough the same age—two years don’t matter anymore—and we’re both of the
Old Religion, but she’s an Associate not a Mackenzie. She really understands.

“Speak to me, they speak to me

Of what has been and what endures

Of summer’s bloom and autumn’s fade

In the circling of the years.”

The valley was a flattish plain on either side of the south-flowing river, bounded
by low mountains to the west and lower ones to the east, opening out irregularly like
a funnel southward towards the great Bay. She looked about as she sang, their voices
startling flights of birds out of the brush and long grass, sometimes dense enough
that they looked like climbing, twining skeins of air and smoke.

“Speak to me, they speak to me

In voices humming in my bone

In whispers rising on my breath

In languages that tell of home!”

The inland hills of the Vaca Range were distant; you could just see how they were
covered in rippling grass just turning from deep green to gold with tongues of woodland
stretching up the ravines that scored them and clumps of blue oak and chaparral. Closer
and westward the heights of the Mayacamas were dense-shaggy with forest, fir and pine
and more. The air was warm and scented with smells stronger and spicier than the northern
lands of her birth, arbutus and thyme and fennel. The broken remains of terraces showed
here and there under the foothill brush.

“What do you think of Fiorbhinn’s latest?” the High King asked her, as they finished.

“Wonderful, and spreading like a grass fire in the Palouse,” she said. “Of course!”

“Your mother has told me for years that we need . . . what did they call it in the
old days . . . a national anthem. A song everyone in Montival can like, that speaks
to our love for the land itself. I think this may be it, and I’ll talk to Fiorbhinn
about that . . . hmmm . . . perhaps a few more verses about mountains and deserts . . .”

“And a
proud castle with banners
or two, Your Majesty,” Heuradys said with an irrepressible grin. “For the north-realm.”

“That too, Herry,” he laughed.

Her fingers strayed to another tune, then to an occasional plucked note and to silence.
They rode quietly for a while, to enjoy a land strange and foreign to them all; he
was an easy man to be quiet with.

“Go n-ithe an cat thú,”
Órlaith cursed mildly as her horse stumbled, bringing the animal up with light hands
and a firm grip of thigh and knee. “May the cat eat you, Dancer, and keep your mind
to what you’re about!”

Her black courser had caught a hoof on what was left of an old dead grape-vine, one
of the innumerable thousands hidden by hock-high wild mustard. The main north–south
road down the Napa Valley had suffered generations of summer wind and sun, winter
flood and frost before the first Montivallan settlers arrived a few years ago, and
they’d not yet done more than patch a few of the more manageable holes with dirt and
gravel. Where the gaps in the ancient sun-faded asphalt were too wide traffic simply
swerved westward away from the river, leaving ruts and trampled patches.

“That’s harsh,
a stór
,” her father chuckled. “Mind, my treasure, it’s not Dancer’s fault.”

They were speaking
Gaeilge
, for practice sake; there weren’t many people in Montival who could, though Heuradys
had learned it for friendship’s sake. Her father’s mother Juniper, the founder and
first Chief of the Clan Mackenzie, had learned it from
her
mother, who’d been born across the eastern sea, and taught it to her son and granddaughter
both. It was a family tradition, and many clansfolk took the odd word or phrase from
it, just as they’d copied her way of speaking in the early years and taken up the
faith she and her core of early followers practiced. Over the generations the origins
of customs and speech both had evolved from memory to legend for most.

Which is fair enough
, Órlaith thought, remembering things her grandmother Juniper had said to her.
For what is the world of humankind, if not a story we tell each other so that we may
live in it together?

“This is a difficult patch, for horses,” he went on.

“The ancients must all have been drunk as Dáithí’s pig seven days of the week and
blind drunk the whole of Beltane month,” she said, stroking the mare’s neck. “I like
a glass of wine as well as the next, but this is ridiculous! The whole valley must
have been solid vineyards from east to west and north to south!”

“Now there’s an
elevating
thought!” Heuradys said.

The High King laughed. “You just might think so,” he said, with a wave of his arm.
“Still, it’s a bonny stretch of land, and at least they didn’t cover the fields with
buildings.”

Some of the innumerable vines on the flat were still alive, monstrous house-sized
tangled ground-hugging networks of shoots green with leaves or bone-hard and bare,
sometimes climbing over a tree or snag of old building like a cresting vegetable wave
caught in midmotion. More were dead gnarled knotted stumps, lurking among the tall
grass and wild mustard and dense drifts of flaming gold California poppies, the brush
and eucalyptus and oak and spreading feral olives. Even dead they lasted like iron.

A sound came from the southward, a deep rhythmic moaning coughing grunt, building
to a shattering roar, loud even miles distant. The horses all shied a little. The
humans frowned or grinned according to their natures. Something deep down in you whispered
what that call meant:
man-eater
.

“And perhaps that was just a wee bit of an unfortunate way to swear,” Órlaith’s father
chuckled. “Seeing as cats with a voracious and unreasonable appetite for horseflesh
swarm upon the earth hereabouts.”

Órlaith had been well tutored in ecology—which she’d enjoyed far more than the rest
of the Classical curriculum inflicted on her, since that science still worked as it
had before the Change. Tigers were common in most parts of Montival that weren’t too
dry and open, descended from zoo and park and private specimens sentimental owners
had turned loose as the ancient world went down in wreck. Lions were not, being less
common before the Change and much less able to adapt to cold winters after it. Down
here in what had been California you met them more and more often as you went south,
since they
did
like warm, dry open landscapes.

“Now, that would make an interesting rug,” Heuradys said speculatively. “You up for
a lion-hunt, Órry?”

“Now it is not as lion-food I have raised the Princess,” her father said, then raised
a hand: “But if lions were to try for our horses, of course, that would be another
matter.”

They’d seen mule deer, tule elk, feral horses and cattle, a troop of baboons, wild
boar and flocks of emu and ostrich since they left the half-built castle at Rutherford,
as well as scat and prints of tiger and wolf and distant glimpses of grizzly. A herd
of lyre-horned antelope with tan coats and pale bellies had been grazing in the middle
distance but giving the humans alertly nervous looks now and then. They took flight
when the lion’s roar added an extra dose of fear and white tails flashed as they bounced
away like rubber balls in astonishing near-vertical leaps that she’d read were called
pronking
, ultimately derived from the same distant land as the lions via curious institutions
the ancients had called
safari parks
.

Órlaith smiled at the sight, and Heuradys strummed the mandolin in time to the leaps,
as if giving them musical accompaniment. The springboks lifted your heart to watch,
and they looked as thoroughly at home as the flocks of yellow-breasted chats that
rose like handfuls of flung gold coins as they passed, going wheet-wheet-wheet in
protest.

More soberly, her father added: “And there were so many of the ancients. More in just
one of the cities on the Bay south of here than in all our Montival even today. More
than enough to drink the fruit of all these vines.”

She nodded. She knew that, and unlike some of the tales she believed it down in her
gut. Anyone did who’d seen the ruins and thought a little rather than just treating
them as part of the landscape, though her generation was less haunted by it than their
parents, and infinitely less than those who’d survived the great dying. That was why
this land was empty. When the machines stopped hordes had eaten the countryside bare
everywhere close enough to reach, then turned on each other amid plague and fire and
horror. A few of their savage descendants still haunted the land, but only a handful
of tiny civilized settlements tucked away in remoteness had greeted the explorers
from the north. Mostly they’d been touchingly joyful to rejoin humankind.

“I’m glad we’re not so crowded today,” she said. “Portland and Boise are bad enough;
you start to itch after a week or so.”

He made a sound of agreement and Heuradys nodded emphatically; they were all countryfolk
by raising and preference, which was something they shared with the overwhelming majority
of their people. She’d gone far east once years ago, on a diplomatic visit to the
Republic of Iowa with her parents, where mighty Des Moines had more than a hundred
and fifty
thousand
folk within its walls. It had been a marvel and she was glad to have seen it, the
largest city on this continent in this age but . . .

But once was enough,
she thought.
And to think of towns ten or twenty times that size . . . brrr!
Aloud she went on:

“Bad for human folk to live as the ancients did, and worse for the land and the other
kindreds.”

“Truth,” her father said, then dropped back into English. “Or at least that’s
my
truth, and yours.”

Órlaith began to nod, then gave her father a sharp glance, suppressing an impulse
to scratch under her flat bonnet with its spray of Golden Eagle feathers in the clasp.

“It’s a little disconcerting you can be at times, Da,” she said in the same language;
her voice held the musical Mackenzie lilt, though less strongly than her father’s.

“What, and didn’t I just agree with you?” he said blandly, then winked. “Most sincerely,
too.”

“Mother says you can be more aggravating by agreeing with her than any other dozen
men can by arguing.”

“Sure, and I have
no
idea what you might be on about. And you’ll note she laughs when she says that.”

Around a corner of the road, and a broad stretch of the renascent wilderness had been
cleared save for some scattered valley oaks; winter wheat rippled waist-high across
it, only a month or so from harvest and already showing heads. About the field young
pencil cypress had been planted in a border. Beyond it southward the settlers were
working on getting more land ready for plow and pasture, with a team of six big oxen
leaning into their yokes.

A chain ran from them to a pit dug around a vine-root. Half a dozen folk were prying
at the stump with long iron bars, and two men in kilts and little else leapt out of
the hole, tossing before them the axes they’d used to chop roots halfway through.
The teenaged girl in charge of the team yelled shrill encouragement and cracked her
long whip, and the beasts leaned forward, pulling until their hooves sank deep and
the muscles stood out beneath their red hides like cast bronze. The humans sang a
working chant as they strained at their levers, and she could catch a bit of it, a
hymn to the Maiden of Spring and Her consort: