Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (10 page)

A glance back southward showed little white curls on the blue mile-broad surface of the Columbia and a mass of barges and oared tugs around the landing points. Farther out, war-galleys with their masts down and lashed for action waited, most at anchor like sleeping river-pike. A dozen kept station, bows pointed into the current as the great varnished lengths of their sweeps flashed, rowing
a scaloccio
with six men to an oar. Water curled around them, a slow multiple synchronized
splash…splash…splash…
of foam on either side to complement the wave that curled forever around the dull enameled steel of their rams, beneath the brightly painted and carved figureheads. They were beating just fast enough to keep position against the current of the massive river, slowed as it was by the ancient dams that still made it as much a series of lakes as anything.

It all made him a little nostalgic for the campfires of the Quest, when it was simply him and nine friends against a hostile world.

“A pity we could not pick a place for battle where our river flank rested on a castle,” Ignatius said a little wistfully. “They have more cavalry, but that would keep our right flank safe at least.”

Rudi snorted. “Ah, that would be the comfort and consolation of the world, it would indeed. If only the enemy were such utter and complete fools as to fight at a place so certain to give us the victory.”

“A point, Your Majesty. Still, the number of castles on the Columbia limits them in the ground that
isn’t
so covered, to our great advantage. If they will fight at all, and not wait and try to force us to come to them.”

“They must fight,” Rudi said, grimly satisfied for a moment; he’d worked hard to put them on the horns of that dilemma. “It’s too late in the year for them to do anything but accept battle or withdraw until spring…and half their forces come from deep in the Rockies or farther yet, past passes the snow has closed already, or will within days.”

He closed his eyes and laid his hand on the pommel of the Sword of the Lady. Energies swelled and swept across the surface of the world; the
Sun kissed Earth, and moisture rose from the Mother Ocean, sweeping in curling patterns that crashed against mountains in a slow violence that would grind stone to meal over aeons as more welled up from the world’s warm beating heart…

“Yes, the snow will be deep this year. Far to the east, far into the Bitterroots, and blizzards on the High Line as well. Which means…”

It was a little like the sensation you had playing a five-pound trout on a light line. Months of time and many lives had gone into the intricate balance. He blinked, for a moment lost in calculations of time and force and space, like a game of chess but one where all the pieces had minds and wills of their own, and more than half were hidden. He went on:

“I
think
they’ll accept battle a little east of here.”

“With the lower Yakima to their backs? And the water rising with autumn?”

“Ah, but they don’t expect to lose, you see, and it’s not so very close to their backs, though close enough if things go as I hope…No castle, to be sure, but the bank of the Columbia there’s much steeper; that will have to be advantage enough. So long as we don’t dally and let them get around our left before we’re deployed, of course. I need to know where the bulk of their horse-archers went, and soon. Too mobile by half, they are, and with plenty of room to work. I fear the commanders on the other side have heard of Manzikert as well as I.”

A rumbling went through the ground. He looked up. Batteries of field-pieces were going past up the slope, twelve-pounders pulled by six big horses each, the crews walking beside and ready to jump in to pull brake levers.

The machines themselves were stubby things on a pair of spoked five-foot steel wheels, a ton-weight each and the heaviest weapons commonly taken along with a marching army. The metal frames showed the ranked coil springs within, taken from the suspensions of heavy trucks and ready to resist when the curved throwing arms were racked back against them. The troughs for the roundshot that were their most common load jutted forward through the angled steel shields that protected the crews in battle; behind them the trails were clamped together, resting on the wheeled
limbers that carried the ready ammunition and the pumps and armored cable for the hydraulic bottle-jacks.

Most of this set had the Lidless Eye on the shields, sometimes freshly joined by the Crowned Mountain and Sword of Montival, and the crews tramping along were in half-armor with glaives over their shoulders. They were part of the standing army of the Protectorate, but mostly men from cities and towns rather than the rural manors and fiefs that supplied men-at-arms and infantry to the PPA forces. The officer at the head in three-quarter armor rode competently enough, but not like a knight, and he didn’t have the golden spurs on his heels either. Instead a banner beside him hanging from a staff showed a blue-mantled woman crowned with stars, a babe cradled in her arms.

The Virgin Mary,
Rudi thought.
The Crown City of Portland’s patron. Not a Goddess, no, perish the thought! She’s just what you’d expect to see with Jehovah of the Thunders…

The amusement died as he glanced aside at Ignatius; for just an instant the cleric’s usual shrewd, reserved gaze was unguarded, and filled with an utter love.

Rudi smiled and thumped his armored shoulder. Christians could be annoying at times, and Ignatius was swordblade-certain in his faith, but it was a large part of what made him a blessing as a comrade in arms, and an unshakeable pillar of a new and still unsteady throne. This was a man you could trust to do any task with all his very considerable talents, and who you could trust at your back without a second’s doubt.

As he will be for my children after me,
he thought.
Absolutely honest men who are also capable are not so common. Not teasing him is an exceedingly small price to
pay.

“To battle then, Knight of the Immaculata,” he said gently. “
Miles
of Christ.”

He looked northward. A form was swelling there, another glider, slender wings flexing as it stooped towards the road and the command party. Two of the flock circling the landing-place on the river peeled off to examine it, then wagged their wings to show it had passed their scrutiny.

Edain’s head was already pointing in that direction; he raised binoculars,
then barked an order and the High King’s Archers took stance, readying to shoot, just in case, and despite the sigil of Benny the Beaver that marked the aircraft as one in the city-state of Corvallis’ armed forces. Edain reached over his shoulder for an arrow, then drew his great yew longbow and shot nearly directly upward. It was a warning shot, with two bright red ribbons tied behind the arrowhead to say
sheer off
. Even so it soared a hundred yards into the air before it turned and plummeted back, striking a rock and snapping.

“Sure, and it’s a waste of a perfectly good arrow,” Rudi could hear his follower grumble.

He didn’t turn, though, and another shaft was resting through the cutout of the bow long before the first came down; this one a plain businesslike bodkin. A glider was seldom a threat to a single man on the ground; it wasn’t as if the fabled explosives of the ancient world were available, after all, and if you were free to run you could generally dodge a single canister of the napalm that was the most deadly alternative natural law allowed in the Changed World. But Edain Aylward Mackenzie was not one to take a chance with his charge when he didn’t have to.

The glider waggled its wings in acknowledgment, banked, stooped again. This time it was a hundred yards away when it pulled up. Something shot downward, trailing ribbons of its own, thin ones in a rainbow of colors meant to make the passage through the air obvious and the tube easy to find on the ground. A finned metal dart the length of a small man’s forearm went
chunk
into the rocky volcanic soil. The glider dove downslope and started to rise in a widening gyre, building altitude for the return to its launching point farther north.

An archer pulled the message-cylinder free and examined it as Rudi and Ignatius dismounted; only after Edain had checked it over himself and opened it briefly did he reseal it and hand it on to the Lord Chancellor.

The monk’s strong hands unscrewed the aluminum tube. He unrolled the paper within.

“Dúnedain Code A7-b,” he said. “Do you need a decryption, Your Majesty?”

That was a formality, to the bearer of the Sword of the Lady. Rudi took the thick paper and spread it out.

“That’s where most of their horse are, at least,” he said with satisfaction as he read the report collated from dozens of scouts. “Good work! To the northeast of Prosser, or what’s left of it; they burned the town last year.”

“How many?” Ignatius said.

Numbers were the bread and butter of war at the command level. Or at least the hard-tack and beans and jerky.

“Hmmm. Twenty-five thousand at least, plus the remount herd—I wish them joy of feeding that many horses in country this dry and at the tail-end of the year, even if they’re cow-ponies for the most part. All light cavalry, though, no sign of the Sword of the Prophet that they could see.”

“They’re using the rancher levies to cloak the point of the spear.” Ignatius nodded. “The part of the Sword they brought west is ten thousand men…less a few thousand, probably, given their losses in this campaign to date and other needs. Add in twenty-five to thirty thousand light horse and that’s the bulk of the CUT’s forces in this theatre.”

“Plus their foot, another ten thousand or so that they haven’t left for sieges or line-of-communications work. Spearmen, but fairly good ones. Now, that leaves the question of where Boise’s main thrust will be, their heavy infantry. Logically south, to form the hinge on which the CUT’s army pivots fast…but I can’t just assume it…”

Decision firmed. “Couriers and encryption team!” he said, raising his voice a little.

A trio dashed over from the headquarters group, Portlanders in half-armor. Sandra had always loved codes and worked hard on her messenger service, and the Protectorate’s espionage and counter-espionage were second to none.

“To: Her Majesty; enclosed is Dúnedain scout report north flank our position. I expect to engage the enemy main force in Prosser area within forty-eight hours maximum, probably sooner. Move general reserve forward under Grand Constable; follow yourself when deployed, as per previous.”

He bared his teeth for an instant. That committed him…but leaving your reserve too far back was as much a mistake as throwing it into the fray at the beginning.

The cryptographer’s fingers danced, and the paper was finished, copied and sealed. The message itself was a solid mass of letters and numbers; decoding it by sheer brute-force mathematics wasn’t impossible…but you needed big calculating machines, and even so it would take
time
, by which time it would be stale news.

For that matter, the Church Universal and Triumphant hated such machinery with a bitter passion; their official theology called the Change the judgment of the Ascended Masters on humankind for using too much of it. Boise had been more liberal in the old General’s day, but his son was the Prophet’s puppet now. Or the puppet of the force that controlled them both…

“Surface courier to the High Queen’s field HQ at Goldendale via Maryhill,” Rudi said.

No need to risk the heliograph net or a glider that might not make it that far.

“And another: Dúnedain code. To: Lord Alleyne,
hîr Dúnedain.
I direct high-priority reconnaissance for—”

This went a little more slowly; the message was not only to be encoded, but in Sindarin to begin with, which meant he had to spell it rather than speaking. The enemy
probably
had at least a few who could puzzle the language out with a set of the
Histories
to hand, but equally probably didn’t have anyone who could really
speak
it, particularly the way the tongue had developed among the Rangers over the past generation. Combining that difficulty with the randomizing code ought to make it unbreakable in any time that mattered.

“Or perhaps Sethaz or his High Seekers could read it,” Ignatius murmured, as the team cleared and packed their equipment.

Rudi nodded; if you’d spent two years of travel and battle and sickness and wounds and the death of friends and final triumph with a man, and him keen-witted, it was no great surprise when he followed your thought. The enemy was strong, strong, and they both knew it.

“Or perhaps not,” he said. “The raw power is there, yes, but—” he
touched the hilt of the Sword “—not the…the
affinity
, would you say? The Powers behind the CUT hate the very touch of us, including the ones they use and possess, because they hate the universe of matter itself. Contact with us is like wading in a sewer to them, or cramming yourself into the mind and body of a maggot. You’ve seen how their touch destroys. Those Ones who gave me the Sword tried very hard indeed not to tear asunder the fabric of things by doing so;
my
fabric in particular, for which I’m grateful. The others don’t have that, mmmm, subtlety of touch.”

Ignatius nodded. “A point indeed. Diabolism is its own infinite punishment.”

The leather-clad couriers on their fast light horses took the messages and sprang into motion. They galloped along the edge of the now crowded road. A battalion from the confederation called Degania Dalet was coming up it now, ranked pikes alternating with recurve bows, singing something in a guttural minor key to flutes and some stringed instrument.

And before the Sword came to me, I’d have just said it had a fine stormy roll for a marching song to make the miles go by
, he thought.
Now…

He could not only understand the words; he could feel the ache of millennial sadness in them and the fierce determination beneath. He bowed his head a little with fist to chest in salute as the blue-and-white banner in the lead dipped to him, and called: