Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (12 page)

Nothing. A desert mouse hopped by, squeaking faintly and making a prodigious sideways leap as it realized a human was six inches away; Mary grinned behind her mask at its expression of bulge-eyed terror. It fled even faster as something half-visible ghosted through the air above, the wilderness going on about its own life heedless of the human-kind. The night was intensely still but the stars were dimming with high thin cloud coming in from the west, the tail end of fall storms hitting the Cascades and spilling into the interior…

She chittered. The faintest of passing shadows as the team behind hers moved forward and upward. Again, and again; not mechanical, but
a subtle dance with every slightest fold of the land, each loose rock and clod of earth and miniature gully washed by the recent fall rains, testing each foothold and handhold before committing to it.

The final leapfrog left her, Ritva, and Uncle Alleyne at the head of the sparsely-dotted column that now snaked up from the river to the plateau above. She inclined her head to see faint shadows cast by irregularities in the ground that didn’t fit the landscape, then crouched and ran her fingers over the ground to take in details that even an expert couldn’t see when it was this dark and in the distorting moonlight.

All shod horses,
she battle-signed, when the other two came close enough to see the broad movements.
Some of it very fresh. Enemy cavalry sweeping the area, repeatedly, in the last few hours.
Lots
of enemy cavalry. And all shod…Boise regulars.

They both made gestures that meant:
I spotted that too
.

They settled in, picking blinds that would work as well in daylight if they had to stay that long and tenting their war-cloaks out around them. She dug a rock out of her position and set it carefully where it wouldn’t draw notice; even with a Ranger tunic on—light mesh-mail between two layers of thin soft leather—a pointed stone digging into your belly-button for hours at a time could get old. The lighter beaten dirt of the road to the north of their position glimmered like a silver ribbon through the heath, with nothing else but the rusted, tattered snags of a pre-Change building of sheet metal half-buried in dust and brush beyond it to say this wasn’t somewhere east of Rhûn a couple of Ages of the World ago.

Like the Paths of the Dead,
she thought with a slight shiver; it was that season.
Come on, now, Ranger, control your imagination.

Once they were certain there weren’t any enemy observing them, there was a brief clipping of vegetation and rubbing of soil to make the cloaks perfect matches for the locality. She stifled a sneeze at the spicy scent of cut sagebrush. Then they took position and waited; Dúnedain got a lot of practice at that, and the Quest had driven it home. Mary sucked on a hard candy to keep her energy level up, worked her muscles against each other on her bones to keep from stiffening in the cold and
at long intervals took tiny sips from a flexible tube that ran to a flat bladder on her back.

Euuuu.

It tasted horrible, flat and rubbery. Also she didn’t want to drink too much, because eventually you had to get rid of it. Peeing yourself was an occupational hazard sometimes, you couldn’t be fastidious when things were serious, but the smell could give you away to an alert scout close-by.

Speak of Morgoth and He appears
, she thought, an hour later.

She controlled her breathing to damp down the spurt of tension. It was still some time to dawn, and dense-dark now that clouds had covered most of the sky. The sound came first, shod hooves thumping dirt; she could feel it through her belly and breasts where they pressed against the soil. From here you could see the dirt road running east and west and then the dark shapes of riders spread out in a long line, with the odd lantern they were using more to keep alignment than for light.

The cavalry patrol were taking their time and picking their way forward slowly. They were Boise cavalry from their gear, horse-archers with sabers at their belts, but a number of them had light lances as well. They were using them to prod at the odd suspicious spot, little gleams of dull silver in the night.

Too professional for comfort
, Mary thought.

With a practiced effort of will she pushed aside the visceral knowledge of how much steel slicing your flesh
hurt
when it happened. That was just her body’s memory reminding her how she’d acquired so many scars at a still-young age. If they got that close, wounds would be the least of her problems. The Dúnedain were superb fighters at their skulk-and-snap style of war, but they didn’t have any disguised Maiar with long beards or shining elf-lords with magic swords to even up impossible odds right now.

Though my big brother
does
have a magic sword, genuine article, so maybe someday…Hmmm. They’re combing their line of march over and over and not just going through the motions either. Old General Lawrence Thurston did his job well.

One of the horsemen passed within ten yards of her blind; he must nearly be on top of Uncle Alleyne. He stood in his stirrups to look southward,
down the slope towards the Columbia; the river would be a glowing ribbon from here, catching what starlight and moonlight there was. This one was in a centurion’s cross-crested helmet rather than cavalry gear, some battalion or brigade commander who wanted to check for himself and not just take a report.

“Goddammit, something doesn’t feel right,” she heard him say. Then, much more quietly: “Goddamn this war.”

He shook his head wordlessly and neck-reined his horse aside, then turned and cantered back east with a purposeful air.

Mary let her breath out slowly. Most of the cavalry went on; several platoons’ worth stayed and screened the road and the flat land on either side. More time crawled past, and then a different sound came through the earth. A thudding like the world’s biggest horse, only each beat was somehow a little blurred. Then she saw glints of light, regularly spaced and moving at about walking pace; someone was using shuttered lanterns as guides. Then starlight glinting on metal to the eastward, and the noise increased, with rhythmic clattering and clunking sounds underneath it and the peculiar rumbling of six-horse teams drawing heavy weights on steel wheels over rutted country roads.

Field artillery and ambulances on the road
, she thought.
Light baggage wagons too, spare weapons and medical supplies and maybe some packaged field rations. Enough for a day or two.

The vehicles were blurs, but she could pick up the outlines; off to either side the spaced-out lights became men with bull’s-eye lanterns, each marking march routes through the empty rolling fields.

Infantry to either side in the open country, marching in battalion columns every hundred yards for as far as I can see. Probably the same thing on that road north of this. Valar and Maiar, but they’ve got good march discipline, to do this in the dark without everything tying up in a mess!

That was dry textbook stuff; the books that Uncle Alleyne and John Hordle had made part of the Dúnedain curriculum said pushing a big army down a single road or a few roads was like trying to pour the Columbia through a straw. It would take forever and the men at the end would still be breaking camp when the ones at the head got where they
were going. The books had a lot of complex rock-paper-scissors stuff about how you couldn’t fight while you were in column of march, but if you deployed to fight you couldn’t march well…

Theory. Reality was the dull bronze gleam of the eagle standards, and the blackness below that was the heavy silk banners with the Stars and Stripes stirring slightly in the night as the standard-bearers carried them forward, the tanned masks of wolves on their helms and the hides flowing down their backs. It was rank on rank of pila-points moving in unison behind, the heavy javelins swaying over each man’s right shoulder to match the big oval shield on the left as their hoop armor clattered and the apron of metal-bound leather thongs that guarded their groins rattled. It was hobnailed boots hitting the dry soil and thin grass of the arid plain like the feet of so many giant centipedes. It was the massed smell of leather and male sweat and oiled metal and dirt ground open to the air, the scent of war drifting through the cold dampness.

Slowly, slowly she raised the night-glass monocular to her eye and details sprang close; the tight intent face of a centurion, the stolid endurance of the rankers pushing through the darkness and a man’s head tossing as he tripped a little on some rock or pocket and recovered without even cursing…

Mary felt a furious bubble of anger beneath her breastbone. Lawrence Thurston had created this awesome
thing
, this mighty instrument of human will and effort and devotion, courage and discipline, for a purpose. It had been a thoroughly demented purpose—the United States had perished in the moment when the wave of Change flickered around the planet and trying to restore it was like trying to make rivers flow backward—but that had been a noble madness. A faithfulness and steely honor that had refused to bend its oath-given word even at the death of a world. She had met the man: she knew.

His traitor son Martin was
wasting
it, stealing it for mere ambition; or at least he had planned to do that, before he’d fallen into a trap more subtle and more cruel than anything he could have imagined himself. Which meant he’d put it in the service of the enemies not simply of humankind, but of
existence
itself.

All the while her mind was counting the movement that turned the darkened plain into a rippling carpet, a skill so automatic that it was like the breath in her lungs. The answer it presented made no sense, which was like having your eyes tell you that down was up. Then she counted again, and this time she used the tricks consciously, counting the men in an area, estimating how many multiples…

That’s twenty or thirty thousand men. That I can see in this fucking cloudy night. There must be nearly as many again
out
of sight! Dulu! Help! Manwë, Varda, Mother!

The only time she’d seen more human beings in one spot was in Iowa, looking down from the city wall on Des Moines…and Des Moines was a monster, the biggest inhabited city left in all the millions of square miles from Panama to Hudson’s Bay. Seeing an
army
this size made her swallow, even after watching the host of Montival forming up for the past couple of months. War wasn’t particularly complex, but it certainly was
hard.

The march seemed endless, though she knew from the stars that it lasted hours rather than the days she felt. She spent her time identifying unit banners so that the High King’s staff could fit them into their appreciation of the enemy’s TOE. At last it was past them; heading towards the west, towards the heart of Montival, towards the host of the High King, towards…

My handfasted husband, my family, my friends, and everything I hold dear
, she thought.
The forests where my children not yet born will walk. Well, we knew they were coming. Now we know how many of what, where, and when.

The stars wheeled on through gaps in the clouds. Those closed, and a light rain began to fall, cutting visibility to nearly nothing by the time the infantry had passed and the cavalry followed; trickles of cold wet soaked into the front of her clothes where she lay in the blind, but there didn’t seem to be any more patrols. Even
this
enemy didn’t have enough men to put them everywhere they might be useful without dispersing effort fatally; war was a matter of prioritizing, and sometimes that rose up and bit you on the ass even if you did everything right.

Another chittering from Alleyne and they rose cautiously, moving together in the drizzle. The war-cloaks had the added merit of being
rain-repellant, since the base layer was woven tightly of greased wool. They crouched in a triangle, close enough together that the brims of the hoods met.

“Compare figures,” Alleyne said. “Ritva first.”

His voice was dry, but not as numb as it had been a while ago. Work helped grief.

“
Nelc-a-meneg, hîr nín
,” she said crisply.

“Thirty thousand, my lord,” Mary agreed. “But perhaps as many as forty thousand or more, if the road north of this is being used on the same scale. Catapults in proportion to infantry, according to the Boise scales. That would be the full reserve the US of Boise has in this theatre, though they’d have to strip their lines of communication to do it.”

“Good analysis,” he said, and wrote quickly on a pad. “They’re not trying to hedge their bets, which is precisely the right thing to do from their point of view.”

Another figure loomed out of the mist-like rain at his low-voiced call.

“Hírvegil. Relay this. The Folk of the West need this information. Tell Lord Hordle and Lady Eilir that they’re to send the first boat on with it. Maximum priority. They’re to follow with the second if we don’t rejoin within an hour. The third to wait for us until the morrow.”

He handed over the message. Hírvegil disappeared, quiet as a ghost, and the paper went with him.

Ritva’s right about Uncle Alleyne
, Mary thought.
About what she sensed at Aunt Astrid’s funeral pyre.

They were speaking Edhellen, of course, but there had been a subtle shift in the way the Lord of the Rangers used it; not as those raised to it as a cradle-speech did, but also less like a running translation from the English he’d used for his first twenty-odd years. More in the manner of the Histories, or the way his wife had taken the Noble Tongue.

He’s going to live her dream for her and do it perfectly. That’s his grave-offering.

Uncle Alleyne was very much Sir Nigel Loring’s son, so reserved and self-controlled that if you didn’t know him well you could think he wasn’t a man of strong passions at all. But Mary knew him very well indeed.

The rain built from a drizzle to pouring for a few moments, a hiss that
cut hearing in a burr of white noise. The horse was almost on them before they heard it.