Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (42 page)

“Short form, fuck all, sir. They’re gone, that’s the best that can be said,” the man said at the end, tapping the city map, one compiled three years ago with hand-drawn notes on developments since. “This thing’s a work of…what did my old man call it…
historical fiction
now. Most of the outer wall’s still standing, but I think that’s only because the sons of bitches couldn’t tear it down. They certainly hit everything else—even dug up and trashed a lot of the water system. And…”

The man swallowed; he was a scar-faced cavalryman in his thirties, looking as tough as the leather of his boots. Mike felt a creeping unease at the expression on his face.

“Spit it out,” Eric said.

“They chopped up bodies and threw them into the waterworks wherever they could, sir. Animals, people…kids, too. They seemed to have a couple of hundred kids—”

“The Church Universal and Triumphant levies children for their training and breeding camps from all their subject peoples,” Ignatius said, stone-faced. “If they had already gathered them before the news of the battle arrived and thought they couldn’t remove them east in the winter season…”

“Well…Sir, Lord Chancellor, it’s pretty bad in there,” the scout finished. “Ah…permission to go get stinking drunk, sir.”

“I need to take a look myself,” Eric said, studying the man narrowly. “HQ staff, get us set up here for now, standard procedure. Lord Chancellor, Rancher Brown, you come with me. Eyes-on is always best if you’ve
got the chance. Oh, and Murchison, if you feel the need that badly, permission granted.”

He took a bottle from his own modest wicker-and-leather chest of baggage and tossed it to the scout before they mounted again.

“That’s Larsdalen brandy. The hangover won’t hurt quite as much when you arrive and you feel better on the way.”

Mike Havel removed his helmet and wrinkled his nose slightly as they came through the city gate and into the pool of still air held by the walls. He was accustomed to the smell of death, or he’d thought so. There was more of it in the ruins of Bend than he’d ever scented before, and it had everything from the lingering stink of ancient corruption to bodies burned in the fires that had swept the town when the Cutter garrison withdrew a day and night ago.

Their horses skirted another pile of smoldering rubble that had slumped into the street when a building collapsed, bricks and bits of charred two-by-four and miscellaneous fragments. The setting sun behind the clouds threw gray-on-gray shadows around them, and the wind was growing colder as it flicked wet ash and snow from the patches of colder ground around them.

Ahead of him his uncle turned to Rancher Brown.

“Your own patrols find any survivors yet?” Eric asked. “I know we got most of the people out before the city fell, but there must have been
someone
here or in the area besides enemy troops and camp-followers. Nobody ever makes a completely clean sweep.”

“A few thousand prisoners were kept for labor,” Chancellor Ignatius said from Eric’s other side. “Scouts didn’t report a column on foot when they withdrew. I fear…”

Messengers had been coming and going since the Montivalans forced the unguarded gates. Most of them were local men, refugees picked because they knew the city. All of them looked even more stunned and lost than Mike felt, and some were weeping openly. Bearkillers and cityfolk and ranchers’ men alike walked or rode with weapons poised, but Mike thought that the sense of threat that hung over the ruins was not something cold steel or arrowheads could assuage.

“Survivors? A few. All raving mad, except for some kids who hid out in attics and sewers and such,” the rancher replied. Suddenly his face woke from the calm of shock. “What’s the
point
of all this?”

Chancellor Ignatius spoke with a calm grimness.

“To deny us a base for operations and to make reconstruction harder in the long term, Rancher Brown,” he said. “And from pure malignance, the desire to inflict pain for its own sake.”

Brown shook his head. “Our intelligence from before…before this said the Cutter garrison had their HQ up ahead, in…”

“A church dedicated to St. Francis,” Ignatius said, nodding at the brick structure ahead of them.

It was on a slight rise, with stone steps leading up to the front doors and a big rose window over them.

“They didn’t burn that, looks like,” Brown observed. “Not like them to be respectful.”

“They were not,” Ignatius snapped, his eyes questing. “They took it for their own uses.”

“I’ll take a look, then,” Eric said, swinging down from the saddle.

Ignatius sighed and said: “Is that wise, Lord Eric?”

Eric shrugged. “It’s quick…don’t worry, I’m not going alone.”

His guards formed around him; Ignatius did too, and put his shield on his arm and drew his sword. Even then, Mike smiled a little to himself. If his uncle had a fault as a war-leader, it was the same headlong courage that made him so formidable and feared. He exchanged a grin with Will Larsson. He and Eric’s eldest son stayed mounted and ready behind.

Asking permission just gives someone the chance to say
no, he reflected.
One of the unofficial lessons.

The Bearkillers—and one Knight-Brother of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict—formed up and walked up the stairs into the church. The tall windows would provide enough light, even at this time of day. There was a pause, and then…

Eric Larsson, called Steel-Fist, stumbled out. The battle-hardened guard detail followed, backing frantically, their shields raised but the swords slack in their hands. Ignatius followed them;
he
had sheathed his
blade and slung his long shield over his back, and he had his rosary and crucifix in his hands instead.

Appalled, several of the Bearkiller A-Listers started towards Eric. He waved them back. They could hear the clank of armor as the big man staggered around a snag of ruin and fell to his knees, retching noisily. Men and women were looking at each other. The war chief of the Bearkillers was notoriously a hard man; not cruel, but sometimes short on mercy, and the product of a generation’s fights.

“What was in there?” Will Larsson asked, and Mike nodded.

That
is
the question.

“What was in there that did that to
Uncle Eric?
” he added thoughtfully.

Eric Larsson returned, accepted a canteen from one of his followers, rinsed and spat and then drank.

“No,” he barked when heads turned towards the entrance to the church. “Stay out. Christ have mercy…right after the Change, Mike and I—”

Even then, Mike Havel had the usual moment’s twinge at his father’s name. There were drawbacks to being the son of a legend, especially to one who’d died too early for you to remember him.

“—smoked out a nest of Eaters. That was almost as…but they were just
crazy
. This—”

The rayed sun had been painted across the doors there, and the cross that had stood above lay smashed some distance from it.

“No indeed, my sons,” Ignatius said slowly in agreement, walking over to push the doors closed. “There are things no man should have to see.”

“Yes,” Eric agreed. Very softly: “They’re too hard to forget. Twenty-five years won’t do it. Don’t anyone ask me. Ever. And burn this. Get some combat engineers in here and burn it
now
.”

He was silent as they rode back to the Bearkiller encampment. Ignatius excused himself with a simple:
I must pray.
Eric brooded until the camp cooks handed around their plates of salt pork stewed with beans and rolled wheat tortillas. Then he pushed his food around the plate for a moment before he looked up at his son and nephew.

“There’s one good thing about this,” he said quietly; the camp-fire underlit his face, showing how grooves had begun to seam it.

“Yes, sir?” Mike asked.

“It’s a good thing to know why you’re fighting,” Eric said. “And that it isn’t just because the other guy’s as big a son of a bitch as you are.”

“I am sorry, my lord Tucannon,” Rudi Mackenzie said gently.

Castle Tucannon stood on its hilltop, a spur of land reaching out from the foothills of the Blue Mountains. There were scorch-marks on the dark walls, but looking at the slope—and the way the spur had been severed off into an island by a deep cut across the neck that connected it to the higher lands—Rudi wondered that anyone had been foolish enough to try. Only someone truly desperate, or utterly mad or both would have sent men against those frowning battlements. It was a fairly big castle, a doubled mirror-keep, and high enough that the catapults on its crenellated walls would have commanded every inch of the approach. A ponderosa-pine signal spire on the tallest tower had kept it connected to the heliograph net centered on Walla Walla all through the siege.

The manor of Grimmond-on-the-Wold below had suffered much more. Few roofs were left and the barns and winery and gristmill, sawmill and stables at the end of the long village street were wrecked. The Baron’s house in particular had been utterly demolished, its thick pise walls pushed in to make an irregular mound that the winter rains were turning into mud; the High King was surprised to see his sister Mary wiping at her one eye as she came out of the empty gates.

“The gardens were so beautiful,” she said. “When Ingolf and I were here in the tail-end of summer. Like something out of the Histories, gardens in Lothlorien or Dol Amroth.”

The Baron’s mother, Lady Roehis de Grimmond—who’d been born Jenny Fassbinder, more than sixty years before—smiled distantly and patted her shoulder. She was in a plain kirtle and wimple of brown and gray, her face gentle and thin.

“I started them, dear,” she said. “My lord Amauri and I, two years after the Change. I can do it again. The damage isn’t really as bad as it looks; remember, this is winter. Most of the roots and bulbs will have survived. The house was timber and soil and we have lots of both.”

“It can wait, Your Majesty,” Baron Maugis said, looking at the thick stumps of the oaks and maples that had lined the town square here in front of his dwelling. “We can live in the castle for a few years. My father did before he built the manor. He planted these trees for me; I can plant more, for my son’s sake. The war’s not over, for that matter, even if we’ve kicked them out of this district.”

He was a young man in his twenties, of medium height and gaunt now, but strong-looking, with a pleasantly ugly face, bowl-cut reddish hair and prominent ears. He and the fighting captains behind him were worn as the patched leather and wool of their gear, but they’d held out in the mountains for months, and their raids had made their occupier’s lives less than pleasant and the supply situation a nightmare. More folk crowded behind, retainers and ordinary craftsfolk and peasants down from the mountain refuges where they’d lived in tents and caves and old forest-ranger cabins in the heights that lay blue and jagged eastward. This was a fine spot for a town, though none had lain here before the Change; good water, shelter from the worst winter winds, and plowland and pasture and timber all available close at hand.

Not to mention a very bonny view, of the mountains…the dawn sun will be a fine sight there…and of the plains away to the east. I think this man’s father chose wisely, and his son seems of no less wit and of great heart besides. I’m usually easier with lords in the Protectorate who are Changelings. Though from what Mary said, this one’s father came here to get
away
from Matti’s sire, the which is a strong argument in his favor.

A wagon train was also curled up the main street; the drovers and the escort and the local folk were unloading crated hardtack, barrels of salt meat and dried fruit and sacks of beans and flour, bales of blankets and tools and sausages of tent-canvas. Some of the locals were wrapping themselves in blankets, or their children; it was a dry cold day, with the wind carrying particles of grit that made you blink if you faced into it.

“What really worries me is that we didn’t get the winter crop planted this fall,” the Baron said, nodding to the rolling fields to the north and east. “We stripped out most of our gear before we took to the hills, but nothing can roll the seasons back, here or at my vassals’ manors.”

You could see the layout of the Five Great Fields where the strips of the peasant holdings had lain, and the demesne fields of the manor-holder’s home farm; there was a biggish vineyard on a south-facing slope that looked to have survived, and most of the trees in the orchards hadn’t been harmed. The sweet clover and alfalfa planted in the Great Fields as rotation and fodder crops were there yet, though heavily grazed by the occupiers; but the potatoes had been dug and stolen, and the fields that should have been green with the young winter wheat were under nothing but a scurf of weeds and incipient bush. That was enough to worry anyone.

Mathilda pulled up and dismounted, passing her reins to a squire with a word of thanks as her guardian men-at-arms and mounted crossbowmen backed out of the crush. She was in civilian riding garb, a divided skirt and jacket of russet brown, with a plumed Montero cap pulled over her brown braids.

“Lord Maugis, you’ll have seed corn and working stock enough by spring,” she said, as the commons touched a knee to the ground and the nobleman bowed and kissed her extended hand in fealty. “As Lady Protector—”

That’s right,
Rudi thought with a blink of surprise.
Matti’s twenty-six this coming year, and inherits. Not that Sandra will be going to a nunnery or dower-house; we need her too much, and sure, she’d die of boredom without administration and intrigues and secrets.

“—I’m going to order a capital levy on every intact manor and Chartered
town in the Protectorate to help rebuild the County Palatine. The Association takes care of its own.”

There was a murmur of delight from the commons crowding behind the knights and their retainers; they had crossbows and shields and spears in their hands, swords at their belts, but their eyes lit at the thought of more plow-oxen and earth curling away from the harrows and seed-drills. A cheer went up from them all, for Mathilda and the prospect of sacks of grain and beans resting secure in their barns come next August.