Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (47 page)

“What’s funny?” Asgerd asked, leaning close to speak beneath the hum of conversation.

“That all of it…the fighting and the faring, the stark dealings with the Powers and the fearsome magic swords and all the rest of it…was for this. Just this.”

The High King had given out that he would spend the Yule season with his Mackenzie kindred. There had been grumbling from the great lords of the Association, all of which he’d politely ignored.

“Let them complain,” Rudi said, looking up towards the lantern-glow at the gates of Dun Juniper and laughing. “If I have to dance another pavane or eat another pastry shaped like a ship or filbert ice cream carved
like a knight or listen to another troubadour dead-set on seeing how many obscure kennings and references he can boot-heel into a single song, it’s gibbering mad I’d go.”

“I hope Mom won’t be too lonely,” Mathilda said as they drew rein. “Christmas by herself.”

“Your mother would rather intrigue than eat her dinner,” Juniper Mackenzie said dryly. “And since when did Todenangst or Portland lack for that? Throngs of people, and when she wants sympathy she has her cats, and Lady Jehane to tutor.”

“She can always visit Castle Odell and sit by Conrad’s bedside and talk about old times,” Mathilda acknowledged. “Valentine and her girls are back from Montinore.”

“With hearty thanks and strong hints from d’Ath.” Rudi grinned.

He was fairly certain the Grand Constable wanted some privacy for herself and her Châtelaine for reasons not entirely unlike his own desire to get Matti to himself, or as close an approximation as was possible for a ruler. More seriously, he went on:

“And likely she’ll have you to herself when Órlaith is born. If I’m to be over the mountains then, hammering at the gates of Boise or Corwin, I’ll not stint myself of your company the now, love. And if any don’t like it, they can do the other thing, that they can.”

“All to herself? As if I wouldn’t be there too!” Juniper said. “Grandchildren give most of the joys of parenthood and only a tenth the labor and pain.”

“I’m sure
we
will all bear up bravely through the birth, speaking of
labor
and
pain
,” Mathilda said, with a raised eyebrow under the white ermine fur of her hat.

He reached over and squeezed her hand. He was relatively certain she and the child would both come through healthy; visions aside, she was fit and well-built for the business, and would have the best midwives and healers half a continent could provide on hand. It still wasn’t an easy thing, any more than heeling your horse into a gallop towards a line of points and battle-cries. And unlike that, it was one sort of fight they
couldn’t really share, though he would have given much to be there to hold her.

It was only a few hours past noon, but it was already gray fading to dark; there was a reason this time of year was called the
Black Months.
Snow was falling, steady and wet, on the long lens-shaped piece of sloping hillside benchland that Jeb Mackenzie had homesteaded more than a century and a half ago. The clouds had come rolling down from the Middle Cascades before they left Sutterdown, and by now the grass and hedges and bare-limbed oaks and walnuts all bore a thick covering; more still turned the tall Douglas fir and hemlocks upslope into a vision of green and brown crowned in white, with a strong mealy-damp smell that brought memory strong as thick honey back to him.

It had never been more than a middling-prosperous stock farm, despite being well over a square mile. Mackenzie family legend said the man had chosen it because it reminded him of Tennessee, though Rudi suspected it was also because the best bottom-land had either been taken up already or was swampy and required draining—certainly there was enough renascent wetland in the
dùthchas
farther west towards the river.

Later the family had moved to town—Eugene and Salem, mostly—and the land had fallen out of use save for timber; later still his mother’s great-uncle had grown wealthy and bought it back and much more of the forest beside, as a hunting-ground. The childless man had doted on the young Juniper, and when he died had left it to her, though she’d been an aspiring bard (and sometime High Priestess of the Singing Moon coven) with no handfasted man, a young daughter, and a burning determination to make her way with her music.

“It still seems a little unreal, sometimes,” he heard her murmur, her voice falling into old patterns. “It all changed so fast, after the Change…”

“Ah, well, it’s just the place I grew to me,” Rudi replied gently. “And very dear it is. You’d done it proud.”

They clattered up the sloping road that turned right to the gates. Dun Juniper wasn’t exactly a town, but nor yet was it an ordinary farming Dun with a palisade of logs if that; the wall was thrice man-height and solid, crenellated, the outer stucco white. Beneath the ramparts was a band of
painting, god-faces and sprites and eerily manlike beasts or beastlike men. Towers flanked the gates, and from them bagpipes keened, Lambeg drums rattled thunder, and flared trumpets whose mouths were shaped like howling wolves boomed beneath.

“And not altogether unlike
radongs
in sound,” another member of their party said.

Rimpoche Tsewang Dorje had made some concessions to the weather, including a sheepskin coat and hat. He looked up at the images, then pressed his palms together and bowed.

“You have done well indeed,” he said to Juniper. Then an impish grin that turned his face into a mass of wrinkles. “Even if some of the tools were…borrowed.”

“Stolen,” she replied cheerfully. “Rampantly stolen by Gardner not least, myself among the others.”

“Only something we
owned
could be stolen!” he answered, and the Buddhist monk and the Witch-Queen of the Old Faith laughed together.

The gates were double leaves of solid yard-thick timber baulks fastened together with bolts and sandwiched between two sheets of quarter-inch steel painted deep brown. On those were outlined images made of thousands of copper rivets, suggested more than seen until you let the focus of your eyes blur a bit and then vanishing again if you stared too hard. Above was the Triple Moon, waxing and full and waning; below was the wild bearded face of a man with curling ram’s-horns on his head. To either side of the gates were tall forms colored and carved; Lugh of the Long Spear, the Many-Skilled, and Brigit of the flame and sheaf and harp, She whose music bound the hearts of men like golden chains.

The music ceased and a voice called down ceremoniously; solemn, but with laughter in it. Rudi recognized Oak Barstow Mackenzie, the First Armsman. This was his home as well, of course.

“Who comes to Dun Juniper near the holy season?” he said. “Do you claim entry by blood-kinship as Mackenzies yourselves, or by guest-right, or do you offer tale or goods or skill?”

“The chief of the Clan comes, the Mackenzie Herself,” Rudi replied.

His mother took it up: “And the
Ard Rí
, the High King himself, the Lady’s Sword, comes to guest his kinfolk.”

There was a story of how Lugh had come visiting in disguise in ancient times, and had proven His worth by listing the skills He commanded. Mackenzie ritual always paid some slight homage to that.

The weight of the gates would have dragged if only the hinges had supported them, massive though those were. He could hear the
clunk
and
chung
as the locking bars were winched out of the way, and then teams pushed the gates open. The inner corners rested on salvaged railway wheels, and those ran on sections of track set into the entryway. Rudi dismounted and lifted his wife down; the others joined him, and the formality dissolved in a shouting mob as the dwellers in the home of his childhood surged around him.

That ended with Mathilda and himself and Juniper and his foster father Nigel Loring being carried shoulder-high behind a pair of strutting pipers playing “Rudi’s Tain,” through the streets of the settlement. It was a welcome relief from the elaborate deference of the north-realm, and they were suitably careful of Mathilda while he and the others were tossed about like chips of driftwood in a Pacific storm.

Most of the homes in Dun Juniper were built against the inside of the wall, knee-high fieldstone foundations and close-fitting squared logs above to the shingled roofs. The woodwork was colorfully carved in sinuous running designs, but none so much so as the Hall that had started as a rich man’s hunting lodge built over the old foundations of Jeb’s farmhouse, and it blazed with lamp-light and firelight through the big windows, a blur of gold and glittering color through the white fog of the snow.

It had been a long low building to start with; the early Mackenzies had doubled its size by lifting the roof and putting on another layer of huge squared logs. That roof loomed above them through the snow now, the end-rafters at east and west extending upward to spirals that faced each other deosil and tuathal, sunwise and its opposite, to balance the energies. Pillars ringed it on three sides, with the beam-ends of the second story gallery extended out over the court that surrounded it; they
were carved into the heads of the Mackenzie totems, Tiger and Bear and Elk, Coyote and Fox and Wolf and more, with great wrought lanterns of iron and glass hanging from their jaws.

Somehow nobody had thought of lifting the Rimpoche; he looked about with keen interest as the others were set on their feet.

“Not altogether unlike some things in Tibet,” he said. “We share a liking for bright colors and symbolic carving, at least.”

“We had a lot of time in the winter and needed to practice woodworking, at any rate,” Juniper said.

Nigel Loring chuckled. “It was already mostly like this when I arrived, and I thought everyone here must be either barking mad, or fallen into a book,” he said.

“Or that it was the biggest, gaudiest Celtic-Chinese restaurant in the world,” Juniper said, leaning aside to give him a quick kiss. “Sweet-and-sour corned beef and deep-fried cabbage, perhaps.”

The oldsters do love their jargon
, Rudi thought tolerantly as all three of them laughed.

The crowd went solemn again as they were set down; Rudi straightened his bonnet and plaid. The pipers put aside their drones; harp-music came as the doors of the Hall with their silver cat-head bosses swung wide. He recognized his younger half sister Fiorbhinn’s touch on the strings, and voices were raised—the pure sweet ones of preadolescents, mostly her gang of musical mischief-makers. For once they were solemn, and there was an ethereal loveliness as they sang:

“
Who will go down to the holy groves

To summon the Shadows there

And tie a garland on the sheltering leaves—”

Maud Mackenzie brought the guest-cup, a horn of hot cider with spices; now that she was Tanist and acknowledged successor to their mother as Chief of the Clan that duty fell to her. Rudi felt a pang as he took it; this
wasn’t
his home anymore, not really. That feeling was redoubled when Juniper guided him to the High Seat with its carved ravens. He smiled at her grin and wink and took it, hanging the Sword from one of the carved bosses.

Aunt Judy—Oak’s mother, and his mother’s oldest friend—plunked a piece of her carrot cake down on the arm of his chair; she was an herbalist and healer of note, the founder and manager of the Clan’s medical tradition, and also a very fine cook.

“What’s a king for, if not to enjoy a piece of cake?” she said.

Rudi leaned back with a sigh and took a forkful. The Hall smelled of the dinner cooking, and of the great fir-tree in one corner—the decoration had just started. There would be music and dancing beforehand; it was a very grave situation indeed that Mackenzies didn’t consider improvable by some song and dance. And storytelling, and riddles, and…

“What’s a king for indeed?”