Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (9 page)

“I gave mine to Ava for a keepsake,” he said a little shyly.

“Chivalrous,” Huon said approvingly. “Really marvelous girls, even if they were lowborn.”

Then he laughed. When Lioncel looked a question at him, he went on:

“Back before lunch, I remember thinking how I wasn’t the type to enter the Church. Now I’m
sure
I don’t have a vocation!”

“Clerics sin too, they’re human.”

“Yes, but they’re supposed to feel worse about it when they do!”

They dashed into the inner keep; all the castles they’d grown up with were basically similar, since nearly all were built to a set of standard designs, slightly modified to fit the site. Only a few of the greater ones had been worth more trouble, in the terrible years. The Great Hall here, where the garrison and staff and their families would eat most days, was built along one side of the court across from the chapel and castellan’s quarters. Lamplight shone through the high pointed windows, but without the halo of moths that would have been present a few months ago. They slowed down to a quick walk, left hands on the hilts of their swords, trying to look briskly casual and not at all tardy.

“You’re lucky we were delayed,” Sir Rodard said.

He was a young knight of the Grand Constable’s
menie
, standing by the doors in breastplate and tassets and fauds, half-armor. The squad of crossbowmen behind him were calmly alert, not expecting trouble but very ready for it.

“And that we got that message from Ogier. Good work, by the way. Come on in, make your devoir and get something to eat.”

They nodded to the brown-haired knight and ducked into the hall. It was fairly well lit by high-placed gaslights, a barnlike structure of plain plastered concrete floored in basalt blocks, and full of the smells of the evening’s inevitable stew and not-particularly-well-washed soldiers of the two households and the Protector’s Guard. Nothing fancy at all; this was a Crown castle, designed simply for a garrison at a strategic spot rather than a resident lord or as a possible headquarters for the high command like Castle Goldendale. It didn’t have any of the plundered artwork the Lady Regent’s salvagers and their imitators had used to furnish the greater
keeps, or the modern equivalents she’d sponsored. Logs crackled in a big, shallow hearth backed with slanted iron plates that threw the heat out into the room.

The two squires went and made their bows before the Grand Constable and the High Queen at the upper table on the dais, sweeping off their hats and bending a knee. The two leaders were deep in conversation with a cluster of scouts and officers as they ate, folded maps and documents amid the platters and bread-baskets and one propped up against a hunk of cheese with a knife in it.

Mathilda looked up, extending her hand for the kiss of homage.

“That was good work, Huon,” she said, smiling. “And you too, Lioncel. Especially for junior squires. A knightly deed. I’d have hated for Ogier to die in a scuffle like that.”

Lioncel flushed. “Sir Ogier would probably have handled it himself, Your Majesty,” he said. “We just…reacted.”

“It was the
right
reaction, both of you. That did you credit, and any honorable accomplishment of yours rebounds to the honor of your lieges.”

Tiphaine d’Ath nodded. “Though from the time stamp on the heliograph message, you took your own sweet rambling way getting back. What were you two up to all afternoon?”

Lioncel froze, wide-eyed, and made a choking sound. Huon coughed and managed to say:

“Ah…this and that, my lady. The High Queen did say
sunset
, my lady, so we didn’t push the horses.”

D’Ath made a slight throat-clearing sound, looked at him for an instant with an unreadable expression, and then went back to the report and sketch-map which had claimed the High Queen’s attention. Lioncel mimed wiping his brow as they went over to the trestles where dinner was being handed out, barracks-style. They took big chipped plastic bowls from a stack; the cook ladled them full of the stew that steamed in a cauldron, and her helper stuck a spoon in each and stacked thick slices of bread and butter on top. They took their meal to the juniors’ benches, signed themselves, murmured Grace and ate in contemplative silence for a while.

I’ve got a lot to think about.

The stew was better than usual this evening, with plenty of onion and garlic, dried tomatoes and chunks of potato as well as the inevitable beans and salt meat.

Or maybe it’s just relief
, Huon thought as he spooned it down.
What a day!

They went back for seconds, and Huon had another mug of the raw red wine. As they turned in the empty bowls, he paused to extend a hand.

“You’re all right, de Stafford,” he said seriously. “I’m glad to have you at my back anytime.”

The blond youngster flushed as they shook, meeting his eyes with a look as firm as the grip of his hand.

“You too, de Gervais. We’re comrades now, brothers-in-arms who’ve stood side by side in battle!”

Rodard looked up as they passed on their way out, tired as the day caught up with them and eager for their bedrolls.

“Ah, Huon.”

“Yes, Sir Rodard?”

The young man grinned, with a slight hint of a wink. “You’re quick-witted, Gervais. But while you were
doing
‘this and that,’ Mistress This and That bit you on the neck.”

Lioncel choked again, and Huon clapped his hand to the sore spot behind his right ear.

“Boys will be men, it seems. There are worse ways to spend what may be the second-to-last day of your life. Go get some sleep. The High King’s ordered the general reserve to close up behind the main force. The enemy are coming. It ends now.”

T
he High King of Montival drew rein, turning off the road past the time-wrecked and rust-gnawed length of an irrigation machine of the ancient world, all wheels and pipe at the foot of a low rough rise.

“Sooo, sooo, Dando,” he said, stroking a gloved hand down the beast’s neck; it was lively with good oats and alfalfa, mouthing the bit and stepping high and showing every sign of wanting to run. “Easy does it, lad. We’ve a long day before us, and more work tomorrow and the day after that.”

The courser turned its head nervously at a harsh whicker from the remount herd following as the headquarters crew badgered them past and took the opportunity to let them roll and graze. Rudi’s charger Epona was there, and she was never altogether easy seeing him riding another horse. Even her own get, much less some anonymous gelding she barely acknowledged as one of the horse-tribe at all. Moving this many strange horses together was always tricky, though at least few disputed Epona’s claim to be lead mare of any group she was in…and she didn’t tolerate sass from stallions, either.

One shied a little from her rolled eye and cocked hoof-ready hip even as he watched, probably wisely. He could see Edain Aylward grinning at the pale anxiety on the faces of the horse-handlers as he deployed a platoon of the High King’s Archers off their bicycles and into a loose screening formation about Rudi; they all had high-geared mountain bike models and could keep up with horse-soldiers easily on this sort of terrain. Epona would tolerate the master-bowman…mostly…because he’d been Rudi’s friend from earliest boyhood and because he knew better than to take liberties. Strange grooms were fair game, and she had never liked the human-kind in general much.

A platoon of Bearkiller mounted crossbowmen were sharing the guard duty today, grimly silent and businesslike as they cantered about to check folds in the land for a couple of hundred yards in every direction. Catapults and aircraft aside, that was as far as bodyguards need worry.

“Epona’s getting even more testy in her middle-age,” Rudi said.

The jest hid real concern. She’d been all the way to the east coast with him, and he’d been worried for her the way she’d lost condition then; Epona had amazing endurance for a seventeen-hand warmblood, which was what her looks said of her breeding. But even so she wasn’t an Arab, or a cow-pony used to living on grass and hard work. Coming back had been easier—big chunks of it through the Dominions where they’d been able to haul her on a horsecar on the rails—but the fact remained that she was nearing the end of her working life.

He remembered the look that had passed between them, all those years ago at Sutterdown Horse Fair; the boy he’d been, and the young mare who’d come to hate the human-kind while she was still a filly. A secret knowledge, a complicity between just the two of them…

And she’d never forgive me if I left her behind
, he thought, casting a look at the sleek black figure that paced along with arched neck and flying mane.
She’s not a horse you can turn out to pasture and bring an apple now and then. There have been times I doubted whether she was not Epona Herself. It wasn’t an accident I named her for the Lady of the Horses.

“I suspect we all will become less tolerant in our age,” Father Ignatius, Knight-Brother of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict said. “If the
Lord blesses us with years, which is by no means certain. And being Lord Chancellor of an inchoate kingdom still in the womb…”

“Will age you before your time, eh, Father?”

Ignatius chuckled; apparently being away from the offices and documents suited him, and he bore the weight of his armor with casual unconcern.

“Not as much as being your chief of staff in an army also inchoate will age me, Your Majesty,” he said dryly. “Bureaucratic tangles are easier to resolve when there isn’t a battle going on at the same time, my son.”

They both shared a chuckle at that, even more dry. Rudi cast his eyes sideways at the gaggle of staff officers, commanders from seven different realms of the High Kingdom and the allied but separate Dominion of Drumheller, messengers and clerks and map-drawers and everything else down to the people a half-mile back driving the wagons with the tents and supplies for the command party.

It does them good to see the high command cheerful, and no need whatsoever to tell them it’s mostly gallows humor. I wish Mathilda were here
, he thought.
She
will
be, come the fight. Tomorrow probably, or the day after possibly, depending on how eager the enemy are to strike. But the reserve is mostly Protectorate troops, and those Yakima regiments d’Ath had with her retreating from the Tri-Cities. She’ll get them going better than anyone else I could appoint.

“Tired of improvising, Your Majesty?” Ignatius asked.

The warrior-monk was a few years older than Rudi; a borderline Changeling, born before the Change but not old enough to really remember the ancient world. His knight’s armor didn’t disguise his slim build, and he was of only medium height—standing flat-footed his eyes were level with the High King’s nose, and the tonsure that exposed the scalp in the middle of his bowl-cut black hair made him look older than his years. An expert would notice other things, though. Starting with the thickness of his wrists, and the ring of swordsman’s callus all around the thumb and forefinger and web of his right hand.

Rudi had seen him fight often enough, on the Quest. More often than not against much bigger men, and the only time he’d seen the Shield-Brother pushed to his limits at anything like even odds was when they’d
both taken on a High Seeker of the Church Universal and Triumphant in Des Moines, one of the magus-warriors the Prophet had set on their track. His mind was even more formidable. The slanted dark eyes were calm as he watched the army of the High Kingdom of Montival pouring past them up the road, the calm of a man who’d done every single thing he could and who was leaving the rest to his God.

“Tired of improvising? Tired of life, you mean?” Rudi replied after a long moment, and this time they
did
laugh, unforced merriment. “Not yet.”

The roadway up from the Columbia was not much to start with and hadn’t been repaired since the Change, not until he threw five thousand men and a group of Corvallan engineers at it a few days ago. It would hold while the portion of the host’s men and supplies that had barged and sailed up the river or used the waterside rail line climbed up to the plateau. He’d picked it for the relatively low grades and for being as far east as he felt comfortable with given what he knew of where the enemy was. Hopefully the warning wasn’t enough for them to react in time and catch his forces before they massed and deployed.

A glance upward showed the morning sun glinting off the wings and canopies of gliders, dozens of them turning in the thermals and updrafts along the river like a swarm of eagles as they kept guard. There wasn’t much a glider could do to another of its kind; opening the canopy and firing a crossbow at a moving target was usually dangerous only to passers-by below. But they could harass each other enough to make reconnaissance difficult, if the pilots had enough nerve to risk one near-collision after another, and his did.

Most of them were wild girls, each picked from dozens of volunteers for nerve and for being lightweight bundles of strong sinew and cat-quick reflex; a lot of them came from Associate families, demoiselles who weren’t content to roll bandages or tally hard-tack, or from Mackenzies without the heft for the longbow and their like elsewhere. You didn’t need as much weight of bone and muscle to fly a wind-riding machine as you did to carry a twelve-foot lance on a barded destrier in plate armor or pull the string of an eighty-pound yew stave past the ear over and over.
Lightness was a positive advantage in a soaring sailplane, where every ounce might make the difference between
safely home
and
crash-landed behind enemy lines.