The Given Sacrifice (24 page)

The particular order Hao had represented at the conference so long ago emphasized
the Way of the Warrior. How exactly they reconciled that with Greater Vehicle Buddhism
was a matter of theological complication Rudi wasn’t much interested in, but Hao had
been in charge of the training and leading of the Valley’s hosts since the beginning.
The Valley had not been protected by its geography alone.

“There is much respect for the holy Rimpoche Tsewang Dorje,” the old Han said a little
severely, naming the abbot of Chenrezi.

“As there should be,” Rudi said, quite sincerely.

In an entirely different way the Tibetan abbot was even more formidable than his warrior
subordinate. The
Rimpoche
had sworn him fealty in impeccable style; then winked, and they’d both shared a chuckle
as the old bonze’s face turned into a network of wrinkles like an ancient merry child.
You got that sense that most of life was a game he played punctiliously out of an
innate courtesy. . . .

Tiphaine d’Ath had been standing like a gray-steel statue of a warrior Goddess, Lioncel
de Stafford behind her with a stack of documents. Now she used her silver baton of
office to sweep from east to west along the lower edge of the map.

“That’s all very well, Bossman, but going that way is like running your little finger
up your own nose; limited possibilities of advance and you’re not likely to reach
anything useful. Unless you’re going to fight your way over the Tetons, where it can
snow any damned month of the year, July included.”

“They’ll have to guard the passes, but yeah,” Rasmussen said, nodding. “Thing is,
the supply situation was even worse than we thought it would be, and we realized we
had more troops than we could feed on the axis of main effort, so we might as well
have them do
something
instead of just going home. Whoever we picked to turn around and march back, the
rest of the troops wouldn’t like that, to put it mildly. A lot of the League’s army . . .
the Iowans particularly . . . well, they were drilled troops and well equipped and
ready enough to
fight
, but a lot of them hadn’t realized how much time in the field you spend being so
bored and miserable that fighting’s a relief.”

That brought some chuckles; everyone here had been fighting for years, and not a single
summer campaign each year on someone else’s fields, either. Whatever else you might
say about him, Rasmussen had
been
there. Someone murmured
poor babies
! Nystrup looked angry rather than mocking; what his people had been through was beyond
conception.

“And once we got the CUT out of the area, the Ranchers there could spare stock to
be driven north, we got some from as far south into old Colorado as the San Luis valley.
Gratitude, gold and fifteen thousand men with shetes can produce a big herd. That
helped a lot with our transport bottleneck. Horses too, and war eats ’em fast.”

A bad man is Bossman Rasmussen, in my opinion, but a fair sound general, and a realist,
Rudi thought.
Hmmm. I must see to that area in old Colorado after the war . . . another bit of work
to add to the plate!

The Midwesterner went on: “Our main force turned north at Casper. There’s more support
for the CUT there as you head north, more people who actually buy that loony line
of goods they peddle, and we started getting serious harassment. God tailor-made the
Bighorn country for a cavalry guerilla. Horse-archers are a pain in the ass that way
to an infantry army. I
told
them in Des Moines to take more light cavalry, but . . .”

There were mutters from the ranked commanders, along the lines of
tell me about it.
The CUT’s armies were mostly plainsmen with recurves, and with a string of several
ponies for each man they could
move.
Trying to force them to give battle when they didn’t want to fight was like trying
to punch smoke with your fist, too; even a little carelessness and they’d ride around
you and burn the country behind you while you stood scratching your head, or arse,
or both, and wondering where they were.

Though there were answers to that. Rudi grinned like a wolf. “We’re approaching things
that they must stand and fight for,” he said. “For all that they put their capital
in a land so remote, they still have one.”

Rasmussen nodded, with an identical expression, and went on:

“The Lakota—”

This time his nod to Rick Three Bears was genuinely polite instead of hostility masked
by a politic pretense of courtesy. He also gave them their own name for themselves,
too, which best translated as
friends
or
allies.
The name
Sioux
more commonly used among outsiders to name those tribes was derived from what their
bitter rivals the Anishinabe-Ojibwa people had called them long ago, filtered through
French and then English, and had originally meant something like
little snakes.

That hadn’t been intended as a compliment or taken as one.

“—have been invaluable keeping them off our backs.”

Rick shrugged and drew on his cigarette, the cheeks of his narrow hook-nosed face
pulling in for a moment and his braids swinging.

“We have lots of practice with the Cutters,” he said in a not-quite-insolent manner,
blowing the smoke upward.

And with your gang, white-eyes,
went unspoken; his father John Red Leaf had been a leader in the Sioux War, when
the resurgent Lakota
tunwan
had tried to take back their ancestral lands in the Red River valley. It hadn’t worked,
but they had ended up once again dominating what had been the western Dakotas.

Though I’ve met his mother as well, and she’s suspiciously red-haired,
Rudi thought whimsically.
Our tribes and clans and nations are stories we tell—though none the less real for
that. But real because we believe in them, not because they’re written in natural
law . . . and as we Changelings know, even natural law isn’t as unchanging as our
parents thought.

Mathilda coughed at the tobacco smoke with resigned disgust, where she sat with a
stack of reports from the staff and Huon Liu de Gervais at her elbow. The Midwesterner
lit one of his own, the habit being much more common where he came from than in Montival,
ignored the High Queen’s glare and several others, and went on:

“But the harassment slowed us down—we kept having to deploy from march column to line
of battle, and occasionally fight a set-piece engagement. We shoved ’em back every
time, but the Cutters always broke off before we could really wreck them.”

More moderately sympathetic nods. Montival
had
wrecked the CUT and Martin Thurston at the Horse Heaven Hills, but mainly because
the enemy had stood and fought there beyond the point of reason in an attempt to win
the war at one throw.

“It would have been fu . . . frankly impossible if there had been twice as many of
them, I grant that, so you and us hitting them at the same time was crucial. But while
that went on they had labor-gangs ripping up the rail, piling it up over heaps of
ties, and setting those on fire—we could see the flames against the sky for weeks
and smell the burning creosote. That meant we had to re-lay
everything
as we advanced into the Bighorn Basin and went west, except the actual grading, and
some of that’s washed out since the Change so we had to shove the
dirt
back. Not to mention bridges. Plus they set grass fires wherever they could, and
drove every head of livestock out of our path. Right now we’re here—”

He tapped the map south of Billings, the old Montana capital and mostly ruins now.
“Only a few hundred miles left to go. Damn bad miles, though, and the Cutters are
thick as grass. Infantry, not just their ranch and Rover levies, and the Sword of
the Prophet, what’s left of it. I understand you guys wiped out most of that crowd
of maniacs in the red armor last year, for which many thanks.”

Tiphaine gave a small chilly smile. The Grand Constable had brought the Association’s
chivalry down on Corwin’s elite troops like a war hammer on a skull, with hideously
perfect timing. Rudi gave her a small crisp inclination of the head. He’d spent most
of that long and ghastly day setting the move up, but she’d carried it out faultlessly
and deserved to be proud of it.

“Thank you for the summation, Bossman,” Rudi said, and tapped the map himself. “And
the Dominions, Drumheller and Moose Jaw and Minnedosa”—the old Canadian prairie provinces,
which had come through the Change with
only
the loss of their larger cities, like the Upper Midwest—“are here, around Great Falls.”

“Hurrah,” Tiphaine said dryly, holding up a fist, extending her index finger and moving
it in a very small circle of celebration.

Rasmussen gave her a look and then an unwilling grin as he resumed his seat. Mathilda
snorted in agreement; Great Falls wasn’t so very far south of the Dominion of Drumheller’s
prewar border. And the Dominions were rich and populous, by the standards of this
continent in the twenty-sixth year of the Change, and they didn’t have as far to go
as the other combatants.

“It’s mountains there,” Rudi said mildly.

Ian was bristling back where he stood in the Dúnedain contingent, but far too junior
and too polite to say anything at the aspersion on his native land.

“Also they didn’t
have
to intervene in this war at all. We’d have beaten the CUT eventually anyway if they
hadn’t, and they’d have gotten all the benefits of victory without any of the costs.”

“Every Cutter they engage is one we don’t have to,” Mathilda put in judiciously; when
she thought politics, you could hear her mother in her voice. “Corwin was a bad neighbor,
but they’d never taken any territory they considered their own. The Association took
the old Canuk territory west of the Rockies, which is now part of Montival. It was
really quite forethoughtful of the Dominions to come in on our side.”

“So, how are we going to get at Corwin, Your Majesty?” Tiphaine asked. “And do it
before snow closes the passes, and get the bulk of our troops back in time? So that
all our neighbors can go home for Yule?”

“That
is
the question,” Rudi agreed.

You’re the High King, you’re the man with the magic sword, so you tell us what to
do . . . and you’d better be right,
he thought sardonically.

In the end you had to decide; you never had enough information and what you did have
might be wrong. That, and the sheer work involved, were among the reasons he’d always
found it surprising that so many
wanted
power. He’d read the philosophers, Plato and Aristotle and Jefferson and the others,
and there was something to be said for republics; but the great asset of a monarchy
was that you could put men in office who
weren’t
obsessed with a ruler’s power, wanting it so much so that they twisted their whole
lives into a search for it.

Who knows, Bossman Rasmussen’s grandson may be a fine fellow
.

“We’re going to follow the old Highway 20 route, east over the Yellowstone Plateau
and north then up Highway 89,” he said after a moment’s echoing silence; he saw shoulders
relax as the dice were cast for good or ill. “Then down from the old park territories
and into Paradise Valley. We have to take Corwin within the next month, and then get
the bulk of the troops out to somewhere we can feed them through the snow season.
The number who we can overwinter there without producing a famine, or even in the
Bitterroot country as a whole, is strictly limited. Even in what passes for lowlands
hereabouts.”

Tiphaine pursed her lips. “It’s direct, and it doesn’t give them the chance to get
off their back foot,” she acknowledged. “Given the time constraints . . .”

“Least bad,” Rudi replied. “The western part outside the old park was cut over about
thirty years ago, and the remainder burned hard just before and then just after the
Change; it’s grassland and shrub now for the most part, good grazing—and heavy with
game, buffalo and elk, deer and boar and feral cattle. That will help a fair bit;
we’d send light cavalry and scouts first anyway, and they can shoot as much as possible
and rough-gralloch it. The troops can eat roast meat and save the iron rations for
later.”

Everyone looked at the map. That route meant hauling everything they couldn’t forage
with wagons on roads that had spent a generation getting worse, repairing where essential
as they went. And even on a
good
road a horse or ox could pull less than a tenth of what it could on rails, and more
slowly too.

He tapped the map again. “We have to guard our line of communication here, at Henrys
Lake and up to the ruins of West Yellowstone town; there’s a possible approach from
Corwin to the north, where they could flank us. I want the bulk of the remaining Association
foot there, Grand Constable, to patrol and block the possible approaches from the
north. Delegate the command as you see fit. You’ll keep . . . two thousand of your
lancers with the main field force advancing on Corwin. We’ll take the light horse,
fifteen thousand of the pike-and-crossbow infantry from Corvallis and the Free Cities,
three brigades of Boiseans—Fred, you pick which ones—the Bearkillers, the Mackenzies,
and field artillery in proportion. Most of the siege train we can leave west of here,
and all the heavy pieces; Corwin isn’t heavily fortified, much less so than Boise,
though there are forts, especially to the north.”

The staff at their tables began frantically scribbling, to translate that into the
movement orders.

“It’s doable,” Tiphaine said. “But only just. And that’s provided we don’t get locked
up skirmishing and breaking ambushes on our way through the Park. That’s mainly still
forests, according to the reports. I’ve fought in similar country before, and it’s
dead easy to end up chasing each other around in circles for weeks while your main
column sits and eats. Or starves.”