The Given Sacrifice (30 page)

The Sword of the Prophet answered with a charge of their own, but they’d never done
well against the heavy metal of the western knights in this sort of stand-up fight.
Twenty minutes later the whole Cutter force was in flight north, with half the Montivallan
light cavalry ant-tiny figures in pursuit. A brigade of Fred’s Boiseans came swinging
down the cracked, potholed pavement of the old US Highway 89 and out into the valley,
with a regiment of Bearkiller cataphracts deploying into the open on their flanks;
their leader Eric Larsson had argued furiously that they be allowed to launch the
charge, and had still been grumbling about it when Rudi left him.

Behind them came blocks of sixteen-foot pikes, like rectangular walking forests topped
with a glitter of honed steel; the levies of the Free Cities, with the banners of
their towns before and their batteries of field catapults rumbling along between.
A crash of boots and squeal of fifes, and a deep chorus paced to the marching stride:

“O’er the hills and o’er the main

Through mountain snows and burning plain

Our King commands and we obey

Over the hills and far away—”

Rudi nodded to the Grand Constable; he and Mathilda turned the noses of their coursers
and trotted down to the main body. Their escorts followed, the High King’s Archers
and the lancers and mounted crossbowmen of the Protector’s Guard bristling slightly
at each other. Huon turned and gave a friendly salute good-bye to Lioncel de Stafford
where he stood by the Grand Constable’s stirrup, handing up a leather map folder.

“D’you think they’ll be a book, someday,
Songs of the Prophet’s War
?” Rudi said. “There are enough to fill a mort of pages. Mind, there’s been a fair
deal of marching and waiting in camp, and singing does make that go faster.”

Matti grinned. “If there is a book . . . maybe
Marching to Corwin
 . . . your little sister Fiorbhinn will write it. And make up half the songs, and
change the rest to make them more lively, and nothing anyone but an expert could sing
or play.”

“And claim the credit for the whole, the scamp,” Rudi chuckled. “Mind, she does have
the talent; to be just, for simple things as well as the high art. Odd that she and
Maude are so unalike, in looks and nature both.”

Rudi’s two younger half sisters had both been sired by his mother Juniper’s second
husband, Sir Nigel Loring. Maude was tanist of the Clan now—hailed as his mother’s
successor-in-training by the
Óenach Mór
, the Great Assembly—and she was brown of hair and eye, steady and calm by inclination
and very clever; Fiorbhinn was fair and slim and had the music and magic running through
her soul strong and wild. Along with a good deal of wildness in other directions.

“If there’s one thing I always envied you it was having siblings,” Mathilda said.

Rudi raised a brow at her. “Ah, but I was lucky in mine, or at least the most of them.
Your friends and your lover you can choose, most often: your blood kin you’re stuck
with. And it’s . . . how did Ingolf put it . . . a crapshoot.”

She nodded. Their friend had spent a long time quarreling with his elder brother,
or in exile; and then there was Fred and Martin Thurston to consider. Being born to
power magnified the usual rivalries and gave them a malignant importance that ordinary
folk didn’t have to take into reckoning.

Their path took them past the First Richland coming back to fill their quivers and
head out again to sweep the western side of the valley. Ingolf saluted from their
head. The volunteers were still young men—the war hadn’t lasted
that
long since they joined in as the Quest returned through the Midwest—but their gear
was battered and their faces had an indefinable something that hadn’t been there when
they were just gentry sprigs riding off heedless to seek adventure in distant lands,
the sons and brothers of Farmers and Sheriffs back there on the Kickapoo.

They’d had the adventure and no mistake, and taken the measure of it. He’d be sorry
to see them go when the High King’s Host met the army of the League and they headed
home. No doubt Ingolf would be too; the older man was committed to Montival, and he’d
left home as a youngster anyway, but his heartstrings would always be there. Having
seen it, Rudi didn’t blame him; it was a fine fair land, fairer to his eyes with its
rolling forested hills and winding river valleys than the endless flat, fat black
earth of Iowa or the Red River. He’d liked the hardy, stoic, plainspoken folk who
dwelt there as well.

“They’ll have a tale to tell, back on the Kickapoo,” Rudi said. “For the rest of their
lives. Of mountains and battles and strange folk and stranger Gods.”

“Mostly lies,” Mathilda said, but with a smile.
“And then sixteen Cutters and a grizzly bear had me cornered in a gulch! With my leg
broken and nothing but a roast turkey drumstick to fight them off!”

“Whereupon I died,”
Rudi finished for the hypothetical storyteller sitting before a winter hearth waving
a mug of mulled cider while his grandchildren gaped. “The which is why I’m not here
drinking this and telling the story!”

The easterners gave him and the High Queen a cheer, which was gracious in foreigners
fighting for the sake of the thing, and went back to the jaunty marching song they
favored, roaring it out loud if not particularly tunefully as they trotted along in
an orderly column of fours:

“Instead of water we’ll drink ale

And pay no reckoning on the nail

No man for debt shall go to jail

While he can Garryowen hail!

We’ll break windows, we’ll break doors

The watch knock down by threes and fours—”

They passed Oak among the Mackenzies retrieving their arrows; the big blond man was
laughing and exchanging a fist-bump with Lord Maugis, who leaned over with a gruesomely
spattered war hammer held across his saddlebow. They both waved to him, well pleased
with how the stratagem had worked, and he returned the gesture; now the Montivallan
army could deploy unhindered in the broad open valley. Tomorrow would end the war,
bar the mopping up and reconstruction . . . which unfortunately might occupy the rest
of his life.

And isn’t that a sight, to be sure, the two of them thick as thieves, when Oak marched
in the War of the Eye against the Protectorate, and his first arrow sent in anger
perhaps aimed right at the breastplate of Maugis’ father? And isn’t it a hopeful thing
to see?

Mathilda caught his eye, and she knew that she shared the thought. It was natural
enough, since their own parents had been bitter enemies once and their sires had killed
each other in single combat.

“To work,” she said.

The first chore was visiting the wounded, those who weren’t actually still on the
operating tables; a painful task, but something those willing to risk maiming and
death for them and the kingdom had a right to expect. Mathilda did the same, and they
went from one form to the next while the hospital tents were going up.

When he’d finished, Ingolf Vogeler was waiting outside, pacing and slapping his leather
gauntlets into his palm. His nephew-cum-trumpeter Mark stood nearby holding the horses,
a youth who looked much like his father’s brother, though lankier with hair of light
sun-faded tow rather than brown. Right now he was looking a bit pale despite summer’s
tan, as well. Ingolf was merely grim, but something in his eyes brought Rudi up.

“Couple of things you need to look at, bossman,” the Midwesterner said.

Rudi nodded. He trusted Ingolf’s judgment as to what was important. And the High King
had a good staff, which freed him from administrative detail, as long as he remained
reasonably available. Part of commanding was standing aside and letting your subordinates
do their jobs; his was to concentrate on the big picture.

“You too, bosslady,” Ingolf said to Mathilda.

The enemy dead mostly lay where they’d fallen once the Montivallan medics had—carefully—checked
for living men to be carried off; bitter experience had shown that some of Cutter
wounded were given to pretending helplessness and then lashing out with hidden weapons
at any who approached them. Policing up weapons and gear wasn’t the maximum priority,
and burial could wait. Followers of the CUT usually cremated their dead, in any case.
Rudi’s brows went up a little when he saw a dozen of the Sword of the Prophet laid
out in rows, the lacquered leather and steel of their harness oddly bright in the
midmorning sun. The smell of blood and opened bodies was fairly heavy, as it always
was, though it was cool enough that they were spared the quick bloat and stink. He
brushed aside flies; overhead the buzzards and crows and ravens were hanging, waiting,
or descending to tear at the dead horses who’d been given quick mercy-strokes.

Oak and the Baron of Tucannon waited for them. The Mackenzie nodded casually, and
the nobleman gave a Protectorate military salute, fist to chest in a clash of steel
gauntlet on articulated breastplate.

“Take a look at their faces, your Majesties,” he said grimly.

The pleasure of doing a difficult job well seemed to have fled, and neither was a
man to be easily upset by the miserable aftermath of battle.

“Aye,
Ard Rí
,” Oak said. “This is just a sample, mind, but it’s the same with most in the red
armor. Save for some officers. It wasn’t until we went over the field looking for
the wounded that we noticed the pattern.”

Rudi did too. At first glance along the row of battered, bloodied bodies he thought
some were women. Which was vanishingly unlikely, since the CUT regarded females as
a lesser creation and had strict rules restricting them to domestic tasks. Far more
so than even Associates, and unlike them with no provision for exceptions for those
too stubbornly bloody-minded to accept or work around customs they found grated on
them. Then he realized . . .

“Young, First Armsman Oak, my lord Maugis,” he said. “Very young indeed—too young
to raise a beard, every one.”

“Yah,” Ingolf said. “They take them young from their parents, six or so, but I’ve
never heard of them putting the cadets in the line before they’re full grown. That’s
eating the seed corn with a vengeance, wasting all that training.”

“Tuili,”
Rudi said flatly. “Bastards. They’re desperate, but even so.”

There were battlefield chores youngsters did; junior squires among Associates,
eòghann
in the Clan, military apprentices among Bearkillers. Some of those tasks involved
danger, because there was no absolute safety in an environment full of flying metal
and human beings in the mildly insane state of savage focus required for naked extreme
violence at arm’s length. Tasks like pulling back the wounded, bringing up arrows
or a fresh lance, carrying messages. Riding in the ranks to meet a charge of knights
was
not
among the things that youths just learning their trade were fit for.

“There wasn’t anything we could do,” Maugis de Grimond said. “It’s unchivalrous, but
there
wasn’t
anything we could do but cut them down.”

He seemed to be trying to convince himself, which spoke well for him. Rudi knew plenty,
and not necessarily wicked men, who’d simply shrug and move on.

“Not if they were serious, no, there
wasn’t
anything you could do but strike,” Rudi said. “My lord, I slew my first man in battle
when I was barely ten. It would have been fair enough if he’d killed me instead. Since
I’d a blade and I intended to see his blood.”

That had been when a Protectorate deep-penetration squad led by one Tiphaine Rutherton
kidnapped him and rescued Mathilda, who the Clan had in turn captured in an earlier
raid, all part of the build up to the War of the Eye. Or the Protector’s War, as they
called it in the north-realm. That was the feat that had won the future Grand Constable
knighthood and the barony of Ath, though it wouldn’t be very tactful to mention the
details right now.

The knight nodded, his eyes still haunted. “We . . . we just thought it was one or
two exceptions, some squire getting a rush of spirits, a boy pushing into a man’s
work, that happens. They were out to kill, and for squires that junior they were very
well trained. And they wouldn’t give up. Then just now we rode back over the battlefield
and saw how
many . . .”

Mathilda put a hand on his shoulder. “Duty is hard, my lord,” she said. “And facing
mere danger is not the hardest part of war, sometimes.”

The baron nodded, his face relaxing a little.

Rudi gestured agreement. “After years each in the House of the Prophet, I’m not surprised
they wouldn’t give up. And a lad of fourteen can kill you dead as dead, if he’s determined
enough and you don’t fight back with all your force. Weight of arm isn’t the only
thing that matters.”

He turned back to Ingolf. “There was something else?”

“Yah, you betcha,” he said, the sing-song guttural of his native speech a bit stronger
than usual in his voice. “The Dúnedain overran one of these farm things.”

“Temple-farms, I think they call them.”

“Yah.” Ingolf glanced at Maugis; they were good friends, if not particularly close
ones. “You ought to come too, Maugis, if you can. I think you might feel better about
this”—he indicated the enemy dead—“if you did.”

“What is it?” Mathilda asked.

“Better just to show you, and I wish I didn’t have to know it myself, Matti,” he said.

They cantered in his wake, a squad of Ingolf’s Richlanders added to the party leading
the way. The path turned off the old highway and onto a narrower road, dirt but well
maintained and covered in rolled gravel. Ingolf was closemouthed.

“I’d have planted trees on the roadsides,” Mathilda said, to fill the silence—something
unusual for her.

“The Cutters don’t do anything just for nice,” Rudi said.

The headquarters of the temple-farm was a set of plain log buildings surrounded by
an earth berm twelve feet tall, the wooden plank gate sagging open. Within were barns
and grain-stores and the usual workshops essential to cropping and grazing, though
there was far less machinery than in most places; the corrals outside were empty,
which was logical—nobody left livestock to be swept up by an enemy. Storehouses trailed
sacks of grain and potatoes, evidence of a hasty attempt to move the just-completed
harvest as well, and a rather crude wagon lay with a broken wooden axle and crates
and boxes spilling out of it. The traces lay before it, sliced and loose where someone
had cut the team out of its rig rather than bothering to unharness.