The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change (11 page)

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Authors: S. M. Stirling

Tags: #Fiction - Science Fiction, #Alternative histories (Fiction), #American Science Fiction And Fantasy, #Alternative History, #General, #Regression (Civilization), #Science Fiction, #Science Fiction - General, #Dystopias, #Fiction

BOOK: The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change
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“Ladies . . . and . . . Erland Johnsson, isn’t it?” he said.
The young man nodded, flushing with pleasure at being remembered from a brief meeting during Rudi’s passage through Eriksgarth.
“Yes, lord;
hirdmann
to the chief. I was here when you came at Yule, and the seidhkona made prophecy, and you and the chief swore blood-brotherhood.”
“You weren’t limping then,” Artos said.
“That thumb-fingered idiot Halfdan Finnursson dropped a crate of hardtack on my foot while we were loading the supply sleds!” Erland burst out, flushing; the flush grew deeper when one of the young women snickered. “That’s why I was left behind when the
fyrd
marched.”
“But you can stand and hit. Your chief must value you highly, to have you defend his home and kin while he’s away.”
Out of the corner of his eye Artos noticed two of the Norrheimers he’d sworn to his service, Hrolf Blood-Ax and Ulfhild Swift-Sword, glance at each other and roll their eyes a bit. The young man—he was about seventeen, Artos judged—nodded without noticing; his face was self-consciously warrior-stern, but there was a pleased note in his voice as he said:
“Pardon, but I must signal.”
Then he pulled an ox-horn from its sling at his tooled leather belt and blew:
huuu-huuu-hu-hu-hu
. The snarling blat of the horn trumpet sounded across the bright snowfield. You could just see the high roof of Bjarni’s mead-hall there over a clump of trees and his father’s grave-mound to the westward. And the glint of his tribe’s stave-hof—it was farther away, but taller and sending bright eyeblinks from its gilding and painting. Post-and-board fences sliced the snowfields into square shapes, curving around an occasional rocky hillock or clump of dark green spruces or leafless birch and maple.
“Lady Harberga will be happy to see you; come with us! It’s her might that holds the garth while the
godhi
is away.”
Edain led a spray of bowmen out first. Before the main column had joined him, Artos heard a high, ringing neigh. A black mare had been standing hipshot in the turn-out field; you could scarcely call it a pasture, with new snow half a foot deep. Night-colored beauty seventeen hands high tossed her head and trotted in a circle, with the other horses in the crowded paddock giving her room.
He laughed, for a moment as carefree and joyous as a boy, and called out ancient poetry in a bard’s voice he had learned at his mother’s knee:
“One horse is black, broad-thighed, fierce, swift, ferocious, war-leaping, long-tailed, thundering, silk-maned, high-headed, broad-chested; there shine huge clods of earth that she cuts up with her steel-hard hooves, and her victorious stride overtakes the flocks of birds!”
Then he whistled loud and shrill; she took ten quick strides and leapt the six-foot rail fence with contemptuous ease, pacing over to him with her tail lifted like a flag and her mane flying in the breeze of her speed. Matti was on his right; the horse casually shouldered her aside and stood by him, turning her head to butt him in the chest and nip slobberingly at the ends of his hair. He blew into her nostrils, a greeting kiss in the horse-tongue, and gave her a piece of dried apple which she deigned to accept, with an implication of forgiveness for his long absence.
“I could get jealous of Epona,” Mathilda said. “Is she your horse, or your leman?”
“Nonsense. We’re just very good friends.” Artos grinned. “You were at Sutterdown Horse Fair, you should know the true story of Artos and Epona.”
No
, he thought.
I was just Rudi then. Ten years old, and Matti a kid as well, sure, when I found Epona. Or she found me.
“I wasn’t watching when you jumped in that paddock. My hair went
white
when I heard. She’d just tried to
kill
a man. Several men!”
“I’m sure she’s not jealous of
you
,
”
he said.
“I know that,” Matti said dryly. “She hasn’t tried to kill
me
. Yet.”
Artos winced slightly as he ran a hand over Epona’s withers. She was well into middle age for a horse . . . or would have been, if she was like most horses. Even her vitality had been worn down by the terrible midwinter trek eastward, the grinding effort and bad food. Now she was glossy-sleek, her neck a smooth arch of power and the long mane shining, her coat as smooth as the winter growth would let it be; he thought he saw a wicked glint in the eye she rolled towards him.
“They’ve been stuffing you,” he said mock accusingly, breathing in her grassy scent. “Maple sugar with the oats, and warm mashes each night, blankets, fresh straw every morning. Some adoring girl currycombing every chance she gets, and teasing out your mane and polishing your hooves as if you were a holy image in a shrine.”
“Which means she’ll savage someone soon,” Matti said. “Poor baby,” she added.
He nodded. Women were relatively—not absolutely—safe around Epona. The horse trader who’d mistreated her as a filly had been a man, and so had his assistants, and had bred a long-lasting feud with humankind in her breast, starting with the male half. All except for him. She followed at heel as he stepped out of his skis, put them over one shoulder and moved on. Every now and then she’d nuzzle him in the back.
Eriksgarth’s heart was an L-shaped combination of a big pre-Change white frame farmhouse sheathed in clapboard and the two-story mead-hall, squared logs on a hip-high foundation wall of mortared fieldstone. The regular whitewashed plank of the one and the flamboyant carved dragonheads and steep roof of the other ought to have clashed, but over a generation they seemed to have grown into each other. The snow-patched shingles on each roof even shared the same spotting of green moss.
Smaller homes for the chief’s carls and
their
families made another arm to turn the L into a U; a little farther back were big hip-roofed barns, the low sunken rectangular structures they called potato-houses here, and granaries and stables and workshops, all the necessities of a busy community’s farming and crafts. Right now it was more busy than ever, but not with its normal round of churn and loom, saw and smith’s hammer. Wagons and sleds were parked densely in the gaps between the buildings, lashed together with ropes and chains to make fighting-platforms. The windows of the houses had been closed with loopholed steel shutters, and a buzz of voices showed that the population had swollen manyfold.
“Some of those are folk who fled the Bekwa,” young Erland said, ignoring the pain of his foot and using his spear as a walking stick. “Their families, at least. And more the families of the
bondar”
—which meant
yeoman
, near enough—“hereabouts sent in as part of the Defense Plan. Erik made the Plan, Erik the Strong, the chief ’s father. Families to rally at the strongest places while the
fyrd
is out.”
Rudi nodded. Bjarni’s father had been head of an Asatru kindred much farther south; he’d also been a soldier in the old American army for most of his life before the Change. This part of the world hadn’t been cursed with the great cities whose witless hordes killed all around them when the Change came, and it had enough goodish farmland to feed the dwellers despite the stark climate, like an island in a sea of forest. But it had been in chaos when Erik arrived with his followers and those picked up along the way. Chaos could kill as certainly as numbers, if more slowly. You couldn’t plow and plant if the forest-edge was likely to vomit armed men at you on any given day. The more so when old ways of doing had to be relearned in desperate haste by stumbling through books or from a few who’d known them as hobbies.
Erik and his men hadn’t conquered the land once called Aroostook, not exactly. From what he’d heard it was more that they’d organized it, with a fair bit of fighting now and then, against bandits and reivers and refugee gangs from the north and south and locals too stubborn to admit what needed to be done.
And I grew up on stories of that sort
, he thought.
Erik sounds a good deal like my blood-father Mike Havel.
Folk came boiling out to meet them. They seemed a little surprised when the newcomers didn’t do likewise. Instead Fred Thurston made a signal, and troop-leaders barked
Halt
. That came a little raggedly, but in silent unison.
“Attention to orders!” the son of Boise’s first General-President snapped.
“We’ll break long enough to load food and get the news,” Artos called. “And then we’re off. No more than two hours—don’t get settled. Dismissed!”
Then more quietly: “Good work, Fred.”
Fred grinned, snapped a salute and then dashed off. The crowd of Norrheimers parted and Harberga Janetsdottir came through. She’d been well along in pregnancy when he met her, and wasn’t now.
“The babe is well?” he asked, with a little anxiety. “And yourself?”
“A boy this time, strong and healthy,” she said, smiling forgiveness of his breach of formal manners. “I find the second time goes easier.”
Gudrun Eriksdottir followed—her husband’s younger sister and about seventeen herself. Gudrun walked in breeks and jacket and boots this time, helm on her auburn-tressed head and spear in hand. Harberga was in Norrheimer women’s garb, a long hanging skirt of fine green wool embroidered at the hem with golden triskels, and a linen apron held at the shoulders with silver brooches, with a shaggy bearskin cloak over all. She was tall and a year or two older than he, her fair hair braided under a married woman’s kerchief according to local custom, and a look of tight-held worry on her face.
Her blue eyes went to the sword at his waist—to the Sword—and then flicked up to his face, going a little wider. He nodded very slightly, and saw her sternness melt a bit. Then he bowed a little with the back of his right hand pressed to his forehead. That was the greeting a Mackenzie man gave to any hearth-mistress, whether in a lordly hall or a crofter’s cot. Harberga handed him a drinking-horn that one of her women had brought.
“Drink I offer, tall helm-tree,” she said, abbreviating the local formula of welcome a little.
“Hail to the giver, to the Powers and the folk,” he said, doing likewise.
It was hot cider, and grateful in his throat, tasting of summer afternoons. They made good cider in this land, and fine whiskey, and excellent mead. The beer . . . well, they flavored it with spruce buds and had no hops.
He touched a finger to the drink, flicked a drop aside in offering to the spirits of place, then raised it and drank again with his own folk’s toast:
“To the Lord, to the Lady, to the Luck of the Clan! Now, Lady Harberga, it’s tidings I need; after that, trail food for those with me, if you can spare it.”
“We can. We’re well supplied and we were expecting . . . well, not you, but the folk from Kalksthorpe at least; they’re the last of the
fyrd
to come in. We were hoping for our allies from Madawaska, but there’s been no word; we don’t know if the messengers got through or if they’re under attack too and can’t spare help . . . Gudrun, see to the supplies!”
The
godhi’
s younger sister pulled Mathilda away, and they started to compare tallies and lists. Barrels and crates and sacks began coming out to fill near-empty sleighs—crackerlike rye hardtack, oatmeal cakes, cheese and dried smoked sausages, with some maple sugar. Concentrated foods, ready for use in the field; several hundred human beings ate a quarter of a ton a day when they were working hard. Meanwhile servers brought the newcomers cooked food from the kitchens, and the improvised camp-style cauldrons that drifted a mist of woodsmoke through the crowded settlement. Artos accepted a chipped plastic bowl of hot bean soup with chunks of meat in it, and a slab of rye-and-barley bread with cheese melted into its surface. The smell of the good plain food made spit run into his mouth; traveling hard on skis in cold weather burned the body’s fuel faster than anything else in his experience.
Harberga spread a map the size of a large towel on a trestle resting on barrel-heads, and Artos’ chief followers crowded around, looking with busy spoons but careful not to mar the precious thing; Heidhveig came over as well, using her staff and assisted by her apprentice Thorlind, herself middle-aged. The Lady of Eriksgarth looked a little askance at Abdou al-Naari, who politely ignored her, eyes kept down on the map itself. It was a new one, copied from a topographical survey of the ancient world onto a carefully tanned white sheepskin with a hot needle, the names and places modernized and twining bands of serpentine gripping beasts added for a border about the edges.
“The muster of the
fyrd
was here, at Staghorn Dale. A short day’s march northwest,” Harberga said, tapping the surface.
“How many?” Rudi asked.
“Eight thousand and a little more when Bjarni moved against the foe. More were coming in each day, but he didn’t want to delay; if there hasn’t been a battle yet, then . . . perhaps nine thousand?”
Artos cleaned the inside of his bowl with the heel of the bread, crunched the hard crust down and handed the empty container aside, tapping a thumb on his chin. Nine thousand was more than a tenth and less than a fifth of Norrheim’s whole population. Subtracting the many children too young to fight and the sprinkling of elders too old for it along with the sick, halt and lame the total came to about half the folk of warrior age. It meant Bjarni had called up every man between fifteen and fifty who was fit for war, and a fair proportion of the stronger women. He was throwing the dice with everything he had for table-stakes. Artos nodded slowly in respect. Many would have tried to hedge their bets, and traded a possibility of swift victory for the certainty of slow piecemeal defeat.

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