The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change (15 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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Then they swung into the saddle, with no more than low grunts of effort. One of the tests of knighthood in the Association was to vault into the saddle full-armed, but nobody felt like showing off right now. Artos held out his hand and Edain tossed him the lance. He caught the twelve-foot length of it in his left hand below the bowl-shaped guard, resting the butt on his thigh. They’d had them made up in Richland, Ingolf’s homeland in Wisconsin, to a west-coast pattern, and stowed at Eriksgarth with their horses when they came through at Yule.
Lances didn’t last long in use, either.
A little wind dropped powdered snow on their heads from the pine branches overhead. The long man-at-arm’s shield slid onto his forearm. Its surface was painted with the new arms of Montival, blue field with a green mountain topped by a crown of white snow, and the silver Sword across it. He left the reins of the bitless hackamore bridle knotted on the high arched steel-sheathed pommel. Even an ordinary destrier didn’t need much rein control in battle, and Epona and he talked at a level far beyond that.
“Forward, my friends,” he said, and dipped his lance.
CHAPTER SEVEN
APPROACHING CASTLE TODENANGST, CROWN DEMESNE
PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION
WILLAMETTE VALLEY NEAR NEWBURG
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN OREGON)
MARCH 24, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
 
 
 
“S
o, is this Toddyangst place really a castle?” John Red Leaf said to Juniper Mackenzie, standing in the stirrups and looking eastward. “Some sort of fort, I suppose it means?”
They’d gotten horses at noon in the Crown stables by the railway station in Newburg a little west of here, along with a Portlander escort to join her six archers; the sun was behind them now, throwing their shadows onto the damp off-white crushed rock of the roadway. Luckily the spring rains had relented today and the sky was blue, studded with drifting high-piled shapes of white cloud.
The two Sioux had changed into carefully packed formal costumes back there; moccasinlike boots, doeskin trousers with fringes of hair down the outer seams, and leather shirt-tunics worked with shells and beads and porcupine quills. Red Leaf was the elder, a thickset proud-nosed man in his forties with a hard square face the ruddy-brown color of old mahogany, lined and grooved by harsh summers and worse winters; he added a headdress of buffalo horns and mane on his steel cap and a breastplate of horizontal bone tubes. His son Rick Three Bears was in his twenties, either a Changeling or on the cusp of it; he had a look of his father but lighter of skin and narrower of face, with a broad-brimmed Stetson on his head and a few eagle feathers in his dark brown braids. Both of them had the shoulders of bowmen and the instinctive seat of those who spent most of their lives in the saddle.
“No, Dun Juniper is a fort, and a village, and other things, my home being one,” Juniper said. “Todenangst is . . . hard to miss, you might be sayin’. And the huge and imposing castle it is, without doubt or question whatsoever.”
She’d had Rudi’s letters to describe his meeting with the Sioux leaders last year in what had once been South Dakota, and evidently they’d been impressed enough with her son to treat
her
as friend and ally from the beginning. Those letters and a day or so in Red Leaf’s company gave her the impression that the Sioux tribes who now dominated the northern High Plains bore a closer resemblance to their ancestors of the time of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull than her Clan Mackenzie did to the actual pagan Gael of the
Táin Bó Cúailnge
. . . but not all that much more.
Which was no surprise; she’d seen since the Change that you couldn’t re-create the past no matter how you tried, though
myths
and
stories
about the past could be a most powerful force in how folk built new ways to live in this new-old world.
“Way! Make way! In the Crown’s name, make way!”
The harsh cry of the golden-spurred knight who commanded the escort moved aside passersby on foot or bicycle or pedicab or mounted horseback themselves, and once a group of villagers doing their corvée duty by filling in potholes looked glad enough to take a rest and lean on their shovels. They threaded around and through and by wagon trains and stagecoaches and oxcarts, flocks of Romney sheep with their fleeces silver or gray or white, a little girl who stopped to curtsy, with an udder-heavy Jersey behind her on a leading rope, a gray-robed Franciscan friar telling his beads . . .
The plate-armored Portlander men-at-arms jogged along swapping jokes and stories with the half-dozen Mackenzie archers who accompanied Juniper.
Amazing and delightful it is, how a common enemy wears away old hatreds!
“Holy shit!” Red Leaf blurted a few moments later. “I thought Disneyland was in California!”
Juniper Mackenzie chuckled. “And we surpass it, these days. That’s not lath and plaster, by all the Gods and the fae as well!”
The laugh had a tired sound to it—she was always exhausted now, down to her very bones, and they’d come just as fast as they could up the valley. But her amusement was genuine.
“Are these people for real?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Most exceedingly so.”
The representatives of the Seven Council Fires of the Lakota
tunwan
had come much farther and faster than she, and mostly by some very rough mountain back roads still dangerously close to winter.
They are without doubt hardy men. But then, they live in tents through winters in Dakota!
Single-minded speed meant this was their first real glimpse of the PPA’s style when at home. She’d been here often enough in the years of peace since the War of the Eye that Norman and Sandra Arminger’s exercise in pseudo-medievalist megalomania seemed just another very large building most of the time. Now she tried to see it through a stranger’s eye . . .
“As I recall, they used the Château de Pierrefonds as a model. Scaled up considerably, to be sure. With elements of Carcassone, if that means anything to you, and a dash of Mad Ludwig of Bavaria’s Neuschwanstein, the which Walt Disney also admired, and hence the family resemblance. With a little
Gormenghast
for flavor.”
The great fortress-palace on the butte ahead had a curious skyward thrust and delicacy to it, despite the brutal massiveness of the structure; it was built of ferroconcrete, since not even the first Lord Protector’s demonic will had been able to summon whole legions of skilled stonemasons from nothing. Mixing cement and aggregate and pouring it into molds had been much simpler, and the fact that it was coated in glittering white stucco helped with the effect, she supposed. A forty-foot curtain-wall formed the outer perimeter, studded with scores of thick round machicolated towers more than twice that height, and the butte below had been cut back to form a smooth glacis down to the moat. Gates punctuated the circuit in four places, with towers and defenses that turned them into smaller fortresses in their own right.
“And just a touch of Hearst’s San Simeon on the inside, which you will see,” she added judiciously.
The inner donjon reared where the summit had been; two towers at north and south were taller than all the others, the first sheathed in palest silver-gray stone, the second covered in some glossy black rock whose crystal inclusions glittered in the bright spring light. Conical roofs of green copper topped all the towers, save for the gilding that turned the tip of the dark spire into a sun-bright blaze, and colorful banners flew from the spiked peaks.
Light blinked from the spearheads and polished armor of soldiers on the crenellated parapets. Then a heliograph began to snap from the highest point, sending a message flashing towards the perfect white cone of Mt. Hood on the eastern horizon, beyond the low green forested slopes of the Parrett Mountains. In the middle distance northward another tower, toy-tiny with distance, began to repeat the coded lights to somewhere else.
“Christ, this was built
after
the Change?” John Red Leaf said. “That black tower must be a hundred and fifty, two hundred feet high! How did you manage it without machinery?”
“We
didn’t,” Juniper said dryly. “We Mackenzies, or Bearkillers or Corvallans or the Yakima League or the Kyklos or . . . well, all the others. We had other priorities, sure and we did.”
He’s what . . . perhaps halfway between forty and fifty? A man grown in 1998, but younger than me. Still, not a Changeling like his son there. He has more sense of what must have been involved.
Aloud: “The Portland Protective Association built it . . . which is to say Norman Arminger did. Quickly, too. Though furnishing the interior’s still going on.”
“Norman Arminger . . . he was Mathilda’s dad, right?” John said.
“That was him. Sandra . . . the Regent . . . uses the Silver Tower there as her headquarters; the black one was Norman’s lair while he was Lord Protector, but it’s full of bureaucrats now.”
And the whole of it bears the mark of him
, she thought; it was like an arrogant mailed fist smashed into the face of heaven.
“There’s many a castle in the Association territories; they built scores to hold down the land, but only one like this. It goes with the flag, you see,” Juniper added.
John turned in the saddle to look at the pennants snapping from the lances of the men-at-arms in their suits of gleaming plate. They were troopers of the Protector’s Guard, and the narrow fork-tailed flags bore the undifferenced arms of House Arminger; a lidless slitpupiled eye, argent on sable, wreathed in scarlet flame.
“It’s an eye; Matti had something like that on her shirt. So?”
“That’s the Eye of
Sauron
, my dear. Or it was in origin, at least. And a good thing that copyright died with the Change, eh? Though it would be a bold lawyer who sued the Armingers in the seat of their power.”
His eyes flicked from the banner to the fortress. “Black tower . . . eye . . . Sauron . . . you’ve
got
to be shitting me, right?”
“No, that was Norman’s little joke. His sense of humor was just a wee bit eccentric, so to say. Though his main obsession was with the Normans . . . William the Conqueror, Strongbow—bad cess to him—and Roger Guiscard and Tancred and that lot.”
“The dude thought he was bad, right?”
“Oh, you have no idea. This is Castle
Todenangst
, for example.”
“Which means?”
“Castle of the Anguish of Death, roughly. Or Death-Anguish, to arrange the words Germanically. I’m afraid he was every bit as bad as he thought he was, too, the creature. They say there’s a man’s bones in the ground for every ten tons of concrete and steel in that thing there; when they didn’t just throw the bodies in the mix. Fortunately he wasn’t quite as
smart
as he thought he was, the joy and everlasting good fortune of it.”
Rick Three Bears whistled quietly to himself and said:
“Rudi’s father killed him, right? Not your husband, that Mike guy, I suppose he was your boyfriend then?”
“Very briefly,” Juniper said dryly. “That was just before he married Signe . . . who’s the mother of Mary and Ritva, whom you met. Yes, Mike killed Norman, and vice versa,
ochone
. . . ah, he was a lovely man, Mike Havel was, and he’s badly missed now.”
“Rudi and his bunch didn’t want to talk about the details much, seemed to me,” Rick’s father noted.
“Understandable, and it wouldn’t be altogether tactful for either of you to mention all this in Sandra’s hearing. Remarkable it is to contemplate, but she really did love Norman. There’s no accounting for taste.”
“So, you’re friends with these folks now?” Red Leaf said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say
that
.
Ní dhíolann dearmad fiacha
; a debt is still unpaid, even if put out of mind. Mathilda’s a wonderful girl—”
“I was impressed with her.”
“Rightly so. But then, she spent half of each year with us Mackenzies after the War of the Eye, in my household; that was part of the peace settlement. She’s like a daughter to me. Her mother, Sandra, the Regent, is much, much more clever than ever Norman was, and Norman was no fool except where his hatreds and lusts blinded him.”
“What’s she
like
? Sandra.”
“Well, some say she’s a sociopath. Some say psychopath. Sandra says her chosen phrase would be:
Very focused
.”
The commander of the escort was riding ahead of them but well within earshot; she could see his helm jerk a little in horror, and then he slid his visor down as if to cut himself off from such sedition. Of course, you
were
a bit cut off from the outside world in a visored sallet, one smooth curve of steel from bevoir to crest interrupted only by the vision slit.
“What’s your opinion?” Red Leaf asked.
“A little of all three. We spent ten years fighting each other, and fourteen since then as . . . allies of a sort. Not that she’s not good company, when she chooses, and she’s devoted to Mathilda, and looks after her supporters very carefully. I don’t think you could call her
cruel
, exactly, either. They don’t hang folk in spiked iron cages here. Not anymore. But there’s more mercy to be found on the edge of a razor than in her mind or soul.”

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