The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change (22 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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His hand gripped tighter on the Sword.
“This is a true King-making,” he said. “The land has welcomed him as the Lady does the young God at Beltane.”
Matti and Ignatius crossed themselves. Mary and Ritva laid right hand to heart and bowed; after a moment Ingolf followed suit. A low murmur ran through the rest of his band, and through the great watching crowd; then silence so complete that the sough of wind through the ash grove was the loudest sound.
Syfrid was spokesman for the
godhar
of the tribes—each of them was also a man who made sacrifice, of course, though there was probably a little irony in their choice of him. He was a bold man too, but he moistened his lips and looked a little aside from that blue stare before he spoke:
“What have you seen, Bjarni Eriksson?” he asked. “What word do you bring to us from the world beyond Midgard?”
“I spoke with my father,” Bjarni said, his voice calm and distant as if he still dreamed, but carrying easily across the assembly. It grew stronger:
“And with the Norrheimer folk who have shed their blood on this soil that fed them, and the old Americans who tilled these fields and so made them their homeland, and with the ancient tribes, the First People who came here when the Ice withdrew and worshipped the Gods who were before the Gods. Theirs is the land’s unrest and its deepest peace. . . . Many and strange were the things told me, many and strange were the sights shown me.”
Heidhveig spoke, firmly but weary; the ordeal had worn harder on her:
“The dead have accepted the King’s oaths, and the land acknowledges him.”
A mass intake of breath, and a sigh.
“What is your oath to us and Norrheim, Bjarni King?” Syfrid asked formally.
“To be father to the land, and the folk; to rule honorably the living, respecting olden law and right, and to give their rightful due to the ancestors, the wights and the High Gods in the name of all our people. To die into the land at last, and watch over it with my might and my main as my father does.”
As he spoke the humanness came back into his gaze bit by bit. There was a brief crashing cheer, and then he stepped forward. The chiefs joined him, and they walked forward together under an arch of rowan and ash-withies, covered with sod cut from the earth around the mound. When they had all bowed beneath it he hung the horsehide on it as well.
Heidhveig raised her staff and called: “The earth of Norrheim is your mother! From this day, you and your tribes and your kindred are reborn as brothers, and the common blood of Norrheim runs in your veins!”
Another cheer, and Harberga came forward with a thick cloak.
Now
Bjarni shivered a little, and clutched it around his shoulders, taking the horn of hot mead she handed him. She chanted as he raised it to the four corners of the world and flicked a drop aside for Earth:
“Mead I bring thee, thou oak-of-battle,
with strength i-blent and brightest honor;
’tis mixed with magic and mighty songs,
with goodly spells, wish-speeding runes.”
“I thank you, Harberga, my wife who is now Queen in Norrheim and Lady of this land,” he said hoarsely, before draining it in one long draught.
“Now,” he said, his eyes meeting Artos’. “Now I want a steam bath, and some clothes, and food . . . and then, my new brothers, and you my tall blood brother, we have
work
to do!”
 
 
Mathilda groaned a little and stretched. Working with her hands was something she was fairly used to; her months every year with the Clan Mackenzie had meant living as the clansfolk did, and even the Chief of the Clan and Name did a lot of her own chores and helped with the harvest.
But I don’t get the same sort of enjoyment out of it some do
, she thought, watching Father Ignatius.
He was wiping thick black grease off his hands as he bent over the plans tacked to a board easel, careful not to smudge them. The barn was close and damp, with cold draughts through gaps in the boards alternating with blasts of heat from a pair of improvised charcoal hearths. At least the rain was no longer beating down on the strakes of the roof; the interior was littered with parts and machinery and workbenches, amid a clanging and grinding of metal on metal, a rasp of saws and files and drills on wood as smiths and carpenters labored. The acrid sulfurous smell of hot metal mixed with sawdust and glue, and feet scuffed on the planks of the floor.
Near a hearth of salvaged brick a squat muscular man was working something on an anvil, a
tinka-tinka-
clang! and showers of sparks on his leather apron and everything else around him, with a boy waiting with a bucket of water in case they caught. Ignatius looked that way, nodded approval, and went on to his audience, composed of Fred Thurston, Ingolf and the twins:
“—the two rolls at right angles can groove and shape the strip at the same time, if we feed it in at red heat,” the warrior-monk said. “Then we can hammer-forge each wheel, heat-shrink it on and hand-file to fit, tedious but possible with the gauges to measure—”
Mt. Angel trained its members in many skills; their missions took them to strange places, and they had to teach and practice the trades of living as well as preach the Church’s message and fight evildoers.
On the one hand, he’s my confessor and a very good one who’s helped my soul and understands me, and he’s a very holy man and a good friend and I love him like an elder brother as well as a man of God
, Mathilda thought.
On the other hand, sometimes when he finds a new toy, he’s like a little boy with a wind-up horsie on the First Day of Christmas. There was that balloon thing in Boise . . .
She slipped outside, past a bevy of Norrheimers carrying in bundles of ashwood poles; the tough springy wood was honey-pale, well seasoned and probably originally meant for spearshafts, or pruning hooks or ladders or sleigh-frames or something of that order. Outside it was raw, but she had a good wool jacket with fleece lining. Behind the barn was an open fenced field with a roofed open-sided shed along one side; from the straw, it was usually used to hold steers for fattening. The mud-and-manure surface wasn’t too bad, but she wouldn’t have chosen the footing for anything difficult. The smell was familiar to anyone who’d spent their life around livestock, hardly noticeable except in concentrated doses.
Rudi was there, next to a row of oak posts seven feet tall and as thick as her thigh, hammered solidly into the earth.
Pells
, she thought.
The things you endlessly whacked at when you practiced with the sword, until your shoulder ached and your tight-wrapped wrist shot stripes of pain up your forearm and your hand felt like a wagon had run over it. They were battered and surrounded by chips hammered off them by dulled practice weapons; Bjarni had been using this ground to test the
picked men
flocking in to make up his war band. Artos stood before one of them with the Sword at his right side, held horizontally with that hand on the sheath and the left resting lightly on the hilt, fingers and palm just touching it. He took a deep breath . . .
And drew. There was a shock, a faint glitter of light that really wasn’t there, a feeling as if her currently rather grimy skin had been soaked in a sauna and scrubbed with soap made with meadowsweet and the sensation had gone inward to her bones and her very self. It wasn’t as strong as it had been when the blade was drawn on a battlefield, and it didn’t have the same fierce clean
anger
she’d felt then. This was cooler, more subtle, just as disturbing.
He gripped the long hilt with both hands, the right towards the crystal pommel and the other just below the guard. The blade rose until the point was at throat height; then he spun it and thrust backward without turning, up again and a slice and a slice, his feet moving as if on the sanded planks of a
salle d’armes
. Dancing with the blade in the two-handed
nihon
style, the most graceful of the sword-arts, if not the most practical in a world of strong shields and steel armor. The moves were fast, but so smoothly coordinated with the motion of his whole long body that there was no sense of hurry. Simply a flowing, flickering grace that held a smashing power as well.
It’s different
, she thought.
He was always like some pagan God of war when he used the blade . . . but he’s . . . calmer, somehow? Cooler. Look at his face; the only reason his lips are open is to breathe. It’s like a statue. Where are you, Rudi? Where’s the boy I knew, the man I love?
Then he turned and cut again, his whole body and the momentum of his motion behind the blow. A lifetime of her own training rose in an instant’s instinctive protest—a battle sword was a precision instrument delicate as a scalpel. You didn’t cut at baulks of oak as if it were an ax. A blunted practice weapon was good enough for smacking into a pell; this was almost cruelty—
Thack
.
The Sword struck, the follow-through perfect as Rudi’s hips twisted, left hand leading on the hilt to press and right pulling it through the cut, knee bending and other leg outstretched. The top three feet of the post’s seasoned hardwood toppled away, the slanting surface that remained as smooth as if burnished and waxed. Cut like the rolled reed mats used as ordinary targets to test a blade. Now there was a slight
huff
of breath, and he pivoted and thrust in the same two-handed style, one hand guiding and the other with heel to pommel ramming the longsword’s blade forward with all his strength. The point glittered through the wood, then the post’s upper half fell away as he withdrew and swept the successor cut in a horizontal slash, turned and struck and struck and struck—
“Rudi!” she said sharply.
He turned to her, and his green-blue eyes were . . . not empty, but full of something. Something great. Not evil; instead her soul recognized it as
terrifyingly
good, but a goodness beyond men’s hopes and fears. Beyond comprehension, save as her mother’s cats understood Sandra Arminger’s love.
“It doesn’t chip, the edge doesn’t turn or blunt, it doesn’t break,” he said, eerily calm. “I don’t think I
could
break it.”
“Rudi!”
she said again, her voice rising a little.
“Watch,” Artos said.
He pulled a long red-gold hair from his head and tossed it into the air. It fell slowly, curling and drifting, bright in the gray gloaming; his wrist presented the Sword so that the edge intercepted it square-on. Despite her concern, she blinked as the hair struck and fell into two pieces that floated apart.
“Like a razor, like
light
, but nothing dulls it.”
“Rudi,
come back
.
”
He blinked, and a little of himself did come back into his gaze.
“It’s so easy,” he said, his voice calm but no longer empty. “It’s as if I can see what I’m doing from outside myself, and all I have to do is tell my body to do it and step aside.”
He looked down the row of hacked, cloven posts and blinked. “And it will do things
as
a sword no sword can do . . . but that is . . . a flattery, an indulgence, I think. So that I can bear it at my side and say to myself,
I carry the Sword forged in the Otherworld
, and the bewilderment and glory of it is as a tale told to a child to reassure him—”
“Rudi, wake up!”
He shook his head, the coppery gold of his hair an explosion of color against the dun browns and grays and off-whites of the early-spring landscape behind him.
“I . . . I . . .”
Then he smiled. “Matti!”
She hurdled the fence, the splintery pine of the upper rail gritting beneath her palm, and ran to hug him. He sheathed the weapon before she could, and caught her up. His arms were living steel around her, his body warm and living and
him
again, and he breathed into the hollow of her neck and shoulder.
“Matti, I keep
seeing
things.”
“All those things that might be?”
“And . . . and as if I’m seeing beneath that, too. To the essence of the world, all the worlds, and it’s . . . it’s like
numbers
somehow, mathematics, and I feel, not know but sense, that if only I could make sense of the numbers
I
would be like a God making and shaping worlds by wishing it so, but the thoughts go by in my mind like great creatures rushing through the night and myself beneath their notice . . .”
He shuddered against her, the grip growing almost painful. Then he pushed back a little, looking down into her face, and it struck her that he was a man in his prime now. There was only a shadow left of the boy who’d started out from home, the one with a sparkle in him like a lad going to steal apples from a grumpy neighbor’s orchard.
“Oh, Matti, acushla, it is so good to have you here. I could not bear it else,” he whispered into her ear.
“I
am
here, Rudi. I always will be.”
They stood together for a long moment, and then he straightened and looked at the mutilated posts and a boy gaping openmouthed as he stood with the basket of potatoes he’d been fetching forgotten.

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