The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change (25 page)

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Authors: S. M. Stirling

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BOOK: The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change
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Artos grinned to himself. Every word of what Edain had said was the truth. What his fellow clansman
hadn’t
mentioned was that it was Ingolf Vogeler who’d shown them what to do when the storm struck, with a trick from his Wisconsin home; they’d probably have died without him. The Kickapoo country around Readstown in the Free Republic of Richland was nearly as bleak in winter as Norrheim.
The Clan Mackenzie’s territories were not, not down in the valleys where their farms and duns lay and where they spent the Black Months in rain and fog with only occasional brief snow cover. You could pasture stock outside right through most winters, with only about thirty hard night frosts in all. His people dealt with the huge mountain snowfalls of the High Cascade range by simply not going there from Samhain to Beltane, for the most part. His own experience of mountain snows had been limited to downhill skiing at Timberline Lodge, a possession of Mathilda’s family on Mt. Hood, with great hearths and well-stocked pantries for stormy days.
I somehow doubt the kilt would have caught on in Norrheim the way it did among us, regardless of fashion!
Despite the mid-forties chill they were all sweating a little after an hour or two. Water bottles made the rounds occasionally, and cold pancakes rolled around jam fillings.
“This is a rest,” Artos murmured to Mathilda as Edain and the Norrheimer girl chatted behind him.
“Rest?” she said, wiping a dab of blueberry jam off her chin with her thumb and licking it. “Well, it’s not as hard as pushing sleds through snowdrifts on the shores of Superior and wondering if we’d have to eat the horses.”
“Rest it is, like a downy bed.”
And you beside me in it
, he
didn’t
add aloud.
That would have been a natural joke among Mackenzies, but not among Associates in mixed company. Instead he went on:
“All we have to do is
pedal
. The future runs ahead on rails, and I don’t have to
decide
a single bit of it! The knottiest problem we’re to be confronted with the now is whether to heave a log off the track bodily or cut it up first.”
She laughed a little, but nodded. “And we’re headed
home
,
”
she said with longing.
He nodded. “And . . . the Sword seems quieter. It’s whispering to me, rather than talking with an annoying insistence in a language I can’t really understand.”
Mathilda reached over and touched his shoulder. “Perhaps it does what’s, um, necessary. And not more. And it will leave you alone when, when all this is over.”
“It’s hope you give me, Matti,” Artos said. Then he smiled. “But you always did.”
CHAPTER TEN
NORRHEIM, LAND OF THE BJORNINGS
(FORMERLY BROWNVILLE JUNCTION, PISCATAQUIS COUNTY, MAINE)
APRIL 1, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
T
hree days later they camped not far from the abandoned town of Brownville Junction. Bjarni was frankly incredulous:
“Ninety miles in three days! Five hundred men and seventy horses and all their supplies!” he said, shaking his head and looking out over the disorderly array of tents.
They had been hastily erected amid scattered snags of brick and cinder-block ruin overgrown with saplings and brush, equally hastily cleared. The corroded lumps of cars and trucks stood among them, or tangles of wire where telephone and power lines had fallen in some storm or fire. Woodsmoke and cooking smells predominated, with badly washed warrior and horses and their by-products a close second, but water was heating for hasty baths. You didn’t want to expose more of yourself wet to the air than you had to, even if it was merely chilly muddy spring and not winter now.
Artos was checking Epona’s feet; there was some wear on the Norrheimer horseshoes from the gravel and the railroad ties—they shod with rather soft metal here, hand-hammered from rebar, rather than the harder machine-made types common in Montival. They’d do for a few more days, though, and the hooves and legs were fine, which gave him a gut-deep feeling of relief. He didn’t quite know what he’d do if she started to break down when they were so committed to an unrelenting schedule.
Actually, you do know what you’d do, boyo. That’s why you’re relieved. And she’s toughening up again nicely after the winter’s rest, but this isn’t stressing her so badly as the trip east. So far.
He put her left forehoof down, slapped her neck and watched her mooch off towards the rest of the herd.
“Fred’s idea seems to be working”—
so far
—“and that’s the truth,” Artos agreed.
“You’re fortunate and well served in your companions,” Bjarni said.
“And
that’s
the truth, Bjarni King,” he replied, feeling an inner glow. “No man better.”
The Norrheimer was thinking hard. “When I come back, I’m going to see what more we can do with railroads. Though I don’t see how we could ever make rail once it rusted or wore away, and I don’t like to think what it would cost to buy from the English.”
“You wouldn’t have to,” Fred Thurston said. “The old Americans used steel rail because it was easy for them, and because they ran giant engines and cars moving fast as arrows
on
the rails. To support a horse-drawn wagon or a pedal-cart all you need is wood with a metal strip spiked on top. My father had some of that worked up by our engineers in Boise for test purposes. It does just as well and it’s a
lot
simpler to make.”
Bjarni grunted thoughtfully. “Perhaps I can find some—what’s the word—engineers in Montival. My folk are breeding many strong sons and daughters, and we don’t like being crowded. If we did more with rail, we could settle the empty lands around us without losing touch with each other, be close enough to help each other. Going overland is hard—there isn’t much good farmland to be had for many miles outside our present boundaries; it’s like an island amid the forest. Long distances on foot to more good land, but short
this
way.”
Artos grinned and slapped him on the shoulder. “Spoken like a King! Perhaps your saga will say that thought was the beginning of great things, eh?”
Bjarni snorted. “My saga? Is this my tale then, or yours?”
“Now that, my friend, will I think depend entirely on who is doing the singing of it. In Montival, it’ll be my epic, and you a friend and ally met on the way and your battles and strivings and loves and hates mere incidents if they’re mentioned at all. Material to burnish me, as it were. In Norrheim, the reverse.”
“Ah,” the Norrheimer said, rubbing at his short red beard; Artos could see him turning the thought over. “And which will be the true tale?”
“The both of them will be entirely true! Or untrue, for if the King
is
the land and the folk, yet his story is really theirs, and bigger than any single man.”
“Bigger than a King?” Bjarni asked, grinning at his earnestness, and looking up to exaggerate the difference in their heights.
“Even one with a fancy gewgaw on his head and a fancy chair beneath his arse. The which he must wipe with a wisp of straw just like his subjects if he’s not to stink like a midden.”
Bjarni laughed. “Too deep for me! See you tomorrow.”
“And I’m a minor character in either story,” Fred said ruefully.
“Not necessarily, boyo. When you’re home in Boise with your family—”
“It’s been a long time since I saw Mom and my sisters,” the young man said wistfully.
Artos nodded. “Well,
you
will be there, and a man of mark.”
Ruler, in fact, if I have anything to do with it. And, I strongly suspect, if Virginia has anything to do with it either, and she will, she will.
Aloud: “I’ll be . . . the High King will be . . . far away, for the most part. That’s one of the virtues of an Ard Rí
.
Do you see? He leaves most of the songs to be sung about people’s own hearths and their own close doings, not seeking to be always before their eyes.”
“You’ve got a point. Sort of like federalism,” Fred said.
Or feudalism
, Artos thought but did not say.
Still, the two have more than a little in common. And another virtue of an Ard Rí is that he’s there at need, should some local lord become too much of a bully.
They walked on to his own campfires—three, including one for the original companions of his quest and two for the Southsider and Norrheimer retainers he’d sworn—greeting his followers by name. The heads of two deer were set on the ground nearby with the hooves and tails; he made a reverence as he passed.
Thank you for your gift of life, sisters
, as he brought his palms together twice before his face and bowed slightly over paired hands.
Go in peace to the Summerlands, and be reborn in joy.
No more was necessary, since he wasn’t the one who’d hunted the animals and didn’t need to ask leave of Cernunnos, the Horned Lord of the Beasts; that had been the twins, as they returned from their latest scout ahead.
Fred joined Virginia and they shared a long kiss. Artos sank on his blanket beside the fire and sighed. Mathilda had no objection to kissing . . .
But it’s just a
trifle
frustrating with nothing to follow but anticipation; that it is. Particularly if I’m to be walking upright the now without frightening the countryside. I think the Lady made women so that it’s easier for them to wait, especially those who don’t know what they’re missing.
Hastily he pushed the thought away and cocked an eye skyward; there was plenty of gray cloud, but with patches of afternoon sky blue between and not looking like rain just now. An aluminum pot of something thick and brown was bubbling over the low embers of the fire, smelling much better than it would probably taste. Even though hunger made a good relish.
He nodded thanks as Ignatius ladled him out a bowlful and added a couple of bannocks and a lump of hard white cheese. The coarse twists of barley bread were made from flour mixed with baking powder and a little salt, and were palatable enough when fresh—particularly if you had butter, of which they still did a little. The stew-soup-whatever was buckwheat groats with dried onion, dehydrated vegetables and bits and pieces of venison mixed in—lean, stringy venison at this time of year, but meat was meat, and you got the most out of it by cooking it this way.
Artos shoveled down the thick
kasha
-style porridge-soup and enjoyed the feeling of relaxation and the warmth in his middle. Thirty miles wasn’t all that far to cover, not when you were cycling on smooth steel. This stretch was the last that had been reconditioned by the Norrheimers while the expedition put together their pedal-carts and rail-wagons. Each day so far had been brief, lest they outrun the capacity of the horses to catch up before nightfall. Even on ordinary roads bicyclists could run horses to death; on rails there was no comparison at all. In the west there were ways around that, but they required skills and machines the Norrheimers couldn’t possibly acquire in time.
He settled in and looked around. Mathilda was over at one of the other fires, teaching a couple of the Southsiders their letters. He waved and she returned it, then went back to using a stick of charcoal and pieces of old board from a wrecked building not too far away; more of that had gone under their tents and blankets to keep out the damp. Fred took out a hand abacus and soon was in some deep calculation; he played a game of chess with Virginia at the same time. Edain was methodically checking the fletching on his arrows, fingers delicate on the thread as he bound on another goose feather to replace one that had been disturbed by use; as he worked he sang a song old in his father’s family:
“Here’s to the bowmen—the yeomen
To the lads of dale and fell;
So we’ll drink all together
Drink to the gray-goose feather
To you, and to you, to all hearts that are true
And to our land where the gray goose flew!”
His voice sounded well, though old Sam Aylward’s was fit to frighten a rook; singing skillfully was as much a part of being a member of the Clan as shooting with the bow, since Juniper Mackenzie had been a bard by trade before the Change. Asgerd was not far away, knotting her brows over a book that had a man in a mail shirt and conical helmet on the cover, drawing a longbow to the ear—
The Free Companions
, by Donan Coyle, one of Artos-Rudi’s childhood favorites and one of three he and the younger Mackenzie had brought with them all across the continent. She absently scratched Garbh’s ears as she turned the pages; the wolf-mastiff was lying with her head in the girl’s lap, eyes closed and chin thrust forward in bliss. At the last lines of the song she looked up:
“What do you mean by
hearts that are true
, master-bowman? We here call ourselves the true folk.”
“True to what?” he asked in turn, holding the arrow point-first to the fire and looking down its length as he gently turned the shaft to check the twist of the feathers that would twirl it in flight.
“True to the Gods—Asatru. True to their kin and their friends, true to their oaths.”

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