The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change (26 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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“Ah, well, then. The song means much the same thing, perhaps with a little less talking about it. Mind you, it’s an English song—me da was born there and his family forever before him, farmers and fighters in a land called Hampshire. But it’s widely sung among Mackenzies; we say that a man can lie with his lips, but not with a bow, and if you watch him shoot you’ll know his soul more than you would from an hour’s talk.”
She snorted slightly, looked at the book again, and said quietly:
“More than you would from an hour’s talk.
I like that. I like the tale in this book too; the folk are brave and true, and they know how to take joy in life even in hard times. Even if they follow the White Christ and not Thor Redbeard.”
“Some of my best friends are Christians,” Edain said, and tipped one of them a wink to the side.
“Finish this,” Ignatius said gravely, and handed the young man and woman the last of the
kasha
. “Waste is an affront to God. And here is the last of the apple turnovers, only slightly stale.”
He turned to Artos. “Perhaps we’d better see to the scout report, Your Majesty.”
Artos scoured his bowl, rinsed it out and rose; they strolled over towards the spot where the twins were huddled over their latest map, with Ingolf looking on, but they went round-about. And stopped by a pile of gear wrapped in burlap; bundles of arrows and little kegs of apple brandy and rounds of hard cheese and boxes of rye flatbread harder still. The warrior-monk chuckled under his breath.
“I’m not even the oldest of our company . . . or Fellowship, as your half sisters would put it. But sometimes those two there make me feel an ancient of days.”
“I know what you mean,” Artos said, brushing his bright red-blond hair back out of his eyes. “Dancing around each other like grouse in the spring.”
He cocked an eye at the cleric. “You approve?”
“They are two fine young people, and I think there is more in their attraction than the body’s needs . . . not that there is anything wrong with those, when properly governed. There are many ways of serving God; and most often, we do it by turning to the service of others. Duty to a wife, a husband, a beloved child; the fulfillment of such are reflections of the one great duty our souls owe to Him. If they wed and work together to raise a strong family, then God is glorified indeed.”
“Even a pagan family?” Artos teased. “Two varieties of pagan, at that! Sure, and if you think so well of them, shouldn’t you be converting them?”
“I pray for it,” Ignatius said, perfectly serious, but also with an ironic note in his narrow black eye. “As I pray for you, Your Majesty. We are all called to tell the glad tidings, but again, not all in the same way. Some are so blessed that they speak with the tongues of men and angels and set a fire in the souls of those that hear them. That is not my gift. I . . . try my poor best . . . to make my life an imitation of Him, and hope that does His work.”
“You’re not without eloquence yourself, Father. You’ve strengthened Matti in her faith, that I know, by example and by word both.”
The priest smiled, and for a single instant his face seemed as if lit from within. “Thank you, my son. By serving her who will be our Queen in Montival I serve the Queen of Heaven whose knight I am. How could I do otherwise, when she laid that charge on me herself?”
“That One could have bound you to duties far worse than being Matti’s guard and guide,” Artos observed.
And I pray to the Lord and Lady and to my Luck that your duty as you see it never clashes with mine. For you make an excellent friend and a rare comrade, knight-brother of the Shield of St. Benedict; but you would be a very dangerous foe indeed. And I would very much regret the day I had to kill you.
Ignatius laughed softly. “No, that One could
not
have bound me to a duty that was other than good. But I know what you mean. She has the seeds of greatness in her, our Mathilda; her mother’s cleverness, her father’s strength of will and ability to dream grandly, but also a sound heart which—frankly—neither of her parents did or do, and a nature that seeks truth and justice strongly, not counting the cost to herself and not forgetting that to others. Nurturing those seeds and seeing them come to their fullness is a task worthy of everything a man can give; or a priest. So does God turn even great evil to lasting good.”
He inclined his tonsured head towards a little fire off to one side, where the man who’d been a Major of the Sword of the Prophet sat brooding and staring into the flames, and Dalan the ex-High Seeker whittled industriously at a stick and whistled.
“Even in
those
men there is good; buried, crippled, twisted by the perversions of the Adversary, but there. The Church teaches us that no living man is ever beyond redemption.”
“And you’ve made me think better of your Church, for producing such a man as yourself. My lord Chancellor.”
Ignatius shrugged off the compliment, then did an almost comical half-step as the rest of it sank in, like a stutter made with the feet.
“That . . . I’m far too young! Other men, wiser and more experienced—”
Artos laughed and shook a finger at him. “Take up your cross, knight-brother of the Order! Yes, I’ll have wise older advisors; my mother, and my foster father Sir Nigel, and Matti’s mother, and your Abbot-Bishop, and many another. But if I’m to be a young High King in a kingdom younger still, I’ll want a young man to help me lay the foundations and shape the timbers. A Changeling, like myself.”
“Technically I’m not—”
“Do you remember the old world? Do you, Father?”
A sigh. “Not really. Perhaps a few glimpses, and I am not sure if they’re memories or things I was told often when I was very young.” He paused. “Do you really think me capable of filling such a post, Your Majesty?”
“Yes,” Artos said crisply. “What you don’t yet know, you can learn. We’ve been in each other’s sporrans for two years now, man! I think I know your quality, if I’m any judge of men. And if I’m not, I’m not fit for a throne myself.”
The cleric sighed. “When we called you King, you told us, you
warned
us, that you would spare neither yourself nor us. I see you meant it. Not that I had any doubts. I would rather be a simple monk following the Rule of Saint Benedict . . .”
“I know you would,” Artos said. “And
I’d
rather stay home and let the world rave as it will. Neither of us will or can do that.”
The dark eyes turned shrewd. “And the fact that I am Catholic . . . and a religious . . . and that it is, by now, generally known that I was granted the high honor of a vision of the Blessed Virgin . . .”
“None of those hurt at all, at all,” Artos conceded. “Better than half the folk in Montival are Christians, the most of them Catholic ones these days, while only a quarter follow the Old Religion and they’re nowhere a majority outside the Clan Mackenzie’s lands. Mathilda helps there, of course. But with a witch-boy for a High King, it takes a Queen
and
a Chancellor to balance it, wouldn’t you say? And while you’re a Catholic, you’re
not
from the PPA.”
“Quite the contrary,” the man from Mt. Angel said.
They both smiled; the fortress-monastery’s rulers had been stout opponents of Norman Arminger’s ambitions and even more of his schismatic Antipope Leo all through the wars with the Association.
Ignatius put his hands in the wide sleeves of his habit and stared down at the earth for most of a minute; then he straightened, left hand on the hilt of his sword, and met Artos’ eyes squarely.
“Your Majesty,” he said evenly. “If you insist on laying such a task on me, I will fulfill it to the best of my ability and I will pray that our Lord Jesus Christ and Holy Mary who is my patroness and all the bright company of Saints give me the strength and wit to do so. But . . . Artos King . . . I am already a man under obedience. To my superiors in the Order, to the princes of the Church and His Holiness, and to the Most High. If ever those vows conflict with my duty to follow your wishes, though I love you as a brother and though I honor you as my captain and my High King, I will obey my vows, and God, not you. Let the consequences be what they may.”
Took the thought right out of my head, so you did, my friend
, Artos thought. Aloud he said:
“The which is just exactly what I expected you to say, Father, and wouldn’t it be proof positive of your unfitness if you said anything else? I’m mindful of the example of Henry and Thomas à Beckett, and have no desire to repeat it!”
“So be it.” A grin. “And while I am
willing
to wear the martyr’s crown, I have no
desire
to do so!”
They shook hands once, firmly, then walked on to the twins. Mary and Ritva looked up at him, made a final notation on the map, and presented it. He looked with interest as they spread the results of their labors before him on crackling paper protected with a thin coat of wax; their labors were done in grease pencil on that. The candle-like smell added to the camp odors.
“Fifteen miles to the first blockage,” Mary said, tracing the line that ran west from Brownville Junction towards the old Canadian border. “Not too bad, just a tangle of fallen timber; we should be able to clear it in, oh, two hours. Eight miles after that there’s a bad one, a long train left on the rails after the Change; it looks as if it was carrying logs and at some point they burned, which buckled things. Parts of the roadbed there were undercut by water after
that
, and the weight of the whole thing turned over a long section of the track and sort of sank into a mixture of mud and rock. We’ll have to set up the winches and drag a lot of wreckage out of the way before we can get the roadbed patched enough. Substitute poles for the wrecked bits of rail, or take up some from behind us.”
“We’ll do the bit with the fallen logs easy enough, and then all the men can get up to the place with the abandoned train before mid-afternoon that day,” Artos said. “Get a start setting up the winches and pitching camp, clear it the next day, rest the night, start fresh the morning after.”
“Beyond that, thirty miles clear to a forest fire and a mudslide; that’ll mean clearing burnt logs and digging out mud and rock. I’d say less than a day but more than a couple of hours.”
“If it’s not too bad the men can have a fair start on it by the time the horses arrive. Might even get it finished soon enough to start the morning after.”
“Beyond that, twenty miles to a washed-out bridge. That will mean a portage, and it’ll take a full day. At least. We’ll have to knock everything down, pack it upstream to a crossing, then back down and onto the rails.”
“Doable. The average is working out acceptable, sure and it is. Next?”
“We only went twenty miles beyond the bridge, but no obstacles on that beyond a little brush trimming.”
“Man - sign?”
“None that we could be sure of. But if we go much beyond there, we’ll be into Bekwa territory.”
Ingolf grunted. “After what happened at the Six-Hill Fight, I doubt if any of those tribes are going to get in the way of five hundred Norrheimers.
Or
listen to the Cutters much.”
“Unless the survivors are mad for revenge,” Artos pointed out. “And they might harass us—arrows in the night, that sort of thing. But I know what you mean. If they didn’t lose three of every four men able to carry a spear, it’s surprised and astonished I would be. Once we’re past the Montreal area . . . Royal Mountain, our hosts call it . . . we’ll be into fresh territory. There some of the wild-men may try to bar our way. Still, at need we can cut our way through most savages by sheer weight of men and metal, where we couldn’t on our way east. Five hundred spears are a good many, and they’re thinly scattered there at best.”
“We’ve been lucky so far, too,” Ingolf observed.
He poked at the fire with a stick and stared at the embers, then coughed a little as the wind shifted a gust of smoke his way. His eyes were looking beyond the present.
“Lucky?” Artos said.
“The way this area here is completely clear of people. It’s just wilderness, not . . . haunted. I went through to Boston south of here back when I was on my way to Nantucket that first time, and it was a nightmare every step, even with my Villains and all our gear. Not fighting every day, no, but you never knew when the Eaters would try something, try to snatch someone. And you knew they were always watching, waiting, looking for a moment when you let your guard down.”
“Does it really matter if you know they’re going to eat you after they kill you?” Mary asked curiously.
Ingolf nodded. “Yeah, darling, it does. Feels different, anyway. Every one of my Villains was pretty much a hardcase even before they went into salvage work—”
“Went
in viking
,
”
Artos said.
Ingolf nodded, but his mood didn’t lighten: “And I didn’t know one of them who wasn’t creeped out by it. Even Kaur and Singh, and half the time they didn’t care whether they lived or died.”
Artos nodded. Much farther south and there would be at least scattered bands of Eaters—the savage descendants of those who’d lived through the Change Year even in the heart of the death-zones of megalopolis. Never very many in any one spot, but there were a great many spots.

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