The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change (40 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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Ingolf glanced aside at his wife and found her watching fondly as well, and grinned to himself. It was an odd person in today’s world who didn’t find beauty in a well-tilled landscape. Even non-farmers such as the Dúnedain Rangers.
“Sort of like the Shire,” she said, echoing his thought. “The people it’s our duty to protect.”
“Us Rangers,” he agreed.
Apparently you got to be one by being sponsored and also by being able to do a bunch of things. Since the
Hiril Dúnedain
was Mary’s aunt he didn’t anticipate too many problems getting on the rolls formally.
The fortified Farmers’ homes and their attendant clusters of Refugee cottages and barns and tall silos that dotted the land faded away as they approached Readstown proper; this was the Sheriff’s home-farm, worked from his own place. The state of the road said that traffic had been heavy lately, hoof and wheel both; he was surprised his elder brother hadn’t had a few teams out grading and smoothing.
Then they turned directly northward, onto a stretch that had been asphalt in the old days and still was where it hadn’t been patched with gravel; the river was far enough away to their left that it hadn’t washed out this section during the periodic floods.
“Well,
troops are gathering
didn’t turn out to be an exaggeration after all,” Mary said. “That explains the road.”
She looked over at the rows of white tents, the men and campfires and picketed horses that occupied a long stretch of pasture between the river and the buildings, running up to the big truck gardens to the north.
“About three, four hundred here, I’d say,” she went on, with an expert’s quick appraisal of numbers.
“Yah,” Ingolf said and nodded agreement. “Maybe a few less, they’ve got a lot of gear with ’em. Or a few more if they’re quartering some of them in the homes. Must be putting everyone’s nerves on edge. And that’s why Ed hasn’t graded the road just lately. Usually we do it as soon as things dry out a bit in spring.”
“No sense in doing it four times if he can wait for the troops to move out and do it once,” Mary said.
“Ed’s . . . not exactly miserly. But he’s tight with things.”
“So he should be,” Mary said. “It’s not like someone sending a beggar away hungry because they won’t spare the scraps. What a lord has comes from his followers, after all. It’s his duty to be careful with their goods and labor.”
Ingolf opened his mouth, closed it again, and nodded. “Yah, I should have thought of that. Maybe I’m not as much over my mad at him as I thought.”
Readstown had been a sprawled-out village of about four hundred people, remote and sleepy ever since its founding around a gristmill not long after white men first settled this land nearly two centuries ago. In the years that followed the Change it had shrunk to a much denser core around the Sheriff’s house—what had become the Sheriff’s house—for reasons ranging from warmth in winter to security against the bands of starving, desperate wanderers who’d gone roaming and reaving in the terrible years, and your odd sneak thief or high-binder or gangs of plain old-fashioned bandits later.
Not to mention various bigger fights over stock and who got the everybody-needs-’em Amish and stuff like that, before the Richland Bossmen knocked some heads together and kicked some butt to create our glorious Free Republic. People did what they had to do in the early days. Dad not least. But that’s part of why he drank too much sometimes. To forget what he had to do.
He’d been just turned five when the Change came; he could remember fear and cold and conversations among the adults that stopped when they noticed him. Now and then someone started acting very strangely, and usually you didn’t see them again. Or they ended up like his aunt Alice, who’d been gently mad and given to sudden fits of tears as she sat at her workbench over a half-finished lute.
Of course, she got caught in Racine at that stupid folk-music festival thing. Never did say how she made it back home. Young as I was I remember her turning up. She was as skinny as anyone I’ve ever seen who didn’t actually die.
“Looks tidier than it did in Dad’s day. A bit more than when we were through last year. Ed keeps plugging away, I’ll give him that.”
It had been worth the labor to link the houses here together into defended courtyards, and later to shift or build more structures into the same complex; just before his father died he’d put up a round stone tower at one corner of the main house with a catapult on a turntable atop it, and sheathed the lower parts of all the buildings with fieldstone batten-walls as well. In the more recent years of peace some new cottages had been built out on their own, and the sawmill and gristmill, of course, and the regional school and the Lutheran and Catholic churches. A teenager he recognized was on mounted sentry-go a little farther up the road.
“Halt!” the boy said, raising a hand. “Who goes . . . Uncle Ingolf, by God! Und Aunt Mary! Yah hey dere! How’s she goin’?”
“She’s goin’, Mark, and hi backatcha. You’re looking pretty military,” Ingolf said.
He was, for someone just turned seventeen and gangly with it. Tallish, six feet and a bit already, but still colt-built, with freckles against pale winter’s skin and corn-tassel hair cut in the rather shaggy local ear-length style. A scattering of nearly invisible hairs on chin and upper lip suggested he was trying to cultivate a beard as well, and failing miserably. But he had a mail shirt with short sleeves on too, over the usual padded undergarment, a helmet that looked like a local blacksmith’s copy of the sallets seen on Rudi’s party last autumn, a shield and quiver on his back and bow in a saddle scabbard at his knee, along with shete, binoculars, bowie and tomahawk at his belt.
Equipped just like me, in fact
, Ingolf thought with an amusement he kept off his face.
Except for the trumpet, and except that you can see everything came from the best armorer in Richland, or maybe even Des Moines. Plain, but no expense spared . . . no, that mail shirt’s a bit big. Probably allowing him some growing room; those things
cost
.
“So,” he went on, “they’ve got you out meetin’ und greeting?”
“I’m officer of the watch!” Mark said; his voice rose and cracked slightly, and a fiery blush ran over his fair skin.
Then he nodded at the tented encampment. “It’s Ensign Mark Vogeler, First Richland Volunteer Cavalry, now. Nobody passes wit’out being recognized.”
“Well, I sure hope you recognize me, nephew,” Ingolf said, in lieu of anything more sensible. “Seeing as I put you on your first pony. Ummm . . . Where’s Ed?”
“Dad’s over to the house, out front, last I saw them, with Mom. Talking wit’ a messenger from Richland Center. Uh, pass, friend!”
They legged their horses up to a canter for the last thousand yards.
“He reminds me of me.” Ingolf chuckled when they were far enough away not to be overheard.
“He’s cute. But then, so are you,” Mary said.
She winked, then rubbed at her eye patch. “
Ai!
I’m still not used to the way that makes me
blind
for a moment.”
Ed was looking harassed and talking to his wife, Wanda, and both of them were tossing instructions at people who came and went; he was also looking pretty much the way Ingolf suspected he himself would look in fifteen years or so, if his scalp started showing well above the forehead through thinning brown hair—that was on exhibit, as Ed Vogeler swept off his feedstore cap and crushed it in one big knobby fist and pulled in a thunderous curse—and if he let himself develop a beer gut. The thought made him suck in his own stomach a little as they swung down from their horses and handed the reins to a stablehand to be led away, though there currently wasn’t an ounce of spare flesh in the two hundred pounds of muscle that covered his broad-shouldered, big-boned frame.
Not after the things I’ve done these last few years, almost none of which have involved sitting around knocking back the brewskis. Mind you, Wanda brews the best and runs a mean kitchen too.
“So you tell Bill Clements it’s
his
job to get that fixed!” the Sheriff said to a wiry man in dusty leathers. “Uff da, try collecting any taxes if she goes and we get a flood!”
The courier nodded respectfully, swung into the saddle, and cantered off northward with two remounts behind him on a leading rein.
Then: “Ingolf!” Ed said, smiling, and they shook hands. “How’s by youse?”
“Ingolf! Mary!”
Wanda hugged him, and then her; she was a motherly-looking blond woman in early middle age, wearing a kerchief around her hair today, and a set of overalls with garden dirt on the knees. And in Ingolf’s considered opinion she was more than half the brains of the Sheriff Vogeler outfit, and three-quarters of the ability to judge people.
Besides being a first-rate manager.
She ran the indoor part of the homeplace, which meant everything from the dairy’s butter and cheese to carpet-making, and directing the labor of dozens.
But something’s bothering her badly, underneath.
“What’s the Bossman done now?” Ingolf asked.
“It’s dat . . . goddamned dam up at La Farge. I wish they’d never built it!”
“Pretty lake,” Ingolf said, remembering trips there. “Good fishing, too.” He frowned at a memory. “Didn’t Dad say they nearly
didn’t
build it?”
“Finished just before the Change. Und now the intake tower’s blocked and we’re having a hell of a time getting it cleared.”
The Sheriff crushed the billed cap again; it was pre-Change, a badge of rank, and he made himself relax with obvious effort.
“Glad to see you made it,” he said gruffly.
“
Most
of us made it,” Ingolf corrected, his tone grim. His eyes looked beyond the busy scene for a moment. “Most.”
“Yah, we figured Pete wasn’t coming back when he didn’t show up after a couple of months. Seeing as he wasn’t planning on going all the way east with you.”
“Jackie? How’s she taking it?”
“Hard, what would you expect? She moved back to her folks over in Forest Grove a couple of weeks ago, wit’ da kids. But when a woman marries a man thirty years older, what can she expect?”
Wanda made a stifled gesture, as if she’d prevented herself from slapping her husband upside the head only by an act of will. Ingolf gave a silent
woof
of relief, even though it made him feel a little guilty; Pierre Walks Quiet had married one of the abundant widows and started a second family here after he drifted in from the North Woods early in the Change years, on the run from one of the grisly little massacres that had punctuated those times. He’d ended up as timber-runner and game manager for Ingolf’s father, who had an eye for ability, and he’d taught woodcraft to the Sheriff’s children too.
That his wife had moved out meant Ingolf wouldn’t have to tell her and the children about the old Indian’s death personally. Though there were far worse ways to go; he’d died with his face to an enemy worth fighting, knowing he’d won, and he’d gone quickly and without much pain. Nobody lived forever, and seventy-odd was a good long time these days.
“He died up in the north country,” Ingolf said somberly. “On the Superior shore this side of Duluth, a few weeks after we left, fighting the Cutters and their local converts among the wild-men. And a couple of the Southsiders died too, and Odard later . . . long story.”
And damn, I miss Odard. Which is crazy because I didn’t
like
him much, or he me. He was too full of himself even after he’ d gotten over some stuff and he was a lot fonder of being Heap Big Baron than he should have been, and he liked needling people too much, and thought he was smarter than he was, and . . . but he was a good man to have at your back. I wish we still had him.
Mary squeezed his hand; he knew she missed the Baron of Gervais too, although the Havel sisters had had a half-joking, half-serious running feud with him most of their lives. It was amazing how you could get to knowing what was in a woman’s head if you were together long enough. He never had been before.
And I like it.
Ed nodded, and Wanda went around and pushed them all indoors.
“In! We don’t talk out on the step wit’ family, here, like you were road-people begging for a handout. We will sit like civilized folk, under a roof. Und I will get youse some lunch, you look hungry.”
The main house seemed to be a bit crowded, probably the officers of the troops outside, who’d be of Farmer and Sheriff families and expected to put up with the local boss. People were rushing up and down the stairs with towels and bedding and rolled-up futons and blankets and pairs of boots. After the travelers had washed—the house had running water—the four of them settled in the breakfast room, which was cheerfully well lit through big windows that looked in on a courtyard, set with pine and maple furniture handmade by Readstown’s own carpenters, with rag rugs on the floor before the empty swept fireplace and a few pictures and photographs on the walls. There was a faint smell of woodsmoke, inevitable in a building heated with stoves and hearths, and of dried wildflowers in jars on the mantel.

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