The Protector's War (58 page)

“I'm sure you could tell us a great deal of interest about the Old World,” Sandra Arminger said.

“I'm merely a soldier, my lady,” Sir Nigel demurred. “A straightforward type, I'm afraid. You probably know a good deal more of history and matters of state than I.”

“Not all that straightforward,” she said thoughtfully. “Despite the charmingly boyish smile—your son has it too.”

“The smile?” he said, feeling a prickle of apprehension as Arminger raised an eyebrow and looked between his wife and his guest.

“The charm, and the hidden depths, I think,” she said, and returned to her account books.

Arminger nodded, the considering look still in his eyes as he went on: “We're entering the farming part of Washington County now. Thank God the Change didn't wait a few more years, or this would have been built-up too.”

Arminger
was
genial enough; until you remembered that at a word his men would cut you down, or drag you off for worse. Or you thought of the sick, brutalized eyes of the labor gangs in Portland, and the weeping sores under the iron neck rings.

Nigel Loring cast an appraising eye on the escort. A dozen were mounted crossbowmen, with mail vests, simple conical helmets, knife and short sword at their waists, small round shields over their backs. Another dozen were what Arminger called his men-at-arms: equipped Norman-style in knee-length hauberks, big kite-shaped shields and nose-guarded helms, but with plate vambraces and greaves on their forearms and shins added, equipped with longsword and eleven-foot lance. All of them seemed tough, fit, probably good with their weapons, and well-mounted—they were certainly expert horsemen, as was their master, and good at riding in formation to boot. The escort's commander had the plume on his helm and little gilded spurs on his boots that he'd been told marked knightly status.

It seems Charles isn't the only one given to romantic terminology,
Loring thought, stroking his mustache to hide a smile; he was a baronet himself, after all.
Still, I've seen stranger things since the Change. And Arminger here was one of those Society chappies.
The medieval reenactment group had offshoots and equivalents in Britain, and a fair number of those had ended up on the Isle of Wight; his own son had been involved with them since his teens.
Very useful they were, as instructors. I
do
wish they hadn't given Charles so many ideas.

Sandra Arminger rode along in an open carriage, reading through some files. Servants jogged along behind on nags, but the mounts of the armed men and the guests were superb, spirited but beautifully trained—the tall yellow hunter he'd been given was a joy to ride, and he hadn't been able to resist naming it
Pommers
after his favorite horse back home…

No. Back in
England, he told himself sternly.
England will never be your home again. You'll have to carve yourself a new home somewhere—land for the Lorings to hold, and I suspect by the sword.

Nigel took a deep breath. The air was fresh, a little warmer than Hampshire would be in April, with an intense green scent. Now that they were out of the overgrown ruins the landscape was gently rolling; steeper ridges in forest of oaks and firs, the hillsides and valleys between a patchwork of greens—pasture with clover and trefoil blooming red among the grass, young grain, a pink froth of cherry blossom scenting the air, hillside vineyards putting out shoots and leaves. There were blue-flowered flax, and hemp and beets as well; cattle and sheep grazed in substantial herds, overseen by herdsmen on foot with slings and simple spears.

But no scattered farmsteads except ruins. Odd, that.

From what he remembered, villages weren't common in the United States, not in the European sense of farmers and farmworkers living clustered together, but that was what he saw here. Homes were tightly grouped at crossroads or near a stream, several dozen in every clump, ranging from modest comfort to mere shacks. The villages were slung along laneways with an open square at the middle, each house surrounded by kitchen gardens and sheds. Every cluster was bounded by a fence of palings with a gate and watchman's house, and each had a church, a larger-than-usual home functioning as a tavern, a smithy and sometimes a water mill. There was usually a larger building some distance from the hamlet, surrounding by a ditch, earthwork bank, concrete or fieldstone-and-concrete wall, and tower; from the look of it each of those was the center of a separate farm, and a large one at that.

It did look rather like some rural parts of England, save that it was more systematic, more consistent, and the village homes were less varied—whether substantial or squalid, most of them looked as if they'd been knocked together since the Change out of salvaged materials. Children and a few women were busy around the hamlets, caring for small stock and weeding in the gardens, or looking after toddlers and infants; he recognized the moan of spinning wheels and the rhythmic clattering thump of looms as well, and several times the distinctive sound of wooden hammers in water-powered mills fulling woolen cloth. Most adults were in the fields, largely weeding at this season when the spring planting was complete. There were a few horse-drawn machines helping, particularly around the fortified manors, but mostly it was hoes, and workers kneeling or stooping to use trowels or their bare hands.

Hmmm,
he thought, judging the density and the spacing.
One or two square miles per village, on average; call it a hundred people per square mile. Most of the territory this Lord Protector claims to control must be empty, or he'd have a million subjects, not the hundred and fifty thousand he boasts about. Islands of cultivation in a sea of wilderness, probably.

The field workers looked up at the sound of hooves; some in rags with iron collars about their necks, some drably but warmly dressed. Loring could see expressions ranging from naked fear to cultivated blankness when they saw the long black banner flapping from its cross-staff. Frenzied cheers burst out, and smiles more artificial than anything he'd seen in Madame Tussaud's as a boy down from Winchester College. As it came closer they dropped to their knees, still cheering, then bent their necks in silence until the standard had gone past; the whole procedure was repeated in reverse as Arminger's party drew away.

I wonder if anyone dares spit or curse when he's out of sight?
Loring thought.

Nobody who'd experienced the frightened court at Osborne House in the days of the madness of King Charles could miss the smell of tyranny when it sweated out of the very earth beneath his feet.

No, probably they
don't
dare. Charles was never as bad as this.

Still…

And the field layouts are interesting, too. Big fields, but I'd say they're worked in strips, from the markings in the crops. Like the old open-field system, except with clover-lays instead of fallow. Demesne home farm around those fortified manor houses. It's
not
like England; it's like a dream of medieval Europe in general…like something out of a book, in fact.

And twice that morning they passed genuine forts, like some demented modernist version of a medieval castle, done in frowning gray ferroconcrete with gangs of plasterers working to cover them in stucco, and complete to the pointed circular roofs over the towers and the wet moats grown up in waterlilies.

Just then one of the servants, a lean, dark-bearded man in a leather jerkin, rode up and pointed.

“Heron, my lord!”

Arminger looked up, and he grinned as he reined in and unhooded the falcon; the column halted as he did. The bird saw the prey and mantled, feathers splayed and wings spread as it crouched, then launched itself into the air with a sweet chime of bells and a fierce
skreeek!
Loring strained his eyes. The heron was high already, traveling from north to south; it broke even further skyward when it saw the peregrine's upward rush. He'd never practiced falconry himself; foxhunting was his sport, and since the Change he'd taken up pursuing boar. This did have a certain excitement.

“She rings, my lord Protector!” the servant—who must be the falconer—cried. The falcon was circling, rising in an upward gyre. “She's going to get above him! I told you that was the finest peregrine in the mews.”

“No, she's way below. Ten rose crowns she's not going to get altitude on him, Herb,” Arminger said with a grin.

The falconer paled, beneath a short-trimmed black beard. “My lord, I'm a poor man. I couldn't pay that.”

“Well, then, let's bet a kick in the ass against the kitchen girl you've been sniffing around,” the lord of Portland said. “She's yours if—”

“She stoops!” someone cried. “The falcon stoops!”

The tiny dots merged. “She binds!” the falconer said. “She's bound, all right!”

The dot grew, until it showed as two birds tumbling around their common center of gravity, the peregrine's talons locked in the heron's body. Then the falcon released its giant white prey and ringed again, climbing for a second strike. It climbed almost to the edge of visibility as the heron flapped heavily for a forested ridge, then stooped again—falling like a guided missile; they could all see a burst of white feathers as it struck, and then killer and victim tumbled together to the ground. The falconer ran out into the pasture to the north of the road, twirling his lure, and returned with the falcon on his wrist, tearing at gobbets of meat he fed it and then submitting meekly to the hood. The big white bird dangled from his free hand by the feet, its wing tips brushing the ground despite his attempts to hold it high.

“Annie's yours,” Arminger said. “That's her name, isn't it?”

“Yes, Lord Protector,” the falconer said.

“You want to marry her? She's a bondservant, isn't she? Peon?”

“Yes both times, Lord Protector.” A flush this time. “And I do want to marry her. She's willing, too.”

“Well, I'll pay her debt,” Arminger said. “Can't have the household staff marrying beneath themselves. And you get the ten rose crowns, too—call it a wedding gift. Take the heron over to that village; give it to the priest with my compliments.”

He waved away the thanks. The rest of the day passed in inconsequential chat—or seemingly so; Loring noted how skillfully Arminger drew out bits of information.

But not as cunning as he thinks he is,
he thought.
Or perhaps he was once, but having nobody to tell him
no
for the last nine years has blunted his edge. His wife's even better; she does it without letting you know what she's about.

Towards evening they passed through a pleasant small town, tree-shaded streets full of Victorian-era homes; the more pleasant because it lacked most of the usual fringe of ruined strip malls and abandoned, burnt-out subdivisions. The hills around were dense with tall fir, and the trees within the town included—

“Those are sequoias, are they not?” Alleyne Loring asked, looking up at the thick columns that towered one hundred fifty feet over their heads. “I didn't think they were native to this area. I saw some in California, long ago, in Yosemite.” A quirking smile. “I was more interested in Disneyland, at the time.”

“They're not native,” Sandra Arminger said. “Planted from seed a little over a hundred and twenty years ago.”

“There seem to be a good many people about here,” Sir Nigel's son observed, his blue eyes alert. The streets didn't exactly bustle, but more than half the homes seemed to be occupied.

“We're resurrecting the Pacific University here,” Sandra said. “The library survived, and even some of the staff. Structured on a new basis, of course, with a charter from the Protector. We can't live on pre-Change training forever. We need a supply of younger professionals; engineers, accountants, priests. And to put some cultural polish on the scions of our baronage; you may have noticed that many of them are rather rough diamonds. I do wish you'd consider staying, Sir Nigel—it would raise the whole tone. Ah, here's the turnoff.”

Arminger dropped back from Captain Nobbes to ride beside Nigel Loring. “It's an interesting place,” he said. “Built by a Montana mining king back in the nineteenth century. Redone as the center of a vineyard estate in the 1980s.”

“Pinot noir, I expect?” Sir Nigel said.

His tastes in wine had always been conservative.
Like most other things about me,
he thought ruefully.
But I
have
heard of Oregon's pinot noirs.
There weren't all that many places which did really well with the great Burgundian red-wine grape.

“Yes, and a pinot gris that went very well with seafood. Also a very nice crisp gewürztraminer, an off-dry Riesling and a
very
nice Müller-Thurgau. I always rather coveted the place, in a daydreaming sort of way, and had it taken in hand when we resettled this area in the fall of the first Change Year; there are three knight's-fees' worth of land attached to it, plus the woodlot and forest; two large villages and two gristmills, and I built a small castle nearby as a stronghold for the fief—you'll see why I didn't put a wall around the house itself. It's convenient to our new university town, near a working rail line to Portland, and the hunting's spectacular—everything from rabbit to tiger, with the Coast Range close. But it's too far west to be really handy, held by me directly, so I've never been able to spend as much time here as I'd like. A pity; my daughter loves the place.”