by SM Stirling
“As I recall, they used the Château de Pierrefonds as a model. Scaled up considerably, to be sure. With elements of Carcassone, if that means anything to you, and a dash of Mad Ludwig of Bavaria’s Neuschwanstein, the which Walt Disney also admired, and hence the family resemblance. With a little Gormenghast for flavor.”
The great fortress-palace on the butte ahead had a curious skyward thrust and delicacy to it, despite the brutal massiveness of the structure; it was built of ferroconcrete, since not even the first Lord Protector’s demonic will had been able to summon whole legions of skilled stonemasons from nothing. Mixing cement and aggregate and pouring it into molds had been much simpler, and the fact that it was coated in glittering white stucco helped with the effect, she supposed. A forty-foot curtain-wall formed the outer perimeter, studded with scores of thick round machicolated towers more than twice that height, and the butte below had been cut back to form a smooth glacis down to the moat. Gates punctuated the circuit in four places, with towers and defenses that turned them into smaller fortresses in their own right.
“And just a touch of Hearst’s San Simeon on the inside, which you will see,” she added judiciously.
The inner donjon reared where the summit had been; two towers at north and south were taller than all the others, the first sheathed in palest silver-gray stone, the second covered in some glossy black rock whose crystal inclusions glittered in the bright spring light. Conical roofs of green copper topped all the towers, save for the gilding that turned the tip of the dark spire into a sun-bright blaze, and colorful banners flew from the spiked peaks.
Light blinked from the spearheads and polished armor of soldiers on the crenellated parapets. Then a heliograph began to snap from the highest point, sending a message flashing towards the perfect white cone of Mt. Hood on the eastern horizon, beyond the low green forested slopes of the Parrett Mountains. In the middle distance northward another tower, toy-tiny with distance, began to repeat the coded lights to somewhere else.
“Christ, this was built after the Change?” John Red Leaf said. “That black tower must be a hundred and fifty, two hundred feet high! How did you manage it without machinery?”
“We didn’t,” Juniper said dryly. “We Mackenzies, or Bearkillers or Corvallans or the Yakima League or the Kyklos or . . . well, all the others. We had other priorities, sure and we did.”
He’s what . . . perhaps halfway between forty and fifty? A man grown in 1998, but younger than me. Still, not a Changeling like his son there. He has more sense of what must have been involved.
Aloud: “The Portland Protective Association built it . . . which is to say Norman Arminger did. Quickly, too. Though furnishing the interior’s still going on.”
“Norman Arminger . . . he was Mathilda’s dad, right?” John said.
“That was him. Sandra . . . the Regent . . . uses the Silver Tower there as her headquarters; the black one was Norman’s lair while he was Lord Protector, but it’s full of bureaucrats now.”
And the whole of it bears the mark of him, she thought; it was like an arrogant mailed fist smashed into the face of heaven.
“There’s many a castle in the Association territories; they built scores to hold down the land, but only one like this. It goes with the flag, you see,” Juniper added.
John turned in the saddle to look at the pennants snapping from the lances of the men-at-arms in their suits of gleaming plate. They were troopers of the Protector’s Guard, and the narrow fork-tailed flags bore the undifferenced arms of House Arminger; a lidless slitpupiled eye, argent on sable, wreathed in scarlet flame.
“It’s an eye; Matti had something like that on her shirt. So?”
“That’s the Eye of Sauron, my dear. Or it was in origin, at least. And a good thing that copyright died with the Change, eh? Though it would be a bold lawyer who sued the Armingers in the seat of their power.”
His eyes flicked from the banner to the fortress. “Black tower . . . eye . . . Sauron . . . you’ve got to be shitting me, right?”
“No, that was Norman’s little joke. His sense of humor was just a wee bit eccentric, so to say. Though his main obsession was with the Normans . . . William the Conqueror, Strongbow—bad cess to him—and Roger Guiscard and Tancred and that lot.”
“The dude thought he was bad, right?”
“Oh, you have no idea. This is Castle Todenangst, for example.”
“Which means?”
“Castle of the Anguish of Death, roughly. Or Death-Anguish, to arrange the words Germanically. I’m afraid he was every bit as bad as he thought he was, too, the creature. They say there’s a man’s bones in the ground for every ten tons of concrete and steel in that thing there; when they didn’t just throw the bodies in the mix. Fortunately he wasn’t quite as smart as he thought he was, the joy and everlasting good fortune of it.”
Rick Three Bears whistled quietly to himself and said:
“Rudi’s father killed him, right? Not your husband, that Mike guy, I suppose he was your boyfriend then?”
“Very briefly,” Juniper said dryly. “That was just before he married Signe . . . who’s the mother of Mary and Ritva, whom you met. Yes, Mike killed Norman, and vice versa, ochone . . . ah, he was a lovely man, Mike Havel was, and he’s badly missed now.”
“Rudi and his bunch didn’t want to talk about the details much, seemed to me,” Rick’s father noted.
“Understandable, and it wouldn’t be altogether tactful for either of you to mention all this in Sandra’s hearing. Remarkable it is to contemplate, but she really did love Norman. There’s no accounting for taste.”
“So, you’re friends with these folks now?” Red Leaf said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that. Ní dhíolann dearmad fiacha; a debt is still unpaid, even if put out of mind. Mathilda’s a wonderful girl—”
“I was impressed with her.”
“Rightly so. But then, she spent half of each year with us Mackenzies after the War of the Eye, in my household; that was part of the peace settlement. She’s like a daughter to me. Her mother, Sandra, the Regent, is much, much more clever than ever Norman was, and Norman was no fool except where his hatreds and lusts blinded him.”
“What’s she like? Sandra.”
“Well, some say she’s a sociopath. Some say psychopath. Sandra says her chosen phrase would be: Very focused.”
The commander of the escort was riding ahead of them but well within earshot; she could see his helm jerk a little in horror, and then he slid his visor down as if to cut himself off from such sedition. Of course, you were a bit cut off from the outside world in a visored sallet, one smooth curve of steel from bevoir to crest interrupted only by the vision slit.
“What’s your opinion?” Red Leaf asked.
“A little of all three. We spent ten years fighting each other, and fourteen since then as . . . allies of a sort. Not that she’s not good company, when she chooses, and she’s devoted to Mathilda, and looks after her supporters very carefully. I don’t think you could call her cruel, exactly, either. They don’t hang folk in spiked iron cages here. Not anymore. But there’s more mercy to be found on the edge of a razor than in her mind or soul.”
His eyes went back to Castle Todenangst; they were closer now, and the sheer scale of it was daunting.
“I still can’t quite believe it. It makes you feel like a bug.”
“That was precisely the intention, I believe, and just exactly how Norman regarded everyone but himself, and perhaps his wife and daughter. The materials he scavenged . . . I think the ornamental stone came mostly from banks and office buildings as far away as Seattle, the concrete and steel from construction sites and factories.”
“But how did he get it all here?”
“Hauled on the railways, mostly. Horses were scarce then, so he used men for that and the rest. Used them up. They were going to starve anyway, he’d say, and might as well work first. The Pyramids were built by hand too, without even steel too
ls or wheelbarrows to help.”
He whistled silently and rode wordlessly for a few moments, craning his neck up.
“I see where your boy got his accent,” he said, changing the subject.
For which I do not blame him. He’s here to negotiate with all the countries of the Meeting at Corvallis . . . of the High Kingdom of Montival . . . and not to hear our old feuds. Though the man does need to know what he’s dealing with; I owe him that and more, for the rescuing of my son and Mathilda.
His own speech was a slightly twanging rural mid-American, with just a hint of something else and an educated man’s vocabulary. She shrugged ruefully.
“At least with him it’s genuine. My mother was Irish, from Achill in the west—she spoke the Gaelic to me in my cradle—and I can put on County Mayo at will. Over the years I’ve let it have free rein, so that at least the real thing is available as a model, so to speak. Most of my people—”
She glanced back at her own guard with fond exasperation as they rode along in kilt and plaid and green brigandine marked with the Moon and Antlers. The six-foot yellow staves of their bows slanted over their backs, and arrows fletched with gray goose feathers rattled in their quivers.
“—imitated what they thought was the accent, for all that I’d tell them they sounded like Hollywood leprechauns from Finian’s Rainbow . And their children grew up hearing that, with a result that is now wholly indescribable without using bad language, so it is, the more so as they don’t realize it. I try to think of it as just the way Mackenzies talk.”
Red Leaf grinned. “Yeah, I thought some of the others sounded like . . . I had a friend, this Mongol guy named Chinua, studying range management at South Dakota State University while I was there, who was crazy about John Wayne. One night he ran a movie on his VCR where the Duke played this boxer who went to hide out in Ireland because he’d hit someone too hard . . .”
“The Quiet Man,” Juniper said with a wince. “A fine movie if you don’t mind assuming my mother’s entire people were a race of happily drunken potato-faced wife-beating peasant yokels with roomtemperature IQs who thought with their fists when they weren’t clog-dancing or killing each other in fits of mindless religious fanaticism. It’s annoying that sort of thing can be.”
“Tell me,” the Indian said dryly. Then, softly: “I miss VCRs sometimes, though . . .”
They paused for a moment, both lost in memories of a world that had perished in an instant of pain and white light. Then they looked aside in mutual forbearance; there were some things that were too hurtful to be called back from their graves, best left in a time that was now remembered mostly as myth. If only because thinking of that made you think of what had followed, in the years of the great dying.
No wonder so many who survived sought escape in dreams of ancient times! As if that age just before the Change had never really happened, something to be passed over with a shrug.
Red Leaf cleared his throat, as his son rolled his eyes, very slightly and probably without conscious intent.
Arra, Changelings are often like that, when they hear their elders babbling of meaningless things like television and movies. Sadly: And soon there will be nobody who understands us, really, as we die off one by one, we survivors who remember the ancient world.
“Pretty country,” John said, looking towards the fields north and south of the road.
It was, gently rolling hills vivid green with the spring rains and burgeoning warmth of this mild and fertile land. The orchards of peach and plum, apple and apricot were in bloom, a froth that sent fragrance drifting on the mildly warm air to compete with the smells of dung and horse and sweat and metal, turned earth and woodsmoke. Willows dropped their drooping branches in the little river to the south, amid oak-dotted pastures studded with pink and blue hepatica.
“Makes me feel closed in, though,” Three Bears said unexpectedly. “Sort of . . . cramped.”
“All what you’re used to,” Red Leaf said. “It sure ain’t the makol.”
When Juniper looked a question at him he translated that: “Makol, the short-grass prairie, the High Plains. Our country.”
Peasants in hooded tunics rode sulky plows on the northern side, turning under green sod in their field-strips as the patient oxen leaned into the traces and soil curved rich and brown and moist away from the plowshares, the smell as intoxicating as fresh barley bread. Others farther away on a south-facing slope worked with hoes flashing in a vineyard whose stocks were still black gnarled stumps after winter’s pruning. Then the almost metallic bright green of winter wheat, with its slight under-tint of blue. It grew ankle high and rippled away towards a line of poplars; a prosperous-looking village clustered there, brick cottages with tile roofs peeping through the trees around the gray square bell tower of a church and a manor hall’s roof.
The castle was south of that and across the highway and railroad right-of-way. A squad of crossbowmen in half-armor doubled out of the gate to stand with their weapons presented at the salute; the great steel leaves were already open. It wasn’t a full-dress ceremonial reception, though trumpets screamed beneath proud banners. The Lakota mission wasn’t exactly confidential but they weren’t trying to draw attention to it yet either; a mass of alarming unconfirmed rumors was the objective.
Red Leaf and his son stayed quiet through the massive gate-halls, shrewd eyes taking in the details of catapult and ballistae and firing-slits for flamethrowers, and through the courtyards and gardens, fountains and roads and sweeping stairways and galleries where pillars supported pointed arches beyond, and into the donjon; the interior of Todenangst was like a small city in itself, a city and a building at the same time. It included a cathedral of some size, rows of houses against the curtain wall’s inner side as well as barracks, stables, armories, workshops, reservoirs, grocers and bakers and cobblers’ shops, cold-stores, granaries, taverns, schools, libraries and printshops, jousting grounds and even a theater. The escort vanished off to their quarters, save for the knight, taking her archers and the horses with them.
“My lady, my lords,” the man said. “This way.”
He accompanied it with a stiff bow—it was difficult to make any other sort in a suit of plate complete, even one with an articulated breastplate. He also had a limp, and a pointed brown chin-beard and green eyes that showed when he pushed his visor up. His shield’s main blazon was the Eye, but an inescutcheon in the upper left showed a series of wedges of gold and black meeting in the center, with a flaming motorcycle painted over it.
Gyronny sable and or, a Harley purpure . . . the Weretons of Laurelwood; they were Hells Angels before the Change, when they decided to back Norman. They hold Laurelwood by knight-service; an armigerous family but not titled, enfeofed vassals of the Barons of Forestgrove in County Chehalis. And that’s a baton of cadency across the arms, and he’s very young, so he’s the tail end of the second generation—his elder brother was about ten at the time of the Change and had that lance-running with Mike Havel in the War of the Eye. And I heard that—
“Ah, Sir Joscelin,” Juniper said, searching her memory. “Congratulations on receiving the accolade, and I hope your wound is healing well.”
“Thank you, Lady Juniper,” the young knight blurted, fighting down a smile.
He showed them through the entrance of the Silver Tower into the vast hall at its base, with an arched groin-vaulted ceiling and great spiral staircases on either side, lit by the incandescent mantles of gas-burning chandeliers. It was fairly crowded; secretaries and clerks in plain tunics; visiting delegations; soldiers of all descriptions, from hairy leather-clad foresters to military bureaucrats; a nobleman in a surcoat of blue silk lined with yellow whose extravagantly dagged sleeves dangled to his knees, attended by pages and squires, and a lady in sweeping dress and pointed headdress who was as gaudy and haughty as he; clerics, from a bishop in crosier and miter to tonsured monks and robed nuns . . . And one section blocked off by planters full of roses and lavender and set with tables a
nd chairs.
“One double-cheese pizza, one chicken stew, two bacon cheese-burgers with fries, right, gentles?” a server in a commoner’s tunic-and-shift said with the singsong intonation of phrases infinitely repeated. “And two glasses of Pinot Noir and one mug of small beer. Bread, butter and cheese are complimentary, but manchet bread is extra. That’ll be one silver piece and three pennies.”
John Red Leaf blinked. “A food court? The Black Tower of the Dark Lord has a food court?”
“Well, even minions have to have lunch, and not all of them can go to their own hearths,” Juniper said. “And technically, this is the Silver Tower. The pizza is fine, but I have my suspicions about the hamburgers, that I do; they taste far too breadcrumbish for honesty sometimes.”
“OK, OK,” he said. “What floor is she on?”
“The seventh, usually, a bit more than halfway up, which is quite a climb, but—ah, here we are. The VIP treatment.”
At the rear wall, the one facing the interior of the donjon, was what looked like a small room lined with an openwork trellis of bronze wrought into vine leaves; Sir Joscelin bowed them into it, stepped back, closed a door of the same construction and pulled on a tasseled rope.
“Godspeed and good fortune, my lords, Lady Juniper.”
Somewhere far below a bell chimed faintly. Young Three Bears did start in alarm when the elevator lurched into motion beneath them, and a slow chiming music sounded from above. His father grinned—he undoubtedly hadn’t ridden in an elevator since March 17, 1998—and swore admiringly.
“All the comforts. How does this work?”
“Convicts on treadmills down in the dungeons turning the drums with the cables,” Juniper said, holding out one hand with the index finger pointing downward.
Then she rotated it towards the roof, where the icy music sounded over and over, like the chiming of Elven bridles on a midnight heath:
“Rigged to a carillon as well.”
“Well, fuck me, elevator music isn’t dead after all.”