by SM Stirling
The elevator didn’t travel very quickly, but it was much faster than trotting up ten flights of stairs. They went from one story to the next and the light outside brightened as narrow arrow-slits turned to real arched windows with glass panes in their stone traceries, albeit with steel shutters that could be barred and bolted.
A young woman was waiting to greet them at the seventh stop, dressed in a long embroidered cotehardie and a wimple of yellow silk bound with jeweled wire. The bright cloth complemented skin the color of chocolate truffles; she had an Associate’s jewel-hilted dagger at her woven gold belt as well as the usual rosary and embroidered pouch. Her narrow black eyes were somewhere between elaborately guileless and extremely shrewd, her delicately full features expressionless save for a bland smile of welcome.
“God give you good day, my lords from the east, my Lady Juniper,” she said, holding her skirts and sinking in a curtsy that let her trailing oversleeves touch the birch-and-maple parquet. “I shall bring you to the Lady Regent.”
“Wait, demoiselle,” Juniper said. “You’re . . . Lady Jehane Jones, aren’t you? Lord Jabar’s youngest.”
“Yes, I have the honor to be the Count of Molalla’s daughter, my lady,” she said. “You and I have met only once, though. And also I have the honor to be amanuensis to the Lady Regent.”
Which meant she was something between confidential secretary and general gofer, a post of considerable importance if your principal was high on the totem pole. Juniper stopped herself from raising an eyebrow; it was the first time Sandra had allowed that job to go to one of the greater nobility. There must be a story there. The Regent liked using people she had some strong hold on, ones whose fortunes were linked to hers, not those with independent power bases and blood-links to the ruling houses of the Association.
The young noblewoman went on: “If you’ll follow me, my lords, my lady?”
She led them down a long corridor walled in pale marble streaked with darker gray. Arched windows to their left overlooked a roof-top garden surrounded by high walls grown with blossoming roses, and the interior wall held paintings—mostly Impressionists and Post-Impressionists along with some of the obligatory Pre-Raphaelites—or objets d’art in niches; a thirteenth-century Persian bowl showing warriors battling around a tower, an ancient savage-looking Shang Chinese mask in jade and gold, and more.
Sandra still has her salvage teams at work, I see, Juniper thought; they’d gotten as far as museums and galleries in San Diego.
“Bet the economic pyramid comes to a mighty sharp point here,” Red Leaf murmured in her ear; she nodded silently.
Knights of the Protector’s Guard crashed gauntleted fist to breastplate outside the last door, burnished cocobolo, teak and maple carved with scenes from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. A tinkle and buzz of music from lute and rebec and hautboy from within died away as it swung noiselessly open.
“My dear Juniper,” Sandra Arminger said, rising to greet them.
She was small and neat and elegant and smooth in her white-and-gray cotehardie, and a pearl-and-platinum headdress that wasn’t quite a crown over an elaborately folded white silk wimple. It framed a round slightly plump middle-aged face, entirely ordinary . . . until you looked into the brown eyes.
“And John Red Leaf and Rick Mat’o Yamni,” she said. “Hau Kola!”
The Presence Room in the Silver Tower emptied at the Regent’s gesture, with even her Persian cats being carried out protesting in baskets. Of the entourage there remained only Jehane and a tall blond woman in black surcoat, jerkin, hose and turned-down thigh-boots. The surcoat bore Sandra’s arms quartered with her own, sable, a delta or over a V argent. She stood behind Sandra’s chair with her left hand on the plain hilt of her longsword and her right turning a rose beneath her chin, watching with eyes the color of moonlit glaciers.
The room was uncluttered and elegantly spare, pale stone and tile, with the color mainly in the glowing rugs where tigers wound through thickets beside the Columbia Gorge and lords and ladies rode out with hawks on their wrists through fields of asphodel. Before she left one last lady-in-waiting set out a coffee service on the blond wood of the table, along with petits fours and nuts and dried fruits; the rich dark scent of the Kona Gold mixed with the lavender sachets and the floral scents from arched Venetian-gothic windows open on a little patio garden. They all sat silent for a moment, considering each other.
One thing clashed violently with the room’s decor. A long carved ceremonial pipe with a spray of eagle feathers along its underside rested in a wooden holder, along with bowls of sage, sweetgrass and tobacco and a brass censer of glowing coals.
Red Leaf’s brows went up as he saw it. “Why do I get the feeling that’s a sure-enough chanunpa, ah, Lady Sandra?”
“Why, it’s best to be prepared,” Sandra said with a slight smile. “In case we come to . . . serious matters.”
Red Leaf returned the smile. “You know, Rudi struck me as a really smart guy. And he’s sure-enough death on two legs in a fight. But I got the impression your girl Mathilda was more subtle. Twisty.”
Sandra’s smile grew to reveal a dimple and she spread her hands palms up.
“Why, my lord Red Leaf, you say the nicest things!”
“And that’s real coffee, isn’t it? God, it’s been over twenty years!”
“By all means,” Sandra said.
Jehane put her shorthand pad aside for an instant and poured for all of them; Rick Three Bears gave her a shy smile and then struggled manfully to hide it; Juniper judged he was fascinated by her alien looks, as well as the fact that she was simply a very comely woman of a bit less than his own age. Black people apparently weren’t common on the High Plains. They weren’t all that common here in Montival either, but the twists and turns of post-Change politics had made them very well represented among the PPA’s nobility.
Red Leaf sipped the coffee and sighed; his son followed suit, winced, and poured in more cream and sugar. The elder Sioux rubbed his palms together.
“Let’s get to business, then.”
Sandra held up a hand. “Before we do, let’s make our own positions plain. I am the Lady Regent of the Portland Protective Association; I make the Association’s foreign policy in peace and war. Jehane is my personal amanuensis and has my full confidence; you may speak as if we were alone. This”—she indicated the tall woman behind her—“is my Grand Constable . . . supreme commander . . . Baroness Tiphaine d’Ath; she also enjoys my full confidence, and is here to give me any military advice I need. Lady Juniper you know. I represent the Association, which is about half of Montival. Lady Juniper is the Mackenzie, the Chief of the Clan and Name, and sufficiently influential that she can more or less commit the remaining powers as long as we don’t do anything too outrageous. Signe . . . the Lady of the Bearkillers . . . couldn’t be here, and Corvallis can’t get anything done without six days of debate. There are over a dozen minor states . . . cities . . . leagues . . . tribes . . . autonomous villages . . . kibbutzim . . . but as a matter of practical politics they’ll fall in with whatever the big four decide. Correct?”
She glanced over. Juniper shrugged:
“It would be more accurate to say that everyone else trusts you to do the negotiations . . . and trusts me to keep watch on you, Sandra. And that Corvallis can’t do anything without six days of debate, including deciding on what’s for dinner, much less who short of a committee of dozens should have plenipotentiary powers. Which is why the people there, if not the Faculty Senate, are keen for the High Kingship.”
John Red Leaf looked around, apparently noticing that he and his son were the only males in the room. “Ah . . . you folks got some sort of matriarchy thing going here?”
“Not exactly,” Sandra said dryly. “Though it can seem that way at times.”
Tiphaine spoke for the first time; she had a strong soprano, with a tone like cool water sliding over gravel in a mountain stream:
“You might say that a lot of our fir
st-generation leadership came down with mutually terminal cases of testosterone poisoning.”
Three Bears looked puzzled, but his father barked amusement. “Yeah! Seen a fair bit of that in our neck of the woods too. A bunch of guys who thought they were a lot more like Conan than they really were. Watching the wrong movies’ll do that to you.”
Then both he and his son took a sudden second look at the Grand Constable. Juniper had fought occasionally with her own hands in the early Change Years, but she didn’t claim to be any sort of warrior; at only a little over five feet she just didn’t have the heft, for starters. But she had a very good fighting-man for her handfasted husband, and had been around many others for decades now. She knew exactly what they were looking at—details of stance and subtle movement, the wrists and hands, the thin scars that showed under the sleeves of the surcoat and shirt and on her tanned face. Other things that showed only in the chilly gray eyes, and the worn sweat-stained look of the leather and wire wrapping on the longsword’s hilt, shaped by constant use to fit the wielder’s palm. A sudden slight wariness showed on both their faces, and a small, brief, bleak smile on Tiphaine’s; she gave them a very slight nod.
The Sioux leader turned back to Sandra and hesitated. “Ah . . . you understand, this place has been a bit of a shock. I mean, your daughter Mathilda . . . the Princess Mathilda . . . and the others described things for us but I thought she was, ah, maybe being a bit colorful.”
Juniper intervened. “They’re finding the Association a little . . . picturesque, Sandra.”
“Perfectly understandable,” the PPA regent said.
One slim, tastefully plucked brown eyebrow went up at the headdress the Sioux leader had put aside on the table, and the rest of the tribal finery. Red Leaf’s heavy-featured face split in a smile.
“OK, I admit, you’ve got a point . . . Lady Sandra. This stuff’s your warbonnet.”
“And then there’s Dun Juniper,” Sandra said.
“It’s as big as this?” Red Leaf said, surprised.
“No, not nearly as large, but it’s every bit as picturesque. I’ve heard it described as looking like . . . ah . . . the biggest, gaudiest Celto-Chinese restaurant in the universe.”
Juniper stifled a laugh, and Sandra went on: “But enough pleasantries.”
Her slight smile died: “Can you commit the Seven Council Fires, then, Chief Red Leaf?” she asked, with gentle implacability. “Can you say yes or no to this alliance?”
“In theory, no,” Red Leaf said. “Yeah, we’ve got a lot more organization than we did the last time we were independent, but we don’t have a King or Bossman or Dictator or anything like that. We didn’t want anything like that. Mostly the tunwan, the nation, handles foreign affairs and leaves us alone except for keeping us from fighting each other.”
“Except for horse theft, from the intelligence reports,” Tiphaine commented, in her cool-water-over-rock voice.
“Yeah, that’s the national sport. That and football. But I helped put the whole thing together at the beginning, I talked things over with the other VIPs before I left, I’m pretty damned influential, and this is about foreign policy. So I can make promises for all the Seven Tribes, provided I don’t go completely . . . off the reservation . . .”
Sandra and Juniper both winced very slightly. Red Leaf grinned and continued:
“Everyone will be together for me to talk to when I get back. We’ve got a mutual problem, and his name’s Sethaz, aka the Prophet, and his merry band of fanatics and magicians and general all-around cutthroat scumbags out of Corwin. And his buddy in Boise, General-President Thurston.”
“Or his name is legion,” Juniper said.
Sandra nodded. “They are . . . alarming in some respects.”
“Yeah, our Sacred Men say the same thing, and I’ve met some of the Cutter . . . High Seekers they call them. Once was more than enough; those bastards seriously creep me out. They’re not natural; there’s something else living in there, like . . . what was that Howard guy, not the one who wrote Conan, the one who wrote the horror stories . . .”
“Lovecraft,” Juniper and Sandra said together.
“Yeah, like that. And just before we left to make this trip, all our Sacred Men and Wise Women and whatnot went bananas about something. Especially my uncle, who did the hunkalowanpi, the making-relatives ceremony for your kids when we adopted ’em last year. Started talking about the akacita wakan. That’s some . . .”
His mouth twitched ironically. “. . . heap big medicine.”
“Akacita wakan: Sacred Messengers, specifically,” Juniper said clinically.
She’d studied more Ways than her own from her girlhood, and had looked up more when her son’s letters spurred her interest; that had led to her arranging this meeting.
Red Leaf spread his hands in a balancing gesture. “You know, I was always all for the old ceremonies. It reminds us of how we’re a people . . . which with all the, um, volunteers we got right after the Change was a pretty good thing. But I never took it all that seriously before, myself.”
Three Bears looked uncomfortable; his father nodded at him. “Right, I know it makes you antsy to hear it, Rick, but this is time for putting cards on the table.”
Sandra nodded. “I had very much the same attitude,” she said. “Allowing for local circumstances. Until recently, as you said.”
“Until recently, and that’s a mouthful. I was wrong. My uncle said the wakan people, the spirits, were finally getting real tired of the Cutters. About fff . . . time, if you ask me, the way their spirits seem to have been beating on everyone in the vicinity.”
“That would have been at Imbolc,” Juniper said crisply. “I doubt that anyone who has the Sight . . . anyone on this continent at least . . . didn’t sense that something had happened.”
“I’ve had a dozen new crazed preachers proclaiming that a Crusade against Corwin is God’s Will since then,” Sandra said. “One of them’s traveling around with a tame wolf, talking to the birds, too. Not to mention bishops. Even bishops I didn’t put up to it myself. Marvelous are the works of God.”
Jehane crossed herself, despite her liege-lady’s obvious irony; Tiphaine touched an owl-shaped amulet around her neck.
“What did happen back then?” Red Leaf asked.
“Rudi told you of the Sword?” Juniper replied.
“Ummm . . . yeah. That was the part I found hardest to believe.”
“Et moi aussi,” Sandra murmured. “But it appears I was wrong too. We have that in common.”
Juniper took a deep breath. “When Rudi was very young, at his Wiccaning . . . it’s a rite of our Old Religion equivalent to baptism . . . I had a vision.”
Sandra raised a finger. “I was a skeptic myself. But please take this seriously.”
“I named him Artos then, in the Craft. And I spoke words.” Her voice deepened a little:
“Sad winter’s child, in this leafless shaw—
Yet be Son, and Lover, and Hornéd Lord!
Guardian of My Sacred Wood, and Law—
His people’s strength—and the Lady’s Sword!
“And then Ingolf Vogeler showed up at Sutterdown a little over two years ago now, telling us what he found on Nantucket . . . and you know the story of that. What happened on Imbolc was that Rudi—think of him as Artos now—reached Nantucket, found the Sword of the Lady in the World beyond the world, returned and drew it in the light of common day. And at that moment Earth’s foundations shook, as they had not since the Change itself.”
“So, he’s got the Sword and he’s coming home, and he’s pissed?”
Juniper nodded; her leaf-green eyes looked beyond the wall for a moment. “The Sun Lord comes, the son of Bear and Raven,” she said softly. “Lugh of the Long Hand comes again, in His splendor and His wrath.”
Silence closed down for a moment. Nobody who heard her could doubt her perfect sincerity . . . and she judged that nobody here was altogether ruling out the literal truth of what she
said, either. She went on more matter-of-factly:
“And in the meantime, the Cutters have been somewhat weakened. And all we who stand against them strengthened. At least as far as their ill-wishing and malignant abuse of the Powers are concerned.”
Sandra sighed and rested her chin on one small fist. “I must admit that . . . that was a real problem.”
Tiphaine nodded from behind her. “We lost castles in ways that just couldn’t be accounted for,” she said. “Lost more than we could afford; we’d been relying on our strongholds to delay them. But now apparently we can play that game too.”
She inclined her head towards the Mackenzie chief: “Lady Juniper here bagged us an entire battalion of Boise’s troops just last week.”
“That was you?” Red Leaf looked at her, surprised. “I heard they surrendered, which is news ’cause they’re tough bastards generally, but . . . you hexed them or something?”
Juniper winced and rubbed the fingertips of her right hand over her forehead. “I cast troubles into their dreams, and they’ll be none the worse for it. Eventually. Most of them. I wouldn’t have done it if there hadn’t been a High Seeker out of Corwin with them, because there’s a price to be paid for that. And I do not wish to discuss it, so.”
“But we must,” Sandra said. “If these things are possible now—”
“They were always possible!” Juniper snapped. “Magic is . . . not a matter of clicking your heels and having boulders fall upward. It’s a thing of mind and soul and will. I will admit—” she said reluctantly. “I will admit that things have become . . . easier since the Change. And much easier since Imbolc. The Veil is thinner. Something . . . or someone . . . moved through me; it’s not the first time, but it was the most disturbing. The which is linked to Rudi bringing the Sword. A new thing has come into the world.”
“Indisputably so,” Sandra said. “It’s disturbing, as you say, but I’m not going to deny the evidence of my senses. That would be irrational. Though I’ve tried prayer and it doesn’t seem to do any more for me than it ever did.”