The High King of Montival

by SM Stirling

  He gripped the long hilt with both hands, the right towards the crystal pommel and the other just below the guard. The blade rose until the point was at throat height; then he spun it and thrust backward without turning, up again and a slice and a slice, his feet moving as if on the sanded planks of a salle d’armes. Dancing with the blade in the two-handed nihon style, the most graceful of the sword-arts, if not the most practical in a world of strong shields and steel armor. The moves were fast, but so smoothly coordinated with the motion of his whole long body that there was no sense of hurry. Simply a flowing, flickering grace that held a smashing power as well.

  It’s different, she thought. He was always like some pagan God of war when he used the blade . . . but he’s . . . calmer, somehow? Cooler. Look at his face; the only reason his lips are open is to breathe. It’s like a statue. Where are you, Rudi? Where’s the boy I knew, the man I love?

  Then he turned and cut again, his whole body and the momentum of his motion behind the blow. A lifetime of her own training rose in an instant’s instinctive protest—a battle sword was a precision instrument delicate as a scalpel. You didn’t cut at baulks of oak as if it were an ax. A blunted practice weapon was good enough for smacking into a pell; this was almost cruelty—

  Thack.

  The Sword struck, the follow-through perfect as Rudi’s hips twisted, left hand leading on the hilt to press and right pulling it through the cut, knee bending and other leg outstretched. The top three feet of the post’s seasoned hardwood toppled away, the slanting surface that remained as smooth as if burnished and waxed. Cut like the rolled reed mats used as ordinary targets to test a blade. Now there was a slight huff of breath, and he pivoted and thrust in the same two-handed style, one hand guiding and the other with heel to pommel ramming the longsword’s blade forward with all his strength. The point glittered through the wood, then the post’s upper half fell away as he withdrew and swept the successor cut in a horizontal slash, turned and struck and struck and struck—

  “Rudi!” she said sharply.

  He turned to her, and his green-blue eyes were . . . not empty, but full of something. Something great. Not evil; instead her soul recognized it as terrifyingly good, but a goodness beyond men’s hopes and fears. Beyond comprehension, save as her mother’s cats understood Sandra Arminger’s love.

  “It doesn’t chip, the edge doesn’t turn or blunt, it doesn’t break,” he said, eerily calm. “I don’t think I could break it.”

  “Rudi!” she said again, her voice rising a little.

  “Watch,” Artos said.

  He pulled a long red-gold hair from his head and tossed it into the air. It fell slowly, curling and drifting, bright in the gray gloaming; his wrist presented the Sword so that the edge intercepted it square-on. Despite her concern, she blinked as the hair struck and fell into two pieces that floated apart.

  “Like a razor, like light, but nothing dulls it.”

  “Rudi, come back.”

  He blinked, and a little of himself did come back into his gaze.

  “It’s so easy,” he said, his voice calm but no longer empty. “It’s as if I can see what I’m doing from outside myself, and all I have to do is tell my body to do it and step aside.”

  He looked down the row of hacked, cloven posts and blinked. “And it will do things as a sword no sword can do . . . but that is . . . a flattery, an indulgence, I think. So that I can bear it at my side and say to myself, I carry the Sword forged in the Otherworld, and the bewilderment and glory of it is as a tale told to a child to reassure him—”

  “Rudi, wake up!”

  He shook his head, the coppery gold of his hair an explosion of color against the dun browns and grays and off-whites of the early-spring landscape behind him.

  “I . . . I . . .”

  Then he smiled. “Matti!”

  She hurdled the fence, the splintery pine of the upper rail gritting beneath her palm, and ran to hug him. He sheathed the weapon before she could, and caught her up. His arms were living steel around her, his body warm and living and him again, and he breathed into the hollow of her neck and shoulder.

  “Matti, I keep seeing things.”

  “All those things that might be?”

  “And . . . and as if I’m seeing beneath that, too. To the essence of the world, all the worlds, and it’s . . . it’s like numbers somehow, mathematics, and I feel, not know but sense, that if only I could make sense of the numbers I would be like a God making and shaping worlds by wishing it so, but the thoughts go by in my mind like great creatures rushing through the night and myself beneath their notice . . .”

  He shuddered against her, the grip growing almost painful. Then he pushed back a little, looking down into her face, and it struck her that he was a man in his prime now. There was only a shadow left of the boy who’d started out from home, the one with a sparkle in him like a lad going to steal apples from a grumpy neighbor’s orchard.

  “Oh, Matti, acushla, it is so good to have you here. I could not bear it else,” he whispered into her ear.

  “I am here, Rudi. I always will be.”

  They stood together for a long moment, and then he straightened and looked at the mutilated posts and a boy gaping openmouthed as he stood with the basket of potatoes he’d been fetching forgotten.

  “Well, I could always find work as a woodcutter, I suppose, if this High King job doesn’t work out well.”

  Mathilda snorted laughter. “Let’s see what’s for dinner. It’s growing dark and getting cold.”

  “Let me guess,” he said. “Roast pork. Blood sausage. And red cabbage and potatoes, and rye-and-barley bread and butter. The savor and the delight of it! To tell you the truth, I’m getting a little tired of that menu.”

  She looked at him and made her eyes go wide, putting on the Norrheimer accent that swallowed the “r” and elongated the “a.”

  “Ti-aahed of food?”

  Ten days later Artos stood in a muddy field and spoke his farewells.

  Not least to you, my lady, he thought as he bowed his head to the Norrheimer seeress.

  “A very wise man told me, Lady Heidhveig, that if I sought to do the will of the Gods and help men upward through the cycles—by which I think he meant what your folk would call achieving the strength that lay within them—it would arouse a legion of enemies against me. But that I would also find friends and wisdom in unexpected places,” Artos said.

  Heidhveig smiled. “You are not the first wanderer to find it so.”

  He laid his hand upon the Sword. “This and much else you helped me to, Lady. My thanks, and the thanks of my House and blood for as long as either shall endure.”

  “My child, you have returned the blessing,” the wisewoman replied. “Your deeds here are part of our saga now; our people won a great victory through your warning and your help. And now there is a true King in Norrheim.”

  Her eyes went blank for an instant with an inwardness he recognized.

  The Sight, he thought. Mother has that look sometimes. When she spoke there was a distant note to her voice for a moment.

  “And that has laid a fate in the Well of Wyrd that will govern the story of the true folk for many lives of men, and in lands that now seem very distant. Yes, one that will touch the very Gods . . . and I think that a certain One had his hand in that. I will pray to my God to keep an Eye on you, though He scarcely needs encouragement from me!”

  Her lips quirked in a rueful grin. “And give my greetings to your mother—from one survivor to another—when you reach home at last.”

  “That I will!” he said, smiling in turn, thinking of how her eyes would light. “Forebye the thought of her happiness when she hears that you still live, and of what you’ve built here, is another reason to hurry home.”

  He bowed his head as she reached up to him, and twitched as he felt runes being drawn on his brow.

  “Raidho . . . and Elhaz . . . to ward your journeying. Sowilo, that you may follow the sun-road to
victory . . . Ansuz for Odin’s blessing, and at the end of it, Wunjo for joy . . .”

  The syllables vibrated through him, expanding in layers of meaning as they were amplified by the Sword. Then her dry lips brushed his forehead in the kiss he had been half-expecting, and the power she had invoked settled into a hum of protection.

  She stepped away, and he saw on her furrowed cheeks the shine of tears.

  “Farewell. We shall not meet again in this life.”

  Well, and weren’t his own eyes smarting too? Then he heard Edain calling him. He turned, and when he looked back, Heidhveig had gone.

  Spring had arrived in the way it apparently always did here—grudgingly, with little of the lush sweet sense of dreamy unfolding he’d grown up with. The temperature was above freezing while the sun was up; there had been rain only a little mixed with sleet several times. Ahead of them the fields stretched in a mottled pattern of old off-white snow and emerging brown mud showing the fall plowing’s clods, a chill silty smell giving notice that Ostara was past and Beltane only a month or so away. Most of the Norrheimers here were the band accompanying their King; they’d made their good-byes earlier. Harberga had done so with a smiling calm, the farewell horn of mead she handed her man steady, but her eyes had been red. A few were here now for a last word, including a girl with hero worship in her doelike eyes who gave Ulfhild a rather clumsily knitted sweater, to the latter’s visible embarrassment.

  “Enough waiting, the which I hate,” he grumbled. “I’ve a war to fight and a throne to win. Let’s go.”

  “We’re not really waiting. We’re getting ready to move fast,” Ingolf pointed out. “We’ll save the time ten times over.”

  “I know that,” Artos said. “I said I hated it, not that I wouldn’t do it, sure.”

  “The cherries will be blossoming at home,” Mathilda said wistfully. “And the apricots, and then the apples. Buds breaking in the vineyards, meadowsweet in the pastures . . .”

  That they will, Artos thought. And the grass bright tender green by now, and the spring lambs butting at the udder, and folk making ready the Beltane bonfires. Ostara the promise, Beltane the fulfillment, the Black Months well past and life running strong like sap in flowers. A time for weddings and beginnings and begettings.

  Grimly: And the time of war. Another two months, and the Cascade passes will be open enough for armies.

  “I’m sorry to miss the rest of the sugaring time,” Bjarni said. “It’s the best part of the mud season.”

  Artos nodded, and belched slightly. Breakfast had been endless stacks of pancakes made from buckwheat flour, studded with dried blueberries and slathered with the maple syrup, besides bacon and fried potatoes. Forest loomed in the middle distance, and he could see sledges moving amid the maples. The work of the land didn’t wait, and it was doubly urgent here in a land where the world lay so long locked in the Holly King’s grip before He yielded to the Oak Lord.

  “We couldn’t have done the job any faster anyway,” Fred said. “They’ve got good woodworkers here and some fine smiths, but it was complicated and there’s very little in the way of machine tools.”

  Ignatius looked up from checking a frame. “All that we needed were a few rollers to groove wheel attachments.”

  Fred nodded: “I’m a bit surprised there were even enough stored bicycles; I thought that would be the bottleneck.”

  Ingolf sucked at a skinned knuckle and grinned. “It was fun to do some hands-on work with machinery again.”

  “My father and his chiefs salvaged a lot of the cycles,” Bjarni said. “They’re handy enough in summertime, and the parts can be made into a dozen sorts of useful machines for winnowing and grinding and pumping and chopping.”

  Artos slapped his hands on the shoulders of Fred and Ingolf where they stood beside him. It was an accomplishment, and it was also always a pleasure to see those who really knew what they were doing at a task.

  “Good work!” he said. “Very good work, my friends!”

  “We had plenty of good help,” Fred said. “We couldn’t really have done it without Father Ignatius, either.”

  The cleric made a final check of wheel bearing-boxes, waved and went back to his infinitely patient examination and reexamination.

  “He’s a real engineer,” Fred said.

  “You had the concept, my son,” he said without looking up. “And a good deal of the details. After that, it was merely a matter of execution. And I have worked on railroad equipment occasionally since I was a novice. Only permanent types, granted, but this is a logical extrapolation.”

  The first cart lifted easily in the hands of those who would pedal it. Four bicycles were at the front, locked into a frame of seasoned springy ashwood held together by bolts; a V of saw-blade was held out on two arms in front, to cut light growth. A like set of bicycles made up the rear, divided from the first by the flat load-bearing section. The flanged wheels on the cycles went onto the rusted steel of the rails with a hard clunk sound. Then they loaded it; the bed between was a mat of strong resilient wickerwork, and on it they lashed the small tent the men would share, food enough for two weeks, and their camp gear, spare weapons and the rest of their needs. It was far more than they could have carried on their backs, or on a bicycle even on smooth well-tended highways.

  The which are rare in this part of the world. The Norrheimers are too few, too scattered and each little garth of them too self-sufficient to spend much time keeping roads repaired; it would be too much labor for too little return.

  Fred went forward, and took out his stopwatch. Mary Vogeler bent one ironic eye on his seriousness, but she and her sister responded with disciplined speed when he barked:

  “Team One!” he called. “Remember to keep your interval . . . ready . . . go . . . now.

  “There’s a work party at the first break south of here,” he called proudly over his shoulder as they pushed the car to trotting speed and he leapt into the saddle, wiping his hands on a cloth. “They’ll walk back. After that it’s up to us.”

  Virginia winced. “Going to be lots of breaks,” she said.

  The thought of being held to a single line of rail didn’t appeal to her. Fred gave her a pawky look; probably also because she had a true range-country down-the-nose attitude towards work that couldn’t be done on horseback, or at least didn’t concern livestock or their products. In the Powder River country where her family’s ranch had sprawled over scores of thousands of acres, that sort of labor had been done by Change-driven refugees from the towns and their descendants, the people on the bottom of a social order ruled from the saddle.

  “Team Two!” he called. “Remember to keep your interval . . . ready . . . go . . . now.”

  Then he nodded. “Yeah, honey, there will. From what the documents Bjarni got us say, this line was about to be abandoned just before the Change anyway! I’ve been down it and we’ll have brush that’ll have to be cleared, washouts, blocked culverts . . . Bridges down will be the worst. The thing is that the people in front can go ahead fast and start working on them, thirty miles an hour or better. Either to repair it—it’s all right to take up rail behind us, after all—or to build a portage track around it, or at worst backtrack a ways and find an alternate route. Then by the time the horse-drawn sections have come up—”

  He nodded towards the rail-wagons they’d made, each drawn by three horses hitched in line ahead. Those carried the heavy loads, food and cracked oats and barley for fodder and tools, tons of it. Some of them could be rigged to carry wounded or sick men; several were set up as rolling kitchens. On steel rails a horse could pull fifteen tons or better, far more than it could manage even with a sleigh on river-ice.

  “—everything will be ready . . . Team Three!” he called, in a louder voice. “Remember to keep your interval . . . ready . . . go . . . now.”

  Then conversationally: “It’ll be slow getting around the gaps, but there’s a lot more intact rail than gaps; say a hundred to one, from what that pre
liminary survey indicates. Our average speed will be about what we could make on good roads with no breaks and supplies available en route. Call it twenty miles a day, day in and day out. Not too hard on the horses, either, since we’ll have good high-energy feed for them, and a portable forge and all. We should hit the Mississippi in say a month, if, ah, Wyrd will have it so.”

  I trust Fred’s judgment, and Ingolf’s and Ignatius’ even more, Artos thought. But if they’re wrong, we’re all likely to starve to death somewhere between here and Lake Michigan. Or be so long on the road that the war is over and done with before we reach Iowa. There’s a lot more to this Kinging it than swinging your own sword, or even the Sword, and I’ve seen that a good deal of it involves depending on others.

  “Why didn’t we think of it?” Bjarni Eriksson said; he sounded a little disgusted with himself.

  “Sure, and that’s obvious: you didn’t have any need for it,” Artos pointed out. “Norrheim’s not so large, and you had no neighbors on land to trade with—trade anything but blows and knocks, so to say. What outland trade you have goes by sea or river.”

  Bjarni nodded. “Still, now that I’ve seen it, I can see uses for it. Do you use the old rails so often in Montival?”

  “Well . . . yes and no. We’ve kept up long sections of them, and joined more together after the War of the Eye; you can go from south of Ashland to the Okanagan in the north, or from Astoria on the Pacific to Spokane; where freight can’t go by water, it uses rail when it can, and pedal-carts are far and away the fastest way to move people or light goods. But we generally switch to foot or bicycle or hoof or wagon wheel when we’re in the lands where they haven’t been kept up. It takes a good deal of work to maintain railroads, so, but far less than making those cuttings and tunnels and the like.”

  “This is a military application, really,” Fred said, a little shyly; it was getting easier to forget how young he was, but every now and then you could still tell. “Dad thought it would give us surprise, if we had an offensive campaign . . . you know, for Reunification. We’d be able to move strike forces really fast.”