The High King of Montival

by SM Stirling

  “Elevation thirty—” Hands spun the aiming wheels and the troughs rose. “Ready . . . battery . . . shoot!”

  Tunnnggg-whack!

  Repeated six times, as the throwing arms slammed forward against the rubber-padded steel of the stops, driven by massive coiled springs taken from the suspensions of heavy trucks. The globes flew up the elevated launch troughs and on long arching trajectories, farther than granite or cast-iron round shot would have carried, though not as far as finned bolts. The Zillah men stayed steady, though some helmets turned as they followed the flight of burning globes overhead, for which she didn’t blame them. Astrid winced at what came next. Two landed short and cracked on the ground, sending sudden gouting tendrils of flame towards the Boisean soldiers.

  “Brave men,” she admitted, as none of the Boiseans flinched, only hunched a little behind their shields as liquid fire spattered the surfaces. “Very brave men.”

  Fire may not kill you more dead than steel, or even be more painful than a pike point through the kidney, but it’s harder to face somehow.

  “Magnificent discipline,” Alleyne said.

  “Got brass balls, that lot,” Hordle added; all of which meant much the same thing.

  Ouch, Eilir said in Sign.

  The next two came down in the middle of the enemy formation, and shattered on upheld shields. There were only a few pints of liquid in each missile, but that was enough to spatter onto half a dozen men and run blazing under their armor. The stuff clung like glue, too.

  Not even the Republic’s army had discipline enough to keep still under that; men rolled shrieking on the ground, until their comrades smothered the flames or gave them the mercy-stroke. Orderlies ran out through the gate to drag the wounded back, but the last two of the balls had slammed into the side members of the gateway itself. It was heavily built, but of green pine timber without the metal sheathing they would have added if they’d had a bit more time. The edges caught at once.

  The battery’s pump teams had started swinging their levers madly as soon as the first volley lifted, and in twenty seconds the water had forced the bottle-jack plungers forward against the resistance of the springs, until the trigger mechanisms caught at full cock. Gunners adjusted the aiming screws as hands passed more globes from the limbers and fuses were lit. Then:

  Tunnnggg-whack!

  Tunnnggg-whack!

  Tunnnggg-whack!

  Tunnnggg-whack!

  Tunnnggg-whack!

  Tunnnggg-whack!

  Another flight of napalm globes soared over the advancing pikemen; this time all six burst in and around the gateway and threw a savage orange barrier across it. The whole framework of the gate began to burn as well, crackling and sending flame licking up towards the watchtower above.

  “Charge! Zillah forever!” the commander of the pikemen roared, and pointed his sword forward.

  The trumpets screamed, the snare drums sounded a long quick roll, and the pikemen broke into a pounding run behind their leveled weapons, shrieking wordlessly. Even with their tower burning beneath their feet the Boisean crews above the fort’s gate fired their two scorpions. Their deeper note sounded beneath the growing white roar of the fire, and two twelve-pound cast-iron shot streaked out at point-blank range. The Zillah commander was running forward beside his city’s banner when one of them smacked off his head in a spray of blood and fragments of hair and bone, and threw them and his helmet bounding behind the body that took two more steps and pitched forward. The other struck short, bounced and whipped forward at knee height, and an entire file of pikemen went down screaming as their legs snapped with a crackle like chicken bones in a dog’s jaws.

  “Hooo-rah! USA! USA! Hooo-rah!”

  The guttural shout sounded again. Three ranks of the Boisean soldiers cocked their six-foot javelins back and then threw in perfect unison. Fifty yards away the charging block of League pikemen had just enough time to hesitate before the missiles slanted down out of the air at them. Pikemen didn’t carry shields; they needed both hands for their unwieldy weapons. A hundred and twenty of the throwing-spears punched into their formation; about half of them hit rather than landing in earth or bouncing off pike shafts or glancing away from smooth pieces of metal, and men went down screaming as the hard narrow points punched through armor and flesh. Then another volley, and another.

  It was a ragged line of pikes which rammed into the big shields of the Boisean troopers. But the Zillah men were still moving at a flat-out run, either brave enough to keep in mind that the way to get out from under a shower of spears was to close with the enemy as fast as they could, or simply too frenzied to think of anything but killing. The front ranks of the Boiseans snapped out their stabbing-swords and took the pikes on the faces of their shields or knocked them up, or hacked to cut the heads free from the shafts. Men ducked forward, shoving and pushing to get within reach of the Zillah pikemen. At arm’s length they would be helpless against the stabbing-swords held underarm for the gutting stroke, but in the meantime men were going down with pike points in the face or throat or belly.

  The whole Boisean force rocked backward; and then the Portlander cavalry hammered home on each flank, swinging in at a steady hand gallop like the jaws of a spring trap.

  A bellow of “Haro! Haro, Portland!” and the lances struck.

  Some horses went down at the impact, but far more men, run through shield and armor and body by points with a ton of horse and rider behind them, bowled over or smashed backward. Even then the Boiseans didn’t break; men stepped up and flung javelins at close range, or stabbed and hacked at the vulnerable legs. Then the longswords were out, and serrated warhammers, smashing down as the knights loomed like steel towers over the men on foot. The Boisean formation shrank as their commander ordered men from the interior of it to break back through the burning gate, throwing down their shields to make a temporary bridge through the flames; behind them their comrades stayed and died to buy them time. So did their commander, fallen beside his standard with its gilded hand on top, two lances through his body.

  The watching Dúnedain bowed in their saddles, right hand to heart; part salute to the Grand Constable’s handling of the little battle, part respect for the enemy’s courage.

  “Time for us to depart, if we’re to meet those Indians,” Astrid said.

  Alleyne nodded and neck-reined his horse around to the east. “And I don’t think anyone down there is going to be paying much attention. Really I don’t.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE WILD LANDS

  (FORMERLY TORONTO, ONTARIO)

  APRIL 12, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

  “Now, that is amazing, so it is,” Artos said quietly. He stared up into a clear blue sky where a few small fleecy clouds drifted, and bisecting that view . . .

  “The wonder of the world!”

  He’d felt awe in his life; never more than on Nantucket, when he’d met something so—

  So wholly grand and wholly beyond the grasp of humankind that my mind could not hold it, still cannot, so that I grasp and fumble after memories, memories not gone so much as too big, and I can contain only specks and splinters of them at any one time.

  Or watching snow tearing from the peaks of the Three Sisters in a winter storm, or the Pacific thundering into a cliff beneath his feet and making the living rock quiver like some great beast in pain while the spray battered at him with chill salt hands. Or a tiger glimpsed moving like a yellow-and-black spirit of the Wild through the thickets along the Willamette. Awe at the Powers, or at the nature They embodied.

  It was a little new to feel it at the works of mortal men like himself. Great buildings were common enough in the still-occupied ancient cities like Portland, so common that usually you didn’t bother to notice them beside the modern life below. Or you looked at them as merely mines in the sky, sources of steel and brass and aluminum and glass and copper. There were plenty of that kind off northward to his right, some scorched and leaning drunkenly and others seemingly
intact and everything in between, mostly of the usual upended-box profile. The ancients had had awesome powers, but very little in the way of taste, to judge from the things they’d built in the generations just before the Change.

  The tower that reared over the travelers here near the edge of the lake wasn’t a building, really. It was a narrow spire of concrete shaped like a Y in cross section, tapering inward like a lance or a finned crossbow bolt, but swelling out again to a pod near the top. Above that was a stepped metal spike. Only as they pedaled closer had he been able to get any feeling for the scale of the thing, and that mostly by how slowly it grew despite their speed on the rail. The Norrheimers were subdued by the dead city anyway; there was nothing even remotely as big where they lived, but if you’d seen enough ruins it was nothing extraordinary. The tower, though, was impossible to grasp until you realized that to see much of it from beneath you had to lie on your back.

  “It fills the sky,” he breathed.

  “Nearly two thousand feet high,” Ignatius said. “Possibly over two thousand, but I think a little under. One or two hundred feet under.”

  What I thought, but I thought I was getting it wrong, Artos mused.

  He’d deployed the usual way of making a quick-and-dirty estimate of something’s height, the one you used with a big tree or a castle tower. Do a rough cut of the distance from the base to where you stood, not difficult if you had something to give you the scale. Then stretch out your arm with the thumb extended and sight over it to the top of the object; with some practice that gave you the angle of elevation between the ground and the peak to within a degree or two. After that it was just a simple little bit of practical trigonometry, the sort anyone got with a warrior’s or builder’s education.

  I just didn’t believe it.

  “Surtr!” Bjarni exclaimed. “Two thousand feet! That’s . . . that’s . . . three bowshots . . .”

  “Two long ones,” Edain said, craning his neck. “But straight up, d’you see! Can you imagine being up there in a thunderstorm? By the Dagda’s dick, man!”

  Bjarni signed the Hammer in aversion, and so did several of this folk.

  “Can you imagine being up there right now?” Mathilda said eagerly. “Think how far you could see on a clear day like this! The Silver Tower at Todenangst would be nothing next to this; even a balloon or a glider wouldn’t be the same. It would be like a mountain, but a mountain shaped like a needle, all by itself!”

  Artos whistled softly as his half sisters cheered her. That it would. Not like a mountain, not like a glider . . . not even like hang gliding in the Columbia Gorge. Like nothing else in the world.

  He looked around. They’d followed a set of multiple railroad tracks five or six pairs across into the ruins; usually even if one or two tracks were blocked by trains caught at the Change, or rubble slumped across in the twenty-five years since, it was simply a matter of switching the pedal-carts and rail-wagons over to another that was whole and clear. Most of the route inside the lost city was solidly bound in stone and concrete and metal, and still holding against the gnawing of nature. Nature was winning with its infinite patience—they’d just come through a section where water six inches deep ran over the rails—but that victory was delayed here where the hand of the ancients still lay so heavy. Hence there was less of the annoying minor scrub growth that was covering more and more rail as the season advanced.

  Northward were broad streets still littered with a scattering of rusting, tattered vehicles, then the ruins proper. He wouldn’t go anywhere near that; some of the streets had collapsed into the pits and tunnels beneath and were slow-moving swampy rivers now, and there might be dwellers, though they hadn’t seen any, or heard drums in the dark either. Southward were elevated roads—freeways, they’d called them—and the tower, and another scattering of ruins in a narrow strip between the railways and the blue of the lake. Which was more like an ocean, since you couldn’t see the other side.

  Ritva and Mary reported the same all the way out of the vast necropolis to the west, so that the worst they’d have to do would be to set up the winches to topple rolling stock off the rails until it fell out of the way; they’d gotten that down to a science in their weeks on the trail.

  “We’ll do it,” he said. “Those that wish to. The rest can stand guard. You Norrheimers may come back this way, but we of Montival will not, and it’s an opportunity we’ll never have again. Who’s for it?”

  Bjarni laughed and shook his head. “I’m a friend of Thor. His mother is Earth.” He stamped his feet on the cracked concrete. “I’ll bide here. That thing’s like the Bifrost Bridge to Asgard, and I’ll not walk that as a living man.”

  The party sorted itself; all his closest companions, and Asgerd, who wouldn’t show doubt in front of Edain; he suspected that the bowman might have hesitated if she hadn’t already loudly volunteered too. Garbh sat at the command of stay but growled dolefully as Rudi and the others walked off.

  They took ropes and sledgehammers, pry-bars and bolt-cutters and hacksaws as well as their weapons with them, and a good assortment of torches—their tallow candles were long gone. They needed all of those in the tumbled entryway buildings; three false starts left them feeling discouraged before they found a way in.

  Though those statues were worth the trouble, Artos thought; they’d been part of the big domed building next to the tower. Bronze giants trying to squeeze themselves out of those narrow spaces, like ground meat from a sausage. I wouldn’t call them beautiful, like the things Matti’s mother collects, but striking? That they were!

  Ignatius stopped with broken glass gritting under his feet when they finally stood at the base of the huge stairway.

  “Your Majesty, there is some danger in this,” he said quietly. “Can a King take an unnecessary risk, when on his safety depends the welfare of the realm? We must get the Sword to Montival. And yourself to bear it.”

  “No, it’s a necessary risk,” Artos replied, giving him a quick grin. “Necessary because a King must be a man, and a man is more than a machine that does a task. Sometimes he must do a deed for the deedʹs own sweet sake. If I become less than that, I’d be less than a man; and it’s a poor King I would be.”

  Artos lifted his torch, watching the ruddy light of the flames sweep across stalactites of rust and plaster taller than him. Hibernating bats hung like thick fur from the ceiling, a few stirring at the light and noise; the smell of their droppings was thick in the damp musty air, and a littering of their dead sprawled mummified on the floor. Ingolf braced a foot against the wall and the door under his pry-bar squealed back. Artos ducked his head in and looked upward past the stairs; light vanished into a well of night, with wisps of smoke drifting across it.

  “Dark and narrow, but it looks pretty dry,” he said. “If there’s not much water, the steel of the stairway should still bear our weight.”

  “Wish there were windows,” Mathilda grumbled.

  “If there were windows, there would have been more water!” Artos said. “Let’s be at it. Everyone on the rope, now—through a good sound loop or ring on your harness, people. Be ready to grab hold if one of us falls through.”

  They joined themselves together, extinguished all but the lead climber’s torch and began the ascent, not sprinting but keeping to a slow steady jog, careful to keep four or five feet of distance between each. Even for someone in hard warrior’s condition he found his breath coming faster after a while and the thick air tired them all faster; there wasn’t anything he did often that used quite the same combination of muscles, but he made his thighs into pistons to push against his weight and his gear. Rusty metal squealed and squeaked under their boots. He studied the wall for a while; sections were of heavy-gauge wire mesh, but mostly plastered concrete. Here and there a black trail showed where water was finding a way, to seep and freeze and expand and scale at the structure, or rot the steel wire within.

  They paused after fifteen minutes. “Excitin’ as a tunnel,” Virginia said; she
was mildly claustrophobic. “Only more work’cause it’s uphill.”

  “I just had a thought,” Artos said. “Eventually this thing will weaken, and in ten years or twenty or fifty or a hundred will fall, so it will. Think of what a sight that would be to watch, the fall of a building two thousand feet high!”

  “Jesus!” Ingolf swore. “Or Manwë.”

  Virginia whistled. “Goddamn,” she said, pronouncing it gaaawddaaa-ym . “Now that would be sumthin’ to see.”

  “Of course,” Ritva said sweetly, “it could fall right now. Wouldn’t that be something to feel?”

  She snickered at Virginia’s scowl; then the rancher’s daughter joined in the twins’ giggle, hitched at the baldric that supported her quiver, and followed as Artos started up once more. He estimated that it was about three-quarters of an hour from their start before they emerged into the first of the floors in the observation pod, and saw light streaming through windows shattered by storm or frost or the slow decay of their metal frames.

  “Careful now!” he said sharply. “Everyone on a safety line, anchored solid to here! The support members and the floor could be much weaker than the tower itself.”

  To Ingolf: “No bones anywhere, that I’ve seen. Wouldn’t anyone have made a fort of it? None easier to defend.”

  The former salvager shook his head; he had more experience of the dead cities than any of them.

  “Too hard to get water up here,” he said. “Nothing to cook with. And it’s conspicuous—show a light here and you’d be seen by anyone for a long way around. Plenty of really hungry anyones, for a while, until the city was eaten out and the last ones drifted out into the suburbs where there were rabbits and varmints.”