The Scourge of God c-2

by S. M. Stirling

  "No," Juniper said flatly. "I've had visions granted… not often. And never shared like that. not even since the Change. It was always possible, I suppose, in theory, but-"

  They looked at each other and nodded, acknowledging that they had seen.

  "But even Christians don't expect to have the sun stopped overhead often," Sumina said, taking a long breath.

  The skin between Juniper's shoulder blades crawled, and she shuddered as her mouth went dry as milkweed silk in autumn. Yes, she loved the Lord and Lady in Their many forms… but those forms spanned the universe of space and time that sprang from Them, and They could be as terrible as the fiery death of suns, as inexorable as Time. A mother's kiss on her child's face came from Them, but so also the glaciers that grind continents to dust.

  "I thought… I thought They might tell us something of the Prophet, this madman out in Montana," she said.

  Signe nodded sharply. "I saw him. It couldn't have been anyone else." She grimaced. "And he was as nasty as… well, as nasty as the rumors, which is an accomplishment."

  "We all did," BD said. "But more than that."

  Juniper took a deep breath, another, inhaling until her lungs creaked and then slowly releasing it, and all the tension in muscle and nerve with it. Ground and center… strength flowed back into her body, and firmness to mind and thought. She saw the others win to calm in their different ways; walking the paths they did gave you that.

  "Now, these things we saw are signs, and a wonder," she said, in the County Mayo lilt she'd learned at her mother's knee and all her Clan had imitated. "But it is not the first I have seen here, in this place."

  They all glanced at the altar. Juniper had prophesied when she held her son over it at his Wiccanning; and Raven had appeared to the boy ten years later, twelve years ago now. Juniper's voice gained strength as she went on:

  "I am thinking that it is Their way of telling us that the storm breaking on us is one that troubles all the world. Not in words, but-"

  "Even so, that was more… obscure than They usually are, wasn't it?" Signe said thoughtfully.

  "Not necessarily, my dear," Juniper said; Signe had a warrior's fierce directness.

  BD nodded. "An oracle's voice speaks like the wind in a forest, turning and twisting like Time Herself. They don't show us more than we can bear."

  "We're all mothers," Melissa said in agreement. "You know you can't speak all your mind to a child. How then could the Divine to us?"

  They paused, listening to the creaks and buzzes of the summer night, letting the cool scented air flow through them, winning to steadiness once more. The lonely sobbing of the wolf's howl sounded, far and faint.

  Juniper added softly: "And also we are told that unimaginable Powers are at strife in the worlds beyond the world. Our struggle is Theirs as well."

  "As above, so below," Sumina murmured, one of the maxims of their faith.

  "How not?" BD said. "The Powers are many; and They are One."

  Juniper signed agreement; both at once were true, and you couldn't begin to understand Them until you grasped it-not just with your mind, but with heart and gut and bone.

  Melissa chuckled. "And sure, we're forgetting something. You have to be careful what you ask, for They have more answers than we can swallow. We should have asked as mothers, not just as… as politicians in fancy dress."

  Juniper smiled ruefully. "My Rudi's east of the mountains; with your girls Ritva and Mary, Signe, and your Edain, Melissa. We should ask about them."

  "Sumina and I will stand as Guardians," BD said. "But… you don't necessarily get what you ask for; They may give you what you need, not what you want. For if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without- "

  Signe smiled agreement, and completed the line: "-for behold: I have been with you from the Beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire."

  Then she shook her shoulders; it was a getting-ready-for-a-tough-job gesture that she'd picked up from Mike Havel. Who had been her husband… and who had also fathered Rudi Mackenzie. It gave Juniper a moment's pang to see it.

  "We should try," Signe said. "Though… I wish scrying were as reliable as turning on a TV in the old days."

  "Well, yes, that would be convenient," Melissa Aylward said, a stout cheerfulness in her tone. "But on the other hand, there was never anything worth watching, anyway, even with a hundred channels on cable."

  "There was always CNN."

  "If you wanted a long story about a farmer in North Dakota who'd taught his duck to sing."

  "Come," Juniper said, her momentary smile dying.

  She walked from the circle of oaks to the pool that lay outside it and went down on one knee, leaning on her staff. The others did likewise. The water flowed quietly, dark and clear, reflecting only the stars and moon. Juniper raised the sickle towards the silver light in the sky with the point up, then turned it down over the water, as if pouring the contents of a cup.

  "Ground and center," she said, laying down the bronze and passing her hand over the pool. "Ground and center. Be at one with each other and the world beyond."

  They knelt around the still surface of the spring-fed pond. After moments that might have been hours or only minutes the focus lifted. Then each drew the wand of blessed rowan-wood from their girdles and touched the surface of the water. Signe sprinkled it with mugwort, picked at the full of the moon.

  "We ask aid of You," Juniper said. "Lugh of the many skills, God whose vision dispels ignorance; Brigid, Goddess of high places and the knowledge that carries the self beyond the self. From the longing of our hearts, we ask that You gift us in this holy place with the dara sealladh, the sight which pierces to the hidden truth."

  "Show me my child. Show me Edain," Melissa asked, and closed her eyes.

  "Show me my daughters," Signe said, and did likewise. "Show me Mary and Ritva."

  "I ask as Your priestess, and as a mother to the Mother," Juniper said. "Show me my son. Show me Rudi." She hesitated, and then used his Craft name: "Show me Artos."

  TheScourgeofGod

  CHAPTER ONE

  High was the Mackenzie hearth

  Dun Juniper, Gods-favored hall

  And goodly its treasures

  Song and feast, harp and verse

  Rang often there and well

  But far and wild were the wanderings

  That Artos must endure

  Hard-handed hero, well companioned From: The Song of Bear and Raven

  Attributed to Fiorbhinn Mackenzie, 1st century CY

  SNAKE RIVER PLAIN, BOISE/NEW DESERET BORDER

  JULY 21, CY23/2021 AD

  "We'd be a lot farther east if we'd gone the southern route," Edain Aylward Mackenzie grumbled quietly. "If we're going to this Nantucket place for the Sword, I'd prefer we just go."

  The first three fingers of his right hand moved lightly on the waxed linen string of his yew longbow as he knelt behind the boulder of coarse dark gray volcanic rock, and he spoke without turning his eyes. A bodkin-pointed shaft was ready on the rest that cut through the riser-grip, and the stocky thick-armed body was ready to bend and loose the weapon with a snapping flick.

  "Yes, but then Martin Thurston would have gotten away with it, sure," Rudi Mackenzie pointed out reasonably, scanning the ground ahead with his binoculars. "And we'd be leaving an ally of the Prophet here on our way home, and next to our own borders."

  The long flatlands to the south were dark as the sun sank westward. Until a few days ago the area had been the borderlands between the United States-the United States of Boise, to everyone except its inhabitants-and New Deseret. Now it was probably the borderland between the US of Boise and the Church Universal and Triumphant, and its Prophet.

  "You mean he hasn't gotten away with it, then, Chief?" Edain enquired sourly. "And we aren't doing just that?"

  Ah, and it's a rare comfort you are, my friend, Rudi thought.

  Not just the rock-steady readiness; the banterin
g grumble kept a distance between his mind and the fact that three of their friends were in the hands of an enemy who were no more likely to show mercy than they were to drift upward and migrate south like hummingbirds.

  "Ah, well, and they do need fighting, to be sure." Edain's lips tightened. "I saw what they did to those refugees. They'll have to account to the Guardians about that… and I'm not sorry to send more of them through the Western Gate to do it."

  "It was probably fated that we get mixed up with this," Rudi said. "The Powers didn't have a nice straightforward trip East for us in their minds, so."

  "And they have our friends," Edain said.

  Well, Rudi thought. Odard's a friend… more or less. Ingolf's a comrade, and Matti is… well, I'm not sure, except that I care for her as much as for anyone living who's not my mother. It's not just that we're anamchara, either.

  He and she had sworn the oath of soul-bonding when they were ten, during the War of the Eye… He smiled a little at the memory of their seriousness, and their determination not to let their friendship be broken by the quarrels of their elders. Not that being young made the ritual any less binding…

  And all of us on this trip are young, he thought, not for the first time. Changelings, or nearly so. For good or ill, the world is passing into our hands.

  The two young Mackenzies fell silent, waiting patiently behind their low ridge of sage-grown rock. Rudi raised his head slightly and looked again through the roots of the bush ahead of him-always much safer than looking over it. At this angle there was no risk of a flash from the lenses of his field glasses.

  He'd tied back his red-gold hair and wrapped a dark bandana about it, and dabbed his face with dust and soot; his gray-green eyes shone the brighter in the dusk. A few hours of sleep snatched during the sunlight hours had repaired most of the damage of days of fighting and hard riding; he'd recovered with the resilience of youth. He'd turned twenty-two just this last Yule, in fact; a broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, long-limbed man two inches over six feet, and even stronger than he looked.

  Few works of humankind showed, besides the fireless war-camp of the Prophet's men two miles away. This stretch of the Snake River plain had depended on power-driven pumps before the Change. People had fled or died when the machines failed, and the fields had gone back to sagebrush with thicker lines of scrub and the bleached skeletons of dead trees to mark the sites of homesteads. Crumbled snags of wall still here and there, and the rusted, canted remains of a great circular pivot-irrigation machine, but like most of his generation Rudi usually ignored the ruins of the pre-Change world so thoroughly that he didn't really see them, unless there was some immediate practical reason to give them thought.

  The air smelled dry, of dust and sage, and hot even though the temperature was falling as quickly as the sun. The first few stars glimmered through the purple eastward. Rudi pulled a Mackenzie-style traveler's cake out of his sporran, broke it in half and handed the other part to Edain; they both munched stolidly, though the pressed mass of rolled oats and honey and nuts and bits of dried fruit tasted of nothing but a vague sweetness now. They might need the energy soon. Edain threw some of his to the big shaggy half-mastiff bitch that lay near him; Garbh's jaws clamped down on it with a wet clomp, followed by smacking and slurping as she struggled to get at bits that stuck to her great yellow fangs.

  Then they waited through to full dark, now and then tensing muscle against muscle to keep themselves supple without the need to get up and stretch; both young men had learned the trick of it and much else from Edain's father… and Aylward the Archer had been First Armsman of Clan Mackenzie for nearly two decades, and a sergeant in the Special Air Service Regiment before the Change.

  There was a three-quarter moon, and the stars were very bright in the clear dry air. An owl hooted, and a jackrabbit scuttered through the ground-cover. Garbh raised her barrel-shaped head from her paws, black nose wrinkling at something she sensed but couldn't place. The same something brought Rudi's head up, and he put his hand on the wire-and-leather wound grip of his longsword. Edain began to draw his bow, his gray eyes darting about for a target.

  "We're coming in," someone said quietly out in the dimness; a woman's voice.

  Rudi relaxed, and let the sword slide back the finger-span he'd drawn, with a slight snick of metal on metal as the guard kissed the scabbard-mouth.

  "The farmer's child breathes so loud we could have shot him in the dark," she went on, still speaking softly but not whispering-whispers carried.

  Edain bristled: " Child yourselves," he muttered. "You're Changelings too, and not much older than I am!"

  He was nineteen and he was a farmer, but also an experienced hunter of deer and elk, boar and cougar, of tigers and sometimes of men, and he'd carried away the Silver Arrow at the Lughnasadh games twice; once he'd been younger than any champion had before. His father had taught the whole Clan the art of the bow.

  "You two might as well have been playing the bagpipes," another soprano added.

  At least they're speaking English instead of Elvish, Rudi thought with resignation. When they insist on Sindarin… there's no better language for being insufferable in, and the Lord and Lady know Mary and Ritva are experts at insufferability anyway.

  The twins came in, shaggy in their war cloaks of mottled dark green canvas covered in loops stuck with bits of grass and sagebrush. Rudi had to admit they were invisible until they wanted to be seen. He was a very good scout himself; the twins were very very good, able to crawl to within touching distance of alert, war-wise men. If they had time enough, and sometimes it could take days.

  They were also identicals, tall young women lithe as cats, their yellow hair caught up in tight fighting braids under knitted caps of dark gray wool. The faces below the hoods of the war cloaks were oval and high-cheeked and their slightly tilted eyes cornflower blue, capable of a most convincing imitation of guileless innocence.

  In truth his half sisters reminded him of cats in more ways than one, including an occasional disconcerting capacity for cool wickedness. They'd also, in his opinion, spent far too much time in Aunt Astrid's little kingdom in the woods, listening to her bards recite from those books she insisted on calling the histories, and talking in a language invented by a long-dead Englishman. Not that they weren't great stories, but the way the Dunedain carried on, you'd think they were as true as Tain Bo Cuailnge.

  Everyone worked their way backwards until they were well below the crest of the low ridge, and then Ritva went down on one knee and smoothed a patch of dirt. There was enough starlight and moonlight to make out the diagram she drew.

  "Their horses are rested now; there's good water there, if you don't mind hauling it up on a long rope, probably four or five saddle lariats linked together. It looks like they're going to have a quick cold dinner, give the horses the last of their feed pellets and then ride east in the darkness, to get past the Boise pickets."

  Rudi nodded. The Church Universal and Triumphant had pushed an army into the territory claimed by the United States-the one head-quartered at Boise-and gotten beaten rather comprehensively. But President-General Thurston had been killed in the fight-by his own eldest son, Martin, who'd been conspiring with the CUT. He hadn't liked his father's plan to finally call elections, and to keep his own children from running for the office. Now he was lord of Boise… and Rudi and his friends were the only ones who knew the real story.

  And in the meantime, we have a problem that isn't politics, Rudi thought. Namely, how to get Ingolf and Matti and Odard free.

  Or it wasn't entirely politics. If you had the right-or wrong-parents, the way he and Matti had, everything you did was politics. And whoever did it, fighting was always about politics, whether it was this or an Assembly of the Clan shouting and waving their arms or two rams butting heads in a meadow; he'd grown up the Chief's son and absorbed that through his pores.

  "Sentries?" he asked.

  "Mounted," Mary said.

  And I know it's you, Mary,
he thought; they did that verbal back-and-forth thing to confuse people, but he could tell their voices apart. And your faces. Well, usually.

  "So much for a bit of quiet Sentry Removal as a solution to that little problem we're havin'," Edain added. "Getting our friends out, that is."

  The twins nodded soberly, not rising to the slight edge in his voice; it was too obviously true. A mounted man wasn't as good a sentry as someone on foot and hiding-much harder to miss and easier to avoid. Unfortunately they were also a lot harder to take out so quietly that nobody noticed. Killing a man silently was hard enough; doing the same to an animal as big and well constructed as a horse was much more so. Doing both together…

  When problems that involved fighting came up, the Rangers were extremely good at sneaky, underhanded, elegant solutions. Astrid-the Hiril Dunedain, the Lady of the Rangers-considered straight-ahead bashing crude. Sentry Removal was one of the Dunedain specialties. Sometimes elegance bought you no lard to fry your spuds, though.

  "Where, what pattern, and how many all up?" he asked briskly.

  "They've got pairs riding in a figure-eight pattern; eight on the move at any one time. There's thirty more of them altogether, with that party that came in this afternoon, the ones who had Mathilda and Odard and his man Alex."

  "About half of them are wounded," Ritva said, taking up the tale; then she grimaced slightly. "And we're not counting the six who were too badly wounded to ride fast or fight."

  "Their officers killed them?" Rudi asked. The Cutters certainly seem ruthless enough for that.

  "No, they killed the badly injured horses. The men killed themselves," Mary said flatly. "No argument about it, either. They were singing until the knives went in. Something about bright lifestreams. "

  "And sure, Ingolf said that the Sword of the Prophet were… serious men," Rudi said. "Everything I've seen bears it out. And our folk?"

  "Mathilda and Odard here," Ritva said, tapping her finger at the sand-map. "They're lightly bound, wrist and ankle, except when they let them up to go to the slit trench. Doesn't look like they're hurt at all, beyond some bruises; they haven't even taken their hauberks off. Odard's man Alex isn't confined at all. But Ingolf…" She hesitated.