Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change

by S. M. Stirling

  Especially now that his own wife and own mother and own sisters escaped with the aid of the Dúnedain and are telling the truth to everyone. Not to mention his brother Frederick is the High King’s friend and one of the Companions of the Quest, so there’s someone for soldiers to go over to. Boise will be part of the High Kingdom too, and under the High King’s peace!

  “Sir Ogier!” Huon said, dismounting and saluting; high politics weren’t his affair yet, but that didn’t stop him thinking.

  The young knight looked up; he’d been a royal squire too, until the High Queen gave him the accolade on the field of honor not long ago, and was still a fairly junior household commander of the High Queen’s menie. He was a little over two years older than Huon and around six feet, probably his full height though he was still lanky with late adolescence; his hair was a very dark brown-yellow, like barley, and there was a spray of acne across his cheeks and nose—something Huon had been spared so far. His smile was genuine and warm beneath the raised visor; they’d served together, after all. And though Ogier of House Renfrew was a son of the Count of Odell, one of the great Peers of the Association, he was the youngest son, with two elder brothers, not to mention three sisters who’d be needing dowries.

  “Good to see you again, Huon,” he said, taking the dispatch, looking at the address and handing it over to the signal detachment commander. “And you too, Lioncel.”

  “I noticed you’d been sent on a mission, Sir Ogier,” Huon said.

  The knight nodded. “I was out meeting these fellows, they slipped a message across the lines that they wanted to switch sides, and Her Majesty thought a man of rank should meet them, being tactful and so forth.”

  A snort. “And thirty lancers with me, to make sure they were honest about it.”

  He turned his head to Lioncel: “Any news from your brother?”

  “Not lately, Sir Ogier,” the blond youth said. Then he grinned: “But my lady my mother is delivered of a daughter, who’ll be christened Yolande. Your lady mother the Countess and the ladies your sisters were there at Montinore manor for the accouchement.”

  “Excellent!” Ogier said; he seemed to be happy with the world today. To Huon: “Lioncel’s little brother Diomede is paging it with Countess Anne in Tillamook off on the Pacific shore.”

  “Don’t let him hear you say little brother, Sir Ogier,” Lioncel said, grinning.

  It was all part of the network of fosterage and service that tied the great houses together. There had also been persistent talk of a marriage between the Countess-regnant of Tillamook, or the County on the Edge of the World, as it was also known, and Count Conrad Renfrew’s youngest son. Marriage was another part of the network.

  He went on to Huon: “I just got this from Her Grace.”

  He tapped a knot of ribbons in Tillamook’s colors on his shoulder, gray and green and silver around an embroidered rose. Wearing a lady’s favor wasn’t precisely a pledge of marriage, that depended on circumstances. But it did entitle you to fight for her name and fame, and it was a serious matter, where the honor of each depended on the other.

  “I sent a letter by heliograph after the Battle of the Vanguard, telling my lady Anne how I’d been knighted by the High Queen on the field of honor and begging leave to send her my first spurs and dedicate the deeds to her glory. This came in this morning with the couriers, and this.”

  He pulled out a locket strung on a silver chain, shaped from an oval of walrus-ivory as long as a man’s thumb and half as wide, carved in delicate filigree and clasped with granulated gold. When he clicked it open there was a portrait of a striking fair-haired young woman, with his own on the other side.

  “It’s beautiful, Sir Ogier,” Huon said. “She is, I mean, your lady the Countess; most fair and gracious, fitting for a Peer of the Association. She gave my sister Yseult shelter when it was, ah, awkward. We’ll always remember that with gratitude.”

  He spoke quite sincerely; that too was a bond. The locket was fine work, and Anne of Tillamook was lovely…though also several years older than the young knight. And Ogier had been a good companion to work with, not stuck-up or birth-proud at all.

  So I wish him all good fortune in his marriage, and her too, when and if. His son will be a Count, after all.

  Huon stepped back so that Lioncel could take a look as Ogier beamed at the picture. That let him pivot at the first shout of alarm, and his bow was still in his hand with a nocked arrow resting in the cut-out. One of the not-quite-prisoners had ducked under a guard’s horse, slashing the girths as he went, and he was throwing himself headlong at Sir Ogier with a long glitter of steel in his hand, dodging the rider’s draw-and-cut as the man toppled onto his own sword with a yell.

  “Look out!” Huon called crisply, into the chaos of rearing horses and men shouting, drawing and loosing as he’d been taught.

  He hadn’t had time to aim except by raw instinct, or to worry about missing and hitting someone else. The string struck his forearm, hard enough to feel through the stiff leather of his arm-guard. The arrow hit, low and at an angle; he could hear the wet smacking impact. There was a screech, and the body of the attacker struck him and he went over backward with a painful thump, too quickly for his training in how to fall to do more than help a little. It gave him a good viewpoint to see the assassin who’d been masquerading as a deserter run into Lioncel. He was a grown man, though wiry and slender as most light cavalry were, a third again as heavy as the young squire. But he stopped rather than overrunning him. The curved dagger in his hand slit the surcoat on Lioncel’s shoulder and grated off his mail, then fell to the ground point-first and stood quivering.

  The man slumped downward, leaking blood from nose and mouth. When he hit, Huon could see the silver wire around the hilt of Lioncel’s misericorde dancing in the center of his chest. The narrow blade of the weapon had slipped easily between the links of the mail shirt, which was what it was designed for. And equally easily between two ribs and into the big blood vessels over the heart, driven by the man’s own weight and momentum. Behind Lioncel, Ogier Renfrew extended a steadying armored arm against the squire’s back as he staggered.

  When the knight spoke an instant later, it was to his men, though, in a sharp carrying voice:

  “Put up your weapons! I’m all right, by the grace of God and St. Dismas! No killing! Remember the High King’s order!”

  The crossbowmen and men-at-arms raised their weapons, or lowered the points of their swords. The prisoners were in a tight clump, hands raised or on their heads, mostly blank-faced but slightly crouched; they’d thought themselves about to be massacred…which might have happened, if Ogier hadn’t spoken swiftly.

  OK, make a note of that, Squire, Huon thought, struggling to draw a breath and then get back to his feet. Focus on the immediate need. Prioritize!

  “Not one of us!” one of the Boise men called. “Bastard wasn’t in our platoon! Just turned up and said he was switching sides too, on his own.”

  Ogier stepped forward and indicated the curved dagger with the toe of his steel sabaton. It was fine work, with a rippling watermarked pattern wrought into the blade, and the pommel was a ball engraved with the shape of a rayed sun.

  “Hand of the Prophet,” he said. “Kill-dagger. Those sons of whores operate in threes.”

  The prisoner who’d spoken before did again: “He was alone. We haven’t seen any others.”

  “Then they may turn up. Or you could be lying.” He shook his head and went on to the deserters: “I’m afraid we are going to have to tie you and search you.”

  In a harder voice, directed at his own followers, who were shuffling their feet:

  “Search you again, only thoroughly this time.” Then he went on to the prisoners:

  “This is a temporary measure, until we get you to Goldendale and sort out who’s who. That’s how the enemy operate, trying to destroy honest men’s trust in each other.”

  One of his own men-at-arms bent to retrieve the assassin’s k
nife.

  “I wouldn’t use my bare flesh on that, if I were you, Teófilo,” Ogier said dryly. “It was consecrated to the service of Hell and the death-demons in Corwin, probably by the Prophet’s own hand.”

  “¡Dios mío!” the man blurted. “Thank you, my lord!”

  He used a stick to push the knife onto a cloth, stuffed the bundle into a leather sack, and put that on a pack-mule. His comrades attended to binding the prisoners, and the knight turned to the squires.

  “Good work, very good work,” he said. “Her Majesty will hear of it, and the Grand Constable, too, of course.”

  “Lioncel did the work…killed him,” Huon said, suddenly feeling a little weak as he looked down at the dead Cutter, wrinkling his nose at the coppery metallic stink of blood. There was a lot of it in a man. “All I did was shoot him in one butt-cheek.”

  Ogier laughed, and Lioncel gave a startled chortle. “I…just drew and stabbed,” he said, his voice wobbling a little.

  “And jumped in front of me towards the danger, like Huon,” Ogier noted. “It’s when he’s surprised that a man shows his real instincts, or his training, or both. My lord my father told me that once and I’ve never forgotten it.”

  Huon looked down at the dead assassin; the arrow had gone in over the hip-bone and then down through one buttock. The red point stood out just where it joined the upper thigh. He didn’t pull a very heavy bow, but flesh was so…

  Tender, Huon thought uneasily.

  “And you can truly say that this is now a thoroughly half-assed assassin,” Lioncel said.

  Something unknotted in Huon’s gut as he joined in the laughter.

  CHAPTER THREE

  COUNTY OF AUREA

  (FORMERLY CENTRAL WASHINGTON)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  OCTOBER 30TH, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

  “Was that your first?” Huon asked an hour later; he thought the younger boy wanted to talk.

  Lioncel shook his head. “No…they, assassins like that, tried to kill my lady the Grand Constable in Walla Walla a few months ago, the very same day I’d been made squire. And the Count, and my lord my father, all on the same night.”

  He stiffened with unconscious pride: “But my lady was ready for them! We were waiting!”

  Maybe because she used to be an assassin herself, Huon thought; he wasn’t sorry that she had been ready, though. That would have been a disaster for our cause, to lose the commanders in the County Palatine just as the invaders came west.

  Lioncel went on: “I shot one of them with my crossbow then, in the apartments my lady was using, and I had to give him the mercy-stroke. And…I think since, during the fighting, but I’m not sure. But that’s not…so close, mostly. You shoot, or someone comes out of the dust, and you hit or dodge and you don’t see him again. Usually I’m behind my lady d’Ath, of course, and the senior squires, well behind.”

  They were out of the mountains again, well into the settled lands around Goldendale. Huon took off his helmet, relishing the breeze through his sweat-damp hair, a feeling of lightness and release. A swale at the base of a low rise had been closed off by earth banks, and a spring kept it filled with water that lay mirror-still, reflecting the blue sky and puffy white clouds above. Willows surrounded it, and reeds grew in the edges; to the east was a long narrow strip of apple orchard along the irrigation furrow that kept it alive, with some of the fruit still glowing red among the faded green of the leaves.

  Apart from that the land around the pool was a long sloping hayfield, the alfalfa recently cut and packed in big round mows all centered around a column made from the trunk of a tall lodgepole pine. Each haystack had a thatched roof on top of its circular height, and they looked as if they were huts taken in two giant hands and stretched like taffy. The smell was as sweet as candy, and it drifted over him like a benison, a reminder of a world where feeding your cattle and horses and sheep through the winter was about the most important thing there was.

  Oh, devils and damnation, I’m not cut out to be a cleric!

  “Let’s stop here for lunch,” Huon said. “We’ve got plenty of time. And nobody can say we haven’t been doing a day’s work today, man’s work!”

  “Yeah,” Lioncel said, and smiled.

  After all, we’re noblemen of the Portland Protective Association, Huon thought. War is our work. We’re the guardians of the land.

  Sir Ogier had thoughtfully given each of them a remount from among the captured horses. They both rode light in the saddle, and switching off mounts every couple of miles, they could cover the distance down to the river in a few hours without overstraining the horses. Neither of them considered that sort of ride anything of a hardship.

  “It’s a nice spot,” the heir of Forest Grove said.

  Huon forced down a slightly queasy recollection of the sound when the arrow struck. The one he’d shot had been a bad man, not just an enemy; an assassin, an agent of the CUT who’d sold his soul to demons. On the other hand, you couldn’t help thinking how it must feel. Or that once the bad man had been a perfectly ordinary little kid. He hadn’t thought of that before.

  You take the good with the bad. I don’t think I’m ever going to like killing men or hurting them. Fighting’s exciting, but I don’t like that part. I can do it when it’s necessary, I guess.

  They watered the horses, rubbed them down and poured small mounds of cracked barley for them to lip up off the turf before they hobbled them and left them to graze beneath the willows. He enjoyed the homey, familiar task, the earthy, grassy smell of the horses and the way Dancer turned his neck and lipped at his rider’s hair.

  The hobbles weren’t really necessary with their own mounts, he’d bought Dancer from a first-rate training farm when he was taken into the royal household and worked him since then, and Lioncel’s Hardhoof was just as good. The remounts were eastern and of quarterhorse blood, and most of all they didn’t know them and their horses didn’t know them. It was better to have them all hobbled while they sorted out who was boss-horse and got used to each other.

  Then they opened their bags and sat under a willow to eat, leaning against their saddles and putting one of the small bucklers they wore on their sword-scabbards down to serve as a plate. Huon had managed to pick up a three-pound ration loaf of maslin bread, a mixture of whole-meal barley and wheat flour that was dense and coarse but fresh that morning, and a length of strong-tasting salty dried pork sausage full of garlic and sage. Lioncel contributed a block of cheese wrapped in dock leaves tied with twisted straw, some honey from the package his mother had sent, and a canteen of watered wine.

  Huon sawed and slapped together a set of massive sandwiches, while Lioncel struggled with the top of the honey jar. Then they signed themselves, said grace and tore into the food with the thoughtless voracity of hardworking teenagers who’d gone six hours since the morning’s porridge and raisins.

  “This is good cheese!” Huon said after a moment.

  Most of the cheese you got with the army was just…cheese, issued in big blocks to groups. Even in the royal household, when they were in the field themselves; Mathilda was a stickler for not dragging too much in the way of personal comforts in the baggage train, and the Grand Constable was notorious for seeing that nobody exceeded what was allowed in the Table of Ranks. Huon didn’t mind; enduring hardship was a knightly duty, the cheese was usually not too moldy, and it made dry bread or the rocklike double-baked hardtack the troops called dog biscuit go down a lot better, especially if you could toast it over a campfire.

  This was quite different, firm but not hard or rubbery either, with a rich lingering taste that was just a little sour-sharp, and bits of hot pepper had been worked into the curd and cured with it. He hadn’t had better, even as the last course at a banquet.

  “My brother Diomede sent it up from Tillamook even though he’s absolutely green that I’m here and he’s stuck there,” Lioncel said. “He’s not a bad kid, an
d Anne’s a good mistress to serve.”

  Huon nodded; Tillamook cheese was famous, and had been even before the Change. Nowadays it was traded all over the Association territories and even beyond.

  “The wine’s from Montinore,” Lioncel went on. “Our home manor near Castle Ath.”

  It was good too, though the water didn’t help, but he already knew better than to drink it straight with work to do and half a day ahead of him. The honey was really good; mostly clover but with fruit flavors, he thought.

  “We live…lived in Castle Gervais full time,” Huon said; the castle and lands were under a Crown-appointed seneschal right now, while he was underage. “My mother liked it that way.”

  Better not to think about that, he added to himself, and went on:

  “I’m going to build a manor house south of town when I’m Baron. It’s a pain keeping the Castle Gervais quarters warm in winter. The wet moat means the concrete weeps during the Black Months; the amount of wood we go through is unbelievable. Why live like you’re under siege until you’re really under siege?”

  Lioncel nodded. “My lady mother says she had to pretty well drag Baroness d’Ath out of the castle to the Montinore manor house after I was born…it was built a long time before the Change, it’s really cool, and it didn’t have to be worked over much. It was in the Crown demesne before we were…that is, before Lady d’Ath…was given the land in fief.”

  “It’s weird, the way they forgot how to build something you could live in just before the Change,” Huon agreed. “A lot of them don’t even have fireplaces. Creepy! No wonder God sent a judgment on them! Gervais town doesn’t have much from before the Change. It all burned down. The new town’s modern, half-timbered stuff mostly, my parents oversaw that after the castle was built. Yseult can remember some of that, but I can’t.”