Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change

by S. M. Stirling

  The twin assaults of the rumal-noose and a hundred and fifty pounds of Dúnadan on his back toppled him forward onto the muddy ground. Half a second later Mary landed on his kicking legs, wrapping her limbs around them, snatching the dagger out of his belt and tossing it aside before he thought to draw it.

  “Quiet!” Ritva hissed in English. “Or else!”

  He went limp in acknowledgment of defeat, wheezing in a breath as she slacked off a very little. Mary’s fingers did a light flickering search for holdout weapons. If there had been anyone close, they could have cast their cloaks over him and done a fair imitation of a lump in the ground within moments. Instead Ritva came up as Alleyne approached, with one leg out and a knee planted between the man’s shoulder-blades.

  “Hîr?” she said. “Boe?”

  That meant Is it necessary, lord? It was probably fortunate that the man they’d defeated didn’t understand either that or the unspoken codicil: to kill him?

  “It’s a girl?” the man under her knee choked out in surprise. “I got dry-gulched by a girl?”

  “No, it’s a woman Ranger,” Ritva snapped in English.

  “Two, actually,” Mary added.

  “So no dhínen! Which means shut up,” Ritva finished.

  He made a gagging noise as her hands poised for the second twist that would snap the neck. Mary could feel the tension in the man’s body through his legs and hips as he strained up with his neck creaking.

  The Hîr Dúnedain swept his hood and face-mask back with the same motion. His handsome face and trimmed blond mustache were blurs in the rainy night.

  “Do you yield yourself?” he asked the man softly, going down on one knee as he sheathed his sword without looking back.

  “I yield,” the man grunted, slapping one palm on the ground in a wrestler’s gesture of concession. “Obviously!”

  “Let him live,” Alleyne said softly, with the very slightest hint of a smile, and in English.

  Shifting back to the Noble Tongue: “We’d have to carry the body out anyway. Better not to kill without need and he might be useful one way or another. Make him safe, though.”

  Ritva nodded, and muttered:

  “Oltho vae,” to the prisoner, which meant sweet dreams, or close enough.

  She let the rumal drop. The man went on his face, choking and gasping for a moment. Before he could recover Ritva had a sealed container opened, and another cloth in her hand; that she clapped across his nose and mouth, holding them firmly and planting her other hand on the back of his head. There was a moment’s sweet smell, and she removed it as soon as he went limp. It was rather too easy to overdose someone on chloroform, given that the stuff had to be made out of seaweed by a complex chemical process and that you never really knew for sure how strong any batch was.

  No point in sparing someone and then having him die of heart failure, Mary thought as she helped bind and gag the unfortunate Boisean.

  Or extremely lucky Boisean, she thought.

  Her snicker and Ritva’s came at the same instant, and Mary knew they were sharing a thought:

  He’s obviously brave and that means he leads from the front. Thousands are going to die before the next sundown, but now he probably won’t end up on the receiving end of a lance or an arrow or a roundshot. As opposed to say, the blameless and far more deserving personal me, who’ll have to go through the whole ghastly damned thing from beginning to end doing Rangerishly dangerous damned stuff to live up to our doubly-damned reputations.

  That sort of mental communion had been happening between the Havel twins all their lives.

  CHAPTER SIX

  HORSE HEAVEN HILLS

  (FORMERLY SOUTH-CENTRAL WASHINGTON)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  NOVEMBER 1ST, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

  Half a dozen more Rangers were there around Mary and Ritva and the Lord of the Dúnedain by now, kneeling silently in a half-circle about them with arrows on the string, bows hidden by their cloaks to keep the rain off the sensitive recurves until the instant they had to draw. Wax and varnish did a good deal, but it wasn’t wise to count on them.

  Another had caught the Boisean’s horse, gentling it and offering it an apple while two more quickly went through the saddlebags and the bedroll strapped behind the saddle for anything that might be documents or maps. It shifted and laid back its ears, backing its stern in a half-circle, then consented to take the fruit, though its eyes still rolled nervously. Horses were conservatives who thought a strangeness probably meant something wanted to eat them.

  “Rochiril, novaer,” the Ranger crooned softly, stroking the mare’s nose. “Be good, horse-lady.”

  “Imlos,” Alleyne said to him. “Mount. Ride east; abandon the horse where you can make your way to the riverside about ten miles east of here without leaving a trail. Take his sword, shield and helmet and drop them somewhere along the way where there are plenty of tracks. You know the Ranger shelter.”

  “I know it, lord,” the young man said; it hadn’t been a question. “I helped build it.”

  Well, alae, duh, Mary thought. Why do you think he picked you?

  They’d all memorized the hideouts and blinds the Dúnedain had established along the river before and during the war; most were merely small camouflaged dugouts with supplies…often including an inflatable boat. Still, there was knowing and knowing.

  “Rejoin when you can, Imlos, but don’t take unnecessary chances,” Alleyne said. “Go!”

  The man nodded, bowed slightly with right hand to heart and vaulted into the saddle amid murmurs of galu—good luck—from the rest. Even as the hoofbeats died away in the hiss of rain, the others were examining the surroundings, blurring footprints with careful speed. One flipped the Boisean’s broad-bladed dagger to Mary, and she tucked it into her boot-top. The captured officer was stripped of his sword belt, tied into his cloak and slung between two rangers. One of them flashed Ritva a thumbs-up sign as he helped carry the prisoner downslope.

  That was not a Ranger gesture, but Ian Kovalevsky was from the Dominion of Drumheller. Originally the slim fair young man had been a liaison between the Questers as they passed through on the last stage of their journey back to Montival and the Force, a red-coated equivalent of the Rangers which helped keep the peace in the Dominions. He’d ended up as Ritva’s new boyfriend, and might well drift into the Rangers as well—it wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened when an outsider fell for a member, and Mary thought Ritva was serious about him. He’d been along on the rescue mission in Boise, too, for which Mary rather envied him.

  Though getting snatched off a roof in the middle of a hostile city by an airship that almost missed, with the usurper’s troops closing in all around in a shower of crossbow bolts, then getting tossed hundreds of miles in a thunderstorm with lightning crackling around the highly-inflammable gasbag…that sort of thing was a lot more fun in retrospect. On a cold winter afternoon in Stardell Hall back at Mithrilwood, say, lying back in one of the big leather chairs in front of the fireplace and roasting chestnuts, with the carved timber of the walls all dim up by the banner-hung rafters, a mug of mulled cider in your hand, a cat in your lap and a bunch of kids and noobs gathered around, sitting on the floor and listening with that is just so cool expressions on their faces.

  They went down the slope faster than they’d climbed it, doing their best to leave minimal tracks; as they cleared each party of two or three the little groups would cover trail as they fell back. Two light galleys were still waiting in the little cove, but they’d been pushed back into the water and the camouflage netting removed, their oars waiting ready in the locks like the legs of a water-spider. Both were fragile-looking things like racing shells, with aluminum masts folded down and stored in the well between the oar-benches.

  John Hordle and his wife, Eilir Mackenzie, were there; this was a very important mission, enough that all three of the remaining founder-leaders of the Ra
ngers were on it. Uncle John was six-foot-six and broad enough to seem squat, built like a hobbit crossed with a troll, with a face like a good-natured ham. He leaned on the hilt of his sheathed greatsword and chewed a grass stem with his graying reddish-brown hair gleaming with raindrops as the rest came up, his shrewd little russet eyes missing nothing. After a few mugs of shandy at festivals and feasts, one of his party tricks was to bend horseshoes straight and then toss them to the unsuspecting, who then howled and danced after they’d gripped the torsion-heated metal.

  Aunt Eilir was Juniper Mackenzie’s eldest child, black-haired, pale-eyed and slender-strong and just short of forty. She had a clipboard and was checking people off as they arrived, soundlessly…which was appropriate, given that she’d been deaf from birth and was one of the reasons Rangers used Sign so much. No matter how well-trained and experienced troops were, it was always shockingly easy to lose someone in the dark if you weren’t very careful. Eilir and Astrid had re-founded the Rangers a few years after the Change, and a few years before John and Alleyne and Sir Nigel had arrived from Greater Britain fleeing Mad King Charles.

  Mary had always thought it was all madly romantic, especially the part where the two young comrades had courted and won the anamchara-sworn Ladies of the Dúnedain. Though she knew Uncle John had always quietly considered Aunt Astrid barking mad and wouldn’t have had her on a bet. And she suspected that Uncle Alleyne had thought she was crazy too, but just didn’t care, the way Uncle John didn’t care that Eilir was deaf. Both of which facts were romantic too, when you thought about it, in a more grown-up way.

  Imlos? Eilir Signed.

  “Sent on with the horse,” Alleyne replied. “Going to ground in one of our underground shelters and rejoining later.”

  “’opefully,” John Hordle said, in his inimitable burring Hampshire-yokel version of Sindarin. “Good practice sending ’im, though, Oi think.”

  Alleyne nodded. “Hopefully they’ll find the horse far away and won’t have any idea where their man was lost. They’ve been having a serious desertion problem, we know that. Some coming over, some just going home.”

  There were younger Rangers who thought Alleyne’s more plummy Winchester-and-Sandhurst tones were a Quenya high-elven accent and had imitated it. Aunt Astrid had frowned on that and Uncle John had encouraged the rumor to drive her distracted…

  Mary sighed a little at the memory as the Boisean was slung onto the second galley. Aunt Astrid would have loved this op like a bowl of blueberries and whipped cream. With toasted walnuts sprinkled on top.

  Everyone clambered aboard with swift care; the narrow hulls rocked anyway.

  “Let’s get him out of the way,” Mary said.

  She was smiling at the same time; they were going home. Going home to a giant murdering battle, granted, but the principle was the same. Being isolated among the enemy just felt worse than openly confronting them, whatever the odds might be. If a hundred thousand men were going to try and kill her, at least she’d be among Montivalans when they did.

  “Raich, he’s heavy!” Ritva said, as she took him by the loop of rope tied under his arms. “For a sort of cutely slim guy.”

  “Or his armor is,” Mary said, as they navigated the narrow path between the rowing benches.

  Mary and Ritva sank into position on either side of the prisoner in the bows. Two of the oarsmen used their shafts to push off, and then both of the boats turned their sharp prows westward. A soft chant of:

  “Leidho…bado…” started as the oars swayed backward and forward.

  Water hissed by outside the thin metal sheath of the hull. The prisoner’s armor was shoulder-protection and a back-and-breast of hoops and bands of plate, fastened with catches at the left shoulder and under the left arm. Ritva pushed him on his side and Mary worked the catches to release the forty pounds of steel. It went overboard with a plop as they reached deeper water; the little ship-by-courtesy was crowded enough that the room and weight-loss were welcome, even if it felt a bit wasteful.

  The sky was clearing after the rain-shower; she could see more stars now, and the eastern horizon was slowly turning from dark-blue through green to a baleful and somehow ill-omened pink, though she usually liked the pre-dawn hush. The broad expanse of the Columbia revealed itself, with wisps of fog glimmering and vanishing, and the great steep brown bluffs on either bank, with black streaks where the basalt showed through. The air was chilly, on the edge of frost. Her damp clothes warmed only reluctantly, tempting her to take a spell rowing. After a few minutes the rhythmic stroke of the oars and the grunting huff of breath settled into a background music. Water purled away from the sharp bows in an endless chuckle.

  Someone opened a basket and started handing out cakes made of pressed cracked and toasted grain, honey and nuts and bits of dried fruit, and cram sandwiches—flat leathery tortillas wrapped around ham and cheese. The Boisean at her feet was stirring and kicking, so they turned him upright, propped him half-sitting against the inside curve of the bow and bent to look him in the face with theirs side-by-side and filling his field of view.

  “You promise to be sensible?” Ritva asked. “No tussling on the boat?”

  “So we don’t have to stab you or hack off your head,” Mary added.

  “Or cut your throat or drown you,” Ritva finished cheerfully.

  “Which would be sort of silly after all the trouble we took to get you here alive,” Mary pointed out. “Which we really didn’t have to do.”

  “It was just our inherent Folk-of-the-West niceness.”

  “So give us your parole until we reach our dock.”

  “It isn’t far,” Ritva clarified.

  The prisoner’s eyes flicked from one of them to the other, as blue as their own; his brown hair was short on the top and tight at the sides. They’d shed their war-cloaks and steel caps, and the identical blond fighting-braids lay on their shoulders as they beamed at him. Ian leaned around Ritva to add with a slightly alarming smile:

  “And they really mean it, you know.”

  The prisoner nodded, and the twins reached to untie his hands and remove the gag.

  “Let’s hear your parole,” Mary said.

  “I won’t try to escape or attack you until I’m taken off this boat,” the man said, his voice rough from the near-throttling. “Or it sinks. On my honor as an officer.”

  “That’ll do,” Mary said. “But we’ll get really cranky if you don’t keep it.”

  “Even a bit mean and bitchy,” Ritva said, pointing a warning finger at his face.

  “And they really mean that,” Ian said. “Have a sandwich.”

  Mary grinned to herself as he glanced from one to the other, startled by the unison of their movements. It had been even more effective in the old days.

  Uh-oh, she thought when he frowned. He’s recognizing us.

  The problem with heroic deeds like the Sword Quest that brought undying fame was that it made you…

  Sort of famous. Which can be awkward when people just recognize you out of the blue. Sometimes they think they know you just because they’ve heard the stories, too.

  His face changed: “Christ. You’re Ritva and Mary Havel, aren’t you? The woo—” He visibly reconsidered something that was probably on the order of woot-woot. “The Dunydain? That King Artos guy’s sisters?”

  “Yup. Though that’s Mary Vogeler now that I’m married and respectable. Sort of.”

  “And we’re the High King’s half sisters; same father, different mothers,” Ritva said.

  “Very different,” Mary clarified.

  The Boisean was a young man but older than they were, with a lean weathered face. Ian’s hand snaked in with a canteen, and as he drank cautiously—chloroform didn’t make you feel all that good when it wore off, and being throttled didn’t either—the shape of his cheekbones tugged at Mary’s memory…

  “You wouldn’t be named Woburn, would you?” she said. “Of the Camas Prairie Woburns? Head of the family is a Rancher and Sh
eriff there, a big landholder near Grangeville?”

  The man nodded. “That would be my father. I’m Centurion Dave Woburn.”

  She shot a covert glance at her sister; it wouldn’t do for her to mention the visit Ritva and the Rangers had paid to Sheriff Woburn’s ranch on their way to the rescue mission in Boise. The elder Woburn was willing to give actual help to Martin Thurston’s opponents; as far as they knew his oldest son was just dissatisfied. Ritva gave her an annoyed do-you-think-I’m-stupid glare in return.

  “I met your brother!” Mary said instead to the prisoner.

  That had been far east of here, in Barony Tucannon, in one of the opening skirmishes of the campaign. The enemy alliance of Boise and the CUT occupied that area now…except for the walled cities and castles, which they didn’t have the time or resources to take, and the guerillas who were making their life less than joyful every hour of the night and most of the days. She’d heard someone describe it as the flies conquering the flypaper.

  “My brother Jack?” the man said, suddenly eager. “But he was taken prisoner—”

  “A couple of months ago. My husband and I were in that fight,” she said happily. “We had lunch with your brother afterwards at the Baron of Tucannon’s manor house at Grimmond-on-the-Wold. Lovely place, I hope you guys didn’t burn it. He’s OK, and the left arm healed well, I heard. In fact, he’s working for Fred now. You know, Frederick Thurston. The one of your ruler’s sons who didn’t kill his father.”

  Dave Woburn gave an alarmed glance to either side by pure involuntary reflex, which said something about the United States of Boise under Martin Thurston. Mary raised a brow as he became conscious of what he’d done, and his jaw tightened as he saw it and took the implication.

  “Fred’s also the one who didn’t sell his soul to demons,” Ritva added helpfully. “Well, pretty much demons. We’ve met them, too and it’s close enough.”