“That’s remarkably authentic garb,” a voice said. “Late fourteenth century, isn’t it?”
Mathilda turned, a smile still on her face; the crowd was so wildly varied, like figures seen in a dream. The jugglers that had held her attention just now were quite good and in familiar motley garb like something from a court masque in Portland’s City Palace or Todenangst. But there were cars nearby, beyond the bright pavilions and the merchant’s booths of the fairground, and not the rusted wrecks that had been part of the background of her life.
Moving cars, purring along unworn roads of dark fresh asphalt as if there were great cats beneath their hoods. And the air smelled different, with an odd odor like burnt turpentine. That mixed with the more familiar scents of frying food and warm people, but there was none of the horse and ox that had always been part of her life.
“Ah…it’s just my clothes, demoiselle,” she answered the stranger politely, with a slight courtesy gesture like the beginning of a curtsy and an inclination of the head. “God give you good day.”
The young woman was about her own age, dressed in a simple dagg-sleeved green kirtle and white wimple bound with a silver chain. Mathilda had found herself…here…in a court cotte-hardie; a day dress she recognized as one that rested in the cupboards in her chambers at home in Castle Todenangst. She even remembered having it taken in a little when she got back from the Quest…
“This stitching is lovely,” the other woman said. “Is that handwork?”
“Yes,” Mathilda said; then she looked up agape as something huge and roaring went by overhead.
An airplane! I’m seeing an airplane! she thought.
“Marvelous!” she whispered aloud in awe, crossing herself. “Jesu!”
Her chance-met companion laughed aloud, a warm chuckle like a hand stroking velvet. She had an ice-cream cone in one hand, and finished it with a catlike delicacy before she said:
“You are staying in character!”
It was the laugh that told her. The laugh and the warm brown eyes, deep with thought, and the height that was exactly the right six inches shorter than Mathilda’s full-grown five-foot-eight. The strangeness was seeing those eyes look at her like a stranger.
“You’re…Sandra Whittle, aren’t you?” she said.
“Actually, my Society name is Eleanor,” she said. “But yes…have we met?”
“I’ve heard of you,” Mathilda said. “I’m…Mathilda.”
The sharp gaze focused on her belt, which was white leather worked with silver flowers.
“Is that dagger live steel?” she said. “Those are the best costume jewels I’ve ever seen, too.”
Mathilda blinked in puzzlement; it was certainly good steel, but it was one of her everyday ones, the type she’d worn since she was twelve and which marked her as an Associate. The blade was ten inches of watermarked Damascus steel, severely plain except for the rippling patterns in the metal, but the hilt was gold and silver wire braided together, and the pommel held a ruby the size of her thumbnail. She drew it from the tooled leather of the sheath and flipped it to reverse it and present it with the point towards herself and the flat of the blade along her forearm, as was courteous.
Sandra’s eyes widened as she took it and weighed the solidity of it in her small hand.
“That is live steel, and not peacebonded!” she said. “Naughty! Though I won’t tell the marshals.”
“Be careful, it’s—” Mathilda began, surprised that her mother was acting as if she’d scarcely ever held a dagger before and knew no better than to put her thumb to it like a kitchen knife.
“—sharp,” she finished, taking it back as Sandra sucked at the slim little cut on the ball of her thumb.
“Sorry,” Mathilda added.
The deep eyes were already looking over her shoulder, though. “Oh, now that’s nice,” she said cheerfully.
Mathilda realized what she’d see even as she turned her head. A man in armor was walking down the laneway towards them. Simple old-fashioned armor, a chain-mail hauberk to the knees, split up the front and rear in horseman’s fashion, a sword belt with a rather broad-bladed sword, an acorn-shaped helmet with a flared nose-guard concealing most of his face and a teardrop-shaped shield four feet long slung point-down over his back; it was black, with the Lidless Eye blazoned on it. And he moved easily under the weight; a lot of the men about were as out of condition as merchants or the worst sort of cleric, even if they went armed, but he looked like a fighting-man to be wary of. Broad-shouldered and long-legged and with a thick wrist in the hand casually on the bevel pommel of the broadsword and an arrogant assurance in the way he strode along. The crowd parted for him, sometimes with a resentful murmur.
“That’s…Norman,” Mathilda said.
“It certainly is, and authentic—notice the cross-gartering and the loose trews? Not my favorite period; I’m more a thirteenth, fourteenth century sort of girl. Nothing like a good pair of legs in tight hose, I say.”
“No, I mean it’s Norman Arminger.”
A gurgling chuckle. “That’s his actual name? He must have a sense of humor, then, and not be a complete Period Nazi. Well, look at the shield!”
“He’s a, uh, going to be a professor of history. Eleventh-century specialist.”
“Definitely interesting!”
She left Mathilda’s side without a backward glance, sinking down in a perfectly executed curtsy before the knight of the Lidless Eye. He halted, sweeping off his helmet by the nasal and bowing; his hair was bowl-cut, but close behind the ears in a fashion Mathilda remembered vaguely from her youth.
Oh, God!
She turned and…
The forest was about him, the one he knew.
No, he thought. Not quite.
It was towards the end of the day, and summer, but late—late August, in these cool uplands, when the aspens and vine-maple started to turn and there was frost in the small hours of the night. The trees were thicker, he thought; perhaps taller. Birds were thick too on the water of the lake, and when a flock took fright at a jumping trout and cataracted skyward it was like a turning skein of smoke. Four horses grazed by the water, and as he stepped around a tree he could see a campfire burned there—an expert’s small hot fire, little fume and much heat. He could smell the savory scent of roasting duck, and a man rose as he approached.
“Bonjour,” the man said, then went on in thickly accented English. “You come share our fire, eh?”
He was shorter than Rudi by a foot, but barrel-chested and strong, with a full dark beard flowing down his chest and long hair of the same almost-black, his skin weathered and tanned oak-brown; there were deep wrinkles beside his hazel-green eyes, and he was missing the little finger of his left hand. A rifle was held casually in his right, the type with an external flint-tipped hammer at the side, and a steel-headed tomahawk and long knife in a beaded sheath thrust through his belt. He wore leather trousers and moccasins strapped about the ankle, a red wool shirt and a knit cap with a tassel. A briar pipe between his yellow teeth gave off a foul-smelling smoke.
“That I will, friend. My name is Rudi Mackenzie.”
“Étienne Bélanger, me. This my woman, Pe Ku Nen Mu.”
She was a tribeswoman, younger than the man and pretty, wearing a deerhide dress and about five months along, he judged. She handed her man a bottle and sat down easily on her hams across the low fire, watching the newcomer with a candid stare of wonder.
“You got friends close?” the man asked casually as he pulled the cork with his teeth and offered the bottle.
He didn’t let the rifle go far from his hand, despite his friendly manner. Rudi wouldn’t have expected otherwise, for a man with horses and gear and a good-looking woman alone in lands beyond settled law.
“I do; I’ve not the gear to travel else. Sláinte mhaith,” Rudi added courteously as he raised the square bottle to his lips and took a swig, then fought not to cough as he handed it back. “To your good health!”
The which you will not keep if you drink that every day! he thought as he squatted also.
“Salud!” the coureur de bois said and drank deep, his Adam’s-apple fluttering blissfully under his beard. The word meant more or less the same thing. “I hear that one before, plenty Company men are…Gael, you say, no?”
He indicated Rudi’s kilt.
“You’re a hunter, then?” Rudi said.
“Trapper, me!” the man said, jerking a thumb at a bundle of pelts among the gear stacked nearby. He sighed. “But maybe not no more. The beaver, she gets thin unless you go far, far east. Not like the old days. I miss them, me, miss the sound their tails make when they whack the water, but a man he must make a living…”
The woman handed them each a bark plate, heaped with duck and flour bannock and with a peck of berries in a twisted cup of leaves. Rudi signed his food and put a morsel aside for the spirits of place, then ate. He didn’t think the man noticed, but the woman did, and gave him a sharp look. She had a small gold crucifix around her neck, which might mean anything or not much, depending.
“Indeed, the beaver are few the now,” Rudi said, eating the plain good food with relish. “And…”
If that history book is to be believed…
“…they’ve taken to wearing hats of silk instead, in the lands across the great water.”
“Oui, I hear that. Mebbe this my last trip; not a young man no more, me, to travel and trap and fight. I go to the prairie de les Française, west of here in the valley, be habitant and grow wheat like my father does back around Trois-Rivières. Better for les enfants, eh?”
“Indeed it will be,” Rudi said softly. “I’d say it will be a good place for them, and that they’d do well indeed.”
He nodded to the woman and rose. “My thanks for the drink and the food and your company, my friends,” he said. “But I’d better be getting along.”
Portland, Mathilda thought.
But that was only from the river before her and a turn that showed her the wooded heights westward that she knew as the New Forest. There was no city wall, no ruined towers of the ancient world, no great bridges across the Willamette. The street around her was deep in mud, though she stood on a wooden sidewalk out of the worst of it. The city-smell was heavier than in the Crown City of her own day, ranker, but with the horse-dung and woodsmoke she had grown up with. The river swarmed with boats from canoes to great three-masted full-rigged ships, and also with curious things like rafts with metal chimneys and mill-wheels to either side or at the stern that she recognized as steamboats after a moment.
Fascinated, she walked closer. Nearer to the water the crowds were even thicker and rougher: fewer of the men wore the dark garb with stovepipe hats she’d noticed earlier, and there were fewer women as well. That wasn’t a complete surprise; something like that would have been true of her Portland. She got more odd glances here too. Her cotte-hardie wasn’t impossibly different from what the women wore here, but it wasn’t identical either…and the rich fabrics and jewels attracted attention in this part of the town.
The edge of the water itself was a chaos of noise and loads going overhead on nets, of bowsprits overhanging the roadway and piles of boxes and bales, of sweating men in floppy trousers held up by suspenders over collarless shirts shifting loads heavier than they were. A stink of sweat and tobacco and now and then cheap whiskey from a staggering drunkard came through a slight cold drizzle and the more wholesome smells of cut timber, flour and barreled produce; it was evidently well into the Black Months here. She edged back and back to avoid the traffic and then dodged a wagon piled with bundles of bar iron stock beneath a tarpaulin and drawn by eight straining platter-hooved horses.
Suddenly a voice from one of the narrow alleys between tall warehouses painted with the names of their owners or gaudy advertisements for goods and patent medicines:
“Aidez-moi, pour l’amour de le bon dieu!”
Then a woman’s scream. Mathilda turned and plunged in without an instant’s hesitation, her left hand pulling up her skirts and her right drawing her dagger. The alley was dark, but she could see three men surrounding a slighter figure, and cloth ripped.
“Unhand her!” she snapped; it was the Crown Princess’ voice, that discounted the very possibility of disobedience. “Unhand that maiden, you stinking curs!”
Bristly faces turned on her, topped by shapeless caps or in one case an odd domed hat with a narrow brim over rat-tails of greasy red hair. They hesitated for a long instant. Then:
“Get out of it, ye hoor—watch, she’s got a knife, Jim!”
She cut; you didn’t stab, not fighting with a knife against someone with shoulders the breadth of the one reaching for her. He shrieked himself as the steel laid open his forearm and turned and ran, clutching it with one hand, bright blood red in the gray light and heavy boots squelching in the mud. The other two spread out, and one flicked his hand. There was something in it, a straight-razor held with the blade in his palm. He started to move, swift as a snake, then halted as he took in the way Mathilda held her dagger and stood poised. His eyes went wide in surprise, then narrowed as rat-thin lips lifted to show yellow teeth.
“Is that the way of it, then, fancy miss? I’ll have that sticker for payment, and more besides.”
One hand shot out to restrain his larger companion, and when he came forward again it was in a shuffling flat-footed crouch, eyes on her face rather than the blade.
The woman they’d been holding was beside Mathilda, panting and gabbling in French—a slurred quacking nasal dialect nothing like the courtly version Mathilda had a little of—and holding the blouse of a cotton dress closed where it had been torn from her neck. The men edged forward—
And a hand grabbed one by the shoulder, the slim quick one with the razor. It whipped him around right into the path of a fist like an oak maul, and there was a sickening crack sound; he dropped like an empty grain-sack tossed aside at a mill. The bigger man wheeled and grappled with the newcomer and then they were staggering back and forth. There was no science and little art in the way they fought, but plenty of strength and a vicious determination to do harm. Mathilda exchanged a glance with the woman…
Girl, she thought. In her teens.
Short and dark, pretty and olive-skinned and with snapping black eyes, part tribeswoman despite the cotton dress and ruched sunbonnet that contained much of her long black hair. Her full lips firmed and she nodded at Mathilda, then bent to take up a length of sawn timber buried in the mud of the alley and lifted it overhead like the handle of a threshing-flail. They poised together, Mathilda’s knife ready as well, waiting for the right back to come towards them.
It wasn’t necessary; the other attacker was down on his hands and knees an instant later, and the newcomer gave him a boot to the ribs that made bone crack audibly. He rolled away, then dragged himself upright and fled clutching his ribs.
The victor was panting and grinning; he picked up a knit cap and bowed, moving aside to make it clear he wasn’t blocking the exit of the alleyway and glancing back to see if anyone had paid attention. Yellow lights were coming on, gaslights in cast-iron standards, gleaming on the puddles.
“Josiah Whittle, at yur service, ladies,” he said. “And that was more lively and better fun than anything since the Dreadnought sailed from Portsmouth town.”
The accent reminded her of Sam Aylward, a little, or John Hordle, though a bit crisper. He was a young man in bell-bottomed canvas trousers and a shapeless sweater beneath a blue cloth jacket with brass buttons, with a kerchief around his neck held by a ring of carved bone. Stocky-strong in build and about Mathilda’s height—she’d noticed walking down to the river that she was a couple of inches taller relative to the average than she had been where she was raised. A shock of corn-colored hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat and rain, and his face was broad and freckled and gap-toothed.
She sheathed her dagger and extended a hand. “Mrs. Mathilda Mackenzie, sir,” she said.
“E…Elaine Bélanger,” the dark young woman said. “Thenk you very much, sair.”
“You know these longshore rats, ma’am?” the sailor said, looking at her in a puzzled way—evidently the dress didn’t match the hand.
“No,” Mathilda said. “I’m not familiar with this part of the city; I was here to meet my husband, and heard this young lady cry out.”
“Brave of you to come running in!” the man said admiringly, and then noticed the improvised cudgel in the younger woman’s hands. “And of you, miss! I thank’ee, though it warn’t needed.”
“I…” Elaine dropped the wooden batten and gave him a look of admiration. “I am here wit’ my father from the farm…I wander off, not used to cities, me…those men…”
“Perhaps you could escort the young lady to her parents,” Mathilda said. “My husband will be anxious…”
This time Rudi heard the men coming down towards the lake. It was later in the season, and the ground had the cold damp smell of hard rain; the snowline came low on Hood to the south, seen across the rising green carpet of the forest.
There were four of them and twice that many horses. All the animals had game slung across their backs; roughly gralloched black-tail deer and one big brown-black hide that must contain the quarters of a butchered bear. There was only a slight smell of blood and few flies at this season. The horses looked worn-down and so did the men; they also looked tough as rawhide, dressed in a mixture of coarse cloth and leather, both much patched. They all had rifles in the crooks of their left arms, the type with hammers but no flints. They stopped when they saw Rudi. Though they didn’t level the weapons, their eyes did flicker about, and one beanpole with a mop of shaggy fair hair under a tattered felt hat faced about to scan the trail behind them for a moment.
Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change Page 29