Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change

by S. M. Stirling

  “They were not,” Ignatius snapped, his eyes questing. “They took it for their own uses.”

  “I’ll take a look, then,” Eric said, swinging down from the saddle.

  Ignatius sighed and said: “Is that wise, Lord Eric?”

  Eric shrugged. “It’s quick…don’t worry, I’m not going alone.”

  His guards formed around him; Ignatius did too, and put his shield on his arm and drew his sword. Even then, Mike smiled a little to himself. If his uncle had a fault as a war-leader, it was the same headlong courage that made him so formidable and feared. He exchanged a grin with Will Larsson. He and Eric’s eldest son stayed mounted and ready behind.

  Asking permission just gives someone the chance to say no, he reflected. One of the unofficial lessons.

  The Bearkillers—and one Knight-Brother of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict—formed up and walked up the stairs into the church. The tall windows would provide enough light, even at this time of day. There was a pause, and then…

  Eric Larsson, called Steel-Fist, stumbled out. The battle-hardened guard detail followed, backing frantically, their shields raised but the swords slack in their hands. Ignatius followed them; he had sheathed his blade and slung his long shield over his back, and he had his rosary and crucifix in his hands instead.

  Appalled, several of the Bearkiller A-Listers started towards Eric. He waved them back. They could hear the clank of armor as the big man staggered around a snag of ruin and fell to his knees, retching noisily. Men and women were looking at each other. The war chief of the Bearkillers was notoriously a hard man; not cruel, but sometimes short on mercy, and the product of a generation’s fights.

  “What was in there?” Will Larsson asked, and Mike nodded.

  That is the question.

  “What was in there that did that to Uncle Eric?” he added thoughtfully.

  Eric Larsson returned, accepted a canteen from one of his followers, rinsed and spat and then drank.

  “No,” he barked when heads turned towards the entrance to the church. “Stay out. Christ have mercy…right after the Change, Mike and I—”

  Even then, Mike Havel had the usual moment’s twinge at his father’s name. There were drawbacks to being the son of a legend, especially to one who’d died too early for you to remember him.

  “—smoked out a nest of Eaters. That was almost as…but they were just crazy. This—”

  The rayed sun had been painted across the doors there, and the cross that had stood above lay smashed some distance from it.

  “No indeed, my sons,” Ignatius said slowly in agreement, walking over to push the doors closed. “There are things no man should have to see.”

  “Yes,” Eric agreed. Very softly: “They’re too hard to forget. Twenty-five years won’t do it. Don’t anyone ask me. Ever. And burn this. Get some combat engineers in here and burn it now.”

  He was silent as they rode back to the Bearkiller encampment. Ignatius excused himself with a simple: I must pray. Eric brooded until the camp cooks handed around their plates of salt pork stewed with beans and rolled wheat tortillas. Then he pushed his food around the plate for a moment before he looked up at his son and nephew.

  “There’s one good thing about this,” he said quietly; the camp-fire underlit his face, showing how grooves had begun to seam it.

  “Yes, sir?” Mike asked.

  “It’s a good thing to know why you’re fighting,” Eric said. “And that it isn’t just because the other guy’s as big a son of a bitch as you are.”

  COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK

  BARONY OF TUCANNON

  (FORMERLY SOUTHEASTERN WASHINGTON STATE)

  PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  DECEMBER 12TH, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

  “I am sorry, my lord Tucannon,” Rudi Mackenzie said gently.

  Castle Tucannon stood on its hilltop, a spur of land reaching out from the foothills of the Blue Mountains. There were scorch-marks on the dark walls, but looking at the slope—and the way the spur had been severed off into an island by a deep cut across the neck that connected it to the higher lands—Rudi wondered that anyone had been foolish enough to try. Only someone truly desperate, or utterly mad or both would have sent men against those frowning battlements. It was a fairly big castle, a doubled mirror-keep, and high enough that the catapults on its crenellated walls would have commanded every inch of the approach. A ponderosa-pine signal spire on the tallest tower had kept it connected to the heliograph net centered on Walla Walla all through the siege.

  The manor of Grimmond-on-the-Wold below had suffered much more. Few roofs were left and the barns and winery and gristmill, sawmill and stables at the end of the long village street were wrecked. The Baron’s house in particular had been utterly demolished, its thick pise walls pushed in to make an irregular mound that the winter rains were turning into mud; the High King was surprised to see his sister Mary wiping at her one eye as she came out of the empty gates.

  “The gardens were so beautiful,” she said. “When Ingolf and I were here in the tail-end of summer. Like something out of the Histories, gardens in Lothlorien or Dol Amroth.”

  The Baron’s mother, Lady Roehis de Grimmond—who’d been born Jenny Fassbinder, more than sixty years before—smiled distantly and patted her shoulder. She was in a plain kirtle and wimple of brown and gray, her face gentle and thin.

  “I started them, dear,” she said. “My lord Amauri and I, two years after the Change. I can do it again. The damage isn’t really as bad as it looks; remember, this is winter. Most of the roots and bulbs will have survived. The house was timber and soil and we have lots of both.”

  “It can wait, Your Majesty,” Baron Maugis said, looking at the thick stumps of the oaks and maples that had lined the town square here in front of his dwelling. “We can live in the castle for a few years. My father did before he built the manor. He planted these trees for me; I can plant more, for my son’s sake. The war’s not over, for that matter, even if we’ve kicked them out of this district.”

  He was a young man in his twenties, of medium height and gaunt now, but strong-looking, with a pleasantly ugly face, bowl-cut reddish hair and prominent ears. He and the fighting captains behind him were worn as the patched leather and wool of their gear, but they’d held out in the mountains for months, and their raids had made their occupier’s lives less than pleasant and the supply situation a nightmare. More folk crowded behind, retainers and ordinary craftsfolk and peasants down from the mountain refuges where they’d lived in tents and caves and old forest-ranger cabins in the heights that lay blue and jagged eastward. This was a fine spot for a town, though none had lain here before the Change; good water, shelter from the worst winter winds, and plowland and pasture and timber all available close at hand.

  Not to mention a very bonny view, of the mountains…the dawn sun will be a fine sight there…and of the plains away to the east. I think this man’s father chose wisely, and his son seems of no less wit and of great heart besides. I’m usually easier with lords in the Protectorate who are Changelings. Though from what Mary said, this one’s father came here to get away from Matti’s sire, the which is a strong argument in his favor.

  A wagon train was also curled up the main street; the drovers and the escort and the local folk were unloading crated hardtack, barrels of salt meat and dried fruit and sacks of beans and flour, bales of blankets and tools and sausages of tent-canvas. Some of the locals were wrapping themselves in blankets, or their children; it was a dry cold day, with the wind carrying particles of grit that made you blink if you faced into it.

  “What really worries me is that we didn’t get the winter crop planted this fall,” the Baron said, nodding to the rolling fields to the north and east. “We stripped out most of our gear before we took to the hills, but nothing can roll the seasons back, here or at my vassals’ manors.”

  You c
ould see the layout of the Five Great Fields where the strips of the peasant holdings had lain, and the demesne fields of the manor-holder’s home farm; there was a biggish vineyard on a south-facing slope that looked to have survived, and most of the trees in the orchards hadn’t been harmed. The sweet clover and alfalfa planted in the Great Fields as rotation and fodder crops were there yet, though heavily grazed by the occupiers; but the potatoes had been dug and stolen, and the fields that should have been green with the young winter wheat were under nothing but a scurf of weeds and incipient bush. That was enough to worry anyone.

  Mathilda pulled up and dismounted, passing her reins to a squire with a word of thanks as her guardian men-at-arms and mounted crossbowmen backed out of the crush. She was in civilian riding garb, a divided skirt and jacket of russet brown, with a plumed Montero cap pulled over her brown braids.

  “Lord Maugis, you’ll have seed corn and working stock enough by spring,” she said, as the commons touched a knee to the ground and the nobleman bowed and kissed her extended hand in fealty. “As Lady Protector—”

  That’s right, Rudi thought with a blink of surprise. Matti’s twenty-six this coming year, and inherits. Not that Sandra will be going to a nunnery or dower-house; we need her too much, and sure, she’d die of boredom without administration and intrigues and secrets.

  “—I’m going to order a capital levy on every intact manor and Chartered town in the Protectorate to help rebuild the County Palatine. The Association takes care of its own.”

  There was a murmur of delight from the commons crowding behind the knights and their retainers; they had crossbows and shields and spears in their hands, swords at their belts, but their eyes lit at the thought of more plow-oxen and earth curling away from the harrows and seed-drills. A cheer went up from them all, for Mathilda and the prospect of sacks of grain and beans resting secure in their barns come next August.

  “And you have the High Kingdom behind you,” Rudi said when it died down.

  He laid a hand on the Baron’s shoulder; some things should be said and done publicly.

  “I give you my thanks as well, and all Montival’s,” he said firmly. “The enemy troops you and your fellow lords of the Palatinate tied down may well have made the difference between victory and defeat at the battle in the Horse Heaven Hills. It was a close-run thing, there at the end, and there were all too many of them as it was. I say to you and your vassals and all your followers well-done, and very well-done. You sacrificed much for the Kingdom, and the King will not forget it.”

  Maugis flushed out to his prominent ears and went to his knees; Rudi took the man’s hands between his. Behind them there was a pleased buzz at the honor done to all through their lord.

  “I am your man, of life and limb and all earthly worship, my King,” he said. “God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost and the Holy Virgin witness it!”

  That was an abbreviated version of the usual ceremony of homage, but nobody could doubt the sincerity. The Count of the Eastermark was in Rudi’s train at the moment, and he was the Baron’s immediate feudal superior, but he smiled and nodded as Rudi replied, also shortening it:

  “I accept your homage, Maugis de Grimmond; your enemies shall be mine and none shall do you wrong save at their peril; my sword shall be yours to call upon; I will hold your honor dear as my own and give you fair justice and good lordship.”

  Maugis was smiling as he rose and stepped back, though there was a very odd expression on his mother’s face, happiness mixed with some strange detachment or incredulity. Rudi looked at her and shrugged mentally; he would never really or wholly understand the generation that had been adults before the Change, even the ones he’d grown up with. The lord of Tucannon was smiling even more broadly as he brought his lady forward by the hand. She was in a riding habit much like Mathilda’s, a slim young woman with tilted eyes of a very pale blue and raven-black hair falling in a silk torrent down her back from beneath a light headdress, her face lovely but tired with an exhaustion that had little to do with sleep. An infant and a toddler were in the care of a nurse behind her, but she led a six-year-old boy by the hand herself.

  “My lady wife, Helissent de Grimmond, your Majesties,” Maugis said proudly. “And the war-captain who held Castle Tucannon for me…and your Majesties…all through the siege, while we harried the enemy.”

  She sank down gracefully, hands spreading her habit slightly as she knelt and bowed her head; the boy did a creditable imitation of his father’s reverence.

  “Rise, my lady Helissent,” Rudi said, and Mathilda gave the other woman the kiss on both cheeks that was also a mark of favor. “I am in your debt as well, then.”

  The boy beamed. “I fired a catapult! Lots of times. I turned the wheel and pulled the lanyard when Captain Grifflet said to and everything! Squished ’em like bugs!” he said with an innocently murderous glee. Then hastily: “Your Majesty.”

  “Did you indeed, young sir?” Rudi said, grinning.

  “He did,” Helissent said. “As often as we’d let him! My son Aleaume, Your Majesty.”

  The young heir of Tucannon had his mother’s eyes. That prompted something as the High King rested his hand on the moonstone pommel of the Sword…

  “Lady Helissent, you’d be from Skagit, originally? Your brother Adhémar de Sego holds as a vassal of the Barons of Skagit?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty, he holds Sego Manor by knight-service to the Delbys,” she said, obviously pleased. “As my father did while he lived.”

  “Sir Adhémar gained much honor at the Horse Heaven battle with the menie of House Delby, Lady Helissent. He was wounded capturing an enemy banner, but he’s healing well and expected to be on his feet in a few weeks. And your younger brother Sir Raymbaud—”

  “Raymbaud’s been knighted?” she said, startled into a broad grin.

  “By the High Queen’s own hand, for his valor in the charge against the Prophet’s guardsmen. They’re both at Walla Walla now with the main body. They should be able to visit you soon, perhaps over Christmas.”

  “My thanks, your Majesties!” she said. “You honor us.”

  “Not beyond your worth,” Mathilda said.

  Young Aleaume decided that there had been enough conversation about people he didn’t know.

  “Is that the Sword of the Lady, Your Majesty?” he asked. “The one from Heaven, like Excalibur in the stories?”

  “Indeed it is, young lord,” Rudi said, making a slight motion of his hand to halt the shushing his mother hadn’t quite started. “Here.”

  He went down on one knee himself and pulled the sheathed Sword free of the frow on his belt, resting it across his palms at about the boy’s height. The young face went serious as the boy tentatively extended a hand and rested it on the glowing stone for a moment. Then he snatched it back, but his face lit up as he met Rudi’s gray-green-blue gaze.

  “Did a lady give it to you in a lake? Or did you pull it from a stone?” The boy frowned. “Arthur did both, didn’t he?”

  Rudi nodded. “Accounts differ. Now, this was given to me by three holy ladies, and that on a forbidden island in a distant sea guarded by pirates and awful magic. And it has lain in a sheath of stone beside a lake here in our land of Montival, and worked wonders.”

  Aleaume nodded in satisfaction. “And you won the great battle with it!”

  “I did indeed,” Rudi said gravely. “With this and the aid of many brave men like your father.”

  Cocking an eye at Mathilda and then his sister Mary: “And many a brave woman as well.”

  “When I’m big I shall fight for you too, Your Majesty!” Aleaume said. “I’ll be your man, and slay dozens and dozens…and, and hundreds of cruel and wicked enemies for you!”

  “You may indeed fight by my side someday,” Rudi answered him, putting a hand on the boy’s head for an instant before he rose and reseated the Sword. “Or by the side of my heir, who’s expected along in spring, and we’ll be well served if you prove as brave a knight an
d as good a lord as your father.”

  The Baron of Tucannon and his lady offered congratulations. Rudi grinned at Mathilda, the wonder still on him.

  “I thank you, my lord, my lady, though sincere as it is, you’re not half so happy as we! Now—”

  There was a clatter of hooves, a challenge and response, and Ingolf swung down from his horse and came towards them with a look of intense predatory satisfaction on his battered face, slapping mud off his breeches with the gloves in his left hand.

  “Good news?” Rudi asked, as Mary came over to lay an arm around the big man’s waist.

  “Damned good! The Boise commander in Castle Campscapell just turned on the Prophet’s men there. Did it real neat and tidy in the middle of the night, too. A few of them are still holding out in the central keep, but they’re bottled up tight, and Hauken, that’s his name, he’s declared for Fred and opened the main gates and our men are inside.”

  The news ran through the crowd and there was a rolling cheer; Aleaume was jumping up and down, certain that the foe’s doom was upon them.

  The which is not so far from at least a local truth, Rudi thought, smiling with a slight show of teeth and tapping his right fist into his left palm in three slow strokes. His mind went on, weighing factors:

  Campscapell is a great keep and in a notable bottleneck. Now the cork is in our hands and we can keep it closed or go east through there just as we choose. Losing the castle was a bad blow, and regaining it a wind at our back. I must…no, let Fred reward this Hauken. He’ll know how to do it properly.

  Rudi raised a hand for silence after the cheers started to fade.

  “Well, my friends, I’d been planning a feast of celebration here—for which we brought slaughter stock, cattle and sheep, doubly sweet for being doubly stolen as the saying goes—”

  Another cheer rose on a different note, less carnivore glee and more straightforward hungry happiness; the local folk hadn’t actually starved, but they’d gone short and nobody either noble or commons had been eating their fill of roasted fresh meat lately.

  “—and some most promising barrels. We’ll feast this night and drink to your homes reclaimed and to this news of a victory won without blood—”