The Sword of the Lady c-3

by S. M. Stirling

  The altar over the hearth on the northern wall held her household?s images of the Lord and Lady as Brigid with her flame and sheaf, and Lugh with his spear and sun disk; Nigel had made those himself when he was courting her, back during the Protector?s War. When he was fresh from England he?d surprised her by how handy he was at all a countryman?s tasks and trades, not just the deadly skills he?d mastered in the SAS and the Blues and Royals and after the Change.

  Now she looked into the blue eyes in the weathered face that loved hers line for line, and smiled back. ?I?ll grant that it?s a mercy to learn my son has been wounded after he?s recovered. This Chenrezi place seems a good one to heal, and to learn.?

  Her mouth quirked in a smile as she looked at that letter. It was signed Rimpoche Tsewang Dorje, and she murmured some of it aloud: ?I have spoken often with your son in these months of winter, Juniper Lady, and found in him much strength of mind and body, some wisdom and astonishingly little vanity. We have become friends, he and

  I.?

  ?Now that is perceptive,? Sir Nigel murmured.?I wouldn?t have thought Rudi an easy man to get to know, below the surface.?

  Juniper nodded at him.?Especially perceptive for one of our age, my love. For the Changelings are different from us, do you see.? ?I see it every day, rather!?

  She shook her head.?Different in a certain way, Nigel. They… see the world through different eyes. They think differently from us; I love them, but it took me long and long to understand them. To them, what they are here?-she touched her forehead-?is less likely to conflict with what they are here.? She touched the back of her skull and went on:?Rudi is a hero. The terrible strength of him and the only weakness of it is that he never doubts it. Regrets it, a little, sometimes; but he is the role the Gods have thrust upon him.?

  He nodded slowly.?The Changelings are all a little less prone to self-examination than we were,? he acknowledged.?Well, than most of us were. They accept things. I?m more inclined to that than… oh, Sam Aylward.? ?Ah, and it wasn?t only for your looks I married you! Yes, for long and long before the Change people spent more and more of their time examining themselves.? ? Pride and Prejudice,? he said.?Odd that Rudi never liked Austen.? ?Yes, he said the people in them are well painted but had far too much time on their hands!? She spread her own hands in a gesture of agreement and resignation.?But he loves the old stories. As do I, but in a different way. He is those men. And this I think Abbot Dorje grasps, if not in exactly those words.?

  She returned to the letter:?Therefore I say that he shall be the better for the trials he has met and shall meet and I would spare him none of them; for unless a man be tested to the utmost, none may know what hidden weakness lies in him; nor may he know his own strength. On his testing and his strength much will turn. Devils seek to rule men; the Gods give us opportunities to rule ourselves, which is infinitely more difficult, and to assist each other upward through the cycles, which is harder still. I think your son may be equal to this task, when his testing is complete.? ?Cryptic,? Nigel said. ?No, my love. Some things have to be said in such fashion. I like the man?s style, sure. And he?s shrewd. We owe him a debt, for the rescue and the care of our folk and the help they gave.? ?He wasn?t entirely disinterested, old girl,? Nigel said dryly. ?His people are having their problems with the Prophet and the CUT as well.?

  Their daughters came in-Maude, calm and quiet at fourteen, with hair halfway between brown and dark auburn, and yellow-locked Fiorbhinn, ten and carrying the miniature but quite functional harp that seldom left her; they?d eaten the midday meal with their schoolmates. Even Maude?s preternatural gravity dissolved at the sight of Rudi?s letter, and Fiorbhinn squealed openly. They read it over her shoulder, agog. ?Rudi will find the Sword of the Lady and put a stop to the black wickedness of those Cutter folk,? Fiorbhinn said decisively. ?He is the Lady?s Sword,? Maude pointed out.?It was Herself who said so, at his Wiccaning!?

  Juniper?s fingers moved unconsciously as if on strings, while she wove the girl?s words into a song she?d been making. How much of the letter to put into it? The earlier ones she?d made of Rudi?s journey had already traveled from here to the Protectorate and back, sometimes with changes that surprised her. Then she?d weave them anew…

  Fiorbhinn?s turquoise gaze met hers, and the girl smiled and nodded, knowing what she was about. Maude was solid and good and clever, but fey little True-Sweet was the one who?d inherited the music, running like a tang of wildwood magic in the blood.

  Nigel knew as well.?Have you considered what you?re doing, Juniper?? he said quietly.

  The girls huddled together over the pages she?d allowed them-there were a few things in the letter she didn?t want anyone else seeing just yet, and a few others not for a child?s eyes. They whispered excitedly to each other, reading out the choice bits, gasping when their elder half brother was in peril, Fiorbhinn jumping from foot to foot with excitement at each escape or wonder. ?I?m making him a hero, poor boy!? she said, trying for lightness and failing.

  Nigel shook his head.?You?re putting his name on everyone?s lips from woods-runner cabins south of Ashland to the Okanogan baronies, but that isn?t the same thing-he was born to be a hero, I?m afraid, and famous already. What you?re doing, my love, is making him everyone?s hope in a time of fear-which is to say, you?re setting out to sing him onto a throne, if he lives. It?s a cruel thing, for a musician to sit and shape a man into a King, like a reed cut and hollowed out to make a flute.?

  His gaze turned inward for a moment, and then he quoted from a poet they both loved: ?And yet half a beast is the great God Pan

  To laugh as he sits by the river;

  Making a legend out of a man.

  The true Gods weep for the loss and the pain

  For the reed that will never grow again

  As a reed, with the reeds, by the river.?

  Juniper sighed and closed her eyes for a second.?I know,? she said softly.?And it?s a bitter thing to do to a child you love.? ?If it?s any consolation, my darling, Rudi would do the job very well indeed.?

  Unwilling, she laughed.?No consolation at all… well, not much. But there?s no choice in the matter, none at all. I?m a musician, and before that a mother… but at seventh and last, I am Her priestess, though that road lead through the hard and stony places.?

  Nigel picked up a letter that bore Edain Aylward?s laborious scrawl on its envelope of coarse handmade paper.?I?ll send this along to Sam; he?s out observing the maneuvers. He?ll be pleased at how young Edain?s done.? ?Proud as punch,? Juniper said, grateful for the distraction.?As proud as I am of Rudi, and with near as much reason.? ?Proud as punch, but in a very understated way.? ?He?s English, poor man.?

  When she was alone in the upper room, Juniper read Mathilda?s letter and smiled, as much at the things not said as the words themselves. She murmured those aloud to herself: ?Rudi and I keep thinking how nice it would be if we could just go off together and start a farm, or run an inn, or wrangle caravans. Sometimes I look into his eyes in the evening, watching him watching the fire and thinking, and he?ll look up at me and smile and it?s like taking a long soak in hot rosewater after a hard day. Does that make any sense? And we?re far from home, and lonely, but I really didn?t feel alone until he was so sick, and we thought he might die. It?s not just that we?re friends. All the others here are good friends now, even the ones like Fred we?ve met along the way. It?s as if Rudi and I have only now gotten to really know each other-which is funny, since we?ve been anamchara since we were kids, more than half our lives.?

  Juniper chuckled to herself:?Since we were kids! Says the withered crone of twenty-three!?

  Then she continued reading:?Maybe it?s that we?re so far away from home, and duties, and rank-so that it?s just us now.?

  She sat in thought on the bench before her big loom where the brightest lantern hung, turning the paper between her fingers and thinking. Thinking long enough that the flame died down, and she needed to stand and adjust the wick in a smell of scorched linen and oil.

  She had loved
Sandra Arminger?s child as if she were her own-perhaps not more than that strange weaver of secrets and hidden plans did, but more warmly, and she believed she?d had some hand in the shaping of a young woman they could both be proud of.

  Foster daughter, you were never just a pawn in the game of thrones. How I would delight to see my grandchild in your arms! Friendship, love… it?s odd how they can tip the one into the other. And Love is a tricksy God, wearing more faces than the stars or the leaves of autumn or the snowflakes in winter, terrible and beautiful, sweet or deadly. Even your evil tuilli of a father truly loved you, I think; the one wholly good thing he did in all his monstrous, wicked life. What one of Their gifts brings us more joy, or more suffering, than love? Love between you and my son there has always been, since first you came here captive, proud little spitfire that you were! So brave and so lonely, and Rudi was your only friend. But not passion of that sort, not until now… though thrown together in desperate peril as you?ve been…

  She stood and went to face the northern wall, where her Book of Shadows stood on its lectern, and her private altar with the blue-mantled figure of the Ever-Changing One crowned with the Triple Moon, and the Horned God dancing in ecstasy amid skyclad worshippers with the panpipes to his lips. She unpinned her plaid and draped it over her hair like a hood; then she made certain signs and murmured invocations and held up her arms with head bowed and palms to the sky. ?You powerful God, You Goddess gentle and strong! You have demanded much of my son and he has never refused You, Lady and Lord. A warrior he is in Your service, and a strong man to ward Your world and folk and law; but he?s still the child I bore beneath my heart.?

  A questioning, like a pressure on her soul. She drew a breath and went on: ?Give him this, at least, on the road You have chosen, the one he has chosen to walk willingly with open eyes, consenting to his fate. Let him know the sweet before the bitter. Let him know the arms of a lover who loves him heart-deep, with mind and soul and body. Let him know the gladdest and deepest Mystery; let him see the child of his love born and raised up before Your altar for the naming. So mote it be.?

  The words were quiet, but they dropped into a silence that echoed; she felt as if a hand had brushed her eyes, and a faint scented warmth elusive as the memory of a dream.

  TheSwordoftheLady

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE WILD LANDS (FORMERLY ILLINOIS) NEAR EAST DUBUQUE SEPTEMBER 12,

  CHANGE YEAR 24/2022 AD

  Sunlight blinked off metal far ahead as the road wound downward. His warrior?s eye recognized that rippling sparkle: polished mail, perhaps, or lance heads, or helmets. Someone was coming who didn?t much care whether anyone spotted him, which meant it was not any native dweller in these lands. Hiding was ground into their souls by now, hiding and skulking and the grisly game of stalk and ambush that had killed their parents young.

  By what the oldsters say, soldiers all fought like that in the days before the Change, Rudi Mackenzie thought. Not just bandits and savages, scouts and Rangers. No wonder, when they all had weapons that could kill at a thousand paces like a catapult, and shoot so fast, too! Anyone who could see you could kill you.

  It wasn?t like that now. Men who fought with discipline, shoulder to armored shoulder, could plow through those who scattered. Many scorned to conceal themselves at all, thinking it the heart of a fighting man?s pride to stand and meet the battle-rush, or to lock shields with their oath-brothers and stride unhesitating towards a line of bright spears in the hands of angry strangers. The Clan were less prickly, but in anything like a pitched battle even Mackenzie longbowmen had to pack pretty tightly together to brew an arrow storm dense enough to stop a charge. ?Whoa!? he said aloud, shifting his balance back, and then reminded himself to pull firmly on the reins; he wasn?t on Epona now.

  Over his shoulder he called to the woman sitting on the wagon?s board: ?Brake!?

  The slug of a horse he was riding was both stupid and malicious-either that, or it missed its former Knifer master so much it was grieving-mad.

  Which I doubt, he thought with exasperation, while worrying whether the other vehicles would notice in time.

  The brake lever locked padded drums against the axles; it was that more than his efforts that made the improvised team stop. He used the slack of the long rein to give the horse a sharp pop on the nose as it responded to the halt with its usual attempt to turn its head and bite him on the knee. It took the rebuke as a signal to try and buck, bolt and kick sideways at its teammate in the traces beside it, and it took a few more moments to convince it that was a bad idea. The fact that it would break its legs and die if the eight beasts hauling the first wagon were to be thrown into a struggling heap didn?t seem to matter to it-probably it was too dim-witted even to fear for its legs, which

  … ?Puts it about on a level with a sheep,? he said with disgust. ?Except that sheep are usually better natured.?

  And to be sure, he had to make certain Epona wasn?t in view while he rode with the team here. She didn?t like it when he rode another horse, even her own get. She definitely wouldn?t like him riding this crowbait. Horses could be as difficult as people, sometimes. And the thought of trying to put her in harness made him shudder. She might or might not have the HorseGoddess for which he?d named her as her dam, but she certainly acted as if she did. In her pride not least.

  He grinned, tired but reasonably contented. Horses and their crotchets he?d have to worry about the rest of his life, he supposed, but this part of the journey was about over and with any luck at all he could get back to the real quest. The road stretched ahead; he could see the screen of Southsider scouts appearing and disappearing ahead as they fell back towards him.

  To his left was about a mile of floodplain, densely wooded but mostly with new growth, here and there a pre-Change tree towering with the height that abundant water and the rich silty soil would endow. Others were dead and gaunt and bleached bone white, killed out when their roots were smothered by the spreading water of renascent swamp. Parts of it were full marsh now; he could smell it, the sweetish-rank scents of black muck and vegetable decay, and see the glints of water where the old levees along the Mississippi had broken. It had probably been cropland before the Change, and very good land at that.

  The reeds were brown with the late season, and a few of the velvet sausage shapes of the cattails were beginning to shed white fluff. The leaves of the maples hadn?t started to turn, but their green had a faint, almost subliminal hint of yellow to them, and all the trees had a bit of tatter, like a shirt worn until the cuff and tails started to unravel. A string of geese took off as he watched, gusting upward like a spray of black dots before they formed into a V and headed southward. The long slanting rays of afternoon made the great river painful to look at, light breaking and blinking off its rippled surface; despite that the Southsiders trudging along on foot were pointing and peering and exclaiming in delighted wonder, with parents putting their infants up on their shoulders to see. They were nomads, but like most such they?d traveled on a fixed seasonal round in a narrow compass, one that didn?t include the Mississippi.

  Off to his right was hilly land, the bluffs that edged the floodplain. The rumpled surface had a pelt of old forest, with here and there brick snags through tangled vines and saplings marking where buildings had stood, and brush growing over stands of thick short bluish grass interrupted by sandy spots.

  The underbrush had been cleared back about half a bowshot on either side of the road, and the rust-rotted hulks of automobiles and trucks were missing. That meant that they were within the area regularly patrolled by Iowan troops from their beachhead in East Dubuque. Edain came trotting up from farther south, with Garbh at the heel of his horse. He was riding the quarterhorse he?d picked up in the Valley of the Sun, in what had once been Wyoming, a decent and civilized beast who didn?t even object when the great dog leapt up to sit behind her master. ?Those bearings on the third wagon?s rear axle aren?t going to last much longer, no matter how much lard we bless?em with, Chief,? he
said.?Then we?ll be worse off than with an ordinary iron collar and no fancy salvage. But I?m thinking we could-?

  His square face had the bullock-stubborn look of a man who was pacing himself by the task, and giving it everything he had. ?Boyo, they have to keep going for another four miles, or an hour and a bit, so. After that it?s Bossman Heasleroad?s problem, and none of ours.?

  Edain blinked and shook his head like a man coming out of deep sleep. Then he grinned at the Mackenzie chieftain, and Rudi grinned back. ?Sure, and it seemed like we?d be traveling forever, didn?t it?? he said, and leaned over to clap the younger man on the shoulder. ?That it did. And not a nice pleasant pilgrimage for Beltane, either. Fighting, which I do not like, or running, the which I like even less.? ?Is fearr rith maith na drochsheasamh.? Rudi laughed.?A good run is better than a bad stand.?

  Edain nodded, then raised a warning fist as Rudi?s mount turned a considering head towards him: ? Keep your teeth to yourself, y? evil-eyed keffle! Forever and a day, Chief. And the Sword there needing to be gotten, the which weighs on my mind.?

  Rudi showed his teeth in what was not quite a smile.?Do you think it does not for me also? But the quest of the Sword is only a bit about the finding of the Sword. It?s what we do along the way, too.?

  Edain blinked at him.?Learning how to travel three thousand miles, then, would that be it?? ?No, boyo. Learning how to travel three thousand miles and make an ally against the Cutters every few hundred of those miles. Allies ready to fight with us when we return. Remember the Lakota? And Chenrezi? And those guerillas in Deseret??

  The gray eyes widened, and the stocky bowman slapped himself on the forehead.?Now it?s blind I feel! Well, you?re the Chief. High King, perhaps, too.?

  Rudi pointed a finger at his face.?And the High King?s right-hand man had better learn to think of such things. It?s your wits I?ll be needing, Edain Aylward Mackenzie of the Wolf sept, as much as the skill of your eye and hand.?