The Sword of the Lady

by S. M. Stirling

  Impatient as he was, he wished he did have more time; a month here . . .

  I could do more for them in a month. Or a year. Or ten; there′s no end to it. I′ll do what I can in the days I have, that′s all.

  He was wearing only his kilt, to keep respect—the Southsiders might be primitive, but they were certainly hardy men—and also to show his scars, for the same reason. Jake sunna Jake handed him the string of hand-twisted sinew, and Rudi whipped the lower end to the bottom notch of the longbow. Then he slipped the other loop upward, and strung the stave Mackenzie-style—bottom tip over his left boot, right thigh over the center. He pressed down with his leg and pushed up with his right hand at the same instant, smooth and steady. Muscle stood out in long swells under the pale skin of his chest and arms like a slow wave of the sea, and the loop at the end of the cord slid into the upper nock.

  ″There,″ he said, running a finger down the back to make sure no splinters stood proud in sign of a fault that would snap the wood under strain.

  I wish I could glue a strip of rawhide here . . . but if wishes were horses we′d have enough to move those wagons . . . it will do, so.

  ″It needs to be well greased against the wet, but it will serve you well enough against anything but a knight in full harness on a barded destrier, and it might do for him as well if you were lucky.″

  ″Cool!″ Jake said.

  Odd, Rudi thought. I′ve heard folk in Corvallis use the word that way, or Bearkillers now and then.

  They′d ceremoniously given Jake all the bows, and he′d handed them out in turn to his favored followers—there had been cursing and jostling in plenty too. They′d all seen what the Mackenzie weapons could do, in the fight with the Knifers and in hunting since and they were panting-eager to have something like it themselves.

  He handed Jake three arrows he′d also made; the little tribe′s notion of fletching was even more sad than their attempts at bowmaking. The heads were ground and crudely hammered from old spoons, but they would do; it had been straight shafts and the delicate, skilled work of fastening the flight feathers that they hadn′t mastered. Jake slipped on his bracer and looked around and spotted a dead chestnut fifty yards away, across the thinner grass growing in drifted soil over the old roadway′s pavement. He drew with an odd motion, pushing the bow away with his left arm as much as drawing with the right.

  Snap.

  The shaft stood in the hard wood, buzzing like a malignant bee; the sound was distinct even through the quiet white noise of the rainfall.

  Ah, well, the bow′s good enough for journeyman work, I′m thinking. There will be more hand shock than I like, a bit of vibration, and quite a surge.

  The Southsiders had half a dozen of the pre-Change bows, fiberglass wonders that they couldn′t even dream of replacing, and they handed them around often enough that they were mostly reasonable instinctive shots by the time they were full grown. But the weapons had been made in all truth as what Edain had called them in scorn: children′s toys. Their draws were light, just enough to be useful for hunting rabbits or birds but nearly worthless for war or bigger game. Good pre-Change arrows were so scarce among them that no man carried more than one or two, with even the enduring plastic feathers growing more and more tattered.

  Most of the time they relied on javelins for anything beyond arm′s reach. With those they were quite skilled.

  ″Can you teach us how to make bows like these?″ Jake asked. ″And arrers?″

  Arrows, Rudi thought. I′m getting the hang of the way they shift the sounds about, so I am.

  ″Southsiders need it, Rudi-man. Need it bad.″

  ″That we can, my friend. It′s a help to your people, it will be.″

  Though I can′t know how much of a help.

  Jake grinned at him, showing gaps in his teeth. Suddenly for an instant Rudi was elsewhere, a dizziness that left him no time to even stagger. Jake screamed as he pulled against the bonds that held him to an ancient streetlamp. Wood around his feet smoldered, and ragged figures danced triumph—

  Rudi blinked again and shuddered; the Southsider chief was still smiling, so it hadn′t been long. Cold sweat lay dank along his sides and under his chin. He′d been raised by Juniper Mackenzie, a High Priestess who walked with the Otherworld, and he′d been touched by it himself more often than most. More, the Old Religion made fewer distinctions between magic and the works of the gods and the stuff of common day than other faiths.

  And still visions like that weren′t easy to bear, and they′d been getting uncomfortably common on this journey. Not to mention the Powers who′d walked the pathways of his dreams.

  I think that was a sight of what would happen if I didn′t help these folk, he thought. The which makes me grateful to Whoever guided my steps here. But it gives my skin the crawls too, so. If a man knew every possible twist and turn his actions might bring to the world, would he dare to act at all? Yet it′s also a comfort; I′m not merely using these people for my own needs, urgent as those are.

  Edain sang again as he went back to work on his own piece:

  ″The elfling shrieked and howled and cried

  And naught she did would make it bide!

  She formed a plan to prove

  This elfling child was not her love—″

  Several of the Southsider babies were howling and crying now and then, which wasn′t surprising. If Rudi had had to endure this damp chill with nothing but a rough rabbit-skin diaper stuffed with moss or leaves he′d have cried, even in his mother′s arms. When some of the tribe′s women began casting thoughtful glances at their infants, Rudi grew a little worried himself.

  Surely they couldn′t take it literally? The fey don′t really do that. Not often, at least.

  He wasn′t altogether sure about how the Southsiders would take it, though. If you had an empty place in your soul where such things should be, something would fill it.

  We need tales to make sense of the world.

  ″Tell′s another story, Rudi!″ one of the children said, as he took up the next billet of the hickory, spat on a smooth hand-sized rock and began to hone hatchet and knife before he began his work.

  The hunters and warriors and women who were gathered around to watch him fashion the longbow murmured agreement. Jake unstrung his new weapon and scooped a little congealed fat out of a dish and began to rub the wood, squatting and looking eager for the tale himself. The Mackenzie had never met folk so poor in story and song and legends, and it moved him to a pity that prickled at his eyes. Without that tapestry of color and words and ritual, what was life but eating and mating, sleeping and moving your bowels? All of them good and necessary things, but not enough; and they themselves needed that framework too, to give them meaning.

  It surprised him as well as saddened him. Granted their pamaws had been young, any random group of Mackenzie children today would have known more and handed it down.

  Though the Clan′s youngsters have had two generations of loremasters by now, he reminded himself.

  He remembered long evenings sitting at his mother′s feet with the others in the great hall at Dun Juniper, listening to her storyteller′s voice weaving music and magic as strong as any she made in the nemed, the Sacred Wood. Her hands shaping images and the light of the fires on the god-faces carved amid the rampant vines on the log walls; flame-crowned Brigid and Lugh Longspear of the clever hands, elk-horned Cernnunos, the triple Morrigan and the Dagda with his club, red-bearded Thor and Sif of the golden locks . . .

  And the most of our clansfolk′s parents and grandparents were probably no better off than these before they became Mackenzies. Before the Change.

  First he demonstrated how to measure the proper taper from grip to tip of the bow by the joints of your forefinger, and the length of the stave by multiples of your drawing reach, and how to calculate the proper fistmele between the belly and the string. A little to his surprise he was better at teaching the bowyer′s craft than Edain; the younger clansman knew
so much he was impatient with their ignorance.

  ″Well, then,″ Rudi said, when he′d reached the working stage. ″It′s a tale you want, is it now?″

  ″Yah!″

  ″You betcha!″

  ″No shit, dude!″

  Ah, he thought, sorting through scores he knew. Yes, this will speak to them. And there′s nothing like telling one of the old stories to put away your own worry and care and fear!

  ″Then you work on this one as I showed you, friend Tuk, and I will tell the tale—and correct your work if your hands go wrong. Now, the story! This happened very long ago, you understand, and far away, in a land across the oceans, among my ancestors and yours.″

  Most of mine, and a lot of yours.

  ″There was a man named Niall who was born to be King . . . to be the big boss . . . who later came to be called Niall of the Nine Hostages. And once in his youth he was traveling alone through the woods at night as he journeyed back to the hunting lands of his people.″

  They all shuddered and leaned forward; to be benighted alone was a thing of fear to them.

  ″He came across a hut, and in the hut was a withered and ancient crone . . . ummmm . . . an ugly old bitch . . . of an ugliness which hurt the eyes to see—but unknown to him she was not just the poor old woman he thought her; she was the Sovereignty of Midhe, the eldest of the Threefold Morrigú, and herself the patron Goddess of that earth.″

  ″I thought you said there was this Lady and her stud who made everything?″ someone asked.

  ″That there is,″ Rudi said.

  His voice was casually confident; he was as sure of that as he was of his own breath and heartbeat.

  ″One of her, or a lot of her?″

  ″Both! Her forms are more numerous than the stars! How not, when the stars themselves are but the dust scattered by Her feet as She and the God danced all that is into being?″

  Many of them nodded. Nobody had ever told them to prefer either/or to yes/and, nor that it was impossible for something to be one and many at the same time. Which meant it didn′t drive them wild.

  The way it would say a scholar from Corvallis. Or Father Ignatius.

  ″Each form She takes, or the Lord, is true; yet each a part of a greater whole. As we put it—″

  He paused, then filled his lungs and sang, a hymn his mother had made, the ″Farewell to the Sun.″ As might be expected of his parentage and rearing, at song he was better than fair even by the reckoning of Dun Juniper, where all the Clan′s best bards were trained and many outlanders as well. Here Edain was the journeyman to his master craftsman, and his deep baritone filled the cavelike space effortlessly:

  ″We know the Sun was Her lover

  As They danced the worlds awake;

  And She lay with His brilliance

  For all Their children′s sake.

  Where Her fingers touched the sky

  Silver starfire sprang from nothing!

  And She held Her children fast in Her dreams.

  ″There was a glory in that forest

  As the moonlight glittered down;

  And stars shone in the wildwood

  When the dew fell to the ground—

  Every branch and every blossom;

  Every root and every leaf

  Drank the tears of the Goddess in the gloaming!

  ″There came steel, there came cities

  Wonders terrible and strange,

  But the light from the first-wood

  Flickered down until the Change.

  And every field, every farmhouse,

  Every quiet village street

  Knew the tears of the Goddess in the gloaming!

  ″Now the Sun comes to kiss Her

  And She rises from Her bed

  They are young—and old—and ageless

  Joy that paints the mountains red.

  We shall dance in Their twilight

  As the forests fall to sleep,

  And She whispers in our ears the word remember!″

  When he looked back, the Southsiders were rapt; there were tears in some eyes, and some of those were scarred warriors. Back in the Willamette country there was a saying that Mackenzies were a clan, divided into septs, duns, choirs, choruses and soloists, and he was used to praise for his singing from that exacting audience. The Southsiders were more than moved; transported, even.

  And sure, you can strike home in a man′s soul—or a woman′s—more easily by telling them stories that speak to their heart than by making arguments to convince their minds. Listening to stories comes naturally to us. Argument you have to study, like sword-work or archery, however much it seems a part of you once you have it learned. Striking home in their souls is what I need to do the now.

  He went on, his voice falling into the storyteller′s cadence:

  ″Now Niall was a great warrior . . . fighter . . . bitchin′ tough stud . . . but he had been fostered far from home because of the hatred of his father′s second wife, and he was almost a stranger to the land of his birth. Yet the King must be as a husband to the Lady of the land, for he stands in the God′s place; as She is the Earth, so also Lugh of the Sun—so that folk and mine call Him—is the rain that brings the soil to life in springtime, and the warmth that ripens the harvest. This crone invited Niall to share her fire and her food, which were poor enough, but he being a man well trained in seemly ways did not refuse the hospitality even when she asked him to lie down on the same pallet as she—″

  He told most of it and sang parts—the Southsiders had a few simple catches, as much chanted as sung to nothing more complex than the beat of palms on thighs or sticks on rocks, but they′d never heard trained singers before and they hung on every note, often weeping openly or looking half tranced.

  Well, mother made us a people, and her a bard from her youth. And little enough else they had to do on the long evenings of the Black Months but make music, in the early days. Though we aren′t as . . . constant . . . about it as the Rangers, to be sure.

  By the time the light faded Rudi and Edain had roughed out three more bows, and guided the best of the Southsider makers through the beginnings of enough more to give all the adult warriors one suited to their strength and their length of arm. He noticed one young fellow with a slight limp sitting by himself, hugging his knees. His eyes stared at nothing and lips moved a little as he repeated the tale of how Niall of the Nine Hostages met the Goddess of Midhe and won Her blessing on his kingship, not by his hero′s strength, but by his kindness and pity to one he thought the least and worst of his people.

  Driving it into his memory; none of them have their letters here.

  A woman was crooning to her own baby Edain′s song about the mother and how she tricked the child of the faerie folk into revealing his imposture.

  Well, and we′ve given them that wealth, too, the which nobody can take, Rudi thought. For what is living, day by day, but living out the story you′re in?

  Few stayed up much past dark here, when a burning stick was the best light they had—and that used sparingly, lest it draw enemies. Edain yawned and stretched when he′d emptied his plate the second time, smiling.

  ″It′s cheerful you are,″ Rudi said.

  ″Sure, and I′m glad to do some work,″ Edain replied. ″Traveling and adventuring are well enough—the things we′ve seen and done, Chief!—and fighting, well, you fight when you have to, not when you wish. Hunting′s work and play at once. But I miss the dun and the fields.″

  His eyes grew distant. ″Wheat harvest will be over, but there′s the soft fruit and the apples and the rest of the orchards, and haying, and soon it′ll be time to raise the spuds and get the turnips into the clenches, and put all right for the fall plowing, and there′s always the stock. Or going over to Sutterdown and helping with the grapes there. It makes me fair itch a bit to miss it all, not to mention the Sabbats and Esbats and the Wheel of the Year. I′d be glad even to muck out the dairy, and that on a cold wet day in the Black Months, so.″ />
  ″Now, boyo, that′s going far and far!″ Rudi laughed.

  He was a warrior by trade, though of course he′d done his share of fieldwork and put his hand to this and that, in the smithy most often. Shoveling compacted manure out onto a cart was one particular chore he didn′t remember fondly; it made getting in the sheaves or even pig butchering pleasant by comparison. He spoke lightly:

  ″Dun Fairfax has a fine dairy barn, but I miss sitting in your mother′s kitchen more, watching her taking an apple pie out of the oven, and the outrageous fine smell of it, and the taste of it too with a piece of her cheese and a big glass of cold fresh milk.″

  When he said it he wished the words back; Edain smiled at the half jest, but Rudi could tell he was wishing himself back there, at table with his parents and brother and sisters and the rest of the Aylward household.

  ″But there′s some here glad enough of your presence,″ he said teasingly, to break the moment.

  It was true, too. Two Southsider girls were standing behind the barrel-chested bowman, one of them winding a lock of her black hair about her finger and both smiling and giggling when he turned to look. They were considerably cleaner than most of their tribe. Edain had whittled them combs and toothbrushes and shown them the use of the Sweet William that bloomed by the creek a little way from here; you could get a good lather out of the roots, which was why it was also known as soapwort.

  And the washing of them was a piece of instruction he probably enjoyed more than trying to turn their menfolk into bowyers, Rudi thought.

  Between constant toil and weather and one child after another—so many died, and they didn′t seem to have any idea how to prevent conception anyway—the Southsider women aged even faster than their men, but these were a few years younger than Edain.