The Sword of the Lady

by S. M. Stirling

  Not quite complete savages, he thought. Not like the Eaters we saw in Illinois closer to the dead cities. They should be useful, if they don′t kill and roast us all.

  What wool clothing they had was tattered enough, probably looted, but they had well-tanned leather gear of their own making, and their weapons—hatchets, knives, spears, short recurve bows—were reasonably well fashioned when they weren′t salvage. Nor did they look so starved and rickety . . . though some of them grinned at him with blackened teeth filed to points. After a few minutes they passed out of the encampment, and then came to a circle of the domed huts set about with poles bearing the standards of the tribes gathered here—one had the rayed Sun of the CUT; others included the withered worm-eaten head of a wolf, and several skulls.

  ″Watch here,″ Dalan said to the Sword officer. ″This struggle will not be on the gross physical plane . . . but I may need protection.″

  Struggle? Graber thought.

  His only outward reply was an inclination of the head. Slowly, men came out of the huts; men and a pair of women. Graber scowled at them—they were wearing trousers—but much service among unbelievers had hardened him to the sight of things forbidden. To be honest, the CUT hadn′t yet managed to purge even the homeland of such wickedness. Some of the newcomers looked hostile; one or two bowed to Master Dalan in fellowship. All were oddly dressed, with strings of beads, clusters of feathers, the feet of eagles, gear more arcane, or the tanned heads of animals worn as caps.

  Several produced small drums and began to beat them with bone hammers, the sound falling flat and distanced among the snow: dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum . . .

  There were a dozen of them in all. They began to dance, a swaying shuffling circle, in and out and around, through the screen of drifting flakes. He blinked as Dalan joined them, turning in place in the center with his arms stretched skyward.

  Shamans, the Sword commander realized. They′re making magic.

  He shuddered; that was unclean, by the CUT′s teaching. Master Dalan must have dispensation from the Prophet himself—of course, what the adepts among the Seekers did wasn′t magic, strictly speaking; it was powers conferred by the Secret Masters. The dance grew wilder, feet stamping and leaping. Then slower, barely moving at all. At last all squatted and knelt, the circle facing inward towards Dalan. Graber realized with a start that his heartbeat was running in time with the drums, and with a wrenching effort of will that made the sweat run down his flanks and his belly twist with nausea he forced himself to break that rhythm.

  Hail Serapis Bey! he told himself, chanting the mantra inwardly as he′d been taught in the House, until calm gradually returned. Hail Serapis Bey! The Fourth Ray is with me. Hail Serapis Bey!

  When he could focus on the world again he almost started and drew his shete; there were men around him, wrapped in bulky fur coats against the growing cold and the endless snow. A little older than the other Bekwa warriors, and better dressed, all with weapons in their hands.

  War chiefs, he thought, noting the array of scars—from the look of them, fighting infection wasn′t among their skills. Waiting for . . . whatever Dalan is doing.

  Some of the chiefs had torches with them, soaked with pine resin. The flames shed a ruddy tinge over the motionless circle, hissing as snowflakes fell into them. The drumbeat stilled at last. One of the drummers seemed to yawn . . . until the gape grew impossibly wide. A whining sound came from the gaping mouth, and an instant later blood sprayed out; and ran from nose and ears and eyes as well, like black tears. Another of the shamans jerked forward and then slumped with a limpness that Graber knew well—it was the sort that a man showed when he′d had his spine cut, or an arrow through the eye into the brain. Dalan held out his arms, as if embracing the shamans.

  ″I . . . see . . . you,″ he said.

  The shamans blinked. It took an instant before Graber realized that they′d done it in unison, and even then he could not be sure. When they spoke it was a rustling whisper, in a synchronicity as complete as a Temple choir:

  ″I . . . see . . . you.″

  They rose. When they had sat it had been one by one; now they came to their feet like drilled soldiers. They turned to face the war chiefs, and blinked once more . . . at the same instant, every pair of eyes obscured and then open. And something looked out from behind those eyes, those faces blank and fixed as if they were formed from dough.

  ″Guerr!″ they cried in unison.

  Dalan threw his hands skyward in triumph.

  ″War!″ he shouted.

  ″Guerr di′ Dyu!″

  ″God says war!″

  Dalan staggered towards him, face blazing with exultation. ″They will fight, Major,″ he said.

  ″Good. Though even so . . . it′s a big country.″

  ″More than them, Major. More things than the tribesmen will make war.″

  ″Now, this is something of a sport!″ Rudi Mackenzie said. ″And a very good way to travel in a hurry, so.″

  He let his skis plow to a stop with the points angled in, and stabbed his poles into the snow. He′d skied before he came east, but only downhill; mostly at Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood, a Portlander Crown preserve kept for hunting and sport under forest law. That was a fine swooping wonder he′d seldom tired of when the Regent′s Court paid a visit during his annual stays in the north. This type of skiing—cross-country, they called it, which was more sensible than most names—was almost as enjoyable, and new to him. The snow didn′t lie long enough in the Willamette lowlands to make it practical and the mountains weren′t flat enough.

  This gear was different, too; the skis were longer and more narrow, with an arch under the foot, and a fish-scale pattern pointing backward in that section to give you a grip when you pushed off. And the foot wasn′t fastened hard to it either, just a loop for the toe and a band.

  Ingolf Vogeler came up the low slope with a skating motion and slid to a halt beside him under the shelter of a stretch of white pine. He pushed the goggles up on his face and blinked into the wind that was—again—starting to flick snow at them. It came harder and harder out of the northeast, out of the darkness growing there as the short day died. The cold with it was bitter, the sort that would turn the tip of your nose numb before you noticed it. They′d had a few cases of mild frostbite already, and only stringent checks and careful training had kept the party from worse.

  Both men wore loose parkas with quilted linings and hoods trimmed in wolf fur; beneath them were what the Richlanders called long johns against the skin, scratchy and itchy but blessedly warm, double-thickness pants, knit socks and flannel shirts, sweaters and balaclavas that covered all of their faces but the eyes.

  Sure, and the brigandine and its padding are lost in the swaddling of it all! Rudi thought.

  With all that and the warmth of effort he was merely a little chilly, but the temperature was dropping fast from the hard cold of day to something that frightened him a little. It was four hours past noon, or a little more, and getting dark even without the thickening clouds. The stretching boughs above them swayed back and forth with a whirring, soughing moan.

  ″Well, at least none of our bunch are falling over regular anymore,″ Ingolf said. ″We′re actually starting to make decent time.″

  They both looked down at the line of sleds toiling northward over the riverside roadway. The river there wasn′t exactly small, but the humped white expanse of ice was already halfway out from each shore, leaving only a narrowing strip of dark moving water in the middle. Slushy lumps of snow-ice floated in it.

  Four of the sleds were pulled by a double hitch of horses each, and even with the burden of walking through snow it was less draught-power than pulling a similar weight on summer roads would require. A smaller sleigh hissed ahead with eight pairs of dogs drawing it, something Rudi hadn′t seen before. Pierre Walks Quiet managed that, breaking trail with a skill that could have left the rest behind any time he chose. He rode the rear of the sled half the time, then ran tirel
essly beside it for a space. His voice was a barking yelp as he commanded the dogs, and they obeyed it like extensions of his will.

  The party had slimmed down to a manageable thirty-odd, now; the Readstown forester, the ten questers, and the rest the pick of the Southside Freedom Fighters. Most of them were between the vehicles, gliding forward with the swooping push their hosts in Ingolf′s birthplace had taught them. As if to give Ingolf the lie, one of them tangled his skis and pitched sideways; it was just barely visible a quarter-mile away, with the snow thickening between them by the minute. Two of his fellows stopped on either side and heaved him upright, dusting off the snow in a process that was half an exasperated drubbing as well.

  ″Surprised they all learned how to handle skis this quickly,″ Ingolf said, unconcerned.

  Rudi shrugged. ″We′re all in hard condition and supple,″ he said; every physical skill you learned made the next one easier. ″And there′s nothing else to do, sunrise to sunset!″

  Though even he had ached a bit the first few days. This way of travel used every muscle you had, and not in quite the same way as anything else.

  ″It′s easy enough to learn passably, though I′d be saying it′s a while before we′ll all do it really well.″

  He could tell that Ingolf grinned under the knit mask; bits of icicle condensed from his breath broke off the pale gray of the wool.

  ″Not as good at it as I once was myself, you betcha,″ he said.

  ″Ah,″ Rudi said with mock consideration. ″And you′re an old man of thirty the now. Suffering from newlywed′s exhaustion, I shouldn′t wonder, too, eh?″

  Ingolf threw a mock punch at Rudi′s head, and the Mackenzie rolled his head aside. He was feeling fairly good himself. They were up to about twice easy walking speed now, making up to forty miles a day and looking to do better; if they could keep that up, they′d reach the eastern ocean fast. There was an edge in the other man′s voice, though.

  ″Something the matter?″ Rudi said.

  Ingolf rubbed at his eyes with the palm of his right glove, squinting into the rising weather.

  ″This isn′t even November yet, not quite, and it′s feeling more like February. Yah hey, we got weather here in wintertime, but this is earlier than I can ever remember it. Not so much the snow; that can happen, in a bad year. It′s the cold. We shouldn′t be getting ice yet, not real river-and-lake ice. That′s earlier than Pierre Walks Quiet can remember, and he was pushing fifty when the Change came. And lived up here in the North Country all his life till then. He was a guide, too. Spent most of his time in the woods, knew every trick the winter could throw.″

  ″Good luck for us, then, traveling so,″ Rudi said. ″Some of the small rivers are already frozen solid.″ He nodded downslope: ″That′ll be solid enough to bear weight in a week. I expected it to take longer, that I did.″

  ″Uff da, so did I! We wanted cold and snow, yah hey, but . . . too much is worse than not enough!″

  Rudi nodded. ″A man can die of thirst, or drown,″ he agreed.

  Then he pulled his goggles down, and they swooped off towards the others; it wasn′t steep enough to glide by gravity alone, but they could build up to something faster than a man could easily run. The rhythm was becoming as natural as walking, after the better part of two weeks; push-with-one-foot, slide with the other, then switch, always remembering the poles—though you could do it without them if you had to. Ingolf still had to hold back a little to let Rudi keep up; his boyhood was returning to him, and with it a skill that wasted no energy at all. The extra speed drove fingers of cold through every possible crevice in Rudi′s armor of cloth and leather and fur, tiny little daggers that only the heat his body generated could hold at bay.

  ″Hungry!″ he said, though they′d eaten well at lunchtime.

  Ingolf laughed, pacing it to his breath. ″Nothing in the whole world like a trek on skis to give a man an appetite! You go fast, but you have to pay for it.″

  The sandy plains they′d crossed lately had been going back to scrub woods, with farms and villages here and there like oases; most had been willing enough to swap a little, with harvest close past. Now it had been days since the last sign of human beings, and they were starting to come into real forest; white and red pine, darker green hemlocks, bare-limbed maple and beech and birch and oak. The ground was still flattish but with occasional low hills, and here and there a granite boulder. One loomed ahead, like a red and pink and speckled egg under a cap of white. They swung left and right around it, and came up alongside the dogsled.

  ″Pete!″ Ingolf shouted. ″Hold up!″

  The old Anishinabe called to his team and rested his mittens on the twin handles of his sled; the dogs laid themselves down, noses tucked under tails, and in seconds their pale fur looked like lumps in the snow. He turned before he pulled down the knit mask that covered most of his face; the wrinkled lips were drawn thin, and his eyes a little sunken. He was nearly seventy now, and though he had the endurance of a fit man a generation younger . . . that still made him the equivalent of middle-aged among a band whose next eldest were not quite thirty.

  ″I don′t like the smell of this merde,″ the Indian said, nodding his head backward into the building wail. ″It′s not right, not this early; snow, yah, but not this cold all the time. I think this one′s going to be worse. Goin′ get cold, too much, you bet. We better look for some place to hole up, and fast.″

  Rudi nodded; when three experienced men all had the same bad feeling, you were well advised to listen. At need the sleds and dome-tents would take them through even a very bad blow, but he′d prefer something stouter to break the force of the wind if it was available.

  ″The twins should be reporting in soon,″ he said. ″Matti! Pass the word that we′ll be camping.″

  His half sisters did come in with the wind behind them, but in the interim the storm built from nasty to a low howl through the pines. Rudi felt an impulse to hunch as he faced into it; instead he just leaned a little. When the two Rangers came in sight, they were only twenty yards away.

  ″Old farmhouse, sheds and barns,″ Ritva said, slapping snow off her ermine-trimmed hood and white face mask and pointing behind herself.

  ″The farmhouse is down,″ Mary continued. ″Looks like it was abandoned before the Change and collapsed a couple of years ago. Lots of nice dry wood.″

  ″One barn is still mostly up,″ Ritva continued. ″We didn′t check inside, but the roof′s on. It′s one of those potato barns. No tracks we could see, but that doesn′t mean much in this. It′s about a mile; up past that low rocky hill, right on an old laneway through some hemlocks.″

  ″Good!″ Rudi said.

  They′d seen many of the potato barns in the sandy district behind them; they were three-quarters sunken in the earth to insulate the root crop for storage over winter. That would make it relatively snug. He thought for a moment, then:

  ″Matti, get the train moving. Fred, Virginia, rearguard. Ignatius, you′re point for the train with Jake. Mary, Ritva, Ingolf, Edain with me; we′ll break trail.″

  ″Me too,″ Pierre Walks Quiet said.

  ″All right. Let′s be going. Faster we′re settled in, the faster we can cook supper!″

  The wind was hard enough to make skiing into it a chore now, even with pine and birch closing in around them; he was glad of the dogsled to hang on to sometimes, and they all gave a little collective grunt of relief as they came into the shelter of the hill. The laneway was probably a farm track by origin, invisible dirt taking off from equally invisible broken pavement in the growing white mist. Half the snow was fresh, slanting down from the low clouds, and half whipped off the ground by the snarling wind, hiding his own legs when he looked down. When they came through the hemlocks the impact was enough to snatch his breath away; even Garbh hesitated a little before bounding forward at Edain′s side, rising and falling in fresh spurts of snow.

  It got a little better when they reached the tumbled ruins; someone had
planted windbreaks long ago, sugar maples mostly, and beeches. They were bare now, but they were big, towering eighty feet or better, and there were a lot of them with trunks nearly as thick as a man. The farmhouse had been substantial, and old—its remains didn′t have the matchstick look that structures from just before the Change displayed when they went down.

  Now it was a pile of board and beam slumped into its cellar, and so were most of the outbuildings; a silo had broken off and left jagged teeth standing upright like a shattered tooth. Nearby the rusted hulk of some machine of the ancient world—the type called tractor—stood forlorn, half buried. The potato barn was a low long rectangle, roofed in curved sheet metal and with ventilators rising from the top like pipes crowned with pointed conical hats.

  ″Seems perfect,″ he said—or rather, shouted. ″Let′s take a look.″

  They did; the boards of the building′s sides were mostly intact, and the glass in a couple of windows unsmashed. The entrance was double doors, sagging open, down a ramp that must have been for the passage of wagons. They approached, then kicked out of their skis and set those upright in the snow. It was nearly knee-deep on the humans when they put their feet down.

  Garbh stopped just outside the entranceway, and even over the wind′s keening he could hear the ratcheting menace of her snarl. Edain and he shouted as one:

  ″Watch out!″

  Warrior′s reflex overrode surprise; he could feel it happening, like a surge of fire through the cold sluggishness of his body. A great dark shape came out of the doors like something shot from a catapult; he could hear the dogsled team going wild in their traces. Garbh leapt for a throat and was batted aside like a rag doll, turning head-over-heels with a whining yelp of surprise. The bear had to rear on its hind legs to do that, though, roaring in gape-jawed rage. That gave Edain his single chance. The longbow spat an arrow, and the roar turned to a coughing gurgle for a moment as the cloth yard shaft transfixed the thick neck.