The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series)

by S. M. Stirling

  Good point, Faramir thought, and both the young men made gestures of agreement.

  Wooden ships inescapably creaked and groaned a lot if they were moving at all, what sailors called working.

  She went on: “Or maybe see the masts, unless the fog was really thick on a moonless night. And how would a ship run the bridge passage if it was totally fogged in or completely dark? The sailors say it’s bad enough in broad daylight.”

  They all looked south for a moment. You could see the bridge from here, of course. The view all around was magnificent, which was the point of a lookout station, and it was a pleasure to see on a nice day like this and exciting in a storm, though they’d all been familiar with it from childhood. Even the bridge was beautiful, which was more than you could say for most of the giant works of the ancients; it would be a pity when it finally collapsed, in a generation or two or three.

  Stath Ingolf had been established when they were about nine and they knew these hills and woods like the kitchens of their homes or the Stath’s dancing ground over on the other side of the valley.

  “Row it in?” Malfind said. “Sweeps from the deck, or a longboat towing?”

  “Even noisier,” Morfind said.

  “You could probably hear or spot a ship from an observation post on the bridge even at night or in bad weather,” Faramir said.

  Then he added: “But.”

  Both the others pursed their lips as they followed his thought. They were young, but they knew the family business from watching their parents run it. They’d been helping out with it as they could all their lives, more so as they grew, the way children everywhere did with whatever their elders’ trade was. Just lately their help had been as ohtar, squire-warriors formally fit for anything but command.

  “Yes, that’s one of those things that would work . . . if only it worked,” Morfind said. “Like, if the Eaters would only not do anything like the things Eaters really do.”

  Most of the Ranger business here had originally been leading the effort to clear out the Eater bands roaming the wilds, the descendants of those who’d survived the collapse of the old world by preying on—eating—other victims. There hadn’t been many, for reasons made clear in the old tale of the Kilkenny cats. And they patrolled to keep more from filtering up from the ruins around the Bay. Some of the ones in the wild had been human enough by then to send back to civilization, just crude backwoods hunters whatever their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents had done to survive. Split up as individuals or small family groups they could fit in among the many places looking for more hands to work and not too picky about backgrounds, and make lives for themselves. Others had still been orc-like and bestial, with only the young children capable of forgetting and so spared.

  The ones who still haunted the city ruins southward and their outskirts were mostly pretty bad. The rest were either very, very bad . . . or even worse than that. They were quite good hunters now, living in territory swarming with game and fish and fowl, and they lived the way they did because they wanted to rather than the necessity that had driven their ancestors. Being killed by them, or even killed and then eaten, was far from being the worst nightmare a Ranger of Ithilien faced. Which was why Rangers generally referred to their kind as yrch: Orcs.

  Besides tending their own properties and ordinary peacekeeping, the rest of the Stath’s work mostly involved salvage in the dead cities, or escorting outside salvagers for a fee and a cut of any unusual finds. Even with their experience and local knowledge that was still deadly dangerous, though also very lucrative and a great service to Montival.

  It would take an army of thousands working for years to sweep the Bay cities clean the way Eugene and Seattle had been in the north, which wasn’t going to happen for a long time given the Crown’s other priorities, but the Rangers did what they could. They’d cleared the roadway across the bridge and some of the main roads of the wrecks of cars and trucks so that escort parties could reach the ruins more easily. Some of the springs had still been useful, and much else went to blacksmiths and glassblowers. Waste offended the Valar.

  But as I said, there’s a big fat but involved . . .

  “We can cross the bridge in daylight,” Morfind said, eating the last fig in two bites and tossing the little dried stem over the wall too. “We can go into the ruins in a strong armed party, though that means fighting. Especially if you’re there for more than a day.”

  The young men nodded solemnly. They’d all three of them served on several escort patrols of that kind, a mark of their promotion to ohtar. That had involved fighting, or skirmishing and night work, and they’d all seen blood and faced blades at least a little. The Eaters didn’t challenge armored warriors marching in ranks during daylight, they’d learned better than that, but those steep tangled overgrown warrens were never safe. And they were riddled with hidden passages made by collapsing buildings and old tunnels and corridors. Despite attempts at mapping, many of them were unknown, or worse still improved by the yrch knocking holes through walls and installing ladders over the years so they could move unobserved.

  After dark the ruins were the stuff of very bad dreams. Drums and obscene shrieking war-cries in the night and knife-work done amidst inky blackness . . .

  “But they’ll push back hard if it looks like we’re trying to run our boundaries farther south, not just escort salvagers on an in-and-out. They know what happened to their kind up here north of the Gate. It would be like standing up in front of a target at the range to stay there on the bridge all the time. You’re right about that, Faramir. It would have to be a fortified post. With at least a dozen in the garrison, or they’d all get eaten some dark foggy night.”

  “Better two dozen,” her brother added, and mixed more of the water-and-wine in their canteens. “And a couple of catapults. Or even better, flamethrowers.”

  Faramir drank. It was good wine, though being mixed three-to-one with water didn’t help with the bouquet. He rubbed his obstinately smooth chin. Malfind had a point.

  “Some of the yrch bands on the peninsula can muster fifty or so fighters, the ones farther south are bigger, and four or five might get together if we left them a really juicy tempting target like that,” Faramir said.

  “You think so?” Malfind said. “They hate each other like poison.”

  “They don’t love us much,” Faramir said with what he thought was elegant understatement.

  “Can’t imagine why,” Malfind said, and laughed.

  “More to the point, they’re afraid of us. And they’re not stupid just because they’re crazy-bad,” Faramir said, staying serious. “They know we’re just the point of a spear aimed at them. The stupid ones all went into one stewpot or another long ago.”

  Though sometimes they ate their prey raw over many days, hung up alive on rope or hook to keep it fresh. Morfind nodded and ran one finger over her lower lip with her eyes rolled up in thought.

  “But twenty or more for an outpost garrison . . . building it would be a one-off and doable, but that many blades tied up in one spot full-time would be a big problem just by itself,” she said.

  There were about three hundred Dúnedain within the bounds of Stath Ingolf’s patrol territory of Ithilien—Moon County in the Common Tongue—but that included all their noncombatants as well, from the hundred-plus children below fighting age to those who just didn’t have the inclination or talent or the physical abilities, and some were only fit to defend the home-places at the last gasp. There were a score or more ohtar from other Ranger communities here at any given time. Dúnedain youngsters often spent a few years going from Stath to Stath, usually from the less to the more active ones like this to get experience in varied environments, not to mention the social benefits. The Dúnedain had an exchange program with the Morrowlander Scout Pack of Yellowstone too, and Faramir had been trying to get into that.

  But even including their visiting kin, there were only sixty or seventy or so warriors at any one time. Tying up every four
th member on the active list sitting in an improvised fort and watching the seagulls for month after month . . . and so far from quick help if they needed it . . .

  “We’d have to get the galor militia to do it,” she said. “It’s not Ranger work. Too passive, and it would leave the rest of our ops too shorthanded.”

  “And the farmers would say it is our job,” Faramir replied. “And not theirs to march far from their homes and stay under arms full-time, even in rotation.”

  The word galor meant literally “grower” and it was Ranger slang for ordinary outsiders. At least among youngsters, who did not use it as a term of endearment, though it wasn’t actually an insult. Not technically, since most people you met were in fact farmers at least part of the time; even Dúnedain, in the sense that they tended groves and gardens and ran livestock. Despite that their parents, Stath Ingolf’s leaders, tended to get shirty if they heard anyone using it, and downright testy if anyone did in front of . . . galor. On the grounds that the farmers knew it wasn’t an endearment, and it made it harder to get everyone reading from the same page. Not many outsiders knew the Noble Tongue, not least because it was Ranger policy to speak the Common Tongue to them, but a few always picked up a bit if there was a Dúnedain Stath around.

  “The Mist Hills people might pitch in,” Malfind said. “Baron Godrick Godulfson has always been a good friend to us.”

  “Yeah, but that wouldn’t be enough either. We really need to get the Crown involved,” his sister replied.

  Malfind nodded, but Faramir snorted.

  “After what happened to the High King?” he said. “I should think the Crown will get involved! Everything’s changed now. We’re not out of sight and out of mind anymore.”

  They packed away the remains of their meal and settled into position again, taking turns with the binoculars, mostly keeping silent. Two hours past noon a bird called from not far away, one among many. Faramir inclined his head. It was a series of five buzzy calls, with the second-to-last high and sharp. Either a small black-gray-white bird was following its mate with nesting material rather late in the season, or . . .

  He held up a hand for everyone’s attention and for silence, and gave the same call in return. It was answered with a repetition. All three of them had picked up their bows, gracefully shaped four-foot recurves of laminated horn and yew and sinew with risers of olive wood, set a shaft through the cutout and nocked it to the string. They watched alertly with their cloak-hoods drawn over their heads and their eyes just over the sides of the post, keeping a three-hundred-sixty-degree lookout. Three more figures came cautiously into view, standing for an instant and throwing back their hoods to be recognized.

  The Stath was still small enough that everyone knew each other by sight, even if their families lived at different ends of Ithilien. These were the Mangjols, Damrod the eldest at twenty-five, then Mablung and their sister Tathardes, who were younger by two-year intervals. Their grandfather had been a retainer of the Larssons somehow back before the Change when all that sort of thing had been different in ways he’d never bothered to study. Their parents had joined the Rangers very early, when they were barely pubescent and the reborn Dúnedain were very new, really just a band of teenagers playing in the woods up north under Hiril Astrid and Hiril Eilir. Albeit even then the games were deadly serious at times. All three had a strong family resemblance, narrow slanted eyes of brownish hazel with flecks of green, olive skin and hair as black as Morfind’s, except that Tathardes’ developed faint reddish highlights if it had been in the sun very long. Everyone relaxed and stood.

  “Mae govannen, ’wanur nîn. Prestad?” Damrod Mangjol asked as he and his siblings walked towards the post.

  “Well-met to you as well, my kinsmen, and no, no trouble. Birds, deer and a bear was around last night from the scat,” Faramir said. “Grizzly, I think; cinnamon-colored hair, at least.”

  “Speaking of scat, no problem with monkeys throwing their crap in your hair, you two?” Mablung said to the twin brother and sister, grinning and taking a couple of ostentatious sniffs.

  Faramir grinned himself and then suppressed it; that had been most of a decade ago, but he remembered his cousins’ discomfiture when he’d tricked them into climbing a certain tree during a children’s game they’d cheated at. That band of scat-slinging macaques no longer lived in the big live-oak near Hîr Ingolf’s hall, but the memory of the day lingered yet in local legend. The beasts were common enough all over the area that everyone knew their feces-slinging habits.

  Malfind and Morfind didn’t think it was nearly as funny as other people did, for some reason; as he recalled, he’d danced after them chanting cheaters and poopy-heads.

  “And some whales out to sea,” Faramir went on diplomatically. “Apart from that, nothing.”

  Tathardes smiled now, though she’d remained tactfully poker-faced at her brother’s joke despite a sparkle in her eyes. He thought it made her look very pretty and extremely kissable when she smiled, except that it also made her look as if she thought he was a child to be teased and chaffed. Which was precisely what she did think. Maybe three years shouldn’t make that much difference, it didn’t seem to be any great matter with people in their thirties, but somehow when you were eighteen . . . just . . . and she was twenty-one . . .

  “You cousins can go back home”—she meant the station at Eryn Muir, where the Mangjols lived full-time—“and sit around moping there,” she said. “Why not, since everyone else is? Except me!”

  When her brothers scowled at her: “Look, the High King, may Lord Mandos receive him with honor in his hall and give him Beren Erchamion’s old chair, was a great man. I loved him as our sworn lord and I would have fought and died for him, we all would. But he fell in battle . . . well, after a victory . . . and well, he was never going to end his life in bed surrounded by grieving great-grandkids! Everyone’s who’s listened to the ‘Song of Bear and Raven’ knows that it was fated he not grow old. Vairë weaves all threads.”

  “And the malice of the Shadow never sleeps,” Faramir agreed. “But look at all that he did with forty-six years!”

  The older Dúnedain woman went on: “So . . . there’s no point in beating ourselves up. Grief, yes: guilt, no.”

  Morfind laughed. “Well, at last someone’s being sensible.”

  “Gellon ned i galar i chent gîn ned i gladhog,” Tathardes said to her, bowing with her hand over her heart and a wink.

  “Ai! How come you don’t love the way my eyes shine when I laugh?” Malfind asked, half-seriously.

  “Because you’re too young,” she replied.

  “She’s my twin! I’m the same age minus fifteen minutes!”

  “That’s in boy-years; they’re different, like with dogs. You’re a spotty kid, she’s just the right age for heedless play amid the spring flowers.”

  “And then harsh waking to the real world ends your happy dream, willow-girl,” Morfind said dryly in the Common Tongue, punning bilingually on the meaning of Tathardes, and everyone chuckled.

  The Mangjols climbed into the outpost and they all exchanged the hand-to-shoulder greeting Rangers used and helped with packing and unpacking respectively. The newcomers had more supplies and some basic cooking equipment with them because they were taking the two-to-ten shift and would be making their evening meal here. They also each had a ring-tailed pheasant hanging from their belts, gutted and headless and drained but not yet plucked of their iridescent blue and green feathers. There was very good hunting on the mountain, if you were alert and walked quietly.

  Some liked to use pheasant wingfeathers for fletching their arrows, though Faramir thought it was showy and preferred goose, or seagull when it was available.

  The center of the outpost’s floor held a deep pit where, with care, a cooking-fire would be invisible after dark, and Faramir noted Damrod’s eyes flick to make sure the stack of dry firewood had been replenished, along with the damp rotten branches needed to turn a blaze into a daytime fire-signal in an
emergency. That was a day-shift duty.

  The newcomers wore the same gear as the three cousins; loose tough pants and shirt-tunics of hard-woven linsey-woolsey twill, with leather patches on knees and elbows, mail-lined elk-hide jerkins cinched by broad equipment belts of the same, soft-sided leather boots that came to just below the knee and were fastened by horn buckles on the outside, and cloaks that had loops sewn to their outer surfaces and loose broad hoods. All had bows and quivers, climbing ropes, round shields and light helms slung over their backs, and tomahawk-hatchets through a loop at the back of their belts; tomahawks were something of a specialty of this southernmost Stath. Two-foot brush-swords hung at their left hips or over their shoulders, straight and thick in the back with a curved, waisted leaf-shape to the blade on the other side.

  Everything was colored in muted, mottled shades, mainly olive and green, steel carefully grayed, copper and bronze fastenings let tarnish. Close-up you could just see the blazon on the jerkins and shields—a tree and seven stars surmounted by a crown—but the whole faded into a blurred gray-green at more than a pace. Malfind picked up his spear in addition as they vaulted easily over the low wall to leave.

  “Novaer, mellyn,” Damrod called after them softly.

  “Good luck to you, too, comrades,” Faramir replied over his shoulder.

  The downward path they took was very steep in parts. As a matter of course they were taking a different route back from the one they’d come on, or that their reliefs had used. The Dúnedain of Stath Ingolf had a network of trackways over the whole of their territory, and memorizing them was part of their education. On the more level parts the packed dirt still had crumbled remains of old asphalt, for there had been a road here once. Now it was much narrower and more direct, and only reinforced here and there with log or rock to keep it from washing out in the rains of winter. Nobody brought wheeled vehicles up here anymore; backs served, or the odd packhorse.