Then there were the tales of King Conan, a favorite of streetcorner story-tellers throughout Montival and for all she knew beyond. There was a detailed history of the Hyborian Age written in the form of an essay, albeit one that had a very odd obsession with the color of people’s hair, and the maps were not dissimilar to those in the Histories, but . . .
Faramir looked up. He didn’t seem angry, but his offhand confidence was all the stronger for it.
“Well, of course the Histories are true, not necessarily every single word, but mostly,” he said. “Granted that a lot of the ancients didn’t accept them as anything but tales, how could the Historian have known so much . . . like the languages . . . if the Valar weren’t inspiring him? It would be Lórien Dreamgiver, of course.”
“He may not have known himself how true they were,” Morfind added. “Visions can be like that, so he bent them a little to the contours of his own mind and age.”
And it became harder to tell what had been fact from what had been mere tale-spinning with every passing year. Her father had told her in confidence that as a young man he’d always thought the Histories merely wonderful stories, and Astrid utterly barking mad, though functionally and usefully so. Until he returned from the Quest to Nantucket with the Sword of the Lady and found he could speak the Elvish tongue. Including grammar not contained in the Histories at all, and thousands of words nobody had known, some of them for concepts that nobody had known.
For colors that the human eye could not see, for instance, she thought. I can see what Light of the Two Trees means the now, the same way I do when I think red.
Dúnedain scribes and bards had followed him around at times for the rest of his life taking notes; he’d endured them for kinship’s sake, and because the Rangers were so useful to the High Kingdom, and of course because Astrid had given her life on a mission of great importance that had been crucial to the outcome of the Prophet’s War. He’d said more than once, and in public, that the least of what she’d done meant that ten thousand souls still walked the ridge of the world who would have lain stark on the battlefields otherwise.
He’d also said privately to his eldest daughter a few years ago that when you found you could say Eat shit and die, arsehole! or I want a shredded pork sandwich on a bun, with a pickle on the side in a language, it made the theory that it all had been made up from whole cloth by a long-dead Englishman less convincing. Even if the Englishman had thought he was making it up.
“You’ve a point there, Morfind,” she admitted.
“Well, if the Histories aren’t true, then they should have been,” John said diplomatically. “Some damned fine song lyrics in them, too.”
“By now two generations of the Rangers have grown up speaking Sindarin as their cradle-tongue along with English, so you could say it’s a language as real as any other,” Órlaith said . . . also diplomatically.
Naturally the Rangers believed in the Histories as strongly as Christians believed in their Bible. In some cases they believed in the Histories and the Bible. The human mind was a wonderful thing, as Grandmother Juniper was fond of saying.
Heuradys seemed to be following her thoughts, as so often in their long comradeship.
“There’s nothing in the Histories that’s outright impossible, any more than in the Tale of Troy or the Tale of Arthur,” she said thoughtfully, turning the stem of her wineglass between her fingers. “I mean, yes, there’s the magic ring . . . rings . . . but we’ve got a magic sword right here and we’re looking for another.”
“One that I have seen in visions,” Reiko said, nodding. “As did my . . . as did Saisei Tenno before me.”
“And there’s the Dark Lord with evil powers, but by Haides and Persephone, Orrey, your own father killed a Dark Lord with evil powers . . . and used his magic sword to do it. And you and the Majesty just killed an evil magician working for the darkest of Powers, didn’t you?”
Órlaith shuddered and made the warding sign of the Horns. Reiko nodded emphatically; again her side of the Pacific had its own analogues and they’d followed her here. Tales from the Prophet’s War told of such, too, ones she’d heard from first-hand witnesses she trusted. John crossed his arms thoughtfully and said:
“Not to mention your crossbow bolt, Herry. And the people in the Histories seem to live pretty much the way actual people do, you know, farming, fighting with swords and bows—it’s a lot more realistic than most of the stuff written before the Change. More like real life and real history. There are even big ruins and lost cities all over the place—those faces of their rulers the ancient Americans carved into the Black Hills that Suzie’s relatives showed us when we visited the Lakota lands, Orrey. They’re pretty much like the Argonath in the Histories with the statues of Isildur and Anárion.”
“A point, brother of mine,” Órlaith agreed.
“And the face of Tašúnke Witkó,” Susan Clever Raccoon said, and added: “That means Crazy Horse, one of our greatest war-chiefs. He’s carved there too. Not far from the Four Big Wašícu Guys.”
“Right, Suzie; I remember thinking it was a pity they didn’t complete the whole statue,” John said. “He’d have looked very imposing on his horse, judging from the model.”
“Yeah, but have you seen the way they were going to have him pointing?”
She grinned and put out her arm with her index finger foremost. “That’s sorta rude to our way of thinking, you know? Like this.” She clenched a fist and extended the middle one.
John raised his hands in acknowledgment. “God knows we couldn’t finish it, anyway, not without an army of ten thousand working for fifty years.”
Karl Aylward Mackenzie returned to her brother’s original point. “Aye, but you’re right, Highness, the Histories of the Rangers don’t have the things that make you scratch your head and wonder what they’d been drinking and how to get some. Whether they’re fact or no, there’s nothing where you go oh, that makes just no sense the now.”
“Nae rockets tae the moon or dinosaurs on islands or clockwurrk men fra the future come to kill their enemy’s grandparents,” Diarmuid agreed. “Forbye, a fine stormy tale they are.”
John took up the thread: “So it could be as true as, oh, R . . . the Majesty’s Heike Monogatari. Basically true, just . . . spiced up troubadour-ishly for added interest. You know, more dramatic tension, taking out the boring bits, simplifying the narrative, have the villain get off the coach and kick a dog on his way indoors, that sort of thing.”
“Like Beowulf, or The Battle of Maldon,” Deor added, and then glanced at Thora. “Or the Völsunga saga.”
“Or Lady Fiorbhinn’s Song of Bear and Raven,” she said.
Susan Mika nodded, and her face took on the considering look of someone remembering a verse they’d memorized.
“That one gets sung a lot up on the makol in wintertime when there’s not much to do,” she said.
Órlaith felt her mind shudder inwardly a bit. The Black Months could be hard enough in places like the Willamette. She’d loved her times among the Lakota, but those had been in summer, the great buffalo hunt and the festivals where they gathered many thousands strong for trade and council, celebration and dance.
Susan went on: “I always liked this part, it’s got my Uncle Rick in it, which is cool. It’s in Book Three . . .”
“The Return Stanzas,” Deor agreed. He hummed wordlessly, supplying the slow undertone as she half-chanted in her light high voice:
“Rick, Lakota incantan
Lord of the tunwan wide
Rode to meet King Artos
At great Des Moines to bide
“No walls defend my kinsmen,
No river, lake or tree.
For long we ride in plains so wide
Their ends no man can see.”
So spoke wise Rick the war-man,
Victor of many a spoil,
/> For he had seen with plains-eyes keen
The fruit of Cutters’ toil.
And as he stood in Iowa
There eighty thousand strong
Mustered close a vast grim host
To cleanse the red-robes’ wrong.
“Such a mighty force as this
We could not face alone.
With rails to tread, our elders said,
Soon all our land they’d own.
I shall not lead my tribesmen
For yields of dust and bone.
A pledge to make that will not break
I must secure and hone.”
He pondered long and deeply
For all his people’s sake,
And in the end he faced his friend
His homage then to make
In view of all the bossmen,
Full-binding as a cord,
His oath to pledge about the edge
of the Lady’s holy Sword.
In your High Kingdom, Raven,
Our honor shall abide.
For you have been ’gainst foul Corwin
And with you we shall side;
Then you shall be our bulwark,
And we your eastern guard.
So sky and sea and earth and thee
witness for time unmarred!”
Everyone raised their glasses in a toast, and Heuradys added:
“And who could say the Valar aren’t real? I know Athana is, I can feel her hand every time I make an offering, and they’re actually pretty much like the Olympians, or the Powers the Mackenzies and McClintocks reverence. Or the Aesir, come to that.”
Karl Aylward Mackenzie finished his fourth apple pastry.
“’Tis plain sense you’re speaking, Lady,” he said, dipping his fingers in the bowl of warm scented water and wiping them on a napkin. “Why, even the figures of them here look like those in Dun Juniper or the godposts outside Sutterdown. A little, at least. I didn’t get much through this thick head of mine in Moon School, but that the Powers wear many faces, that I did get well into my chine. And though they say the Otherworld was more distant before the Change, at least for the years just before it, still it wasn’t entirely absent. Otherwise this sword of Her Majesty of Nihon wouldn’t have the name it did, eh? For that story happened long, long before our grandparents’ day.”
Órlaith nodded respectfully. None of the Aylwards are stupid, even if they’re not scholarly hairsplitters like some.
John rolled his Catholic eyes and sighed at that, and Heuradys stuck out her Old Faith tongue at him, before ostentatiously turning back to Órlaith:
“Your father met deities around every hill, back on the Quest.”
“Twice, once in a dream and once through a seer who was in a trance.”
“Or angels,” John said stubbornly.
“You use your titles, Johnnie, and I’ll use mine. But it wasn’t around every hill, Herry. And . . . the Histories have dragons and orcs,” Órlaith pointed out dubiously. “And Ents. You don’t see things like them around. Which is a pity, I’d have liked to meet Ents.”
“I have seen . . . the kami are very real,” Reiko said. “And the Grass-Cutting Sword. So why not the great eight-headed serpent whose tail contained it?”
“Passenger pigeons,” Heuradys added suddenly. “I mean, all the chronicles say they were extinct, but they’ve come back, right? Starting with Nantucket, where the Change began?”
Morfind nodded. “And the Histories themselves say the orcs and trolls faded and dwindled in the Fourth Age, the Age of Men. But . . . now, who knows? We did meet a golor, an evil magician; met him twice and killed him, though sooner would have been better.”
She touched the scar on her face. “And the Eaters are enough like yrch for everyday use. If Morgoth of old twisted elves into orcs back in the deeps of time, before the rising of the Sun and Moon, why not the same with humans now? And the Elves set out for the Uttermost West to usher in the Age of Men. So maybe here in the Fifth Age, we’ll get them all back again eventually.”
“Powers, I hope not the orcs and trolls, Eaters are bad enough!” Órlaith said, but she nodded too; Morfind had a point.
“Well, fauns and centaurs, then,” Heuradys grinned.
The Dúnedain themselves occasionally spent winter evenings squabbling over what Age this was in their reckoning; the consensus was that it was the Fifth, with the Change marking the beginning of it as the destruction of the One Ring had started the Fourth. Some of their Catholics held out for this being the Sixth, with the ministry of Christ marking the Fifth. The odd eccentric said seventh or eighth, on the theory that they were getting shorter.
Órlaith wished Luanne was here; for herself, but just now also for the sardonic look she’d have given. Her grandfather Eric Steelfist Larsson, Mike Havel’s brother-in-law, had always held to the barking mad interpretation of his younger sister Astrid, and had been known to refer to her during her life as Princess Leg-o-Lamb.
Which according to campfire stories drove her into fits. A great lady and a warrior for the legends, but by all the tales she was . . . difficult.
“Well, the Dúnedain in this age are real enough,” Órlaith said. “There are thousands of them, all over Montival.”
“Except where the barons get a hair up their . . . noses about it, in the Association territories,” Heuradys added. “Pity. They’re useful. If my lady mother or my lord my father had estates further north or on the coast, I think they would have endowed a stath. The way those idiots kicked up a fuss in the House of Peers when the Counts of Tillamook invited them in was a disgrace.”
Órlaith nodded. Useful to the realm, and the Crown, and to Lord Chancellor Ignatius’ lasting pleasure, inexpensive to the Exchequer, except in grants of land which nobody else is using or wants to use anyway.
“It’s not as if they asked for manors, or even land that would be valuable under the plow,” Heuradys added, echoing her thought.
Rangers didn’t farm much beyond truck gardens, though they had many excellent artisans, and the places they settled had good hunting but mostly little land suited to the plow. Their main trade was danger: escorting caravans, patrolling against or hunting down bandits, scouting into the perilous wastelands of the dead cities to protect salvagers, slipping through forests to find pirate bases.
Their place in the Great Charter also made them available to communities that needed outsiders to keep the peace or deal with malefactors because their own methods had broken down, though the Rangers were rather picky about that and had given some self-satisfied lords unpleasant surprises when they sided with their underlings. In war they scouted and raided and operated behind enemy lines. Her father had been fond of saying they did more to keep the High King’s Peace than several armies thrown together.
People who wanted a nice secure life, a normal one where you rarely went more than a few hours’ walk from the fields you tilled, tended to drift out of the Rangers. Those of the opposite temperament drifted in, often by marriage.
John looked up at the stars. “Getting late, if we’re to be off early,” he said. “And hearth or no, it’s a bit chilly, too, with the walls open like this.”
Then he grinned, that reckless expression Órlaith knew. “I’ll give them something to wrap it up. Something appropriate for a Quest, by St. Jude!”
He moved down from the dais and spoke to the musicians. They’d gone back to gentle background work, and listened keenly. Then they took up a slow rhythmic tune, like the pace of a swaying march. Silence fell as attention turned to him, and he began.
She recognized the words; they were from a book of poetry that Captain Feldman had lent him, but the tune was new, and his:
“We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage
And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die,
We Poets of the proud old lineage
Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why—”
“Ah!” Reiko murmured.
Órlaith nodded and closed her eyes for a moment, letting the images flow through a mind lit by wine and war and things beyond the world of common day:
“What shall we tell you? Tales, marvelous tales
Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,
Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,
And winds and shadows fall towards the West:
And there the world’s first huge white-bearded kings
In dim glades sleeping, murmur in their sleep,
And closer round their breasts the ivy clings,
Cutting its pathway slow and red and deep.”
The hall had fallen entirely silent, and she saw tears on some faces when she opened her eyes.
“And how beguile you? Death has no repose
Warmer and deeper than the Orient sand
Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those
Who make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
And now they wait and whiten peaceably,
Those conquerors, those poets, those so fair:
They know time comes, not only you and I,
But the whole world shall whiten, here or there;”
A voice murmured mujo; that meant transience, or the melancholy of things that were impermanent—life, in particular.
“When those long caravans that cross the plain
With dauntless feet and sound of silver bells
Put forth no more for glory or for gain,
Take no more solace from the palm-girt wells.
When the great markets by the sea shut fast
All that calm Sunday that goes on and on:
When even lovers find their peace at last,
And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.”
A long moment when only harp and flute sounded, and then her brother’s voice soared again, triumphant:
“Yet sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells
When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,
The Desert and the Blade Page 37