“Well, this is our primary fortification,” Kwame said. “We’ve been strengthening it over the past decade or so too.”
Droyn had been giving it careful consideration while they spoke. “It’s extremely well-placed,” he said. “Couldn’t be better, given the terrain.”
Which was true, and avoided being too blunt about its shoddy makeshift construction and very modest size. The older man pointed back and to their right.
“We have an observation post there too, called the Top of Topanga. With good warning, this position is very strong.”
“You certainly can’t get at it from over there”—Droyn indicated the steep drop—“and I presume there’s no good path over those heights to our left?”
“Not for quite some distance.” Kwame’s brows went up. “You’re an expert in fortifications?” he said. “You seem a bit young for that. No offense.”
Droyn shrugged in a clatter of plates; he was young, young to be a knight at all, though not implausibly so. Though of course he’d had a noble’s education and all Associates were born to the sword.
“Oh, no, not an expert, just the basics. I can lay out a fortified marching camp or the like. I did grow up in castles . . . my family’s, and Todenangst and I’ve seen most of the strong places in Montival at one time or another, traveling with the Court, and studied their plans.”
“What do you use as construction materials for those?” Kwame asked.
“Steel-reinforced concrete, and for the biggest structures salvaged cargo containers filled with various things and concrete and faced with more.”
Kwame looked very thoughtful. “How do you move heavy freight like that around?”
“Horse-drawn railways and careful organization and enough manpower, where there’s no navigable water. And patience. It gets done if you keep working at it.”
He left out the dreadful labor camps the first Lord Protector had employed in the early years where uncounted thousands had died under the whip. Nobody, or nobody you wanted to know, was proud of that part of the Association’s history, and most would prefer that it gradually faded into oblivion—though people in the rest of Montival were less charitable. He went on:
“Pyramids and cathedrals and . . . what’s it called . . . the Great Wall of Cathay, that could be seen from space? They were all built without powered machines, and we have hydraulic cranes and the like, and better materials to use.”
“Pyramids. Yeah. Sometimes I’m sort of glad we’re out the way here. Or were until now. What sort of dimensions on the forts?”
“Some of the highest castle walls—Todenangst’s inner keep—are eighty feet high and twenty or thirty thick and machicolated all along the top, with gate and wall towers and reversed approaches,” Droyn said proudly.
And remembered the awe he’d felt as he rode towards that man-made mountain for the first time, heading to Court for page duty.
Kwame blinked again. “Good God, how do you take something like that without explosives?”
“You don’t,” Droyn said bluntly. “Smaller castles can be stormed, albeit at a high price, but the major works are essentially impregnable to assault or artillery if they’re garrisoned and have the standard year’s worth of rations. You can starve them out, but . . .”
“You’d really better not be in a hurry,” Kwame said dryly.
“Exactly. Or you can take them by treachery, of course.”
“How many of the damned things are there?”
“Several hundred, but only thirty or so of the major ones.”
Kwame frowned. “I heard you had big wars up there. With those things all over the place, it sounds like everything would be gummed up and stalemated.”
“Well, in the Foundation Wars and the Protector’s War . . . some call it the War of the Eye . . . the Association had the castles and others usually came to grief when they tried to attack us. That was long before I was born, of course—before my father was, for that matter.”
He left out the fact that the early Association had used improvised castles to nail down conquered lands in the initial drive, and then built more and better ones to hold them, not least against rebellious peasants pushed into the manorial system. Everyone was part of Montival now and the Portland Protective Association only about a quarter of the total, but if Norman Arminger had had his way there wouldn’t be anything else but Association fiefs in the western half of this continent. He supposed that would have been good because Holy Church spread with the Association . . . but it would make things a bit dull.
“In the Prophet’s War when my father was a young man, for the most part Montival had the castles and walled cities and the Church Universal and Triumphant didn’t, their core being mostly eastern plainsmen, horse-archers, and it hurt them very badly in just the way you thought. Castle Campscapell in the Palouse changed hands twice, and we took Boise by escalade, but those were all after someone opened the gates from within. I’ve heard the late High King say it would have cost him ten thousand men to storm Boise if it could have been done at all. Major castles are even worse than cities because the circuit of their walls is so much smaller relative to the size of the garrison within, and an attacker can’t get an overwhelming advantage of numbers at any one point.”
“Ah.”
The Topangan looked at the wall, which was obviously made of anything that came to hand mortared together with cement. He sighed.
“We could use one of those walls here now. On the other hand, then we’d have had to have all the stuff in our backgrounds that made you people develop them. All right . . . Sir Knight . . . how would you take this? And the Canyon?
“Well, I wouldn’t try to use mounted knights,” Droyn said, and got a dry chuckle from the older man.
This reminds me of the way they used to drill us with hypotheticals, he thought, remembering his time as page and—until very recently—squire.
“Artillery, basically, for this wall, and it’s low enough for wheeled siege towers or even just scaling ladders, it really should have a ditch in front and a drawbridge. Secure the flanks with light infantry, crossbowmen . . . or McClintocks, if I had them . . . bring up engines, batter it down, drench it with napalm shell, then massed crossbowmen shooting—or Mackenzie longbows, if I had them—and heavy foot charging under their cover, dismounted knights and men-at-arms and spearmen. It would cost, but you could do it.”
“Same thing down the road?”
Droyn nodded. “Being very careful to secure the heights above the road each time and bringing up the catapults. It would cost, of course.”
He thought of something one of his instructors had told him. “If you outweigh your enemy, you don’t have to be brilliant to win. You just have to be . . . not stupid. It is the weaker side that requires inspired leadership.”
He smiled. “Your stroke with the avalanche, for example, Captain Curtis.”
“Yeah, but Mark Delgado isn’t stupid and I’m right out of inspired. I hope someone has some on them, and that someone isn’t him. How many battles have you fought in, kid, ah, Sir Knight?”
“Mmmm, two, Captain, both this year and both small; one charge of knights, and a defensive engagement holding a hilltop on foot. But I was well-taught.”
“Apparently. And now the Chatsworth God-damned Lancers seem to have the artillery. And we don’t. The trebuchets have limited range and they’re not mobile. We’ve tried to hire machines from passing ships, but the fact of the matter is we’ve found out we couldn’t raise the cash to hire a kid in a canoe with a slingshot in his back pocket. We’re just plain poor.”
“Well,” said Droyn, “we’re seeing if we can do something about that. The Crown Princess has some very persuasive friends.”
• • •
Moishe Feldman took a sip of cocoa slightly spiked with rum—quite good rum—and smiled at his host here in the captain’
s cabin of the Virgen de las Esmeraldas.
“Most excellent cocoa and even more excellent rum, Captain de Mendoza,” he said, quite truthfully.
Antonio de Mendoza y Pacheco was a slim man of about Feldman’s mid-thirties and similar medium height, with smooth dark-brown skin and well-tended curly black hair and a neatly trimmed mustache and pointed chin-beard framing bluntly handsome features. There was a crucifix around his neck, hanging on the breast of a loose shirt of snowy white cotton embroidered along the hems and neck. Snug breeches were tucked into half-boots . . . of which the right had a dagger-hilt showing. His long fawn-colored coat, a narrow-bladed sword with a complex swept guard and the baldric to which it was fastened were hung on the wall near the door, with a floppy-brimmed hat sporting a plume of some colorful feathers. Feldman’s plain blue jacket, round peaked nautical cap and his cutlass hung there as well.
“Both are from my esteemed father-in-law’s estates,” Mendoza said.
The smell of cocoa and tobacco mingled not unpleasantly with wax and the sea-breeze through the open sterncastle windows . . . though there was a slight and less agreeable whift from the bilges. Silence stretched, with the Esmeraldan waiting with patiently attentive courtesy; which proved he was no fool.
The captain’s cabin of the Virgen de las Esmeraldas was a bit larger than Feldman’s on the Tarshish Queen, and the ceiling—the quarterdeck was above—was a bit higher as well. The curved wall of windows at the stern lit it brightly, but not too brightly with the sun overhead, and there was a pleasant moving dapple of reflected light on the ceiling above. This ship had roughly the same displacement as his, but it was broader-beamed. That made it slower, but there were advantages.
“He is as fortunate in the produce of his lands as he is in his son-in-law,” Feldman said.
The décor was darkly rich, carved chanul and teak in shades of reddish brown and chocolate buffed and waxed to bring out the grain. One corner held an elaborate little shrine with the Virgin and a prie-dieu.
The silver pot and service were ornately wrought with Classical figures, and there were a pair of well-done oil portraits on the walls; one of a smiling, plumply pretty woman in a long white dress seated with three children standing to either side of her, and one of a stone-faced man in an elaborate uniform holding a scepter in one hand and a sword in the other, with a thicket of medals on his chest and a jewel-encrusted golden crown on his head—His Majesty Hernán the First.
Whose father Antonio had been a successful warlord who’d marched down from Quito in the chaos, famine and desperate mass migrations of post-Change Ecuador and made himself President for Life of a chunk of the northwestern coast covering several score thousand square miles. His son had decided to change the title to something more modern now that monarchy was fashionable. Feldman supposed it was all to the good; it would make usurpation and civil wars a little less likely, at least, if Hernán’s dynasty generated some legitimacy by lasting a generation or two. Long enough that nobody living remembered anyone else on top.
Captain Mendoza should pump the bilges out more, Feldman thought automatically. Apart from that, a well-found ship. Overmanned, though. Even if wages are lower in Esmeraldas than Newport, extra crew still eat and take up space. And a bit lightly armed for long voyages far foreign; maybe he’s trying to make up for fewer catapults with more cutlasses.
“More, Señor Capitan?” the Esmeraldan skipper said, smiling as put his cigarillo in the ashtray’s holder and lifted the pot.
“Muchas gracias, Don Antonio,” Feldman said.
They were speaking Spanish; Feldman’s grasp of that language was much better than the other man’s English, which was functional at best. He’d apparently had a nanny who had been an American tourist’s child when the Change stuck them in Ecuador, and without that he wouldn’t have been comprehensible at all.
“You are too kind; and Don is far too formal. Señor is more than sufficient for a mere merchant like myself,” he said . . . or purred, with a wide white smile. “Though I hope to have a hacienda of my own eventually, you understand, and be enrolled among the new hidalgos of the realm. Truly my homeland has entered a golden age under our good and most noble and able King, one in which prosperity is general and anything is possible to a man of ability and character, with the help of God and His mother.”
The southerner faced the shrine and crossed himself, and then made a little bow to the portrait of his monarch.
That and the fact that you can’t mention His Majesty without a half paragraph of flattery tells us something about the Golden Age, Feldman thought dryly.
“And your Spanish is also most excellent, which is a relief among these isolated peasants,” his host went on.
The sailor squatting by the door was also smoking, but something much harsher; he had a machete and hooked knife at his belt, and his face and bare muscular dark torso were heavily scarred above the ragged canvas pantaloons that were his only garment. A straw hat hung on his back by the cord around his neck, and there was a printed kerchief wrapped around his shaven head and tied at the back.
His snake-steady eyes never left the Corvallan as his captain went on genially:
“Believe me, it is a relief to have a conversation with a civilized man, a man of culture, one of the gente de razón. These Topangans, they are honest enough peasants, but . . .”
He shrugged his shoulders eloquently. “Peasants nonetheless. Believe that I mean no reflection on Montival; there are many just as backward in the hinterlands of my own country.”
“I gather you do not expect to sell your cargo here,” Feldman said, after a further brace of mutual compliments.
Which I suspect cover a damned judío somewhere in the background, he thought, and shrugged himself—mentally. If he’d been prickly about that, being a merchant was the wrong line of work; he’d have gone to Degania Dalet and taken up farming. And I’ve met far less courteous ways of putting it.
Mendoza laughed gently as he shook his head. “You choose to joke, Señor Captain Feldman. I would never have put in here if our casks had not been contaminated during the storm and I had not heard it was a reasonable watering stop. They could not buy one hundredth part of my cargo with all the wealth of their little tribe.”
“Don Antonio,” Feldman said—and found no further objections to the title. “—I profoundly sympathize, as one who has experienced the irritating delays . . . and the attendant loss . . . of trade by sea.”
The cargo was in fact a rich one; a hundred and fifty tons of processed cocoa and cocoa butter ready to be transformed into drinks and confections, along with hibiscus-vanilla-scented palm oil soap (and dried hibiscus petals in sacks), bricks of high-quality indigo, a good deal of fine cotton cloth and planks of exotic woods that were naturals for the furniture and cabinetry markets—mascarey, tangare, Fernán Sánchez, jigua, higuerón, ceibo, sande, virola and guayacán. That sort of thing was in high demand these days, and overall there was an almost sensuous pleasure to reciting the names and contemplating the value . . . and beauty and usefulness . . . of what the Esmeraldan had below his hatches.
Mendoza raised his eyes to the ceiling. “And would you believe they tried to hire me to engage in one of their petty local quarrels? That is why I intend to sail with the morning tide, having replaced my water and taken on some fresh provisions.”
Feldman sighed in sympathy, sipped, and put his cup down. “You were intending to dock in . . .”
Mendoza’s eyes were blandly unreadable. “Portland, I had thought. I have not made this run before, it is so new, but I have spoken with those who have. A good market, and a very fine selection of goods for the return. And there is an acting Esmeraldan consul, himself a merchant of Portland who acts for those of my kingdom who trade there—there is a similar arrangement back in our capital.”
“Yes, Portland is an excellent market . . . but no better than Newport,” Feldman
said. “Which has rail connections with the Willamette and the Columbia Valley, and is considerably closer. The Columbia mouth is tricky, even with a pilot . . . and the Astoria pilots charge highly, to discourage foreign traders from going upriver themselves. The Guild Merchant of Astoria prefers to see those cargos sold in their own city . . . for obvious reasons.”
“Obvious indeed,” Mendoza said and waited, showing that he knew something of bargaining.
“I admit there is a certain rivalry between my city and Astoria . . . but I assume you have heard of the First National Bank of Corvallis?”
“Indeed. Their letters of credit and other paper are accepted in Esmeraldas at very modest discounts these last few years.”
“And at full face value in Newport . . . and Corvallis . . . and Astoria and Portland; in fact, everywhere in the civilized portions of Montival and as far away as Hawaii and Darwin. Now, I am currently under a government charter—”
True enough . . . for government work, Feldman thought, as he went on.
“—but my firm often deals in cargos of the sort you are shipping. It strikes me that our meeting is a gift of fortune; and as men of business, it is our duty to our trade and our families to seize opportunities, is it not?”
“Indeed,” Mendoza said calmly. “And to distinguish between the true opportunities and unjustified risks.”
Feldman didn’t let the rhetorical trick throw him off stride.
“If I were to purchase your cargo, you would be able to save considerable time and expense by simply docking in Newport and unloading to my warehouses, rather than spending at least weeks, possibly months vending it in bits and pieces . . . with wages and charges mounting up . . . demurrage costs, warehouse rental fees . . . awkward dealings with bureaucrats unsympathetic to a foreign captain . . . cabals of merchants who all know one another combining to bargain down an outsider . . . all the problems of a strange port without contacts.”
The Desert and the Blade Page 48