A Meeting At Corvallis

by S. M. Stirling

  They had a box to stand on, which let them reach the eyepieces, and a helper—what they called a varlet here—to move the tripod around for them.

  The forty feet of the tower and the two hundred and fifty of the hill gave a splendid view of a countryside that was subtly different from what he was used to, looking like a painting tinted with old gold as the sun dipped towards the Coast Range westward. He could see two villages from here, with their houses and barns, worksheds and mills, surrounded by truck plots. Further out each had a set of five large fields; winter wheat, spring oats or barley, roots like turnips or potatoes, and two in clover for grazing and hay. Strips within each marked family holdings; there were meadows beside the rivers, and the vineyards and orchards mostly where pre-Change convenience had put them; manor houses had a big farm attached, the demesne. The main roads were well kept; potholes patched with asphalt, gravel and grading maintained on the smaller ones.

  A train of ox-drawn wagons loaded with unknown boxes and sacks passed in the middle distance, heading south towards the railway stop there. Heading north was a troop of half a dozen horsemen; he looked through the glasses and saw it was a knight in bright tunic and tooled leather with golden spurs on his heels and a peregrine on his wrist. Beside him was a lady riding with divided skirts and embroidered leggings showing beneath, as gaudy and as haughty, bearing a goshawk; as he watched she unhooded it and the bird mantled, wings splayed for an instant before it leapt skyward in a torrent of strokes.

  Rudi sighed; and again when he pivoted the binoculars westward. Barely two miles in that direction was trackless forest. Literally trackless since the hand of man was withdrawn, as lumbering roads were overgrown, and clearcuts sprawled into impenetrable tangles of undergrowth taller than a man through which Douglas fir and hemlock and red cedar saplings pushed. He could …

  Nah. Make a realistic threat appraisal, the way Unc' Sam does. I'm a kid. Sure, I'm really, really good in the woods for a kid my age, but they've got some real woodsmen here. And Lady Tiphaine isn't just good, she's scary. They'd catch me and then they'd lock me up all the time. If someone does come to rescue me, that could screw everything up. The Luck of the Clan will help me, if I'm smart and wait for the Lord and Lady. Gotta be like Coyote, always waiting for the right moment for a trick.

  The top of the tower was a featureless rectangle, fifty-five feet by forty-five, covered in thick asphalt paving, broken only by the trapdoor and a metal chimney in the middle of the eastern side, and by the turntable-mounted throwing engines crouching under their tarpaulins at each corner. They walked over to the western edge and looked down, Mathilda sitting casually in the gap between two merlons, with Rudi leaning by her side. The fighting platform on the inside of the circuit wall ended a dozen feet short of where it joined the tower's second story; the gap was covered by removable footbridges that ended in thick steel doors. A full-scale metal drawbridge joined the ground floor of the tower to the courtyard over a ditch bristling with sharpened, rust-reddened angle iron that surrounded the tower-keep on the inside. The drawbridge was down now, and the gates wide open, but two spearmen stood by the entrance.

  Houses and barracks and workshops lined the inside of the wall, along with a chapel, all built in thickly plastered and whitewashed cinderblock, plain and serviceable; there were paved pathways, but most of the courtyard was graveled dirt. Savory smells came from the kitchens; scullions bustled in and out, and outside over pits full of white-glowing oak coals two yearling steers turned on spits, along with shoats, sending wisps of blue smoke skyward as cooks basted and brushed. Others rolled barrels up pairs of beams thrust slantwise through cellar doors. There was a cheerful bustle in and out through the main gates; relief was in the voices as well, for nobody had lost their post, and the new seigneur had ordered a feast on a scale that showed she wasn't the sort to squeeze every silver dime until it squeaked. The tenants and peons would pay for all in the end, but at least the staff would get a good feed out of it.

  A female knight was very rare, but not enough to be bizarre or totally unheard-of, even as a fief-holder. And this one had the prestige of rescuing the princess, and capturing none less than the son of the Witch Queen, and having the favor of the Lord Protector and Lady Sandra.

  Tiphaine d'Ath was busy at something else, over by the pells and targets where the castle garrison trained. Rudi grinned, and Mathilda did too: one of the men-at-arms froze in midstroke. Even at this distance they could tell how his face went white as new cheese under a weathered tan. The razor tip of his new liege-lady's sword rested very lightly against the throat of his mail coif; a slight push would crush his larynx, or even pierce the mail—she used a sword with a lighter blade and a longer point than most in the Protectorate.

  "Not bad," she said, stepping back. "But you can all use some work with the blade, particularly the pointy bit on the end. A hint: it's supposed to go into the other guy. Any of you infantry care to try a bout? You'll have to use a sword sometimes as well as crossbow and spear."

  Sir Ivo and Sir Ruffin were grinning as well, where they stood with their shields slung over their backs and their crossed hands resting on the pommels of their own drawn blades. None of the men-at-arms had been able to beat either, even Ruffin with his not-quite-completely recovered left arm, but some of them had lasted more than a few seconds. Then the new Lady of Ath had offered a hundred rose nobles and a promotion to anyone who could beat her …

  "Tiphaine made them all look like dancing bears," Mathilda giggled.

  "Yeah. She's good," Rudi said; he blinked away a memory of Aoife's neck suddenly running red, and her eyes going wide in shock. "I think maybe Aunt

  Astrid's better, and maybe Lord Bear, but maybe not. And she's smart, too. Now they'll all go around boasting about what a swordswoman their new liege is."

  Mathilda gave him an odd look. "I thought she was just making them look silly, and they'd hate it," she said.

  "Well, yeah, she made them look like clowns. But they don't … you know .. .feel silly if she's Scathach come again with a sword," he said, blinking a little; he'd thought it was obvious. "Warriors are like that. If their leader can beat them, they want to believe they can beat anyone else easy, and that makes them feel sort of proud. It's a bit funny when you say it out loud, but that's the way it works, I guess here too."

  "Yup," she said thoughtfully. "And I suppose 'cause Tiphaine's a girl, she has to show that she's better than anyone real quick."

  "Well, yeah, around here, I suppose so. Dumb."

  "I wonder if we could get her to tutor us with the sword, while we're here?" Mathilda said, still thoughtful. "Mom said we'd have a tutor for book stuff soon but she didn't say anything about phys-ed. I want to be real good. Like you say, it'll be handy someday. And it's fun anyway."

  Matti's no dummy, Rudi thought with approval. A Chief has to think of things like that.

  "Her friend Katrina was your tutor, wasn't she?"

  "Yup," Mathilda said. "Arms, gymnastics, and riding. I don't know if she was that good—" She nodded towards the exercise ground. "I was only just eight back then, you know, too little to know much. But she and Tiphaine used to spar a lot, and people would come to watch. They did all sorts of things together."

  "Like Aoife and Liath," Rudi said absently.

  Down below, the row of spearmen and crossbowmen were respectfully declining more practice bouts with Tiphaine d'Ath; several of them were smiling as they did so. She nodded to the two knights, and both of them attacked immediately, not wasting time on preparations beyond unslinging their shields. He leaned over the parapet and wished he were a little closer, absently hooking a hand into the back of Mathilda's belt as she bent forward as well.

  There was a fast, violent clash, steel-on-steel and beating in sharp cracks on the big kite-shaped shields, and then Ruffin's blade went flying as a shield edge slammed into his forearm just above the wrist. People dodged the pinwheeling length of sharp metal; sparring with real battle swords was a bit of a show
-off thing. But even then they kept looking as Tiphaine drove Ivo before her; at last he leapt forward, trying to knock her back shield-to-shield, and she spun like a dust devil, tripped him neatly and tapped the point of her blade between his shoulders before helping him up.

  "Well, not really like that," Mathilda said; then her brows flew up in shocked surmise.

  Rudi looked up at her. "Oh? I thought it was probably like that—I can usually tell things about people, you know. But I can't be sure, 'cause I never, like, saw them at the same time."

  She frowned, and looked over to see that the varlet was out of hearing distance. When she spoke it was quietly: "You'd better not tell anyone else you think that," she warned. "You could get her into a lot of trouble."

  "Oh? Oh, yeah. Sure, no problemo. Tiphaine's not so bad."

  Mathilda hesitated. "I'm sorry about Aoife and Liath. They were great, and … I sort of think it was my fault. If I hadn't gone under the trees—"

  Rudi let the grief flow through him and past him. "It wasn't your fault, Matti. I mean, we were right there, only a mile and a half from the gates of the dun. Who could have known? Even Uncle Dennis just said not to go beyond the watchpost, and we didn't get that far. Tiphaine and her bunch pulled it off really slick."

  The garrison cheered and shouted as they watched the brief, spectacular match, then formed up again; Tiphaine addressed them with her sword blade resting on her right shoulder, and the other hand on her hip, shield with its new blazon hanging off her left by its guige.

  "Sir Ivo and Sir Ruffin are damned good. I won't settle for anything but the best in my menie," she said. "So you're all going to be working hard from now on. When the call comes, you're going to be facing pikes and crossbows or Bearkiller lances or Mackenzie longbows, not wooden posts and targets. Anyone who doesn't like the idea can go hire on with someone else, like maybe as bouncers at the Slut and Brew in Portland."

  That got a general laugh, and blades flourished in salute. "And now let's get cleaned up before the feast; I don't know whether this gambeson is trying to drown me or marry me, and if I get any hungrier I'm going over there to hack that cow apart personally. Dismissed!"

  She sheathed the sword without looking down, then passed weapons belt and shield to one of the varlets. The smile was off her face as she turned to look up at the tower top; the wall was casting shadow over the courtyard, but her hair still burned bright in a stray beam.

  Yeah, gonna have to be real careful, Rudi thought, ducking back. She doesn't jool easy.

  Then his stomach rumbled; it had been a long while since the picnic lunch in the carriage. Mathilda punched his shoulder.

  "Let's get ready for dinner," she said. "I'm clemmed."

  "You're gonna have to stop talking like that," Rudi said as they walked over to the head of the stairs. "You sound like a kiltie!"

  * * * *

  The great dining hall was the whole ground floor of the keep. With no resident lord, it had been used as an armory and storehouse until now, and spears and crossbows still stood racked around the inside of the massive concrete walls. The slight tang of oiled metal was now overlain by the sweet scent of burning fir and the savory smells of roast beef and pork, chicken and duck, vegetables and spiced gravy and fresh wheat bread. There were no openings in the two walls that faced the outer world, and only thin slits for firing through on the pair that overlooked the courtyard through thick ferroconcrete. The inside walls were plain apart from whitewash, and the concrete floors hastily covered with mats of woven straw. Open gates and portcullis let in air grown a little chill with the spring evening, but the stars were many and bright save where the moon hung on the horizon. Torches burned in brackets outside, mostly for show; the bonfires in the courtyard gave both light and warmth to the commons feasting there on tables set on the drawbridge and close by it, sending flights of sparks drifting skyward.

  A fire in the great inner hearth kept the room warm despite draughts, thigh-thick fir logs crackling and booming on the iron dogs and making an occasional spit of sparks and sending out a strong, wild scent. Gasoline lanterns hanging from the ferroconcrete beams that crisscrossed above kept it bright; draughts flickered the only hanging in the room, the new banner of Ath hanging behind the high seat. The tables were set up in a T, with chairs at the upper end and benches lower down. Tiphaine sat at the center of the top bar; Mathilda and Rudi had the honor seats on her right, with Ivo and Ruffin and their soon-to-be wives just beyond; the priest of Ath, Father Peter, sat on her left along with the captain of the men-at-arms and his wife and two of their older children. Beyond the big gilt ceremonial saltcellar that marked off those of lower rank sat the ordinary men-at-arms and their families, below them the other soldiers of the garrison, their families, the primary officers of the estate and their families.

  The steward was on his feet, directing carvers and servers and pourers with a white wand in his hand; a yearling shoat with an apple in its mouth stood on one stand, and a quarter of beef on another, smoking and cooling a bit before the carving.

  Father Peter was a slightly plump young man with a friendly looking face; he stood and said a long grace, ending with a blessing on the Lord Protector, the Defender of the Faith, and Pope Leo. When he sat again the new overlord of Ath stood in her turn. Silence fell amid the crowded tables, and an instant later from those outside the tower gate as well, broken only by the crackle and pop of burning resinous wood. When she spoke, it was in a clear cold voice that carried without being particularly loud.

  "The Portland Protective Association, through the Lord Protector and Lady Sandra, have granted seizin of this domain of Ath and its manors to me and my heirs, as tenants-in-chief, with the right of the high justice"—which meant she could hang—"the middle"—which meant she could imprison and flog—"and the low." That meant fines and extra service.

  "To all the folk of the Domain of Ath I promise fair justice and good lordship, defense against attack to the limit of my strength, and punishment of wrongdoers. From them I expect due loyalty and service. I will take what the law of the Association allows, neither more nor less."

  She gave a quick sidelong glance at the two knights who would hold part of it for her, and then down the table at the garrison and the officers who would carry out her will.

  "And so will everyone else," she said, a slight note of warning in a tone gone flat. "I will not tolerate insolence from underlings; nor will I tolerate their mistreatment by any in my service, whether on the rolls of the Association or not."

  After a moment's delay there was a cheer from the lower table, and from those seated outside. Tiphaine judged the tone and cocked an eye at the steward, who kept his face carefully blank; doubtless he was reassessing any scams he had running. She went on: "While I'm at it, we have the Princess Mathilda here as our guest, entrusted to the care of the Domain of Ath by the Lord Protector himself. This is an honor I'm sure we'll all strive to deserve."

  You'd better, her tone added. Every one of you.

  "And also with us is Rudi Mackenzie, son of the Chieftain of the Clan Mackenzie—"

  She hesitated as Rudi came to his feet and bowed slightly to her. "Thank you, Lady dAth," he said, his treble loud and steady. "I also honor the Lady of Ath for her care of me in … ummm … difficult circumstances. I swear by … " He cocked an eye at the priest. " … by my holy things and by hers that I will not try to escape from her lands until the war ends, or my people come for me, so long as I stay here with the princess."

  There was silence and a murmur after that; Tiphaine bowed, but the pale gray eyes narrowed slightly in the strong-boned impassive face; he knew she'd noticed the careful reservations in his oath.

  "Thank you, young lord. As you mentioned, there is unfortunately war between the Association and the Clan and its allies at present. Therefore our other guest will be treated with all respect, but let no man allow Rudi Mackenzie beyond the gates of this castle, save with my immediate leave on each occasion, and with such escort as I order.
"

  But I bet I'd wouldn't have been allowed out of the tower at all if I hadn't promised, Rudi thought, keeping any satisfaction off his face.

  Tiphaine inclined her head again, beckoning to a guard and murmuring in his ear before she raised her glass and went on: "To the Portland Protective Association, to the Lord Protector, to my liege the Lady Sandra. May God and the Saints have them in their keeping. And to our spiritual father, Pope Leo, and to Holy Mother Church, our guides on the path of salvation."

  Everyone rose and lifted their glasses; except Rudi, of course, who politely stood but left the small glass by his plate. Tiphaine raised one pale brow and shrugged very slightly as she saw the untouched wine.

  Ruffin's voice boomed out in the pause that followed the toast: "And to our noble liege and good leader, Tiphaine d'Ath, God bless her!"

  "And on that note, let's eat," Tiphaine said, and sat down to cheers.

  A hum of conversation followed, and the steward's voice: "My lady, here we have a soup of pickled clams, black cod, and smoked dried shrimp with seal-lions, mushrooms and ginger," he announced. "With it, we have a chilled pinot gris from your manor of Montinore, and beaten biscuits with new butter."

  "Mmm, thanks!" Rudi said to the servant who put the bowl before him. He blew on a spoonful and swallowed; Dun Juniper wasn't well placed for fish, except mountain trout. "That's good."

  The server was a friendly looking girl in her late teens, slender, with long black hair and clear blue eyes and freckles across high cheekbones above a tip-tilted nose; she seemed a little surprised that he'd talk to her, and gave him a broad white smile before she moved on. She wore a double t-tunic, the longer green one to her ankles and the shorter russet-colored over-tunic to her thighs, both of good wool woven in a herringbone pattern, and over both a black linen tabard embroidered with the new arms of the Lady d'Ath. The belt under it was embroidered cloth as well, and skillfully done.

  Tiphaine noticed the clothing as the servant ladled soup into her bowl, glancing aside and then up at her face, and then at the tabard again.