“Uh . . . hi,” Ingolf added. “My lord, my ladies.”
“My wife, Lady Helissent de Grimmond, my lord, Your Highness,” Maugis said.
Ingolf knew enough to bow and kiss the ladies’ hands when they were extended to him palm-down, taking them gently in his. They both started to curtsy to Mary; as the new High King’s half sister her status had to be stratospheric, not to mention that her father and mother had been and were respectively the sovereigns of the Bearkillers and her aunt led the Dúnedain.
“Please,” Mary said, with a graceful gesture. “I’m just a commander of Dúnedain Rangers for now.”
Maugis nodded acknowledgment of the courtesy as she exchanged kisses on the cheek with the women of his family, and bowed over her hand.
“And my lady mother, the dowager Baroness, Lady Roehis de Grimmond.”
“Originally Jenny Fassbinder,” the older woman said; she was in her sixties but looking very healthy for it, with a worn gentle-looking face but an ironic quirk to her mouth. “A long long time ago.”
Helissent gave her a look of fond exasperation and gestured towards a buffet laid out on the side table. “We’re not keeping any state today, Lord Vogeler, Lady Mary. The staff are far too busy, I’m sure you understand.”
“Uff da, of course! There’s a war on, no need to apologize, my lady.”
“Do help yourself. The others will be here soon.”
He did, feeling sharp-set as he lifted the anti-fly gauze over the various dishes; he’d done hard work all day yesterday and as far as he could recall dinner had made lunch out of his helmet look like a banquet. There was a ham, and what they called a mutton-ham here, which was a leg of mutton pickled and cured the same way as ordinary ham and surprisingly good; cold fried chicken; some salads; half a dozen types of bread and rolls. And all the fixings, rather like a very good picnic. Mary constructed herself several large sandwiches and filled a plate with the green salad; she had a passion for those.
To his pleasure there was also a decent potato salad, creamy with well-made mayonnaise and with flecks of peppers and onion, something which he’d had trouble getting on this side of the continent. Few people outside Richland and its neighbors really seemed to understand what could be done with potatoes.
“Delicious,” he said sincerely, when he was back at the table.
There was also a crock of beer; only moderately cold, but quite good, well hopped and nutty. He didn’t like the prospect of wine in this heat even if he was sitting in pleasant shade, or this early in the day for that matter. Mary and the Association nobles sipped very slowly at small glasses of it, between draughts of fruit juices.
“Dang, but this is good!” he said. “You’ve got a good cook!”
“He was chef in a restaurant in Seattle and my husband Lord Amauri found him in a group of refugees,” Lady Roehis said. “Quite able, but given to temperaments. And he drinks, sometimes. His children are just as good and they don’t, not that way.”
Maugis rolled his eyes slightly in an agreement that hinted at crises over the years.
His wife went on: “Aleaume—our eldest son—was complaining about there being no French fries. For the last month, they are all he wants to eat.”
Mary laughed. “My aunt Astrid’s daughters Hinluin and Fimalen are five, and they were like that for a while, only with them it was noodles. Nothing would do but noodles. And nothing on the noodles but butter. I love them but they drove me and my sister crazy while we were living in Stardell Hall.”
“You have to be crazy to be a parent,” Lady Roehis said confidently. “But it’s a rewarding insanity, in its way.”
Everyone chuckled, but Ingolf thought after an instant that it was a rather odd way to talk about it, though it was funny. But strange, as if having kids were a hobby you could choose not to have. As far as he knew it was just something you did, like growing up. Unless you couldn’t, which would be like being born with a clubfoot, a terrible and pitiful calamity.
He searched for something to say, not wanting to leave the whole burden to Mary; he’d left home at nineteen, and at that age you ignored younger kids just as hard as you could, being falsely convinced you were a man now. His life afterwards hadn’t been very domestic. But he did like flowers.
“Ah, these are lovely gardens, Lady Helissent.”
Helissent nodded towards her mother-in-law. “Lady Roehis did those, starting from nothing. This was bare pasture when she arrived in the second Change Year, and thin pasture at that! I wouldn’t have believed it possible until I saw it, and you’re right, it’s lovely. I’m from Barony Skagit originally, myself—my elder brother, Sir Adhémar de Sego, is a knight there, and holds Sego Manor as vassal of House Delby as my father did while he lived. Flowers are easy in Skagit. I was used to things being green naturally.”
“Including the people,” Maugis said with a smile. “Skagit’s on Puget Sound, my lord Vogeler. Where they think it’s a drought if the moss on their north side dies.”
“As opposed to places where the rabbits starve to death if they don’t run between blades of grass,” she said tartly, and they both laughed.
Mary’s hand stole into his beneath the table and squeezed. It’s true, when you’re in love you see it everywhere, he thought.
“My father picked this land when this county was shared out among the conquerors, and his comrades in arms thought he was crazy,” Maugis said. “My lady wife is quite right; there was no settlement here; we have photographs. Nothing for miles but a few farmhouses, and thirty miles north to the nearest rail spur. But he saw the possibilities, and so did my lady mother.”
“We wanted to get as far from Norman Arminger as we could,” his mother said suddenly; she’d been looking a little abstracted. “Somewhere he’d never think of visiting. That was worth living in tents for a year, and dugouts for another, and the castle until this place was ready. Anything was worth getting out from under his eye. Court was a cesspit then. Dreadful man, absolutely dreadful. When I knew him in the Society I thought he was just an asshole, as we said then, but after the Change he blossomed into a monster.”
The other two nobles stiffened in alarm, looking around reflexively. Lady Roehis nibbled on a biscuit and smiled at them, irony and affection mixed.
“He’s dead,” the older woman said. “He’s long dead. Good riddance. And nothing would delight his evil heart more than knowing that fifteen years later he could still frighten people, ones who’d been children when he died. I think I’ll take a nap before we go up to the keep, dear.”
“Ah—” Ingolf said, as she nodded politely and left.
Mary spoke: “Lord Maugis, she’s perfectly right. I say it, and my husband and I are good friends of Princess . . . High Queen Mathilda. And here’s the others.”
Ingolf breathed a well-concealed sigh of relief; at least he thought it was, until he caught Mary’s sideways glance and smile.
“Captain Jaeger,” Maugis said.
Mark was with the other Richlander, but looking a bit shaken, almost certainly from memories of the fight surfacing. That happened after the insulating rage and fear burned out of your blood. It was worse when it happened at night when you were half asleep.
And the captured Boise commander. “And Captain Woburn . . . Rancher Woburn, I believe, too; your father is a Sheriff as well, isn’t he?” Maugis went on. “Please join me and my family for luncheon. As a Montivalan I say, let us put aside the war for a little; as a soldier, I say, welcome, comrade.”
Woburn looked as if he’d been having those night-thoughts too. It was worst of all when you’d lost, and were lying alone blaming yourself for it.
Jaeger filled half his plate with the potato salad and took a tankard of the beer; evidently Richland’s foodways bit deep. The Boisean ate as well, but kept silent; he was limping and had a couple of bandages and his left arm was in a sling, and no doubt he was hurting for his men. Ingolf sympathized, but he had business to do. Fortunately it was all stuff the Boisean already knew, or whi
ch he wouldn’t at all mind the enemy knowing if by some unlikely chance he got loose.
“I’m promoting you to Major, Jaeger.”
That got a blink and a smile, but not a big one; which said that Jaeger’s priorities were good.
Kohler thought he was sound, and Kohler was a good judge of men.
“Pick your own replacement for your command and run the name by me. What’s the state of the regiment?”
Since I’m now going to have to be more hands-on. Dammit, Kohler, I needed you! I’ve got half a dozen jobs to juggle! I only took the Colonel’s post because you needed someone whose father was a Sheriff as a figurehead!
He’d led them to victory more than once, led from the front, and his latest plan had let them give the enemy a lot more of a world of hurt than they received. That had probably kept the men reasonably happy with him, even though he was busier than he liked with other things half the time. It wasn’t that he couldn’t run a light cavalry regiment; he’d done it before, and pretty well. Time, time . . .
Jaeger flicked his eyes aside at Woburn while he chewed hastily; Ingolf nodded very slightly. Let him know how light we got off; can’t hurt, might help.
“Three more of the wounded died overnight, Colonel,” Jaeger said when he’d swallowed.
He had medium-brown hair and was whippet-thin despite the way he was shoveling in the potato salad and mutton-ham and something very like kielbasa, and tomatoes and onions dressed with oil and vinegar and crusty rolls and butter, and eyeing the pastries. He’d eaten that way every time Ingolf saw him have an opportunity, but he wasn’t surprised at the man’s looks. From what older people said now and then, fatties had been common before the Change even among farmworkers, though that was difficult to imagine. You certainly weren’t going to get that way doing what a horse-soldier did these days.
“Richter and Smith died of internal bleeding, the doctor tried, but too much was sliced up. They had to stop transfusing them, there were men who might recover who needed it and only so many donors.”
Ingolf sighed. There were places that could store refrigerated blood for a while, but they were few and far between. Triage was an ugly fact of a fighting-man’s life, but it was a fact. You weren’t doing anyone a favor if you let a man who had some chance to live die just to keep someone who didn’t have a chance going another half hour. There were times when the only favor you could do a comrade was a quick knife-thrust; at least they’d been spared that.
“The third?” he said.
Can’t recall anyone else who looked that bad and it’s too early for infection to show up.
“Sir, Olson got hit on the head hard enough to dent his helmet in, but he was doing fine and then . . . he just started breathing funny and died, real quiet.”
Ingolf nodded. Head wounds were tricky that way; there was no way to see inside a head, of course, and nothing much the doctors could have done if you could see inside. They could pick fragments out of a depressed fracture or trepan for pressure on the brain if you were lucky, but that was about it. He’d been knocked out once and had had blinding headaches at intervals for six months afterwards; sometimes men never did entirely recover from a clout to the skull; and sometimes they just died, like Olson.
Three more dead made ten too many, but fewer than he’d expected. Ten dead altogether and thirty non-walking-wounded of whom only half a dozen would be crippled for life was a light butcher’s bill for an engagement that size, but then winning always made for a lighter payment. The Boiseans had taken five times that. Still, you died just as dead either way.
“The rest seem to be doing well. The doctors here are excellent, that’s what our Doc Jennings says. One of them went to the same school his own teacher did. And uh, Lord Rigobert left some of his medics too, and more medical supplies, so we’ve got enough morphine for the bad cases. He pulled out at dawn, couldn’t have slept more than a couple of hours, that’s one busy man. The Tithe Barn thing we’ve got all the wounded in is as comfortable as you could expect, sir, it was just used for a grain store, pretty clean.”
“I’ll drop in on them again today,” Ingolf said. And it won’t be quite as bad this time. “The rest?”
“Camp’s pitched in the reaped fields about a half mile out of town. Still putting up the tents.”
Which wasn’t urgent; in weather like this it was probably more comfortable to just roll in your blankets than sleep in a stuffy tent. Most men preferred them if they had a choice, though. Probably because they gave an illusion of permanence, of home, in the enforced nomadism of a soldier’s life. They were a shell you could take with you.
“There’s a good well of clean water we can drink straight, plenty of it and a wind-pump, and the distance might, ah . . .”
“Make it harder for bored troopers to come into town and get drunk and cause too many problems,” Ingolf said.
The younger Richlander nodded. “Yessir. And maybe we should provide working parties to our hosts, sweat some of the devilment out of them once they get over the fight and start feeling bored and randy again. Uff da, this officer’s job, it’s like being a nanny, isn’t it, sometimes! I figure that’s why Three Bears put the Sioux even farther out.”
Says the graybeard of twenty-four, Ingolf thought.
“That, and they don’t like being crowded; and he’s scouting out to the north right now. Supplies?”
“Plenty, sir, we don’t have to touch the reserves. Lots of firewood ready cut. Lord Maugis here gave us a bunch of the sheep.”
Maugis shrugged and spread his hands. “Sheep and battles go ill together, and the meat won’t keep in this heat. That was my demesne herd, too.”
The Richlander nodded. “And all the vegetables and fresh bread and fruit we can use, which is making the men happy, and some pretty good beer, I’m having that carefully rationed. We paid, of course.”
“Of course,” Ingolf said gravely.
He and Mary glanced at each other. They had permission to draw on the Crown accounts through Sandra Arminger, but Rudi was still fairly heavy with gold—the friendly new government of Iowa had given them a substantial going-away present to mark the alliance. As it turned out, gold was relatively more valuable here in Montival. Ingolf knew why. There were more ruins in the east, particularly more big ones, and the big ones were where most of the precious metals could be found. You had to have a grasp on the economics of the trade to succeed as a salvager. The difference in purchasing power was about two-to-one for gold, a little less for silver.
But it’s going to run out someday not too far away. Wars are really expensive, and then Rudi’s going to be dependent on his mom-in-law for an allowance. Which will make everyone else unhappy or even get them thinking she’s taking over using him and Matti as a false front, and I’ve noticed other people in this neck of the woods aren’t too fond of the PPA. Or he’s got to get them all to pay him taxes so he can be independent, which will also make them unhappy, and he’ll probably have to borrow a lot from the bankers too. The Destined Prince with the Magic Sword is wonderful, but less wonderful when he asks you to cough up every tenth bushel and piglet and takes out a mortgage on your farm.
Maugis smiled. “Cash is always useful, Esquire,” he said; Jaeger blinked a little at the unfamiliar title. “But note that my bailiff is selling you fresh produce.”
It took a moment for Jaeger to get the implications; Mary snorted a little under her breath, but Ingolf thought the man wasn’t slow, just deliberate.
I’m not selling anything that would be useful in case of a siege, in other words.
The captured Boise officer had been eating with concentrated attention; probably they’d been on thin rations for a while. The enemy army was so big it was straining their logistics just by being all in one place, and they’d also probably looked forward to getting somewhere they could forage from the enemy. Ingolf waited for him to slow down and make a second trip for dark red Shuksan strawberries and cream. He could ease himself by thinking of it as pl
under.
“Have your wounded been treated properly, Captain Woburn?” Ingolf asked, a formal note in his voice.
The man nodded, equally correct as the saying went.
“Yes, Colonel Vogeler. I wouldn’t be here, otherwise. My medical officer survived, he’s been working with yours, and he tells me that they received the same care as your men. I’ve visited them and they’re as comfortable as possible. The rest of us have been well treated and well fed, and the guards are no rougher than necessary.”
He swallowed; he was an unremarkable-looking young man, medium-brown hair and blue eyes, with a rather long bony face and weathered skin, not big or small but hard-looking and very fit, with large hands and wrists. He forced those eyes back to Ingolf.
“Thank you, sir. It’s . . . not exactly what I’d expected.”
“You’re welcome, though technically you’re Lord Maugis’ prisoners.”
“Thank you as well, then . . . my lord,” the Boise officer said.
Maugis nodded gravely. “You are welcome, Rancher Woburn. It’s an obligation of chivalry to care for the defeated.”
That brought an odd look; he wondered what sort of propaganda Boise pumped out about the PPA. Boise went in for propaganda a lot, posters slathered all over the place, he’d seen that traveling through its territory on the way to tell Rudi about the Sword, and then again when they all came back heading east; they’d returned by the northern route, through the Dominions. He doubted General-President Martin Thurston had stopped the practice when he took over from—after killing—his father Lawrence. He’d certainly put out enough lies about his brother Fred being responsible for their father’s death; Fred had been one of the Companions of the Quest, and Rudi intended to see him in charge in Boise when things were settled.
Assuming we win, of course. And “assume”. . .
Boise’s posters never said much that was good about this part of the world, and probably a lot of it was deserved, though not as much these days as in the past. There were still barons who would have been a lot rougher than de Grimmond, though, even with the High King issuing orders.
The Tears of the Sun Page 42