The Given Sacrifice c-7

by S. M. Stirling

  More surprisingly, Eric Larsson was with them at the head of a squad of Bearkiller A-listers in their plain good armor, a big blond man with a steel prosthetic where his left hand had been until a few years ago. The Bearkiller war-leader reined his horse in and looked at the barricade; an arrow shot from behind it sparked on the stone blocks of the road’s pavement not far in front. Knights of the Protector’s guard formed up before the leaders, one line kneeling and the other standing with their shields raised to form a wall of overlapping protection.

  “It’s not a cataphract’s battle,” Eric said at Rudi’s raised eyebrows as he dismounted and his troops followed.

  He turned reins bridle over to his military apprentice, who was also his son William, a tall youth of nearly eighteen with an arresting combination of skin on the cusp between light brown and very dark olive, midnight blue eyes and curling brown hair. Rudi nodded to the young man, who responded with a slight crisp inclination of the head and then stood in silent, focused readiness in the Bearkiller manner. His father went on:

  “Hell, it’s more of a giant brawl, most of our A-listers are fighting dismounted. Good practice in being flexible. The Norrheimers are coming up, I pulled them out of reserve before they mutinied at being left out. Gotta be careful with those Asatruar types. They tend to start baying at the moon if you keep ’em from a fight. Something about the Nine Impulsive Vices or something like that. I just tune Signe out when she gets on about it.”

  Rudi nodded; the words were only slightly in jest. Eric and his son both had crucifixes around their necks-he had become a Catholic when he married his half-Tejano wife Luanne just after the Change-but Signe’s branch of the family followed those Gods.

  “Ah, excellent,” he said. “Bjarni and his band are good at this.”

  “Yeah, he’s hell on wheels in a close-in fight, and no mistake, and so are all his merry band,” Eric said with complete seriousness.

  Then he grinned; it made his face look younger than his forty-four years. When he leaned forward he whispered a little:

  “As my sister could testify, especially about Bjarni.”

  Rudi looked a question and he went on:

  “Signe’s expecting and refuses to say who’s the other party. . to the very few who dare to ask, of which I was one. Only by letter, though. But just between me and thee, I strongly suspect. .”

  Rudi chuckled; he wouldn’t have expected it, but he supposed she was still beneath the Moon. . his own mother had been older when she bore Fiorbhinn. Motherhood had never mellowed Signe before-she was as fierce as a she-wolf with her cubs-but one could hope.

  The crews had been putting the scorpions into operation as they spoke, lifting the trails off the limbers and swiveling them around before splaying them open. Sledgehammers rang as they hammered spikes into the cracks between paving blocks to anchor it-the usual method of digging in the hinged spades at the ends of the trails wouldn’t do for absorbing the recoil here. A clanking tramp sounded behind, and the Norrheimers were there, with their standard at their head.

  That banner had been that of Bjarni’s father, Eric the Strong. The flag had a stiffener jutting out from the top of the pole at right angles, and a curved outer edge bore bullion tassels. The rim of the cloth was black, the center white, and on it a stylized black raven-for the birds Thought and Memory who sat on the shoulders of Odhinn Father of Victories and whispered wisdom in his ears. On the bird’s breast was a double letter A, the outer strokes curved and the inner straight and parallel. The flag commemorated a band of pre-Change warriors Eric had fought with as well as his faith; he had borne it north with his followers and friends into what had once been Maine right after the Change, from which much had followed.

  The redbeard had his four-foot axe over his shoulder; the outer edge had been hastily wiped so that a nick could be ground out and the edge redone, but the rest of it was thickly clotted. His followers came up behind him in a bristle of spears and swords and eyes glaring beneath nose-guarded conical helms, their big round shields making a wall. Their byrnies of chain or scale mail clinked as they moved.

  “Awkward as hogs on ice are these Cutters, when they fight on foot,” the king of Norrheim said cheerfully. “Still, warm work.”

  Rudi held out a hand, and he clasped wrists in the fashion of the folk of that far bleak land, and then both did the same with Eric.

  “This may be our last battle together, blood brother,” Rudi said to Bjarni.

  “Good. We’ve been doing a man’s work, but it’s time for us to go home.”

  He looked admiringly as the Bearkiller crew worked the levers of the hydraulic pump that cocked their weapon and loaded a globe of cast steel into the trough. His shrewd blue eyes took in the barricade. Rudi could guess why he grinned; if there was one thing someone from Norrheim-what had once been northern Maine-was going to recognize at first glance, it was a sack of a certain root vegetable. He called over his shoulder to his followers:

  “They want us to peel their potatoes for them! Then we’ll have meat with the mashed, boiled and fried!”

  A roar of hoarse laughter went up; that was just the sort of jest to tickle a Norrheimer funny bone. Rudi glanced around, nodded crisply, and spoke:

  “Now!”

  Whung-whap!

  The catapults spoke one after another, the wheels coming up a little and then thumping down again. Long bowshot to the west top of the barricade fountained up in a shower of burlap and fragments of root vegetable. . and men. They waited while the throwing-machines worked their way along the parapet, knocking it down into a slumped chaos in a steady rhythm of one shot every four seconds, and then the bowmen trotted forward.

  “Let the gray geese fly!” Edain barked. “Wholly together-shoot!”

  A hundred bows snapped, and the arrows sleeted down. For once, Rudi felt little of the grim urgency of impending battle, only a smoldering anger at the necessity of it.

  I’ve done this too often for too long, he thought. I’m. . not quite bored with it, but nearly. It’s time to finish it. This isn’t the climax of my life, it’s something I have to get out of the way before I get on with my life.

  One thing the bards usually didn’t talk about was the essential sameness of battle; there was more variety to farming. He judged, knocked down his visor, glared through the vision slit at a world like a bright distant painting. .

  “Morrigú!” he shouted, and charged.

  “Ho la, Odhinn!” Bjarni roared.

  “Haro, Portland! Holy Mary for Portland!” Mathilda shrieked, not a step behind.

  “Haakaa päälle!”

  “Artos and Montival!”

  The catapults and the longbowmen kept shooting as long as they could-beside Rudi a knight swore and ducked as a cloth-yard shaft zipped by and clipped the last ostrich plume from the rather ragged assembly on his helmet. The Bearkiller artillerists had all the self-confidence that common wisdom said their folk showed-some called it arrogance-and the last ball thumped home in the tumbled arrow-studded sacks when the front rank of the Montivallans was only thirty yards from their goal.

  It was good to keep the enemy’s heads down; bad to have yours smacked right off your shoulders by a six-pounder ball fired from behind you. That last one left a Boisean white-faced and sweating as it went overhead so fast that it was a mere blurred streak and so close that the wind of its passage made him stagger. Then Frederick Thurston’s men threw their heavy javelins and drew their short swords.

  The surviving Cutters popped up again, but they had time for only one volley of arrows from their powerful horn-backed bows as the Montivallans stormed up the obstacle in a roaring wave of shields and blades. One whistled by Rudi, another went thwack into his shield with a hard sound and a feeling like a blow from a club. The High King sprang up the remains of the barricade, agile as a great hunting tiger in the sixty pounds of steel despite the shifting footing. A shete tried to stop the Sword of the Lady, and the tough spring steel was shorn straight through. The
man beneath spun away clutching at his severed throat. .

  When he fought with his own hands, there was a. . going away, since the Sword came, a madness that was completely lucid. Black wings bore him up, amid a storm of buffetings. More of the guardsmen crowded ahead as the fight tumbled down the inner side of the barricade. Their shields came up to protect the monarchs and Rudi shoved his visor up again as he came back to himself and stood on a sack to give himself a better view. Across the square a snarling scrimmage of fighting at the entrance to an avenue broke apart, and a walking wall of leveled pike-points came through, marching to a hammer of drums and a wordless chant of ha-ba-da, ha-ba-da. .

  A flick of his glance right and left, and only the details were different; the Cutters had been pushed back into the open space at last, where the westerners’ numbers and drill could take effect.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  • • •

  He’d been afraid they’d have to dig the Prophet out of some underground lair, or wall him in and never be completely sure there hadn’t been some path of escape. Instead Sethaz stood at the last step below the platform where scaffolding and scattered blocks of stone told of decades of labor. His shete was in his hand; he was protected by two men with great round shields, but every now and then the steel would flick out and come back red.

  This high up the pyramidal structure the artillery couldn’t be elevated enough to fire, but archers could. Carts were carrying bundles of shafts in a ceaseless stream from the reserves, and sighing clouds of gray-feathered cloth-yard arrows and stubby crossbow bolts went by overhead, sweeping the upper steps, their impact like the sound of hail on tile roofs. The dead were thick despite shields and what armor they had, and blood ran down the granite and made it slippery beneath the foot. The stink of it was thick, iron and copper and salt, the butcher’s smell of battlefields redoubled-this was a huge building, but still more packed and smaller than any open field could be. The noise was stunning, individual voices and even the hammering pulse of the Mackenzie Lambegs lost in an all-consuming white roar.

  The heavy-armed troops of the High King’s Host fought their way upward, shields up against spears and blades stabbing and beating from above-the steps of the structure were around three feet tall, just enough to make the business as difficult as possible, like always fighting against mounted men in the perfect position to strike downward.

  “Ready-now!” Rudi called. “Follow me!”

  Pikes slanted forward from behind, jabbing over their shoulders. He turned a spearhead with his shield-the fourth he’d had that day-and chopped. A young man in red armor blocked desperately with his shield, bringing it awkwardly across to face the left-handed attack; the Sword cut through a section of the bullhide and wicker and into his leg above the knee and through the bone.

  Rudi snarled, “Morrigú!”, crouched and leapt.

  The dark wings of the Crow Goddess indeed seemed to bear him up. He landed, buffeted one man aside with his shield, took off a hand at the wrist and shoved his way into the gap made when that man turned shrieking and sprayed blood into the eyes of his comrades. Blades hammered at him, thudding on his shield and cracking off the smooth steel of his armor.

  “Jesu-Maria,” Ignatius wheezed, somehow beside him.

  An arrow flashed between them and into the face of a spearman, Edain shooting from recklessly close. Matti was back at the base of the Temple, directing operations and feeding in reserves with a wrenched knee-some distant walled-off part of him was glad of it. One more step, and the Cutters would be forced back onto the flat unfinished top, where there was no protection.

  Moving with a unison like one man monarch and monk hacked down the shieldmen protecting the Prophet and went in to kill.

  Sethaz blocked a Bearkiller backsword hacking for his leg, kicked out and sent Eric Larsson tumbling backward with a yell and a dented breastplate, killed a Boisean with a slash that laid his arm open from elbow to wrist, launched a flurry of strikes at Ignatius that sent the warrior Benedictine down on one knee, guarding frantically.

  Rudi lunged. The Sword slid along the Prophet’s shete, the counter cunningly sloped to keep the supernal edge from chopping through mere steel. Sethaz’ other hand snapped out and took him by the throat like a grab made of steel and gears. The metal of his bevoir began to grate and crumple.

  “I. . see. . you. .” he grated, in a voice like the death of stars.

  And the world vanished.

  • • •

  Too big, Rudi thought.

  He was nowhere, and everywhere. It was dark and utterly cold and all that was material had vanished so long ago that even the memory of it was gone, but there was order here, complexity, a structure that vibrated at a level next to which atoms were coarse and chaotic as a lump of horse-dung. There was a beauty that he could not grasp, that left him weak with longing, and thoughts rushed by like huge glowing matrixes of the pure sublime. He could not grasp them, but if he could, even the least of them, he knew he would be utterly transformed, lost and yet fulfilled beyond all reckoning. .

  They vanished, and he was Rudi Mackenzie once again, crying out with grief and loss for an instant.

  Then he gained command of himself; what he had. . not seen, there was nothing for light to reflect off in that place, but somehow apprehended, fled like a dream. It was too big to remember.

  Instead he was in a forest. A real forest, as far as he could tell, though not of trees he was very familiar with; he could see the great trunks rising around him like reddish pillars upholding the sky, smell a green spiciness, hear the trickle of falling water. Light speared down between the needled boughs so far above, and smaller plants reached for it. Birds whistled and chirped, and insects buzzed; a hummingbird circled him in blue iridescence and then departed. He turned and walked along the creek that tumbled over lustrous brown stream-polished stones, conscious that he was no longer wearing the battered, blood-spattered armor or the sweat-stinking arming doublet below; instead he was in kilt and knee-hose and schoon, saffron-dyed linen shirt and plaid pinned over his shoulder.

  The sun was slanting to the westward, and the air grew a little colder. The light was golden-somehow, more real than a nugget of the metal itself, be it polished never so bright. He walked in a dream, but it was more real than the waking world. Suddenly he dropped his hand to the pommel of the Sword of the Lady at his right hip. It was thee, but. .

  It feels. . at home. Without that sense that the world might rip around it. Here, the world itself is like that. More real, more itself. Myself it is that feels fragile and not-quite-real.

  A fire flickered through the gathering dusk. He walked into the circle of its light, his feet soft on the duff and fallen ferns.

  “Ladies,” he said, with a deep bow.

  As once before on Nantucket, there were Three. This time he knew all the faces. The youngest was his sister Fiorbhinn, a maiden of a little more than twelve summers; slender but strong, breasts just beginning to bud beneath her pale gown, white-blond hair torrenting down on her shoulders, and a small harp on her knee. The huge pale blue eyes met his, depths within depths. .

  He took a deep breath and looked at the others; Mathilda, her slightly irregular face beautiful as she looked down at the swaddled form of Órlaith on her knee, and his mother Juniper-but not the hale, graying figure of eight-and-fifty that he knew in this twenty-eighth year of the Change. This woman in tunic and arsaid was Juniper Mackenzie as she might be in the years of her deep age, hair snowy, face deeply lined, a little stooped as she leaned on the carved rowan staff of a High Priestess topped by the silver moon waxing and full and waning. The leaf-green eyes were nearly the same, warm and kind.

  “Are-” he began, then stopped. Maiden, Mother, Crone, he thought. Of course. How otherwise?

  Fiorbhinn laughed. “Of course we are who we seem. All our seemings. And not. Time is different here.”

  “And there are no words for it all,” Rudi said patiently. “I’m no longer angry a
t that. Irritated, perhaps.”

  All three of the Ladies smiled. The youngest spoke again:

  “If we could explain-”

  “You would, yes.” A thought occurred to him. “Was that place. . that place I was. . was that how this really is?”

  His nod took in the forest, and the frosted glory of stars that was showing overhead, brighter and more colorful than any he had ever seen, even in glimpses beneath the black swaying shapes of the treetops.

  His mother spoke. “No. That was the. . heaven, you might say. . the dream of the Powers behind the CUT. Behind many another dream of men. Dreams of order and of knowledge. . in the beginning.”

  He blinked, shocked. Mathilda spoke: “You’ve been told before, that here this is not a war between good and evil.”

  “It most certainly is in the world of common day!” Rudi said, and they all looked at him with fondness clear in their eyes.

  “Yes, it is,” Juniper said. “That is the shadow it throws there, and those in the cave see it upon the wall. And it is true, what they see. But. . let me ask you: which is better, the utterly particular, or the absolutely infinite? Immanence or transcendence?”

  “I’m tired of shadows!” Rudi said. “And-with respect-tired of moving amid forces the which I cannot understand!”

  “You may understand if you will, brother,” Fiorbhinn. . possibly Fiorbhinn said, her voice as her name, truesweet. “That is why you are here, to make that choice.”

  He looked up again, and the stars spoke; if only he could read that vast slow dance it would be everything. Rest that was high adventure, infinite knowledge that was just a beginning, home and a journey without end. .

  Mathilda spoke. “You have done everything you were born to do, my beloved,” she said. “Thus is the will of God fulfilled.”

  “You have sung a good song,” Fiorbhinn added. “One that echoes even here.”

  “You have earned homecoming, if you choose it,” his mother said, and there were tears in her eyes. “Homecoming beyond all sorrow, beyond all loss.”