The Sky-Blue Wolves

by S. M. Stirling

  “That’s a matter of perspective, Juniper. But it’s a fact that we need to keep the houppelandes and coats-of-arms in the background as much as we can.”

  She steepled her fingers and rested her chin on the tips. “I’m reasonably popular but I’m also Norman Arminger’s daughter and I’m an Associate. And now you’re back, John, with a bride, and you’re very much an Associate . . . and young and newly married with an heir on the way.”

  “I don’t. . . . Wait a minute. Mother, that’s why you had me come here to Todenangst, rather than the capital, isn’t it? To avoid reminding people that I might, God forbid it, become High King if Órlaith falls without an heir?”

  “See, you can think when you try, boy. If you became High King you might reign for forty or fifty years and pass the throne on to children and grandchildren who were Catholics and Associates too.”

  “Mother, if there’s one thing I want less than being Lord Protector of the PPA, it’s being High King of Montival!”

  “Yes, and I believe you. If only because you’re lazy and you know how much work it is.”

  John made a gargling sound and she smiled and patted him on the shoulder before going on, all seriousness once more:

  “Too many won’t believe it. Too much of the realm remembers the old wars, and we can’t afford to make it look as if the Association has won by birth now what it couldn’t take by sword and lance then. I pray for Órlaith’s life every day as a mother, but also as a monarch. I don’t know if the High Kingdom could stand an Associate monarch by right of birth.”

  “Ah,” d’Ath said. “You always were better at the politics, Mattie. And with a war on, the Association will bulk larger anyway, our nobility are fighters, when they’re not drinking and hunting and fornicating. And I’m an Associate too, and in wartime the Grand Marshal actually gives people orders a lot; it’s a nice quiet behind-the-scenes planning job in peacetime.”

  Mathilda sighed. “I only wish . . . God and His Mother and Saint Michael protect her, but we have to think of the Kingdom . . . if only Órlaith could leave an heir of her body coming before she went back to war. . . .”

  D’Ath raised a brow. “Your Majesty, it just doesn’t work that way. The foam-born Cyprian knows I’ve tried. . . .”

  “Tiph!” Lady Delia said indignantly in a half-screech, before dissolving into giggles.

  Even Mathilda laughed this time, though a little reluctantly; only Ignatius cleared his throat and looked away.

  “Yes, this is wisdom,” he said then.

  He rose for a moment and bowed deeply.

  “My most profound respect, Your Majesty. Yes, this is a good plan and best for the Kingdom. As Lady Juniper said, it is a joy to a teacher to see a pupil excel.”

  Mathilda’s smile was fond, but with an underlying hardness.

  “Father Ignatius, I had my mother to teach me politics as well; I learned much from you, but I think of you as the one who trained my conscience as much as my wits. Take credit, if you will, for making me someone who doesn’t convince themselves that keeping power in their own hands is always their duty.”

  He smiled. “And that tempts me to the sin of pride as well, my daughter. Though if I know the Crown Princess, she won’t like your inspiration a bit.”

  Mathilda nodded decisively, and spoke to her secretary: “Lady Bricet, draft a report for the Crown Princess incorporating our information from Prince John and his companions, and summoning her home for . . . call it consultation. I’ll read and annotate your first draft tonight.”

  “And we can tell her she needs to get a grip on the second wave troops,” d’Ath said. “That’ll actually be useful, because it’s true and she’ll know it.”

  Mathilda signed agreement with the comment:

  “Be polite, Bricet, but make it plain I will brook no disobedience . . . and yes, another to Empress Reiko, inviting her to consult too. Lady d’Ath, have your office draft a report for forwarding to the Crown Princess with the same dispatches, outlining your plans for further mobilization—emphasize that Órlaith’s needed for that, too. My Lord Chancellor, I’ll want one from your office as well for Órlaith’s eyes, outlining the costs of what we’re doing. And the three of us will consult the next few days over the necessary moves with the Congress of Realms and then fill her in on the politics.”

  She was silent for a moment, then went on thoughtfully: “We can use this to push as many as possible of the Realms on the King in Yellow matter too. Make it plain that it’s not a matter of banning a book because we Catholics find it blasphemous, but that it’s an active threat to human life and the Realm in wartime.”

  Juniper sighed. “I’ll add my voice to that. Reluctantly.”

  “Wooosh,” Pip murmured under her breath.

  John cocked an eye at her. Told you, it seemed to say; but she didn’t know if he saw quite how formidable his mother was. He didn’t have her perspective. . . .

  The High Queen’s brown eyes turned on her. “And Pip, I’m giving you into Lady Delia’s hands. She’s been my Mistress of Ceremonies for . . . great God, Delia, is it a quarter century now?”

  “And a bit, Mattie.”

  “Well, Pip, she is Mistress of Ceremonies, and this right here is a very ceremonial part of the world. And Delia’s one of our arbiters of fashion.”

  “Not so much anymore, Mattie. That’s a younger woman’s position and I’m a matron now, not a reigning beauty.”

  “But you’ve still got your finger on the pulse of it. Also she’s the mother of four, all of whom turned out very well, and you’re going to need someone to fill in for your mother about that and I’m going to be too busy . . . I understand your own mother has passed on?”

  “Yes . . . Mattie.”

  There was no need to add that Lady Julianne Balwyn-Abercrombie had had about as much maternal instinct as a hungry dingo, or possibly a salt-water crocodile, which was part of the explanation of why she hadn’t married until late in life and why Pip was that rare modern phenomenon, an only child. They’d gotten on splendidly, but only after Pip was able to walk, talk and control her own bodily functions. Until then she’d been in the hands of servants.

  “Lady Delia will be very useful to you in that respect too, then . . . and there’s nobody in the realm better informed on the decisions you’ll have to make in establishing your own Household, now that John’s not a bachelor anymore . . . and of course we’ll need an affirmation ceremony to placate all those people who have their noses out of joint they didn’t get to attend the wedding of the generation.”

  John smiled with relief. “I’m glad you’re not worried about their rage at not having their prize heifers . . . pardon me, their beloved daughters . . . married off to the prize bull . . . pardon me, me.”

  Everyone laughed at that except d’Ath; even Ignatius chuckled.

  The Chancellor spoke: “Call it an equality of dissatisfaction, Your Highness.”

  “Just so,” Mathilda added. “None of them get the prize, but none of them are enraged to see a rival get it either; that was giving me nightmares. And as a matter of principle, I’m not eager to encourage arranged marriages. And her personal qualities aside—I trust you on that, John, and frankly you’re the one who has to live with her, and vice versa—Pip’s perfect for the future Lord Protector’s consort. Catholic, granddaughter of a sovereign with another as a patron, excellent blood on her mother’s side too, that even gives us a link with the King-Emperors in Greater Britain, young, healthy, intelligent . . .”

  “Mooooooo,” Pip said, imitating a heifer.

  She kept her own expression deadpan, but this time even d’Ath laughed. When it had died down, Mathilda finished briskly:

  “Órlaith belongs to the whole High Kingdom, but Pip’s going to be the Lord Protector’s lady eventually, and it’s the Association you need to know first, from the ground up. Delia is pe
rfect for that.”

  “I’ll be glad of the advice, Mathilda,” Pip said, very carefully. “And I’m looking forward to working with you, Lady Delia.”

  Delia and the High Queen both looked at her with knowing smiles.

  “Meaning you’ll listen to advice, which is worth its weight in gold, and then make your own decisions,” Delia said in a pleased tone. “Good for you, my girl!”

  * * *

  • • •

  “Your mother’s quite something,” Pip said thoughtfully as she combed out her hair.

  They’d both switched into lounging robes of thin fine wool, green for her and dark blue for him. The heating system kept the place at the locally comfortable sixty degrees or a little more, and there was a psychologically cheering fire crackling in the hearth. The bedroom rug did its best to imitate an Impressionist version of a flowering meadow in spring over pretty but chilly tile, and the walls were mostly oak paneling, which helped to make you forget you were in a piece of monolithic cast concrete.

  John had been a bit startled when they were shown to a suite that was not the one he’d used as the . . .

  Bachelor Pad of the Dreamboat, and probably Tomcat, Troubadour Prince, Pip thought with a slight smile.

  More of Mathilda’s tact, or possibly Lady Delia’s. I think I’m going to like her, and she’ll certainly be very, very useful. And do not be in the least fooled by Delia’s bouncy-beauty-fashionista thing. It may have had some truth when she was eighteen and setting her cap for the dashing young knight. Now there’s a very experienced mind there and this is her environment, not yours.

  John’s valet-cum-bodyguard Messer Evrouin had come on ahead posthaste from Astoria and had been on hand to help him out of his court dress, assure him that his gear had been moved up here, set out the nibbles and drinkables, and discreetly fade out. Somehow a set of clothes in her size had mysteriously appeared as well, complete with riding and hunting outfits that for some reason closely resembled what (male) samurai wore: short kimono and broad hakama trousers like a divided skirt.

  “Darling?” John asked as she chuckled.

  “It’s . . . just that I’m having trouble convincing the underneath-part of my mind that I’m not traveling anymore. I’ve arrived. Time to mentally unpack.”

  For a while, at least. But I’ll be popping out the heir long before Johnnie goes off to war . . . from the way they were talking about bringing Órlaith home and waiting until after the next harvest is here, roughly September . . . and we’ll see if I have more maternal instinct than Mummy did. I doubt it, somehow.

  This suite was obviously designed for a couple, with changing rooms flanking the bedroom with its four-poster, a bath arrangement of which she thoroughly approved—large sunken marble tubs were a Balwyn weakness, and the shower setup with its multiple nozzles and sliding walls of cast glass etched in designs of waterfowl and reeds had definite possibilities. There were sitting and reception rooms and two generously sized study-libraries, and a balcony the size of a small room itself, made of cast aluminum terminating in eagles with interlinked wings, which would be very pleasant when it wasn’t cold and, as now, pitch-black outside except for the lights of the castle-town and the fainter glow of nearby villages.

  Just the place for an alfresco tea or whatever.

  Speaking tubes and bellpulls would fetch anything you wanted.

  It’s a bit like a luxury hotel. Possibly because a lot of the features were looted from luxury hotels and spas, she thought.

  Of course, Todenangst had been built before modern crafts were up to the job and salvage was cheap here, because several of the large pre-Change cities like Seattle and Vancouver and Eugene were actually under government control and could be outright and systematically mined, rather than be the target of hit-and-run raids from a distance by small bands of adventurers, the way it was back in Oz.

  Then she looked at the walls; there were a couple of actual pre-Raphaelite paintings including The Prioress’ Tale and Veronica Veronese, which John had said he’d gotten for his sixteenth birthday because it was about musical composition; the rich greens and velvety textures were incomparably different from even the best pre-Change photograph.

  And a clunky-looking chair on a pedestal in a corner incredibly enough was a genuine William Morris, with his panel The Arming of a Knight on the seat-back; nobody would be putting their bum on that ancient English oak anytime soon. And not just because it looked magnificently uncomfortable in that wonderfully arrogant damn-your-eyes Victorian British way that expected you to sacrifice your buttocks gladly in the cause of Art with no insolent back talk to your betters.

  Make that like living in a luxury hotel crossed with a museum.

  “Unpack and start acting as if this was home? I know what you mean,” he said. “Though we were always traveling when I was younger—as my father liked to say, if your government’s going to culminate in a person, people have to get to see him sometimes. Saint Christopher, but we got dragged everywhere! In tents, a lot of the time, and to places where they’d lost the habit of washing.”

  “You won’t have to tour that much?”

  “No, thank God. And here in the Protectorate, we have the City palace in Portland, and manors and hunting lodges. And sometimes Mother keeps over-mighty nobles under control by visiting them.”

  Pip raised a brow. “That works how?”

  “Expense. It’s an honor to get a Royal visitation—no matter how much of the Court follows along and how ruinous it is to put on the fiestas and feasts and tiger-hunts and tournaments and whatnot. None of them can resist trying to out-splendorific their rivals; and then Mother sends in accountants to make sure they don’t try to up the squeeze on their vassals.”

  Pip laughed. “That’s . . . diabolical!” she said. “I like your mother.”

  “I think she likes you.” He said more seriously: “I’d have defied her if she didn’t, Pip. But frankly I’m glad I don’t have to live up to that resolution after all.”

  Pip laid down the hairbrush and smiled, looking at him out of the corners of her eyes.

  “And now that we’re not traveling in cramped, uncomfortable, no-privacy ships anymore . . . is this the honeymoon?”

  John rose and made a sweeping bow that ended with him sweeping the robe off and tossing it aside.

  “My lady . . . shall we essay the experiment?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PEARL HARBOR

  AUPUNI O HAWAIʻI

  (KINGDOM OF HAWAIʻI)

  DECEMBER 4TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD

  Susan Mika and her companions waved and kept their bows conspicuously cased as they rode up to the Lakota warband, conscious that they’d been observed for minutes and that several dozen had arrows on the strings of their bows, though nobody was actually pointing one at them or drawing. They kept their horses to a trot because of the footing; creepers and grass and the general vivid green of the vegetation here covered a multitude of sins once you were off the beach, not least holes left by two generations of abandoned ancient houses falling down or burning down and being torn to bits by the rampant tropical vegetation or salvagers or both.

  The speed also helped them look nonthreatening. Montival’s endlessly varied local customs and dress and ways of life had produced a wide variety of military skills for this army. But it also meant that a lot of the participants looked like weird foreigners to one another, particularly to the jumpy, disoriented and overwhelming majority for whom this was their first trip away from home and their first battle.

  Apart from being short—a grandmother had called her vertically challenged, which she supposed was an oldster’s joke—Susan personally looked the way Lakota were traditionally supposed to look, and which not all did. That despite the fact that one of her grandmothers had been called Fox Woman for the color of her hair, and a grandfather had been an exchange
student named Ulagan Chinua, which was Mongol for Red Wolf, studying range management at SDSU before the Change. Individuals had moved around a lot in those years as the needs of survival dictated, and paired with the people to hand.

  She didn’t dress in the full Lakota regalia most of the time, though she did braid her hair and wear a couple of feathers she felt entitled to for her deeds. And she felt a little ambiguous about finally talking with the Lakota contingent of the Montivallan expeditionary force, which was another reason why she had kept her horse to a fast rocking trot getting here, not the flat-out gallop she would have used normally.

  On the one hand she was proud of her folk, their power and famous deeds. And that the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the Seven Council Fires, were the lords of the makol, the high plains and the Black Hills that marked the easternmost march of the High Kingdom. There were times when she missed the prairies bitterly, when things like the memory of the buffalo hunt and the Sun Dance festivals made her want to cry, and even the frigid stinging blizzards of winter could bring a sigh. And it would be nice to hang out with people who spoke her own language, literally and metaphorically. Though their everyday tongue was their own version of English, they remembered the other too, especially the prominent families like hers, and everyone learned it or at least took some lessons along with reading and writing and math and so forth in the schools that accompanied their herding camps.

  And dropping in might mean a chance to score some buffalo-hump jerky. Oh, that taste of home, just like Mom used to make!

  On the other hand, there was the little matter of why she’d left home, with a fair number of people wanting her dead. Which led into why her uncle had used his influence with the High King to get her a post in the Crown Courier Corps that put her under the protection of the Crown of Montival everywhere she went, and why she didn’t ever intend to go back unless it was briefly and on official business.