Then: “By Earth! By Sky!”
“I am the land’s, and the land is mine,” she said. “Its flesh has fed me, and I am its body; its water has given me life, and flows in my veins. As guardian to all its kindreds I shall be, and to that I pledge myself and the line of my blood so long as it shall last; until the seas rise and drown us, or the sky falls and crushes us; or the world’s end.”
A moment of singing silence.
“So mote it be,” a voice replied, softly, from everywhere about her and nowhere.
Da is here. He’s . . . everywhere in Montival, I think.
She could feel that now, like a shadow of a smile, like a hand on her shoulder, a warmth. . . .
Thinking that made her conscious of the cold. It had been a cool day before; now it was unambiguously cold. Órlaith looked down at herself. She’d been in kilt and plaid, and now she was in an unfamiliar outfit, stout laced boots, trousers, a padded jacket and gloves. Her hair was covered by a cap that had earflaps. It was all the sort of gear a hunter might wear, but nothing specific . . . and when she brought the jacket sleeve up the little details were off. The sewing thread used on the seams wasn’t linen or even the rare imported luxury of long-staple cotton, and the stitching was very fine and even. The buttons were plastic—nothing unusual, that was a staple of the salvage trade, and they lasted very well in a dark place. But . . .
She put the strangeness out of her mind; her parents had told her stranger things than this about their own time at the Kingmaking, though mostly as hints or words spoken without thought in conversations about something else. She looked around. Snow stood on the boughs of the tall conifers that crowded to the rim of the lake, thick and clinging as a froth of whipped cream on the dark green and brown. The water was a purpling blue as the sun sank, and in the distance bands of crimson lay against the western sky. The same color flecked the clouds scattered in mare’s-tails above and painted the cone of Mount Hood, and the image of mountain and clouds repeated itself in the mirror of the water, broken only for a moment when a trout leapt with a tiny audible splash, and reforming as the ripples died. There were shapes moving in the clouds, like the patterns in the Sword’s blade. A loon cried somewhere, its haunted call echoing through the quiet.
I’m out of my time. This is Lost Lake, but . . . and yes, you can still see something of the cabins that were here before the Change. It was just some bushes and mounds you had to look to see when I walked down, but now it’s more recent. When . . . Da and Mother came here in winter, yes—but it wasn’t winter when I talked with him, him as he was then. Does when mean anything at all here, anymore? Anymore . . . but that’s time . . . my head hurts. When this place became the Heart of Montival, did it change all the ways it ever had been?
The cabins weren’t intact, though, either. They’d burned sometime after the old world fell. Rain and snow, insects and clinging roots had returned ash to the soil, and reduced metal to rust and glass to fragments. Mounds of berry-bushes covered foundations and were well begun in the long toil of grinding them back into the earth, the canes standing in tangles through the knee-deep snow.
Órlaith shivered. She heard voices, and stepped behind a thicket of red cedar on the path. Two people came by on skis, and she recognized both of them.
Her mother and father dropped their packs, planted their skis upright, then walked to the water’s edge hand in hand, looking about.
“As sure as the beat of my own heart that you should be here, anamchara mine,” he said to her. “And that this is the rightful place.”
Órlaith flushed, and turned and walked quietly upward.
I was there, she thought. I was there right then. In a way I saw myself, for Mother was bearing me. But I mustn’t say anything or show myself because I didn’t the first time . . . thinking about this makes my head hurt. . . .
The knowledge was strange enough to make her feel as if the earth was wobbling beneath her feet. These were not the woods she knew . . . and then they weren’t woods at all, but a city park at night with a road through it. It was even one she recognized; in the center where the roadway parted stood the Elk, a statue of a noble animal on a pedestal . . . in the center of Portland, the Association capital where she’d spent years of her life. It was very dark, the gaslights weren’t turned on. . . .
No, she thought with an eerie certainty. They haven’t been built yet; that happened just before my grandfather Norman Arminger was killed in the Protector’s War—all of Portland was a vast building project then, streets ripped up and buildings torn down and things remade. This is after the Change, but not long after. Yes, those are autos in the streets, not salvaged yet, just pushed aside from where they stopped when the Change struck.
Somewhere distant a fire was burning, enough to outline the bronze antlers against the sky, despite the clouds that were just starting to let a little wet snow filter down. Órlaith set herself near a tree and let her senses fan out the way a hunter learned, letting her thoughts drift so that there was no filter between her and what eyes, ears, nose, skin, the very taste of the chill wet air told her. There was an odd heaviness to the overall feel of things, as if the world around her was a thing of gears and wires rather than a living being. . . .
Maybe this is more the way the world felt before the Change. It’s so close in time that what started on that day hasn’t gone so far yet. That door is open a crack, and swinging wider, but slowly, as Earth turns and swings about the sun. . . .
Voices in the distance, a scream, a shout, the clump of feet, the unmistakable hollow clop of shod hooves on pavement.
This is the start of the Association. The part nobody likes to talk about much with anyone who wasn’t there, the years where the oldsters stop and change the subject when you come into the room, though in other parts of the realm they’re not so shy about it. Am I in danger? Could I be in danger, before I’m born? I think . . . I think I had better act as if I was? Mother said she was in a bit of a fight, when she traveled to odd places after the Kingmaking, and Da said he had spears pointed at him.
She wasn’t armed, except for a knife on her belt below the coat; she drew it for a moment and looked at it quickly, and found it was a good sturdy single-edged weapon-tool. About nine inches long, excellent steel and Parkerized gray except for the honed edge of the blade, with a clip point but no guard, and the fillets of the hilt were some odd rubbery pre-Change synthetic. And there was a cosh in her pocket, a flattened sausage of soft leather filled with something heavy, probably fine lead shot.
Her exploring fingers found something else pinned to the inside of her jacket, about a handspan below the neck. She opened the garment—struggling for a moment with the unfamiliar zipper fastening—and peered at it. Fingering the surface gave her more information in the murk, and memory did more because the image was quite familiar. It was a Saint’s token—a figure of Mary as the blue-mantled Queen of Heaven, standing on a very glum-looking droop-eared Dragon of Sin. It was also the personal blazon of Lady Sandra Arminger, assumed when her husband proclaimed himself Lord Protector of the Portland Protective Association . . . and hanged the former mayor and Chief of Police outside his headquarters.
And a mark of her sense of humor; she stayed a private atheist as long as she could, long past this date, and she accumulated a fair catalogue of sins. Certainly all the ones the Christians call the Seven Deadly Sins . . . except maybe lust and gluttony . . . no, she was a glutton for her art collection, that’s true . . .
As her eyes adjusted to the blackness she saw more differences from the city she’d known all her life. The skyline—she could see that more plainly than closer things because the distant fire backlit the outline—was different. Buildings above about ten stories weren’t practical in the modern world, not for everyday use, and by the time she had memories that included such things almost all the ones within the circuit of the city walls had been torn down to that height. Or ofte
n demolished to ground level because they were impossibly stuffy and hard to light and heat properly and it was easier to build anew in brick or half-timbering or cement-stabilized rammed earth. A lot of the steel for Castle Todenangst had come from here, and even more had gone into the massive concrete of the city walls built along the line of the old Highway 405. . . .
Which won’t be started until . . . this coming spring, I think. They may already be digging the foundations for Todenangst.
She shivered, and not just because of the cold. Even if it couldn’t harm her, this was a bad place to be. It wasn’t the worst place in the world in the era of the Change, far from it; the year was full of horrors like a blade across history’s neck, the time when nine in ten of human kind had perished. That shadow had lain across the world all her life, only gradually growing lighter. But bad enough.
I wish I’d been walked into Dun Juniper. They were hungry and frightened there, but they had laughter and song too.
The city stank, and not in the usual way she was used to and that was one reason she preferred the countryside. As far as a city could be clean, Portland was a clean place in her day. It was well-policed by its Council of Guilds and Mayor and her mother’s administrators, and had an excellent gravity-flow water and sewer system and many public baths and laundries that anyone could use. Enough that even the poorest could afford to wash themselves and their clothes once a week.
From her earliest visits she remembered aromas of stale horse-piss—the dung was carefully swept up and sent out by barge or rail for fertilizer—of woodsmoke trapped within the circuit of the walls, sweat from people and the wool and linen of their clothing. And while things like foundries and tanneries and soap-boiling shops had to stay outside the wall, the various trades added their tang—the divine savor of baking bread and pastries, the frying and spices of food-carts and restaurants and inns and homes, the scent of wood shavings and tanned leather from carpenters and harness-makers and cobblers, the scorched metal and burnt hoof from a farrier’s shop shoeing horses, to the exotic oils and sweet scents of a parfumerie or the massed blossoms of a flower-seller who catered to the rich merchants and visiting nobles.
This smell was from the smoke of things not meant to burn, and the faint but unmistakable odor of death.
The clop of hooves came louder, and a clearer stink she recognized—old rot. She faded backward, into the parkland on the south side of the roadway, and went to one knee. The park was well-kept, or at least not a jungle of weeds, which surprised her until she stepped into a dried horse-apple, and realized it had probably been intensively grazed all summer.
She did remember her grandmother Sandra talking about the program she’d run for her husband, with agents and troops sweeping the lower Columbia Valley for horses and preserving and training and breeding them in guarded locations . . . and how difficult it had been to train people to ride, which was an odd thought when you came to it, since one of her first memories was her mother lifting her onto a pony. Apparently mounted combat had had to be reinvented from scratch, with only hints in books to go on.
People talk about Norman Arminger as the founder of the Association, but Sandra did as much of the work, behind the scenes, and more than half the thinking. Now, is that a good thing to say of her, or a bad one? I liked her . . . but the first I remember of her was as an old lady playing with her granddaughter or her cats. She’d . . . mellowed, but even then you got glimpses. . . .
Torchlight came down the road, heading eastward towards the river—towards the city’s river-wall, in her day. Most of the docks and warehouses and dosshouses and shipyards for the riverboats and barges and deep-sea windjammers were on the eastern bank, since the great bridges made access easy and their landing-points could be covered by forts built into the wall itself.
The torches were on poles carried by raggedly-dressed men with wild hair and beards, their faces thin and with expressions that would have been terrified if they weren’t too exhausted and too cold and nagged by dragging hunger. She knew her grandparents had seized trainloads and shiploads and elevators-full of wheat all up and down the river from here to the Snake in the immediate aftermath of the Change; it had been one of the first foundations of their power in a world of famine. They’d been quite sparing in handing out the bowls of gruel, though.
Behind them came the man on horseback, riding a good bay that would have done for a courser; he was in a rider’s divided hauberk of good riveted mail that came down to his polished boots; his saddle was a rancher’s type, though, not a knight’s more massive affair. He had a conical helm with a noseguard and a leather flap at the rear covered in small plates on his head, and a broad-bladed sword and dagger at his waist. The teardrop shield on his left arm was similar enough to the modern type, and had the Lidless Eye emblazoned on it quartered with his own arms: Argent, a fess Gules, in chief two greyhounds courant proper.
It would have been outdated backwoods equipment for a heavy cavalryman in her day, but it was wealth here and now, and a badge of skills rare and deadly and valuable. So was the easy way he sat his horse, and the fact that he was merely cold and uncomfortable, not on the edge of starving.
Behind him came a long trail of light carts of half a dozen types, some what the ancient world had called trailers, others blazoned with odd slogans—what did “U-Haul” mean?—and all alike laden with corpses, illuminated by more torches on poles fastened to the carts. The bodies were long dead, some skeletons held together by scraps, some half-mummified. Órlaith’s lips tightened. The motive power wasn’t the precious horses, but gangs of thin dull-faced human beings.
She’d seen death often enough—walked over the battlefield in Pearl Harbor, and that had been worse than this. So had some parts of South Westria been, what had been Los Angeles in the ancient world, because the desert heat preserved bodies for a long time. She’d seen the fringes of the roads where they’d fled death when the water stopped coming out of their taps, fled it and met it in millionfold profusion.
But this was bad, not least because she disliked disrespect to the bodies of the dead. She’d punished a few cases of mutilation herself. Yes, the spirit had departed for self-judgment before the Guardians of the Western Gate, and the vessel would return to Earth the Mother who had furnished it from Her bounty, but even when you were rushed a certain degree of reverence was . . .
A sign of good character, she thought. But then, there’s abundant evidence here of bad character, isn’t there? Though perhaps I should be less ready to sit in judgment. I was born to those born after the Change, and it’s no accident that so many who lived through it are still slightly mad . . . the very mad ones didn’t survive long enough to be old, and usually not long enough to breed.
A line of armed men bearing spears made from poles and hastily ground-down knives of various sorts and bows and crossbows that she recognized as pre-Change hunting models flanked the train of carts, occasionally encouraging the men . . . mostly men . . . pulling them with a prod from the point or a blow from lengths of rubber hose filled with something granular and heavy, probably lead shot or wet sand. They made a heavy smack sound across a laborer’s shoulders.
Rubber’s not an expensive rarity here. It’s still common as dirt.
They were wearing crude makeshift armor, too; helmets in the old style of the American army, like abbreviated sallets, and body-protection of cloth or leather jackets sewn with metal washers or scales or in a few cases of chunky sections cut from steel-belted radial tires. One of them walked beside the mounted man-at-arms; he wore better gear than average, scale-mail, and had a falchion . . .
No, they called it a machete, didn’t they?
. . . at his belt, rather than just a knife.
The man on horseback’s a knight, she thought.
He had the golden spurs and there were gold bosses on his sword-belt . . . probably added recently. Gold had been cheap this year, while food was t
reasure beyond price.
“Do we have to keep on at this so late, Sir Amauri?” the spearman said, scratching at a blond beard not quite as tangled as the laborers’. “It’s cold and dark and I’m hungry. Uh, sorry, my lord de Grimmond, forgot about the promotion to baron and all that.”
“No problem. This is the last load today.”
The knight grinned; his features weren’t obvious under the nasal, but Órlaith thought he was pale-skinned, hawk-nosed and had a neat black Van Dyke. From things she remembered he probably also had the old Norman style of haircut, shaven at the back to just before the line of the ears, rather than the bowl cut more common among Associates in modern times.
“And would you rather do this in warm weather, Bardol? Rot and bugs breed disease, we all saw that this summer . . . that’s what these Halloween decorations back there died of, mostly: black plague, and typhus. Let’s dump the stiffs and the Willamette crappies and bullheads can clean things up for us, and I hear the long-term plan is to plant trees on the suburbs once we’ve cleaned them up and salvaged what we can. Next year we’ll be busy getting in the volunteer crop and doing some serious planting and starting the manors and more castles.”
“I didn’t join up to be a farmer, my lord. Standing guard on all the farmers and such we rounded up hasn’t changed my mind, either. Or marching all the way to Walla Walla to fight those cons from the Big House, and then back.”
“Neither did I,” the knight said. “Even in the Society, I wasn’t one of those people who got off on making things.”
He slapped the sword. “But getting things working the way we want . . . that’s going to be a lot of work too. And another epidemic is just what we don’t need. I heard Lady Sandra say so herself.”
The spearman shuddered ostentatiously at her name, and the knight crossed himself—intending it as a joke, but being more sincere than he intended—and the caravan moved on amid its cold oily stink, and the panting grunts of the men drawing the death-carts.
The Sky-Blue Wolves Page 23