Diomede staggered three steps. He recovered quickly and cut backhand at her visor, but the shield had come up over her head in time to catch it with a hollow thud. His own was too far out to bring the tail back in time to stop a blurring-fast thrust into the mail grommet at the back of his right knee, and he went down on it in turn . . .
. . . but with a snarling grunt of pain, and when he rose he tested the limb in a gingerly fashion before ruefully bringing his sword up in salute. The referee raised his baton and then slanted it towards Diomede’s sister.
“Lady Heuradys d’Ath is victor of this bout. The match is in her favor, three to two. Sir Diomede d’Ath concedes.”
The pair of them handed shield and practice swords to Diomede’s squires. He had two, currently; one a brown young man from County Molalla in his late teens and nearly due for the accolade and hoping for a battlefield knighting in this war, and the other a blond fourteen-year-old newly graduated from page status, gangling and with hands and feet that promised inches in the future and made her a little puppy-awkward now.
She was blushingly excited to handle the arms of the head of the High Queen’s riding household, the more so when Heuradys gave her an absent word of thanks as she helped her unarm and reverently put her armor in the padded wraps and stored them in a stout leather bag and ran off with it towards her quarters.
They were all close enough that Órlaith could follow their conversation as they donned long fleece-lined wool coats, buttoned them to their throats, swung chaperon hats on their heads and buckled on their sword-belts.
“I have got to stop trying an overrun with you!” Diomede said.
His eyes were bright-blue in a flushed face; even with the cold it was streaming. They both mopped theirs on the towel the senior squire handed them.
“How many times have I fallen for that?” he added ruefully.
Heuradys laughed. “Dear brother, how many years have I heard you making the same promise to yourself? It works with other people or you wouldn’t have developed the habit. Besides which, you knock me off my horse as often as not when we joust. You’re at least as good as I am with a lance.”
“With swords it’s as bad as fighting Mother was when I was a new squire,” he grumbled. “You are as fast as she ever was . . . faster than she was then. Well, duty calls. Good to cross blades with you again, sis.”
They embraced, and then Diomede came to attention, thumped his fist to his chest and bowed to Órlaith and Prince John, and walked away with an abstracted frown. Several military functionaries were waiting for him, some of them eagerly holding document-boxes.
“Thank God for that man,” John said fervently. “I’d never have a moment off if he weren’t my chief of staff.”
“You wouldn’t need so many moments off if you weren’t still working on that epic,” Pip said.
“Chanson de geste, my sweet,” John corrected. “Song of Great Deeds. The content is epic, I grant you. I just squeeze in a few minutes here and there as a change from paperwork.”
“Your paperwork is epic and I do most of it,” she said.
Then he groaned slightly as he stood erect to let two headquarters pages take his armor off.
Your own fault, Johnnie, she thought. In weather like this you’re going to get stiff if you don’t disarm right away.
“You’re deft, Herulin,” he said gently to one. “But no palms on the plates—fingertips only.”
The boy flushed and hastily polished the tasset with the sleeve of his coat to remove the offending smudge. Órlaith’s brother and sister-in-law bowed to Reiko and then a little deeper to her, the type with a knee bend in it that was a symbol of kneeling, and exchanged the kiss of greeting—letting someone kiss you on both cheeks was an acknowledgment of their high rank even if it wasn’t equal to yours, and Pip was handling the Association courtesies faultlessly now, albeit Órlaith thought she was still rolling her eyes in the privacy of her mind.
Which I don’t mind in the least because I do that myself.
John’s voice dropped a little. “Deor and the others are back,” he said to her.
“Good,” she replied.
The Archers snapped to attention as she and her companions walked towards the pavilion; it wasn’t one of the days on which member-realm contingents shared the guard duty for honor’s sake. Two of the kilted troopers drew the leaf of the tent back; there was a small antechamber, and then it was blessedly warmer inside the inner portal, because the gear included several light-metal portable stoves. Those were also useful for keeping food and drink warm, and the smell of supper filled the air pleasurably. An orderly had brought a bucket and basket of the evening’s offering up from the nearest communal cookfire.
Also inside were Deor Godulfson, his lover Ruan Chu Mackenzie, Thora Garwood, Susan Mika and the Dúnedain pair, in the underlayers of field scouting gear for this frigid time and place, and all looking a bit worn. Folding chairs stood around an equally portable table, and they sat and handed things around with the informality of field service; she thought Egawa Noboru was a little put-out that there wasn’t more ceremony for his liege, but he had been a soldier for a long time. The food was boiled rice—Australian rice—camp-bread, cheese and dried fruit and a stew of salt pork and desiccated vegetables and beans that was savory enough.
She said so, and Heuradys replied:
“Or at least it’s salty, thick and brown, Orrey, which is much the same thing in an army cook’s opinion. Oh, well, the weather makes us hungry.”
She was right about that; the hard work of campaigning would do that anyway, and if you threw in constant subfreezing weather you had to eat more or steadily lose weight.
The Nihonjin passed by the butter and cheese, politely hiding their disgust, and simply took a little more of the rice; the stew was similar enough to their native butajiru to be easy on their rather parochial tastes, though they used it as a garnish for the rice as they pulled out the little chopstick sets they carried in their sleeve-pockets. Those were slightly awkward when the rice was this type, less sticky and given to clumping than their own variety.
The Mongols loved dairy foods, preferred meat as their staple, and were familiar enough with rice if not enthusiastic about it. She’d observed that it was evidently a point of pride with them not to be fastidious and they spooned everything up with relish.
Deor and his companions were simply ravenous and would be for days after their ordeal. Órlaith and Heuradys and her brother John and Pip weren’t, but they were solidly hungry, since in terms of sheer demand for fuel their day-to-day life involved the equivalent of a full day’s work by a farm laborer.
“This is hard country to travel in by winter,” the Mist Hills scop said after he’d finished a second bowl; he looked on the thin side of wiry now, hard and drawn and every day of his mid-thirties. “Doing this sort of thing was easier for me ten years ago.”
Susan Mika chuckled. “You coastal types are spoiled,” she said. “Now up on the makol . . .”
“. . . the snow doesn’t melt until June, and then it’s hot enough to melt lead and one prairie fire after another until it freezes in September, but you don’t care by then because you’ve been trampled by stampeding buffalo,” Thora said dryly. “Try it on someone who hasn’t spent a winter on the Trondheimsfjorden, girl. And a hot season in Darwin; I fried an egg on a pan laid out in the sun there once, for a bet.”
Órlaith leaned to one side and murmured a translation of the byplay to Dzhambul. He’d been trying to pick up some spoken English, to go with the basic acquaintance he’d gotten as a child with the written form, but it wasn’t nearly good enough yet to follow humor. He chuckled, and spoke softly in his turn, near her ear:
“We do that too—folk from the Gobi go on about their sand-blizzards stripping faces to the bone, and then we northerners will tell stories about hairy monsters that wander in during the snowst
orms to eat people, or men and horses frozen solid like statues. Though that does happen sometimes, but not often.”
Órlaith waited until one of the junior Archers came in and took the bowls out, and then whistled softly. Edain Aylward Mackenzie stuck his head through the flap.
“Sea, Ceannas?” he asked.
Órlaith swallowed. Suddenly hearing her father’s old comrade say that—the simple Yes, Chief? she had heard all her life, but to her rather than him—made that looming absence almost unbearable once more for an instant. A slight change in his face as their eyes met told her that the same thought had struck him.
Instead of speaking she moved her hands in Clan Mackenzie battle-sign; the three gestures meant secure the perimeter, and no entry except in crisis.
A spirit lamp kept sake warm, and there was a bowl of some thin crisp crackers flavored with seaweed and powdered shrimp they’d picked up in Japan, where an enterprising trader had unloaded a warehouse-full on the quartermasters in return for a shipload of dried ramen. She nibbled on one; they were extremely tasty, once you were used to the combination of flavors, and for some reason the Japanese didn’t usually eat rice and drink their national rice-based liquor at the same time.
Then she raised her cup to Deor.
“To our scouts—and to the scout who went beyond the light of common day. To Deor the Wide-Farer, Deor Woden’s-man, waes hael!”
He raised his and replied to his people’s toast in their fashion:
“Drinc hael, Cwēn!”
They all sipped, though John and Pip crossed themselves as well, and Deor and Thora signed the Hammer; down in Baru Denpasar they’d followed those disturbing gray eyes through the veils of the worlds. Ruan Chu Mackenzie, emptied his cup, leaned his head against Deor’s shoulder and yawned enormously.
“I know my task if this goes where Deor thinks,” he said; he was a physician as well as a warrior. “And if you’ll excuse me . . .”
Deor grinned and they exchanged a wrist-to-wrist handgrip and a hug.
“He was up all last night,” he said.
There was quiet pride in his voice as the younger man curled up in a corner and dropped off immediately with the ease of someone who’d been in the field long enough to take sleep when he could get it.
“One of our horses started favoring its left fore, and he put hot packs on it. We’d have been back later, if he hadn’t, and believe me, by then another night in the open was nobody’s wish.”
Órlaith nodded. “Now, to business,” she said, and unrolled a map on the table.
It showed central Korea; the old ruined capitals of the North and South Kingdoms, Seoul and Pyongyang, and north of that the massive complex of fortifications that housed the current Sinseonghan jidoja, the Divine Leader—or perhaps Perfect Embodiment was better—whose grandfather had conquered the peninsula in the wake of the Change. She had that odd feeling again that meant the Sword had given her more than one form of a language. The latter term was from the dialect used here and now by the Divine Leader’s followers.
“We got just close enough to produce these,” Faramir said. “It was . . . difficult. The yrch have hidden observation posts all over the area and constant patrolling.”
“Bayar khürgeye!” Börte said.
Which meant more or less congratulations or well-done in Mongol. She’d managed to follow the English a little. In her own tongue:
“We’ve never managed to get anyone that close. They just . . . don’t come back.”
“The same with us,” Reiko agreed.
Faramir nodded soberly. “We couldn’t have done it without Deor. The yrch had . . . seers. Sniffers, rather.”
Morfind silently laid out a series of sketches; they were drawn to a scale marked by the side, helpfully done in the meters the folk of this part of the world used as well as the feet and yards prevalent in Montival. All of them leaned closer to study it for long moments. Several looked incredulous, Toa whistled, and then Egawa grunted:
“That is worse than rumor painted, for once,” he said, then shifted to hideously mangled English: “Velly bad. Bad, bad.”
“I don’t see how you could build walls that high—that outer parapet alone is taller than the Silver Tower at Castle Todenangst,” Heuradys said. “And the inward batter . . . odds are they just took a mountain and carved it. Those are retaining walls, not free-standing curtains. Mount Angel back home is something like that. But not nearly as big.”
Órlaith nodded; that was the home and headquarters of the warrior monks of the Order of the Shield of Saint Benedict; after the Change they’d planed away the sides of the hill the monastery was built on and encased them in thick stone and concrete. That and Todenangst were the strongest fortresses in Montival, and there had been a joke back in the old wars that fifty thousand troops commanded by Saint Michael the Archangel and with Vulcan for a siege-engineer would still need divine intervention to take either. This was worse.
“Your bannerwoman is correct,” Egawa said, when Órlaith relayed the comment. “We in Dai-Nippon used the same technique for building castles in the Sengoku and the early Tokugawa era . . . and when we invaded Korea the first time, about four hundred years ago . . . but never so big. That wall is unscalable. And where are the gates?”
Faramir arranged the sketches to give an all-round view. “There aren’t any gates. It’s just this moat—about half bowshot across—then a smooth wall, hundreds of feet high; then on the platform it encloses there are successive inner keeps, each higher than the last and big as major castles in their own right—probably that was part of the mountain-sculpting, successive spurs, which is why they’re placed irregularly. And I suspect the construction involves a lot of steel, with reinforcement running into the living rock, and a maze of tunnels running from top to bottom.”
Deor nodded. “See here and here and here? These are projections . . . towers and overhangs . . .”
“Machicolations,” Heuradys supplied.
That meant the overhang beneath the fighting platform of a castle, so that you could raise metal trapdoors and shoot or drop things straight down.
Deor’s finger moved. “The roads and railroads from the approaches terminate in this ring of forts on lower hills . . . small mountains, actually . . . around the greater one.”
From the drawings, they did have gates, though well-defended ones; they were built into the base of the tall hills, and would be easy to seal with multiple solid steel portcullises, and each of them was a major fort in its own right.
“Tunnels,” Órlaith said; she had that odd books-being-filed sensation that the Sword gave her when it was drawing conclusions. “Those outerworks are connected with the main fort by tunnels . . . probably some of them have railways . . . and they’d be easy to block. By dropping metal or stone slabs, for starters. And if you did manage to break through one set of obstacles, there would be another, and then flooding . . . pumping in burning napalm . . . cutting the ventilation . . . and then trying to fight your way upward through a maze of more tunnels. . . .”
Dzhambul bared his teeth. “There will be a good water supply, with reservoirs carved into rock, and pumps. And any amount of stored food and munitions. You could besiege it for years.”
Órlaith looked at the sketches and then at the map.
“Worse than that. The subsidiary forts crowd any approach, and there are probably other tunnels into these mountains with concealed entrances, possibly miles away. It would be impossible to stop all traffic in and out, so they could keep in touch with the other forts and bases we’ve bypassed and screened. And we know they have good catapults. The main citadel and the forts will all mount heavy throwers, heavier than anything we could bring up and with the advantage of height and carefully prepared range tables.”
Egawa grunted again. “So you could not concentrate your own siege engines on one of the outlying forts without
your whole force being under fire from the central citadel and several of the others.”
John leaned close to Pip, conferred in murmurs, and then spoke:
“This is militarily impossible, Orrey. Just can’t be done. Not without years and years of reducing this country acre by acre and then starving that monstrosity out.”
Dzhambul snorted. “Perhaps you will have to reconsider your strategy of driving straight for the enemy leader!”
Órlaith sighed. I really wish I didn’t have to do this, but . . .
“There is another way; I’ve discussed it with Deor, and the Tennō. It involves great risk for us . . . and I mean us, personally, here.”
Egawa stirred. Reiko turned to him, and touched the wrist of his sword-hand with her tessen.
“I have four sisters who can carry my blood forward, General, if worst comes to worst. There is no price too high for victory and there is no victory without risk. I took great risks to recover the Grasscutter, and so we must do here, to end this war and give our people peace. You will not object to what I consider that I must do.”
He subsided, and Órlaith went on. “It’s an idea I had, but based on what happened to my brother last year in the Ceram Sea, in Baru Denpasar. Deor? You’re the expert.”
“Scarcely an expert.” The scop sighed and put a hand to his brow. “I make and sing songs . . . but I also studied seidh, wreaking . . . what most call magic.”
He touched the Valknut at his throat. “I am Woden’s man, and He is patron of music and seidh both. It is a power he gives some, to guard Midgard against trollcraft and ettin-work. I studied with Lady Juniper, the High Queen’s grandmother. And elsewhere.”
Egawa’s tough scarred face was still as stone, but it had a sheen of sweat on it when that was translated. He turned and bowed to Reiko.
“Majesty, I am your loyal vassal, serving you as my ancestors served yours. It was a torment to me that I could not accompany you when you fought against evil spirits for the Grasscutter in the lost castle. Now that I may fight by your side, I am content, though the fight be in strange and dark places. Command me!”
The Sky-Blue Wolves Page 32