The Given Sacrifice

by S. M. Stirling

  Lioncel winced behind an impassive face as the older nobles smiled, or at least showed their teeth. Little Ease was a dungeon oubliette beneath the Onyx Tower, a cramped cell carefully designed to make it impossible for an inmate to either lie or stand or sit properly, not to mention the rough knobby surface and utter blackness and total silence and cold and filth and damp. Sending people there was done by the prerogative Court called Star Chamber . . . over which the Queen Mother would preside.

  “Oh, a month . . . that’s a bit much, unless you want a gibbering madman,” Conrad said cheerfully. “A week would be about right. It’ll just feel like months. Like forever and a day in Hell, in fact.”

  “All right, a week. You’re getting soft, Conrad.”

  Conrad’s smile grew more alarming. “You can be a bit . . . drastic . . . when you’re peeved. That’s probably why Sandra had you consult me, you know. We want to discipline Sir Othon and his lieges, not drive them to desperation. Besides, we’ve reformed. We’re the good guys these days. Sorta.”

  “Sorta, kinda.” Tiphaine rubbed one hand across her forehead. “I don’t have time for this crap. Our command structure is still scrambled six ways from St. Swithin’s Day. I’m being bounced back and forth from here to Portland to the front like a Ping-Pong ball. Trailing files and letters like a comet’s tail. And you would be too, Conrad, if you weren’t in that wheelchair.”

  Conrad Renfrew shrugged.

  “If the High Kingdom of Montival were a human being it’d still be in diapers,” he said. “And His Majesty is trying to run a war with what used to be six or seven separate armies two years ago. Us, and six separate armies built to fight us plus bits and pieces of odds and sods. It’s not our command structure, even if we’re the biggest single element; it’s Montival’s command structure. And yes, it’s fucked.”

  The Lord Chancellor chuckled like gravel shaken in a bucket.

  “And Ping-Pong? Pre-Change metaphors are so twentieth century for a near-Changeling like you. You’re dating yourself, Tiph.”

  “Dating myself? Doesn’t that make you go blind?”

  Didn’t dating also mean something like courtship before the Change? Then—

  Lioncel suppressed a startled giggle with an effort that made him cough as he struggled to maintain adult gravitas.

  Lioncel had the same fair hair and blue eyes as his father Lord Riobert de Stafford and a similar bold cast of features, and his hands and feet gave promise of equal height, but so far a lot of it was adolescent gawkiness and his sire’s easy natural dignity was only an aspiration. It was like your voice breaking occasionally and having impure thoughts about girls every thirty seconds, about which even his confessor had to work to keep the smile out of his voice. Evidently it all just went with his age.

  At least I don’t have pimples. Well, not many.

  “I wouldn’t like to be in Sir Othon’s boots when the Count learns how he avoided asking for money. Over and above what we’re going to do to him,” Renfrew said.

  “His own damned fault and a valuable life-lesson for the lot of them.”

  “At least my lord Enguerrand isn’t complaining about stripping his eastern border anymore. They’re still paranoid about the Canuks up there,” the Chancellor said.

  As the Grand Constable’s squire—and before that as a page, and before that simply as the son of Lady Delia de Stafford, who’d been the Grand Constable’s Châtelaine since before he was born—Lioncel had been in and out of these rooms for years. He found himself more self-conscious about their function now that he was older and knew more about it. It was no longer simply a place he lived sometimes, like Montinore Manor back in the barony of Ath that he thought of as really home, or the townhouse near Portland.

  Tiphaine spread the long callused fingers of her right hand slightly, half a gesture of agreement, half a motion like touching a swordhilt.

  “Taking Dawson wasn’t really cost-effective, no matter how much plowland it has or even how many extra workers we got. I remember distinctly at the time Sandra thought Norman was getting Big Eyes syndrome again, pushing our frontier that far north,” she said. “Risky. We were overstretched.”

  Renfrew shrugged. “Our big advantage was getting organized first, and at least suspecting where the pointy end of the sword went, not to mention having swords and not just kitchen knives on sticks. That was a wasting asset. Norman knew we had to use it or lose it.”

  “Norman just liked looking at the map and rubbing his hands and saying: Mine, all mine! BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!”

  “Yeah, that’s him to the life, but it worked. And half the time back then we hardly had to fight at all to take over, people were so glad to see someone who knew what they were doing and had a plan. Later . . . later it got a whole lot harder.”

  “We had to fight for Dawson, all right,” she said. “And then fight seriously to keep it when the Drumheller government got their act in gear and decided to restore British Columbia.”

  Conrad spread his massive hairy spade-shaped hands. “By then we had some castles built, and they never did manage to cleanse us from the sacred soil . . . or permafrost . . . of Canukistan.”

  “They certainly tried. The Yakima is a lot warmer and closer, and we could have rolled up the rest of the towns there after the Tri-Cities fell, if we hadn’t had so many troops chasing Canuks through the snowdrifts and getting frostbite, also arrows in the rump.”

  The Count nodded. “Remember the February campaign? Back in . . . Change Year Five, or Six, wasn’t it? You were doing scout work there with . . . mmm, Katrina Georges? She died four or five years later, in that ratfuck rescue attempt with Eddie Liu after the Mackenzies kidnapped Mathilda? Dawson would have been your first real war, apart from all that black-bag and spec-ops work you two were doing as Sandra’s Teen Ninjas.”

  “Change Year Five and Six,” Tiphaine said, her voice softening a little. “Kat and I were doing scouting, right . . . we actually were scouts before the Change, you know. Girl Scouts. It’s the main reason we didn’t die.”

  The Chancellor frowned. “I thought you were a gymnast? Olympic hopes and all that?”

  “Gymnastics first, but Kat talked me into the Scouts in ’ninety-seven, my mother pitched a fit . . . Sandra pulled some strings to have us attached to the reconnaissance element for the Dawson campaign. Norman thought we were a joke, but she wanted us to broaden our skill-sets. And get some mojo with the regulars.”

  “Ah, right. I remember you two mousetrapped that Mountie deep-penetration patrol. A nice change from all the times the sneaky bastards did it to us. Yes, and you marched up and plopped the heads down on the breakfast table and said Pray allow us to present some friends, my lord. He didn’t think that was a joke!”

  “He laughed, Conrad. He laughed so hard he snarfed his porridge and you had to pound him on the back. Kat offered to do the Heimlich on him and then he turned blue.”

  You can always tell when older people are reminiscing, Lioncel thought indulgently. They start using that old-fashioned way of speech, even my lady isn’t quite a Changeling that way.

  “He didn’t think you were a joke anymore. The heads, yes, that hit him right in the funny bone.”

  “We did think it would cheer people up,” Tiphaine said, a little amusement in her tone.

  “That was when I really first noticed you. That girl will go far, I thought, and now you’ve got my old job.”

  Conrad shivered reminiscently and crossed himself before he went on:

  “I also thought I’d never feel warm again, and it was so damned dark all the time. . . .”

  Tiphaine gave a half-snort: “I remember trying to pee and my armor being so cold that skin stuck hard to the metal anywhere it touched,” she said. “That and the way the Canuk ski troops kept working around our flanks through the woods. If they’d had more body armor and cavalry it would have been impossible.”

  Conrad sighed as he referenced a letter and murmured to his clerk. “Enough about the old days, l
et’s get the rest of these supply projections sorted.”

  “All right, let’s start with the barges and that elderly hardtack we have stockpiled at Goldendale—”

  Watching the Chancellor and my lady the Grand Constable do their work is . . . educational, Lioncel thought as he stood and directed the page boys with flicks of his hand. Well, I’m the Grand Constable’s squire; I’m supposed to be learning.

  They went through the rest of the stack of documents at a pace that made him blink, usually talking in an elliptical compressed way that showed how many years they’d worked together and stopping just long enough to chew when they took a bite of the lunch collation.

  “That’s all for now, Mistress Brunisente,” Conrad said to the senior clerk when they came to the bottom of the stack. “Get me a typewritten transcript by tomorrow and do a précis.”

  “Copies, my lord?”

  “No carbons. We’ll circulate it under seal to the Queen Mother and Chancellor Ignatius after we go over it. No need to bother Their Majesties with this unless the Chancellor-slash-Questing Monk says so. Rudi and Mathilda have enough on their plates.”

  The clerk took the hint, bobbed a curtsy and left.

  “Good enough,” Tiphaine d’Ath said.

  She leaned back, stretching her arms far behind her and tilting her head to one side and then the other until there was a sharp click.

  “As far as the Association contingent goes we’re golden on the supply situation for the rest of this campaigning season,” she said. “Especially since His Majesty’s letting a lot of our infantry go back to their villages and plow.”

  “The downside of that is that we’re cutting the size of the field force because we can’t feed that many so far from the Columbia, not because Rudi couldn’t use the men,” Conrad grunted. “Anyway, it’s time the rest did their share, and their foot soldiers are just about as good as ours. Nobody else has anything like our men-at-arms, though.”

  “The Bearkillers come fairly close. Nobody else has anything like the Mackenzie Archers, either,” Tiphaine said and shrugged. “Our knights are more use on campaign than they are back home beating on each other at tournaments and hawking and boozing, and only a little more expensive.”

  “You don’t have to find the money to pay their stipends,” Renfrew said. “Or pay to replace their beloved destriers when the bloody things die in the field—you wouldn’t think something so big would be so fragile. Those damned gee-gees cost more than a suit of plate and they wear out a whole hell of a lot faster.”

  Lioncel was mildly shocked at the way the Count was talking about the noble beasts. Nearly everyone he knew loved their destriers and coursers, but you had to make allowances for the older generation. It took six years to breed and train a charger fit to bear an armored lancer into battle wearing armor of its own. He’d been unpleasantly surprised to find out that their average life expectancy on active campaign was around ten months. Even the High King’s fabled steed Epona, who’d gone all the way to the Sunrise Lands and back with him on the Quest, had died at the Horse Heaven Hills.

  “The knights pay war-tallage anyway,” Tiphaine said. “So it’s out of one pocket and into another. And the Crown owns a lot of the horse-breeding farms, plus we have insurance. The Counts aren’t complaining really seriously either, it’s just the usual moaning bitchery and mine-is-bigger bickering. Ah, the delights of feudalism.”

  “If you think this is bad, you should have seen what SCA politics were like before the Change. Truly murderous, at least as far as emotions went.”

  “Society politics? With so little at stake?” Tiphaine asked.

  “Because so little was at stake by modern standards. And notice that the Counts bitch to me,” Conrad said. “Not to you.”

  “They’re not as afraid you’ll kill them, my lord Chancellor. And you are a Count, of course.”

  “Nobody likes paying taxes . . . also of course. Wait until they see what Matti plans to levy on them for the reconstruction program,” Conrad said, using the familiar form of High Queen Mathilda’s name.

  Of course, he’s been around her since she was a baby, Lioncel thought charitably. And the older generation . . . well, you have to make allowances.

  The Count of Odell shuddered slightly for effect, then rubbed his hands together and grinned. “Sandra’s drawing up one of her little lists.”

  “You seem to be working well with Father Ignatius, by the way,” Tiphaine said.

  “He’s very capable,” Conrad Renfrew said, nodding and running a spade-shaped hand over his head, mostly naturally bald now rather than shaven as had been his custom for decades. “Even if he disapproves of me.”

  “Ignatius disapproves of me a lot more,” Tiphaine said. “I can’t say he’s my favorite person in all the world either, though he and Matti are close. And he’d better be able, with his job. He gives it everything he’s got, I grant him that.”

  The Knight-Brother was a Lord Chancellor too, but of the whole of the new High Kingdom of Montival. The warrior cleric had won great glory and ringing fame for himself and his Order of the Shield of St. Benedict at the High King’s side on the quest to Nantucket. He’d had a vision of the Virgin, too, which was awe-inspiring.

  But Their Majesties gave him high office for his talents, Lioncel thought. The Order are scholars as well as warriors.

  They’d also been leaders in the old wars . . . on the side against the Portland Protective Association, despite the Lord Protector’s championing of the Faith. Of course, technically the Protectorate had been in schism in those days; all contact with Rome had ceased on the day of the Change and for better than a decade after, and Norman Arminger had found a bishop willing to claim the Throne of St. Peter. Rome was a haunted ruin now, but a legitimately chosen Holy Father ruled the universal Church from the Umbrian city of Badia.

  Curiosity as to why the Lord Protector’s chosen antipope Leo had survived him by less than a month was strongly discouraged in the Association lands. Officially it was a heart attack, providentially easing the task of reunion.

  Unofficially, from things overheard at home, Lioncel knew Sandra Arminger had sent one Tiphaine d’Ath to untraceably turn him from a problem into a memory, though it had been before he was born. That sort of thing didn’t happen nearly as often nowadays. . . .

  Conrad laughed. “Though unlike me, Ignatius only has to bust his ass for the Crown metaphorically.”

  “That joke was funny the first seventeen times, Conrad,” she said in a coolly neutral voice. “And you started the minute the field medics told you what the problem was.”

  “Not until they got the morphine into me; before that I just screeched and swore. And I paid for that joke with months of my ass being literally in a sling and I’ll use it as often as I damned well please,” he said cheerfully. “Still, it’s all more fun than it was in the old days.”

  He nodded out the pointed-arch window that lit the dayroom. That looked south across the courtyard to the glittering gold-tipped black height of the Onyx Tower, the Lord Protector’s old lair.

  Tiphaine snorted slightly, but Lioncel thought it had a wealth of meaning.

  “Granted Norman blossomed into a tyrant’s tyrant when he got the opportunity, but he wasn’t all bad,” Conrad said a little defensively.

  Conrad of Odell had also been a fixture of Lioncel’s life—besides his duties, his Countess and her daughters were good friends of Lioncel’s mother—but at times like this you remembered that the unofficial uncle who’d played “bear” with you in front of the hearth had also been the Lord Protector’s right-hand man. He was beginning to suspect that being disconcerted that way by sudden shifts in perspective was another . . . disconcerting thing about being his age.

  Mother told me once she’d heard from the Countess of Odell that the Armingers stood by him when he got those burns on his face, way back before the Change.

  “Ninety percent absolutely rotten bad,” Tiphaine said shortly.

  “E
xcept that we’d all have been gnawed bones without him. I sure as shit had no earthly idea what to do when the Change hit and the machines stopped, and he did. Ah, well, it’s ancient history. I think we’ve wrapped up all the essentials and you’ve had a chance to look over the replacements we’re sending forward. They’re eager enough.”

  “They’re ironhead macho imbeciles who need to be bled, to correct the balance of their humors,” she said crisply. “Which I will see to. Not to mention learning that there’s more to war than couching a lance and sticking spurs in a horse’s ass.”

  “Better to restrain the noble steed than prod the reluctant mule. Give my regards to Rudi . . . His Majesty . . . when you’re back in the cow-country.”

  “The Prophet’s men did a good cloud-of-locusts imitation out there to slow pursuit. It’s gnawed bones country, since you brought up the phrase, with cows pretty scarce. The buzzards there have to carry their own rations,” she said.

  “Speaking of which, here’s the grant,” he said, pulling a last formidable-looking document out of a folder and tossing it in front of her. “That’ll keep you travelling out there the rest of your life!”

  “Joy,” she said. “Thank you . . . I suppose.”

  “Hey, it’s free! That’s always a bargain.”

  “Like getting fifteen million tons of undelivered Arizona sand for sixpence ha’penny,” she said dryly. “Don’t work yourself to death while I’m gone, Conrad. I’d rather snog wolverines in a confessional booth than be saddled with the job you’ve got now.”

  The Count of Odell picked up the ebony cane that leaned against his wheelchair, tapped it on the marble tiles of the floor and waved it forward as he cried:

  “En avant!”

  There was a ripple of bows as his squire wheeled him out.

  “Clear this up, Tasin,” Lioncel said, when nobody was left but the Grand Constable’s household.

  The senior page—he was Tasin Jones, one of the younger brothers of Count Chaka of Molalla—slid forward and helped the younger pair clear the remains of lunch. His square brown face was intent; he’d entered the d’Ath household barely six months ago. Lioncel had been a page himself until last August, and he remembered how anxious you could get at the thought something would go wrong while you were attending the lords. It would be worse for Tasin, since he hadn’t grown up with the Grand Constable, just knew her fearsome reputation.