The Given Sacrifice

by S. M. Stirling

  “That way, Cole Salander of Boise. If the Lady needs assistance, give it, and do it well. Oh, and just so we understand each other about any thoughts of skipping off into the woods with rude unseemly haste like a Jack in the Green—urghabháil dó!”

  The two great dogs had been at his feet, heads on paws. They sprang in a blur of speed, and Cole froze again as the gruesome jaws closed on his wrists; they were tall enough at the shoulder that they didn’t have to bend their heads upward to do it. They didn’t clamp down, which he suspected would have cut right through bone and sinew with a single bite, but they weren’t letting him move either. Those growls like millstones grinding came from each deep chest again, and their eyes cocked up at him in warning. Or possibly hopeful anticipation. The feel of the fangs was like the teeth of a waiting saw, and between them they weighed as much as he and half over again.

  Alyssa was grinning at him. Which was understandable; turnabout was fair play, and being a helpless prisoner was no fun.

  “Urghabháil dó! means ‘grab him,’ pretty much, soldier,” she said. “You don’t really have to worry until he says mharú air! Which means ‘kill.’ Though he’d most likely just shoot you instead.”

  “Loose him, Artan, Flan!” the Mackenzie said to the dogs, and they obeyed, backing away but looking at Cole with suspicion anyway. “Now, off we go!”

  “You guys are weird,” Cole said resignedly.

  “Oh, you have no idea,” Alyssa said cheerfully. “What you’ve seen so far is nothing. Try Dun Juniper sometime. Or even better, Castle Todenangst, I’ve visited there a couple of times with Mom and Dad. That place is weird.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Castle Todenangst, Crown demesne

  Portland Protective Association

  Willamette Valley near Newburg

  High Kingdom of Montival

  (formerly western Oregon)

  June 15th, Change Year 26/2024 AD

  “M om!” the High Queen of Montival said.

  Sandra Arminger looked up from where she had been kneeling at her prie-dieu. The padded prayer-stool—rather like a reversed legless chair—stood before a triptych of the Madonna and Child flanked by Saints Edgar and Olaf, the patrons of rulers. The gold leaf of the halos in the icons glowed in the beam of light from an ocular window set high up under the carved plaster of the coffered roof.

  She smiled at her daughter, the dark-brown eyes dancing. “Honestly, Matti, you needn’t goggle as if you’d caught me doing something nasty with a pageboy. I was praying.”

  Mathilda opened her mouth and closed it as Sandra crossed herself, returned her rosary to the embroidered purse at her belt and stood. That still left her six inches shorter than her tall daughter, a smoothly pretty and slightly plump woman in her fifties, in a cotte-hardie of dove-gray silk elaborately jacquarded with ribbons and swallows and a white silk wimple bound with silver and opals. A Persian cat yawned and padded out from beneath the prie-dieu, its gaze as blandly self-satisfied as that of its mistress.

  People who don’t know better underestimate Mother.

  Though nowadays you had to go a long way to find someone so utterly uninformed. She’d seen very hard men start to sweat when Sandra Arminger smiled at them in her let’s-share-a-joke way. The joke might be very pointed, or give you indigestion.

  Mathilda shook her head. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen her mother pray, of course; it was just the first time she’d seen her doing it strictly in private, where there wasn’t any political benefit to be gained by conventional piety. Previously she’d used this little room off the Regent’s suite for confidential interviews, though it was the sort of place a noblewoman would set up a private shrine. Now, besides the prie-dieu and images it had a big carved rood on one wall and a small shelf of devotional books.

  “What . . . were you asking?” she said at last.

  “I was praying for your father,” her mother said.

  “Oh, good!” Mathilda said with a rush. “I mean, for both of you.”

  They looked at each other silently for a moment in the incense-scented gloom. She’d told her mother much of what she’d seen in the . . .

  Visions, Mathilda thought. That’s as close as you can get to a word for things there aren’t words for. What did Father Ignatius say when I made my confession? That some realities make language itself buckle and break when we try to describe them instead of just living them.

  . . . the visions she’d seen at Lost Lake, when she and Rudi had joined their blood on the blade of the Sword of the Lady and thrust it into the living rock of Montival.

  Or perhaps where Artos and I did.

  Rudi carried the Sword again now, but in another sense it was still there beside the infinitely blue waters with their hands clasped on the hilt . . . and always had been and always would be. She could still feel a little of the curious linking that had started then, the sensation that the whole of Montival was like her own body. Since then her dreams had been odd; not so much fantastic as . . . real.

  Like vivid memories but of things she had never seen. Perhaps of ragged men stalking deer in a clearing fringed by redwoods, or wild horses running in a desert with dust smoking around their hooves and manes flying, or gulls on a cloudy beach beneath the enormous rusted hulk of a wrecked freighter, or the empty tinkling clatter of glass falling from the leaning tower of a skyscraper as windblown rain hooted through the wreck of a dead city . . .

  Either it had faded a little or she’d grown accustomed to it; Rudi thought it was the latter, though he felt it much more as bearer of the Sword.

  But for a while at Lost Lake she and he had walked outside the light of common day, their footsteps carrying them on separate paths across all boundaries of space and time. One thing she had seen was her own father, Norman Arminger, in a place where he did penance. And there she had met . . .

  Her eyes went to the supernal peace on the Virgin’s face as she looked down upon the Christ Child.

  “She said . . . She said that because he loved us, he could receive love now,” Mathilda said softly. “And choose to . . . to make amends. I think that works both ways.”

  Her mother sighed. “Here I receive positive proof of an afterlife, and instead of being reassuring it’s frightening.”

  “Well, of course,” Mathilda said. “That’s much worse than death. Potentially. Worse than oblivion, I mean. It raises the stakes of everything.”

  They looked at each other with perfect mutual bafflement for a moment.

  Sandra broke it with a laugh. “You know, darling, I have exactly the opposite problem with this than many people used to have with religion. When I was your age.”

  Mathilda raised an eyebrow, and Sandra made a graceful gesture with one small well-manicured hand, tapping her own temple with a finger that just touched the white silk of her wimple.

  “Now I know up here that it’s all true. Including the parts that are flat-out mutually contradictory, but leave that aside. Oh, well, a great many very intelligent people always did believe it, and I’m not going to reject the evidence of my own senses.”

  She put the hand over her heart. “But the difficult part is making this part of me believe it . . . integrate it into my worldview, as we’d have said in the old days . . . my heart rebels against my mind. And here I thought I was a complete rationalist!”

  “You are impossible, Mother!” Mathilda laughed.

  “Not impossible. Improbable, yes. Anyone who’s lived my life and done what I’ve done would have to be highly improbable at the very least, my darling. Now let’s go. It wouldn’t do to keep people waiting, even now that you’re Lady Protector.”

  “Particularly now that I’m High Queen too,” Mathilda said, with a slight quirk in her smile. “I always knew that the higher your rank the more firmly you were bound by custom. I hadn’t quite realized . . .”

  “Just how high a High Queen is,” Sandra finished for her. “But there are compensations, dear.”

  They walked out t
hrough the semipublic part of the Regent’s suite arm in arm. Technically Mathilda was Lady Protector now; the peace after the Protector’s War had provided that she’d come of legal age at twenty-six. In practice . . .

  In practice, being High Queen of Montival in the middle of a great big war doesn’t leave me the time to be Lady Protector of the PPA! And being a new mother, which cannot be completely delegated and I won’t anyway . . . having Mother handling the administrative routine and a lot of the politics in the north-realm territories not only lets me do other things, it buffers me from Associates who’d presume too much. I don’t want to alienate the Protectorate’s nobility. But I’m High Queen of all Montival, not just the PPA, and I have to be seen to be so people will know I mean it. Ruling is as much about seeming as being. If there’s a difference at all.

  So she’d firmly turned down her mother’s pro forma offer to relinquish the suites that occupied the upper stories of the Silver Tower and shuffle off to some manor. Sandra Arminger had been the Spider of the Silver Tower for far too long. Even her virtues were a political problem; everyone knew how effectively she’d rebuilt the PPA after the shock of Norman Arminger’s death in the Protector’s War and the Jacquerie rebellion and the reforms and purges that followed it. If the Prophet hadn’t come along that might have caused real trouble with fearful neighbors.

  Mathilda would have felt uneasy calling these her own chambers anyway, though of course her bedroom had been here before she turned twelve and got her Associate’s dagger and her own household and retinue. Like much of the great fortress-palace they’d been designed by Sandra, or at least she’d directed the terrified architects and interior decorators and artists she and Norman had swept up after their coup.

  They were well over a hundred feet high here, and on the side looking out southward over the central keep, so the windows could be large—sets of triple pointed-arch portals at intervals, their upper fifth filled with stained glass and stone tracery in the Protectorate’s version of Venetian Gothic style. The sashes below were thrown open on the fresh early summer afternoon amid a scent of roses and Sambac jasmine from the planters. A torrent of light shimmered on walls and floors of pale stone, on tables of inlaid rare woods and mother-of-pearl, the carved surrounds of arched open doorways or tile above hearths, on spindly chairs and sofas upholstered in cream silk and on tapestries of war and the hunt and high ceremony.

  The vivid colors of the hangings and those of the rugs on the floor were a deliberate contrast. Walls and niches held art commissioned new or scavenged from museums and galleries all across the west of the continent. Some were as familiar as her own face: Leighton’s Pavonia for instance, which had been there in the background so constantly she’d assumed for years it was a modern portrait of Delia de Stafford until she embarrassed herself by saying so at a reception here. But there was always something that surprised even her: this time it was a bronze statue of a youth, a slimly perfect athlete standing hipshot and about to crown himself with a wreath of laurel vanished twenty-four hundred years ago.

  Classical but not Roman, Mathilda thought. Greek, and of the great years. And undamaged except for the feet. Oh, my . . .

  “That’s new,” she said. “Well, you know what I mean.”

  “Not so very,” Sandra said, stopping for a moment and seeming to caress the figure with her eyes. “This one is . . . probably . . . by Lysippos, Alexander the Great’s court sculptor. But it was in storage for a long time, since that last expedition I sent to southern California just before the war . . . my goodness, three years ago now! I’ve had some experts working it over and mounting it on that pedestal. It’s amazingly fragile, for something that’s lasted so very long.”

  Mathilda looked at it and sighed, then sighed again rather differently as they walked on. She’d gone through a phase of guilt about her mother’s art-collecting activities when she’d been a teenager and in the first incandescent sureness of her faith. Some of the men in the teams sent to retrieve these treasures had died horribly in the desolate Eater-haunted ruins of the lost cities, in Seattle and Vancouver, San Francisco and Los Angeles and places like San Simeon and the Getty Villa. And the revenues to finance it all came out of the incomes of peasants and craft-folk and traders, eventually.

  When you were in a position to spend the fruits of other people’s sweat, not to mention their blood, prudent thrift became a cardinal virtue.

  But should we be concerned only with food and shelter and the weapons to protect it? she thought. Mom saved so much that was beautiful. And she made it fashionable for the other nobles and the wealthy guildsmen to do the same thing; and to give patronage to our own makers. That kept knowledge and skills alive through the terrible years when everything might have been lost. How many generations will thank her for both? And if she did it so she could have this . . . stuff . . . does that matter? The realm gets it just the same, and all the people in times to come. That’s good lordship too.

  Two separate holy men had pointed that out to her—Father Ignatius had used Sandra’s art collecting as an example of how God’s plan turned all things to good in the end. The Rinpoche Tsewang Dorje had phrased it a little differently, but it amounted to the same thing. Though her private confessor at the time had simply and sternly admonished her that her own sins were a heavy enough burden to carry up to Heaven’s gate without adding the spiritual pride of assuming someone else’s.

  I’ve never quite understood why my confessors and tutors were all so sincere. Not since I realized . . . or let myself realize . . . that Mother wasn’t, that she was playing at it. Which I only really accepted when she stopped playing and started trying it for real. And now I’m High Queen—

  She asked the question bluntly, and was a little astonished when her mother wiped at one eye until she caught a glint through the tear that was neither entirely false nor altogether genuine.

  Absolutely Mother, in other words.

  “My little girl is all grown up, and just as smart as I am!” she said.

  Then, in utter seriousness: “Because I wanted you to fit in this world, darling. I can fake it . . . sometimes for days or weeks at a time, I don’t notice . . . but then everything, all this—”

  She waved a hand.

  “—is suddenly like a dream, and I expect to wake up and pop another tape in the VCR.”

  Mathilda looked around and shook her head. Todenangst was about the most solidly real place she knew. Her mother went on:

  “I survived by playing a game in deadly earnest I’d always liked to pretend to do for fun—I was in the Society but not the type who pulled their persona around them like a security blanket after the Change and never let go. Possibly I could play it so well because something deep down in me never entirely believed it, which meant I could be more objective. But it’s your life and you deserve to live it with a whole heart.”

  Mother is troubling, but she’s rarely dull, Mathilda thought. Then with a rush of anguish: Oh, Rudi, I wish I was with you! Not safe here, but there where things are happening!

  She couldn’t tell if it was normal worry, or her new sense of being linked to everything, but she could feel peril approaching, and that had to mean Rudi was in danger far from the strong walls that surrounded her.

  • • •

  Seven Devils Mountains

  (Formerly western Idaho)

  High Kingdom of Montival

  (Formerly western North America)

  June 15th, Change Year 26/2024 AD

  Cole Salander and his captors moved mostly in single file through mountainside meadow and forest, with the dogs weaving back and forth to keep an eye and nose on the surroundings. Occasionally he caught one cocking an eye at him in a considering manner, as if to remind him of something.

  After a while Talyn pulled out sticks of jerky from his sporran and handed them around. Cole got one, which surprised him slightly, though Artan and Flan weren’t left out either. It was a not-too-odd variation on the usual fibrous salty not-much,
better than nothing, and it made him thirsty.

  They’d left him his canteen, and they all stopped to fill up at a spring-fed pool. He noted that they used water purification tablets like his, too; no matter how clear and cold and inviting it looked, any open water could have giardia in it, or for that matter a dead animal under a rock or dollops of dissolved deer-crap. You didn’t drink it untreated unless there was no choice, and the slight chemical tang was the taste of safety. The dogs didn’t drink at all until their master gave them a nod of permission.

  The Mackenzie held out his hand before they started out again: “Talyn Strum Mackenzie, of Dun—village, you’d say—Tàirneanach; the totem of my sept is Lynx. And this fair but tight-lipped warrior maid is Caillech Carlson Mackenzie, a neighbor of mine and oath-sister. And a Raven like the Ard Rí himself, as you might be guessing from the paint.”

  “Ard Rí?” he said.

  “High King,” Alyssa said. “That’s what it means. Artos the First, High King of Montival. AKA Rudi Mackenzie, my cousin, sorta.”

  Whoa, wait a minute, a cousin, “sorta”? What’s that mean?

  “And you talk too bloody much, Talyn, the which is beyond question or doubt,” Caillech said, but smiled.

  Cole shook the offered hands; to his surprise Alyssa extended hers, too. Then he hesitated. You weren’t supposed to talk . . . but nobody had asked him any military secrets. Plus there were things he really wanted to know. And after all, they were all Americans. That was the official line too, which enabled him to feel a slight glow of virtue about not keeping his mouth completely shut. Talyn and Caillech might be the children of people who’d gone so batshit insane after the Change that they just barely managed to hang on to the side of the planet with suction cups, but they were also working countryfolk caught up in the gears of war even if they were on the other side. Very much like him.

  “I’m Cole Salander—”

  What the fuck is the equivalent of what he said?