The Given Sacrifice

by S. M. Stirling

  “Please, no formality, Mesdames,” Mathilda said, and picked a pastry off the chased silver, making herself nibble graciously rather than bolting it. “Speak freely, and don’t worry about precedence.”

  I’m hungry. Getting back into shape is brutal but I don’t dare go anywhere near a battlefield until I do. Even commanders end up fighting with their own hands at least occasionally, God knows I have often enough, and if you get tired first you die. I want to help Rudi the way I did on the Quest, not burden him.

  She’d managed to hack out a two-hour session every morning from her impossible schedule, and sparring in plate armor with a fifteen-pound shield on one arm and an oaken drill-sword in the other hand was about the best overall exercise there was. The changes in her body during pregnancy had been . . .

  Interesting, she thought. And certainly worthwhile. Though the mood swings . . . poor Rudi! He was probably glad to get back to the field.

  Her lips thinned a little as a muscle-memory of her sword-edge hammering into bone ran through her fingers and up into her gut. That was the sort of thing you remembered in the middle of the night sometimes; that and the faces.

  She worked her right hand, the way you did to get the kinks out after a fight. Unexpectedly, she found herself crossing eyes with Signe Havel, who nodded very slightly with a small wry smile. They’d never be friends, but for that instant across the gulfs of family and rivalry they shared something—something incommunicable to anyone who hadn’t been in the place they’d both visited and from which you never entirely returned.

  The hardest part now was that unlike a lot of warriors she had never really enjoyed the utterly essential life-preserving process of keeping in tip-top shape. She enjoyed the results, the feeling of strength and capacity, she was a pretty good natural athlete and sparring was fun in limited doses, but it wasn’t the passion for her it was with—say—Rudi. Or for that matter Tiphaine d’Ath, whose idea of rest was flipping through a back issue of Tactical Crossbows between bouts in the salle d’armes. And if she was better than average with a sword, it was because she’d pushed it doggedly all her life with the finest tutors.

  Not least of that had been Rudi. Just trying to keep up with him made you do things you hadn’t imagined were possible.

  God, I miss him, seeing him smile and touching him and even the way his hair smells. Oh, well, at least my sword-calluses are recovering so my hands don’t hurt as much. For once I’m not sorry to be in a cotte-hardie; I still feel shapeless without lacing.

  Delia de Stafford exchanged a glance with Sandra; she was in her thirties and smoothly beautiful, with raven-black ringlets hanging artlessly from under an open lace wimple topped by an embroidered cap. Baroness Forest Grove by marriage to Baron Rigobert and Châtelaine of Ath because of a rather less . . . orthodox . . . arrangement with the Grand Constable, as the two sets of ceremonial keys at her belt indicated. Sandra had always been her patron—she had an Associate’s dagger because of the then Lady Regent’s favor, as well as the Grand Constable’s—and the whole rather complex quasi-family were pillars of the throne.

  “It’s wonderful that the news from the east is so good,” Delia said. “Not only more victories, but so far bloodless ones. Well, mostly bloodless. As far as our blood goes.”

  “Thanks to Fred! Ah, General Thurston,” Virginia Thurston—née Kane—said. “President Thurston, soon.”

  “He’s certainly done a wonderful job,” Mathilda said.

  And truthfully again! she thought, and went on:

  “We both saw what he could do on the Quest.”

  Though we also saw him grow up a lot getting there and back again. Or at least I did. You never saw him in his father’s shadow.

  Delia’s eight-month-old daughter Yolande was with her, and a very active toddler named Heuradys in a lace-fringed shift and mob cap controlling unruly mahogany hair, both playing quietly to one side under the direction of a nanny. Though Heuradys had apparently learned the word no and liked using it with lordly insouciance. Mathilda chuckled at the sight, not least because of the names.

  Yolande and Heuradys, Lioncel and Diomede . . . all of Delia’s children were named from a set of books her mother had always liked, set in a skewed version of France seven hundred years ago. Mathilda liked them too; they were far more realistic than most pre-Change fiction, even Austen or Mallory. They fitted in perfectly with the archaic-French naming pattern the PPA nobility mostly favored anyway; Spanish was the second choice. The Grand Constable, Tiphaine d’Ath, had taken her Associate name from them too, long before, when Sandra had taken her under her wing and recognized her . . . unique . . . talents.

  The Countess Anne of Tillamook looked at the children wistfully. She was in her twenties and handsomely strong-faced, a pale blonde with sea-green eyes; and she ruled that coastal holding by her own hereditary right as her father’s heir, as yet without a consort. She was more or less betrothed to Ogier, the youngest son of Count Renfrew of Odell. Young Sir Ogier was with the host, of course; another thing to resent about the war was the way it delayed things you were looking forward to.

  The other noblewoman was Countess Ermentrude of Walla Walla, a slim dark-haired willowy woman in her mid-twenties, still looking a little uncertain in this company but hiding it well. By birth she was from County Dawson on the Association’s far northern border, and her husband’s holding—the County Palatine of the Eastermark, centered on the great fortress-city of Walla Walla—was on the PPA’s far frontier eastward, what had been the border march with Boise before the war. Neither she nor the young Count Palatine, Felipe de Aguirre-Smith, had been much at court, beyond the essentials.

  She was making a strong effort to be gracious to Delia, too; the last year had given her and her spouse good personal as well as military reasons to be grateful to Tiphaine d’Ath and Rigobert. And Ermentrude herself had won considerable troubadour-spread fame by commanding the defense of the city of Walla Walla during its siege by the enemy, while the Count led his vassals in the field with the High King. She’d commanded the all-important political side at least, which included keeping the city’s guilds and her lord’s war-captains in order, and that despite being heavily pregnant at the time.

  It’s breaking out all over, Mathilda thought whimsically. Well, replenish the earth and all that. At least this miserable war is cementing a lot of new relationships between the noble houses who support the Crown. Delia and Anne and Ermentrude between them have connections all over the Association, and their opinions really matter on the manor-house grapevine telegraph. If they’re all pulling in the same direction, it’ll make things a lot easier.

  Signe looked down at the heir to the crown of Montival and chuckled as she tickled her, a little unexpectedly . . . but she was a mother as well as a political leader, of course.

  “They’re so cute at that age,” she said. “They have to be, or we’d strangle them. After two sets of twins and a singleton I should know.” She looked around. “Aren’t the Thurston kids here at Todenangst? Fred’s sisters?”

  “Shawonda and Jaine? They’re at their lessons with my lady-in-waiting, Yseult Liu,” Mathilda said.

  “Studying falconry, was what I heard,” Juniper said. “Diomede is giving them a tour of the mews.”

  Delia smiled fondly at the mention of her younger son. “Diomede is just getting to the age when showing off to girls is something a boy likes,” she observed.

  Mathilda nodded. “I’m keeping them close for security reasons, but this is going to be a bit boring for teenagers, they’re good friends of Yseult, and . . .”

  “You don’t want them too closely identified with Court,” Signe said; she was a politician too, after all. A wolfish grin. “Especially with Associate court stuff.”

  Sandra nodded coolly and sipped at her tea; partly in recognition, partly an unspoken tsk, tsk. She would never have said that aloud at a public gathering, even a small one like this. Not that she’d give Signe any notice of it, either.

&nb
sp; Mathilda could read her thought: those with wit enough will realize, and why point out to the gullible and dim what they can’t see for themselves? Part of being clever is not needing to prove it all the time.

  Juniper snorted and rolled her eyes.

  “They’re nice kids,” Virginia said. “And their Mom is one smart lady.”

  Everyone nodded and took a sip of their tea. Anne of Tillamook had been visibly waiting to speak, but she deferred gracefully to Ermentrude. The flat, slightly drawn-out vowels of the Peace River country were still audible in her voice as she spoke slowly:

  “Thank you for inviting me, Your Majesty. I’ve written, but it’s always better to speak face-to-face if you can. And Felipe . . . well, he’s very busy with leading the County’s contingent in the field, of course. The thing is . . .”

  She took a deep breath. “I’ve been touring all the areas of the County Palatine the enemy overran, helping with the reconstruction. It’ll be years . . . we lost so much livestock and equipment. Though we’re not actually facing famine thanks to what you’ve shipped in. And the damage to the manor houses and villages was very bad . . . the castles held, almost all of them, but . . .

  Her calm broke a little. “A generation of work wrecked in a year!”

  “I said after the Horse Heaven Hills that the Association looks after its own,” Mathilda said. “We’ve already sent a good deal.”

  Everyone nodded. About a quarter of the Protectorate’s manors had been damaged in the war, ranging from cattle raid level to burned to the ground. Castles were nearly invulnerable if well provisioned and strongly held—that was the whole point—but villages and manor houses were easy meat to an enemy who held the open country. The untouched ones farther west had agreed to doubled mesne tithes and even better had mostly actually paid them, with no more than a token amount of grumbling. That was over and above the lawful reliefs they owed in war anyway and the lost labor when the full levy was called out, and it was going to hurt. That response had made her proud to be an Associate and an Arminger.

  “We’re grateful. But?” Ermentrude said. “Your Majesty, I can hear the but in your voice. My father always said that but is the killer.”

  Mathilda sighed. “Have you seen the reports from south of the Columbia? The CORA territories?”

  She pronounced the acronym in the usual way, as if it were a woman’s name. Technically it stood for the Central Oregon Rancher’s Association, the ad hoc group that had gotten the area west of the Cascades through the first years of the Change down there.

  Ermentrude winced a little. “Yes. There’s . . . really not much left, is there? We were hurt, they were wrecked.”

  Juniper sighed, suddenly looking older. “The people got out two years ago, the most of them, and some of their stock, and what they could carry with them on packhorses moving fast through the Cascades to the Willamette. Nothing else.”

  The Mackenzie chieftain nodded to Signe. “You Bearkillers helped cover the retreat well, after the lost battle at Pendleton.”

  Signe shrugged. “From what Eric tells me it’s a total mess there.”

  Her brother Eric Larsson had led the Montivallan forces following the retreating enemy south of the Columbia; he was a hard man, but there had been an undertone of horror in his reports.

  “Pure meanness,” Virginia Thurston said with deep sincerity. “Christ . . . or the Aesir . . . but the CUT needs to be burned off the face of the earth.”

  She obviously sympathized with the Ranchers; she was fierce, but not vicious. And the CORA were very much like her own folk, though perhaps a little less . . .

  Rustic, Mathilda thought charitably. The Powder River country is very . . . rustic. Or within wiping distance of the arse-end of nowhere, as Edain put it.

  “Most of the CORA fighting-men are with the host,” the High Queen said aloud. “And the King will need them badly in the east, they’re fine light cavalry. But they’re also proud folk, the Ranchers and their cowboys both. They’ve fought well, and their guerillas did good service tying down enemy troops south of the river. They don’t like being refugees living on the charity of others.

  “They want to go home, and make a start on rebuilding, even while their warriors are away.”

  Looked at coldly, it would make more sense to resettle the folk elsewhere. Morality and practical politics both made that out of the question, of course. Her own consciousness of the land—all the land of Montival—made that part of it feel like a raw bruise.

  Some of the conversation that followed was by prearrangement. The Mackenzies had always had close links with the CORA, and she suspected it hadn’t been too hard for Juniper to get the Clan’s Óenach Mór, the Great Assembly, to agree to more help; Father Ignatius had assured her that Mt. Angel would do the same. Signe offered to join the effort, and hinted that she’d get Corvallis to cough up too. They all promised longer-term aid to the County Palatine as well.

  “Lady Ermentrude?” Mathilda said, when they’d gone around the subject long enough.

  “I . . . yes, we’ll accept that some of the aid from the western and northern parts of the Association goes to the CORA rather than immediately to the County Palatine. Felipe will agree, after he shouts and kicks the walls a little.” More firmly. “Yes. Ruling means setting priorities and you can never satisfy everyone.”

  Juniper handed the little princess to Sandra; Mathilda smiled to herself at her mother’s well-concealed eagerness. The Mackenzie went on:

  “I’d suggest that we find some excuse to take folk . . . including some of yours, Lady Ermentrude . . . on a wee bit of a tour of the CORA lands, to see for themselves what’s been done there. Forbye that will show them the extent of the damage and that they weren’t the only ones to suffer. And remind them why we’re fighting, to be sure, to be sure.”

  Sandra nodded. “Excellent idea, my dear Juniper. Now, about the details—”

  Halfway through the discussion Mathilda found herself standing at the edge of the balcony, making a tactful withdrawal of her High Queenly presence and sipping her fourth cup of tea and nibbling a scone rich with hazelnuts. She smiled a little as she looked out over the great castle. The Association’s barons affected a plate-armored machismo; the unkind said they tended to be solid iron from ear to ear whether their helmets were on or not. But it occurred to her, not for the first time, that this group here was making a lot of the real decisions among themselves . . . and every single one of them was female.

  From here you could see most of Todenangst, the south side at least. The great circuit of the outer bailey, a tall granite-faced wall studded with machicolated towers bearing tall witch-hat roofs of green copper, lined on the inner surface by a linear town of tiled homes and workshops, barracks and stables and armories and inns and churches. A ring road and terraced gardens marked the bailey’s boundary; the gates there were tunnels into the hillside that bore the inner keep, and could be blocked by portcullis-like slabs of steel falling at the push of a lever. Inside access was via spiral roadways that were death traps to an invader in themselves.

  Then the keep itself, itself far larger than most castles, a hill topped with wall and tower, courtyard and cathedral and endless little nooks and surprises, all the way down to the dungeons below and the secret passages that laced the whole. Above them all the Silver Tower and the Onyx, rearing sheer hundreds of feet into the air and flaunting their banners beneath the blue cloud-speckled sky. It had been so all her life that she could remember—the main structure had been completed by ten thousand men working in round-the-clock shifts and finishing when she was about five, though furnishing and fitting was still going on in some parts, and probably always would be.

  Mother kept that copy of Gormenghast close at hand when she was designing the place. Though it’s much prettier than Steerpike’s stamping grounds. Gormenghastian but not Gormen-ghastly. And say what you like about father, he had a will like forged steel, and he dreamed grandly.

  Perhaps it was what Junip
er and Sandra had said earlier, but it struck her now that virtually everything in the landscape she could see save the bones of the earth—things like the tiny perfect white cone of Mount Hood off to the west, the lower blue line of the Coast Range westward—was not much older than she. Todenangst looked as if it had reared here for centuries amid its surroundings of river and woodland, manors and the multihued green of field and vineyard, woodlot and orchard, the spires of churches, railroads thronged with horse-drawn trains, dusty white roads thick with oxcarts and peasants on foot, monks and men-at-arms, merchants and bicyclists or Tinerant caravans.

  In fact the lower bulk of the castle was steel cargo-containers from trains, and from barges and freighters stranded in the Columbia by the Change, filled with crushed automobiles and rubble and cement and all locked together and set in cast mass-concrete. The heights were girders and lead-coated rebar and more concrete; the very stone sheathing had been stripped from skyscrapers in Portland and Vancouver and Seattle. Only the roofing-tile and some of the woodwork and textiles had been made for it. Parts of the enormous complex were still faintly warm with the heat of curing cement.

  I don’t think this way very often, Mathilda reflected, sipping at the delicate acridity of the tea.

  She’d received a good Classical education, including elements of the pre-Change sciences. Some of them were still useful, but it had all never seemed really real to her until she’d been whirled through the depths of time at Lost Lake. Still . . .

  Will any of this ever occur to Órlaith at all? she thought.

  Something hit the bronze bars of the trellis with an enormous whung sound. Mathilda whirled around in a flurry of skirts and dagged sleeves. A man had flung himself out of a window sixty feet above the balcony, spread-eagled to distribute the impact. It should still have broken half his bones, but his face was as empty of expression as an insect’s as he rolled off the metal and onto the tile of the floor. He wore a servant’s tabard and livery, but a curved knife glittered in his hand, with the rayed sun of the Church Universal and Triumphant etched into the steel.