The Given Sacrifice

by S. M. Stirling

  Rudi’s smile was crooked; not for the first time Ingolf reflected that he seemed older than his face would indicate, sometimes.

  “I suspect I know how he feels, and will the more so as time goes on,” the High King said quietly.

  A drum was thuttering in the background as the party paced towards the Council; there were flutes too, and flags. Rudi halted for a moment, went to one knee, and raised a clod of the dirt to his lips before he stood again.

  “I greet the Morrowland Pack in the name of the High Kingdom of Montival and all its peoples and the kindreds of earth and sea and sky,” he said, his beautiful almost-bass carrying clearly through the still cool air. “I step upon the Pack’s territory by its leave, obedient to its Law, making no claim without the free consent of its folk.”

  The Council formed up on either side of them, and they not-quite-marched into the House of the Council. The big interior room was a little dim, but comfortably warm despite the lingering chill of the night, from the stoves in the corners more than the crackling fire on the big hearth at the north end. The figure in the fur cloak sitting waiting for them struggled to his feet, helped by the anxious hands of a young man and woman on either side of him. They put a staff whose head was carved in the form of a wolf’s head in his hand and he leaned on it, breathing a little harshly.

  The Morrowlanders all stopped and called: “Akela!” They added a chillingly realistic collective wolf-howl. The Montivallans saluted in their various fashions, and Rudi Mackenzie inclined his head briefly.

  And yeah, this is a man to respect, Ingolf thought.

  Ingolf Vogeler had never seen anyone burned so badly who’d lived to heal—heal after a fashion. One blue eye looked out of the ruined face, and it was obvious that the Aklela’s left knee hadn’t bent properly for a very long time.

  Twenty-six years, to be precise, Ingolf thought. I’ve seen a lot of people hurt in the Change, but usually they’re not only a little more than my own age. Children mostly either made it or they didn’t.

  The High King and the Last Eagle Scout stood for a quiet time, meeting each other’s gaze. Then the single eye closed for an instant, with a long sigh.

  “Sit,” he said when he looked up again. “Sit, everyone . . . I have waited so long. . . .”

  They did, and then the Last Eagle spoke to the king, as if they were alone. “Captain Morrow got us down, but he died the next day, he was all broken inside, and burned so bad. I went forward with Scoutmaster Wilks to get him out, it was all burning . . . that’s why we’re the Morrowland Pack. When the ground thawed we buried him up on the high place, and every year on that day we go there and sing for him.”

  Rudi nodded. “Fitting indeed,” he said quietly. “A great honor, but well earned. There are far worse ways to die.”

  “It was so cold, and we got so hungry . . . Scoutmaster Wilks was hurt too, but he got us through. We chopped holes in the ice to fish, and we dug pine nuts, and made bread from whitebark, and found animals in their dens, and then we got a buffalo, we were so happy about it . . . I could help by then . . . And Ms. Delacroix knew so much, she was like our mom . . . Mr. Androwski left to get us help in the spring, but he never came back, he went north and I think . . . I think he met the Prophet, the first Prophet, in Corwin, and . . . and then three years later Scoutmaster Wilks was killed by a bear. And Ms. Delacroix had this cough, it got worse and worse, after a while the herbs didn’t help anymore. She said I’d have to be brave for the little ones, be a real Eagle Scout. We buried her next to Scoutmaster Wilks and the Captain on the high place, that was the year we saw the first tiger.”

  A long silence and then: “Sometimes I dream about them, dream they’re back and then I wake up. . . .”

  The story rambled on. Ingolf had heard much of it yesterday, and it gave him an odd lost feeling anyway, as if he was one of those children alone in the dark as the plane fell and broke open to the cold and the fire. Or the hurt boy ignoring his constant pain, working and teaching, holding himself and them to a dream. Instead he looked at the rack of books on the wall behind the hunched figure: The Boy Scout Handbook, Best of Ernest Thompson Seton, The Jungle Book, books on crafts and ecology and some he didn’t recognize at all. Most of those would have been on the 747, though there were a few modern leather bindings that must have trickled in from the outside world.

  “Did I do the right things?” the Last Eagle said finally to the King. “I tried, but sometimes I just had to make things up . . . I hated to help the Prophet, I bargained as hard as I could, I never let them send their priests here, said we’d die first, but . . .”

  “You saved your people,” Rudi said, leaning forward for a moment and putting a hand on the older man’s shoulder. “More than once, you saved them, from perils to body and to soul. You did what you could, and what you knew you must do, and you fought the good fight, Scout.”

  He nodded to the books. “What those men dreamed in the ancient times, you have become in truth. Now we will free your people.”

  He raised his voice slightly: “We will throw down Corwin together, and then all this land will be the Morrowlander Pack’s, forever; to hold in trust for all the kindreds of fur and feather and scale, for the very grass and trees and the rock beneath, as guardians and helpers. None of humankind shall come on it without your permission, nor harm it, while the line of my blood lasts.”

  The cheer rose to the carved rafters of the House. The Last Eagle rose to cheer with the rest of them, then staggered. Rudi frowned in concern, and the two young attendants stepped forward.

  “Our father is tired. Akela should rest. He’s worked so hard.”

  Rudi nodded. “Indeed he has,” he said softly. “Hard and well, and well he has earned rest from the Powers. Rest and blessing, in the land where no evil comes and all hurts are healed.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Valley of Paradise, near Corwin

  (Formerly western Montana)

  High Kingdom of Montival

  (Formerly western North America)

  August 28th, Change Year 26/2024 AD

  “Hold them off, by Our Lady of the Citadel!” Rudi heard Tiphaine d’Ath mutter. “Don’t chase them, just hold them and look like it’s killing you with the effort.”

  “They’ll do it long enough, Grand Constable, long enough,” he said. “And the effort is killing some, to be sure.”

  Mathilda swept the horizon northward. “Nothing that the gliders missed. Everyone’s here, and the Volta can begin.”

  They sat their horses on a slight rise about long catapult shot from the action, surrounded by the usual staff and couriers and guardsmen; and they were out of the woods, literally if not metaphorically. Well behind them lay the arched stone gate that had For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People on it—another of the old American ruler Roosevelt’s works, like Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood; the man had certainly left his mark on the world and usually in a way Rudi admired.

  The Valley of Paradise opened out before them. As far as looks went, it lived up to its heavenly name. To the west were the Gallatin Mountains, to the east the Absarokas, blue in the distance and tipped with white. The lowland ran north-south, opening out in a broad diamond shape with the Yellowstone river running through it in a broad swath of gallery forest, aspen and willow and big cottonwoods. Up from the valley flats rose buffalo-hump foothills, dark where tongues of spruce and fir and pine thickened amid the grass, fading into the endless mountain forests. Even with the heights upon every hand it felt . . .

  Big, somehow, he thought. As if the sky were larger, somehow. And yet—is that sense of some menace just things working below the surface of what my waking mind thinks, or am I really feeling it?

  “The League and the Dominions are on the other side of Bozeman Pass,” Rudi said aloud.

  “The League’s siege-train was most impressive, what we saw in Iowa,” Mathilda said, her voice carefully neutral. “Now they’ll get a chance to use it.”

  “Lucky it is
that the CUT put their major forts there when they were thinking how to protect Corwin, is it not?” Rudi said, with just a little sarcasm.

  “Because nobody would be crazy enough to come through Yellowstone,” d’Ath said dryly. “Always better to fight nature than men, when you can. They’re earning their corn, our gallant allies . . . at last.”

  Mathilda made a slight chiding sound; she’d never say anything so impolitic in public. Ruling folk were seldom really alone, and their words travelled. You had to remember that what you said casually could hit like a club.

  Rudi glanced upward; sunlight flashed off his reconnaissance fliers, wheeling thousands of feet above. The High King’s host had direct communication with the League and Dominion forces now, by very daring glider pilots, which cut about a week off the closest land route. Coming through Yellowstone had been nerve-wracking, mainly because he had to cover both banks of the river, giving the enemy the chance to cut one half of the army off from the other and destroy it . . . or it would have given them the chance, if the Scouts hadn’t given him a better grasp of the Cutters’ movements than their own commanders had.

  Sure, and it’s the Threefold Law in operation.

  “Not long now,” Mathilda put in. “A month or two, and we’ll be seeing Órlaith again.”

  Rudi nodded agreement, putting aside a stab of longing that felt like a wound to speak judiciously:

  “There’s no doubt about the outcome. Their last chance to preserve anything was to keep us from crossing into this valley . . . and they failed at that, thanks to our Scout friends. We’re just seeing to the details the now.”

  The details would mean an arrow through the gut for some, which would be unpleasantly final whether you were winning or losing. No point in mentioning that; it was a cost of doing business.

  “About now, I think,” he said aloud instead.

  The surface of the valley was open, with few buildings and those clustered inside palisades or earth berms. Much of it was tilled in big square fields colored brown or shades of green, planted with buckwheat and rye and potatoes and other hardy crops that could grow in a climate that consisted of an eight-month winter briefly interrupted by two months each of spring and autumn. Most of the harvest had been gathered, except for some rye that was cut but still standing with the sheaves in stooks. The rest was pasture and hay-meadow, and there was rarely anything tall enough to be much obstacle to a horse.

  He leveled his binoculars. The skirmish—it would have been counted a battle in any war less huge—involved several thousand fighters on either side. There was a block in the reddish-brown armor of the Sword of the Prophet, about a regiment’s worth, six or seven hundred, hanging back to the north, waiting to punch at the right moment. That was more than he’d seen of them since the Horse Heaven Hills last year, and he hadn’t missed them at all; the Prophet’s guardsmen were as disciplined as any of his own troops, too disciplined by far, and fanatically dedicated to their cause and leader. They waited quietly with the thread-thin shafts of their lances standing upright topped by the bright slivers of the heads.

  The main action was between the light horse on both sides, armed with bow and round shield and curved sword, few with more armor than a helmet and mail shirt. His CORA levies and some of the PPA’s eastern cavalry and the Boisean equivalents, along with the Richland volunteers under his brother-in-law Ingolf, and Rick Three Bear’s Lakota and the Dúnedain.

  The Grand Constable was using her own binoculars, below the raised shelf of her visor. “Now, the question is, will the CORA-boys obey the signal to get the hell out of the way? They’ve got lots of motivation, but not much discipline.”

  “Oh, I think so,” Rudi said. “We’ve all been working together for some time now. You have Baron Tucannon . . . Lord Maugis de Grimmond . . . in charge of your first detachment of men-at-arms, correct?”

  She nodded. “I’ve been giving him more work, now that a lot of the Counts are out of the picture. He’s very able, and well-born enough he doesn’t have to kill anyone to get the others to pay attention. And he’s mentally flexible as well as intelligent.”

  Which was not something you could say for every Associate baron; they were all brave, but many had about as much subtlety as a war hammer in the face. Maugis was a vassal of the Counts of Walla Walla, a smallish wiry young man with frizzy red hair and jug ears, and he was very clever indeed. Also . . .

  “Also the enemy burned his manor house and villages and those of his vassals, and chased him and his men like a wolf before hounds through the Blue Mountains for months while his lady held their castle against the besiegers.”

  Motivation like that could turn a man into a berserker; or if combined with intelligence and self-control into someone very useful to his King.

  “Let’s bring it all together and sample the taste of the stewpot,” Rudi said. “Now, Grand Constable.”

  D’Ath nodded and raised her gauntleted hand and the wand of office, chopping it downward. A signal team nearby worked the lever of their heliograph, flashing the sun through an angle. Instants later trumpets blew below, half a dozen different varieties.

  The Montivallan light horse had been busy at the deadly swirl of a horse-archery engagement, small parties sweeping past each other, rising in the saddles to shoot as they passed, advancing or retreating with eyeblink agility. Only occasionally would two bands clash hand to hand when one or the other miscalculated. A brief melee of shetes and sabers, the clash of steel on steel or the cracking thud of blades against the varnished leather of shields, a scream of war cries or just animal shrieks of rage and pain, then the combatants exploding outward with riderless horses galloping and bodies lying in the green grass.

  At the sound of trumpets the Montivallans all turned tail and ran for the shelter of the woods as fast as their horses could carry them, turning in the saddle to shoot behind. The Cutters pursued, but cautiously—feigned retreats to draw an enemy in were the favorite tactic of all the vast interior lands of mountain and steppe and desert. The Cutters would be afraid of artillery, too, field catapults that outranged even the powerful composite bows. They didn’t make the machines themselves, and now that Boise was part of Montival they didn’t have allies to supply the lack. What they wouldn’t be afraid of, hopefully, was what was really waiting for them. Down there Oak Barstow Mackenzie, the First Armsman of the Clan, would be judging distances and preparing to give the signal.

  About . . .

  “Now,” Rudi said crisply; it was the moment he’d have chosen.

  Three thousand Mackenzies stood and threw off their disguising war-cloaks, trotting forward out of the final screen of trees. They were in open order, and they drew as they came, halting only when they needed to pull that last few inches. The savage snarl of the war-pipes sounded, raw and hoarse, and the inhuman roar of the Lambeg drums.

  “Let the gray geese fly!” Rudi murmured to himself, what the bow-captains would be shouting down there. “Wholly together—shoot!”

  The arrows flew upward at forty-five degrees for maximum range, two more flights in the air before the first came slanting down out of the sky and struck like steel-tipped rain. The loose mass of horse-archers wavered, men dropping clawing at the iron in their flesh, horses running in bucking frenzies.

  “They’re really going to have to stop underestimating infantry,” d’Ath said thoughtfully, in a detached professional tone. “Particularly longbowmen. Everybody understands a pike when it’s pointed at them, but it’s taking them a while to realize foot-archers have three times as many bows per unit of front than mounted ones. Horses take up a lot of space.”

  “It’s a bit late for them to learn. Now let’s see how desperate they are to knock back our vanguard.”

  The cowhorns the Cutters used sounded in a series of snarling blats. The whole mass came forward after an instant’s wavering, and the contingent of the Sword of the Prophet moved up in support . . . or to take advantage of the arrow-absorbing capacity of their light caval
ry, depending on how you wanted to look at it. The Mackenzies were spread out, and they hadn’t planted their swine-feathers—the knock-down double-ended spears they carried to jam into the dirt and hold off horsemen with a hedge of points while they shot.

  It would look like a tempting bit of arrogance by an overconfident invader, a chance to get in close with the shete and cut down footmen.

  “There they go, taking the bait. Sure, and when something’s too good to be true, it usually isn’t true,” Rudi said. “But you’ll also seldom go wrong encouraging men to believe what they strongly want to be so.”

  “Let’s see how Lord Maugis is at timing,” d’Ath said meditatively, raising a brow for permission to wait. He nodded; that was something you needed to know.

  They waited a few moments more; Mathilda was looking a bit unhappy at the length of it by the end. She was a good competent field commander but a little more conservative in her style than Rudi. Or the Grand Constable—the gauntlet was just going up again when the Portlander oliphants sounded down below, long and shrill, a sound that somehow gleamed like polished metal in the sun, fit to raise the hair on the back of your neck.

  “He’s good,” the Grand Constable said. “Waited until the last minute but no longer.”

  “Or we’re all three wrong in the same way,” Rudi said dryly.

  He wished he were down there, ready to charge with the rest, but that would have been self-indulgent under the circumstances.

  There was a concerted flicker from among the underbrush, as the knights walked their destriers forward. They’d had time to add the horse-barding for their mounts as well, or rather their varlets had; armor of articulated steel plates riveted to padded leather, covering for head and neck, shoulders and breast. It made the great beasts look like dragons uncoiling as they emerged into the sunlight, the more so for the touches of fancy, plumes nodding, rondels and silvered unicorn-horns on the chamfrons, spikes or brass inlay. There were five hundred of them, their formation a block of two staggered lines, a mass of muscle and hoof and steel that would make ground quiver hundreds of yards away once they got moving. The clatter and ring of the harness of men and horses carried clearly to where he waited.