The Protector's War

by S. M. Stirling

  "Grimy arse, cried the kettle to the pot, my sweet Lord Bear."

  "Hey, that was Astrid!"

  "But Mike, there aren't that many people around who were even adults when the Change hit—and people over forty were a lot less likely to make it through alive. If you ask people the same age as my demented little sister, or the ones who're younger, most of them have never heard of Elvis or Springsteen. They have heard of the Lord Protector, and sweetie, they don't think he's funny at all. Hell, darling, most of them don't even think Astrid is funny, which is funny itself and scary too. By the time Mathilda Arminger and Rudi Mackenzie and the twins are our ages… much less Mike Junior…"

  "Ehhhh." Havel tried to follow the thought.

  And I think that was a polite way of telling me I'm a middle-aged fuddy-duddy.stuck in apre-Change mental rut. Aloud, he went on: "Look, Arminger would never put up with Rudi Mackenzie as king of Portland after him—or even, what did they call it, prince consort."

  "Yes," Signe said patiently. "But let's look at the alternatives here. Let's say we do really, really well in the war we all know is coming—I mean, God, we're fighting it now, more or less, whenever the Protector feels like it, because if we don't win we'll be too dead to care—so, if we win as big as we can possibly do, are we going to flatten the Protectorate?"

  "Not unless they break up hopelessly from the inside," Havel said ruefully. "Too many men-at-arms and too many castles. If we could knock off Arminger in the process, though, or make them turn on him—"

  "Then they'd need a figurehead," Signe said. "Depends when and how it happens, of course, but… so whoever gets the hand of the little princess might well pick up a big chunk of Arminger's power with it. If it were Rudi, that would make better than half the Valley. Not real comfortable for the Outfit, eh?"

  Havel nodded. "But, alskling, to get to that point we have to beat the Lord Protector first," he said reasonably. "And we're a long, long way from there right now. Long-term alternatives are all well and good, but you've gotta prioritize. If you don't make it through the next six months, six years is sort of moot."

  She sighed, nodded, and came to join him. A long moment later: "Ouch!That's a bruise!"

  "Sorry," he said. "That's the problem with making out when we've both been in a sword fight. Too much like rubbing wounds on wounds… ouch! Hey, you did that on purpose."

  "Damn right I did, darling. Now let's think about this…"

  "I'm dreaming, aren't I?" Juniper Mackenzie asked.

  "Of course you are, darlin' girl," her mother said. "There! Isn't it just ready, now?"

  The plain suburban kitchen was just as she remembered it, down to the chipped white enamel of the old Maytag four-burner gas stove and the crayon drawings she'd made in sixth grade clipped onto the refrigerator with magnets, and the mixing bowls soaking in the sink. Her father's ga-loshes were by the screen door; it was spring, from the look of the lilac bush outside the window, but a gray, rainy, western Oregon day whose raw chill wind swung the seats of the swing in the middle of the little backyard.

  She knew this house, the white frame Victorian in the Hackleman District on Elsworth and Seventh. A modest two-bedroom, not quite shabby, the water damage in the upper rear corner of the ceiling from the windstorm back in October of '62 neatly repaired by her father's own clever hands—it hadn't been when her parents bought the house in 1968, the year of her birth, which had cut the price to something they could afford. It even smelled the same: waxed linoleum and a sachet of dried lavender and the peculiar smell of the mutton-based shepherd's pie her mother made, overlaid with the good scent of the raisin-studded soda bread she was lifting out with her oven mitts. The same print of a Madonna and Child taken from a Church calender in 1982, the same checked tablecloth…

  Mary Mackenzie was in her late thirties, as she'd looked a year or two before the accident, wearing an apron over a plain housedress, the first gray strands in her fiery molten-copper hair…

  Just like mine, Juniper thought, looking down at herself.

  The homespun saffron shirt and patterned kilt should have looked out of place; with the curious logic of dreams somehow they didn't, not even the dirk with its carved bone hilt and the sgian dubh in her boot top. Neither did Nigel Loring sitting across from her, smiling as he dropped the little perforated silver ball full of tea leaves into the pot on the end of its chain.

  "Never could abide those tea-bag things, Mrs. Mackenzie," he said.

  "Inventions of the devil," Mary said, shaking the triangles onto a plate. "A nice cuppa to welcome you to America, Sir Nigel—and sweet soda bread with raisins, if you like it."

  "I'm very fond of it," he said, breaking one open and applying the butter and homemade strawberry jam. "My wife and I took our honeymoon in a little place in Donegal, and the good lady there made something very like this at teatime. Just the thing after a long walk in the wet."

  Juniper took a piece as well and bit into it; the scent and the rich sweet taste were like a flood that stung her eyes with tears and broke down the gates of memory. Helping Mom with the dishes, standing on a little wooden footstool so she could reach the counter. Judy Lefkowitz and she bicycling on the banks of the Willamette and singing Beatles tunes together at the tops of their lungs. Dad coming in from his beat and her running out to meet him, and he put his cap on her head and hoisted her on his shoulders as he walked up the driveway…

  "You'll be looking for a place here, then?" Mary asked Nigel. When he nodded, she went on: "Then you'd best be remembering is folamh fuar e teach gan bean. A house without a woman is empty and cold."

  He smiled, a charming expression in his normally impassive face, one that made him look younger despite the laughter lines beside his faded blue eyes; then the smile died. "Well, perhaps if I could find one like you, Mrs. Mackenzie… or my Maude."

  She touched him on the shoulder. "Grief is the tribute we pay the dead," she said, matter-of-fact sympathy in her voice. "But they don't ask more than we can afford to give. They've never really gone from us, you know, those we love; they're part of our story, and we of theirs."

  Just then the door blew open. Eilir was there, and Nigel's son Alleyne, and Astrid, and the great slab-shouldered form of John Hordle. The youngsters' cheeks were flushed with wind and exercise; there was a minute of laughter and jostling and dripping cloaks before they were seated around the table and fresh plates of the soda bread set down, and tea poured.

  Juniper gripped her cup in both hands as she sipped, then set it down.

  "Mom?" she said, murmuring under the buzz of conversation. The infinitely familiar face leaned down by her. "Are you… are you really my mother?" Her eyes flicked to the blue-robed mother and god-child in the print.

  Soft lips touched her brow. "To be sure I am, my heart, my treasure! For aren't all mothers one, in the end?" Her eyes went to Eilir, laughing silently as Astrid showed the two men how to shape the sign for wet. "And don't we all return what we're given?"

  "Oh, Mom, I've missed you! I hated it when you went away!"

  She pressed her face into the apron, flung her arms around her mother's body and felt the infinitely familiar soft warmth and scent. A hand stroked her hair. "Shhh, mo chroi. It was only for a little while I left you…"

  Suddenly she was sitting up in bed, in the comfortable darkness of the Crossing Tavern's room. With Eilir and Astrid and herself they were near to filling even the big king-sized; the place was too crowded for the luxury of a private room. The girls were asleep, dark head and fair on two pillows, with a tavern moggy curled up at the foot of the bed and only a little starlight and moonlight shining in through the cracks around the shuttered windows.

  What a dream! she thought, waiting while her quickened heartbeat slowed. What a dream!

  She was smiling as she laid her head down once more. When in doubt, ask the Mother.

  "This is getting to be entirely too much like the Decameron," Juniper Mackenzie grumbled as the leaders sat down to breakfast, with the L
orings present as well.

  They were eating al fresco, as much for privacy's sake as for the bright spring sunlight. The stretch of courtyard was still pleasant, with a peach orchard beyond—pink blossom above, and sheep cropping amid grass below starred with yellow penstemon. The cold sweet scent of the peach blossom mixed with cooking, horses and woodsmoke.

  "Ah, you like Boccaccio too?" Sir Nigel said. "Chaucer as well?"

  "Indeed," she replied. She'd requested soda bread for breakfast, and Crossing Tavern's staff included someone who made a very passable batch. "I do that, professionally and personally."

  "You were a musician before the Change?"

  "Mostly," she said. And he seems genuinely interested. It's a rare man who's a good listener on first acquaintance.

  "Celtic and folk. Which meant you were a stage performer as much as a singer, and a tale-teller nearly so."

  "And now you're a ruler," he said.

  "By some yardsticks," she replied, and they both laughed. "Immeasurably so."

  Mike Havel cleared his throat, obviously anxious to get down to business. It's a grim sort you are at times, Mike, she thought. And besides that, it's a terrible habit, putting mustard on bacon like that.

  The sausages were very good; a little spicier than the cooks at Dun Juniper made them. She waited as Sir Nigel sipped his semitea and smoothed down his white-streaked yellow mustache.

  "Well," he said, clearing his throat. "It didn't take long to learn what it was that the Protector wanted. The problem was that Captain Nobbes was rather more taken in than I'd have liked…"

  Portland Protectorate, Willamette Valley, Oregon April 6th, 2007 AD—Change Year Nine

  The dinner ended with apples and a cheese board; both were excellent. But then, so had been the fresh oysters, the lobster bisque, the crusted stuffed pork loin, the fresh baguettes—and the coffee, a gift from Captain Nobbes's dwindling store.

  "So you see," Norman Arminger said, leaning back and turning the stem of his wineglass in his long fingers, "I'm sympathetic to your mission. Certainly I've no desire to see nerve agents brought back into common use! A pity the Change couldn't have taken care of those as well."

  The crackling fire on the hearth behind him left his face in shadow, despite the candles on the table—only a half dozen of those had been lit. Nigel suspected that was calculated, to let him see his guests' faces clearly without revealing all of his own. His wife was smilingly inscrutable in her wimple and cotte hardi.

  "Dear, I suppose even God has to let some chemical functions go on unaltered," Sandra Arminger said, taking a precise nibble of sliced apple and then a bite of blue-veined cheese on a rye cracker. "Or at least that's what Pope Leo says, at great length sometimes."

  "There's no danger of their being brought into common use," Nigel Loring said. "The industrial processes needed to mass-produce the organophosphates are impossible post-Change. You could make tiny amounts on a laboratory scale, I fear, but nothing beyond that… and that would be quite hideously dangerous, don't you know. And they can be destroyed; dropping them into a large quantity of water will do nicely. The sea, or a large river."

  "That's a relief," Arminger said. "The storage facility at Umatilla is uncomfortably close, and the area's chronically unstable, currently having a civil war. It wouldn't do to have the gas fall into the wrong hands. You're an expert, Sir Nigel?"

  Before he could demur, Nobbes cut in: "S'truth! Couldn't have done half what we've done without this bloke."

  "I had some experience with them before the Change," Nigel said. "I wasn't a chemical-warfare specialist, though. More from the other side, if anything, poking around the Middle East and Eastern Europe looking for them."

  "As close to an expert as anyone's going to get," Nobbes said with annoying enthusiasm.

  "Surely most of it wouldn't be operational anyway," Arminger said.

  Loring sighed mentally and cut in. Nobbes would blabber if he didn't, and the information wasn't exactly secret anyway: "Well, most of the artillery and rocket-delivered ones wouldn't be usable," he said. "They're generally binary agents that can't be mixed except by firing the shell or warhead—which is scarcely practicable in our time, eh? The mustard gas is corrosive and I'd be surprised if any is left that hasn't eaten its way through the containers, without preventative maintenance."

  "And according to my intelligence, the staff at Umatilla poured gasoline into the storage bunkers and set them on fire before leaving," Arminger said.

  His hands clenched on the arms of his chair in anger at the thought. I don't think we were supposed to see that,

  Nigel thought. And our good host probably didn't think of checking for some time after the Change.

  "Well, then," Nigel began, a sentence that would end with: Not much point in poking about there, eh?

  "We'd still have to check," Nobbes said. "We've got protective gear on the Pride, right enough. The spray dispensers for the nerve gas might still be functional, eh? Isn't that what you said, Sir Nigel?"

  Nigel Loring sighed aloud this time. "Yes, I'm afraid that's a distinct possibility," he said.

  "Well, then," Arminger said. "We can't have that. I'll give you all the assistance I can."

  Half an hour later, the lord of Portland grinned as he sat alone with his wife in the darkened dining room, cracking walnuts in his fist.

  "Just what we needed," he said, tossing a few of the nut-meats into his mouth. "We may even be able to win without a war, after a few demonstrations. I'll even offer the idiots in the south Valley fairly easy terms. Subject to subsequent modifications, of course."

  A maid came in with a fresh pot of tea; she wore a black-and-white uniform of gown,'t-tunic and tabard. "Thank you, Isabelle," Sandra Arminger said, and poured for them both as the girl left.

  "I'm glad you got over that fetish period and agreed to have the staff properly clothed," she said. "Body hairs in the soup… God, how embarrassing. One lump or two?"

  Arminger snorted. "Two… I know you, my love. You've got something unpleasant to say. You always bring up an over-and-done-with quarrel before starting a new one."

  "Only ones I won," she said tranquilly. "And face it, the skimpily clad maiden thing lost its thrill fairly fast, didn't it? Both the looking and the touching."

  "To an extent," Arminger admitted.

  "That's why I didn't say anything at the time," she said, with a gracious smile that grew wider when he gritted his teeth. "I knew you'd get over it. I must admit it was fun to watch you have your wicked way with them, occasionally, all the screaming and thrashing. Very occasionally."

  "Always room for three," Arminger pointed out.

  Sandra smiled again, and drew a line through the air with one finger, as if tracing the edge of a draftsman's set-square used to draw straight lines. "Sorry, dear. Raw oysters never did appeal."

  "The point, dearest wife? Besides the fact that being Supreme Overlord turns out to be more like being a bu-reaucraft than I anticipated?"

  "That you tend to confuse fantasy and reality sometimes, my lord Protector, and not just the way you pander to those old Society geeks' taste for romantic terminology. You've… nobbled Captain Nobbes, the Aussie extrovert. But Sir Nigel is quite another kettle of fish. Much more subtle under that bluff hearty Squire Western exterior. I think he's seen through you—us, for that matter."

  An eyebrow went up on the Protector's knob-cheeked face. "You think so?"

  "I know he knows you're after that nerve gas for your catapults."

  "Gliders too," Arminger said absently. "A very little VX apparently goes a very long way. It might make some of our more independent-minded vassals think twice about pulling their drawbridges up on me as well if I could spray them like bugs from the air."

  "Raid as opposed to raids," Sandra said with a chuckle.

  He grinned at her. "Insecticide for people. I like it."

  "Then strike while the iron's hot, my dear. Before he can talk Captain Nobbes into withdrawing his protective
gear and trained team… I gather it's not practical without them?"

  "I have better uses for the limited supply of people who'll walk into a contaminated poison-gas facility just because I tell them to," Arminger said, picking up an apple and peeling it with a small sharp knife, taking the whole skin in a single long circular strip.

  Interesting to know you can peel a human being the same way, he thought, and went on aloud: "It's not really something you can get men to do with a threat of docking a week's pay. But there are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream."

  "You're really a very wicked man," she said with a smile, after he explained. "Dreadful. A monster."

  "Part of my charm, darling."

  "Why do you think I married you?"

  "You mean it wasn't the professor's salary and the faculty cocktail parties? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you."

  He put his arm around her waist; they laughed together as they walked out the door and into the corridor.

  Nigel Loring had seen many rivers, from the homely little streams of England to the Rhine and the Zambezi; before the Change he'd kayaked down the Amazon, and paddled his way up the Sepik in New Guinea—Sam Aylward had been with him, and insisted on calling it the "Septic" River, for good reason. The mile-wide Columbia Gorge was impressive even so. The water was bright blue this April day, with a wind out of the west beating the surface to white-caps in the morning, dying away to a glassy calm as the day wore on. Black basalt cliffs closed in on either side, broken by the silver threads of waterfalls and bright-green ferns on the southern shore, then gave way to tall hills forested in somber firs and pines, towering thousands of feet above. When the galley's course brought it close to shore he could see sheets of purple lupin and bright yellow flowers he didn't recognize. And there were glimpses of Mt. Hood's perfect white cone to the south.

  "Striking," he said. "A land for giants."

  Norman Arminger nodded, apparently taking that as a personal compliment; there was pride in his eyes as he watched the landscape inch past. Some of the small settlements on the shore were abandoned; more were shrunken, but there was a lively traffic of fishing boats and sailing barges and the odd oared craft.