And good riddance; I wouldn’t have liked to be in his skin when he had to make accounting to the Guardians of the Western Gate. Even such a man as he probably deceived himself about his deeds. But there’s no lying before Them.
Alleyne stepped up to the portable map table and opened his report, reading and pointing things out at the same time, and one of the attendants put little carved hardwood chip markers on it and moved them around with something like a billiard-cue rake. It was now light enough to see the map well; the smell of the just-extinguished lamps hung in the air with a musky wax for a moment, and someone was cooking porridge not far away. Even a very new kingdom could be well-organized, if you had a competent Chancellor and other helpers.
The scents were soon lost in the wind that blew over the vast rolling landscape of the Horse Heaven Hills, even the stronger stink of the troops not far away. He felt he could see forever from here, and you really could see very far indeed. That air was cold and clean, and birds rode it high above-crows, buzzards, ravens, hawks, even eagles. They’d had time since the Change to learn it meant a feast spread for them when men gathered in such numbers; it wasn’t an accident that one of the Dark Mother’s names was Crow Goddess.
He was in full plate now, save for the helm and gauntlets, the marvelous alloy-steel suit Mathilda’s mother had had made as a wedding gift. It felt indecently light and easy compared to some gear he’d worn. Only a monarch could have commissioned it, and not a minor monarch at that, given the difficulty of working those refractory metals under modern conditions; most plate was made from ordinary salvaged sheet-steel. Although his still performed armor’s twofold miracle, making you too hot in warm weather and obstinately refusing to protect you from even the slightest chill.
The little markers on the map seemed to glow with significance as he watched, trembling with possibilities as his right palm rested on the moon-crystal pommel of the Sword of the Lady. He was used to the way it affected him now, the way it made him more of the man he had to be to do the job the Powers had handed him.
But I’m still not altogether certain I much like that man, he thought absently. I’ll just have to try not to be him so much I dislike myself, which would be a grievous fate given that I’m stuck in here with…me. To be sure.
Beside him Frederick Thurston grunted thoughtfully, his hard brown young face calm as he nodded.
“I’d have bet anyway that they were winding up to hit us here on our right, close to the river, but it’s nice to have confirmation. Well, that removes some of the uncertainty from the next twenty-four hours,” he said.
Rudi knew what he meant. Still…
“We know what’s going to happen in the next day, Fred,” he said. “A great many who’d rather be home tending their crops or their workshops are going to die, more still will be crippled, children will keep asking when their parents are coming home until they’re old enough to understand an ugly truth, and many a household will know want and hardship for years to come. Everything else is…arra, how did they put in the old days…damage control. The only consolation is that this isn’t just about which pair of buttocks will be gracing which chair, so to say.”
Eric of the Bearkillers traced the huge blunt arrow that was heading westward on the map with his metal left hand. This one was a utilitarian slotted trowel-shaped thing that fitted into the round shield across the big fair man’s back and would do as a weapon in a pinch, rather than the dramatic one that gave him his nickname of Steel-Fist. The Boiseans were coming in just a little north of the bluffs along the Columbia, the closest ground that would give them room to deploy.
“That’s not particularly subtle as an opening move,” he said, the plates of his armor clinking a little as he moved to stare meditatively eastward.
Rudi nodded. “They outnumber us five to four and they need a swift victory. Otherwise winter will kill them if they stay and force them to fall back on their bases of supply if they don’t; and the League of Des Moines is marching up their backsides, the which is a most uncomfortable sensation. Winter will slow the war over there in the east, too, but not altogether until they hit the mountain passes. If your troops are willing to suffer and you can feed them, you can move on the high plains in winter; it’s the one time of year when footmen have the advantage, since there’s not much grazing. Come spring the CUT must be able to shift troops east to meet the Midwesterners. Hence they must come to us and break us the now or lose the war over the next year. There’s no more time for slow maneuver. And if they can knock us away from the river, they win this round.”
He turned his head to the messengers. “Observation balloons up now; this will be the battlefield. Gliders concentrate on denying the enemy air reconnaissance.”
They scribbled and dashed away; heliographs began to blink. Rudi went on:
“Chief McClintock!”
The McClintock was a big man, with a two-handed sword slung across his back, a claidheamh mòr with a four-foot blade and a cross-and-clamshell guard. He looked rather like John Hordle in seven-eighths scale, save for the bushy brown beard that fell down his chest over the steel and leather nearly to the big dragon-shaped brass buckle of his belt, and the rather baggy look of the Great Kilt he wore.
That garment wasn’t much like the neat, tailored pleats of the Mackenzie version; the skirt and plaid were all one five-yard-long stretch of woolen cloth held by waist-belt and shoulder-brooch, in a tartan of dark brown-red, blue and hunter green. He straightened a little when the call came.
“Aye, Yer Majesty?” the clan chief asked.
The McClintocks spoke in what they thought was a Scottish fashion, one that Rudi’s mother’s fine ear found even more excruciatingly artificial than the imitation of her Irish brogue which had settled in among Mackenzies back at the beginning. The McClintocks had formed in the forested hills and narrow beautiful valleys between Ashland and Cave Junction, down south of the Willamette, in the post-Change period; partly with Mackenzie assistance, and partly in imitation of them as a model that had worked in the wild and terrible years-the latter something they fiercely denied, of course.
Their Chief’s father actually had been named McClintock, at least, and he’d been a man of great strength of will and vision…and probably what the old world would have called certifiably insane, either before the Change or driven so by the terrors and horrors he’d seen. There had been many such in those years, and the mentally damaged were still common in the older generation. Rudi had always suspected, and since he first touched the Sword he knew, that the more successful of those founders had done more than dream and make dreams real. They’d tapped into patterns more ancient and strong than anything the old world had suspected, a subtle force pushing and shaping through individuals attuned to it.
So the Powers have their jests with us. Did our ancestors create the myths that now walk naked among us in the light of common day? Or do they but return from an age of legends much like this new world of ours, an age whose recollection echoed down many a thousand year? For walk the world again they do, now, most certainly and uncomfortably real whether we believe in them or not. More real than the world or we its dwellers, sometimes, you might be saying. So heavy with reality they threaten to tear through the gossamer fabric of our lives.
“I want your clan’s warriors to hold this area-” he pointed south with one hand and traced the scrambled contour lines on the map with the other “- between the riverbank and the plateau up here, as we discussed. Now we know it’ll be this stretch in particular and though it’s rough as a cob we can’t let them move through it. Sure as the Lady’s love they’ll put troops in there; light infantry, at a guess. Dispose your clansfolk as you will, so long as you don’t let them through.”