"Well, you were the one who was pining because I didn't take you out enough," he scolded her. "Be good!"
He kicked his right foot free of the stirrup, bent down and retrieved the bonnet. To calm her, he let Epona drop behind the rest of them; Odard and Matti were mounted too, and they all watched the shouting mob lead the two ponies pulling the sled through the snowy woods. A scramble and a push to help the team, and they were on a well kept trail that ran east to Dun Juniper.
This forest had been Mackenzie land before the Mac kenzies were a Clan, back before the Change; way back, since the family came out from east Tennessee in his mother's great-great grandfather's time. Generations ago her great uncle had started to tend and plant here-that was why there were so many oaks, and exotics like black walnuts, though nowadays every dun on this side of the valley spread them from the nuts and acorns. He halted under one walnut that reared a hundred feet above the trail and made a reverence to a small shrine there; it had a stone arch and two rosebushes trained to twine together.
"This is where they died," Mathilda said quietly. "Nearly twelve years ago now."
Rudi nodded; that had been in March of the last year of the War of the Eye, when Mathilda had been captive here. Her parents had sent a team of warriors to get her back; they had, and taken Rudi too, and killed the two Clan fighters guarding him, Aoife Barstow and Liath Dunling. He made an offering here every year on the anniversary of it, a handful of salt and wheat and a little of his own blood, to their spirits and the spirit of the tree; it had become a symbol to him that he'd be heading north soon, as part of the agreement that had ended the War.
She crossed herself and brought out her crucifix to kiss. "They fought very bravely, I remember that," she said gravely. "Holy Mary, Queen of Heaven, intercede for them, and for us all, now and at the hour of our deaths."
Odard repeated the gesture; they all sat silent for a moment in respect, then touched their horses into a canter and followed the sled.
It was already out of the trees, out onto the long lens-shaped stretch of benchland meadow that held Dun Juniper on the south facing slope of the mountain. The snow was knee-deep, with more coming as the weather thickened. Mathilda tilted her head back and stuck out her tongue to catch the flakes on it. Laughing, Rudi did the same; even Odard joined in after a moment. They passed the tannery and bark mill and soap boiling sheds, not in use in this season but still giving off a strong whiff of curing leather and boiled fat. The sled had gotten ahead of them, and they leg-signaled their horses to pick up the pace, until plumes of white flew up from their forefeet.
Dun Juniper lay at the middle of the oval, hard up against the flank of the mountain, halfway between the tannery at one end and the little waterfall and gristmill at the other. It had been a low plateau once, where his mother's kin had built a hunting lodge of great squared logs.
Rudi chuckled under his breath as he looked up at the walls looming through the snow; they were as high and strong as Sutterdown's, albeit the circuit of them was a lot less. Snow stuck in patches to the rough stucco, hiding the swirling designs of vine and leaf and flowers under the battlements.
And whenever he saw them, something deep within him said home, wherever he'd been.
"What's the joke, Rudi?" Odard asked.
"I was just remembering something my mother said. She showed up here right after the Change, and met her coven-she'd been in Corvallis; they were in Eugene. And she gave them this little speech, you know, to buck them up because they were all at sea and scared witless with it."
The other two nodded; they were all the children of rulers, in one way or another, and they'd grown up with the necessities of leadership. Rudi went on:
"And she said, 'It's a clan we'll have to be, as it was in the old days…' "
Odard frowned. "What's funny about that? That's what happened, isn't it?"
"Yeah," he said, laughing outright now. "But she didn't actually mean it, not really. She thought it was, what are they after calling it, a figure of speech. She just meant they'd have to pull together to get through. It was the others who decided to really do that, and she says she pretty well just had to go along with it whenever they came up with something, like calling her Chief or Uncle Denni making the kilts when they found that load of tartan blankets. She says it shows how 'leading' means running fast enough to keep ahead of your people."
Mathilda joined in the laughter. "Well, my dad did something like that too," she said.
Rudi raised an eyebrow, intrigued. She didn't usually talk about her father much, naturally enough, since ev eryone outside Protectorate territory hated his memory. And a fair number within, too, for all that his tyranny had still saved their lives, or these days more often their parents' lives.
"Mom says he got a bunch of people he'd known in the Society together, that first day, Conrad Renfrew and the others…"
Odard and Rudi both nodded; a surprisingly large proportion of survivors had been members of the Society for Creative Anachronism and similar groups, and an even larger share of those had ended up in leader ship positions. Enough so that in these latter days social climbers tended to invent Society parents if they didn't actually have them. Not just in the Protectorate, though that was where they'd been most influential, because of the Armingers.
For a while they'd been the only ones with weapons that worked, and who knew how to use them. In a world where you had to fight to take food and fight to keep it, a desperate man with hauberk and helm and shield, a sword and some faint beginning idea of what to do with it, had a big advantage over desperate suburbanites with kitchen knives and shovels. Mathilda went on:
"… and after they'd talked about what was happen ing, and Dad had convinced them things weren't going to Change back and they had to do what he wanted or they'd all die, he said: 'What if a man were to take it upon himself to be king?' "
Odard grinned, catching the reference; or maybe he'd heard the story before. Even when Rudi was visiting in Association territory, people tended to avoid certain subjects-after all, his blood father, Mike Havel, and Norman Arminger had fought like bulldogs with a grip for ten years and then killed each other in a spectacular duel between the two armies they led, and his mother, Juniper, hadn't exactly been friendly with the Armingers either, to put it mildly.
He racked his brains; he'd read a lot of history, particularly of periods well back before the twentieth century-it was fun, and useful, and his teachers had encouraged him, starting with Juniper. Then the fact jiggled into place, along with a memory of his mother and himself curled up on a couch reading a heavy book with a leather cover.
Ah. That was what Oliver Cromwell said, when he was thinking of taking the throne of England, after he'd killed Charles the First. He never did, though. He just called himself the Lord Prot… well, Annwyn take it, was that where that bastard Arminger got the idea?
Matti went on: "And Count Conrad… well, he wasn't a count then, of course… said, 'Oh, hell, Norman, we'll just call you the Lord Protector. You can enter an in sanity plea if the lights come back on, and we'll blame everything on you.'
"And Dad laughed and said: 'Lord Protector? I like it. We'll call ourselves the Portland Protective Associa tion; it'll sound more familiar to the non Society people I want to bring in. And if the lights come back on, Conrad, I promise to take the fall.' "
"Odd to think of important things starting by chance, like that," Odard said meditatively. "Though… when you're reading history, have you noticed how the older stuff seems more real, somehow? The people and the things they say and do, I mean. The closer you get to the Change, the more… weird… things seem. Except things like the Society; my mother's always on about that and how her father was king of some territory by right of combat. That sounds more like real life. It's all the stuff around it that doesn't. Opinion polls, and computers, and Star Trek…"