When he did that, Someone always answered. Often with fire-shot darkness, so that he woke later scarcely knowing what he’d done, save for the blood. Now it came on him in cold certainty; the world seemed to recede until everything was small and bright and perfect, seen through panes of crystal. He took up a clod of snowy earth where Epona’s hooves had torn through winter’s coat to bare the soil’s flesh, and touched it to his lips:
“Earth must be fed.”
Behind him Edain did the same, and the Southsiders who’d come to follow the Old Religion. It was acknowledgment that you only borrowed your body from Earth the Mother for a little while. And that to slay in battle was to consent to your own mortality and make your killer free of your blood.
Then they swung into the saddle, with no more than low grunts of effort. One of the tests of knighthood in the Association was to vault into the saddle full-armed, but nobody felt like showing off right now. Artos held out his hand and Edain tossed him the lance. He caught the twelve-foot length of it in his left hand below the bowl-shaped guard, resting the butt on his thigh. They’d had them made up in Richland, Ingolf’s homeland in Wisconsin, to a west-coast pattern, and stowed at Eriksgarth with their horses when they came through at Yule.
Lances didn’t last long in use, either.
A little wind dropped powdered snow on their heads from the pine branches overhead. The long man-at-arm’s shield slid onto his forearm. Its surface was painted with the new arms of Montival, blue field with a green mountain topped by a crown of white snow, and the silver Sword across it. He left the reins of the bitless hackamore bridle knotted on the high arched steel-sheathed pommel. Even an ordinary destrier didn’t need much rein control in battle, and Epona and he talked at a level far beyond that.
“Forward, my friends,” he said, and dipped his lance.
CHAPTER SEVEN
APPROACHING CASTLE TODENANGST, CROWN DEMESNE
PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION
WILLAMETTE VALLEY NEAR NEWBURG
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN OREGON)
MARCH 24, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
“So, is this Toddyangst place really a castle?” John Red Leaf said to Juniper Mackenzie, standing in the stirrups and looking eastward. “Some sort of fort, I suppose it means?”
They’d gotten horses at noon in the Crown stables by the railway station in Newburg a little west of here, along with a Portlander escort to join her six archers; the sun was behind them now, throwing their shadows onto the damp off-white crushed rock of the roadway. Luckily the spring rains had relented today and the sky was blue, studded with drifting high-piled shapes of white cloud.
The two Sioux had changed into carefully packed formal costumes back there; moccasinlike boots, doeskin trousers with fringes of hair down the outer seams, and leather shirt-tunics worked with shells and beads and porcupine quills. Red Leaf was the elder, a thickset proud-nosed man in his forties with a hard square face the ruddy-brown color of old mahogany, lined and grooved by harsh summers and worse winters; he added a headdress of buffalo horns and mane on his steel cap and a breastplate of horizontal bone tubes. His son Rick Three Bears was in his twenties, either a Changeling or on the cusp of it; he had a look of his father but lighter of skin and narrower of face, with a broad-brimmed Stetson on his head and a few eagle feathers in his dark brown braids. Both of them had the shoulders of bowmen and the instinctive seat of those who spent most of their lives in the saddle.
“No, Dun Juniper is a fort, and a village, and other things, my home being one,” Juniper said. “Todenangst is. . hard to miss, you might be sayin’. And the huge and imposing castle it is, without doubt or question whatsoever.”
She’d had Rudi’s letters to describe his meeting with the Sioux leaders last year in what had once been South Dakota, and evidently they’d been impressed enough with her son to treat her as friend and ally from the beginning. Those letters and a day or so in Red Leaf’s company gave her the impression that the Sioux tribes who now dominated the northern High Plains bore a closer resemblance to their ancestors of the time of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull than her Clan Mackenzie did to the actual pagan Gael of the Tain Bo Cuailnge. . but not all that much more.
Which was no surprise; she’d seen since the Change that you couldn’t re-create the past no matter how you tried, though myths and stories about the past could be a most powerful force in how folk built new ways to live in this new-old world.
“Way! Make way! In the Crown’s name, make way!”
The harsh cry of the golden-spurred knight who commanded the escort moved aside passersby on foot or bicycle or pedicab or mounted horseback themselves, and once a group of villagers doing their corvee duty by filling in potholes looked glad enough to take a rest and lean on their shovels. They threaded around and through and by wagon trains and stagecoaches and oxcarts, flocks of Romney sheep with their fleeces silver or gray or white, a little girl who stopped to curtsy, with an udder-heavy Jersey behind her on a leading rope, a gray-robed Franciscan friar telling his beads. .
The plate-armored Portlander men-at-arms jogged along swapping jokes and stories with the half-dozen Mackenzie archers who accompanied Juniper.
Amazing and delightful it is, how a common enemy wears away old hatreds!
“Holy shit!” Red Leaf blurted a few moments later. “I thought Disneyland was in California!”
Juniper Mackenzie chuckled. “And we surpass it, these days. That’s not lath and plaster, by all the Gods and the fae as well!”
The laugh had a tired sound to it-she was always exhausted now, down to her very bones, and they’d come just as fast as they could up the valley. But her amusement was genuine.
“Are these people for real?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Most exceedingly so.”
The representatives of the Seven Council Fires of the Lakota tunwan had come much farther and faster than she, and mostly by some very rough mountain back roads still dangerously close to winter.
They are without doubt hardy men. But then, they live in tents through winters in Dakota!
Single-minded speed meant this was their first real glimpse of the PPA’s style when at home. She’d been here often enough in the years of peace since the War of the Eye that Norman and Sandra Arminger’s exercise in pseudo-medievalist megalomania seemed just another very large building most of the time. Now she tried to see it through a stranger’s eye. .
“As I recall, they used the Chateau de Pierrefonds as a model. Scaled up considerably, to be sure. With elements of Carcassone, if that means anything to you, and a dash of Mad Ludwig of Bavaria’s Neuschwanstein, the which Walt Disney also admired, and hence the family resemblance. With a little Gormenghast for flavor.”
The great fortress-palace on the butte ahead had a curious skyward thrust and delicacy to it, despite the brutal massiveness of the structure; it was built of ferroconcrete, since not even the first Lord Protector’s demonic will had been able to summon whole legions of skilled stonemasons from nothing. Mixing cement and aggregate and pouring it into molds had been much simpler, and the fact that it was coated in glittering white stucco helped with the effect, she supposed. A forty-foot curtain-wall formed the outer perimeter, studded with scores of thick round machicolated towers more than twice that height, and the butte below had been cut back to form a smooth glacis down to the moat. Gates punctuated the circuit in four places, with towers and defenses that turned them into smaller fortresses in their own right.