“And just a touch of Hearst’s San Simeon on the inside, which you will see,” she added judiciously.
The inner donjon reared where the summit had been; two towers at north and south were taller than all the others, the first sheathed in palest silver-gray stone, the second covered in some glossy black rock whose crystal inclusions glittered in the bright spring light. Conical roofs of green copper topped all the towers, save for the gilding that turned the tip of the dark spire into a sun-bright blaze, and colorful banners flew from the spiked peaks.
Light blinked from the spearheads and polished armor of soldiers on the crenellated parapets. Then a heliograph began to snap from the highest point, sending a message flashing towards the perfect white cone of Mt. Hood on the eastern horizon, beyond the low green forested slopes of the Parrett Mountains. In the middle distance northward another tower, toy-tiny with distance, began to repeat the coded lights to somewhere else.
“Christ, this was built after the Change?” John Red Leaf said. “That black tower must be a hundred and fifty, two hundred feet high! How did you manage it without machinery?”
“We didn’t,” Juniper said dryly. “We Mackenzies, or Bearkillers or Corvallans or the Yakima League or the Kyklos or. . well, all the others. We had other priorities, sure and we did.”
He’s what. . perhaps halfway between forty and fifty? A man grown in 1998, but younger than me. Still, not a Changeling like his son there. He has more sense of what must have been involved.
Aloud: “The Portland Protective Association built it. . which is to say Norman Arminger did. Quickly, too. Though furnishing the interior’s still going on.”
“Norman Arminger. . he was Mathilda’s dad, right?” John said.
“That was him. Sandra. . the Regent. . uses the Silver Tower there as her headquarters; the black one was Norman’s lair while he was Lord Protector, but it’s full of bureaucrats now.”
And the whole of it bears the mark of him, she thought; it was like an arrogant mailed fist smashed into the face of heaven.
“There’s many a castle in the Association territories; they built scores to hold down the land, but only one like this. It goes with the flag, you see,” Juniper added.
John turned in the saddle to look at the pennants snapping from the lances of the men-at-arms in their suits of gleaming plate. They were troopers of the Protector’s Guard, and the narrow fork-tailed flags bore the undifferenced arms of House Arminger; a lidless slitpupiled eye, argent on sable, wreathed in scarlet flame.
“It’s an eye; Matti had something like that on her shirt. So?”
“That’s the Eye of Sauron, my dear. Or it was in origin, at least. And a good thing that copyright died with the Change, eh? Though it would be a bold lawyer who sued the Armingers in the seat of their power.”
His eyes flicked from the banner to the fortress. “Black tower. . eye. . Sauron. . you’ve got to be shitting me, right?”
“No, that was Norman’s little joke. His sense of humor was just a wee bit eccentric, so to say. Though his main obsession was with the Normans. . William the Conqueror, Strongbow-bad cess to him-and Roger Guiscard and Tancred and that lot.”
“The dude thought he was bad, right?”
“Oh, you have no idea. This is Castle Todenangst, for example.”
“Which means?”
“Castle of the Anguish of Death, roughly. Or Death-Anguish, to arrange the words Germanically. I’m afraid he was every bit as bad as he thought he was, too, the creature. They say there’s a man’s bones in the ground for every ten tons of concrete and steel in that thing there; when they didn’t just throw the bodies in the mix. Fortunately he wasn’t quite as smart as he thought he was, the joy and everlasting good fortune of it.”
Rick Three Bears whistled quietly to himself and said:
“Rudi’s father killed him, right? Not your husband, that Mike guy, I suppose he was your boyfriend then?”
“Very briefly,” Juniper said dryly. “That was just before he married Signe. . who’s the mother of Mary and Ritva, whom you met. Yes, Mike killed Norman, and vice versa, ochone. . ah, he was a lovely man, Mike Havel was, and he’s badly missed now.”
“Rudi and his bunch didn’t want to talk about the details much, seemed to me,” Rick’s father noted.
“Understandable, and it wouldn’t be altogether tactful for either of you to mention all this in Sandra’s hearing. Remarkable it is to contemplate, but she really did love Norman. There’s no accounting for taste.”
“So, you’re friends with these folks now?” Red Leaf said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that. Ni dhiolann dearmad fiacha; a debt is still unpaid, even if put out of mind. Mathilda’s a wonderful girl-”
“I was impressed with her.”
“Rightly so. But then, she spent half of each year with us Mackenzies after the War of the Eye, in my household; that was part of the peace settlement. She’s like a daughter to me. Her mother, Sandra, the Regent, is much, much more clever than ever Norman was, and Norman was no fool except where his hatreds and lusts blinded him.”
“What’s she like? Sandra.”
“Well, some say she’s a sociopath. Some say psychopath. Sandra says her chosen phrase would be: Very focused.”
The commander of the escort was riding ahead of them but well within earshot; she could see his helm jerk a little in horror, and then he slid his visor down as if to cut himself off from such sedition. Of course, you were a bit cut off from the outside world in a visored sallet, one smooth curve of steel from bevoir to crest interrupted only by the vision slit.
“What’s your opinion?” Red Leaf asked.
“A little of all three. We spent ten years fighting each other, and fourteen since then as. . allies of a sort. Not that she’s not good company, when she chooses, and she’s devoted to Mathilda, and looks after her supporters very carefully. I don’t think you could call her cruel, exactly, either. They don’t hang folk in spiked iron cages here. Not anymore. But there’s more mercy to be found on the edge of a razor than in her mind or soul.”
His eyes went back to Castle Todenangst; they were closer now, and the sheer scale of it was daunting.
“I still can’t quite believe it. It makes you feel like a bug.”
“That was precisely the intention, I believe, and just exactly how Norman regarded everyone but himself, and perhaps his wife and daughter. The materials he scavenged. . I think the ornamental stone came mostly from banks and office buildings as far away as Seattle, the concrete and steel from construction sites and factories.”
“But how did he get it all here?”
“Hauled on the railways, mostly. Horses were scarce then, so he used men for that and the rest. Used them up. They were going to starve anyway, he’d say, and might as well work first. The Pyramids were built by hand too, without even steel tools or wheelbarrows to help.”
He whistled silently and rode wordlessly for a few moments, craning his neck up.
“I see where your boy got his accent,” he said, changing the subject.
For which I do not blame him. He’s here to negotiate with all the countries of the Meeting at Corvallis. . of the High Kingdom of Montival. . and not to hear our old feuds. Though the man does need to know what he’s dealing with; I owe him that and more, for the rescuing of my son and Mathilda.
His own speech was a slightly twanging rural mid-American, with just a hint of something else and an educated man’s vocabulary. She shrugged ruefully.
“At least with him it’s genuine. My mother was Irish, from Achill in the west-she spoke the Gaelic to me in my cradle-and I can put on County Mayo at will. Over the years I’ve let it have free rein, so that at least the real thing is available as a model, so to speak. Most of my people-”