“What I’m really worried about is Rudi,” Ingolf said.
“I think we’d better get used to calling him Artos,” Mary said; but she said it without the usual smile in her voice.
“Yah, OK, I’m worried about His Majesty Artos the First, High King of Montival, our liege-lord,” Ingolf said. “Also my friend and brother-in-law Rudi Mackenzie. I’m worried about both of him.”
“Why? He’s coping very well. Look at the way he remembered you’ll possibly never have a chance to visit Readstown again.”
“That’s the problem,” Ingolf said; talking crystallized his thought, giving it form. “You’d need a general staff to do a lot of the stuff he’s doing all by himself. Yah, he was always an impressive guy, but some of this. . remembering every name in that pissant village at the mouth of the Wisconsin River? All the ones he heard once when we were through it for one day last year? I was born not two days’ ride from it and I don’t! You notice how he doesn’t make mistakes anymore?”
“He never did make many.”
“Now he never forgets anything, not even his spare bowstring. He never has to stop and figure things out anymore!”
Mary was subdued; when she spoke it was slowly.
“I asked him. . I asked him a while ago if he wasn’t making decisions too quickly. He said there just wasn’t any point in pretending he had a choice. What did he mean? Is the Sword. . is it taking him over?”
Ingolf shook his head; it was hard even to talk about this, as if there weren’t the right words in the language.
“It’s spooky, but I don’t think so. It doesn’t give you that creepy feeling the Cutters do. I think. . this is just blue-sky. . I think the Sword is too smart. Or makes him too smart.”
“How can you be too smart?”
“If you knew, if you really knew what would happen when you made a decision. . would you have any freedom left at all? There would be only one thing you could do.”
“Oh,” she said, and shivered. “I guess it’s like the Elven-Rings; good, basically, but perilous to any but the strongest bearer.”
For a moment he felt impatience that she was dragging the Histories into things again. Then he shrugged mentally. In fact-
“That’s actually a good comparison. . what Doc Pham, our doctor in Readstown-God, how could anyone know so many books? — he used to tutor me sometimes as well. . what he used to call a metaphor.”
She nodded; he knew without resenting it that she had a lot more book learning than he did, even if much of it was bizarre.
Though I’m better at lifting heavy weights. . That’s me: strong like an ox, sharp like a watermelon.
“Metaphors help you understand the world,” she said. “Otherwise. . otherwise it’s just a mass of things without pattern. It doesn’t mean anything. But you’ve got to be careful with them. They can make you see patterns that aren’t there.”
“Yah. Only the Sword seems to be a, a metaphor that’s actually there. Not just a way to sling words together; it’s a physical object you can touch, so the story is telling us instead of the other way ’round. Damn und hell, but that’s scary.”
Mary shivered, and he knew exactly how she felt.
“It’s like the old legends about Gods becoming men, or animals talking. I mean, they’re wonderful as stories and they show you the way things are underneath, but if you actually met one it would. . would sort of break things. Not deliberately, not because it was bad and wanted to do that, but just by being too real for us.”
Ingolf smiled grimly. He reached over and touched her eye patch with the thick calloused fingers of his right hand, very gently:
“We’ve both met men like that before. Only they were bad, as well as scary, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, yes.” Then she brightened. “Most of the time, though, it’s as if the Sword makes him more of what he was already.”
Ingolf grinned. “Super-Rudi. Ye. . Gods, that’s a scary thought too!”
They laughed together, and then by unspoken mutual agreement brought themselves back to the moment. For a while after they left the village the landscape was mostly abandoned land used for summer grazing if at all; tall grass and thickets of raspberry bushes, goldenrod, and surging clumps of young elder and elm struggling with them and the saplings spreading out of the old woodlots. All were loud with birdsong as the migrants settled in and disputed their territories; flights of blue warblers chased cloud-formations of mayflies in melodious flocks.
He saw tracks and scat of elk, deer, feral cattle, swine and half a dozen others, but this road was traveled enough that animals were wary of men by daylight; they caught only a fleeting glimpse of what might have been a wolf or a very large coyote. And once, laughing, they steered their mounts around a defiant skunk standing with raised tail.
Mary was looking at the roadway too; much of it was post-Change, created by the traffic pounding the soil when the road by the river was washed out. Improvements later had mostly meant a little ditching, the odd brushup with a horse-drawn grader, reused culverts, and shoveling gravel into the worst wet spots when they threatened to swallow travelers or their horses whole.
“Is there normally so much traffic on this road?” she said.
“No,” he said, noticing. “People usually float things up- and downriver; the Kickapoo’s not big enough for real boats but canoes do fine most of the year and they can carry a fair bit. And mostly we swap around locally anyway.”
By definition any area that had come through the first Change Years without utter collapse was self-sufficient in everything it really needed. Where trade had revived at all it was mostly in light high-value luxury goods, particularly here in the backwoods.
Which Readstown is, you betcha, even if we. . they. . don’t like to admit it.
“Wagons and horsemen both,” Mary said, looking down again. “Horsemen in column of fours, and trains of wagons. The troops we’re supposed to be looking for.”
“You’ve got a good eye.”
She hit him on the shoulder; mostly theoretical when he was wearing a mail shirt and gambeson, but he cowered theatrically. Then he went on:
“Hmmm, looks like it was mostly a couple of weeks ago and then tapering off; it’s real blurred by the rain. Well, we’ll find out.”
Now and then a Norway spruce or an old apple tree still valiantly showing a few flowers served to mark the site of an abandoned homestead. Once a ruin’s glass shards glinted from the high ridge to the west, beneath the purple blaze of a rambling lilac.
“Why would anyone build up there?” Mary asked. “Well, easier to defend, I suppose. .”
She stood in the stirrups for a moment and shaded her eye with a hand; the sun was a little past noon, and the air was just in that place between warm and cold where you hardly noticed it except as a stroking on the skin. Then she took out her monocular.
“That was a pretty big house, not just a lookout post. No defenses. . and the roadway to it runs straight up the slope; there’s an overgrown gully where it washed out. Strange.”
“There’s actually good farmland up on the ridges in places, you just can’t see it from here,” Ingolf said. “But those were built for the view.”
He raised a hand at her stare: “I swear to God. . by the Valar. Just so they could live there and look at the view. Which is pretty.”