Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (18 page)

Dave Woburn must have been thinking hard for some time; the conversation was brief. He clapped his brother on the shoulder and strode briskly over to Fred.

“Sir, Centurion Woburn reporting for duty,” he said, coming to attention and saluting.

“Right,” Fred said with a nod, returning the gesture. “First thing, let’s shed the pseudo-Roman crap; you’re a major. My dad drew on that stuff because it was useful, not because he was some obsessive with a man-crush on Julius Caesar.”

Unlike Fred’s elder brother
, Rudi thought, silent.

“Next, I’m operating under the High King’s orders here. You do understand that?”

The young officer’s face grew a little grimmer. “Yes, sir, General Thurston.”

“Good. We’re going to have a referendum on joining the High Kingdom
after the war…
right
after the war, not ‘when circumstances permit’ which is another way of saying ‘Fifth of Never.’”

Woburn’s eyes flicked to Rudi. He nodded, his hand on the hilt of the Sword.

“That has my public oath,” he said, meeting the blue eyes of the Rancher’s son. “I’m confident the result will be yes, which would be best for the peace and prosperity of all Montival; but I’ll abide the result, come what may. I’ve no desire to bring any land or folk into the High Kingdom against their wish and will. Save for the CUT territories, and that’s a matter of common sense and necessity. Just for your information, what’s left of Deseret wants to join us, as well.”

“I’ve never heard that your word isn’t good,” Woburn said after a moment. Then, after another pause: “Your Majesty.”

Rudi smiled, a little bleakly. “
And
you may have heard that no man can deceive me with effect while I hold the Sword of the Lady. Which, by the Lady and the Hornéd Lord who is Her consort, is nothing less than the truth. If you find that alarming…well, so do I. Not that either of our opinions matters a great deal.”

Woburn swallowed. “I wasn’t planning on lying, Your Majesty.”

“No, you weren’t. I know.”

And for me falsehood now feels like…very much like biting down on a piece of metal foil with your back teeth. Or a smell. I was always fairly good at reading men’s faces, but no more than that. Now it’s like a banner waving in the wind, if I concentrate. Lord and Lady witness, when this war is over I will hang the Sword on the wall and take it down only at direst need, making a sacrifice of Power to Justice, as Jason did of Medusa’s head. Too much truth can destroy you, or destroy your capacity to live among men as one of the human-kind.

“Good man,” Fred said to the elder Woburn brother. “But first we have to
win
the war. Which means you’re going to debrief, Major, and do so fully.”

“Yes, sir.”

He moved over to the map table, put his hand on the markers for the Boisean forces and rearranged several.

“You had it mostly right. Here’s the order of battle as far as I know it, and how the brigades are going to deploy—”

Rudi’s eyes went north and east. The battle would be starting by now, the fringes of two vast hosts intent on violence meeting and clashing where they met, and battle was chaos where a slipped horseshoe or a man blinking as sunlight struck his eyes could change the fate of kingdoms. But he could feel factors shifting now, shifting a little in his favor.

Favor bought with blood,
he thought.
So, Ard Rí, let’s be about the work of the
day.

He signed, and the attendants put away the markers and packed up the map table. Before they left he took Alleyne Loring aside for a moment.

“Lord Alleyne,” he said in
Edhellen
. “Rescuing Fred’s mother and sisters was a worthy deed, and it’s a help to us their testimony has been. But rescuing Juliet Thurston, and the manner in which it was done…that’s helped us more still, even though it was no part of your plan in the beginning.”

“Plans don’t survive contact with the enemy.”

“Call it a lucky chance, then, amid so much ill-luck.”

“If chance you call it,” Alleyne said with the ghost of a smile.

Rudi nodded. “Not because Juliet’s beloved as they are, but because being who and what she is her word carries extra weight about Martin Thurston’s doings, and because his trying to kill her to silence her doubles that credibility, the which too many saw to hush up. He—”

He inclined his head to indicate where Dave Woburn was being introduced to his new comrades, then put a hand on the older man’s shoulder for a moment.

“—is not the first fighting-man who’s been brought to our side from Boise by the tale of it, and I’m thinkin’ he won’t be the last either, in this war. The battle today
may
turn on that, and with it our homes and families; and for a certainty, there will be many on our side walking the ridge of the world come sundown who’d be lying stark and dead save for what you and your lady did that day. I won’t presume to tell you how much comfort to take from that, but for what it’s worth, there it is.”

Alleyne took a long breath. “Thank you, Your Majesty,” he said.
“Astrid…Astrid knew what she was doing and why. And
I
knew what might happen, every time we went on an operation together.”

He hesitated. “When she…her last words…”

“My sister told me,” Rudi said. “
Like silver glass…green shores…the gulls…a white tower…home, home, at last…”

The older man swallowed painfully. “I always thought…it was a pardonable eccentricity? The, ah, interpretation of the Histories. It gave people comfort and meaning in their lives, and so I went along with it. But…”

Then he shook his head. “No. That’s being too gentle. I thought it was a functional madness. It didn’t interfere with the
rest
of our lives, and it did no harm…did good, rather. People need stories to live by, and why not those? Something
like
the Rangers was essential, Astrid had already set the…the process in motion, it was too late to use a different set of myths. And the Histories were no more fictional than the Bible, allowing for the difference in age. But…”

Rudi looked him in the eye. “Now you’re wondering if there could really be anything to it,” he said.

A nod, and Rudi went on: “My friend, after Nantucket, I think there actually may be something to it; to that, and to many another vision folk have had; to the Bible of the Christians, for that matter, as well.”

“All at once?”

Rudi shrugged ruefully: “Why would you expect to understand all of a God’s mind, save that part of themselves they make apparent to us? Any more than a dog can understand a man…though he understands the food, and the warm spot by the fire, and the hand of love upon the head, and the joy of a day’s hunt together.”

“Not a flattering comparison.”

“Now with that I don’t agree; there are few men so good as a good dog, for such will neither lie nor will they break faith. And I’ve always believed we pass from here to a place of rest and beauty where we heal ourselves and then return. What your lady saw…I don’t understand it, and I’m not going to pretend I do. But this I
do
believe; that your lady saw exactly what she thought she did, and that she is home indeed this very
moment, the home for which she longed all her life. And that she is waiting for you when you’ve completed the tasks duty and love lay on you here.”

“I…Thank you. Thank you very much.”

He took a deep breath. “And now there’s a bloody great job of work to do, Your Majesty.”

“That there is. I want you and your Rangers on the northern flank now, which will mean some swift riding.”

“We’ll be there, Your Majesty.” More softly: “And someday…it would be very interesting to see. Very interesting indeed.”

“And now we’ve a battle to fight,” Rudi said. He shook his head. “Are fighting now, the opening steps.”

A
n arrow went by overhead with a slight
whppt
sound, arching down at a high angle. It stood quivering in short brown-blond grass still coated with hoarfrost until steel-shod hooves trampled it a second later. The sound of hundreds of horses moving fast filled the air around them, the heavy hollow thuds merging into a continuous stuttering rumble. The dust-plume they kicked up from the fine soil followed close behind, their speed a little greater than the wind that carried it in their wake.

“Uff da!” Mark Vogeler swore as he ducked.

The shaft hadn’t been very far from his ear on its way down. One of the many unpleasant things about arrows was that if they were fired on a high arching shot, even at maximum range they hit going about three-quarters as fast as they’d been when they left the string.

“When do I start getting used to that, Unc’ Ingolf?” he called plaintively over the noise. “Uh, Unc’ Ingolf, sir?”

Ingolf Vogeler grinned at the teenaged nephew riding at his left stirrup. The young man was tall and gangly and with bits of straw-colored hair leaking out from beneath his helmet and near-invisible fuzz on his
cheeks. At just short of eighteen he’d nearly reached Ingolf’s six-two height, strong and fit for his age though still lacking the full thick-armed bear strength of his kinsman. He wasn’t unblooded anymore, but he also lacked the experience that decades of hard living and harder fighting had brought his father’s younger brother; the slight crook to Ingolf’s nose and the scars that left white lines through his short brown beard and on his hands were simply the most obvious traces. The dark blue eyes told more, if you knew what to look for, and the way he held himself and moved.

“That’s
Colonel
Ingolf, sir, to you, kid,” he said. Time and travel had worn some of the slightly guttural sing-song accent of the Kickapoo Valley out of his voice, but enough remained to be another mark of kinship. “And you
don’t
get used to getting shot at. Not really. It just gets less surprising. And everyone ducks.”

Which is true. And it’s even worse once you’ve been hit a couple of times. The damned things
hurt,
and if you end up with a field surgeon who’s already used all his morphine grubbing around with an arrow-spoon to get it out, you scream so they can hear you in the next county. Mind you, you don’t see the ones that hit you, usually. And never the one that kills you, the saying goes…though how would you check that? Ask dead men? I’ve seen a lot of them, and they never said a word.

The First Richland Volunteer Cavalry were moving westward at a hand gallop in double line, the three-hundred strong formation writhing like a ripple in a river as it moved over the rolling surface of the Horse Heaven Hills. It was a relief to have the morning sun at their backs as they retreated towards the main force; trying to shoot with it leaving glare-spots in your eyes was a pain.

Like most of his countrymen, Ingolf wore what was called a kettle-hat helmet, mostly because it looked a lot like a kettle, with a central peaked dome and a wide flat brim. It had the added advantage that on a bright day like this it gave your eyes some shade. He looked over his shoulder and the circle of the round shield slung over his back, squinting; the sun was only a handspan over the horizon. The pursuit was gaining, and there were a thousand men or better in the…

Clump. Gaggle. Whatever.

…that pursued them.

OK, this is going to be tricky.

It always was, when horse-soldiers were moving at speed. At a gallop you could cover a couple of hundred yards awfully fast. As usual, timing was the margin between success and…

…and,
oh shit we are so fucked.
Well, I trust the Mackenzies to do what they say they’ll do…or really, I trust Rudi’s judgment of what they can do and
he
trusts them to do what they say they can do. Getting into position this fast is awfully quick work for infantry, and not full-time soldiers at that. And doing it without being obvious. These levies we’re fighting may not be much at field drill, but there’s nothing wrong with their field
craft.
Especially in open grassland.

He’d been a paid soldier kicking around the Midwestern realms for years himself before he went into the closely related salvage trade, and he’d seen that like anything else you got better at it the more you practiced.

Though sometimes even that doesn’t work,
he thought, studying the pursuit.

The nearest of them were a hair under three hundred yards back, just close enough to tempt them to shoot when you added in the wind at their backs but far enough that you’d have to be dead lucky to hit a herd of buffalo, much less a man. Flags flying from the shafts of spears beat the wind among them, spiky brand-symbols of the Ranchers who led their cowboy-retainers to war, the golden rayed sun on crimson of the CUT. Another arrow arched out, falling ten yards short this time.

Only an exceptionally strong saddlebow combined with great skill and more than a bit of luck could hope to send an arrow this far; actually hitting anything would be sheer dumb luck. In an outfit with more fire discipline some noncom would be roasting the enthusiast’s ass about now, for wasting an arrow he might need desperately soon. The enemy cavalry were superb riders and very good archers, herdsmen from the mountains and valleys and high bleak plains of what had been Montana and northern Wyoming. They were raised in the saddle and lived by the bow, but he’d seen more organization in brothel-and-bar brawls than in most of the CUT’s Rancher levies. The Sword of the Prophet wasn’t here right now, thank God…or Manwë and Varda. No regular troops of any sort from the CUT-Boise alliance, not yet.