Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (38 page)

They stopped on the hilltop; vision stretched all around them.

“You will see what you need to see. High Queen, daughter of Eve, mother of sons and daughters, Mathilda Arminger.”

For a long moment Rudi stood in wonder with the wind ruffling his hair and the edges of his plaid; wonder, but no fear. He felt balanced and strong, motionless but implicit with swiftness in muscle and bone and nerve.

The mountain was there and the sun was at the same angle, but the very shape of Hood was different; more naked, rougher, steeper, with a plume of either cloud or smoke off eastward from its summit. The lake was a deep tarn, lost among rock and patches of rotted snow. The slopes about him were nearly bare, though from the mildness it was no longer winter, and there was a very faint tinge of sulfur in air otherwise clean as crystal.

Only a few little blue flowers starred the bare ground, and moss, and one or two tiny dwarf spruce, as if life had only just begun its conquest here.

This is the beginning
, he knew.
Not long after the Ice withdrew; long enough that wind and water have changed the very bones of the mountain from this day to mine. Before our kind were woven into the story of the land. Long and long ago, before the Gods who were before the Gods.

A stone rattled behind him. He made himself turn calmly. There were two men there, one in his late teens, another old enough to show grey in the knot of dark hair they both had tied and twisted above their right
ears. Both wore leggings and loincloth and hide shoes; one had a tunic of yellow-brown leather besides, worked in patterns with shell beads.

Their faces were marked with blue and yellow tattooed stripes, and they had the broad high-cheeked look and ruddy-brown skin of the First Peoples, though not of any tribe he knew. There were hide rolls over their backs, knives and hatchets thrust through their belts, stout spears in their right hands. The spears had long lanceolate points of flint so finely worked that it had a metallic luster, of which he had an uncomfortably businesslike view since they were poised to thrust or throw.

Everything about their gear was beautifully made and often carved or colored, but it was all hide and wood and stone or what appeared to be implausible amounts of ivory, no trace of metal or cloth. He took all that in an instant, and also saw their eyes wide with the shock and fear that could turn to rage in an instant. His appearance would be outlandish beyond belief to them, and he suspected they were far less used than he to seeing outlanders or strangers. They were tall well-muscled men as well, and his instant, instinctive appraisal was that they would each be deadly quick as wolverines.

“Peace,” he said, and slowly lifted his hands palm out. “Peace between us, brothers.”

A woman stepped from behind them, pushing them casually apart. She wore a longer version of the tunic the older man sported, deerskin worked until it was butter-soft, hers bleached white and bearing patterns of colored feathers as well as beads and shells. Her face was framed by greying braids and had a hard strength just starting to sink into a net of wrinkles.

“
E’mi, e’mi
,” she said to the two men, putting her hands on their spear-arms and pushing them downward. “
E’mi, woam. T’t’shui-Ta.
”

Rudi blinked, astonished when he thought his capacity for wonderment filled and overfilled. He understood the words, and not just the words but the meaning behind the strange forms and structures that knit them together:

“Be still, be still. Be still, my brave ones. Here is no enemy.”

The men looked at each other, scowling, then stood aside. They
stayed ready for instant action, but they grounded their spears. Rudi slowly brought the back of his right hand to his brow and bowed, the greeting a Mackenzie male made to any new-met hearthmistress.

Loremistress, I think,
he decided, meeting her eyes. They were dark and warm and somehow reminded him of his mother in their kindly strength.
A High Priestess of the triple cords, we’d say; one who’s walked with the Powers.

She looked him over with a fearless intelligence. Then she reached into a pouch at her waist and blew a pinch of some powdered herb into his face. He suppressed a cough; the scent was green and spicy, but not unpleasant. After that she took a baton of carved ivory from her belt, looked at him through a loop in one end and started to tap him lightly with it from head to toe, chanting as she did.

When she had finished she considered him with a bird’s bright curiosity, fingering a lock of his hair and looking at his eyes. She smelled of woodsmoke and tanned leather and the wilderness, and a faint scent of healthy well-washed human. Then she spoke again in the quick-rising, slow-falling language that he now understood:

“Are you of Those Others? Is this land forbidden to us?”

Of the Fair Folk
, he guessed; there was more to talking than the surface meaning of words.

He shook his head with a smile:

“No, wise woman. I am a man like these with you, a child of Earth born to die.”

She pursed her lips. “We have seen no man-sign since we came south of the Great River. I walk here to make friends of the Mountains and Rivers and the Mothers of the fur and feather tribes. Is this your people’s hunting range? We have heard of none like you, and the beast clans here have no fear of men.”

“No,” he said, suddenly sure that he spoke the truth. “This land lies empty for you. It holds no ghosts until yours come, and you will dwell in it for many lives of men, beyond counting, and the line of your blood for longer still, and always the stones and the trees will remember you.”

She stood and looked at him while the wind whistled down from the glaciers.

“You are speaking truth, man of Earth,” she said at last, and then smiled like a girl. “All the kindly spirits go with you, then. We will hunt south of the river that our children may eat and grow strong; and you are always welcome on our runs, Sun Hair.”

“That’s remarkably authentic garb,” a voice said. “Late fourteenth century, isn’t it?”

Mathilda turned, a smile still on her face; the crowd was so wildly varied, like figures seen in a dream. The jugglers that had held her attention just now were quite good and in familiar motley garb like something from a court masque in Portland’s City Palace or Todenangst. But there were
cars
nearby, beyond the bright pavilions and the merchant’s booths of the fairground, and not the rusted wrecks that had been part of the background of her life.

Moving
cars, purring along unworn roads of dark fresh asphalt as if there were great cats beneath their hoods. And the air smelled different, with an odd odor like burnt turpentine. That mixed with the more familiar scents of frying food and warm people, but there was none of the horse and ox that had always been part of her life.

“Ah…it’s just my clothes, demoiselle,” she answered the stranger politely, with a slight courtesy gesture like the beginning of a curtsy and an inclination of the head. “God give you good day.”

The young woman was about her own age, dressed in a simple dagg-sleeved green kirtle and white wimple bound with a silver chain. Mathilda had found herself…here…in a court cotte-hardie; a day dress she recognized as one that rested in the cupboards in her chambers at home in Castle Todenangst. She even remembered having it taken in a little when she got back from the Quest…

“This stitching is lovely,” the other woman said. “Is that handwork?”

“Yes,” Mathilda said; then she looked up agape as something huge and roaring went by overhead.

An airplane! I’m seeing an airplane!
she thought.

“Marvelous!” she whispered aloud in awe, crossing herself. “Jesu!”

Her chance-met companion laughed aloud, a warm chuckle like a
hand stroking velvet. She had an ice-cream cone in one hand, and finished it with a catlike delicacy before she said:

“You
are
staying in character!”

It was the laugh that told her. The laugh and the warm brown eyes, deep with thought, and the height that was exactly the right six inches shorter than Mathilda’s full-grown five-foot-eight. The strangeness was seeing those eyes look at
her
like a stranger.

“You’re…Sandra Whittle, aren’t you?” she said.

“Actually, my Society name is Eleanor,” she said. “But yes…have we met?”

“I’ve heard of you,” Mathilda said. “I’m…Mathilda.”

The sharp gaze focused on her belt, which was white leather worked with silver flowers.

“Is that dagger live steel?” she said. “Those are the best costume jewels I’ve ever seen, too.”

Mathilda blinked in puzzlement; it was certainly
good
steel, but it was one of her everyday ones, the type she’d worn since she was twelve and which marked her as an Associate. The blade was ten inches of watermarked Damascus steel, severely plain except for the rippling patterns in the metal, but the hilt was gold and silver wire braided together, and the pommel held a ruby the size of her thumbnail. She drew it from the tooled leather of the sheath and flipped it to reverse it and present it with the point towards herself and the flat of the blade along her forearm, as was courteous.

Sandra’s eyes widened as she took it and weighed the solidity of it in her small hand.

“That
is
live steel, and not peacebonded!” she said. “Naughty! Though I won’t tell the marshals.”

“Be careful, it’s—” Mathilda began, surprised that her mother was acting as if she’d scarcely ever held a dagger before and knew no better than to put her thumb to it like a kitchen knife.

“—sharp,” she finished, taking it back as Sandra sucked at the slim little cut on the ball of her thumb.

“Sorry,” Mathilda added.

The deep eyes were already looking over her shoulder, though. “Oh, now
that’s
nice,” she said cheerfully.

Mathilda realized what she’d see even as she turned her head. A man in armor was walking down the laneway towards them. Simple old-fashioned armor, a chain-mail hauberk to the knees, split up the front and rear in horseman’s fashion, a sword belt with a rather broad-bladed sword, an acorn-shaped helmet with a flared nose-guard concealing most of his face and a teardrop-shaped shield four feet long slung point-down over his back; it was black, with the Lidless Eye blazoned on it. And he moved easily under the weight; a lot of the men about were as out of condition as merchants or the worst sort of cleric, even if they went armed, but he looked like a fighting-man to be wary of. Broad-shouldered and long-legged and with a thick wrist in the hand casually on the bevel pommel of the broadsword and an arrogant assurance in the way he strode along. The crowd parted for him, sometimes with a resentful murmur.

“That’s…Norman,” Mathilda said.

“It certainly is, and authentic—notice the cross-gartering and the loose trews? Not my favorite period; I’m more a thirteenth, fourteenth century sort of girl. Nothing like a good pair of legs in tight hose, I say.”

“No, I mean it’s Norman Arminger.”

A gurgling chuckle. “That’s his actual
name
? He must have a sense of humor, then, and not be a complete Period Nazi. Well, look at the shield!”

“He’s a, uh, going to be a professor of history. Eleventh-century specialist.”

“
Definitely
interesting!”

She left Mathilda’s side without a backward glance, sinking down in a perfectly executed curtsy before the knight of the Lidless Eye. He halted, sweeping off his helmet by the nasal and bowing; his hair was bowl-cut, but close behind the ears in a fashion Mathilda remembered vaguely from her youth.

Oh, God!

She turned and…

The forest was about him, the one he knew.

No,
he thought.
Not quite.

It was towards the end of the day, and summer, but late—late August, in these cool uplands, when the aspens and vine-maple started to turn and there was frost in the small hours of the night. The trees were thicker, he thought; perhaps taller. Birds were thick too on the water of the lake, and when a flock took fright at a jumping trout and cataracted skyward it was like a turning skein of smoke. Four horses grazed by the water, and as he stepped around a tree he could see a campfire burned there—an expert’s small hot fire, little fume and much heat. He could smell the savory scent of roasting duck, and a man rose as he approached.

“
Bonjour
,” the man said, then went on in thickly accented English. “You come share our fire, eh?”

He was shorter than Rudi by a foot, but barrel-chested and strong, with a full dark beard flowing down his chest and long hair of the same almost-black, his skin weathered and tanned oak-brown; there were deep wrinkles beside his hazel-green eyes, and he was missing the little finger of his left hand. A rifle was held casually in his right, the type with an external flint-tipped hammer at the side, and a steel-headed tomahawk and long knife in a beaded sheath thrust through his belt. He wore leather trousers and moccasins strapped about the ankle, a red wool shirt and a knit cap with a tassel. A briar pipe between his yellow teeth gave off a foul-smelling smoke.

“That I will, friend. My name is Rudi Mackenzie.”

“Étienne Bélanger, me. This my woman,
Pe Ku Nen Mu.
”

She was a tribeswoman, younger than the man and pretty, wearing a deerhide dress and about five months along, he judged. She handed her man a bottle and sat down easily on her hams across the low fire, watching the newcomer with a candid stare of wonder.

“You got friends close?” the man asked casually as he pulled the cork with his teeth and offered the bottle.

He didn’t let the rifle go far from his hand, despite his friendly manner. Rudi wouldn’t have expected otherwise, for a man with horses and gear and a good-looking woman alone in lands beyond settled law.

“I do; I’ve not the gear to travel else.
Sláinte mhaith,
” Rudi added courteously
as he raised the square bottle to his lips and took a swig, then fought not to cough as he handed it back. “To your good health!”