The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change (16 page)

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Authors: S. M. Stirling

Tags: #Fiction - Science Fiction, #Alternative histories (Fiction), #American Science Fiction And Fantasy, #Alternative History, #General, #Regression (Civilization), #Science Fiction, #Science Fiction - General, #Dystopias, #Fiction

BOOK: The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change
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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—”
She glanced back at her own guard with fond exasperation as they rode along in kilt and plaid and green brigandine marked with the Moon and Antlers. The six-foot yellow staves of their bows slanted over their backs, and arrows fletched with gray goose feathers rattled in their quivers.
“—imitated what they
thought
was the accent, for all that I’d tell them they sounded like Hollywood leprechauns from
Finian’s Rainbow
. And their children grew up hearing that, with a result that is now wholly indescribable without using bad language, so it is, the more so as they don’t realize it. I try to think of it as just the way Mackenzies talk.”
Red Leaf grinned. “Yeah, I thought some of the others sounded like . . . I had a friend, this Mongol guy named Chinua, studying range management at South Dakota State University while I was there, who was crazy about John Wayne. One night he ran a movie on his VCR where the Duke played this boxer who went to hide out in Ireland because he’d hit someone too hard . . .”
“The Quiet Man
,
”
Juniper said with a wince. “A fine movie if you don’t mind assuming my mother’s entire people were a race of happily drunken potato-faced wife-beating peasant yokels with roomtemperature IQs who thought with their fists when they weren’t clog-dancing or killing each other in fits of mindless religious fanaticism. It’s annoying that sort of thing can be.”
“Tell me,” the Indian said dryly. Then, softly: “I miss VCRs sometimes, though . . .”
They paused for a moment, both lost in memories of a world that had perished in an instant of pain and white light. Then they looked aside in mutual forbearance; there were some things that were too hurtful to be called back from their graves, best left in a time that was now remembered mostly as myth. If only because thinking of that made you think of what had followed, in the years of the great dying.
No wonder so many who survived sought escape in dreams of ancient times! As if that age just before the Change had never really happened, something to be passed over with a shrug.
Red Leaf cleared his throat, as his son rolled his eyes, very slightly and probably without conscious intent.
Arra, Changelings are often like that, when they hear their elders babbling of meaningless things like television and movies.
Sadly:
And soon there will be nobody who understands us, really, as we die off one by one, we survivors who remember the ancient world.
“Pretty country,” John said, looking towards the fields north and south of the road.
It was, gently rolling hills vivid green with the spring rains and burgeoning warmth of this mild and fertile land. The orchards of peach and plum, apple and apricot were in bloom, a froth that sent fragrance drifting on the mildly warm air to compete with the smells of dung and horse and sweat and metal, turned earth and woodsmoke. Willows dropped their drooping branches in the little river to the south, amid oak-dotted pastures studded with pink and blue hepatica.
“Makes me feel closed in, though,” Three Bears said unexpectedly. “Sort of . . . cramped.”
“All what you’re used to,” Red Leaf said. “It sure ain’t the
makol.”
When Juniper looked a question at him he translated that:
“Makol
, the short-grass prairie, the High Plains. Our country.”
Peasants in hooded tunics rode sulky plows on the northern side, turning under green sod in their field-strips as the patient oxen leaned into the traces and soil curved rich and brown and moist away from the plowshares, the smell as intoxicating as fresh barley bread. Others farther away on a south-facing slope worked with hoes flashing in a vineyard whose stocks were still black gnarled stumps after winter’s pruning. Then the almost metallic bright green of winter wheat, with its slight under-tint of blue. It grew ankle high and rippled away towards a line of poplars; a prosperous-looking village clustered there, brick cottages with tile roofs peeping through the trees around the gray square bell tower of a church and a manor hall’s roof.
The castle was south of that and across the highway and railroad right-of-way. A squad of crossbowmen in half-armor doubled out of the gate to stand with their weapons presented at the salute; the great steel leaves were already open. It wasn’t a full-dress ceremonial reception, though trumpets screamed beneath proud banners. The Lakota mission wasn’t exactly confidential but they weren’t trying to draw attention to it yet either; a mass of alarming unconfirmed rumors was the objective.
Red Leaf and his son stayed quiet through the massive gate-halls, shrewd eyes taking in the details of catapult and ballistae and firing-slits for flamethrowers, and through the courtyards and gardens, fountains and roads and sweeping stairways and galleries where pillars supported pointed arches beyond, and into the donjon; the interior of Todenangst was like a small city in itself, a city and a building at the same time. It included a cathedral of some size, rows of houses against the curtain wall’s inner side as well as barracks, stables, armories, workshops, reservoirs, grocers and bakers and cobblers’ shops, cold-stores, granaries, taverns, schools, libraries and printshops, jousting grounds and even a theater. The escort vanished off to their quarters, save for the knight, taking her archers and the horses with them.
“My lady, my lords,” the man said. “This way.”
He accompanied it with a stiff bow—it was difficult to make any other sort in a suit of plate complete, even one with an articulated breastplate. He also had a limp, and a pointed brown chin-beard and green eyes that showed when he pushed his visor up. His shield’s main blazon was the Eye, but an inescutcheon in the upper left showed a series of wedges of gold and black meeting in the center, with a flaming motorcycle painted over it.
Gyronny sable and or, a Harley purpure . . . the Weretons of Laurelwood; they were Hells Angels before the Change, when they decided to back Norman. They hold Laurelwood by knight-service; an armigerous family but not titled, enfeofed vassals of the Barons of Forestgrove in County Chehalis. And that’s a baton of cadency across the arms, and he’s very young, so he’s the tail end of the second generation—his elder brother was about ten at the time of the Change and had that lance-running with Mike Havel in the War of the Eye. And I heard that—
“Ah, Sir Joscelin,” Juniper said, searching her memory. “Congratulations on receiving the accolade, and I hope your wound is healing well.”
“Thank you, Lady Juniper,” the young knight blurted, fighting down a smile.
He showed them through the entrance of the Silver Tower into the vast hall at its base, with an arched groin-vaulted ceiling and great spiral staircases on either side, lit by the incandescent mantles of gas-burning chandeliers. It was fairly crowded; secretaries and clerks in plain tunics; visiting delegations; soldiers of all descriptions, from hairy leather-clad foresters to military bureaucrats; a nobleman in a surcoat of blue silk lined with yellow whose extravagantly dagged sleeves dangled to his knees, attended by pages and squires, and a lady in sweeping dress and pointed headdress who was as gaudy and haughty as he; clerics, from a bishop in crosier and miter to tonsured monks and robed nuns . . . And one section blocked off by planters full of roses and lavender and set with tables and chairs.
“One double-cheese pizza, one chicken stew, two bacon cheese-burgers with fries, right, gentles?” a server in a commoner’s tunic-and-shift said with the singsong intonation of phrases infinitely repeated. “And two glasses of Pinot Noir and one mug of small beer. Bread, butter and cheese are complimentary, but manchet bread is extra. That’ll be one silver piece and three pennies.”
John Red Leaf blinked. “A food court? The Black Tower of the Dark Lord has a
food court?”
“Well, even minions have to have lunch, and not all of them can go to their own hearths,” Juniper said. “And technically, this is the
Silver
Tower. The pizza is fine, but I have my suspicions about the hamburgers, that I do; they taste far too breadcrumbish for honesty sometimes.”
“OK, OK,” he said. “What
floor
is she on?”
“The seventh, usually, a bit more than halfway up, which is quite a climb, but—ah, here we are. The VIP treatment.”
At the rear wall, the one facing the interior of the donjon, was what looked like a small room lined with an openwork trellis of bronze wrought into vine leaves; Sir Joscelin bowed them into it, stepped back, closed a door of the same construction and pulled on a tasseled rope.
“Godspeed and good fortune, my lords, Lady Juniper.”
Somewhere far below a bell chimed faintly. Young Three Bears did start in alarm when the elevator lurched into motion beneath them, and a slow chiming music sounded from above. His father grinned—he undoubtedly hadn’t ridden in an elevator since March 17, 1998—and swore admiringly.
“All the comforts. How does
this
work?”
“Convicts on treadmills down in the dungeons turning the drums with the cables,” Juniper said, holding out one hand with the index finger pointing downward.
Then she rotated it towards the roof, where the icy music sounded over and over, like the chiming of Elven bridles on a midnight heath:
“Rigged to a carillon as well.”
“Well, fuck me, elevator music isn’t dead after all.”
The elevator didn’t travel very quickly, but it was much faster than trotting up ten flights of stairs. They went from one story to the next and the light outside brightened as narrow arrow-slits turned to real arched windows with glass panes in their stone traceries, albeit with steel shutters that could be barred and bolted.
A young woman was waiting to greet them at the seventh stop, dressed in a long embroidered cotehardie and a wimple of yellow silk bound with jeweled wire. The bright cloth complemented skin the color of chocolate truffles; she had an Associate’s jewel-hilted dagger at her woven gold belt as well as the usual rosary and embroidered pouch. Her narrow black eyes were somewhere between elaborately guileless and extremely shrewd, her delicately full features expressionless save for a bland smile of welcome.
“God give you good day, my lords from the east, my Lady Juniper,” she said, holding her skirts and sinking in a curtsy that let her trailing oversleeves touch the birch-and-maple parquet. “I shall bring you to the Lady Regent.”
“Wait, demoiselle,” Juniper said. “You’re . . . Lady Jehane Jones, aren’t you? Lord Jabar’s youngest.”
“Yes, I have the honor to be the Count of Molalla’s daughter, my lady,” she said. “You and I have met only once, though. And also I have the honor to be amanuensis to the Lady Regent.”
Which meant she was something between confidential secretary and general gofer, a post of considerable importance if your principal was high on the totem pole. Juniper stopped herself from raising an eyebrow; it was the first time Sandra had allowed that job to go to one of the greater nobility. There must be a story there. The Regent liked using people she had some strong hold on, ones whose fortunes were linked to hers, not those with independent power bases and blood-links to the ruling houses of the Association.
The young noblewoman went on: “If you’ll follow me, my lords, my lady?”
She led them down a long corridor walled in pale marble streaked with darker gray. Arched windows to their left overlooked a roof-top garden surrounded by high walls grown with blossoming roses, and the interior wall held paintings—mostly Impressionists and Post-Impressionists along with some of the obligatory Pre-Raphaelites—or objets d’art in niches; a thirteenth-century Persian bowl showing warriors battling around a tower, an ancient savage-looking Shang Chinese mask in jade and gold, and more.

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