Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (16 page)

R
udi Mackenzie looked up from the folding map table.

“Ah, most excellent!” he said, as the Lord of the Dúnedain dismounted and approached. “
Hîr
Alleyne,
mae govannen
.
I chyth ’wîn dregathar o gwen sui fuin drega od Anor.
”

“Well-met, Your Majesty; and indeed our foes shall flee.” A pause. “Your command of the Noble Tongue has improved.”

Rudi smiled; he hadn’t spoken more than a few words or rote phrases until he reached Nantucket and stepped outside the world of common day to return with the Sword of the Lady. He tapped the hilt:

“A benefit of this, I fear, and not my own merit.”

It gives me command of tongues…including ones that don’t exist, or didn’t until fairly recently when an Englishman invented them. Including, and here oddness becomes very odd indeed, both words and grammar that
weren’t
in what poor Astrid called her Histories, or indeed in any of the man’s writings, but which fit the rest perfectly. Which is a puzzlement I don’t intend to think about; it makes my head hurt.

There was a Dúnedain bard about, scribbling down the added vocabulary whenever she had a chance. She had a list, and she’d give him paragraphs and ask him to translate them and take notes in shorthand.
Given what had happened to Astrid and how it had aided the kingdom’s cause, he hadn’t had the heart to tell her to take herself off. Among other projects, the Lady of the Rangers had been working on a translation of the Histories…into Elvish.

The handsome man with the haunted eyes and the first silver in his blond hair bowed with hand on heart in the Ranger manner, bending the knee as well. So did the others—though his twin half sisters gave him antiphonal winks as they did.

They had a prisoner with them, a Boisean officer in the rough olive-green uniform that host wore under their armor, and he remained proudly standing. One sleeve had been ripped off, and ointment glistened on the skin there; doubtless there was a story behind it. He wasn’t bound, but two of the Rangers stood near with their long knives bare in their hands.

Something clicked in his mind, as if working some mathematical magic on the shape of face and eyes and hands.
That’s close kin to the prisoner who went over to Fred last month.

He didn’t know if it was his own wit working there or the Sword of the Lady working through him.

Sure, and I should stop wondering that. There’s no way to tell, and often enough it just seems to
exaggerate
the way I’ve always thought, like attaching a water-mill to a saw to give it added power. It’s obsessive I could become about it, to my own detriment.

The prisoner’s stiff refusal to bend showed courage, particularly if he believed any of the propaganda Martin Thurston was putting about concerning what a feudal tyrant Artos the First was. In what the Lady Regent Sandra considered one of life’s little ironies, much of the black tale was lifted from the actual deeds of Norman Arminger…who would be Rudi’s father-in-law, except that he was long dead.

And good riddance; I wouldn’t have liked to be in his skin when he had to make accounting to the Guardians of the Western Gate. Even such a man as he probably deceived himself about his deeds. But there’s no lying before Them.

Alleyne stepped up to the portable map table and opened his report, reading and pointing things out at the same time, and one of the attendants
put little carved hardwood chip markers on it and moved them around with something like a billiard-cue rake. It was now light enough to see the map well; the smell of the just-extinguished lamps hung in the air with a musky wax for a moment, and someone was cooking porridge not far away. Even a very new kingdom could be well-organized, if you had a competent Chancellor and other helpers.

The scents were soon lost in the wind that blew over the vast rolling landscape of the Horse Heaven Hills, even the stronger stink of the troops not far away. He felt he could see forever from here, and you really could see very far indeed. That air was cold and clean, and birds rode it high above—crows, buzzards, ravens, hawks, even eagles. They’d had time since the Change to learn it meant a feast spread for them when men gathered in such numbers; it wasn’t an accident that one of the Dark Mother’s names was
Crow Goddess
.

He was in full plate now, save for the helm and gauntlets, the marvelous alloy-steel suit Mathilda’s mother had had made as a wedding gift. It felt indecently light and easy compared to some gear he’d worn. Only a monarch could have commissioned it, and not a minor monarch at that, given the difficulty of working those refractory metals under modern conditions; most plate was made from ordinary salvaged sheet-steel. Although his still performed armor’s twofold miracle, making you too hot in warm weather and obstinately refusing to protect you from even the slightest chill.

The little markers on the map seemed to glow with significance as he watched, trembling with possibilities as his right palm rested on the moon-crystal pommel of the Sword of the Lady. He was used to the way it affected him now, the way it made him more of the man he had to be to do the job the Powers had handed him.

But I’m still not altogether certain I much like that man
, he thought absently.
I’ll just have to try not to be him so much I dislike myself, which would be a grievous fate given that I’m stuck in here with…me. To be sure.

Beside him Frederick Thurston grunted thoughtfully, his hard brown young face calm as he nodded.

“I’d have bet anyway that they were winding up to hit us here on our
right, close to the river, but it’s nice to have confirmation. Well, that removes some of the uncertainty from the next twenty-four hours,” he said.

Rudi knew what he meant. Still…

“We know what’s going to happen in the next day, Fred,” he said. “A great many who’d rather be home tending their crops or their workshops are going to die, more still will be crippled, children will keep asking when their parents are coming home until they’re old enough to understand an ugly truth, and many a household will know want and hardship for years to come. Everything else is…
arra
, how did they put in the old days…
damage control
. The only consolation is that this isn’t just about which pair of buttocks will be gracing which chair, so to say.”

Eric of the Bearkillers traced the huge blunt arrow that was heading westward on the map with his metal left hand. This one was a utilitarian slotted trowel-shaped thing that fitted into the round shield across the big fair man’s back and would do as a weapon in a pinch, rather than the dramatic one that gave him his nickname of
Steel-Fist
. The Boiseans were coming in just a little north of the bluffs along the Columbia, the closest ground that would give them room to deploy.

“That’s not particularly subtle as an opening move,” he said, the plates of his armor clinking a little as he moved to stare meditatively eastward.

Rudi nodded. “They outnumber us five to four and they need a swift victory. Otherwise winter will kill them if they stay and force them to fall back on their bases of supply if they don’t; and the League of Des Moines is marching up their backsides, the which is a most uncomfortable sensation. Winter will slow the war over there in the east, too, but not altogether until they hit the mountain passes. If your troops are willing to suffer and you can feed them, you can move on the high plains in winter; it’s the one time of year when footmen have the advantage, since there’s not much grazing. Come spring the CUT must be able to shift troops east to meet the Midwesterners. Hence they must come to us and break us the now or lose the war over the next year. There’s no more time for slow maneuver. And if they can knock us away from the river, they win this round.”

He turned his head to the messengers. “Observation balloons up now;
this will be the battlefield. Gliders concentrate on denying the enemy air reconnaissance.”

They scribbled and dashed away; heliographs began to blink. Rudi went on:

“Chief McClintock!”

The McClintock was a big man, with a two-handed sword slung across his back, a
claidheamh mòr
with a four-foot blade and a cross-and-clamshell guard. He looked rather like John Hordle in seven-eighths scale, save for the bushy brown beard that fell down his chest over the steel and leather nearly to the big dragon-shaped brass buckle of his belt, and the rather baggy look of the Great Kilt he wore.

That garment wasn’t much like the neat, tailored pleats of the Mackenzie version; the skirt and plaid were all one five-yard-long stretch of woolen cloth held by waist-belt and shoulder-brooch, in a tartan of dark brown-red, blue and hunter green. He straightened a little when the call came.

“Aye, Yer Majesty?” the clan chief asked.

The McClintocks spoke in what they thought was a Scottish fashion, one that Rudi’s mother’s fine ear found even more excruciatingly artificial than the imitation of her Irish brogue which had settled in among Mackenzies back at the beginning. The McClintocks had formed in the forested hills and narrow beautiful valleys between Ashland and Cave Junction, down south of the Willamette, in the post-Change period; partly with Mackenzie assistance, and partly in imitation of them as a model that had worked in the wild and terrible years—the latter something they fiercely denied, of course.

Their Chief’s father actually had been named McClintock, at least, and he’d been a man of great strength of will and vision…and probably what the old world would have called certifiably insane, either before the Change or driven so by the terrors and horrors he’d seen. There had been many such in those years, and the mentally damaged were still common in the older generation. Rudi had always suspected, and since he first touched the Sword he
knew
, that the more successful of those founders had done more than dream and make dreams real. They’d tapped into
patterns more ancient and strong than anything the old world had suspected, a subtle force pushing and shaping through individuals attuned to it.

So the Powers have their jests with us. Did our ancestors create the myths that now walk naked among us in the light of common day? Or do they but return from an age of legends much like this new world of ours, an age whose recollection echoed down many a thousand year? For walk the world again they do, now, most certainly and uncomfortably real whether we believe in them or not. More real than the world or we its dwellers, sometimes, you might be saying. So heavy with reality they threaten to tear through the gossamer fabric of our lives.

“I want your clan’s warriors to hold this area—” he pointed south with one hand and traced the scrambled contour lines on the map with the other “— between the riverbank and the plateau up here, as we discussed. Now we know it’ll be this stretch in particular and though it’s rough as a cob we can’t let them move through it. Sure as the Lady’s love they’ll put troops in there; light infantry, at a guess. Dispose your clansfolk as you will, so long as you don’t let them through.”

“Aye. We shall be th’ strong castle ye dinnae hae.”

Rudi nodded; the man was no fool. “The riverboats will support you with their catapults and flame-throwers, but they can only control the strip right along the water. Work east and come in on their flank if you can, but hold them you must.”

The hairy man nodded. “It’s gae bare for oor taste, but steep and rough enough tae suit. We canna complain, and we’ll hold it waur there’s bluid in oor veins.”

Chief Collin wasn’t crazed; often uncomfortably shrewd, in fact, but he had to use what his father’s obsessions had left. Things had jelled in the generation since the Change and become less fluid; back then there had been plenty of survivors eager to follow
anything
that looked as if it would keep them alive and their children fed. More than ready to dive headlong into what they thought was the past, since the present had betrayed them, though from what he’d heard and read, what they made usually had only a passing resemblance to anything in real history.

Real
being a term much in dispute in these times, of course.

Mackenzies had been known to refer to the McClintocks as
the Clan Wannabee
. Epithets in the other direction included
Clan Little Wussy Pleated Skirt
and went downhill from there. There were probably about as many of them as there were Mackenzies, but nobody knew for sure; they didn’t go in for census-taking.

But they’ve certainly sent everyone who could walk and do anything useful in a fight.

A little west the grassy plain was covered in them, in a dense mat of tartan and bonnets and plaids, mail shirts and boiled leather and hide vests sewn with pre-Change washers and crude noseguarded helms, all spread down a long slope. Banners rose above them, and a forest of steel; spears, gruesome-looking hooked Lochaber axes with broad blades two feet long, a fair number of yew bows, two-handed swords worn across the back in rawhide slings as well as the more common basket-hilted broadswords, round nail-studded shields with spikes in the center. The two men walked over to a jutting knee of hillside above them and Chief Collin drew his great blade with a flourish.

“Clan McClintock will hae the honor of holding the right wing! Och aye, there we wa’ stand, and there die maun we must—for our homes an’ oor bairns and this tall lad here! Hurrah for bonny
Ard Rí
Artos! Artos and Montival!”

“
Artos and Montival!”
Then a rhythmic pulse of: “
Ar-tos! Ar-tos! Ar-tos!
”

Rudi raised a hand, and the roaring cheer sank away. When he spoke it was in the Scots variety of Gaelic; he’d grown up familiar with the closely related Erse dialect, and the Sword made him preternaturally ready with tongues used anywhere in Montival. He shouted:

“
Clamar theid na h-uaislean cruinn

Gun Cailean ’bhith san airmh!”

Collin McClintock grinned widely in his burst mattress of a beard. That translated roughly as:

How can there be a gathering of warrior chiefs without Collin?