The Given Sacrifice (33 page)

The surviving Cutters popped up again, but they had time for only one volley of arrows
from their powerful horn-backed bows as the Montivallans stormed up the obstacle in
a roaring wave of shields and blades. One whistled by Rudi, another went
thwack
into his shield with a hard sound and a feeling like a blow from a club. The High
King sprang up the remains of the barricade, agile as a great hunting tiger in the
sixty pounds of steel despite the shifting footing. A shete tried to stop the Sword
of the Lady, and the tough spring steel was shorn straight through. The man beneath
spun away clutching at his severed throat . . .

When he fought with his own hands, there was a . . . going away, since the Sword came,
a madness that was completely lucid. Black wings bore him up, amid a storm of buffetings.
More of the guardsmen crowded ahead as the fight tumbled down the inner side of the
barricade. Their shields came up to protect the monarchs and Rudi shoved his visor
up again as he came back to himself and stood on a sack to give himself a better view.
Across the square a snarling scrimmage of fighting at the entrance to an avenue broke
apart, and a walking wall of leveled pike-points came through, marching to a hammer
of drums and a wordless chant of
ha
-ba-da,
ha
-ba-da . . .

A flick of his glance right and left, and only the details were different; the Cutters
had been pushed back into the open space at last, where the westerners’ numbers and
drill could take effect.

“Let’s go,” he said.

•   •   •

He’d been afraid they’d have to dig the Prophet out of some underground lair, or wall
him in and never be completely sure there hadn’t been some path of escape. Instead
Sethaz stood at the last step below the platform where scaffolding and scattered blocks
of stone told of decades of labor. His shete was in his hand; he was protected by
two men with great round shields, but every now and then the steel would flick out
and come back red.

This high up the pyramidal structure the artillery couldn’t be elevated enough to
fire, but archers could. Carts were carrying bundles of shafts in a ceaseless stream
from the reserves, and sighing clouds of gray-feathered cloth-yard arrows and stubby
crossbow bolts went by overhead, sweeping the upper steps, their impact like the sound
of hail on tile roofs. The dead were thick despite shields and what armor they had,
and blood ran down the granite and made it slippery beneath the foot. The stink of
it was thick, iron and copper and salt, the butcher’s smell of battlefields redoubled—this
was a huge building, but still more packed and smaller than any open field could be.
The noise was stunning, individual voices and even the hammering pulse of the Mackenzie
Lambegs lost in an all-consuming white roar.

The heavy-armed troops of the High King’s Host fought their way upward, shields up
against spears and blades stabbing and beating from above—the steps of the structure
were around three feet tall, just enough to make the business as difficult as possible,
like always fighting against mounted men in the perfect position to strike downward.

“Ready—
now!
” Rudi called.
“Follow me!”

Pikes slanted forward from behind, jabbing over their shoulders. He turned a spearhead
with his shield—the fourth he’d had that day—and chopped. A young man in red armor
blocked desperately with his shield, bringing it awkwardly across to face the left-handed
attack; the Sword cut through a section of the bullhide and wicker and into his leg
above the knee and through the bone.

Rudi snarled,
“Morrigú!”
, crouched and leapt.

The dark wings of the Crow Goddess indeed seemed to bear him up. He landed, buffeted
one man aside with his shield, took off a hand at the wrist and shoved his way into
the gap made when that man turned shrieking and sprayed blood into the eyes of his
comrades. Blades hammered at him, thudding on his shield and cracking off the smooth
steel of his armor.

“Jesu-Maria,”
Ignatius wheezed, somehow beside him.

An arrow flashed
between
them and into the face of a spearman, Edain shooting from recklessly close. Matti
was back at the base of the Temple, directing operations and feeding in reserves with
a wrenched knee—some distant walled-off part of him was glad of it. One more step,
and the Cutters would be forced back onto the flat unfinished top, where there was
no protection.

Moving with a unison like one man monarch and monk hacked down the shieldmen protecting
the Prophet and went in to kill.

Sethaz blocked a Bearkiller backsword hacking for his leg, kicked out and sent Eric
Larsson tumbling backward with a yell and a dented breastplate, killed a Boisean with
a slash that laid his arm open from elbow to wrist, launched a flurry of strikes at
Ignatius that sent the warrior Benedictine down on one knee, guarding frantically.

Rudi lunged. The Sword slid along the Prophet’s shete, the counter cunningly sloped
to keep the supernal edge from chopping through mere steel. Sethaz’ other hand snapped
out and took him by the throat like a grab made of steel and gears. The metal of his
bevoir began to grate and crumple.

“I . . . see . . . you . . .”
he grated, in a voice like the death of stars.

And the world vanished.

•   •   •

Too big,
Rudi thought.

He was nowhere, and everywhere. It was dark and utterly cold and all that was material
had vanished so long ago that even the memory of it was gone, but there was order
here, complexity, a structure that vibrated at a level next to which atoms were coarse
and chaotic as a lump of horse-dung. There was a beauty that he could not grasp, that
left him weak with longing, and thoughts rushed by like huge glowing matrixes of the
pure sublime. He could not grasp them, but if he could, even the least of them, he
knew he would be utterly transformed, lost and yet fulfilled beyond all reckoning. . . .

They vanished, and he was Rudi Mackenzie once again, crying out with grief and loss
for an instant.

Then he gained command of himself; what he had . . . not seen, there was nothing for
light to reflect off in that place, but somehow apprehended, fled like a dream. It
was too
big
to remember.

Instead he was in a forest. A real forest, as far as he could tell, though not of
trees he was very familiar with; he could see the great trunks rising around him like
reddish pillars upholding the sky, smell a green spiciness, hear the trickle of falling
water. Light speared down between the needled boughs so far above, and smaller plants
reached for it. Birds whistled and chirped, and insects buzzed; a hummingbird circled
him in blue iridescence and then departed. He turned and walked along the creek that
tumbled over lustrous brown stream-polished stones, conscious that he was no longer
wearing the battered, blood-spattered armor or the sweat-stinking arming doublet below;
instead he was in kilt and knee-hose and schoon, saffron-dyed linen shirt and plaid
pinned over his shoulder.

The sun was slanting to the westward, and the air grew a little colder. The light
was golden—somehow, more real than a nugget of the metal itself, be it polished never
so bright. He walked in a dream, but it was more
real
than the waking world. Suddenly he dropped his hand to the pommel of the Sword of
the Lady at his right hip. It was thee, but . . .

It feels . . . at home. Without that sense that the world might rip around it. Here,
the world itself is like that. More real, more
itself.
Myself it is that feels fragile and not-quite-real.

A fire flickered through the gathering dusk. He walked into the circle of its light,
his feet soft on the duff and fallen ferns.

“Ladies,” he said, with a deep bow.

As once before on Nantucket, there were Three. This time he knew all the faces. The
youngest was his sister Fiorbhinn, a maiden of a little more than twelve summers;
slender but strong, breasts just beginning to bud beneath her pale gown, white-blond
hair torrenting down on her shoulders, and a small harp on her knee. The huge pale
blue eyes met his, depths within depths. . . .

He took a deep breath and looked at the others; Mathilda, her slightly irregular face
beautiful as she looked down at the swaddled form of Órlaith on her knee, and his
mother Juniper—but not the hale, graying figure of eight-and-fifty that he knew in
this twenty-eighth year of the Change. This woman in tunic and arsaid was Juniper
Mackenzie as she might be in the years of her deep age, hair snowy, face deeply lined,
a little stooped as she leaned on the carved rowan staff of a High Priestess topped
by the silver moon waxing and full and waning. The leaf-green eyes were nearly the
same, warm and kind.

“Are—” he began, then stopped.
Maiden, Mother, Crone,
he thought.
Of course. How otherwise?

Fiorbhinn laughed. “Of course we are who we seem. All our seemings. And not. Time
is different here.”

“And there are no words for it all,” Rudi said patiently. “I’m no longer angry at
that. Irritated, perhaps.”

All three of the Ladies smiled. The youngest spoke again:

“If we could explain—”

“You would, yes.” A thought occurred to him. “Was that place . . . that place I was . . .
was that how this really is?”

His nod took in the forest, and the frosted glory of stars that was showing overhead,
brighter and more colorful than any he had ever seen, even in glimpses beneath the
black swaying shapes of the treetops.

His mother spoke. “No. That was the . . . heaven, you might say . . . the dream of
the Powers behind the CUT. Behind many another dream of men. Dreams of order and of
knowledge . . . in the beginning.”

He blinked, shocked. Mathilda spoke: “You’ve been told before, that
here
this is not a war between good and evil.”

“It most certainly is in the world of common day!” Rudi said, and they all looked
at him with fondness clear in their eyes.

“Yes, it is,” Juniper said. “That is the shadow it throws there, and those in the
cave see it upon the wall. And it is true, what they see. But . . . let me ask you:
which is better, the utterly particular, or the absolutely infinite? Immanence or
transcendence?”

“I’m tired of shadows!” Rudi said. “And—with respect—tired of moving amid forces the
which I cannot understand!”

“You may understand if you will, brother,” Fiorbhinn . . . possibly Fiorbhinn said,
her voice as her name,
truesweet.
“That is why you are here, to make that choice.”

He looked up again, and the stars
spoke
; if only he could read that vast slow dance it would be
everything
. Rest that was high adventure, infinite knowledge that was just a beginning, home
and a journey without end . . .

Mathilda spoke. “You have done everything you were born to do, my beloved,” she said.
“Thus is the will of God fulfilled.”

“You have sung a good song,” Fiorbhinn added. “One that echoes even here.”

“You have earned homecoming, if you choose it,” his mother said, and there were tears
in her eyes. “Homecoming beyond all sorrow, beyond all loss.”

Slowly, Rudi bowed his head in thought. “What is a man, if he should leave those he
loves?” he said at last.

“I
am
here,” Mathilda said. “We all are. Time is different here, and choices.”

Rudi raised his eyes to the stars again, feeling himself begin to fall out among them.
As one himself, a star in glory . . . but that was only a symbol, a thing his mind
clutched to give him words for something beyond words.

Then he lowered his eyes again, his smile crooked. “What is a man, if he puts aside
his work?” he said. “I don’t ask you, Ladies, if it is finished. Just that I be given
the time to do it, needed or no.”

Silently they rose and passed him, each pausing to press her lips to his forehead.

•   •   •

Sethaz staggered back, snarling. The Sword moved once more, and he gasped as the not-steel
transfixed him, then half fell backward off it and dropped his shete as he went to
one knee. A hand pressed to the blood welling out through the slit in his armor.

“I . . .” he began.

Then the rage left his face, and he looked at the blood on his hand. “So . . . pure.
I wanted it to be . . . pure.”

And he fell, features slack against the bloody stone, years seeming to melt from them.
Until he was merely a man, dead among so many.

Rudi raised his eyes to the blue of the sky, and let the tears well past his closed
lids.

THE SPRING QUEEN

Barony Harfang

County of Campscapell

(Formerly eastern Washington State)

High Kingdom of Montival

(Formerly western North America)

August 28th, Change Year 32/2030 AD

Ó
rlaith Arminger Mackenzie wa
sn’t bored with the train ride, though they’d been travelling for days. There were
too many interesting things to watch outside the windows. Besides, she was with her
mother, and her father, and they were the most fun people in the world. And Butterball,
her new pony, was in a car of his very own at the end of the train, and she could
go and visit him any time she wanted, and ride him when they stopped to change teams
or visit.

Also her puppy Maccon was back there. Maccon meant
Son of a Wolf
, but Maccon’s grandmother was Garbh. Garbh had been Uncle Edain’s dog on the Quest,
and bards had made
songs
about her, which hardly ever happened with dogs, though it had with Da’s famous horse
Epona. Maccon would be just as brave and loyal and fierce as Garbh had been, when
he was big, and go on adventures with her. He was already brave for a puppy, and smart,
too—he already knew her and licked her face whenever she came. Uncle Edain had said
that he’d train them both up, and teach Maccon not to chew her shoes, which he’d done
with her
best
shiny red silk ones.

She folded up her book, which was about Dorothy of Oz with pictures, put it neatly
away in the bookshelf with the strap as Dame Emelina had taught her; Dame Emelina
was wonderful, but strict. Then she knelt on the seat and looked out of the window
with her elbows on the sill; the leather cushion made a sort of sighing sound. She
liked the story, and she could read now.

Well, read a bit,
she thought, with stubborn honesty.
Some of the words are still too hard.

But after a while she wanted to
move
. The window was pushed up, so she could put her head out and let her long yellow
hair fly in the breeze of their passage, and the air was hot with summer and smelled
like dust and dry hay and a little like thunder somehow—she was glad she was in a
kilt and shirt, though they were here in the north. The new girl’s kirtle she’d gotten
for her birthday was very pretty, with little birds around the hems in silver and
gold thread that sparkled, but it could be too warm for anything but sitting around.
She had to sit around sometimes, but she didn’t like it.

There were hills outside, odd smooth-looking ones, this was a place called the
Palouse
that was all hills but no rocks, and the railroad wound like a snake through them,
staying on the tops of the ridges mostly. A little while ago she’d seen a herd of
Appaloosa horses running across them, with their manes flying in the bright sunshine
and their coats all spotted against the brown of the summer pastures. Da had taken
her up the ladder onto the roof of the car, where a couple of the archers rode, and
stood with her on his shoulders so she could watch and wave and whoop. Now the ground
was sort of a dark yellow where the wheat had been, and there were rows and rows of
sheaves piled up together in tripods curving across the hills, brighter yellow than
the stubble, looking like . . .

“Tipis!” she said. “They look like tipis! Like the
La-ko-tah
had when they came on the visit. Chief Three Bears said I could sleep in a tipi sometime!”

Her father looked up and smiled, his blue-green eyes crinkling. He was the handsomest
man in the world, and the bravest knight, and he was King. It was wonderful that he
was King, though it meant he was busy a lot of the time. Now he put down the paper
he’d been reading and came across and knelt down on the floor by the seat so that
their eyes were level as he looked out the window.

“Well, by the Powers, so they do!” he said.

“Can I really sleep in a tipi?”

He nodded solemnly. “That you can, if Rick promised you could, for he is a great warrior
and a wise chief and a man of honor; also he has little girls your age and knows their
ways and how important a promise is.”

“Can I sleep in a
Lakota
tipi?” she said, thinking of the stories about the lords of the high plains. “Chief
Three Bears fought with you in the great battles, didn’t he?”

“Not only that, he aided me on the Quest, when we used a stampeding buffalo herd to
hide us from the Cutters who pursued us.”

“I remember that story!” she said, eyes shining. “That must have been the most fun
ever!”

There was something a little odd in his laugh. “It was . . . exciting, that it was
in truth. And so the Seven Council Fires are also among our peoples. In a few years
you’ll come with your mother and I when we go east for the summer buffalo hunt. You
can see the Sun Festival where the camps of the Lakota carpet the prairie, and the
dancers, and the great stone faces carved by the old Americans into the Black Hills,
the kings of the ancient world. They’ll give you a Lakota name, and perhaps you will
become one of the girls who apprentice to the White Buffalo Woman’s Society or the
Sacred Shawls, and you will indeed sleep in a tipi. Though the Lakota themselves sleep
in ger, most of the time now—tents on wheels with round tops. Tipis are for ceremony,
to respect their ancestors.”

She laughed and clapped her hands at the thought of the tipis and the gers, and put
an arm around his neck; his hair was redder than hers and had less yellow, and smelled
like summer.

“That sounds like a lot of fun!”

“It will be.” He turned and kissed her cheek, his mustache tickling a little so that
she giggled. “But it will be important too, for these are sacred things. You understand?”

She nodded solemnly. Then something occurred to her.

“Da,” she said. “I was wondering. The horses make the train go, don’t they? Walking
on that treadmill thing up at the front.”

“Indeed they do.”

“But how can we go so fast? This is like a gallop. Horses can’t go this fast for long.
Horsemaster Raoul told me so, that it would hurt them if you made them go fast for
too long.”

“Very true, and when he speaks on horses Sir Raoul is a man to listen to most carefully.
It’s the gearing that lets them do it, so that they walk at their best pace and the
wheels are made to go faster.”

He held up a hand. “I’ll show you later, and you can help grease the gears, but don’t
expect to understand it right away. ’Tis a mystery of the mechanics, and requires
mathematics to really know.”

“Oh.”

She pouted a little. She wanted to understand it
now
, and usually her father and mother would explain things to her, though the greasing
part sounded like fun. Math was . . . OK, she supposed. She could already add some
numbers, but the times table was too difficult for now. Then something else occurred
to her.

“Why does the train go more clackety-clack now than it did yesterday?”

“Ah, well, that I can explain. In the ancient times, the trains were much bigger and
heavier than they are now, and they needed rails of solid steel, which we still use
where they remain and which are very smooth. But now in modern times, when we lay
more track we make wooden rails and then fasten a strip of steel on top. That’s fine
for our trains, and takes less of the metal, which has many uses. The rails here were
torn up during the war, and now we’ve fixed them . . . the Lady Tiphaine and the Lord
Rigobert have, their folk . . . and that’s why the noise is different.”

She nodded happily; she liked knowing why things were the way they were. Her father
sat back in the seat, and she sat back in his lap; he put an arm around her. His arms
were long, and you could feel how strong they were, almost the way you did when you
touched a horse; when he threw her up in the air it was fun-scary, like being a bird
and flying until she swooped down and he caught her. When she watched him practicing
at arms with the guards, it was almost really scary sometimes, but when he held her
like this it made her feel very safe, like pulling up the covers in winter when a
storm was lashing against the windows and draughts made the candles flicker.

Her mother was in the seats across from them, which were like a big sofa; she was
in a travelling habit, brown hakama divided skirt and a green jacket with pretty jade
buttons over a blouse, not the High Queen’s court dresses that shimmered. But the
little golden spurs on her boots showed she was a knight too, who’d ridden with Da
on the Quest and his adventures.

Her little brother John was curled up with his head in their mother’s lap, snoring
a little. John was only four, and still napped a lot; he had brown hair like their
mother and looked more like Mom, when he wasn’t just looking like a baby. But he could
sing
already, better than her at least; the court troubadour said he had perfect pitch,
which meant he could listen to a note and make the same one.

Sometimes that drove her crazy, because he’d pick two or three and do them over and
over and laugh. She loved him but he could be a jerk and of course he was still so
young
.

Mom was dozing too. There was going to be a new sister around Yule, and that made
her sleepy a lot; Órlaith couldn’t remember much about when John came, she’d been
just a two-year-old herself then. The High Queen opened her eyes and smiled at Órlaith
and then closed them again, letting her head fall back against the cushion. Her round
hat with the trailing veils was hung from the back of it, the peacock feathers standing
up.

The railcar swayed and clacked. It was just like a nice room on wheels, there were
chairs and sofas, rugs with flowers and vines, and a table where they’d had lunch,
and where she sat with picture books and coloring books and did her lessons with Dame
Emelina. There were ten more cars in the train, including the one with the little
beds that folded down, which she liked.

“Will Heuradys and Yolande be there when we get to Lady Tiphaine’s manor?”

“Yes, they will; and their father, and their mother.”

“Oh, good,” Órlaith said.

She could feel her father’s deep chuckle through his tunic—he was wearing shirt and
jerkin and breeks and a T-tunic, the way people did up here, rather than a kilt the
way he did down in the Mackenzie lands.

“Indeed, and it’s good for you to have some your own age to play with.”

“They’re nice, but they’re not my age. Well, Heuradys isn’t. She’s older.”

“Not so much.”

“Two whole
years
older,” she said. “And don’t say it isn’t important. It is, and Heuradys thinks so
too.”

He laughed, his beard tickling her neck. “To be sure, darlin’ girl, that’s the third
of a lifetime, isn’t it? I was forgetting.”

“I like their Mom, though. Tell me a story. Tell me how you snuck into Boise and opened
the gate!”

“I and some others. Well, if you must, though you’ve heard it before.”

“I want to know all the stories! I need to hear it a lot so I’ll remember all the
parts. You have the best stories, anyway.”

“It’s my life, darlin’ girl, but I suspect it’s your story the now.”

She wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but she settled back to hear his voice.

“There we were, sitting outside Boise, and no way of getting through the walls. Well,
now, if you can’t go through, you must go around; but there’s no way around a city
wall, for the wall itself goes around. And if you can’t go through, and you can’t
go around, you must go over or under. Men holding a wall watch for you to try
over
—so, we thought, what about under? Now, Fred’s father—”

•   •   •

Rudi set Órlaith down and sent her to Dame Emelina as the whine of the locomotive’s
gearing died, more conspicuous by its absence for a moment. Mathilda’s lady-in-waiting
and tirewoman appeared as if by magic to tidy her up as the train coasted into the
village of St. Athena—theoretically named for a virgin martyr who’d died in Thrace
about seventeen hundred years ago, though Rudi had his doubts; the other train of
the Royal party was already there, having put on a sprint, and the two-score of the
High King’s Archers were already double-timing over to line up before he got down
and stand in ranks with their longbows in their arms. Through the window he heard
Edain say:

“Now, let’s show these haughty northern lords that we know how to . . . Talyn, for
Lugh of the Long Hand’s own sake, try to look like you didn’t spend the afternoon
muckin’ out a byre, man!”

Mathilda yawned a little as she checked that her habit was tidy and let the tirewoman
redo her braids and put them up under the broad-brimmed hat and scarf.

“How are you feeling, my love?” he said.

“Worn out, but no worse.” She crossed herself and made a gesture of steepling her
hands. “But thanking
God
and the Virgin that the morning sickness is over,” she said; she was pious, but not
sanctimonious. “Though why they call it
morning
sickness . . .”

“A wishful hope, perhaps,” he said, making the sign of the Horns.

He was thankful to the Mother as Brigid, she Who watched over childbirth, and as Matti’s
blue-mantled patron too that her births had all been—relatively—easy, with no complications.
Hopefully this one would be too, and he had reason to so hope . . . but no certainty.

Dame Emelina had the children in hand; literally, with a hand to each. He gave her
a friendly nod. She had dark freckles across skin a few shades lighter, handsome full
features and keen black eyes; she’d been Órlaith’s wet-nurse, having lost her own
babe about the time Mathilda was brought to bed, but she’d also been a scholar of
sorts before her husband—a belted knight and an Associate, but the third-son-of-a-second-son
variety—was killed at the Horse Heaven Hills.

Between her own good birth and years of being Órlaith’s wet-nurse it had been possible
to appoint her to the governess position without offending any of the great houses
in the old Protectorate who’d have schemed to get the job for protégés or daughters
unlikely to do it with half her skill or devotion. They’d put out that Matti was deeply
attached to her, which was simply true. Sandra had arranged the whole thing to start
with, and that triple-play was like her.