The Given Sacrifice

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

High King’s Host

Near Ashton

Liberated New Deseret

(Formerly eastern Idaho)

High Kingdom of Montival

(Formerly western North America)

August 15th, Change Year 26/2024 AD

The map had originally been from a publication called National Geographic, often a source of useful knowledge. The older collections particularly were eagerly sought after. Rudi’s cartographers-a mixture of Boiseans, Corvallans and obscure clerks from the PPA’s Chancellery-had done up an excellent large-scale transcription of one covering the core territories of the Church Universal and Triumphant and its marchlands, pyrographed on bleached deerhide, with a few modern additions like puff-cheeked faces blowing from the four quarters.

Now it was tacked to a piece of ancient plywood, itself set on an easel for easy reference. Rudi stood beside it, waiting with his left hand tucked through his sword belt and his right resting on the pommel of the Sword. The wall of the tent was rolled up, to delay the necessity of lighting the lamps. It wasn’t very hot even at the tail end of a summer’s day, since the easternmost part of the Snake River plain here was a mile above sea level, but the High King thought the view of the smoking ruins of the town were instructive as well for the assembled contingent commanders and their aides. The CUT’s forces were retreating, but doing as much damage as they could-not that this area hadn’t been badly wrecked anyway, in the long CUT-Deseret war that had been going on for most of the last decade before the greater struggle started.

In a way it’s weirdly comforting that they’re doing it, so. The Powers behind the CUT are trying to weaken Montival in every way they can, which means we’re a threat to them in the long term. At least I think so; I’m dealing with beings I cannot understand, any more than a coyote can understand a man. But try as they might, even with the tools of the ancients, men have never been able to kill all the coyotes. . and we have Those who help us as well as those who hunt us, that we do.

The air held a fair bit of dust as well as the smell of the camp and the reek of things not meant to burn, but this area got more rain than most of the Snake River valley, which was one reason he was pausing to regroup here. The grazing was better, which helped when you had so many horses to feed. The more he spread out, though, the more he was vulnerable to the swift slashing counterattacks the enemy specialized in. They were retreating, but they weren’t going willingly and they weren’t running witless.

More’s the pity; I want this war over, he thought, and began:

“As usual, it’s the logistics that are the problem-the more so as we’re far from home,” he said when everyone had settled and the orderlies had handed around cups of chicory to those who wished it.

“We aren’t, Your Majesty,” Donald Nystrup said.

He was technically a Brigadier in the army of New Deseret, and in fact had been the leader of the guerillas who’d been making the CUT’s occupation of the eastern Snake River country less than a delightful experience. The riders who’d been under his command were still trickling in from their hidden lairs in canyon and side-valley and badland, in groups from companies to little handfuls of men and women as desperate and lethal as so many starved wolves. Rudi had met their leader going east on the Quest, and he looked much older now than those few years would account for, with streaks of gray in his cropped brown beard and new scars, and hammered-out dents and nicks in his breastplate. He also looked like a man who’d had a pile of rocks taken off his back recently; relief mingled with an awareness of pain long suppressed and harder to bear for that.

“Yes, Brigadier,” Rudi said gently. “This is your home, and now truly yours again.”

What was that word Ingolf used, in his ancestors’ tongue? he thought. Heimat, yes. This is Nystrup’s heimat, his little homeland of the heart, what some call the patria chica. Where his ancestors are buried, a landscape rich and alive with their woven memories and stories, where his blood and sweat and theirs have watered and made sacred the soil that fed them. As the dùthchas of the Clan is to me. And it’s badly hurt. He must bleed with its wounds. Best be careful of his pride.

He met the eyes of the soldier of Deseret, his hand on the pommel of the Sword. There was an odd inner flash as he did, of something that was there but not to the unaided eyes of the flesh.

As if another man stood behind the seated Nystrup, slender work-battered hands resting on his shoulders. A big man in a blue uniform, high-collared and fancifully ornate with gold braid and buttons and epaulettes in the manner of the middle nineteenth century. The figure had a shock of unruly fair hair and bright humorous blue eyes shaded by long thick lashes, and a smile showing a chipped front tooth. It was a Yankee farmboy’s face, oval and long-nosed. At first glance a yokel out of an original America long generations gone even at the Change, save for a sense of a glowing golden charm that could bring the birds out of the trees. Full of shrewdness and good nature. . and yet a touch of something other about it, a power and a wisdom and a deep sadness.

He blinked the moment aside. Nystrup looked startled for just an instant, then squared his shoulders as if new power had flowed into him from a familiar reservoir.

Rudi went on: “But it’s a badly ravaged part of your home. Can you provide much in the way of fodder and provender?”

“Well. . not until we get the rail line to the south repaired, from down by the old Utah border. Our farmlands there are still productive, but. . and we’ve lost a lot of our working stock.”

“Not this campaigning season, then,” Rudi said.

“My troops don’t need much. We’ve gotten used to doing with very little, and we’re not going to stop until the enemy is utterly cast down.”

“And it’s a great help your lads and lasses have been and will be, but we have a large force here, and it limits our options.”

He stood to one side and tapped the eastern part of the map so that they could all see where his finger fell. “The armies of the League of Des Moines reached Casper in old Wyoming a month ago, and took it from the CUT garrison by storm after a brief siege, though with some loss.”

Sober nods from everyone. Storming a fortified position. . the antiseptic phrase covered a multitude of sins. Men falling off ladders screaming as boiling canola oil splashed into their faces and ran under their armor, for starters.

“The Bossman of Fargo will fill us in on the details.”

The League powers had a liaison officer here, who’d come over the mountains to the southward as a small party could do in summer; a high-ranking one, the Bossman of Fargo no less, one Daniel Rasmussen.

He strode confidently up to the map, a tall lean man in his forties in plain leather and linen and wool, an equally plain shete at his belt, with two fingers missing from his left hand and gray in his cropped yellow beard. He’d been notably cool when the alliance called the League of Des Moines was formed as Rudi went through Iowa on his way back west. Not least because he enjoyed being entirely sovereign in his family’s Red River bailiwick-he’d seized power from his elder brother in a coup, originally, and ruled as an iron-fisted though competent and reasonably popular dictator. The thought of mighty Iowa awakening from its inward-looking sleep wasn’t one he found delightful.

A concern for which Artos the First has an underwhelming sympathy, I will not say aloud.

His eyes were gray and very cold, with the wary bitterness you often saw in those who’d come to adulthood in the terrible years right after the Change, those damaged in their souls but not outright mad. Though they’d had a considering respect in them since he rode into the Montivallan camp and seen the size of it, and the good order and fine weapons and most of all the tough veteran faces of the troops. He hadn’t altogether believed in the High Kingdom as anything real, until then, but he was a man who believed in armies if nothing else and knew a good one when he saw it. He was casting the occasional considering look at young Rick Three Bears, the head of Rudi’s token Lakota contingent-a useful token, though most of their forces were out east of the mountains.

Rasmussen lost those fingers fighting the folk of the Seven Council Fires as a young man. And unlike Ingolf, he hasn’t let the fire of his anger die; he’s a man of cold enduring hatreds, I think. Here I thought things were complicated two months ago! Rudi mused. The Iowans are keeping that kettle off the boil, Lady bless them and the Lord guide their hands, but once the war is over I’m going to have to spend some time out east, settling things with the Lakota and their neighbors, if we’re to have real peace there and not just a truce until a new generation gets an itch in its collective sword-hand.

The number of contingents in his army had increased once again now that the US of Boise territories were secured. There was even a Nez Perce battalion; very likely and useful light horse they were, but touchy about the increased degree of autonomy Fred had given in their new charter, suspicious of Boise under anyone’s rule and needing a fair bit of stroking. It hadn’t helped when he’d thoughtlessly spoken to their commander in the Nez Perce language, and found that the man had only a few phrases of it himself; evidently only a few score people still knew it, most of them elderly. That had put him in a sulk for days, convinced it had been done to embarrass him before his followers.

Sure, and it’s like juggling porcupines! Wiggling ones intent on nibbling each other!

His blood brother and guest-friend King Bjarni of Norrheim winked at him. The burly redbeard with the axe was the least troublesome member of the war-council; all he was interested in was hacking his way through the CUT to get back to his distant realm. And absorbing every useful bit of information he could along the way; his baggage-train contained mostly crates of books and diagrams and models, not to mention a careful selection of experts in a dozen skills enticed to make the trek with offers of rank and reward. Norrheim was a bit backward now, but he suspected it would be much less so by the time Bjarni’s son was hailed on the Thingstone.

Bossman Rasmussen stepped up to the easel and spoke as Rudi moved politely aside:

“Casper’s where we started running into hard trouble. We came west up the North Platte valley as soon as the ground was dry enough and the grass was up this spring, eighty thousand strong, horse, foot and catapults, not counting the screening forces we’d had securing the approaches since last fall, or the Sioux.”

Respectful nods; that was a great many fighting-men. A great many to muster and equip, and a very great many to feed away from the farms producing the grain and meat. Eighty thousand men meant tens of thousands of draught-horses, rail and road wagons, teamsters and roustabouts, crates of boots and harness, barrels of salt pork and sacks of flour and cornmeal and beans and oats and bale after bale of blankets and socks. .

Armies ate wealth like drought or locusts.

“That was fairly straightforward; Nebraska’s forces joined us and they had everything organized, supply dumps and plenty of fodder and replacement horses. After that we had to re-lay some of the rails as we came, sending scrap back east to the rolling mills in Des Moines. We’ve been doing that all summer, because there certainly wasn’t enough on hand once we were out of the settled zone, and every mile of track we fixed was another one we had to guard against Cutter raiding parties. We sent a secondary force along here to the south-”

His finger traced a line through Cheyenne and then far westward and north into the Powder River basin.

“And the people all joined in, the ones still free were scared stiff of the Cutters and happy to see us, the independent Ranchers and the tribes both. And the occupied zone rose against the CUT as soon as our scouts arrived, and the, ah-”

“Chenrezi Monastery,” Master Hao said.

His voice was still strongly accented despite twenty-eight years in what had become the Valley of the Sun when the Change stranded a convention of Buddhist monks at an off-season tourist hotel there. Fortunately for the other inhabitants, since most of the monks had started their lives as mountain peasants and remembered those skills.

“The Monastery of the Most Compassionate Bodhisattva. And those in the Valley who accept our advice.”

“Yeah, I’d heard you guys ran the place.”

Hao was a stringy man in some indeterminate place between middle aged and elderly, apparently naturally hairless and assembled out of rawhide and sticks, the sort of old man who looked as if he’d never die or had some time ago and didn’t let it slow him down to speak of. He was dressed in a set of lamellar armor, lozenges of metal laced together, with a dao at his side. In the Valley’s position, Rudi would have hesitated to refuse any advice he gave; from his time there he knew that was in fact the attitude of most. Not that Hao was a bad or violent man, and the Monastery’s rule had been almost comically tolerant and benevolent from all he had seen. But the High King remembered his tutelage during the winter he’d spent there, recovering from wounds. Even old Sam Aylward had never worked him harder.

“Chenrezi Monastery helped get things organized,” Rasmussen said. “The Powder River people all jumped when they said frog.”

The particular order Hao had represented at the conference so long ago emphasized the Way of the Warrior. How exactly they reconciled that with Greater Vehicle Buddhism was a matter of theological complication Rudi wasn’t much interested in, but Hao had been in charge of the training and leading of the Valley’s hosts since the beginning. The Valley had not been protected by its geography alone.

“There is much respect for the holy Rimpoche Tsewang Dorje,” the old Han said a little severely, naming the abbot of Chenrezi.

“As there should be,” Rudi said, quite sincerely.

In an entirely different way the Tibetan abbot was even more formidable than his warrior subordinate. The Rimpoche had sworn him fealty in impeccable style; then winked, and they’d both shared a chuckle as the old bonze’s face turned into a network of wrinkles like an ancient merry child. You got that sense that most of life was a game he played punctiliously out of an innate courtesy. .

Tiphaine d’Ath had been standing like a gray-steel statue of a warrior Goddess, Lioncel de Stafford behind her with a stack of documents. Now she used her silver baton of office to sweep from east to west along the lower edge of the map.

“That’s all very well, Bossman, but going that way is like running your little finger up your own nose; limited possibilities of advance and you’re not likely to reach anything useful. Unless you’re going to fight your way over the Tetons, where it can snow any damned month of the year, July included.”

“They’ll have to guard the passes, but yeah,” Rasmussen said, nodding. “Thing is, the supply situation was even worse than we thought it would be, and we realized we had more troops than we could feed on the axis of main effort, so we might as well have them do something instead of just going home. Whoever we picked to turn around and march back, the rest of the troops wouldn’t like that, to put it mildly. A lot of the League’s army. . the Iowans particularly. . well, they were drilled troops and well equipped and ready enough to fight, but a lot of them hadn’t realized how much time in the field you spend being so bored and miserable that fighting’s a relief.”

That brought some chuckles; everyone here had been fighting for years, and not a single summer campaign each year on someone else’s fields, either. Whatever else you might say about him, Rasmussen had been there. Someone murmured poor babies! Nystrup looked angry rather than mocking; what his people had been through was beyond conception.

“And once we got the CUT out of the area, the Ranchers there could spare stock to be driven north, we got some from as far south into old Colorado as the San Luis valley. Gratitude, gold and fifteen thousand men with shetes can produce a big herd. That helped a lot with our transport bottleneck. Horses too, and war eats ’em fast.”

A bad man is Bossman Rasmussen, in my opinion, but a fair sound general, and a realist, Rudi thought. Hmmm. I must see to that area in old Colorado after the war. . another bit of work to add to the plate!

The Midwesterner went on: “Our main force turned north at Casper. There’s more support for the CUT there as you head north, more people who actually buy that loony line of goods they peddle, and we started getting serious harassment. God tailor-made the Bighorn country for a cavalry guerilla. Horse-archers are a pain in the ass that way to an infantry army. I told them in Des Moines to take more light cavalry, but. .”

There were mutters from the ranked commanders, along the lines of tell me about it. The CUT’s armies were mostly plainsmen with recurves, and with a string of several ponies for each man they could move. Trying to force them to give battle when they didn’t want to fight was like trying to punch smoke with your fist, too; even a little carelessness and they’d ride around you and burn the country behind you while you stood scratching your head, or arse, or both, and wondering where they were.

Though there were answers to that. Rudi grinned like a wolf. “We’re approaching things that they must stand and fight for,” he said. “For all that they put their capital in a land so remote, they still have one.”

Rasmussen nodded, with an identical expression, and went on:

“The Lakota-”

This time his nod to Rick Three Bears was genuinely polite instead of hostility masked by a politic pretense of courtesy. He also gave them their own name for themselves, too, which best translated as friends or allies. The name Sioux more commonly used among outsiders to name those tribes was derived from what their bitter rivals the Anishinabe-Ojibwa people had called them long ago, filtered through French and then English, and had originally meant something like little snakes.

That hadn’t been intended as a compliment or taken as one.

“-have been invaluable keeping them off our backs.”

Rick shrugged and drew on his cigarette, the cheeks of his narrow hook-nosed face pulling in for a moment and his braids swinging.

“We have lots of practice with the Cutters,” he said in a not-quite-insolent manner, blowing the smoke upward.

And with your gang, white-eyes, went unspoken; his father John Red Leaf had been a leader in the Sioux War, when the resurgent Lakota tunwan had tried to take back their ancestral lands in the Red River valley. It hadn’t worked, but they had ended up once again dominating what had been the western Dakotas.

Though I’ve met his mother as well, and she’s suspiciously red-haired, Rudi thought whimsically. Our tribes and clans and nations are stories we tell-though none the less real for that. But real because we believe in them, not because they’re written in natural law. . and as we Changelings know, even natural law isn’t as unchanging as our parents thought.

Mathilda coughed at the tobacco smoke with resigned disgust, where she sat with a stack of reports from the staff and Huon Liu de Gervais at her elbow. The Midwesterner lit one of his own, the habit being much more common where he came from than in Montival, ignored the High Queen’s glare and several others, and went on:

“But the harassment slowed us down-we kept having to deploy from march column to line of battle, and occasionally fight a set-piece engagement. We shoved ’em back every time, but the Cutters always broke off before we could really wreck them.”

More moderately sympathetic nods. Montival had wrecked the CUT and Martin Thurston at the Horse Heaven Hills, but mainly because the enemy had stood and fought there beyond the point of reason in an attempt to win the war at one throw.

“It would have been fu. . frankly impossible if there had been twice as many of them, I grant that, so you and us hitting them at the same time was crucial. But while that went on they had labor-gangs ripping up the rail, piling it up over heaps of ties, and setting those on fire-we could see the flames against the sky for weeks and smell the burning creosote. That meant we had to re-lay everything as we advanced into the Bighorn Basin and went west, except the actual grading, and some of that’s washed out since the Change so we had to shove the dirt back. Not to mention bridges. Plus they set grass fires wherever they could, and drove every head of livestock out of our path. Right now we’re here-”

He tapped the map south of Billings, the old Montana capital and mostly ruins now. “Only a few hundred miles left to go. Damn bad miles, though, and the Cutters are thick as grass. Infantry, not just their ranch and Rover levies, and the Sword of the Prophet, what’s left of it. I understand you guys wiped out most of that crowd of maniacs in the red armor last year, for which many thanks.”

Tiphaine gave a small chilly smile. The Grand Constable had brought the Association’s chivalry down on Corwin’s elite troops like a war hammer on a skull, with hideously perfect timing. Rudi gave her a small crisp inclination of the head. He’d spent most of that long and ghastly day setting the move up, but she’d carried it out faultlessly and deserved to be proud of it.

“Thank you for the summation, Bossman,” Rudi said, and tapped the map himself. “And the Dominions, Drumheller and Moose Jaw and Minnedosa”-the old Canadian prairie provinces, which had come through the Change with only the loss of their larger cities, like the Upper Midwest-“are here, around Great Falls.”

“Hurrah,” Tiphaine said dryly, holding up a fist, extending her index finger and moving it in a very small circle of celebration.

Rasmussen gave her a look and then an unwilling grin as he resumed his seat. Mathilda snorted in agreement; Great Falls wasn’t so very far south of the Dominion of Drumheller’s prewar border. And the Dominions were rich and populous, by the standards of this continent in the twenty-sixth year of the Change, and they didn’t have as far to go as the other combatants.

“It’s mountains there,” Rudi said mildly.

Ian was bristling back where he stood in the Dúnedain contingent, but far too junior and too polite to say anything at the aspersion on his native land.

“Also they didn’t have to intervene in this war at all. We’d have beaten the CUT eventually anyway if they hadn’t, and they’d have gotten all the benefits of victory without any of the costs.”

“Every Cutter they engage is one we don’t have to,” Mathilda put in judiciously; when she thought politics, you could hear her mother in her voice. “Corwin was a bad neighbor, but they’d never taken any territory they considered their own. The Association took the old Canuk territory west of the Rockies, which is now part of Montival. It was really quite forethoughtful of the Dominions to come in on our side.”

“So, how are we going to get at Corwin, Your Majesty?” Tiphaine asked. “And do it before snow closes the passes, and get the bulk of our troops back in time? So that all our neighbors can go home for Yule?”

“That is the question,” Rudi agreed.

You’re the High King, you’re the man with the magic sword, so you tell us what to do. . and you’d better be right, he thought sardonically.

In the end you had to decide; you never had enough information and what you did have might be wrong. That, and the sheer work involved, were among the reasons he’d always found it surprising that so many wanted power. He’d read the philosophers, Plato and Aristotle and Jefferson and the others, and there was something to be said for republics; but the great asset of a monarchy was that you could put men in office who weren’t obsessed with a ruler’s power, wanting it so much so that they twisted their whole lives into a search for it.

Who knows, Bossman Rasmussen’s grandson may be a fine fellow.

“We’re going to follow the old Highway 20 route, east over the Yellowstone Plateau and north then up Highway 89,” he said after a moment’s echoing silence; he saw shoulders relax as the dice were cast for good or ill. “Then down from the old park territories and into Paradise Valley. We have to take Corwin within the next month, and then get the bulk of the troops out to somewhere we can feed them through the snow season. The number who we can overwinter there without producing a famine, or even in the Bitterroot country as a whole, is strictly limited. Even in what passes for lowlands hereabouts.”

Tiphaine pursed her lips. “It’s direct, and it doesn’t give them the chance to get off their back foot,” she acknowledged. “Given the time constraints. .”

“Least bad,” Rudi replied. “The western part outside the old park was cut over about thirty years ago, and the remainder burned hard just before and then just after the Change; it’s grassland and shrub now for the most part, good grazing-and heavy with game, buffalo and elk, deer and boar and feral cattle. That will help a fair bit; we’d send light cavalry and scouts first anyway, and they can shoot as much as possible and rough-gralloch it. The troops can eat roast meat and save the iron rations for later.”

Everyone looked at the map. That route meant hauling everything they couldn’t forage with wagons on roads that had spent a generation getting worse, repairing where essential as they went. And even on a good road a horse or ox could pull less than a tenth of what it could on rails, and more slowly too.

He tapped the map again. “We have to guard our line of communication here, at Henrys Lake and up to the ruins of West Yellowstone town; there’s a possible approach from Corwin to the north, where they could flank us. I want the bulk of the remaining Association foot there, Grand Constable, to patrol and block the possible approaches from the north. Delegate the command as you see fit. You’ll keep. . two thousand of your lancers with the main field force advancing on Corwin. We’ll take the light horse, fifteen thousand of the pike-and-crossbow infantry from Corvallis and the Free Cities, three brigades of Boiseans-Fred, you pick which ones-the Bearkillers, the Mackenzies, and field artillery in proportion. Most of the siege train we can leave west of here, and all the heavy pieces; Corwin isn’t heavily fortified, much less so than Boise, though there are forts, especially to the north.”

The staff at their tables began frantically scribbling, to translate that into the movement orders.

“It’s doable,” Tiphaine said. “But only just. And that’s provided we don’t get locked up skirmishing and breaking ambushes on our way through the Park. That’s mainly still forests, according to the reports. I’ve fought in similar country before, and it’s dead easy to end up chasing each other around in circles for weeks while your main column sits and eats. Or starves.”

Rudi smiled. “I have. . contacts there. They’ll deal with it.”

Hopefully, he added to himself.