The High King of Montival

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE WILD LANDS

(FORMERLY TORONTO, ONTARIO)

APRIL 12, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

“Now, that is amazing, so it is,” Artos said quietly. He stared up into a clear blue sky where a few small fleecy clouds drifted, and bisecting that view. .

“The wonder of the world!”

He’d felt awe in his life; never more than on Nantucket, when he’d met something so-

So wholly grand and wholly beyond the grasp of humankind that my mind could not hold it, still cannot, so that I grasp and fumble after memories, memories not gone so much as too big, and I can contain only specks and splinters of them at any one time.

Or watching snow tearing from the peaks of the Three Sisters in a winter storm, or the Pacific thundering into a cliff beneath his feet and making the living rock quiver like some great beast in pain while the spray battered at him with chill salt hands. Or a tiger glimpsed moving like a yellow-and-black spirit of the Wild through the thickets along the Willamette. Awe at the Powers, or at the nature They embodied.

It was a little new to feel it at the works of mortal men like himself. Great buildings were common enough in the still-occupied ancient cities like Portland, so common that usually you didn’t bother to notice them beside the modern life below. Or you looked at them as merely mines in the sky, sources of steel and brass and aluminum and glass and copper. There were plenty of that kind off northward to his right, some scorched and leaning drunkenly and others seemingly intact and everything in between, mostly of the usual upended-box profile. The ancients had had awesome powers, but very little in the way of taste, to judge from the things they’d built in the generations just before the Change.

The tower that reared over the travelers here near the edge of the lake wasn’t a building, really. It was a narrow spire of concrete shaped like a Y in cross section, tapering inward like a lance or a finned crossbow bolt, but swelling out again to a pod near the top. Above that was a stepped metal spike. Only as they pedaled closer had he been able to get any feeling for the scale of the thing, and that mostly by how slowly it grew despite their speed on the rail. The Norrheimers were subdued by the dead city anyway; there was nothing even remotely as big where they lived, but if you’d seen enough ruins it was nothing extraordinary. The tower, though, was impossible to grasp until you realized that to see much of it from beneath you had to lie on your back.

“It fills the sky,” he breathed.

“Nearly two thousand feet high,” Ignatius said. “Possibly over two thousand, but I think a little under. One or two hundred feet under.”

What I thought, but I thought I was getting it wrong, Artos mused.

He’d deployed the usual way of making a quick-and-dirty estimate of something’s height, the one you used with a big tree or a castle tower. Do a rough cut of the distance from the base to where you stood, not difficult if you had something to give you the scale. Then stretch out your arm with the thumb extended and sight over it to the top of the object; with some practice that gave you the angle of elevation between the ground and the peak to within a degree or two. After that it was just a simple little bit of practical trigonometry, the sort anyone got with a warrior’s or builder’s education.

I just didn’t believe it.

“Surtr!” Bjarni exclaimed. “Two thousand feet! That’s. . that’s. . three bowshots. .”

“Two long ones,” Edain said, craning his neck. “But straight up, d’you see! Can you imagine being up there in a thunderstorm? By the Dagda’s dick, man!”

Bjarni signed the Hammer in aversion, and so did several of this folk.

“Can you imagine being up there right now?” Mathilda said eagerly. “Think how far you could see on a clear day like this! The Silver Tower at Todenangst would be nothing next to this; even a balloon or a glider wouldn’t be the same. It would be like a mountain, but a mountain shaped like a needle, all by itself!”

Artos whistled softly as his half sisters cheered her. That it would. Not like a mountain, not like a glider. . not even like hang gliding in the Columbia Gorge. Like nothing else in the world.

He looked around. They’d followed a set of multiple railroad tracks five or six pairs across into the ruins; usually even if one or two tracks were blocked by trains caught at the Change, or rubble slumped across in the twenty-five years since, it was simply a matter of switching the pedal-carts and rail-wagons over to another that was whole and clear. Most of the route inside the lost city was solidly bound in stone and concrete and metal, and still holding against the gnawing of nature. Nature was winning with its infinite patience-they’d just come through a section where water six inches deep ran over the rails-but that victory was delayed here where the hand of the ancients still lay so heavy. Hence there was less of the annoying minor scrub growth that was covering more and more rail as the season advanced.

Northward were broad streets still littered with a scattering of rusting, tattered vehicles, then the ruins proper. He wouldn’t go anywhere near that; some of the streets had collapsed into the pits and tunnels beneath and were slow-moving swampy rivers now, and there might be dwellers, though they hadn’t seen any, or heard drums in the dark either. Southward were elevated roads-freeways, they’d called them-and the tower, and another scattering of ruins in a narrow strip between the railways and the blue of the lake. Which was more like an ocean, since you couldn’t see the other side.

Ritva and Mary reported the same all the way out of the vast necropolis to the west, so that the worst they’d have to do would be to set up the winches to topple rolling stock off the rails until it fell out of the way; they’d gotten that down to a science in their weeks on the trail.

“We’ll do it,” he said. “Those that wish to. The rest can stand guard. You Norrheimers may come back this way, but we of Montival will not, and it’s an opportunity we’ll never have again. Who’s for it?”

Bjarni laughed and shook his head. “I’m a friend of Thor. His mother is Earth.” He stamped his feet on the cracked concrete. “I’ll bide here. That thing’s like the Bifrost Bridge to Asgard, and I’ll not walk that as a living man.”

The party sorted itself; all his closest companions, and Asgerd, who wouldn’t show doubt in front of Edain; he suspected that the bowman might have hesitated if she hadn’t already loudly volunteered too. Garbh sat at the command of stay but growled dolefully as Rudi and the others walked off.

They took ropes and sledgehammers, pry-bars and bolt-cutters and hacksaws as well as their weapons with them, and a good assortment of torches-their tallow candles were long gone. They needed all of those in the tumbled entryway buildings; three false starts left them feeling discouraged before they found a way in.

Though those statues were worth the trouble, Artos thought; they’d been part of the big domed building next to the tower. Bronze giants trying to squeeze themselves out of those narrow spaces, like ground meat from a sausage. I wouldn’t call them beautiful, like the things Matti’s mother collects, but striking? That they were!

Ignatius stopped with broken glass gritting under his feet when they finally stood at the base of the huge stairway.

“Your Majesty, there is some danger in this,” he said quietly. “Can a King take an unnecessary risk, when on his safety depends the welfare of the realm? We must get the Sword to Montival. And yourself to bear it.”

“No, it’s a necessary risk,” Artos replied, giving him a quick grin. “Necessary because a King must be a man, and a man is more than a machine that does a task. Sometimes he must do a deed for the deed?s own sweet sake. If I become less than that, I’d be less than a man; and it’s a poor King I would be.”

Artos lifted his torch, watching the ruddy light of the flames sweep across stalactites of rust and plaster taller than him. Hibernating bats hung like thick fur from the ceiling, a few stirring at the light and noise; the smell of their droppings was thick in the damp musty air, and a littering of their dead sprawled mummified on the floor. Ingolf braced a foot against the wall and the door under his pry-bar squealed back. Artos ducked his head in and looked upward past the stairs; light vanished into a well of night, with wisps of smoke drifting across it.

“Dark and narrow, but it looks pretty dry,” he said. “If there’s not much water, the steel of the stairway should still bear our weight.”

“Wish there were windows,” Mathilda grumbled.

“If there were windows, there would have been more water!” Artos said. “Let’s be at it. Everyone on the rope, now-through a good sound loop or ring on your harness, people. Be ready to grab hold if one of us falls through.”

They joined themselves together, extinguished all but the lead climber’s torch and began the ascent, not sprinting but keeping to a slow steady jog, careful to keep four or five feet of distance between each. Even for someone in hard warrior’s condition he found his breath coming faster after a while and the thick air tired them all faster; there wasn’t anything he did often that used quite the same combination of muscles, but he made his thighs into pistons to push against his weight and his gear. Rusty metal squealed and squeaked under their boots. He studied the wall for a while; sections were of heavy-gauge wire mesh, but mostly plastered concrete. Here and there a black trail showed where water was finding a way, to seep and freeze and expand and scale at the structure, or rot the steel wire within.

They paused after fifteen minutes. “Excitin’ as a tunnel,” Virginia said; she was mildly claustrophobic. “Only more work’cause it’s uphill.”

“I just had a thought,” Artos said. “Eventually this thing will weaken, and in ten years or twenty or fifty or a hundred will fall, so it will. Think of what a sight that would be to watch, the fall of a building two thousand feet high!”

“Jesus!” Ingolf swore. “Or Manwe.”

Virginia whistled. “Goddamn,” she said, pronouncing it gaaawddaaa-ym. “Now that would be sumthin’ to see.”

“Of course,” Ritva said sweetly, “it could fall right now. Wouldn’t that be something to feel?”

She snickered at Virginia’s scowl; then the rancher’s daughter joined in the twins’ giggle, hitched at the baldric that supported her quiver, and followed as Artos started up once more. He estimated that it was about three-quarters of an hour from their start before they emerged into the first of the floors in the observation pod, and saw light streaming through windows shattered by storm or frost or the slow decay of their metal frames.

“Careful now!” he said sharply. “Everyone on a safety line, anchored solid to here! The support members and the floor could be much weaker than the tower itself.”

To Ingolf: “No bones anywhere, that I’ve seen. Wouldn’t anyone have made a fort of it? None easier to defend.”

The former salvager shook his head; he had more experience of the dead cities than any of them.

“Too hard to get water up here,” he said. “Nothing to cook with. And it’s conspicuous-show a light here and you’d be seen by anyone for a long way around. Plenty of really hungry anyones, for a while, until the city was eaten out and the last ones drifted out into the suburbs where there were rabbits and varmints.”

They explored cautiously, until they were close enough to the windows to see out. They did come across some bones before then; a woman’s, he thought, though it was hard to be sure when they were scattered a bit by birds. The human skeleton curled around a smaller one, certainly a cat’s.

“Sedatives,” Father Ignatius said, taking up a cylindrical plastic pill bottle from the finger bones.

The same type of container was still used and reused over all the world they knew, for everything from fire splints to spare needles; or even for pills.

“May God have mercy on her,” he said soberly, signing the air over the remains. “I do not know if this could be strictly construed as suicide. Perhaps. . but I hope not.”

Ritva sniffled a little. “And she brought her cat. That’s sad, that’s really sad.”

Artos shook his head silently. They were looking out over the graves of four or five millions who’d died quickly if they were lucky, and more often in slow bewildered fear and agony and dread; the whole ruined city was a tomb, like a thousand others. Yet while the deaths of six billion were a story too hard for a mind to grasp, the death of one and her cat could move folk even a generation later.

We humans are made so, he thought. We’re creatures of the pack, and our packmates or those we can imagine as such are more real to our hearts than any number of nameless strangers.

Then he came to the edge and leaned against the rope; the windows had slanted outward here, so you could look directly down as well.

“Oh, my,” he said after a while. “Oh, my. By flower-faced Blodeuwedd’s all-seeing owl!”

It was different from a glider or balloon, yet oddly as if he were hovering suspended by a sheer act of will half a mile above the earth. The next surprise was how fair the view was. Water stretched south and east and west, white-ruffled blue beating in light surf on the curving shore, empty of sails but dense with birds nesting on green offshore islands. They rose in skeins like twisting trails of smoke as he watched, and other flights went honking through the air not far away-black-white-gray Canada geese for the most part. The ruins of the skyscrapers formed a huge cross, but soon they gave way to a mantle of green that must have started as tree-lined streets and gardens and now was a burgeoning forest with only occasional snags of brick peeking through; more birds flew raucous through the branches, and he could imagine deer and boar beneath, and rabbit and fox and badger and raccoon. From that wood of oak and maple, fir and spruce and locust, occasional apartment towers reared like monoliths, often more than half overgrown in a shaggy coat of climbing ivy.

Here there was none of the sense of brooding menace that filled the heart down among the buildings, the closed-in sense of hostile eyes always watching, and the awareness of the great dying beneath that. Here you could see how root and branch and leaf and burrowing beast were slowly reclaiming the land, and it gave you a detachment where the lifetimes of men waxed and vanished like morning light on the leaves. The air that blew in through the shattered glass smelled of the silty-wet lake and was otherwise clean.

“Does the Middle Earth of men look thus, from the halls of the Gods in Asgard?” Asgerd said quietly. “Does the All-father’s eye see so, the gaze that roams the Nine Worlds from his high seat?”

She turned to Edain: “I came up here because I was ashamed not to, Edain. Thank you for bringing my heart to it. I’d not want to have missed it.”

His arm went around her waist. “It’s a sight, and no mistake, eh? Something to tell the grandkids.”

They stood looking outward. Ritva and Mary went the circuit of the round observation deck, pointing things out and exclaiming, the liquid trills of excited Sindarin marking their passage. Ingolf stood with his arms crossed.

“So damn many,” he said in a brooding tone. “Madison, Chicago, Cincinnati, Albany, Boston. . I’ve seen dozens of ’em and there’s always more.”

Father Ignatius meditated for a while, and then pulled a pad out of one of his robe’s capacious pockets and began to sketch. Virginia merely blinked, then blinked again; Artos suspected she was trying to fit what she saw into a mind shaped by twenty years of Powder River ranch life, and succeeding only slowly.

“Well, I always thought the old folks mighty foolish when they talked about things before the Change,” she said. “Maybe I was. . sorta wrong about that. If they could do this …”

Fred nodded slowly. “I think I understand Dad a bit better now. They had this, and they lost it. It was all taken away. No wonder he was wild to get it back-get some of it back at least, the big country even if he couldn’t get the stuff like this.”

“But they left this!” Asgerd said. “For us to see, and sing of in our sagas.”

There was another moment of quietness. “And yet they died,” Edain said. “And they’re gone, almost as if they never were.”

Artos shook his head. “They left us. We’re not the ancients, but we’re their children. Children of their seed, children of their dreams.”

The dark young man from Idaho spoke:

“Rudi. . Artos. . do you think we can ever do something as, as magnificent as this? Or are we always going to be living in their shadows, tearing down their wonders and using them to build sheep-pens or hammer into spearheads?”

Artos put his hand to the hilt of the Sword, feeling the blur of possibility like currents beneath the surface of the world.

“No,” he said. “We won’t do anything like this. We’ll do different things. Things just as grand! And maybe when we’ve proved we can, we’ll get the power to do such as this back as well. Someday, when we’re ready.”

Mathilda took his free hand. He squeezed hers gratefully, and she said:

“I’m glad we saw this. But I’m glad it’s only once. We can’t let this sort of thing, umm, intimidate us. We Changelings have a world to make-our own world.”

There was a murmur of assent, as they looked around at the bones of glory.

“And that’s what’s important,” Artos said. “Important to us and our children and theirs after them. It’s been an hour. Best we be going.”

The nine of them collected their gear. Ignatius paused for a second, ripped out a page from his sketching pad, wrote his name on it and then folded the whole into a winged dart like a hang glider. Then he gave a dexterous flick of the wrist and sent it out the window; the wind took it and snapped it upward. The white fleck shrank into a dot that spun away.

The soldier-monk grinned; when he did you remembered he was still barely thirty, and saw the smallholder’s boy who’d walked barefoot down the little dusty lanes below Mt. Angel.

“I used to do that when I was a scholarship student in the abbey’s junior secondary school,” he said, chuckling ruefully. “Before I decided I had a vocation. Mt. Angel’s walls are high enough on its hilltop, though not as high as this. Sister Agatha would crack me over the knuckles with her rosary for wasting paper, and my confessor would set me penances for wasting the labor of those who made it-and made it for a tool of learning, not a boy’s game. But I had trouble truly repenting.”

His smile grew reminiscent. “One landed five miles away-and I got another switching from my father when he had to pay the man who brought it to us. It was worth it.”

“And with that, let’s take our leave of this wonder,” Artos said.

When they were all in the stairwell he carefully shut the steel door once more and wedged it against wind and storm with a bit of metal that he drove in with a blow of his heel. It made the door boom like a drum, echoing down the confines of the concrete passage.

“Why?” Ingolf said. “Won’t keep the water out forever.”

“Very little is forever,” Artos replied. “It’ll keep it out for a while, and that may mean the tower stands for another year. Which is not such a little thing, eh?”