The High King of Montival

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

BEND

CAPITAL, CENTRAL OREGON RANCHERS ASSOCIATION

MAY 5, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

“So far, we haven’t donemuch thisyear,” General-President Thurston said.

They were using a third-floor chamber in a pre-Change building for the conference. It had glass walls on two sides, facing west and north; you could see the line of the-criminally inadequate-city wall along the bend of the Deschutes River that had given the city its name; he instinctively drew a mental picture of how it should have been done, the underground aqueduct to secure the water supply, the height of the wall, the wet moat and glacis. He knew that from there it followed two of the old roads in a right angle to the eastward, encompassing the old core of the city, and the visibility made his sense of frustration at the stalled campaign worse. The room also had the slightly dead feel that old buildings often did; you just couldn’t get the ventilation to work properly and frequently, as here, the windows didn’t open at all.

“We’re not accomplishing anything,” he said. “Not fast enough.”

Not since that. . that whatever it was. His mind shied away from remembering it, and he forced it back. Something. . something like a flash of light. . something about the Sun. . anyway, it’s put a crimp in your style.

The Prophet of the Church Universal and Triumphant smiled. Martin Thurston blinked. There was something. . wrong about the smile. Sethaz was a middling man, middling height and coloring and features; very fit but otherwise unremarkable, save for the tuft of brown chin-beard and stubble-shaven head that the higher echelons of the Church Universal and Triumphant affected. A little older than Martin Thurston, in his early thirties, but young enough to be more or less a Changeling.

And there’s something wrong about him.

“You sense higher things, the touch of the Ascended Masters. Yet you are still blind to them.”

As Martin stared, the ruler of Corwin went on, and the wrongness seemed to fade:

“We have taken Bend and all of central Oregon; and we have pushed the enemy out of the Palouse and confined their holdings along the middle Columbia to a narrow strip.”

Martin nodded jerkily.

And I need him and he needs me. Which is the best reason for cooperation there ever was. But we’re not taking any more castles by the. . special means he had. That’s why Dad never tried to break the PPA; they had too many of the damned things by the time we were organized enough to think about it. Storming one castle is expensive. Fighting your way through country full of them is a nightmare, like dancing up to your knees in molasses. “Yes,” he said aloud. “We have. Unfortunately, that means we’ve taken a lot of thinly populated rangeland. We won’t have mortally wounded the enemy until we cut them in half by cracking the line of the Columbia down to the sea, and we won’t have disposed of them until we’ve overrun the western valleys. And we’ve lost more men than they have.”

“We can afford it and they cannot.” Sethaz shrugged. “The lifestreams of the fallen will be welcomed by the Masters.”

There was a rattle in one corner of the room. He had a six-man squad from the Sixth Battalion here-just in case, and in full armor of hooped plates, with shield and pilum; tough young farmboys, smelling of sweat and leather and oiled metal. The rattle had been the men moving-not enough to notice, they were still rigidly braced-but enough to show their start of indignation. Martin Thurston was known to be a ruthless bastard, but he was also one who husbanded his men and hated to lose one without a measurable result.

Two centuries of infantry waited in the street outside. Sethaz might be an ally. . but I’m not crazy enough to actually trust him.

“My intelligence indicates the Midwestern states are making preparations for an attack,” the General-President said, tapping the files before him on the table. “We may not have as much time as we thought.”

“They are preparing for war,” Sethaz said equably. “But they are very far away. Also the Church Universal and Triumphant’s territories are between them and Boise.”

“And what about this Sword?” Martin asked. Because that’s what scares me. “Every rebel and guerrilla is talking about it-”

Sethaz screamed.

For a moment Thurston simply stood staring at him. He’s gone mad, he thought, and then they locked eyes. The eyes drew at him, a whirling vortex. He could feel bits and pieces of his mind shredding, flying away, sucked in by the spinning nothingness. He was floating, falling, drawn down, deeper and deeper and something waited for him at the bottom of the darkness. Not-being. Not-anything. Waiting to un-make.

Martin Thurston screamed in agony, and then in something far worse, that made him shriek on the same rising-falling note as the Prophet.

Did you think that you had bargained with Me? a voice asked. No, you deceived yourself. I have no need to buy men. They give themselves to Me.

FREE REPUBLIC OF RICHLAND

SHERIFFRY OF READSTOWN (FORMERLY SOUTHWESTERN WISCONSIN)

MAY 10, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

“Not as nervous as you were last time, meleth nin,” Mary Vogeler teased gently. “Even though it’s just the two of us for now, instead of the great band.”

“Herves, last time I wasn’t sure whether big brother Ed was going to greet me like the prodigal son or kick me out like the proverbial polecat,” Ingolf said, taking a deep breath of the clean moist air as the earth exhaled last night’s rain. “Also we weren’t married yet. It’s calmed me down a lot and given me a more optimistic outlook on life.”

And last time I’ d been away for ten years. Now it’s only months, and two of those. . just went missing in an instant while we were on Nantucket. But I haven’t been feeling homesick quite as hard either, and that’s the truth. It’s as if something inside has let go. Mary and I will have our own place someday, and in the meantime we’re each other’s home.

“Anyway, we’re just going up to see about those troops.”

It was spring instead of late autumn this time, too; the same season when he’d originally stormed out as a young man to begin his wandering years as a paid soldier and salvager.

Mary grinned. “Anyway, Rudi’s giving you a last chance at a visit home while everyone else is stuck at the muddy junction of the Wisconsin and the Mississippi rivers, waiting for the barges. That’s why he didn’t ride with us, too. He wants you to have some time with your family before he arrives.”

It may well be the last time you can be here, went unspoken between them. Crossing the continent isn’t something that many men have done once, let alone two or three times.

They followed the dirt track north from a hamlet named Craw-ford, with forested ridges on either side crowding closer to the winding Kickapoo or opening out into a wider view. Mostly they traveled at an easy trot, the fastest pace a good horse could keep up for any distance. Every few miles they slowed to an ambling walk for ten or twenty minutes; that combination gave an average speed close to a man running. It didn’t even make conversation too difficult, if you were used to it and traveled side by side. Right now the traffic was light enough for that, only an occasional buckboard or someone on foot pulling a handcart or in the saddle or a bicyclist now and then lurching along on a solid-tire makeshift.

“What I’m really worried about is Rudi,” Ingolf said.

“I think we’d better get used to calling him Artos,” Mary said; but she said it without the usual smile in her voice.

“Yah, OK, I’m worried about His Majesty Artos the First, High King of Montival, our liege-lord,” Ingolf said. “Also my friend and brother-in-law Rudi Mackenzie. I’m worried about both of him.”

“Why? He’s coping very well. Look at the way he remembered you’ll possibly never have a chance to visit Readstown again.”

“That’s the problem,” Ingolf said; talking crystallized his thought, giving it form. “You’d need a general staff to do a lot of the stuff he’s doing all by himself. Yah, he was always an impressive guy, but some of this. . remembering every name in that pissant village at the mouth of the Wisconsin River? All the ones he heard once when we were through it for one day last year? I was born not two days’ ride from it and I don’t! You notice how he doesn’t make mistakes anymore?”

“He never did make many.”

“Now he never forgets anything, not even his spare bowstring. He never has to stop and figure things out anymore!”

Mary was subdued; when she spoke it was slowly.

“I asked him. . I asked him a while ago if he wasn’t making decisions too quickly. He said there just wasn’t any point in pretending he had a choice. What did he mean? Is the Sword. . is it taking him over?”

Ingolf shook his head; it was hard even to talk about this, as if there weren’t the right words in the language.

“It’s spooky, but I don’t think so. It doesn’t give you that creepy feeling the Cutters do. I think. . this is just blue-sky. . I think the Sword is too smart. Or makes him too smart.”

“How can you be too smart?”

“If you knew, if you really knew what would happen when you made a decision. . would you have any freedom left at all? There would be only one thing you could do.”

“Oh,” she said, and shivered. “I guess it’s like the Elven-Rings; good, basically, but perilous to any but the strongest bearer.”

For a moment he felt impatience that she was dragging the Histories into things again. Then he shrugged mentally. In fact-

“That’s actually a good comparison. . what Doc Pham, our doctor in Readstown-God, how could anyone know so many books? — he used to tutor me sometimes as well. . what he used to call a metaphor.”

She nodded; he knew without resenting it that she had a lot more book learning than he did, even if much of it was bizarre.

Though I’m better at lifting heavy weights. . That’s me: strong like an ox, sharp like a watermelon.

“Metaphors help you understand the world,” she said. “Otherwise. . otherwise it’s just a mass of things without pattern. It doesn’t mean anything. But you’ve got to be careful with them. They can make you see patterns that aren’t there.”

“Yah. Only the Sword seems to be a, a metaphor that’s actually there. Not just a way to sling words together; it’s a physical object you can touch, so the story is telling us instead of the other way ’round. Damn und hell, but that’s scary.”

Mary shivered, and he knew exactly how she felt.

“It’s like the old legends about Gods becoming men, or animals talking. I mean, they’re wonderful as stories and they show you the way things are underneath, but if you actually met one it would. . would sort of break things. Not deliberately, not because it was bad and wanted to do that, but just by being too real for us.”

Ingolf smiled grimly. He reached over and touched her eye patch with the thick calloused fingers of his right hand, very gently:

“We’ve both met men like that before. Only they were bad, as well as scary, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh, yes.” Then she brightened. “Most of the time, though, it’s as if the Sword makes him more of what he was already.”

Ingolf grinned. “Super-Rudi. Ye. . Gods, that’s a scary thought too!”

They laughed together, and then by unspoken mutual agreement brought themselves back to the moment. For a while after they left the village the landscape was mostly abandoned land used for summer grazing if at all; tall grass and thickets of raspberry bushes, goldenrod, and surging clumps of young elder and elm struggling with them and the saplings spreading out of the old woodlots. All were loud with birdsong as the migrants settled in and disputed their territories; flights of blue warblers chased cloud-formations of mayflies in melodious flocks.

He saw tracks and scat of elk, deer, feral cattle, swine and half a dozen others, but this road was traveled enough that animals were wary of men by daylight; they caught only a fleeting glimpse of what might have been a wolf or a very large coyote. And once, laughing, they steered their mounts around a defiant skunk standing with raised tail.

Mary was looking at the roadway too; much of it was post-Change, created by the traffic pounding the soil when the road by the river was washed out. Improvements later had mostly meant a little ditching, the odd brushup with a horse-drawn grader, reused culverts, and shoveling gravel into the worst wet spots when they threatened to swallow travelers or their horses whole.

“Is there normally so much traffic on this road?” she said.

“No,” he said, noticing. “People usually float things up- and downriver; the Kickapoo’s not big enough for real boats but canoes do fine most of the year and they can carry a fair bit. And mostly we swap around locally anyway.”

By definition any area that had come through the first Change Years without utter collapse was self-sufficient in everything it really needed. Where trade had revived at all it was mostly in light high-value luxury goods, particularly here in the backwoods.

Which Readstown is, you betcha, even if we. . they. . don’t like to admit it.

“Wagons and horsemen both,” Mary said, looking down again. “Horsemen in column of fours, and trains of wagons. The troops we’re supposed to be looking for.”

“You’ve got a good eye.”

She hit him on the shoulder; mostly theoretical when he was wearing a mail shirt and gambeson, but he cowered theatrically. Then he went on:

“Hmmm, looks like it was mostly a couple of weeks ago and then tapering off; it’s real blurred by the rain. Well, we’ll find out.”

Now and then a Norway spruce or an old apple tree still valiantly showing a few flowers served to mark the site of an abandoned homestead. Once a ruin’s glass shards glinted from the high ridge to the west, beneath the purple blaze of a rambling lilac.

“Why would anyone build up there?” Mary asked. “Well, easier to defend, I suppose. .”

She stood in the stirrups for a moment and shaded her eye with a hand; the sun was a little past noon, and the air was just in that place between warm and cold where you hardly noticed it except as a stroking on the skin. Then she took out her monocular.

“That was a pretty big house, not just a lookout post. No defenses. . and the roadway to it runs straight up the slope; there’s an overgrown gully where it washed out. Strange.”

“There’s actually good farmland up on the ridges in places, you just can’t see it from here,” Ingolf said. “But those were built for the view.”

He raised a hand at her stare: “I swear to God. . by the Valar. Just so they could live there and look at the view. Which is pretty.”

“The view?” Mary said. “They put a house on top of a slope that would kill a team climbing it just to look out the window?”

They both laughed and shook their heads; you could go crazy trying to understand why people did the things they did before the Change. Then they emerged into the settled lands closer to Readstown with startling suddenness, shaggy neo-wilderness on one side of a weathered board fence, close-cropped green pasture on the other and then a not-quite-town.

“This used to be called Gay’s Mills,” he said. “We’re about an hour from home, from Readstown, now. If nobody’s horse throws a shoe, that is.”

Both riders relaxed at the signs of habitation. . relaxed a little. . and slid their recurve bows back into the saddle scabbards at their left knees and the arrows into their quivers on their backs. Gay’s Mills was a cluster of farms and cottages these days, with a blacksmith’s shop by the side of the road and a gristmill somewhere close; they could hear the bur of the millstones. The full-bearded smith looked up from shoeing a big hairy-footed draft beast and gave a brief wave of his hammer with his mouth full of nails before he bent back to his task.

Ingolf’s horse, Boy, threw up his head and snorted as the wind brought the scent of his own kind; Mary’s dappled Rochael ignored them and him. A barefoot pigtailed girl in a linsey-woolsey shift and a floppy hat three sizes too big for her dragged a barking mongrel back just before he was kicked into next week, then stood gaping at them with one dirty foot tucked behind her other knee. Mary smiled and leaned down with effortless grace to pat her head in passing. They headed through a gaggle of chickens that stopped pecking at the roadway and scattered in mindless panic, and out into open country again.

Shod hooves thudded on the soft rutted dirt or sparked on the odd rock or clattered against bits of asphalt that had survived a generation of flood and frost. Shete and longsword rattled and banged against stirrup-irons occasionally, but the loudest sounds were birdsong and wind in the trees. There were farms set back at the edge of the hills every half mile or so, but none very close.

He spent a moment just enjoying the day and the view. There weren’t many pleasures greater than the feel of a good horse moving beneath you on a fine spring day, with the woman you loved riding at your side.

The apple and cherry orchards were in full blossom on the south-facing slopes, frothing in white like snowdrifts, or pink like cotton candy; he could remember the planting of many of them. The season was far enough along that when the road twisted close the breeze brought not only the blossoms’ cool sweet scent but drifts of petals on a gust of wind, settling now and then in Mary’s long yellow braid of hair, framed against the ridge beyond and the piled clouds catching the westering sun amid an endless blue like her eye.

And that’s just about the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen, Ingolf thought. Like this is just about the prettiest country I’ve ever seen. Of course, I’m prejudiced. The Willamette’s great too, and a lot of what I’ve been through is grand, but this place has my heartroots in it. Always will, even if I never see it again.

The Kickapoo Valley was part of what they’d called the Drift-less area back in the day, which meant it hadn’t been planed flat and buried by glacier-born silt like a lot of the Midwest. Instead it was a maze of valleys like this, separated by steep ridges and little plateaus, spreading like the pattern of veins in a leaf. That had helped keep out most of the waves of cityfolk desperate for food and shelter after the Change, that and distance and plenty of hard fighting. There had been enough food even that first year. . just enough, despite the waste caused by disruption and ignorance of how to handle it without machines.

The steep slopes of the uplands were a fresh intense green now with the new leaves of sugar maple and basswood, oak and hickory, with the darker green of hemlock and white pine where the land dipped northward, now and then some dark red sandstone where the earth’s bones showed, here and there the cream of flowering dog-wood. There were willows and elm and cottonwood by the river, with dense clumps of Virginia bluebells and geraniums nodding beneath; trailing arbutus and purple-blue wood violet grew by the side of the road.

They rode past a crude statue carved from an oak stump, and Ingolf grinned at the mocking portrait of Richland’s original Bossman; he’d done that himself as a teenager with a couple of friends, just when the man was on a visit, and it had been worth the hickory stick his father applied. Between forest and water were the fields, many plowed in curving strips along the lie of the land, planted with different crops to help hold the soil, a succession of greens lighter or darker or a first fine mist of tender shoots across smooth disk-harrowed brown earth. He looked at them with a countryman’s eye, enjoying seeing them simply for nice as his folk said, but mostly for their promise:

“Just getting the corn planted,” he said, inhaling the mealy-yeasty-musty smell of damp turned earth, as appetizing as fresh bread. “Not before time, either.”

A woman in dungarees and a straw hat was driving a four-row grain drill along the contour not too far away, the twin heads of her team of bay geldings bobbing patiently ahead of her as they strode along. She had a crossbow in an upright holder beside the seat of the planter, but returned his wave in friendly wise.

“Bandits?” Mary asked, eyeing the weapon. “We’re not all that far from the Wild Lands.”

“Possible,” Ingolf acknowledged; this was the edge of civilization, more or less. “Mostly for the hoof-rats, though, I’d guess.”

“Hoof-rats?”

“Deer, whitetails.”

“Ah, yes. They’re a menace back home too.”

He nodded, though he’d been too busy to hunt while he was there in Montival-mostly too busy recovering from being wounded near to death by Cutter assassins. Deer were a crop-and-garden-devouring pest in most places, what with all the abandoned farmland providing exactly the sort of scrubby edge-country they liked. It had gotten a little better lately as closed-canopy forest spread.

“Though Aunt Astrid insists deer are noble creatures. Not to mention the staple of the Dunedain diet.”

“What do you think?”

“Hoof-rats,” she said, and they both laughed. “But the wolves and bears and cougars and tigers seem to be catching up, finally.”

“Which if you’re trying to raise livestock-”

“-presents its own problems. On the other hand, tiger skin makes a very nice coat.”

“More excitement getting it than I like.”

Children with slings on bird-scaring detail pointed excitedly at the travelers; the school year ended when the fields dried out enough for work nowadays. One white-headed six-year-old ran beside them for a while with a gap-toothed grin. A man was driving a potato planter behind a four-horse hitch in another field, a clumsy-looking thing like a tapering bin on wheels, its center of gravity dangerously high and all covered in patches and rust. He ignored them; all his attention was on his horses and the set of levers and ropes that controlled the mechanism which opened the furrow, dropped in seed potatoes and covered them up in turn. This time Ingolf laughed aloud.

“What’s funny, my heart?” Mary asked.

“That potato planter.”

She looked, and blinked. “Not much different from most, except that it’s old and mostly metal. Looks pre-Change, nearly. There’s a story attached?”

“Just a memory, really. Back when I was about ten. . that must have been around Change Year Four. . my dad and my brother Ed and a farmer named Fritz Ventluka made that. Cut it down and made eight one-row machines from this huge-erific old-time thing that fifty horses couldn’t pull, and we were short of horses then anyway. We didn’t have to go out and plant the spuds by hand that spring, and everybody was happy about that! I helped. . well, I stood around and handed wrenches and hacksaws and ran for stuff. When it was finished, Dad let me have my first drink of applejack. Mom gave him hell for it, but he tipped me a wink behind her back.”

She reached over and put a hand on his shoulder. “I wish I could have met your father. And your mother.”

Ingolf snorted, trying to imagine it. “Dad. . Dad could be sort of. . drastic about things. Never could take being crossed, and he was a hard man when he was angry, or when he’d had one too many. I think Mom would have liked you, but she wouldn’t have shown it. God knows she tried riding roughshod over my sister-in-law Wanda often enough, though she was wild about the grandchildren.”

He shook himself mentally and looked around again. Haying would be the next busy time, but it would be a few weeks at least before the timothy or alfalfa was high enough to bring the mowers out to cut. And there was always the eternal battle with the weeds.

“The oats are in, good, it’s always best to get them planted by the middle of April around here, the shoots are just showing now, see? Winter wheat looks fine, plenty of tiller, no bare patches from winter-kill. .”

“My love, could we be a little less agricultural?” Mary asked.

“Sorry, melda,” he said with a grin; his Sindarin was still shaky, but he’d mastered the endearments.

He’d also been about to comment that the stock looked in good fettle too-white naked-looking sheared sheep with black faces grazing under the fruit trees with a shepherdess and her collie in attendance, many of them with a lamb at their heels, Angus cattle like square black blocks of flesh in the lower pastures, white-and-black or Jersey milkers. Sows grunted happily as they mowed down young alfalfa with swarms of pink-and-brown piglets tumbling around them.

Ingolf glanced aside at his wife and found her watching fondly as well, and grinned to himself. It was an odd person in today’s world who didn’t find beauty in a well-tilled landscape. Even non-farmers such as the Dunedain Rangers.

“Sort of like the Shire,” she said, echoing his thought. “The people it’s our duty to protect.”

“Us Rangers,” he agreed.

Apparently you got to be one by being sponsored and also by being able to do a bunch of things. Since the Hiril Dunedain was Mary’s aunt he didn’t anticipate too many problems getting on the rolls formally.

The fortified Farmers’ homes and their attendant clusters of Refugee cottages and barns and tall silos that dotted the land faded away as they approached Readstown proper; this was the Sheriff’s home-farm, worked from his own place. The state of the road said that traffic had been heavy lately, hoof and wheel both; he was surprised his elder brother hadn’t had a few teams out grading and smoothing.

Then they turned directly northward, onto a stretch that had been asphalt in the old days and still was where it hadn’t been patched with gravel; the river was far enough away to their left that it hadn’t washed out this section during the periodic floods.

“Well, troops are gathering didn’t turn out to be an exaggeration after all,” Mary said. “That explains the road.”

She looked over at the rows of white tents, the men and campfires and picketed horses that occupied a long stretch of pasture between the river and the buildings, running up to the big truck gardens to the north.

“About three, four hundred here, I’d say,” she went on, with an expert’s quick appraisal of numbers.

“Yah,” Ingolf said and nodded agreement. “Maybe a few less, they’ve got a lot of gear with ’em. Or a few more if they’re quartering some of them in the homes. Must be putting everyone’s nerves on edge. And that’s why Ed hasn’t graded the road just lately. Usually we do it as soon as things dry out a bit in spring.”

“No sense in doing it four times if he can wait for the troops to move out and do it once,” Mary said.

“Ed’s. . not exactly miserly. But he’s tight with things.”

“So he should be,” Mary said. “It’s not like someone sending a beggar away hungry because they won’t spare the scraps. What a lord has comes from his followers, after all. It’s his duty to be careful with their goods and labor.”

Ingolf opened his mouth, closed it again, and nodded. “Yah, I should have thought of that. Maybe I’m not as much over my mad at him as I thought.”

Readstown had been a sprawled-out village of about four hundred people, remote and sleepy ever since its founding around a gristmill not long after white men first settled this land nearly two centuries ago. In the years that followed the Change it had shrunk to a much denser core around the Sheriff’s house-what had become the Sheriff’s house-for reasons ranging from warmth in winter to security against the bands of starving, desperate wanderers who’d gone roaming and reaving in the terrible years, and your odd sneak thief or high-binder or gangs of plain old-fashioned bandits later.

Not to mention various bigger fights over stock and who got the everybody-needs-’em Amish and stuff like that, before the Richland Bossmen knocked some heads together and kicked some butt to create our glorious Free Republic. People did what they had to do in the early days. Dad not least. But that’s part of why he drank too much sometimes. To forget what he had to do.

He’d been just turned five when the Change came; he could remember fear and cold and conversations among the adults that stopped when they noticed him. Now and then someone started acting very strangely, and usually you didn’t see them again. Or they ended up like his aunt Alice, who’d been gently mad and given to sudden fits of tears as she sat at her workbench over a half-finished lute.

Of course, she got caught in Racine at that stupid folk-music festival thing. Never did say how she made it back home. Young as I was I remember her turning up. She was as skinny as anyone I’ve ever seen who didn’t actually die.

“Looks tidier than it did in Dad’s day. A bit more than when we were through last year. Ed keeps plugging away, I’ll give him that.”

It had been worth the labor to link the houses here together into defended courtyards, and later to shift or build more structures into the same complex; just before his father died he’d put up a round stone tower at one corner of the main house with a catapult on a turntable atop it, and sheathed the lower parts of all the buildings with fieldstone batten-walls as well. In the more recent years of peace some new cottages had been built out on their own, and the sawmill and gristmill, of course, and the regional school and the Lutheran and Catholic churches. A teenager he recognized was on mounted sentry-go a little farther up the road.

“Halt!” the boy said, raising a hand. “Who goes. . Uncle Ingolf, by God! Und Aunt Mary! Yah hey dere! How’s she goin’?”

“She’s goin’, Mark, and hi backatcha. You’re looking pretty military,” Ingolf said.

He was, for someone just turned seventeen and gangly with it. Tallish, six feet and a bit already, but still colt-built, with freckles against pale winter’s skin and corn-tassel hair cut in the rather shaggy local ear-length style. A scattering of nearly invisible hairs on chin and upper lip suggested he was trying to cultivate a beard as well, and failing miserably. But he had a mail shirt with short sleeves on too, over the usual padded undergarment, a helmet that looked like a local blacksmith’s copy of the sallets seen on Rudi’s party last autumn, a shield and quiver on his back and bow in a saddle scabbard at his knee, along with shete, binoculars, bowie and tomahawk at his belt.

Equipped just like me, in fact, Ingolf thought with an amusement he kept off his face. Except for the trumpet, and except that you can see everything came from the best armorer in Richland, or maybe even Des Moines. Plain, but no expense spared. . no, that mail shirt’s a bit big. Probably allowing him some growing room; those things cost.

“So,” he went on, “they’ve got you out meetin’ und greeting?”

“I’m officer of the watch!” Mark said; his voice rose and cracked slightly, and a fiery blush ran over his fair skin.

Then he nodded at the tented encampment. “It’s Ensign Mark Vogeler, First Richland Volunteer Cavalry, now. Nobody passes wit’out being recognized.”

“Well, I sure hope you recognize me, nephew,” Ingolf said, in lieu of anything more sensible. “Seeing as I put you on your first pony. Ummm. . Where’s Ed?”

“Dad’s over to the house, out front, last I saw them, with Mom. Talking wit’ a messenger from Richland Center. Uh, pass, friend!”

They legged their horses up to a canter for the last thousand yards.

“He reminds me of me.” Ingolf chuckled when they were far enough away not to be overheard.

“He’s cute. But then, so are you,” Mary said.

She winked, then rubbed at her eye patch. “Ai! I’m still not used to the way that makes me blind for a moment.”

Ed was looking harassed and talking to his wife, Wanda, and both of them were tossing instructions at people who came and went; he was also looking pretty much the way Ingolf suspected he himself would look in fifteen years or so, if his scalp started showing well above the forehead through thinning brown hair-that was on exhibit, as Ed Vogeler swept off his feedstore cap and crushed it in one big knobby fist and pulled in a thunderous curse-and if he let himself develop a beer gut. The thought made him suck in his own stomach a little as they swung down from their horses and handed the reins to a stablehand to be led away, though there currently wasn’t an ounce of spare flesh in the two hundred pounds of muscle that covered his broad-shouldered, big-boned frame.

Not after the things I’ve done these last few years, almost none of which have involved sitting around knocking back the brewskis. Mind you, Wanda brews the best and runs a mean kitchen too.

“So you tell Bill Clements it’s his job to get that fixed!” the Sheriff said to a wiry man in dusty leathers. “Uff da, try collecting any taxes if she goes and we get a flood!”

The courier nodded respectfully, swung into the saddle, and cantered off northward with two remounts behind him on a leading rein.

Then: “Ingolf!” Ed said, smiling, and they shook hands. “How’s by youse?”

“Ingolf! Mary!”

Wanda hugged him, and then her; she was a motherly-looking blond woman in early middle age, wearing a kerchief around her hair today, and a set of overalls with garden dirt on the knees. And in Ingolf’s considered opinion she was more than half the brains of the Sheriff Vogeler outfit, and three-quarters of the ability to judge people.

Besides being a first-rate manager. She ran the indoor part of the homeplace, which meant everything from the dairy’s butter and cheese to carpet-making, and directing the labor of dozens. But something’s bothering her badly, underneath.

“What’s the Bossman done now?” Ingolf asked.

“It’s dat. . goddamned dam up at La Farge. I wish they’d never built it!”

“Pretty lake,” Ingolf said, remembering trips there. “Good fishing, too.” He frowned at a memory. “Didn’t Dad say they nearly didn’t build it?”

“Finished just before the Change. Und now the intake tower’s blocked and we’re having a hell of a time getting it cleared.”

The Sheriff crushed the billed cap again; it was pre-Change, a badge of rank, and he made himself relax with obvious effort.

“Glad to see you made it,” he said gruffly.

“Most of us made it,” Ingolf corrected, his tone grim. His eyes looked beyond the busy scene for a moment. “Most.”

“Yah, we figured Pete wasn’t coming back when he didn’t show up after a couple of months. Seeing as he wasn’t planning on going all the way east with you.”

“Jackie? How’s she taking it?”

“Hard, what would you expect? She moved back to her folks over in Forest Grove a couple of weeks ago, wit’ da kids. But when a woman marries a man thirty years older, what can she expect?”

Wanda made a stifled gesture, as if she’d prevented herself from slapping her husband upside the head only by an act of will. Ingolf gave a silent woof of relief, even though it made him feel a little guilty; Pierre Walks Quiet had married one of the abundant widows and started a second family here after he drifted in from the North Woods early in the Change years, on the run from one of the grisly little massacres that had punctuated those times. He’d ended up as timber-runner and game manager for Ingolf’s father, who had an eye for ability, and he’d taught woodcraft to the Sheriff’s children too.

That his wife had moved out meant Ingolf wouldn’t have to tell her and the children about the old Indian’s death personally. Though there were far worse ways to go; he’d died with his face to an enemy worth fighting, knowing he’d won, and he’d gone quickly and without much pain. Nobody lived forever, and seventy-odd was a good long time these days.

“He died up in the north country,” Ingolf said somberly. “On the Superior shore this side of Duluth, a few weeks after we left, fighting the Cutters and their local converts among the wild-men. And a couple of the Southsiders died too, and Odard later. . long story.”

And damn, I miss Odard. Which is crazy because I didn’t like him much, or he me. He was too full of himself even after he’ d gotten over some stuff and he was a lot fonder of being Heap Big Baron than he should have been, and he liked needling people too much, and thought he was smarter than he was, and. . but he was a good man to have at your back. I wish we still had him.

Mary squeezed his hand; he knew she missed the Baron of Gervais too, although the Havel sisters had had a half-joking, half-serious running feud with him most of their lives. It was amazing how you could get to knowing what was in a woman’s head if you were together long enough. He never had been before.

And I like it.

Ed nodded, and Wanda went around and pushed them all indoors.

“In! We don’t talk out on the step wit’ family, here, like you were road-people begging for a handout. We will sit like civilized folk, under a roof. Und I will get youse some lunch, you look hungry.”

The main house seemed to be a bit crowded, probably the officers of the troops outside, who’d be of Farmer and Sheriff families and expected to put up with the local boss. People were rushing up and down the stairs with towels and bedding and rolled-up futons and blankets and pairs of boots. After the travelers had washed-the house had running water-the four of them settled in the breakfast room, which was cheerfully well lit through big windows that looked in on a courtyard, set with pine and maple furniture handmade by Readstown’s own carpenters, with rag rugs on the floor before the empty swept fireplace and a few pictures and photographs on the walls. There was a faint smell of woodsmoke, inevitable in a building heated with stoves and hearths, and of dried wildflowers in jars on the mantel.

The courtyard was one Wanda used for her herb garden, some espaliered fruit trees against the walls and a selection of rosebushes, with flagstone paths and a few benches and some wrens and bluebirds squabbling around a feeder. That interior orientation was what allowed the big windows, though there were steel shutters with loop-holes for shooting ready to be slammed home, and racks for crossbows and quivers of bolts. Mild scents of flowers and turned earth drifted in through the opened panes, and the trowel-work in the raised beds was as neat as a snake’s scales. Wanda attended to that herself, saying she found it soothing. Right now several of her children were playing, tumbling over each other much like the puppies who were helping them at it. Though little Jenny was lying in a cradle, being still at the stick-everything-in-your-mouth stage.

“Let me guess about the troops,” Ingolf said.

By then they’d been seated and a girl from the nearby kitchens came in with a tray of kielbasa and blutwurst and liverwurst and three types of cheese, rye and wheat bread, pickles and tall steins of turned maple-wood full of Wanda’s foaming Schwarzbier.

“Thank you, Wilma,” Wanda said with a smile, and promptly loaded plates. “You two missed lunch. Eat!”

Ingolf took a deep draught of the dark-colored beer, savoring the almost bitter flavor like coffee-and-chocolate, wiped foam off his mustache and beard with a napkin, and saw Mary still swallowing blissfully. There wasn’t much conversation until they’d graduated to oatmeal cookies studded with walnuts and a big pot of chicory coffee with beet-sugar and cream on the side.

Ed ruffled the ears of a large nondescript dog that sat with its head in his lap, tail thumping the floor.

“The Bossman over in Richland is getting a volunteer force together?” Ingolf went on. “Not just Readstown? And that outside is our contingent?”

“Yah, cavalry only, all volunteers like you guessed, to join up with Iowa. We’re figuring on three or four thousand all up, from what Richland Center tells me, say five or six regiments; the ones you saw are us, Forest Grove and Franklin, Ross, Viola, a couple of others. Another four thousand each from Fargo and Marshall. Everyone’s pretty hot to trot about the Cutters, now that what happened in Dubuque has gotten around.”

“Everyone?”

“Everyone who matters, and everyone in Iowa. All the Bossmen round about for sure, young Bill Clements here und Dan Rassmusen in Fargo and Greg Johanson in Marshall and Carl Mayer in Nebraska and Andy Hickock in Kirksville and even whatshisname, McIvery, down in Concordia-”

“What used to be Kansas and northern Missouri,” Ingolf explained to Mary; she’d have seen old-world maps, but she wouldn’t be familiar with the modern political boundaries.

“-so it’s not just Iowa,” Ed continued. “Having those lunatics knock off one of their own has the Bossmen all antsy, and I don’t blame them wanting to put a stop to it either. The bastards tried to kill Tony Heasleroad’s family, too. That’s going off the reservation.”

“Any more trouble since?”

“A bit. Assassinations, riots, Cutter agents stirring up the city rabble and hobos and such against the authorities; more of that in Iowa, but dey’re the biggest anyway, hey? We’ve all agreed to outlaw the Cutters and send men, and the Sheriffs here in Richland voted to support the Bossman on it by t’ree to one. Iowa and Nebraska are kicking in the main army, especially the infantry and artillery and engineers, but everyone’s sending cavalry. Figure they’re going to need all they can get, up there on the high plains and in Montana.”

“Yah hey, you betcha they will. That’s how the Sioux kept running rings around us in the war. . that war-”

The Sioux War had been his first serious conflict, when he’d left home as a volunteer in the force Richland sent to help Fargo and Marshall. Looking back, it had been educational, if also deeply stupid and pointless.

“-they could move faster. This is going to be on a different scale, though. And hopefully the Sioux will be on our side, or at least neutral.”

Says Ingolf Vogeler aka Iron Bear, he thought, a little bemused. Never thought I’d be a blood brother of the Lakota, after I spent all that time fighting them.

“Yah,” Ed said. “But since it’s all volunteers and not a regular National Guard call-up. .”

“. . it’s also a complete cluster. .” Ingolf paused and remembered Wanda was present. “Cluster-frack. Und who’s you got bossing da troop I saw outside?”

Home a couple of hours und I start already talking da Deepest Cheesehead again, he thought, hearing himself begin to turn the “th” sounds to “d.”

Though he’d never lost the flat hard vowels and hint of singsong in the years of his wandering. For that matter, unless memory was fooling him it had gotten a bit stronger here since he left.

Of course, everyone wants to sound like they’ve lived here forever. It’s. . what did Father Ignatius call it? The prestige dialect. If you can’t be a Farmer, you can at least sound like one.

Ed went on: “Will Kohler’s commanding, for now. Brevet National Guard rank of Major, got the Bossman to confirm dat.”

Ingolf nodded; Will Kohler was about forty, the local drill instructor, and his father had held the job before him-and before the Change he’d run a martial arts club, and been in the old American military before that. As Sheriff, Ed Vogeler was in charge of the county’s militia and maintained a force of Deputies, who were the closest thing to a standing military force the local government had as well as police and first-responders and much else, but Kohler handled most of the training and organization.

Then the wording his brother had used struck him and he spoke sharply:

“For now?”

“Ah. .”

The Sheriff coughed. Wanda spoke:

“A lot of the people who have cavalry training and whose families can spare them in da working season are Farmers’ sons, or even Sheriffs’. Und-”

“And Will Kohler isn’t,” Ingolf said. “Yah, yah. They’ll be young and full of beans, too. Average age under twenty-one and even dumber than I was then. What was it you said last autumn, Ed?”

His brother coughed again and looked at his wife. “Ah. . at nineteen a man is supposed to think with his fists and his balls.”

Wanda laughed ruefully, but the problem was serious. Here in rough-and-ready Richland where everyone put his hand to the work of the season class divisions weren’t as strong as in wealthier and more sophisticated parts of the Midwest. But the division between Farmer and Refugee was there, and stronger in the younger generation.

With exceptions, of course.

Wanda’s family had run a microbrewery in Madison, and had arrived in Readstown with a wagonload of tools and hop-seed pulled by some big draught horses; nobody thought it odd that she’d ended up marrying the Sheriff’s eldest son. Others had had useful skills, been blacksmiths or carpenters or bowyers or whatever. Nor was William Kohler exactly a Refugee, even if his father was originally from Racine.

But he isn’t from a local Farmer’s family, either, Ingolf thought unhappily. No feedstore cap in his closet.

Talking to Mathilda and her friends had given him more tools to think about how it worked.

A lot of the volunteers are sons of. . Matti’ d say manor-holding knights and barons. That’s what they are for all practical purposes, though they don’t know it yet. And Will’s just a paid soldier, a noncom. Except that he really knows what he’s doing and they don’t, and damn it that ought to count for more.

He caught Mary’s eye. He could read what she thought, too, by now:

Since when does ought mean that much?

Ingolf sighed. “Yeah, if I hadn’t been Dad ’s son, God knows I wouldn’t have gotten a command right away in the Sioux War; and God also knows I was pretty useless until I learned by doing. So Will can’t lick them into shape? I’m a bit surprised.”

“Oh, he’s kicked some of their sorry young asses,” Ed said. “While I handled their folks. And the ones from right hereabouts know him. The worst of the rest left und the rest have learned, dey are volunteers. But they’re not happy about it. That’s why they need a Sheriff’s son in charge.”

Ingolf put his cookie and his coffee cup down abruptly. “Wait a minute, Ed! I’m working for Rudi. . Artos. . now! And he’s as busy as a centipede in an ass-kicking contest, and it’s getting worse. He can’t spare me.”

Ed nodded, smiling. “And this army we’re all raising is going to be fighting the people who’re after him!”

Ingolf sighed, and rubbed his hand over his short-cropped brown beard, feeling the tug as his calluses caught and wondering when the first gray hairs would show. His elder brother had plenty, and he was starting to sympathize with him as well. It felt odd, after so many years of being a resentful exile.

“And when’s Rudi arriving? The whole bunch going to be with him?” the elder Vogeler went on.

“Ah. . just him and just a flying visit. Time’s pressing. And we’ve got about a battalion with us; call it five hundred.”

Ed ’s brows went up. “More wild-men like the Southsiders? They’ve learned a lot, but dey’re still sort of rough at da edges.”

Ingolf shook his head. “No, no, there’s civilization in northern Maine. Farms und such, at least, couple of towns, a government. They’ve done pretty well.”

“Yah, Yankees then.”

“Ah. . not exactly, Ed. Let’s just say that since our family’re square-heads, it’s going to be sort of like meeting some real old stories.”

The original Vogelers had been from Lower Saxony, though they’d married the usual local mixtures in the eighteen decades since; other varieties of Deutsch, plenty of Norski, some Polak and Czech, even Yankee and Irish.

Ed frowned. “Thought it was all Yankees and Frenchmen there in Maine.”

“Dere’s some Svenska, couple of places named New Sweden and Stockholm and such. Settled back in Civil War times, a little after we Vogelers arrived here in the Kickapoo country. But mostly it’s. . there was this guy named Erik, who started out in Massachusetts, and he. . it’s a long story, that’s what it is. Five hundred good fighting men, though. Rudi has a gift for making strong friends.”

He took out his pipe, and his brother filled his own and pushed over fragrant shredded tobacco in a container made from a section of polished curly maple, and a lighter. Mary ostentatiously coughed and looked revolted as he filled it, tamped it down with a horny thumb and spun the lighter’s wheel and held the flame to the bowl.

Figure I don’t indulge often enough for you to really get upset, darling, he thought.

There was no point in saying it, and the smoking habit had largely died out in Montival. Wisconsin had been tobacco-growing country before the Change, though, and had kept it up. In the old days they’d believed that smoking was bad for you, but there were so many other things that could, would and did kill you now that people didn’t care. Mary simply disliked the smell and made no bones about it.

Not much use in pointing out that that guy Strider smoked a pipe, either, and Gandalf. And all the furry-foot brigade lit up at the drop of a match.

He wasn’t afraid a pipe now and then would kill him. As far as he could tell, a lot of the old Americans had been quivering daisies who thought they’d live forever if only they were careful enough, as if life was worth living that way. Some of them had believed eating butter was bad for you, of all things.

“By the way, Ed, what’s Mark doing all dressed up like he’s off to da wars?” he said instead.

Mary’s eye rolled. “Because he is off to the wars, alae, duh!”

“Ensign Vogeler of the First Volunteer Cavalry?” Ingolf asked incredulously. Mark’s his son, but. . “That’s for real, he’s not just dressing up until they leave?”

Wanda glared at her husband, and Ed puffed furiously on his pipe. They both had the look a long-married couple got who’d chased an argument around in circles long enough that they’d stopped, if only because biting each other on the buttocks was the sole way to continue.

Ed’s tone was defensive: “Look, he is off to da wars. He threatened to run away und join up as a paid-soldier trooper somewhere if I didn’t let him, and he meant it. What am I supposed to do wit’ him, throw him in jail for da next six months? I don’t have enough pull outside Richland to stop someone hiring him.”

Ingolf opened his mouth to say You betcha you should put his butt in jail and paddle it too and closed it again; what Mark threatened was more or less what his uncle Ingolf had done after his grandfather died. Ingolf and Ed had spent six months butting heads before the call for volunteers to fight the Sioux came down from Richland, and he’d leapt at the chance.

“Yah,” his brother went on, reading his hesitation; he wasn’t stupid about people when he bothered to pay attention. “If I locked him up, he’d leave when he got out and never come back. A man has to know what he can do wit’ his sons, and what he can’t. Dad would push us too hard, sometimes.”

I nearly didn’t come back. Wouldn’t have, except for the thing on Nantucket and the way that worked out; I’d have gone on being mad at you until I died, because it’d become a habit. And I’d never have seen Wanda again, or met my younger nieces or nephews, or remembered Mark as anything but a little kid.

He couldn’t even tell the boy this war was an exercise in mutual stupidity like the fracas with the Sioux. He could say it was a stupid thing for a very young man to do when he had a perfectly good reason for staying home, but that was like saying that the world would be a better place if everyone followed the Golden Rule.

Which is true, but deeply fucking useless, because it’s never going to happen.

“Ed. . I’m not sure this is a great idea. Want me to try and talk Mark out of it?”

Ed sighed. “You can try, but he reminds me of you at that age. Or me. He’s getting to da stage where your old man is so stupid the whole world can’t bear it. Or anyone older if they cross him. Yelling didn’t work, even Wanda crying didn’t work for long, and he’s too old to put over my knee.”

“I hear you. Butting at everything like a young ram in the spring, eh?”

“Right. Und he’ll be better off wit’ you. Hell, he’s not that much younger than you were when you pulled the same stunt.”

“Two years. That’s nothing for you or me now, but seventeen to nineteen’s a big jump. He’s got his growth but his bones haven’t knit and he’s not as strong as he’ll be in two years, or as fast. He’s just not damn-well ready yet but he thinks he is. It’s dangerous enough when you are ready.”

“No, he’s not ready!” Wanda cut in. “Uff da! He’s still a child.”

Of course, he’ll always be your firstborn baby boy, Wanda. Ingolf knew mothers thought that way. But you’re right. Just now he’s a kid who thinks he’s a man.

“Yah yah, Wanda, OK!” Ed said desperately. “But he will run off if I don’t let him go! Can you talk him out of it, woman? What’m I supposed to do, break his legs?”

Mutely she shook her head, and looked out the window at twelve-year-old Dave and Melly and young Ingolf and Jenny.

Ed sighed. “And I figure you can keep an eye on him, Ingolf. I’d appreciate it.”

Ingolf felt his shoulders go tight, and his lips; he forced relaxation on himself, using a technique he’d picked up in Chenrezi Monastery, in the Valley of the Sun. It had been designed for more serious things, but it worked for this too.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Ed.”

The older man bristled. “I’ve been in fights, some of them before you had hair on your. . chin! I know-”

“You’ve been in fights, Ed. Yah, in Dad’s day, the upstream raid at Cashton, and against the road-people. You did well in them too. You’ve seen men die, had them try their best to kill you, killed a few yourself.”

For a moment Edward Vogeler glanced down at the table and turned the bowl of his pipe between his big knobby hands, looking at somewhere far away from this pleasant homey room.

“Oh, yah,” he said quietly. “Damn und hell, yah.”

Ingolf nodded, not really in agreement. “What you haven’t been in is a war. Not the same thing. This is going to be a big war; it’s already gone on for years out west. There’s going to be real battles, and against real soldiers, in real gear with real weapons, not starving cityfolk with baseball bats and kitchen knives, or even some raggedyass woods rats with hunting bows and bowies. They’ll be fighting to kill, not to steal a flitch of bacon and a pie, or run off a horse, or just to get in out of the cold.”

“OK,” Ed said. “You do know about dat stuff. So you can-”

“I’ll be doing my job. I can’t be Mark’s bodyguard. I couldn’t keep him safe even if I was his bodyguard. I can’t even keep her safe-”

He pointed at Mary. She nodded soberly and touched her eye patch, and said flatly:

“I can’t keep him safe either.”

Ingolf nodded: “A stray arrow, a catapult ball or a bolt coming in from a thousand yards away, or some weasel bastard of a paid soldier who’s forgotten more about using a shete than any seventeen-year-old kid can know and sees Mark between him and safety, or-”

He saw Wanda wincing more deeply with every sentence, and dropped the litany. It was probably worse because she knew he wasn’t pulling up possibilities out of his imagination. Every one he’d mentioned was something he’d seen, and she could hear it in his voice.

“Damn and hell, men die in every big army camp I’ve ever seen just because they get caught in front of a bolting mule team hauling a wagon full of hardtack or some shit like that! I don’t want Mark hurt, and I don’t want you hating me, Ed; we did that long enough. I especially don’t want Wanda hating me. Or me hating myself, come to it.”

He could see his brother fighting down anger; Wanda brushed fiercely at her eyes with the back of her hand. Ed puffed at his pipe, waited a moment, puffed again, then spoke with careful softness:

“That’s all God’s truth,” he said, and crossed himself for emphasis. “But, Ingolf, I can’t stop him. I tell myself it’s a good thing he gets some military experience for when he’s Sheriff, und all that shit, but it’s what’s going to happen. Please. . I know you can’t keep him safe, but I know he’ll be safer with you than he would bolting and getting into some half-hard bunch where nobody knows his ass from Adam or gives a damn about him. Please, little brother?”

Ingolf closed his eyes and put his hand across them for an instant. “OK. I’ll do my best. But I don’t promise you anything, understand?”

Rudi, get here fast, would you?