He remembered the look that had passed between them, all those years ago at Sutterdown Horse Fair; the boy he’d been, and the young mare who’d come to hate the human-kind while she was still a filly. A secret knowledge, a complicity between just the two of them…
And she’d never forgive me if I left her behind, he thought, casting a look at the sleek black figure that paced along with arched neck and flying mane. She’s not a horse you can turn out to pasture and bring an apple now and then. There have been times I doubted whether she was not Epona Herself. It wasn’t an accident I named her for the Lady of the Horses.
“I suspect we all will become less tolerant in our age,” Father Ignatius, Knight-Brother of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict said. “If the Lord blesses us with years, which is by no means certain. And being Lord Chancellor of an inchoate kingdom still in the womb…”
“Will age you before your time, eh, Father?”
Ignatius chuckled; apparently being away from the offices and documents suited him, and he bore the weight of his armor with casual unconcern.
“Not as much as being your chief of staff in an army also inchoate will age me, Your Majesty,” he said dryly. “Bureaucratic tangles are easier to resolve when there isn’t a battle going on at the same time, my son.”
They both shared a chuckle at that, even more dry. Rudi cast his eyes sideways at the gaggle of staff officers, commanders from seven different realms of the High Kingdom and the allied but separate Dominion of Drumheller, messengers and clerks and map-drawers and everything else down to the people a half-mile back driving the wagons with the tents and supplies for the command party.
It does them good to see the high command cheerful, and no need whatsoever to tell them it’s mostly gallows humor. I wish Mathilda were here, he thought. She will be, come the fight. Tomorrow probably, or the day after possibly, depending on how eager the enemy are to strike. But the reserve is mostly Protectorate troops, and those Yakima regiments d’Ath had with her retreating from the Tri-Cities. She’ll get them going better than anyone else I could appoint.
“Tired of improvising, Your Majesty?” Ignatius asked.
The warrior-monk was a few years older than Rudi; a borderline Changeling, born before the Change but not old enough to really remember the ancient world. His knight’s armor didn’t disguise his slim build, and he was of only medium height-standing flat-footed his eyes were level with the High King’s nose, and the tonsure that exposed the scalp in the middle of his bowl-cut black hair made him look older than his years. An expert would notice other things, though. Starting with the thickness of his wrists, and the ring of swordsman’s callus all around the thumb and forefinger and web of his right hand.
Rudi had seen him fight often enough, on the Quest. More often than not against much bigger men, and the only time he’d seen the Shield-Brother pushed to his limits at anything like even odds was when they’d both taken on a High Seeker of the Church Universal and Triumphant in Des Moines, one of the magus-warriors the Prophet had set on their track. His mind was even more formidable. The slanted dark eyes were calm as he watched the army of the High Kingdom of Montival pouring past them up the road, the calm of a man who’d done every single thing he could and who was leaving the rest to his God.
“Tired of improvising? Tired of life, you mean?” Rudi replied after a long moment, and this time they did laugh, unforced merriment. “Not yet.”
The roadway up from the Columbia was not much to start with and hadn’t been repaired since the Change, not until he threw five thousand men and a group of Corvallan engineers at it a few days ago. It would hold while the portion of the host’s men and supplies that had barged and sailed up the river or used the waterside rail line climbed up to the plateau. He’d picked it for the relatively low grades and for being as far east as he felt comfortable with given what he knew of where the enemy was. Hopefully the warning wasn’t enough for them to react in time and catch his forces before they massed and deployed.
A glance upward showed the morning sun glinting off the wings and canopies of gliders, dozens of them turning in the thermals and updrafts along the river like a swarm of eagles as they kept guard. There wasn’t much a glider could do to another of its kind; opening the canopy and firing a crossbow at a moving target was usually dangerous only to passers-by below. But they could harass each other enough to make reconnaissance difficult, if the pilots had enough nerve to risk one near-collision after another, and his did.
Most of them were wild girls, each picked from dozens of volunteers for nerve and for being lightweight bundles of strong sinew and cat-quick reflex; a lot of them came from Associate families, demoiselles who weren’t content to roll bandages or tally hard-tack, or from Mackenzies without the heft for the longbow and their like elsewhere. You didn’t need as much weight of bone and muscle to fly a wind-riding machine as you did to carry a twelve-foot lance on a barded destrier in plate armor or pull the string of an eighty-pound yew stave past the ear over and over. Lightness was a positive advantage in a soaring sailplane, where every ounce might make the difference between safely home and crash-landed behind enemy lines.
A glance back southward showed little white curls on the blue mile-broad surface of the Columbia and a mass of barges and oared tugs around the landing points. Farther out, war-galleys with their masts down and lashed for action waited, most at anchor like sleeping river-pike. A dozen kept station, bows pointed into the current as the great varnished lengths of their sweeps flashed, rowing a scaloccio with six men to an oar. Water curled around them, a slow multiple synchronized splash…splash…splash…of foam on either side to complement the wave that curled forever around the dull enameled steel of their rams, beneath the brightly painted and carved figureheads. They were beating just fast enough to keep position against the current of the massive river, slowed as it was by the ancient dams that still made it as much a series of lakes as anything.
It all made him a little nostalgic for the campfires of the Quest, when it was simply him and nine friends against a hostile world.
“A pity we could not pick a place for battle where our river flank rested on a castle,” Ignatius said a little wistfully. “They have more cavalry, but that would keep our right flank safe at least.”
Rudi snorted. “Ah, that would be the comfort and consolation of the world, it would indeed. If only the enemy were such utter and complete fools as to fight at a place so certain to give us the victory.”
“A point, Your Majesty. Still, the number of castles on the Columbia limits them in the ground that isn’t so covered, to our great advantage. If they will fight at all, and not wait and try to force us to come to them.”
“They must fight,” Rudi said, grimly satisfied for a moment; he’d worked hard to put them on the horns of that dilemma. “It’s too late in the year for them to do anything but accept battle or withdraw until spring…and half their forces come from deep in the Rockies or farther yet, past passes the snow has closed already, or will within days.”
He closed his eyes and laid his hand on the pommel of the Sword of the Lady. Energies swelled and swept across the surface of the world; the Sun kissed Earth, and moisture rose from the Mother Ocean, sweeping in curling patterns that crashed against mountains in a slow violence that would grind stone to meal over aeons as more welled up from the world’s warm beating heart…
“Yes, the snow will be deep this year. Far to the east, far into the Bitterroots, and blizzards on the High Line as well. Which means…”