There were a few other officers and their guests there, but Martin and Juliet Thurston were getting a deference that was just a shade more than the man's official rank would account for. Particularly from the younger men.
"That saber you used is fairly nimble, too," Rudi said. "You gave me a few uncomfortable moments, if you know what I mean. A more subtle weapon than the shete, I would say."
"Just plain and simple better… as long as you're not trying to clear brush with it. Shetes are so point heavy all you can really do is make like a woodchopper. The easterners dote on the damn things, though, I suppose because their dads used the original-article machetes to get through the Change and the dying time."
"I've a man in our company from the east who uses a shete very well."
"Vogeler? The tall fella? He looks like things would stay down if he hit them with a club, much less any sort of sword."
They grinned at each other, two big men who'd taken each other's measure with the tools of their deadly trade.
Though I have less sense of the man than I would ex pect, Rudi thought, sipping again at his drink. Usually you get a feel for the mind in the head when you test the sword in the hand.
His foster father, Nigel, said that it was hard to lie with a sword.
"Yes, he's got wrists like a bear, anyway," he went on aloud. "Even so, the shete is slow."
"The saber's faster," Martin agreed. "But it's a cav alry weapon. Not suitable for our infantry tactics… and speaking of cavalry, do you have any stallions out of that mare you ride? I'd pay gold for one of them in our stud."
"I can believe it, sure. Unfortunately young Ahearn is in stallion heaven back home, improving the breed throughout the Willamette Valley. And outside the Clan's territories, it's often enough I'm paid in gold indeed."
He raised a brow. "Which makes me sort of an equine pimp, I suppose…"
The young Thurstons joined in the laugh, before Mar tin went on: "Pity. That mare's the best piece of horse flesh I've ever seen… well, we depend mostly on our infantry, and short swords are our weapon of choice for the foot. Though in a one-on-one duel, I'd still take a longer blade. But for fighting in ranks…"
"I know the short blade's dangerous, close in," Rudi said. "Many of my people use them. A line of them, with those big great shields of yours, that would be more dangerous than is comfortable to contemplate."
"Iron discipline and the short sword, that's what makes good heavy infantry," Martin replied. "In fact-"
"Oh, God, honey, you're not going to go into the glory-of-the legions thing again, are you?" his wife said.
"Sorry, darling," the young man said with a quick smile.
Juliet Thurston was… the word sleek came to Rudi's mind. Partly that was the glow of early pregnancy-about four months along, he thought-but most of it was a general catlike smoothness, not least in her long blond hair, and the way she curled into the red leather of the couch. She was pretty otherwise, too, long-limbed and well curved, with an oval face framing bright blue eyes. They seemed guileless.
And they're not, sure, Rudi told himself.
The mess steward came by; she chose a fruit drink of some sort; Rudi and her husband took another whiskey-and-water each. He took a sip. It was good, with a smooth burnished taste he wasn't used to, probably from something else besides barley in the malt.
"Tell me about your mother," Juliet said. "Judging by the little we hear from the far West, she must be quite a lady."
"She is that!" Rudi said enthusiastically.
And I miss her, he thought. I miss everyone.
"She's elected, you say?" Martin asked.
"Hailed, every Beltane," Rudi said. "I suppose some one else could stand and ask for it at the same time, but there wouldn't be much point, and someone might throw things… not sharp or metallic or pointy things, but even so… though now and then a Jack-in-the-green does."
"Jack?" Juliet said.
"Sort of a licensed fool… one of the merrier parts of our religion. A Jack does outrageous things and it doesn't count."
"She didn't mind you standing for… what did you call it? Tanner?" Juliet said.
"Tanist," Rudi said, noting a quick glance between the two. "Much like your vice president, I think."
"Sensible," Martin said. A smile: "Though perhaps sending you haring off across the country in the middle of a war isn't."
Rudi shrugged. "It's necessary."
Juliet sighed. "I wish we didn't have to fight the Corwinites," she said."But we do."
"Since they tried to kill me and Frederick and Dad, yeah," Martin said dryly. "But you're right, honey, that's going to be hard. And not just the fighting. The reports are there's a great big mob of refugees headed this way."
"I hope it won't interfere with mustering your war levy… no, it's mobilization you call it, isn't it?" Rudi said.
Martin nodded crisply. "You'll find that nothing can interfere with our mobilization," he said proudly. "In fact, we're making arrangements for the refugees to help with the harvest, while our reservists are under arms. Speaking of which, I should get going."
"Don't go," Juliet said after her husband had shaken Rudi's hand and walked briskly out. "You were going to tell me about your mother."
"Fascinating," Father Ignatius said sincerely.
He absently wiped the sweat from his forehead; the summer morning was warm.
"How many cubic feet of hydrogen, did you say?" he went on.
"Couple of hundred thousand," the engineer replied. "That's not counting the central hot-air ballonet that we use to help with altitude control."
The Curtis LeMay was nearly three hundred feet long, crowding the arched sheet metal expanse of the hangar, but nearly all of that was the great orca shaped gasbag-from bluntly pointed prow through swelling midsection to the cruciform stabilizer fins at the rear.
The glider and airship field was well north of Boise proper, though it had probably been suburbs before the Change, and the land around showed the snags of burnt out ruins and some trees still living to mark the sites of gardens.
Tawny hills rose northward, fading into blue distance as they climbed towards the forested mountains, with a crest line at about eight thousand feet. An occasional ranch house speckled them. Just south was still a suburb, or at least the outside the-wall residences of wealthy men, often surrounded by barriers of barbed wire or concrete blocks, with gardens and stables around the big houses within.
The field itself had an X of runways as well, and a long ski-ramp launching mechanism with counterweights and hydraulic rams that could snap gliders into the air to catch the updraft over the hills. The winged craft were kept in a series of hangars salvaged from the old municipal airport; a larger one housed the airship and several uninflated balloons. There was a smell of metal and sharp acidic chemicals and paint and shellac, as well as the more usual scents of people and horses and vegetation.
"Do you find that the power to-weight ratio is sufficient, Major Hanks?" the monk asked.
The military engineer looked at him. "You are an unusual young fella," he said.
The Boisean was in his late forties himself, lean and with a crew cut of stiff, grizzled brown hair. Ignatius spread his hands.
"I received a classical education… the pre-Change sciences, or at least some of them," he said.
"Wish more did," Hanks said. "The young guys I get off the farm nowadays, you just can't convince some of them machinery can't be treated like a horse. I guess it comes of growing up without anything more complicated than their mom's sausage grinder."
An orderly came up and gave them both cups of hot herb tea-the stove was well away from this area. Things didn't explode the way they had once, but that didn't mean hydrogen wouldn't burn.
A lot of it catching all at once would burn very hot and very fast.
There were vats alongside the walls of the blimp hangar, where zinc shavings and sulfuric acid combined to generate the lifting gas as needed. Technicians were uncoupling the hoses that ran from those to the gasbag as he watched, coiling them away neatly. Others pulled ropes to open broad slabs of the roof, to make sure none of the gas lingered inside.