When the musicians had marched out of the room-to shed their instruments and scurry back in for the meal-Juniper Mackenzie rose to her feet and lifted the silver-mouthed horn from its rest before her to make the invocation and libation:
Harvest Lord who dies for the ripened grain Corn Mother who births the fertile field Blessed be those who share this bounty;
And blessed the mortals who toiled with
You Their hands helping Earth to bring forth life.
Then she poured out a portion into a bowl and raised the horn high: "To the Lord, to the Lady, to the Luck of the Clan- drink hail !"
"Wassail!"
Fifty voices roared reply as she drank; Nigel took a sip of his wine. Knolles senior and junior did the same, and then looked down at their glasses with identical surprised respect.
"And to the Clan's guests, come across the sea from the lands of our ancestors-may there always be peace and friendship between usdrink hail!"
"Wassail!"
As she sat, Knolles leaned close to whisper in Nigel's ear: "Whatever else I expected, it wasn't to find you playing at king of the Picts, old boy."
Nigel looked down at his ruffled shirt, jacket, kilt, plaid pinned at his shoulder with a brooch of silver knotwork and turquoise.
"More the prince consort of the pseudo-Celts, I'm afraid. Make no mistake, Tony, Juniper is the Chief, not I. I'm one of her military advisors-armsmen, we say-in my official capacity, and that's all."
Juniper leaned forward to look around him at the Count of Azay, mock indignation in her tone.
"Pseudo-Celts, is it? I'll have you know my mother was born on Achill Island in the Gaeltacht, no less. And my father was an American of Scots descent… mostly Scots. So… nil anon sceal eile agam ."
Nigel knew that his old friend could understand the Gaelic: there's no other story, translated literally. He also knew that Knolles had learned the language for the same reason he had; the Provos had used it as a sort of code.
Both the Englishmen had commanded small and extremely clandestine SAS teams in Ulster during the Troubles, mostly in South Armagh-and occasionally, highly illegally and unofficially, across the Irish border. By her sly grin Juniper was recalling exactly the same thing, and by his snort Knolles had realized that she knew, and knew that he knew.
She went on: "And you're probably wondering-"
Then she dropped impishly into a creditable imita tion of the upper-class public school-cum-officer's-mess drawl that was the native dialect of Nigel and his friend both:
"Are all these people utterly barking mad?"
"Not in the least," Knolles said, obviously lying stoutly.
"The kilts weren't my idea," she said. "Honest. And the rest of it
… sort of grew, like Topsy."
Nigel saw the other man's reserve crack a little; Juni per had that effect on people. There was a creak of dry amusement in Knolles's voice when he spoke:
"I did have thoughts along those lines in Portland… those bizarre castles! The titles, and the way they dress and speak! Were they all struck on the head at birth by copies of Ivanhoe? Although the regent, Lady Sandra… she was disconcerting, to say the least, and impressive, in a rather terrifying way. Still, how did all that happen?"
Knolles's voice was a little plaintive by the end. Nigel chuckled.
"The man who founded the Association was a history professor, you see-a medieval specialist-and one of those re-creationist Johnnies, like Alleyne. The most charitable explanation is that the Change sent him mad."
"Or that he was always an evil weasel of a man and the Change gave him the opportunity to show it," Juni per said. "It caused no end of trouble, and it didn't die with him."
"Ah, re-creationists," Knolles said. "Very useful some of them were in England as instructors, as you'll recall, Nigel. Where is young Alleyne?"
"Uncle Alleyne is married to Aunt Astrid," Maude Loring said from the other side of her mother.
Juniper amplified: "Astrid is Signe Havel's younger sister, the widow of the Bearkiller lord… the people over on the western side of the Willamette, between the Association and Corvallis. Astrid is Lady of the Dunedain Rangers, with my daughter Eilir."
Maude's grave face suddenly broke out in a smile as she abandoned the struggle to be adult for a moment.
"If you think we ' re weird, Lord Count, you should meet them. They live in the woods, and they speak Elvish to each other. All the time. "
Knolles blinked, obviously wondering if his leg was being pulled. Nigel gave him a grave shake of the head: It's quite true, old chap. Aloud he added:
"Although Alleyne acts as a moderating influence and so does my stepdaughter Eilir. She's married to John Hordle now. You'll remember Hordle-SAS just before the Change, promoted to battalion sergeant major just before we… left… England."
"Ah, yes. Big chappie, carried a bastard longsword," Knolles said.
Then he harrumphed diplomatically before going on; Hordle had also put an arrow through one of Knolles's men during Nigel's escape.
"Ah, well, considering all that's gone on back Home, we're not in a position to judge. Have you been following events out there at all, Nigel?"
"In outline; news does travel, if slowly, and Abbot Dmwoski forwards some of the Church's reports to us. I know Charles died-"
"Hallgerda killed him when he finally refused to disinherit his older sons in favor of her brood, though it was never proved," Knolles said flatly.
His knobby fist clenched. "And then tried to seize power herself. Colonel Buttesthorn and I and a few others put a stop to that. And put William on the throne."
"We heard that he'd beaten the Moors. Good show, that."
Though to most here, it didn't matter much more than hearing how Prince Piotr of Belgorod and Hetman Bohdan of the All Great Kuban Cossack Host defeated the Tartars outside Astrakhan last year, Loring thought. How one's horizons shrink…
Knolles nodded. "We and a coalition beat them-the Norlanders, the Umbrian League, the Kingdom of Sicily, the Republic of Shannon-we even had ships and men from the Cypriot Greeks. Defeated them at sea off the Canaries, then burned out the nests they'd established along the coast of Morocco, then chased them south and gave them a damned good drubbing at home. There's been the odd dustup with Berber raiders from the Atlas since, but nothing significant."
The fierce hawklike green eyes kindled. "Mind you, about six years ago I was with a party exploring the ruins of Marrakech, and-"
"And we heard that William called a new Parliament," Nigel said dryly.
Knolles flushed; it was for advocating that move that Nigel and his wife, Maude, had been put under arrest by Charles the Mad and his Icelandic ice queen in the first place, while Knolles had still been satisfied with the Emergency Regulations.
"Yes, yes, yes, you were right, you were right, you were bloody well right, Nigel. And we've set up a new House of Lords along the old lines," Knolles went on. "Quite old…"
"Not altogether the way our ancestors did it, I hope!" Nigel said.
"Very much in the manner our grandfathers would recognize. Things have worked out quite nicely since. The capital's still in Winchester, the Icelanders and Faeroese are settling in and marrying out, their grandchildren will be English to the bone-"
His son grinned and made a gesture towards his own chest; his mother's name was Dagmar, and she'd come from Torshavn along with a flood of others from the northern isles in the earliest Change Years.
"-and we've resettled Britain-thinly-as far as the Midlands, and made a good start on the Continent."