The world is wider and wilder than we can know. But this is the part the Powers have set me to ward.
The defector and Fred had gotten down to cases more rapidly than Rudi would have considered tactful at first, which was another reason he was leaving this in his friend’s capable hands. Someone who’d grown up among Boise’s folk would understand them in ways that Rudi never quite could, even bearing the Sword of the Lady. The officer wouldn’t be his subject unless and until he came to an agreement with Fred, and even then only indirectly.
He and Fred had gone all the way to Nantucket and back together on the Quest; they were comrades and allies, but lord and sworn follower as well. Fred had come to understand the relationship those words implied, but most Boiseans didn’t. Worse, they thought they did understand it.
Being ignorant is truly bliss compared to being misinformed, especially if you’re aware of the depths of your own ignorance. As Mother says, it isn’t what you don’t know that will kill you, it’s what you think you know that just isn’t so.
“Yes, sir, Mr. President,” the officer said at last, saluting; he hadn’t been invited to sit.
“I’m not President yet,” Fred replied sharply. “There’s a little matter of elections first. I expect to win them. . but I also intend to do it fair and square.”
The man looked very slightly anxious; he was in his thirties, with Brigadier’s insignia on his loose olive-green linsey-woolsey field uniform of boots and pants and patch-pocketed jacket. Fred wore the same kit, the uniform of the realm that called itself the United States of America and ruled much of Idaho from its center at Boise, but without marks of rank at all apart from the Stars-and-Stripes badge on the shoulder. That ostentatious plainness was a statement in itself.
“But we have an agreement, sir?” the man said.
“Certainly, Brigadier Roberts. Unless you insist on having the personal parts in writing? That could be embarrassing down the road, unless we altered some of the details.”
So you’d better hope I win the vote went unspoken between them. And use what influence you have to make sure I do. Someone else might not consider themselves bound by our negotiations here.
The man licked his lips; they were thin, like his face, and together with his cropped blond hair and pale yellowish eyes gave him the look of a wolf that had gone a little too long without a meal. Those eyes flicked towards the back of the big tent. The High King had never made any secret of the fact that one of the things the Sword gave him was the ability to tell truth from falsehood. By now, nearly everyone believed it.
Or more precisely, I can sense the intention to deceive, Rudi thought. The which means my simply standing here keeps him. . relatively. . honest.
Though with a man as fundamentally untruthful as this, whether anything he said was true at heart would be a matter for philosophers to split hairs over.
“Of course not, sir. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust your word.”
And oddly enough, he does trust Fred’s word. Wise enough not to judge others by himself, at least.
Fred nodded. “Report to my chief of staff, and we’ll slot your men into the overall TOE. He’ll show you where to plant the eagle.”
He stood and returned the brigadier’s salute, then shook hands. The man left, his stride growing brisker with relief, and there was a clank as the armored guards outside the tent’s entrance brought their big oval shields up and thumped the butts of their long iron-shod throwing spears to the hard-packed earth. Silence fell for a long moment, amid the smell of hot canvas and dust and horses and woodsmoke from the encampment beyond. There were sounds-voices, someone counting cadence, the massed tramp of booted feet, iron on iron from a field smithy-but they were curiously muffled.
“I don’t like that deal at all,” Fred said quietly, when the defector was well out of ear-range, looking at his right hand and turning it back and forth. “I’ll do it for three-and-a-half-thousand men. . to save three-and-a-half-thousand men. . but I don’t like it at all.”
Rudi Mackenzie smiled wryly as he came forward and sat across from him.
“I don’t like it either, Fred. And neither of us likes fighting battles, but you do as you must, not as you would. You must have seen it with your father; I certainly did with Mother, by Nuada of the Silver Hand who favors Kings! It may mean dying for the people. . ”
Fred ran a hand over his hair, which was cut short in a cap of soft black rings. “I think I’d actually prefer that, sometimes.”
“We’re all going to die sometime, to be sure. More often ruling well means we have to do things like shaking hands and breaking bread with men we’d rather put facedown in a dungheap with a boot to the back of their necks. The which hand-shaking and bread-breaking is nearly as unpleasant as death and wears harder on the soul.”
Fred grinned in weary agreement and kneaded the back of his neck. “Thor with me, this sort of thing wears you out worse than a march in armor. And that’s an attractive image. The manure pile and the boot and his face, that is.”
Rudi nodded. “And you can wash muck off your boot, but it’s harder to get clean of that sort.”
He jerked his head towards the entrance, the long copper-gold hair swirling about his shoulders. Fred sighed and nodded.
“Should I have been more. . tactful?”
“No, you were about right, I’d say. He’d smell a trap if you were all hail-fellow-well-met and inviting him to sit down for a yarn and a tankard of beer with a slap on the back in good fellowship. And he’d despise you if he thought it was genuine. Best to make it a matter of business and advantage on both sides.”
The king and his ally were both big young men only a year apart in age, with similar broad-shouldered, long-limbed builds, both with the smooth graceful movements of those raised to the sword and the tensile wariness of those who’d also lived by it in lands beyond law. In other ways they differed. The younger son of Boise’s first ruler had bluntly handsome broad features and skin of a pale toast color, legacy of his sire’s part-African blood.
“Well, it is to our mutual advantage,” Fred said. “And he does have some virtues. He’s smart enough to treat his men well enough that they’ll follow him. Especially now that he’s leading them in the direction they want to go.”
“That always makes it easier, to be sure,” Rudi said.
The High King’s eyes were a changeable blue-green-gray, brighter by contrast now as the setting sun turned the big command tent into a cave of umber gloom. He wore the pleated kilt of a Mackenzie in the Clan’s green-brown tartan, with a plaid pinned at his shoulder over a loose-sleeved saffron-colored linen shirt cinched at wrists and throat with drawstrings.
A sword hung at his right side from a broad belt, in shape a knight’s long cut-and-thrust weapon with a shallow-curved crescent guard and a double-lobed hilt of black staghorn inlaid with silver knotwork. Its pommel was a globe cradled in a web of antlers, at first glance a perfect sphere of moon-opal. Then if you looked closer it was like crystal, and within it curves that drew the vision deeper and deeper-