Ermentrude winced a little. “Yes. There’s. . really not much left, is there? We were hurt, they were wrecked.”
Juniper sighed, suddenly looking older. “The people got out two years ago, the most of them, and some of their stock, and what they could carry with them on packhorses moving fast through the Cascades to the Willamette. Nothing else.”
The Mackenzie chieftain nodded to Signe. “You Bearkillers helped cover the retreat well, after the lost battle at Pendleton.”
Signe shrugged. “From what Eric tells me it’s a total mess there.”
Her brother Eric Larsson had led the Montivallan forces following the retreating enemy south of the Columbia; he was a hard man, but there had been an undertone of horror in his reports.
“Pure meanness,” Virginia Thurston said with deep sincerity. “Christ. . or the Aesir. . but the CUT needs to be burned off the face of the earth.”
She obviously sympathized with the Ranchers; she was fierce, but not vicious. And the CORA were very much like her own folk, though perhaps a little less. .
Rustic, Mathilda thought charitably. The Powder River country is very. . rustic. Or within wiping distance of the arse-end of nowhere, as Edain put it.
“Most of the CORA fighting-men are with the host,” the High Queen said aloud. “And the King will need them badly in the east, they’re fine light cavalry. But they’re also proud folk, the Ranchers and their cowboys both. They’ve fought well, and their guerillas did good service tying down enemy troops south of the river. They don’t like being refugees living on the charity of others.
“They want to go home, and make a start on rebuilding, even while their warriors are away.”
Looked at coldly, it would make more sense to resettle the folk elsewhere. Morality and practical politics both made that out of the question, of course. Her own consciousness of the land-all the land of Montival-made that part of it feel like a raw bruise.
Some of the conversation that followed was by prearrangement. The Mackenzies had always had close links with the CORA, and she suspected it hadn’t been too hard for Juniper to get the Clan’s Óenach Mór, the Great Assembly, to agree to more help; Father Ignatius had assured her that Mt. Angel would do the same. Signe offered to join the effort, and hinted that she’d get Corvallis to cough up too. They all promised longer-term aid to the County Palatine as well.
“Lady Ermentrude?” Mathilda said, when they’d gone around the subject long enough.
“I. . yes, we’ll accept that some of the aid from the western and northern parts of the Association goes to the CORA rather than immediately to the County Palatine. Felipe will agree, after he shouts and kicks the walls a little.” More firmly. “Yes. Ruling means setting priorities and you can never satisfy everyone.”
Juniper handed the little princess to Sandra; Mathilda smiled to herself at her mother’s well-concealed eagerness. The Mackenzie went on:
“I’d suggest that we find some excuse to take folk. . including some of yours, Lady Ermentrude. . on a wee bit of a tour of the CORA lands, to see for themselves what’s been done there. Forbye that will show them the extent of the damage and that they weren’t the only ones to suffer. And remind them why we’re fighting, to be sure, to be sure.”
Sandra nodded. “Excellent idea, my dear Juniper. Now, about the details-”
Halfway through the discussion Mathilda found herself standing at the edge of the balcony, making a tactful withdrawal of her High Queenly presence and sipping her fourth cup of tea and nibbling a scone rich with hazelnuts. She smiled a little as she looked out over the great castle. The Association’s barons affected a plate-armored machismo; the unkind said they tended to be solid iron from ear to ear whether their helmets were on or not. But it occurred to her, not for the first time, that this group here was making a lot of the real decisions among themselves. . and every single one of them was female.
From here you could see most of Todenangst, the south side at least. The great circuit of the outer bailey, a tall granite-faced wall studded with machicolated towers bearing tall witch-hat roofs of green copper, lined on the inner surface by a linear town of tiled homes and workshops, barracks and stables and armories and inns and churches. A ring road and terraced gardens marked the bailey’s boundary; the gates there were tunnels into the hillside that bore the inner keep, and could be blocked by portcullis-like slabs of steel falling at the push of a lever. Inside access was via spiral roadways that were death traps to an invader in themselves.
Then the keep itself, itself far larger than most castles, a hill topped with wall and tower, courtyard and cathedral and endless little nooks and surprises, all the way down to the dungeons below and the secret passages that laced the whole. Above them all the Silver Tower and the Onyx, rearing sheer hundreds of feet into the air and flaunting their banners beneath the blue cloud-speckled sky. It had been so all her life that she could remember-the main structure had been completed by ten thousand men working in round-the-clock shifts and finishing when she was about five, though furnishing and fitting was still going on in some parts, and probably always would be.
Mother kept that copy of Gormenghast close at hand when she was designing the place. Though it’s much prettier than Steerpike’s stamping grounds. Gormenghastian but not Gormen-ghastly. And say what you like about father, he had a will like forged steel, and he dreamed grandly.
Perhaps it was what Juniper and Sandra had said earlier, but it struck her now that virtually everything in the landscape she could see save the bones of the earth-things like the tiny perfect white cone of Mount Hood off to the west, the lower blue line of the Coast Range westward-was not much older than she. Todenangst looked as if it had reared here for centuries amid its surroundings of river and woodland, manors and the multihued green of field and vineyard, woodlot and orchard, the spires of churches, railroads thronged with horse-drawn trains, dusty white roads thick with oxcarts and peasants on foot, monks and men-at-arms, merchants and bicyclists or Tinerant caravans.
In fact the lower bulk of the castle was steel cargo-containers from trains, and from barges and freighters stranded in the Columbia by the Change, filled with crushed automobiles and rubble and cement and all locked together and set in cast mass-concrete. The heights were girders and lead-coated rebar and more concrete; the very stone sheathing had been stripped from skyscrapers in Portland and Vancouver and Seattle. Only the roofing-tile and some of the woodwork and textiles had been made for it. Parts of the enormous complex were still faintly warm with the heat of curing cement.
I don’t think this way very often, Mathilda reflected, sipping at the delicate acridity of the tea.
She’d received a good Classical education, including elements of the pre-Change sciences. Some of them were still useful, but it had all never seemed really real to her until she’d been whirled through the depths of time at Lost Lake. Still. .
Will any of this ever occur to Órlaith at all? she thought.
Something hit the bronze bars of the trellis with an enormous whung sound. Mathilda whirled around in a flurry of skirts and dagged sleeves. A man had flung himself out of a window sixty feet above the balcony, spread-eagled to distribute the impact. It should still have broken half his bones, but his face was as empty of expression as an insect’s as he rolled off the metal and onto the tile of the floor. He wore a servant’s tabard and livery, but a curved knife glittered in his hand, with the rayed sun of the Church Universal and Triumphant etched into the steel.