The valley was a flattish plain on either side of the south-flowing river, bounded by low mountains to the west and lower ones to the east, opening out irregularly like a funnel southward towards the great Bay. She looked about as she sang, their voices startling flights of birds out of the brush and long grass, sometimes dense enough that they looked like climbing, twining skeins of air and smoke.
“Speak to me, they speak to me
In voices humming in my bone
In whispers rising on my breath
In languages that tell of home!”
The inland hills of the Vaca Range were distant; you could just see how they were covered in rippling grass just turning from deep green to gold with tongues of woodland stretching up the ravines that scored them and clumps of blue oak and chaparral. Closer and westward the heights of the Mayacamas were dense-shaggy with forest, fir and pine and more. The air was warm and scented with smells stronger and spicier than the northern lands of her birth, arbutus and thyme and fennel. The broken remains of terraces showed here and there under the foothill brush.
“What do you think of Fiorbhinn’s latest?” the High King asked her, as they finished.
“Wonderful, and spreading like a grass fire in the Palouse,” she said. “Of course!”
“Your mother has told me for years that we need. . what did they call it in the old days. . a national anthem. A song everyone in Montival can like, that speaks to our love for the land itself. I think this may be it, and I’ll talk to Fiorbhinn about that. . hmmm. . perhaps a few more verses about mountains and deserts. .”
“And a proud castle with banners or two, Your Majesty,” Heuradys said with an irrepressible grin. “For the north-realm.”
“That too, Herry,” he laughed.
Her fingers strayed to another tune, then to an occasional plucked note and to silence. They rode quietly for a while, to enjoy a land strange and foreign to them all; he was an easy man to be quiet with.
“Go n-ithe an cat thú,” Órlaith cursed mildly as her horse stumbled, bringing the animal up with light hands and a firm grip of thigh and knee. “May the cat eat you, Dancer, and keep your mind to what you’re about!”
Her black courser had caught a hoof on what was left of an old dead grape-vine, one of the innumerable thousands hidden by hock-high wild mustard. The main north-south road down the Napa Valley had suffered generations of summer wind and sun, winter flood and frost before the first Montivallan settlers arrived a few years ago, and they’d not yet done more than patch a few of the more manageable holes with dirt and gravel. Where the gaps in the ancient sun-faded asphalt were too wide traffic simply swerved westward away from the river, leaving ruts and trampled patches.
“That’s harsh, a stór,” her father chuckled. “Mind, my treasure, it’s not Dancer’s fault.”
They were speaking Gaeilge, for practice sake; there weren’t many people in Montival who could, though Heuradys had learned it for friendship’s sake. Her father’s mother Juniper, the founder and first Chief of the Clan Mackenzie, had learned it from her mother, who’d been born across the eastern sea, and taught it to her son and granddaughter both. It was a family tradition, and many clansfolk took the odd word or phrase from it, just as they’d copied her way of speaking in the early years and taken up the faith she and her core of early followers practiced. Over the generations the origins of customs and speech both had evolved from memory to legend for most.
Which is fair enough, Órlaith thought, remembering things her grandmother Juniper had said to her. For what is the world of humankind, if not a story we tell each other so that we may live in it together?
“This is a difficult patch, for horses,” he went on.
“The ancients must all have been drunk as Dáithí’s pig seven days of the week and blind drunk the whole of Beltane month,” she said, stroking the mare’s neck. “I like a glass of wine as well as the next, but this is ridiculous! The whole valley must have been solid vineyards from east to west and north to south!”
“Now there’s an elevating thought!” Heuradys said.
The High King laughed. “You just might think so,” he said, with a wave of his arm. “Still, it’s a bonny stretch of land, and at least they didn’t cover the fields with buildings.”
Some of the innumerable vines on the flat were still alive, monstrous house-sized tangled ground-hugging networks of shoots green with leaves or bone-hard and bare, sometimes climbing over a tree or snag of old building like a cresting vegetable wave caught in midmotion. More were dead gnarled knotted stumps, lurking among the tall grass and wild mustard and dense drifts of flaming gold California poppies, the brush and eucalyptus and oak and spreading feral olives. Even dead they lasted like iron.
A sound came from the southward, a deep rhythmic moaning coughing grunt, building to a shattering roar, loud even miles distant. The horses all shied a little. The humans frowned or grinned according to their natures. Something deep down in you whispered what that call meant: man-eater.
“And perhaps that was just a wee bit of an unfortunate way to swear,” Órlaith’s father chuckled. “Seeing as cats with a voracious and unreasonable appetite for horseflesh swarm upon the earth hereabouts.”
Órlaith had been well tutored in ecology-which she’d enjoyed far more than the rest of the Classical curriculum inflicted on her, since that science still worked as it had before the Change. Tigers were common in most parts of Montival that weren’t too dry and open, descended from zoo and park and private specimens sentimental owners had turned loose as the ancient world went down in wreck. Lions were not, being less common before the Change and much less able to adapt to cold winters after it. Down here in what had been California you met them more and more often as you went south, since they did like warm, dry open landscapes.
“Now, that would make an interesting rug,” Heuradys said speculatively. “You up for a lion-hunt, Órry?”
“Now it is not as lion-food I have raised the Princess,” her father said, then raised a hand: “But if lions were to try for our horses, of course, that would be another matter.”
They’d seen mule deer, tule elk, feral horses and cattle, a troop of baboons, wild boar and flocks of emu and ostrich since they left the half-built castle at Rutherford, as well as scat and prints of tiger and wolf and distant glimpses of grizzly. A herd of lyre-horned antelope with tan coats and pale bellies had been grazing in the middle distance but giving the humans alertly nervous looks now and then. They took flight when the lion’s roar added an extra dose of fear and white tails flashed as they bounced away like rubber balls in astonishing near-vertical leaps that she’d read were called pronking, ultimately derived from the same distant land as the lions via curious institutions the ancients had called safari parks.
Órlaith smiled at the sight, and Heuradys strummed the mandolin in time to the leaps, as if giving them musical accompaniment. The springboks lifted your heart to watch, and they looked as thoroughly at home as the flocks of yellow-breasted chats that rose like handfuls of flung gold coins as they passed, going wheet-wheet-wheet in protest.
More soberly, her father added: “And there were so many of the ancients. More in just one of the cities on the Bay south of here than in all our Montival even today. More than enough to drink the fruit of all these vines.”
She nodded. She knew that, and unlike some of the tales she believed it down in her gut. Anyone did who’d seen the ruins and thought a little rather than just treating them as part of the landscape, though her generation was less haunted by it than their parents, and infinitely less than those who’d survived the great dying. That was why this land was empty. When the machines stopped hordes had eaten the countryside bare everywhere close enough to reach, then turned on each other amid plague and fire and horror. A few of their savage descendants still haunted the land, but only a handful of tiny civilized settlements tucked away in remoteness had greeted the explorers from the north. Mostly they’d been touchingly joyful to rejoin humankind.