The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) (13 page)

“Yugen,”
she said.

“Beautiful,” Órlaith said softly in her own tongue.

Koyama and Egawa nodded agreement behind their
jotei
. Then Reiko went on: “
Yugen
, that is beautiful, yes, but also it means . . .”

Órlaith was a little surprised when it was the scar-faced soldier Egawa who recited:

“To watch the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill.

To wander on in a huge forest without thought of return.

To stand ashore and gaze after a boat that disappears behind distant islands.

To contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds.”

Her father had been fond of saying that even a horse or a dog might always surprise you, and that the true inwardness of any among human-kind was like a forest at night, mysterious and full of the unexpected, with much hidden even from the self that dwelt there and walked beneath those trees. And prone to poking you in the eye if you moved heedlessly.

She blinked; the beauty of the view merged with the pain of missing him.

I will never share this with him, or anything like this, ever again.

She looked over at Reiko for an instant; their eyes met, shared a moment of communion across all boundaries of people and custom, then looked aside.

“Yugen,”
Órlaith agreed.

They crossed the sloping pasture and headed into the valley of the Rógaire River on a track that switchbacked down a rocky slope overrun with purple-flowered deerbrush. The name of the stream was post-Change, bestowed during the years of chaos and violence when the Clan McClintock had taken form in these comely but rugged lands south of the Willamette Valley. Their first Chief, the McClintock Himself, had
been a man of odd skills, esoteric knowledge and strong will who ended up founding his own small nation. One that modeled itself on him and his first core of helpers, as a saturated solution crystallizes around a seed; that part of physics hadn’t changed with the Change, and her instructors had demonstrated it in her chemistry lessons. It was much like what Órlaith’s grandmother Juniper had done in founding the Clan Mackenzie.

Only in a manner rather less sane,
she thought.

One of the first McClintock’s many obsessions had been slapping names from the tongue of his ancestors on any piece of local geography that didn’t actively fight back, and by now many of the older terms had dropped out of living memory. Though he hadn’t quite been able to get his new clan to
speak
that language, if only because it would have taken too much time and effort when both were at a premium.

But they do mine it . . . or pull plums out of the pudding.

Diarmuid’s grandfather had been one of the first McClintock’s right-hand men, what they called a
feartaic
or tacksman, and Diarmuid had succeeded to this land when his father had demonstrated the risks of tackling a grizzly with a boar-spear several years ago.

Reiko came up again as the way broadened out from the narrow track into open oak-savannah, accompanied by her two closest advisors. She untied the chin-cords of that curious straw hat shaped like a flat-bottomed bowl and fanned herself with it for a moment; it was noticeably warmer in this sheltered hollow than up the mountainside.

“This man Di-ar-mu-id is . . . your . . . vassal?” she asked, in her own tongue and then in much-improved English that had even acquired a very slight Mackenzie lilt.

Órlaith nodded a little reluctantly; the knowledge she’d gained through the Sword warned her that
vassal
and
fudai
weren’t exactly the same thing. It wasn’t anything explicit, more a matter of a slight mental stumble, as if on an uneven pavement.

“More or less,” she said. “Through the McClintock himself, himself, Colin, the
ceann-cinnidh.
Clan chief,” she added, again frustratingly conscious that
shi
and
clan
weren’t exactly the same thing either, nor was
ichizoku
.

Knowing a language was much better than not, but it didn’t mean perfect communication. Not even with Da’s magic sword. Her mother had said that once while she was teething her parents had come in to a room and found her gnawing on the pommel. There were times she still felt like doing that.

You have to
work
at getting across what you mean. And Reiko
works
, by Ogma of the Honey Tongue! She can follow most speech now.

“The McClintocks were early allies of my father’s birth-Clan, the Mackenzies,” she added, to clarify. “From their beginnings, soon after the Change. When my father returned from the Quest with the Sword of the Lady—”

She touched it with her palm on the crystal, the same gesture her father had used.

“—they were among the first to hail him High King; and they fought for him in the great battles of the Prophet’s War, and he confirmed them in their lands and a good deal more when Montival was founded and the Great Charter proclaimed. They . . . hmmm . . . resemble Mackenzies somewhat in their customs.”

Edain had trotted back, saluting and leaning on his bow to listen for a moment as she spoke. She’d been repeating each sentence in English and Japanese and he grinned at the last part.

“Resemble us? That they do. Somewhat as a donkey resembles a horse, so,” he said.

“That was not tactful, old wolf,” Órlaith said affectionately. To Reiko: “Some . . . ah . . . consider the McClintocks a little . . . I think you would say
soya
. Rustic.”

Edain snorted. “And some consider them a bunch of drunken savages from the arse-end of nowhere,” he said cheerfully; almost the first time since her father fell she’d seen him so.

Egawa spoke; Reiko started to translate and then made a graceful gesture of apology.

The Imperial Guard commander looked at his sovereign, tucked his head when she waved him on, and asked:

“How do they fight, your Highness?”

“Understand, General Egawa, I haven’t seen them in combat myself.”

In fact, that fight when we rescued you and Da fell was my first real battle. But not the last, by the Dagda’s club and the wings of the Morrigú! Not while those who killed Da walk the ridge of the Earth.

“My father’s appraisal was that they were fine skirmishers and raiders in broken country, especially in wooded land like this.”

She inclined her head to indicate the mountains and foothills they’d been traveling through.

“Good at scouting, good at ambushes—both ways. And very fierce in a massed charge, especially if their enemy isn’t expecting them. They’re weak against cavalry on open ground, or against disciplined foot-soldiers, if they don’t win by a quick rush. And they have no artillery—no field catapults—or engineers. They can’t take fortified places, except small ones by scaling ladder. Da would say . . . that they have all the courage in the world, but not so much staying power.”

Egawa nodded. “I knew your Royal father only by watching him command one small battle,” he said thoughtfully; it was a manner she recognized, a craftsman speaking of his trade. “But that was enough to show him to be a man whose judgments in war were to be taken very seriously.”

The words were praise, but they were sincerely meant. Órlaith swallowed and took a deep breath; it was getting a little easier to think of him without actual physical pain, especially when she had something to focus on.

“How many of them are there?” he asked. Casually, but there was a slight edge of tension in his voice.

“Nobody knows exactly,” she said. “They don’t take censuses, they had some . . . unfortunate experiences with that soon after the Change. The Lord Chancellor’s office thinks somewhere between one and two hundred thousand. They sent more than ten thousand warriors to the great battle in the Horse Heaven Hills the year I was born, and there are certainly more of them now, they’ve been spreading. They don’t like being crowded, which means to them being able to see a neighbor’s smoke.”

The Japanese were as difficult to read as any people she’d met, not least because they were also apparently free of the impulse to fill a silence with talk just for the sake of it. Reiko blinked quickly, and Egawa squinted thoughtfully. Koyama gave no reaction at all, simply noting what she said. She still thought they found that a large number.

“There’s a many of them at the tacksman’s steading now, Princess,” Edain said. “Gathered for Beltane, and stayed for a handfasting; the party was just splitting up and the wreath still on the bride’s head.”

She nodded; the May feast was a lucky time for joinings, as for beginnings in general, and weddings were common in this month among followers of the Old Faith.

“Whose handfasting?” she asked.

“The tacksman himself, to be precise. The bride’s name is Caitlin Banaszak McClintock, who I think—”

He raised his eyes tactfully, and did
not
grin.

“—I think you know.”

Órlaith exhaled slightly; that would simplify things. She had no intention of taking a consort until she came of age for the Throne.

Heuradys murmured: “Oh, good,” and the three of them shared a glance. “Cry hail to Aphrodite, and to Eros, You Goddess gentle and strong, You powerful God,” the knight added piously, but with a grin. “And may Hera of the Hearth bless them. She’s probably pregnant, too.”

I’ve never thought Diarmuid was ambitious that way,
Órlaith thought.
But being the High Queen Regnant’s consort might be tempting to any able man, if he thought he could gain it.

They came out into the pocket of flattish land on the south bank of the broad swift Rógaire, noisy with the spring melt and still rising as the mountains warmed and shed their white winter coats.

The river ran westward several hundred miles from the High Cascades to the Pacific at
Tràigh òr
, mostly through mountains and often in deep narrow canyons. Land that wasn’t too rocky or steep to farm came in patches along river and tributaries, some quite extensive and others small like this; canoes and rafts afloat and pack-beasts through the forests and folk on their own feet were the links that held the McClintock
dùthchas together, as far as anything did. The mountain winters with their storms and huge snows hadn’t been kind to the ancient world’s roads and bridges, and the dwellers here lived widely scattered, each family or little kin-group to itself.

Hooves and feet thudded and drummed on the rutted trail that led them on, flanked by planted walnut trees. Diarmuid’s steading showed him to be a great man, by local standards, though in some places—Corvallis or Boise, for example—it would have been about what a well-to-do yeoman farmer might have.

Unless you count the warriors he could call out at need.

Sixty or so acres along the river were planted to wheat and barley and oats, hay and fodder and potatoes, orchards of cherry and apple and pears and other fruits, truck gardens and a small patch of gnarled goblet-trained grape vines. A shift of the wind brought a waft of smoky, pungent odor from long huts by the river that told of brine-cured salmon being smoked; the big fish swarmed thickly here in spring and even more so in the fall. A flume led from a creek to an overshot waterwheel, standing next to a small stone-built mill that would grind grain, saw timber, break flax and lift some of the labor of fulling woolen cloth for all the neighborhood. The forests themselves would yield as much or more than the fields, game for meat and hides, bones and fat and horn; wood and fuel; dyestuffs, honey and wax; nuts and other wild provender and pasturage for cattle and swine and sheep.

Eight crofts shared the land, little log-and-fieldstone cabins standing back from the bank and possible flooding amid their own gardens that included flowers as well as vegetables, and the intense blue of patches of blossoming fall-sown flax wove bands of color near the houses. There would be more homes tucked away in suitable pockets for many score miles around, and upstream and down. Families who followed the Tennart sub-chieftains to war when the Red Arrow went around, and met here for worship at the great feasts of the Wheel of the Year or in assembly to vote on disputes or for something like cobbler’s work when traveling artisans came through on their rounds.

Diarmuid’s house was larger, though quite modest compared to a
north-realm manor or a rich merchant’s mansion in Corvallis. A two-story block of deep-notched logs rested on a foundation of mortared fieldstone; lower wings in a U shape stood around a cobbled court. High-pitched roofs reared above, shake and birch-bark covered in dense flower-starred green turf, and the rafter-ends snarled in the shape of dragons. The log walls were carved in sinuous running patterns based on a three-armed spiral where they weren’t covered with trellised roses just coming into full crimson bloom.

The house was on a rise of ground. Not far away, but beyond the scatter of tree-shaded barns and sheds, corrals and stables and workshops, was a low hill with a rough circle of tall trees. It was surrounded by a screen of the sacred Rowan, planted many years ago when the Old Faith swept this area. That was the
nemed
, the Sacred Wood. You couldn’t see the altar from here, but two carven trunks of old-growth incense cedar had been set in stones where the path wound up to it, each a thick baulk thirty feet high.

One was wrought at its top with the image of stag-headed Cernunnos, two torcs of twisted gold in His hands. The other was Flidais, with Her sacred white deer crouched at Her feet, the Goddess standing naked and bold, cattle-horns raised in Her grip. The colors of the figures glittered fresh under a coat of varnish.

The carving was cruder than it would have been in the Mackenzie dùthchas; for that matter, most of the northern Clan’s duns would have used Lug of the Many Skills leaning on His spear and Brigit the Bright holding the wheatsheaf of abundance and the flame of inspiration for the images, as they did outside the gates of Dun Juniper. But Mackenzies were village-dwelling farmers and craftsfolk who also hunted and fished; the McClintocks were hunters and fishermen who also farmed and practiced crafts. Here in the vast steep tangle of forest and mountain, glacial lake and swift tumbling river, their first worship went to the wild Powers of the lands beyond the tamed tilled fields, the Ones who dwelt in the rustling green silences that shaped their souls. There was a raw strength in the images that made her hand move in the Invoking gesture.