Rudi slapped him on the shoulder. “That they are, Oak. For planting their feet in the dirt and locking shields to conquer or die where they stand, I've seen that there's none like the warriors of Norrheim. Pitiless fighters, fell and grim. Also they're the truest of men to their oaths, and fear does not enter into their actions.”
There was a slight happy growl from the armored
hirdmen
behind their king; he couldn't have picked a compliment from all the world's tongues that would have pleased them more, as long as it came from someone they respected.
The which they do, after the Seven Hills fight, at which all these men shed sweat and many let their blood on the ground from their wounds. And for their pledged oaths many of them will die very far from home, meeting their end on foreign ground with their last sight the faces of angry strangers. I will do what I must, for the kingdom's sake and the world's. And for my children yet unborn. The praise will also go a way to reconciling them to being brigaded with Fred's not-really-turncoats. It's an acrobat a High King must be!
“Now, when is this battle where we Norrheimers will do our head-bashing to be?” Bjarni said, belching contentedly and handing his plate to the youth. “And where?”
More of the watered wine went around, and a small sack filled with dried fruit and nuts. Oak leaned forward eagerly as well, and Fred's face had a wolf's keenness.
“It'll be as late as I can manage,” Rudi said. “Around Samhain, if I can harry and delay until then. Yule would be too much to hope for.”
He turned aside to Bjarni for a moment: “Samhain's our festival of the dead and the Otherworld, that ends the sacred Wheel of the Year. The Quarter Day at the end of October. Lughnasadh is the summer festival, just past.”
Oak hissed between his teeth. “Samhain? That long?” he said, obviously thinking of the autumn planting and a hungry year to follow if it was skimped.
“Everyone planted more last fall than normal, I hear, and we can put in more spring grain next year needs must. Time fights for us, remember; time, and the land itself,” Rudi said. “The enemy outnumber us three to two; or they will at the beginning of things.”
“It would have been two to one, if you hadn't gotten us allies,” Oak acknowledged.
Rudi nodded; it was true. “I'll make them leave their base of supply far behind, draw them in, with each step making them weaker as they must detach forces to guard their lines of supply and invest the strongholds. Then I'll bring them to battle at the time and place I choose.”
“Where?” Oak said.
“The Horse Heaven Hills,” he said, nodding eastward.
Bjarni frowned, and Rudi drew in the dirt with a twig, showing how those lay between the valley of the Yakima river and the Columbia, a little east of where they were now.
“Or at least Horse Heaven is my choice,” Rudi said, seeing the lay of those long swells in his mind. “The enemy, the dirty dogs, will have a plan of their own, the which is a reason why we call them
the enemy
. It's nicely varied terrain, not too closed in to maneuver freely or use our heavy cavalry, and not so open there's no element of surprise or choice of ground. They might try to go north of there, up the Yakima, but that would trap them in a cul-de-sac and the Free Cities are too strong to storm with an army still on their flank.”
“It's rich land, if they're hungry,” Oak said. To Bjarni: “A great valley, closely tilledâwatered by channels from the river, one fortified village and walled town after another, field after field. Densely peopled with strong yeomen, and they good farmers and stubborn fighters both.”
“Rich land but with all that's edible behind walls,” Rudi said. “Or it will be after my orders are carried out. Taking the Yakima would only make sense in a slow campaign aimed at steady conquest of one bit at a time, but now that the League of Des Moines and the Dominions are marching up their backsides they don't have that luxury.”
“You think that will make them give you a fight where and when you want it?” Bjarni said. “Letting your enemy set the terms of battle is halfway to a battle lost. If they have good war-captains, they'll know that.”
Rudi nodded. “They'll go for our main field army, the beating of which is their only hope of any real victory now. Castles and walled cities can slow and frustrate an invader, but it's only in concert with an army that they can defeat him. That's the bait I'll dangle before them, snatching it away again and again by taking positions too strong to attack as I fall back.”
He smiled. There was something he'd read once . . . and the Sword prompted him. He said something in another language. When the two men looked at him questioningly, he went on:
“In our tongue . . .
Those skilled at making the enemy move do so by creating a situation to which he must conform; they entice him with something he is certain to take, and with lures of ostensible profit they await him in strength.”
“That's sensible,” Bjarni said.
“Sun Tzu generally is, the wit and keen insight of the man.”
“I've read him, Dad was big on his
Art of War
,” Fred noted soberly. “The thing is, Martin read him too. He's an evil treacherous shit but he's not stupid.”
“You're thinking of the man as you knew him,” Rudi said. “I have grounds to suspect he's much changed. Also knowing what you should do and overriding impulse are two quite different things; and he'll be much concerned with things at home, and even the most absolute ruler must take the opinions and feelings of his war-captains into account. By Samhain they'll be mad with rage and fear and hunger and want nothing so much in all the world as to
finish
it. Then I'll offer battle in a position that looks just a little more doable from their side than it really is, andâ”
Bjarni drew a thumb across his throat below the dark red beard and made a horribly realistic gurgling sound, like a man drowning in his own blood, rolling his eyes upward; the coal-glow from the fire added an unpleasant touch to the pantomime. He and Oak barked laughter together. Fred looked grim; any victory would mean the death of a good many of his people.
“Or so we hope,” Rudi nodded.
They discussed options and details, munching on the raisins and slices of dried peach and apricot and apple, the walnuts and hazelnuts in the bag and calling over a couple of those with clerk's skills to take notes. After an hour or so a stir came from the northward.
“Ah, and yet another detail to squeeze into the capacious folds of the dying day,” Rudi said. His head turned to look down the valley. “Twelve thousand . . . not a quorum by itself.”
Oak nodded. “Counting proxies, yes, though. They're all duly registered, so we have the
Ãenach Mór
here with us, that we do.”
A helper brought round water and a well-used cloth, and they washed their hands.
“Ãenach . . . Mór?”
Bjarni asked.
“A . . . folkmoot,” Rudi said. “Each Dun in the Mackenzie dùthchas has its
óenach
, its assembly of adult members. And
Mór
means
Great
in the old tongue of our ancestors. The Great Moot, you might say, where the Chief presides and decisions are made for the Clan as a whole. The votes must represent the majority for the decision to be lawful, by pledged proxy if they can't be there themselves. In ordinary times it's a great holiday, with games and contests and plays and such, held yearly after the harvest festival. Lughnasadh, about this time, in fact.”
Bjarni's eyes lit. “Why, that's like the
things
for our tribes, and the
all-thing
for Norrheim!” he said. “The town meetings, as the old folk called them.”
“Mmmm, ours are more noisy than yours, I'm thinking,” Rudi said judiciously. “They certainly last longer, as a general rule; though I'd say this one may be mercifully brief. You're welcome to watch.”
“I'll bring my men and they'll sit on the edge,” Fred said, nodding. “It'll impress them. In more ways than one.”
A stirring came through the darkness, and then the keening, droning wail of the pipes with a thuttering roar of drums beneath it. Rudi grinned to himself; his mother had composed that tune, too, when someone insisted. He thought it had been Dennie, a friend of hers who'd had a big role in establishing Clan customs in the early days.
Officially the title was
It's a Clan We Must Be
, from the first speech she'd given to the little band of fugitives meeting at the old hunting lodge that had become the core of Dun Juniper. She herself had been known to refer to it as
Hail to the Chief
, which oldsters considered a great joke; some obscure reference to the ancient world.
His eyes sought her eagerly.
After Matti, the one I love most in all the world,
he thought.
And Sir Nigel. I need their wisdom. And Maude and Fiorbhinn, so grown while I was away!
Â
Juniper Mackenzie listened to the pipers and the hammering rattle of the Lambegs and the dunting snarl of war-horns calling the assembly and smiled to herself. Beside her Nigel Loring, her man, leaned his head towards her.
“That's your
ironic
smile, my dear,” he said.
The smooth cultured drawl of the grandmother who'd raised him was still strong in his voice. His parents had both died within a few years of his birth, and his grandfather Eustace had stood too close to a German howitzer shell during the retreat from Mons in 1914, leaving a young widow and a posthumous son. He'd been in middle age when he arrived a fugitive from Mad King Charles in England, fifteen years ago, during the War of the Eye. Now he was unambiguously old, his head egg-bald, the last yellow gone from the clipped white mustache. He was still slim and erect in the Clan's formal garb of tight green jacket with lace at throat and cuffs and double row of silver buttons, badger-skin sporran, kilt and plaid, flat Scots bonnet with silver clasp.
“I was thinking that I should never have let Dennis at my Gaelic dictionary and
Myths and Customs of the Ancient Celts
; the illustrated one, at that. The glee the man had in him when he persuaded people to take up some bit of Victorian-fantasy folderol that drove me wild, back in the early years! In the end the only way to stop him tormenting me with it was to go along, so . . . and I couldn't bear to quash folk when they needed something to catch their fancy when all else was so bleak. And he thought it the cream of the jest that he was nine-tenths English by blood himself, and the rest everything under the sun
but
Irish, or even Scots. Whereas I had my mother speaking the Gaelic to me in my cradle.”
“Ah, well, old girl, remember the definition of an Anglo-Saxon:
a German who's forgotten his grandmother was Welsh
. Back in the old days I did always note that it wasn't the people from the Gaeltacht who went barking mad for the Celtic-Twilight, Deirdre-of-the-Sorrows bit.”
“No,” Juniper said shortly. “They were too poor and too sensible, both. What my mother would think of this festival of deranged romanticism run amuck I shudder to imagine. It was hard enough on her when I went over to the Old Religion.”
“She might note that it was an Englishman by the name of Rawlinson who invented the kilt.”
“He probably just stole the credit for it,” she said loftily, and saw the glint of amusement in his rather watery blue eyesâthey'd been injured in some distant land in battle before the Change.
Oman, it was called,
she recalled.
Odd, to remember a time when places halfway around the world were more than distant rumor, when it really
mattered
what happened there. Nigel isn't the only one who's old. I'm spending more and more time remembering, and less than I should focusing on the future. It's well that Rudi is High King now, a Changeling King for the Changeling world. Time for oldsters to take another step back.
They'd had practice talking quietly for each other's ears only, but Juniper thought that Fiorbhinn caught a little of it. The girl had inherited the music from her side of the family along with a very keen set of ears, and her mother's bright leaf-green eyes, though her hair was white-blond with summer. The eyes sparkled now, and she carried the case with her small harp proudly, with the gravity only eleven years was capable of.
Maude was fifteen, coltish and slim and slightly awkward with it, brown-haired and grave. She was also swallowing a little now and then behind her calm face. Maude had always been the good one, steady and sensible and clever and kindhearted but not foolishly so, without the tang of wildwood magic that rang in Fiorbhinn's blood and out through her music. This wasn't something she had anticipated.
Which just goes to show the limits of being sensible, my girl,
Juniper thought sympathetically.
For this is a matter of the Chieftainship, and truly that has something beyond the schemes and thoughts and reasons of humankind. There is a true magic to it, a thing that lifts us beyond the veils of the everyday. There always was.
Rudi stood waiting for her; he removed his bonnet and bowed, smiling. Their eyes met as if in complicity, sharers in some solemn game, and her heart twisted with love and the sorrow that was its shadow.
I loved him so as a baby, and a child, and now a man. I protected him from all I could, but in the end love means letting them go.
The procession led to the edge of a slight rise; the valley fell away downslope and southward from there. It was packed now, a sea of upturned painted faces that stretched into a firelit darkness where clumps of leaves glittered amid the rising sparks of the torches. A rolling cheer started as she stopped and raised her hands; it built rapidly into a war-yell, the racking banshee shriek surging back and forth as blades and bows were thrust into the air. Juniper shivered a little. Mackenzies weren't exactly warlike; at least, they didn't go out and start wars as a group. On the other hand, when someone provoked them . . .