The Protector's War (11 page)

The grin looked more piratical than it had before the Change; the older man had lost his left eye and hand to a bandit's sword in Change Year One, and the patch and hook added something too.

“Hi,
Lord
Ken,” Havel went on, smiling a crooked smile, stripping off the metal-backed leather gauntlets. “Got the initiations over with, at least.”

In the distance a roaring chorus of voices rose in song, or something close to it, as booted feet clashed in unison to the beat of drums and the squeal of fifes:

“I like that song,” Havel said, grinning. “It's becoming sort of traditional—another favor Juney Mackenzie did us. What's better, everyone else on the A-list likes it, too.” He winced slightly as Ken Larsson raised a brow, and continued: “That is, everyone likes it except Signe. I ducked out when she started glaring at me again—everything associated with our red-haired friend puts her on edge now. Christ Jesus, I don't
need
this. Can't you talk to her? She's your daughter…”

Ken Larsson laughed until he wheezed. “Oh, no, son-in-law, I got out of
that
job at the altar. Besides…can you blame her?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I can! Yes, Rudi's my kid—but Signe and I weren't married then. She was still back in Idaho when I came west on that scouting mission and ran into Juney. Hell, Signe and I weren't even
involved
then, not really, and she'd made it pretty plain no hanky-panky was in prospect. OK, she said no, I folded up my tent and rode away.”

“She'd had a rough time,” Larsson said, looking aside. It had been even rougher on him, the night his first wife died.

“And I haven't touched another woman since we
did
get involved,” Havel said bitterly. “Christ Jesus, I'm getting the punishment for adultery without having the fun!”

Larsson cleared his throat. “Anyway, Mike, expecting a woman to be
reasonable
about something like that is about as futile as trying to fly to the moon by putting your head between your knees and spitting hard. Have you actually confessed yet?”

“No,” the younger man said shortly.

“Well, you should. Grovel and apologize and beat your breast and promise never to do anything wrong again. Keep on doing it while she yells and throws things, and then while she sulks and gives you the cold shoulder beat yourself up some more.”

“Shit, I didn't
do
anything wrong!”

“And that is relevant…how?” Larsson snorted. “Listen to the voice of experience, son. Besides, there's young Mike. She's probably worried about him.”

Havel's lips curled into a smile at the mention of his son's name; then he frowned in puzzlement.

“Worried?”

“About who inherits all this,” Larsson said, waving his good hand.

Havel blinked, obviously surprised. “Well…well, shit, Ken! Who said the position's hereditary, for Christ Jesus' sake? Even Arminger hasn't gone that far.”

“He will,” Larsson predicted. “Bit awkward for him that his only child's a girl, but if you read the reports, he's setting things up for Queen Mathilda the First.”

Havel shrugged. “Yeah, but I'm not Arminger, by Christ Jesus. Last I heard, the assembled Outfit chooses the bossman when the old one dies, retires or is impeached; and I should know, seeing as how I
wrote
the damned law code. I've gone along with a lot of Astrid's pseudomedieval horse manure, but enough's enough! No golden crowns for this country boy.”

Larsson sighed. “Mike, you might have made the distinction between political and military authority and private property a little more distinct…or distinct at all…when you were setting things up. Or maybe I should have reminded you, even busy as we were. But done's done; if the Outfit were to select somebody
else
after you were gone, who owns the house? And the lands—the stuff we manage directly from here? The heirs of Mike Havel, guy with a growing family, or the successor to Lord Bear, ruler of all he can see? And if it's the latter, what do your kids get? Parents are
supposed
to be anxious for their children's futures, you know; you can't blame Signe for living up to the job.”

“Hmmm,” Havel said. “Point. Distinct point.”

“Besides which…let me ask you a question: How many of those apprentices you just enrolled were relatives of people already on the A-list?”

Havel frowned, thinking. “Four out of seven. Why? Anyone can take the tests.”

Larsson sighed again. “Mike, you're a smart guy, but you're kind of…focused. This is a low-productivity economy we've got—not as bad as the Dark Ages, more nineteenth-century in a lot of ways, except it's also a pre-money setup most of the time and our population's too small for much specialization. And we've made schooling compulsory, which I approve of. But what do a tenant farmer's kids do in their munificent free time, school holidays being scheduled to coincide with the growing and harvest season?”

“Work their asses off helping their family get the crop in,” Havel said promptly. “Same as I did back in the Upper Peninsula, before I graduated high school and joined the Corps. Only a lot more so. We ran that farm part-time; mostly the family lived on what my old man made in the Iron Range mines.”

Larsson raised his metal prosthesis and made a checkmark in the air. “Bingo. Now, what does an A-lister's kid do? You know, the people with the big land grants and tenants and full-time household workers.”

“Pitches in on the home farm a bit, usually…but I see your point.”

“You betcha. You insisted on high standards even for getting into the apprentice program, and it's
hard
learning to shoot a bow from the saddle of a galloping horse, or handle a lance. The A-lister's kids have the gear and the space and the trained horses and the leisure to
practice,
not to mention expert coaching from their parents and siblings. Plus one
hell
of an incentive—the land goes with the A-lister rank, and without money, how do you build up alternate investments? Plus the family has to be willing to let the kid go when they're sixteen to
be
a military apprentice, just when they're getting really useful on the farm or in the workshop and starting to pay off the parental investment. A-listers don't need their children's labor so badly.”

“It's not all family members,” Havel said defensively.

“Not yet. The original A-listers are too young to have many adolescent children; it's mostly their younger siblings so far. But when their offspring are old enough, you're going to find they're a
lot
more than half the apprentice uptake. And watch who marries whom, too, which'll push the process along even faster—the more so since it's a coed setup. I watched the same thing happen in the business world back before the Change in the seventies, eighties. When lawyers and executives were all men, they sometimes married secretaries. When women professionals arrived in numbers, they married other lawyers and executives.”

“I hadn't…Ouch.”

“So it's pretty likely the A-listers will vote in one of
your
kids as successor. Because by then it'll be unnatural to do anything else. So Signe's worrying, maybe unconsciously, if it'll be
her
kid, not just
yours.
Pam tells me that there were a lot of systems like that in the old days—where the throne was elective within a certain family, broadly defined. Like in the sagas—read about what the dozen sons of Harald Fairhair did to Norway sometime. If you acknowledge that Rudi Mackenzie
is
your son, everyone will believe it who's got eyes. He's older than young Mike, too. Old enough to start getting hints of what sort of a man he's going to be; he's smart, and he could charm a snake out of its skin, for starters.”

“Well, shit,” Havel said, pushing back his helmet by the nasal and rubbing his jaw. “But even if the position goes to one of my kids, I'd want to pick the best when they're old enough—for that matter it could be Mary or Ritva, as easily as Mike Jr. or Rudi.”

“That was probably Alexander the Great's plan, watching his kids grow and picking his own successor from the best of them. Unanticipated events sort of took a hand, and nobody's immortal. You ought to be thinking about this
now
, Mike. We don't have a tradition on how to handle succession yet. Note that I have an interest here too—if it's going to be hereditary, I want one of
my
grand-kids to get it.”

They looked at each other, and Larsson changed the subject. “When did they start that ‘Lord Kenneth' business?” he asked. “It fits for you and your shining-armor crowd, but why humble mechanical
me
?”

“You know perfectly well, and it's your own damned fault,” Havel replied, smiling. “They started it when your youngest talked them into it. She'll have them forsoothing next. You're not an A-lister, but you're my father-in-law and you're our…wizard, I suppose. Astrid loves that idea, by the way.”

“Astrid's perverted imagination is not
my
fault!”

“She's your daughter, isn't she? You let her slide into the Mistress of Ceremonies position, didn't you? You're also the one who let her wallow in all those doorstopper books with the lurid covers and knights and princes and warriorelf maids and wizards and walls of ice and quests for the Magical Dogtag of Doom and whatever.”

“I thought she'd grow out of it,” Ken Larsson said weakly.

Havel's boot knocked the sheath of his backsword aside with practiced ease as he sat on the stool before a drill press and went on: “She landed
me
with the Lord Bear nonsense before we'd finished who-eats-whom with Mr. Bruin. I'm surprised it hasn't turned into a
talking
bear conjured up by an evil sorcerer, and gotten slapped down in that goddamned illustrated journal she keeps.”

“Illuminated, not illustrated,” Larsson said.

They shared a chuckle at the thought of the—profusely illustrated—Red Book of Larsdalen. Sheer dogged persistence had let Astrid Larsson hang names out of her favorite books on a good many things, post-Change. A fanatic for Tolkien and his imitators could do a world of linguistic damage, particularly when things were in flux anyway and she was part of the ruling circle of families; Astrid hadn't shown any signs of growing out of it at the ripe old age of twenty-two, either. The younger generation was alarmingly given to humoring her—or even to taking up her enthusiasms simply because they sounded cool and torqued off their elders.

“I think it's the isolation, too,” Larsson said. “If we had more outside contacts, people would laugh us out of it. As it is, every little bunch of us is free to go off on their weird tangent of choice.”

Havel nodded. “Sounds plausible, in a horrible sort of way. So, what's up?” he went on, dropping his bear-topped helm on a table and running his hands over his bowl-cut black hair. “I've got to go read some reports by Signe's intel people about bandit trouble up on the northern border.
Anything
you've got to say will be more interesting than more goddamned reports.”

Larsson's single blue eye gleamed. He turned to a desk piled with papers and bearing a mechanical calculator he'd salvaged out of a museum, and pulled out a sheet covered with graphs from beneath his slide rule—the results of months of experiment over the winter.

“I think I've got a handle on the Change!”

Havel snorted. “How many times have we chewed the fat about that? Starting the morning after. I thought you'd gotten the reaper binder working.
That
we can use. Harvest is tricky. Or more penicillin. We could get another outbreak of the Black Death anytime and we're clear out of tetracycline.”

“No, not just a hypothesis this time—a theory with experimental confirmation.”

“You can
do
something about it?” Havel said, sitting bolt upright.

“Oh, hell, no, Mike. Do I look like an Alien Space Bat from an arbitrarily advanced civilization? Arbitrarily Advanced Alien Space Bats…sounds like a lobbying group. But I've gotten some idea of what's happening. Look at this.”