guess you hate someone who’s turned on you worse than someone who’s just an enemy.
He took a deep breath. Duty first. That was something his father’s training and that of his new faith agreed on utterly.
“Let’s go, Your Majesty,” he said formally.
A little to the north was the canal that supplied the town’s water and powered its mills; they could hear a grumbling sound through the screen of trees, as grain was ground and wood sawn and flax pounded. Then they turned south and crossed the Sutter river itself and its band of oaks and firs, willows and shaggy meadows; that was Clan land, sacred to Cernunnos and Flidais, barred to heavy use by humankind and the tame animals that lived with men. Its edges were marked at intervals by tall stakes carved with a stag-headed man or a white deer, and the Mackenzies made a reverence as they passed. Several had small offerings of flowers at their feet.
Or it’s a State park, he thought dryly. And protecting stream banks from trampling and erosion makes excellent sense. Though… I do remember Dad complaining about how hard it was to enforce regulations like that. Maybe it’s easier for people to defer to a Lady who drives a chariot pulled by snow-white deer through their dreams than to bend their necks to a rule in a book written by a bureaucrat far away.
Of course, you can just kill anyone who breaks your rules. I know someone who thinks like that…
“Somethin’ on your mind, Fred?” Virginia said softly, under the clop of hooves and creak of saddle leather.
“I was thinking about home, honey,” he said. “My mother and sisters, trapped there with… him.”
“We’ll see to that,” she said stoutly.
He took a deep breath. Don’t flinch, he told himself. And in the meantime it was a fair day in pretty country, riding a good horse past orchards and fields, with the fir-sap smell of the mountains that reared westward coming on the warm breeze. And he was young, and the woman he loved rode at his side, and he was going to set his people free.
The prisoner-of-war camp was a mile south across flat open land; close enough to the town to be convenient, but beyond the ring of crofts worked by people living within the walls and equally far from the nearest farming dun. It was shaggy rough pasture and clumps of burgeoning young forest in normal times, with low wooded hills beyond. The camp was rows of tents, or rough barracks built of poles, wattle-and-daub, and salvage goods from nearby ruins. A board trestle brought in water from a spring, and a few more substantial buildings had been run up to serve as an infirmary, cookhouse and bathhouse; there were piles of boards from the sawmills near Sutterdown, ready to be turned into weather-tight winter quarters. Neatly tilled vegetable gardens surrounded it all, and he could smell that it was well policed, just turned earth and woodsmoke and the warm scents of vegetation with no reek of unwashed bodies or overfull latrines.
Rudi reined in, and gave a slight sideways inclination of the head to indicate that Fred and Virginia should ride in first. There was a fence around the camp, but no wall; it was a marker rather than a barrier, and the two-score of Clan warriors with spear and bow looked relaxed enough, like the pack of big shaggy hunting dogs at their feet. A parade ground was already crowded; most of the seven hundred men here had been taken near Dayton, back in March.
Frederick shivered a little. He’d heard about that. A CUT Seeker had been with them. And Juniper Mackenzie had been there too…
“Ten- hut!” a sergeant barked as they rode up.
The High King’s guardsmen put their bicycles on their kickstands and stood at parade rest behind Rudi Mackenzie-or behind High King Artos, probably. They didn’t have shafts nocked, but that could be changed very quickly indeed with the bows strung. Fred dismounted and walked forward. The men were braced at attention, but quite properly they were looking at Rudi. A quick glance showed him they were mostly in good health. Well fed, certainly, and only a few showed healing wounds. Their olive-green uniforms were the field model, meant to be worn under armor and optimized for endurance and protection rather than comfort. The rough cloth was clean but worn and patched, and a few had been eked out with civilian gear.
The High King leaned forward on the pommel of his saddle and waved a hand towards Fred.
“I’m not the center of this occasion, to be sure,” he said in a clear carrying voice. “Stand your men at ease, if you would.”
Fred took a long breath and stepped forward. A rising murmur started to turn into shouts as dozens recognized him. One of the officers drawn up to the right of the block of enlisted men shouted: “Sir!”
That was aimed at Artos, not at him; the man was ostentatiously ignoring Frederick Thurston. He was in his thirties and gaunt-looking, with an empty left sleeve pinned to his olive-green jacket. The other hand pointed at Fred, who recognized him; he’d been tight with Martin.
“Sir, this is… is unacceptable.”
Rudi smiled. “Captain Hargood, isn’t it?”
“Ah… yes, sir. Centurion Hargood, under the new regulations, technically.”
“Well, Captain Hargood, there’s naught in the rules or customs of honorable war, from before the Change or since, which says prisoners can’t be talked at. I can’t make you pay attention and I certainly can’t make you believe what you hear-wouldn’t if I could, unlike some people I could name-but I can and do insist that you stand quietly. Now go do it, man, and stop wasting our time.”
A pause, then his voice went hard and cracked out: “Back in ranks!” Hargood blinked and recoiled half a pace, then obeyed. Fred took one more step forward and flung up a hand.
“Nobody has to listen to me,” he said, pitching his voice to carry as he’d been trained. “Anyone who doesn’t want to hear what I have to say can leave right now. No names, no punishments.”
The buzz rose and then fell, as the ranks rippled. A good many left; he estimated that it was more than a tenth but less than a fifth. Hargood hesitated, since he was more than smart enough to realize that the exodus was lowering the hostility quotient Fred had to face, but then decided he had to join it for form’s sake.
I do like putting an enemy where all his choices are bad, Fred thought grimly.
Not all the looks he got from the rest were friendly, but they seemed willing to listen, at least.
“You’re mainly the Third Battalion, right?” Fred said. “That correct, Sergeant Saunders?”
He was looking at a platoon sergeant he’d met on maneuvers when he was in the ROTC. The man licked his lips, looked to either side and then cleared his throat and spoke:
“Yes… sir. We got… captured in March, up north and east of here.”
“That would be near Dayton? Castle Campscapell? Stand easy all, by the way.”
“Yessir, big concrete fort, castle, whatever.” He paused to lick his lips. “We took it last year, after this CUT guy opened the door, is how I heard it. You know what happened there when we were taken, sir?”
“I hear about that when we got back, yes. I’ve talked to Lady Juniper about it. She tried to explain and she was using English, mostly, but it didn’t mean Thing One to me. Something about casting trouble in your dreams. And she said that she could only do it… do it without some sort of heavy blowback… because the CUT had one of their Seekers there and he was doing things.”
The sergeant nodded vigorously. “He… he’d talk to you and it was like flies buzzing inside your head, I’m not shitting you, sir. Like the world was twisting into a bad dream, and maybe if it went on long enough you wouldn’t wake up. And we’re still trying to figure out what the hell happened that night; we just… had some real strange dreams and then woke up and there were a bunch of Mackenzies standing over us. And that Seeker dude was lying with his body in one place and his head about a yard away and the biggest badass I’ve ever seen with the biggest Godammed sword was standing over him grinning like a cat.”
“Little John Hordle. He is sort of impressive.”
“That was how the Third got here. Some of the rest came in just lately, from the Tenth and Fifth and some cavalry pukes, but a lot of those were wounded, and they were all captured in the usual way.”
Fred nodded. “Have you men been treated all right?” he asked.
The noncom shrugged, looking a little less nervous; he was a snub-nosed young man about Fred’s own age, with close-cropped blond hair and a healing scar across the side of his face.
“Yessir,” he said. “It’s not a beer-bash being a prisoner, but we got good medical care and plenty of plain food. Better than field rations, a bit. Work details for the enlisted men but nothing too hard and no direct help to the enemy war effort, farm work and lumberjacking mainly, just about enough to earn our keep.”
There were nods from many at that. The majority were from farm families themselves, doing their compulsory three years of military service, which became for the duration in time of war. They knew that food might
