months there every year after the war… as well as could be asked. Certainly we both learned much of kingcraft from her. We can never know the whole inwardness of another, nor all the paths their souls take from the Eastern to the Western gate. Not even our own, until the Dread Lord comes for us, and we stand before the Guardians in the place where Truth is seen whole.
“Our children,” Mathilda said again, leaning against him.
“When we’ve made a world safe for them,” he said. “So, let’s be about it, eh? We’ve troops to muster. Nearly as important, we need to get a better handle on what’s been going on here while we were away questing for the Sword.”
Mathilda nodded vigorously, her eyes going narrow with calculation. When she did that, she could look disquietingly like her mother. Rudi knew he was quick-witted; he suspected that in her way his handfasted wife was more intelligent still. More subtle, certainly, and perhaps a little more systematic.
“And not just the big things, battles won or lost, castles defended or not,” she said. “All the details. It’s going to be crucial to manage the politics properly from the start and we can’t assume things stood still while we were gone.”
“That’s my girl!” he laughed. “Though Chancellor Ignatius will have to take most of the burden perforce… and I’ll need him in the field eventually.”
“He’s a very able man. And not from the Protectorate.”
“Sure, and that’s one reason I appointed him. That and being absolutely sure of him.”
She frowned, still lost in thought. “And that’s why I’m glad we sent your Aunt Astrid off on Operation Luthien.”
“I took your advice on that, acushla, though it’s a thin chance, but what’s the relation?”
“Mom always said you have to remember that individual people exist in themselves, but things like nations and clans and armies and classes and religions only exist because people think they exist. They’re not rocks, they’re a swarm of people all flocking in the same direction. I mean, think of Montival-it didn’t exist two years ago, and now it does, and that’s because we pretty much talked people into thinking it did. By letter, at that.”
“A point, though we were pushing on an open door. The folk wanted to believe in a… dream of greatness. When people by the scores of thousands are convinced something is true, that truth can hit you very much like a rock. Hence our problems with the Church Universal and Triumphant and its Prophet Sethaz, the creature.”
She nodded. “That’s so. But Mom also always said that when bunches of people are fighting against each other, whether it’s with arms or words, you have to remember that they’re not rocks colliding. They’re people colliding. Every helmet has a head under it, and the head can think. The whole point of politics is to get people to do what you think they should. Bashing them is just one way of doing that. That’s why Operation Luthien is so important. I think it might help us… talk some people out of thinking that a certain set of rocks exist. And make them believe in our rocks.”
“With the Sword in my left hand, and you at my right, I’m going to be invincible,” Rudi grinned. Then more soberly: “Though we’d best remember this is far bigger than either of us the now, the story of many and not ours alone. We may be at the center, but it’s the wheel that matters, not just the hub.”
One arm went around her shoulders. He put the other hand’s thumb and forefinger to his lips and whistled sharply. There was a moment’s silence, and then figures with long yew bows in their hands came trotting down out of the trees, hard to see at first in their green-covered brigandines and Mackenzie-tartan kilts and plaids. As they formed up around the High King and Queen for the walk back to Dun Juniper one began to sing, and they all took it up. When he recognized the tune so did Rudi, despite Mathilda’s laughing gesture of protest: “Near Sutterdown, in the country round
One morning last Beltaine
Down a boreen green came a sweet colleen
And she was whistlin’ Rudi’s Tain.
She looked so sweet from her sandaled feet
To the sheen of her nut-brown hair
Such a coaxing elf, sure I shook myself
To see if I was really there!”
“That song’s a mutilation!” Mathilda said. “I’ve heard the original.”
“I call it an improvement,” Rudi said. “This isn’t Erin, after all!
And he continued in a strong tenor: “From Ashland’s plays up to Portland’s quays
From Bend down to Coos Bay town
No maid I’ve seen like the fair colleen
That I met near Sutterdown!
As she onward sped I shook my head
And I gazed with a feeling rare
And I said, says I, to a passerby
‘Who’s the maid with the nut-brown hair?’
He smiled at me, and with pride says he,
‘That’s the gem of our own Clan’s crown…’ ”
CHAPTER TWO
SHATTUCK HALL, TEMPORARY CHANCELLERY CROWN CITY OF PORTLAND (FORMERLY PORTLAND, OREGON) PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA) JULY 31, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
“ M y Lord Chancellor,” his executive assistant said. “Abbot-Bishop Dmwoski to see you.”
“Thank you, Ms. Wong,” Ignatius said, with a polite nod.
Many hats to keep straight, he thought; the title still felt a little unnatural.
Though at present, with the hood of his scapular thrown back, there was nothing between his tonsured head with its rim of raven hair and the ceiling. He was a slim broad-shouldered man of medium height, with a pale weathered regular face and slightly tilted black eyes, the legacy of a Vietnamese grandmother brought back here after some half-forgotten war of the ancient world.
Knight-brother of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict, priest, Lord Chancellor of Montival. Remember that names do not make the man. You are a human soul like uncounted millions more, the smallholder’s boy baptized Karl Bergfried; as precious to God as they, and no more so.
“Please send him through immediately,” he went on. “Then the mustering reports from the Ashland… no, it’s the Liu matter, isn’t it?”
He concealed a rush of embarrassment at her raised eyebrow. Adjunct Professor Felicia Wong was from Corvallis, part of the University Faculty of Administration there-which meant that she was a junior-to-middlinglevel bureaucrat on secondment from the city-state’s government, and hoping to get in on the ground floor of the new High Kingdom’s administration. Faculties were the term Corvallans used for what most people called guilds; a little confusingly they were also part of the University’s teaching structure. Like their terminology, they also insisted on dressing in what Ignatius considered an absurdly archaic manner; in her case, a button-down dress shirt, a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, blue denim trousers and a painstaking modern re-creation of an old- world type of shoe known, for no discernible reason, as a sneaker.
She was also hard-working and efficient, and everyone was entitled to their foibles. Even if she was in her early thirties, scarcely older than he. Effectively they were as much Changelings as those born after that day in 1998.
“Yes, my lord Chancellor. The Liu children are expected momentarily.”
“Notify me when they arrive.”
I have been lurching from emergency to emergency all month. This lack of system wastes time, but there is no time to introduce a system! I must delegate more! But there is no time to test and come to know my subordinates. I must know more, I have been absent for two years, but there is scarcely a moment to spare to read, think or question people.
