Juliet frowned. “But how does just getting us out of the Compound help? There’s the city wall, and the Compound’s in continuous touch with the defenses there by semaphore and heliograph!”
Ritva smiled thinly. “Trust me,” she said. “I’ve gotten all the way from Montival to the Sunrise Lands and back.”
Though that didn’t involve something like this, she thought behind her confident expression. Dulu! I hope Aunt Astrid likes this idea!
CHAPTER TWELVE
COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK CHARTERED CITY OF WALLA WALLA PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION (FORMERLY EASTERN WASHINGTON) HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA) AUGUST 23, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
“ T hat’s that,” Grand Constable Tiphaine d’Ath said, tasting sweat on her lips.
It must still be well over ninety degrees, though the temperature was falling a bit with the sun. She slapped her leather riding gauntlets into the palm of her left hand in a slight puff of dust. The omnipresent grit was one of the things she disliked about the eastern fiefs; her own estates were in the northern Willamette valley, which had a decently moderate climate where things stayed green year-round. Then she stifled a yawn, brought on by the sultry stillness as much as real fatigue. The sun was low in the west, turning the thin clouds there crimson, and the sky was darkening towards night eastward behind the distant line of the Blue Mountains. At least it would drop to decent sleeping weather later. The air here was too dry to hold the heat long.
The end of a long summer day, and she’d been the first to get off the train an hour before dawn after a short period of semisleep on the pitching, clanking vehicle. Since then she’d been supervising while the army she’d brought pitched camp outside Walla Walla’s northern gate and unloaded supplies for the campaign.
Ah, the glory of knightly combat.
“Right, that’s the last of them, my lady,” the commander of the Protector’s Guard said, mentally checking off a list. “The signals chain says the line’s clear as far west as the Wallula Gap. We’re holding the rest of the empty rolling stock just east of the city ready to come back through.”
“Get that started now, Sir Tancred. I want them out of the way and the line and stock ready for military use.”
A final load of boxes came off a railcar and onto a wagon, and a clerk stepped forward and ran a paintbrush over a stencil on their sides while another made a tick on a ledger. The team of sixteen big mules had been led away and replaced by fresh beasts, hitched to what had been the rear of the train and hitched up to pull it back westbound; they leaned into their traces to get the six empty flatbed cars away from the platform. It halted again where the refugees waited to embark.
A crowd of a hundred or so civilians surged forward under the direction of a file of infantry; mostly peasants by their shapeless undyed linsey-woolsey clothing and floppy homemade straw hats, and more than half women with youngsters.
“No, no!” the sergeant in charge screamed. “All you strong ones, hand up your bundles and brats! Then you push to get it started, and then you climb on. You, you, you-”
The butt of his spear flicked out and tapped to conscript volunteers.
“-just grab the handles… oh, St. Dismas have mercy, the fucking handles, the… these things, these things! Just wait until I tell you, then push, then get on!”
They handed up bundles and baskets and swaddled infants, then settled with dumb patience, half a dozen ready to push each car. They were silent save for the wailing babes and toddlers, their eyes wide and bewildered as they stared around at city and army. Most of them were Changelings, and probably hadn’t been more than a day’s walk from their villages since they were born. Or at least had been toddlers themselves when their parents were resettled.
Tiphaine nodded to Sir Tancred. “Warn Sir Varocher at Castle Dorian that five or six thousand civilians are heading their way, mostly sick or children and their mothers. He has authority to draw on the other castles and the stores in Wallula Town as necessary. They’ll need to be fed and checked over by the physicians before they’re loaded on the barges.”
She paused for a moment and then added in the same flat tone, “Emphasize that I and the Lady Regent will be extremely displeased if they’re not treated in a humane and chivalrous manner, peasants or no.”
He scribbled a note on a clipboard and shouted for a messenger. The warning would be taken seriously; when the Lady Regent Sandra was extremely displeased the headsman’s ax or the two-handed sword reserved for noble Associates tended to become involved. Or people just mysteriously dropped dead with no apparent cause or had perfectly plausible accidents and wise living people carefully didn’t comment. A page dashed up, bowed, took the note and ran for a tall metal framework not far away, scampering up the rungs of the ladder built into it as agile as a monkey. Moments later the heliograph atop it began to blink.
“What’s the condition of the railroad draught teams?” she asked.
“Not bad, my lady. We’ve replaced the worst tired ones from the town and the Count’s herds, one-for-one, on your authority. There’s plenty of alfalfa and sweet clover hay by the watering points and we’ve been baiting them on that and milled barley and oats and bean-mash as they came in. The first in are already rested and well fed and ready for another run. The Count’s men have been very cooperative and pretty well organized. Not to mention his veterinary officers.”
“They’d better be, Sir Tancred,” Tiphaine said. “We don’t have time for pissing matches or screwups. Not if we’re going to make the enemy react to us, rather than the other way ’round.”
Walla Walla hadn’t been a large city before the Change as they reckoned things then; a bit under thirty thousand, and reasonably compact, with less sprawl at the edges than most urban settlements of the time. It had also contained the fortresslike State Penitentiary, with over two thousand hardened cons, who’d broken out on Change Day Five and taken the city over. When the Lord Protector’s troops arrived later that year, there had been a mass uprising of what was left of the population in their favor.
“All aboard!” the train driver said. “Loose brakes-”
The brakemen spun their wheels, and the stronger passengers-to-be the sergeant had selected set their hands to the grips and pushed to get the cars rolling; the mules knew the drill, and started to lean into their collars even before the long whip snapped over their backs. The crowded cars began to move along the rusted steel, to a chorus of shrieks and wailing children. Inching at first, slowing again for an instant as the pushers clambered aboard, and then rumbling up to a fast walk; an animal could pull a lot more on rail than on even the best road.
Tiphaine nodded in satisfaction. One of the first things she’d learned back fifteen years ago when she moved from small-unit black ops into the conventional military was just how hard it was to keep a major troop movement from seizing up into a series of ungovernable traffic jams.
Conrad and his staff taught me that; and how hard it was to get everything in the right place at the right time so people don’t get hopelessly lost, starve, get sick, or run out of crossbow bolts or horseshoes at a crucial moment. Sandra always was good at finding her people mentors.
Conrad Renfrew had also been in charge of that first expedition of conquest up the Columbia to Walla Walla; from what Tiphaine had read in the records, he’d killed a couple of hundred of the convicts, recruited about seventy-five for service elsewhere, and put the rest to forced labor for the rest of their short miserable lives, mostly getting in the harvest round about and then making a beginning on the fortifications and helping make things habitable for the refugees from Spokane and the western cities and the Columbia plateau selected for resettlement on the new manors. Then he’d installed the present Count’s father, who’d been his second-in-command and to whom Norman Arminger owed multiple favors, and departed for the next urgent job. Of which there had been an infinite number then.
A nice workmanlike job, Tiphaine thought judiciously. Solid, like Conrad.
She’d been fourteen then, training with Katrina in Lady Sandra’s household, initially for clandestine work. Young females made extremely efficient assassins, if they had the right attitudes, training and native talent. They
