young men born and fed from the same soil and folk that had bred him, and when they were gone back home-or dead-he’d probably never see their like again.
The Dunedain were something else, wearing mail-lined leather tunics in sage-green and elegantly practical clothing of similar shades, chests blazoned with the Tree and Seven Stars and Crown and riding some of the prettiest horses he’d ever seen, mostly Arab by breed. They bowed in the saddle to him, with a massed murmur of “Ve thorthol.”
Which meant at your command, pretty much. He was getting good at conversations in pseudo-Elvish as long as they were mostly commonplaces and cliches. Though the first time Mary had started yelling in it during a clinch he’d nearly been thrown off his stride.
“No dirweg,” he replied: take care, or stay alert.
Polite youngsters, superb scouts in open country and even better in forests, very respectful of him as Mary’s husband and increasingly for his own abilities… and all of them at least a bit weird, in his opinion. He supposed they were his future, rather than his past.
“I’ll keep the enemy in sight… in our sight, out of theirs,” Mary said cheerfully, swinging up into the saddle of her dappled Arab mare as gracefully as an otter climbing onto a rock. “And let you know if they turn away from our muttonish bait.”
They reached out and touched hands for an instant; then she turned the horse with a motion of balance and thighs, and cried: “Garo chur an dagororo! Noro lim, Rochael, noro lim!”
He suppressed his anxiety with a practiced effort of will. Mary was very, very good with her weapons; most of the few professional fighting women he’d met were. Male soldiers could get by with being average, more or less, because most of the opposition would be too. You had to be way out on the right edge of the curve if you were going to risk your life over and over again fighting people on average bigger and thicker-boned and stronger than you were. His wife wasn’t petite; she was a big strapping young woman taller than the average man, heavy as some and as strong as many. Sparring with her was like trying to nail a ghost to a wall, she was fast as a cat and sneaky as a fox, an even better rider than he was and a dead shot with the recurve…
Of course, you can still just get unlucky, especially if there’s artillery involved… back to business!
“Ensign Vogeler!” he said as they bore away northwest.
Mark brought up the trumpet he wore on a baldric.
“Sound advance in column of twos.”
This was all supposed to buy time. He hoped someone was using it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK CHARTERED CITY OF WALLA WALLA PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION (FORMERLY SOUTHEASTERN WASHINGTON STATE) HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA) AUGUST 23, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
T iphaine nodded as Sir Tancred saluted with fist to breastplate, whistled for his squire and horse, and detached a conroi of lancers and two of mounted crossbowmen to stay with her. Only a few of her own menie were with her now and they all had real work to do; if you were a retainer of d’Ath you usually had more urgent things to do than dance attendance and lend her credence.
Then he swung easily into the saddle despite a full set of plate and cantered off to the army camp that had sprung up outside Walla Walla’s northern wall in the course of the long day now ending. She looked after the Guard commander with a slight envy; he had a straightforward job to do.
Whereas I have to spend the evening herding barons and bucking up justifiably terrified townsmen and reassuring a Count. Still, that’s a big part of higher command.
The force she’d brought was off the trains and camped on what was usually common-pasture for the chartered city’s horses and mules, with a few spilling over into stubble-fields. A low constant rumble came from it; rows of tents, dust smoking from under wheels and hooves and boots, picket lines, neatly racked bicycles and pyramidal stacks of twelve-foot lances and seven-foot infantry spears, lines of field artillery parked next to their limbers. Grooms and squires were leading strings of horses down to the water of the little Walla Walla River, or to irrigation ditches; files on work detail made the light loess soil fly in a chorus of spades and dirt and muttered curses as they dug sanitary trenches. Light blinked fiercely from metal, and here and there the heraldic banners and shields of baron and knight were splashes of color, but most of it was variations on the color of the soil.
A little farther off the landscape still looked peaceful and prosperous despite its aridity, surprisingly so to someone reared west of the Cascades. Here it was two months before the winter rains were due and it seemed dubious that it had ever rained at all. Reaped grain fields stood sere and yellow-brown, shedding ochre dust to the occasional whirling wind-devil, with the odd remaining wheat-stack like a giant round thatched hut of deeper gold. Poplar trees made vertical accents along a canal, more conspicuous for the general lack of trees, with here or there the intense green of vines or fruit trees or alfalfa and sweet clover in blocks startling against the dun landscape. Rippling distant hills quivering with heat haze were the brown of summer-sere bunchgrass. The creaking sails of tall frame windmills circled, grinding grain or pumping water, and villages of rammed-earth cottages stood each with its church steeple, clustered around the gardens and groves of manor houses often based on pre-Change farms.
You couldn’t see how few folk remained, or how the ones who did worked at a frantic pace with spears close to hand, under the protection of mounted guards. The smell right here made it obvious that peace had flown, though. She took a deep breath through her nose. War did have a set of smells all its own, like the varied bouquets of wine. She liked wine well enough; Sandra had put her through an informal course in telling the various types apart. But she was a connoisseur of the bouquet of lethal conflicts.
Even when you weren’t fighting in a miasma of copper-iron blood and the unique scent of cut-open stomach, or marching past the week-old bloated bodies of dead livestock and smoldering burnt-out houses. Mostly war smelled of old stale sweat soaked into wool, unwashed feet and armpits and crotches, horses, and canola oil smeared on metal and leather and long since gone rancid. A big camp like this added the woodsmoke of campfires, salt pork and beans and tortillas cooking, the charcoal and scorched metal of the little wheeled forges the field farriers used, and latrine trenches. It was all the smell of her trade, the way manure was to a groom or dye-vats to a clothier or incense to a cleric.
Getting the expeditionary force detrained and ready to march had gone fairly smoothly, but she’d been at it all day. Too often dealing with various noble scions who insisted on quarreling over precedence and citing cases right back to the day Norman Arminger proclaimed himself Lord Protector, and who considered themselves too important to listen to anyone but the Grand Constable in person.
That was the drawback of calling out the arriere-ban, the full levy of the Association; you got everyone who had military obligations to the Crown, which meant mobilizing a lot of contumacious, well-and-high-born pricks who hated taking orders from anyone, even if their lives depended on it. Some of the great families had followed their medieval models all too seriously.
I haven’t had to kill any of them. Yet. Which is almost disappointing. Though it’s fun bringing home that the rules in the Schedule of Ranks really, really, really do apply to the ones who think they can’t possibly be expected to go on campaign without three pavilions, a chef and hot and cold running mistresses.
A very small bleak smile turned her lips; she had a long straight-nosed regular face, but at that moment it looked very like a predatory bird. She’d had any baggage found over the established maximum for a man’s status pitched off the barges on the Columbia or the railcars as they turned up later and left for the fish, the coyotes, the camp followers and anyone who had a use for a down mattress or six sets of court dress or a knock-down bathtub or a crate of Domaine Meriwether Cuvee Prestige ’15 with bottles of pickled oysters on the side. Excess servants had been shed with a little more ceremony, but not much.
The fingers of her left hand touched the twelve silver-inlaid notches on the hilt of her long sword, the metal smooth and cool against the callused skin. Nobody had argued much, however purple their faces turned.
A party rode up from the camp. A nobleman in gear that looked to have seen hard use in the last few days led them, and over their heads a fork-tailed baron’s pennant flew from a lance. A squire behind him carried a shield that had been recently and roughly field-repaired after being hit repeatedly with things sharp and hard and
