Ingolf Vogeler woke, yawned, stretched comfortably and for a moment just enjoyed feeling clean and reasonably well rested between linen sheets and snuggled close to his wife. Then another knock came on the door and he realized the first one had woken him up.
He was wearing drawers and Mary was in a long shirt that would do for a shift. From what he’d seen, the Association folk were about as modest about skin as his own people… which wasn’t something you could just assume when you traveled far. Places had started out different before the Change and gotten more so, fast, when the world closed in again and each area was isolated from the other’s ideas and customs. And some were left to stew in whatever lunacy had bubbled to the top when a charismatic madman took charge. He’d seen places where you’d get attacked for taking off your shirt-men would.
“Come in,” he said.
The door opened and a servant girl came through with a tray that held a steaming pot of something aromatic. Probably not coffee or real tea this far from the coast, and not chicory either from the smell; after a moment he identified it as peppermint tea. A moment after that he really looked at the shadows cast through the window.
“Holy… holy things, what time is it?”
The servant girl smiled. “It’s eleven of the clock, my lord,” she said. “Lord de Grimmond said that we should let you sleep, you’d been fighting for us and then working hard with the troops and the wounded late into the night.”
She was unremarkable in every respect, and dressed in a plain good outfit of a short knee-length tunic over a long ankle-length one, with a shirtlike shift underneath and a kerchief on her head and stout shoes. The smile was welcome, though; late though it had been everyone in the little town of Grimmond-on-the-Wold had turned out to help with the wounded by torch and lantern light, and they’d pitched in for the Richlanders and Sioux just as hard as they had for their own folk. It was nice to be a valued ally, even if it was mainly because they were scared spitless at what was coming at them.
I would be too. Hell, I am scared. I was a prisoner in Corwin, even if I don’t remember all of it-and don’t want to. I know what the Cutters are, and Boise’s in bed with them. Not so sure about God being the way Mom thought, but the Devil? You betcha.
“Thank you,” he said, accepting the polished wooden tray.
Mary sat up and murmured thanks as well, reaching for a cup.
“Luncheon will be in an hour, my lord, my lady; en famille, in the gazebo court. Lord de Grimmond said to tell you that everyone you want to contact immediately will be there.”
“Lord de Stafford?”
“He’s gone, my lord. He left his regards and said he had to get back to his main force to make sure everything was ready. He didn’t say ready for what, my lord.”
She bobbed a curtsy and left, with the quick step of someone who has important work waiting.
“What time did we get to bed?” he said, rubbing his face, doing it carefully because of a couple of bruises. “I feel indecent, lying up this late. There’s a lot to do.”
Mary made an indelicate slurping sound as she sipped the hot tea; he followed suit. The acrid-sweet liquid seemed to clear the cobwebs from his mind, enough for him to notice that there was a bandage on his right forearm, and from the dull ache underneath a couple of stitches, not quite sharp enough to be real pain. It was a familiar feeling, and a familiar place-that was the most vulnerable part of a swordsman’s anatomy and he had the white scar lines on his skin to prove it, this would just be one more. You could wear a vambrace, but he’d always thought the minute loss of speed wasn’t worth it most of the time.
He worked the fingers, testing the feeling in his arm and the degree of play; nothing serious, and he could use it hard at a pinch, though ideally he’d wait a few days before putting any strain on it.
“When did we go to bed or when did we get to sleep?” Mary asked, working her eyebrows and grinning. “As I recall, you weren’t that tired. At first.”
“Well, a soldier learns to-”
“Sleep and eat and whatever, whenever he can. I am a Ranger, darling. Same saying. C’mon, they’ve got showers here. Solar heating system, all the hot water we want on tap.”
“Didn’t we shower last night?”
“How often do you get the chance? Without waiting for the water to heat, even?”
“Point,” he said. “Very definite point. Have to keep this bandage dry somehow, though.”
“I’ll soap and rinse and dry you again. Thoroughly, very thoroughly. And whatever.”
When they came out again, dressed for the day in a clean set of the rough clothing you used when traveling or fighting, the bedding had been stripped from the four-poster and their own kit was on the bare frame, neatly strapped up into their saddle-rolls. Ingolf looked around the room again, this time by daylight. An experienced eye told him that nothing except the double-glazed sash windows was pre-Change; he’d worked for years running a salvager outfit making trips deep into the wildlands to loot the dead cities. It hadn’t been that different from his previous job as head of a troop of paid soldiers; in fact, they’d included a lot of the same people.
That lack of old-world goods was a little rare; most places had a mixture, with more new-made as the years went on. The rest of the room was just a big rectangle with pleasantly shaped wooden furniture in the rather twisty PPA Gothic style, armor-stands for their harness and weapons, exposed but smoothly planed and attractively carved beams above, a floor of polished western larch, and a couple of alpaca rugs patterned in vivid geometric patterns of black and red and off-white. A fireplace was built into one wall, a closed model with a metal door in its tiled face, empty now with summer. The only fancy touch was a Catholic prie-dieu in a corner, with an image of an armored woman with a halo in the central panel of the triptych facing it.
“St. Joan,” Mary said, making a reverence with hands pressed together before her face. “She’s their patron here, and a powerful one when you’re fighting invaders.”
He was still figuring out the Dunedain attitude towards religion. It seemed to include cheerfully stealing everything from anyone; sort of like the Old Religion of Rudi’s bunch but with different names. He’d been brought up a conventional but not very intense Catholic himself, and gotten careless about it in his wandering years. Since Nantucket, he’d become increasingly unwilling to be skeptical about anyone’s approach to the supernatural, which caused its own difficulties. He didn’t feel comfortable with treating faith as a buffet lunch, either.
He also noticed the windows were deep-seated, confirming his initial impression that the manor was built by ramming moist earth down hard between frames and then letting it air-cure, what some called pise. The natural texture of well-made rammed-earth pise was like a coarse porous stone, often with the impress of the framing still visible, but the interior here was smoothly plastered and the outside whitewashed. One of the advantages of the material was that it was no great trouble to make it as thick as you wanted; at this second-story level it was over a yard through. They had fittings for steel shutters, too, and the wall surround on the window wasn’t square, it was beveled in. That would let you step up to a slit in the shutter and shoot an arrow or crossbow bolt through it easily at any angle under full protection.
Uh-huh, he noted. Wall all around the manor gardens, too. Nothing to a siege train or field catapults, say twelve-pounders, or even just regular troops with assault ladders, but you could put the whole village in here for a while and stand off bandits or a casual raid easy. Rammed earth’s not quite as strong as concrete, but it’s more than halfway there once it’s had time to cure and it’s a lot cheaper and easier to come by. Good stuff, as long as you can keep too much water off it.
They passed more people stripping and bundling and crating things outside, turning what had been a big rambling comfortable house into an empty shell, and dodged a string of eight men with a long rolled-up rug or major tapestry. He found the sight oddly melancholy. One of the crew working at removal was the girl who’d brought them their tea.
“Taking stuff up to the castle?” he said, as she passed with a big basket full of linens.
“Oh, no, my lord. The castle’s much too crowded with more important things. This is all going up into the mountains.”
The gazebo court turned out to be part of the gardens at the rear of the house, which covered several acres. The gazebo part was a long arched wooden trellis, overgrown with a great sheet of green vine thickly starred with trumpet-shaped crimson flowers; the table was underneath. The rest of the gardens were a spectacular blaze of flower beds and blue oaks, copper beeches and poplars, with the odd stretch of lawn. Terraces and wandering paths paved with basalt blocks stepped down from the higher terrace the house was built on, with water channels
