S. Stirling - A Meeting At Corvallis

Havel nodded vigorously, then removed his helmet and handed it to a military apprentice-a teenaged aspirant to A-Lister status-and ran his hands over his bowl-cut hair. That was straight and coarse and still crow black in his late thirties, a legacy of his Anishinabe-Ojibwa grandmother. The high cheekbones and slanted set to his gray eyes might have been from her, or from the Karelian Finns who made up most of the rest of his ancestry; the sharp-cut features were startlingly handsome in a harsh, masculine way, emphasized by the long white scar that ran from the corner of his left eye and across his forehead. He stood just under six feet, and his lean frame moved with a leopard's easy grace under fifty pounds of armor and padding.

"Yeah, good point," he said to his sister-in-law.

He gave the militia a glare, and they shuffled uneasily-which produced an alarming volume of clanks and clinks among two hundred people in metal protective gear.

"This field's pretty level; if you can't advance over it without breaking front, what's going to happen on a battlefield, maybe with grapevines or fences, and people shooting at you? Or if you have to do something more complicated than pushing straight ahead? You let a pike wall get ragged, and the Protectors knights will be all over you like flies on cowshit. One-on-one, they'll slaughter you. Keep drilling until the formation's always tight, and you slaughter them. It's as simple as that. Understood?"

"Yes, Lord Bear!"

"I can't hear you."

"Yes, Lord Bear!"

"All right, that's enough for today. Fall in, and we'll see if the barbeque's ready."

That brought more cheers, and more cheerful ones; the padding around the blades of weapons was stripped off and tossed into a light cart, and everyone wiped their faces, scraped off the worst of the mud and straightened their gear. The apprentice brought him his horse, Gustav; he swung into the saddle easily enough, despite the weight of hauberk and weapons. The infantry company formed up on the roadway that led westward from this stretch of pasture; an officer gave a shouted pikepoints: up! and fall in! and the long shafts rose, like an ordered bare forest. The footmen went first, as the victors of the contest, swinging off with a good marching step; the A-listers followed along, looking fairly glum at first.

Except for Astrid, and the young man riding by her side. Alleyne Loring wore different gear, a complete set of jointed steel plate topped by a visored sallet helm, what Havel had thought of as King Arthur armor when he was a kid, the type beloved of Victorian illustrators. The Pre-Raphaelite look was emphasized by the fog that clung to hollows and treetops round about, making a fantasy of the rolling fields and woodlots. The armor was actually late-medieval in inspiration, fifteenth-century or so, but manufactured post-Change out of high-strength alloy steel stock by jury-rigged hydraulic presses in southern England.

Havel grinned like a happy wolf. Alleyne was also young, only a few years older than Astrid, and six feet tall, blondly handsome, dashing, charming, from a far-off foreign place and in the process of saying "Sinome maruvan ar Hildinyar, vanimalion noastari: "

"Onen i-Estel Edain -" Astrid replied in the same liquidly pretty tongue, which sounded Celtic but wasn't; Havel understood not a word of it.

My languages being limited to English, a bit of Ojibwa, rudimentary Finnish and some Arabic cusswords I picked up in the Gulf, he thought. None of the Tongues of Middle-earth included in the package.

"You're looking like the coyote that met the rabbit coming 'round the rock," Signe said.

"Thanks to those Tasmanians-poor bastards-and their world survey voyage I think we may finally have gotten your little sister hooked up," Havel said. "And out of our hair."

"Hey!" She punched him on the shoulder. Since he was wearing a hauberk with padded gambeson beneath, that was mostly symbolic, but her voice was only a little defensive as she went on: "Astrid's been: useful."

"And a lot less trouble since she started up that Ranger outfit out in the woods. But she's still trying to trick us all out in costumes from those books she likes. She makes Norman Arminger sound as everyday as a dental hygienist."

"Granted she's a flapping wingnut, but a handy wingnut to have around. A lot of stuff we've done wouldn't have been nearly as popular if we hadn't had her to slap some cool, antique name on it and give it some style. It kept those Society types we recruited happy too, they love fancy titles and playing dress-up. Useful: and if they're here being useful to us they're not up north being useful to Lord Protector Arminger, who was one of their own after all. Besides, this lords-and-ladies stuff: once it stops sounding so silly it sort of grows on you."

"And fungus grows on your toenails if you aren't careful. Yeah, she's useful, and also a goddamned pain in the ass. For a while I thought she'd probably settle down with Eilir, who's sensible, sort of-"

His wife shot him a look; the sisters had quarreled all their lives, but he liked the way they closed ranks. "Astrid isn't gay."

"Nothing so convenient or conventional. She's an elf instead," he said dryly.

Signe grinned. "I think she's settled on being a, what's the word, Numenorean instead of an elf."

"I thought it was Dunadan: or is it Dunedain? I forget which."

"Dunedain is the plural: " She smiled wickedly as he mimed clutching at his head. "Dunadan is the word for Numenorean: in another language."

"Another invented language? Christ Jesus, didn't the man have anything else to do with his time? Trimming the shrubbery, visiting the pub? How many of them are there?"

"Let's see: the Common Speech, the Black Speech, the tongue of the Ro-hirrim, Halfling dialects, Quenya elvish, Sindarin elvish: "

"Stop! Stop! Anyway, why: whatever: instead of an elf? Hell, I've got to admit, she looks like one."

"But elves don't get cooties on campaign, or smell. Or have monthly cramps, which she does, bad. Anyway, Eilir's just her best friend."

"Alleyne there will do even better, nothing like kids to calm you down. Someone who shares her interests-"

"Is nutbar about the same stuff?" Signe clarified helpfully.

"Nah, he just likes the books; he's not goofy over living it all out. He's a pretty regular guy, once you get past that Jeeves-old-chap-fetch-me-a-biscuit accent. But liking the books'll help him keep her from doing a swan dive into the deep end. Christ Jesus knows nobody else ever had much luck at that! Foreign prince-well, son of a baronet-exotic, great warrior. It's a natural! And I get a first-rate fighting man on my side, too; he can king it off in the woods with her in between wars. Win-win situation."

"You haven't said anything about it to her."

"Christ, no! That'd be the best way to spoil things."

"Well, maybe you're learning after all," Signe said, and touched an ear when he started to reply.

They were leaning together and speaking quietly, and the rumbling clatter of hooves, the crash of boots and the thrrrrip-thrrrrip-thrrrrip of the marching drum covered it. Still, she was right. Another time would be better for chewing over family matters.

Not that there's much difference between family stuff and politics anymore, he thought. Or between either and the military side of things.

"Aaron wants to visit Corvallis and see if he can get more medical supplies," Signe went on.

"Aaron just wants to find a cute young thing," Havel answered. Aaron Roth-man was chief physician of Larsdalen; he was very competent, but had his quirks. "He's been itching for some social life since his last boyfriend left him."

"That's because you're the unrequited love of his life, darling. You did save him from the cannibals."

Havel laughed. "Saved all of him but his left foot," he said, which was literally true; that band of Eaters had gone in for slow-motion butchery to keep the meat from spoiling.