S. Stirling - A Meeting At Corvallis

"Leave us," Arminger said, leaning back in the leather-upholstered chair.

They bobbed curtseys and scuttled out. The guards followed at his nod, with a stamp of boots and crash of metal.

Arminger grinned to himself as he watched the two Corvallans, a tall, horse-faced blond woman and a short, thickset brunet man, twitch their noses at the scent from the coffeepot. Master Turner was a fixer and backer of budding enterprises, a sort of neo-medieval equivalent of a venture capitalist and the closest thing Corvallis had to a banker; closer every year as trade and handicraft flourished. Mistress Kowalski had made handlooms and spinning wheels before the Change for the handicraft market and still did-in a large workshop with dozens of employees-renting the equipment out to poor families, supplying the raw materials, and taking payment in thread and cloth. In Europe in the old days they'd called it the putting-out system; evidently she'd reinvented it on her own initiative. The two had joint interests in flocks of sheep out on shares with farmers, and in mills for breaking flax and finishing cloth.

Both had influence in the city's Faculty Senate through their clients and debtors, and through business connections with other budding magnates. Those still called their get-together and steering committee the Faculty of Economics, but it might as well have been the Guild Merchant.

"You've met Conrad Renfrew?" Arminger said to the two visitors from the city-state. "Grand Constable of the Portland Protective Association, Count of Odell, and Marchwarden of the East, as well."

They murmured my lord Count together. "Mistress Kowalski, Master Turner," the Constable replied, in a voice like gravel and sand shaken together in a bucket.

Kowalski frowned suddenly, and looked at Arminger's commander more closely. "Lord Count, didn't we meet before the Change? At a tournament: Was Renfrew your Society name?"

The Grand Constable was a thickset man built like a barrel, with a shaved head and bright blue eyes in the midst of a face hideously scarred. The two from Corvallis looked at him a little uneasily, but they didn't show much fear despite his reputation. Arminger nodded to himself; they'd be useless to him if they did. Although if they were going to be afraid of anyone in the room it ought to be him, with Sandra a close second.

"No it wasn't, Mistress Kowalski," Renfrew rumbled. "Yes, I think I remember the occasion. But I've put all that behind me. The time for playing at things is past. We don't have the luxury of make-believe anymore."

Arminger cut in; pre-Change connections in the Society could be a sore issue these days, considering how badly its survivors had split between his followers and the rest. Not to mention that if he remembered correctly that particular tournament had been the Day of the Ox, about which memory he had mixed emotions himself.

"You know Lady Sandra, of course."

She gave each of them a nod as she sat, adjusting the skirts of her cotte-hardi and smoothing back her headdress. Both were in fabrics rich but subdued, in shades of dove gray and off-white, the jewels silver and diamond with a few opals.

"And this is Father McKinley."

McKinley was a lean young man in his early twenties in a coarse, black Dominican robe with a steel crucifix and rosary at his belt. He also had a quill pen and blank paper, and took unobtrusive notes; the priest-monk was Pope Leo's man, of course, but he and the Holy Office of the Inquisition also reported directly to the Lord Protector.

It was best to remember that Leo's Dominicans took their nickname-the Domini Canes, the Hounds of God-quite seriously.

Sandra poured coffee with a smile of gracious hospitality. "Sugar? Cream?" she asked.

Arminger added a small dollop of brandy to his; it was the genuine product of Eauze, the crop of 1988, and aged in black oak, recovered from a warehouse in desolate Seattle by his salvagers in '05. From what he'd learned from the Englishmen who'd arrived last spring, and the crew of the Tasmanian ship that brought them, there wouldn't be any more even if traders crossed the waters again. France was a howling wilderness, without even the tiny band of survivors that King Charles the Mad and his junta of Guards colonels had brought through in the British Isles. The English and Irish would resettle France in due course and prune the abandoned vines, but he doubted they'd ever rival the French as vintners and distillers.

"There's more coffee where that came from; it's fresh-roasted bean imported by sea, not pre-Change leftovers," he went on. And our own brandy's passable, and will get better as we master the knack. In the meantime:

He poured small glasses of the amber liquor. "Do have some of this as well. Genuine Armagnac, Larressingle, nearly twenty years old and quite marvelous."

Carefully he did not sneer at the way the pair's ears pricked in trader's reflex when he mentioned the coffee. There was no more point in despising a merchant for being a merchant than a dog for being a dog.

Not that you don't kick a dog if it gets out of place, he thought. How did the poem go? Ah, yes, something like:

Gold for the merchant, silver for the maid.

Copper for the craftsmen, cunning at their trade.

Good! Laughed the baron, sitting in his hall;

But iron-cold iron-shall be master of them all.

"The coffee's from Hawaii," he amplified. "Kona Gold, and none better in all the world."

"Hawaii survived?" Turner said in amazement. Then, hastily: "Lord Protector."

"Not Oahu, that was toast, but the Big Island did; not too many people, a lot of farms and ranches, and they didn't get too chaotic so they made the best of what they had. And Ni'ihau."

Or so those Tasmanians told me, he thought. I suspect their folk at home will be a bit peeved with me when they find out what happened to the Pride of St. Helens; and they and the Kiwis on South Island came through amazingly well. It's a good thing they haven't anything I want to trade for.

Those Antipodean islands were among the few places where there hadn't been a collapse or mass dieback in the aftermath of the Change; he supposed it was having scores of sheep per person, and not having any unmanageably large cities.

Taking the ship was a just payment for them bringing the Lorings and their pet gorilla to Oregon, and the trouble they caused me.

"And the Hawaiians are ready to trade sugar and coffee and citrus fruit and macadamias for: oh, any number of things. Wheat and wine, for instance. Dried fruit. And timber; they don't have much suitable for shipbuilding themselves. Smoked fish too, perhaps: but all that would be more your line of work than mine. We rulers keep things stable and safe for the traders and makers."

Or the smart ones do, he thought. Some of my new-made nobility apparently can't grasp the parable of the goose that laid the golden eggs.

He had the Tasmanian ship, the Pride of St. Helens, safely docked at Astoria, and he was training his own crew from fishermen and surviving yachtsmen. There were still enough people who remembered coffee fondly for it to be a valuable trade. The two merchants looked at each other; Corvallis had its own outlet on the sea at Newport, and a railroad and highway link across the Coast Range that the city-state had kept up. They were probably wondering if they could find a hull big enough for a Pacific voyage themselves.

"Salvage goods?" Turner asked hopefully. "Since there weren't any large cities on the Big Island."

"No, I don't think so. They have enough sailing craft of their own to mine the ruins of Honolulu and that had all the usual assets." Arminger stopped to consider. "On second thought, there might possibly be a few things; medical supplies, perhaps. Definitely cloth. It's getting hard to find any pre-Change cloth in useful condition here, and it would rot faster down there in the tropics."