Harry Turtledove: In High Places

Wolves howled in the woods south of Paris. The wind wailed through bare-branched oaks and chestnuts and elms. That nasty northwest wind carried the threat of rain, or maybe snow. Winter didn't want to leave in the year of our Lord 2096—or, as it was more widely known in the Kingdom of Versailles, the year 715 of the New Revelation.

Jacques the tailor's son trotted through those woods. He hoped the howls would come no closer. A sheepskin jacket and baggy wool trousers held out the wind. He was bareheaded, and had to pause every few minutes to shake straw-colored hair back from his eyes. At not quite eighteen, his beard was still scanty— more orange fuzz on cheeks and chin and upper lip than a proper man's growth.

When a twig cracked not far away, as if trodden underfoot, he slipped off the track and behind the rough-barked trunk of an old oak. His right hand fell to the hilt of his sword. The leather that wrapped the hilt was smooth from much use. The weapon had belonged to Jacques' father, but he'd been using it for the past three years and more.

Worse things than wolves were liable to lurk in the woods. Scouts from the Berber Kingdom of Berry might be spying out Versailles' defenses. Muslim slave raiders might be on the prowl, too. When they could, they seized believers in the Second Son and sold them in the great markets of Marseille and Madrid and Naples.

A doe stepped out onto the track, not fifty feet upwind of Jacques. He could see her nose twitch as she tested the air. Then a swirl of the breeze must have brought his scent to her. She snorted. Her liquid black eyes widened. With a flirt of the tail, she bounded away.

He didn't break cover. He thought she'd stepped on the twig, but didn't want to take the chance of being wrong. Patience paid. The priests always preached that, and Jacques believed it. People had been patient when God sent the Great Black Deaths, hadn't they? Of course they had, and their patience had been rewarded. After a generation and more of unending disaster, God sent Henri, His Second Son. And, thanks to Henri's prayers, the plagues finally stopped. He'd died a martyr like His older brother Jesus, but He'd saved the world.

At last, Jacques decided no scouts or raiders hunted anywhere close by. "Thank you, Henri," he murmured, and sketched the sign of the wheel on which the Second Son had been broken all those years ago. They followed the New Revelation over in the Germanies, too, but they spun the wheel backwards. Even stupid foreigners like the Germans should have known better than that.

Down the track Jacques went. His rawhide boots thudded on the hard ground. It was packed hard now, anyway. E the wind brought rain instead of snow, everything would turn to mud. Some of the streets in Paris and Versailles were cobblestoned like the ones in the big Berber towns farther south. That showed how modern and up-to-date the Kingdom of Versailles was. The idea of paving a forest track, though, had never crossed Jacques' mind, or anyone else's in the kingdom.

How much farther to the fort? The thought had hardly crossed his mind before the forest thinned out ahead of him. There it was, on a swell of ground that dominated the view to the south. Like other forts on both sides of the border, it looked like a many-pointed star. The thick earthen ramparts soaked up cannon balls that would have smashed stone or brickwork.

A sentry on the ramparts spotted him. The sun flashed off the man's helmet and back-and-breast as he turned. He shouted out a challenge: "Who comes?"

"I'm Jacques. I'm down from Versailles with a message for Count Guillaume," Jacques shouted back.

"How do I know you're not one of King Abdallah's spies?" the sentry said.

He couldn't have been any older than Jacques. He took his duties very seriously—too seriously, as far as the messenger was concerned. "I've been here before," Jacques answered, as patiently as he could. "Plenty of men in there will know me. The seal on the letter I carry will show I am what I say I am. And if the count decides I'm a spy, he won't let me go. He'll bash in my head."

The sentry chewed on that. After a moment, he shouted to the gate crew. A drawbridge thumped down over the moat that kept attackers from getting too close. Jacques hurried across it. His boots thudded and boomed on the timbers. As soon as he'd crossed, it rose again. Heavy iron chains creaked as it went up.

Stone- and brickwork lined the inside of the passage through the rampart. Heavy iron grates could thud down to block the way. A man at a murder hole set into the roof leered at Jacques. He could pour boiling water or red-hot sand on invaders, and they would have a hard time hurting him. Every other way in was just as strongly warded. Jacques wouldn't have wanted to try to take a place like this.

But he knew why the sentry had sounded nervous. Treachery could do what strength of arms couldn't. Up till a few years ago, the frontier had lain on the Loire. Then two of Versailles' fortresses there fell within days of each other. Nobody fired a shot at or from either place. Now the kingdom had to scramble to find a new southern frontier it could defend.

When Jacques came out of the tunnel through the rampart, he blinked against the bright sunshine—his eyes had had time to get used to the gloom. He waved to an underofficer he knew. "Hello, Pierre," he called. "You can tell anyone who doubts me that I'm a regular messenger, right?"

"Who, me?" the gray-bearded sergeant said. "How can I do that when I never saw you before in my life?" Jacques' jaw dropped. Pierre pointed at him and laughed till tears ran down the gullies of his weathered cheeks. "Sweet Jesus and Henri, the look on your face was worth twenty francs—maybe fifty." He'd never seen fifty francs together in his whole life, any more than Jacques had.

"Funny. Very funny." Jacques tried to stand on his dignity. Sergeant Pierre thought that was funnier yet. Sometimes Jacques thought the best thing old people could do was dry up and blow away. This was one of those times. "Can you take me to Count Guillaume, please?" He made the last word as sarcastic as he dared.

He could have done worse, because Pierre went right on laughing. But the sergeant nodded and said, "Come on, then."

The keep at the center of the fortress lay behind a ditch. It was of stone, and looked more old-fashioned and more impressive than the rest of the work. When Pierre led Jacques to Count Guillaume's office, the commander was writing something. He set down his quill pen. "What's this?"

"Messenger, your Grace," the sergeant answered.

"All right." Guillaume was younger than the underofficer. He had a clever, foxy face made foxier by green eyes and red side whiskers. "What is it, young fellow?" he asked Jacques.

"I bring a letter, your Grace, from the Duke of Paris," Jacques said.

Duke Raoul was an important power in the Kingdom of Versailles. Some people said he was the power behind King Charles' throne. Even so, the fortress commander looked unimpressed. He also looked to have practiced the expression, perhaps in front of a mirror imported from the south. After a small yawn that also seemed practiced, Guillaume said, "Well, let me have a look at it."

"Here you are, sir." Jacques handed him the rolled-up parchment.

Guillaume did carefully inspect the seal pressed into the wax. He nodded. "Yes, that swan's Raoul's, all right." He used a pen knife to flick off the wax and cut the ribbon that held the letter closed. Unrolling it, he held it out at arm's length to read.

"Anything the men ought to know about, your Grace?" Sergeant Pierre asked.

"Well, Raoul says he's got word some kind of way about a Berber plot to take this place." One of Guillaume's carroty eyebrows quirked upward. "I don't know what he was drinking when he got that word, but it must have been plenty strong. Or do you think Abdallah's getting ready to try to bite us again, Sergeant?"