S. Stirling - The High King of Montival

“This city is going to fall,” Signe Havel said bluntly. The Rancher-delegates who made up the CORA assembly roared-some in agreement, some in protest, some to hear themselves make noise, as far as she could tell. It echoed off the walls of the old pre-Change theater; shouting faces shone desperate in the light of the gas lamps, a thick smell of sweat and burnt methane and hot lime, wool and leather and linen. The representatives of the city itself and the smallholders who farmed the irrigated land upstream and down mostly just stared at her wide-eyed.

“Why can’t you stop them?” someone shouted.

Signe leaned forward and braced her hands on the sides of the podium, and the lames of her articulated suit of plate clattered slightly against each other, despite the backing of soft leather. Moving quietly in armor was like trying to tiptoe in a suit sewn with cowbells. She wanted them to notice it; notice the nicks and the indented lines that looked like someone had taken something sharp and pushed it against the steel very hard . Which was exactly what had happened, and she still had the bruises underneath.

“You may notice we’ve all been trying to do exactly that, your people and mine.”

She paused to let the way she looked-and for some of the closer delegates, smelled-reinforce the words.

Rationally it’s silly to wear sixty pounds of metal to talk to people, she thought. But then again, who ever said war is a rational activity? And the whole world went crazy when I was eighteen. It’s been getting worse ever since. My armor is a symbol, and Mike taught me about the value of symbols. He used them and knew he was using them, even when he believed in them himself. Because symbols hit down below the part where knowing makes any difference.

She was very tired, tired enough that her eyeballs felt as if they’d been rolled in a mixture of fine grit and cat hair before they were stuffed back in their sockets. There was probably enough red around the pupils to drown out the blue.

I’m forty-three now. I can’t go for days without sleep anymore. Willpower makes up for the tired and the hurt and the hungry, but every time it takes a bit more water from the well and someday soon I’m going to run dry.

“It hasn’t been working, no matter how hard we try, because they outnumber us three to one,” she said, when the noise had died down a little.

If anyone but Mike Havel had been flying that light plane over the Bitterroots on Change Night, she and her family would have died like hundreds of thousands of others. Signe thought of them sometimes, whenever the present seemed too grim to bear: astronauts in orbit when all the city lights below went out and the ventilators died, passengers in 747s at thirty thousand feet glancing up in a flickering moment of pain and silence, people in submarines or down at the bottom of gold mines when the pumps stopped.

Mostly they’d been the lucky ones, at that. For them it had been fairly quick. Five billion and more had died in what followed, died slowly of thirst and hunger, of plague, or killed for what little they had or the meat on their bones.

And thanks to Mike we survived. Survived the plane crash, survived that year after the Change, survived. . life. For a while. Life’s so dangerous nobody gets out of it alive, he used to say, and he’s been dead fourteen years now. I’ve got this bad feeling about what’s coming down the tracks.

She poured strength into her voice, willing desperate men to see sense:

“The Prophet’s maniacs alone outnumber all the troops the countries of the Meeting. . the High Kingdom of Montival-”

Freya, we’re calling the whole country something because someone barely old enough to shave suggested it in a letter . What next? How desperate for hope are we?

“-can muster. The United States of Boise outnumbers us by about the same margin. If we try to meet them here in open country, they’ll crush us. They didn’t beat us at Pendleton last year because they were better, they beat us because they were good enough and there were Loki’s own lot of them. They want big decisive battles. We can’t afford to fight on their terms; we have to make them come to us. Bleed them until they’re down to a level we can tackle.”

A man got up; elderly, leathery: Rancher Brown of Seffridge. A good man, steady. He’d been an ally of the Outfit in the wars against the Association in the decade after the Change.

“What’s wrong with Bend?” he asked; they’d agreed on the question beforehand. “They have to come at us here, and we’ve got the city wall and plenty of food.”

Signe made herself grin. “You have to ask? The wall’s good enough against a bunch of bandits or Rovers. It’s too long and too low for an army with a good battering and assault train-wheeled belfries, siege towers, trebuchets, which Boise has and will lend to the Corwinites. And the water supply can be cut off. You people should really have thought of that.”

She saw embarrassed winces. The CORA had trouble agreeing on the time of day, normally. War wasn’t normal times, but it was a bit late now for major engineering.

“I thought that. . that thing that happened was supposed to stop places falling to the Cutters,” Brown said.

People made the signs of their various religions, or muttered prayers. . or curses, or both. Signe kept calmness, but only just. That flash of pain and the ringing voice in the middle of Juniper Mackenzie’s ceremony:

Artos holds the Sword of the Lady, she remembered that tolling voice speaking from within her. The Sun Lord comes, the son of Bear and Raven! The High King comes, as foretold! Guardian of My Sacred Wood, and Law! His people’s strength, and the Lady’s Sword!

She cleared her throat, swallowed and went on: “That means their spooks can’t hoodoo men into opening gates anymore,” she said.

She added to herself: We think .

Aloud: “It does absolutely nothing to keep them from coming over the walls on ladders. When-” She nearly said if and then went on: “When Artos gets back, things will be different. Until then we’re on our own.”

Another roar, and a general shout of What good are you, then?

She slammed a gauntleted fist down on the podium. “We Bearkillers stand by our promises, and by our friends!” she shouted.

That had the double advantage of being true, and being known to be true. Over the years the Outfit had shed a lot of blood, their own and other people’s, making sure everyone knew it. Everyone, including the people expended, had thought it was worth it. Quiet fell, slowly and incompletely.

“Bend will fall, and with it everything this side of the Cascades, before we can hope to get help. Before Rudi. . Artos gets here. Your homeplaces aren’t fortified, not really, not the way the PPA’s castles are up north. But if we hold Bend long enough, you can get your families and your livestock through the passes, which have forts we are strong enough to hold. Hold for a long time, long enough for the snow to close them, while you hit and run and pull back into the space you’ve got so much of out here. We-and the Clan Mackenzie and the Corvallans and everyone else in the west-guarantee you lodging for your people and grazing for your stock during the rest of the war, and all the help we can give after it, to rebuild. We’ll take your families in. Nobody starves as long as anyone has food.”

That set off another explosion; she waited it out, while the sensible ones argued the hotheads into line. It took less time than she might have expected; but then, they were ranchers, not farmers. Losing buildings and the crops some grew would be painful, but their real wealth was their flocks and herds.