S. Stirling - The High King of Montival

“OK, Rudi. We got plenty of guys who don’t look all that Lakota, whatever their spirits are. We could make these two up like they were ours, and send them back with some of our walking wounded in the next couple of days, so they’d be in position to slip across the border. I know the guy to handle it, too.”

He called and talked to the man, who responded in a quick mixture of English and Lakota that Artos would have had trouble following a year ago. When his follower had led Graber and Dalan away he shook himself and shivered again. His finger wobbled a bit as if he didn’t dare point directly at the sheathed Sword.

“Man, oh, man, that is one fucking scary Wakha? artifact you got there!”

“My friend, you don’t know the half of it.”

Three Bears fumbled at his belt, rolled a cigarette, and touched it to the flame of a flint-and-steel lighter. He drew and handed it to Artos.

“You sure you can handle it?” he said.

Artos let the smoke out through his nostrils; for once it wasn’t just something to be endured for ceremony’s sake.

“No, I’m not sure,” he said, handing the little burning cylinder back. “Not at all. But I have to do it anyway!”

“Better you than me, dude.”

“And don’t I wish it was anyone but me! There’s one thing I am sure of.”

“Which is?”

“That as soon as I can I’m going to put this”-he slapped the hilt of the Sword-“in an honored place on the wall, and not touch it unless driven by sheer stark necessity. It’s dangerous, that it is; more dangerous to my enemies, which is why I bear it, but. . it’s too real for the world, I think. It threatens to break the fabric of things just by being , and unravel the story of our lives, as if it were an anchor of cast crucible steel dropped into a world made of gossamer. And we the butterflies among the threads, so.”

“Dude, watch me shudder.”

He did, and drew on the cigarette until the ember underlit his high-cheeked, proud-nosed face.

“I’m just glad you’re on our side.”

“Frankly, so am I. And now I suggest we eat, drink and be merry. For tomorrow-”

“We ride like hell with hemorrhoids, yeah. I better tell my boys not to get too deep into the firewater and forget they’re guests.”

“There’s a fair bit of that advice going around tonight, I think.” Artos laughed. “And much-needed.”

His own gaze went westward, towards the high peaks his mind’s eye knew were there. What was happening beyond the Rockies now? Then he shook his head, and turned towards the lanterns that burned bright all along the walls of the Anchor Bar Seven. Mathilda would be waiting.

He smiled at the thought, and stepped out more quickly.

CROWSNEST PASS

BORDER, DOMINION OF DRUMHELLER /HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

(FORMERLY BORDER OF ALBERTA AND BRITISH COLUMBIA)

JUNE 7, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

“Home,” Mathilda breathed.

“Home,” Artos said, then laughed and shouted: “Home,”

He stood in the stirrups, and Epona reared beneath him. The Sword flashed free-

Shock.

The moment stretched, and he saw .

Mounted warriors fought on a grassy plain that rolled upward towards forested mountains, their swords glinting in the bright sunlight. A white road lined with poplars smoked dust as a long train of wagons passed, leaving the powder heavy on the fresh green leaves of the trees and the yellowing grain behind. A couple made love in a haymow beneath the roof of a barn whose rafters were carved in sinuous running knotwork. A big dog and a five-year-old wearing nothing but a kilt and his own gold curls stamped and romped gleefully along the edge of a pond and ducks avalanched into the sky. A man with silvery stubble on his cheeks crouched in a dark stinking alley and clutched a bottle, whispering a name as he sobbed and rocked. A woman squinted as she leaned into the tiller of a gaff-rigged fishing boat; dolphins broached from the whitecapped waves around her as she called sharply: Haul away and sheet her home! A smith took a piece from the coals between his tongs and considered its white-red glow as he reached for his hammer. A tiger woke in a den on the slopes of a snow-topped mountain and lifted its head from huge paws, yawning, stretching until its claws slid free, its red tongue curling over ivory daggers. .

“Rudi, where were you?” Mathilda asked, her face anxious.

He looked at the blade and smiled at her; he blinked against what he recognized with astonishment were tears.

“I was. . everywhere . Everywhere in this land of ours, Matti, acushla, and I was the folk and the trees and the beasts and the land itself. Oh, and it’s beautiful, our Montival, a land fit for Gods and giants and heroes!”

“I hope we can make it a good land to live in,” she said soberly, still darting a cautious glance at the Sword. “For just plain people.”

“It’s not all bad, what the Sword does,” he said gently. “And we shall do just that, so.”

Then he laughed again as he sheathed it. “And right now, we’re riding up to Castle Corbec. We’re home , Matti, the two of us, and summer is coming, and the harvest of our hopes.”

Mountains lifted all around them, thickly forested with lodgepole pine and Douglas fir and clumps of aspen. Hills rolled down to the road bright with green grass, and a cool wind blew from the naked granite teeth of the heights, clean and scented with conifer-sap; snow glittered on the higher peaks. In the near distance a herd of elk took fright and leapt over the remains of a ruined fence, heading higher into the hills. Then they came over a rise, and the border fort was before them.

To the right of the roadway was a long blue lake that lapped against cliffs northward, and to the left the land rose rapidly. Ahead the highway crossed an arm of the water on a pre-Change bridge at one narrow spot where the flood turned emerald-green. Castle Corbec reared on a hill just before it, faced in hard pale mountain stone over its concrete and baring fangs of crenellation at heaven with water on two sides and a moat around; southward a waterfall brawled down a mountainside, thread-tiny in the distance.

“Looking as if it had been there forever and not just fifteen years, so it does,” he said.

Twin round towers with pointed roofs flanked the gatehouse, and flying from the spike atop one was. .

“Arra, that’s even quicker work,” Artos said.

It was the green-silver-blue flag of Montival, the crowned mountain and the Sword, in pride of place above the other banners.

“That’s my mom,” Mathilda said proudly. “Bet you there’s thousands more like it all over the kingdom now, and not just in Association territory.”

“ The kingdom. It’s starting to seem real to me, and there’s no escaping it. We dreamed a new name for a new country, and by the time we return everyone’s accepted it!”

“They were afraid,” she said, with the cool certainty that made you remember she was her mother’s daughter. “And frightened people grasp at things. They’re more ready to change.”

He looked back. The troops followed in a long column twisting eastward and downslope; lanceheads and spears glittered, and bright banners flew, but most of the colors were dark-leather, oiled gray mail, green or gray cloth or undyed linsey-woolsey, only here or there a glimpse of scarlet and blue and gold. Edain rose with a clod of earth crumbling between his fingers, and Garbh sniffed curiously at it. Most of his close companions were looking upward at the banners as well.

“It’s not just like riding up the lane to Dun Fairfax in the Clan’s territory,” Edain said, grinning. “But then again, it’s not entirely unlike, either, is it not, Chief? Though I’d give a good deal to see my family now, that I would.”