S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

He drew the Sword and held it high. The setting sun gleamed on it, a fire in the crystal pommel, and the prisoners swayed back; a moan ran through them.

“You’ve been given another chance at life, and to live as men should. Don’t waste it. Do some thinking, for you’ll have time for it.”

High King’s Host

Near Ashton

Liberated New Deseret

(Formerly eastern Idaho)

High Kingdom of Montival

(Formerly western North America)

August 15th, Change Year 26/2024 AD

The map had originally been from a publication called National Geographic , often a source of useful knowledge. The older collections particularly were eagerly sought after. Rudi’s cartographers-a mixture of Boiseans, Corvallans and obscure clerks from the PPA’s Chancellery-had done up an excellent large-scale transcription of one covering the core territories of the Church Universal and Triumphant and its marchlands, pyrographed on bleached deerhide, with a few modern additions like puff-cheeked faces blowing from the four quarters.

Now it was tacked to a piece of ancient plywood, itself set on an easel for easy reference. Rudi stood beside it, waiting with his left hand tucked through his sword belt and his right resting on the pommel of the Sword. The wall of the tent was rolled up, to delay the necessity of lighting the lamps. It wasn’t very hot even at the tail end of a summer’s day, since the easternmost part of the Snake River plain here was a mile above sea level, but the High King thought the view of the smoking ruins of the town were instructive as well for the assembled contingent commanders and their aides. The CUT’s forces were retreating, but doing as much damage as they could-not that this area hadn’t been badly wrecked anyway, in the long CUT-Deseret war that had been going on for most of the last decade before the greater struggle started.

In a way it’s weirdly comforting that they’re doing it, so. The Powers behind the CUT are trying to weaken Montival in every way they can, which means we’re a threat to them in the long term. At least I think so; I’m dealing with beings I cannot understand, any more than a coyote can understand a man. But try as they might, even with the tools of the ancients, men have never been able to kill all the coyotes. . and we have Those who help us as well as those who hunt us, that we do.

The air held a fair bit of dust as well as the smell of the camp and the reek of things not meant to burn, but this area got more rain than most of the Snake River valley, which was one reason he was pausing to regroup here. The grazing was better, which helped when you had so many horses to feed. The more he spread out, though, the more he was vulnerable to the swift slashing counterattacks the enemy specialized in. They were retreating, but they weren’t going willingly and they weren’t running witless.

More’s the pity; I want this war over, he thought, and began:

“As usual, it’s the logistics that are the problem-the more so as we’re far from home,” he said when everyone had settled and the orderlies had handed around cups of chicory to those who wished it.

“ We aren’t, Your Majesty,” Donald Nystrup said.

He was technically a Brigadier in the army of New Deseret, and in fact had been the leader of the guerillas who’d been making the CUT’s occupation of the eastern Snake River country less than a delightful experience. The riders who’d been under his command were still trickling in from their hidden lairs in canyon and side-valley and badland, in groups from companies to little handfuls of men and women as desperate and lethal as so many starved wolves. Rudi had met their leader going east on the Quest, and he looked much older now than those few years would account for, with streaks of gray in his cropped brown beard and new scars, and hammered-out dents and nicks in his breastplate. He also looked like a man who’d had a pile of rocks taken off his back recently; relief mingled with an awareness of pain long suppressed and harder to bear for that.

“Yes, Brigadier,” Rudi said gently. “This is your home, and now truly yours again.”

What was that word Ingolf used, in his ancestors’ tongue? he thought. Heimat, yes. This is Nystrup’s heimat , his little homeland of the heart, what some call the patria chica . Where his ancestors are buried, a landscape rich and alive with their woven memories and stories, where his blood and sweat and theirs have watered and made sacred the soil that fed them. As the dùthchas of the Clan is to me. And it’s badly hurt. He must bleed with its wounds. Best be careful of his pride.

He met the eyes of the soldier of Deseret, his hand on the pommel of the Sword. There was an odd inner flash as he did, of something that was there but not to the unaided eyes of the flesh.

As if another man stood behind the seated Nystrup, slender work-battered hands resting on his shoulders. A big man in a blue uniform, high-collared and fancifully ornate with gold braid and buttons and epaulettes in the manner of the middle nineteenth century. The figure had a shock of unruly fair hair and bright humorous blue eyes shaded by long thick lashes, and a smile showing a chipped front tooth. It was a Yankee farmboy’s face, oval and long-nosed. At first glance a yokel out of an original America long generations gone even at the Change, save for a sense of a glowing golden charm that could bring the birds out of the trees. Full of shrewdness and good nature. . and yet a touch of something other about it, a power and a wisdom and a deep sadness.

He blinked the moment aside. Nystrup looked startled for just an instant, then squared his shoulders as if new power had flowed into him from a familiar reservoir.

Rudi went on: “But it’s a badly ravaged part of your home. Can you provide much in the way of fodder and provender?”

“Well. . not until we get the rail line to the south repaired, from down by the old Utah border. Our farmlands there are still productive, but. . and we’ve lost a lot of our working stock.”

“Not this campaigning season, then,” Rudi said.

“My troops don’t need much. We’ve gotten used to doing with very little, and we’re not going to stop until the enemy is utterly cast down.”

“And it’s a great help your lads and lasses have been and will be, but we have a large force here, and it limits our options.”

He stood to one side and tapped the eastern part of the map so that they could all see where his finger fell. “The armies of the League of Des Moines reached Casper in old Wyoming a month ago, and took it from the CUT garrison by storm after a brief siege, though with some loss.”

Sober nods from everyone. Storming a fortified position. . the antiseptic phrase covered a multitude of sins. Men falling off ladders screaming as boiling canola oil splashed into their faces and ran under their armor, for starters.

“The Bossman of Fargo will fill us in on the details.”

The League powers had a liaison officer here, who’d come over the mountains to the southward as a small party could do in summer; a high-ranking one, the Bossman of Fargo no less, one Daniel Rasmussen.

He strode confidently up to the map, a tall lean man in his forties in plain leather and linen and wool, an equally plain shete at his belt, with two fingers missing from his left hand and gray in his cropped yellow beard. He’d been notably cool when the alliance called the League of Des Moines was formed as Rudi went through Iowa on his way back west. Not least because he enjoyed being entirely sovereign in his family’s Red River bailiwick-he’d seized power from his elder brother in a coup, originally, and ruled as an iron-fisted though competent and reasonably popular dictator. The thought of mighty Iowa awakening from its inward-looking sleep wasn’t one he found delightful.