S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

A concern for which Artos the First has an underwhelming sympathy, I will not say aloud .

His eyes were gray and very cold, with the wary bitterness you often saw in those who’d come to adulthood in the terrible years right after the Change, those damaged in their souls but not outright mad. Though they’d had a considering respect in them since he rode into the Montivallan camp and seen the size of it, and the good order and fine weapons and most of all the tough veteran faces of the troops. He hadn’t altogether believed in the High Kingdom as anything real, until then, but he was a man who believed in armies if nothing else and knew a good one when he saw it. He was casting the occasional considering look at young Rick Three Bears, the head of Rudi’s token Lakota contingent-a useful token, though most of their forces were out east of the mountains.

Rasmussen lost those fingers fighting the folk of the Seven Council Fires as a young man. And unlike Ingolf, he hasn’t let the fire of his anger die; he’s a man of cold enduring hatreds, I think. Here I thought things were complicated two months ago! Rudi mused. The Iowans are keeping that kettle off the boil, Lady bless them and the Lord guide their hands, but once the war is over I’m going to have to spend some time out east, settling things with the Lakota and their neighbors, if we’re to have real peace there and not just a truce until a new generation gets an itch in its collective sword-hand.

The number of contingents in his army had increased once again now that the US of Boise territories were secured. There was even a Nez Perce battalion; very likely and useful light horse they were, but touchy about the increased degree of autonomy Fred had given in their new charter, suspicious of Boise under anyone’s rule and needing a fair bit of stroking. It hadn’t helped when he’d thoughtlessly spoken to their commander in the Nez Perce language, and found that the man had only a few phrases of it himself; evidently only a few score people still knew it, most of them elderly. That had put him in a sulk for days, convinced it had been done to embarrass him before his followers.

Sure, and it’s like juggling porcupines! Wiggling ones intent on nibbling each other!

His blood brother and guest-friend King Bjarni of Norrheim winked at him. The burly redbeard with the axe was the least troublesome member of the war-council; all he was interested in was hacking his way through the CUT to get back to his distant realm. And absorbing every useful bit of information he could along the way; his baggage-train contained mostly crates of books and diagrams and models, not to mention a careful selection of experts in a dozen skills enticed to make the trek with offers of rank and reward. Norrheim was a bit backward now, but he suspected it would be much less so by the time Bjarni’s son was hailed on the Thingstone.

Bossman Rasmussen stepped up to the easel and spoke as Rudi moved politely aside:

“Casper’s where we started running into hard trouble. We came west up the North Platte valley as soon as the ground was dry enough and the grass was up this spring, eighty thousand strong, horse, foot and catapults, not counting the screening forces we’d had securing the approaches since last fall, or the Sioux.”

Respectful nods; that was a great many fighting-men. A great many to muster and equip, and a very great many to feed away from the farms producing the grain and meat. Eighty thousand men meant tens of thousands of draught-horses, rail and road wagons, teamsters and roustabouts, crates of boots and harness, barrels of salt pork and sacks of flour and cornmeal and beans and oats and bale after bale of blankets and socks. .

Armies ate wealth like drought or locusts.

“That was fairly straightforward; Nebraska’s forces joined us and they had everything organized, supply dumps and plenty of fodder and replacement horses. After that we had to re-lay some of the rails as we came, sending scrap back east to the rolling mills in Des Moines. We’ve been doing that all summer, because there certainly wasn’t enough on hand once we were out of the settled zone, and every mile of track we fixed was another one we had to guard against Cutter raiding parties. We sent a secondary force along here to the south-”

His finger traced a line through Cheyenne and then far westward and north into the Powder River basin.

“And the people all joined in, the ones still free were scared stiff of the Cutters and happy to see us, the independent Ranchers and the tribes both. And the occupied zone rose against the CUT as soon as our scouts arrived, and the, ah-”

“Chenrezi Monastery,” Master Hao said.

His voice was still strongly accented despite twenty-eight years in what had become the Valley of the Sun when the Change stranded a convention of Buddhist monks at an off-season tourist hotel there. Fortunately for the other inhabitants, since most of the monks had started their lives as mountain peasants and remembered those skills.

“The Monastery of the Most Compassionate Bodhisattva. And those in the Valley who accept our advice.”

“Yeah, I’d heard you guys ran the place.”

Hao was a stringy man in some indeterminate place between middle aged and elderly, apparently naturally hairless and assembled out of rawhide and sticks, the sort of old man who looked as if he’d never die or had some time ago and didn’t let it slow him down to speak of. He was dressed in a set of lamellar armor, lozenges of metal laced together, with a dao at his side. In the Valley’s position, Rudi would have hesitated to refuse any advice he gave; from his time there he knew that was in fact the attitude of most. Not that Hao was a bad or violent man, and the Monastery’s rule had been almost comically tolerant and benevolent from all he had seen. But the High King remembered his tutelage during the winter he’d spent there, recovering from wounds. Even old Sam Aylward had never worked him harder.

“Chenrezi Monastery helped get things organized,” Rasmussen said. “The Powder River people all jumped when they said frog .”

The particular order Hao had represented at the conference so long ago emphasized the Way of the Warrior. How exactly they reconciled that with Greater Vehicle Buddhism was a matter of theological complication Rudi wasn’t much interested in, but Hao had been in charge of the training and leading of the Valley’s hosts since the beginning. The Valley had not been protected by its geography alone.

“There is much respect for the holy Rimpoche Tsewang Dorje,” the old Han said a little severely, naming the abbot of Chenrezi.

“As there should be,” Rudi said, quite sincerely.

In an entirely different way the Tibetan abbot was even more formidable than his warrior subordinate. The Rimpoche had sworn him fealty in impeccable style; then winked, and they’d both shared a chuckle as the old bonze’s face turned into a network of wrinkles like an ancient merry child. You got that sense that most of life was a game he played punctiliously out of an innate courtesy. .

Tiphaine d’Ath had been standing like a gray-steel statue of a warrior Goddess, Lioncel de Stafford behind her with a stack of documents. Now she used her silver baton of office to sweep from east to west along the lower edge of the map.

“That’s all very well, Bossman, but going that way is like running your little finger up your own nose; limited possibilities of advance and you’re not likely to reach anything useful. Unless you’re going to fight your way over the Tetons, where it can snow any damned month of the year, July included.”

“They’ll have to guard the passes, but yeah,” Rasmussen said, nodding. “Thing is, the supply situation was even worse than we thought it would be, and we realized we had more troops than we could feed on the axis of main effort, so we might as well have them do something instead of just going home. Whoever we picked to turn around and march back, the rest of the troops wouldn’t like that, to put it mildly. A lot of the League’s army. . the Iowans particularly. . well, they were drilled troops and well equipped and ready enough to fight , but a lot of them hadn’t realized how much time in the field you spend being so bored and miserable that fighting’s a relief.”