S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

That brought some chuckles; everyone here had been fighting for years, and not a single summer campaign each year on someone else’s fields, either. Whatever else you might say about him, Rasmussen had been there. Someone murmured poor babies ! Nystrup looked angry rather than mocking; what his people had been through was beyond conception.

“And once we got the CUT out of the area, the Ranchers there could spare stock to be driven north, we got some from as far south into old Colorado as the San Luis valley. Gratitude, gold and fifteen thousand men with shetes can produce a big herd. That helped a lot with our transport bottleneck. Horses too, and war eats ’em fast.”

A bad man is Bossman Rasmussen, in my opinion, but a fair sound general, and a realist, Rudi thought. Hmmm. I must see to that area in old Colorado after the war. . another bit of work to add to the plate!

The Midwesterner went on: “Our main force turned north at Casper. There’s more support for the CUT there as you head north, more people who actually buy that loony line of goods they peddle, and we started getting serious harassment. God tailor-made the Bighorn country for a cavalry guerilla. Horse-archers are a pain in the ass that way to an infantry army. I told them in Des Moines to take more light cavalry, but. .”

There were mutters from the ranked commanders, along the lines of tell me about it. The CUT’s armies were mostly plainsmen with recurves, and with a string of several ponies for each man they could move. Trying to force them to give battle when they didn’t want to fight was like trying to punch smoke with your fist, too; even a little carelessness and they’d ride around you and burn the country behind you while you stood scratching your head, or arse, or both, and wondering where they were.

Though there were answers to that. Rudi grinned like a wolf. “We’re approaching things that they must stand and fight for,” he said. “For all that they put their capital in a land so remote, they still have one.”

Rasmussen nodded, with an identical expression, and went on:

“The Lakota-”

This time his nod to Rick Three Bears was genuinely polite instead of hostility masked by a politic pretense of courtesy. He also gave them their own name for themselves, too, which best translated as friends or allies. The name Sioux more commonly used among outsiders to name those tribes was derived from what their bitter rivals the Anishinabe-Ojibwa people had called them long ago, filtered through French and then English, and had originally meant something like little snakes.

That hadn’t been intended as a compliment or taken as one.

“-have been invaluable keeping them off our backs.”

Rick shrugged and drew on his cigarette, the cheeks of his narrow hook-nosed face pulling in for a moment and his braids swinging.

“We have lots of practice with the Cutters,” he said in a not-quite-insolent manner, blowing the smoke upward.

And with your gang, white-eyes, went unspoken; his father John Red Leaf had been a leader in the Sioux War, when the resurgent Lakota tunwan had tried to take back their ancestral lands in the Red River valley. It hadn’t worked, but they had ended up once again dominating what had been the western Dakotas.

Though I’ve met his mother as well, and she’s suspiciously red-haired, Rudi thought whimsically. Our tribes and clans and nations are stories we tell-though none the less real for that. But real because we believe in them, not because they’re written in natural law. . and as we Changelings know, even natural law isn’t as unchanging as our parents thought.

Mathilda coughed at the tobacco smoke with resigned disgust, where she sat with a stack of reports from the staff and Huon Liu de Gervais at her elbow. The Midwesterner lit one of his own, the habit being much more common where he came from than in Montival, ignored the High Queen’s glare and several others, and went on:

“But the harassment slowed us down-we kept having to deploy from march column to line of battle, and occasionally fight a set-piece engagement. We shoved ’em back every time, but the Cutters always broke off before we could really wreck them.”

More moderately sympathetic nods. Montival had wrecked the CUT and Martin Thurston at the Horse Heaven Hills, but mainly because the enemy had stood and fought there beyond the point of reason in an attempt to win the war at one throw.

“It would have been fu. . frankly impossible if there had been twice as many of them, I grant that, so you and us hitting them at the same time was crucial. But while that went on they had labor-gangs ripping up the rail, piling it up over heaps of ties, and setting those on fire-we could see the flames against the sky for weeks and smell the burning creosote. That meant we had to re-lay everything as we advanced into the Bighorn Basin and went west, except the actual grading, and some of that’s washed out since the Change so we had to shove the dirt back. Not to mention bridges. Plus they set grass fires wherever they could, and drove every head of livestock out of our path. Right now we’re here-”

He tapped the map south of Billings, the old Montana capital and mostly ruins now. “Only a few hundred miles left to go. Damn bad miles, though, and the Cutters are thick as grass. Infantry, not just their ranch and Rover levies, and the Sword of the Prophet, what’s left of it. I understand you guys wiped out most of that crowd of maniacs in the red armor last year, for which many thanks.”

Tiphaine gave a small chilly smile. The Grand Constable had brought the Association’s chivalry down on Corwin’s elite troops like a war hammer on a skull, with hideously perfect timing. Rudi gave her a small crisp inclination of the head. He’d spent most of that long and ghastly day setting the move up, but she’d carried it out faultlessly and deserved to be proud of it.

“Thank you for the summation, Bossman,” Rudi said, and tapped the map himself. “And the Dominions, Drumheller and Moose Jaw and Minnedosa”-the old Canadian prairie provinces, which had come through the Change with only the loss of their larger cities, like the Upper Midwest-“are here, around Great Falls.”

“Hurrah,” Tiphaine said dryly, holding up a fist, extending her index finger and moving it in a very small circle of celebration.

Rasmussen gave her a look and then an unwilling grin as he resumed his seat. Mathilda snorted in agreement; Great Falls wasn’t so very far south of the Dominion of Drumheller’s prewar border. And the Dominions were rich and populous, by the standards of this continent in the twenty-sixth year of the Change, and they didn’t have as far to go as the other combatants.

“It’s mountains there,” Rudi said mildly.

Ian was bristling back where he stood in the Dúnedain contingent, but far too junior and too polite to say anything at the aspersion on his native land.

“Also they didn’t have to intervene in this war at all. We’d have beaten the CUT eventually anyway if they hadn’t, and they’d have gotten all the benefits of victory without any of the costs.”

“Every Cutter they engage is one we don’t have to,” Mathilda put in judiciously; when she thought politics, you could hear her mother in her voice. “Corwin was a bad neighbor, but they’d never taken any territory they considered their own. The Association took the old Canuk territory west of the Rockies, which is now part of Montival. It was really quite forethoughtful of the Dominions to come in on our side.”

“So, how are we going to get at Corwin, Your Majesty?” Tiphaine asked. “And do it before snow closes the passes, and get the bulk of our troops back in time? So that all our neighbors can go home for Yule?”