S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

She folded up her book, which was about Dorothy of Oz with pictures, put it neatly away in the bookshelf with the strap as Dame Emelina had taught her; Dame Emelina was wonderful, but strict. Then she knelt on the seat and looked out of the window with her elbows on the sill; the leather cushion made a sort of sighing sound. She liked the story, and she could read now.

Well, read a bit, she thought, with stubborn honesty. Some of the words are still too hard.

But after a while she wanted to move . The window was pushed up, so she could put her head out and let her long yellow hair fly in the breeze of their passage, and the air was hot with summer and smelled like dust and dry hay and a little like thunder somehow-she was glad she was in a kilt and shirt, though they were here in the north. The new girl’s kirtle she’d gotten for her birthday was very pretty, with little birds around the hems in silver and gold thread that sparkled, but it could be too warm for anything but sitting around. She had to sit around sometimes, but she didn’t like it.

There were hills outside, odd smooth-looking ones, this was a place called the Palouse that was all hills but no rocks, and the railroad wound like a snake through them, staying on the tops of the ridges mostly. A little while ago she’d seen a herd of Appaloosa horses running across them, with their manes flying in the bright sunshine and their coats all spotted against the brown of the summer pastures. Da had taken her up the ladder onto the roof of the car, where a couple of the archers rode, and stood with her on his shoulders so she could watch and wave and whoop. Now the ground was sort of a dark yellow where the wheat had been, and there were rows and rows of sheaves piled up together in tripods curving across the hills, brighter yellow than the stubble, looking like. .

“Tipis!” she said. “They look like tipis! Like the La-ko-tah had when they came on the visit. Chief Three Bears said I could sleep in a tipi sometime!”

Her father looked up and smiled, his blue-green eyes crinkling. He was the handsomest man in the world, and the bravest knight, and he was King. It was wonderful that he was King, though it meant he was busy a lot of the time. Now he put down the paper he’d been reading and came across and knelt down on the floor by the seat so that their eyes were level as he looked out the window.

“Well, by the Powers, so they do!” he said.

“Can I really sleep in a tipi?”

He nodded solemnly. “That you can, if Rick promised you could, for he is a great warrior and a wise chief and a man of honor; also he has little girls your age and knows their ways and how important a promise is.”

“Can I sleep in a Lakota tipi?” she said, thinking of the stories about the lords of the high plains. “Chief Three Bears fought with you in the great battles, didn’t he?”

“Not only that, he aided me on the Quest, when we used a stampeding buffalo herd to hide us from the Cutters who pursued us.”

“I remember that story!” she said, eyes shining. “That must have been the most fun ever!”

There was something a little odd in his laugh. “It was. . exciting, that it was in truth. And so the Seven Council Fires are also among our peoples. In a few years you’ll come with your mother and I when we go east for the summer buffalo hunt. You can see the Sun Festival where the camps of the Lakota carpet the prairie, and the dancers, and the great stone faces carved by the old Americans into the Black Hills, the kings of the ancient world. They’ll give you a Lakota name, and perhaps you will become one of the girls who apprentice to the White Buffalo Woman’s Society or the Sacred Shawls, and you will indeed sleep in a tipi. Though the Lakota themselves sleep in ger, most of the time now-tents on wheels with round tops. Tipis are for ceremony, to respect their ancestors.”

She laughed and clapped her hands at the thought of the tipis and the gers, and put an arm around his neck; his hair was redder than hers and had less yellow, and smelled like summer.

“That sounds like a lot of fun!”

“It will be.” He turned and kissed her cheek, his mustache tickling a little so that she giggled. “But it will be important too, for these are sacred things. You understand?”

She nodded solemnly. Then something occurred to her.

“Da,” she said. “I was wondering. The horses make the train go, don’t they? Walking on that treadmill thing up at the front.”

“Indeed they do.”

“But how can we go so fast? This is like a gallop. Horses can’t go this fast for long. Horsemaster Raoul told me so, that it would hurt them if you made them go fast for too long.”

“Very true, and when he speaks on horses Sir Raoul is a man to listen to most carefully. It’s the gearing that lets them do it, so that they walk at their best pace and the wheels are made to go faster.”

He held up a hand. “I’ll show you later, and you can help grease the gears, but don’t expect to understand it right away. ’Tis a mystery of the mechanics, and requires mathematics to really know.”

“Oh.”

She pouted a little. She wanted to understand it now , and usually her father and mother would explain things to her, though the greasing part sounded like fun. Math was. . OK, she supposed. She could already add some numbers, but the times table was too difficult for now. Then something else occurred to her.

“Why does the train go more clackety-clack now than it did yesterday?”

“Ah, well, that I can explain. In the ancient times, the trains were much bigger and heavier than they are now, and they needed rails of solid steel, which we still use where they remain and which are very smooth. But now in modern times, when we lay more track we make wooden rails and then fasten a strip of steel on top. That’s fine for our trains, and takes less of the metal, which has many uses. The rails here were torn up during the war, and now we’ve fixed them. . the Lady Tiphaine and the Lord Rigobert have, their folk. . and that’s why the noise is different.”

She nodded happily; she liked knowing why things were the way they were. Her father sat back in the seat, and she sat back in his lap; he put an arm around her. His arms were long, and you could feel how strong they were, almost the way you did when you touched a horse; when he threw her up in the air it was fun-scary, like being a bird and flying until she swooped down and he caught her. When she watched him practicing at arms with the guards, it was almost really scary sometimes, but when he held her like this it made her feel very safe, like pulling up the covers in winter when a storm was lashing against the windows and draughts made the candles flicker.

Her mother was in the seats across from them, which were like a big sofa; she was in a travelling habit, brown hakama divided skirt and a green jacket with pretty jade buttons over a blouse, not the High Queen’s court dresses that shimmered. But the little golden spurs on her boots showed she was a knight too, who’d ridden with Da on the Quest and his adventures.

Her little brother John was curled up with his head in their mother’s lap, snoring a little. John was only four, and still napped a lot; he had brown hair like their mother and looked more like Mom, when he wasn’t just looking like a baby. But he could sing already, better than her at least; the court troubadour said he had perfect pitch, which meant he could listen to a note and make the same one.

Sometimes that drove her crazy, because he’d pick two or three and do them over and over and laugh. She loved him but he could be a jerk and of course he was still so young .

Mom was dozing too. There was going to be a new sister around Yule, and that made her sleepy a lot; Órlaith couldn’t remember much about when John came, she’d been just a two-year-old herself then. The High Queen opened her eyes and smiled at Órlaith and then closed them again, letting her head fall back against the cushion. Her round hat with the trailing veils was hung from the back of it, the peacock feathers standing up.