S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

“Rise, my friends,” Rudi said; they did, and cheered, waving straw hats and holding up children to see.

Pleasant to be popular; and to be sure, they get a party at their baron’s expense out of it, he thought.

Yearling steers and pigs were roasting over open pits in the town square, filling the air with a pleasant savor as cooks basted them with paintbrush-sized brushes on the end of long sticks, and trestle tables had been set up with wheels of cheese and bowls and dishes of each household’s prize contribution, and barrels were waiting in the shade along with tall baskets of new loaves. Another carried the lutes and hauteboys, drums and accordion that would provide music for the dancing later.

He and Mathilda extended their hands for the kiss of homage. The Grand Constable was limping and using her stick as she came forward.

“How is the leg, Tiph?” Mathilda asked.

“Healing, but damned slowly,” d’Ath said. “He shouldn’t have been able to touch me. I was careless.”

“He was twenty-five and you’re forty-six !” Lady Delia said sharply. “You’re not getting those awful lettres de cachet from Sandra anymore, you don’t have to do this.”

A small chilly reminiscent smile from Tiphaine: “ The bearer has done what has been done by my authority, and for the good of the State. Sandra always absolutely loved writing those. That was back before she got religion, of course.”

Mathilda winced. Baron Tucannon looked up briefly as if considering the weather, unconsciously disassociating himself from the display of high-level dirty linen, while his son looked bewildered at the byplay and his wife carefully blank-faced. Rigobert simply laughed. Delia cleared her throat and went on:

“And you shouldn’t be fighting duels at your age anyway! I spent far too much time sending you off to the wars; now that you’re home I expect you to live for a while.”

Her eyes flashed; she was in her thirties herself, and one of the most beautiful women Rudi had ever seen in a sweetly curved way, with translucent eyes the color of camas flowers in a cloud-shaded mountain meadow and hair of iridescent black, glimpsed in braids beneath her tall headdress. She had a reputation as an arbiter of fashion, which she showed now by the elegant variation on what she had christened afternoon dress . August in the Palouse was hot to people used to the Willamette. Lady Delia’s red linen shift came to a daring two inches above her ankles, trimmed with a ruching of darker red and a scatter of pink ribbon roses. It was sleeveless and the light silk half-dress over it was a pale pink that took the warm tone below. From the waist to the knee it descended in long thin daggers of cloth, each neatly bordered with cream and crimson. The sort-of-sleeves were also dags of the translucent silk, dangling to her elbows and more thickly embroidered. Her wimple was more of the pink silk, held in place by a light ribbon braid in graduated pinks and reds, cascading down her back.

Rudi caught Helissent and Mathilda’s tire-women both eyeing it intently, clearly memorizing details for later. Lady d’Ath’s irritated answer brought him back from contemplation of feminine frivolities, though he’d always found Delia’s skills in that regard seriously impressive.

“I’m alive and getting older, and he isn’t, like that uncle of his I killed back in the old days,” d’Ath pointed out. “And he challenged me , not vice versa.”

“And forbye, for that very reason if he were alive, he’d be in very bad trouble,” Rudi said grimly.

“I’m Grand Constable, for what it’s worth these days,” d’Ath said. “That’s a Protectorate appointment, covering the Association, not one by the High King. You couldn’t have touched him, legally.”

“ I could,” Matti said flatly. “I’m Lady Protector. And I would .”

There were two carriages drawn up with the d’Ath arms on the doors; sable, a delta Or over a V argent. They managed to disengage themselves, after the inevitable bouquet and chorus of children, singing quite nicely under the direction of a young and nervous priest, and after a sharp glare from the Baroness of Ath and a quiet word from Delia dissuaded the bailiff of the estate from proceeding from an introduction to a plan for a tour of the newly installed and state-of-the-art dam, well, hydraulic ram, windmill and solar-heated waterworks that he obviously had his heart set upon.

Rudi grinned to himself. He’d just received an anguished howl in the form of a petition from some Corvallan manufacturers complaining that workshops in Portland and Walla Walla had stolen the thermosiphon design. He’d replied politely, pointing out that the Faculty Senate had refused to include a patent law in the Great Charter and that they might want to take it up with them. .

Tiphaine grumbled as she levered herself up into one of the coaches, and the High King’s Archers deployed their bicycles; there were a dozen men-at-arms on coursers and mounted archers on quarter-horses, their look of grim efficiency marking them as much as the d’Ath arms, and smaller detachments from the menies of the other nobles. Rudi sympathized with the injured Grand Constable as he handed Mathilda up and seated himself; he would vastly have preferred riding horseback, after days of sitting in a train. There had been times he was tempted to go walk the treadmill with the horses, not being a man used to inactivity. Órlaith was on her Butterball, to the unspeakable envy of all the other noble children.

The whole settlement was on the south-facing slope of a declivity in the hills. The carriages jounced across the stone-paved central square with its church, tavern, smithy and workshops, school, bakery, bathhouse-laundry. There was rather more than the average, since this was to be the home-manor of the whole estate, and had a railway to boot. A long low building with large windows was a weaving-shed, where households with a loom could use it and store their yarn and gear without cluttering up the house; behind the whole ensemble was the tall skeletal shape of the village windmill on the ridgetop, its three airfoil-shaped vanes rotating with majestic deliberation.

The village was raw and new, the trees and plantings still small and struggling, but looked prosperous; the tile-roofed rammed-earth cottages of the peasants and craftsmen were on lanes lined with young trees, each in its rectangular fenced toft with sheds and gardens at the rear. Even the small dwellings of the cottar laborers had three rooms and a loft and an acre of allotment ground attached. A few excited peasant youngsters ran after them waving as they drove up the winding road to the manor between rows of fir saplings; Órlaith waved back with a broad smile, and various mothers and elder siblings dragged the youngsters back, often by one ear.

The manor sat on its own gentle south-facing slope some distance away, beyond the demesne farm complex with its squat circular grainaries and boxy wool-stores and a bit higher up for the view, behind a wall that enclosed its lawns and ambitious but rather tentative terraced gardens. The Great House and outbuildings were rammed earth too, the more expensive variety with some cement mixed in and covered in a warm cream stucco with just a hint of reddish gold. The composition was so charming that you took a minute to discern the dry moat disguised by a ha-ha and the fact that all the exterior windows were narrow and could be slammed closed in moments by steel shutters. It wasn’t a castle but it was definitely defensible against anything short of a formal attack with artillery, and while certainly big it was by no means excessive for a moderately prominent baron.