The Given Sacrifice (28 page)

“My dad was a . . . what did they call it . . . Scoutmaster. And my older brother
was a Scout, and they talked about it a little now and then. And they had some books
about it that were real useful, practical stuff. Nobody kept it up after the Change
where I come from, though. Too busy.”

“No need, either, I imagine,” Mary said thoughtfully.

“Yah. You learn that stuff from your folks or uncles or whatever, like farming or
hunting or smithing. Or at school.”

From their sixth year to around twelve kids in Richland went to school, at least between
fall and spring, which was when they could best be spared from chores. Enough to get
their letters and how to do sums and a bit of this and that; children of Farmers and
Sheriffs usually stuck with it a little longer so they could keep account books and
deal with the outside world, especially merchants and tax-collectors. That was about
the way most civilized, advanced places worked, with arrangements running downhill
from that to wildmen bands in the death zones who’d forgotten that there ever
had
been such a thing as writing. Modern life just didn’t demand much book learning for
most.

He went on slowly, marshaling his thoughts: “But say there were a couple of hundred
of these . . . Scouts . . . flying through the air on that thing over there, and most
of them lived through the crash. They’d mostly be . . . oh, teens or a little younger.”

“Ah, I knew I didn’t marry you just for your looks. So they wouldn’t have started
having children until a bit later, would they? That’s why the born Changelings are
all younger than me, nobody Rudi’s age, or even Ian’s.”

“Right, and no grown-ups to raise them, probably. None still around, at least. And
you know how kids get notions and run with them.”

“And they’d be isolated from the outside world. By the Cutters, and by distance. Who’d
come here if it weren’t for the war?”

“Oh, afterwards they’ll get a trader and some mules every year. Or every two or three,
fur traders maybe. Or hunters. It’s nice country if you like the woods.”

“Yup, but there’s plenty of places with pretty scenery and good hunting somewhere
closer to somewhere, if you know what I mean. They haven’t got anything anyone outside
would want, they’re not on the best road between anywhere and anywhere, and they’re
the only people at all in ten or twenty thousand square miles. I can see how they’ve
turned out strange,” Mary said solemnly.

What’s that saying Edain likes? My, how grimy and sooty is your arse, said the kettle
to the pot?
Ingolf thought behind a poker face.

The Dúnedain had been started by a couple of teenagers, and look how
they’d
ended up. Though in his private opinion the PPA and the Mackenzies were just as weird,
and adults had been responsible for that. Not adults who’d have ended up running countries
before the Change, granted. You saw a lot of that if you travelled far, places where
some charismatic lunatic or small bunch with some set of bees in their bonnets had
ended up on top in the chaos and then shaped everything like a trellis under a vine.
Most people had been ready to grab anything that looked as if it worked with the desperate
zeal of a drowning man clutching at a log.

Like the Church Universal and Triumphant,
he thought with a shiver.
The way it turned out after the Change. Of course, something . . . else . . . is at
work there.

The three Council representatives came to meet them. They were back in full formal
fig, and there were a dozen more behind them in the same, with carved staffs if they
didn’t have spears. After a solemn exchange of greetings—the Morrowlanders were a
ceremonious folk—one of them handed over a document written on something he recognized
as a sort of paper made from birch bark.

“We didn’t want to tire you excessively,” the member of the Council said.

Ingolf looked down the list of Badges they were supposed to earn and wondered what
it would have been like if they
had
wanted to tire them out.

“I’ll take the
Tomahawk Throwing
,” he said, briefly remembering that night in Boise. “And
Wrestling
.”

You never knew when keeping up a skill would save you grief. Mary and Ritva were looking
over his shoulder.

“Dibs on
Storytelling
!” Mary said.

“We can do that together,” Ritva said. “We’ll do
Riddles in the Dark
and
Conversations with the Dragon,
and switch off the speaking roles, how’s that? And then one of us can do
Shelob’s Lair.
Those all come across pretty well in the Common Tongue.”

“OK, I’m cool with
Identifying Plants and Their Uses
,” Cole said thoughtfully. “I aced that part of Special Forces training and it shouldn’t
be too different around here. And
Field Shelters.
”

“I’m for
Snowshoes and Skis
,” Ian said decisively. “My dad taught me that, my family had a sideline in making
them and swapped them for our blacksmith work back on the farm. And
Camp Cooking
.”

Everyone looked at the Mackenzies. “Well,
Folk Song
, and
Musical Instruments,
” Mary said. “What else?”

Talyn grinned and slid the longbow out of the loops beside his quiver and made a flourish
with it. Caillech just strung hers with a step-through and a wrench.

“Need y’ ask?” the young man said. “For let me tell you—”

“You talk too much,” Caillech said, grinning herself. “Let’s show instead.”

•   •   •

It took a while to get to the archery, but the reception was all that could be asked
when they did. A cheer went up as Talyn and Caillech straightened and leaned on their
bows, panting and their faces running with sweat. The shooting range was overlooked
by informal bleachers made by cutting seats into the hillside and cultivating turf.
The cheering came mostly from the younger element—what the Scouts called
cubs
. The older spectators were enthusiastic too, but a lot of them were looking rather
thoughtful.

I would be too,
Ingolf thought.

The range included pop-up targets of various sorts and even some rigged to move, but
final test had been straight speed-and-accuracy shooting at a hundred yards. Both
the round wood targets bristled with gray-fletched cloth-yard shafts. Many had punched
their heads right through the four-inch thickness of pine. The ground below was littered
with the ones that had been broken by more recent arrivals simply because there wasn’t
any more room in the bull’s-eye. The Clan warriors had emptied their big forty-eight
arrow war quivers in less than five minutes of concentrated effort, and not a single
shaft had missed the targets; most were tightly grouped in the centers, though admittedly
there wasn’t any wind to complicate matters.

I couldn’t have matched that,
Ingolf thought.
Oh, accuracy, sure, but not the speed.

Cole Salander smiled as he fingered the new badge sewn to his camouflage jacket; it
turned out to be made of beautifully tanned and colored deerskin, and sported a red
leaf against a green background.

“Makes me ever more glad I wasn’t at the Horse Heaven Hills with you guys shooting
at me,” he said. “But I’d have figured these guys here for good shots, too. That was
some impressive, yeah, but should they be
this
impressed?”

“I know why they’re startled,” Ingolf murmured. “They’re hunters, not war-archery
specialists like our Clan friends.”

Mary nodded, though Cole still looked a little puzzled; his folk mostly used crossbows
for distance work, at least when fighting on foot.

Hunting . . . particularly hunting on foot in woodland . . . you very rarely shot
more than once or twice at any particular animal. After that you’d either hit it or
it had run away, so there wasn’t much point in carrying more than half a dozen arrows.
And you got just as close as you could; Ingolf would have bet the Scouts were good
enough stalkers that they ended up shooting from point-blank more often than not.
They were fine archers with their light handy recurves within that envelope, and he
certainly wouldn’t want to try and force his way through this rugged, forested country
with them stalking him from ambush.

Mackenzies did a lot of hunting too; you had to in the Willamette, as in most places,
if only to protect your crops from animals breeding fast in a world where humans were
scarce. But the Mackenzie longbow was a battlefield weapon first and foremost. On
a battlefield you were shooting for your life, not your supper, and your steel-clad
targets came at you, screaming and waving sharp pointy things with ill intent. The
training regime that old Sam Aylward had instituted right from their beginnings was
aimed at shooting very fast with very powerful bows from the maximum possible distance,
not taking your time.

To get into the Clan’s First Levy, you had to be able to shoot twelve arrows in sixty
measured seconds, and hit a man-sized target at a hundred yards with eight of them;
that was the minimum standard, not the average. With a bow of at least seventy pounds
pull as measured on the tillering frame; Talyn’s drew a hundred-odd, and Caillech’s
a
mere
eighty. Both of them were well above the entry level in speed and accuracy, too.

When they were serious, Mackenzie archery contests
started
at a hundred yards.

The badges were presented; the Dun Tàirneanach pair got carried around the bleachers
shoulder-high, too. Then everyone stood before the Council.

Andrew, called Swift, came forward again. “You have proven to be people of skill and
merit, worthy of badges,” he said. “You are worthy to speak with the Last Eagle, our
Akela. So will your King be, when he can come here.”

The Montivallans looked at each other. “Well, about that, Andrew of the Council.”
Mary said. “We didn’t want to presume before you’d decided, but there
is
a bit of a hurry . . .”

•   •   •

The glider banked out over the water and turned in towards the shore; the pennant
on a tall pole showed the wind to be directly out of the south. The long slender wings
on either side of the tadpole shape flexed visibly, and the speed slowed. Suddenly
it turned from a bird-sized dot out over the sun-glinting chop of the waters into
something of visibly human make. It slowed, slowed, dropped . . . and then it was
trundling over the grass, stopping, dropping one wing to the ground.

A long
ahhhhhhh
came from the Morrowlanders. Flying wasn’t something they’d ever seen in their own
lives; they didn’t travel much, and the Cutters who were their neighbors regarded
balloons and gliders as abomination. But flying was important in their founding myth.

Ingolf and the others walked forward. The transparent upper front of the fuselage
tilted to one side; the glider was a two-seater model. Alyssa Larsson hopped out,
and a second later Rudi Mackenzie did likewise and stood with the wind from the lake
ruffling his plaid and long sunset-colored hair and the spray of raven-feathers in
his bonnet.

“Hail, Artos!
Artos and Montival!
”

The cry was sincere enough, though Ingolf could see a glint of humor in Rudi’s blue-green
eyes. They all saluted, and he walked forward. Mary and Ritva fell in on either side
of him, giving him a rapid précis in the Noble Tongue; Ingolf caught about half of
it. Behind him he could hear:

“Cole, we’re going to have to stop meeting this way.”

“Well, at least you didn’t crash-land upside down on top of a
bear
.”

“That was only
once
 . . .”

Rudi nodded to his half sisters and looked at Ingolf.

“Yeah, he’s . . . strange, the Last Eagle,” the Richlander said. “Not exactly wandered
in his wits, but strange. And he’s not a well man. I got the feeling he’s hanging
on with his fingernails because he thinks he has to get a job done first.”

Rudi’s smile was crooked; not for the first time Ingolf reflected that he seemed older
than his face would indicate, sometimes.

“I suspect I know how he feels, and will the more so as time goes on,” the High King
said quietly.

A drum was thuttering in the background as the party paced towards the Council; there
were flutes too, and flags. Rudi halted for a moment, went to one knee, and raised
a clod of the dirt to his lips before he stood again.

“I greet the Morrowland Pack in the name of the High Kingdom of Montival and all its
peoples and the kindreds of earth and sea and sky,” he said, his beautiful almost-bass
carrying clearly through the still cool air. “I step upon the Pack’s territory by
its leave, obedient to its Law, making no claim without the free consent of its folk.”

The Council formed up on either side of them, and they not-quite-marched into the
House of the Council. The big interior room was a little dim, but comfortably warm
despite the lingering chill of the night, from the stoves in the corners more than
the crackling fire on the big hearth at the north end. The figure in the fur cloak
sitting waiting for them struggled to his feet, helped by the anxious hands of a young
man and woman on either side of him. They put a staff whose head was carved in the
form of a wolf’s head in his hand and he leaned on it, breathing a little harshly.

The Morrowlanders all stopped and called:
“Akela!”
They added a chillingly realistic collective wolf-howl. The Montivallans saluted
in their various fashions, and Rudi Mackenzie inclined his head briefly.

And yeah, this is a man to respect,
Ingolf thought.

Ingolf Vogeler had never seen anyone burned so badly who’d lived to heal—heal after
a fashion. One blue eye looked out of the ruined face, and it was obvious that the
Aklela’s left knee hadn’t bent properly for a very long time.

Twenty-six years, to be precise,
Ingolf thought.
I’ve seen a lot of people hurt in the Change, but usually they’re not only a little
more than my own age. Children mostly either made it or they didn’t.