The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change - By S. M. Stirling Page 0,40

be fed.”

Behind him Edain did the same, and the Southsiders who’d come to follow the Old Religion. It was acknowledgment that you only borrowed your body from Earth the Mother for a little while. And that to slay in battle was to consent to your own mortality and make your killer free of your blood.

Then they swung into the saddle, with no more than low grunts of effort. One of the tests of knighthood in the Association was to vault into the saddle full-armed, but nobody felt like showing off right now. Artos held out his hand and Edain tossed him the lance. He caught the twelve-foot length of it in his left hand below the bowl-shaped guard, resting the butt on his thigh. They’d had them made up in Richland, Ingolf’s homeland in Wisconsin, to a west-coast pattern, and stowed at Eriksgarth with their horses when they came through at Yule.

Lances didn’t last long in use, either.

A little wind dropped powdered snow on their heads from the pine branches overhead. The long man-at-arm’s shield slid onto his forearm. Its surface was painted with the new arms of Montival, blue field with a green mountain topped by a crown of white snow, and the silver Sword across it. He left the reins of the bitless hackamore bridle knotted on the high arched steel-sheathed pommel. Even an ordinary destrier didn’t need much rein control in battle, and Epona and he talked at a level far beyond that.

“Forward, my friends,” he said, and dipped his lance.

CHAPTER SEVEN

APPROACHING CASTLE TODENANGST, CROWN DEMESNE

PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

WILLAMETTE VALLEY NEAR NEWBURG

HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

(FORMERLY WESTERN OREGON)

MARCH 24, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

“So, is this Toddyangst place really a castle?” John Red Leaf said to Juniper Mackenzie, standing in the stirrups and looking eastward. “Some sort of fort, I suppose it means?”

They’d gotten horses at noon in the Crown stables by the railway station in Newburg a little west of here, along with a Portlander escort to join her six archers; the sun was behind them now, throwing their shadows onto the damp off-white crushed rock of the roadway. Luckily the spring rains had relented today and the sky was blue, studded with drifting high-piled shapes of white cloud.

The two Sioux had changed into carefully packed formal costumes back there; moccasinlike boots, doeskin trousers with fringes of hair down the outer seams, and leather shirt-tunics worked with shells and beads and porcupine quills. Red Leaf was the elder, a thickset proud-nosed man in his forties with a hard square face the ruddy-brown color of old mahogany, lined and grooved by harsh summers and worse winters; he added a headdress of buffalo horns and mane on his steel cap and a breastplate of horizontal bone tubes. His son Rick Three Bears was in his twenties, either a Changeling or on the cusp of it; he had a look of his father but lighter of skin and narrower of face, with a broad-brimmed Stetson on his head and a few eagle feathers in his dark brown braids. Both of them had the shoulders of bowmen and the instinctive seat of those who spent most of their lives in the saddle.

“No, Dun Juniper is a fort, and a village, and other things, my home being one,” Juniper said. “Todenangst is . . . hard to miss, you might be sayin’. And the huge and imposing castle it is, without doubt or question whatsoever.”

She’d had Rudi’s letters to describe his meeting with the Sioux leaders last year in what had once been South Dakota, and evidently they’d been impressed enough with her son to treat her as friend and ally from the beginning. Those letters and a day or so in Red Leaf’s company gave her the impression that the Sioux tribes who now dominated the northern High Plains bore a closer resemblance to their ancestors of the time of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull than her Clan Mackenzie did to the actual pagan Gael of the Táin Bó Cúailnge . . . but not all that much more.

Which was no surprise; she’d seen since the Change that you couldn’t re-create the past no matter how you tried, though myths and stories about the past could be a most powerful force in how folk built new ways to live in this new-old world.

“Way! Make way! In the Crown’s name, make way!”

The harsh cry of the golden-spurred knight who commanded the escort moved aside passersby on foot or bicycle or pedicab or mounted horseback