The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change - By S. M. Stirling Page 0,68

curled to rest on Edain’s sleeping bag. The huge half-mastiff was a little plumper; even a dog could be a hero of the Battle of the Six Hills, and trade on it for many a rib or titbit.

“I swear that beast looks smug,” Mathilda said, smiling. “She’s going to ride at her leisure, most of the way!”

“Team Five!” Fred called. “Remember to keep your interval . . . ready . . . go . . . now.”

Artos swung into the saddle of the bicycle. “Hup!” he called, letting his left foot bear his weight down on the pedal. Everyone else in the team did likewise. “Hup! Hup!”

Steel grated on steel; one wheel skidded amid Southsider curses not intelligible to anyone who hadn’t grown up with their little tribe in the Wild Lands of Illinois. Then the weight of the cart moved forward, slowly at first and then faster and faster. His long legs pushed at the soft steady resisting force. He’d pedaled carts before back home, but this wasn’t quite like the streamlined aluminum pods used in most of Montival for fast transport. The wind in his face was colder with the speed of their passage, but not too uncomfortable for any of them, accustomed as they were to hard labor of one type or another outdoors in all weathers.

Behind Mathilda, Asgerd blurted in a tone halfway between shock and exhilaration:

“This is as fast as skiing downhill! Faster than a galloping horse!”

“Not quite.” Edain grinned. “Still, it’s better than walking, eh? And no more effort.”

Better if you’re in a hurry, Artos thought. And to be sure, better than mud!

There was plenty of that to either side as they covered the stretch of open fields southward; doubtless in a month or so they’d be planted to grain or buckwheat or potatoes or timothy and clover, but right now they looked the sort of glutinous quasi bog that would suck the boots right off your feet or break a horse’s heart. Then they flashed into the woods, with dapples of shade running across their faces and blinking brightness in the intervals; it was colder where there was shade, and most of the ground was still snow-covered. Occasionally the framework would shake and sway as they hit a patch where some gravel had washed out below the ties or rails had bent a little in a storm, but mostly their passage was smooth.

The sugaring party they’d seen looked up from emptying buckets of wood or old-time galvanized metal into the tank on a sled, moving their spears or bows to stay in arm’s reach as they went from tree to sled and back. A black-and-white dog with them dashed in a circle and barked at Gharbh, who turned her head away in ladylike indifference, and a boy or girl of around seven called from the box of the sled, waving with the hand that didn’t hold the reins.

Artos waved back, and Asgerd called a greeting lost in the speed of their passage.

“My family has a fine stretch of sugar-woods,” she said. “They’re a little east and north of here. Nearer to New Sweden. It’s a good farm; my mother’s family held it before the land-taking. Good woods for timber and firewood and sugar, good pasture, good land for grain and spuds and flax, and fishing rights on a lake.”

“Your mother’s?” Edain asked.

“All her kin were killed by outlaw reivers before Erik the Strong came in the first Change Year. My father, Karl, was one of his followers . . . joined him after the Change but far south of here, in a place called New Hampshire where he was a warrior who kept the peace . . . a policeman, that was the word . . . and he helped rescue her. There are six of us children—my brothers, Grettir, he’s twenty-four summers and just wed, Hauk and Erik, and me and then Brynhildr, she’s fifteen, and little Tóra’s ten. Tóra loves sugaring time. When we make candy by dropping the hot syrup from the boiler in the snow.”

The words were plain enough, but there was an undertone of longing. Glancing over his shoulder, Artos saw her head turned as well, with wisps of honey-colored hair escaping from her knit cap. Doubtless she was thinking that she might well never see it again, or the land where she’d been raised and had thought to live all her life and her children after her.

“Why didn’t you stay?” Edain asked, a little more bluntly than