“I figure he’s OK, but he’s as old as the boss. We should elect Captain Martin vice president,” Gottberg said firmly, scooping more of the walnut-studded ice cream onto his plate.
It took Edain a moment to remember the ruler of Boise’s eldest son; they must mean Martin Thurston. Who was about Rudi’s age or a little more, come to think of it.
Gottberg went on: “That way if . . . well, you know . . . it’ll be like the boss wasn’t really gone.”
“Yeah,” Kit said. His eyes turned a little hooded. “I remember my dad telling me about how the boss found him and Mom and some others hiding out in an old warehouse near Nampa—this was just after the plague, you know, when it all went to hell?—and he said, ‘Come with me if you want to live,’ and they did. And they got a crop planted in time.”
One of the rest of the squad nodded. “And if we pick Captain Martin, then when the boss is gone, we’ll have someone closer to our age in charge. Christ, I get so fucking sick of those old geezers who never shut up about things before the Change. It doesn’t mean any thing! I’m not talking about the boss, of course. Just the rest of them. Like my old man.”
“Yeah,” Gottberg said. “If I have to hear another story about how wonderful it was to sell, what did they call ’em, elstronics, for a living I’m gonna puke. Besides . . . when I get out of the army, I’m going home and then when my father’s ready I’ll take over the farm. I know that ground—know it through my hands and feet, know what every inch of it can do. I’m the oldest son, so I’ll get it when Dad wants to sit by the stove and rest; that’s fair, that’s right. I figure it’s the same with the country—why not?”
Edain ventured a comment: “This Captain Martin of yours, he’s had his hands on the plow handles, then?”
Gottberg nodded. “I figure Captain Martin’s got to know the Chief’s job the same way I know our farm. It’s not like he’s some goof off; he’s been doing jobs for his dad for years now, running a company in the sixth, helping start new villages—he talked the folks up north in Moscow into rejoining the country, too, the way I hear it, even if he was just in charge of the escort on paper.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Kit said. “And Martin Thur ston’s . . . he understands, you know? Nothing against the boss, but sometimes he doesn’t think like us. I’ve heard Captain Martin talk and I’ve talked to guys in the sixth regiment. They say you can always go to him with a problem and he’ll see you right—he’ll stand by a friend no matter what. And he’s a young guy, like Joe says, he’s got his pecker up, he’s got big plans for the country.
Time to do something new, like his dad did when he was young.”
“You’ll hail him tanist, then?” Edain asked. “Vice president, I mean.”
“Well, there’s some bullshit rules about it,” Kit said. “I don’t see why we’ve always got to get our panties in a twist ’cause of something written way over on the other side of the world back when.”
Gottberg put down his spoon, his blue eyes narrow ing. “Fuckin’-A. And those Cutter loonies from Corwin, they tried to kill him—snuck killers into the guard detail! Kill him and the boss and his brother too! I’ve got nothing against Colonel Moore, but he’s even older than the boss, like you say. If those scumbags hadn’t been shot in time, we wouldn’t have anything of the boss left.”
That brought a growl all along the table. Men sitting at others close enough to hear nodded; a couple of them gave Edain a thumbs-up gesture, probably having heard who it was who saved their ruler.
Rudi will be interested to hear this, Edain thought.
Politics lost its charm; someone began to sing. The Boise men didn’t have as much training as so many clansfolk would, and it was odd to sing without women’s voices, but they had some catchy tunes.
They liked “March of Cambreath,” and he did it twice so they could get the words; the “How many of them can we make die?” chorus was really popular. Then they started in on their own war songs. Soon the whole room was hammering mugs and fists on the tables and bellowing:
Yanks to the charge! cried Thurston
The foe begins to yield!
Strike—for hearth and nation
Strike—for the Eagle shield!
Let no man stop to plunder
But slay, and slay, and slay;
The God who helped our fathers
Fights by our side today!
Edain turned down an invitation to follow them to a sporting house, whatever that was. He didn’t know what the conversation had meant, not wholly, but it did give him a bit of a feeling for the place, and Rudi was better than he at putting the bits and pieces together.
* * * *
“Yeah, that toadsticker you use is dangerous one-on-one,” Martin Thurston said. “As long as you’ve got room to give ground.”
Rudi nodded and settled back in the big chair; he felt loose and relaxed after the sparring and the shower. The officer’s mess of Boise’s citadel was a comfortable place, with leather furniture and good paneling, and a discreet bar. It also stood on the sixth floor of an old high rise, the Williams Office Building, built into the new citadel wall, which gave it a magnificent view of the state capitol—national capitol, according to the residents—when the heavy steel shutters with their arrow slits were drawn back.
There were a few other officers and their guests there, but Martin and Juliet Thurston were getting a deference that was just a shade more than the man’s official rank would account for. Particularly from the younger men.
“That saber you used is fairly nimble, too,” Rudi said. “You gave me a few uncomfortable moments, if you know what I mean. A more subtle weapon than the shete, I would say.”
“Just plain and simple better . . . as long as you’re not trying to clear brush with it. Shetes are so point heavy all you can really do is make like a woodchopper. The easterners dote on the damn things, though, I suppose because their dads used the original-article machetes to get through the Change and the dying time.”
“I’ve a man in our company from the east who uses a shete very well.”
“Vogeler? The tall fella? He looks like things would stay down if he hit them with a club, much less any sort of sword.”
They grinned at each other, two big men who’d taken each other’s measure with the tools of their deadly trade.
Though I have less sense of the man than I would ex pect, Rudi thought, sipping again at his drink. Usually you get a feel for the mind in the head when you test the sword in the hand.
His foster father, Nigel, said that it was hard to lie with a sword.
“Yes, he’s got wrists like a bear, anyway,” he went on aloud. “Even so, the shete is slow.”
“The saber’s faster,” Martin agreed. “But it’s a cav alry weapon. Not suitable for our infantry tactics ... and speaking of cavalry, do you have any stallions out of that mare you ride? I’d pay gold for one of them in our stud.”
“I can believe it, sure. Unfortunately young Ahearn is in stallion heaven back home, improving the breed throughout the Willamette Valley. And outside the Clan’s territories, it’s often enough I’m paid in gold indeed.”
He raised a brow. “Which makes me sort of an equine pimp, I suppose. . . .”
The young Thurstons joined in the laugh, before Mar tin went on: “Pity. That mare’s the best piece of horse flesh I’ve ever seen . . . well, we depend mostly on our infantry, and short swords are our weapon of choice for the foot. Though in a one-on-one duel, I’d still take a longer blade. But for fighting in ranks . . .”
“I know the short blade’s dangerous, close in,” Rudi said. “Many of my people use them. A line of them, with those big great shields of yours, that would be more dangerous than is comfortable to contemplate.”
“Iron discipline and the short sword, that’s what makes good heavy infantry,” Martin replied. “In fact—”
“Oh, God,honey,you’re not going to go into the glory-of-the legions thing again, are you?” his wife said.
“Sorry, darling,” the young man said with a quick smile.
Juliet Thurston was . . . the word sleek came to Rudi’s mind. Partly that was the glow of early pregnancy—about four months along, he thought—but most of it was a general catlike smoothness, not least in her long blond hair, and the way she curled into the red leather of the couch. She was pretty otherwise, too, long-limbed and well curved, with an oval face framing bright blue eyes. They seemed guileless.
And they’re not, sure, Rudi told himself.
The mess steward came by; she chose a fruit drink of some sort; Rudi and her husband took another whiskey-and-water each. He took a sip. It was good, with a smooth burnished taste he wasn’t used to, probably from something else besides barley in the malt.
“Tell me about your mother,” Juliet said. “Judging by the little we hear from the far West, she must be quite a lady.”
“She is that!” Rudi said enthusiastically.
And I miss her, he thought. I miss everyone.
“She’s elected, you say?” Martin asked.
“Hailed, every Beltane,” Rudi said. “I suppose some one else could stand and ask for it at the same time, but there wouldn’t be much point, and someone might throw things . . .not sharp or metallic or pointy things, but even so . . . though now and then a Jack-in-the-green does.”
“Jack?” Juliet said.
“Sort of a licensed fool . . . one of the merrier parts of our religion. A Jack does outrageous things and it doesn’t count.”
“She didn’t mind you standing for . . . what did you call it? Tanner?” Juliet said.
“Tanist,” Rudi said, noting a quick glance between the two. “Much like your vice president, I think.”
“Sensible,” Martin said. A smile: “Though perhaps sending you haring off across the country in the middle of a war isn’t.”
Rudi shrugged. “It’s necessary.”
Juliet sighed. “I wish we didn’t have to fight the Corwinites,” she said.“But we do.”
“Since they tried to kill me and Frederick and Dad, yeah,” Martin said dryly. “But you’re right, honey, that’s going to be hard. And not just the fighting. The reports are there’s a great big mob of refugees headed this way.”
“I hope it won’t interfere with mustering your war levy . . . no, it’s mobilization you call it, isn’t it?” Rudi said.
Martin nodded crisply. “You’ll find that nothing can interfere with our mobilization,” he said proudly. “In fact, we’re making arrangements for the refugees to help with the harvest, while our reservists are under arms. Speaking of which, I should get going.”
“Don’t go,” Juliet said after her husband had shaken Rudi’s hand and walked briskly out. “You were going to tell me about your mother.”
* * * *
“Fascinating,” Father Ignatius said sincerely.
He absently wiped the sweat from his forehead; the summer morning was warm.
“How many cubic feet of hydrogen, did you say?” he went on.
“Couple of hundred thousand,” the engineer replied. “That’s not counting the central hot-air ballonet that we use to help with altitude control.”
The Curtis LeMay was nearly three hundred feet long, crowding the arched sheet metal expanse of the hangar, but nearly all of that was the great orca shaped gasbag—from bluntly pointed prow through swelling midsection to the cruciform stabilizer fins at the rear.
The glider and airship field was well north of Boise proper, though it had probably been suburbs before the Change, and the land around showed the snags of burnt out ruins and some trees still living to mark the sites of gardens.
Tawny hills rose northward, fading into blue distance as they climbed towards the forested mountains, with a crest line at about eight thousand feet. An occasional ranch house speckled them. Just south was still a suburb, or at least the outside the-wall residences of wealthy men, often surrounded by barriers of barbed wire or concrete blocks, with gardens and stables around the big houses within.
The field itself had an X of runways as well, and a long ski-ramp launching mechanism with counterweights and hydraulic rams that could snap gliders into the air to catch the updraft over the hills. The winged craft were kept in a series of hangars salvaged from the old municipal airport; a larger one housed the airship and several uninflated balloons. There was a smell of metal and sharp acidic chemicals and paint and shellac, as well as the more usual scents of people and horses and vegetation.
“Do you find that the power to-weight ratio is sufficient, Major Hanks?” the monk asked.
The military engineer looked at him. “You are an unusual young fella,” he said.
The Boisean was in his late forties himself, lean and with a crew cut of stiff, grizzled brown hair. Ignatius spread his hands.
“I received a classical education . . . the pre-Change sciences, or at least some of them,” he said.
“Wish more did,” Hanks said. “The young guys I get off the farm nowadays, you just can’t convince some of them machinery can’t be treated like a horse. I guess it comes of growing up without anything more complicated than their mom’s sausage grinder.”
An orderly came up and gave them both cups of hot herb tea—the stove was well away from this area. Things didn’t explode the way they had once, but that didn’t mean hydrogen wouldn’t burn.
A lot of it catching all at once would burn very hot and very fast.
There were vats alongside the walls of the blimp hangar, where zinc shavings and sulfuric acid combined to generate the lifting gas as needed. Technicians were uncoupling the hoses that ran from those to the gasbag as he watched, coiling them away neatly. Others pulled ropes to open broad slabs of the roof, to make sure none of the gas lingered inside.
Everything about the air base was neat, almost fanatically so, the grounds swept, every piece of wood painted and every metal part polished or oiled or enameled. Ig natius profoundly approved, as a soldier and an engi neer and a monastic as well. Physical things were like time—both belonged ultimately to God; sloth and waste were a form of stealing from Him.
“Well, we’ve got twelve pedal sets on either side,” Hanks said, returning to the cleric’s question and pointing upward. “Set up recliner-fashion, that gives you maximum output.”
Ignatius nodded, following the finger. The airship had an aluminum-truss keel along the bottom of the shark-like gasbag; that made it semirigid. The gondola below was covered in thin doped fabric, for streamlining, but enough panels were unlaced for maintenance that he could see the spiderweb scantiness of the interior structure as technicians made their final checks and fastened the sheets once again. Idle now, a twelve foot propeller stood at the rear, behind a long wedge of rudder.
“The rudder is worked from a wheel at the prow of the gondola. She carries twenty-four pedalers, and an other six reliefs who act as the deck crew—you can see their positions at the rear there, like a semicircle—plus the captain and second in command.”
Ignatius smiled to himself. Hanks had not answered the question. The engineer caught the smile and shrugged.
“Well, in a dead calm, they can get her up to about the speed of a trotting horse.”
“And against the wind?”
The engineer shrugged again, and smiled himself, a little bitterly. “You go up or down trying to find a wind going in the right direction. Or anchor and wait it out. Trying to fight a breeze in this thing is like trying to hammer a nail through a board.”
Ignatius raised his brows. “Not very difficult, you mean?”
“Only the nail’s made out of candle wax.”
They shared a chuckle, and Hanks went on: “That’s the downside. The upside is that you can stay aloft a lot longer than a glider can. Less speed and control than a glider, but a hell of a lot more than an ordinary balloon. If only we had a goddamned engine . . .”
Ignatius nodded. He recognized the engineer’s bitterness without sharing it. The man had grown up
before the Change, and like many such—particularly those who’d worked much with machines—he resented the limitations of the new world with a savage passion.
God must have His reasons for it, Ignatius thought. Though it would have been interesting to have such possibilities open. . . .
He didn’t voice the thought; it would be futile, and would serve only to further disturb the middle-aged engineer’s soul. Instead he asked a technical question about the gearing. Hanks brightened, and they talked ratios and aspects and hollow-cast driveshafts for a few happy moments.
Outside an observer keeping an eye on the wind sock shouted, “Clear!”
Hanks strode away, and Ignatius stepped back po litely; the ungainly craft had to be brought out quickly, lest a cross wind catch it and smash it up against the edge of the big hangar’s doors. The ground crew were all hefty looking young men, and they tallied onto the long metal tube skids beneath the gondola and simply walked the craft out into the open by main force, before hooking a long cable onto a ring at the front of the gondola. It stood bobbing at head height as they tallied on and pulled until the LeMay’s nose was close to the base of a tall metal pole.
“Crew aboard!” Hanks shouted.
Most of the crew were women, which surprised the monk for a moment. Then he took a long look at their builds underneath the gray overalls as they scrambled up the rope ladders. Every one of them was slender and wiry enough to be assembled out of steel cables and springs.
Ah, he thought to himself. Maximum leg strength with minimum overall weight per pound of leg muscle. This is an instance in which a female’s relative lack of upper body mass is an advantage rather than a hindrance. Interesting.
Also very interesting to watch; he’d sworn celibacy, but found inner disinterest much more difficult. He sighed and closed his eyes for a second, praying for strength.
“You interested in a ride, padre?” Hanks called.
“Thank you!”he said eagerly. After all, it’s not as if I’m deliberately looking.
And while he’d been aloft in balloons and gliders once or twice, he’d never been up in a powered craft. It would be like a little hint of the fabulous days of old. His grandfather had been a helicopter pilot in a place called Vietnam, and the old man had lived through the Change, lived long enough to tell stories of marvels to a young boy then named Karl Bergfried. He had never seen his grand mother, though it was her inheritance that gave the slight umber tone to his skin and the tilt to his dark eyes.