Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change by S. M. Stirling Page A

also inchoate will age me, Your Majesty,” he said dryly. “Bureaucratic tangles are easier to resolve when there isn’t a battle going on at the same time, my son.”
    They both shared a chuckle at that, even more dry. Rudi cast his eyes sideways at the gaggle of staff officers, commanders from seven different realms of the High Kingdom and the allied but separate Dominion of Drumheller, messengers and clerks and map-drawers and everything else down to the people a half-mile back driving the wagons with the tents and supplies for the command party.
    It does them good to see the high command cheerful, and no need whatsoever to tell them it’s mostly gallows humor. I wish Mathilda were here
, he thought.
She
will
be, come the fight. Tomorrow probably, or the day after possibly, depending on how eager the enemy are to strike. But the reserve is mostly Protectorate troops, and those Yakima regiments d’Ath had with her retreating from the Tri-Cities. She’ll get them going better than anyone else I could appoint.
    “Tired of improvising, Your Majesty?” Ignatius asked.
    The warrior-monk was a few years older than Rudi; a borderline Changeling, born before the Change but not old enough to really remember the ancient world. His knight’s armor didn’t disguise his slim build, and he was of only medium height—standing flat-footed his eyes were level with the High King’s nose, and the tonsure that exposed the scalp in the middle of his bowl-cut black hair made him look older than his years. An expert would notice other things, though. Starting with the thickness of his wrists, and the ring of swordsman’s callus all around the thumb and forefinger and web of his right hand.
    Rudi had seen him fight often enough, on the Quest. More often than not against much bigger men, and the only time he’d seen the Shield-Brother pushed to his limits at anything like even odds was when they’dboth taken on a High Seeker of the Church Universal and Triumphant in Des Moines, one of the magus-warriors the Prophet had set on their track. His mind was even more formidable. The slanted dark eyes were calm as he watched the army of the High Kingdom of Montival pouring past them up the road, the calm of a man who’d done every single thing he could and who was leaving the rest to his God.
    “Tired of improvising? Tired of life, you mean?” Rudi replied after a long moment, and this time they
did
laugh, unforced merriment. “Not yet.”
    The roadway up from the Columbia was not much to start with and hadn’t been repaired since the Change, not until he threw five thousand men and a group of Corvallan engineers at it a few days ago. It would hold while the portion of the host’s men and supplies that had barged and sailed up the river or used the waterside rail line climbed up to the plateau. He’d picked it for the relatively low grades and for being as far east as he felt comfortable with given what he knew of where the enemy was. Hopefully the warning wasn’t enough for them to react in time and catch his forces before they massed and deployed.
    A glance upward showed the morning sun glinting off the wings and canopies of gliders, dozens of them turning in the thermals and updrafts along the river like a swarm of eagles as they kept guard. There wasn’t much a glider could do to another of its kind; opening the canopy and firing a crossbow at a moving target was usually dangerous only to passers-by below. But they could harass each other enough to make reconnaissance difficult, if the pilots had enough nerve to risk one near-collision after another, and his did.
    Most of them were wild girls, each picked from dozens of volunteers for nerve and for being lightweight bundles of strong sinew and cat-quick reflex; a lot of them came from Associate families, demoiselles who weren’t content to roll bandages or tally hard-tack, or from Mackenzies without the heft for the longbow and their like elsewhere. You didn’t need as much