The Protector's War (23 page)

Ken Larsson nodded and held up a sheaf of papers covered with pencil drawings. “I think Arminger's working from historical models.”

“Hand 'em over, hubbie dear,” Pamela said. She flicked through the pages. “Oh, yeah. Kerak des Chevaliers, I'd say, maybe Shobak.” At their blank looks she sighed and went on: “Late Crusader types, from the Middle East. Add in a bit from Harlech and Edward the First's other Welsh castles, and modern touches like barbed wire. As good as you're going to get for pre-gunpowder fortifications. Or
post
-gunpowder, in our case.”

“Nice to have an expert,” Havel said, smiling crookedly.

“Hey, bossman, remember I was a
veterinarian
.”

“At a zoo,” Ken Larsson put in. “And still are, in a manner of speaking.”

Pamela thumped him on the shoulder and went on: “The historical stuff was my
hobby
, like prancing around with swords. The Protector's the guy who was a real gen-u-wine history professor.”

“The Demon Professor…from
hell
,” her husband said. “We
would
get one who specialized in medieval history, too. It gives him entirely too many clever things in his bag of tricks.”

“Where's he getting all the
materials
?” Eric asked, giving his father and stepmother a quelling look. “The concrete alone—”

His sister spoke up; she handled the intel files. “There were at least two big bulk freighters in Portland loaded with cement, according to what we've got from travelers and debriefing refugees,” she said. “And another in the Columbia, and God knows what in Seattle, which he's been scavenging lately—incidentally, he controls everything from the Columbia to Tacoma now, too, which means quite a few cement
factories
with their stockpiles of finished product—like the one down here where we get ours. Not hard to haul the building materials on the railways, now that he's got them cleared of dead locomotives. There's a Southern Pacific branch line in through McMinnville and he's done better at keeping up the bridges than we have.”

Eric rubbed at his beard. “Now that you mention it, we saw a couple of big trains—horse-drawn, and oxen. Didn't get close enough to see the loads under the tarpaulins, that could have been anything. I just thought it would be grain and such. And little handcarts on the rails too—you know, the ones with a couple of guys pumping at levers, like you used to see in old movies. Zipping along real fast, too, faster than a horse—faster than anything I've seen since the Change.”

“Clever,” his father said, and tapped his hook absently on the sketches. “And Portland's a big asset. You know, back before the Change, the United States produced about a hundred million tons of steel a year, and imported more. And
lots
of it went into buildings, or other uses where it'll last a long time; Portland was a fast-growing town, plenty of skyscrapers—millions and millions of tons, just in those alone. Considering that we've mostly gone back to using a few pounds of metal per head every year rather than thousands, it'll last a
long
time. We're so fixated on the Change that all we associate with cities is death and chaos. But if you can get at it, today a big city's a
mine
. Steel mine, glass mine, copper mine, asphalt mine—you name it, high-quality metals and alloys already smelted, plus gears and shaped stuff. And that gravity-flow water system in Portland gives Arminger a lot of hydraulic power; he's rigged up machine tools to run off it. It gives him manufacturing capacity.”

“So Arminger isn't short of materials,” Eric said. “He's still doing a
lot
of this building. It must cost something fierce in terms of other things he
can't
do.”

Well, my brother-in-law
has
absorbed basic logistics,
Havel thought.

“Notice what he and his barons've been buying, during this latest so-called truce?” he said aloud. “Food, mostly. That lets him pull workers out of the fields and build up a reserve.” He called up a mental map. “With McMinnville, that gives him a string of castles east to Dayton, St. Paul, then down to Woodburn-Gervais, then over to Yoder. Plus all the smaller works, and what he's been doing in his HQ. A bit south of the old Yamhill-Marion county line. Defense in depth and he can screen the full width of the Valley; it counterbalances our advantage with the way the Eola and Waldo hills pinch in towards the river around the ruins of Salem.”

Pamela nodded. “When a country's fully castellated”—she paused—“I mean, when it's got lots of castles, war turns into a series of sieges; even without camp fever, that'd be no fun at all. Unfortunately, we don't have anything comparable, apart from Larsdalen and Dun Juniper and a few other spots. And that city wall the university put up at Corvallis. Our A-lister steadings and most of the Mackenzie duns, they're a lot smaller, about like his second string. And we
know
he's got a good siege train now.”

“There's Mt. Angel,” Kenneth Larsson said. “I'd hate to have to try and storm that.”

“Yeah, although that's geography as much as fortification,” Havel said. “The abbey's on a nice, steep, three-hundred-foot-high hill to
begin
with, besides what they've put in in the way of walls.”

Ken Larsson looked at his eldest daughter. “What news out of Portland?”

“Nothing unusual that my people can detect. There's a rumor he's going to announce that his daughter Mathilda is his heir, some big church ceremony with his pope laying on a blessing; she's over with Baron Molalla right now, has been for six months—some fosterage thing.”

Eric snorted. “And I can see
that
bunch obeying a nine-year-old girl,” he said.

“I can see anyone obeying Sandra Arminger as Regent, if our dear Lord Protector kicked off early,” Signe said. “She's got a following there, particularly among the old Society for Creative Anachronism types who think the gangers need to be scraped off their shoes, and she scares a lot more. Scares
me
sometimes! Besides, I doubt he plans on dying anytime soon, which is a pity, and there's a matter of Mathilda's marriage when she's of age—that is going to be one highly courted debutante.”

“Given up on having a son, has he?” Havel said meditatively.

“Pretty well. It isn't like he hasn't tried—he's the ‘If it moves, screw it, and if it doesn't move, shake it' type but none of them's ever caught. Maybe he had the clap sometime.”

“Hmmm,” her father said. “Is it certain young Mathilda—he must have named her after Mathilda of Flanders, what a thing to do to a kid—actually
is
his?”

“Certainly from her looks,” Signe said. “I've seen portrait pictures taken at her birthday last October and it's unmistakable. Pity, we might be able to do something with it if it weren't.”

Havel shrugged. “Hopefully he won't have a successor anyway. Is he mobilizing?”

“Nope, not beyond the usual,” Signe said. “Mostly he's been spending a lot of time with those Australians—Tasmanians, actually—who showed up in Portland before Gunpowder Day. I haven't been able to get any of my people close to them, though. Odd…it'd be nice to hear what's going on in the rest of the world, but why is he putting so much effort into them, with a big war brewing?”

“Maybe he's decided to just defend what he has?” the elder Larsson said hopefully. “After all, he's got most of western Washington, and the Columbia Valley nearly to the Dalles. Going on for a couple of hundred thousand people, too. That's the biggest, well,
country
anyone's put together on the whole west coast between Acapulco and Alaska, as far as we know. Biggest single political unit this side of New Deseret, probably.”

Havel shook his head; everyone else except the elder Larsson echoed him.

“Nah, Ken. Wishing don't make it so. That string of castles are meant as a base for attack—they're a lot more than he needs for defense, or even holding down the countryside, and like Eric said, it's costing him a lot. It's the shield to his sword, it lets him use small garrisons for cover and put the maximum numbers into a field army. He's got more full-time troopers than anyone else but he doesn't have a big militia he can call out when the balloon goes up.”

Signe nodded. “Plus he's just not the type to stop; and besides, the Willamette's the best farmland around and he hasn't got more than a third of it. Plus we're the only real opposition this side of Pendleton and the Yakima; the rest, it's just odds and ends, little villages and a few towns that made it through, and the ranchers over in the Bend country. If it weren't for us at his back, he could snap it all up as far as Idaho and south to California—that's empty, but a lot of it would be worth resettling eventually. He's gobbled up everything he can without taking us on directly, so now he's going to do that.”

“And he's bigger but we're growing faster these last few years, which is likely to make him sort of impatient,” Ken acknowledged. “Not least because we keep getting escapers from his territories.”

“I'd want to run away too, the way he squeezes his people.” Eric scowled. “I saw more of that than I like to remember, up McMinnville way.”

“Which is how he
can
do all that building,” Havel said. “You can build big without machinery; that's how the pyramids got made. But it costs.” He contemplated the map in his mind's eye for a moment longer and went on: “Not to mention keeping all those soldiers drilling year-round. Hmm…There's still a gap in that chain of forts. Just east of the river—the French Prairie.”

“Foundations,” Ken said. “The subsoil there's like jelly, and getting worse. I wouldn't want to put in anything with a forty-foot curtain wall and towers. Chancy.”

In a fake-British accent he went on: “
But the fourth time, it
stood!”

Pamela snickered, but the younger Bearkillers gave him blank looks.

He threw up his hands: “Christ, didn't any of you people watch Monty…oh, never mind. Anyway, that area was half swamp in the old days and it's going back that way.”

“Damn it, if he put as much effort into keeping up the levees and drains as he does into soldiers and forts, he wouldn't
need
to try and take away our land!” Eric Larsson snapped.

“To be fair, I don't think there are enough people left in the Valley to keep the old drainage system up with no power tools, and even without it there's more land than we can cultivate anyway,” Signe said. “Not that I want to be fair to Arminger. I doubt any of the people on our side do.”

Havel growled with exasperation. “That's the problem. We don't have a ‘side.'
Arminger
has a side. What
we've
got is an alliance of four major and
twelve
smaller…university-run city-states, theocracies, clans, village republics, whatever-we-ares…trying to fight a single dictatorship. A damned
loose
alliance, at that. The only way we can do anything collectively is for all sixteen of us to sit and argue until it's unanimous. You know the definition of a committee? The only life-form with more than four legs and no brain.”

“Makes you miss the good old US of A,” Kenneth Larsson said. “Gridlock and all.”

“I always did,” Havel replied seriously.

“How come you never pushed to start it up again, then?” Eric Larsson said curiously. “I mean, you never let us use the Stars and Stripes or anything when anyone suggested it.”

“Because that country's
dead,
” Havel said, an edge in his voice. “It died the night of the Change. I met a guy in Europe once who said the basic thing about Americans was that we'd never had a Dark Ages, just the Enlightenment. I've got news for you: the Dark Ages arrived, in spades, March seventeenth, nine years ago. Flying Old Glory would be…disrespectful. Like someone digging up their mother and using the old girl's skin for shoe leather. I may have lost my country but I'm not going to desecrate its grave.”

Eric winced. His mother Mary had been injured when their Piper Chieftain crashed in Idaho the day of the Change, and then was killed by bandits in a rather gruesome fashion not long after. The other Larssons glared at Havel.

“Sorry. Tact not my strong suit.” He sighed and rose. “OK, we'll get the reports circulated and have a staff council meeting day after tomorrow. Christ Jesus, but I hate annotating reports and holding meetings!”

Ken Larsson relaxed and chuckled. He'd been a businessman, and the son and grandson of wealthy magnates, while the Havels had all been miners since they arrived from Finland in the 1890s—and got their unpronounceable
Myllyharju
changed to something the Czech pay clerk found easier to write. When they weren't feeding the steel mills they enlisted in the marines, or went logging, or worked a hardscrabble farm they'd bought around 1900. All very worthy and salt-of-the-earth, but…