The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change - By S. M. Stirling Page 0,1

don’t they do that all the time?”

She snorted and elbowed him in the side. In armor it was more heard than felt, but he took the point.

“So, bearer of the Sword of the Lady, what does its power tell you about this island? What and where and what is it, now?” she said.

“It’s not visions I’m receiving,” he said. “And there’s no printed list of directions on the scabbard!” He could feel her shift.

“You’ll probably spend a lot of time learning what it can do,” she said.

Rudi smiled at the winter ocean. Nobody’s fool, my Matti! he thought. Aloud: “That I will! So far it’s like the sharpening of my own thoughts. And I think ...” He hesitated for an instant. “I think that this island has been a . . . a patchwork since the Change ended the old world; that it has. Not quite the place it was before that day. Not quite the island of another time, or many other times. Now it’s all of one thing—and that thing is the Nantucket Island that was before men first cut down its trees for cornfields. As if a thing started the year we were born has now been completed.”

“Then what happened to the island from our time? Or at least from the time of the Change? There were thousands of people here according to the books.”

“I suspect—not know, mind, but suspect—that the island that lay here twenty-four years ago was switched for the one we’ve gotten. And so began the Change Years.”

She frowned. “But wouldn’t that have made things different? Changed the past, I mean. When the English came here they didn’t find men speaking English, or riding horses, or forging iron swords.”

The vision that had come with the Sword’s finding was slipping away, as such things did. Flickers of a forest far grander than this, grander even than the Douglas fir woods of his homeland. Trees that towered towards a crescent moon. Three Ladies—Maiden, Mother, Crone—had spoken with him, and he could still grasp at shattered fragments of what they told, at vistas of time and space vaster than a human mind could ever hold, of universes born and dying and reborn again.

He touched the hilt, and Mathilda shivered against him. Rudi was tempted to do likewise.

“You’ve the right of that. There’s something . . . something about what the Ladies said to me—spirals of time, and each different yet partly the same . . . As to how the one is linked to the other, well, don’t ask me, for I can’t do more than babble of wondrous things seen in dreams.”

Then he worked his shoulders and returned to practicalities: “From the sky, the weather and the way our wounds have healed, I’d say we lost about a month since we arrived . . . in an instant or so,” he said. “And to be sure, we’ve lost that . . . town too. If it was altogether here to begin with . . . the strangeness and dark bewilderment of it. I kept seeing it different while we were running through it.”

“Me too,” Mathilda said, and crossed herself. “Then . . . it was as if someone was talking to me.”

“Who?” Rudi said, and tightened his arm as she shivered.

“A . . . a woman in blue? Ignatius saw her in the mountains, but . . . or was she in armor? There’s Saint Joan . . . I don’t know. And they were the most important words I’d ever heard but now they’re gone, mostly. Then you were back, and I didn’t care anymore where we were.”

She took his arm. “Now . . . now, like you said, it’s all of a piece. And, more important, it looks like it isn’t going to change on us again.” There was as much question as certainty in her voice.

He nodded. “It feels that way to me, as well.”

Now there was a thick, low forest of leafless brown oak and chestnut, and green pine behind; ahead lay beach, and salt marsh full of dead brown reeds, and the ruffled gray surface of a broad inlet of the winter-season Atlantic. It still seemed a little unnatural for the glow of sunrise to be over the eastern waters; the only ocean he’d ever seen until a month ago had been the Pacific, which beat on the shores of Montival—what the old world had called Oregon and Washington.

It’s still the Mother’s sea, he thought.

The wind came off it, damp and