The Given Sacrifice by S. M. Stirling Page A

amusement in her
     tone.
    “That was when I really first noticed you.
That girl will go far
, I thought, and now you’ve got my old job.”
    Conrad shivered reminiscently and crossed himself before he went on:
    “I also thought I’d never feel warm again, and it was so damned dark all the time. . . .”
    Tiphaine gave a half-snort: “I remember trying to pee and my armor being so cold that
     skin stuck hard to the metal
anywhere
it touched,” she said. “That and the way the Canuk ski troops kept working around
     our flanks through the woods. If they’d had more body armor and cavalry it would have
     been impossible.”
    Conrad sighed as he referenced a letter and murmured to his clerk. “Enough about the
     old days, let’s get the rest of these supply projections sorted.”
    “All right, let’s start with the barges and that elderly hardtack we have stockpiled
     at Goldendale—”
    Watching the Chancellor and my lady the Grand Constable do their work is . . . educational,
Lioncel thought as he stood and directed the page boys with flicks of his hand.
Well, I’m the Grand Constable’s squire; I’m
supposed
to be learning.
    They went through the rest of the stack of documents at a pace that made him blink,
     usually talking in an elliptical compressed way that showed how many years they’d
     worked together and stopping just long enough to chew when they took a bite of the
     lunch collation.
    “That’s all for now, Mistress Brunisente,” Conrad said to the senior clerk when they
     came to the bottom of the stack. “Get me a typewritten transcript by tomorrow and
     do a précis.”
    “Copies, my lord?”
    “No carbons. We’ll circulate it under seal to the Queen Mother and Chancellor Ignatius
     after we go over it. No need to bother Their Majesties with this unless the Chancellor-slash-Questing
     Monk says so. Rudi and Mathilda have enough on their plates.”
    The clerk took the hint, bobbed a curtsy and left.
    “Good enough,” Tiphaine d’Ath said.
    She leaned back, stretching her arms far behind her and tilting her head to one side
     and then the other until there was a sharp
click
.
    “As far as the Association contingent goes we’re golden on the supply situation for
     the rest of this campaigning season,” she said. “Especially since His Majesty’s letting
     a lot of our infantry go back to their villages and plow.”
    “The downside of that is that we’re cutting the size of the field force because we
     can’t feed that many so far from the Columbia, not because Rudi couldn’t use the men,”
     Conrad grunted. “Anyway, it’s time the rest did their share, and their foot soldiers
     are just about as good as ours. Nobody else has anything like our men-at-arms, though.”
    “The Bearkillers come fairly close. Nobody else has anything like the Mackenzie Archers,
     either,” Tiphaine said and shrugged. “Our knights are more use on campaign than they
     are back home beating on each other at tournaments and hawking and boozing, and only
     a little more expensive.”
    “
You
don’t have to find the money to pay their stipends,” Renfrew said. “
Or
pay to replace their beloved destriers when the bloody things die in the field—you
     wouldn’t think something so big would be so fragile. Those damned gee-gees cost more
     than a suit of plate and they wear out a whole hell of a lot faster.”
    Lioncel was mildly shocked at the way the Count was talking about the noble beasts.
     Nearly everyone he knew loved their destriers and coursers, but you had to make allowances
     for the older generation. It took six years to breed and train a charger fit to bear
     an armored lancer into battle wearing armor of its own. He’d been unpleasantly surprised
     to find out that their average life expectancy on active campaign was around ten months.
     Even the High King’s fabled steed Epona, who’d gone all the way to the Sunrise Lands
     and back with him on the Quest, had died at the Horse