The Tears of the Sun tc-5

by S. M. Stirling

  Sober nods, and he continued: “Well, you’ll be receiving them in the next day or two. And I’m off. This High King position needs about six men to fill it.”

  “You won’t be disappointed in us Bearkillers, Your Majesty,” Mike Jr. blurted. Then he quoted: “Always faithful.”

  That was the motto of a band of warriors their common father had fought with, before the Change.

  “Mike, mo bhrathair, you were at my wedding!” Rudi said. “And saw me pale and wan with terror until your uncle slipped me some brandy. It’s a little too formal that was, brother, for an everyday occasion like this.”

  “My liege, then,” Mike said.

  “That will do. Feel free to add embellishments when you’re convinced I’ve gone lunatic; I’ve yet to see a battlefield where men didn’t feel that way about the high command, at times.”

  The tall young man’s face split in an answering grin, and the High King went on: “Every time we meet you favor our father more; you’ve more of his cast of face than I do, I’m thinking. Perhaps by the end of this war you’ll be wearing the Bear Helm, eh?”

  Mike’s face flushed; he met Rudi’s eyes for a long moment, then gave a slight nod. Eric’s brows went up. Signe went pale.

  After a long moment she bowed to Rudi. “Hail, Artos King,” she said; there was a slight choking in her voice. “I wished that. I hadn’t thought you’d aid me in it.”

  Rudi smiled. I know it’s a charming smile, some corner of him thought. Matti’s told me it is often enough, and sometimes with a deal of exasperation in her voice. Still, if the Gods gave it me, I should use it, and I’m not putting it on, either. I’ve always liked Signe better than she did me, Eric is a man you’re glad to have at your back, and of young Mike I’m fond in truth.

  “The Bearkillers will be a stout pillar of the High Kingdom,” Rudi said. “The more so with the bond of blood between my House and the line of the Bear Lords.”

  “We will be your sword and shield!” Mike blurted, then blushed as his mother and uncle shot him quelling looks. “Well, we will.”

  Rudi made his farewells and turned to Bjarni. “Walk with me, blood brother.”

  The Norrheimer did, squinting westward for a moment past his own people’s encampment; the lines of tall slim poplars on the plain were casting long shadows. They were alone. Except for Edain and the score of the High King’s Archers behind them, of course, and a half dozen of Bjarni’s hirdmen, walking with mail byrnie clinking and conical nose-guarded helmets on their heads, round shields on their left arms and spears or great long-hafted axes over their right shoulders. All of the guardsmen were out of earshot, if they spoke quietly.

  “Bad blood there, eh?” Bjarni said shrewdly, inclining his head slightly back towards the Bearkillers. “Or there was.”

  Rudi shrugged. “My blood father rescued my mother from some Eaters-mad cannibals-”

  “What we called troll-men,” Bjarni nodded.

  Such bands had been common throughout the more heavily peopled places in the year after the Change, as the desperate millions ate the storehouses bare to the last hidden scrap and then turned on each other amid chaos, fire and plague. Where the cities had been most dense, their savage descendants were the only human thing left, save scorched bones split for the marrow.

  “-not long after the Change. They were both of them on scouting missions, you see. And… well, that night was when I was begotten. Mike Havel wasn’t handfasted to Lady Signe then; they weren’t even betrothed, really, though they were thinking of it from what I’ve heard.”

  “Ah,” Bjarni said. “And there’s the rub, eh?”

  Rudi nodded: “She always held it against mother, and me. Less so as the years have gone by, but it’s also a bitterness to her that her son will be a chief in my kingdom, and not the other way about, you see. Mike himself doesn’t mind; we’ve always gotten along well and he’s a likely and good-natured lad. Also just the now he’s at the age when he needs a hero to worship, or an elder brother. Whether he’ll still feel that way ten or fifteen years from now… we’ll see.”

  “I do see,” Bjarni said. “My folk have their own rivalries. It’s the nature of the sons and daughters of Ash and Embla. So that’s why you said your half brother has more of a look of your father.”

  “Sure, and it’s the truth… though not by much, we’re both his image in body and face, though we’re taller than he was by a few inches. And the neither of us have his coloring; he was black-haired, perhaps because he had an Anishinabe grandmother, one of the First People, though for the rest he was mostly Suomi with a dash of Svenska and Norski. But young Mike does have a bit more of his face, I’d be saying. He was a handsome fellow, my father, among much else.”

  “He must have been a man of strong main”-which meant soul-strength, in the Norrheimer dialect-“and a fighting man of note and able to steer matters wisely,” Bjarni said thoughtfully. “From what I’ve heard, Gods aside, he puts me in mind of my father, Erik the Strong.”

  “A fair comparison. I remember him only a little, but he left a great mark on the world passing through it, and from that you can see the shape of the man who made it.”

  The land wrinkled up before them a little, scored and gashed and littered with rocks ranging from loaf-sized to real boulders; as you went south here you met spots that had been cut by water into gullies long ago. Three sentries rose out of nowhere, with arrows on the half-drawn strings of their longbows, Mackenzies in ghillie cloaks; those were hooded lengths of camouflaged cloth sewn all over with loops. The loops were thrust through with bits of grass and sagebrush or whatever else fit the landscape, and if the wearers knew what they were doing they could be nearly invisible even in open ground. Rudi had spotted them, but Bjarni gave a slight start.

  The leader of the trio tossed back his gauze-masked hood as he took the draw off his string. He was painted for war in the Clan’s style, patterns of scarlet and black swirling over his face to give it the look of his sept totem, a fox-mask in this case. The moon-and-antlers of the Mackenzies was blazoned on the green leather surface of his brigantine, and there was a tuft of the reddish fur dangling from a silver ring he wore in one ear.

  There was something a little foxlike about his eyes too, despite his dark hair and olive skin, darting and quick and cunning. Doubtless that kinship of spirit was why he’d dreamed of Fox on his vision journey as a youngster; that was part of the Clan’s coming-of-age ceremonies.

  “Chomh gilc ie sionnach,” Rudi said gravely; clever as a fox in the old tongue, and the motto of the man’s sept.

  “That we are, High King. Pass you may, lord, and those with you,” he said, tapping his bow stave against the brow of his open-faced sallet helm in salute.

  Then he turned, waved to someone farther down the slope, and made a slight chittering sound with tongue and teeth. It might have passed unnoticed anywhere insects formed the background of life. The sentries took different positions, sank down… and were once more nearly invisible, even if you’d seen them do it.

  Bjarni looked behind him as they walked on. “Your folk take war seriously,” he said approvingly.

  “That we do, or we’d be long dead,” Rudi said, hiding a grin. “We have no Fluffy Bunny sept… sorry, an old joke among us, I’ll explain another time if you wish.”

  And you Norrheimers find us deplorably flighty and light-minded and longwinded and fanciful about all else, he thought but did not say. While the most of my clansfolk who meet them find your people a staid and stark and solemn-dull lot who find little mirth in anything but hitting folk with axes. It would be a drabber and less interesting world if everyone were the same, would it not?

  The Norrheimer gave a slight grunt of surprise when they came over the slope and saw the Mackenzie camp below. The plain around Goldendale was really a plateau at the foot of the hills behind the town, and its southern edge was valleys where water had cut back long ago; the ground became rougher as you went south to the Columbia at Maryhill and
less of it was farmed. This was a broad open swale, the bottom perhaps twenty or thirty feet lower than the higher plowed fields. The bulk of it was in grass turning gold in the sunset light, with thick-scattered clumps of oak and pine in the lower parts. In time of peace it was a preserve for the hunting and hawking of the Associate lord who held these lands, and in war a fine campground that didn’t interfere with what remained of workaday life.

  Scattered almost as thickly through it were the small tents of the Mackenzie host, grouped in threes and those in circles for each Dun; Sutterdown’s contingent had four circles, they being the Clan’s only approach to a city, grouped around their banner of sea-blue and sky-blue blazoned with a scalloped shell and lyre and bow. Little efficient cook fires cast a trickle of smoke into the air, just enough to let you get a whiff of the wood burning and a bit of the food. The other camp odors weren’t too bad; Mackenzies were as cleanly a people as they could be, and this group hadn’t been here long yet. Rudi walked down the track at an easy swing, taking off his flat Scots bonnet now and then to wave back greetings.

  A different set of tents caught his eye as well, about a score and in rigidly regular lines; the flag that flew over them was the ancient Stars and Stripes.

  “Ah, Fred Thurston’s here,” Rudi said. “And by the looks of it, his little force has grown. More prisoners going over to him, and we’ve had a few deserters as well.”

  Bjarni made a skeptical sound. “Fred Lawrencesson I know and like,” he said. “He’s a good fighter and no fool, and the High One did claim him in my own hall-a great honor, though it’s a dangerous one. He’s one of the true folk. Yet I’m not altogether sure of his followers, men who’d turn on their lord.”

  “Martin Thurston isn’t their rightful lord,” Rudi pointed out, then thought a moment to put it into terms his friend would grasp at once and with his gut as well as his head. “He killed their father by stealth and treachery.”

  “True, true.”

  “And then he lied about it, got his men’s oaths under false pretense. His oath was false, and he made theirs false too.”

  “Also true. The Gods hate an oath-breaking man, they send him bad luck and bad luck is catching, like a flu. But… well, it’s all a tangle as bad as Sigurd and the Rhinegold.”

  “That it is. We’ll cut that knot, though.”

  The Mackenzies were mostly readying their dinners, practicing archery at targets of rolled straw matting or working on gear or just lolling about passing the time at games or songs or storytelling or lively arguments. War was mostly boredom, when it wasn’t terror. The Boise men were drilling, moving with a smooth machine-discipline that was almost eerie to watch as they cast their heavy javelins, formed and re-formed and changed front, then suddenly clumped together into a walking fortress that had shields on all sides and overhead as well.

  “Pretty,” Bjarni admitted. “We do something like that, but not as smooth.” He looked around at the clansfolk. “Those thin gold collars mean the handfasted, don’t they?” he said after a moment.

  When Rudi nodded, and touched the torc around his own neck, the Norrheimer continued: “You’re putting everything you have into this, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Rudi said. “As you did with your folk at the Seven Hills battle, Bjarni King. You couldn’t hedge your bet and neither can I. We have to win the campaign coming up or be ruined, and to win it we have to load a rock in our fist before we hit them, so to say.”

  This wasn’t just a group of wild youngsters. Many of these folk were solid householders with crofts and worksteads and children back at their Duns. And there were stacks of boxes and sacks, wagons parked in long ranks, even longer ones of bicycles, horses grazing under watchful eyes. And great man-high banks of stacked wicker cylinders full of bundled arrows, more than all the other supplies together.

  They came to his goal, a series of larger tents where a brace of guards stood, tall men leaning on Lochaber axes-gruesome weapons with hafts five feet long and a yard of chopping blade that tapered to a wicked point, with a hook behind. The Clan Mackenzie’s standard flew above, a silver crescent moon cradled between black antlers on a green field. The sides of the tents were brailed up to let the breeze in, and he could see folding tables and chairs, racks for records and account-books and maps, and men and women busy at the paperwork that any army seemed to accumulate. They were winding it up, though, as the light died. That came earlier down here, with the higher ground to cut off the sunlight.

  As the red sun dropped the clansfolk put aside any work or play that could be halted-he saw cards, dice, baseball and a whooping impromptu Iomanaioch game with the ball flying up amid a waving of ax-shaped hurly sticks-and turned to face the fiery glow that turned the western horizon crimson and light the sky above pale green. Voices took up a long wordless note, more and more until you realized that there were many thousands scattered down the valley. Singing well was as much a part of being a Mackenzie as shooting with the bow. Rudi turned westward with the rest and raised his voice, his arms spread above his head, palm-upward in the Old Religion’s gesture of prayer. Then the song began: “We know the Sun was Her lover

  As They danced the worlds awake;

  And She lay with His brilliance

  For all Their children’s sake.

  Where Her fingers touched the sky

  Silver starfire sprang from nothing!

  And She held Her children fast in Her dreams.”

  Bjarni and the Norrheimers stood aside, inclining their heads to show a guest’s respect for customs and Gods not their own. The massed voices rolled on, bidding farewell to the day in a hymn that Rudi’s own mother had composed: “There was a glory in that forest

  As the moonlight glittered down;

  And stars shone in the wildwood

  When the dew fell to the ground-

  Every branch and every blossom;

  Every root and every leaf

  Drank the tears of the Goddess in the gloaming!

  There came steel, there came cities

  Wonders terrible and strange,

  But the light from the first-wood

  Flickered down until the Change.

  And every field, every farmhouse,

  Every quiet village street

  Knew the tears of the Goddess in the gloaming!

  Now the Sun comes to kiss Her

  And She rises from Her bed

  They are young-and old-and ageless

  Joy that paints the mountains red.

  We shall dance in Their twilight

  As the forests fall to sleep,

  And She whispers in our ears the word remember!”

  The silence held for a long moment afterwards, as the sunlight faded. Rudi dropped his hands, still feeling the peace of it plucking at his heart, like a bard’s hands on the strings. Then he shook his head slightly. There was little enough peace he’d have in the next few years.

  Well, the more reason to grab what moments I can, he thought.

  He strode forward towards the area in front of the command tent. There was a fair-sized fire there, down to red-and-yellow coals now, and a bustle of cooking. A big man dressed only in a kilt was crouched over a young sheep, no longer quite a lamb-a yearling wether, he thought-holding its shoulders pressed between his knees and its head in his hands.

  “So, little brother, we are sorry,” he said, in a soothing, crooning voice as he stroked its head until it quieted. “But we are hungry and must eat. We thank you for your gift of life. To us also the hour of the Hunter will come, for Earth must be fed. Go swiftly and without pain to the green clovermeads of the Land of Summer where no evil comes, and be reborn through Her who is Mother-of-All.”

  The big hands clamped and he twisted with a sudden violent swiftness. Muscle moved and then stood out on his bare shoulders and arms like a swelling wave. There was a crackling snap like a green branch breaking, and the animal gave one single kick and died before it had time to bleat. A boy and girl in their mid-teens stepp
ed forward, took the carcass away and began bleeding and butchering it efficiently, the sort of task helpers of their age did in any Mackenzie force, learning the routine of war before they were old enough to stand in the bow-line. A collection of big shaggy dogs gathered to watch intently, tails wagging as they waited for their treat of blood and offal but too disciplined to do more than whine softly and lick their chops.

  “Merry met, Oak,” Rudi said to the man as he straightened.

  Oak Barstow Mackenzie nodded back; they clasped hands for a brisk shake. The First Armsman of Clan Mackenzie was about Rudi’s height and not unlike in build, though eight years older and a trifle heavier; his long queue of hair was the color of summer-faded meadow grass, and so were his long mustaches. He’d been an orphan of the Change, one of a busload of schoolchildren on tour left stranded by the roadside and lucky enough to meet the bulk of the Singing Moon coven on its flight from Eugene to what eventually became Dun Juniper. The fledgling Clan had continued to adopt such foundlings as often as they could without actually starving all through those early years, and it had paid in a manner which showed the truth of the Law of Threefold Return.

  “Merry met, Ard Ri,” Oak said, using the old tongue’s term for a High King. “And to you too, Bjarni Ironrede. Join us; there’s plenty for all. And Mother sent along some of her BBQ sauce.”

  “That’s an offer I’ll accept gladly,” Rudi said. “Aunt Judy’s herb-lore is of the best, for healing and cooking both. And merry met to you as well, Fred, Virginia. How are your men shaping? More in?”

  “Two hundred thirty altogether, sir,” Fred said. “And they’re shaping very well indeed. A lot of squads decided to come over together and they’re glad to be in the field instead of in a camp.”

  Rudi sat on one of the rocks that had been rolled around the fire. Absently, he noticed Edain detailing units of the Archers to eat by turns while the others stood watch; Bjarni’s guard-chief was doing something similar.

  I’ll just be learning to live with that unsleeping vigilance, for I think it’s my fate, he thought.