The Tears of the Sun tc-5

by S. M. Stirling

  He finished the food, extracted some gristle from between his teeth and went to check on his horses, including his favorite, a big brown gelding named Boy he’d picked up in Nebraska years ago. He made a point of feeding them some of the apricots. A horse wasn’t like a water mill where you pulled a lever and got a given result. It was important that it liked and trusted you as well as knowing you were boss.

  Then he went back and waited, thumbing through a copy of The Silmarillion from his saddlebags, which was more or less essential if you were going to be part of the Dunedain Rangers, into which he’d married. This edition was from the Mithrilwood Press. The cover was gilt-stamped tooled leather over board, and it had annotations by her aunt Astrid Loring-Larsson, the Lady of the Rangers, along with her Helpful Hints on Modern Spoken Sindarin at the end. She had started the Rangers a few years after the Change, she and her anamchara Eilir, Juniper Mackenzie’s daughter. They and their husbands still ran the outfit.

  That priest I met in Fargo said Christians and Jews are People of the Book. Well, so are the Dunedain Rangers! Or Books, plural.

  He’d actually read some of the other stories by this guy when he was younger…

  OK, hold that thought. According to Astrid Loring, the Hiril Dunedain, those aren’t stories, they’re the Histories and the Englishman was The Historian, inspired by the Valar demigods even if he didn’t know it and every word is goddamned gospel true. I don’t know if all the Rangers actually buy that… I’m not really sure how seriously Mary takes it… but on brief acquaintance with her aunt I think that living in the woods with Astrid for a couple of years would convince pretty well anyone, much less a bunch of impressionable teenagers who wanted to believe in the first place.. . It’s the official line anyway, sure as shit stinks. What the hell, it works. And it’s no sillier than all these Protectorate guys ready to draw swords over who gets to paint what stuff on their shield. All your perspective, I guess.

  When you considered what the Cutters believed about their Ascended Masters and the Nine Rays and whatnot, it wasn’t even very strange. Nor was the Church Universal and Triumphant just imagining things. There was something there, it just wasn’t what they thought it was.

  A soft call came from one of the sentries and he stuffed the book away. A few minutes later two figures came up leading their horses.

  The one in the lead was Mark Vogeler, his nephew and aide-de-camp. The boy would be eighteen about Christmas, but he was tall and well built for his age; still gawky but when and if he got his full growth he’d look a lot like his uncle, except that his hair was the color of corn tassels and that his snub-nosed face was considerably less battered. The mail shirt and helmet he wore, his shete, tomahawk, the quiver over his back and the laminated recurve bow in its saddle scabbard on his horse, were all of the highest quality and they’d been new that spring.

  But they’d seen use since. The long trip from Readstown and several stiff fights had knocked a lot of the puppylike piss and vinegar out of the eldest son of Edward Vogeler; he was no longer quite the brash youngster who’d virtually blackmailed his kin into letting him come along to the war. The grin was still wide and white in his dark-tanned face below the mop of summer-faded hair.

  “Reporting, Colonel Vogeler,” he said, saluting and handing over a folded sheaf of papers. With a bow that showed how quickly he’d picked up local custom: “My lord Tucannon.”

  The other newcomer was in worn buckskins deliberately stained and mottled in shades of brown and sage-green to make them better camouflage. He was a short brown-skinned man in his thirties with black braided hair and high cheekbones, definitely Indian or mostly so. He bowed as well but remained silent afterwards, squatting with his reins tucked through his belt and munching on a handful of the apricots someone passed him.

  “Ah,” Ingolf said, flipping quickly through the papers covered in small, neat handwriting and hand-drawn maps. “Yup, Lady Mary’s report. About three hundred fifty men, Boise light cavalry, regulars, all horse-archers, with a battery of four springalds along with them. Damn, horse artillery. I hate those things.”

  Everyone in hearing nodded, including the men-at-arms. Plate would turn most arrows, unless they came from a powerful bow and hit just right. Springalds were like giant crossbows on wheeled carriages, but they threw four-foot bolts powered by an entire set of leaf-springs from the rear suspension of a light truck. They had three times the range of a bow and they’d punch through knight’s armor as if it were made from old tin cans. A good crew could fire nearly as fast as a crossbow, with two men heaving on the cocking levers from behind the steel shield that protected them from arrows.

  “They’re advancing in squadron columns-”

  Which meant forty or fifty men each.

  “-with a good screen out. A remuda of a couple of hundred horses bringing up the rear. A reconnaissance in strength, the lead element of a powerful raiding party out to disrupt your harvest and seize or destroy what they can, or both. Likely both. And they’re definitely turning east towards that valley, so it looks as if they’re going to go for the sheep. Confirmed by Rick Three Bears.”

  Ingolf grinned. “He adds that they’re well mounted. Those horses are plain wasted on white-eyes, quote unquote.”

  De Grimmond looked encouraged. And also, Ingolf thought, the tiniest bit uncertain. That was natural; he knew Ingolf and his Richlanders and the Dunedain only by reputation, and the Lakota contingent led by Three Bears barely even by legend. The leather-clad man who’d come in behind Mark Vogeler spoke.

  “My lord, I can confirm that.”

  De Grimmond nodded. “Go on. Tom Yallup, isn’t it? You saw it?”

  The man was a Yakima, from a tribe farther west who’d lost heavily in the Change and then in the long brutal wars between the Free Cities of the Yakima League and the Association; they’d ended up tributary to the PPA on what was left of their land. The tribute included horses, and in time of war scouts. Both had a high reputation.

  “Tom Yallup, that’s me, my lord,” the man said, looking pleased at being recognized. “Yeah, I saw it. Their commander had this sideways red crest on his helmet.”

  “Definitely Boise,” de Grimmond said. “A Centurion’s crest. Old General Thurston had an odd obsession with Ancient Rome and his son’s worse.”

  Ingolf coughed frantically. “Sorry,” he gasped. “Swallowed wrong.”

  The Indian scout went on, shaking his head ruefully: “It was hard keeping up. Those Rangers, they’re like ghosts. Real smooth scouting, real smooth, they’ve got an eye for the way the land lies. And the Lakota… they’re some serious ’skins, my lord.”

  “Right. Let’s proceed, then.”

  Ingolf nodded. “We come in behind them; my Richlanders first, to hit their rearguard, and the Sioux behind as reserve, to make sure none of them escape. The enemy will try to disengage and break contact when they realize they’re outnumbered, the valley side on the south isn’t impassable for mounted men and they’ll think they can get around us that way, hit us on the flank or escape and get back to their main body. You ram into them right then when they’re not expecting it and the impact ought to break them. And, my lord, the High King instructed me to say that he wants prisoners, if they’re willing to surrender. Particularly if they’re US of Boise men.”

  De Grimmond nodded. “It’s in accordance with the laws of chivalry anyway,” he said. “But thank you for the reminder, Lord Vogeler; it’ll help keep that in my vassals’ minds. God go with you.”

  “Good luck to you too, Lord de Grimmond.”

  “It is a good day to die,” Rick Mat’o Yamni-Three Bears-said solemnly, in a deep sonorous voice, with a broad gesture of one hand.

  Rick was a young man, about Rudi Mackenzie’s age, with a hawk-nosed high-cheeked face and a complexion a little darker than a deep tan; his furbound braids were a very dark brown, and there were green flecks in his dark eyes. His mother’s name was Fox Woman, from the color of her hair; she’d been one of the
many volunteers who’d ended up joining the Lakota nation, as it re-emerged from the Change. By now the Seven Council Fires dominated much of the northern High Plains; since last May they’d also been formally part of Montival, in exchange for complete internal autonomy and a pledge of help in defending their borders.

  Rick’s father John Whapa Sa, Red Leaf, had negotiated it. He’d also sent his son and three hundred warriors along when Rudi came home to Montival, as a symbol.

  “It is a day when the sun shines on the Hawk and on the quarry,” Rick went on, raising both hands in a hieratic gesture. “We shall take many horses, many scalps!”

  Three Bears had white and black bars painted across his face, the eagle feathers that marked his deeds in his braids, and his steel helmet was topped by buffalo hair and horns. There was an ornamental vest of white bone tubes across his entirely functional shirt of riveted mail, and a string of perfectly genuine tufts of scalp-hair down the leather seams of his buffalocalf breeches. Tom Yallup was staring at him and his followers-some of whom were in full fig of eagle-feather bonnet-with a look halfway between fascination and suspicion.

  Suddenly Rick grinned at him and burst into laughter, leaning his hands on the pommel of his saddle.

  “Nah, I’m just fuckin’ with your head, dude.”

  He turned to Ingolf. “OK, cousin, give us until”-his arm pointed accurately to where the sun would be at about three-“to get into position and start playing Cowboys and Indians. We want to make sure we get ’em all. Otherwise we’re blown and whoever’s following on will know where we are.”

  “Right,” Ingolf said. “That would be a bad thing. Hey, tahunsa, remember we’re supposed to take ’em alive if we can.”

  “Sure thing, Iron Bear,” he said, which was mildly impolite; his people didn’t use personal names when it could be avoided. “ Shee! How could you possibly think we’d do anything else? Gentle as kittens, that’s us.”

  Then he stood in the stirrups and waved his bow overhead. “ Hokahe! Let’s go, Lakota!”

  The Sioux poured away in a torrent, their horses moving like a wave of flowing water up the slope to the west and disappearing as if they were the passing of a dream.

  Mary Vogeler, nee Havel, laughed beside him. “What do you think the odds are they’ll take any prisoners?”

  “Fucking zip, honey,” he said. “But they’ll collect every single horse, you betcha.”

  “Ah… Colonel… Iron Bear?” the Yakima scout asked.

  Mary answered him. “We spent some time with the Oglala last year. A good deal happened. I’m Zintkazawin, for example. Yellow Bird.”

  She touched the wheat-blond hair that rested in a tight, complex fighting braid at the back of her neck below her light helmet; the ribbon that ran through it helped secure the patch over her missing eye. The other was a bright cornflower blue, in a face that was smoothly regular in a chiseled Nordic way.

  “Rudi… High King Artos… is Strong Raven. It’s a considerable honor to be taken in by the Lakota,” she added sincerely.

  Tom Yallup looked after the Sioux war party. “They really are some serious ’skins,” he said again.

  “Tell me,” Ingolf said. “I spent the first four years after I left home fighting them, and I never, ever want to have to do that again. It’s a lot more fun having them on my side.”

  He turned and beckoned. Major Will Kohler came up beside him and drew rein.

  “Yah hey, Colonel?” he said, in a heavier version of Ingolf’s rasping, singsong Richlander accent.

  “Let’s get our Cheeseheads ready,” he said. “We’ll be moving out in about twenty minutes.”

  There were still three hundred and sixty of the First Richland Volunteer Cavalry alive and fit for duty, after the long trip from the Kickapoo through the Midwest and the Dominions with Rudi and the rest of them. Their round shields were painted brown, with an orange wedge, the national colors of the Free Republic of Richland.

  Like the Sioux contingent they were a symbol, in this case of the alliance against the Prophet between Montival and the League of Des Moines that encompassed the Midwest realms and their various Bossmen. They were also all volunteers, wild young men of the Farmer and Sheriff classes for the most part. Major Kohler had been the chief arms instructor for the Vogeler family Sheriffdom in Readstown; he was the oldest man in the regiment at forty, and he was a big part of why they’d shaken down very well. The other was the educational value of hard experience.

  Educational for the ones that lived, Ingolf thought grimly. There were four hundred thirty of them when we left. But they’re not complaining.

  Instead they were finishing off baiting the horses, feeding them cracked barley from nose bags. These were fairly tall beasts, not as muscular as the destriers, but not cow ponies either. More like what they called coursers here, and they benefited from some grain before really hard work. Then each squadron led theirs away from the water hole and put on their tack. If you could, you always rested your horses and unsaddled whenever possible, letting them roll and graze; every moment of that added to their endurance and speed when you desperately needed it. Horses were curiously fragile beasts, despite their size and strength. Dead ones had littered the trail of every big army he’d ever seen.

  The orders were passed, blankets and saddles went on quickly, and each squadron mustered under its banner. Ingolf looked them over with a pang. They were him, minus a decade in most cases, big fair muscular young men born and fed from the same soil and folk that had bred him, and when they were gone back home-or dead-he’d probably never see their like again.

  The Dunedain were something else, wearing mail-lined leather tunics in sage-green and elegantly practical clothing of similar shades, chests blazoned with the Tree and Seven Stars and Crown and riding some of the prettiest horses he’d ever seen, mostly Arab by breed. They bowed in the saddle to him, with a massed murmur of “Ve thorthol.”

  Which meant at your command, pretty much. He was getting good at conversations in pseudo-Elvish as long as they were mostly commonplaces and cliches. Though the first time Mary had started yelling in it during a clinch he’d nearly been thrown off his stride.

  “No dirweg,” he replied: take care, or stay alert.

  Polite youngsters, superb scouts in open country and even better in forests, very respectful of him as Mary’s husband and increasingly for his own abilities… and all of them at least a bit weird, in his opinion. He supposed they were his future, rather than his past.

  “I’ll keep the enemy in sight… in our sight, out of theirs,” Mary said cheerfully, swinging up into the saddle of her dappled Arab mare as gracefully as an otter climbing onto a rock. “And let you know if they turn away from our muttonish bait.”

  They reached out and touched hands for an instant; then she turned the horse with a motion of balance and thighs, and cried: “Garo chur an dagororo! Noro lim, Rochael, noro lim!”

  He suppressed his anxiety with a practiced effort of will. Mary was very, very good with her weapons; most of the few professional fighting women he’d met were. Male soldiers could get by with being average, more or less, because most of the opposition would be too. You had to be way out on the right edge of the curve if you were going to risk your life over and over again fighting people on average bigger and thicker-boned and stronger than you were. His wife wasn’t petite; she was a big strapping young woman taller than the average man, heavy as some and as strong as many. Sparring with her was like trying to nail a ghost to a wall, she was fast as a cat and sneaky as a fox, an even better rider than he was and a dead shot with the recurve…

  Of course, you can still just get unlucky, especially if there’s artillery involved… back to business!

  “Ensign Vogeler!” he said as they bore away northwest.

  Mark brought up the trumpet he wore on a baldric.

  “Sound advance in column of twos.”

  This was all supposed to buy time. He hoped someone was using it.

  CHAPTE
R THIRTEEN

  COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK CHARTERED CITY OF WALLA WALLA PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION (FORMERLY SOUTHEASTERN WASHINGTON STATE) HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA) AUGUST 23, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

  T iphaine nodded as Sir Tancred saluted with fist to breastplate, whistled for his squire and horse, and detached a conroi of lancers and two of mounted crossbowmen to stay with her. Only a few of her own menie were with her now and they all had real work to do; if you were a retainer of d’Ath you usually had more urgent things to do than dance attendance and lend her credence.

  Then he swung easily into the saddle despite a full set of plate and cantered off to the army camp that had sprung up outside Walla Walla’s northern wall in the course of the long day now ending. She looked after the Guard commander with a slight envy; he had a straightforward job to do.

  Whereas I have to spend the evening herding barons and bucking up justifiably terrified townsmen and reassuring a Count. Still, that’s a big part of higher command.

  The force she’d brought was off the trains and camped on what was usually common-pasture for the chartered city’s horses and mules, with a few spilling over into stubble-fields. A low constant rumble came from it; rows of tents, dust smoking from under wheels and hooves and boots, picket lines, neatly racked bicycles and pyramidal stacks of twelve-foot lances and seven-foot infantry spears, lines of field artillery parked next to their limbers. Grooms and squires were leading strings of horses down to the water of the little Walla Walla River, or to irrigation ditches; files on work detail made the light loess soil fly in a chorus of spades and dirt and muttered curses as they dug sanitary trenches. Light blinked fiercely from metal, and here and there the heraldic banners and shields of baron and knight were splashes of color, but most of it was variations on the color of the soil.