The Tears of the Sun tc-5

by S. M. Stirling

  “Not all going to the castle,” Ingolf said; it wasn’t a question.

  He estimated that the tall stronghold could be held securely by about two hundred men at a pinch, and three or four hundred would be ample. If they had their families along, it would be pretty tight quarters. Build small and high was a good rule for a fort, and that one was high and no mistake. Ingolf couldn’t think of any way to storm it at all, offhand, as long as the garrison stayed alert. Even getting close to it would be dangerous, given the vantage it provided for catapult fire, and shooting back would be a joke with that elevation.

  “No, not even most is going to the castle. The mountains were another reason my father took seisin of this grant, and not just for the water and timber, though that’s why my manors are all in the foothills. There are caves up there, and old buildings from before the Change-ranger cabins, and so forth.”

  “Hmmm.” Ingolf scratched at his beard. “And you’ve been working at them since your father’s day?”

  Maugis nodded. “For the last twenty years, and there are hidden storehouses underground we’ve been filling since the war started last year. Good grazing, too; it’s not all forest and rock, there are flat areas with plenty of grass, and there’s the devil’s own lot of game, boar and bear and deer and elk. Not to mention tiger and wolf and cougar. We use the high country in dry years for summer grazing; my folk know those mountains. I’m not sending any to Walla Walla to be shipped down the Columbia… and possibly never come back.”

  Ingolf nodded understanding. The baron was being forethoughtful for his people, and for his own family’s interests as well. There wasn’t any serfdom anywhere in Montival, or slavery. Fifteen years ago the treaty at the end of what everyone but the PPA folks called the War of the Eye, what they termed the Protector’s War here, forbade any law that limited the right to emigrate. Anyone who wanted to leave could, debts or no. But that meant leaving the only home they had, with nothing more than the clothes they stood up in, and no skills but one particular type of farming.

  Few would face that if they weren’t impossibly badly treated at home. However, if you’d been shipped to a distant city anyway, with the government footing the bill, heading home away from the bright lights might not seem very attractive at all. Or at least some would stop on a manor where a holding was available from a lord greedy for workers; there was more good land everywhere than there were hands to till it.

  “That castle could be held by a corporal’s guard, my lord,” Ingolf said thoughtfully. “Well, them and some catapult crews.”

  “And I could do it that way,” Maugis agreed. “Keep a minimal garrison and the most vulnerable noncombatants in the castle. Everyone else in the hills, and then raid out of them with the barony’s fighting men when the enemy occupy the lowlands… which they will.”

  “Yup, they will,” Ingolf said; he wasn’t going to lie to this man. “Hopefully, not for all that long, but for a while, yeah.”

  “Tell me, Lord Vogeler, how many men would you need to comb these mountains against me and my neighbors if we took refuge there? How long would it take?”

  Ingolf’s professional reflexes kicked in. He looked up at the peaks to the east-one of them still had a little snow on it and must be around seven thousand feet-and ran what he knew of the terrain through his mind.

  “At least five thousand men and a lot of equipment, if you gave me a year,” he said. “Not counting the ones you’d need to besiege the castles around here, or at least solidly invest them. Maybe two years to do a thorough job. Ten, twenty thousand and even more gear if you wanted it done quick and dirty. You’d need good troops you could trust to get out there in small units and get stuck in whenever they could, not just go through the motions when someone higher up was looking. And some engineers to build roads and fortified posts, plus labor. And it’d cost you, money and blood both. That’s natural ambush country, looks like.”

  Maugis nodded quietly. They walked on through the town, the baron nodding response to bows and curtsies and salutes; nobody was going to interrupt him, of course. Grimmond-on-the-Wold had something like eight hundred folk in peacetime and many more now. That was big for a village, but not a place that had wholly made up its mind to be a town either, and certainly not even the smallest city.

  “I could raid from those hills and tie down that many troops or more,” Maugis said. “I could make trying to move supplies through this country… anywhere between here and the Snake River… a nightmare of endless harassment. Ambush convoys, kill foraging parties, cut off patrols, burn outposts.”

  He turned and gestured to the town and the lands beyond. “I know that this doesn’t look like much to a traveled man,” he said.

  “Actually it looks pretty good,” Ingolf said sincerely. “Mary and I were just now saying that we envied you. Well, would envy you if it were peacetime.”

  Maugis smiled; it was an oddly charming expression, and made his rather ugly face handsome for a moment.

  “Thank you,” he said. “This is my… my world, if you know what I mean. My own particular world.”

  Ingolf dredged his memory for a word he’d heard; his family were mostly Deutsch if you went back far enough, along with a slew of other things including a lot of Norski. They had preserved a few bits and pieces of that heritage, and not just recipes for bratwurst.

  “Heimat,” he said. “An old word. Your heimat is… your little country, the first homeland of the heart. The place where your roots are.”

  Maugis nodded quickly. “Exactly. I’ve enjoyed my times at Court in Todenangst and Portland, the university in Forest Grove, visits to Walla Walla, tournaments and meetings of the Peers, theatre and concerts, but this place is my home. All of it, and the people are my people.”

  Most of the folk of Grimmond-on-the-Wold were peasants, who tilled the little garden tofts around their three-room-and-a-loft cottages that gave off the tree-shaded streets. They had their strips in the big open fields of wheat and barley, canola and sunflowers and clover westward, their stock in the common flocks and herds. From that they paid a share to the lord, and worked two or three days a week on his demesne land; that included a long south-facing slope of goblet-trained vineyards green and bushy with summer and the orchards around the irrigation furrow beneath. Some of the little houses were neatly kept, with flowers planted around their doorways. Others had patches flaking from their whitewash and chickens walking in the door.

  None of them looked truly miserable; the people in them certainly weren’t underfed, or very ragged, or too smelly. The toft gardens all had abundant vegetables and a few fruit trees; there were chicken coops and the odd pigsty or shed for a milch cow down at their far fence. There were Refugees in Richland who lived worse. The upper part of the town held larger houses as well, from the reeve’s and the bailiff’s up to those of the household knights.

  “Heimat,” Maugis repeated, rolling the word around his mouth to taste it. “I like that. It… fits.”

  Since this was a baron’s seat, it also had two or three of the things the ordinary manorial village had one of, bakeries and blacksmith’s shops and some full-time weavers. The blacksmiths had the usual piles of bundled scrap metal around their doors, and they were working too hard to notice their overlord walking by; metal hissed viciously with a vinegary smell and a spearhead was quenched, with a grinding chorus of metal shoved against spinning honing wheels beneath. Most of the other craftsfolk looked about as busy.

  “War wears things out,” Maugis said, nodding at them. “Things and people.”

  “God knows it’s worn holes in me,” Ingolf said ruefully, touching the dent where his nose had been broken.

  Down at the end of the single street were a set of huge barns, long work sheds, a tall windmill and a tangle of corrals. Those were swarmingly busy too.

  “I could turn these mountains into a running sore when the enemy come… as they will. Or I could put up a single fight on the plains for honor’s sake, and then just defend
the heights, giving a bloody nose to anyone who pokes it in and hoping to deal as best I can with whoever has the victory in the end.”

  “You could do that, my lord,” Ingolf said carefully, as he might to a horse he wasn’t sure might bolt. “But you’d be making it that much less likely we win the war.”

  “Yes,” Maugis said calmly. “And I have obligations to the Count, whose vassal I am. He’s a good man who does his best, and even his father-who was a jumped-up thug with a veneer of courtesy, as my father said-gave us good lordship, mostly, which is as much as a vassal can rightly demand. The question is, can the Count protect me and mine in return for my service if I throw everything into the scales for him? I’m not a household knight who can fight with no thought but to die at his lord’s side. There are more than four thousand people living in this Barony, Lord Vogeler, commons, clerics and gentles alike. They’re my vassals; they look to me for protection in return for their service and obedience, and I have sworn to provide it. For that oath I must account before the very Throne of God.”

  He crossed himself. “Most of the time being a baron is a fine thing, the wealth and power and glory of it. There comes a time to pay for everything, though, if a man’s to be a man indeed and not just a wolf that walks on two legs with his sword for fangs. And only the lesser debts can be paid in cash. These decisions are mine to make here, and that is my burden.”

  “There’s more involved than the Count Palatine,” Ingolf said. “Or Walla Walla and the County of the Eastermark in general.”

  “Yes; there’s his overlord the Lady Regent, and the new Kingdom. Lady Sandra I know a little, and she is very able, she’s led the Association well. But she’s colder than the dark side of the Moon. A ruler must make sacrifices, and balance this loss against that, sometimes ruthlessly; I know that from watching and listening to my father work, and my own experience. But she would sacrifice my barony and its folk without even a moment’s hesitation if it served her aims, as if it were an entry in a ledger or a cutting bar in a hay-reaper. I cannot give fealty to a machine or a mere form of written laws. It must be to a person, someone who respects my honor, who loves it, even if he sends me to death and condemns my lands to the fire for a greater duty’s sake.”

  “She’s not the big boss anymore, Lord Maugis.”

  He stopped and looked at Ingolf Vogeler. “I don’t know Rudi Mackenzie,” he said. “Or Artos the High King. But I do know you, a little, Lord Vogeler. We’ve fought together side by side, and I’ve seen you at work with your own troops. And I flatter myself that though I’m young yet, I’m a fair judge of men. So tell me about Artos. Tell me if he’s a King worth risking all this”-he moved his arm about-“for. Is he a man who loves his vassals’ honor as much as his own? Is he worthy of true fealty, that I can ask my followers to lay down their lives and risk their homes for him?”

  Ingolf stood rooted to the spot. Hell, how do I answer that? he thought desperately. OK, I know Rudi pretty damned good. We were together through two really stressful years and a lot of… wait a minute.

  “Lord Maugis,” he said. “I could tell you what I think of Rudi.. . the High King… but that would just be words. My opinion at most. Let me tell you what I’ve seen him do, these last two years and more, since I rode into Sutterdown with the Prophet’s men on my tracks. Words are cheap, but a man is what he does.”

  When Ingolf finished, he found his throat unexpectedly dry. And the sun was much lower, low enough to make him blink in surprise. They were sitting on a stone horse-trough with a spigot above it. He turned it on, and drank a double handful of the cold mineral-tasting water, shaking out his hands afterwards. The air sucked the moisture out of his beard in moments, but it was a little cooler now.

  Lord Maugis stood looking westward for a long moment, his left hand on his sword-hilt. When he turned he bowed.

  “My lord de Stafford said that all the barons of the County Palatine were summoned to a conference in Walla Walla by the Count, to consider our strategy in this war. If we could be spared from our domains. I think that I can be, now.”

  A bell began ringing; the big one in the church, going a slow deep: bong… bong… bong… a dozen times.

  “And it is time to return to the square,” he said.

  They did. The bustle there was still going on, by the light of steel baskets of burning pinewood that lofted trails of sparks like little scarlet-yellow stars. The fire in the clouds westward was dying down, and the sky over the mountains was dark blue, a few first true stars showing. The moon was nearly full, shedding a silvery light almost as bright as the fires. And a timber podium had been set up in front of the manor gates, a simple thing that would raise a few people to about head-height over the pavement. The ground sloped away from there; it would give everyone in the square a view.

  More and more people summoned by the bells were pouring in, until the area was packed. Lady Helissent and her mother came out, and her children. Her glance crossed that of her husband; he nodded to her. Ingolf could see something pass between them, knowledge and decision; Helissent’s eyes closed for an instant, and then she took a deep breath and opened them and smiled bravely at the father of her children.

  “If you would accompany me, Lord Vogeler, and your good lady?” Maugis chuckled at the look on the older man’s face. “No, I’m not asking you to speak, just to… be present.”

  The local priest went up the stairs first in his vestments, and intoned a prayer. Nearly everyone crossed themselves and kissed their crucifixes, then joined in the last part of it:

  “… Dignum et iustum est. Amen.”

  Then the lord of Tucannon and his family and guests climbed up. Looking down, Ingolf saw a sea of faces, and at first was conscious mainly of the eyes. The gaudy haughtiness of the knights and their families and households were in the first row, shading backward into the shaggy dun mass of the commons, straw hats and kerchiefs and shock-headed children. There were a scattering of Richlanders and Sioux; even a few of the Boiseans were there, officers who’d given their paroles. Captain Woburn was one of them, his face impassive. The crackle of the fire-baskets ran beneath the sough of breathing.

  Almost-silence fell as Lord Maugis stepped forward; then a bow swept through the crowd. The soldiers behind the podium came to attention, thumping their spearbutts and the metal-edged points of their four-foot shields down on the paving blocks. Maugis doffed his hat with a flutter of liripipe and returned the bow, not so deeply but a definite gesture.

  “My people,” he said. “My brothers and sisters-for any who fights beside me for this our home I call my brother-we are here tonight to celebrate and to mourn. We fought and beat those who threatened our land, our homes and our families-”

  The crowd burst into a long rolling cheer, calling the baron’s name. Maugis stopped for an instant; Ingolf could see him blinking in surprise. Beside him Mary murmured very quietly, but pitching it to carry to his ear: “I sort of like our host.”

  Ingolf nodded; he saw her point.

  “-and that we celebrate. We mourn the loss of fathers, brothers, husbands. We pray that God will receive their souls, who died bravely fighting for the right.”

  He crossed himself. “Holy Mary-”

  The crowd murmured with him, like wind through trees: “-mother of God, pray for us, now and at the hour of our deaths.”

  Maugis waited again. “I wish that I could say that this was the last battle we must fight. But it was not. The enemy is numerous and strong. He will come again, and we must fight, for he comes to kill our loved ones, to take the land that feeds our children, and to destroy our holy faith. The way will be hard, and many of us may fall. Pray to God and to our patron St. Joan for the strength to endure all that we must suffer and do.”

  Well, that’s telling it straight, Ingolf thought. Hope he knows his audience.

  Into the silence Maugis continued: “But we do not fight this fight alone! Not only all the Association, but all of the High Kingdom of Montival is fighting thi
s war with us. Our High King, Artos, leads them; and he bears the Sword that was forged in Heaven and given to him by the Lady of Stars, the Queen of Heaven herself! If God is with us, who can prevail against us? Artos and Montival! ”

  The cry was unfamiliar, but the crowd took it up willingly; stories of Artos and the Sword had been circulating for a while now, even in out-of-the-way spots like this. Many of the faces looking up were exalted and rapt now.

  “And we have strong allies. You see some of them among us now. More are marching against the enemy from north and east. A cheer, my people, for the allies come from far away to risk their lives beside us!”

  Maugis laid a hand on Ingolf’s shoulder for a moment, and the Richlander fought down an impulse to fidget and blush at the roar of acclaim.

  “Already a great army gathers at Walla Walla, many thousands strong and led by the Grand Constable of the Association, and by our own Count Felipe, who is my overlord as I am yours. He has called me there to consult with him.”

  This time the silence had an edge to it. Maugis lifted his hands again.

  “In the short time I shall be gone, I name my own good wife, the well-loved Lady Helissent, as deputy in my place. To assist her, our allies will remain here until I return in a few days. Give her your loyal service, your strong arms and wise counsel, as you have to me.”

  There were more cheers. Mary’s lips moved close to his ear: “Pointing out his wife and children are staying right here,” she said. “That was a smart move.”

  When the sound died down, Maugis’ arm went to the trestle tables. “And now let us feast and dance, my brothers and sisters. Whatever storms come, let us remember this day, and that we are one, and that one with the strength of many. Here, and in lands we have never seen.”