Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun

by S. M. Stirling

  Stavarov’s menie turned and ran west, to the waiting railcars and retreat. Viscount Chenoweth’s men and Guelf’s plugged the hole at the intersection, holding the enemy at bay while Thierry’s siege engineers and artillerists worked behind them in a ratcheting clack and clatter of machinery.

  Smoke billowed upward as the bridge was fired, black and oily and rank with a scent of burning petroleum seldom smelled these days. The Pendleton men crumbled away, but behind them were ranks of oval hemispherical shields like sections of tower wall, each marked alike with an eagle and thunderbolts. The grim faces behind the low domed helmets and faceguards looked completely unfazed by being cut off from reinforcements by the fire. They moved in a unison like the bristle of a porcupine’s quills around an eagle standard, and the points of long javelins cocked backward with a ripple on brawny thick-muscled arms.

  “Ware spears! Up shields!” Guelf shouted, and he wasn’t the only one.

  The kite shields came up and the crossbowmen ducked and grabbed for their small steel bucklers. From the other side, a steady unhurried bellow of:

  “Pila . . . ready . . . front rank . . . throw. Second rank . . . throw. Third rank . . . throw.”

  A whistle of six-foot throwing spears at fewer than ten yards distance. Guelf grunted and took a step back as two hammered into his shield, then cursed and threw it aside as the long soft-iron shanks bent, making the defense useless. He tossed his long sword up, settling it in the two-handed grip and working his fingers in the armored gauntlets. The setting sun cast long shadows, and the rusty patchwork of the sheet metal building beside him reflected the red rays. Guelf felt squeezed like grapes in a press as the close quarters caused the sound to echo and re-echo up and down the hot, airless, man-made canyons.

  “Charge!” the enemy commander shouted, and the blatting tubae echoed it.

  The eagle standard moved forward, carried by a man with a lion’s-skin headdress over his helmet.

  “Hooh-RAH! Hooh-rah!” chanted the Boise infantry, pushing forward, their short swords flickering out from the wall of shields. “USA! USA!”

  “CUT! CUT! CUT!” came the eerie scream of the Church Universal and Triumphant’s men, somewhere not far distant.

  Guelf wondered if any red-robed Seekers were with them, but he was too busy flexing with his line. Swaying aside from the glaive that poked over his shoulder at the shield in front of him, the hook catching it and pulling it down. Delivering a sweeping overarm cut onto a low-crowned helmet with all his strength, and feeling something snap. The man in hoop armor fell, and the one behind him stepped forward into his position with stolid speed. No time to really think through the implications.

  Like two turtles, he thought as the lines drew apart for a few seconds, breathing hard.

  The dust, the smell of blood, voided bowels and urine rasped at his throat, and the burning oil made him cough. He panted, mouth hanging open, ignoring the taste on his tongue. In front of him he could see a Boise sergeant rallying his men for the next push, more confident as the PPA ranks moved back. They flexed, swords poked out, pole arms reached over the shields; individuals pushed harder, probed for openings. Guelf grinned savagely as he lifted his sword overhand. The late sun was in the enemy’s eyes and he stabbed at a face. Chenoweth was by his side as they worked in tandem to hold the plug until Thierry’s men had done their work. He watched for the swath of whitewash on a wall by the side of the road that marked the prearranged spot. The Boise men paused to regroup, wounded dragged back and fresh men stepping forward, new pila handed forward too.

  Five, four, three . . . wait for it, two, one . . .

  The oliphants screamed. “Back!” he shouted.

  The Gervais men skipped backward, shields up but moving fast; then in one fluid motion the PPA men threw themselves down; the front rank holding up their shields as they went to one knee.

  The Boise men drew back, paused, and in the instant, were lost. All the siege machinery that would be abandoned had been pre-sighted on this spot; behind each crouched a gunner with a lanyard in his hand. They jerked the cords in unison, and the murder-machines flung their loads in a chorus like the harps of tone-deaf demons. Cast-iron round shot, darts, incendiaries lashed down on the small crowd of warriors. Men screamed as napalm ran down their shields and under their armor in splashes of clinging fire. Shields cracked under the round shot and legs snapped like twigs as the twelve-pound balls bounced and spun. At this range four-foot darts nailed men together through armor and shields both.

  Guelf stood, his balls crawling up inside as he saw what remained of the enemy rank; smoke and flame billowed up behind them. Even if the asphalt of the surface didn’t catch, it would be a while before anyone could cross that bridge.

  It only takes one dart thrower . . . he thought.

  “Back, retreat!” he shouted, and the oliphants echoed it. He stooped and snatched up an intact shield someone had dropped. “Back! This place is rigged to burn. Fast, fast!”

  The men turned and trotted away; some of them had the arms of wounded comrades over their shoulders, and others were making rough carrying seats from two pairs of crossed hands. One giant even had an armored form slung across his back. The knights and squires were last, backing in a controlled rush and trusting to their fuller armor to shield their subordinates.

  Chenoweth’s eyes flicked back and forth over the broken bodies they left behind. Guelf was doing the same. Stopping to pick up the dead was out of the question; even the wounded weren’t always possible. If they could recognize the fallen, it made it easier later to compile the lists of the dead.

  Then they were out, running, running for their lives to the rail bridge, 84 to the left and Westbridge dead ahead, engulfed in flames. The warehouses behind them burst open like an overripe watermelon dropped off a castle’s battlements, the stacked incendiaries collapsing as the thermite charges ruptured their glass walls. A wave of liquid fire poured out of the ruined buildings, running knee-high like surf on a beach.

  The screams of the enemy rose to a peak and then died as the fire ripped the air out of the narrow alley. Men fled burning; even Boise’s discipline couldn’t take this.

  Guelf leapt aboard the first of his contingent’s pedal cars, ignoring the Odell brothers doing likewise ahead of him.

  “Push, damn you!” Guelf screamed. “Half push, half pedal!”

  His men threw their weapons and shields on the cars; some clambered aboard and threw themselves into the recliner seats, booted feet searching for the pedals. The rest rammed their shoulders into the sides, so enthusiastically that Guelf had to grab for a support as his car almost came off the tracks. It began to rock forward with the rough, irregular neglected bed giving it a sickening side-to-side motion as it gathered speed. He and a few others went around the edge, bending and straining to get the now-trotting groundlings up and onto the surface.

  “Pull your arms and legs in, don’t get in the way of the men pedaling!”

  “Too close!”

  More stacks of incendiary shot and barrels of the noxious stuff were going up in the warehouses to either side. The wave of heat washed over them. Men covered their faces and held their breaths and pedaled even while they coughed and retched. The heat seared the membranes of their noses and throats, and hoarse screams sounded. Fortunately the only way to panic was to pedal harder.

  Guelf felt dizziness edging his vision with gray, sparks and black spots dancing before his eyes. He drew a cautious breath in and then another. Hot, but not hot enough to burn his lungs. Around him men were fainting or breathing cautiously through wet cloths that lay over the train.

  He could hear the rough jeers and laughter from the ones who’d stayed conscious. They’ll rib their mates for days, he thought. It will keep them all alert.

  Someone shoved a canteen of improved river water into his hand; he drank, coughed liquid out through his nose, spat and drank again despite the savage pain as the diluted alcohol struck the damaged membranes, and passed it a
long. They pedaled onward into the setting sun, bloodred sunset to the fore; bloodred fire to the rear.

  Huon Liu frowned. “So . . . so he didn’t really do anything bad there?”

  “Not there,” Dmwoski said grimly. “Your uncle was no coward and not a bad soldier. It was his bad judgment that gave the enemy their opening; his refusal to let go of hatred and the desire for revenge. We learned the details of that later; from his deeds, and his words.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  DUN JUNIPER TO DUN FAIRFAX

  DÙTHCHAS OF THE CLAN MACKENZIE

  (FORMERLY THE EAST-CENTRAL WILLAMETTE VALLEY, OREGON)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  JULY 31, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

  “It’s by you my place is, Chief,” Edain Aylward Mackenzie said.

  Rudi Mackenzie cocked an eyebrow. The commander of his guard regiment continued stolidly, his feet planted apart and hands on his sword belt, his gray eyes steady in his square young face: “I’m Bow-Captain of the High King’s Archers. You can dismiss me if you’ve a mind to; but until you do, I’ll do my job whether you find it suits your whim or not. Your Majesty.”

  “You never call me that save when you’re going to defy me,” Rudi laughed.

  “With all due respect—”

  “And you never say that unless you’re going to be disrespectful, either. I’ve a sufficiency of armed men to guard me here in Dun Juniper, don’t you think? And this.”

  He slapped a hand to the Sword of the Lady, and went on: “And I’ll have you remember I put your face in the midden more than once when we were boys together. I can do it again if I must.”

  Despite himself, Edain laughed. At the High King’s inquiring glance he admitted: “That is most exactly what I said to me little brother Dickie when we got home, word for word, midden and all. And him grown so tall and roynish while we were gone.”

  “Then be off. We’ll have our fill of risk this year, and you can throw yourself between it and me. This day I’m going to spend with my mother and stepfather and my sisters in the place I was born. You and your bride the sword-maiden go down to Dun Fairfax and do likewise!”

  Edain chuckled as he set foot on the steep path that led down from the plateau of Dun Juniper to Dun Fairfax, where it was tucked away in the valley of Artemis Creek. The quiet of the hillside forest swallowed it, greenumber distances between the tall candle-straight trunks of the Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine, red cedar and hemlock, with the odd big-leaf maple or garry oak, and black walnut thickly planted long ago for variety. A jay went sheunk-sheunk-sheunk, squirrels ran chattering like gray streaks, and a hedgehog scuttled off into the underbrush.

  Asgerd Karlsdottir looked at him and raised one yellow brow. She was only a finger shorter than his five-nine, but with a slender strength in contrast to his broad-shouldered, thick-armed, barrel-chested build; she wore breeks and tunic rather than the kilt, a seax-knife and Norrheimer broadsword at her belt but a Mackenzie-style quiver on her back. They both took the steep way effortlessly, ducking and twisting now and then when tree branches or undergrowth nearly caught at the arrows in their quivers, their feet making little sound despite the boots they wore. Now and then one would bend a fern gently aside with the tip of the longbows they both carried in their left hands, leaving no trace of their passing.

  Neither was conscious of taking care not to make noise or leave trail. It was a manner you learned when you hunted for food’s sake, not to mention scouting and tracking and skirmishing across a continent with life and death for the table stakes.

  “What’s the jest?” she asked.

  “No jest; just thinking that I’m a lucky man.”

  “Lucky in your lord, or your wife?”

  He grinned at her; freed from the helmet his oak-colored curls tossed around his tanned face, and she restrained an impulse to smooth them back.

  “The both, which is as much luck as a man can decently ask of the Powers, eh?”

  They both made protective signs, though different ones; he the Invoking Pentagram, she Thor’s Hammer.

  “And I was happy that the Sword gave Rudi a happy vision for once, those children he told us of. It’ll be a fine rare thing to have a little princess and prince about.”

  Asgerd sighed. “I wish we had such a foretelling,” she said.

  “Well, as a general rule folk don’t need a vision from a magic sword to produce children, you see. The usual way suffices,” he said solemnly.

  A glint came into Edain’s gray eyes as he deliberately looked her up and down. “We’ll just have to keep practicing over and over until we get it right, so to say . . .”

  He dodged as she pretended to clout him along the head with her bow, then said more seriously: “Though we’ve plenty of time; we’re both of us younger than Rudi and his lady. Why, look at me ma and da; I come back after only two years away, and I’ve a new brother and sister tumbling about the place like puppies. Twins, I admit, and born no more than nine months after I left almost to a day, but it’s scarce daycent, at their ages. Da’ll be seventy, come Samhain and a bit!”

  Asgerd snorted. “Your mother is younger, and that’s what counts.”

  “Aye, eighteen year younger, near nineteen; she lost her first man in the Change, my half sister Tamar’s father, he was some place far away. And Tamar was nobbut a wee one then. Not that I’m not glad to have little Nigel and Nola, of course. The more Aylwards the better for the Clan and the world—”

  “They do set an example of modesty,” Asgerd said in a pawky tone.

  “Modesty is a vice I leave to Christians, as the Chief likes to say. But it’s odd to think they’re younger than Tamar’s children, my nieces and nephews. It’s taken a good deal out of Ma, too. Fifty is old to be brought to bed of a hard labor, and they say it was painful hard. Thank Brigid we have fine midwives and healers.”

  Asgerd shivered a little inwardly; her people did too, but you went to the mouth of Hela’s realm to bring forth life, nonetheless. Then her mouth quirked. “And she’s not all that happy you’ve brought a foreign wife home, and one who follows other Gods than hers.”

  Edain shrugged. “Could be worse, darlin’; you’re not of the Old Religion, but you’re not quite a cowan either. Now if you’d been a Christian, one of the ones who scorns all other Gods and won’t so much as set aside a bowl of milk for the house-hob . . . that would have put the manure-fork in the soup kettle, right and proper it would.”

  Asgerd wore the triple interlinked triangles of Odin on a thong around her neck, the Valknut; she was Asatru, like most of the folk in her distant homeland of Norrheim, what had once been northernmost Maine.

  Her man went on: “And she’s not overhappy her grown children are near all off to the war—Tamar’s man Eochu, and me, and Dickie, and even young Fand as an eòghann. Tamar would be too, except that she has a babe at the breast. We’d best remember that there’s been war here, with battles and all, while we made our way to Nantucket and back, tricking and twisting and fighting. Not to mention runnin’ like buggery when we could, though the bards will leave that out, I’m thinking.”

  “Only from Norrheim to Nantucket and all the way back here, for me, but that was long enough! Three thousand miles, is it?”

  A chill ran down her back as she remembered what had happened on Nantucket. The details were hazy, as if in a fever-dream that slipped away when you woke; but she knew she had stepped out of the light of Midgard’s common day there. And the Sword . . . she could hear the seeress’ voice, deepened and roughened as the All-Father took hold of her on the high seat of seidh in the hall at Eriksgarth: More potent than Tyrfing, forged for the hand of a King!

  They came out of the deep woods, onto a spot where the trail turned downward in a switchback; it had been roughly reinforced with logs and rocks to prevent the soil from washing in the winter rains, and those in turn worn by boots and the odd hoof. From here you were a hundred feet above the funnel shape o
f the little valley running out into the broader stretches of the Willamette and could see it all with a sweep of the eyes.

  A winding strip of forest followed Artemis Creek; the rest of the vale was divided into small fields by neatly trimmed hawthorn hedges studded with lines of poplars and oaks, well grown but usually no older than Edain. Some of the fields were the pale brown-blond of reaped wheat, or the gold-shot green of standing barley a month or two from harvest. The vivid grass of cropped pasture lay dreaming beneath the warmth of a sun that brought out the rich smell of earth and sap; white-coated sheep and red cattle grazed there, and beneath orchards. Plots of potatoes and vegetables were grouped closer to the walls of the Dun. Beeches lined the white-surfaced dirt road that followed the tumbling water, and dust smoked away behind an oxwagon that moved there, small as a child’s toy with distance.

  “And isn’t this a brave bright sight,” Edain said, his voice soft with love. “I can remember the time my father took me to this spot, after the first harvest I recall clear, and pointed out our fields and our neighbors’, where I’d worked carrying water to the binders and myself so proud to be part of it. Often and often I thought of this on the journey there and back again.”

  Asgerd tried to see it as he did; tried and failed.

  Oh, it’s was beautiful enough, she thought; beautiful with an alien comeliness. And rich, richer than Norrheim.

  Some of the crops were the same; her folk grew wheat and barley and oats and spuds too. But here they planted wheat in the fall and harvested it in the summer, instead of putting seed down in spring and making prayer and blót to Frey and Freya and Thor that the weather held long enough to get it in come fall. Norrheimers reaped with one eye on the sky, dreading clouds and cold driving rain to make the grain sprout and rot in the stack, hail that could beat it flat, and even early snow. Here it was one fine warm day after another for the ripening.

  So in the Mackenzie dùthchas barley went mostly to beer and oats to horses and they didn’t bother with rye. Everyone ate fine feast-time white bread made from wheat flour every day if they pleased, like a great chief. There were fruits here she’d only heard about in tales, apricots and cherries, pears and peaches and nectarines, even grapes for wine. You could graze stock outside ten or eleven months of the year, too; she’d never seen such a wealth of strong fat beasts. Winters here were chilly and wet, not the endless gray iron cold and driving blizzards she’d grown up with, and there were near a hundred days more between the last killing frost and the first.