Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun

by S. M. Stirling

  Bjarni was shaking his head as he turned away to the waiting knot of folk at the gate of the paddock. A rolling plain stretched away in all directions. Reaped grain was straw-blond, alfalfa a dusty green, with here and there the darker shade trees and orchards and vineyards around a village, the church steeples and whirling wind-pumps rising above. The fields still under harvest were bright burnished gold that shone with an almost metallic luster as horses or mules hauled the turning creels of the reaping machines through, laying the cut grain in bands lighter-colored than the stubble. Workers followed binding the sheaves and stooking them into pyramids.

  It is a golden land hereabout this time of the year, he thought. Perhaps that’s why they named this shire so.

  Looking at it in August you wouldn’t think there was enough rain to produce a crop, but the ears were heavy in the fields of wheat and barley; for a moment he simply smiled at the comforting beauty of the sight. It made him itch a little too; it seemed unnatural not to pitch in. Many of his men had, from the same feeling and because it was a chance to meet the local women, but he was too busy with the mustering.

  There were pine-clad hills to the north, just visible beyond the walls and towers of Goldendale town and castle. To the north and west a great white peak floated in the distance. Mount Adams, they called it; another like it lay south and west, Mt. Hood, the two framing that side of the world. Even after the long journey from Norrheim in what the old world had called northern Maine he still found his breath taken away sometimes by the scale of the landscapes here in the High West. You’d hardly credit that many days’ travel separated this spot from those high snowfields, or that Hood was on the other shore of the great Columbia itself, in green rainy forest country. Behind Adams was another, even greater.

  The world is wider and more full of wonders than I knew before Artos Mikesson and his questers rode into my garth last Yule, he thought. More dangerous, much stranger, and more beautiful. Yet I would give it all to sit by my own fire again, with Hallberga beside me and our son in my lap while we watched our daughter play.

  He picked a towel off the fence and wiped his face and neck; it was also hot here, though the dryness made it easier to tolerate than a like day back home.

  Not that we have many days like this! And we could use some, come harvest-time.

  “That horse puts my horsemanship to shame. What shall I do with him, Lady Signe?” he asked the woman who’d given it to him. “We Norrheimers aren’t fighters on horseback, like you Bearkillers. We plant our feet with Earth, Thor’s mother, when we make the shield-wall.”

  “Take him home with you after the war, and put him to your mares, Bjarni King,” she said. “And when you see the foals he gets, remember us here. Your folk may need warhorses, someday.”

  She was a tall fair woman a little more than a decade older than him, with the Valknut of Odin around her neck and a set of rough dark clothing; man’s boots and breeches and jacket, though there was certainly a good-looking woman beneath them, and her face was still handsome. He judged that she could use the long single-edged, basket-hilted sword at her belt with some skill.

  This one is a she-wolf, he thought. Shrewd, brave, loyal to her own, but very hard and used to rule, I would say; her man fell and she has striven to take his place while her sons grew. Still, she’s guested and gifted us well, and her people . . . or some of them . . . are true folk who follow the Aesir as we do. Well, not exactly as we do, but close enough. And they have many arts I want for Norrheim, and they’re fell fighters, as dangerous as any I’ve seen.

  “I shall name him Vakr,” he said.

  She smiled. “Ah, Hawk, for the horse of Morn who rides out to bring the dawn,” she said. “A good choice.”

  He inclined his head. “You know the ancient tales well, gythja,” he said, giving her the title of Godwoman.

  That could mean either chieftainess or priestess, since either made sacrifice to the Mighty Ones. He had been a godhi himself, when he was merely chief of the Bjornings, his own tribe, and before he became the first king of Norrheim. A chief made offerings; just as he led his folk in war and presided over the folk-moot, the thing, so he stood before the Mighty Ones for them. A king most of all, who must be father to all the land.

  “I’ll breed Vakr to my mares and the colts will be the envy of Norrheim. And others will think it a favor indeed if I let them do likewise.”

  Her nod told him she’d thought of that too; the network of favor and obligation was one a leader had to know how to weave and tug on at need.

  “Those of my folk who are true to the Aesir will hold a blót soon,” she said. “We will give cattle to the Gods for luck and victory in this war, and feast, and drink sumbel to hail the Gods, remember the dead and make boast and oath. You and yours are welcome to share the rite. And the beef!”

  “Many thanks, if you will let me send cattle we find ourselves to be given with yours. It is fitting that you Bearkillers should lead the rite; this is your land, and you know the holy wights who ward it under the high Gods.”

  She smiled, looking much younger for a moment. “This here”—she tapped a boot on the sparse grass beneath them, and a little dust puffed up—“is not ours, exactly. For various values of us and ours.”

  “Ah, yes,” Bjarni said. “Your pardon if this hard head of mine hasn’t gotten all the details of this realm hammered into it yet.”

  Signe’s smile grew into a grin, a remarkably predatory expression. “The details of who owned what resulted in a lot of skulls getting hammered in my youth, the years after the Change,” she said. “And we’ve yet to pound home the lesson these boundaries are not for our enemies to rearrange now, either.”

  Bjarni gave her the same wolf-grin back, and so did several of his countrymen. The play on words appealed to their sense of humor and his. The world was a place of strife; no less than a wolf pack, a tribe or kingdom had to be ready to fight for its hunting grounds, or to take what its people needed from others, though no man could guarantee triumph in every fight.

  Though my old friend Thor has lent me his might. And the All-Father can give victory where he pleases.

  But even the Gods would go down in wreck at the end, when the horn of Heimdalr blew for the final battle. Then Asa-Loki and the Jotun lords would ride against them to Vigrid plain, on the last morning of the world, when the stars fell from the sky and sea overwhelmed the land. It was for that fight that the High One gathered the spirits of fallen heroes in his hall. A man could strive with all the craft and might and main that was in him, though, and face death undaunted. And so could a woman.

  Signe’s son Mike Mikesson—Mike Havel, using the old system that was still popular here—touched his own backsword.

  “We’ve made a start on showing Boise and the CUT the point of our arguments in this lawsuit,” he said solemnly, though with a twinkle in his sky-colored eyes. “But we’ll still need some cutting remarks to finally convince them our case is stronger.”

  Bjarni laughed aloud. “This cub’s growing fangs, by almighty Thor!” Mike Jr. was just on the cusp of young manhood, perhaps a little short of eighteen years; already tall and broad-shouldered, with a shock of corncolored hair, and already with a few scars on hands and face to show his words weren’t just an untried youngster’s air and wind. He’d be stronger when he got his full growth, there was still a bit of adolescent lankiness to him, but he was more than strong enough to be dangerous already, and Bjarni judged by the way he moved that he’d been very well taught. Between his brows was a small round mark made by a hot iron; his mother had the same. That was a mark the Bearkillers reserved for their best, what they called the A-list, and it was never granted for anything but proved courage and skill in the arts of war.

  Bjarni turned to Mike’s mother again. “I was near the Bearkiller land, but pressed for time, when I visited Artos Mikesson’s garth at Dun Juniper. When the war is over, I will come guest you a while at your Larsdalen, if you wish it.”

  Her li
ps thinned a little, but she answered in friendly wise: “Yes, that would be good. Ours is much like the Mackenzie land, but on the other side of the Willamette. Save that the mountains to our west between us and the sea are not as grand as the High Cascades to the east of theirs. My father’s family, the Larssons, held a farm there for long and long, generations before the Change. They did more, but that was the first they took, long ago, when they came west-over-sea from the ancient homelands.”

  “Fine fat soil, then, good pasture and plenty of forest and the Gods of weather are kind to you,” he said. “You are lucky. The valley of the Willamette is some of the best farming land I’ve seen, and I’ve traveled far. Better than Norrheim, and especially better weather.”

  Though not much better than some of the land I saw lying near empty as we journeyed , some corner of his mind thought. In what the old world called Quebec and Ontario. With Artos Mikesson’s help we beat the Bekwa. Not just beat them but wrecked and crushed them, at the Seven Hills fight. Which opens the way there; Norrheim is a small kingdom now, but it needn’t always be so. Our numbers grow, and there’s room there to make safe our folk and feed our children’s children’s children.

  She nodded. “All that my husband Mike, the first Bear Lord, won for us with his craft and drighten might, and died defending.”

  Bjarni’s eyes went to the white peaks again, and he thought of the canyons of the Columbia he’d passed, towering above like the walls of Valhöll above a river to rival the Mississippi itself, with the waterfalls cataracting down the cliffs.

  “Yet all this land of Montival is a fit home for our Gods,” he said. “A giant’s country, made to breed heroes! I have my own land, but I honor yours.”

  “For the which I thank you,” another voice said, in a musical lilt. “And it breeds fine horses too, of which it seems you have acquired one of the best.”

  Bjarni started a little. Artos Mikesson was a big man, but so graceful and light of step that it was eerie sometimes. And any man who carried the Sword forged by Weyland the Smith beyond the bounds of Midgard had something of that about him anyway. Bjarni had heard the High One confer kingship on Artos himself, through the seeress his spirit possessed.

  “Your Majesty,” Signe said, bowing.

  “Lady Signe,” Rudi said in turn, returning the bow and hiding his slight amusement. “I’ve just come from reviewing your Bearkiller encampment. May the Dagda club me dead if I could find anything not in perfect order. And you were prompt. Mike Havel would be proud. Corvallis, on the other hand . . .”

  The big fair man beside him snorted. “We’re all here, ten thousand of us. Fourteen hundred A-listers, eight thousand pikemen and crossbowmen, fifty field catapults. Plus the garrisons we’ve got over in the Cascade forts backing up the Clan’s troops. Corvallis was always a day late and a dollar short in the wars against the Association and they’re keeping up the batting average.”

  The war-leader of the Bearkillers had the snarling red bear’s-head of the outfit Mike Havel had founded on the shoulder of his brown cord jacket; in that as in other ways Eric Larsson looked very much like a male version of Signe, which wasn’t surprising, since they were fraternal twins. The sign on a silver chain around his neck was a cross, though. His left arm ended at the wrist, to continue in an artificial hand of metal, which accounted—partly—for his nickname: Steel-fist.

  “That’s not diplomatic,” Rudi said, slightly chiding. “And I have good friends in Corvallis. They’re just . . . a little slow, taken as a whole.”

  “Not diplomatic, but it’s true though,” another voice said. “They surprised us in the Association unpleasantly a few times during the old wars. Turning up late can be effective if you’re so late you’re not expected to turn up at all.”

  Rudi could see Bjarni blinking at that cool soprano, with its sound like water running over polished stones in some mountain stream. Then his eyes narrowed.

  Yes, he’s a shrewd one, Rudi thought. Enough to take in something unfamiliar and not just stick to his first thought.

  “Bjarni Eriksson, called Bjarni Iron Counsel, King in Norrheim,” he said in introduction. “Lady Tiphaine, Baroness d’Ath and Grand Constable of the Portland Protective Association. Which is to say, war-leader of their host.”

  Tiphaine d’Ath was in full plate, from steel sabatons on her feet bearing the golden spurs of knighthood to the bevoir that protected neck and chin; a mounted squire carried her helmet and gauntlets, and another her lance and her shield with its arms of sable, a delta or over a V argent. Her eyes were the color of glacier ice, level and almost expressionless.

  “Your Majesty,” she said to Bjarni, with a thump of right fist on the lames of her articulated breastplate, and a bow; as a noble to a sovereign, but not her own ruler.

  Bjarni extended his hand. They exchanged the Norrheimer wrist-towrist grip; his eyes widened a little as he did.

  Then she turned back to Rudi. He went on with the orders: “I’m sending you and fifteen thousand troops to Walla Walla, to take overall command in the County Palatine of the Eastermark. A thousand of the light horse will be refugees from the Bend country south of the Columbia, CORA ranchers and their retainers, horse-archers. Also the Lakota contingent, and Colonel Ingolf Vogeler’s Richlanders, another eight hundred together.”

  She nodded. “The CORA-boys will be useful and they’re certainly well motivated. The Sioux and the Richlanders are to demonstrate the support we . . . Montival . . . have from the east, I suppose?”

  “Yes. The Richlanders are good horse-soldiers, and highly disciplined.”

  “The Sioux aren’t well disciplined, I take it, Your Majesty?”

  “Not disciplined either well or badly; they’re splendid warriors, but not soldiers in our sense of the word at all, at all. And treating them with a heavy hand is as futile as pushing on a rope. Only ropes don’t bite when pushed, and they do . . . so perhaps pushing on a rattlesnake would be a better metaphor? Also they have a rooted conviction that all the horses in the world belong to them alone. I suggest you deal with them through Ingolf, as much as possible.”

  “They’ll take his orders?”

  “No. They may well listen to him, though. And he knows the Lakota well.”

  “He should,” Eric said with grim amusement. “From what he’s said, he learned his trade fighting them back east.”

  “He did. And he and intancan Rick Mat’o Yamni, Rick Three Bears, their war chief, are friends. All of us on the Sword-Quest spent some time with the Seven Council Fires last year, and fought by their sides. You’ll find that Ingolf is a very good light cavalry commander; competent in other things as well, some of which will be relevant and some not. A steady man and sure of himself, but adaptable, and vastly experienced; there’s few tricks of that sort of fighting he does not know. And my half sister Mary . . . Mary Vogeler, now . . . will be with him, along with two dozen Dúnedain Rangers.”

  “Your Majesty,” Tiphaine said, nodding in the manner of someone thinking hard. “Yes, I can work with the Sioux. Or around them, needs must.”

  “And I’m giving you two thousand PPA men-at-arms, the rest bicycleborn foot troops and field artillery,” Rudi went on. “Among them seven regiments of pike and crossbow infantry from the Yakima. They’ll have their own field batteries in support.”

  Tiphaine’s pale brows rose slightly, the more visible against her tanned skin.

  “The Free Cities of the Yakima League and the Association have an, ah, unfortunate mutual history,” she said.

  Rudi grinned. “Meaning, you and they fought hammer and tongs for years, to be sure, when the Association tried to overrun them and divide their land into fiefs,” he said. “You did exactly that with the Tri-Cities, which they thought of as theirs. Yet we’re all part of the High Kingdom now, and must learn to work together. Also the Yakima Valley will be at your back, hence their homes, hence excellent motivation. Forbye they’ll see Associates fighting to help defend their homes, the satisfaction and wonder
ment of the world it will be to them, to see you.”

  “Politically astute, my liege,” she said.

  “Hopefully; and more of the same will be required in the Eastermark, dealing with the local lords.”

  “That,” she said, with a small, chilling smile, “I think I can do.”

  He nodded, not altogether in agreement. “Not just putting them in fear. We won’t be able to hold the enemy in that area. Your job is to slow them, sure, and bloody them, and keep them pinned until they’ve exhausted their supplies, and lead them by the nose to where I want them; but don’t get caught in any action you can’t withdraw from. I leave that to your judgment; just let you bear in mind that you can use the army I’ve given you, but you cannot lose it.”

  A faraway looked came into her eyes; the look of someone considering a difficult but interesting challenge.

  He nodded. “But that’s not enough. The castles and especially Walla Walla must hold, and hold strongly even when the enemy occupy the open plains. The nobles there must do their best, not every man for himself and fighting just enough to satisfy honor. Starting with the Count Palatine himself they must be resolved to tie down every enemy soldier they can and do the foe every harm they’re able, despite the risks. I rely on you to see to that, as well; I’ve more than enough to do here.”

  “Let the flies conquer the flypaper,” she said, with what he thought was a very faint hint of amusement. “We were on the other side of that often enough. I’ve seen your plans, Your Majesty. Persuading the County’s nobility to go along with them may take a little work. The equipment we’re bringing ought to make a start on that.”

  “Which shrewdness is why I’m sending you, my lady Grand Constable. This is a task both political and military, and it will take nice judgment and hard fighting both.”