Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun

by S. M. Stirling

  Juliet Thurston! Ritva thought, keeping her face bovine-calm and uninterested. Rhaich, Rhaich! Siniath faeg!

  She mentally added a phrase which translated literally into the Common Tongue as: An individual excessively attached to their mother in a carnal manner who is also the offspring of a female Warg.

  The tired eyes scanned across her listlessly, then came back. The wife of the ruler of Boise yawned and said: “Lawrence, go play in the living room.”

  “No!” the boy said.

  Lawrence Jr. was a handsome-looking lad, and he grinned with a gap in his white teeth as he used a two-year-old’s favorite word; both his parents were well made, with the long-limbed build he showed promise of. His eyes were a brightly alert dark blue, and his hair curly and brown with light streaks from the summer sun. He was clad in a miniature version of Boise’s army uniform, complete with small boots.

  “Lawrence, do I have to tell you twice? The third time comes with a spank.”

  “ ’Kay, Mom,” he said.

  His air was cheerful, just a child whose attention had been gotten, and he picked up the painted wooden cavalrymen he had been marshaling and gallumphed out of the kitchen making horse-noises. The living room was visible from here, but far enough away that a soft-voiced conversation couldn’t be heard.

  Ritva wasn’t openly armed; the little knife on her belt was the universal tool nearly everyone carried. The blade was only four inches long, but it was honed shaving-sharp, and it was good steel. A step, a blow, a slash . . .

  No, she thought. I can’t kill cut a mother’s throat in front of her toddler, and her with child. Better to use it on myself.

  That was illogical, she knew. In war she’d be perfectly ready to pull the lanyard on a trebuchet and send a five-hundred-pound boulder over a city wall to strike whom it would, and this was war. Some things went deeper than logic, though, or beyond it. Everyone was looking at her; the listless, slightly slumped body language was gone and her body was quivering with alertness, her weight up slightly on the balls of her feet and everything flowing smoothly.

  Juliet’s face had firmed too. “Mary Havel, isn’t it? Or the other one?”

  Three slight gasps, and then she saw recognition dawn on the others, too. Very carefully she spread her hands and kept her own voice level and light.

  “Mae govannen, my ladies,” she said. “I am here to see if you need our help. I am Ritva Havel, yes.”

  The fog seemed to clear from Cecile Thurston’s eyes as she peered and then slowly recognized the Dúnedain too; it had been only the one meeting, several eventful years ago, after all. Her daughters sat bolt-upright, and the eldest said: “Elvellon!” she said: The elf-friend!

  Ritva held up a soothing hand at the clumsy Sindarin that followed. She remembered that Shawonda had been entranced by the Histories even when they first met; she guessed shrewdly that she’d fled into them since as a refuge from her troubles since, and as a source of strength and hope in a world whose foundations had crumbled beneath her in a welter of treachery and blood. The Rangers got a fair number of recruits from exactly that pattern of thought and feeling.

  “In the Common Tongue, nethig,” she said; that meant little sister, and brought a tremulous smile.

  Juliet’s reaction surprised Ritva most of all; she buried her face in her hands for a moment and started to cry. Not what she would have expected given their previous acquaintance, at all. Doubly so before a stranger.

  “I take it,” she said carefully, “that you want to leave too, ah, Mrs. Thurston? Leave your husband?”

  “Oh, God, yes, please, he’s not Martin anymore! Since he came back from Bend . . . he, he, he hit me. And then he said if I argued with him again he’d cut out my tongue, that I didn’t need that to breed.”

  Cecile Thurston gave a grimace of distaste, and the two girls stared at their sister-in-law with shock and dawning horror; evidently she hadn’t said that in front of them before.

  “I can’t . . . I can’t bear the thought of him touching me again!”

  Well, that settles that, Ritva thought. This can’t be a put-on to set me up. Cunning elaborate plans like that only happen on the spur of the moment in stories. She’ d just yell for the guards, and I can’t get out of here. And I’ve hardly ever seen anyone so frightened . . .

  She remembered fighting the Seeker who’d cut out Mary’s eye; his own gaze, like a spiral downward into a depth that wasn’t even black, was nothing, un-being where even meaning was no more. Then she tried to imagine waking up and seeing that on the pillow next to her, and felt a rash of sweat break out under her arms and around her neck, along with a twist in the stomach.

  “Euuuu,” she murmured to herself.

  Juliet scrubbed at her face, and called mastery back to herself with a series of deep breaths. “How . . . what can you do?” she went on steadily.

  Ritva shook her head. “This change in your husband, it happened after he came back from meeting the Prophet, Sethaz, in Bend?”

  “Yes. Before then, he was . . . he was Martin. Now it’s as if there’s two people in his head, or another one that can put Martin on like a mask.”

  Like one of those grubs that eats out an insect from the inside, Ritva thought. Only with the soul as the host. I won’t say that, though.

  Cecile was glaring at her daughter-in-law; Ritva could fill in that too. As long as it had merely been a matter of parricide and usurpation, Juliet had been all for it. Only once the whole web of betrayal had turned on her had it become bad. The older woman took a deep breath and obviously pushed the matter aside for later. She did say: “It wasn’t Fred, was it.”

  The inflection didn’t have a question in it. Ritva replied gently but firmly: “No. It wasn’t.”

  Then: “Do you have a map of the city?” she said. And to Juliet: “When is your . . . when is Martin due back?”

  “The day after tomorrow,” she said. “There’s a report of some sort of force moving through Nevada . . . but there are always Rovers and bandits down there.”

  And we went through that way for a while, Ritva thought; it was the path that avoided Boise’s all-too-active patrols.

  “Can you get out of the Compound?” Ritva asked. “Taking all here with you?”

  Juliet cast a quick glance at the others. Ritva caught it and went on: “The mission is to rescue Lady Cecile and Janie and Shawonda . . . Fred’s kin. To them we have a debt of honor. You were no part of our plan and it’s an added risk.”

  The bloodshot eyes were shrewd. “And you need them to undermine Martin’s position.”

  “Yes. Will you, too, denounce him?”

  Juliet took a deep breath. “Yes. Yes. I can’t stay, I can’t.”

  “Then we have little time. Ah, thank you, Shawonda.”

  The girl spread a map of the city out on the kitchen table; it was a modern one, showing the walls. “Now, can you get all these outside the Compound walls?”

  Juliet nodded, her fists clenching. “I . . . I think so. Yes. As long as Martin isn’t here. For a little while at least. But there will be guards, at least two platoons of the Sixth.”

  “That I think we can take care of. Show me where it’s credible you’d go . . .”

  When they had finished Ritva nodded briskly. “Here, then.” She tapped a building. “This shopping expedition is credible?”

  “The commander will be pleased. He’ll think it means I’ve persuaded Cecile and the girls to be, uh, cooperative.”

  Juliet frowned. “But how does just getting us out of the Compound help? There’s the city wall, and the Compound’s in continuous touch with the defenses there by semaphore and heliograph!”

  Ritva smiled thinly. “Trust me,” she said. “I’ve gotten all the way from Montival to the Sunrise Lands and back.”

  Though that didn’t involve something like this, she thought behind her confident expression. Dulu! I hope Aunt Astrid likes this idea!

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  COUNTY OF THE EASTERM
ARK

  CHARTERED CITY OF WALLA WALLA

  PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

  (FORMERLY EASTERN WASHINGTON)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  AUGUST 23, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

  “That’s that,” Grand Constable Tiphaine d’Ath said, tasting sweat on her lips.

  It must still be well over ninety degrees, though the temperature was falling a bit with the sun. She slapped her leather riding gauntlets into the palm of her left hand in a slight puff of dust. The omnipresent grit was one of the things she disliked about the eastern fiefs; her own estates were in the northern Willamette valley, which had a decently moderate climate where things stayed green year-round. Then she stifled a yawn, brought on by the sultry stillness as much as real fatigue. The sun was low in the west, turning the thin clouds there crimson, and the sky was darkening towards night eastward behind the distant line of the Blue Mountains. At least it would drop to decent sleeping weather later. The air here was too dry to hold the heat long.

  The end of a long summer day, and she’d been the first to get off the train an hour before dawn after a short period of semisleep on the pitching, clanking vehicle. Since then she’d been supervising while the army she’d brought pitched camp outside Walla Walla’s northern gate and unloaded supplies for the campaign.

  Ah, the glory of knightly combat.

  “Right, that’s the last of them, my lady,” the commander of the Protector’s Guard said, mentally checking off a list. “The signals chain says the line’s clear as far west as the Wallula Gap. We’re holding the rest of the empty rolling stock just east of the city ready to come back through.”

  “Get that started now, Sir Tancred. I want them out of the way and the line and stock ready for military use.”

  A final load of boxes came off a railcar and onto a wagon, and a clerk stepped forward and ran a paintbrush over a stencil on their sides while another made a tick on a ledger. The team of sixteen big mules had been led away and replaced by fresh beasts, hitched to what had been the rear of the train and hitched up to pull it back westbound; they leaned into their traces to get the six empty flatbed cars away from the platform. It halted again where the refugees waited to embark.

  A crowd of a hundred or so civilians surged forward under the direction of a file of infantry; mostly peasants by their shapeless undyed linsey-woolsey clothing and floppy homemade straw hats, and more than half women with youngsters.

  “No, no!” the sergeant in charge screamed. “All you strong ones, hand up your bundles and brats! Then you push to get it started, and then you climb on. You, you, you—”

  The butt of his spear flicked out and tapped to conscript volunteers.

  “—just grab the handles . . . oh, St. Dismas have mercy, the fucking handles, the . . . these things, these things! Just wait until I tell you, then push, then get on!”

  They handed up bundles and baskets and swaddled infants, then settled with dumb patience, half a dozen ready to push each car. They were silent save for the wailing babes and toddlers, their eyes wide and bewildered as they stared around at city and army. Most of them were Changelings, and probably hadn’t been more than a day’s walk from their villages since they were born. Or at least had been toddlers themselves when their parents were resettled.

  Tiphaine nodded to Sir Tancred. “Warn Sir Varocher at Castle Dorian that five or six thousand civilians are heading their way, mostly sick or children and their mothers. He has authority to draw on the other castles and the stores in Wallula Town as necessary. They’ll need to be fed and checked over by the physicians before they’re loaded on the barges.”

  She paused for a moment and then added in the same flat tone, “Emphasize that I and the Lady Regent will be extremely displeased if they’re not treated in a humane and chivalrous manner, peasants or no.”

  He scribbled a note on a clipboard and shouted for a messenger. The warning would be taken seriously; when the Lady Regent Sandra was extremely displeased the headsman’s ax or the two-handed sword reserved for noble Associates tended to become involved. Or people just mysteriously dropped dead with no apparent cause or had perfectly plausible accidents and wise living people carefully didn’t comment. A page dashed up, bowed, took the note and ran for a tall metal framework not far away, scampering up the rungs of the ladder built into it as agile as a monkey. Moments later the heliograph atop it began to blink.

  “What’s the condition of the railroad draught teams?” she asked.

  “Not bad, my lady. We’ve replaced the worst tired ones from the town and the Count’s herds, one-for-one, on your authority. There’s plenty of alfalfa and sweet clover hay by the watering points and we’ve been baiting them on that and milled barley and oats and bean-mash as they came in. The first in are already rested and well fed and ready for another run. The Count’s men have been very cooperative and pretty well organized. Not to mention his veterinary officers.”

  “They’d better be, Sir Tancred,” Tiphaine said. “We don’t have time for pissing matches or screwups. Not if we’re going to make the enemy react to us, rather than the other way ’round.”

  Walla Walla hadn’t been a large city before the Change as they reckoned things then; a bit under thirty thousand, and reasonably compact, with less sprawl at the edges than most urban settlements of the time. It had also contained the fortresslike State Penitentiary, with over two thousand hardened cons, who’d broken out on Change Day Five and taken the city over. When the Lord Protector’s troops arrived later that year, there had been a mass uprising of what was left of the population in their favor.

  “All aboard!” the train driver said. “Loose brakes—”

  The brakemen spun their wheels, and the stronger passengers-to-be the sergeant had selected set their hands to the grips and pushed to get the cars rolling; the mules knew the drill, and started to lean into their collars even before the long whip snapped over their backs. The crowded cars began to move along the rusted steel, to a chorus of shrieks and wailing children. Inching at first, slowing again for an instant as the pushers clambered aboard, and then rumbling up to a fast walk; an animal could pull a lot more on rail than on even the best road.

  Tiphaine nodded in satisfaction. One of the first things she’d learned back fifteen years ago when she moved from small-unit black ops into the conventional military was just how hard it was to keep a major troop movement from seizing up into a series of ungovernable traffic jams.

  Conrad and his staff taught me that; and how hard it was to get everything in the right place at the right time so people don’t get hopelessly lost, starve, get sick, or run out of crossbow bolts or horseshoes at a crucial moment. Sandra always was good at finding her people mentors.

  Conrad Renfrew had also been in charge of that first expedition of conquest up the Columbia to Walla Walla; from what Tiphaine had read in the records, he’d killed a couple of hundred of the convicts, recruited about seventy-five for service elsewhere, and put the rest to forced labor for the rest of their short miserable lives, mostly getting in the harvest round about and then making a beginning on the fortifications and helping make things habitable for the refugees from Spokane and the western cities and the Columbia plateau selected for resettlement on the new manors. Then he’d installed the present Count’s father, who’d been his second-in-command and to whom Norman Arminger owed multiple favors, and departed for the next urgent job. Of which there had been an infinite number then.

  A nice workmanlike job, Tiphaine thought judiciously. Solid, like Conrad.

  She’d been fourteen then, training with Katrina in Lady Sandra’s household, initially for clandestine work. Young females made extremely efficient assassins, if they had the right attitudes, training and native talent. They just didn’t attract the eye of wary suspicion the way your average hulking macho brute did, particularly if the target was a hulking macho brute, which most had been. Profound surprise had been the l
ast expression on a lot of faces she and Katrina had dispatched to their putative rewards via stiletto, crossbow, piano-wire garrote, poison-filled hypodermic and various other unpleasantnesses.

  It was very like Sandra to see the possibilities instantly when two vicious, intelligent, hungry, traumatized and extremely athletic barely teenaged girls managed to infiltrate her heavily guarded private quarters and demand a job on Change Day Forty. Norman Arminger had just laughed himself sick and told her to go ahead with the Sailor Moon Squad if she thought it was worthwhile. They’d both agreed that the rough and ragged material they were trying to forge into an elite needed a lot of culling, particularly the non-Society elements.

  People don’t realize how much of what Norman did was possible because he had people like Conrad carrying water for him and Sandra to handle the Deep Thought. What’s that old saying, you can accomplish almost anything if you’re willing to let someone else get the credit? And now it’s my job to see that this place doesn’t fall and plays its part in the campaign, and I don’t care a damn if the chroniclers all go on about Rudi and Mathilda and don’t give me more than a footnote.

  Walla Walla’s defenses stood in a stout irregular rectangle now, ferroconcrete and rubble walls forty feet high faced with hard granite; round towers reared half that again at intervals, with conical roofs of witch-hat shape on top sheathed in lead or copper, the whole surrounded by a deep moat. The wartime hoardings were up over the crenellations of the wall, sloping metalfaced timber roofs that protected the fighting platform from arrow fire and let defenders shoot and drop things straight down from under cover.

  The old penitentiary had been the foundation for the big castle that made the northwestern corner of the new walled city; she could see its massive machicolated towers silhouetted against the blazing colors of the western sky. A blimp-shaped observation balloon at three thousand feet up stood black against the dark blue vault of heaven, the long curve of its tethering cable hardly visible at all.

  As she watched a signal light began to snap from its basket, aimed east in a rapid flicker of coded Morse, probably sending to one of the castles in the foothills of the mountains there.