Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun

by S. M. Stirling

  There were still around fifteen thousand people here in peacetime, half what Portland had and nearly as much as Corvallis. The rich farmlands, pastures, orchards and vineyards of the Walla Walla valley and the timber of the Blue Mountains to the east brought it wealth, as did trade in peacetime; in war it was an outpost against the city-state of Pendleton to the south and the United States of Boise to the north and east. Or against both and the Prophet’s hordes from Montana, now.

  Banners flew from the peaks of tower and gatehouse. Besides the scarlet-yellow-black Lidless Eye of the PPA, there were the arms of the Aguirre family who were Counts Palatine of the Eastermark and Barons of Walla Walla—Or, a tree vert with a wolf passant sable, on a tree brun—and now the crowned mountain and sword of the High Kingdom of Montival flying above them all. Sandra had seen to that throughout the Association territories and encouraged it elsewhere, even before the putative High King got back.

  Well, I helped train Rudi . . . Artos . . . all those years since I first kidnapped him. He’s certainly very capable; a little sentimental, but hard enough when he has to be, and extremely smart. Deadly dangerous with any weapon, too. I wouldn’t have believed a man over six feet could move that fast, if I hadn’t seen it myself. The only man I’ve ever met as fast as I am.

  Her thoughts shied away from the Sword of the Lady. Not that she didn’t believe in it; it was so real that your belief became utterly irrelevant. Too real. You got the feeling that it could tear through the fabric of things at any moment, like a heavy weight through damp paper. Meaning itself crumbled around it.

  She went on aloud: “All right, get them moving in relays, Sir Tancred,” she said, as an empty train rumbled in from the east. “It’s important that their kinfolk inside the walls know they’re safe. See all those watchers on the parapet? Seeing vulnerable dependents heading out will help morale a great deal. They can fight to defend their families while the families are out of immediate danger.”

  Tancred nodded, looking thoughtful for a second; he was an extremely capable young man or he wouldn’t be commanding the Protector’s Guard regiment, but he needed to gain a broader perspective if he was going to rise further. Another thing Sandra and Conrad had drummed into her hard long ago was that a big part of commanding was finding which of your subordinates could learn and then keeping them at it.

  A second throng of civilians waiting a hundred yards farther down rose to their feet. This clump was more feisty, or just more frightened, and tried to stumble forward in a rush. The infantry sweating in their harness cursed wearily as they locked their big kite-shaped shields together into a wall to keep the frightened peasants from cluttering the track too soon. The train screeched to a halt as the brakemen wrestled with the horizontal wheels between each car.

  She heard the sergeant shouting again: “Get back there, you dimwit churls, wait your turn—wait your Saints-forsaken turn—push them back, men, push them, Turchil, you weeping pustle on Satan’s dick, put your shoulder into that shield and push, man!”

  “They’ll be loading the noncombatants and refugees and sending them west all night, then, Grand Constable,” Tancred went on. “If we push, we should be able to get it done by the time the army’s ready to march, which will leave the line clear and the rolling stock and teams on hand at our supply base on the navigable Columbia. There’s an intact line all the way northeast to Dayton we could use as we advance.”

  “Very good, Sir Tancred,” Tiphaine d’Ath replied. “We should get out of the way, then. You’re camp commandant until I get back from consulting with the Count. I’ll probably be staying the night at the City Palace; it would raise questions if I didn’t.”

  She’d have to wait for the local overlord to come out; it would be within her rights but a political faux pas to enter the city before an invitation and ideally himself to welcome her in person, and she’d sent word she’d be busy all day. On the other hand, it would also be impolite not to be here near the gate waiting to be greeted at the hour she’d specified. Tiphaine d’Ath tried very hard never to be unintentionally offensive.

  “Don’t take any nonsense,” she went on. “You speak with my authority, and the Lady Regent’s, and that of the High King. And send me Lord Forest Grove soon as he’s ready. Tell him the Count should be here fairly soon, and I’ll need him then to report on the situation up near the front.”

  Lord Rigobert Gironda de Stafford, Baron Forest Grove, was in charge of the allied . . .

  Montivalan. We’re all part of Montival now, not just allies. Completely and utterly forget how we spent the first ten Change Years fighting each other, Tiph, and the next ten watching each other with gimlet-eyed suspicion and thinking about fighting each other again someday. Down the memory hole, as Sandra puts it. You’ve got seven regiments of Yakima foot from the Free Cities in this army and glad to have them, the stubborn bastards fought us to a standstill, after all. Montivalans.

  . . . Montivalan screening force to the northeast.

  His men were buying time for this army to form up. Buying it with blood, and now he had to come back for a conference.

  There was no avoiding it, but Tiphaine d’Ath looked in that direction, towards the distant line of mountains, and suppressed a fierce desire to be there.

  And to know what the hell’s been going on up there. Reports just aren’t the same.

  COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK

  BARONY OF TUCANNON

  (FORMERLY SOUTHEASTERN WASHINGTON STATE)

  PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  AUGUST 18, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

  Make a mistake, you sons of bitches. You’re out there. I can feel it, I can smell it. Come on, screw up.

  Ingolf Vogeler carefully leveled the binoculars from where he lay just below the crest of the ridge, using a hand to shade the lenses so they would give no betraying flash in the noonday sunlight. This whole country on the fringe of the Blue Mountains was smooth ridge and slope making valleys, sometimes with a bit of a creek running down the vale between, sometimes dry, getting steeper as you went east.

  Send me a nice cocksure kid, Lord, he thought. Or Manwë or Varda or whatever. Nineteen, a hard-on with legs, he’s invincible, he’s immortal, he knows it all. Give me something to work with.

  There was a thin stand of tall straight ponderosa pine along the top here, smelling like butterscotch and vanilla as sap oozed out of cracks in their orange bark; the trees got thicker behind him too, up into the heights. Downslope were scattered thickets of shrubby mountain mahogany, and then grass rolling away in billowing folds that rose up the slope on the other side. Very faint marks in it along the contour indicated that it had been cultivated before the Change, but now it was in bunchgrass again, bleached almost white by summer but still good fodder. A herd of several hundred sheep and a few alpacas grazed it, and drank from the little summer-sunken trickle through the cottonwoods at the base.

  “Good woolies,” he murmured very softly to himself. “Just eat the grass, drink the water, crap wherever the hell you please, look appealing and vulnerable. Good woolies.”

  Though in fact they were still looking spindly with the late-spring shearing; you forgot how leggy sheep actually were if you only saw them with twelve pounds of fleece wrapped around them. A couple of mounted girls in leather pants and thin shirts and broad-brimmed Stetson hats watched over them, directing their dogs and keeping an arrow on the string for predators. That probably made both the humans and the sheep down there a lot more comfortable than his light mail shirt and the padded gambeson underneath it left him. He was used to sweating, though, and it was more bearable in this dry Western climate than in the humid Midwest summers he’d grown up with.

  Minutes crawled by, the smell of sap grew stronger, and small pale grasshoppers went by his nose in ticking leaps. Ants trooped through the pine needles and sparse grass bearing a beetle aloft in bloodthirsty triumph, and somewhere a gro
und squirrel whistled, sounding a little like a woodchuck but with more of a chitter to it. Occasionally a little of the light powdery loess soil would blow into his face with a gust of the wind that soughed through the branches of the tall straight pines, and the dirt stuck to the sweat.

  A golden eagle soared down the little valley, and several collies ran around barking hysterically in protective reflex as its broad-winged shadow fell on the flock. It sheered off at an upraised bow, evidently thinking the lambs not worth the risk of an arrow; in his considerable experience most predators knew the range of human weapons to a foot. A big golden eagle could carry off a lamb. Some folk trained and used them for hunting deer and wolves, which Ingolf considered more trouble than it was worth. Pronghorn antelope trooped by out in the rolling country northwestward, raising a thin cloud of dust as they moved from north to south and occasionally breaking into a leaping frenzy for no perceptible reason except that they liked to jump and run.

  His eyes kept up their steady, methodical scan. His attention was carefully general, waiting for the break in the pattern that would leap out because it didn’t belong. Then something tickled at the edge of his sight. He turned the glasses that way, and it became a tiny horseman with two remounts on a leading rein coming up out of a swale. That might be a scout, prepared to ride fast and far to escape pursuit if he was spotted. There was a quick blink of light as the distant man stood in the stirrups and raised something to his face. Ingolf put down his own binoculars and saw the same flicker of light again, and then once more. Without the glasses nothing was visible except the flash, but that could be seen for miles. And binoculars meant . . .

  “Gotcha, you stupid careless fuck,” Ingolf murmured, with a surge of savage satisfaction mixed with professional disapproval. “Now go back and tell your dumb careless friends that a mutton dinner’s just waiting for them. Grilled lamb chops too, you betcha, real tempting after a while on hardtack and beans.”

  The problem with sending out scouts was that the scouts could be seen themselves . . . and when you ran into a scout screen, seeing them told you a lot right there.

  Plus he’d never yet met cavalry who could resist stealing livestock, or burning stuff down, and a good many of his thirty-one years had been spent as a horse-soldier himself, after he’d left home in a hurry, that or as a salvager working the dead cities. All the way across the continent, from his home along the Kickapoo river in what had once been Wisconsin (and was now part of the Free Republic of Richland) to the Pacific, with a side trip through the Wild Lands of the east to Nantucket, and he’d done it more than once. He doubted anyone since the Change had bounced around as much as he had.

  And a lot of them are calling me Ingolf the Wanderer now. I’d be flattered, except that I’m damned sick of wandering. And I’m a married man now. I want to settle down, put my legs under my own table and my head under my own roof on my own land every day. OK, Ingolf, let’s win this war so we can.

  Ten minutes, and the man disappeared, even his dust-trail invisible through the binoculars. Ingolf waited another ten, then cased the precious instrument and wormed his way backward on hands and knees to where he’d left his round shield, quiver of arrows and four-foot recurve horseman’s bow. He shrugged the archer’s baldric over his shoulder; the strung bow was pushed through loops on the outside of the quiver. Then he crawled a bit more. Not until he was a good ten yards back did he rise to one knee, turn and wave his hand in a signal.

  A horse and rider lay at the base of the slope. The man slapped his mount’s neck; the horse rose, and the man was in the saddle as it did, and trotting west a heartbeat after. His own men were out there, and the Sioux contingent under Rick Three Bears, and Ingolf’s wife Mary, and her followers—Dúnedain Rangers. Of which he supposed he was one too.

  Sorta. Kinda.

  “Go let ’em know, Mark,” Ingolf muttered. “I’ve got to see the local panjandrum.”

  He walked down the slope, a big broad-shouldered man with a bear’s strength in his long limbs and thick shoulders. But he moved lightly, with a sort of lazy precision; his shaggy ear-length hair was sun-faded brown, his eyes dark blue in a weathered face that had been better looking before a broken nose and a fair assortment of scars, some showing as white hairs in his close-cropped beard. There was a sword by his side, the heavy horseman’s chopping blade known as a shete, and a bowie on the other hip, with the handle of a tomahawk tucked through a loop at the back.

  None of the weapons clattered as he scooped up his helmet—a locally made sallet with a neck-flare—and trotted across the open grassland with the scabbard of the shete in his left hand. The black cottonwoods here were thicker than in the next valley over with the sheep, up to forty or fifty feet tall, with a dense understory along their edge. He slowed down as he approached them and waved his sword-hand to show it was empty.

  Because there are a bunch of local yokels with crossbows there; I’m not coming back to the same spot I slipped out of. I don’t think some of them really grasp the distinction between stranger and enemy all that well. Christ . . . Manwë . . . but a lot of the peasants on these Association manors are more like turnips than people. And I thought we Readstowners were hicks!

  “Come ahead!” someone said from ahead of him. “Slowly!”

  He came ahead . . . slowly. Sure enough, two crossbows were pointed at him, and a bunch of spears with unpleasant foot-long heads sharpened until the naked metal gleamed. The men behind them were bearded if they were old enough for it, with fairly close-cropped hair; short hair was a lower-class marker here, like their shapeless linsey-woolsey shirt-tunics and wool pants and moccasinlike shoes tied at the ankle with thongs. Ingolf spread his arms.

  “Ingolf Vogeler. Your ally. Remember?” he said.

  The powerful smell they gave off was just summer and not much opportunity to wash in the last little while. They didn’t have the crusted, scabrous appearance or the hard stink people did in areas where the habit of washing at all had died out. And the weapons were pointed up once they recognized him as one of the newfound allies helping them fight Boise and the Prophet. A couple of them even smiled.

  Better than I expected.

  “Take me to your leader,” he said.

  “The lord baron has arrived with his menie, my lord,” one of them said.

  His full-time soldiers, Ingolf mentally translated. What we’d call his deputies back home, or National Guardsmen.

  “Girars, you show him,” the oldest of the men said; he might have been anything from a work-gnarled thirty to fifty.

  The militiaman delegated for the job was pathetically young, not more than seventeen and a bit scrawny with a growth spurt, with only a little yellow peach-fuzz on his acne-scarred cheeks. The steel-strapped leather breastplate and simple bullet-shaped conical helmet he wore both seemed too big for him; he left the four-foot kite-shaped shield propped against a stump, which was a bad sign. Ingolf’s own went on his back on a leather strap, where he could swing it forward with a quick duck of his left shoulder and pull.

  Yeah, those big shields weigh fifteen pounds, the way they make them here. But if you suddenly need a shield, you need it bad. I’d roast his ass for leaving it just ’cause it’s heavy and awkward if he were in my outfit. Better years of a sore arm than one minute of an arrow in the gut. I’m tempted to do it anyway, but I don’t know the baron well enough to interfere in his chain of command.

  The militiaman led Ingolf forward and down the bank of the dry river to the sandy bottom, an arroyo they called it hereabouts. The branches of the cottonwoods mingled overhead, turning the creek bed into a tunnel of green that sparkled with moving golden flickers.

  It was cooler here, too, and easy walking. No water showed, but the sandy bottom was damp in spots, and insects buzzed and clicked. This was a fair-sized river in the winter rains, to judge from the height of the banks; it might flow at night even in August, when the cottonwoods weren’t sucking water and pumping it into the air. It was a convenient place to
be safely out of sight in daytime right now, but it would be dangerous a little later in the year; he’d spent enough time in arid areas to understand what a flash flood meant.

  “My lord . . . is there going to be a fight?” the boy asked after they were out of sight and hearing of his friends and neighbors.

  Ingolf stopped himself from barking: I’m not a lord!

  He was a Sheriff’s son back home—his father had been the one who organized his remote rural district after the Change and led the effort to deal with the failure of the machines and the wave of city folk fleeing chaos and starvation. He’d become a powerful landowner in the process, a giver of judgments and leader of the local Farmers and their dependent Refugees in war and peace. Now Ingolf’s elder brother Edward held the position.

  And actually does a pretty decent job at it. I . . . well, I can’t wish we hadn’t quarreled when Dad died. If I hadn’t stormed out, I wouldn’t be where I am now, which is not such a bad place. I’m glad we made it up when the Quest passed through, though. Glad I got to see Wanda again and my nieces and nephews even if young Mark is a pain in the butt sometimes.

  Being a Sheriff didn’t mean quite as much back in Richland as a title of nobility did around here and they were a lot less formal about it, but he was roughly equivalent to the younger son of a baron in Association terms.

  The whole feudal folderol is pretty damned silly to my way of thinking, names from books and all, but they take it very seriously indeed here in this part of Montival. And they outnumber me about six, seven hundred thousand to one and I have to stay here for now, so they can call themselves whatever the fuck they please, right.

  “Probably there’s going to be more than one fight, kid,” he said instead. “Those bastards aren’t invading your land ’cause they love you.”

  “I’m not scared, my lord,” the boy said, lying transparently. “It’s just . . . my family’s not far. My mom and my brothers and sisters and all.”