Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun

by S. M. Stirling

  “Then don’t let them get past you, that’s all I can say. Kill the other bastard before he can kill you and your home and family are safe. Running from a fight just means it follows you. It’s as simple as that.”

  The boy’s grimy knuckles tightened and went white on the spear shaft; he’d probably take the advice to heart. Ingolf had long since seen that it was a rare and lousy specimen of a man who couldn’t show willing with his back to his home and kin.

  And probably he’ll get himself killed and die still a virgin, poor brave little clod. I’ve also seen how much willing counts for when amateurs go up against real soldiers with real gear, who know what they’re doing when the amateurs don’t.

  Another set of sentries stopped and identified them, and then they began to pass horses picketed on either side of the arroyo, tethered to ropes strung from pegs driven into the sandy soil. Most simply stood hipshot, their tails swishing regularly; others were being watered, with buckets filled at holes dug in the lower parts of the sandy bed of the seasonal watercourse. The homey, familiar smell of horse-piss, horse-sweat and manure added to the odors of damp sand and sun-baked earth and grass and sagebrush.

  Lord Maugis de Grimmond, Baron Tucannon and enfeoffed vassal of the Counts Palatine of Walla Walla, was a year or two younger than Ingolf, which meant he’d been four or so at the time of the Change. His parents had both been SCA members in Oregon who threw their lot in with Norman Arminger and ended up with a barony here.

  Mathilda is a fine person, but her dad was one heap big bad badass, from all I’ve been able to gather, Ingolf thought. Still, needs must. Those were hard times. Mary’s father, Rudi’s dad Mike Havel, killed Arminger.

  Though he’d only survived it by about forty minutes before dying of the wounds Arminger inflicted; and now Rudi was married to Norman Arminger’s only child. The family politics here got twisty, and he was still learning his way around them. For one thing, Rudi’s mother Juniper Mackenzie hadn’t been married to Mike Havel, either. Mary’s mother, Signe, had married him. She still wasn’t what you’d call overenthusiastic about Rudi or Juniper, though she and the outfit Havel had founded and she ran, the Bearkillers, had accepted High King Artos gracefully over around Larsdalen on the other side of the Willamette from Clan Mackenzie. Mary and her twin Ritva had moved out from there in their teens to live in the woods with their Aunt Astrid, who was . . . strange. Even by comparison with other people who’d had a rough time in the first Change Year.

  Like most Changelings his age Ingolf had elastic standards when it came to what was or wasn’t outright barking madness, having grown up among an adult population many of whose members had been strained beyond the breaking point by what they’d seen, suffered and done to survive. They were functional most of the time or they’d have been bones in a ditch somewhere, but screaming sweating nightmares or people who suddenly burst into tears or rages at odd moments were pretty common, and every year brought a trickle of suicides done one way or another. His own father had just taken a bottle out to a barn and drunk himself unconscious now and then; you could see it coming on in his eyes, when he got to remembering.

  And Mike Havel wasn’t nasty like Arminger, or crazy like Arminger, but he was a hard man and no mistake. Dad did what was necessary back then too, so I’m not going to be too snippy about this baron guy’s parents. They lived, and so did their kids. And if it helped to plaster everything with names out of old books, so be it.

  Their son had coarse, curly bowl-cut red hair of a dark copper color like an old penny, pale skin of the sort that turned ruddy rather than tanning, slightly buck teeth, a big nose and ears like the handles of a jug. He also wore a full set of Western plate armor except for the helmet and the gauntlets, which lay beside him, and while he wasn’t particularly large he moved as if the weight and heat and constriction didn’t bother him more than dayclothes.

  He was busily engaged in cutting bread and cheese, using a painted shield as a platter. Ingolf dredged up newly acquired heraldic knowledge to read it: Argent, a fess Gules, in chief two greyhounds courant proper while the nobleman stopped and glanced up at the pair. The peasant spearman bowed low in a complicated gesture with something like a curtsy involved. Maugis returned it with a nod that was . . . literally . . . lordly.

  Mind you, he could have just ignored the kid.

  “Thank you, Girars . . . Bero, get some of this, take it back to the rest at your post, boy . . . and tell your father I’m glad he’s keeping a sharp lookout,” he said.

  “Thank you, my lord!” the youngster said, louting low again as he accepted the loaves and cheese and meat wrapped in a length of coarse sacking.

  “And Girars, next time you leave your post, take your shield with you as well as your spear, or you’ll be very sorry.”

  “Yes, my lord!”

  The nobleman turned to Ingolf, and bowed respectfully with the gesture between equals.

  “Colonel Ingolf! Welcome, my lord of Readstown. What news of the enemy?”

  Of course, when it comes to people here being polite to me it sure as shoot doesn’t hurt that I went with Rudi all the way to Nantucket and back and am officially now one of the Nine Companions of the Sword- Quest in song and story. Or that I married his half sister on the way, Mary being a big wheel among the Dúnedain Rangers and now a princess, more or less. Since Rudi is High King Artos these days. I didn’t realize quite how important she was, and it wasn’t why I married her, but since it’s a fact . . . well, use the mojo where you can get it, Ingolf old son. Sure as shit beats being a wandering paid soldier the local Farmers wouldn’t let in the front door and the Bossmen treated like something nasty you scrape off your shoe on a hot day.

  “Looks like we’ll have company the way I thought, my lord Tucannon,” he said aloud.

  “You saw them?” the nobleman said eagerly.

  “Saw one of them, and he saw the sheep. It was an enemy scout, all right; I caught the sun-blink off his binoculars. I sent my aide back to alert our own scouts and they should be reporting in . . . an hour to three.”

  The baron nodded. Binoculars were an expensive specialty tool and among the most prized of salvage from the old world; the modern replacements just starting to appear were bulkier, not nearly as good, and almost as expensive. Field glasses ended up in the hands of those whose missions really demanded them, or those of extremely high status.

  Ingolf went on: “And you can bet he’s part of the screen for a cavalry outfit. One gets you ten they take the bait.”

  That brought a general rustle. About forty of the men sitting with their backs against the bank upstream of him munching on sausage and bread and cheese were equipped in articulated steel plate much like their lord; some of them de Grimmond’s household knights and men-at-arms, and the rest his vassal knights called up from their manors and their men-at-arms. They were the ones who fought as heavy cavalry; the twelve-foot lances they’d carry were stacked neatly in pyramids of ash wood and steel.

  Very bad news if you can’t get out of the way, dodge around and pepper them with arrows, Ingolf thought. If you can . . . not so much.

  He had a suit of plate complete too, the gift of Sandra Arminger, but he preferred lighter gear for work like this.

  You have to use great big horses with that ironmongery, and even bigger ones if they’re wearing armor too. They’re fast in a charge, but not what you’d call nimble, and they get tired out quick.

  Rather more men wore light armor of leather and mail like Ingolf’s; they also had tight horseman’s breeches, swords and powerful recurve bows of horn and sinew and wood. This far east the PPA bred its own cowboys and hence horse-archers. There were also foot spearmen with the same big kite-shaped shields as the knights and crossbowmen with small round bucklers and their specialist missile weapons; both carried swords as well and they wore what they called three-quarter armor here, which was like a man-at-arms’ but with some of the pieces left off. Spearmen and crossbowmen and men-at-arms were the three typ
es of soldier that Association military tenure required landholders here to maintain and furnish at need.

  All those looked at least unbothered by the prospect of bloodshed, working on their gear or talking quietly and joking as they ate, a few praying with their rosaries in their hands, a couple even sleeping; but then it was their trade, more or less, even if the infantry did farming on the side and the horse-archers stared up the ass-end of a lot of livestock. The rest of the force were dispersed up and down the arroyo in spots where water was available and the cover good, several hundreds strong; they were peasant militia not unlike the unfortunate Girars, a few callow-eager, most grimly determined. Ingolf suspected that their main military purpose would be to absorb arrows that might otherwise hit a real fighter.

  “If they do come, we’re ready,” said the baron.

  Ingolf looked back over his shoulder, juggling distances and the lie of the land.

  “You sure you can take heavy horse down that slope?” he said, a little dubious. “Looked mighty steep to take fast, much less a flat-out charge in all that gear.”

  The baron laughed and handed Ingolf a length of dried and smoked mutton sausage, salty and greasy and pungent with garlic and sage and hot peppers, balanced on a thick chunk of maslin wheat-and-barley bread with a slab of strong-smelling cheese a little runny with the heat. There was a helmet full of onions not far away, another full of raisins and dried apricots, and someone was handing around a skin bottle of water cut with a rough red wine. Ingolf sat with one foot drawn up—which let you get back on your feet in a hurry, a fixed habit he’d picked up long ago—and set to the food, using his own helmet to hold things he wasn’t chewing on at the moment.

  It was all reasonably undecayed, and far, far better than some things he’d eaten in the field. Nearly raw foundered mule three days dead, eaten in a weeping late-autumn rainstorm that kept smothering the fire, for instance.

  “Lord Vogeler,” de Grimmond said patiently. “This is not only my barony of Tucannon, it’s Grimmond manor, the place I was raised as far back as I can remember and where I’ve spent nine-tenths of my life. I’ve ridden and hunted and hawked and walked and strolled and camped out and searched for strayed stock and led my men-in-arms practice and occasionally fought bandits or raiders over every inch of it starting when I could walk three steps. Yes, it’s steep right there, but we can do it.”

  “Point taken, my lord,” Ingolf said. “I’d laugh at you if you gave me advice on using terrain back in Readstown. We’ll need confirmation on how many of them there are before we settle the details of the plan, of course.”

  He finished the food, extracted some gristle from between his teeth and went to check on his horses, including his favorite, a big brown gelding named Boy he’d picked up in Nebraska years ago. He made a point of feeding them some of the apricots. A horse wasn’t like a water mill where you pulled a lever and got a given result. It was important that it liked and trusted you as well as knowing you were boss.

  Then he went back and waited, thumbing through a copy of The Silmarillion from his saddlebags, which was more or less essential if you were going to be part of the Dúnedain Rangers, into which he’d married. This edition was from the Mithrilwood Press. The cover was gilt-stamped tooled leather over board, and it had annotations by her aunt Astrid Loring-Larsson, the Lady of the Rangers, along with her Helpful Hints on Modern Spoken Sindarin at the end. She had started the Rangers a few years after the Change, she and her anamchara Eilir, Juniper Mackenzie’s daughter. They and their husbands still ran the outfit.

  That priest I met in Fargo said Christians and Jews are People of the Book. Well, so are the Dúnedain Rangers! Or Books, plural.

  He’d actually read some of the other stories by this guy when he was younger...

  OK, hold that thought. According to Astrid Loring, the Hiril Dúnedain, those aren’t stories, they’re the Histories and the Englishman was The Historian, inspired by the Valar demigods even if he didn’t know it and every word is goddamned gospel true. I don’t know if all the Rangers actually buy that . . . I’m not really sure how seriously Mary takes it . . . but on brief acquaintance with her aunt I think that living in the woods with Astrid for a couple of years would convince pretty well anyone, much less a bunch of impressionable teenagers who wanted to believe in the first place . . . It’s the official line anyway, sure as shit stinks. What the hell, it works. And it’s no sillier than all these Protectorate guys ready to draw swords over who gets to paint what stuff on their shield. All your perspective, I guess.

  When you considered what the Cutters believed about their Ascended Masters and the Nine Rays and whatnot, it wasn’t even very strange. Nor was the Church Universal and Triumphant just imagining things. There was something there, it just wasn’t what they thought it was.

  A soft call came from one of the sentries and he stuffed the book away. A few minutes later two figures came up leading their horses.

  The one in the lead was Mark Vogeler, his nephew and aide-de-camp. The boy would be eighteen about Christmas, but he was tall and well built for his age; still gawky but when and if he got his full growth he’d look a lot like his uncle, except that his hair was the color of corn tassels and that his snub-nosed face was considerably less battered. The mail shirt and helmet he wore, his shete, tomahawk, the quiver over his back and the laminated recurve bow in its saddle scabbard on his horse, were all of the highest quality and they’d been new that spring.

  But they’d seen use since. The long trip from Readstown and several stiff fights had knocked a lot of the puppylike piss and vinegar out of the eldest son of Edward Vogeler; he was no longer quite the brash youngster who’d virtually blackmailed his kin into letting him come along to the war. The grin was still wide and white in his dark-tanned face below the mop of summer-faded hair.

  “Reporting, Colonel Vogeler,” he said, saluting and handing over a folded sheaf of papers. With a bow that showed how quickly he’d picked up local custom: “My lord Tucannon.”

  The other newcomer was in worn buckskins deliberately stained and mottled in shades of brown and sage-green to make them better camouflage. He was a short brown-skinned man in his thirties with black braided hair and high cheekbones, definitely Indian or mostly so. He bowed as well but remained silent afterwards, squatting with his reins tucked through his belt and munching on a handful of the apricots someone passed him.

  “Ah,” Ingolf said, flipping quickly through the papers covered in small, neat handwriting and hand-drawn maps. “Yup, Lady Mary’s report. About three hundred fifty men, Boise light cavalry, regulars, all horse-archers, with a battery of four springalds along with them. Damn, horse artillery. I hate those things.”

  Everyone in hearing nodded, including the men-at-arms. Plate would turn most arrows, unless they came from a powerful bow and hit just right. Springalds were like giant crossbows on wheeled carriages, but they threw four-foot bolts powered by an entire set of leaf-springs from the rear suspension of a light truck. They had three times the range of a bow and they’d punch through knight’s armor as if it were made from old tin cans. A good crew could fire nearly as fast as a crossbow, with two men heaving on the cocking levers from behind the steel shield that protected them from arrows.

  “They’re advancing in squadron columns—”

  Which meant forty or fifty men each.

  “—with a good screen out. A remuda of a couple of hundred horses bringing up the rear. A reconnaissance in strength, the lead element of a powerful raiding party out to disrupt your harvest and seize or destroy what they can, or both. Likely both. And they’re definitely turning east towards that valley, so it looks as if they’re going to go for the sheep. Confirmed by Rick Three Bears.”

  Ingolf grinned. “He adds that they’re well mounted. Those horses are plain wasted on white-eyes, quote unquote.”

  De Grimmond looked encouraged. And also, Ingolf thought, the tiniest bit uncertain. That was natural; he knew Ingolf and his Richlanders an
d the Dúnedain only by reputation, and the Lakota contingent led by Three Bears barely even by legend. The leather-clad man who’d come in behind Mark Vogeler spoke.

  “My lord, I can confirm that.”

  De Grimmond nodded. “Go on. Tom Yallup, isn’t it? You saw it?”

  The man was a Yakima, from a tribe farther west who’d lost heavily in the Change and then in the long brutal wars between the Free Cities of the Yakima League and the Association; they’d ended up tributary to the PPA on what was left of their land. The tribute included horses, and in time of war scouts. Both had a high reputation.

  “Tom Yallup, that’s me, my lord,” the man said, looking pleased at being recognized. “Yeah, I saw it. Their commander had this sideways red crest on his helmet.”

  “Definitely Boise,” de Grimmond said. “A Centurion’s crest. Old General Thurston had an odd obsession with Ancient Rome and his son’s worse.”

  Ingolf coughed frantically. “Sorry,” he gasped. “Swallowed wrong.”

  The Indian scout went on, shaking his head ruefully: “It was hard keeping up. Those Rangers, they’re like ghosts. Real smooth scouting, real smooth, they’ve got an eye for the way the land lies. And the Lakota . . . they’re some serious ’skins, my lord.”

  “Right. Let’s proceed, then.”

  Ingolf nodded. “We come in behind them; my Richlanders first, to hit their rearguard, and the Sioux behind as reserve, to make sure none of them escape. The enemy will try to disengage and break contact when they realize they’re outnumbered, the valley side on the south isn’t impassable for mounted men and they’ll think they can get around us that way, hit us on the flank or escape and get back to their main body. You ram into them right then when they’re not expecting it and the impact ought to break them. And, my lord, the High King instructed me to say that he wants prisoners, if they’re willing to surrender. Particularly if they’re US of Boise men.”