Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun

by S. M. Stirling

  Ingolf spoke again: “Your men fought hard against odds when we surprised you, no panic. And they’re very well drilled. When you reversed front on us after that arrow-exchange it was like one man moving; it’s a difficult maneuver and I’ve never seen it better done. If we hadn’t had an ace you’d have gotten away and hurt us badly in the process.”

  “Ah . . . thank you again.” Bitterly. “Those sheep were a trap, weren’t they? Bait.”

  “Yup,” Ingolf said, and ate a bite of honey cake with whipped cream.

  “And I led us into it and lost half my command,” the younger man said with soft bitterness, looking down at his bowl. “Lost all of it and me, too. It’d be easier all around if I’d taken an arrow in the eye. And I’m supposed to be a trained officer!”

  “Son, if something looks too good to be true, like a nice tasty flock of sheep just begging to get put on the grill, it usually is. If it’s any consolation I got sucker punched pretty much the same way back . . . when I was younger than you are now and had a command I deserved a lot less that you did yours. Training does only so much. Experience you have to get the hard way. You pay for it, and your men pay for it, and that’s just the way it is in this screwed-up world.”

  Woburn looked up, eyes narrowed in thought. “You’re not from around here, are you, sir? I can’t place your accent.”

  “Nope. I’m from the Free Republic of Richland . . . the Richland in Wisconsin, not the Richland over near Kennewick on the Columbia.”

  The other man’s eyes widened. “The Midwest? Then—”

  He shut up quickly. Ingolf ate another forkful, before he said judiciously: “Yup. It really is true that Iowa and the others are marching. On Corwin, for starters, but they’re going to keep right on going as far as Boise and they’re not likely to be in a real good mood by then. Hell, after the way the Cutters killed their Bossman on his own ground, the Iowans aren’t in a good mood now. Iowa’s run by his widow these days, you know. I was there when they mustered outside Des Moines. Must have been seventy, eighty thousand men—and that wasn’t counting the ones who were joining ’em later. They’ve got more if they need ’em.”

  “That’s a large force,” Woburn said, a little white about the lips. “Still, numbers aren’t everything.”

  “They’re mostly pretty green, except for a few from Fargo and Marshall who were in the Sioux War,” he added honestly. “But there are a hell of a lot them and their gear and logistics are good. The Sioux are coming west too, and they’ve got blood in their eyes and scores to pay off. You had some experience with them yesterday.”

  Woburn was silent for an instant, then doggedly returned to his food. “And thank you for . . . stopping those . . . Sioux.” He’d probably been about to say savages. “They’d have killed us all.”

  Ingolf nodded. “They’re not what you’d call fond of the CUT,” he said mildly. “They’ve got good reason, and there weren’t a lot of rules when they fought ’em the last time, out there on the High Plains east of the Rockies.”

  That brought the other man’s head up. “We’re soldiers of the United States, not that f- . . . not the Prophet!”

  What everyone else called the United States of Boise called itself the United States of America, and some of them actually meant it. Ingolf chuckled slightly. “Captain Woburn, have you ever been out of Idaho before?”

  He opened his mouth, closed it, then said with stubborn honesty: “No. Never even as far as Boise until I did the Officer Candidate School course.”

  “Well, I’ve been all the way from Nantucket to the Willamette. More than once. And young feller, the United States is deader than . . . than Rome. Than f-. . . freaking Babylon, come to that, or those other places in the Bible, Nineveh and Egypt and whatnot.”

  “All the way . . . are you that Ingolf Vogeler?” Woburn blurted, his eyes going a little wide.

  “Yup.” Ingolf nodded towards Mary. “And that’s the Mary Vogeler, formerly Mary Havel. Rudi’s sister. High King Artos’ sister, Mike and Signe Havel’s daughter, Astrid Loring’s niece.”

  She smiled charmingly. “My mother and father met your father a long time ago, in Idaho. The Camas Prairie, isn’t it? Just after the Change.”

  Woburn took a deep breath. “Well, that’s, ah, startling. Yes, I remember Father telling me about that.”

  “I’m sure he told you about the fight against Iron Rod,” Mary added.

  Yeah. Mike Havel saved Woburn the elder’s bacon back then. We won’t mention the fact that Arminger was backing Iron Rod by proxy.

  “And Captain Woburn?” Ingolf went on calmly. “Just for your information, I was at the Battle of Wendell, when old general Thurston died. He was wounded by the Prophet’s men, but his son Martin killed him, your current ruler and the one who came up with this alliance with the Prophet and the CUT. I know Fred Thurston didn’t do it, Martin did. I was there.”

  “So was I,” Mary said crisply.

  “Is that the truth?” Woburn said quietly.

  Ingolf shrugged. “Either my word’s good, or it isn’t, and you’ll have to be the judge of that for yourself.” He held up a hand. “Just think about it.”

  Woburn gave a jerky nod. “May I ask what’s to be done with my men?”

  Maugis nodded in turn, smiling politely and slipping in a small needle: “The High King’s orders are that all Boise prisoners are to be kept separate from the Prophet’s men . . . I trust that’s satisfactory?”

  Woburn flushed, and the nobleman went on: “You’ll be taken to Walla Walla and then on the rail line to Wallula, and down the Columbia by barge to join the others; we’ve got over three battalions’ worth of your comrades by now. The High King has also commanded that Boisean prisoners are to be treated strictly according to the laws of war. Enlisted men may be required to work, but nothing excessive, officers to keep their sidearms and be allowed to give parole, prisoners will get the same rations our men eat, and no degrading punishments. Perhaps he’ll talk to you himself.”

  The Boisean was silent for a moment. “I should return to my men, my lord.”

  “By all means. If you have any needs, please inform my guards and they’ll relay the message to me. We’re rather busy and stretched thin here, defending our homes, but I’ll consider anything within reason.”

  Then he went on to Ingolf: “Come walk with me, Lord Vogeler.”

  Mary caught his eyes and nodded very slightly; Mark gave a slight yelp as if someone had kicked him under the table and subsided, and he didn’t think Lady Helissent missed any of it. Captain Jaeger stood and gave him a salute and then headed back to the buffet one more time before he’d have to get back to the regiment.

  The two men strolled out through the busyness of the manor, down the front steps and toward the heavy steel-strapped timber gates.

  “Getting your stuff out while the going’s good?” Ingolf asked.

  Maugis shrugged. “Yes. Though in the end, things can be replaced.”

  He gestured at the big house. “This is earth and stone and timber; I love it because of the memories it holds for me of my childhood, and because my own children were born here, but it’s not . . . not something that can really die. We can rebuild if the enemy wreck it, though losing the labor that went into it will hurt. But it’s the people that are the core of it.”

  They walked out the front gate of the manor gardens. The outer wall of the great house grounds formed one side of a town square paved with squared blocks of basalt, with a big fountain in the center, one of several where the folk could fill their buckets as they pleased.

  Trees ringed it, maples and oaks, and other buildings; the tall church, a bathhouse-cum-laundry, a tavern with a creaking sign that read The Hawk and Bear showing a very large eagle fighting a very small grizzly and right now doing a land-office business. There was a potter’s shop too; a wheelwright’s long sheds; and several stores selling things, rather than relying on peddler’s carts or passing Tinerant caravans. This was a baron’s seat as w
ell as the village of a manor.

  Everything was built of the same materials as the great house, tile roofs over whitewashed pisé walls on knee-high foundations of mortared basalt stone. The square was thick with activity, some of it preparation for a big public feast; there were a row of fire pits with whole carcasses of pig and sheep and ox roasting over them and giving off clouds of savory smoke as grease dripped on the coals, and women were setting up trestle tables and a series of stands that would hold barrels.

  “I will be giving an address to my people tonight,” Lord Maugis said. “One way or another.”

  Ingolf’s eyes were shaped by a lifetime’s campaigning; they rose to the heights eastward, the first time he’d done that here in daytime. He stopped still for an instant and whistled. He’d known that Castle Tucannon was on a hill over the town. And it was, but that was like saying that the ruins of Chicago were large or that Iowa had a hell of a lot of people.

  This whole range of low mountains had obviously been a plateau once, and then been cut up by water action far in the past into a maze of ridges, peaks and canyons that got steeper as you went farther in. This looked like a lot of the ridges on the edge of the high country. Only the end of the ridge had fallen off somehow, leaving better than a hundred feet of nearly sheer basalt in a horseshoe shape with a tangle of huge rocks at the base.

  The castle had been built atop that; it was the usual basic Association design, doubled as they sometimes were to enlarge it—what they called a mirror keep. But the outer walls were at the edge of those cliffs, and the builders had improved them by chopping out any projecting spurs. Mounted on one of the towers was a tall Ponderosa pine trunk, about a hundred feet tall with a ladder up its side and a small platform on the top. He tried to imagine what sort of a vantage it would give you, and failed. And it probably put Castle Tucannon in connection with the heliograph net all the way to Walla Walla, which would mean all the way to Portland and beyond.

  Say what you like about this Arminger guy, he knew how to get things built, not just how to kill people.

  “There was a solid path in from the other side; my father’s builders used that, then cut it away afterwards and put in a bridge that could be brought down quickly, as well as the drawbridge,” Maugis said, as they resumed their walk. “My sire always did have a good eye for ground.”

  “Water?” Ingolf asked, and Maugis nodded respectfully.

  “You do see the essentials, my lord Vogeler. The rock is basalt, but there’s limestone under it. Water drains down from the mountains through the strata and breaks out as springs there, at the base, plenty even in high summer like this. We run the town’s water in from there through pipes, and there are deep tube wells and reservoirs under the keep. And we use chambers in the rock for bulk storage after the harvest . . . a bit cumbersome, but it means there’s a four-year supply there at any one time.”

  Maugis smiled, a hard expression. “And besides getting away from the Lord Protector—quite true, by the way—that is a reason why my father picked this place for his stronghold. A major one. He told me he was looking carefully all the time the Association was pacifying these lands. Most of the poor harried starved wretches welcomed overlords with real weapons who could give them peace to plow and plant.”

  Light wagons and packtrains were heading upslope; the jagged peaks of the Blue Mountains lay dreaming and purple there to the eastward. Some of them bore the goods he’d seen coming out of the manor, others bundles of weaponry or farm tools or things less readily identifiable, still others household furnishings more humble than the baron’s.

  “Not all going to the castle,” Ingolf said; it wasn’t a question.

  He estimated that the tall stronghold could be held securely by about two hundred men at a pinch, and three or four hundred would be ample. If they had their families along, it would be pretty tight quarters. Build small and high was a good rule for a fort, and that one was high and no mistake. Ingolf couldn’t think of any way to storm it at all, offhand, as long as the garrison stayed alert. Even getting close to it would be dangerous, given the vantage it provided for catapult fire, and shooting back would be a joke with that elevation.

  “No, not even most is going to the castle. The mountains were another reason my father took seisin of this grant, and not just for the water and timber, though that’s why my manors are all in the foothills. There are caves up there, and old buildings from before the Change—ranger cabins, and so forth.”

  “Hmmm.” Ingolf scratched at his beard. “And you’ve been working at them since your father’s day?”

  Maugis nodded. “For the last twenty years, and there are hidden storehouses underground we’ve been filling since the war started last year. Good grazing, too; it’s not all forest and rock, there are flat areas with plenty of grass, and there’s the devil’s own lot of game, boar and bear and deer and elk. Not to mention tiger and wolf and cougar. We use the high country in dry years for summer grazing; my folk know those mountains. I’m not sending any to Walla Walla to be shipped down the Columbia . . . and possibly never come back.”

  Ingolf nodded understanding. The baron was being forethoughtful for his people, and for his own family’s interests as well. There wasn’t any serfdom anywhere in Montival, or slavery. Fifteen years ago the treaty at the end of what everyone but the PPA folks called the War of the Eye, what they termed the Protector’s War here, forbade any law that limited the right to emigrate. Anyone who wanted to leave could, debts or no. But that meant leaving the only home they had, with nothing more than the clothes they stood up in, and no skills but one particular type of farming.

  Few would face that if they weren’t impossibly badly treated at home. However, if you’d been shipped to a distant city anyway, with the government footing the bill, heading home away from the bright lights might not seem very attractive at all. Or at least some would stop on a manor where a holding was available from a lord greedy for workers; there was more good land everywhere than there were hands to till it.

  “That castle could be held by a corporal’s guard, my lord,” Ingolf said thoughtfully. “Well, them and some catapult crews.”

  “And I could do it that way,” Maugis agreed. “Keep a minimal garrison and the most vulnerable noncombatants in the castle. Everyone else in the hills, and then raid out of them with the barony’s fighting men when the enemy occupy the lowlands . . . which they will.”

  “Yup, they will,” Ingolf said; he wasn’t going to lie to this man. “Hopefully, not for all that long, but for a while, yeah.”

  “Tell me, Lord Vogeler, how many men would you need to comb these mountains against me and my neighbors if we took refuge there? How long would it take?”

  Ingolf’s professional reflexes kicked in. He looked up at the peaks to the east—one of them still had a little snow on it and must be around seven thousand feet—and ran what he knew of the terrain through his mind.

  “At least five thousand men and a lot of equipment, if you gave me a year,” he said. “Not counting the ones you’d need to besiege the castles around here, or at least solidly invest them. Maybe two years to do a thorough job. Ten, twenty thousand and even more gear if you wanted it done quick and dirty. You’d need good troops you could trust to get out there in small units and get stuck in whenever they could, not just go through the motions when someone higher up was looking. And some engineers to build roads and fortified posts, plus labor. And it’d cost you, money and blood both. That’s natural ambush country, looks like.”

  Maugis nodded quietly. They walked on through the town, the baron nodding response to bows and curtsies and salutes; nobody was going to interrupt him, of course. Grimmond-on-the-Wold had something like eight hundred folk in peacetime and many more now. That was big for a village, but not a place that had wholly made up its mind to be a town either, and certainly not even the smallest city.

  “I could raid from those hills and tie down that many troops or more,” Maugis said. “I could make trying
to move supplies through this country . . . anywhere between here and the Snake River . . . a nightmare of endless harassment. Ambush convoys, kill foraging parties, cut off patrols, burn outposts.”

  He turned and gestured to the town and the lands beyond. “I know that this doesn’t look like much to a traveled man,” he said.

  “Actually it looks pretty good,” Ingolf said sincerely. “Mary and I were just now saying that we envied you. Well, would envy you if it were peacetime.”

  Maugis smiled; it was an oddly charming expression, and made his rather ugly face handsome for a moment.

  “Thank you,” he said. “This is my . . . my world, if you know what I mean. My own particular world.”

  Ingolf dredged his memory for a word he’d heard; his family were mostly Deutsch if you went back far enough, along with a slew of other things including a lot of Norski. They had preserved a few bits and pieces of that heritage, and not just recipes for bratwurst.

  “Heimat,” he said. “An old word. Your heimat is . . . your little country, the first homeland of the heart. The place where your roots are.”

  Maugis nodded quickly. “Exactly. I’ve enjoyed my times at Court in Todenangst and Portland, the university in Forest Grove, visits to Walla Walla, tournaments and meetings of the Peers, theatre and concerts, but this place is my home. All of it, and the people are my people.”

  Most of the folk of Grimmond-on-the-Wold were peasants, who tilled the little garden tofts around their three-room-and-a-loft cottages that gave off the tree-shaded streets. They had their strips in the big open fields of wheat and barley, canola and sunflowers and clover westward, their stock in the common flocks and herds. From that they paid a share to the lord, and worked two or three days a week on his demesne land; that included a long south-facing slope of goblet-trained vineyards green and bushy with summer and the orchards around the irrigation furrow beneath. Some of the little houses were neatly kept, with flowers planted around their doorways. Others had patches flaking from their whitewash and chickens walking in the door.