The Tears of the Sun tc-5

by S. M. Stirling

  “What’s the motto, Lioncel?”

  “Take care of your gear, and your gear will take care of you, my lady. The one time you’re careless is the time it will kill you.”

  She tossed the sword on the bed and sat, and Lioncel finished drying her hair with warm fluffy towels and then carefully brushed it out. Tiphaine would have rather gone down with wet hair, or done it herself. It was the job of her page. That Lioncel took pride in it argued well for his character.

  When he approved, they went down to the breakfast nook where Rigobert’s staff had laid out bread, butter, cheese, jam, platters of sausages and bacon and scrambled eggs and more coffee, plus a large bowl of oatmeal cooked with apples for Lioncel to start with. Tiphaine let Lioncel pour her coffee; an Associate learned to command by learning to serve.

  First Armand and Radomar, teaching me how to accept service; now Lioncel and Diomede. And I can’t steal one tittle of what they consider their job without them raising a very, very polite ruckus.

  “Thank you, Lioncel. Please sit and eat, yourself.”

  This was her usual command when eating alone and her pages had learned to eat with her; however, they always sat after they had served her. Tiphaine shook her head in private amusement at the size of the portions she had to eat these days. A Bearkiller doctor she’d enjoyed talking with a few times had worked out that a knight actually burned off nearly half again as many calories as a peasant on average.

  Government by pro athlete, had been the way he’d defined the PPA’s neofeudalism.

  And the last few weeks in camp had been short enough rations that she ate with gusto.

  “Aunt?”

  Tiphaine nodded; the keyword told her this was Lioncel to Tiphaine, not a page to his knight.

  “Yes, Lioncel?”

  “Aunt, how bad is the situation?”

  Tiphaine sighed as she met the serious pale blue eyes.

  Looking more and more like Rigobert every day… and me, since Rigobert and I have similar coloring and builds. He’s going to be tall, too… which both of us also are.

  “It’s bad, Lioncel.”

  She bit off a piece of bread and Tillamook cheese and stared at the ticking grandfather clock against the far wall of the room for a moment, composing her thoughts. He was old enough to be a squire soon; nearly old enough to be treated like an embryonic adult, by modern standards. Certainly old enough to get the unvarnished truth.

  “The expression I like to use is cluster-fuck. It’s very rude and describes the situation to a T. It also means that more than one thing went wrong at once, and the things that went wrong each made the other things worse than they would have been by themselves. We did very well to get out of it without being wrecked beyond recovery.”

  “What’s it called when everything goes wrong at once?”

  “Dead and defeated.”

  A flash of fear shadowed the boy’s eyes for an instant. His jaw clenched. “That means really bad things to Mom and Diomede and the baby she’s going to have, doesn’t it?”

  Tiphaine nodded. Not fear for himself. Lioncel would have been considered insanely courageous, or pathologically fearless in the old days. Today, the rest of the pages at court know better than to tease or harass him. It’s not just that I’m known to kill anybody threatening my family. Lioncel is shaping up to be a really solid, mean fighter, himself and there’s no backing down in him.

  “Lioncel de Stafford.”

  He looked up at her, blue eyes meeting gray.

  “This is what we’re for, boy. We put ourselves in the front line between danger and those we love, those who look to us for protection. There will always be some danger or threat, because that’s the way human beings work. This is why we have the lands and the castles and power and deference from the commons. It’s the price we pay, not just the danger but the responsibility and worry and the knowledge that everything turns on our making the right decisions, and it’s what being an Associate and a noble means.”

  Also it means we were a very successful gang of strong-arm artists back when, right after the Change, but it’s not just a protection racket anymore. Things change. Kings start as lucky pirates, and wolves graduate into guard-dogs. The myths they used to tie everything together were stronger than Norman or even Sandra suspected and the stories speeded up the process quite a bit.

  The boy looked down at his plate and visibly put the worry aside.

  “Will you be going to the War Office this morning, my lady Grand Constable?”

  “Yes, boy. Order the pedicab when you’re done with breakfast, please. You’ll come with me. Tell Diomede that he’ll come down with my lunch, your lunch, and his lunch from the kitchens here.”

  Because I swear I’ve lost seven or eight pounds in the last two weeks and I was lean to start with; anything I lose is muscle and I need it all. Grandmother told me once when I was about six that her father used to eat sandwiches with lard for filling and I just thought it was gross. But he was a lumberjack. He needed them.

  “We’ll share it and he will stay. You go home then, and study. I heard something about geometry difficulties.”

  “Yes, my lady. Why do I have to study geometry? It’s boring; all those lines and arcs and sines and cosines and problems.”

  Tiphaine gave him a hard look. “That’s an important skill. Numbers are how you analyze the world; they’re how you to do siegecraft for war, construction and surveying for peace; fight legal battles; aim a catapult… If you can’t do it, or at least understand it, you’re helpless in the hands of those who can, like lacking a hand or a foot or an eye. Hasn’t your tutor explained the applications to you, boy?”

  He shook his head, brightening up quite a bit. “It’s good for things? Like sword training?”

  Tiphaine growled. “I’ll talk to the man tonight; remind me. Right now, finish your breakfast.”

  She sipped her cup of coffee, pausing to admire the delicate rose flower pattern on the cup. She knew Delia had picked it out from the large warehouses the PPA kept for Associates when she’d married Rigobert, and she’d been working with a group of noblewomen and guildsmen here who were trying to get a bone-china works going in Portland for when the plunder ran out. This porcelain had blue roses. The set at Montinore Manor had yellow roses.

  And my town house has plain brown dishes because I picked them before I wangled Delia into the office of Chatelaine of Ath and she dove with headfirst glee into Patronness of the Arts and Leader of Fashion mode.

  The proprieties required Delia to stay in the Forest Grove town house when visiting Portland, mostly; and it was large enough for the nursery. The d’Ath town house on Cedar Street had been picked out before she realized she would turn into a family woman with a spouse who entertained during the Court season in the city, so it was comfortable enough but rather small and out of the way. All three used it for flying visits when they didn’t have time for the panoply of service and state.

  I suppose I could request another town house, there are plenty on minimal-maintenance, there’s still less than forty thousand people inside the walls of Portland and only a few hundred in this neighborhood, but I’ll let Diomede do that when he’s married and old enough to need it. Probably we should get a residence in Newberg, as well. Assuming we win the war, of course.

  She put the cup down, stood and slid the scabbarded sword into the frow-sling that hung from her belt and walked briskly out to the porch, nodding as servants curtsied or bowed. Outside she returned the fist-to-chest salute of the squire in half-armor commanding a squad of six crossbowmen on guard outside.

  “Will you require an escort, my lady Grand Constable?” he said.

  “No, I think I can survive in Portland, Jeffries,” she said.

  Lioncel was just coming around the corner of the street, perched on the back of the pedicab Rigobert kept for town work, with the de Stafford arms displayed on the side: Gules a domed Tower Argent surmounted by a Pennon Or in base a Lion passant guardant of the last .r />
  That was a heraldic joke, if you knew how to read it, rather like her own but a bit less blatant and, she had to admit, more witty.

  She glanced up at the white-pillared portico of the residence, then looked east towards the heart of present Portland, squinting a little into the sunrise. This was an extramural suburb, literally so these days-better than half a mile outside the city walls. Behind her rose the densely wooded West Hills, green and purple shadows in the light of dawn. Those had been parks and exclusive residential neighborhoods before the Change, and it was all part of the New Forest now; you could smell the fresh greenness of it, and the sky was thick with birdsong. That was Crown demesne under special forest law, and permission to hunt there or an invitation to parties at the royal retreat in the Japanese Gardens was a mark of great favor.

  This neighborhood at their foot was reserved for the town house complexes of noble families, prestigious because of the greenery and open space but not too far from the City Palace downtown and the social-political whirl of Court. Each had a central residence, and several other structures taken over and modified for the trail of servants and followers. Their retainers made sure the hoi polloi didn’t intrude, so the usual urban chorus of street vendors and would-be troubadours and the roar of hooves and wheels were lacking, only pedicabs and an occasional rider or horse carriage moving along the curving, tree-lined streets.

  It was all very pleasant, and by no coincidence at all kept the nobility’s household troops outside the walls of the Crown City. She swung up into the cab and Lioncel got in beside her.

  “Customs House,” she said to the man on the pedals. Then: “Odd,” to Lioncel.

  The driver-rider pedaled hard down Vista to Everett through the brightening day, then turned east on the thoroughfare, sounding an imperious bell with his thumb and occasionally shouting for way. Most of the passersby scattered at the sight of the arms on the pedicab or simply because it certainly held someone influential.

  “Odd, my lady?”

  “The word cab used to mean a public vehicle for hire. They were everywhere and people flagged them down and were taken to where they needed to go. There was enough business that several hundred could work all day long. In the downtown and on docksides, where the streets were really narrow, pedicabs like this were used. We still call these things cabs but they’re private vehicles and only nobles and a few guildmasters and such have them.”

  The boy nodded, polite but slightly baffled, and Tiphaine stifled a sigh.

  They just don’t have the background. Best to live in the present as much as you can, Tiphaine, like a Changeling which you almost are anyway. The oldsters get tiresome when they go on about the old world and I don’t want to end up like that. Of course, everybody thinks about the past more as they get older. I’m just starting to realize that’s because you’ve got more past as you get older. And Portland sets me off because I was born here. Forget it. That Portland died at the Change, this place just has the same name and some of the geography. It’s like a new person wearing a dead man’s shoes.

  The trip from the de Stafford residence to the South Park blocks and the old Customs House was quick, less than a mile and a half. Most of the buildings outside the city wall had been systematically torn down to leave clear fields of fire for the monstrous throwing-engines on Portland’s walls, except for the Civic Stadium to the south of Everett, still used for soccer, baseball and jousting tournaments. Tented camps with troops from all over the Protectorate and the other realms of the Meeting sprawled over the open space usually used for turnout pasture and truck gardens and livery stables, and there was a thick mist of woodsmoke as cooks started their morning fires.

  As always, she felt a prickle of unease as she approached the city wall.

  You do, if you remember how Norman used the labor camps as a horrible example of what could happen to you. People sobbed with joy when they got picked to be peasants on the manors instead. That’s a long time ago now, but the memory sticks.

  The defenses ran along the eastern edge of what had been Interstate 405, which neatly enclosed the old core of Portland, the original city along the west bank of the Willamette before the twentieth century and sprawl. The broad roadway was sunken well below the surface most of the way too, which had made it a perfect dry moat; apart from narrow laneways left for workmen it was a continuous bristle of outward-slanting angle iron posts now, set deep and then ground to vicious points and edges like a forest of swords.

  The wall itself was poured mass concrete sixty feet high and thirty thick, around a frame of steel girders ripped out of old skyscrapers. Round towers stood at hundred-yard intervals, rearing twice as high and thick enough to seem squat, each a miniature fortress in its own right that could be cut off from the outside by raising footways and slamming thick steel doors. The towers had steep metal roofs like witches’ hats, steel plated with copper; a hoarding of the same material made a sloping roof over the crenellations of the wall. Wall and towers both were machicolated, the fighting platforms on top protruding over the walls on arches so that trapdoors could be opened to drop things straight down.

  “Say what you like about Norman, he didn’t think small,” Tiphaine said, looking at the curiously graceful massiveness of it, glistening in the dawn light with the white stucco that covered the whole surface.

  “My lady?”

  “Nothing, boy.”

  Most of the bridges that had crossed Interstate 405 had been destroyed. The others had been fortified with Norman Arminger’s usual combination of brutal functionalism, paranoid thoroughness and deliberately soul-crushing use of intimidation-architecture. Everett Street Gate was typical. They crossed a drawbridge that could be raised instantly by giant counterweights, then a great squat castle of four towers on the western bank of the 405, with the roadway running past massive gates of solid steel and under a high arched ceiling pierced with murder-holes and slots for portcullis after portcullis to drop, more gates, the bridge with sections that could be dropped at the pull of levers or flooded with burning napalm or both, then another castle as strong as the first in the city wall proper.

  The guard commander gave her a swift but genuine once-over before passing her through; despite the early hour the traffic was heavy, but the crossbowmen were still searching wagons and pulling random or suspicious travelers aside for more thorough searches. Tiphaine nodded sober approval; she’d signed off on those orders herself, and damn the inconvenience. Being dead was more inconvenient still.

  Lioncel looked at the fortifications with innocent pride; they’d been finished before he was born.

  “They say Des Moines in Iowa is bigger, my lady, but I doubt there’s a city anywhere that’s stronger!”

  “Probably not,” Tiphaine said, and the page rested silently; he knew better than to try to chat.

  She swung down from the pedicab outside the building that housed the War Ministry, across from a small square of greenery and trees. Other pedicabs came and went along Park, and horses clip-clopped; churls and varlets pulled handcarts, led long teams of oxen that dragged heavy wagons, hurried about errands. A streetcar rumbled by behind its six-mule hitch down tracks completed just last year, and there was a scattering of private carriages as well.

  Farther north and closer to the river-wall the Main Post Office building was serving as a hospital and relocation depot, since it was amply large and was conveniently across the street from Union train station. A trickle of ambulances passed, taking the recovering elsewhere, and everyone tried to make way for them.

  “Lioncel,” she said. “Go down to the hospital and make sure your lady mother isn’t overdoing it. If she is tired or looks tired, tell her I said to go get some rest and to remind her she’s seven months pregnant. If she won’t, go find the Dowager Molalla and get Phillipa to help you chase her home. Don’t take no for an answer. Once you’ve done that, get one of the housemaids to sit with her while she rests and come back to my office.”

  “Yes, my lady!�
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  He smiled, ducked his bright head with its black brimless page’s hat, and dashed away.

  The guards in front of the five-arched granite loggia of the War Ministry were a platoon in three-quarter armor with glaives, seven-foot pole arms topped with a wicked head like a giant single-edged butcher’s knife with a thick hook on the reverse. They were at parade rest-feet apart, left hand tucked behind the back, extended right hand holding the weapon with the butt against the right foot and the rest slanted out. As she came up they went to attention and rapped the steel-shod butts of the glaives against the pavement, and Tiphaine returned the salute gravely.

  Their gear was not quite the kind the Association used, and the sigil on their breastplates was the snarling red bear’s-head of the Bearkillers. They weren’t A-listers, the Bearkiller equivalent of knights; things were too fraught to waste elite troops on duty like this, though even Bearkiller militia had a precise snap to the way they did things.

  But they’re doing something useful here, not just propping up their glaives. They’re showing for everyone to see that this is an alliance and we’re all in the war together. Armed Bearkillers in Portland, the people founded by Mike Havel, the man who killed Norman Arminger. Now if we had more than a talking-shop to coordinate things at the top, we’d be… not fine, you can’t be fine when you’re outnumbered two to one… we’d be a lot better off. The problem is none of the existing rulers will bow to one of their own.

  The legend along the top of the loggia had been switched from US Customs House to War Ministry of the Portland Protective Association long ago. Now that was tactfully obscured by staffs bearing a dozen flags, covering all the more important realms of the Meeting. The Lidless Eye in gold and crimson on black wasn’t even in the center.

  Sandra really knows how to handle this sort of thing, Tiphaine thought. Considering that this is where we plotted and planned and schemed to conquer everyone and divide their land up into fiefs. What a magnificent bitch that woman is!