“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 last 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.
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 Manwe 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 ground 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, e
vidently 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.
The Tears of the Sun tc-5 Page 31