Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun

by S. M. Stirling

  Before Martin was a traitor. But he was, even then: I just didn’t know it. Rudi and Edain killed those Cutter infiltrators, but his own son killed Dad later at Wendell. I didn’t think I could hate anyone in all the Nine Worlds as much as I hate Martin now, but he’s still my big brother. Even when he was an asshole I loved him, but now . . . I guess you hate someone who’s turned on you worse than someone who’s just an enemy.

  He took a deep breath. Duty first. That was something his father’s training and that of his new faith agreed on utterly.

  “Let’s go, Your Majesty,” he said formally.

  A little to the north was the canal that supplied the town’s water and powered its mills; they could hear a grumbling sound through the screen of trees, as grain was ground and wood sawn and flax pounded. Then they turned south and crossed the Sutter river itself and its band of oaks and firs, willows and shaggy meadows; that was Clan land, sacred to Cernunnos and Flidais, barred to heavy use by humankind and the tame animals that lived with men. Its edges were marked at intervals by tall stakes carved with a stag-headed man or a white deer, and the Mackenzies made a reverence as they passed. Several had small offerings of flowers at their feet.

  Or it’s a State park, he thought dryly. And protecting stream banks from trampling and erosion makes excellent sense. Though . . . I do remember Dad complaining about how hard it was to enforce regulations like that. Maybe it’s easier for people to defer to a Lady who drives a chariot pulled by snow-white deer through their dreams than to bend their necks to a rule in a book written by a bureaucrat far away.

  Of course, you can just kill anyone who breaks your rules. I know someone who thinks like that . . .

  “Somethin’ on your mind, Fred?” Virginia said softly, under the clop of hooves and creak of saddle leather.

  “I was thinking about home, honey,” he said. “My mother and sisters, trapped there with . . . him.”

  “We’ll see to that,” she said stoutly.

  He took a deep breath. Don’t flinch, he told himself. And in the meantime it was a fair day in pretty country, riding a good horse past orchards and fields, with the fir-sap smell of the mountains that reared westward coming on the warm breeze. And he was young, and the woman he loved rode at his side, and he was going to set his people free.

  The prisoner-of-war camp was a mile south across flat open land; close enough to the town to be convenient, but beyond the ring of crofts worked by people living within the walls and equally far from the nearest farming dun. It was shaggy rough pasture and clumps of burgeoning young forest in normal times, with low wooded hills beyond. The camp was rows of tents, or rough barracks built of poles, wattle-and-daub, and salvage goods from nearby ruins. A board trestle brought in water from a spring, and a few more substantial buildings had been run up to serve as an infirmary, cookhouse and bathhouse; there were piles of boards from the sawmills near Sutterdown, ready to be turned into weather-tight winter quarters. Neatly tilled vegetable gardens surrounded it all, and he could smell that it was well policed, just turned earth and woodsmoke and the warm scents of vegetation with no reek of unwashed bodies or overfull latrines.

  Rudi reined in, and gave a slight sideways inclination of the head to indicate that Fred and Virginia should ride in first. There was a fence around the camp, but no wall; it was a marker rather than a barrier, and the two-score of Clan warriors with spear and bow looked relaxed enough, like the pack of big shaggy hunting dogs at their feet. A parade ground was already crowded; most of the seven hundred men here had been taken near Dayton, back in March.

  Frederick shivered a little. He’d heard about that. A CUT Seeker had been with them. And Juniper Mackenzie had been there too . . .

  “Ten-hut!” a sergeant barked as they rode up.

  The High King’s guardsmen put their bicycles on their kickstands and stood at parade rest behind Rudi Mackenzie—or behind High King Artos, probably. They didn’t have shafts nocked, but that could be changed very quickly indeed with the bows strung. Fred dismounted and walked forward. The men were braced at attention, but quite properly they were looking at Rudi. A quick glance showed him they were mostly in good health. Well fed, certainly, and only a few showed healing wounds. Their olive-green uniforms were the field model, meant to be worn under armor and optimized for endurance and protection rather than comfort. The rough cloth was clean but worn and patched, and a few had been eked out with civilian gear.

  The High King leaned forward on the pommel of his saddle and waved a hand towards Fred.

  “I’m not the center of this occasion, to be sure,” he said in a clear carrying voice. “Stand your men at ease, if you would.”

  Fred took a long breath and stepped forward. A rising murmur started to turn into shouts as dozens recognized him. One of the officers drawn up to the right of the block of enlisted men shouted: “Sir!”

  That was aimed at Artos, not at him; the man was ostentatiously ignoring Frederick Thurston. He was in his thirties and gaunt-looking, with an empty left sleeve pinned to his olive-green jacket. The other hand pointed at Fred, who recognized him; he’d been tight with Martin.

  “Sir, this is . . . is unacceptable.”

  Rudi smiled. “Captain Hargood, isn’t it?”

  “Ah . . . yes, sir. Centurion Hargood, under the new regulations, technically.”

  “Well, Captain Hargood, there’s naught in the rules or customs of honorable war, from before the Change or since, which says prisoners can’t be talked at. I can’t make you pay attention and I certainly can’t make you believe what you hear—wouldn’t if I could, unlike some people I could name—but I can and do insist that you stand quietly. Now go do it, man, and stop wasting our time.”

  A pause, then his voice went hard and cracked out: “Back in ranks!” Hargood blinked and recoiled half a pace, then obeyed. Fred took one more step forward and flung up a hand.

  “Nobody has to listen to me,” he said, pitching his voice to carry as he’d been trained. “Anyone who doesn’t want to hear what I have to say can leave right now. No names, no punishments.”

  The buzz rose and then fell, as the ranks rippled. A good many left; he estimated that it was more than a tenth but less than a fifth. Hargood hesitated, since he was more than smart enough to realize that the exodus was lowering the hostility quotient Fred had to face, but then decided he had to join it for form’s sake.

  I do like putting an enemy where all his choices are bad, Fred thought grimly.

  Not all the looks he got from the rest were friendly, but they seemed willing to listen, at least.

  “You’re mainly the Third Battalion, right?” Fred said. “That correct, Sergeant Saunders?”

  He was looking at a platoon sergeant he’d met on maneuvers when he was in the ROTC. The man licked his lips, looked to either side and then cleared his throat and spoke:

  “Yes . . . sir. We got . . . captured in March, up north and east of here.”

  “That would be near Dayton? Castle Campscapell? Stand easy all, by the way.”

  “Yessir, big concrete fort, castle, whatever.” He paused to lick his lips. “We took it last year, after this CUT guy opened the door, is how I heard it. You know what happened there when we were taken, sir?”

  “I hear about that when we got back, yes. I’ve talked to Lady Juniper about it. She tried to explain and she was using English, mostly, but it didn’t mean Thing One to me. Something about casting trouble in your dreams. And she said that she could only do it . . . do it without some sort of heavy blowback . . . because the CUT had one of their Seekers there and he was doing things.”

  The sergeant nodded vigorously. “He . . . he’d talk to you and it was like flies buzzing inside your head, I’m not shitting you, sir. Like the world was twisting into a bad dream, and maybe if it went on long enough you wouldn’t wake up. And we’re still trying to figure out what the hell happened that night; we just . . . had some real strange dreams and then woke up and there were a bunch of Mackenz
ies standing over us. And that Seeker dude was lying with his body in one place and his head about a yard away and the biggest badass I’ve ever seen with the biggest Godammed sword was standing over him grinning like a cat.”

  “Little John Hordle. He is sort of impressive.”

  “That was how the Third got here. Some of the rest came in just lately, from the Tenth and Fifth and some cavalry pukes, but a lot of those were wounded, and they were all captured in the usual way.”

  Fred nodded. “Have you men been treated all right?” he asked.

  The noncom shrugged, looking a little less nervous; he was a snub-nosed young man about Fred’s own age, with close-cropped blond hair and a healing scar across the side of his face.

  “Yessir,” he said. “It’s not a beer-bash being a prisoner, but we got good medical care and plenty of plain food. Better than field rations, a bit. Work details for the enlisted men but nothing too hard and no direct help to the enemy war effort, farm work and lumberjacking mainly, just about enough to earn our keep.”

  There were nods from many at that. The majority were from farm families themselves, doing their compulsory three years of military service, which became for the duration in time of war. They knew that food might grow on trees, but that it didn’t prune or water or pick or pack itself, and they’d all been doing hard work since they were old enough to scare birds out of a grain field or carry water to their parents during harvest.

  “The guards haven’t been rough on anyone who didn’t try to escape, either; some’ve made breaks for it and they got shot or mauled by those fucking dogs when they were chased down and recaptured, but that’s by the book if you take a chance on it. Mostly it’s just sort of boring. We play a lot of baseball and football and that thing the Mackenzies play, hurley they call it in English, sometimes our team against the guards. They’ll even let parties go hunting, if we give our word to come back by sundown, and we get to keep the meat.”

  “Nobody did that and then ran?”

  “Nossir. We, ummm, sort of made sure of that. A promise is a promise and anyway it would screw things up for everybody. Someone wants to try to escape, fine, but no breaking the rules.”

  “Good to hear it,” Fred said sincerely, and asked no more; there were times when an officer was well-advised not to pry. “OK, you’re off the hot spot, Sergeant.”

  Rudi had told him that his mother had strongly suggested that the Boise prisoners be kept in the Clan’s territories. There were fewer grudges, and Mackenzies were simply less likely to do harm than some of the rougher barons up in the PPA lands. His eyes went along the line of faces, some angry, a few smiling, more wary and neutral. They all knew who he was; most of the ones who hadn’t met him would have seen him at a distance at one time or another. The US of Boise was a very big country, over a million people and that outnumbered even the PPA, but he’d still gotten around. For that matter, he took after his father though he wasn’t as dark, and people who were visibly of part-African descent weren’t all that common in what had once been Idaho.

  He stood at what wasn’t quite parade rest and went on: “All right, I’m not a damned fool. There’s only one real question: that’s who killed my father. Killed the President. My brother Martin says it was me. I say it’s him; and I saw it. OK, what about proof? I can’t give you any. The nitty-gritty is that you’re going to have to decide who you believe. But here’s a couple of things to think over.”

  He squared his shoulders. “Martin wanted to be President. That was something everyone knew. And now he’s running things back home. Dad was getting ready to call elections, and since then . . . well, Martin says he may regularize things when the emergency’s over. Want to bet that’s going to be about the Fourth of Never?”

  There were some nods at that, but it wasn’t all that important to these men. They were all Changelings. They could read and write, his father had been insistent on keeping the schools going even in the terrible early years, but the old world wasn’t really real to them. Few of them had the visceral commitment to the old ways his father had had; he didn’t himself, though he was closer to it. They’d grown up in a benevolent despotism, thinking of General Thurston as the one who’d saved their families’ lives, the stern wise father figure who brought order out of chaos and let every man reap what he sowed. And not least, the one who’d put down the pretensions of budding land-rich would-be patricians.

  Not that Dad wanted to be a despot. But at first it was just a struggle for survival and doing what he had to do day by day, and then he thought he could put enough of the country back together first so he could have real elections that would give him legitimacy as something more than a local warlord, and it turned out to be a lot tougher proposition than he thought. By the time he admitted that, a lot of water had gone under the bridge; Dad was stubborn as a granite butte. Martin could probably have won real elections if he’d been old enough to be a candidate under the old system, but he didn’t want that anyway. He wanted to be Emperor or something like it, and hand it down to his son. And that was before he started getting involved with the CUT.

  “OK, Martin’s behind this alliance with the Church Universal and Triumphant. Does anyone here like the idea of that? Those people have slaves, and they don’t even bother calling them Registered and assigned Refugees like Pendleton . . . which Martin also allied us with. Dad declared war on the CUT when they trashed New Deseret and he fought his last battle against them at Wendell. Fought them and beat them, I was there. Now they’re supposed to be allies working for national reunification alongside the United States. Does anyone here really believe that? Is there one single man here who’ll get up and say it with a straight face?”

  This time the silence was deeper.

  Fred went on: “Dad broke up some of the big ranches so guys like you could have their own farms after the Change.”

  A youngish ranker spoke: “Seems like the Mackenzies did that too.”

  Fred nodded. I wish I’d thought of making that comparison, but these men have been around the Clan longer than I have. The Clan at home earning a living, that is, and not just Rudi and Edain traveling through the wilds.

  “Yes, they did.”

  “They’re pretty good folks,” another said judiciously. “They remind me of my neighbors back home—except they’re so fucking weird, sorry, sir, but they are, and I don’t mean just that Juniper Lady who is deeply scary weird. They’re all weird, putting out milk for the fairies at the bottom of the garden and stuff and talking to trees and animals and going dancing through the woods buck-naked with antlers on their heads and I don’t know what else. But pretty damn friendly to us, considering everything, though.”

  “Some of the girls are real friendly sometimes,” a man said dreamily, and that brought a general laugh.

  “Right,” Fred agreed. “But back home, instead of keeping public land in reserve for new farms, Martin is handing out vacant tracts in great big chunks to his cronies and supporters. Not just grazing land like Dad let the ranchers keep, but good land that could support dozens of families. Your families, someday, if you’re not in line to inherit a farm from your parents.”

  “Cronies and supporters like Hardass Hargood’s family,” someone muttered. “I actually heard the son of a bitch say they deserved it because of all they sacrificed to serve the Republic, like I’m here ’cause it’s so much fun? What the fuck are we, leftover mutton hash?”

  He subsided at an elbow in his ribs, but there were nods at that too.

  Fred struck the argument home: “And he’s assigning the Deseret refugees to work it for them. Temporarily . . . until the Fifth of Never, right? And there are these new laws about what women can do—that’s CUT stuff, and no mistake. He’s not using them, they’re using him. Right, now put all that together, and who is it who’s really likely to have killed Dad . . . the General?”

  Another silence, deep and prolonged; men were exchanging looks, squads unconsciously drawing together. Squad deep was Boise sla
ng for people you can trust. Another man spoke:

  “Right, sir, what do you want?”

  “I think I’d make a good President,” Fred said.

  I really think I would. And I know for a fact that Virginia would dance on my face in her cowboy boots if I said otherwise. But I think I would . . . Dad was a great man but his head was stuck in the old world. This one’s a different place. Without the machinery, the people are different, and that’s not counting stuff like the CUT and the Sword of the Lady.

  “But I’m not going to just take it. If we—Montival—win this war, I promise here and now, and I’ll repeat it whenever anyone asks, that there will be real elections within six months. Not ‘if circumstances permit’ or ‘when the emergency is over’ because circumstances are never right and life is one fucking emergency after another. Six months, come flood, war or forest fire. And everyone can pick whoever the hell they please, every four or six years or whatever we decide. If it’s me, fine. And we can work out a real constitution, because the old one wasn’t made with this world in mind and most of the old States don’t exist anymore. Folks changed when the world Changed, too.”

  “And if they tell you and your new friends to take a hike?”

  Fred smiled grimly. “If the people—which includes women and refugees—want someone else, well, Hell, I can live with it. I won’t starve and I’m not afraid of working for a living, and neither is my wife . . . this is her, Virginia Thurston, by the way. She comes from southeast of us, east of the Rockies on the High Plains. The CUT ran her out of her home; they’re doing their job there too, and their job is being evil sons of bitches.”