The Tears of the Sun

by S. M. Stirling

  Dick nodded. “And the new little ones, they probably won’t remember him at all.”

  Edain’s breath hissed between his teeth; it was all too likely. Seventy years was old; three-score and ten were the years of a man, as the Christians said.

  “It karks at his pride that he can’t go with the war-levy, of course. So he does too much else.”

  Dick sighed again, in resignation this time.

  “Well, at least the mother will have him to fuss at while we’re gone, and her babes and Tamar’s. It’s luck Tamar has one at the breast and can’t answer the levy-call herself, for she’ll be company for them both and keep an eye on him.”

  The air of Dun Fairfax was warm and drowsy, heavy with the good cooking smells of baking and roasting and simmering. But the scents subtly differed from what she was used to; more spices and pungent herbs, a broader range than her folk had, and the cooking done more often with sunflower oil or canola and less with butter or lard. Despite her good intentions, Asgerd ducked into the Aylward house through what had once been its double-car garage.

  That had been modified to make it a workshop, though rolled bedding was strapped to the walls as well right now; the outer side had a trellis trained with roses, a blaze of color and sweet heavy scent. She had expected it to be empty and give her a spell to nerve herself to plunge into a hardworking crowd who all knew each other from the inside out and she the white crow in the flock. Instead Sam Aylward was sitting at the workbench near the big double doors, before the clamps and spokeshaves, the vices and drawknives and drills.

  Run from your fate and you run towards it, she thought to herself.

  The old man was fingering the tools neatly racked there, below the bundles of yew staves and hardwood burls. He wore only a kilt, and you could see that he’d been a powerful man once, built much like Edain, but the flesh was gaunt and thinner on the heavy bones now. You could also see the marks of every weapon known to man; knife and sword, spear and arrow and ax, even the round puckered scars left by bullets before the Change—Erik the Strong, King Bjarni’s father, had had some of those that she had seen while her family was visiting at Eriksgarth over the festivals.

  Asgerd felt a little awed; hers were a warrior folk who honored courage as the first of the Nine Virtues. And someone, sometime, had used red-hot iron to write in an odd curling script on Sam Aylward’s belly, but the letters trailed off. He looked up sharply when she cleared her throat, his gray eyes searching beneath the white tufted eyebrows.

  “Ah, Asgerd. Come on in, my girl.”

  His accent was nothing like the usual Mackenzie burble and lilt; it was slower and deeper, sonorous, in a way Edain had told her was from the English lands where he’d grown: he pronounced the last two words as moi guurl.

  He saw where her glance had gone. “Yus, that were interrupted. By Sir Nigel, ’im who’s Lady Juniper’s ’usband now, long ago, when I were Edain’s age and he was captain of my SAS company. Glad Oi was of it, and that’s a fact.”

  “Hello, good father,” she said, a little formally.

  “And ’ello to you too. All’s well up to Dun Juniper?”

  She nodded. “The King commanded us to go home.” A ghost of a smile. “Said Edain could throw himself in front of danger later, but for now he’d put his face in the midden and hold it there if he didn’t come down and have the parting feast with his kin.”

  Sam Aylward laughed. “Good man, Rudi. Good officer, too, come to that. Sir Nigel taught him well.”

  So did you, old man, and you taught Edain well too. But you are the sort who will praise another’s deeds before his own, I think.

  Then he turned to the workbench. “Oi’ve summat for you,” the old man said. “Bit of a gift loik. I was meanin’ to wait until the levy left, but per’aps it’s better now.”

  “Ah!” Asgerd said as he pulled back a cloth.

  The bow was beautiful, a long shallow double curve in and out with the polished yew limbs, orange heartwood and pale sapwood gleaming under varnish and oil. The riser-grip in the center was from a maple burl, its curling grain promising hard rigid strength. The nocks at the ends were elkantler, translucent as amber, and they were carved with gripping beasts in the style of her own people. He must have gone looking for that, consulting some book or Lady Juniper.

  Sam grinned as she took it up and held it out, feeling the sweet balance.

  “Six foot two, reflex-deflex, and near eighty-five pound even on the tillering frame for the draw. Oi don’t think that’ll overbow you, you’ve bin practicing ’ard. That hickory bow Edain made you out east is a foine piece o’ work, but you’ll be needing two at least, for a long campaign, and mountain-grown yew is best at the last.”

  Asgerd swallowed. “Thank you, good father,” she said. “This is lovely work, and a real battle-tool. I will not dishonor it.”

  “Oi can still make ’em, just slower loik,” the old man said, and waved away her thanks.

  Then he winced and halted the motion.

  “Don’t you fuss at me too, girl,” he said sharply as she came forward with a frown on her face.

  “I’m not fussing, I’m finding out what’s wrong!” she said sharply, and pressed down on his shoulder.

  He winced again, but was silent long enough for her to probe the muscles along the ridges of his spine with ruthless fingers.

  “All right, good father,” she said briskly. “On your face. This bench will do.”

  “Thank you, girl, but—”

  “But nothing. I grew up on a farm too, old man; do you think I’ve never seen a man who’s pulled his back before? And I know what to do. I’ve done it often enough for my father and my brothers!”

  The glare turned to a wry nod. “Oi wonder if my boy knows what ’e’s gotten ’isself into,” he said, and obeyed. “Damned if Oi don’t loik you, girl. You go straight at things.”

  “See if you like me so well after I’m finished; this is going to hurt,” she said.

  Asgerd looked along the bottles and jars racked behind the workbench. There would be oil, and . . .

  Her nose led her to a small vial. “Wintergreen, good,” she said. “Too strong, though. I’ll mix it with some oil. Now let’s get to work.”

  She rolled up the sleeves of her shirt and did. Her father-in-law’s breath caught once or twice, but he made no other sound. When she was finished he sat up cautiously and worked his shoulders while she cleaned her hands on a rag.

  “Believe that’s eased it,” he said.

  “Now go and rest for a few hours,” she said; when he bridled, she shook a finger in his face. “You wouldn’t overburden a piece of wood, why do you think your spine is any different? Do just as you please, good father, but if you don’t rest now you’ll be stiff as driftwood tomorrow again, and as brittle.”

  He laughed softly. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and got up.

  The door from the inner house opened, and a faded woman in her fifties with yellow-brown hair liberally streaked with gray came in. She was not in the usual Mackenzie kilt, but in the shift and tartan arsaid that older woman often preferred—an arsaid wrapped around the waist to make a long skirt under a belt, and then one end was thrown over the shoulder and pinned. She was taking off the apron she’d worn over that, and dabbing at a flush of sweat on her face with a corner of it that wasn’t stained or flourcoated.

  “Sam?” she said. “Are you all right the now?”

  “Better than Oi was, luv,” he said.

  His expression made the leathery weathered surface of his face crinkle into a web of wrinkles, but also made it seem younger too as he smiled at his wife. His daughter-in-law could feel the love there, not much spoken but as comfortable as a low fire of coals on a cold day.

  “Asgerd ’ere gave me back a bit of a rub, where it were stiff this last while. Now I’ll ’ave a nap, if you can spare me. Be fresh for the big dinner, eh?”

  The woman blinked. “That’s a fine idea, we’ll be eating about sundown. Nola and Nige
l are in their truckle beds there too, be careful not to wake them, now. It was hard enough to get them asleep and out from underfoot.”

  “Oi will, luv. They sleep ’ard as they play, at that age, eh?”

  She looked after him and shook her head, then looked at Asgerd. Blue eyes met blue.

  “Well, and how did you manage that? Without clouting him hard enough to crack the thick stubborn skull of him, to be sure.”

  Asgerd ducked her head. Edain’s mother was mistress of this household, and she knew her manners.

  “Good mother, I . . . I just told him I’d been raised on a farm and knew what to do when a man pulled his back, and not to be foolish but to lie down so I could fix it.”

  She indicated the bench. Melissa Aylward came over and looked at the dish of improvised liniment, sniffing at it.

  “Essence of meadowsweet and sunflower oil. That would do nicely. I add a little mint-water when I make up a batch for the stillroom.”

  “My mother does too,” Asgerd said. “But there wasn’t any to hand.”

  Melissa nodded. “So it isn’t all swords with you, then, girl?”

  “Oh, no,” Asgerd said, surprised; though they hadn’t had much time to talk, or she thought much inclination on the older woman’s part. “I trained to arms, we all do in Norrheim just as you do here, but I wasn’t a shield-maid until my man Sigurd . . . the one I was to marry . . . was killed. By the Bekwa savages, led by a red-robe, a trollkjerring of the CUT. I heard that the night I first saw Edain.”

  Quick sympathy lit the other woman’s face, and Asgerd turned her head aside slightly.

  “That is a good loom,” she went on determinedly, walking over to where it stood tall at the other end of the big room. “My mother has one much like it—a bit higher, a little narrower.”

  “Sam made it for me . . . sweet Brigid, twenty-three years ago last Imbolc,” Melissa said.

  Asgerd touched the satiny finish of the wood, pegged and glued together from oak and ash, beech wood and maple, and carved with running vines at the joinings. Just now it was set up to weave a stretch of blue cloth with yellow flowers at the corners, half done but already lovely. One of the good things about weaving was that it could be interrupted for something more urgent and taken up again an hour or a day later; she supposed that was why it was usually woman’s work, though she’d known men who did it well. If there was anything that made for interruptions more urgent and more often than a small child, she’d never heard of it.

  Melissa went on: “He copied it from Lady Juniper’s that she had from before the Change—she taught me to weave, like many another. We like to work here together in the winter afternoons, Sam and I; he’ll be at the bench, and I at the loom.”

  Asgerd looked more closely, whistled under her breath, and traced one of the joints with her thumbnail. It was so close-set there was hardly even a catch when she ran it across the surface; the whole of it was like that, mortise-and-tenon joins pegged together with almost invisible smoothness. Even the king-bolts that could be taken down to disassemble the whole thing for storage were countersunk to be out of the way yet instantly accessible.

  “This is beautifully made, so light and yet so strong!” she said.

  Every ounce of unnecessary weight in a loom’s moving parts was something you felt in your shoulders and back after a day spent weaving; any half-competent carpenter could knock together something that relied on sheer bulk, but paring weight to a minimum without losing strength or rigidity took real art at every stage from selecting the materials on.

  “Like fine cabinetwork,” she went on. “I’ve never seen better.”

  Melissa swallowed. “Sam always has been proud of his carpentry and joinery, though, sure, he doesn’t talk about it much,” she said. “People came from all over to learn it from him, those first years. Bows yes, but not just those, and he made . . . oh, looms and churns and a dozen other things, getting ideas from books and old things from museums and then figuring out how to do them properly. And they came to learn farming from him, too, the old ways of doing it, he’d go ’round giving a hand to all and showing the way of it. There’s many alive and well today on the ridge of the world with children and grandchildren of their own, who would have starved half to death or outright died without my Sam!”

  Asgerd nodded. After courage and loyalty, a man’s pride was in the strength and skill of his hands, the work that fed his children and made strong his house and kindred. She knew that love of craft as well, and the kindred pride in keeping going uncomplaining when your bones groaned with weariness and all you wanted in the world was food and bed.

  “Lovely,” she said again, and sat at the weaver’s bench.

  When Melissa nodded permission at her inquiring glance she ran her hands over the heddle and beater, touched her feet to the paddles that would shift the warp and weft and the cord and lever that would throw the shuttle, looked at the little wheeled baskets that held supplies out of the way and yet to hand.

  “This would be a pleasure to work at,” she said. “I can feel how everything’s just where you want it.”

  “That cloak you brought, was that your mother’s work? It’s well done,” Melissa said. “Only a little worn, and you must have used it fair hard on a journey like that.”

  “She taught me but it’s my work, good mother,” Asgerd said, letting a little of her own pride of craft show. “That journey cloak, I sheared the sheep and cleaned and spun the wool and wove it; it’s a twin to one I made for Sigurd to use when he went in Viking to the dead cities. Just plain weaving, of course, nothing fancy like this, but it has worn well, and it’s kept me warm and dry many a time.”

  “It must be nearly waterproof, done with the grease in that way,” Melissa said.

  Then she sighed and sat on the bench before the loom, beside the girl.

  “I’m . . . I know I’ve been less welcoming than I might. Than I should have been. I’ve been . . . anxious about things, sure and I have, and more things than one. And the Lady is taking me out from under the dominion of the Moon now, into the Wise One’s hands and near to my croning.”

  That puzzled Asgerd for an instant; her people didn’t have a formal ceremony for that, as they did for coming of age. Then she nodded understanding.

  “All of which I offer as some poor excuse,” Melissa said.

  “Good mother, I didn’t expect a dance of joy when your son came home with a stranger, a foreign bride. You don’t know me or my kin or my very folk. I could have been an ill sort, one who did him no credit. I’m not like that, but I expected to have to prove . . . Well, if a man of my kindred, say one of my brothers, had come back with a Mackenzie maid for handfasting, it wouldn’t have been all hot mead and kisses at first from the women of my kindred either!”

  “It’s been hard, with Edain away, hearing nothing but the odd letter, and those often of some battle or peril he’d been in and me not even knowing,” Melissa said softly, her eyes seeming to look beyond the wall.

  “I can see that. I’ve been frightened for him more than once myself, even there with him! Though it was a comfort to have Artos King on hand.”

  Melissa nodded. “Rudi . . . Artos . . . is a great hero, one whose song will live forever. Yet it’s perilous to stand too close to a hero in a tale! He’s been in and out of this house all his life, and I love him too; Lady Juniper was my sponsor in the Craft, and . . . But Edain is mine, my first son, the babe I bore beneath my heart and carried in my arms, new life in those years when it seemed death had swallowed all the world.”

  “And he always will be your son,” Asgerd said. “You and the good father raised him to be a fine man, strong and kind both. My man, the one I will walk beside all my days, shipmates through life, and who will be the father of my children. The grandchildren I will lay in your arms, good mother.”

  “I would like that, sure and I will like it very much indeed,” Melissa said.

  Then unexpectedly, she chuckled. “Though with twins only two
years old myself . . . I hadn’t expected that, after twelve years without a hint and not for want of trying. There’s a good many infants around this house the now!”

  “The twins are fine children!” Asgerd said, with genuine enthusiasm. “So strong already, like little Ratatoskr-squirrels for dashing and climbing, so bold and fearless!”

  “So hard to keep out of everything that might burn, cut, drown, crush or poison them!” Melissa said. “The great thing with grandchildren is that you can hand them back to their parents and get a moment’s rest now and then!”

  Then she extended a hand. “Shall we start again, and see what comes of it, Asgerd Karlsdottir? Asgerd Aylward Mackenzie, too?”

  Asgerd took it in both of hers. “I would like that. And now let me help with the rest of this feast. I can chop and mince and peel a potato and knead bread and roll pastry and baste meat, even if I don’t have all the kitchen arts you do.” With a wry smile. “Of which I have heard the praises sung near every evening for full three thousand miles of campfire meals, let me tell you!”

  Melissa laughed again, carefree this time. “Girl, with that in your ears day and night, it’s surprised and astonished I am you didn’t hate me already by the time you arrived!”

  They stood and made for the door, arm in arm.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DOMINION OF DRUMHELLER

  (FORMERLY PROVINCE OF ALBERTA)

  WESTERN NORTH AMERICA

  JUNE 21, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

  Ritva Havel blinked. “I thought I was fully recovered from the concussion,” she said, stepping back and lowering the point of her wooden blade.

  “Aren’t you?” Ian Kovalevsky said anxiously, doing likewise and letting his shield down.

  Neither of them went entirely out of stance until they were three paces backward. He was barely limping anymore, and neither was she, though they were still being careful. Not as careful as Dr. Nirasha would have liked; but they were both in their early twenties, in robust good health and in a profession where a fairly casual attitude towards risk was part of the package and wounds just a cost of doing business. Ritva doubted the doctor would have approved of the padded practice gear, or the cloth-wrapped wooden swords in their hands. The hot, bronze, hay-smelling distances of the shortgrass prairie stretched around them, with the white walled mass of the Anchor Bar Seven homeplace tiny in the distance, and the blue eye of the little lake and the green-and-yellow streak of the irrigated land. An eagle cruised not far away, looking over a flock of ewes and lambs, but respectful of the mounted shepherdess’ bow.