The Tears of the Sun

by S. M. Stirling

  “We live by the Rule of St. Benedict here,” she said, pointedly looking at the worn, sweat-stained hilt of Ritva’s borrowed saber. “We insist on peacefulness. There is no room for quarrels here.”

  “I’m peaceful as all get-out, sister, as long as others are peaceful around me. I don’t belong to your Church, though.”

  “That makes no difference; you belong to God, as do we all.”

  She pointed up the graveled dirt track. “You’re welcome to stable your horses there, and your gear will be safe—you can deposit any money or valuables with the Bursar for safekeeping. We’re crowded, but there will be a place to sleep, and food for you and your beasts.”

  “I can pay a little, sister.”

  The nun smiled. “We ask nothing, not even many questions. Our houses are the Inns of God, the last refuge of the weak. Help in whatever way you wish or can, when you can. God bless you.”

  Ritva pushed on; the place had a hospital, and a big school—apparently one for girls, who all wore an odd archaic pinaforelike uniform. On top of that, it looked to be taking care of a lot of displaced people, cripples and the sick and just plain desperate, the detritus and backwash of war and of a government harsh in its demands and merciless with any sign of dissent.

  It took a while to get the attention of the harried sisters in charge without being obtrusive, and all of them looked too junior to trust with her message to the Mother Superior. For that matter, many of the nuns and all of the gray-robed postulants looked younger than her own early twenties.

  Supper was served in a long refectory that had been hastily converted from some sort of storehouse, clean but very plain and very crowded indeed, mostly with people who looked as if they had stories worse than the one she was using for cover. It was dim, as well, lit only by pine-splints clamped in metal holders to the walls; that probably meant they were economizing on the fats usually used for lamps, keeping it to cook with or make soap instead.

  The food was dark bread, butter and cheese and chipped plastic bowls ladled full of a thick soup of barley and potatoes and other vegetables that tasted as if it had some passing acquaintance with meat-bones on the stock side of its ancestry. There was enough if no more, but the meal would have been more appetizing if it hadn’t been clear that the bathing facilities were being worked in shifts too, and if there had been fewer unhappy children, some of whom needed changing.

  When her group was finished eating she helped load bowls and plates and carry them to the kitchens, and volunteered to help wash. That ended up meaning mostly carrying wood to feed the hot-water boiler. There were many hands, but she was taller and stronger than most here. Patience finally got her close to the middle-aged Sister supervising the whole process.

  “Hot work, sister,” she said, grinning and wiping her forehead with one sleeve; it was still warm in the building, though cooling rapidly into the clear night air outside. “Hope there’s water enough for a bath?”

  “Cold water, I am afraid, child,” the nun said.

  “That’ll do fine, in summer,” Ritva said cheerfully. “Like to shake your hand in thanks for you folks’ kindness. Makes me think well of your religion, so to say.”

  The nun beamed at her in a tired sort of way. Then her eyes widened very slightly as she felt the scrap of paper in Ritva’s palm. The corner was dark; she seized the Ranger’s hand for a moment, turning it over and examining the calluses before dropping it and casually tucking the folded note into a pocket in her habit. If you knew what you were looking for a person’s hands were one of the best indicators of what they were. Most people had calluses; even clerks usually developed one on their pen finger. The patterns were very distinctive, though.

  You got a very particular set from drilling with the sword for hours a day nine days in ten from the time you were six or so. That was one of the things even a really skillful disguise couldn’t completely hide; Ritva had the swordsman’s ring of hardened skin running all the way from the tip of her right index finger around the web of her hand and up to the top of the thumb.

  “Sleep well, my child,” the nun said smoothly. “May only good visions visit you.”

  Ritva was tired, but she thought she might not have slept all that well even if she hadn’t been waiting. There had been a stress on the visit part of that.

  Waiting for arrest, perhaps, she thought mordantly. I’d certainly be more comfortable out under the stars. Praise to the Valar I got the outside place!

  The long tent was so old that it smelled of a pre-Change synthetic canvas, much patched over the years with this and that. It was also very crowded and too warm for blankets; all women, or older girls, but no children. Someone not far away had an alarmingly persistent cough, too. She found being confined with that rather more frightening than most straightforward dangers; you couldn’t shoot a germ with arrows or cut it with a sword.

  A glimmer of starlight and lighter air, and a hand touched her shoulder.

  “Come, my child,” the figure said very softly.

  The dark habit disappeared in the moonless light, but the coif gave the face an eerie detached frame. It was the same nun she’d seen in the kitchens. She was glad that the Sisters weren’t so otherworldly that they let more people than absolutely must know a secret.

  “I come,” Ritva replied as quietly.

  She picked up her boots and followed that beckoning, walking a dozen paces with dew-wet grass soaking through her socks before she could stamp them in to the welcoming leather. The night smelled of green growing things and wetted dust, intensely clean and welcome.

  “There’s someone back there with a very bad cough,” she said quietly.

  “We know. It’s a chronic pulmonary disease, not tuberculosis. Probably caused by smoke. Unfortunately we can do nothing for her but pray and give morphine when the pain is bad. Beds in the hospital are needed for the treatable sick or the infectious and those closer to death.”

  They walked together beneath the rustling fruit trees of the orchard, the pruned branches just over their heads with green apples showing like the fists of babies. Most of the settlement was dark as well, with only a few lanterns glowing, but the high rose window of the church shone.

  As they approached down a narrow lane flanked by poplars, Ritva heard slow solemn music and voices singing. A swelling chorus of women’s voices, rising and then sinking to a background as a single high clear alto rose with an almost unbearable intensity:“Ave Maria, gratia plena

  Dominus tecum, virgo serena;

  Benedicta tu in mulieribus

  Que peperisti pacem hominibus

  Et angelis gloria

  Et angelis gloria—”

  For an instant she shivered with a feeling that was chill down her spine, yet without the slightest hint of threat or malice. It was not her faith, nor was this a way of life that had the slightest attraction for her, but there was a power and clarity in it that could not be denied.

  Many paths, she thought. Trite but true.

  They came to a small door; the nun unlocked it before them and then secured it behind again. Up a narrow staircase, feeling her way along with one hand on the worn pine of the handrail. Then the kindly glow of lamplight from under a door. The nun made a gesture to stay her and slipped through the door; a moment later after a murmur of voices she returned, beckoned, and then left with a smile.

  That’s a little odd, Ritva thought an instant later as she returned the nod. We didn’t exchange more than a few words, but I actually feel as if I knew her.

  The chamber within was an office, but there was a neatly made cot in one corner, and a window that probably gave on the interior courtyard when it wasn’t tightly shuttered as it was now. The walls were unplastered brick, and the battered pre-Change metal desk and shelves bore books and account-books and sheaves of indexed letters arranged very neatly. The only touches of color were a portrait of a robed woman with St. Hilda of Whitby beneath it, a Madonna and Child, a beautifully carved modern crucifix and a portrait o
f the current Pope, Pius XIII, that looked like a woodblock done from a photograph.

  Ritva made the gesture of reverence that the Dúnedain shared with the Old Religion towards the holy images, clapping her palms twice, softly, and then bowing with them pressed together and fingers beneath her chin. Her people were courteous towards the fanes of others, whether it was reciprocated or not. Then she stood easily, waiting a moment for the lady of the plain clean chamber to speak first if she would.

  It wasn’t a bleak room, though; the austerity was of a friendly sort, the bareness chosen because it sufficed and didn’t distract from things thought more important. The stern-faced woman behind the desk probably looked friendly often enough too, judging by the way the lines around her mouth and eyes lay. Right now she looked very tired, and not just because she’d probably been up all night, and extremely serious. Her face was rather horselike, and Ritva judged she’d been about the Ranger’s age at the time of the Change.

  No point in a who-can-wait-longest match, and I’m the guest here asking for a favor, Ritva thought.

  Then she put her hand on her heart and bowed. “Ni veren an gi ngovaned, naneth aen,” she said. “In the Common Speech, I am very pleased to meet you, Reverend Mother.”

  “Sit, my child,” she replied, with a wry quirking smile. “I have been expecting this visit for some time, since my last talk with Rancher Woburn.”

  Ritva pulled a small knife from her boot-top first, slit open a seam on her belt, and produced a set of thin onionskin paper documents. The abbess took them in worn fingers, fished spectacles out of a pocket, turned up the lamp and read. At one point she looked up sharply. “The leaders of the Dúnedain?”

  Ritva spread her hands, and the Abbess nodded.

  “Yes, there is no need for me to know more about that.”

  At last she sat back and sighed, then crossed herself and bent her head over clasped hands for several long moments, in prayer or meditation.

  “You come highly recommended,” she said when she looked up again. “Not least by Abbot-Bishop Dmwoski and Father Ignatius. I know of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict, and news of the good father’s vision of the Virgin in the Valley of the Sun—”

  She paused to bow her head to the Madonna.

  “—has spread widely to us of the Church.”

  “I was with him on that journey, Reverend Mother,” Ritva said. “I’m not of your faith, but he is a very holy man. And a very clever one as well; clever, brave, a faithful friend. The High King has appointed him Lord Chancellor of Montival.”

  The eyes of the Abbess were a cool blue-gray. They studied her for a moment before the religious spoke herself: “But his is a militant order, and necessarily involved in politics and war. We . . . are not. We have our life here according to our Rule, here and in the daughter-houses we have established since the Change. We work, we teach, we heal, we help God’s poor, and for our joy and our rest we have prayer. All this I would endanger, if I help you and you fail. Possibly even if you succeed, in the end.”

  Ritva nodded gravely. All that was perfectly true. Reverend Mother Dominica had to think of it. She was responsible for her followers, after all; and for all those who depended on her Order.

  “Everything you are and do is endangered if we lose, Reverend Mother. As it was in the days of Duke Iron Rod, but more so.”

  The older woman flinched; very slightly, but Ritva was sensitive to such things. Oops, she thought. She must have been a member back then too. Or one of Iron Rod’s prisoners, or both.

  “I have tried to forgive,” the nun whispered after a moment. “But to forgive evil men is not to submit to the evil they do. You are right that we owe your family a debt from those days.”

  She sighed. “I’ve also heard of this Sword of the Lady. A pagan thing, and a pagan King wields it.”

  I’m a pagan thing myself, Ritva thought; she restrained herself from arguing: It’s all different avatars of the same Lady, right?

  Christians could be irritatingly rigid about that. She’d had two years of Father Ignatius’ implacably polite certainty to drive home the lesson.

  “I’m the High King’s half sister,” she pointed out instead. “And I’ve known him all my life and besides, it’s the same with us Dúnedain as it is with the Mackenzies: it’s a point of our faith that everyone finds their own path to the Divine. We’re in more danger from you than you from us. There will be a lot more Christians in Montival than anyone else, and your type of Christian is the commonest. Matti . . . the High Queen Mathilda . . . is one of you. Whereas the Church Universal and Triumphant . . .”

  “They are evil and they serve evil,” the Abbess whispered. “I don’t say that idly or simply because their theology, the public version, is absurd. There must be freedom—even for error.” She smiled a little. “Even for taking the stories of a long-dead Englishman who was a good Catholic with appalling literal-mindedness, for example, my child.”

  Ritva suppressed an impulse to stick out her tongue. She suspected that the Abbess read it anyway.

  “But while that may be wrong, it is not evil,” the Abbess continued earnestly. “And General-President Thurston has . . . changed since he came back from his meeting with the false Prophet Sethaz in Bend last year. He was always a very hard man, very ambitious, but . . . the new decrees are ominous.”

  “They’re straight out of the CUT’s book,” Ritva said; she’d been reading the briefing papers the leaders had brought along during the ride south. “And they’re just a start.”

  “Can you tell me what use you will put our aid to, if we give it?”

  “No, of course not, Mother Superior. You don’t need to know. That’s need to know in the technical sense. You know we’ll use it to fight the CUT and the parricide Martin Thurston and I can’t give details.”

  A long silence, during which the older woman’s gaze turned inward. Then: “Yes. Tell me what you need us to do.”

  “No more questions?” Ritva asked.

  The Mother Superior smiled. “If it is to be done at all, it should be done well. When you make a decision, think carefully, pray, consult where appropriate, and then make it. Half measures give you all the drawbacks of each alternative and none of their advantages.”

  Ritva rose and bowed a salute, hand to heart, as she would have done for her own superiors.

  “So also says the Lady of the Rangers, and the other leaders of our people, my kinsfolk,” she said. “And my brother Rudi . . . Artos . . . as well. Are you sure you were never a soldier, Reverend Mother?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “Only a foot soldier of Christ, my child. But in this office I have had to make decisions in plenty. Your aunt is a wise lady, if she grasps that, because it is not an easy thing to do. And your High King doubly so, because he is still a young man.”

  A slight wince. “It is no easier when lives ride on it.”

  Ritva listed the aid that Operation Lúthien would need. The Reverend Mother sighed, pushed herself back slightly from the desk, and opened a drawer that proved to hold a typewriter.

  “What you need, then, is primarily information and recommendations,” she said, as she inserted a sheet of paper in the roll. “Between us, St. Hilda’s and Rancher Woburn will be able to furnish those.”

  Then she smiled; it made her face much younger for a moment, reminding Ritva of Mary’s—which was to say, herself—when they were thinking up some prank.

  “In fact, we may be able to furnish unexpected help from above, so to say.”

  Ritva nodded. I wish I could be as carefree about this as Mary and I used to be on missions, she thought. But this time it’s not just my life. It’s the life of my home . . . not just the Dúnedain, either. All of Montival.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CASTLE ODELL, COUNTY OF ODELL

  (FORMERLY NORTHERN OREGON)

  PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)


  JULY 31, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

  Castle Odell was small compared to the great fortress-palace of Todenangst, but substantial compared to anything else built in the PPA’s territories since the Change; towers and curtain-walls and rearing central keep beneath bright banners. Conrad Renfrew had started it in the second Change Year, right after he was granted the fief to hold as tenant-in-chief, direct vassal of the Crown.

  After he’d conquered it for the Association, Sandra Arminger thought.

  The carriage of the Lady Regent of the PPA rolled past the tents of the levy’s encampment and men gaped or gathered to cheer as the black-and-gold coach and its escort of men-at-arms and mounted crossbowmen of the Protector’s Guard swept by. More bowed and then waved and called greetings in the town.

  Though considering who was in charge before, it’s no wonder he’s always been popular here. Not something that you could say about all our new lords. Mind you, Lady Valentinne had a good deal to do with it, starting with being native to the place. Tina mellowed him, which caused problems with Norman if not with me. He was still angry about the accident and the scars in those days, and she helped him deal with that.

  His engineers had used Lenz Butte as the base, rising nearly two hundred feet over the rolling surface of the valley; the little red-tiled town of Odell clung to its base to the east by the road and railway, dwarfed by the castle and the newly completed Cypriot-Gothic cathedral. The slopes below the white-stuccoed ferroconcrete ramparts were terraced gardens. Just now they were a blaze of roses, the scent full and sweet in the warm drowsy summer air through the open windows of the carriage. The clatter of her escorts’ hooves came through as well, then the hollow drumming on the drawbridge; trumpets rang from the gatehouse, and they passed into its gloom beneath the arched ceiling that held the murder-holes and portcullis and out into light once more.

  “This is a bit private, Jehane,” she said to her amanuensis as the driver pulled up with a whoa. “It’ll be easier to tell the Lord High Chancellor to act his age and stop being an idiot if it’s all in the family. Keep going on the précis of those reports.”