The Tears of the Sun

by S. M. Stirling

  She nodded, briskly this time. “The Yakima regiments can bicycle down their valley and then barge down from the Three Cities to the Wallula Gap and meet me at Castle Dorion; we can draw on the supply magazines there. The main force from here can travel up the Columbia to the Gap, and then we’ll put our supplies and the heavy gear on the rail line to Walla Walla and march. I’ll have the movement orders drafted by tomorrow morning and the lead elements moving by dawn of the day after.”

  She frowned and looked southward. “I’d like to send the Richlanders and the Sioux on ahead. They can use railcars along the river gorge and move a lot faster, then push on and join the screening force that’s covering the enemy garrison in Castle Campscapell.”

  The Montivalans winced slightly; something flickered even in the Grand Constable’s pale eyes. Campscapell had fallen last year, and in mysterious circumstances. Losing it had been a strategic disaster for which they’d paid heavily since.

  “It’ll improve morale in County Palatine, to see our allies passing through towards the enemy,” she continued. “That will whet their appetite for hope, and the main field force will give them something more substantial. Also it will get the Sioux out in the boondocks. With an enemy force they can expend their energy on killing and robbing, and accompanied by someone they trust.”

  “The screening force is under Lord Forest Grove?” Rudi said.

  He’d have remembered that himself, he thought; but with his palm on the hilt of the Sword there was no need to struggle with memory or call for files from his staff. It flowed in currents like the deep strong movements of the ocean, any knowledge he’d ever so much as glimpsed just there in any form he wanted it. He no longer feared the sensation.

  I’m . . . resigned, he thought. It’s even coming to seem natural. And sure, it’s as convenient as an ever-filled stock of firewood in winter. I’ll have to watch that I don’t make the Kingdom too dependent on it in the long run, to be sure.

  “Lord Rigobert de Stafford, Baron of Forest Grove, yes, Your Majesty,” the Grand Constable said. “With local forces of the County called out under the arrière-ban, mostly, besides his own menie, and a thousand or so from County Chehalis who he’s been hammering into shape for eight months now. A very capable man; aggressive, but not reckless.”

  Unexpectedly Signe spoke, with her brother nodding agreement: “He’s the PPA Marchwarden of the South, so we Bearkillers have a border with his bailiwick. I’ve dealt with him myself. A hard bargainer but honorable.”

  “Very well, I defer to your wishes, Grand Constable; send those units immediately.”

  She bowed again. “I’ll get things moving then, Your Majesty.”

  A polite nod to the others, and one of her squires led her courser forward. She put one hand on the cantle of the high knight’s saddle and made a skipping leap. Her left foot caught the stirrup, and she swung onto the horse with a light clatter of gray steel. The party of Associates reined around and cantered off. Bjarni watched consideringly.

  “How effective is that armor?” he asked; his own folk used knee-length tunics of mail or scale, and simple conical helms with a strip riveted to the front as a nose-guard.

  “Very,” Rudi said; then he touched the Sword that hung at his right hip. “This could cut it, but an ordinary slash with an ordinary sword, no, it’s about like trying to chop through an anvil. Even if you’re very strong, the most you could do would be to dent it quite a bit, knock the wearer down and bruise him badly. You have to thrust, so”—he indicated face, armpits, groin, the backs of the knees—“and even then you’d best be lucky. You need a two-handed weapon like a long ax or a greatsword to pierce plate. Or something that concentrates impact, like a war-pick, or a war hammer. Or a lance with a charging horse behind it, or a hard-driven bodkin-tipped arrow or bolt hitting just right.”

  “It doesn’t seem too heavy,” the Norrheimer said meditatively.

  His concern was more or less abstract, a warrior’s curiosity about his craft. All the people who wore plate in this war were on his side.

  “Fifty pounds or a bit less for a suit in her size,” Rudi agreed. “More than mail, but not so very much more. And it’s nearly as flexible as one of your hauberks. The weight’s well distributed by tying and buckling it to the point strings on the arming doublet and breeches instead of hanging everything from the shoulders. And it’s much better protection from arrows and bolts than mail. The way it traps heat is the worst drawback; you get tired faster, and you can sweat yourself into a faint if you’re not careful. That’s why she was wearing it, probably. You have to keep yourself accustomed to the heat and constriction. Forbye it’s good exercise.”

  “Still, wearing it and moving quickly needs strength. You have many strong shield-maids here.”

  Bjarni looked surprised when the others chuckled.

  “Everyone else here does, except the PPA,” Rudi explained. “Tiphaine and . . . perhaps fifty or sixty others all told. Including my Matti! Their custom doesn’t hold with it. Nor their God, or at least so say many of their priests; it takes great skill and even more strength of will to break those barriers. She’s an exception. I told you how we Mackenzies captured Mathilda on a raid during the War of the Eye, when we were both around ten?”

  Bjarni nodded, and Rudi continued: “Well, Tiphaine—she was knighted and ennobled for it and granted the fief of Ath—snatched her back that spring, with a small picked band. And myself, the both of us being not twice bowshot from the gates of Dun Juniper when she struck, the which was ingenious and bold. She got us back out of the Mackenzie dùthchas to Castle Todenangst with cloth yard arrows raining about her ears, too, which was not merely bold but skill of a miraculous degree—even on foot the Clan’s warriors can push a pursuit like wolves on the track of an elk and run horses to death. Lady Sandra stashed the both of us at Castle Ath for some time . . . which is where I began learning swordplay from her.”

  “She’s good with a blade?” Bjarni said, his own hand dropping unconsciously to the hilt of his broadsword. “I thought she might be, from the grip she gave and the pattern of calluses on her hand.”

  “I first beat her sparring when I was twenty-one, and didn’t again for some time,” he said soberly. “I’ve never crossed blades with anyone faster in all my travels. As swift as I, and more nimble. I have more reach and I’m much stronger, of course, but her blade-art is complete.”

  The others all nodded, Signe a little unwillingly. A speculative look came into Bjarni’s blue gaze; to a warrior, everything that wasn’t a prize to be seized was a potential challenge to be overcome.

  “Don’t even think it,” Rudi said, and Eric nodded vigorously.

  Signe smiled grimly. “Did you see the hilt of her sword, my friend?”

  Bjarni nodded, obviously puzzled. “A very good weapon, if narrower than we like in Norrheim, I suppose for thrusting strokes against the joints in plate. And well-adorned, the silver setting off the back horn.”

  “Those twelve silver bands aren’t adornment, Bjarni King. They’re a death-tally and public warning,” she said.

  “Holmgangs?” Bjarni said, using his folk’s word for a duel.

  “Technically,” Eric laughed, but this time it was utterly without humor. “I saw a few of those . . . you couldn’t really call them fights, though the victims were experienced swordsmen. They were executions. Slow executions. It was more like a cat playing with a mouse than combat. And one of the few occasions I’ve seen her really smile.”

  “Brrr!” Bjarni said. Then, with blunt practicality: “And what’s my part in this plan you make, my blood brother?”

  “Never fear, you’ll hear it soon.” He turned to Eric and Signe. “I brought two thousand Drumheller cavalry with me when we crossed the Rockies at Castle Corbec,” he said. “Medium horse, lance and saber and bow, mail hauberks and plate for the arms and legs.”

  “About what we Bearkillers were using ten, fifteen years ago,” Eric said thoughtfully. “I liked what I saw
of them there. Trained in cataphract tactics like ours, too?”

  “Precisely; well trained and drilled. Also Drumheller is not part of Montival and will not be, and they did fight the Association, when they tried to take back that western part of the Peace River country the Lord Protector grabbed off in their despite, the spalpeen. County Dawson, it is now; about which they are still bitter, so. So I’ll be brigading them with your Bearkiller A-listers, giving out it’s the best tactical fit—the which is true—and to avoid unnecessary memories of a painful and awkward sort.”

  “That ought to work,” Eric said thoughtfully. “We’re more mobile than the Association knights, we don’t need a light cavalry screen as badly, and we have a lot more punch in a charge with the lance than pure horse-archers.”

  “It’s fair pleased I’ll be if it does work,” Rudi said frankly. “Fitting this collection of puzzle pieces, not to mention the odds and sods trickling in from everywhere between Dawson and Ashland, into an army I can use without it coming to pieces on a battlefield like a soggy biscuit in hot tea is a nightmare of purest black, and we’ve little time.”

  Sober nods, and he continued: “Well, you’ll be receiving them in the next day or two. And I’m off. This High King position needs about six men to fill it.”

  “You won’t be disappointed in us Bearkillers, Your Majesty,” Mike Jr. blurted. Then he quoted: “Always faithful.”

  That was the motto of a band of warriors their common father had fought with, before the Change.

  “Mike, mo bhràthair, you were at my wedding!” Rudi said. “And saw me pale and wan with terror until your uncle slipped me some brandy. It’s a little too formal that was, brother, for an everyday occasion like this.”

  “My liege, then,” Mike said.

  “That will do. Feel free to add embellishments when you’re convinced I’ve gone lunatic; I’ve yet to see a battlefield where men didn’t feel that way about the high command, at times.”

  The tall young man’s face split in an answering grin, and the High King went on: “Every time we meet you favor our father more; you’ve more of his cast of face than I do, I’m thinking. Perhaps by the end of this war you’ll be wearing the Bear Helm, eh?”

  Mike’s face flushed; he met Rudi’s eyes for a long moment, then gave a slight nod. Eric’s brows went up. Signe went pale.

  After a long moment she bowed to Rudi. “Hail, Artos King,” she said; there was a slight choking in her voice. “I wished that. I hadn’t thought you’d aid me in it.”

  Rudi smiled. I know it’s a charming smile, some corner of him thought. Matti’s told me it is often enough, and sometimes with a deal of exasperation in her voice. Still, if the Gods gave it me, I should use it, and I’m not putting it on, either. I’ve always liked Signe better than she did me, Eric is a man you’re glad to have at your back, and of young Mike I’m fond in truth.

  “The Bearkillers will be a stout pillar of the High Kingdom,” Rudi said. “The more so with the bond of blood between my House and the line of the Bear Lords.”

  “We will be your sword and shield!” Mike blurted, then blushed as his mother and uncle shot him quelling looks. “Well, we will.”

  Rudi made his farewells and turned to Bjarni. “Walk with me, blood brother.”

  The Norrheimer did, squinting westward for a moment past his own people’s encampment; the lines of tall slim poplars on the plain were casting long shadows. They were alone. Except for Edain and the score of the High King’s Archers behind them, of course, and a half dozen of Bjarni’s hirdmen, walking with mail byrnie clinking and conical nose-guarded helmets on their heads, round shields on their left arms and spears or great long-hafted axes over their right shoulders. All of the guardsmen were out of earshot, if they spoke quietly.

  “Bad blood there, eh?” Bjarni said shrewdly, inclining his head slightly back towards the Bearkillers. “Or there was.”

  Rudi shrugged. “My blood father rescued my mother from some Eaters—mad cannibals—”

  “What we called troll-men,” Bjarni nodded.

  Such bands had been common throughout the more heavily peopled places in the year after the Change, as the desperate millions ate the storehouses bare to the last hidden scrap and then turned on each other amid chaos, fire and plague. Where the cities had been most dense, their savage descendants were the only human thing left, save scorched bones split for the marrow.

  “—not long after the Change. They were both of them on scouting missions, you see. And . . . well, that night was when I was begotten. Mike Havel wasn’t handfasted to Lady Signe then; they weren’t even betrothed, really, though they were thinking of it from what I’ve heard.”

  “Ah,” Bjarni said. “And there’s the rub, eh?”

  Rudi nodded: “She always held it against mother, and me. Less so as the years have gone by, but it’s also a bitterness to her that her son will be a chief in my kingdom, and not the other way about, you see. Mike himself doesn’t mind; we’ve always gotten along well and he’s a likely and good-natured lad. Also just the now he’s at the age when he needs a hero to worship, or an elder brother. Whether he’ll still feel that way ten or fifteen years from now . . . we’ll see.”

  “I do see,” Bjarni said. “My folk have their own rivalries. It’s the nature of the sons and daughters of Ash and Embla. So that’s why you said your half brother has more of a look of your father.”

  “Sure, and it’s the truth . . . though not by much, we’re both his image in body and face, though we’re taller than he was by a few inches. And the neither of us have his coloring; he was black-haired, perhaps because he had an Anishinabe grandmother, one of the First People, though for the rest he was mostly Suomi with a dash of Svenska and Norski. But young Mike does have a bit more of his face, I’d be saying. He was a handsome fellow, my father, among much else.”

  “He must have been a man of strong main”—which meant soul-strength, in the Norrheimer dialect—“and a fighting man of note and able to steer matters wisely,” Bjarni said thoughtfully. “From what I’ve heard, Gods aside, he puts me in mind of my father, Erik the Strong.”

  “A fair comparison. I remember him only a little, but he left a great mark on the world passing through it, and from that you can see the shape of the man who made it.”

  The land wrinkled up before them a little, scored and gashed and littered with rocks ranging from loaf-sized to real boulders; as you went south here you met spots that had been cut by water into gullies long ago. Three sentries rose out of nowhere, with arrows on the half-drawn strings of their longbows, Mackenzies in ghillie cloaks; those were hooded lengths of camouflaged cloth sewn all over with loops. The loops were thrust through with bits of grass and sagebrush or whatever else fit the landscape, and if the wearers knew what they were doing they could be nearly invisible even in open ground. Rudi had spotted them, but Bjarni gave a slight start.

  The leader of the trio tossed back his gauze-masked hood as he took the draw off his string. He was painted for war in the Clan’s style, patterns of scarlet and black swirling over his face to give it the look of his sept totem, a fox-mask in this case. The moon-and-antlers of the Mackenzies was blazoned on the green leather surface of his brigantine, and there was a tuft of the reddish fur dangling from a silver ring he wore in one ear.

  There was something a little foxlike about his eyes too, despite his dark hair and olive skin, darting and quick and cunning. Doubtless that kinship of spirit was why he’d dreamed of Fox on his vision journey as a youngster; that was part of the Clan’s coming-of-age ceremonies.

  “Chomh gilc ie sionnach,” Rudi said gravely; clever as a fox in the old tongue, and the motto of the man’s sept.

  “That we are, High King. Pass you may, lord, and those with you,” he said, tapping his bow stave against the brow of his open-faced sallet helm in salute.

  Then he turned, waved to someone farther down the slope, and made a slight chittering sound with tongue and teeth. It might have passed
unnoticed anywhere insects formed the background of life. The sentries took different positions, sank down . . . and were once more nearly invisible, even if you’d seen them do it.

  Bjarni looked behind him as they walked on. “Your folk take war seriously,” he said approvingly.

  “That we do, or we’d be long dead,” Rudi said, hiding a grin. “We have no Fluffy Bunny sept . . . sorry, an old joke among us, I’ll explain another time if you wish.”

  And you Norrheimers find us deplorably flighty and light-minded and longwinded and fanciful about all else, he thought but did not say. While the most of my clansfolk who meet them find your people a staid and stark and solemn-dull lot who find little mirth in anything but hitting folk with axes. It would be a drabber and less interesting world if everyone were the same, would it not?

  The Norrheimer gave a slight grunt of surprise when they came over the slope and saw the Mackenzie camp below. The plain around Goldendale was really a plateau at the foot of the hills behind the town, and its southern edge was valleys where water had cut back long ago; the ground became rougher as you went south to the Columbia at Maryhill and less of it was farmed. This was a broad open swale, the bottom perhaps twenty or thirty feet lower than the higher plowed fields. The bulk of it was in grass turning gold in the sunset light, with thick-scattered clumps of oak and pine in the lower parts. In time of peace it was a preserve for the hunting and hawking of the Associate lord who held these lands, and in war a fine campground that didn’t interfere with what remained of workaday life.

  Scattered almost as thickly through it were the small tents of the Mackenzie host, grouped in threes and those in circles for each Dun; Sutterdown’s contingent had four circles, they being the Clan’s only approach to a city, grouped around their banner of sea-blue and sky-blue blazoned with a scalloped shell and lyre and bow. Little efficient cook fires cast a trickle of smoke into the air, just enough to let you get a whiff of the wood burning and a bit of the food. The other camp odors weren’t too bad; Mackenzies were as cleanly a people as they could be, and this group hadn’t been here long yet. Rudi walked down the track at an easy swing, taking off his flat Scots bonnet now and then to wave back greetings.