The Tears of the Sun

by S. M. Stirling

  “Lioncel, do you know why I took your oath as squire today?”

  “Ah . . . no, my lady.”

  “First, you deserve it. In peacetime, I’d have waited another year, but we’re at war. That leads to the second reason. You are your father’s heir, but your younger brother Diomede is my son and heir by adoption, and the Barony of Ath, title and lands, go to him and the heirs of his body.”

  Lioncel nodded; he’d already started his study of feudal law—the Association’s system was based on twelfth-century England under the Anglo-Norman kings, as modified by the peace treaty at the end of the Protector’s War and more subtly by Sandra Arminger in her term as Regent since. A nobleman needed some acquaintance with it, if he weren’t to be helpless in the hands of his advisers.

  “Nothing is certain in war. Your father and I may both fall in battle. I don’t expect it, but it could happen.”

  Lioncel nodded gravely; even as a youngster the son of a knightly house did not hide from the facts of life and death. He had been raised with the knowledge that war was the nobility’s trade and avocation, and death by the sword their accepted fate. One that might come calling at any moment to exact the price of their privileges.

  “If we did, your mother would take seisin of Barony Forest Grove by dower right until you came of age, in trust for you and your sister, and would have a third of the mesne tithes as widow’s portion for her lifetime after you came of age and took seisin in your own right; that’s settled law. But Diomede’s position would be . . . ambiguous, and so would Delia’s with regard to Ath and its revenues. Your lady mother would need your support because she has no formal right to Ath from me except through Diomede and that’s uncertain. Technically Diomede is my son, but of course I’m not married to her so she can’t claim seisin by dower right if I die or the widow’s portion of the revenues. Dower descends from the husband, it doesn’t rise from the child.”

  Dammit, she thought. Norman and his obsessions! Not to mention the Thomas à Becket fixation a lot of the clergy have developed. Why on earth couldn’t Delia and I get married? We have been for all practical purposes for a decade and a half!

  Aloud she continued: “It’s a nice point of law and some Chancellery clerk or worse still some Churchman might start a suit alleging Diomede was an orphan in need of wardship and that she had no standing to claim ward over him since a child can’t have two legal mothers. The thing could be tied up in the courts for years with the land going to ruin. A page is a child; being a squire doesn’t mean you’re of age but it does give you a foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. It proves that you’re old enough to take a legally binding oath of vassalage, so you can’t be completely ignored. And as elder brother, you do then have certain rights where a minor sibling and the sibling’s inheritance is concerned, and your mother through you since you’d be automatically under her ward as a widowed mother of a minor heir. Understand?”

  He frowned, pale brows knotting in his tanned young face. “Yes, my lady, I think so. God and your patron saints protect you and my lord my father, but if the worst should happen, I will be my mother’s strong right arm and my brother’s shield and prove their rights against any who deny them. I swear it before God and the Virgin and my patron saint, St. Michael of the Lance.”

  He crossed himself and she nodded.

  “Good. In the meantime, you’re the most junior of my squires instead of the oldest page in the household. And you’re not going to be old enough to fight as a man-at-arms for another five years or so, is that clear?”

  A nod, and she went on: “Sir Rodard will find you enough work to do, esquire of House Ath. Hop!”

  “Thanks, my lady,” Rigobert said as the boy raced off. “I should have thought of something like that. I still find myself thinking like an uncle rather than a father sometimes, and as for being a husband . . . And there are other times I have to remind myself I really am a feudal lord, not just playing at it.”

  Tiphaine gave a faint snort; she was a crucial near-decade younger and that sort of feeling hit her less often, but . . .

  “Tell me. My highest ambition in Middle School was going to the Olympics as a gymnast. Until the world ended, when not starving to death, and not getting raped, butchered and eaten by cannibals or not catching the Black Death soon came to the fore.”

  “I knew you were a complete jockette, but I’ll bet you wore black and red flannel shirts, too,” Rigobert said with a grin. “Flannel shirts and a white A-shirt underneath, and skate shoes?”

  “Oh, incessantly; with a trucker’s hat, no less. I think the thirteen-year-old boys hated me because I looked more like a thirteen-year-old boy than they did.”

  “Not a mullet. Please, God, tell me you didn’t have a mullet.”

  “Mother wouldn’t let me, but that would have come in a couple of years. And when I turned twelve I realized I was desperately in love with Melissa Etheridge and put a great big poster of her on the inside of my locker door and played her music twenty-four/seven on my Walkman.”

  Rigobert laughed, and Tiphaine smiled thinly. She’d never lost herself in laughter easily, not when she was sober at least, and for her being thoroughly disinhibited was usually a bad idea. She envied him that easy laugh a little. It was odd to realize she couldn’t have had this conversation with Delia either; not because they didn’t share everything, but because the younger woman simply didn’t have the referents to understand it without a lot of backing and filling. She’d grown up a miller’s daughter on Montinore Manor and hadn’t even learned to read until her late teens. Tiphaine shook her head as memories opened like the door to a dusty cupboard.

  “I was a complete caricature of a baby-dyke-in-training and didn’t even realize it until I caught myself in the middle of a daydream of rescuing Melissa from a stalker and then smooching her passionately . . . my family didn’t talk about things like that so I didn’t even really understand the names my beloved classmates were calling me. I did know they weren’t well meant, you bet I did.”

  “Was it possible to be that naive in 1998?”

  “For a while, if you were a lonely introspective only child of a single mother who was extremely religious, with no friends except your gymnastics coach. And she was terrified of being hit with ‘inappropriate conduct’ accusations by a hysterical parent. Everyone knew before I did, except my mother and she was deep in denial.”

  “Wasn’t as much of a problem for me,” Rigobert said, with a reminiscent smile. “It might have been hellish if I were swish, but—”

  “Yeah, you’re even more butch than I am,” Tiphaine said sardonically. “Football star, right?”

  “Not dumb enough for football. Basketball, track and field, karate, and fencing club. I was such a model of blazing macho hotness even the straight guys wanted me,” Rigobert said. “Ah, high school, the amount of action I—”

  “Now you’re boasting . . . wait a minute, do you realize our speech patterns just lost twenty-five years?”

  The other baron shook his head. “You’re right. Best not to dwell on the past . . . it was just seeing Lioncel looking so damned young. And looking so much the way I did at that age . . . though I’m pretty sure he’s straight, come to that.”

  “He is,” Tiphaine said definitely.

  A conversation about stumbling upon him and a servant girl in a linen closet back at Montinore Manor came to mind; Delia had found it hilarious and she’d thought it rather embarrassing.

  “Lioncel’s greatest ambition is to be a gallant knight and a good baron, and I think he’s going to achieve it,” she said instead.

  “He’s a fine boy, all three of us can be proud of him, but . . . they scare me, sometimes, the Changelings. No offense.”

  “None taken. I’m a borderline case anyway. I can remember the old world, bits and pieces, particularly the last couple of years before the Change. I simply don’t, usually, unless it comes up the way it did just now. The last twenty-three years or so have been a lot more fun than my
childhood anyway, on the whole.”

  “It’s Changelings raised by Changelings who really give me that odd feeling, and Delia’s seven years younger than you; she is a Changeling and no mistake. From time to time I look back on the way we set things up in the early years and think . . . what have we done?”

  Tiphaine’s expression went colder than usual. “We all did what we had to do, in those days,” she said, very softly. “All of us. Everybody did what they had to, or they died, like ninety-five percent of the human race.”

  Rigobert inclined his head in silent agreement, memories of his own moving behind his eyes. Anyone old enough to really remember the first Change Years and the great dying knew that expression, from the inside as well as from their mirror; it would die only when the last of them were gone.

  “Not quite what I meant. I was thinking of the Association’s trappings in particular,” he said more lightly after a moment. “We all went along with it and now . . . now it’s just the way people around here live.”

  “Norman did that,” Tiphaine observed. “God help us if he’d been obsessed with first-century Rome or Chin Dynasty China or the Old South. Or been an old-fashioned Red with a man-crush on Stalin.”

  “And if Norman hadn’t existed, we’d probably all three have been dead these twenty-five years now and the children wouldn’t have been born, so done is done and probably for the best.” Rigobert sighed. “We can’t complain, seeing we not only made it into the small minority who survived but came out very much on top of the heap. I try to do right by the peasants on my manors, but being a baron is much more pleasant.”

  “Except when we’re doing the hard parts.”

  Rigobert smiled. “No, sometimes then too, don’t you find? Sometimes especially then.”

  COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK

  BARONY OF TUCANNON

  PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

  (FORMERLY SOUTHEASTERN WASHINGTON)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  AUGUST 18, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

  “Gotcha!” Ingolf said as his force came in out of the westering sun.

  From here, several miles out on the high plains leading from the mountains down to Dayton, the valley with the sheep looked different; the rugged peaks in the background seemed closer, and the whole thing more closed off. And you could see most of it was rolling, not a steep V down to the little creek. The shepherdesses had fled in well-simulated terror, scattering their sheep artfully as they went, and the Boise cavalry had spread out to get the flock under control.

  Almost all of them would be cowboys from the ranching parts of Idaho originally anyway; you nearly had to be born at it to make a good horse-archer. They’d know how to gather a mob of woolies. It was probably a homelike interval in the war for them . . . until the moment they felt the hook inside the delectable bait. He looked behind. Most of his men would still be hidden by the folds he’d been diligently following, but they were getting too close for caution.

  “Sound advance in file order,” Ingolf called, and legged his horse up to a canter.

  The sweet notes of Mark’s bugle rang. The columns opened out like fans; a few moments later the First Richland was strung out in a great line two men deep, rippling and twisting as it moved over the swells of the ground. Ingolf looked left and right and over his shoulder; the Sioux were closing in from the rear, their formations more like the flocking of birds than regular lines, but keeping up easily. Three Bears slanted through the Richlander files to ride beside him, his quarter horse matching the longer strides of Boy.

  “Got ’em all!” he called, over the growing, growling thunder of hooves; there were fresh scalps at his saddle. “And the remuda. Good horses.”

  Horse-theft was the Lakota national sport; you just had to accept that they were obsessed.

  “Any prisoners?”

  “Nah, they all fought to the death. Brave as shit. Look, cousin, I’ve got a bad feeling about this. They may not have been alone, you know? Yellow Bird and her tree huggers and some of my boys are sweeping back west of here.”

  “Good. Let’s get this part done quickly.”

  He chopped his hand left, to the north, where the little creek ran down from the hills and came closer to that steeper edge of the valley.

  “Keep them from getting across that, will you? It’s fordable everywhere but it’ll slow them if they try to cross and you can shoot the shit out of them. We need them bunched and I don’t want to extend that far. Your call on when you get stuck in.”

  “Right, cousin. Ki-yi-yip-ki!”

  He angled away again, and the Lakota veered in that direction, pulling ahead at a gallop. A growing pillar of dust was rising from the pounding hooves, fortunately mostly swept behind them by the wind and the speed of their own passage. The spicy scent of crushed grass mixed with Ingolf’s own sweat and Boy’s and the oily metallic smell of his mail and the muskier stink of leather. Ahead the Boise formation was reacting with commendable speed now that they’d realized . . .

  They’re about to be corncobbed, Ingolf thought with a taut grin, reaching over his shoulder for an arrow.

  The wind in his face would give the other side a slight advantage in a horse-archery duel. You had to be careful about that sort of thing, and remember always that mounted men could only shoot ahead, behind and to a half-circle arc on their left. Even worse, the enemy had a battery of four springalds. Spitters, they were called sometimes. Not as bad as scorpions or twenty-four pounders throwing dart-bundles, but bad enough and very mobile. A four-horse team could drag them almost anywhere cavalry could go, and about as fast.

  The Boise cavalry were back in formation already, four blocks three men deep—risky, but it would add firepower and weight to any charge. Now they were rocking forward, but between the blocks of the enemy formation loomed squat wheeled shapes behind angled arrow-shields . . .

  “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful,” Ingolf muttered, then louder: “Mark! Drop behind me!”

  Reluctantly the boy obeyed; Major Kohler was over on the left flank of the formation with the other guidon banner so that a lucky spray of shafts couldn’t decapitate the regiment, but being a commander meant you got shot at more, and that was that. You were completely useless if your men couldn’t see you, and if they could the enemy could too.

  Up to a hand gallop now, the knotted reins dropped on the saddlebow, guiding the horse with weight and thighs alone. It took almost as long to train a cavalry mount as it did the rider, longer in proportion to life span, ordinary horses were useless for this . . .

  TUNG! A great metallic bass throb of a sound, like the world’s biggest untuned lute, and instantly the crack as the springald’s slide hit its stops and the dart flashed free.

  Something arched out from behind the onrushing body of horsemen. It seemed to go faster as it approached, a blur in a long shallow curve traveling too fast to really see. Then shunk! as it struck the dirt fifty feet ahead of him and buried half its length in the ground. He was past it immediately, close enough to see the malignant quiver of the sheet-metal fins that fletched it. Then another went by, and he could hear the whipppt of cloven air as it passed his left shoulder. Death missed by six inches; it would have torn his arm off at the shoulder if it had struck. And there was a huge scream from behind him, just an instant before it stopped sharp as an ax-cut.

  Mark! he thought, then ruthlessly suppressed the wave of anger and grief.

  More three-pound darts traveling hundreds of feet per second; one made a brutal wet cracking sound as it passed entirely through a trooper not far to his right in a spray of blood and broken mail-links and killed the man behind him too. Another skewered a horse, punching into its chest and disappearing entirely into its body cavity. The beast went down between one stride and other, limp as a banker’s charity, tangling the feet of the mount behind as it tried to leap the sudden obstacle. The second horse went over in a tumble of l
imbs and crackle of bone, the rider flying free to strike with crushing force. And they were close now, close, four hundred yards, three hundred . . .

  “Shoot!” he bellowed.

  Few of the men could hear him. They could all see and the commanders would relay the order; he rose in the stirrups, twisting his torso as he drew against the recurve’s hundred-pound resistance with the thick muscle of arms and shoulders, chest and gut. The arrow slid through the centerline cutout in the bow’s riser, and the smooth curved limbs bent back into a deep C-shape, sinew stretching and horn compressing on either side of the central layer of hickory.

  He let the string roll off his draw-fingers.

  Whap!

  Three hundred and fifty shafts followed within a second, arching into the sky like slivers of incarnate motion, seeming to pause for an instant and then plunging downward. The enemy shot in almost the same instant, and in the passing of a fractional second Ingolf fought and won the usual battle of will not to duck and hunch his head forward. You got hit or you didn’t; he’d had both. Instead he was flicking out more arrows, shooting as fast as he could draw and adjusting the angle as the forces came together. More men and horses went down on both sides, falling out with iron in their bodies, going limp or thrashing out of the saddle, horses suddenly uncontrollable with the pain of sharp steel and wood in their flesh. Not much to choose between his men and the enemy in speed or accuracy of shooting, but there were more of his and the Sioux were into it now too, at extreme range.

  Six arrows, seven, eight—

  He thrust the bow into the boiled-leather scabbard at his knee. The same motion helped slide the yard-wide round shield off his back and onto his left arm, and an instant later the shete was in his right hand, moves practiced for decades. That switch needed careful timing; too soon and you got shot at without being able to reply, too late and you were fumbling with things while the guy on the other side cut you out of the saddle like a side of pork. Juggling your weapons like that, fast but without dropping anything, was a big part of cavalry training. It was even worse if you had a lance to worry about too.