The Tears of the Sun

CHAPTER TWELVE

COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK

CHARTERED CITY OF WALLA WALLA

PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

(FORMERLY EASTERN WASHINGTON)

HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

AUGUST 23, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

“That’s that,” Grand Constable Tiphaine d’Ath said, tasting sweat on her lips.

It must still be well over ninety degrees, though the temperature was falling a bit with the sun. She slapped her leather riding gauntlets into the palm of her left hand in a slight puff of dust. The omnipresent grit was one of the things she disliked about the eastern fiefs; her own estates were in the northern Willamette valley, which had a decently moderate climate where things stayed green year-round. Then she stifled a yawn, brought on by the sultry stillness as much as real fatigue. The sun was low in the west, turning the thin clouds there crimson, and the sky was darkening towards night eastward behind the distant line of the Blue Mountains. At least it would drop to decent sleeping weather later. The air here was too dry to hold the heat long.

The end of a long summer day, and she’d been the first to get off the train an hour before dawn after a short period of semisleep on the pitching, clanking vehicle. Since then she’d been supervising while the army she’d brought pitched camp outside Walla Walla’s northern gate and unloaded supplies for the campaign.

Ah, the glory of knightly combat.

“Right, that’s the last of them, my lady,” the commander of the Protector’s Guard said, mentally checking off a list. “The signals chain says the line’s clear as far west as the Wallula Gap. We’re holding the rest of the empty rolling stock just east of the city ready to come back through.”

“Get that started now, Sir Tancred. I want them out of the way and the line and stock ready for military use.”

A final load of boxes came off a railcar and onto a wagon, and a clerk stepped forward and ran a paintbrush over a stencil on their sides while another made a tick on a ledger. The team of sixteen big mules had been led away and replaced by fresh beasts, hitched to what had been the rear of the train and hitched up to pull it back westbound; they leaned into their traces to get the six empty flatbed cars away from the platform. It halted again where the refugees waited to embark.

A crowd of a hundred or so civilians surged forward under the direction of a file of infantry; mostly peasants by their shapeless undyed linsey-woolsey clothing and floppy homemade straw hats, and more than half women with youngsters.

“No, no!” the sergeant in charge screamed. “All you strong ones, hand up your bundles and brats! Then you push to get it started, and then you climb on. You, you, you-”

The butt of his spear flicked out and tapped to conscript volunteers.

“-just grab the handles. . oh, St. Dismas have mercy, the fucking handles, the. . these things, these things! Just wait until I tell you, then push, then get on!”

They handed up bundles and baskets and swaddled infants, then settled with dumb patience, half a dozen ready to push each car. They were silent save for the wailing babes and toddlers, their eyes wide and bewildered as they stared around at city and army. Most of them were Changelings, and probably hadn’t been more than a day’s walk from their villages since they were born. Or at least had been toddlers themselves when their parents were resettled.

Tiphaine nodded to Sir Tancred. “Warn Sir Varocher at Castle Dorian that five or six thousand civilians are heading their way, mostly sick or children and their mothers. He has authority to draw on the other castles and the stores in Wallula Town as necessary. They’ll need to be fed and checked over by the physicians before they’re loaded on the barges.”

She paused for a moment and then added in the same flat tone, “Emphasize that I and the Lady Regent will be extremely displeased if they’re not treated in a humane and chivalrous manner, peasants or no.”

He scribbled a note on a clipboard and shouted for a messenger. The warning would be taken seriously; when the Lady Regent Sandra was extremely displeased the headsman’s ax or the two-handed sword reserved for noble Associates tended to become involved. Or people just mysteriously dropped dead with no apparent cause or had perfectly plausible accidents and wise living people carefully didn’t comment. A page dashed up, bowed, took the note and ran for a tall metal framework not far away, scampering up the rungs of the ladder built into it as agile as a monkey. Moments later the heliograph atop it began to blink.

“What’s the condition of the railroad draught teams?” she asked.

“Not bad, my lady. We’ve replaced the worst tired ones from the town and the Count’s herds, one-for-one, on your authority. There’s plenty of alfalfa and sweet clover hay by the watering points and we’ve been baiting them on that and milled barley and oats and bean-mash as they came in. The first in are already rested and well fed and ready for another run. The Count’s men have been very cooperative and pretty well organized. Not to mention his veterinary officers.”

“They’d better be, Sir Tancred,” Tiphaine said. “We don’t have time for pissing matches or screwups. Not if we’re going to make the enemy react to us, rather than the other way ’round.”

Walla Walla hadn’t been a large city before the Change as they reckoned things then; a bit under thirty thousand, and reasonably compact, with less sprawl at the edges than most urban settlements of the time. It had also contained the fortresslike State Penitentiary, with over two thousand hardened cons, who’d broken out on Change Day Five and taken the city over. When the Lord Protector’s troops arrived later that year, there had been a mass uprising of what was left of the population in their favor.

“All aboard!” the train driver said. “Loose brakes-”

The brakemen spun their wheels, and the stronger passengers-to-be the sergeant had selected set their hands to the grips and pushed to get the cars rolling; the mules knew the drill, and started to lean into their collars even before the long whip snapped over their backs. The crowded cars began to move along the rusted steel, to a chorus of shrieks and wailing children. Inching at first, slowing again for an instant as the pushers clambered aboard, and then rumbling up to a fast walk; an animal could pull a lot more on rail than on even the best road.

Tiphaine nodded in satisfaction. One of the first things she’d learned back fifteen years ago when she moved from small-unit black ops into the conventional military was just how hard it was to keep a major troop movement from seizing up into a series of ungovernable traffic jams.

Conrad and his staff taught me that; and how hard it was to get everything in the right place at the right time so people don’t get hopelessly lost, starve, get sick, or run out of crossbow bolts or horseshoes at a crucial moment. Sandra always was good at finding her people mentors.

Conrad Renfrew had also been in charge of that first expedition of conquest up the Columbia to Walla Walla; from what Tiphaine had read in the records, he’d killed a couple of hundred of the convicts, recruited about seventy-five for service elsewhere, and put the rest to forced labor for the rest of their short miserable lives, mostly getting in the harvest round about and then making a beginning on the fortifications and helping make things habitable for the refugees from Spokane and the western cities and the Columbia plateau selected for resettlement on the new manors. Then he’d installed the present Count’s father, who’d been his second-in-command and to whom Norman Arminger owed multiple favors, and departed for the next urgent job. Of which there had been an infinite number then.

A nice workmanlike job, Tiphaine thought judiciously. Solid, like Conrad.

She’d been fourteen then, training with Katrina in Lady Sandra’s household, initially for clandestine work. Young females made extremely efficient assassins, if they had the right attitudes, training and native talent. They just didn’t attract the eye of wary suspicion the way your average hulking macho brute did, particularly if the target was a hulking macho brute, which most had been. Profound surprise had been the last expression on a lot of faces she and Katrina had dispatched to their putative rewards via stiletto, crossbow, piano-wire garrote, poison-filled hypodermic and various other unpleasantnesses.

It was very like Sandra to see the possibilities instantly when two vicious, intelligent, hungry, traumatized and extremely athletic barely teenaged girls managed to infiltrate her heavily guarded private quarters and demand a job on Change Day Forty. Norman Arminger had just laughed himself sick and told her to go ahead with the Sailor Moon Squad if she thought it was worthwhile. They’d both agreed that the rough and ragged material they were trying to forge into an elite needed a lot of culling, particularly the non-Society elements.

People don’t realize how much of what Norman did was possible because he had people like Conrad carrying water for him and Sandra to handle the Deep Thought. What’s that old saying, you can accomplish almost anything if you’re willing to let someone else get the credit? And now it’s my job to see that this place doesn’t fall and plays its part in the campaign, and I don’t care a damn if the chroniclers all go on about Rudi and Mathilda and don’t give me more than a footnote.

Walla Walla’s defenses stood in a stout irregular rectangle now, ferroconcrete and rubble walls forty feet high faced with hard granite; round towers reared half that again at intervals, with conical roofs of witch-hat shape on top sheathed in lead or copper, the whole surrounded by a deep moat. The wartime hoardings were up over the crenellations of the wall, sloping metalfaced timber roofs that protected the fighting platform from arrow fire and let defenders shoot and drop things straight down from under cover.

The old penitentiary had been the foundation for the big castle that made the northwestern corner of the new walled city; she could see its massive machicolated towers silhouetted against the blazing colors of the western sky. A blimp-shaped observation balloon at three thousand feet up stood black against the dark blue vault of heaven, the long curve of its tethering cable hardly visible at all.

As she watched a signal light began to snap from its basket, aimed east in a rapid flicker of coded Morse, probably sending to one of the castles in the foothills of the mountains there.

There were still around fifteen thousand people here in peacetime, half what Portland had and nearly as much as Corvallis. The rich farmlands, pastures, orchards and vineyards of the Walla Walla valley and the timber of the Blue Mountains to the east brought it wealth, as did trade in peacetime; in war it was an outpost against the city-state of Pendleton to the south and the United States of Boise to the north and east. Or against both and the Prophet’s hordes from Montana, now.

Banners flew from the peaks of tower and gatehouse. Besides the scarlet-yellow-black Lidless Eye of the PPA, there were the arms of the Aguirre family who were Counts Palatine of the Eastermark and Barons of Walla Walla-Or, a tree vert with a wolf passant sable, on a tree brun-and now the crowned mountain and sword of the High Kingdom of Montival flying above them all. Sandra had seen to that throughout the Association territories and encouraged it elsewhere, even before the putative High King got back.

Well, I helped train Rudi. . Artos. . all those years since I first kidnapped him. He’s certainly very capable; a little sentimental, but hard enough when he has to be, and extremely smart. Deadly dangerous with any weapon, too. I wouldn’t have believed a man over six feet could move that fast, if I hadn’t seen it myself. The only man I’ve ever met as fast as I am.

Her thoughts shied away from the Sword of the Lady. Not that she didn’t believe in it; it was so real that your belief became utterly irrelevant. Too real. You got the feeling that it could tear through the fabric of things at any moment, like a heavy weight through damp paper. Meaning itself crumbled around it.

She went on aloud: “All right, get them moving in relays, Sir Tancred,” she said, as an empty train rumbled in from the east. “It’s important that their kinfolk inside the walls know they’re safe. See all those watchers on the parapet? Seeing vulnerable dependents heading out will help morale a great deal. They can fight to defend their families while the families are out of immediate danger.”

Tancred nodded, looking thoughtful for a second; he was an extremely capable young man or he wouldn’t be commanding the Protector’s Guard regiment, but he needed to gain a broader perspective if he was going to rise further. Another thing Sandra and Conrad had drummed into her hard long ago was that a big part of commanding was finding which of your subordinates could learn and then keeping them at it.

A second throng of civilians waiting a hundred yards farther down rose to their feet. This clump was more feisty, or just more frightened, and tried to stumble forward in a rush. The infantry sweating in their harness cursed wearily as they locked their big kite-shaped shields together into a wall to keep the frightened peasants from cluttering the track too soon. The train screeched to a halt as the brakemen wrestled with the horizontal wheels between each car.

She heard the sergeant shouting again: “Get back there, you dimwit churls, wait your turn-wait your Saints-forsaken turn-push them back, men, push them, Turchil, you weeping pustle on Satan’s dick, put your shoulder into that shield and push, man!”

“They’ll be loading the noncombatants and refugees and sending them west all night, then, Grand Constable,” Tancred went on. “If we push, we should be able to get it done by the time the army’s ready to march, which will leave the line clear and the rolling stock and teams on hand at our supply base on the navigable Columbia. There’s an intact line all the way northeast to Dayton we could use as we advance.”

“Very good, Sir Tancred,” Tiphaine d’Ath replied. “We should get out of the way, then. You’re camp commandant until I get back from consulting with the Count. I’ll probably be staying the night at the City Palace; it would raise questions if I didn’t.”

She’d have to wait for the local overlord to come out; it would be within her rights but a political faux pas to enter the city before an invitation and ideally himself to welcome her in person, and she’d sent word she’d be busy all day. On the other hand, it would also be impolite not to be here near the gate waiting to be greeted at the hour she’d specified. Tiphaine d’Ath tried very hard never to be unintentionally offensive.

“Don’t take any nonsense,” she went on. “You speak with my authority, and the Lady Regent’s, and that of the High King. And send me Lord Forest Grove soon as he’s ready. Tell him the Count should be here fairly soon, and I’ll need him then to report on the situation up near the front.”

Lord Rigobert Gironda de Stafford, Baron Forest Grove, was in charge of the allied. .

Montivalan. We’re all part of Montival now, not just allies. Completely and utterly forget how we spent the first ten Change Years fighting each other, Tiph, and the next ten watching each other with gimlet-eyed suspicion and thinking about fighting each other again someday. Down the memory hole, as Sandra puts it. You’ve got seven regiments of Yakima foot from the Free Cities in this army and glad to have them, the stubborn bastards fought us to a standstill, after all. Montivalans.

. . Montivalan screening force to the northeast.

His men were buying time for this army to form up. Buying it with blood, and now he had to come back for a conference.

There was no avoiding it, but Tiphaine d’Ath looked in that direction, towards the distant line of mountains, and suppressed a fierce desire to be there.

And to know what the hell’s been going on up there. Reports just aren’t the same.

COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK

BARONY OF TUCANNON

(FORMERLY SOUTHEASTERN WASHINGTON STATE)

PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

AUGUST 18, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

Make a mistake, you sons of bitches. You’re out there. I can feel it, I can smell it. Come on, screw up.

Ingolf Vogeler carefully leveled the binoculars from where he lay just below the crest of the ridge, using a hand to shade the lenses so they would give no betraying flash in the noonday sunlight. This whole country on the fringe of the Blue Mountains was smooth ridge and slope making valleys, sometimes with a bit of a creek running down the vale between, sometimes dry, getting steeper as you went east.

Send me a nice cocksure kid, Lord, he thought. Or Manwë or Varda or whatever. Nineteen, a hard-on with legs, he’s invincible, he’s immortal, he knows it all. Give me something to work with.

There was a thin stand of tall straight ponderosa pine along the top here, smelling like butterscotch and vanilla as sap oozed out of cracks in their orange bark; the trees got thicker behind him too, up into the heights. Downslope were scattered thickets of shrubby mountain mahogany, and then grass rolling away in billowing folds that rose up the slope on the other side. Very faint marks in it along the contour indicated that it had been cultivated before the Change, but now it was in bunchgrass again, bleached almost white by summer but still good fodder. A herd of several hundred sheep and a few alpacas grazed it, and drank from the little summer-sunken trickle through the cottonwoods at the base.

“Good woolies,” he murmured very softly to himself. “Just eat the grass, drink the water, crap wherever the hell you please, look appealing and vulnerable. Good woolies.”

Though in fact they were still looking spindly with the late-spring shearing; you forgot how leggy sheep actually were if you only saw them with twelve pounds of fleece wrapped around them. A couple of mounted girls in leather pants and thin shirts and broad-brimmed Stetson hats watched over them, directing their dogs and keeping an arrow on the string for predators. That probably made both the humans and the sheep down there a lot more comfortable than his light mail shirt and the padded gambeson underneath it left him. He was used to sweating, though, and it was more bearable in this dry Western climate than in the humid Midwest summers he’d grown up with.

Minutes crawled by, the smell of sap grew stronger, and small pale grasshoppers went by his nose in ticking leaps. Ants trooped through the pine needles and sparse grass bearing a beetle aloft in bloodthirsty triumph, and somewhere a ground squirrel whistled, sounding a little like a woodchuck but with more of a chitter to it. Occasionally a little of the light powdery loess soil would blow into his face with a gust of the wind that soughed through the branches of the tall straight pines, and the dirt stuck to the sweat.

A golden eagle soared down the little valley, and several collies ran around barking hysterically in protective reflex as its broad-winged shadow fell on the flock. It sheered off at an upraised bow, evidently thinking the lambs not worth the risk of an arrow; in his considerable experience most predators knew the range of human weapons to a foot. A big golden eagle could carry off a lamb. Some folk trained and used them for hunting deer and wolves, which Ingolf considered more trouble than it was worth. Pronghorn antelope trooped by out in the rolling country northwestward, raising a thin cloud of dust as they moved from north to south and occasionally breaking into a leaping frenzy for no perceptible reason except that they liked to jump and run.

His eyes kept up their steady, methodical scan. His attention was carefully general, waiting for the break in the pattern that would leap out because it didn’t belong. Then something tickled at the edge of his sight. He turned the glasses that way, and it became a tiny horseman with two remounts on a leading rein coming up out of a swale. That might be a scout, prepared to ride fast and far to escape pursuit if he was spotted. There was a quick blink of light as the distant man stood in the stirrups and raised something to his face. Ingolf put down his own binoculars and saw the same flicker of light again, and then once more. Without the glasses nothing was visible except the flash, but that could be seen for miles. And binoculars meant. .

“Gotcha, you stupid careless fuck,” Ingolf murmured, with a surge of savage satisfaction mixed with professional disapproval. “Now go back and tell your dumb careless friends that a mutton dinner’s just waiting for them. Grilled lamb chops too, you betcha, real tempting after a while on hardtack and beans.”

The problem with sending out scouts was that the scouts could be seen themselves. . and when you ran into a scout screen, seeing them told you a lot right there.

Plus he’d never yet met cavalry who could resist stealing livestock, or burning stuff down, and a good many of his thirty-one years had been spent as a horse-soldier himself, after he’d left home in a hurry, that or as a salvager working the dead cities. All the way across the continent, from his home along the Kickapoo river in what had once been Wisconsin (and was now part of the Free Republic of Richland) to the Pacific, with a side trip through the Wild Lands of the east to Nantucket, and he’d done it more than once. He doubted anyone since the Change had bounced around as much as he had.

And a lot of them are calling me Ingolf the Wanderer now. I’d be flattered, except that I’m damned sick of wandering. And I’m a married man now. I want to settle down, put my legs under my own table and my head under my own roof on my own land every day. OK, Ingolf, let’s win this war so we can.

Ten minutes, and the man disappeared, even his dust-trail invisible through the binoculars. Ingolf waited another ten, then cased the precious instrument and wormed his way backward on hands and knees to where he’d left his round shield, quiver of arrows and four-foot recurve horseman’s bow. He shrugged the archer’s baldric over his shoulder; the strung bow was pushed through loops on the outside of the quiver. Then he crawled a bit more. Not until he was a good ten yards back did he rise to one knee, turn and wave his hand in a signal.

A horse and rider lay at the base of the slope. The man slapped his mount’s neck; the horse rose, and the man was in the saddle as it did, and trotting west a heartbeat after. His own men were out there, and the Sioux contingent under Rick Three Bears, and Ingolf’s wife Mary, and her followers-Dúnedain Rangers. Of which he supposed he was one too.

Sorta. Kinda.

“Go let ’em know, Mark,” Ingolf muttered. “I’ve got to see the local panjandrum.”

He walked down the slope, a big broad-shouldered man with a bear’s strength in his long limbs and thick shoulders. But he moved lightly, with a sort of lazy precision; his shaggy ear-length hair was sun-faded brown, his eyes dark blue in a weathered face that had been better looking before a broken nose and a fair assortment of scars, some showing as white hairs in his close-cropped beard. There was a sword by his side, the heavy horseman’s chopping blade known as a shete, and a bowie on the other hip, with the handle of a tomahawk tucked through a loop at the back.

None of the weapons clattered as he scooped up his helmet-a locally made sallet with a neck-flare-and trotted across the open grassland with the scabbard of the shete in his left hand. The black cottonwoods here were thicker than in the next valley over with the sheep, up to forty or fifty feet tall, with a dense understory along their edge. He slowed down as he approached them and waved his sword-hand to show it was empty.

Because there are a bunch of local yokels with crossbows there; I’m not coming back to the same spot I slipped out of. I don’t think some of them really grasp the distinction between stranger and enemy all that well. Christ. . Manwë. . but a lot of the peasants on these Association manors are more like turnips than people. And I thought we Readstowners were hicks!

“Come ahead!” someone said from ahead of him. “Slowly!”

He came ahead. . slowly. Sure enough, two crossbows were pointed at him, and a bunch of spears with unpleasant foot-long heads sharpened until the naked metal gleamed. The men behind them were bearded if they were old enough for it, with fairly close-cropped hair; short hair was a lower-class marker here, like their shapeless linsey-woolsey shirt-tunics and wool pants and moccasinlike shoes tied at the ankle with thongs. Ingolf spread his arms.

“Ingolf Vogeler. Your ally. Remember?” he said.

The powerful smell they gave off was just summer and not much opportunity to wash in the last little while. They didn’t have the crusted, scabrous appearance or the hard stink people did in areas where the habit of washing at all had died out. And the weapons were pointed up once they recognized him as one of the newfound allies helping them fight Boise and the Prophet. A couple of them even smiled.

Better than I expected.

“Take me to your leader,” he said.

“The lord baron has arrived with his menie, my lord,” one of them said.

His full-time soldiers, Ingolf mentally translated. What we’d call his deputies back home, or National Guardsmen.

“Girars, you show him,” the oldest of the men said; he might have been anything from a work-gnarled thirty to fifty.

The militiaman delegated for the job was pathetically young, not more than seventeen and a bit scrawny with a growth spurt, with only a little yellow peach-fuzz on his acne-scarred cheeks. The steel-strapped leather breastplate and simple bullet-shaped conical helmet he wore both seemed too big for him; he left the four-foot kite-shaped shield propped against a stump, which was a bad sign. Ingolf’s own went on his back on a leather strap, where he could swing it forward with a quick duck of his left shoulder and pull.

Yeah, those big shields weigh fifteen pounds, the way they make them here. But if you suddenly need a shield, you need it bad. I’d roast his ass for leaving it just ’cause it’s heavy and awkward if he were in my outfit. Better years of a sore arm than one minute of an arrow in the gut. I’m tempted to do it anyway, but I don’t know the baron well enough to interfere in his chain of command.

The militiaman led Ingolf forward and down the bank of the dry river to the sandy bottom, an arroyo they called it hereabouts. The branches of the cottonwoods mingled overhead, turning the creek bed into a tunnel of green that sparkled with moving golden flickers.

It was cooler here, too, and easy walking. No water showed, but the sandy bottom was damp in spots, and insects buzzed and clicked. This was a fair-sized river in the winter rains, to judge from the height of the banks; it might flow at night even in August, when the cottonwoods weren’t sucking water and pumping it into the air. It was a convenient place to be safely out of sight in daytime right now, but it would be dangerous a little later in the year; he’d spent enough time in arid areas to understand what a flash flood meant.

“My lord. . is there going to be a fight?” the boy asked after they were out of sight and hearing of his friends and neighbors.

Ingolf stopped himself from barking: I’m not a lord!

He was a Sheriff’s son back home-his father had been the one who organized his remote rural district after the Change and led the effort to deal with the failure of the machines and the wave of city folk fleeing chaos and starvation. He’d become a powerful landowner in the process, a giver of judgments and leader of the local Farmers and their dependent Refugees in war and peace. Now Ingolf’s elder brother Edward held the position.

And actually does a pretty decent job at it. I. . well, I can’t wish we hadn’t quarreled when Dad died. If I hadn’t stormed out, I wouldn’t be where I am now, which is not such a bad place. I’m glad we made it up when the Quest passed through, though. Glad I got to see Wanda again and my nieces and nephews even if young Mark is a pain in the butt sometimes.

Being a Sheriff didn’t mean quite as much back in Richland as a title of nobility did around here and they were a lot less formal about it, but he was roughly equivalent to the younger son of a baron in Association terms.

The whole feudal folderol is pretty damned silly to my way of thinking, names from books and all, but they take it very seriously indeed here in this part of Montival. And they outnumber me about six, seven hundred thousand to one and I have to stay here for now, so they can call themselves whatever the fuck they please, right.

“Probably there’s going to be more than one fight, kid,” he said instead. “Those bastards aren’t invading your land ’cause they love you.”

“I’m not scared, my lord,” the boy said, lying transparently. “It’s just. . my family’s not far. My mom and my brothers and sisters and all.”

“Then don’t let them get past you, that’s all I can say. Kill the other bastard before he can kill you and your home and family are safe. Running from a fight just means it follows you. It’s as simple as that.”

The boy’s grimy knuckles tightened and went white on the spear shaft; he’d probably take the advice to heart. Ingolf had long since seen that it was a rare and lousy specimen of a man who couldn’t show willing with his back to his home and kin.

And probably he’ll get himself killed and die still a virgin, poor brave little clod. I’ve also seen how much willing counts for when amateurs go up against real soldiers with real gear, who know what they’re doing when the amateurs don’t.

Another set of sentries stopped and identified them, and then they began to pass horses picketed on either side of the arroyo, tethered to ropes strung from pegs driven into the sandy soil. Most simply stood hipshot, their tails swishing regularly; others were being watered, with buckets filled at holes dug in the lower parts of the sandy bed of the seasonal watercourse. The homey, familiar smell of horse-piss, horse-sweat and manure added to the odors of damp sand and sun-baked earth and grass and sagebrush.

Lord Maugis de Grimmond, Baron Tucannon and enfeoffed vassal of the Counts Palatine of Walla Walla, was a year or two younger than Ingolf, which meant he’d been four or so at the time of the Change. His parents had both been SCA members in Oregon who threw their lot in with Norman Arminger and ended up with a barony here.

Mathilda is a fine person, but her dad was one heap big bad badass, from all I’ve been able to gather, Ingolf thought. Still, needs must. Those were hard times. Mary’s father, Rudi’s dad Mike Havel, killed Arminger.

Though he’d only survived it by about forty minutes before dying of the wounds Arminger inflicted; and now Rudi was married to Norman Arminger’s only child. The family politics here got twisty, and he was still learning his way around them. For one thing, Rudi’s mother Juniper Mackenzie hadn’t been married to Mike Havel, either. Mary’s mother, Signe, had married him. She still wasn’t what you’d call overenthusiastic about Rudi or Juniper, though she and the outfit Havel had founded and she ran, the Bearkillers, had accepted High King Artos gracefully over around Larsdalen on the other side of the Willamette from Clan Mackenzie. Mary and her twin Ritva had moved out from there in their teens to live in the woods with their Aunt Astrid, who was. . strange. Even by comparison with other people who’d had a rough time in the first Change Year.

Like most Changelings his age Ingolf had elastic standards when it came to what was or wasn’t outright barking madness, having grown up among an adult population many of whose members had been strained beyond the breaking point by what they’d seen, suffered and done to survive. They were functional most of the time or they’d have been bones in a ditch somewhere, but screaming sweating nightmares or people who suddenly burst into tears or rages at odd moments were pretty common, and every year brought a trickle of suicides done one way or another. His own father had just taken a bottle out to a barn and drunk himself unconscious now and then; you could see it coming on in his eyes, when he got to remembering.

And Mike Havel wasn’t nasty like Arminger, or crazy like Arminger, but he was a hard man and no mistake. Dad did what was necessary back then too, so I’m not going to be too snippy about this baron guy’s parents. They lived, and so did their kids. And if it helped to plaster everything with names out of old books, so be it.

Their son had coarse, curly bowl-cut red hair of a dark copper color like an old penny, pale skin of the sort that turned ruddy rather than tanning, slightly buck teeth, a big nose and ears like the handles of a jug. He also wore a full set of Western plate armor except for the helmet and the gauntlets, which lay beside him, and while he wasn’t particularly large he moved as if the weight and heat and constriction didn’t bother him more than dayclothes.

He was busily engaged in cutting bread and cheese, using a painted shield as a platter. Ingolf dredged up newly acquired heraldic knowledge to read it: Argent, a fess Gules, in chief two greyhounds courant proper while the nobleman stopped and glanced up at the pair. The peasant spearman bowed low in a complicated gesture with something like a curtsy involved. Maugis returned it with a nod that was. . literally. . lordly.

Mind you, he could have just ignored the kid.

“Thank you, Girars. . Bero, get some of this, take it back to the rest at your post, boy. . and tell your father I’m glad he’s keeping a sharp lookout,” he said.

“Thank you, my lord!” the youngster said, louting low again as he accepted the loaves and cheese and meat wrapped in a length of coarse sacking.

“And Girars, next time you leave your post, take your shield with you as well as your spear, or you’ll be very sorry.”

“Yes, my lord!”

The nobleman turned to Ingolf, and bowed respectfully with the gesture between equals.

“Colonel Ingolf! Welcome, my lord of Readstown. What news of the enemy?”

Of course, when it comes to people here being polite to me it sure as shoot doesn’t hurt that I went with Rudi all the way to Nantucket and back and am officially now one of the Nine Companions of the Sword- Quest in song and story. Or that I married his half sister on the way, Mary being a big wheel among the Dúnedain Rangers and now a princess, more or less. Since Rudi is High King Artos these days. I didn’t realize quite how important she was, and it wasn’t why I married her, but since it’s a fact. . well, use the mojo where you can get it, Ingolf old son. Sure as shit beats being a wandering paid soldier the local Farmers wouldn’t let in the front door and the Bossmen treated like something nasty you scrape off your shoe on a hot day.

“Looks like we’ll have company the way I thought, my lord Tucannon,” he said aloud.

“You saw them?” the nobleman said eagerly.

“Saw one of them, and he saw the sheep. It was an enemy scout, all right; I caught the sun-blink off his binoculars. I sent my aide back to alert our own scouts and they should be reporting in. . an hour to three.”

The baron nodded. Binoculars were an expensive specialty tool and among the most prized of salvage from the old world; the modern replacements just starting to appear were bulkier, not nearly as good, and almost as expensive. Field glasses ended up in the hands of those whose missions really demanded them, or those of extremely high status.

Ingolf went on: “And you can bet he’s part of the screen for a cavalry outfit. One gets you ten they take the bait.”

That brought a general rustle. About forty of the men sitting with their backs against the bank upstream of him munching on sausage and bread and cheese were equipped in articulated steel plate much like their lord; some of them de Grimmond’s household knights and men-at-arms, and the rest his vassal knights called up from their manors and their men-at-arms. They were the ones who fought as heavy cavalry; the twelve-foot lances they’d carry were stacked neatly in pyramids of ash wood and steel.

Very bad news if you can’t get out of the way, dodge around and pepper them with arrows, Ingolf thought. If you can. . not so much.

He had a suit of plate complete too, the gift of Sandra Arminger, but he preferred lighter gear for work like this.

You have to use great big horses with that ironmongery, and even bigger ones if they’re wearing armor too. They’re fast in a charge, but not what you’d call nimble, and they get tired out quick.

Rather more men wore light armor of leather and mail like Ingolf’s; they also had tight horseman’s breeches, swords and powerful recurve bows of horn and sinew and wood. This far east the PPA bred its own cowboys and hence horse-archers. There were also foot spearmen with the same big kite-shaped shields as the knights and crossbowmen with small round bucklers and their specialist missile weapons; both carried swords as well and they wore what they called three-quarter armor here, which was like a man-at-arms’ but with some of the pieces left off. Spearmen and crossbowmen and men-at-arms were the three types of soldier that Association military tenure required landholders here to maintain and furnish at need.

All those looked at least unbothered by the prospect of bloodshed, working on their gear or talking quietly and joking as they ate, a few praying with their rosaries in their hands, a couple even sleeping; but then it was their trade, more or less, even if the infantry did farming on the side and the horse-archers stared up the ass-end of a lot of livestock. The rest of the force were dispersed up and down the arroyo in spots where water was available and the cover good, several hundreds strong; they were peasant militia not unlike the unfortunate Girars, a few callow-eager, most grimly determined. Ingolf suspected that their main military purpose would be to absorb arrows that might otherwise hit a real fighter.

“If they do come, we’re ready,” said the baron.

Ingolf looked back over his shoulder, juggling distances and the lie of the land.

“You sure you can take heavy horse down that slope?” he said, a little dubious. “Looked mighty steep to take fast, much less a flat-out charge in all that gear.”

The baron laughed and handed Ingolf a length of dried and smoked mutton sausage, salty and greasy and pungent with garlic and sage and hot peppers, balanced on a thick chunk of maslin wheat-and-barley bread with a slab of strong-smelling cheese a little runny with the heat. There was a helmet full of onions not far away, another full of raisins and dried apricots, and someone was handing around a skin bottle of water cut with a rough red wine. Ingolf sat with one foot drawn up-which let you get back on your feet in a hurry, a fixed habit he’d picked up long ago-and set to the food, using his own helmet to hold things he wasn’t chewing on at the moment.

It was all reasonably undecayed, and far, far better than some things he’d eaten in the field. Nearly raw foundered mule three days dead, eaten in a weeping late-autumn rainstorm that kept smothering the fire, for instance.

“Lord Vogeler,” de Grimmond said patiently. “This is not only my barony of Tucannon, it’s Grimmond manor, the place I was raised as far back as I can remember and where I’ve spent nine-tenths of my life. I’ve ridden and hunted and hawked and walked and strolled and camped out and searched for strayed stock and led my men-in-arms practice and occasionally fought bandits or raiders over every inch of it starting when I could walk three steps. Yes, it’s steep right there, but we can do it.”

“Point taken, my lord,” Ingolf said. “I’d laugh at you if you gave me advice on using terrain back in Readstown. We’ll need confirmation on how many of them there are before we settle the details of the plan, of course.”

He finished the food, extracted some gristle from between his teeth and went to check on his horses, including his favorite, a big brown gelding named Boy he’d picked up in Nebraska years ago. He made a point of feeding them some of the apricots. A horse wasn’t like a water mill where you pulled a lever and got a given result. It was important that it liked and trusted you as well as knowing you were boss.

Then he went back and waited, thumbing through a copy of The Silmarillion from his saddlebags, which was more or less essential if you were going to be part of the Dúnedain Rangers, into which he’d married. This edition was from the Mithrilwood Press. The cover was gilt-stamped tooled leather over board, and it had annotations by her aunt Astrid Loring-Larsson, the Lady of the Rangers, along with her Helpful Hints on Modern Spoken Sindarin at the end. She had started the Rangers a few years after the Change, she and her anamchara Eilir, Juniper Mackenzie’s daughter. They and their husbands still ran the outfit.

That priest I met in Fargo said Christians and Jews are People of the Book. Well, so are the Dúnedain Rangers! Or Books, plural.

He’d actually read some of the other stories by this guy when he was younger…

OK, hold that thought. According to Astrid Loring, the Hiril Dúnedain, those aren’t stories, they’re the Histories and the Englishman was The Historian, inspired by the Valar demigods even if he didn’t know it and every word is goddamned gospel true. I don’t know if all the Rangers actually buy that. . I’m not really sure how seriously Mary takes it. . but on brief acquaintance with her aunt I think that living in the woods with Astrid for a couple of years would convince pretty well anyone, much less a bunch of impressionable teenagers who wanted to believe in the first place. . It’s the official line anyway, sure as shit stinks. What the hell, it works. And it’s no sillier than all these Protectorate guys ready to draw swords over who gets to paint what stuff on their shield. All your perspective, I guess.

When you considered what the Cutters believed about their Ascended Masters and the Nine Rays and whatnot, it wasn’t even very strange. Nor was the Church Universal and Triumphant just imagining things. There was something there, it just wasn’t what they thought it was.

A soft call came from one of the sentries and he stuffed the book away. A few minutes later two figures came up leading their horses.

The one in the lead was Mark Vogeler, his nephew and aide-de-camp. The boy would be eighteen about Christmas, but he was tall and well built for his age; still gawky but when and if he got his full growth he’d look a lot like his uncle, except that his hair was the color of corn tassels and that his snub-nosed face was considerably less battered. The mail shirt and helmet he wore, his shete, tomahawk, the quiver over his back and the laminated recurve bow in its saddle scabbard on his horse, were all of the highest quality and they’d been new that spring.

But they’d seen use since. The long trip from Readstown and several stiff fights had knocked a lot of the puppylike piss and vinegar out of the eldest son of Edward Vogeler; he was no longer quite the brash youngster who’d virtually blackmailed his kin into letting him come along to the war. The grin was still wide and white in his dark-tanned face below the mop of summer-faded hair.

“Reporting, Colonel Vogeler,” he said, saluting and handing over a folded sheaf of papers. With a bow that showed how quickly he’d picked up local custom: “My lord Tucannon.”

The other newcomer was in worn buckskins deliberately stained and mottled in shades of brown and sage-green to make them better camouflage. He was a short brown-skinned man in his thirties with black braided hair and high cheekbones, definitely Indian or mostly so. He bowed as well but remained silent afterwards, squatting with his reins tucked through his belt and munching on a handful of the apricots someone passed him.

“Ah,” Ingolf said, flipping quickly through the papers covered in small, neat handwriting and hand-drawn maps. “Yup, Lady Mary’s report. About three hundred fifty men, Boise light cavalry, regulars, all horse-archers, with a battery of four springalds along with them. Damn, horse artillery. I hate those things.”

Everyone in hearing nodded, including the men-at-arms. Plate would turn most arrows, unless they came from a powerful bow and hit just right. Springalds were like giant crossbows on wheeled carriages, but they threw four-foot bolts powered by an entire set of leaf-springs from the rear suspension of a light truck. They had three times the range of a bow and they’d punch through knight’s armor as if it were made from old tin cans. A good crew could fire nearly as fast as a crossbow, with two men heaving on the cocking levers from behind the steel shield that protected them from arrows.

“They’re advancing in squadron columns-”

Which meant forty or fifty men each.

“-with a good screen out. A remuda of a couple of hundred horses bringing up the rear. A reconnaissance in strength, the lead element of a powerful raiding party out to disrupt your harvest and seize or destroy what they can, or both. Likely both. And they’re definitely turning east towards that valley, so it looks as if they’re going to go for the sheep. Confirmed by Rick Three Bears.”

Ingolf grinned. “He adds that they’re well mounted. Those horses are plain wasted on white-eyes, quote unquote.”

De Grimmond looked encouraged. And also, Ingolf thought, the tiniest bit uncertain. That was natural; he knew Ingolf and his Richlanders and the Dúnedain only by reputation, and the Lakota contingent led by Three Bears barely even by legend. The leather-clad man who’d come in behind Mark Vogeler spoke.

“My lord, I can confirm that.”

De Grimmond nodded. “Go on. Tom Yallup, isn’t it? You saw it?”

The man was a Yakima, from a tribe farther west who’d lost heavily in the Change and then in the long brutal wars between the Free Cities of the Yakima League and the Association; they’d ended up tributary to the PPA on what was left of their land. The tribute included horses, and in time of war scouts. Both had a high reputation.

“Tom Yallup, that’s me, my lord,” the man said, looking pleased at being recognized. “Yeah, I saw it. Their commander had this sideways red crest on his helmet.”

“Definitely Boise,” de Grimmond said. “A Centurion’s crest. Old General Thurston had an odd obsession with Ancient Rome and his son’s worse.”

Ingolf coughed frantically. “Sorry,” he gasped. “Swallowed wrong.”

The Indian scout went on, shaking his head ruefully: “It was hard keeping up. Those Rangers, they’re like ghosts. Real smooth scouting, real smooth, they’ve got an eye for the way the land lies. And the Lakota. . they’re some serious ’skins, my lord.”

“Right. Let’s proceed, then.”

Ingolf nodded. “We come in behind them; my Richlanders first, to hit their rearguard, and the Sioux behind as reserve, to make sure none of them escape. The enemy will try to disengage and break contact when they realize they’re outnumbered, the valley side on the south isn’t impassable for mounted men and they’ll think they can get around us that way, hit us on the flank or escape and get back to their main body. You ram into them right then when they’re not expecting it and the impact ought to break them. And, my lord, the High King instructed me to say that he wants prisoners, if they’re willing to surrender. Particularly if they’re US of Boise men.”

De Grimmond nodded. “It’s in accordance with the laws of chivalry anyway,” he said. “But thank you for the reminder, Lord Vogeler; it’ll help keep that in my vassals’ minds. God go with you.”

“Good luck to you too, Lord de Grimmond.”

“It is a good day to die,” Rick Mat’o Yamni-Three Bears-said solemnly, in a deep sonorous voice, with a broad gesture of one hand.

Rick was a young man, about Rudi Mackenzie’s age, with a hawk-nosed high-cheeked face and a complexion a little darker than a deep tan; his furbound braids were a very dark brown, and there were green flecks in his dark eyes. His mother’s name was Fox Woman, from the color of her hair; she’d been one of the many volunteers who’d ended up joining the Lakota nation, as it re-emerged from the Change. By now the Seven Council Fires dominated much of the northern High Plains; since last May they’d also been formally part of Montival, in exchange for complete internal autonomy and a pledge of help in defending their borders.

Rick’s father John Whapa Sa, Red Leaf, had negotiated it. He’d also sent his son and three hundred warriors along when Rudi came home to Montival, as a symbol.

“It is a day when the sun shines on the Hawk and on the quarry,” Rick went on, raising both hands in a hieratic gesture. “We shall take many horses, many scalps!”

Three Bears had white and black bars painted across his face, the eagle feathers that marked his deeds in his braids, and his steel helmet was topped by buffalo hair and horns. There was an ornamental vest of white bone tubes across his entirely functional shirt of riveted mail, and a string of perfectly genuine tufts of scalp-hair down the leather seams of his buffalocalf breeches. Tom Yallup was staring at him and his followers-some of whom were in full fig of eagle-feather bonnet-with a look halfway between fascination and suspicion.

Suddenly Rick grinned at him and burst into laughter, leaning his hands on the pommel of his saddle.

“Nah, I’m just fuckin’ with your head, dude.”

He turned to Ingolf. “OK, cousin, give us until”-his arm pointed accurately to where the sun would be at about three-“to get into position and start playing Cowboys and Indians. We want to make sure we get ’em all. Otherwise we’re blown and whoever’s following on will know where we are.”

“Right,” Ingolf said. “That would be a bad thing. Hey, tahunsa, remember we’re supposed to take ’em alive if we can.”

“Sure thing, Iron Bear,” he said, which was mildly impolite; his people didn’t use personal names when it could be avoided. “Shee! How could you possibly think we’d do anything else? Gentle as kittens, that’s us.”

Then he stood in the stirrups and waved his bow overhead. “Hokahe! Let’s go, Lakota!”

The Sioux poured away in a torrent, their horses moving like a wave of flowing water up the slope to the west and disappearing as if they were the passing of a dream.

Mary Vogeler, née Havel, laughed beside him. “What do you think the odds are they’ll take any prisoners?”

“Fucking zip, honey,” he said. “But they’ll collect every single horse, you betcha.”

“Ah. . Colonel. . Iron Bear?” the Yakima scout asked.

Mary answered him. “We spent some time with the Oglala last year. A good deal happened. I’m Zintkazawin, for example. Yellow Bird.”

She touched the wheat-blond hair that rested in a tight, complex fighting braid at the back of her neck below her light helmet; the ribbon that ran through it helped secure the patch over her missing eye. The other was a bright cornflower blue, in a face that was smoothly regular in a chiseled Nordic way.

“Rudi. . High King Artos. . is Strong Raven. It’s a considerable honor to be taken in by the Lakota,” she added sincerely.

Tom Yallup looked after the Sioux war party. “They really are some serious’skins,” he said again.

“Tell me,” Ingolf said. “I spent the first four years after I left home fighting them, and I never, ever want to have to do that again. It’s a lot more fun having them on my side.”

He turned and beckoned. Major Will Kohler came up beside him and drew rein.

“Yah hey, Colonel?” he said, in a heavier version of Ingolf’s rasping, singsong Richlander accent.

“Let’s get our Cheeseheads ready,” he said. “We’ll be moving out in about twenty minutes.”

There were still three hundred and sixty of the First Richland Volunteer Cavalry alive and fit for duty, after the long trip from the Kickapoo through the Midwest and the Dominions with Rudi and the rest of them. Their round shields were painted brown, with an orange wedge, the national colors of the Free Republic of Richland.

Like the Sioux contingent they were a symbol, in this case of the alliance against the Prophet between Montival and the League of Des Moines that encompassed the Midwest realms and their various Bossmen. They were also all volunteers, wild young men of the Farmer and Sheriff classes for the most part. Major Kohler had been the chief arms instructor for the Vogeler family Sheriffdom in Readstown; he was the oldest man in the regiment at forty, and he was a big part of why they’d shaken down very well. The other was the educational value of hard experience.

Educational for the ones that lived, Ingolf thought grimly. There were four hundred thirty of them when we left. But they’re not complaining.

Instead they were finishing off baiting the horses, feeding them cracked barley from nose bags. These were fairly tall beasts, not as muscular as the destriers, but not cow ponies either. More like what they called coursers here, and they benefited from some grain before really hard work. Then each squadron led theirs away from the water hole and put on their tack. If you could, you always rested your horses and unsaddled whenever possible, letting them roll and graze; every moment of that added to their endurance and speed when you desperately needed it. Horses were curiously fragile beasts, despite their size and strength. Dead ones had littered the trail of every big army he’d ever seen.

The orders were passed, blankets and saddles went on quickly, and each squadron mustered under its banner. Ingolf looked them over with a pang. They were him, minus a decade in most cases, big fair muscular young men born and fed from the same soil and folk that had bred him, and when they were gone back home-or dead-he’d probably never see their like again.

The Dúnedain were something else, wearing mail-lined leather tunics in sage-green and elegantly practical clothing of similar shades, chests blazoned with the Tree and Seven Stars and Crown and riding some of the prettiest horses he’d ever seen, mostly Arab by breed. They bowed in the saddle to him, with a massed murmur of “Ve thorthol.”

Which meant at your command, pretty much. He was getting good at conversations in pseudo-Elvish as long as they were mostly commonplaces and clichés. Though the first time Mary had started yelling in it during a clinch he’d nearly been thrown off his stride.

“No dirweg,” he replied: take care, or stay alert.

Polite youngsters, superb scouts in open country and even better in forests, very respectful of him as Mary’s husband and increasingly for his own abilities. . and all of them at least a bit weird, in his opinion. He supposed they were his future, rather than his past.

“I’ll keep the enemy in sight. . in our sight, out of theirs,” Mary said cheerfully, swinging up into the saddle of her dappled Arab mare as gracefully as an otter climbing onto a rock. “And let you know if they turn away from our muttonish bait.”

They reached out and touched hands for an instant; then she turned the horse with a motion of balance and thighs, and cried: “Garo chûr an dagororo! Noro lim, Rochael, noro lim!”

He suppressed his anxiety with a practiced effort of will. Mary was very, very good with her weapons; most of the few professional fighting women he’d met were. Male soldiers could get by with being average, more or less, because most of the opposition would be too. You had to be way out on the right edge of the curve if you were going to risk your life over and over again fighting people on average bigger and thicker-boned and stronger than you were. His wife wasn’t petite; she was a big strapping young woman taller than the average man, heavy as some and as strong as many. Sparring with her was like trying to nail a ghost to a wall, she was fast as a cat and sneaky as a fox, an even better rider than he was and a dead shot with the recurve. .

Of course, you can still just get unlucky, especially if there’s artillery involved. . back to business!

“Ensign Vogeler!” he said as they bore away northwest.

Mark brought up the trumpet he wore on a baldric.

“Sound advance in column of twos.”

This was all supposed to buy time. He hoped someone was using it.