The Tears of the Sun (44 page)

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

“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?”

“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.

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.