Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ALSO BY S. M. STIRLING

  ALSO BY S. M. STIRLING

  NOVELS OF THE CHANGE

  ISLAND IN THE SEA OF TIME

  AGAINST THE TIDE OF YEARS

  ON THE OCEANS OF ETERNITY

  DIES THE FIRE

  THE PROTECTOR’S WAR

  A MEETING AT CORVALLIS

  THE SUNRISE LANDS

  THE SCOURGE OF GOD

  THE SWORD OF THE LADY

  THE HIGH KING OF MONTIVAL

  NOVELS OF THE SHADOWSPAWN

  A TAINT IN THE BLOOD

  THE COUNCIL OF SHADOWS

  OTHER NOVELS BY S. M. STIRLING

  THE PESHAWAR LANCERS

  CONQUISTADOR

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, September 2011

  Copyright © Steven M. Stirling, 2011

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Stirling, S. M.

  The tears of the sun: a novel of the change/S. M. Stirling.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54385-6

  I. Title.

  PS3569.T543T43 2011

  813’.54—dc23 2011025290

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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  This one’s for Kier

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Yet more!

  Thanks to my friends who are also first readers:

  To Steve Brady, for assistance with dialects and British background, and also natural history of all sorts.

  Thanks also to Kier Salmon, insufficiently credited collaborator, for once again helping with the beautiful complexities of the Old Religion, and with . . . well, all sorts of stuff! Sometimes I feel guilty about not paying her.

  To Diana L. Paxson, for help and advice, and for writing the beautiful Westria books, among many others. If you liked the Change novels, you’ll probably enjoy the hell out of the Westria books—I certainly did, and they were one of the inspirations for this series; and her Essential Asatru and recommendation of Our Troth were extremely helpful . . . and fascinating reading.

  To Dale Price, help with Catholic organization, theology and praxis; and for his entertaining blog, Dyspeptic Mutterings, which can be read at http://dprice.blogspot.com/.

  To Brenda Sutton, for multitudinous advice.

  To Melinda Snodgrass, Emily Mah, Terry England, George R. R. Martin, Walter Jon Williams, Vic Milan, Jan Stirling and Ian Tregellis of Critical Mass, for constant help and advice as the book was under construction.

  Thanks to John Miller, good friend, writer and scholar, for many useful discussions, for lending me some great books, and for some really, really cool old movies.

  Special thanks to Heather Alexander, bard and balladeer, for permission to use the lyrics from her beautiful songs, which can be—and should be!—ordered at www.heatherlands.com. Run, do not walk, to do so.

  Thanks again to William Pint and Felicia Dale, for permission to use their music, which can be found at www.pintndale.com and should be, for anyone with an ear and salt water in their veins.

  And to Three Weird Sisters—Gwen Knighton, Mary Crowell, Brenda Sutton and Teresa Powell—whose alternately funny and beautiful music can be found at http://www.threeweirdsisters.com/.

  And to Heather Dale for permission to quote the lyrics of her songs, whose beautiful (and strangely appropriate!) music can be found at www.HeatherDale.com, and is highly recommended. The lyrics are wonderful and the tunes make it even better.

  To S. J. Tucker for permission to use the lyrics of her beautiful songs, which can be found at www.skinnywhitechick.com, and should be.

  Thanks again to Russell Galen, my agent, who has been an invaluable help and friend for a decade now, and never more than in these difficult times.

  All mistakes, infelicities and errors are of course my own.

  CHAPTER ONE

  DUN JUNIPER

  DÙTHCHAS OF THE CLAN MACKENZIE

  (FORMERLY THE EAST-CENTRAL WILLAMETTE VALLEY, OREGON)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  JULY 31, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

  Rudi Mackenzie—Artos the First, High King of Montival though yet to be formally crowned—finished the last crusty bite of the ham sandwich, savoring the smoky taste of the cured meat and sharp cheese, and washed it down with the last swallow in the clay crock of beer. Then he leaned back against the smooth-worn roots of the gnarled wild apple tree and sighed, listening to the soft sough of wind in branches, the hum of bees. A sharp tup-tu
p came from a flock of little yellow-faced warblers diving through a cloud of mayflies, and then a buzzing zee-zee-zee-bzzzee as they swarmed off like swooping dots of sunlight into the Douglas firs above.

  “Now this,” he said, “is something on the order of a homecoming, so it is. Or close enough for government work, until the war is over. Which is appropriate, since now we are the government.”

  His newly handfasted bride Mathilda Arminger snuggled into the curve of his shoulder, a pleasant solid burden, her brown hair smelling of summer like the sun-warmed grass in which they rested, and her strong not-quitepretty features relaxed as she turned her face towards the sun. The weight didn’t bother him, though Mathilda was a rangy five-nine and had the leanly solid build of someone who’d trained to fight in armor most of her life. He was a tall man, born late in the first year of the Change—which made him a few months older than his bride—long-limbed, broad in the shoulders and narrow in the waist, with a regular high-cheeked face just on the edge of beauty, a shoulder-length mane of hair a color just halfway between gold and molten copper, and light eyes of a changeable blue-green-gray.

  “It’s fair beyond bearing, this is. We’ve seen everything from the Sunset Ocean to the lands of Sunrise and nothing can quite compare,” he said softly.

  He pulled a strand of long grass free and chewed meditatively on the stem as they looked down through the screen of firs to the open benchland below that made an irregular oval of grassland running east-west along the side of the hill, about a mile long and half a mile wide at its broadest. Most of it was rolling meadowland where horses and red-coated cattle grazed thick green grass starred with pink lupine and white daisies, separated by hawthorn hedge and white board fence into paddocks studded with great garry oaks or the tall black walnuts his mother’s great-uncle had planted long before the Change. Beyond that the forested ground fell away steeply and blocked sight of the little valley of Artemis Creek flowing westward into the great green-gold quilt of the Willamette lowlands. Those faded in turn to the blue line of the Coast Range on the very edge of sight, even to keen young eyes on a day cloudless from horizon to horizon.

  Mathilda crossed herself and touched her crucifix to her lips for an instant.

  “God made all lands beautiful in their own way,” she said. “But this is our way, or part of it. For Rudi and Mathilda, not just the King and Queen.”

  “It’s a good thing to have your heartstrings rooted in one place, small and very dear,” he agreed. “You build from there, but it’s the foundation, as the love of your kin is the starting place for a regard for folk in general.”

  When he’d left this place two years ago to journey to the Sunrise lands and return, there had still been a good deal of boy in his face. Though he’d already been a warrior of note and chosen tanist of the Clan, successor to his mother as Chief. There was little of that lad left, though the man the boy had become was contentedly relaxed for the moment. Living out a prophecy every day was much more wearing, he found, than simply living with one looming in his future had been, and he needed to take the moments of peace when he could.

  “I like the beard,” Mathilda said, tickling his jaw; he arched his neck and purred like a cat. “Very distinguished looking. This time. Not mangy, like the previous attempts.”

  “Like a wheat field struck by rust and weevils and blight that was, the black sorrow and shame of it, but the third’s the charm.”

  “I remember when you were sixteen and tried for a mustache. Your mother said: And aren’t you getting old enough to shave that peach fuzz on your lip now, boyo? You blushed crimson.”

  The short-cropped growth was a slightly darker shade than his head hair, and had come in dense and even this time.

  It adds a few years to my looks, Rudi thought. Which cannot hurt when I’m dealing with so many touchy men and women of power. Human beings are like that; buried memories of our childhoods, perhaps, when age is authority.

  She sighed. “Remember how we used to come up here as kids and lie finding shapes in the clouds?”

  “It drove your attendants mad. Not that some of them ever liked your spending part of the year here.”

  “Those ones didn’t last. Anyway, it was in the treaty.”

  Off to the left was the little waterfall, falling like a strand of silver lace over a lip of rock and into its pool, and below it the dam and querning gristmill, busy with grain from the just-completed harvest. Beyond that the distant snow peaks of the High Cascades glittered like islands of white against blue heaven in the east; the enemy held the Bend country overmountain, up to the forts in the passes. To his right he could just see the white stucco on the walls of Dun Juniper, and over it a blink of paint and gilding from the Chief’s Hall. The wind down from the crags carried a hint of the glaciers, and the strong wild scent of the great fir-forests that rolled mile after mile along the west-facing scarps.

  “We’re still driving them all crazy,” Mathilda said. “Just in different ways.”

  The oval of pastureland and garden on the knee of the hill below was a little crowded, with tents in many of the paddocks and far more horses than usual, including those of Dun Juniper’s share of the eastern refugees quartered in every Mackenzie settlement.

  “I wish we’d been able to do more than a flying visit in Portland and Castle Todenangst, though,” she added. “They’re home too.”

  She was in a kilt and plaid herself, not for the first time. She’d spent half of every year here since they were both ten, back at the end of the War of the Eye, and had often gone in Mackenzie dress for convenience’s sake. Now it was also a statement that the High Queen belonged to all her peoples, not just her native Portland Protective Association, the same reason she’d taken to wearing jeans and turtleneck when they were in Corvallis.

  Which was wise, given the long and well-merited grudges many bore from her ghastly bachlach of a father’s reign and the wars against the Association; there were still people to whom the sight of a cote-hardie or hose and houppelande were like a red rag to a bull. Some simply feared the Colossus of the North because it had more territory and as many people as all the rest put together. The War of the Eye had trimmed it back, but it had recovered quickly and had been growing steadily stronger in numbers and wealth and power all three under Sandra Arminger’s farsighted rule. That had made everyone nervous until the rise of the Prophet and the Church Universal and Triumphant had buried old feuds in a common fear.

  “Or the PPA outweighed all the other powers before we proclaimed Montival,” Mathilda murmured. “If you look at it in terms of everything from the Pacific to the Sioux country and not just as far as the Rockies, then the Association is cut down to size . . . and people may learn to relax about it a little.”

  Rudi chuckled. Their minds did tend to run alike. He’d heard that longmarried couples were often so. They’d been wed about one turning of the Moon, but he supposed being friends from childhood as well as lovers now hastened the process. Plus both being the children of rulers, and extremely shrewd ones.

  “But we have to win the war to make that more than a claim,” he said, and kissed her. The touch was soft and sweet, and he murmured: “In the meantime, your wearing a kilt does have its merits . . .”

  “Eeek! Rudi!”

  He stopped, a little unwillingly even though he’d been playing.

  “But we have permission from the Gods themselves now,” he said, teasing. “Yours in particular, since we were married in a Catholic church.”

  “Not in the open air. Someone might come by! I am Catholic, remember, not a witch-girl.”

  “Nobody’s coming by, not with Edain and a score of the High King’s Archers on guard.”

  “And they’re too close!”

  He sighed dramatically. “Alas, it’s right you are; their silent presence just out of sight would make for a little constraint?”

  “Just a little!”

  They rose, brushing bits of grass and the odd leaf off each other; Rudi put on
his flat Scots bonnet with the spray of raven feathers in its clasp. There was a clump of meadowsweet growing half a pace away; he made a sign of apology and murmured: “Let us share your beauty for a while, little sisters,” as he bent and plucked them and wove a garland. “My thanks to you and Her.”

  “There,” he said, setting the lacy cream-white flowers on her head, binding the long seal-brown hair that fell past her shoulders. “Queen of the Meadow to crown my Queen.”

  She kissed him again, and the sweet almond smell of the flowers encompassed them both.

  “Duty calls,” she said a moment later.

  “In a shrill unpleasant voice,” he agreed mournfully.

  Reflex as deep as instinct made them reach for their sheathed swords where they leaned against the tree with the belts wound around the tooled black leather of the scabbards; you didn’t go a step without steel in reach. Rudi felt a slight sudden cold shock as he touched his and swung the belt around his waist, doubling it and tucking the tongue under and settling the weight on his right hip with a twitch.

  He’d borne the Sword of the Lady for more than a year now, since that memorable day on Nantucket, and it still made the little hairs prickle along his spine every time he put his flesh to it anew. It was quiet today, or as much as the Sword ever was. There were times a casual eye might have mistaken it for an ordinary weapon of extraordinary quality. The form was that of a knight’s weapon, a yard of straight two-edged tapering blade with a slightly crescent-shaped guard and a double-lobed hilt of black staghorn. He gripped it and drew it slightly, enough for a handspan to gleam above the silver of the chape. Steel, at first glance. Then you could see the rippling, curling marks on it weren’t damascene work. They drew the eye inward, every pattern repeating, down and down and down, as if it were a window through the world.

  And the pommel, a sphere of crystalline moon-opal gripped in antlers. Light swirled in it—