The Tears of the Sun tc-5 Read online

  “That’s my girl!” he laughed. “Though Chancellor Ignatius will have to take most of the burden perforce… and I’ll need him in the field eventually.”

  “He’s a very able man. And not from the Protectorate.”

  “Sure, and that’s one reason I appointed him. That and being absolutely sure of him.”

  She frowned, still lost in thought. “And that’s why I’m glad we sent your Aunt Astrid off on Operation Luthien.”

  “I took your advice on that, acushla, though it’s a thin chance, but what’s the relation?”

  “Mom always said you have to remember that individual people exist in themselves, but things like nations and clans and armies and classes and religions only exist because people think they exist. They’re not rocks, they’re a swarm of people all flocking in the same direction. I mean, think of Montival-it didn’t exist two years ago, and now it does, and that’s because we pretty much talked people into thinking it did. By letter, at that.”

  “A point, though we were pushing on an open door. The folk wanted to believe in a… dream of greatness. When people by the scores of thousands are convinced something is true, that truth can hit you very much like a rock. Hence our problems with the Church Universal and Triumphant and its Prophet Sethaz, the creature.”

  She nodded. “That’s so. But Mom also always said that when bunches of people are fighting against each other, whether it’s with arms or words, you have to remember that they’re not rocks colliding. They’re people colliding. Every helmet has a head under it, and the head can think. The whole point of politics is to get people to do what you think they should. Bashing them is just one way of doing that. That’s why Operation Luthien is so important. I think it might help us… talk some people out of thinking that a certain set of rocks exist. And make them believe in our rocks.”

  “With the Sword in my left hand, and you at my right, I’m going to be invincible,” Rudi grinned. Then more soberly: “Though we’d best remember this is far bigger than either of us the now, the story of many and not ours alone. We may be at the center, but it’s the wheel that matters, not just the hub.”

  One arm went around her shoulders. He put the other hand’s thumb and forefinger to his lips and whistled sharply. There was a moment’s silence, and then figures with long yew bows in their hands came trotting down out of the trees, hard to see at first in their green-covered brigandines and Mackenzie-tartan kilts and plaids. As they formed up around the High King and Queen for the walk back to Dun Juniper one began to sing, and they all took it up. When he recognized the tune so did Rudi, despite Mathilda’s laughing gesture of protest: “Near Sutterdown, in the country round

  One morning last Beltaine

  Down a boreen green came a sweet colleen

  And she was whistlin’ Rudi’s Tain.

  She looked so sweet from her sandaled feet

  To the sheen of her nut-brown hair

  Such a coaxing elf, sure I shook myself

  To see if I was really there!”

  “That song’s a mutilation!” Mathilda said. “I’ve heard the original.”

  “I call it an improvement,” Rudi said. “This isn’t Erin, after all!

  And he continued in a strong tenor: “From Ashland’s plays up to Portland’s quays

  From Bend down to Coos Bay town

  No maid I’ve seen like the fair colleen

  That I met near Sutterdown!

  As she onward sped I shook my head

  And I gazed with a feeling rare

  And I said, says I, to a passerby

  ‘Who’s the maid with the nut-brown hair?’

  He smiled at me, and with pride says he,

  ‘That’s the gem of our own Clan’s crown…’ ”

  CHAPTER TWO

  SHATTUCK HALL, TEMPORARY CHANCELLERY CROWN CITY OF PORTLAND (FORMERLY PORTLAND, OREGON) PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA) JULY 31, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

  “ M y Lord Chancellor,” his executive assistant said. “Abbot-Bishop Dmwoski to see you.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Wong,” Ignatius said, with a polite nod.

  Many hats to keep straight, he thought; the title still felt a little unnatural.

  Though at present, with the hood of his scapular thrown back, there was nothing between his tonsured head with its rim of raven hair and the ceiling. He was a slim broad-shouldered man of medium height, with a pale weathered regular face and slightly tilted black eyes, the legacy of a Vietnamese grandmother brought back here after some half-forgotten war of the ancient world.

  Knight-brother of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict, priest, Lord Chancellor of Montival. Remember that names do not make the man. You are a human soul like uncounted millions more, the smallholder’s boy baptized Karl Bergfried; as precious to God as they, and no more so.

  “Please send him through immediately,” he went on. “Then the mustering reports from the Ashland… no, it’s the Liu matter, isn’t it?”

  He concealed a rush of embarrassment at her raised eyebrow. Adjunct Professor Felicia Wong was from Corvallis, part of the University Faculty of Administration there-which meant that she was a junior-to-middlinglevel bureaucrat on secondment from the city-state’s government, and hoping to get in on the ground floor of the new High Kingdom’s administration. Faculties were the term Corvallans used for what most people called guilds; a little confusingly they were also part of the University’s teaching structure. Like their terminology, they also insisted on dressing in what Ignatius considered an absurdly archaic manner; in her case, a button-down dress shirt, a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, blue denim trousers and a painstaking modern re-creation of an old-world type of shoe known, for no discernible reason, as a sneaker.

  She was also hard-working and efficient, and everyone was entitled to their foibles. Even if she was in her early thirties, scarcely older than he. Effectively they were as much Changelings as those born after that day in 1998.

  “Yes, my lord Chancellor. The Liu children are expected momentarily.”

  “Notify me when they arrive.”

  I have been lurching from emergency to emergency all month. This lack of system wastes time, but there is no time to introduce a system! I must delegate more! But there is no time to test and come to know my subordinates. I must know more, I have been absent for two years, but there is scarcely a moment to spare to read, think or question people.

  She left and held the door for the next entrant; a clicking noise of counting-boards and scritch of pens came through from the open-plan spaces beyond, and the clatter and ring of typewriters and adding machines. Ignatius rose from behind his desk and advanced with a smile of relief. The man was in his sixties, twice Ignatius’ age, balding and white-haired with penetrating blue eyes under tufted brows, but likewise in the simple black Benedictine habit. Around his waist was a broad leather belt with a plain cross-hilted long sword, a dagger, a rosary and crucifix; the buckle bore a shield-and-raven badge that was the emblem of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict that he had founded.

  Don’t be excessive, Ignatius, he told himself. Yes, he is a very intelligent and holy man. But you are not the hero-worshipping novice Karl Bergfried anymore. You have your own tasks to do and cannot always run to the Reverend Father for reassurance.

  Dmwoski had been thicker-set than the younger man but was growing gaunt, and stooped a very little now. Ignatius bowed and kissed his bishop’s ring.

  “Are you well, Most Reverend Father in God?”

  Dmwoski shrugged. “At my age and in this world of ours, a man is either well, or dead, my son,” he said. “At present I am consumed with curiosity at this task you have for me. Curiosity and eagerness.”

  Ignatius indicated a chair and poured cool water before he resumed his seat behind the desk; the day was hot for Portland, probably over eighty. Dmwoski removed his sword belt and racked it beside Ignatius’ on the stand to the left of the do
or before he sat.

  “I ask you only because, Reverend Father, you are one of the few able men I know who is not impossibly busy. Merely very busy.”

  Dmwoski nodded. “The forces of the Order and of the lay militia of the Queen of Angels Commonwealth march even as we speak; the Abbey and its daughter-houses and the civil administration are functioning well.”

  “I expected nothing else,” Ignatius said. “It’s not the first time we’ve marched north towards Portland.”

  They both appreciated the irony of that; the last time it had been to fight the Association, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, at the end of the War of the Eye.

  “And now…”

  He indicated his desk as he sat behind it. It wasn’t precisely cluttered; he was a man of painstaking neatness, the habits of a monk and a soldier and an engineer combined. But it was certainly crowded, and it also held a tray with the remains of a working lunch of bread, butter, cheese, sausage and a vegetable salad. The room was brightly lit by an overhead skylight, but the shabbiness of long disuse lingered in corners that had evaded a whirlwind of hasty patching and renovation.

  “I am in the midst of trying to erect the skeleton of an administrative structure to coordinate our efforts while His Majesty fights a major war. All in the course of a month and without a legal or constitutional framework as yet. Not to mention no source of funds once what we brought from Iowa runs out.”

  “I hope that is not self-pity I hear in your tone, my son. The reward for work well done…”

  “Is more work, yes.”

  “It seems the Association is providing generous assistance,” Dmwoski said, a slight dryness in his tone.

  “As you see, rather too much so; that is why I picked this building, unused since the Change and obviously temporary. It would have been easier just to use the Lady Regent’s administrative apparatus…”

  “… which would have meant a most unfortunate precedent, and all the other states would be justly terrified that the new kingdom is the Association in disguise, yes,” Dmwoski said.

  “Your lecture to the novices on that curious old concept of initial path dependency suddenly seems much more relevant,” Ignatius said.

  They shared a brief chuckle. The Order was a militant offshoot of the original Benedictine house at Mt. Angel; that mutation had been a necessity of survival in the terrible years, approved by the Church a decade later when contact had been restored with the new Pope and Curia in Badia. It had organized an enclave of survival, and it had played a significant role in the wars against the Association and Norman Arminger’s schismatic antipope Leo. In the years since the Order had helped bring civilization back to remote areas, spreading skills, teaching and guarding. That necessarily meant a fairly close acquaintance with politics, if only to protect their bailiwick around Mt. Angel and the daughter-houses.

  In all that time since the War of the Eye, Sandra Arminger had played the part of a loyal daughter of the Faith with smooth skill and used the Church in the PPA lands as an instrument of her rule whenever she could. The arrangement wasn’t completely one-sided; it had kept up and consolidated in less violent form the momentum of conversion that had started with Norman Arminger’s motto of kiss the cross or kiss the sword. The dangers were still all too apparent.

  They were both morally certain that she had had Leo assassinated, as well, during her housecleaning after Norman Arminger’s death. The timing of his mysterious collapse had simply been too convenient. That knowledge went silently between them in a glance, and Ignatius murmured: “When a man causes you a problem-”

  “-remember, no man, no problem,” Dmwoski finished for him.

  “Fortunately, our new High Queen will be quite a different type of ruler. And she is now very close indeed to her delayed majority. Early next year, in fact. That will make her Lady Protector of the Association as well as High Queen of Montival.”

  “Yes,” Dmwoski said. “And she really is a loyal daughter of Holy Mother Church.”

  “Which does not mean she will necessarily defer to a cleric’s political opinions, of course,” Ignatius said. “I know her, and believe me, that is the case.”

  “Nor should she. However, she will not necessarily defer to her mother’s opinions, either, close as they are. Yet the Association’s apparatus is one designed by and loyal to her mother; even when Norman Arminger was Lord Protector she managed the detail work. It is a tool shaped and fitted to her hand. You do quite right to build anew, my son, even in these desperate circumstances. Institutional inertia is a very powerful force-which, as Catholic clerics and heirs to two thousand years of it, is something we should know down in our bones.”

  Ignatius nodded. “I am improvising, and pulling in whatever personnel I can from wherever I can get them, but there is method in my madness. It keeps things fluid. And every power in our new Montival is of course fully occupied with mobilization for the campaign to come, down to the littlest autonomous village. If it were not for the fact that all the other powers were jealous of the Association-”

  “And each other,” Dmwoski added.

  “-and each other, and hence anxious to have their people involved, I could never have pried loose a single clerk.”

  “And I am whatever you can get as well, my son?”

  Ignatius flushed slightly, despite the detached amusement in the Abbot-Bishop’s voice.

  “I am attending to political tasks His Majesty understandably cannot do in his own person yet recognizes are utterly essential. He must have the support of the realm, and what is that if not a political matter? And for that, I need your help.”

  Dmwoski nodded slowly. “Which speaks well of him,” the older cleric said. “I knew he was a very able field commander, but a King requires far more than that. More than a charismatic presence, as well. He must be able to govern, or he is a disaster in the making. Especially in a new kingdom without a cushion of institutions and traditions.”

  Ignatius spread his hands. “Even before the Sword, his grasp of detail was phenomenal. Since then… miraculous. And I mean that in a fairly literal manner, Reverend Father. Yet he can still only be in one place at a time.”

  “I presume from the files you sent me that your request has something to do with the problem of the false Church Universal and Triumphant’s infiltrations here.”

  Ignatius nodded. “Precisely. Most particularly, the matter of House Liu. This is not simply a political matter, either. Their mother’s machinations may have begun that way, as a plan to make their brother Odard Lord Protector, but her contacts with the Church Universal and Triumphant quickly became more than that… spiritual elements seem to have been involved.”

  “Infernal elements, and there is no spoon long enough to sup safely in that company. She went from ally to unwitting tool to possessed rather quickly,” Dmwoski said grimly. “I understand that you had direct experience with agents of the CUT.”

  Ignatius crossed himself and shivered slightly. “And only by the very great mercy of God and the Virgin was I able to cope with them.”

  “You are fortunate, my son. The Queen of Angels has taken a very personal interest in you, and you are hence protected against this.. . filth. For those less armored in Faith it is a contagious foul leprosy of the soul.”

  Ignatius blinked at the choice of words. Dmwoski was usually a very temperate man. Then he recalled looking into eyes that were windows into nothing, whose very existence was a wound in the fabric of the world and an invitation to the mortal sin of despair…

  He shook his head, refusing to be daunted. “The matter of the Liu family is very delicate. Baron Gervais, Odard Liu, was one of our companions on the Quest. By the end of it, at least, he was a true comrade; and he saved us all several times.”

  “This bureaucratic morass must seem infuriating beyond bearing by contrast!” Dmwoski said.

  “Am I so obvious?” Ignatius said. “It is valuable work. And the Quest was… often a nightmare. Hunger, thirst, heat, cold, battle
and perils, constant fear for my companions, constant worry for those back here at home facing the enemy.”

  “A single, comprehensible aim to which you could devote heart and soul; the company of honorable friends who became as dear to you as brothers and sisters; each day a new vista and a new challenge; the inexpressible glory of a direct vision of the Virgin calling you to be her chosen knight…”

  Ignatius laughed. “I am so obvious, then! Yes, this is almost squalid by contrast. Absolutely essential, though. And I must not let my life be one long declension from a moment of glory. I must make that a beginning and this work also an offering to Him, the Cross I am called to carry up to Heaven’s gate.”

  Dmwoski nodded. “I do not blame you in the least if you find that difficult. Let difficulty be a spur to effort. And even in your very bare-bones reports, my son, it is obvious that everyone on that quest-with the exception of Baron Odard’s traitorous servant Alex-saved each other many times. I was a soldier before I became a monk or a priest; and then after the Change, soldier and monk and priest as well, as you are now. I know the strength of those bonds. The exhilaration of shared danger is not necessarily sinful, so long as it does not become an addiction.”

  “Even Alex Vinton saved the Princess… the High Queen… at least once, though without intending anything but treachery.”

  “So does God turn even evil to the service of good,” Dmwoski agreed.

  “And I am doing essential work here. Yet it will be a relief beyond expressing if you can lift some of that burden from me. And frankly, the tale of the Quest to Nantucket and the Sword of the Lady is also an important element in rallying support to the new kingdom.”

  “What is a kingdom, if not a tale that many agree is true? Or a nation, if not a collection of shared stories? To lead is to tell stories through action. To embody them and give them substance. We shape them; and then they shape us.”