Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun Read online

  And . . .

  Told everything! That’s a change from being treated like a mushroom, he thought, with a sudden eagerness. It’s going to be fun being the High Queen’s squire, but I’m still sort of burning a bit over the way we were kept in the dark about things. I suppose it was necessary, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. The Spider . . . the Lady Regent . . . is tighter with information than she is with money, and that’s saying something.

  He felt a slight guilty spurt of pleasure when he thought of the letter of credit in his belt-pouch, after years on a close allowance while Barony Gervais was under Crown wardship. He could run amok through the quality armorers that catered to the nobility, even with the war. No need to accept good-enough Armory standard gear. It was even justified, since he was going to be a royal squire. He had to show well to do his patron credit!

  And horses, he thought. A pair of rouncies and a good courser . . . maybe even a destrier—

  Destriers were the ultimate luxury; they cost many times what a suit of plate armor did, and wore out much faster.

  If I bought a young one, just out of a training farm, he would still be in his prime when I’m old enough to fight as a man-at-arms; that’s only three years or so from now . . . and he’d be really well-used to me by then.

  Yseult gave him a sharp elbow in the ribs and he glared back; they knew each other too well to hide much, even of their thoughts. Then he smoothed his expression. He had a feeling that the elderly cleric didn’t miss much either.

  Most of the gathering troops were passing directly east, or were being held in tented camps outside the city walls, but there were armed men in plenty—noblemen and officers clutching papers as often as swords, afoot or on horseback or in pedicabs, with sergeants on bicycles or trotting doggedly with a rasp of hobnails on asphalt and cement. Most of the traffic was freight, though; endless wagons of grain, barreled hardtack, racked armor, crossbows, and the salvage metal and timber and leather that the city’s craft guilds and factories would transform into the sinews of war.

  The noise was a continuous grumbling roar, voices and steel-shod hooves clattering hollowly on pavement, and steel wheels grinding on the steel rails of the city’s horsecar network. The inn was not far away and had been a hotel before the Change, called the Benson after some lord of old. It occupied most of a block, three stories of pale terra-cotta and many more of brick above, graded by ease of access. The reception rooms and dining chambers and kitchens were on the first two, the guests of rank on the next pair, those of more humble background on the three above that, and the rest fading up through servants and attendants to the hotel staff themselves.

  Right now more than a dozen miniature heraldic shields were hung beside the main doors, showing that guests of armigerous family were staying—knights and lesser nobles who had no town houses of their own and rented suites here instead for themselves and their families and retinues when duty or pleasure called them in from their estates. Huon read them as casually and automatically as he would have so many printed signs. They flanked a larger fixed shield bearing a Madonna and Child; the Virgin was Portland’s patron.

  The staff were dashing around looked harried themselves, but one man with a towel over his shoulder showed the bishop and his party to a corner booth of the big common room with its cut-glass wall at one end. The good odors of cooking overrode the city-smells of smoke and horses and sweat and wool; they were not far from the riverside docks where barges and the craft that plied the Columbia above its joining with the Willamette unloaded. Even oceangoing ships came upstream from Astoria sometimes, and they added their tang of bulk produce and salt fish and exotics like sugar and coffee and indigo and tea to the symphony of scents.

  It was all exciting, and would be even in peacetime compared to the quiet routine of a castle or manor, though he didn’t think he’d like it for more than a visit. The great walls and towers that surrounded Portland made it immensely strong, but they also gave an uncomfortable sense of confinement. You could get out of a castle quickly, at least, and most of them had green fields right up to the moat.

  A swift look at the menu chalked on a blackboard made him dither a bit, but Yseult had been teasing him about always getting the same thing; he forewent the double-bacon cheeseburger and had the souvlaki and pita with fries and a Portland Crown Ale. Yseult chose the batter-fried sturgeon with a salad and a glass of white wine, and Dmwoski settled for bread and a piece of grilled fish.

  “It’s not a fast-day, is it, Most Reverend Father?” Huon asked, with a prickle of stricken embarrassment.

  He wasn’t as devout as his sister, but he tried to do the right thing. Yseult shook her head doubtfully, then pulled out a little bound Book of Hours and checked the reference table at the back as the platters arrived to be sure. Dmwoski chuckled.

  “Just Father will do, my children. No, it’s simply that at my age the fire needs less fuel. Fat monks are figures of fun for good reason.”

  He pronounced a short brisk grace and they fell to; Huon was feeling hungrier than usual, since he’d been too nervous to do breakfast any justice. Dmwoski nodded at his appetite.

  “You, on the other hand, are building bone and muscle yet, my son. Give me your hand for a moment.”

  He did, and they squeezed. The soldier-monk’s grip was astonishingly strong for a man his age, and felt as if it had been carved from an ancient dry-cured ham.

  “Good,” the cleric said. “Lord Chaka’s report did say that you were shaping well. What is the first thing you wish to know?”

  Huon opened his mouth, closed it again, and thought. He was warmed and irritated both when Yseult gave him an approving look, and though Dmwoski’s face was calm he thought there was something similar in the monk’s blue eyes.

  “I’d like to know what really happened with our—with Barony Gervais—contingent at the Battle of Pendleton. With my uncle.”

  “Sir Guelf Mortimer, your mother’s brother.”

  “Yes. I know something went badly wrong, Father, at the battle or just after, and there are all sorts of rumors. But our men are not cowards!”

  “No, they are not,” Dmwoski said. He frowned, tapping his fingers together. “In fact, they did rather well.”

  When he went on his tone was dry, the voice he would have used to speak to an adult: “What happened was this: the allied powers of the Corvallis Meeting—we were not yet Montival then, Rudi Mackenzie and the Princess and the other questers were still struggling through eastern Idaho—tried to steal a march on the CUT and Boise and seize Pendleton. That was just a little under two years ago now. We meant to strike before its Bossman could make a pact with them and they could send troops to secure the city and its territories. Unfortunately, it turned out that they had stolen a march on us. As nearly as we can tell, from reports and interrogations later, what happened is . . .”

  Huon leaned forward as the old soldier-monk spoke. The room around them faded away; he could smell the oiled metal of armor, feel the fierce interior sun—

  PENDLETON ROUND-UP TERRITORY

  CITY OF PENDLETON

  (FORMERLY NORTHEASTERN OREGON)

  SEPTEMBER 15, CHANGE YEAR 23/2021 AD

  This is not going to be a good day.

  Sir Guelf Mortimer of Loiston Manor frowned down at the map spread over the gritty soil and weighed down at the corners with chunks of volcanic rock. It showed the city of Pendleton, capital of the Round-Up territory, or the Associated Communities of the Pendleton Emergency Area if you wanted to be technical, which he didn’t. He could look up and south across the river and see the low rough-built walls with bits of rusty iron showing where the reinforcement cropped out through the concrete and rubble and odd angles where buildings had been incorporated into the defenses. Modern Pendleton was a rectangle, roughly, on the south bank of the Umatilla River; that acted as a natural moat on three sides.

  Sir Ruffin Velin was delivering the bad news. He was the Grand Constable’s second-in-command right now, a
hard-looking man in his thirties with thinning brown hair, and one of her vassals and hatchet men. You had to be careful around them. They’d been the Lady Regent’s kill-squad before Baroness d’Ath went into the mainline military. He wasn’t going to take Ruffin on lightly. Tiphaine d’Ath . . . made his skin crawl. He wasn’t the only one. Nor was the Regent called the Spider without good reason.

  In fact, it’s going to be a very bad day, Guelf thought.

  He was head of the Barony Gervais contingent here today, as senior fighting vassal in the absence of his nephew Baron Odard . . . who was off somewhere to the east on a quest like something out of one of the Dúnedain storybooks, hopefully making the runaway Princess Mathilda helpless with admiration of his heroism as they tailed along behind the Mackenzie brat.

  And what I’m doing today won’t be in front of a beautiful . . . well, passably good-looking . . . Princess who’s heir to immense wealth and power. Hell, let Odard get her flat and I’ll be content to be his uncle and shake the patronage tree in his shade.

  They’d been up before the dawn, working like mules to set up the siege machinery along the bank of the Umatilla. He was sweating like a pig inside his suit of plate and wishing he’d switched to an old-fashioned mail hauberk; the interior was still beastly hot this time of year, and they were a long way from the Pacific’s cool breezes. Plate might as well be waxed canvas as far as keeping the air out was concerned. All he was getting was the occasional tantalizing draught through the joints when he moved. Little metallic clanks sounded as men jostled around the map and their harness rattled, or the leather straps and padding beneath creaked.

  The stated objective—Right up till now, thought Guelf, casting an irritated eye at the quarter high sun—had been to install the machines to sweep the bridges across the river, then advance to take out the city wall of Pendleton by the Emigrant Gate when the beaten forces of the Round-Up tried to hold the city. Meanwhile the rumor was that the Dúnedain were to do something unspecified but wonderful, if it worked.

  “The whole operation got blown,” Ruffin said bluntly. “They pushed in more forces at precisely the wrong time for us. We don’t have very much information yet, mostly from enemy deserters, but the Grand Constable . . .”

  Sir Ruffin was looking at Sir Érard Renfrew, who was also Viscount Chenoweth, heir to the Count of Odell, and his younger brother, Sir Thierry Renfrew, who was something of an artillery specialist.

  Sir Guelf allowed himself the luxury of a grimace of distaste and a quick turn of his head and spit. With enough dust to make your teeth gritty every time you swallowed no one could prove it was a statement of opinion. Of the Grand Constable, and of House Odell, d’Ath had been Conrad Renfrew’s protégé as well as the Lady Regent’s; the families were tight, part of the glacis around the Lady Regent’s position.

  “. . . says we also have intelligence that we are facing almost twice the numbers we expected, say two or three thousand men each from Boise and the Church Universal and Triumphant as well as the Pendleton troops we knew about.”

  That brought grunts. Everyone here could add.

  “They suckered us and got their forces in here first. We can’t fight this one and win with what we’ve got here and there’s no way to get meaningful reinforcements in time to do any good. We need to break contact and retreat as far as Castle Hermiston, on the old border. The fortifications there will give us an edge and we can put in enough additional forces to make them think three times about trying to invest the castle.”

  Guelf growled at the thought of giving ground. He knelt next to Thierry and traced the bridges over the Umatilla north of the walled city of Pendleton.

  “They can cross these and flank us. We control the 18th Street bridge and the footbridge next to it. But 10th, 8th and Main are weak points. If we can cut those off, they’ll have to go all the way up to Fulton”—his gloved finger traced north, over the river and then back down—“and sneak back down Highway 37 to get near us. Which will give us the time we need.”

  Sir Ruffin nodded. “So, here’s what we’ll do—Sir Guelf, you’ll take your men and neutralize those bridges. Caltrops, barbed wire, oil slicks, burn them, saw them, fucking piss on them, whatever it takes. Just make them impassable for long enough if you can’t destroy them.”

  He turned to the scions of House Renfrew. “Sir Thierry, we’re abandoning the siege engines, so you can start the teams and limbers out now, at least we can save the horses. You’ll hold this headland until the evacuation is complete. Breaking contact is going to be a bitch.”

  Thierry thought for a moment, then grinned like a coyote scenting a housecat.

  “I think we can get some use out of the engines first, Sir Ruffin. There’s only a couple of ways they can get at us here; if a place is hard to get into it’s usually hard to get out of as well. And if we channel them a bit that narrows it even more. Done right we can turn it into a real killing ground and they’ll lose all interest in chasing us for a while.”

  Sir Ruffin nodded. “Good, use your discretion. I need you and you, my lord Viscount, to hold here and get as much matériel out as possible as well as the troops. We’ve got the pedal cars all set up; they’ll go to Hermiston and return for a second trip if possible, and anyone marching in that direction can hop on when they reach them. When you leave, take out these three bridges over the Umatilla . . .”

  Sir Ruffin marked a cross on the bridges at Highway 84, the Westgate Bridge and the rail bridge.

  “They have to be impassable for at least twelve hours, more if possible. That’ll bottleneck the enemy long enough, hopefully.”

  The elder Renfrew brother looked east. “We don’t have enough men for that, Sir Ruffin. If there’s a sortie in any strength from the city to capture the engines, we’ll be up Shit Creek, not the Umatilla River!”

  The Grand Constable’s right-hand man nodded. “I’ll send a couple of conroi of men-at-arms and infantry to help you hold. Most of the fighting is down around the John Day Highway and south of the old Highway 84 and 30, that’s where it looks like the battle line is shaping up. The enemy is anchoring their right on the city and trying to swing up north. We’ll have to rock them back on their heels there, that’s where we’ve got most of our lancers and the Mackenzie longbowmen, but this position has to be secured or they can use their reserves to flank us out too soon. As soon as I can spring the men I’ll send them to you.”

  “What forces specifically, Sir Ruffin?” the Viscount asked a little more formally.

  Ruffin chewed his lip and shook his head. “How good are you at kicking butt? The only one I think we can detach is going to be from House Stavarov’s contingent from County Chehalis; Sir Constantine and his menie, you know.”

  “Piotr’s brat? He’d better not mess with me. But he won’t.”

  “His reputation isn’t long on discipline.”

  The heir to Odell snorted. “To hell with discipline, Sir Ruffin. He likes to fight. He’s a complete loss at knightly courtesy and social graces, in fact his vocabulary is limited to variations on drink and fuck and kill, but give him a chance to charge screaming at the head of his men-at-arms and he’s happy as a drunken pig in a grape-vat. That maneuver is the limit of his military knowledge but he does it well. And he’ll take my orders.”

  Guelf glanced curiously over at the iron expression on Viscount Chenoweth’s face, but decided not to ask. Sir Ruffin nodded and picked up the yard square map. Guelf hurried to help him shake it gently and roll it up. Map paper was horribly difficult to press evenly and cost the earth. Only the Albany presses of Corvallis made this grade of paper. He tapped it very carefully and slid it into the carry tube for Ruffin.

  The Viscount took off his helmet with a single pungent word as Ruffin mounted and left in a spurt of pebbles and dust, the pennants of his escort flapping as the lance heads glittered in the sunlight. He scrubbed his short, light-brown hair and growled.

  “Thank you so very much for this gift of a helmet full of horse t
urds, Sir Ruffin! Guelf, get your men; take out those bridges. I don’t need to teach you how to suck eggs. What the hell happened to the Dúnedain? That op was tricky, but they’ve pulled off harder. Beelzebub’s arse with piles the size of plums, I wish I knew the details!”

  Guelf didn’t answer, limiting himself to a duck of the head and thump of fist on breastplate in salute. He took off looking for Sir Harold Czarnecki, the other Gervais knight here, and waved their squires forward. But he bared his teeth in a sudden angry grin.

  The Dúnedain, huh? Hope that bitch and her sidekicks all bought it. That would be a nice little dividend on Gervais’ arrears of revenge for my brother Jason’s death back in the Protector’s War! Baroness Mary will be pleased. And they promised me, uncle to the King, they did indeed promise me that. Which doesn’t mean throwing this fight. Uncle to the King of As Much As Possible, that’s the thing.

  “Chezzy! Get the menie together; we’re on dirty tricks! Grab some mantlets, one of Thierry’s engineering wagons and let’s go burn and destroy!”

  His men-at-arms and footmen . . .

  Odard’s men! he thought. But I’m here and my nephew isn’t.

  . . . roared with pleasure.

  “Valentine! Valentine! St. Valentine for Gervais! Let the arrows fly! Valentine will suck them up! Face Gervais, face Death!”

  The battle banner of the barony waved in the hot sun with its black-andred image of St. Valentine, transfixed with arrows, on a yellow background.

  Looks painful, he thought, not for the first time.

  The crossbowmen slung their weapons and put their shoulders to the heavy wheeled shields, heaving them up on their props like wheelbarrows.

  “Six men pulling, six pushing on each!” Guelf snapped. “Get to it!”

  The spearmen moved their shields to their right shoulders and fanned out in a protective screen between the mantlets and the city walls.