The Tears of the Sun (46 page)

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 . . .

“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.

COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK
CHARTERED CITY OF WALLA WALLA
PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION
(FORMERLY SOUTHEASTERN WASHINGTON STATE)
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)
AUGUST 23, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

 

 

T
iphaine nodded as Sir Tancred saluted with fist to breastplate, whistled for his squire and horse, and detached a
conroi
of lancers and two of mounted crossbowmen to stay with her. Only a few of her own
menie
were with her now and they all had real work to do; if you were a retainer of d'Ath you usually had more urgent things to do than dance attendance and lend her credence.

Then he swung easily into the saddle despite a full set of plate and cantered off to the army camp that had sprung up outside Walla Walla's northern wall in the course of the long day now ending. She looked after the Guard commander with a slight envy;
he
had a straightforward job to do.

The force she'd brought was off the trains and camped on what was usually common-pasture for the chartered city's horses and mules, with a few spilling over into stubble-fields. A low constant rumble came from it; rows of tents, dust smoking from under wheels and hooves and boots, picket lines, neatly racked bicycles and pyramidal stacks of twelve-foot lances and seven-foot infantry spears, lines of field artillery parked next to their limbers. Grooms and squires were leading strings of horses down to the water of the little Walla Walla River, or to irrigation ditches; files on work detail made the light loess soil fly in a chorus of spades and dirt and muttered curses as they dug sanitary trenches. Light blinked fiercely from metal, and here and there the heraldic banners and shields of baron and knight were splashes of color, but most of it was variations on the color of the soil.

A little farther off the landscape still looked peaceful and prosperous despite its aridity, surprisingly so to someone reared west of the Cascades. Here it was two months before the winter rains were due and it seemed dubious that it had ever rained at all. Reaped grain fields stood sere and yellow-brown, shedding ochre dust to the occasional whirling wind-devil, with the odd remaining wheat-stack like a giant round thatched hut of deeper gold. Poplar trees made vertical accents along a canal, more conspicuous for the general lack of trees, with here or there the intense green of vines or fruit trees or alfalfa and sweet clover in blocks startling against the dun landscape. Rippling distant hills quivering with heat haze were the brown of summer-sere bunchgrass. The creaking sails of tall frame windmills circled, grinding grain or pumping water, and villages of rammed-earth cottages stood each with its church steeple, clustered around the gardens and groves of manor houses often based on pre-Change farms.

You couldn't see how few folk remained, or how the ones who did worked at a frantic pace with spears close to hand, under the protection of mounted guards. The smell right here made it obvious that peace had flown, though. She took a deep breath through her nose. War did have a set of smells all its own, like the varied bouquets of wine. She liked wine well enough; Sandra had put her through an informal course in telling the various types apart. But she was a connoisseur of the bouquet of lethal conflicts.

Even when you weren't fighting in a miasma of copper-iron blood and the unique scent of cut-open stomach, or marching past the week-old bloated bodies of dead livestock and smoldering burnt-out houses. Mostly war smelled of old stale sweat soaked into wool, unwashed feet and armpits and crotches, horses, and canola oil smeared on metal and leather and long since gone rancid. A big camp like this added the woodsmoke of campfires, salt pork and beans and tortillas cooking, the charcoal and scorched metal of the little wheeled forges the field farriers used, and latrine trenches. It was all the smell of her trade, the way manure was to a groom or dye-vats to a clothier or incense to a cleric.

Getting the expeditionary force detrained and ready to march had gone fairly smoothly, but she'd been at it all day. Too often dealing with various noble scions who insisted on quarreling over precedence and citing cases right back to the day Norman Arminger proclaimed himself Lord Protector, and who considered themselves too important to listen to anyone but the Grand Constable in person.

That was the drawback of calling out the
arrière-ban
, the full levy of the Association; you got everyone who had military obligations to the Crown, which meant mobilizing a lot of contumacious, well-and-high-born pricks who hated taking orders from
anyone
, even if their lives depended on it. Some of the great families had followed their medieval models all too seriously.

I haven't had to kill any of them. Yet. Which is almost disappointing. Though it's fun bringing home that the rules in the Schedule of Ranks really, really,
really
do apply to the ones who think they can't possibly be expected to go on campaign without three pavilions, a chef and hot and cold running mistresses.

A very small bleak smile turned her lips; she had a long straight-nosed regular face, but at that moment it looked very like a predatory bird. She'd had any baggage found over the established maximum for a man's status pitched off the barges on the Columbia or the railcars as they turned up later and left for the fish, the coyotes, the camp followers and anyone who had a use for a down mattress or six sets of court dress or a knock-down bathtub or a crate of Domaine Meriwether Cuvée Prestige '15 with bottles of pickled oysters on the side. Excess servants had been shed with a little more ceremony, but not much.

The fingers of her left hand touched the twelve silver-inlaid notches on the hilt of her long sword, the metal smooth and cool against the callused skin. Nobody had argued much, however purple their faces turned.

A party rode up from the camp. A nobleman in gear that looked to have seen hard use in the last few days led them, and over their heads a fork-tailed baron's pennant flew from a lance. A squire behind him carried a shield that had been recently and roughly field-repaired after being hit repeatedly with things sharp and hard and heavy.

“My lady Grand Constable,” Rigobert Gironda de Stafford said, thumping his breastplate with his right fist in salute before he dismounted.

“My lord Marchwarden,” she replied, returning the gesture. “Your horses look hard-used. I suppose screening us up there required a lot of riding.”

She turned and gestured for a squire. “Get my lord de Stafford and his party fresh coursers, and have these seen to. Bring water for his men, and bread and cheese and raisins if they want it.”

The nobleman nodded his thanks. “We've been busy, my lady. Just got in, in fact. It's quieted down up towards Castle Campscapell a bit now or I wouldn't have been able to make this meeting, but it's the stillness before the storm. I'm extremely glad to see you've brought us a substantial force.”

He cocked his head and looked at her. “You were smiling a most evil little smile just now, my lady.”

Tiphaine let it grow . . . just a little. This particular campaign would probably be a preliminary to the main event, and she was going to use it to toughen up some of the feudal levies who hadn't seen the elephant in this war yet. Toughen them up or kill them off; either would do.

“I know that expression, Grand Constable,” the lord of Forest Grove said with a grin of his own, offering his canteen. “Someone who deserved it suffered, eh, my lady d'Ath?”

“Suffered the loss of oversize tents and silk sheets and overweight private rations, my lord Forest Grove,” she said, putting the canteen to her mouth and tilting it. “And the services of various doe-eyed beauties.”

It was field-purified water, cut one-to-six with harsh coarse brandy to cover the chemical taste and kill any bacteria the chlorine missed. The mixture cut the gummy saliva and dust in her mouth quite nicely; she swilled it around, spat and drank.

“But they can't say I didn't warn them,” she finished, handing it back.

“Thirty lashes with an acerbic tongue and an icy stare, too,” Rigobert said. “The novel experience of having to bow their heads and stand silent while their arses are roasted in public will be good for them. It'll rectify their humors, though not as much as a good bleeding and purge would.”

They were both in half-armor, the articulated lames of the back-andbreasts covering their torsos, pauldrons and faulds on shoulders and thighs; with their junior squires standing by, the rest of the gear could be donned in less than two minutes. Sweat and dust clung to their faces beneath the peaked Montero hats—the type she'd always thought of as a Robin Hood hat, from an old movie she'd watched on TV before the Change. Nobody put their head in a steel bucket if they didn't have to right that moment. She could feel more sweat trickling down her neck and flanks and between her breasts, itching and chafing in the padded arming doublet and her underwear as it baked to a rime of salt in the hot dry air and then more dripped in, long-familiar and still irritating. The interior was
hot
this time of year, and its mountain-fringed geography made the Walla Walla valley warmer still.

“Is the Count due?” de Stafford asked.

He was seven years older than she, in his mid-forties, a tall broad-shouldered man with pale blond hair like hers worn in the usual nobleman's bowl-cut, eyes of a blue that was startling against his tanned face, and an unfashionable short-cropped beard that emphasized his square chin and ruggedly masculine good looks.

The thought was oddly wistful; she'd been an only child.

A few of the less experienced or more naive staff officers and messengers in the group around her looked surprised that he dared to bandy words with the Grand Constable, who had a reputation for a cold, distant masterfulness. Tiphaine's mouth quirked a little more as she jerked her head slightly and the circle around them widened to allow more privacy.

Or to put it differently, I have a reputation for being a murderous evil reptilian unnatural bitch who's inhumanly good with a sword and under the Lady Regent's protection,
she thought.
Rigobert's a special case, though.

She looked at her watch, a self-winding mechanical model from the old world.

“Not for about another fifteen or twenty minutes, my lord, assuming he's punctual. We got the encampment settled just a bit faster than I anticipated and told him we would.”

“Any news from Delia?” he asked.

“A letter just in,” she said, fishing it out from where she'd tucked it into her thigh boot. “She's well, Diomede sends his love and wishes he were here and not in Tillamook, where incidentally he's going to stay if I have to tell Baron de Netarts to chain him to a dungeon wall, Heuradys has learned to say ‘no', and our beloved Delia herself feels like an overripe watermelon about to split, she says. Also she sends
greetings to my beloved beard
.”

“I'm her beard, she's mine,” de Stafford laughed as he took it and read it eagerly.

Her Châtelaine and lover of fifteen years, Delia de Stafford, was married to Lord Rigobert. The Barony of Forest Grove was the next tenant-in-chief holding north of her manors, and its lord had about as much erotic interest in women as Lady Delia de Stafford did in men, which was even less than Tiphaine did. Fathering Delia's children had involved what passed for hightech medicine these days, namely a pre-Change turkey baster.

“Ah, I see Countess Odell has arrived for the accouchement, with her girls. That will be a comfort,” he said happily. “To them both. Valentinne will worry less about Conrad and her sons with something else to occupy her time and Delia will feel better with company and mothering, she's always been a social sort and makes friends easily.”