The Tears of the Sun (2 page)

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—

Mathilda's voice was sharp as she called him back to the world of common day. He snapped the weapon home with a
click
of guard against chape.

“It's so
creepy
when you . . . go away like that.”

He looked up at her and smiled. “Don't say it's always bad, acushla,” he said. “Here, put your hand on mine, and we'll see together what I glimpsed.”

She did, where his left—his sword-hand, since the wound that nearly killed him leached a hair-fine edge of the strength and speed from his right—rested on the hilt. Then she gasped.

They took their hands from the Sword and looked at each other, wondering.

“Is . . . that what will be?” she asked.

“No. It's what
might very well be
, though, which is close enough for government work, which is appropriate, eh? Making it so is up to us.”

“Two children,” she said wonderingly; he could hear happiness bubbling up beneath it. “In a few years from now, at least, and maybe more later. Oh, thank you, Holy Mary, mother of God.
My
children!
Our
children!”

“A daughter and a son,” Rudi added, nodding; then his mouth quirked. “Crown Princess Órlaith, and little Prince John.”

Mathilda looked at him sharply; the order of succession hadn't been settled yet, whether it should be the eldest or the eldest
son
. The conservative nobility of the Association mostly wanted the latter, of course; and he knew she was ambivalent herself. Then her eyes went wider.

“You know their
names
. The
Sword
knows their names?”

“Well, we
could
choose others now, just to spite it, so. But they have a nice ring to them, don't they? So we might as well . . . though it's most surely a matter of the snake biting its own tail . . .”

“Órlaith,” Mathilda said. “That means . . .
Golden Princess
, doesn't it?”

“So it does, in the ancient tongue. Her hair will be like white gold as a child, and palest yellow when she's grown, with eyes like the sunlit sea; she'll be tall and graceful as a willow-wand, stronger than sword steel.”

He frowned seriously. “And she'll be mad for strawberries and cream in season, and love cats, and play the mandolin—”

Mathilda mock-punched him in the chest. “Now you're making it up!”

“That I am. It's true about the hair and all that, though.”

She paused for a moment. “And John . . . that was Dad's middle name.”

“And so it was,” Rudi said mildly, meeting her eyes.

“I wouldn't have dared suggest naming him
Norman
. I know that's impossible. The politics.”

“Your father did great things, my heart, for good and ill. Let that part of him which did well and saved lives and built for the ages be remembered with the name, and the part of him that loved your mother and you. Let all else . . . be forgotten.”

Mathilda looked away for a moment. “Thank you,” she whispered.

Her father Norman John Arminger, the first Lord Protector and founder of the PPA, had been a very able man. A warrior to be feared with his own hands, and himself fearless as a lion, and still more to be respected as a battle-leader. Intelligent and quick-witted enough to see immediately what the Change that stopped the machines meant, while others dithered and denied and died. And with power of will enough to inspire and bully others into following him. Without him most of what became the PPA would have been ruins and charred bones split for marrow and wilderness long since. He'd truly loved Mathilda also, and in his odd way her mother Sandra.

A strong man,
Rudi thought.
Even a great one, but bad at the heart; though no man is all one thing.

As a ruler he'd also been a brutal terrorist and outright tyrant both from policy and by natural inclination, and from a half-mad determination to bring his obsessions to life and impose them as far as his sword's writ reached. One who killed with a relish and delight that would probably have appalled even his idols and models, William the Bastard and Strongbow and Bohemond and Godfrey de Bouillon. Opportunities for that had been many in those early years of chaos and despair, when the most of human kind perished in a welter of famine and plague and desperate violence.

And ten years after the Change he'd have killed
me
, if Matti's mother hadn't hustled us out of his way after Tiphaine d'Ath rescued Matti from us Mackenzies, and captured me in turn. Killed me with embellishments, just to give Mother anguish, I think. His mind worked that way, the creature. But Sandra saw she might have use for me, even then.

Lady Regent Sandra Arminger was just as ruthless as her spouse had been. She was also even more intelligent, vastly more patient, and not hagridden by his inner demons. Since Norman's death at the end of the War of the Eye she'd even been a good overlord to the Association from pure rational calculation; a hard ruler, very hard indeed, but not vicious. She had men killed without passion when she thought it necessary, like a croft-wife picking a chicken for the pot, and with as little regret; in just the same spirit as she calculated taxes or which bridges needed repair or how to balance factions in the dance of intrigue. She was even popular with the commons in the PPA territories, because the Counts and barons feared and obeyed her and she kept them in check and enforced the law on high and low alike.