The Tears of the Sun (42 page)

“
That
I think we can take care of. Show me where it's credible you'd go . . .”

When they had finished Ritva nodded briskly. “Here, then.” She tapped a building. “This shopping expedition is credible?”

“The commander will be pleased. He'll think it means I've persuaded Cecile and the girls to be, uh, cooperative.”

Juliet frowned. “But how does just getting us out of the Compound help? There's the city wall, and the Compound's in continuous touch with the defenses there by semaphore and heliograph!”

Ritva smiled thinly. “Trust me,” she said. “I've gotten all the way from Montival to the Sunrise Lands and back.”

Though that didn't involve something like
this
,
she thought behind her confident expression.
Dulu! I hope Aunt Astrid likes this idea!

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

 

 

“
T
hat's that,” Grand Constable Tiphaine d'Ath said, tasting sweat on her lips.

It must still be well over ninety degrees, though the temperature was falling a bit with the sun. She slapped her leather riding gauntlets into the palm of her left hand in a slight puff of dust. The omnipresent grit was one of the things she disliked about the eastern fiefs; her own estates were in the northern Willamette valley, which had a decently moderate climate where things stayed green year-round. Then she stifled a yawn, brought on by the sultry stillness as much as real fatigue. The sun was low in the west, turning the thin clouds there crimson, and the sky was darkening towards night eastward behind the distant line of the Blue Mountains. At least it would drop to decent sleeping weather later. The air here was too dry to hold the heat long.

The end of a long summer day, and she'd been the first to get off the train an hour before dawn after a short period of semisleep on the pitching, clanking vehicle. Since then she'd been supervising while the army she'd brought pitched camp outside Walla Walla's northern gate and unloaded supplies for the campaign.

“Right, that's the last of them, my lady,” the commander of the Protector's Guard said, mentally checking off a list. “The signals chain says the line's clear as far west as the Wallula Gap. We're holding the rest of the empty rolling stock just east of the city ready to come back through.”

“Get that started now, Sir Tancred. I want them out of the way and the line and stock ready for military use.”

A final load of boxes came off a railcar and onto a wagon, and a clerk stepped forward and ran a paintbrush over a stencil on their sides while another made a tick on a ledger. The team of sixteen big mules had been led away and replaced by fresh beasts, hitched to what had been the rear of the train and hitched up to pull it back westbound; they leaned into their traces to get the six empty flatbed cars away from the platform. It halted again where the refugees waited to embark.

A crowd of a hundred or so civilians surged forward under the direction of a file of infantry; mostly peasants by their shapeless undyed linsey-woolsey clothing and floppy homemade straw hats, and more than half women with youngsters.

“No, no!” the sergeant in charge screamed. “All you strong ones, hand up your bundles and brats! Then you push to get it started, and
then
you climb on. You, you, you—”

The butt of his spear flicked out and tapped to conscript volunteers.

“—just grab the handles . . . oh, St. Dismas have mercy, the fucking
handles
, the . . . these things, these things! Just wait until I tell you, then push, then get on!”

They handed up bundles and baskets and swaddled infants, then settled with dumb patience, half a dozen ready to push each car. They were silent save for the wailing babes and toddlers, their eyes wide and bewildered as they stared around at city and army. Most of them were Changelings, and probably hadn't been more than a day's walk from their villages since they were born. Or at least had been toddlers themselves when their parents were resettled.

Tiphaine nodded to Sir Tancred. “Warn Sir Varocher at Castle Dorian that five or six thousand civilians are heading their way, mostly sick or children and their mothers. He has authority to draw on the other castles and the stores in Wallula Town as necessary. They'll need to be fed and checked over by the physicians before they're loaded on the barges.”

She paused for a moment and then added in the same flat tone, “Emphasize that I and the Lady Regent will be
extremely displeased
if they're not treated in a humane and chivalrous manner, peasants or no.”

He scribbled a note on a clipboard and shouted for a messenger. The warning would be taken seriously; when the Lady Regent Sandra was
extremely displeased
the headsman's ax or the two-handed sword reserved for noble Associates tended to become involved. Or people just mysteriously dropped dead with no apparent cause or had perfectly plausible accidents and wise living people carefully didn't comment. A page dashed up, bowed, took the note and ran for a tall metal framework not far away, scampering up the rungs of the ladder built into it as agile as a monkey. Moments later the heliograph atop it began to blink.

“What's the condition of the railroad draught teams?” she asked.

“Not bad, my lady. We've replaced the worst tired ones from the town and the Count's herds, one-for-one, on your authority. There's plenty of alfalfa and sweet clover hay by the watering points and we've been baiting them on that and milled barley and oats and bean-mash as they came in. The first in are already rested and well fed and ready for another run. The Count's men have been very cooperative and pretty well organized. Not to mention his veterinary officers.”

“They'd better be, Sir Tancred,” Tiphaine said. “We don't have time for pissing matches or screwups. Not if we're going to make the enemy react to us, rather than the other way 'round.”

Walla Walla hadn't been a large city before the Change as they reckoned things then; a bit under thirty thousand, and reasonably compact, with less sprawl at the edges than most urban settlements of the time. It had also contained the fortresslike State Penitentiary, with over two thousand hardened cons, who'd broken out on Change Day Five and taken the city over. When the Lord Protector's troops arrived later that year, there had been a mass uprising of what was left of the population in their favor.

“All aboard!” the train driver said. “Loose brakes—”

The brakemen spun their wheels, and the stronger passengers-to-be the sergeant had selected set their hands to the grips and pushed to get the cars rolling; the mules knew the drill, and started to lean into their collars even before the long whip snapped over their backs. The crowded cars began to move along the rusted steel, to a chorus of shrieks and wailing children. Inching at first, slowing again for an instant as the pushers clambered aboard, and then rumbling up to a fast walk; an animal could pull a
lot
more on rail than on even the best road.

Tiphaine nodded in satisfaction. One of the first things she'd learned back fifteen years ago when she moved from small-unit black ops into the conventional military was just how hard it was to keep a major troop movement from seizing up into a series of ungovernable traffic jams.

Conrad Renfrew had also been in charge of that first expedition of conquest up the Columbia to Walla Walla; from what Tiphaine had read in the records, he'd killed a couple of hundred of the convicts, recruited about seventy-five for service elsewhere, and put the rest to forced labor for the rest of their short miserable lives, mostly getting in the harvest round about and then making a beginning on the fortifications and helping make things habitable for the refugees from Spokane and the western cities and the Columbia plateau selected for resettlement on the new manors. Then he'd installed the present Count's father, who'd been his second-in-command and to whom Norman Arminger owed multiple favors, and departed for the next urgent job. Of which there had been an infinite number then.

A nice workmanlike job,
Tiphaine thought judiciously.
Solid, like Conrad.

She'd been fourteen then, training with Katrina in Lady Sandra's household, initially for clandestine work. Young females made extremely efficient assassins, if they had the right attitudes, training and native talent. They just didn't attract the eye of wary suspicion the way your average hulking macho brute did, particularly if the target
was
a hulking macho brute, which most had been. Profound surprise had been the last expression on a lot of faces she and Katrina had dispatched to their putative rewards via stiletto, crossbow, piano-wire garrote, poison-filled hypodermic and various other unpleasantnesses.

It was very like Sandra to see the possibilities instantly when two vicious, intelligent, hungry, traumatized and extremely athletic barely teenaged girls managed to infiltrate her heavily guarded private quarters and demand a job on Change Day Forty. Norman Arminger had just laughed himself sick and told her to go ahead with the Sailor Moon Squad if she thought it was worthwhile. They'd both agreed that the rough and ragged material they were trying to forge into an elite needed a lot of culling, particularly the non-Society elements.

Walla Walla's defenses stood in a stout irregular rectangle now, ferroconcrete and rubble walls forty feet high faced with hard granite; round towers reared half that again at intervals, with conical roofs of witch-hat shape on top sheathed in lead or copper, the whole surrounded by a deep moat. The wartime hoardings were up over the crenellations of the wall, sloping metalfaced timber roofs that protected the fighting platform from arrow fire and let defenders shoot and drop things straight down from under cover.

The old penitentiary had been the foundation for the big castle that made the northwestern corner of the new walled city; she could see its massive machicolated towers silhouetted against the blazing colors of the western sky. A blimp-shaped observation balloon at three thousand feet up stood black against the dark blue vault of heaven, the long curve of its tethering cable hardly visible at all.

As she watched a signal light began to snap from its basket, aimed east in a rapid flicker of coded Morse, probably sending to one of the castles in the foothills of the mountains there.

There were still around fifteen thousand people here in peacetime, half what Portland had and nearly as much as Corvallis. The rich farmlands, pastures, orchards and vineyards of the Walla Walla valley and the timber of the Blue Mountains to the east brought it wealth, as did trade in peacetime; in war it was an outpost against the city-state of Pendleton to the south and the United States of Boise to the north and east. Or against both and the Prophet's hordes from Montana, now.

Banners flew from the peaks of tower and gatehouse. Besides the scarlet-yellow-black Lidless Eye of the PPA, there were the arms of the Aguirre family who were Counts Palatine of the Eastermark and Barons of Walla Walla—
Or, a tree vert with a wolf passant sable, on a tree brun
—and now the crowned mountain and sword of the High Kingdom of Montival flying above them all. Sandra had seen to that throughout the Association territories and encouraged it elsewhere, even before the putative High King got back.

Her thoughts shied away from the Sword of the Lady. Not that she didn't believe in it; it was so real that your belief became utterly irrelevant.
Too
real. You got the feeling that it could tear through the fabric of things at any moment, like a heavy weight through damp paper. Meaning itself crumbled around it.

She went on aloud: “All right, get them moving in relays, Sir Tancred,” she said, as an empty train rumbled in from the east. “It's important that their kinfolk inside the walls know they're safe. See all those watchers on the parapet? Seeing vulnerable dependents heading out will help morale a great deal. They can fight to defend their families while the families are out of immediate danger.”

Tancred nodded, looking thoughtful for a second; he was an extremely capable young man or he wouldn't be commanding the Protector's Guard regiment, but he needed to gain a broader perspective if he was going to rise further. Another thing Sandra and Conrad had drummed into her hard long ago was that a big part of commanding was finding which of your subordinates could learn and then keeping them at it.