The Tears of the Sun

Table of Contents

 

 

NOVELS OF THE CHANGE
ISLAND IN THE SEA OF TIME
AGAINST THE TIDE OF YEARS
ON THE OCEANS OF ETERNITY
DIES THE FIRE
THE PROTECTOR'S WAR
A MEETING AT CORVALLIS
THE SUNRISE LANDS
THE SCOURGE OF GOD
THE SWORD OF THE LADY
THE HIGH KING OF MONTIVAL

 

NOVELS OF THE SHADOWSPAWN
A TAINT IN THE BLOOD
THE COUNCIL OF SHADOWS

 

OTHER NOVELS BY S. M. STIRLING
THE PESHAWAR LANCERS
CONQUISTADOR

ROC
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, USA
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

First Printing, September 2011

Copyright © Steven M. Stirling, 2011

All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

 

Stirling, S. M.
The tears of the sun: a novel of the change/S. M. Stirling.
p. cm.

ISBN : 978-1-101-54385-6

I. Title.
PS3569.T543T43 2011
813'.54—dc23 2011025290

 

 

 

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

 

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

 

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This one's for Kier

Yet more!

Thanks to my friends who are also first readers:

To Steve Brady, for assistance with dialects and British background, and also natural history of all sorts.

Thanks also to Kier Salmon, insufficiently credited collaborator, for once again helping with the beautiful complexities of the Old Religion, and with . . . well, all sorts of stuff! Sometimes I feel guilty about not paying her.

To Diana L. Paxson, for help and advice, and for writing the beautiful Westria books, among many others. If you liked the Change novels, you'll probably enjoy the hell out of the Westria books—I certainly did, and they were one of the inspirations for this series; and her
Essential Asatru
and recommendation of
Our Troth
were extremely helpful . . . and fascinating reading.

To Dale Price, help with Catholic organization, theology and praxis; and for his entertaining blog, Dyspeptic Mutterings, which can be read at
http://dprice.blogspot.com/
.

To Brenda Sutton, for multitudinous advice.

To Melinda Snodgrass, Emily Mah, Terry England, George R. R. Martin, Walter Jon Williams, Vic Milan, Jan Stirling and Ian Tregellis of Critical Mass, for constant help and advice as the book was under construction.

Thanks to John Miller, good friend, writer and scholar, for many useful discussions, for lending me some great books, and for some really, really cool old movies.

Special thanks to Heather Alexander, bard and balladeer, for permission to use the lyrics from her beautiful songs, which can be—and should be!—ordered at
www.heatherlands.com
. Run, do not walk, to do so.

Thanks again to William Pint and Felicia Dale, for permission to use their music, which can be found at
www.pintndale.com
and should be, for anyone with an ear and salt water in their veins.

And to Three Weird Sisters—Gwen Knighton, Mary Crowell, Brenda Sutton and Teresa Powell—whose alternately funny and beautiful music can be found at
http://www.threeweirdsisters.com/
.

And to Heather Dale for permission to quote the lyrics of her songs, whose beautiful (and strangely appropriate!) music can be found at
www.HeatherDale.com
, and is highly recommended. The lyrics are wonderful and the tunes make it even better.

To S. J. Tucker for permission to use the lyrics of her beautiful songs, which can be found at
www.skinnywhitechick.com
, and should be.

Thanks again to Russell Galen, my agent, who has been an invaluable help and friend for a decade now, and never more than in these difficult times.

All mistakes, infelicities and errors are of course my own.

DUN JUNIPER
DÙTHCHAS OF THE CLAN MACKENZIE
(FORMERLY THE EAST-CENTRAL WILLAMETTE VALLEY, OREGON)
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)
JULY 31, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

 

 

 

R
udi Mackenzie—Artos the First, High King of Montival though yet to be formally crowned—finished the last crusty bite of the ham sandwich, savoring the smoky taste of the cured meat and sharp cheese, and washed it down with the last swallow in the clay crock of beer. Then he leaned back against the smooth-worn roots of the gnarled wild apple tree and sighed, listening to the soft sough of wind in branches, the hum of bees. A sharp
tup-tup
came from a flock of little yellow-faced warblers diving through a cloud of mayflies, and then a buzzing
zee-zee-zee-bzzzee
as they swarmed off like swooping dots of sunlight into the Douglas firs above.

“Now this,” he said, “is something on the order of a homecoming, so it is. Or close enough for government work, until the war is over. Which is appropriate, since now we
are
the government.”

His newly handfasted bride Mathilda Arminger snuggled into the curve of his shoulder, a pleasant solid burden, her brown hair smelling of summer like the sun-warmed grass in which they rested, and her strong not-quitepretty features relaxed as she turned her face towards the sun. The weight didn't bother him, though Mathilda was a rangy five-nine and had the leanly solid build of someone who'd trained to fight in armor most of her life. He was a tall man, born late in the first year of the Change—which made him a few months older than his bride—long-limbed, broad in the shoulders and narrow in the waist, with a regular high-cheeked face just on the edge of beauty, a shoulder-length mane of hair a color just halfway between gold and molten copper, and light eyes of a changeable blue-green-gray.

“It's fair beyond bearing, this is. We've seen everything from the Sunset Ocean to the lands of Sunrise and nothing can quite compare,” he said softly.

He pulled a strand of long grass free and chewed meditatively on the stem as they looked down through the screen of firs to the open benchland below that made an irregular oval of grassland running east-west along the side of the hill, about a mile long and half a mile wide at its broadest. Most of it was rolling meadowland where horses and red-coated cattle grazed thick green grass starred with pink lupine and white daisies, separated by hawthorn hedge and white board fence into paddocks studded with great garry oaks or the tall black walnuts his mother's great-uncle had planted long before the Change. Beyond that the forested ground fell away steeply and blocked sight of the little valley of Artemis Creek flowing westward into the great green-gold quilt of the Willamette lowlands. Those faded in turn to the blue line of the Coast Range on the very edge of sight, even to keen young eyes on a day cloudless from horizon to horizon.