The Tears of the Sun (48 page)

She ignored the sudden crack in his voice that had him blushing crimson, and spoke to carry again: “On this day, I have chosen to take Lioncel de Stafford as my squire, deeming him of good character and sufficiently instructed in the knowledge suitable to his years. Does any here know of an impediment to this oath?”

Silence, and she went on: “Kneel!”

She drew her sword and planted it point-down. Lioncel hesitated for an instant, then set his hands on the quillions; she clasped hers around his and looked down into his eyes. The fingers felt a little chill beneath hers despite the hot day; he hadn't been expecting this.

“The path of chivalry is a long one, and the honor of knighthood not easily won. Are you willing to devote yourself to this cause?”

“I am.” The boy's voice rang, strong and steady now.

“Then repeat after me:
Here I do swear—
”

“Here do I swear—”

The boy's face was shining as he finished. Tiphaine replied, “In return for your service, and your devotion to chivalry, I swear to teach you what I can, and to find instruction for you in what I cannot. I will furnish you with arms, horse and gear as needful and see to your honorable maintenance as befits your station. You shall be my vassal in arms and my pupil, and your service is not menial or infamous. As my honor reflects upon you, so does your honor reflect upon me. Whoso deals ill with you deals also ill with me, and at their peril.”

She released his hands, wiped the point of her sword carefully on one sleeve before sheathing it and pulled a badge with her arms out of a pouch. Then she pinned it to his cap before she drew him up by his shoulders and exchanged the ritual kiss on both cheeks.

“By wearing my badge, you declare your service to me, and my sponsorship of you.”

Rigobert was beaming with fond pride; Tiphaine drew him and the broadly grinning Lioncel aside, and the other baron hugged his son. Lioncel returned the gesture, then faced Tiphaine proudly; now he was forcing himself not to finger the badge in his cap that marked his acknowledged exit from childhood and into the intermediate status of a youth.

“Lioncel, do you know why I took your oath as squire today?”

“Ah . . . no, my lady.”

“First, you deserve it. In peacetime, I'd have waited another year, but we're at war. That leads to the second reason. You are your father's heir, but your younger brother Diomede is my son and heir by adoption, and the Barony of Ath, title and lands, go to him and the heirs of his body.”

Lioncel nodded; he'd already started his study of feudal law—the Association's system was based on twelfth-century England under the Anglo-Norman kings, as modified by the peace treaty at the end of the Protector's War and more subtly by Sandra Arminger in her term as Regent since. A nobleman needed some acquaintance with it, if he weren't to be helpless in the hands of his advisers.

“Nothing is certain in war. Your father and I may both fall in battle. I don't expect it, but it could happen.”

Lioncel nodded gravely; even as a youngster the son of a knightly house did not hide from the facts of life and death. He had been raised with the knowledge that war was the nobility's trade and avocation, and death by the sword their accepted fate. One that might come calling at any moment to exact the price of their privileges.

“If we did, your mother would take seisin of Barony Forest Grove by dower right until you came of age, in trust for you and your sister, and would have a third of the mesne tithes as widow's portion for her lifetime after you came of age and took seisin in your own right; that's settled law. But Diomede's position would be . . . ambiguous, and so would Delia's with regard to Ath and its revenues. Your lady mother would need your support because she has no formal right to Ath from me
except
through Diomede and that's uncertain. Technically Diomede is
my
son, but of course I'm not married to her so she can't claim seisin by dower right if I die or the widow's portion of the revenues. Dower descends from the husband, it doesn't rise from the child.”

Dammit,
she thought.
Norman and his obsessions! Not to mention the Thomas à Becket fixation a lot of the clergy have developed. Why on earth
couldn't
Delia and I get married? We
have
been for all practical purposes for a decade and a half!

Aloud she continued: “It's a nice point of law and some Chancellery clerk or worse still some Churchman might start a suit alleging Diomede was an orphan in need of wardship and that she had no standing to claim ward over him since a child can't have two legal mothers. The thing could be tied up in the courts for years with the land going to ruin. A page is a child; being a squire doesn't mean you're of age but it does give you a foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. It proves that you're old enough to take a legally binding oath of vassalage, so you can't be completely ignored. And as elder brother, you
do
then have certain rights where a minor sibling and the sibling's inheritance is concerned, and your mother through
you
since you'd be automatically under her ward as a widowed mother of a minor heir. Understand?”

He frowned, pale brows knotting in his tanned young face. “Yes, my lady, I think so. God and your patron saints protect you and my lord my father, but if the worst should happen, I will be my mother's strong right arm and my brother's shield and prove their rights against any who deny them. I swear it before God and the Virgin and my patron saint, St. Michael of the Lance.”

He crossed himself and she nodded.

“Good. In the meantime, you're the most junior of my squires instead of the oldest page in the household. And you're not going to be old enough to fight as a man-at-arms for another five years or so, is that clear?”

A nod, and she went on: “Sir Rodard will find you enough work to do, esquire of House Ath.
Hop!
”

“Thanks, my lady,” Rigobert said as the boy raced off. “I should have thought of something like that. I still find myself thinking like an uncle rather than a father sometimes, and as for being a husband . . . And there are other times I have to remind myself I really
am
a feudal lord, not just playing at it.”

Tiphaine gave a faint snort; she was a crucial near-decade younger and that sort of feeling hit her less often, but . . .

“Tell me. My highest ambition in Middle School was going to the Olympics as a gymnast. Until the world ended, when
not starving to death
, and
not getting raped, butchered and eaten by cannibals
or
not catching the Black Death
soon came to the fore.”

“I knew you were a complete jockette, but I'll bet you wore black and red flannel shirts, too,” Rigobert said with a grin. “Flannel shirts and a white A-shirt underneath, and skate shoes?”

“Oh, incessantly; with a trucker's hat, no less. I think the thirteen-year-old boys hated me because I looked more like a thirteen-year-old boy than they did.”

“Not a mullet. Please,
God
, tell me you didn't have a mullet.”

“Mother wouldn't let me, but that would have come in a couple of years. And when I turned twelve I realized I was desperately in love with Melissa Etheridge and put a great big poster of her on the inside of my locker door and played her music twenty-four/seven on my Walkman.”

Rigobert laughed, and Tiphaine smiled thinly. She'd never lost herself in laughter easily, not when she was sober at least, and for her being thoroughly disinhibited was usually a bad idea. She envied him that easy laugh a little. It was odd to realize she couldn't have had this conversation with Delia either; not because they didn't share everything, but because the younger woman simply didn't have the referents to understand it without a lot of backing and filling. She'd grown up a miller's daughter on Montinore Manor and hadn't even learned to read until her late teens. Tiphaine shook her head as memories opened like the door to a dusty cupboard.

“I was a complete caricature of a baby-dyke-in-training and didn't even realize it until I caught myself in the middle of a daydream of rescuing Melissa from a stalker and then smooching her passionately . . . my family didn't talk about things like that so I didn't even really understand the names my beloved classmates were calling me. I did know they weren't well meant, you bet I did.”

“Was it
possible
to be that naive in 1998?”

“For a while, if you were a lonely introspective only child of a single mother who was extremely religious, with no friends except your gymnastics coach. And she was terrified of being hit with ‘inappropriate conduct' accusations by a hysterical parent. Everyone knew before I did, except my mother and she was deep in denial.”

“Wasn't as much of a problem for me,” Rigobert said, with a reminiscent smile. “It might have been hellish if I were swish, but—”

“Yeah, you're even more butch than I am,” Tiphaine said sardonically. “Football star, right?”

“Not dumb enough for football. Basketball, track and field, karate, and fencing club. I was such a model of blazing macho hotness even the straight guys wanted me,” Rigobert said. “Ah, high school, the amount of action I—”

“Now you're boasting . . . wait a minute, do you realize our speech patterns just lost twenty-five years?”

The other baron shook his head. “You're right. Best not to dwell on the past . . . it was just seeing Lioncel looking so damned
young
. And looking so much the way I did at that age . . . though I'm pretty sure he's straight, come to that.”

“He is,” Tiphaine said definitely.

A conversation about stumbling upon him and a servant girl in a linen closet back at Montinore Manor came to mind; Delia had found it hilarious and she'd thought it rather embarrassing.

“Lioncel's greatest ambition is to be a gallant knight and a good baron, and I think he's going to achieve it,” she said instead.

“He's a fine boy, all three of us can be proud of him, but . . . they scare me, sometimes, the Changelings. No offense.”

“None taken. I'm a borderline case anyway. I can remember the old world, bits and pieces, particularly the last couple of years before the Change. I simply don't, usually, unless it comes up the way it did just now. The last twenty-three years or so have been a lot more fun than my childhood anyway, on the whole.”

“It's Changelings raised by Changelings who really give me that odd feeling, and Delia's seven years younger than you; she
is
a Changeling and no mistake. From time to time I look back on the way we set things up in the early years and think . . .
what have we done?
”

Tiphaine's expression went colder than usual. “We all did what we had to do, in those days,” she said, very softly. “All of us.
Everybody
did what they had to, or they died, like ninety-five percent of the human race.”

Rigobert inclined his head in silent agreement, memories of his own moving behind his eyes. Anyone old enough to really remember the first Change Years and the great dying knew that expression, from the inside as well as from their mirror; it would die only when the last of them were gone.

“Not quite what I meant. I was thinking of the Association's trappings in particular,” he said more lightly after a moment. “We all went along with it and now . . . now it's just the way people around here live.”

“Norman did
that
,” Tiphaine observed. “God help us if he'd been obsessed with first-century Rome or Chin Dynasty China or the Old South. Or been an old-fashioned Red with a man-crush on Stalin.”

“And if Norman hadn't existed, we'd probably all three have been dead these twenty-five years now and the children wouldn't have been born, so done is done and probably for the best.” Rigobert sighed. “
We
can't complain, seeing we not only made it into the small minority who survived but came out very much on top of the heap. I try to do right by the peasants on my manors, but being a baron is
much
more pleasant.”

“Except when we're doing the hard parts.”

Rigobert smiled. “No, sometimes then too, don't you find? Sometimes
especially
then.”

“Gotcha!” Ingolf said as his force came in out of the westering sun.

From here, several miles out on the high plains leading from the mountains down to Dayton, the valley with the sheep looked different; the rugged peaks in the background seemed closer, and the whole thing more closed off. And you could see most of it was rolling, not a steep V down to the little creek. The shepherdesses had fled in well-simulated terror, scattering their sheep artfully as they went, and the Boise cavalry had spread out to get the flock under control.