Excerpt from
The Sunrise Lands
by S. M. Stirling

To be published in 2007,
Reprinted in Mythic Passages with the author's permission

Publisher's Note: Author S.M. Stirling is an adept of alternate history and post-apocalyptic storytelling, escorting his readers through imaginative landscapes where other writers haven't ventured. In Island in the Sea of Time, Nantucket Island and a Coast Guard tall ship sailing in its harbor are flung back in time to 1250 BC.

Stirling masterfully leads thristy readers to the well of "What If." New myths and heroes join the ranks of the ancient ones. Mythic Passages is pleased and honored to publish a sample chapter from The Sunrise Lands that illuminates many forms of courage.

"Everything was fine until we got to the coast," Edain said at last, starting slowly, as if dragging things out of the well of memory that wanted to stay submerged. "This was... by the Wise Lord, more than a year ago now..."

County Tillamook, Portland Protective Association
Coastal Oregon
October 1, Change Year 21/2019 AD

"It was upon a Lammas night
When wheat sheaves are bonny
Beneath the Moon's unclouded light
I lay a-while with Molly…"

The song died away, muffled in the clinging mist, and they rode on in silence; though usually you couldn't get four young Mackenzie clansfolk to shut up, riding abroad for adventure and strange sights. The air was too thick, and the way it drank sound made the song forlorn.

I feel like a ghost, Edain Aylward Mackenzie thought, peering through the fog.

Then he shivered a little at the thought, spitting leftward to avert the omen and signing the Horns. Thick morning mist off the sea puffed and billowed about them, and moisture dripped from the boughs of the roadside trees. Drifts wandered over the graveled way; the fetlocks of the horses stirred it like a man's breath in smoke. Slow wet wind soughed through the Coast Range firs behind him, louder than the sounds of the little caravan's hooves and wheels; the Association baron and Rudi Mackenzie rode directly ahead.

"These clansfolk have come all the way from Sutterdown to see about your cheeses and smoked salmon," Rudi said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder towards the wagons. The red-gold curls that tumbled to his shoulders were like a fire-beacon in the dimness. "Not to mention that attar-of-roses stuff you wrote about. If trade's not below your notice, Juhel."

"Men with wheat-fields and vineyards in their demesne and Portland on their doorstep can afford to get picky about dérogeance," the young baron growled. "What I've got is trees, grass, cows, potatoes and fish. God has given this land and these people into my charge — and now that I'm Anne's guardian, the whole of God-damned County Tillamook's on my plate 'till she's come of age, not just Barony Netarts. It's up to me to see to it the people prosper. I'm sick of courtiers making jokes about Tillamookers in wooden shoes."

Edain listened and snorted quietly to himself. He'd seen enough in this visit to know that any Association aristo would say that sort of thing, and a lot of them were right bastards all the same. Evidently Rudi thought this one meant it, though — he'd gotten to know the man while he was up north in Protectorate territory on his yearly visits.

That was why the Juniper Mackenzie's son and tanist had agreed to speak for the wagon-train's owners. Edain and his three friends had come along for the fun of the thing, this being after Mabon and slack time on their parents' crofts. There were casks of Brannigan's Special Ale and carved horn cups from Bend and raw turquoise and such packed in the wagons, and blankets and cloaks woven on Mackenzie looms - his own mother and sister's among them.

He let the conversation blur into the background noise of hooves and wheels on gravel and looked around instead; he'd come along on this trip with Rudi to see new things.

That I have! he thought.

The ruins of Salem, the steel gates of Larsdalen, great empty-eyed skyscrapers in Portland staring like lost spirits of the past at the present-day pomp of tournament and court, the majesty of the Columbia gorge and hang-gliders dancing through it like autumn leaves, Astoria and its tall ships and crews from as far away as Chile and Hawaii, Tasmania and Singapura and Hinduraj...

And the sea, the Mother's sea. And whales! And sea lions!

His eyes went left, towards the ocean about a mile away. The great gray vastness of the Pacific was out of sight now — fog still clung in drifts and banks over the flat green fields of the Tillamook plain.

It gave them glimpses as if curtains were drawn aside for an instant and then dropped back. They rode past drainage ditches and levees and rows of poplars with leaves gone brown-gold and the skeletal shape of a windmill that pumped water to dry out the soggy land. Cows with red and yellow and brown coats grazed between rose-hedges, mostly on the rich grass of the common pastures; now and then there were fields that looked like reaped oats, and potatoes; others bore ranks of rosebushes, an odd-looking thing to be grown like a crop, and he wished he could see them in summer's glory.

He could smell the sea, though, the wild deep salt of it, and the rich silty scent of the vast salt marshes on the seaward edge of the plain. They were full of wildfowl at this time of year too, and the gobbling and honking and thrashing of their wings came clear.

A village passed, stirring to the morning's work and giving off a mouth-watering scent of cooking and baking; there was a roadside calvary; then a manor's sprawling outbuildings, and ahead the gray concrete of a castle's tower on a hill, with the town walls of Tillamook glimpsed at the edge of sight when a gust parted the fog for a moment. A fisherman had told them there would likely be an onshore breeze most mornings. The view would be better from the castle where they'd be guesting...

And I'm sharp-set for breakfast.

They did an excellently good veal-and-potato pie here, and fine things with seafood you couldn't get in the Clan Mackenzie's home territory.

The baron's young son dropped his pony back from where the talk had turned boringly to trade. His father's men-at-arms and crossbowmen rode on the left side of the road, and the four Mackenzies who'd come with Rudi on the right, and behind it all the wagons and the clansfolk from Sutterdown who were wrangling them. He angled back towards the fascinating strangers and gave a would-be-regal nod.

"The best of the morning to you, young sir," Edain said.

That was polite enough, and Mackenzies didn't call anyone lord — even the Chief herself herself, the Mackenzie, much less some foreign kid in strange clothes. The boy was dressed in a miniature version of his father's green leather-and-wool hunting garb, down to the arms in the heraldic shield on the chest of his jerkin — a round cheese one-half sinster, with a holstein head dexter, a crossed sword and crossbow below. He also had a real if boy-sized sword; otherwise he looked like any tow-haired and freckled seven-year-old.

"You guys sure talk funny," the lad said seriously.

"And sure, we think you northerners are the ones that talk funny," Edain replied, exaggerating his lilt and winking.

The youngster laughed, but Edain did think that; the Portlanders' accent was flat and a little grating to an ear accustomed to the musical rise and fall the younger clansfolk put into English, and the nobles here sprinkled their talk with words from some foreign language in an absurd, affected fashion.

The boy threw a look at their kilts and plaids and bonnets; Rinn Smith and Otter Carson had painted up too, with designs on their faces in black and scarlet and gold — designs of Fox and Dragon, for their sept totems. Not from serious expectation of a fight, but to play to the Clan's image and look fierce for the outlanders. Rinn thought it impressed outlander girls no end, often onto their backs in a haystack to hear him tell it, but then he was a boaster who'd have worn himself away to a shadow in the past couple of weeks if everything he claimed was true.

And he's not traveling with his girlfriend.

"And you wear weird clothes, too," the nobleman's son went on. "Even weirder than Bearkillers or the people from Corvallis."

"They are strange there," Edain agreed gravely. Though not so strange as you Portlanders.

"You've been to all those places?"

"To most of them. The wagons have come direct from the Clan's land, but the young Mackenzie and we have been wandering with our feet free and our fancy our only master for weeks now, and only joined them these last days."

Pure sea-green envy informed the look he got. "Cool! I'm going to go to be a page at the Lady Regent's court in a couple of years, in Portland and Castle Todenangst and places. So I can learn to be a squire and then a knight and stuff. That'll be cool too."

Edain found himself grinning; he'd come into the wide world himself now and seen some of the wonders of it, but to the lad this little pocket of farm and forest by the sea was the world, just as Dun Fairfax had been to him at that age. More so, because he'd had Dun Juniper just an hour's walk away, with all its comings and goings, and the Mackenzie herself dropping by to talk with his father. This place was a backwater.

The boy drew himself up then, consciously remembering his manners:

"I'm Gaston Strangeways," he said, left hand on the pommel of his miniature sword. "Son and heir of Baron Juhel Strangeways — Lord Juhel de Netarts, guardian of County Tillamook, with the right of the high justice, the middle and the low."

"It's an impressive array of titles, that it is," Edain said, and they shook hands solemnly, leaning over in their saddles.

"And his father was a knight, too. Even before the Change. He died a year ago, the same time the Count did."

Edain had suffered through hour after hour of tedium in the Dun Fairfax school from his unwilling sixth summer to glad escape at twelve, and some of the pre-Change history lessons had rubbed off.

"I don't think they had knights or barons or counts before the Change, the old Americans," he said. "They had Lobbyists and Presidents and Consultants instead."

"In the Society," young Gaston said. "Granddad told me about the tournaments and things." Then he cleared his throat and went on formally: "Welcome to our lands."

Edain grinned again; toploftiness like that was irritating from a grown man, but funny when it was a kid.

"And I'm Edain Aylward Mackenzie," he said. "My sept's totem is Wolf."

The boy's eyes went a little wider. "You're Aylward the Archer?" he said breathlessly.

Then an accusation: "You're not old enough! The Archer fought in the Protector's War, and my dad wasn't old enough for that. Granddad fought in that war and he got his limp then."

"That's my dad you'd be thinking of," Edain said, a little sourly. "Sam Aywlard, First Armsman of the Clan. Well, he was until a couple of years ago."

Hecate of the Crossroads and Him called the Wanderer, hear me; now wouldn't it be a braw thing to travel far enough that people think of me when I say my name's Aylward! I love my dad, but it's like being a mushroom growing on an old oak, sometimes.

"He did that, and you can. Careful now! It's well-oiled with flaxseed, but I'd not want to drop it in this wet."

Edain reached over his shoulder and slid the long yew stave free of the carrying loops beside his quiver. It was strung, and the boy tried to draw it after he'd admired the patterned carving of the antler-horn nocks and the black walnut-root riser. The young Mackenzie let him struggle with it, and there were chuckles from the rest of the clansfolk as the youngster handed it back and said gravely:

"That's a pretty heavy draw." He looked at Edain as he returned it. "I've heard a lot about Mackenzie archers. Is it true you guys are witches and can make magic, too?"

"Well, I'm not much of a spell-caster myself, beyond the odd little thing to keep the sprites and the house-hob friendly, or for luck when I'm hunting —"

"I shot a rabbit with my crossbow just last week. It was eating the cabbages in Father Milton's garden."

"Sure, and if the little brothers won't mind your gardens, that's what you must do. Also a rabbit is good eating."

"Could you teach me a spell for luck when I'm hunting?"

"Mmmmm, I think your Father Milton might not like you making luck-spells, so you'd best ask him for a prayer to your saints, instead. We're followers of the Old Religion, which you are not," he said, touching the Clan's moon-and-antlers sigil on his brigandine.

Then he glanced aside at his lover Eithne.

"Now, this one you'd better be careful of!" he said, teasingly solemn. "A priestess of the second degree! She can sing a bird out of the bough, and 'chant a cow's teats to give butter ready-churned, and blind a man's eyes with love by a rune cut on a finger-nail. The fey themselves give her a wide birth, hiding beneath root and rock unless she bids them fetch her tea and spin wool for her, the which they do in fear and trembling before her power, so."

The boy looked at her wide-eyed and crossed himself. "Is that why you've got a girl along?" he said, loading the descriptive word with scorn. "'cause she's a real witch?"

The mounted Mackenzies all laughed. The four of them were every one younger than Rudi; old enough to travel and fight but not solid householders weighed down with responsibilities like the group by the wagons. Eithne stuck out her tongue at the boy, or possibly at Edain. She was eighteen too, a tall lanky brown-eyed girl with skin one shade darker than olive and long black braids falling from beneath her Scots bonnet. The clasp on that held a spray of feathers from a red-tailed hawk, to show her sept totem, and she had a round yellow flower tucked behind one ear, late-blooming Coast Maida.

"It's because otherwise the boys wouldn't know what to do, the dear creatures, without a woman along," she said, her tone mock-lofty. "Pretty? They are that, but dim. Ná glac pioc comhairie gan comhairie ban, as the Chief would say. It's a female's guidance you need when advice is given."

"Very true! That's why I've got Garbh with me," Edain said guilelessly.

The big rawboned bitch walking at his horse's heels should have looked up at the sound of her name. Instead she made a sound halfway between a whine and growl, stopping stock-still and looking westward, the heavy matted fur over her shoulders rising and her ears cocked forward.

"Aire!" Edain shouted, loud as he could. "Beware!"

He blushed furiously as his voice broke despite the sudden sharp stab of alarm, but the clansfolk stiffened at the danger-call.

He had just enough time to flip off his bonnet and slap his sallet helm over his brown curls before he heard something. Something familiar as breathing; the wshhssst sound of arrows cleaving air, but this wasn't a practice-ground back home, or a riverside thicket with an elk in it. Someone was shooting at them, and doing it while he couldn't see three times arm's length.

"Down!" he yelled, conscious of eyes turning towards him. "Incoming!"

Young Gaston was still on his pony, gaping. Edain kicked his feet out of the stirrups and dove off his borrowed mount, grabbing the boy as he did and hugging him to his chest, turning his back to the deadly whistle. Black arrows with red-dyed fletching went smack into the mud around him. There was a harder, wetter thwack as one struck flesh, and someone screamed, and a horse bugled pain and fear. Then a hard bang and something hit him between the shoulderblades, also hard. Pain lanced through him, but it was gone in a moment — the little steel plates riveted inside his brigandine had shed the point.

"Down and stay down," he shouted to Gaston, throwing the boy flat in the roadside ditch. "Garbh — guard! Stay!"

Then he had his own bow out, slanting it to keep the lower tip off the ground as he knelt. As he whipped an arrow out of his quiver, he was suddenly and wildly certain that someone out there was trying to kill him, and felt an indignation he knew even then was absurd.

A high screaming rose from the misty field west of the road, and spears and axes glinted through the fog.

"Haiiiii-DA!" they called, a rhythmic screeching. "Haiiiii-DA!"

His father had told him that it was the waiting beforehand that was the time of fear, and you were too busy for it when the red work began. It turned out to be not quite that way for him; he was aware of being afraid, but he didn't have any attention to spare for the emotion.

Most of the strangers' arrows hit the Protectorate men on that side of the road, or whistled past into the fields and fog. Then there was a roaring onrush of half-seen figures, running in to strike in the confusion.

Edain drew and shot and drew shot and drew and shot again, the deadly fast ripple he'd been taught from infancy, something else he didn't have to think about, and the other Mackenzies were with him. His quiver was half-empty when a man in a helmet with a raven-beak covering half his face came at him no more than arm's-length away, spear drawn back for a thrust, a shield covered with blocky angular patterns in his other hand. Edain dropped his bow and snatched for shortsword and buckler, feeling as if he was moving through thick honey...

The snarling tattooed face behind the mask's beak went slack with shocked surprise as a horse floated by behind him with a flash of steel.

"Morrigú!" Rudi Mackenzie shouted in a voice like brass and steel as he struck.

He swung the long blade in an arc that crunched into someone who staggered back in ruin on the other side. His black horse Epona reared, its milling forefeet smashing heads and shoulders.

"Morrigú! Morrigú!"

Edain had his own sword out now, and the buckler in his left fist. His friends were with him and they rushed across the road, shouting their totem warcries; somewhere he could feel part of his mind gaping in bewildered horror, but he was too busy for that, too busy howling and hitting, spinning and dodging and leaping over a hiss of steel and stabbing as he came down... Shapes loomed up out of the fog, a man swinging an axe at a fallen crossbowman. Edain punched him with the buckler before he could look up and felt a shivery sensation as a jaw broke beneath the steel.

There were shouts all around him. Haiiiii-DA; calls of Haro! and St. Guthmund for Tillamook! Further off a church-bell started to ring, and a hand-cranked siren wailed from the castle's tower.

Then suddenly there was nobody within sight standing up except the people he'd started with. A man sprawled in unlovely death at his feet, dark eyes wide in surprise at the arrow in his chest. A broad-built broad-faced man not much older than he was; very dark, with blood in his black hair, wearing a jacket of sealskin sewn with bracelet-sized steel rings and a dented steel cap not far away. A short thick bow of yew and whalebone and sinew lay near his hand.

Edain stood panting and glaring around; Eithne handed him his bow, and he checked it automatically before sliding it back into the loops. He still had half of his arrows left. The fight had been too brief and too brutally close-quarters to shoot them all away.

Rudi cantered up, the visor of his helm up, and the baron with him.

"They must have come in before dawn," Juhel Strangeways de Netarts said, and then swore lividly: "Satan's arsehole, with piles like fat acorns! They'll be all over the country between the bay and the hills by now, stealing and kidnapping —"

"So we'll cut them off from their boats, before they can get back with loot and prisoners," Rudi snapped. "Where will they have come ashore?"

"Over there," Juhel replied, pointing a little south of west with his red-running broadsword. "It's the best spot near here — where we pull up the boats — no water deep enough anywhere else short of Bay City. They'll have one of their schooners off the coast. They tow the landing boats down from the islands for longshore raids, damn them. It's a good idea to take their boats, but I have to rally my retainers and the militia! Otherwise we can't hit them hard enough to overrun them."

"Juhel, we Mackenzies will keep them busy. You get your people together and relieve us — get them ready, but for the sweet Lady's sake, don't take too long!"

He swung down from Epona's back and looped up the reins to the saddlebow; the horse followed him like a dog, but this wasn't the weather for playing at knights, nor were there many Mackenzies besides Rudi who could. Edain and the clansfolk fell in behind him, his friends and a round dozen from the wagons, led by a lanky man named Raen with the twisted gold torc of a married man around his neck; he was old Tom Brannigan's son-in-law.

"Who are we fighting, Chief?" Edain asked as their feet splashed through a slough.

Wish I'd painted up, now, he thought to himself. It'd be... comforting, like.

His father disapproved of the custom of painting your face for war, but few Mackenzies under thirty agreed.

"They're Haida," Rudi said absently.

Cold water sloshed into his shoes, and then they were on dry land again; he could sense a river to their left, and the loom of the low Coast Range beyond that, but their path was wet pasture. Fairly soon his knee-socks were as sodden as his feet. They moved at a steady jog-trot, as fast as was practical in unknown country with dense fog about them, spread out in a loose triangle.

"Haida, that's Indians, right, Chief? From somewhere up north?" Edain went on; he liked to get things tidy in his mind.

The Indians he'd met had all been folk much like anyone else, just with different customs; the Clan got along well with the Warm Springs tribes, who were allies of the CORA and had always been friendly to the Mackenzies. That wasn't always the case everywhere...

"A lot of them are Indians and that's where they got the name," Rudi agreed. "From the Queen Charlotte islands. Their ancestors used to raid like this in the old days, too, for plunder and slaves — long long ago, before white men came here. Great seafarers and boat-builders they were, back then. And things were... very bad... where they live, I hear, after the Change. So they probably remembered the old tales. Now quiet."

Traveling through a fog like this when there might be enemies at hand in any direction made your balls try to crawl up into your belly; sometimes he could see a hundred yards, sometimes barely well enough to place his feet, and it muffled sound and smell. He wished Garbh was still with them.

At first they found nothing; then a two-wheeled oxcart tumbled empty. The oxen had been speared, whatever was in the cart carried off. A child's body lay by one wheel, picked up by the heels and with its head beaten in against the steel. The child's mother lay dead beside it, her skirts rucked up around her neck, legs spread and a stab-wound low in her belly to show how she'd died.

The Mackenzies stopped as if halted by an invisible wall. Edain felt his stomach try to rise as his eyes went round in disbelief; all the parts of the picture were there, but he couldn't force his mind to take them in - and he didn't want to. Eithne was making a sound deep in her throat, a growl that would have done Garbh credit. Rinn did bend and spew. Otter backed away, making protective signs with his left hand and shaking so badly that he obviously didn't think they'd do much good.

And maybe they won't, Edain thought, fighting blind panic and feeling the hair bristling on his neck. Bad luck, bad luck, seven times bad luck just to see it!

Rape was bad enough, a dirty profanation of the Mysteries, of the loving union between Lord and Lady that made all creation. But there were evil men in any people and such things happened sometimes, especially in war. To kill a woman's child and then force her and then kill her through the womb, though — he half-expected Earth Herself to open up and swallow him and everything else male and breathing within a mile, down to the hedgehogs, and at a gulp.

The thought made him look down uneasily and shudder, but at least it distracted him enough to let his stomach settle.

Rudi winced and looked aside and began to speak, to wave them all forward, but Eithne held up a hand and stopped him. Her face was white and set as well, but in fury rather than fear. She moved forward and bent quickly to rearrange the dead woman's clothes. When she straightened again there was blood on her hand; the woman's blood, and the child's.

"Stand still!" she snapped as he and the other men began to back away. "We don't have time for nonsense! You first, tanist of the Chief."

Rudi bent to receive the defiled blood with a face like iron. Edain shuddered again as she touched his forehead and cheeks, then repeated it quickly with the other men. "You who bear the Lord's semblance — avenge this His Lady's blood, and make Earth clean of it," she said. Suddenly her lips skinned back over her teeth and white showed all around her eyes: "Kill!"

She was an Initiate and priestess; Edain was still simply a Dedicant, but he knew the voice of the Mother when he heard it... and She was angry. There was blood and death in that sound, and his skin rippled like a restive horse's at the midnight magic in it.

Rudi nodded grimly. "Let's go, Mackenzies!"

They did. Rinn and Otter dropped back a little to trot beside Edain.

"Your girl," Rinn muttered, tracing a sign. "The Night Face has her. The Dark Mother."

"That means we'll win this fight," Otter said, snarling eagerly. "Good!"

Edain shook his head. The Mackenzie herself had stood as Goddess-mother at his Wiccaning — and Dun Juniper was the center of the Mysteries. Also his mother was High Priestess of a coven. He knew more about it all than most young men his age.

"No, it means the other side's going to lose this fight," he said grimly. "That's not the same thing as us winning, boyos, and you'd better believe it. Nobody's safe when the Devouring Shadow shows up."

Rinn winced. "The manure's hit the winnowing fan for true."

Whether the kettle hits the pot, or the pot hits the kettle... Edain thought, but did not say.

"Lord Goibniu, shelter us with Your arm," Otter prayed; his family were smiths, and favored the Iron-Master. "Goddess Mother-of-All, gentle and strong, be gracious to Your warriors."

Fire showed through the murk. They stopped, fitted arrows to string, then moved forward at a walk. Mud squelched beneath his brogans and the pleated wool of his kilt shed beads of wet as it swayed about his thighs. Edain took a deep breath and let it out, another and another; ground and center, ground and center.

Dad was right; waiting's hard. The fighting just past spun through his mind in a welter of foul images, like butchering-time but with people, and then there was the horror near the cart. Lugh Long-Spear, spare me to avenge that!

The mud-smell was starting to yield to that of burning timber, but the fog was thicker than ever close to where the river ran into the bay, like having wool pushed in your nose and ears. The firelight was like a candle seen through glass thick with frost.

"Good as a beacon," Raen said to Rudi, softly.

"Probably why they did it, to show their raiding-parties the way back. The fog works for them, but not if they get lost themselves."

The Haida had scouts out, but the fog that had helped them hindered now. One loomed out of the dimness, started to level his spear, started to yell, a high thin sound. Rudi killed him with a snapping lunge to the throat and it ended in a gurgle. More yells came out of the fog, from the direction of the burning light. The raiders there knew something was wrong.

Rudi turned and vaulted into Epona's saddle.

"Hit them hard and keep moving," he said to the Mackenzie warriors. "They won't know how many we are if we don't let them have time to think, and by the time they do the Tillamookers will be here."

Then he filled his lungs and called, a great brass cry like a chorus of trumpets given words:

"We are the point —"

Edain drew a deep breath and joined in as the others took it up:

"We are the edge —

We are the wolves that Hecate fed!"

"At them, Mackenzies! Follow me!"

A knot of Haida warriors loomed out of the fog, standing guard over a clot of several dozen locals, men and women and children bound and sitting on the ground; bundles of tools lay beside them — adzes and broadaxes and two-man saws and drills and the rest of what you used for working wood.

The whole party dashed forward. A sudden banshee wail from beside him made Edain start; Eithne had been quiet since they left the dead woman. Now she wrenched a spear away from one of the Sutterdown men as she gave that appalling cry, a snatch so hard and swift he yelled in turn from the pain of his bruised fingers as she dashed past.

It was what the Clan called a battle spear, six feet of ashwood with a foot of double-edged blade on one end and a heavy steel butt-cap on the other. There was an art to using one...

Eithne charged into the knot of guards with the spear blurring over her head like the fan of a winnowing-mill, shrieking, face contorted into a gorgon mask of horror, striking with butt and blade-edge and point, leaping and using the torque of the spinning length to whirl herself around in mid-air. The guards were taken by surprise; one died in an instant in a splash of red as the blade whipped across his throat, and another as the butt crashed between his brows with a smack like a maul splitting oak and his eyes popped out of their sockets...

Too many of them for her to handle, Edain thought grimly, setting his feet and ignoring everything else. Got to -

The string of his longbow went snap on his bracer. A man about to swing a warhammer with a head of polished green stone into the back of Eithne's skull went down as the arrow tore through his throat in a double splash. Another, another...

Dimly he was conscious of shooting better than he ever had before, even at the Lughnasadh games at Sutterdown just past, when he'd carried away the silver arrow. Not much distance, but bad light and moving targets — and some of the arrows were passing close enough to Eithne to brush her with the fletching, a shaft for every two quick panting breaths.

Things burned behind them; sheds and houses and the ribs of a fair-sized ship on a slipway. Four big boats of cedar and fir were grounded bow-first on the mud nearby, shark-lean flat-bottomed things forty or fifty feet long, their prows carved in blocky angular depictions of ravens and orcas and hawks colored black and white and blood-red. Heads were spiked to the wood below their grinning jaws.

Edain was even more distantly aware that Rudi and the others were doing something... cutting the bonds of the first set of prisoners, and the men were snatching up their tools — a maul or a broadaxe made a weapon, if you were strong and full of hate.

The freed captives swarmed over the last of the Haida guards. But more raiders were coming in, driving people before them, often laden with huge bundles of their own goods; and then armed Tillamookers started arriving themselves in dribs and drabs, hunting through fog for the flames and the sounds of battle. Village militia with hunting spears and crossbows and farming tools, the town guard with glaives and poleaxes, a snarling scrambling brabbling fight amid burning buildings and ankle-deep mud and shoreside rocks that shifted under foot as the fog began to lift. Some of the Haida tried to keep them off while others heaved to push the boats back into the water. The core of them only broke when the baron came with his knights and their menies behind them, their fighting-tails of men whose trade was war; barded destriers, lances and men-at-arms and wet-gleaming gray chainmail hauberks.

He remembered seeing Rudi racing down the beach with gobbets of mud flying out from under Epona's hooves, throwing torches into the Haida boats. Three of them were burning, black choking smoke as the oiled cedarwood caught. Then the last started to slide free, and there was a savage scrimmage around its bow. A Haida chieftain with a raven's-wing on his helmet thrust a spear down at Rudi and Raen and Juhel de Netarts, and swords were scything up at men along the ship's side who clubbed back with oars and tried to row it out deeper. Raen fell back wounded and Rudi reached down to pull him out of the red-stained water, throwing him across his horse's crupper, and Edain put the last arrow in his quiver through the Haida as he thrust downward at Rudi's face.

A few raiders jumped into the water and swam into the bay, but the others threw down their weapons...

Edain staggered as silence fell, suddenly aware of his chest heaving against his brigandine as he struggled to suck in air, and the stink of his own sweat mixed with the tacky iron smell of blood. Or what felt like silence fell; there was still the crackle of fire — and the shouts of men trying to put it out, and others from the wounded, and a great crowd of people. A Catholic priest came up with a wagon, the Red Cross on its side and a load of bandages and ointment within, and a brace of women in plain dark dresses and wimples — nuns, they called them. They began setting up a field hospital. The baron's lady and his mother and a round dozen of others in cotte-hardies and ordinary women in double tunics pitched in beside them.

The people cheered the Mackenzies, waving scythes and pitchforks and spades, some of them dripping red; people were pounding him on the back, harder than he'd been hit in the fight.

And they cheered Baron Juhel and his men as well, and harder, holding up their children to see the good lord who would not leave his people to the terror from the sea. Rudi dropped back from where he'd been riding at the baron's side...

To leave the cheers for Juhel, Edain realized suddenly, blinking and feeling as if his mind was floating up from deep water into the sun. Well, that's the sort of thing a Chief has to think about, eh?

The sun was out now, burning away the last wisps of fog; he blinked against that, and the harsh smoke stung his eyes and made him cough, conscious of how dry his mouth was.

Juhel de Netarts had his plumed helmet off, hanging from his saddlebow, and pushed the mail coif to fall back on his shoulders. The smile he'd worn as he waved to his people slid off his face, and though he was well short of thirty he looked a lot older.

"God's curse on them," he swore, looking up at the burned ribs of the ship on the slipway. "I put money I couldn't afford into this, and borrowed more against Lady Anne's inheritance, and so did a lot of her subjects, at my urging. We were going to send her far south — down the coast to the Latin countries, and deal for coffee and sugar and cochineal on our own, make Tillamook a real town again with its own traders, with jobs for craftsmen and cash markets for our farmers. Those bastards in Corvallis and Newport skin us on every deal and the Guild Merchant in Astoria and Portland aren't any better. Now... now I don't know what the hell I'm going to do."

"Petition the Lady Regent," Rudi said promptly, dabbing at a long shallow slash on the angle of his jaw and holding a swatch of bandage to it. "Get Lady Anne to deliver it. Say if you get three year's relief of the mesne tithes from your barony, you'll promise to put all of it into rebuilding. She wants people like you to do well. It's good for revenue, and it gives her more bargaining power with the Guild Merchant as well. That should let you repair the shipyard as well as the rest of the damage — it's just wood that burned, mostly, and you didn't lose many of your skilled workmen or their tools."

"Thanks to you for that," Juhel said, and looked at him dubiously. "They'd have gotten away otherwise, and taken a lot with them. But the Spider's awful tight with a coin. Happier taking it in than giving it out. Usually bleating about the tithes just gets you what the sheep gets at shearing time."

"Yeah, she's not what you'd call open-handed. But she knows you have to spend to get, believe me... and I know the Princess Mathilda, and that her mother listens to her."

Juhel grinned delightedly and clapped the younger man on the shoulder.

Ah, Edain thought. And the tanist doesn't even have to come right out and say he'll urge the Princess to advise her mother. What a Chief he'll make for the Clan some day!

Rudi lowered his voice: "And if I were you, I'd be very careful. The Haida knew too much about just where and when to hit you. Something smells there, and not like attar of roses, either."

Juhel nodded, then walked his horse a few steps over to where the other Mackenzies were grouped. Raen's friends and kin from Sutterdown had laid out his body and those of three others; they weren't keening them, being among strangers, but they'd put the coins on their eyes and laid holly on their breasts, and were chanting softly:

"So ever to — blessed be —
Part of life's Wheel..."

Otter and Rinn were a little way off with nothing worse than nicks and bruises, accepting basins of water, soap and towels and bits of food and mugs of beer from an admiring crowd that seemed to include a lot of teenage girls, starting to grin as the relief of surviving their first hard fight sank in. Eithne leaned on her spear, still white and tense, sweat like teardrops making tracks through the blood on her face.

"Lord who holds this land," she broke in, her voice with an edge like sharpened silver. "What will you do with your captives?"

There were about a dozen of them, mostly wounded, bound and under guard. Juhel looked at her oddly, and shrugged.

"Take off their heads and send them to Portland, I suppose, mistress," he said. "Easier than sending all of them."

"No," she replied. She pointed with the spear.

The whole length of it still glistened dark-red as the blood grew tacky. Juhel looked at her… but over her head, rather than in the face.

I wouldn't like to meet her eyes right now, either, Edain thought as she went on, giving orders like a queen:

"Is it that there's an ash tree there, not far from your castle, tall and great?"

The nobleman nodded, and his look grew odder still and more sidelong.

"Put your men about it — about it in a circle, wearing iron and carrying spears and the emblems of your god. Bring your dead and lay them beneath a cairn with the blessings of your mass-priest. Then hang the evil-doers from the tree in sight of the dead and leave them for three days and nights. Do that, and you'll have... luck, luck for you and your land. Do that, or bury them living at a crossroads with a spear driven in the earth above."

"Ahhh..." Juhel swallowed, crossed himself and looked aside, shivering a little.

Rudi gave him a nod, short but sharp, and the baron drew a deep breath.

"I suppose we might as well hang them now. Sir Brandric! See to it! And the rest, as well."

"A pleasure, my lord. Very much a pleasure," the tall grizzled knight who commanded the garrison of Castle Tillamook said, and stalked off barking orders and grinning.

Eithne's knees buckled then, as if something — or Someone — withdrew a hand that had worn her like a glove. She shook her head as Edain tried to help her, then almost fell. When he caught her in his arms the eyes rolled up in her head and she went limp; somehow he'd been expecting her to be heavier, but it was the familiar slender form he picked up, though her head rolled limp against his shoulder. Cold fear worse than any he'd felt in the fight clawed at his gut as he bore her over to the aid station the nuns had set up, letting the spear fall to lie in the wet trampled grass.

One of them bent over the pallet he laid her on, pushed back an eyelid, felt her forehead and took her pulse with professional briskness. He showed her how to unbuckle the brigandine along the side and draw it off.

"Just stress and exhaustion, but a bad case of it," the nun said, clucking her tongue and drawing blankets over her. "A young girl's got no business doing this! She'll be fine with sleep and a good meal — just a few little cuts and scratches and some bruising here. Now, if you're not going to help, young man, get out! She won't be waking for a good many hours and I've got urgent cases to see to."

Edain blew out his cheeks in a whistle of relief and backed away; they were busy here, and he would be as useless as an udder on a bull.

Rudi and the local lord had dismounted, holding their horse's heads not far away as they spoke.

"Remind me never to piss your people off, Rudi," Juhel said with feeling.

He looked at the spray of dead where the Mackenzies had struck out of the fog with surprise and terror at their backs; bodies in the mud with gray-fletched arrows in them, or tumbling gashed and bloodless in the gray water. He shook his head.

"Dad fought at the Battle of Mt. Angel back in the Protector's War, and evidently he wasn't exaggerating."

Then he looked at Edain and smiled. "I've thanked Rudi," he said. "But I haven't thanked you yet, master Aylward. I saw you save my son. That was bravely done, and done for strangers."

Edain felt himself blush to the roots of his hair, and shrugged awkwardly as they shook hands.

"It's a poor excuse for a man who won't fight for his host, or help out a little kid caught in a battle," he said shortly. "Besides, I didn't notice these Haida buggers telling me they wouldn't hurt me if I were to kindly stand aside."

Rudi grinned. "He's a good man to have your back," he said, and clapped Edain on his. "And that's a fact."

Juhel laughed. "I don't doubt it. Fought with you before, eh?"

"No," Rudi said. "This was your first real fight, eh, Edain?"

The younger Aylward nodded and the Chief's son went on: "But I thought he would be someone I wanted with me if it came to one. Now I know it."

Juhel's brows went up. "If that was your first fight, I'd hate to see what you'll be like in ten years! But you did save my son; you put your back between him and those arrows. Name a reward, and if it's mine, it's yours. In honor I can't do less."

Edain drew himself up despite the burning tiredness that made him want to crawl into the nearest haystack and sleep for a year.

"I didn't do it for that, sir," he said. "I'll take your thanks, and that's all that's needed — the gods and the Three Spinners will see to any reward."

Juhel looked bewildered, and Edain cursed himself as he saw the beginnings of offense. For a fact, he didn't understand how an Association noble's mind worked. Outsiders didn't understand Mackenzies, and that was a fact too.

"There is a gift you could give him, Juhel, and one he'd value highly, though he'd never ask for it," Rudi said.

He was grinning again, like a fox for all that his totem was Raven.

"What's that?" Juhel said. "Horses? Weapons? Gold? Land, even?"

"Better than that. Write a letter to his father, telling what he did — and that he wouldn't take anything for it, either. I'll deliver it."

Edain stifled an impulse to shuffle his feet. His father wouldn't say much, just smile to himself and nod. He blushed again and fought not to grin.

"I will write, then," the baron said. He looked at the son of the Mackenzie chieftain, a long considering glance. "Your people don't have princes, Rudi, do they?"

Rudi looked a little impatient as he replied: "I'm not even really a lord, Juhel; just the Chief's tanist. My mother's Chief, and I may be after her - if the Clan wants me, and for as long as they want me. No, no princes."

"That may be a great pity," Juhel said thoughtfully, then looked around. "Now, I'd better get to work."

***

The Sunrise Lands will be published in 2007.

Learn more about S.M. Stirling
at his unofficial website, smstirling.com

Dies the Fire (Roc Science Fiction)

Island in the Sea of Time

More on "Courage":