The Tears of the Sun Read Free Page B

my right, I’m going to be invincible,” Rudi grinned. Then more soberly: “Though we’d best remember this is far bigger than either of us the now, the story of many and not ours alone. We may be at the center, but it’s the wheel that matters, not just the hub.”
    One arm went around her shoulders. He put the other hand’s thumb and forefinger to his lips and whistled sharply. There was a moment’s silence, and then figures with long yew bows in their hands came trotting down out of the trees, hard to see at first in their green-covered brigandines and Mackenzie-tartan kilts and plaids. As they formed up around the High King and Queen for the walk back to Dun Juniper one began to sing, and they all took it up. When he recognized the tune so did Rudi, despite Mathilda’s laughing gesture of protest:
    â€œNear Sutterdown, in the country round
One morning last Beltaine
Down a boreen green came a sweet colleen
And she was whistlin’ Rudi’s Tain.
She looked so sweet from her sandaled feet
To the sheen of her nut-brown hair
Such a coaxing elf, sure I shook myself
To see if I was really there!”
    â€œThat song’s a mutilation!” Mathilda said. “I’ve heard the original.”
    â€œI call it an improvement,” Rudi said. “This isn’t Erin, after all!
    And he continued in a strong tenor:
    â€œFrom Ashland’s plays up to Portland’s quays
From Bend down to Coos Bay town
No maid I’ve seen like the fair colleen
That I met near Sutterdown!
As she onward sped I shook my head
And I gazed with a feeling rare
And I said, says I, to a passerby
‘Who’s the maid with the nut-brown hair?’
He smiled at me, and with pride says he,
‘That’s the gem of our own Clan’s crown . . .’ ”

CHAPTER TWO
    SHATTUCK HALL, TEMPORARY CHANCELLERY
CROWN CITY OF PORTLAND
(FORMERLY PORTLAND, OREGON)
PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)
JULY 31, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
    Â 
    Â 
    â€œ M y Lord Chancellor,” his executive assistant said. “Abbot-Bishop Dmwoski to see you.”
    â€œThank you, Ms. Wong,” Ignatius said, with a polite nod.
    Many hats to keep straight, he thought; the title still felt a little unnatural.
    Though at present, with the hood of his scapular thrown back, there was nothing between his tonsured head with its rim of raven hair and the ceiling. He was a slim broad-shouldered man of medium height, with a pale weathered regular face and slightly tilted black eyes, the legacy of a Vietnamese grandmother brought back here after some half-forgotten war of the ancient world.
    Knight-brother of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict, priest, Lord Chancellor of Montival. Remember that names do not make the man. You are a human soul like uncounted millions more, the smallholder’s boy baptized Karl Bergfried; as precious to God as they, and no more so.
    â€œPlease send him through immediately,” he went on. “Then the mustering reports from the Ashland . . . no, it’s the Liu matter, isn’t it?”
    He concealed a rush of embarrassment at her raised eyebrow. Adjunct Professor Felicia Wong was from Corvallis, part of the University Faculty of Administration there—which meant that she was a junior-to-middlinglevel bureaucrat on secondment from the city-state’s government, and hoping to get in on the ground floor of the new High Kingdom’s administration. Faculties were the term Corvallans used for what most people called guilds ; a little confusingly they were also part of the University’s teaching structure. Like their terminology, they also insisted on dressing in what Ignatius considered an absurdly archaic manner; in her case, a button-down dress shirt, a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, blue denim trousers and a painstaking modern re-creation of an old-world type of shoe