The Sword of the Lady

Table of Contents

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 PESHAWAR LANCERS
CONQUISTADOR

ROC
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
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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 2009

Copyright © Steven M. Stirling, 2009

Map by Cortney Skinner
All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

 

Stirling, S. M.
The sword of the lady: a novel of the change/S. M. Stirling.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-13468-9

1. Regression (Civilization)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.T543S96 2009
813′.54—dc22 2009015863

 

 

 

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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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The saga continues and grows—for a solitary business, you need a lot of help!

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, for once again helping with the beautiful complexities of the Old Religion, and with local details for Oregon. And for further use of BD!

To Diana L. Paxson, for help and advice (amounting to virtual collaboration in the Norrheim chapters), 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, for 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 Will Sanders, for putting me in stitches with Princess Yump ing Yimminy; read his excellent mystery ″Smoke″ for his take on this—unbelievably—real-life character.

To Melinda Snodgrass, Daniel Abraham, Sage Walker, 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. And to Gail Gerstner-Miller, ditto. Also the steak pie recipe was delicious.

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 by anyone with an ear and saltwater in their veins. Lyrics of ″The Trawling Trade″ are used by kind permission of the writer, John Conolly, who also wrote the folk classic ″Fiddler′s Green″ (further details on
myspace.com/johnconolly
). 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.threeweirdsis- ters.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.

The ″ancestral epic″ in Chapter Seventeen is actually the opening paragraph of
The Broken Sword
, a fantasy classic by Poul Anderson. Go out and get it!

Much overdue thanks to Russell Galen, my agent, who has been an invaluable help and friend for a decade now. By a stunning noncoincidence, my career has shot up like a sapling in this period. We make a good team; not only is he smart as a whip on the business side, but his advice on literary matters and on the conjunction between the two has been spot-on.

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

CHAPTER ONE

Rudi Mackenzie and Edain hadn′t been singing the hymn; more of a breathy whisper, though it rang loud in their minds as the moon rose enormous on the horizon, and they′d come down here below the lip of the valley where there was more cover for the rite. Rudi stopped instantly when a stick snapped. The warm sense of communion ghosted away like dust in a desert, and he sank down behind the tangle of wild rose in a motion that was swift but smooth rather than a catch-the-eye jerk.

Five paces to his right and a little behind him Edain Aylward Mackenzie did the same; his great shaggy half-mastiff bitch Garbh vanished even more completely, belly to the ground, ears cocked and only her black nose moving as it wrinkled. The air wasn′t moving enough to carry scent any distance, but her blocky barrel-shaped head seemed to split as the thin black lips drew back silently from her long yellow fangs.

The other half of her was probably wolf.

Both men listened hunter-fashion, with their whole bodies: not straining, but opening themselves to the summer twilight, letting sound and sight and smells and the movement of air on skin flow in until you
knew
. The evening hush was strong and the hot thick air hazy along the ridge where they lay above the river valley, full of rank odors of flowers and greenery and warm earth damp from yesterday′s thunderstorm. Sweat trickled down Rudi′s flanks beneath the brigantine torso-armor he wore, a corselet of little steel plates riveted between two layers of soft green leather. Something with too many legs bit the back of his left knee below the kilt and above the sock-hose, adding to the prickling itches. The coarse sandy grain of the leather on the riser grip of his longbow drank moisture from the palm of his left hand, growing damp but not slippery, which was the point.

The steep fall of ground to the river below was a patchy almost-forest. Single stands or clumps of mature pre-Change burr oak and shagbark hickory, black walnut and sugar maple reared above teardrop-shaped surrounds of saplings, where they′d rolled their seed downslope in the decades since the State foresters had stopped coming to prune and tend. The new growth ranged from fresh sprouts to fair-sized trees as old as Rudi, but the canopy wasn′t tall or closely spaced enough to shade out the undergrowth yet, and a dense understory of weeds and scrub was just past its summer prime.