08 The Tears of the Sun by S. M. Stirling

Author:S. M. Stirling [Stirling, S. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Roc
Published: 2011-08-04T14:00:00+00:00

Make a mistake, you sons of bitches. You’re out there. I can feel it, I can smell it. Come on, screw up.

Ingolf Vogeler carefully leveled the binoculars from where he lay just below the crest of the ridge, using a hand to shade the lenses so they would give no betraying flash in the noonday sunlight. This whole country on the fringe of the Blue Mountains was smooth ridge and slope making valleys, sometimes with a bit of a creek running down the vale between, sometimes dry, getting steeper as you went east.

Send me a nice cocksure kid, Lord, he thought. Or Manwë or Varda or whatever. Nineteen, a hard-on with legs, he’s invincible, he’s immortal, he knows it all. Give me something to work with.

There was a thin stand of tall straight ponderosa pine along the top here, smelling like butterscotch and vanilla as sap oozed out of cracks in their orange bark; the trees got thicker behind him too, up into the heights. Downslope were scattered thickets of shrubby mountain mahogany, and then grass rolling away in billowing folds that rose up the slope on the other side. Very faint marks in it along the contour indicated that it had been cultivated before the Change, but now it was in bunchgrass again, bleached almost white by summer but still good fodder. A herd of several hundred sheep and a few alpacas grazed it, and drank from the little summer-sunken trickle through the cottonwoods at the base.

“Good woolies,” he murmured very softly to himself. “Just eat the grass, drink the water, crap wherever the hell you please, look appealing and vulnerable. Good woolies.”

Though in fact they were still looking spindly with the late-spring shearing; you forgot how leggy sheep actually were if you only saw them with twelve pounds of fleece wrapped around them. A couple of mounted girls in leather pants and thin shirts and broad-brimmed Stetson hats watched over them, directing their dogs and keeping an arrow on the string for predators. That probably made both the humans and the sheep down there a lot more comfortable than his light mail shirt and the padded gambeson underneath it left him. He was used to sweating, though, and it was more bearable in this dry Western climate than in the humid Midwest summers he’d grown up with.

Minutes crawled by, the smell of sap grew stronger, and small pale grasshoppers went by his nose in ticking leaps. Ants trooped through the pine needles and sparse grass bearing a beetle aloft in bloodthirsty triumph, and somewhere a ground squirrel whistled, sounding a little like a woodchuck but with more of a chitter to it. Occasionally a little of the light powdery loess soil would blow into his face with a gust of the wind that soughed through the branches of the tall straight pines, and the dirt stuck to the sweat.

A golden eagle soared down the little valley, and several collies ran around barking hysterically in protective reflex as its broad-winged shadow fell on the flock.

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