Sunrise Lands

They all nodded thoughtfully; California had been a charnel house as bad as anywhere on the globe, that day when the lights went out.. . and the water stopped coming through the pipes that kept nearly two-score million alive in a natural desert. Not one in a thousand had lived through it, the ones who'd run early and fast; reports said there were places where the desiccated corpses still lay three deep on the edges of the Mohave, despite a generation of sun and wind and crows and coyotes.

Dead as LA, went the proverb.

Tiphaine went on: "The new management of the CUT started small just after the Change, but they've been expanding recently, both by straightforward conquest and by conversion; they cover most of what was Montana by now, and chunks elsewhere. If they take over you con vert or die, so it snowballs. I've looked into the theology. They're. .."

Her tone remained flatly unemotional as she paused for a moment to search for the appropriate phrase and then resumed: "… mad as Tom O'Bedlam. Living on a different planet. Fucking bughouse nuts."

"Yes, I've perused it a bit, too," Sandra said. "Even stranger than the late unlamented Pope Leo here. Sort of a mishmash of Christianity and Buddhism and every lunatic and charlatan from Madame Blavatsky on, with an explanation of why God sent the Change, too-floods having been tried before, as it were. And they're getting uncomfortably close, if they win this war with New Deseret. I wish we had access to this easterner Vogeler who was involved. The Mackenzies didn't exactly brief Mathilda on it."

Conrad's brows went up; when the scars on his face moved, he looked more like a gargoyle than ever. "The CUT are a bit far away to worry about, surely?"

"That's the time to worry. Knowledge is power. And now that we've absorbed the Palouse-"

"The western half of it," Tiphaine said, with pedantic accuracy.

"-there's only Boise and Deseret between us and them."

Conrad shrugged massive shoulders. "You're the sovereign. They're basically a bunch of sheep shaggers, though. And they think anything with gears in it is sacrilegious, don't they?"

"Yes, but you should read more widely in history, dear Conrad. There are any number of cults which've caused no end of trouble, though their first followers were few and poor. Especially when they preach salvation at the sword's edge. In the event of trouble, how are we placed?"

She knew most of the answer, but it never hurt to go over the facts again. Conrad's blue eyes took on a slightly abstracted look. He'd been an accountant by trade before the Change, as well as a fellow member of the Society for Creative Anachronism and a close friend of Norman and Sandra Arminger.

"The treasury's got a full year's revenue on hand in cash, our paper is trading at par and we can borrow at excellent rates if we have to-the customs and excise taxes are blossoming nicely with the way trade's picked up. It would be even better if it weren't for the Haida raiders and plain-and-simple pirate scum all over the Pacific basin."

"The pirates we'll have to leave to the naval powers like Tasmania, but for the Haida we need a Warden of the Coast. But who to appoint Marchwarden? Piotr has the most lands in that direction, but. .."

"But I wouldn't appoint him to supervise an orgy at the Slut and Brew," Conrad said.

Tiphaine nodded. "There's Juhel Strangeways, Lord de Netarts. He's competent, and even fairly honest. And he already has County Tillamook in ward, for Lady A

"Five years until she reaches her majority," the regent said.

"By then, he could have the place organized. He already dealt with that Haida raid, October before last."

"A matter in which our Rudi had a hand," Sandra said thoughtfully, stroking the cat in her lap. "He attracts trouble as sparks fly upward, that boy."

"Coincidence?" Conrad rumbled.

"I'm far too paranoid to believe in coincidence, Count Odell."

The other two smiled. "Neither do I," the man said, and Tiphaine nodded. "De Netarts, for Marchwarden of the West, then?"

Sandra nodded, and he went on: "The basic mesne tithes are coming in without too much trouble as well; it's easier now that we don't have to split them with the Church."

Sandra smiled like a cat. That had been one of the many reasons she'd unobtrusively arranged for Pope Leo to shuffle off his mortal coil, and for Portland's Church to be reunited with Rome-or rather with the Umbrian hill-town of Badia, which was where the Swiss Guard had escorted the remnant of the Vatican when Rome went under.

Poor Norman, he did so want a pope of his own in true medieval style, and Bishop Rule was just the sort of madman to suit the role, once he'd decided that God considered everything since about June 15, 1297, a mis take. Of course, the Change was some evidence for that.. . on the whole, though, Pope Log is preferable to Pope Stork.

Despite the occasional tussle with Benedict and his successor Pius XIII over things like the nomination of bishops, and despite how useful a tame inquisition had been. One sane pope six months away was far easier to deal with than an all-too-active lunatic in Portland, and it had made reconciliation of a sort possible with Mount Angel and the other so called Free Catholic bishoprics. Mount Angel's mutant order of warrior Benedictines was becoming uncomfortably influential, through its budding university and with its daughter settlements helping the more badly battered areas get on their feet again.

Stalin had meant mockery when he asked how many divisions the pope had, but in the end his bewildered successors had found it didn't matter; and men at arms and castles could come into the same category. At sev enth and last men were ruled from within their heads by ideas as much as by clubs from without, and a careful ruler kept it in mind. The Church of Rome had outlasted any number of systems that looked stronger than iron at the time, and had ridden out many storms that claimed to be the wave of the future; she was wise with years, and infinitely patient, and bided her time.

Best to take advantage of that, for herself and her daughter and her daughter's children to come, rather than trying to build dams against it.

Conrad nodded, as if reading her mind. "We're mak ing a mint off the salt-works on the coast and the Columbia tolls, too. Basic population has more than recovered from all those laborers who left after the Protector's war."

They both scowled slightly; of all the conditions im posed after the Portland Protective Association's quali fied sort of defeat in what everyone else called the War of the Eye, the one allowing peons to leave without pay ing their unpayable debts had hurt hardest. Everyone had a lot more land than farmers to till it, even now. Peo ple were wealth in the most fundamental sense, strong hands and backs to work and fight.

"Between natural increase and immigration from the more chaotic areas like Pendleton, which unfortunately goes to the other realms as well as to us, and the fifty thousand left in the Palouse when we a

Sandra smiled her cat smile, and Tiphaine d'Ath nodded, and Renfrew gri

At least, it was voluntary on the part of the collection of sheriffs and strong-arm types who took over there after the Change, she thought. And their sons.

They'd been unable to compose their own feuds-not least because of the Association's subtle pot-stirring-and had been left in the end with a choice between the neofeudalism of the PPA and the iron-fisted centralized autocracy of the United States of Boise under General President Thurston. Now the Free Cities of the Yakima League were surrounded by Protectorate territory on three sides, too, and could be squeezed, as long as she was subtle and indirect about it.

Conrad went on as she mused: "-we're up to about four hundred thousand people all told. Portland-the-city's nearly as big as Corvallis now."