The Sunrise
Lands
The Change
Book I
S. M. Stirling
Synopsis
A generation has passed since The Change that rendered technology inoperable around the world, and western Oregon has finally achieved a degree of peace. But a new threat has risen in Paradise Valley, Wyoming. A man known as The Prophet presides over the Church Universal and Triumphant, teaching his followers to continue God's work by destroying the remnants of technological civilization they encounter-and those who dare use them.
Rudi Mackenzie, son and heir of the mystic Juniper, must journey with seven friends across a continent in chaos to the Sunrise Lands to solve the riddle of what destroyed a civilization. And as the friends journey farther into the interior, enemies may be within their own band as well as outside it . . .
Praise for the
Novels of
S.M. Stirling
“Stirling has his world firmly in hand.... All those who were on board for Dies the Fire, The Protector’s War, and A Meeting at Corvallis should jump on this ride as well.”
—Contra Costa Times
* * * *
“Combines vigorous military adventure with cleverly pack aged political idealism . . . Stirling’s narrative deftly balances sharply contrasting ideologies.”
—Publishers Weekly
* * * *
“A master of speculative fiction and alternate history, Stirling delivers another chapter in an epic of survival and rebirth.”
—Library Journal
A Meeting at Corvallis
“A richly realized story of swordplay and intrigue.”
—Entertainment Weekly
* * * *
“Stirling concludes his alternative history trilogy in high style. . . . [The story] resembles one of the cavalry charges the novel describes—gorgeous, stirring, and gathering such earth-pounding momentum that it’s difficult to resist.”
—Publishers Weekly
* * * *
“A fascinating glimpse into a future transformed by the lack of easy solutions to both human and technological dilemmas.”
—Library Journal
* * * *
“Grand and resonant . . .exciting and suspenseful. . . .Blending elements of Arthurian and Tolkienesque romance with down in-the-muck details of birth and death, farming and herding, building and politicking, Stirling manages to fashion a narrative that acknowledges that humanity is a creature of both soul and body, heart and mind, lust and sacrifice, much in the manner of Poul Anderson. . . .Stirling has blazed a clear comet trail across his postapocalyptic landscape that illuminates both the best and the worst of which our species is capable.”
—Science Fiction Weekly
* * * *
“The ensuing maze of intrigue, diplomacy, and battle (with a wonderful variety of weapons ingeniously exploiting archaic technology) comes up to Stirling’s highest standards for pacing, world building, action, and strong characterizations, particularly of women . . . a major work by an authentic master of alternate history.”
—Booklist (starred review)
* * * *
“Entertaining and satisfying.”
—Contra Costa Times
* * * *
“[Stirling’s] made his heroes real people about whom we care and with whom we identify, and the way they have risen to heroic stature out of necessity and the instinct to survive and to thrive says something heartening about the potential in all of us.”
—SF Reviews
* * * *
“An exciting and fitting end to this science fiction thriller trilogy ... a rousing finale to a strong trilogy.”
—Alternate Worlds
The Protector’s War
“Absorbing.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
* * * *
“[A] vivid portrait of a world gone insane . . . it also has human warmth and courage.... It is full of bloody action, exposition that expands character, and telling detail that makes it all seem very real.... It is the determination of its major characters to create a safe and loving world that makes the book so affecting.”
—Statesman Journal (Salem, OR)
* * * *
“Reminds me of Poul Anderson at his best. . . . Against a colorful, action-filled background, Stirling shows characters who’ve solved the problems of immediate personal survival and can now focus on their legacies.”
—David Drake, author of When the Tide Rises
* * * *
“Rousing . . . Without a doubt [The Protector’s War] will raise the bar for alternate universe fiction and shows all of S. M. Stirling’s hallmark ability to tell a stirring tale with vivid characters.”
—John Ringo, New York Times bestselling author of A Deeper Blue
* * * *
“The characters are distinct and clearly drawn with a lovely sense of humor . . . very readable.”
—SFRevu
* * * *
“Villains of the darkest hue are matched by average men and women grown into heroes of Arthurian stature and complexity. The action streaks across the page like an avenging blade.... When you’re finished reading, you’ll beg him for more.”
—John Birmingham, author of Final Impact
* * * *
“Consistent excitement and dramatic tension . . . a marvelous adventure and a strong entry in an improving trilogy. The new characters and overseas settings are an immense asset, in that we finally see the global scope of the Change. Thus there’s even greater depth to the overall story.”
—SF Reviews
* * * *
“Stirling always does a great job with his novels of uprooted communities building a new world.”
—Chronicle
* * * *
“[Stirling’s] ability to imagine a return to quasi medievalism in the modern world provides a glimpse into the inner strength of men and women under fire. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
* * * *
“An exemplary specimen of the postapocalyptic tale . . . with panache, insight, and ingenuity. [Stirling] alternates massive, thrilling set pieces that are impeccably crafted.... Readers who relish a battle between the forces of light and darkness, along with many frissons about what civilization means, are in for a rousing good time”
—Science Fiction Weekly
Dies the Fire
“Dies the Fire kept me reading till five in the morning so I could finish at one great gulp. It’s an alarmingly large specula tion: how would we fare if we suddenly had the past 250 years and more of technological progress taken away from us? No more electricity. No more internal combustion engines. No more gunpowder or other explosives. All gone, vanished in the blink of an eye.... Don’t miss it.”
—Harry Turtledove
* * * *
“Gritty, realistic, apocalyptic, yet a grim hopefulness pervades it like a fog of light. The characters are multidimensional, un usual, and so very human. Buy Dies the Fire. Sell your house, sell your soul, get the book. You won’t be sorry.”
—John Ringo
* * * *
“A stunning speculative vision of a near-future bereft of modern conveniences but filled with human hope and determination. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
* * * *
“S. M. Stirling gives himself a broad canvas on which to display his talent for action, extrapolation, and depiction of the brutal realities of life in the absence of civilized norms.”
—David Drake
* * * *
“The Willamette Valley of Oregon and the wilds of Idaho are depicted with loving care, each swale and tree rendered sharply. The smell of burning cities, t
he aftermath of carnage, the odor and sweat of horses—Stirling grounds his action in these realities with the skill of a Poul Anderson.... Postapocalypse novels often veer either too heavily into romantic Robinsonades or nihilistic dead ends. But Stirling has struck the perfect balance between grit and glory.”
—Science Fiction Weekly
Novels of the Change
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 Scourge of God
Other Novels by S. M. Stirling
The Peshawar Lancers
Conquistador
To Jan, forever and ever
Acknowledgments
These are getting dense and chewy. Trying to create a world, even in words, is good occupational therapy for lunatics who think they’re God, and an excellent argument for polytheism.
Thanks to my first readers:
To Steve Brady, for assistance with dialects and British background, hints on birds, beasts and bugs . . .and spotting some howlers.
Thanks also to Kier Salmon, for once again helping with the beautiful complexities of the Old Religion, and with local details for Oregon, and spotting some howlers, including a six-hour continuity gap. Oopsie! Not God yet!
To Dale Price, help with Catholic organization, theology and praxis, and some excellent suggestions . . . and spotting some howlers.
To all of them for becoming good, if long-distance, friends.
To Melinda Snodgrass, Daniel Abraham, Sage Walker, Emily Mah, Terry England, George R. R. Martin, Wal ter Jon Williams, Yvonne Coats, Sally Gwylan, Laura Mixon-Gould and Ian Tregellis of Critical Mass, for constant help and advice as the book was under construction, which enabled me to avoid some howlers. And heck, they were already friends.
To John Ringo, for some advice.
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. I always do when she’s got a new CD out.
Special thanks to Kate West, for her kind words and permission to use her chants.
Special thanks . . . am I overusing the word? . . . to William Pint and Felicia Dale, for permission to use their music, which can be found at members.aol.com/pintndale/ and should be, for anyone with an ear and salt water in their veins.
And to Three Weird Sisters—Gwen Knighton, Mary Crowell, Brenda Sutton and Teresa Powell—whose al ternately funny and beautiful music can be found at www.threeweirdsisters.com/.
They’ve not only allowed me to use their music, but to modify it, as for example Gwen’s lovely “New Forest,” the original lyrics of which can be found at www.gwenknighton.com/lyrics.html.
All mistakes, infelicities (including missed howlers) and errors are, of course, my own.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
Chapter One
Near Sutterdown,
Willamette Valley, Oregon
Samhain Eve—October 30,
CY22/2020 A.D.
Ingolf Vogeler slapped his horse affectionately on the neck; he felt a little better now that the rain had stopped, even though it was the tag end of a chilly October day with a ragged sky the color of damp raw wool rolling in from the west. His gloved hand made a wet smack on his mount’s mud-spattered coat; its breath smoked in the harsh wet air, and so did his. The hooves beat with a slow clop crunch on the good crushed rock of the road, sending up little spurts of muddy water whitish gray with limestone dust.
He summoned up a little of the old excitement at heading into fresh country as he looked about at the Willamette Valley, inhaling the musky-silty smell of fallen leaves and turned earth, and the faint tang of woodsmoke drifting on the wind.
Riding damp and cold was nothing new to him for all that he’d turned twenty-eight only last summer, but the struggle to get over the High Cascades had been brutal. He’d barely crossed the Santiam Pass alive; the last blizzard would have killed him for sure, if he hadn’t had two warm horses, a good sleeping bag covered in oiled bison leather and lined with fleece and stuffed with down, and a lot of experience with cold weather. He hadn’t been really dry or warm in the days since either, and he could still feel the storm’s white death in his bones, though down here five thousand feet lower things were just uncomfortable.
Look on the bright side, he told himself. If any of the Prophet’s cutters were still on my trail by then, they’re surely dead, dead and frozen under twenty feet of snow until spring.
“Hang in there, Boy.”
Boy smelled powerfully of wet horse; but, then, Ingolf smelled of the wet wool of his jacket and pants, and wet leather and oiled metal from his gear and the harness. It had been a good long while since his last bath, too. You didn’t, not out alone in the wilds in the cold season; you didn’t take off your clothes at all if you could help it.
“That town should be coming up soon, Boy. Good warm stable and oats for you, if it’s as fine as those yokels said it was.”
The horse snorted and shook its head in what he could have sworn was doubtfulness; the big gelding and he had come a long way together, a lot farther than the remount-cum packhorse on the end of the leading rein, which looked nearly ready to keel over and die. He’d seen that happen often enough; you could usually follow an army by the bodies of the horses. Past a certain point their hearts broke and they just lay down and gave up.
“You too, Billy.”
He stopped to lean over and give the packhorse some hoarded honeycomb; it barely had the energy to lip it off his glove, and Boy didn’t even protest.
“Just one hoof ahead of another, that’ll do it.”
They passed the odd wagon or oxcart, once a flock of sheep whose wet wool smelled a lot worse than his clothes; that had both horses crow-hopping a bit even tired as they were. And plenty of other riders and passersby on foot, now and then a bicyclist; most of the folk wore the funny pleated skirts he’d started seeing as soon as he got down into the valley, men and women both. Ingolf touched a finger to the floppy brim of his leather hat whenever he passed someone, and usually got a wave and a smile back, despite the foul weather; most people seemed to be cheerful and friendly here west of the Cascades, which made sense since they also seemed unusually well fed and clothed.
Wonder just how far it is to Sutterdown? he thought.
Traffic had died down as the sun sank, except for a few hurrying in the same direction he was, probably hoping to get inside before the gates closed. That gave him a good idea of when they were likely to shut . . . and that it would be soon.
“Uff da,” he swore mildly.
Most places wouldn’t let you in once they’d buttoned up, and the ones that did usually charged a fine for open ing a postern after curfew. He touched Boy up with a pressure of his legs. That was hard on him, and even more on Billy . . . but he didn’t think Billy would survive a night in the open right now.
There were tall hills to his right—the last stubs of the mountains he’d crossed. The rolling floor of the valley opening westward was divided into small farms, their fields bordered by hedges and rows of trees. Within the enclosures were the green of pasture or new-sown winter wheat just beginning to mist the soil, da
rk brown of plowland with wind ruffled puddles between the furrows or the rather messy look of a well dug potato field, the bare spindly branches of orchards, cherry and apple, pear and peach. Now and then there was a clump of woodlot, oaks and firs, and more thickets along the river. He recognized the crooked stumplike plants on a south-facing hillside as grapevines, still with their spin dly branches unpruned, though he hadn’t seen their like often before.
I have drunk wine, though, and I wouldn’t mind some at all, he thought, and smacked his lips absently. Though right now something hot would be very good.
Days like this, as the shadows grew darker and the wind blew colder, even a young man felt how the years would tell on him in another two decades. He coughed to clear his throat and spit aside.
There weren’t any buildings in the fields apart from the odd byre and shed. The land was all worked from walled hamlets like the one he’d passed not long ago—they called them duns here. The Sutter River gurgled and chuckled to his left, flowing westward into the valley; the steep hills just north were densely forested, dark green and brooding with tall firs.
Then a scatter of sheds and workshops loomed up to either side of the road out of the misty dimness, showing lamps or furnace light—mostly strong smelling tan yards and pottery kilns, the sort of trades smart towns didn’t leave inside the wall. He heard the splashing and grinding sound of water turning millwheels to his right, and saw the occasional yellow glitter of flame through the branches of thick planted trees.
His lips shaped a silent whistle when he came through the last fringe of bare-limbed oaks into a clear space and saw the town walls.
“Wouldn’t like to have to storm those,” he muttered. Even allowing for how the darkness made them seem to loom . . . “No, sir.”
Must be thirty feet high, and pretty damned thick, he thought. And towers every hundred yards, half bowshot apart, and I’d say they’re half again as tall. You don’t see many things built after the Change that height.
He’d seen walls that had a bigger circuit—the town couldn’t have more than three or four thousand people; Des Moines had thirty times that—but few that looked stronger.
And never any painted like that.
The surface looked like pale stucco; along the top below the crenellations was a running design of vines and flowers with . . . He peered through the murk.