Free The Tears of the Sun by S. M. Stirling Page B

it?”
    A chill ran down her back as she remembered what had happened on Nantucket. The details were hazy, as if in a fever-dream that slipped away when you woke; but she knew she had stepped out of the light of Midgard’s common day there. And the Sword . . . she could hear the seeress’ voice, deepened and roughened as the All-Father took hold of her on the high seat of seidh in the hall at Eriksgarth: More potent than Tyrfing, forged for the hand of a King!
    They came out of the deep woods, onto a spot where the trail turned downward in a switchback; it had been roughly reinforced with logs and rocks to prevent the soil from washing in the winter rains, and those in turn worn by boots and the odd hoof. From here you were a hundred feet above the funnel shape of the little valley running out into the broader stretches of the Willamette and could see it all with a sweep of the eyes.
    A winding strip of forest followed Artemis Creek; the rest of the vale was divided into small fields by neatly trimmed hawthorn hedges studded with lines of poplars and oaks, well grown but usually no older than Edain. Some of the fields were the pale brown-blond of reaped wheat, or the gold-shot green of standing barley a month or two from harvest. The vivid grass of cropped pasture lay dreaming beneath the warmth of a sun that brought out the rich smell of earth and sap; white-coated sheep and red cattle grazed there, and beneath orchards. Plots of potatoes and vegetables were grouped closer to the walls of the Dun. Beeches lined the white-surfaced dirt road that followed the tumbling water, and dust smoked away behind an oxwagon that moved there, small as a child’s toy with distance.
    â€œAnd isn’t this a brave bright sight,” Edain said, his voice soft with love. “I can remember the time my father took me to this spot, after the first harvest I recall clear, and pointed out our fields and our neighbors’, where I’d worked carrying water to the binders and myself so proud to be part of it. Often and often I thought of this on the journey there and back again.”
    Asgerd tried to see it as he did; tried and failed.
    Oh, it’s was beautiful enough, she thought; beautiful with an alien comeliness. And rich, richer than Norrheim.
    Some of the crops were the same; her folk grew wheat and barley and oats and spuds too. But here they planted wheat in the fall and harvested it in the summer, instead of putting seed down in spring and making prayer and blót to Frey and Freya and Thor that the weather held long enough to get it in come fall. Norrheimers reaped with one eye on the sky, dreading clouds and cold driving rain to make the grain sprout and rot in the stack, hail that could beat it flat, and even early snow. Here it was one fine warm day after another for the ripening.
    So in the Mackenzie dùthchas barley went mostly to beer and oats to horses and they didn’t bother with rye. Everyone ate fine feast-time white bread made from wheat flour every day if they pleased, like a great chief. There were fruits here she’d only heard about in tales, apricots and cherries, pears and peaches and nectarines, even grapes for wine. You could graze stock outside ten or eleven months of the year, too; she’d never seen such a wealth of strong fat beasts. Winters here were chilly and wet, not the endless gray iron cold and driving blizzards she’d grown up with, and there were near a hundred days more between the last killing frost and the first.
    Rich land well farmed and plenty of it, she thought. The only wealth that’s really real. Never a hungry spring for my children, when they come; a place for them to grow straight and strong and carry our blood down the years in our children’s children.
    But for a moment she was possessed by a bitter longing for the hard pine scent of the homeland winds, the pale light of the short midsummer nights gleaming on the silver bark of the