"Dies the Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M.)Interlude I: Portland, Oregon March 31st, 1998 Emiliano knew the way to the Central Library on Tenth Street, although he wouldn't have wanted his Ruddy light blinked back from the spearheads of the men standing along the roadway. There was plenty-not only from the huge fires consuming the city eastward across the river and smaller ones nearby, but from wood burning in iron baskets hung from the streetlamps; the air was heavy with the acrid throat-hurting smell of both, enough to make him cough occasionally, and the flames reflected back from the heavy pall of smoke and cloud overhead. The fighting men directing foot traffic and clumped before the library entrance got his And hanging from the two big trees in front of the entrance were- "Holy shit, man," someone said behind him, awe in the tone. There was enough light to recognize faces; a stocky middle-aged woman with flyaway black hair, and a big burly black male. Enough light to recognize faces even with the distortion of the cargo hooks planted under their jaws; it was the mayor and the chief of police-Cat and the Moose, as they were known on the street. Emiliano swallowed, and Dolores clutched at his arm; he shook her off impatiently, but still licked his lips. He'd killed more than once, and gotten away with it-his time inside had been for other things-but this left him feeling a little scared, like the ground was shifting under his feet. That was nothing new since the Change, but he could sense the same fears running through his men, sapping their courage, making them feel small. The tension broke in laughter; even some of the guards smiled, briefly. "And maybe now we know why nobody's heard much from that Provisional Government last couple of days." The bodies hadn't begun to smell much; Portland was fairly cool in March, and anyway the stink from the fires burning out of control across most of the city hid a lot. The raw sewage pouring into the river didn't help, either. The guards at the entrance carried long ax-spike-hook things like some he'd seen on TV occasionally. All of the guards had long blades at their waists, machetes or actual swords. He blinked consideringly at those, as well. His first impulse was to laugh, but his own boys were carrying fire axes and baseball bats themselves, and possibly… "You're the With two dozen armed men at his back, the gang chief could afford to be confident. But not too confident. The cooking smells from inside made his stomach rumble, even with the whiff from the corpses. They'd been eating, but not well, particularly just lately. Everything in the coolers and fridges had gone bad, and he hadn't had fresh meat since last Friday. "Pass on up, then. You and three others. The staff will bring food out to the rest of your men there." He pointed his ax-thing… He sauntered up the stairs; the light got brighter, big lanterns hanging from the entranceway arches, making up for the dead electric lights inside. A blond chick met them inside the door; she was wearing bikini briefs under a long silk T-shirt effect and a dog collar, and carrying a clipboard. The greeter spoke, fright trembling under artificial cheerfulness; he recognized fear easily enough, and also the thin red lines across her back where the gauzy fabric stuck: "Lord Emiliano?" It took him a moment to realize she was giving him a title rather than referring to the name of his gang; for a moment more he thought he was being dissed. Then he began to smile. "Yeah," he replied, with a grand gesture. "Lead on." He hadn't seen a room so brightly lighted after dark since the Change; and the lobby was huge. All around it big kerosene lanterns hung at twice head-height, and a forest of lighted candles stood in branched silver holders on the tables that ringed the great space. Their snowy linen and polished cutlery glistened; so did the gray-veined white marble of the floor. All the desks and kiosks had been taken out; nothing but the head table broke the sweep of view towards the great staircase that began at the rear and divided halfway up into two sweeping curves. The flames picked out that too, black marble carved in vine-leaf patterns. More guardsmen stood around the outer walls; in the U that the tables formed milled a crowd whose faces he mostly recognized. The Crips and Bloods, the Russians- Alexi Stavarov himself-the chink Tongs, the Koreans, the Angels, the Italians… and groups he thought of as white-bread suburban wannabes, but it wasn't his party and he didn't get to write the guest list, and Portland wasn't what you'd call a serious gang town anyway. More chicks like the greeter circulated with trays of drinks and little delicacies on crackers, doing nothing but smile at pats and gropes from the hairy bearded Angels and some of the other rougher types. Emiliano took a glass of beer-Negro Modelo-and ate thin-shaved ham off little rondels of fresh black bread, and chatted with a few of his peers. Meanwhile his eyes probed the gathering; not everyone here were his kind. Some were politicians, looking as out of place as the half-naked women; there were even a couple of Trumpets blared. Emiliano jumped and swore silently as an Angel with a beard like a gray Santa Claus's down his leather-clad paunch grinned at him. A man appeared at the top of the stairs. "The Lord Protector!" he barked, and stood aside with his head bowed. "The Lady Sandra!" The armed men around the great room slammed their weapons against their shields in near-unison, barking out: It took him a minute to recognize the man coming down the stairs with a splendidly gowned and jeweled woman on his arm. He'd never seen Norman Arminger in a knee-length coat of chain mail before, or wearing a long sword in a black-leather sheath. A follower-male, and armed- carried a helmet with a black feather crest and a kite-shaped shield. Arminger looked impressive in the armor, six-one and broad in the shoulders, with thick wrists and corded forearms. His face was long and lean, square-chinned and hook-nosed, with brown hair parted in the center and falling to his shoulders. "Lord Emiliano, good of you to join us," Arminger said. "I believe you're the last." "Hey-you're that guy who was writing a book on the gangs, aren't you?" "I was," Arminger said. "As you may have noticed, things have changed." He gestured, and spoke in a carrying voice: "Please, everyone have a seat. The place cards are for your convenience." Emiliano sat, with Dolores and his backup men. Arminger stayed standing, leaning one hip against the head table, his arms folded against the rippling mail that covered his chest. "Gentlemen, ladies. By now, you will all have come to the conclusion that what Changed a little while ago is going to stay Changed. This has certain implications. Before we talk, I'd like to demonstrate one of them." Four prisoners were prodded into the broad central floor of the hall; two middle-aged policemen in rumpled uniforms, and two guys in army gear-a big shaven-headed black and an ordinary-looking white. Arminger slid the helmet over his head; his face disappeared behind the protective mask. There were three strips of steel that came to a point just below his nose, and it gave him a bird-of-prey look; the grin beneath it did too, and the nodding plume of raven feathers. He took up the shield, sliding his arm through the loops, and drew the long double-edged sword. It glittered in the firelight as he twitched it back and forth easily, making the Marquez, his numbers man, leaned aside and hissed in Emiliano's ear: "This "Shut up," Emiliano murmured back. "We'll see how crazy right now." Arminger smiled yet more broadly at the low murmur of understanding and rustle of interest that went along the tables. "You men," he said loudly, addressing the prisoners. His sword pointed to a trash can. "There are weapons in there. Take them and try and kill me. If you win, you go free." "You expect us to believe that?" the black soldier said. Arminger's grin was sardonic. "I expect you to believe I'll have you doused in gasoline and set on fire if you don't fight," he said. "And you get a chance to kill me. Don't you want to?" Then things moved very quickly. The black soldier started to attack, and Arminger met him halfway. There was a crack as one machete glanced off the shield, and a slithering clang as the other hit the sword and slid down it to be caught on the guard. And another crack, meatier and wetter-sounding, as Arminger smashed his metal-clad head into the black man's face. The big soldier staggered backward, his nose red ruin. Arminger's sword looped down as he turned, taking the soldier behind a knee and drawing the edge in a slicing cut. The scream of pain matched Arminger's shout as he lunged, the point punching out in a stab that left three inches of steel showing out a policeman's lower back. In the same motion the shield punched, hitting the other cop on the jaw and shattering it. That left the smaller soldier an opening. He jumped in and slashed, and the edge raked across Arminger's back from left shoulder to right hip. Sparks flew; Emiliano thought he heard a couple of the steel rings break with musical popping sounds. And Arminger staggered, thrown forward by the blow. That didn't stop him whirling, striking with the edge of the shield. It hit the soldier's wrist with a crackle of breaking bone, and the machete went flying with a clatter and clang on the hardwood floor. He shrieked in pain, clutching at his right forearm with his left hand, then screamed briefly again in fear as Arminger's sword came down in a blurring-bright arc. That ended in a hard thump at the junction of shoulder and neck. The scream broke off as if a switch had been thrown; the sword blade sliced through the neck and into the breastbone, and the killer had to brace a foot on the body to wrench it free. Then he made sure of the others- the big soldier was trying to crawl away when the point went through his kidney-and scared-looking men and women came out with wheelbarrows to take the bodies, and mops and towels and squeegees to deal with the mess. Another of the pretty girls in lingerie sprayed an aerosol scent to cover the smells. Every eye fixed on Arminger as he turned, shield and sword raised. "Gentlemen, power no longer grows out of the muzzle of a gun. It grows from He thrust his sword skyward. The blood on it glistened red-black in the light of the candles and lanterns. The armored men around the walls cheered, beating their weapons or their fists on their shields. Many of the guests joined in. Emiliano clapped himself. When the noise subsided, Arminger went on: "Many of you know that I was a professor of history before I dabbled in urban anthropology. Some of you may know that I was once a member of the Society of Jesus. What you probably don't know is that I was also a member of a society that meets to celebrate the Middle Ages… by, among other things, practicing combat with the ancient weapons. I've persuaded quite a few members of that society to throw in with me; food is a wonderful incentive. And we're recruiting and training others, many others. Some of you have already contributed manpower. As you saw out there at the front gate, we're already the most effective armed force in this city. Certainly more effective than the overweight, over-aged, donut-eating legions of the former city government." He laughed, and handed the shield and dripping sword to a servant. Quite a few of the guests joined in the laughter; this wasn't a crowd where the police had many friends. "Making these weapons and armor requires considerable skill. Using them requires even more. But when you do have them and do know how to use them, you're like a tank to the unarmored and untrained. A hundred men so armed, acting as a disciplined unit, can rout thousands." Emiliano nodded slowly, and saw others doing likewise. That made sense… "Now, you'll also have noticed that traditional means of exchange-money-is worthless now. Right now, there's only one real form of wealth: food." He'd been living on canned stuff for days now. "There's enough food in this city to feed the population for about two months, if nothing was wasted. One month, more realistically, if there was a rationing system; a great deal has already been lost and destroyed. Then everyone would die. There is, however, enough for a That got an excited buzz. "Yo," one of the Crips leaders said. "We thinkin' move out to the country, get the eats. With no guns, the farmers not much trouble." Arminger shook his head again. "Not yet. In the long run, yes. Everything that's been invented in the last eight hundred years is useless now. There's only two ways to live in a time like this-farming, and living off farmers. I don't feel like pushing a plow." Emiliano nodded; and again, he wasn't the only one. His father had been born a peon on a little farm in Sonora, and he had no desire at all to be one himself. Living off farmers, though… A haciendado, he thought, amused. He leaned forward eagerly, hardly noticing when the banquet was brought in. He was in a golden haze from more than the wines and brandies and fine liqueurs by the end of the night. Lord Five Sssst!" Michael Havel hissed, and held his left hand up with the fist clenched. Footfalls stopped behind him as he peered into the brush and half-melted snow along the Centennial Trail, in the cold shadow of the tall red cedars. Just being on it was a relief; all he knew of this particular stretch of country was maps and compass headings, and it was an enormous mental load off his shoulders to be able to follow a marked trail-even if it was still wet with slush, and muddy. As a fringe benefit of being here between the end of cross-country skiing season and the beginning of hiking, the animals weren't all that wary, since they didn't expect humans along. He'd trimmed and smoothed a yard-long stick from a branch; it was as thick as Astrid Larsson's wrist, and nicely heavy. He let it fall from where he'd been carrying it under his armpit; the end smacked into his palm with a pleasant firmness. The snowshoe hare made a break for it as he moved, streaking up the slope and jinking back and forth as it went; he whipped the stick forward and it flew in a pinwheeling blur. "Yes!" he said. The throw had the sweet, almost surprising feel you always got when you were going to hit. The rabbit stick hit the hare somewhere in the body, and it went over in a thrashing tangle of limbs and a shrill squeal. He started forward, but Astrid's voice checked him: "There's another one!" The second terrified-rodent streak was much farther up the slope; he waited as the girl brought the bow up, drawing in a smooth flexing of arms and shoulders as it rose. The string snapped against her bracer, and the arrow flashed out in a long beautifully shallow curve; he followed it with an avid hope born of days of hard work and short rations. Astrid muttered something under her breath as she recovered the arrow. Then she checked it-you had to keep broadheads sharp-and smiled at him in congratulations. "Better luck next time," he called to her. He trotted to his kill and finished the hare off with a sharp blow of the rabbit stick; the animal was a young male, a little under two pounds, with the relatively small ears and big feet of its breed. He was crouched by the side of the trail getting ready for the gutting and skinning when the stretcher came into sight. Eric Larsson was on one end, and his sister on the other. They both exclaimed in delight at the sight of the rabbit; even their father looked up from where he walked beside his wife and smiled. "And He'd stripped off his sheepskin coat and rolled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt; it was chilly, but getting blood out of the fleece was impossible. There was a little hone in a pocket on the outside of his belt sheath; the steel went Astrid drifted off ahead; she could shoot rabbits easily enough now, and was certainly willing to eat her share, but she didn't like to watch the butchering. Eric followed, probably to tease her-someone was going to have to tell the kid to lay off it, but Havel remembered what Ken stayed beside the stretcher as he always did at stops, holding Mary Larsson's hand; he and his wife talked in low tones, usually of inconsequential things back in Portland, as if this was just a frustrating interruption in their ordinary lives. Biltis the orange cat also jumped up on the stretcher, burrowing down to curl up beside the injured woman in what Astrid insisted was affection and Havel thought was a search for somewhere warm and dry in this detested snowy wilderness. She made a pretty good heater-cat, though. He grinned at the thought; the cat would come out for its share of the offal, right enough; it would even purr and rub against his ankles. Cats and dogs and horses were more honest than people-they really did like you when you did things for them, instead of faking it. Signe Larsson came up; she leaned his survival pack against a tree-she carried it, when she wasn't on stretcher duty, freeing him up to forage-and squatted on her hams with her arms around her knees, watching him skin and butcher the little animal. She didn't flinch at the smell or sight of game being butchered anymore, either. He'd roll the meat, heart, kidneys and liver in the hide, and they'd stew everything when they made camp-he still had a few packets of dried vegetables, and the invaluable titanium pot. You got more of the food value that way than roasting, particularly from the marrow, and it made one small rabbit go a lot further among six. Plus Mary Larsson found liquids easier to keep down. The antibiotics gave her a mild case of nausea on top of the pain of her leg; he was worried about the bone, although the pills were keeping fever away. "The Anishinabe," he said, his hands moving with skilled precision. "Which means "Oh," she said. "That's how you learned all this… woodcraft?" She looked around at the savage wilderness and shivered a bit. "You really seem at home here. It's beautiful, but… hostile, not like Larsdalen-our summer farm-or even the ranch in Montana. As if all this"-she waved a hand at the great steep snow-topped slopes all around them-"hated us, and wanted us to die." "These mountains aren't really hostile," Havel said. "They're like any wilderness, just indifferent, and… oh, sort of unforgiving of mistakes. If you know what you're doing, you could live here even in winter." "Well, maybe "A nice tight cabin and a year's supply of grub, ideally," he said, chuckling in turn. She mimed picking up the rabbit stick and hitting him over the head. He went on: "Minimum? Well, with a rabbit stick and a knife you can survive in the bush most times of the year; and with a knife you can make a rabbit stick and whatever else you need, like a fire drill. You can even hunt deer with the knife; stand over a little green-branch fire so the smoke kills your scent, then stalk 'em slow-freeze every time they look around, then take a slow step while they're not paying attention, until you get within arm's reach." "That's fascinating!" she said, her blue eyes going wide. "Of course, the Native Americans The big blue eyes looked good that way, but… He gave a slight mental wince. "Even the Nez Perce starved here when times were bad," he said. "Nobody lived in these mountains if they hadn't been pushed out of somewhere better. I hope you don't believe any of that mystic crap about Indians and the landscape." "Oh, of course not," she replied, obviously lying, and equally obviously wanting to correct him to "Indians have to learn this stuff just like us palefaces," he went on. "It's not genetic. But some of Grandma's relatives He scrubbed down his hands and forearms with some of the snow lying in the shade of a whortleberry bush, trying not to think about hot showers and soap. She passed him his coat again, and winced a bit doing it, pulling her hands back protectively and curling the fingers as he took the garment. "Damn, let me look at that." He took her hand in his and opened it. The palms looked worse than they were, because the strings of skin from the burst blisters had turned black. Havel drew his "I told you to put more of the salve on them," he scolded. "You're pushing it too hard. When something starts bleeding, say so and someone will spell you on the stretcher." "I'm doing less than Eric is, Mike," she said. "You're also forty pounds lighter than Eric, and most of that's on his shoulders and arms," Havel said bluntly. "I thought you had more between your ears than he does, though. You've got nothing to prove." She learned quickly, rarely had to be told how to do something twice, and didn't stand around waiting to be found work. "Eric may be bigger, but I'm a lot younger than Dad-I don't like the way he looks," she went on, leaning a little closer and lowering her voice. "Mike, he goes The flesh had melted away from him, but it didn't make him look healthy, just sort of sagging, and his color was as bad as Signe thought. Cold and the brutal work and lack of proper sleep or enough food was grinding him down, and he wasn't a young man or in good shape. "By the way, Mike," Signe said, obviously pushing the worry aside with an effort of will. "There's something you should consider about 'mystical crap,' as you put it." His brows went up and she continued by putting her hand out, fingers cocked like a pistol and making a Havel was on his feet and running forward in an instant, scooping up the rabbit stick and tumbling Signe on her backside with a squawk; she was up and following him half a heartbeat later, though. He passed Eric, but the twins were right on his heels as he flashed into the clearing; their legs were long and their hightops were better running gear than his solid mountain boots. Astrid was a hundred yards ahead, sprinting fast with the bow pumping back and forth in her left hand; and the blood trail was clear enough for anyone to follow- bright gouts and splashes of it on snow and mud and last year's dry grass sticking through both. He pushed himself harder, knowing all too well how the tap could turn off suddenly on a trail like that, unless- He went through a belt of lodgepole pines, like seventy-foot candlesticks; the ground beneath them was fairly clear, and the wounded animal was following the trail; that wasn't too surprising, since it was on level ground and would make for maximum speed. Massive tree boles flashed by him, and then they were out into bright sunlight with mountain ridges rippling away to the west and south like endless green-white waves on a frozen sea. Thin mountain air burned cold in his chest; Astrid's hair was like a white-silk banner as he pulled past her. Then the trail jinked a little higher. The blood trail wasn't dying off; getting thicker, if anything. Then he saw the animal in a patch of sunlight not far ahead. It was an elk; a three-year bull still carrying his rack, a six-pointer, and he knew it must be badly wounded-a healthy elk could do thirty-five miles an hour in a sprint, and twenty all day long. As Havel neared it staggered, gave a gasping, bugling grunt of pain, and began to collapse by the rear. Blood poured out of its nose and mouth; the forelegs gave way, and it lay down and groaned, jerked, and went still with its thick tongue hanging out of its mouth. Astrid and the twins were only a few seconds behind him. "Stand back!" he said sharply, controlling his breathing. As if to back up his words the beast gave a final galvanic kick; it was a little thin with winter, but sill magnificent- glossy reddish brown on most of its body, with a shaggy gray mane on its thick neck and a yellowish patch on the rump around the small white tail. He could just see the fletching of the two-foot arrow against its rib cage behind the left shoulder; Astrid must have been lucky. The blade of the broadhead had struck with the edges up and down, slipping between two ribs and going through right into the lungs, probably cutting a big artery or nicking the heart too. The arrow could never have punched through the outer ribs if it had struck horizontally, not from a twenty-five pound draw. Even so, that was a light bow and a short shaft to bring down something this size; bull elk were the size of a medium-sized horse. This one wasn't quite full-grown, but it would dress out at four hundred pounds or more of steaks, roasts, chops, ribs and organ meat, enough to feed six people for a month. The main problem would be carrying it; in this weather it would keep a long time once he'd drained it properly and dressed it out. Astrid was dancing from one foot to another and crowing with glee: "He stepped right onto the trail! He was only twenty feet away! Go me! Go me! I got him, I got him!" "That you did, kid," Havel said. "That makes up for a hell of a lot of lost rabbits!" Signe hugged her sister and danced her in a circle. Even her brother gave an admiring whistle. "I take it back, Legolamb," he said. "I'm gonna say 'sorry' with every mouthful." Havel nodded agreement and moved in to make sure of the elk with his knife; on the one hand there was no point in letting it suffer, but on the other he didn't want a hoof through his skull or six inches of pointed antler in his crotch either. Then what he was seeing through the stand of mountain ash penetrated. "Eric," he said. "Come on." "What?" the young man said. Havel pointed and grinned. "The ranger cabin's just through there," he said. "I figure we can get your mom into a real bed and start the stove in about twenty minutes." What was more, The four-room log cabin had been built by the WPA back in the thirties, and it had a big woodstove with a water heater, plenty of stacked firewood, a meat safe and even some food in the pantry-flour in a sealed bin, canned fruit and vegetables, salt and pepper and baking soda-left for just this sort of emergency. There were blankets in a cupboard too; even in this year of grace 1998 you didn't have to assume vandals and thieves would be by, not in the middle of the Selway-Bitterroot, you didn't. That kind usually didn't have the stamina for a three-day hike through frigid mountain forest from the nearest road. For castaways like Havel and his passengers, the Forest Service would be forgiving. The radio was thoroughly dead, and the batteries too- not even a tickle from the tongue taste-test, which didn't surprise him although it was annoying as hell. Right now he was satisfied with something besides MREs or cold rabbit stew for breakfast. Signe Larsson was cooking; he'd done ribs and steaks last night, and started a big pot of "perpetual stew" that still simmered on the back plate. If you brought it to a boil now and then, you could add fresh ingredients and water daily and keep it going indefinitely. "Flapjacks," she said over her shoulder; her wheat-blond hair was loose, and still slightly damp and tousled from washing with a scrap of soap. "And canned peaches to go with them-yum!" "Food for the gods," he said sincerely, accepting a plateful; his body craved starch, and sugar only a little less. Eric and Astrid were concentrating on eating; like their sister, they'd bounced back with the resilience of healthy youth. Ken Larsson was looking less like walking death; partly due to a night on a real mattress, even if there were only blankets rather than sheets, and mostly that his wife seemed to be doing a lot better too. "OK," Havel said, looking out the window after he'd cleared his plate the second time. It was just past dawn, with sunrise turning the snow on the peaks opposite rosy pink; if he hadn't quit soon after he'd left the Corps, this would be the perfect time for a cigarette. It was a pity tobacco was so goddamned bad for you! "We can make it in two days if we push hard," he said to Ken Larsson. "The emergency people ought to get help back here a lot faster than that; there's a year-round crew at the Lochsa Ranger Station, and Lowell's only a ways down I-12." "Good luck," the older man said. When Havel rose, he stuck out a hand. "And thanks, Mike." "Hell, just doing my job," Havel said, flushing a little- and being careful not to squeeze too hard, because Larsson's hand was as mucked-up as Signe's or Eric's. "You and your family are my responsibility; I've got to see you safe." "I won't forget it, Mike," Larsson said. Havel grinned. "We'd better get going, before everyone gets all soppy," he said. "Yeah," Eric said indistinctly through a last mouthful of pancakes. "Got to get Mom to a hospital." He glanced sidelong at Signe, who was just setting down her own plate. "Though sis here is going to be "It's amazing how repulsive you get when you're not starving," Signe said. Eric laughed, and went on to Havel: "The ranch next to our place there uses our pasture, and pays us by doing the maintenance and looking after our horses when we're not visiting," he said. "They're Signe Larsson held the opened salt shaker over his coffee cup. "More?" she said sweetly. "You ruined it!" "Salt for bacon, Eric," she said in a tone that could have cut crystal. "And you Ken Larsson cleared his throat: "You two, can it. Remember that your mother's hurt." They both looked abashed; Havel grinned mentally. The two sisters and Larsson accompanied their brother and the pilot out onto the veranda; everyone's breath showed, smoking silver in the rising light, but with warmth and food that was exhilarating, not depressing. Havel set his pack with a shrug and a grunt; they could take the remaining MRE, three bouillon cubes, and the chocolate bar; it was enough to keep them comfortable all the way there. "See you in three days, Ken," he said. Then he looked at Astrid and Signe. "Hey, Astrid, you really did good with that elk. That was important." The girl glowed. He caught Signe's eye. The older girl nodded. "I'll keep an eye on her, Mike," she said. "Let's get going!" Eric Larsson said impatiently. "We can't stop now!" "The hell we can't," Havel said, setting his pack down against a rock; it was two hours before sunset. They'd made better time than he'd expected: twenty miles at least, and they might make four more before sundown. At that speed, they could reach Highway 12 sometime around noon tomorrow. He went on: "We'll walk fast for an hour, and then we'll rest fifteen minutes, and then we'll do it all over again. A man can walk a lot further than he can run. Right now we're at the fifteen-minutes-rest stage. We'll keep going till moonrise, eat, sleep, and get going again at dawn, and make it by lunchtime tomorrow." "Who died and made you God?" the youth asked. "I know what I'm doing here," Havel said shortly. "You don't." "I think you're the hired help," Eric spat back. "And that means what I say goes." Havel surprised him by laughing, deep and obviously genuine. "Kid, if there's anyone I work for here, it's your dad-and "And I don't like the way you look at my sister!" Havel laughed again: this time the sound was a little taunting. "It's 1998. If you try to play whup-ass with every guy who looks at Signe Larsson with lust in his heart, you're going to have to be a lot better at it than I think you are." Eric came forward an inch, then jerked to a halt, looking at the rabbit stick in the older man's right hand. Havel grinned. "That shows some sense." He tossed it to rest by the side of his pack, then held out both hands and made a beckoning gesture with curled fingers. "Let's get this over with, kid," he said. Eric flushed-the disadvantage of being so blond, even with a tan-and came in with his fists up in a good guard position, moving lightly for someone his size: he was six-one, long-limbed, broad in the shoulders and narrow in the waist. Very much like his opponent, except that Havel was built in nine-tenths scale by comparison. The young man's big fist snapped out; the blow would have broken Havel's jaw and several of Eric's fingers, except that the ex-Marine jerked his head aside just enough to let it brush by his left ear; at the same instant he stepped in and swept his shin upward with precisely controlled force, then bounced back lightly, moving on the balls of his feet and keeping his own hands open. "Kill number one, kid," he said, as Eric bent and clutched himself for a moment. "Or at least I could have ruined you for life. And never try to hit a man in the head with your fist. You'll break your hand before you break his head." Eric was red-faced and furious when he straightened, but he didn't make the bull-style charge that Havel had half expected. Instead he set himself and whirled into a high sweeping kick; it was well executed, except for being telegraphed, and a little off because his right foot slipped in the squishy mixture of mud and pine needles underfoot. Havel let his knees relax, and the foot swept over his head. His hand slapped up, palm on the other's thigh, and pushed sharply. "Shit!" Eric screamed as he landed on his back, more in frustration than in pain. Then: "Kill number two. This isn't Buffy the Dojo Ballerina. All right, let's finish up with the lesson. We haven't got time to waste." Ninety seconds later, Eric Larsson wisely made no attempt to resist as the back of his head rang off the bark of a Douglas fir. Fingers like steel rods gripped his throat, digging in on either side of his windpipe, and he fought to drag air in through his mouth-the swelling had made his nose nonoperational. Havel looked at him with the same crooked smile; there was a pressure cut on his cheek, but otherwise he was in-furiatingly undamaged. "Kill number six. And you forgot one thing, kid," he said. "Never bring your fists to a knife fight." Eric Larsson's eyes went wide as Havel stepped back; something silver flashed in his hand, and the young man looked down at a sudden cold prickle; the odd-shaped hunting knife was touching just under his ribs. "Kill," Havel said. The knife reversed itself, lying edge-out along his forearm, then swept across Eric's throat with blurring speed. "Kill." A backhanded stab, letting the cold steel touch behind his right ear. "Kill." Havel stepped back another pace; the younger man was chalk white and keeping himself from trembling by sheer willpower. He sheathed the knife and cocked an eyebrow, his expression cold. "So, have we settled the 'Who's the big bull gorilla?' question?" "Yeah. Noooo doubt about it, man." "Good, because we've got things to do. Like saving your mother's life, saving your sisters' lives, saving your dad's life, saving Eric nodded, massaging his throat. "Yeah. Definitely. Havel grinned suddenly, and extended a hand. "Actually. Eric. you're not bad at all. You're strong and you're fast and you're not scared about getting hurt. Get the right experience, and you'll be a dangerous man to meet in a fight. Are we square?" "Square." Eric was obviously flattered by the man-to-man treatment and took his hand, starting to squeeze. Then he stopped abruptly: "Jeez, I hope I didn't break that knuckle," he said, wincing. "Yeah, I see your point… actually, man, I saw too Eric picked up the bundle of gear; Havel liked that, and the absence of pouting. "Nah, Karelian," he replied genially. "Force Recon refined my technique, but Dad taught me the basics of-he tapped the knife-"the "Karelian?" Eric asked. "Eastern Finland, or it used to be-where the poets and shamans and knife-waving crazies came from. Farther west you get Tvastlanders, who're so dull they might as well be Swedes like you." "I'm Yankee on Mom's side-English." "Well, I'm sorry for you and all, but wouldn't it be better to keep that quiet?" They both laughed. "The "Finland's national epic. That great big thing that sounds like "Now I remember," Eric nodded. "We've got a copy at home; every line sort of repeats? Dad has it with his saga collection; he used to read us that stuff when we were little kids- that's how Astrid got started on her schtick. The illustrations were cool, but I couldn't get through it. I can't remember anything about knives, though; I thought it was all witches and monsters and Santa Claus sleigh-trips with reindeer?" "Yeah, the Old Country version could make sex sound dull, but the one my dad taught me was sort of modified; it goes-" He began to chant as they walked west along the trail: Eric hadn't expected to be forced to listen to poetry, but a smile broke through his frown of puzzlement as the words sank in. Havel cleared his throat and continued, in the solemn singsong shaman-type voice purists always used for the real thing when the old farts got together at the Suomi-American Society meetings: Eric Larsson was beginning to stagger and wheeze with laughter as they walked; Havel made a grand gesture with the rabbit stick, declaiming: He carried on through the younger man's laughter, remembering the way the sauna had run that night, he and his brothers and father howling out the verses in turn until the one reciting couldn't go on, and falling back on the scalding-hot pine benches. Six "Hope Luther doesn't mind us dropping in past midnight," Dennis said. Juniper snorted wordlessly, too tired to waste breath on speech as she pedaled her heavily laden bike along the rough patched pavement of the country road. She felt every jolt, all the way up her back. The muscles of her thighs burned and cramped; the day had wrung her limp as a dishrag, even after all the miles she'd covered on a bicycle over the years. Despite the chill damp of the air she was sweating under her down coat, and the straps of her knapsack cut into her shoulders. "Hold up!" she said suddenly, stopping and putting a foot down. It skidded through dirt and gravel along the edge of the asphalt. They all braked and swerved. It was dark, dark in a way she'd never experienced in settled country before. Between patches of cloud the stars were a bright frosted band across the sky, and the moon was rising huge on the edge of sight; it turned the grassy fields and woodlots to silvered mystery. The tin mailbox on its post beside the turnoff was prosaic by contrast, down to the little flag in the upright position to warn the mailman there were letters waiting. "This is Luther's drive," she said. "Another quarter mile." Luther Finney had farmed south of Corvallis most of his seventy-four years, like his fathers before him since they came west on the Oregon Trail the year before the California gold rush started; when the last of his children moved away, he'd rented out most of his land to neighbors and kept only the old house and a few acres around it. He still kept farmer's hours, but he'd complained to her that he slept lightly these days. Dogs barked as the three fugitives walked their laden bicycles up the tree-lined gravel lane. The buds were out on the rock maples arching overhead-trees Luther's great-greatgrandfather had planted to remind him of Massachusetts- and they turned the lane into a tunnel of shadow even darker than the open road. First the buttery yellow flame of a candle, and then the brighter glow of a kerosene lamp. Nothing like the hard glare of electricity, which she was already starting to miss. Luther's two Alsatians came up, excited but polite; her own nondescript black-and-white mongrel threw himself into the air around them in wriggling transports of barking joy, before making his usual nosedive for the crotch to catch up on the olfactory news. "Quiet, Cuchulain," she said, giving him an admonitory rap on the head. She'd named him after the Hound of Ulster, which was somewhat appropriate given the beast's mixed ancestry, though not for his entirely nonheroic nature. He jumped up and tried to lick her face instead. She pushed him down and thumped his ribs reassuringly. The dog sensed anxiety and whined a bit, then followed them with head down and tail wagging nervously. More lights came on downstairs, and the door opened; Luther Finney came out, wrapped in a long bathrobe. "Juney!" he cried. "And Eilir! Weren't expecting you back for another few days." The old man's face carried a genuine smile; so did his wife Sarah's, where she stood behind him. "Come on in," the farmer said. He shook hands with Dennis, giving the ax over his shoulder no more than a glance; he'd met the manager of the Hopping Toad before, and even come in to hear Juniper sing a couple of times. Sarah hugged Juniper and her daughter, and shooed them forward through the hall and into the farmhouse kitchen. They were ugly squared-off things like stubby rifles with short thick bows across the front, but light and easy to handle. That made her feel a bit better about the transaction; she was mournfully convinced that camping gear and high-energy trail rations and garden seeds were going to be worth a Luther's eyebrows "There a reason for the cutlery, Juney?" he said. "You and Mr. Martin on your way to one of those pageant things you sing at?" She suppressed an absurd impulse to slide the weapons around behind her; instead she unbuckled the belt and hung it on the back of a chair. Sarah Finney didn't say anything; but then, she rarely did. Instead she started loading three plates with leftovers-cold fried chicken, beans, potato salad, string beans, and slices cut from a loaf of fresh bread. Then she put an old-fashioned percolator coffeepot on the gas range. "Can't do filter," she said apologetically. "Power's out." She made a gesture towards the two big buckets on the counter. "Pump, too." "Good thing the old hand pump's still working," Luther said. "Knew it would come in useful sometime." Dennis cut in, as he leaned the handle of the war-ax against the door: "Mr. Finney, you've got a gun around, don't you?" "'Course," Luther said, puzzled; his chin and nose looked as if they were going to meet when he frowned. "Got a shotgun, and my old deer rifle, too. Why?" "I'd rather you see for yourself. Get one of 'em and go out back and pop off a couple of rounds into the woodpile. Either will do." He raised a hand. "I can't explain and you won't believe me until you've tried. It'll save time. This is important. Humor me." The old man glanced at Juniper; she nodded, and he shrugged and went out. The three sat down and obeyed Sarah's smiling wave, pitching into the food. Juniper hid a smile as she bit into a drumstick; Luther affected a hard-headed practicality and a loud contempt for any "hippie nonsense," but he also kept a henhouse full of free-range Rhode Islands because they simply tasted better, and a half-acre vegetable garden for the same reason. Dennis's eyes met hers, and she knew they shared a thought: A "You knew about this?" he said in a half-accusing voice, and sat-though not before he'd made sure there were no rounds left in the shotgun's magazine. He was thoroughly careful about firearms, courtesy of his father and a lifetime of hunting, plus World War II and Korea. "Yeah," Dennis said. He glanced over at Juniper. "You want to tell 'em, Juney?" She was more articulate, anyway, as befitted a musician and storyteller. When she'd finished the old man sat and stared at her for a while. "Craziest damned thing I ever heard, Juney," he said after a moment. "But my equipment won't start, that's true; not the car or the pickup either. And the scattergun won't shoot worth shhh.shucks." He shook his head. "There's going to be hell to pay while this lasts, too." "How do you know it's not going to last forever?" she said grimly. "Why… it Juniper swallowed. "Luther, it's already terrible. There are Sarah's face had lost its smiling composure; Luther's hand clenched, and he looked at the silent radio on the countertop by the stove. "And nothing works, Luther. Nothing. We got into a fight-" Luther's eyes went wide as they described it; then they went to his own shotgun, leaning against the wall by the back door, and then to Dennis's ax. "Luther," Sarah said. "Eddie and Susan and the children!" Juniper and Dennis winced; so did Eilir, who read lips well. Those were the Finneys' son and daughter and grandchildren. there were great-grandchildren too, come to think of it. They all lived in Salem. Luther made a calming gesture in his wife's direction with one gnarled hand, a gentleness in contrast with a look more grim and intent than the musician had ever seen on his features before. Though others might have recognized it, in the bloody, frozen hills around Chosin Reservoir. "Later, honey. Let's get things straight first." He looked back at his guests. "You figure this thing has happened all over?" All three nodded. "I can't be sure," Juniper admitted. "But I climbed the tallest building in town and used my binoculars. It's dark out there, Luther. There isn't a single light, not a moving car, not a plane going overhead that I could see. All there are, are fires. Lots of fires. And you saw what happened with the gun-that's the way it was when we tried, too." Luther nodded in his turn and sipped at his coffee. "So what do you three plan on doing about it?" "Run like blazes and hide like hell," Dennis said. "I've got no family in Corvallis." "We're going up to my great-uncle's old place in the foothills," Juniper said, leaning her head eastward for an instant. "It's nicely out of the way, and I expect some of my friends to head that way." The farmer frowned. "If things are all messed up this way, folks'll need to pull together," he said, a hint of disapproval in his voice. Juniper felt herself flush-the curse of a redhead's complexion. "Luther, we've had some time to think about this. It's not just something like a barn on fire, or the river flooding." Dennis nodded. "There's fifty, sixty thousand people in Corvallis alone," he said. "Every one of them gets their food from stores that get Luther Finney thought for an instant, and his face went gray under the weathered tan. "Not too many. Most of the land right around Corvallis is in grass for seed, or flowers or nursery stock or specialties like mint. More'n half the farms don't even have livestock. Some orchards and truck, but not much. Take a while to plant… with hand tools, and getting the seed… " Juniper put her elbows on the table and lowered her face into her hands, the heels over her eyes to block out the visions in her mind. "And that's just Corvallis," she said. "The rest of the Willamette… there's a million plus in Portland alone, and there's Salem and Eugene and Albany… and no tractors or harvesters or-most No trucks, no trains, no telephones-the government's "Holy Hannah," Luther breathed. Sarah put a hand over her mouth. "And Luther blinked at her. "Well, thank you kindly," he said. "But surely we'd just be a burden to you? We're well fixed here if times are hard; there's the preserves, and the chickens, and the garden and the fruit trees. We're better off than we would have been back when I was doing real farming-I've had more time for puttering around putting in truck." Dennis jerked his chin towards the shotgun leaning beside the door. "Thing is, Mr. Finney, that pretty soon a "Holy Hannah," Luther said again. Then he exchanged a look with his wife. "I see your point, you three. But we've got relatives around here, and our kids and grandkids will need a place to stay. They know where we are. No, I think we'll be staying here. And you're welcome to if you want, as well." The floor of the Willamette Valley was mostly flat, but here towards the edge of the Cascade foothills the odd butte reared up out of the fields. Juniper Mackenzie lay on the crest of one such, training her binoculars west; the damp ground soaked into her shirt, but the temperature was heading up, finally getting springlike, and the earth had the yeasty smell of new growth. Crocus bloomed nearby, blue spears under a big Oregon oak whose leaves were a tender green. She swallowed, her hands trembling as she watched I-5, the main interstate that ran north-south from Portland to Eugene. The litter of motionless cars and trucks hadn't changed. The first thin scatter of trudging people on foot had; most of the stranded passengers had probably dispersed quickly, and for a day or two-the day her party had crossed-it had been nearly empty. Now it was A lot of the ones on bicycles were almost certainly from Portland; it was an easy three-day trip by pedal, and there were a That city wasn't far away to the north; she could have seen it on a normal day. Today a thick plume of black smoke marked the location, and the faint bitter smell was an undertone to the earth scents. On the highway, a group was fighting around an eighteen-wheeler truck that had coasted into the rear of an SUV on the evening when everything Changed, carried along by momentum. Merciful distance hid the details, but there were certainly clubs and pieces of car-jack and tire-iron in use. Probably knives and shovels as well. Twenty or thirty cyclists traveling in a clump abruptly braked to a halt and drove into both groups fighting around the truck in a solid wedge. At this distance everything was doll-tiny even with the powerful binoculars, and she kept the point of aim moving so that she wouldn't catch more than an odd glimpse. There were already too many things in her head that kept coming back when she tried to sleep. The worst of it was that she couldn't even blame them for fighting over the food. If everyone shared fairly, that would simply mean that That was like telling yourself not to think about the color orange, or an elephant, but she had to try if she wasn't going to curl up into a little ball and wait to die. Cuchulain thrust his nose into her armpit and whined slightly as he scented her distress. Instead she cased the binoculars, picked up her crossbow and started to thread her way down through the tangle of trees and brush that covered the steep south face of the butte, sliding down on her butt and controlling her descent with her heels more often than not; it was better than five hundred feet of steepness. Cuchulain kept pace with her, wuffling happily as he stuck his nose, into holes and snapped at long-tailed butterflies. She felt a moment's bitter envy; as far as the dog was concerned this was a perfect spring day, out with his person in the country, and she'd even let him eat some very high carrion. The only thing wrong was that she smelled scared and sad. Then he went quiet, stiffened, and gave a low growl. Juniper reached out and grabbed his collar, whispering The narrow graveled road ran along the base of the butte, with a filbert orchard on the other side. The hobbled horses were grazing there among the new spring grass and the flowers, and the barrel shape of her wagon was a little distance further from the road, mostly hidden from a casual view; Dennis had agreed that it was best to travel only at night, by the back ways, and that slowly. Now six people on bicycles faced him and Eilir where the gate from the road went through the orchard fence. They weren't openly hostile yet, but she could hear the raised voices, and she could The child was young, no more than four or five. A boy, and with his own miniature cyclist's helmet; his mother's bicycle had a pillion seat for him. She was Oriental, and she was dangerously well armed. Two of the others carried baseball bats, one a golf club, one a spade with a thick straight-sided blade crudely sharpened; all of them had some sort of knife, if only the kitchen variety. But the Asian woman had an honest-to-goodness bow, and a quiver clipped to the side of it with four arrows; it was a fiberglass target weapon, not even meant for hunting, but potentially deadly for all that. An arrow was nocked to the string, but she hadn't drawn it. "Look," Dennis said, his voice tight with frustration. "Look… " He had the Danish ax held slantwise across his body, one hand on the end of the haft and one halfway up. Eilir stood beside him with her crossbow cocked and loaded but not quite leveled. "I'm sorry as can be, but there's nothing we can do for you. We don't want any trouble. You can pass on by, and nobody will be hurt." Just then one of Luther Finney's gifts-the rooster in the wire cage on the other side of the big barrel-shaped cart- chose an unfortunate moment to crow. It took the strangers a minute to understand what they were hearing; she could tell from the once-expensive sporty look of their clothes they were all deeply urban. But "You've got "No, we don't," Juniper said firmly. Everyone jerked around to look at her as she came out of the brush at the base of the hill and onto the road. "That's a rooster and some breeding hens and we're not parting with them to make all of you one meal," Juniper went on. She met their eyes one by one; she could feel her mother's accent getting a little stronger in her voice, as it did when she was angry or afraid: "They have to help feed my family from now until… things get better." She knew her own eyes were steady, and the green of them cold; more to the point, the three-bladed and very pointed head of the bolt in the groove of her cocked crossbow glittered bright and sharp in the cool spring sunshine. Several of the strangers were "You've got chicken, you've got He mastered himself with a visible effort. "Look, just give us what you can spare. We'll… look, is there any sort of work you need done? We're not thieves. We just haven't had anything to eat for a day and a half now, and that was some crackers and olives and some soup we tried to make out of grass." The child was hugging his mother's leg where she stood beside her bicycle; he had tear-tracks through the dust on his face. "Hungry, Mommy," he said. "I want something to She looked at Juniper. "You don't know what it's like back there," she said. "Back in Portland. The whole city's burning, and nobody has anything, criminals are stealing and killing-Terry'll That set them all off; they crowded closer, leaving their cycles on the kickstands or dropping them and waving their arms and shouting. These weren't bad people; probably none of them had so much as hit anyone since junior high. But they were desperate. Then there was a sharp sound, a snapping Eilir dropped the end of the crossbow to the ground, put her foot through the metal stirrup, and dropped the claw of the spanning device at her belt over the string. Then she hooked the other end over the butt of her weapon and whirled the crank-handle around half a dozen times. The mechanism clicked, and she put another quarrel in the groove with fumbling haste. "Be off!" Juniper shouted at the same time, her weapon scanning back and forth. She could shoot only one-but nobody wanted to be that one, or so she hoped from the bottom of her peaceful soul. "Go! Now, while you can!" They ran; not quite panicked enough to leave their bicycles, but several nearly falling in their haste as they sprang aboard them and pedaled madly westward, back towards I-5. Back towards despair and death in a ditch, most likely. Eilir kept her crossbow to her shoulder until the last of them was out of sight. Then she dropped it and burst into clumsy racking sobs. Juniper tried to put an arm around her shoulder. Dennis leaned on his ax, taking deep whooping breaths for an instant. "Oh, fuck, that was too close," he said. "Oh, Something small and hard rammed Juniper in the stomach. After an instant she realized it was the child's head, and he was trying to punch her as well. "You don't hurt my mom!" he cried; he was sobbing too, but striking out with blind determination. "You don't hurt my mom!" "I'm not going to hurt her!" Juniper said helplessly. She wrapped her arms around the boy in self-defense, lifting him and handing the writhing, kicking bundle to Dennis. "Or you either; be still, for the Goddess' sake!" The Oriental woman was silent where she lay in the roadway, wide-eyed, clutching at her injured leg. The bolt Eilir had used had a smooth target head, and the blood trickled freely but did not have the fatal spurting flow that would mean a severed artery. "He's just a little boy," the woman said as Juniper approached. "Please, whoever you are, he's just a little boy. He didn't hurt anyone. You've got to help him." "And I'm not going to hurt him," the musician replied. It would be so much easier just to go away and leave them if the injured woman were a ravening bandit spitting curses, or thinking of nothing but her own hurt. "Will you let me see to the leg?" she went on aloud. A nod replied. "Toss your knife away, then. I have a daughter depending on Juniper used her own dagger to slit the tight cycling shorts up around where the shaft pierced the flesh, wincing as she looked at it. Dennis came up; he had their medicine box, and readied a bandage; the boy was standing behind him, darting looks around his legs and then turning away. Juniper took a deep breath, gripped the bolt and pulled; it came free easily, and they occupied themselves with salve and tape for a moment. "I'm Sally Quinn," the wounded woman said when she'd stopped panting and recovered herself somewhat. "My son's Terence, Terry." She spoke good General American, with a very faint trace of an accent, and looked to be half a decade older than Juniper, though that might be the dirt and desperation and not having eaten much the past week. Dennis surprised his friend by breaking into another language, fast-paced and with a nasal twang; she didn't think it was Chinese, which she could at least recognize. Sally started in surprise, smiled hesitantly through her pain and replied haltingly in the same tongue. After a moment she relapsed into English: "But my parents came over in 'seventy-five, when I was very young," she said. "I don't remember all that much." Juniper looked at Dennis. "You were in Vietnam?" she said curiously. "In the rear with the gear," he said, shrugging. "Supply corporal. But I did pick up some of the language, yeah, dealing with the local economy. And we better She recalled vaguely from books and movies that that meant "Was your husband with the. others here?" Juniper asked. There was a wedding band on Sally's left hand, she certainly hadn't been born with the surname "No," Sally replied; her voice was tired and flat, and her face sagged with lack of sleep and food and hope. "Peter was working late at the office at HP. that night, you know what I mean." They both nodded. "When things Changed," Juniper said, hearing the capital in her own voice. "He didn't come back. I couldn't go looking for him because of Terry, and it was four days. And then there was nothing left in the apartment, and nothing worked… the water, the toilets… there was fighting in the streets! And some people I knew a little said they were going to go south to where there was food; I think they wanted me to come because I had the bow, I'm in an archery club, we meet every second Saturday… " The words trailed off. Juniper stood abruptly and paced, then turned. She left the words unsaid; Dennis was about to speak too. They met each other's eyes and Juniper shrugged angrily. "Oh, we should not be doing this, Dennie, we really shouldn't. We A hand tapped her on the shoulder. "All right… Sally," Juniper said. "We can't help everyone… which doesn't mean we can't help anyone. You wait here, and we'll get you into the wagon when the horses are hitched." She looked at Dennis. "We'd best get a move on, before we pick up so many strays we're out of food even before we reach the cabin." Seven Well, shit," Havel said with profound disgust. "I was really hoping this wouldn't happen." There were cars on Highway 12. The problem was that they were all stationary; he could see half a dozen, before the road curved out of sight along the steep canyon of the Lochsa. Several of them had been left with the doors open; not one was moving. Eric halted beside him, gawking up and down the roadway. "Wait a minute," he said. "Do you mean that all the cars are stopped the way our plane's engines were?" "And my GPS unit and the radio at the cabin," Havel said grimly. He spat into the dirt by the side of the roadway. It seemed to be the only way to really express his feelings. "But… " Eric's slightly battered-looking face went fluid with shock. "How are we going to get help for my mother?" "You tell me," Havel said, throwing down his pack. They did; nothing remained but a few empty plastic wrappers. "No blankets," he said. Eric looked at him; probably big-city families as rich as his didn't think about that sort of thing. "A lot of people out here keep spare blankets or a sleeping bag in their trunks on a long trip," Havel said. "Or emergency supplies. None of these cars have anything like that. Five gets you ten everyone's car stopped at the same moment, then they hung around for a while and eventually started walking out when they realized nobody was coming to rescue them." He swept a hand along the road. "They were crapping by the side of the road for a couple of days too." Eric tried a shaky smile. "I'm not much of an expert at roadside dumps," he said. "Spoor is spoor." Havel felt his mind struggling to refuse the implications of what he saw. The two men looked at each other. It was a relief when they heard the hollow clop of shod hooves, and the harder crunch on the gravel beside the pavement. The sound came from the east, down the road that stretched in from Lolo Pass and Montana. There were six horses. Two carried packsaddles; three bore men in outdoors dress, looking even more scruffy than Havel felt or Eric was. The lead rider had a brush of mouse-colored beard that fell halfway down his chest and… Havel blinked… an actual coonskin cap. He looked like a potato with legs, and rode like one, sawing at his horse's mouth as he pulled up; a lead rein from his saddle controlled the packhorses after a fashion. His face was thick-featured under the matted hair, heavily pocked, with a nose like a smaller spud attached to the mass. His companions were a gangling stork and a third man much younger than the other two, pinker and fatter as well; he carried a compound hunting bow with an arrow on the string and six more in the quiver clipped to the side of the weapon. None of them looked It was what followed that made Eric swear under his breath, and Havel's eyes narrow. There was one more rider, a middle-aged black man with his feet lashed to the stirrups and his hands cuffed before him, with the chain of the handcuffs through a ring on the horn of his saddle. Two women walked beside the packhorses, also cuffed; the older looked Hispanic, or possibly Italian; the teenage girl beside her was darker, but had a family resemblance. All three of the captives looked like they'd been roughed up, and recently, with still-wet blood running from mouths and noses; the black man looked as if he'd have trouble walking at all, though even semiconscious he rode much better than his three captors. The saddles were Western-style, looking practical and battered enough to be real working gear, and the mounts were excellent; definitely of quarter-horse stock, but in the older style, with good thick legs and strong hooves, and big for the breed. "Afternoon," the potato-with-legs leader said as the party drew up; he halted within talking distance, but not close. Havel waved a greeting, unobtrusively letting the rabbit stick fall into the palm of his right hand and handing it off to the left behind his back. "Follow my lead," he said softly to Eric. The young man nodded; Havel could tell he was trembling-tense, but he wasn't showing it much. "Hello there," Havel went on. "Mind telling me what the hell's going on? We crash-landed up in the woods"-he waved his left hand back towards the wilderness rearing southward-"about ten days ago, and just walked out. Is it like this all over?" The fat rider with the bow threw back his head and yeee-hawed; Havel had heard it done a lot better. The older two laughed. "It's the apocalypse, brother," the potato-man said, grinning. "It's the downfall of the Z-O-G, and the triumph of God's people! And yeah, it's all over. Far as we know, and we've talked with people from as far as Smithton, and over to Billings in Montana. All of 'em on bicycles, trying to get somewhere better, and not finding it. And ZOG stood for "Zionist Occupation Government." These three were obviously some variety of neo-Nazi/Christian Identity/Aryan Brotherhood types, one of the groupuscules that had set up redoubts in northern Idaho through the eighties and nineties as part of the survivalist wave-or the scum on the wave, to be more descriptive. The redoubts usually consisted of a cluster of mobile homes and shacks on heavily mortgaged land, splitting and recombining as the quarrelsome lunatics anathematized each other over fine points of ideology and/or got arrested for credit card scams and death threats to judges and process servers, but the inhabitants could be dangerous enough when they weren't selling each other out to the FBI. The tall thin one was riding with his jacket open over a bare chest, and the tattoos under it were pure jailhouse; all three of them looked hopped up, as if they'd done a major hit of coke or won the Powerball. Eric bent, as if he were scratching at his leg; out of the corner of his eye Havel couldn't be sure, but he thought the younger man palmed a rock. The man nodded. "Didn't we say it was coming?" he crowed. "And now we white original sovereigns are coming into our own." "What about these folks here?" Havel said mildly, drifting a little closer. "We got us a good husky "Couple of nice fuck-toys too," the youth with the bow said. "I like the look of the young one." "In your dreams, Jimmie," the thickset man said; apparently he was the leader. "But you can have her momma tonight while I break her in." The tattooed man scowled. "They're mud people, Dan," he said, probably a long-running argument. "They're unclean, most likely full of diseases. We ought to kill them right off, like we did those Indians." "Now, Bob, we'll find us some good pure white women for bearing children," the leader said. "When we're settled in our stronghold waiting for the dying time to pass. Meantime, a man has his needs." The black man was sitting slumped in the saddle, resting his cuffed hands on the horn and a good deal of his weight on those. His head was down as well, but his eyes peered up at Havel, flickered to Eric. There wasn't much hope in them, but there was thought, and he was probably noticing Havel's slow, inch-by-inch drift towards the riders. He looked to be about forty, with an outdoor worker's weathered skin and squint lines beside his eyes, sinewy and strong. "Dying time?" he said, edging a little closer still to Dan. "Could you tell me what you mean by that?" "Well, it figures that with all the technology gone, most everyone's going to die, except in the real backward places, bush-niggers in Africa and such. Even country folk, without their tractors and pumps, and anyway those close to the cities will get eaten out. Without guns, they can't even defend their farms from the hordes. But up here in the National Redoubt where people are thin on the ground, we can survive and expand later. Lot of cattle and a lot of grain in Idaho. Not to mention game in the forests. I figure best thing is to hide out for maybe six months, then go looking for a place to live long-term." The man's eyes had glazed over with lust as he spoke; partly, Havel supposed, at contemplating the death of more of humanity than a nuclear war could have managed; partly at the prospect of being a big man among the survivors, after a lifetime of total failure; and partly a more human elation that at last he'd gotten something right, even if it was only improving his chances of surviving by moving to Idaho. From his accent, he'd started out in some East Coast city, although he was trying hard to westernize it. Just a minute more to get them relaxed… "You two boys look like good original-sovereign stock," the leader of the riders said. "Why don't you-" "Help us!" the woman walking by the packhorse cried. "For God's sake, mister, please, help us! They're crazy!" Eric wound up like a pitcher on the mound and threw his rock; he was too close to do a really good job, but his stream-smoothed lump of granite thumped into the shoulder of the bowman. The archer loosed, the shaft flying inches wide of the back of the neck of the thin man with the jailhouse tattoos; that one did what Havel expected-clapped his heels to his horse's sides, heading straight for Eric. He had some notion of what to do in a fight. The younger Larsson threw himself back with a yell, landing and rolling in the roadway and then dodging around a stopped car that stood with its doors open; he came right back through it, diving over the backseat faster than the inexperienced horseman could get his mount around it. The knife flicked into Havel's hand and the rabbit stick into the other. The thickset man's horse thundered down on him; he'd never been charged by a man on horseback before, and his stroke with the stick at the rider's knee went wide-fortunately, so did the heavy man's potentially bone-shattering kick with one cup-stirrup-bearing foot. That nearly unseated him, and he clutched at the horn of his saddle. Havel leapt forward again, trying for a hamstringing blow, and The heavy youth with the bow tried to grab the young girl by the chain of her handcuffs with his right hand and drag her up across the saddle in front of him while slinging the bow over his shoulder at the same time; she seized the hand in both of hers and sank her teeth into his wrist. That made him shriek in pain and start trying to shake her off instead as his horse skittered sideways; and her mother added a series of ear-splitting screams to the confusion as she came up on the other side and began beating her clenched fists on his leg. Mr. Jailhouse Bob was coming back into the fight; he had a machete out now, from a sheath strapped to his saddle. He also came straight for Havel, ignoring the rest of the milling chaos. Fortunately Bob's time in stir hadn't included training in the equestrian arts, and he misjudged the speed of his mount. His roundhouse swing passed a foot in front of Havel's face-close enough for him to feel the ugly wind of its passage-and nearly took an ear off his own horse. Havel's return stroke with the rabbit stick cracked into his arm. The blow was glancing, but it was enough to make him drop the machete. Then he clapped his heels into his horse's flanks and circled out of the fight again, shaking the limb and cursing but looking quickly back and forth to get a sense of the action. The black man made his own contribution; even without reins, he managed to get his horse moving west, probably hoping to draw the rest off from his family. He succeeded; Dan and young Jimmie turned the heads of their horses around and went after him, but Jailhouse Bob was in their path. Instead of trying to pass him the black man turned his horse up the Centennial Trail to the south, disappearing into the steep heights and the tall pines. "Get the nigger!" Dan cried as he spurred after him. Jimmie followed, turning in the saddle to loose an arrow that wobbled up at a mortar-shell angle and came down with a Havel dropped his rabbit stick and scooped up the fallen machete, starting towards the last of the bandits. Eric followed, picking up a few more baseball-weight rocks; behind him the two women were getting the packhorses under control, despite the handcuffs, which argued for considerable skill. Bob looked at the approaching men with hatred that radiated from him like heat from a banked fire, then turned and followed his companions. Havel let out a long breath and shook his head, fighting down a wave of nausea and light-headedness. It had been a long time since he'd fought in a kill-or-be-killed situation, but it was just as unpleasant as he remembered. Eric dropped his rocks. "Damn," he said. "I'm better than that with a baseball-I should have hit that fat fuck in the teeth or at least broken his collarbone." "Not bad for your first real fight," Havel said, punching him in the shoulder. "Which it was, right?" Eric grinned cautiously and touched his swollen nose and split lip. "Not counting you, Mike, yeah." Havel nodded. "Only I don't think they had education in mind." He turned to the women. "Ma'am," he said as the older of the two began to speak. "We need your help if we're going to rescue… your husband?" She nodded; a woman of about forty, full-figured and with boldly handsome mestizo-Hispanic features, wearing riding jeans with a belt of silver medallions and a blousy white shirt. The teenager nodded too; she was darker, with a mass of frizzy hair, and would be quite pretty when she wasn't bloodied and terrified. "Will, my husband. I'm Angelica Hutton, and this is our daughter, Luanne," she said; there was a soft Tejano-Spanish accent under a Southwestern twang. "Mike Havel. Eric Larsson," Havel said shortly; there wasn't much time for social niceties. "What do you need?" Angelica Hutton said steadily. "Tools, if you've got them; can't do anything until we bust you loose of those cuffs. And knives-one of them should be the biggest you've got." There were tools; a jumble in one of the panniers, including a short heavy pry bar and a farrier's hammer. Havel grunted in satisfaction and freed each of the women with a few short clanging blows, the chain of their handcuffs stretched across a roadside boulder. As he worked, the woman spoke. He caught most of it: "… just attacked us, they came down the road on bikes to where our trucks stopped; we'd been pasturing the horses and we were about to head out ourselves, we hadn't seen anyone else and they just "Any more of them?" Havel asked. "Not from what they said. I think they'd been in a fight, and they were afraid some Indians were chasing them. They just took what they could grab and made us saddle up the horses and… they were going to… " The packsaddles bore her account out, heaped high and packed badly, with a melange of goods and food and gear thrown on higgledy-piggledy. It was probably a very good thing for Angelica Hutton and her daughter that the Aryan Trio had been pressed for time. "You can ride?" he said. "Since I was six. We always had horses." "Good. Are these saddle-broke?" "Yes," Angelica said. "We were taking them to an outfitter in Lewiston, and the stallion, they didn't get that one. My husband and I raise and train horses. These two are the slowest of the bunch, though." Havel nodded crisply: "Look, Mrs. Hutton, get these packsaddles off, and hide your goods up there in that thicket, behind the big rock-you can get up along the side with a little work. I'd advise you to keep extremely quiet and wait. I don't have time to argue. We'll be back when we've done what has to be done, but it could be a couple of days or longer. Are those lashings rawhide?" They were thin and soft-surfaced. "Wet them down for me as well, would you please? Put them in water, do that first. And get me those knives." "Thank you, and Havel worked as well. He'd spotted suitable red cedar saplings downslope to the north and not far from the edge of the road; the wood wasn't what he'd have chosen with more time, but it worked easily, and he'd been thinking hard about their brush with the three bandits. A few strokes of the machete at their bases felled both the young trees. After trimming the first he had a straight pole five feet long and another a little taller than he was. A single swift hard chop split the smaller end of the first down the middle, leaving a cleft twelve inches long, and he repeated the process for the second, longer one. Then he used the hammer and prybar to knock the wooden handle off the machete, and punch out the two rivets; the tang was solid except for those holes, a simple continuation of the blade. He forced it into the cleft of the shorter pole, trimming with his knife and waggling it carefully to seat it and then hammering in two horseshoe nails from a bag in the packsaddles. Angelica brought him the rawhide thongs, which had at least been thoroughly wetted down. "Wish there was more time to soak these," he said absently. Eric came up and helped hold the shaft while he bound the cleft with a double layer of leather cord, using the ends of the nails as tie-points and pulling the wet leather as tightly as he could with both hands and bracing foot. Then he turned the ends of the nails down with a few swift hammer-blows; there was no wobble when he shook the improvised weapon, and in a while the drying leather would hold it on like iron. The result was a shaft about the thickness of a shovel handle, with two feet of chopping steel fixed on the end coming to just over eye level on the younger Larsson. "Looks like a "That's the idea," Havel said. "I was stationed in Okinawa for a while back in 'eighty-nine. You ever trained with one?" "Just a few times, and watching. Hate to have to use one and try to ride a horse, though." "Better than nothing, and we'll get down to fight. These'll give us enough reach to get at a man on horseback; While he spoke he sorted through the knives; he knocked the handle off a good-sized pointed kitchen blade, and bound it into the second shaft as he had the machete. Now he had a spear as well, about seven feet long in all. By the time the weapons were ready the horses were as well; they both had bags of food thrown across their withers. Eric gave him a boost to mount, then sprang on with rather more agility himself; Havel was a good practical horseman, and he'd enjoyed wilderness trips in the saddle, but he hadn't grown up in a family who had a stable at a country property. "Wait, and keep out of sight," Havel said to the two women. "God go with you," Angelica said, crossing herself. They both pressed their thighs to their mounts and the well-trained animals moved, taking the steep section of the trail that joined Highway 12. Havel looked up. It was about an hour to the early spring sunset; the sky was already darkening in the east, and the temperature was dropping-it might go below freezing in the dark, and they probably wouldn't dare light a fire, but the horses should help keep them warm. "We've got problems," he said to Eric, drawing level with him. The trail was broad enough for that, and soft enough that he could read the tracks fairly easily: one horse galloping first, and then three more strung out after it. "Tell me about it," Eric said. The answer was probably rhetorical, but Havel took it literally: "We've got a set of problems, assuming we don't get lucky and find the Three Demon Stooges lying with their necks broken 'cause they couldn't stay on. OK, first, there's the kid with the bow." "He didn't hit anything," Eric observed. "And we were pretty close." "Not from a horse he didn't, no. But he might be a lot better on foot. Those hunting bows are no joke-look what your kid sister did with one, and neither of us is as tough a target as a bull elk! That means we have to get real close before he sees us. Next, there's tall skinny tattoo-man. You noticed him?" "He's worse than the others?" "He's a real killer, not a wannabe or a blowhard; I recognize the type. I don't know if he's got any hunting experience, or whether he's got any brains, but he won't panic or freeze up-which the other two might. That's the difference between life and death when it's for real." Eric swallowed; he was coming down from the adrenaline high of the brief chaotic fight, and looking a bit pale. But he was a sharp kid, and he probably took the point about freezing up better than he would if Havel had stated it openly. "What's the third problem?" "They're heading right towards your folks… The young man reined in at the snap of command. "We come barreling down after them, they're likely to hear us coming and ambush us. Right now they're going hell for leather after Hutton-the black guy. They'll catch him, he can't get off the trail tied to his horse like that, but they won't worry about us if we're real careful." "Why not?" Eric said. "Because to their way of thinking, we've got the women and the stuff; plus they don't know about your family. They may know about the old cabin, though. Three on two is bad odds. This is going to be real tricky." He paused a moment. "You realize we're going to have to kill them all?" Eric nodded abruptly, swallowing again; he started to speak, cleared his throat, and then went on: "Yeah, Mike, I do. They'll kill my folks if we don't, won't they? And rape my sisters. And they'll torture that black guy." "For starters," Havel said. The sun was setting on the mountains behind them, and the beauty of it made him shiver a little as the great trees threw spears of shadow before them. He'd told Signe that the forest wasn't hostile; and that was still true. But men, now… men had been suddenly thrown back each on himself. The cake of law and custom had been broken; now they were all on their own, and their true natures could come out, for good or ill. "They're fucking monsters!" Eric burst out. Havel shook his head. "No, they're just evil," he replied. "But that's close enough for government work." Eight "What the hell He looked at the two great horse-drawn wagons; curious children freed by the lack of school buses gathered around as well. Chuck Barstow glanced up and down the one street of the little town of Dable; houses faded into farmland not two hundred yards from where he stood, and new leaves were budding on the trees that arched overhead. It was only nine o'clock, but there was a line outside the bakery and the little grocery store. A group of men were pushing the dead cars out of the middle of the street, clearing the way. Several of them looked speculatively at the wagons, which made him nervous. The strong smell of the horses' sweat filled the air; getting out of Eugene had been a nightmare-if you could call this out of it, since a ribbon of suburb and strip mall extended nearly this far. Nobody had attacked them- quite-or seemed to guess what was under the canvas tilts. He still shuddered and swallowed acid at the back of his throat, thinking of the things he'd seen in the dying city. "What do you think has happened?" Chuck said. "Don't know," the storekeeper admitted. "Figure it's some sort of big power-out." "What about the cars? Radios? The batteries?" Chuck said. "Well, that could be one of those government projects- I read about it in Then he chuckled: "I suppose that's why you folks are carrying the swords and such." Chuck had his own Society long sword at his belt and a buckler-a little shield like a steel soup-plate-hooked over it, along with his dagger on his right hip; he'd had those over at Andy and Diana's for coven work. He shoved down a wistful thought about the gear at home in his garage; they'd decided it was too risky to go all the way south through the city for them, and that was that. The rest of the coveners had shovels, or axes, or at least long kitchen knives and baseball bats. "What do you think really happened?" the storekeeper said. "Well, we figure it's a global catastrophe," Chuck said. "All our technology-anything involving engines or electricity or guns-has suddenly stopped working. Planes fell out of the air. Most of humanity is going to die in the next six months, except for peasant farmers, and a lot of The storekeeper was a thin balding man with thick glasses. Chuck could see his words being processed and rejected behind them. Chuck shivered internally. He knew he was talking to a man who would die, soon and horribly, simply because he couldn't really believe in what had happened. It was all he could do to make From what he'd seen, the vast majority of people were going to wait awhile for things to return to normal, or for the Army or the National Guard to show up. Then when they started to get hungry, or the water didn't run anymore, probably a lot of them would panic and go He shivered and swallowed a bubble of nausea; it was too big to grasp thoroughly, down in the gut, and all at once. By the time most really got it into their heads, it would be too late. There were advantages to being one of a collection of misfits who believed in magic. "So, what would you folks like?" the thin man said. Sally sat beside Juniper on the driver's seat of the Traveler wagon; it was comfortable enough as they rumbled eastward along the dirt road, with a piece of artfully arranged board to support her injured leg.The Portland woman handled the reins quite well for an amateur, but the horses were experienced and knew the way as hills rose on either side. Shadows flickered over them from tall roadside trees; between them were vistas of fields on either side, and growing patches of tall conifer forest running up creek-sides and gullies towards the heights on either hand. Juniper kept an eye cocked on Cagney and Lacey as her fingers moved on the strings of the guitar and she sang: The slow staccato clop and crunch of the hooves beat a rhythm below the rumbling wheels, and the rattle and creak of the wagon's wooden framework. She could smell dust from the road, the strong grassy smell of the big platter-footed gray horses, and greenness from forest and field beyond; a wet breath of coolness from Artemis Butte Creek as it swung closer to the south side of the roadway. Underneath the country smells was a tang of burning, something they hardly noticed anymore-it had been constant since the Change. The Willamette was a giant trough, and the smoke from the vast city fires would linger for a long time-until the fall rains came to clean the air, most likely. The music made the thoughts go away, at least for a while. When she'd finished the song, Juniper put the guitar behind her-there was a padded rack for it on her traveling wagon-and took the reins back. The road wasn't as straight and level now, as they wound up the creekside towards the mountains. "That was nice," Sally said. "I didn't go in much for that sort of music, but… I've missed She'd started talking more since she'd stopped being so fearful of the strangers-a fear for which Juniper couldn't blame her, considering the circumstances of their meeting. She There were types of music Juniper liked but didn't play herself-she had a weakness for old-time blues, Americana and even some types of hip-hop-and she'd probably never hear them again. "I was thinking," Sally said. "About those songs you do… I mean, the knights and swords and horses… I mean, is all that coming back?" "All that never existed, not the way the ballads paint it," Juniper said. "I don't think what's coming will be exactly like the real past, either-but it's certainly going to have more in common with it than with the way things were right before the Change. Which is a pity; things were Sally smiled. "I suspect it's going to be a weird old world, when things settle down." "That it will," Juniper said, musing; it was easier than thinking about the immediate future. "Well… buffalo on the Plains, again, perhaps?" Sally nodded. "And not just buffalo. I took wildlife biology and ecology courses before I met Peter, and I did volunteer work at the zoo before Terry was born. Guess which country in the world has the most tigers?" Juniper blinked in surprise. "Ah… India? China?" Sally shook her head. "The United States of America. Over twenty thousand of them, mostly privately owned." "Like that Tiger Lady in New Jersey, who turned out to have a whole pack of them?" "Right. A lot of them are in enclosures they could get out of, with some determined effort-places out in the country. Tigers are "And there are those exotic-wildlife ranches," Juniper said thoughtfully. "Many of them well out in remote places, to be sure. And ostriches and emus and… why, I saw llamas in plenty the last time I was out Bend way." Sally agreed. "If I know them, the volunteers at the zoo in Portland will probably turn the animals there loose when they can't feed them. It'll make for some interesting ecological swings, when people are… rare… again." The hills pushed closer to the creekside road, and fresh-painted board fences appeared to their left. She pulled in slightly on the reins, calling out a soft "Is this your place?" Sally asked. "No, it's the Fairfax farm," Juniper said, pointing with her left hand. "They're the last house below me. It's not really a working farm, more of a hobby place for the Fairfaxes- they're retired potato-growers from Idaho." She stood, resting one hand on the brake lever beside her and shading her eyes with the other; it was a warm day for March, and sunny, full of fresh sweet odors; they were traveling by daylight, now that they were so close to home. The gravel-and-dirt road they were on ran east up the narrowing valley of Artemis Butte Creek; half a mile ahead it turned north to her land. It was all infinitely familiar to her, even the deep quiet, but somehow strange… perhaps Hills rose ever more steeply to either side, turning into low forested mountains as they hemmed the valley in north and south; behind them the road snaked west like a yellow-brown ribbon, off towards the invisible flats of the Willamette. A cool breath came from the ridges, shaggy with Douglas fir, vine maple and Oregon oak. "You can't see my cabin from here, but it's that way," Juniper went on, shifting her pointing arm a little east of north, up the side of the mountain. "It's in the forest on the slope?" Sally asked. From here, there didn't look to be any other alternative; the ground reared up from the back of the Fairfax place to the summit three thousand feet above; most of it at forty-five degrees or better, with no sign of habitation. Eastward ridges rose higher to the Cascades proper, snow peaks floating against heaven. "No," Juniper said. "You can't see it, not from here, but there's a break in the slope-the side of the hill levels off into sort of a bench along the south side about four hundred feet up. There's a long strip more or less level, a meadow a mile long and a quarter wide. The creek crosses it from higher up, then turns west when it hits the head of this valley where the hills pinch together, and the road follows it. Right after the Civil War my ancestors arrived and spent two futile lifetimes trying to make a decent living off that patch up there. Maybe it reminded them of East Tennessee! But it stayed in the family when we moved into town in my great-granddad's time." "Not very good land?" "Middling, what there is of it that isn't straight up and down, but Lady and Lord, it's pretty! There's two creeks and a nice strong spring right by the cabin. All but the bench is in trees, near eight hundred acres of our woods, and more forest all around and behind it. We Mackenzies got to Oregon just a wee bit late for the share-out, you might say-story of our line since we left County Antrim for Pennsylvania in 1730, always just a little behindhand for the pickings." "Eight hundred acres sounds fairly substantial." "Not if you're a farmer, and the most of it's hillside! My great-uncle Earl the banker kept the farm as a summer place, and bought more of the hills about; he was a hunter, and dabbled in what they called scientific forestry. Then the good man left it to me, the unwed teenage mother, the family's shame, the sorrow and black disgrace of it; everyone said he was senile. Mind you, I'd been spending summers there all my life, and was a bit of a favorite of his, and he adored little Eilir. Well, who wouldn't?" Sally seemed to hesitate, then spoke: "Your family has been here a long time then? I thought you sounded. well, a little different." She smiled. "I'm sort of sensitive to accents; I spent my teenage years trying to shed mine." "Ah, different I am," Juniper said, grinning and dropping further into a stage-Irish brogue for an instant. "Me sainted mither was a fair Irish rose, d'ye see? From the Gaeltacht, at that-Achill Island." In her normal voice: "She met Dad while he was in the Air Force, over in England; his side of the family are Scots-Irish with a very faint touch of Cherokee. Mom had a genuine brogue, bless her, and spoke the Gaelic to me in my cradle; and for my type of music, a hint of the Celt does no harm professionally, so I make a habit of keeping it up. Did make a habit." "Just the opposite for me. My father was Air Force too- Vietnamese air force, of course. He flew us out in a helicopter, but I don't really remember-" Juniper held up her left hand and pulled the horses in; Sally fell silent at the sharp sudden movement. Then Juniper set the brake lever and stood, shading her eyes. Terry and Eilir had been tearing along the roadside verge, playing some game; he'd even picked up a little Sign over the past few days. Cuchulain had been romping along with them when he wasn't chasing rabbits real and imaginary. Now he stopped by the gate and looked uncertain, running back and forth a bit with his tail down. "He smells something he doesn't like," Juniper said, handing over the reins and picking up her crossbow; Dennis was carrying his ax instead. Dennis caught the same clue. He'd been walking by the horses' heads; now he stepped away, pushing back the brim of his cowboy hat. His right hand went back and down along the haft of the ax hooked over his shoulder, lifting and flipping it to hold slantwise across his thick chest. Short commons and hard work had started whittling down the beer belly; now he looked like a shaggy ill-kept barrel rather than a melancholy pear. "What's wrong?" Sally said sharply. "Nothing except the fool dog, for now," Juniper said; she spanned the spare crossbow before she handed it to Sally. Then her own went into the crook of her arm. "But I'd better take a look." She whistled; Terry looked up and touched Eilir's arm, and they came back to the wagon. "The Fairfaxes friends of yours?" Dennie said as they let themselves through the gate and started cautiously up the laneway that wove between two grassy green slopes. "Not really friends," Juniper said, her eyes roving. About half the Fairfax place was wooded, the steeper northern section; the merely hilly half towards the road and the creek was in pasture and fenced with white boards, apart from a bit in some bluish green grassy crop she didn't recognize and a substantial orchard. They cut kitty-corner northeast through the ancient gnarled fruit trees; it was apples mostly, with some cherries, only recently pruned and sprayed after years of neglect. Blossoms showed tender pink and frothy white, scenting the air as the two walked beneath. The house wasn't visible from the road, being tucked into a steep south-facing hill with a pond in front of it and then more hill beyond, with grass blowing on it among the blue camas flowers. Aloud: "Not unfriends either, for all that they're strong Mormons and went pale when they realized I was an actual living breathing Witch. Frank does me favors with his tractor now and then, and his wife gave me some jam she made last summer, but it's a nodding acquaintance." "You afraid someone less neighborly has moved in?" "Just fearful in general, Dennie. Hush." They went through the last of the fruit trees, and then to their hands and knees below the crest line of the hill; Juniper could go ghost-silent that way, the fruit of months every year of her life following the ways of bird and beast in these wooded hills. Dennis had all the grace of an elephant seal hauled up on a beach, but it probably didn't matter… She uncased her bird-watching binoculars-another gift from Great-uncle Earl, who'd shared the hobby-as they lay concealed in the knee-high grass. The Fairfax place was old, a four-square frame farmhouse built in the 1880s. It had been boarded up and derelict for years before Frank Fairfax bought it. Now the white paint shone in the sunlight; the neat lawn with its flowerbeds went down to the pond, and a tractor tire hung from the bough of a big willow, for the times his grandchildren visited. He'd added a two-car garage, repaired and repainted the barn, and put in some sheds as well. For a retired man of seventy, he drove himself hard; probably a lifelong habit he couldn't shake. "His stock are loose," Juniper said after a moment. "Which he'd never allow." There were a dozen sheep lying in the shade of the tree, not far from the pond, fluffy white Correidales with a collie lying close by them; it got up and barked warningly at the humans. The henhouse by the barn gaped empty and silent. A Jersey cow and her bull calf were hock-deep in the water, drinking; they looked up and blinked mild welcome as they scented the humans, jaws working on mouthfuls of waterweed. She scanned over to the barnyard; the gate there was open, and the fifty-horsepower tractor parked off to one side under its shelter roof. Not far from it was a truck with a seed company logo on its side. Birds flew in and out of the buildings in throngs. "Silent as the grave," Dennis said, which made her shiver a little. "Let's go see," she said roughly. Dennis led with his ax at the ready, and she behind him and to one side with the crossbow held to her shoulder. Fear gave way to sadness well before they came to the veranda with its swing chair and lace-bordered cushions. "Christ," Dennis said, lowering the ax and putting a sleeve of his dusty flannel shirt over his mouth. Juniper tied a bandana from her hip pocket over hers as she approached the door; she could hear the buzzing of flies going in and out of a half-opened window on the second floor, over to her right-the master bedroom. A crow launched itself from the windowsill as she watched, the harsh Juniper swallowed. There was a note taped to the glass behind the screen door, and the keys dangled by a cord from the knob. Juniper read it aloud: The next part was probably written later; the strong bold hand was much shakier: Juniper turned away, clearing her throat and wiping savagely at her eyes with the back of her hand. "Blessed be," she said softly, remembering their strained politeness, and the Christmas cookies they'd given Eilir, and the swarm of grandchildren who'd asked permission before they went up into her woods when they visited around Ostara time last year-Easter to Christians. Silently to herself: Dennis stood back respectfully as Juniper put a hand to her eyes; he hadn't known them, after all. Then he looked at the animals, and the open barn as she came down from the veranda; he took the keys from her hand. "I'm sorry as can be about your neighbors, Juney. But we ought to take an inventory. Their family was in Idaho?" "Farmers near Twin Falls," she said. "Potatoes in a large way; Frank said"-she swallowed-"that he couldn't live without putting in a patch at least." She went into the molasses-smelling dimness of the barn; Fairfax had opened sacks of feed, and one of kibble for his sheepdog. There were more flats of pelletized alfalfa up in the loft, grain-and-molasses feed and baled hay-old-fashioned square bales, at that. The milk would be good for Terry, and Eilir… and perhaps she could try her hand at making butter and cheese, there were descriptions in books she had. A vision of Eilir's face goblin-thin like pictures of an African famine faded from the back of her mind. Twin Falls, Idaho, might as well be on the far side of the Atlantic for all the good the Fairfaxes' family would get out of their stuff here, and they were probably better off than anyone on the western side of the Cascades anyway. Then Dennis burst in, flourishing his ax. "Seed potatoes!" he yelled. "The sacks read 'Oregon Foundation Seed Program Certified Potatoes!' The man must have been on a delivery run when the Change hit; Juney, there's a couple of She threw herself at him, and they whirled about in an impromptu dance, whooping with glee. After a breathless moment she broke free. He was still exclaiming and waving the ax when her face went sober. "What's wrong, Juney?" he said. "We can plant enough potatoes up by your place to keep us going all next winter, if we hurry-and there's enough to feed us all until October in style, too." "Provided nobody comes up the road with bad intent," she said. "There's an old logging track from the back of the Fairfax place to the cabin. We'll use that up to the cabin, and get things in order. And then we'll start." "Planting potatoes?" Dennie said curiously. "We'll start doing what we can for the world." "For the world?" Juniper waved a hand at the barn. "The Mother-of-All's been good to us, Dennie. But She's giving us a message, too. We have to pay back, if we don't want the luck to leave us-threefold return for good or ill." "Whoa," Chuck Barstow said, easing back on the reins. The other two wagons and the walking coveners halted too. It was a bright, breezy spring day; sixty or a little more, and no sign of rain, for a wonder. The big yellow school bus ahead had swerved half off the road. That was a narrow country two-lane blacktop, fifteen miles north of Eugene and a few east of the I-5. They hadn't seen anything but a few local farmers on foot and the odd horseman for hours, which was a relief. The wagons could carry a lot, but they couldn't do it very fast or for very long at a time, not without killing the horses. He wasn't an expert-he knew just enough to put the harness on properly-but he knew that, from Juniper's tales of her team and what he'd picked up at RenFaires and Society events. Faces came to the windows of the bus, and two small figures ran out, jumping up and down and waving their arms at the adults. Chuck blinked again. It was a boy and a girl, both nine or ten, both in white shirts and green blazer jackets with some crest on the breast pocket, shorts and brown shoes and knee socks. One had tow blond hair and the other dark red braids and freckles. "Please!" the boy cried. "Sanjay's sick!" "We're Chuck's eyes flicked to the bus again; Washington plates, and they'd been heading north when things… Changed. Why on this side road and not I-5, the Lord and Lady alone knew. More children came crowding out of the bus; he counted twelve, all about the same age. Diana pulled up the second wagon, and the coveners on foot gathered around-all the adults had tools over their shoulders, long-handled pruning hooks or shovels or pitchforks. The garden-supply store manager It was a new experience, being envied for his wealth; he didn't much like it. The coveners looked at the children with troubled eyes; their own children mostly glared at the newcomers with pack-instinct suspicion. "Sanjay's Before Chuck could open his mouth, Judy was off the bench with her bag in hand. Chuck hesitated, ran a hand over his receding blond hair, then shrugged and followed. "Dorothy, would you mind watering them?" he asked, in passing. The horses stood patiently, twitching their hides occasionally or tossing a head in a jingle of harness. Chuck's own nose twitched as Judy walked up the stairs by the vacant driver's seat. Sanjay was at the back of the bus, lying on an improvised pallet of coats and covered with more of the same; the children had made a clumsy effort to clean up the vomit, but he'd obviously fouled himself as well. His clammy, sweating brown face looked at them with bewildered hope-he was South Asian, by the name and the delicate fine-boned features. Judy knelt by his side; the boy was groaning faintly and moving, clutching at his middle. She brought out an old-fashioned mercury thermometer and her stethoscope and began an examination. "Mister," the tow-haired boy said. "I'm supposed to give you these." A list of addresses and phone numbers followed. The driver's note was short and to the point: The first was dated Thursday morning, the second Friday at noon, twenty hours ago. "Chuck!" Judy's voice was sharp, her nurse-practitioner tone. He looked up. "This boy has a stomach bug-contaminated water. I'm going to have to rehydrate him with a drip, and then he needs to be cleaned up and kept warm. I won't use an antibiotic unless he gets worse-Goddess knows when I can get more. Bring him!" He did; the other children gathered round him solemnly as he laid Sanjay down on a tarp and Judy began to work. "He drank water from the ditch when the bottles ran out," the mahogany-haired girl said. "I "Oh, sweet Goddess Queen of Heaven," Chuck groaned to himself. "Do you mean Mary, Jesus' mother?" the girl asked curiously. "Sort of," he replied, looking around at the others. "I'm named Mary too. My brother's Daniel. We all went to the play in Ashland, and we were supposed to be taking notes on the countryside." "Pleased to meet you," he said, solemnly shaking hands. Like many kids their age, these seemed to have an almost catlike concern for propriety and routine. A few were sniffling or crying with sheer relief at the arrival of adults, and accepting hugs; others were more timid. Mary and Daniel weren't crying, not out loud, but a little of the look of strain left their faces. "Let's set up a cookfire," he said to Diana. "We'll need sterilized water." "I'll get the water jugs," Andy said. "We could heat up some miso soup. If they haven't eaten for a day and a half, they'll need something easy to start with." The others split apart, to get at goods packed in a hurry, or to calm their own children. "Can you take us home?" the redheaded girl said, after her first ecstatic gulp of water. "Our parents are going to be really worried. I mean, we couldn't phone or "We can't take you home just now," he said. "Where do they live?" "Mom lives in Seattle. Dad moved to Los Angeles after they… well, they had a big fight." St. George's seemed to be an expensive private school, the sort where really rich people parked offspring they didn't have time for; the kids had been on a special excursion to the Shakespearian festival at Ashland, of all things. Eugene had been bad enough the first night and day. What Seattle was like by now… not to mention LA… "We'll take you somewhere fun in the meantime, though," he said to Mary. "Do you like camping out?" She nodded solemnly. "You and your brother and. Sanjay?" Mary nodded again. "You and your brother and Sanjay can stay with us and Tamsin until things get better." "What's that?" Sally asked, pointing to a big black-walnut tree as the wagon creaked and jounced over the ruts of the logging road. Juniper Mackenzie looked up. She'd been musing on how to get the food stores out of the Fairfax place and safely into her cabin's cellar and her barn. That was why she'd decided to take the steeper way from the back of the farm up through the belt of forest and to her land. It was quicker, and if the logger's trucks hadn't torn it up too much she might spend the rest of the day getting a first load. On the path-side tree was a wheel with eight spokes. A plank below it had letters burned into the wood: "That's the Wheel of the Year," Juniper said. "Crescent Moon for the Goddess; horns for the God, of course; we're the Singing Moon Coven, too. I put it up a long time ago, when I was in my new-convert, in-your-face phase." "And the letters?" "That's an acronym." She recited: Huge Oregon white oak and Douglas fir stood tall around them; the living musty-yeasty-green smell of the spring woods was strong. The woods were second growth, but the area hadn't been clear-cut since before World War I, and they'd been carefully managed for most of the time since, not to mention widely planted with valuable hardwoods like the walnut. Their rich mast of nuts and acorns attracted game, too. Dappled sunlight flowed over the rutted dirt of the road in a moving kaleidoscope, and Eilir and Dennis strode ahead of the horses, signing to each other. Terry was curled up asleep on a nest of sacks behind them in the wagon, and the Jersey cow walked along tethered to its rear, with her calf following of its own accord. Sally looked much more herself with a few days' rest and food; also much more ready to ask questions. She gave Juniper an odd sidelong look. "That's… ah… a very civilized maxim," she said, glancing over her shoulder as they passed the sign. "True. It's also bloody difficult, if you take it seriously; it includes psychological harm, and it includes harming yourself. Very different from "I… it's sort of difficult to believe you're actually a, ah… " "Witch," Juniper said, grinning. She put an index finger on the tip of her nose and waggled it back and forth. "But this is broken, so I can't magic us up much in the way of goods." At Sally's blank look, she went on: "Classical reference." "Anyway, the Craft is a religion-magic is sort of one aspect of it, not the whole thing-and anything you've heard about it is probably wrong. Or read, or seen in a movie especially." That did get through, thankfully. Juniper went on aloud: "My coven meets here, for the Sabbats and some Esbats; the Coven of the Singing Moon. We have a Then she shrugged. "Well, being human, we actually do think we're better, but most of us try not to act like it. And… we "Is Dennie one of your… ah… coven?" Sally asked; she seemed to be having trouble making herself say certain words. "Ah… I'm a Buddhist myself." "No; he's a blatant materialist, the poor man. And he's not Eilir's father, either; I know you were dying to ask. Or my lover. Eilir is living proof that you Sally gave a chuckle of laughter. "She's a nice girl, even… " She touched her leg where the wound from the crossbow bolt was healing nicely. Neither of them mentioned the fact that a few inches up and to the left and it would have cut her femoral artery and spilled all her life's blood on the road. "She's a wonder, and that's the truth," Juniper said, happy for a moment. Thinking about Eilir usually made her feel that way. "Anyway, we're an eclectic Georgian group who favor Celtic symbolism; which means nothing to you, of course, but think of it as our equivalent of being Episcopalians." "You're single, then?" "No, handfasted." At Sally's blank look she went on: "Married, in Wiccaspeak. My man was in Eugene when things Changed. He's a systems analyst, of all things, but he loves the old music-that's how we met; and he's my High Priest. Think of it as being the vice-president of the coven." Softly: "Rudy's his name, Rudy Starn, and I'm trying not to think about him much. He'll know I've headed here, and I tell myself he'd want me to wait with Eilir until he comes, but it's hard, hard." Then she held up a hand. Dennis had walked up to the crest of the ridge; that ought to give him a good view of the cabin, and he was using the binoculars as well. When he turned she stiffened in alarm, but he didn't seem frightened himself-just puzzled. And Eilir tore over the ridge and disappeared at a run, which she wouldn't do if there was anything to fear. "Whoa, Cagney, Lacey," she said as she pulled in the team, set the brake lever-they couldn't be expected to lean into the traces on an upslope for long-and waited until Dennis trotted back to her, his face alight. "What is it?" she demanded. "There are people there," he answered. Alarm rammed through her, but he went on: "I recognize a couple of them, though, seen them with you. Chuck Barstow-I'd know that silly hat he wears anywhere. And a couple of others; come see for yourself." A surge of hope ran through her, shocking, like a cold electric jolt. He'd been leaving on a trip down to California, to San Jose and Silicon Valley; a surprising number of Wiccans were in software. "It's the Singing Moon," she said aloud; poor Sally would be bewildered. "Or at least some of them. They'd know the way; I should have expected it; Goddess, I halfway did, as much as I dared. Chuck or Judy would have thought of coming here, at least, and we were supposed to have a meeting, the night of the Change-I was to drive in. They had farther to come, but probably had to hide less on the way." She flicked the reins and released the brake; another bit of steep climb, a turn to the left, and they broke into the open. A long stretch of rolling upland meadow opened out to either side, new grass rippling green and thick-streaked with early blue camas and rose-pink sorrel, dotted with big white oaks; forest-shaggy hills dark with conifers rose steep to the north. Off in the distance to the right a small waterfall went in spray down a rock face, formed a pool surrounded by willows, then lazed across the open plateau in a series of curves before vanishing from sight. "Those people are your, umm, coven?" Sally asked, as they rattled down the rough track towards the cabin. Eight adults and more children were running towards them, waving and shouting; Eilir was hopping up and down as she greeted them, and Cuchulain doing his usual barking wiggle at the familiar scents. Juniper scanned their faces, easy to recognize despite the distance. "They're most of it," she said. "Chuck, Judy, Diana, Andy, Susan, Dorothy, Karl and Dave-and their kids- but all those children in the green blazers? I don't recognize Parked in front where the laneway curved by the house and trailed off to the right were… Juniper blinked. And strapped to its sides was a variety of historic junk, including an old-fashioned walking plow. The coveners had just begun unloading bales and sacks and boxes from inside when she arrived. Another was beside it. Eight horses grazed under a tree, big glossy roan beasts, and a dozen cattle of various breeds and… "Well, Lugh love me, it's a pig!" she said to herself. A big sow, to be exact, with some half-grown piglets near it. The cabin stood on a U-shaped rise in the center of the plateau's northern side, separated from the wooded ridge behind by a gully. It was a long low structure of Douglas fir logs squared on top and bottom, all resting on a knee-high foundation of mortared fieldstone and topped by a steep shingled roof that covered a veranda around three sides. Smoke trickled from the big central stone chimney; there were sheds and a barn of similar construction, and a gnarled and decrepit orchard on the south-facing slope below. "That's all yours?" Sally said; she sounded impressed. Not unreasonably, since there were three thousand square feet on the ground floor, plus the attic loft where she'd set up her loom and had a space for private Craft working. "It is mine, and a monster that's swallowed every penny I could earn in upkeep these last ten years," Juniper answered absently. "Great-uncle Earl built it to impress his cronies in Calvin Coolidge's time. And he may have been trying to bankrupt me with his will! At least I won't have to sell off the timber to pay the taxes and keep the roof tight anymore… " She felt a huge grin break free as her coveners came closer, and she stood up on the seat of the wagon despite the lurching and jolting, holding to the curving roof with one hand. "Welcome!" she shouted. "Oh, Hands reached up to catch her as she dove down from the seat; for a long ten minutes there was only hugging and babbling and shouts of glee. When that died down enough, she looked around. There were Chuck and Judy Barstow, he a gardener for the city of Eugene, she a registered nurse and midwife; Diana and Andy, who ran a health food store and restaurant there… eight of them in all. "Where's the others? Where's Rudy?" she said. Her friends looked at each other, and their smiles died. Chuck Barstow finally spoke, his voice gentle: "We couldn't find Jack or Carmen or Muriel; we left a message at MoonDance. I hope they show up later. Rudy… Rudy's flight was a hundred feet up at six fifteen. Andy and I were at the airport to see him off. He's dead, Juney." She gave a sound somewhere between a moan and a grunt, feeling winded, as if something had punched her under the short ribs and made it physically impossible to breathe; somehow she'd known, but pushed the knowledge away. Dennis gave her an awkward pat on the back, and Eilir snaked through the crowd to embrace her; she'd liked the funny, skinny little man as well, even after he'd become her mother's lover. "Blessed be," Juniper murmured after a moment. "May he rest in the Summerlands, and return to us in joy." "So mote it be," everyone replied. Then she took a deep breath, and wiped her hand across her eyes. "Where did you get all this "At the museum's exhibit-Living Pioneer History, where else?" Chuck grinned. The plumed hat looked a little incongruous over the workaday denim and flannel; he usually wore it with a troubadour's costume at the RenFaires, or his knight's festival garb for Society events. He was wearing his buckler slung from his belt over his parade sword, too… He went on: "The exhibit was mostly abandoned when we got there, right after the Change… all gone off to try and find their families, I suppose, poor bastards. It was chaos and old night in Eugene by then. So we just… liberated it, you might say, having as good a claim as anyone else. The rest of the livestock the same-some we bought, from people still taking money." "You saved lives by doing that," Juniper said. "Ours to start with; we'll use the tools and do it in time. It'll come back to you threefold, remember. And the children? Not that I'm objecting… but it's going to be very tight for food before harvest." She made a quick calculation. The Fairfaxes' stores would easily have been eighteen months' eating for three, without stinting; for… … it would be about three months, carefully rationed. Of course, they could eat the livestock if they had to, even the horses… the chickens would yield something… "They were on a school bus," Andy Trethar said. "All the way from Seattle to Ashland, and returning when the Change hit. And… well, we just couldn't leave them." Chuck cut in: "Juney, Diana and Andy had just taken a delivery for their store, which we brought along, and we picked up everything we could along the way, and we cleaned out a garden-supply place that had a "Well, every mouth comes with a pair of hands," she said stoutly. Rudy had always been on at Andy and Diana for carrying too much inventory at the MoonDance, tying up their scanty capital. That looked as if it was going to be a very fortunate mistake. Chuck bent close: "And you don't know Juniper swallowed, then planted her hands on her hips and raised her voice to address them all. At least she had a good voice, experience with crowds, and had long ago lost all tendency to stage fright. "Another hundred thousand welcomes, my darlings," she said. "But listen to your High Priestess now. We've got a lot of work to be done, and not much time to do it in. Here's what I think-that it's a clan we'll have to be, as it was in the old days, if we're going to live at all… " Nine Men on foot were a lot quieter than galloping horses. That was the only way Havel could justify this last-minute dash through the night to himself; he prayed with every footfall that they were going to be in time. The bandits had flogged their horses on all through the night, even after they'd caught up with Will Hutton, halting only when they'd run into the ranger cabin half an hour ago. Which meant that he had to stop too, to let them have enough time to lose fear of pursuit. Fortunately he'd been able to follow them through the open patches with the telescopic sight from his old rifle. He hoped it was the right thing to do, but he could feel sand grinding in the gears of his brain; it had been nearly thirty hours of hard effort since he last slept. "Stop!" he hissed to Eric, sinking to one knee. He'd blackened the heads of their weapons with mud, and now he held the spear low and level to the ground. From the edge of the pines that fringed the area around the old ranger station he gave the cabin a quick once-over, looking for the men on guard. There was light from the windows, firelight and lamplight, enough to endanger his night vision; he squinted and looked aside. Four horses were hobbled in the clearing near the cabin, looking tired and discouraged and nosing at the rock and pine duff in a futile search for something to eat. He could see two human figures there: one slumped near the steps that led to the broad front veranda, and another standing on it-a stout figure carrying a bow, but looking through the front window, with his back to the outside world. A woman's scream probably indicated what was occupying his attention. "Now!" Havel said, and ran forward. Eric followed. Will Hutton was sitting on the edge of the veranda, his hands tied behind him around one of the wooden pillars that supported the roof. He'd obviously gotten another beating, but he watched the men coming across the pine needles and rocks of the space between the trail and the cabin with a hunted alertness. He raised his feet and hitched himself around the post silently as the two neared, pressing himself down flat as he did. Eric was making a lot more noise than his companion; he wasn't used to running in the dark. Fat Boy Jimmie turned when they were still ten yards away. Havel abandoned any attempt at stealth at his strangled whinney of surprise and just ran as fast as he could, but it wasn't quite fast enough; the young man managed to draw the bow to his ear. Havel held the rough spear underarm with both hands, like a giant rifle-and-bayonet combination, hoping that the boy would be flustered or simply miss in the shadowy light with his eyes still dazzled from looking through the firelit windows-the bow wasn't a submachine gun and he couldn't spray-and-pray. There was no time to be afraid, but plenty to watch the archer's hands stop shaking, and steady with the three-edged blade of the arrowhead pointed directly at Havel's liver. He was using a snap-release glove, which argued for a distinctly uncomfortable degree of accuracy. Havel's snarl turned to a guttural roar of triumph as a foot lashed out and kicked the bowman behind one knee and the arrow flashed out into the night over his head, close enough to hear. Will Hutton had just saved his life, before they'd ever really met. Jimmie screamed and tried to dodge as Havel came up the last ten feet of rock path before the stairs to the cabin. The spearpoint took him low in his belly and he screamed again, high and shrill. The impact shocked up Havel's arms as the young man thudded back violently into the logs of the cabin and the point jammed in bone, bending back with the violence of the impact. He snarled in the ferocity of total focus, wrenched the kitchen-knife blade out of his opponent's flesh and then thrust again, with all the power of his arms and shoulders behind it and his weight as well. It went in under the young man's breastbone and through a rib where it joined the spine and into the weathered Ponderosa-pine log behind, pinning him to it like a butterfly to a board and leaving the spear shaft stretched out like a horizontal exclamation mark. His scream turned to a squealing babble; half a second later it cut off in a thump and gurgle as Eric's improvised Havel felt the vibration beneath his feet as he ducked under the spear shaft. It registered, but just as data-like the rest flowing in through his skin and ears and eyes, like the spray of blood that spurted out for half a dozen feet in every direction from the huge flap of skin and flesh sliced off the dying man's neck. Havel's mouth was open too, showing his teeth. He left the spear-too big for close work-and flicked the door catch open, yanking the plank-and-iron portal towards him and bouncing back and to the side. A chair flew through the open door, thrown from close range. The scrimmage on the veranda had been brief but noisy. Havel ducked forward again, stooping under the pole-and-rawhide chair, knife out and flashing up in the gutting stroke. The skinny tattooed bandit named Bob leapt backward in turn, hitting the floor with his shoulders and rolling erect; Havel crowded through the door quickly, before he could block it again, conscious of Eric coming in behind him. The front room of the cabin was big, nearly thirty feet by fifteen, with chairs and a couch set in a U-shape around the fireplace; there was a blaze going in it, and a Coleman lantern on the mantelpiece over it. The thickset bandit was there, trying to stand and having difficulty with it. That was because Signe Larsson had him around the knees; he was wearing long johns with the front flap open, and she had on panties and a set of scratches and bruises. He was swinging his fists at her head and screaming curses as he tried to wrench free, but she ducked her face into the dirty gray fabric covering his legs and hung on like grim death. That couldn't last; the bandit leader weighed two-fifty at least, and not all of it was blubber. The blade of Eric's "Keep him off me," Havel barked, jerking his left hand at the skinny man. In the same instant he vaulted over the couch. The bandit chief roared and flailed his arms at Havel, kneeing Signe in the face in his heaving panic. Havel stepped in, delicate as a dancer, taking the clumsy blow on his shoulder. The Havel knocked the dying man over backward with a grunt of effort as he shouldered past him; he fell with his head and shoulders in the fireplace and lay there with his hair burning and his blood frying and crisping and stinking on the hot iron of the log holder. That left Eric and Jailhouse Bob on one side of the sofa and Havel on the other, moving fast towards the bandit's end to take him in the rear. The man had been on the attack, ready to take a few cuts to get in under Eric's polearm with his knife and finish him quickly before the two men could gang up on him, just exactly the right thing to do. He hadn't quite managed it, and there was blood flowing from a shallow cut on his cheek. Now he backed again, moving fast in a straddle-legged crouching shuffle, his head swiveling between the two opponents coming at him. The knife in his hand was nearly a foot long, almost a bowie, and sharpened on the recurve; it glittered in the lantern light as he moved it in small precise arcs at the end of his long arm. No fancy Ramboesque serrations on the blade or Klingon wings on the plain brass quillions; it was a professional's weapon, and even two-on-one Bob was likely to do some serious damage before he went down. Behind him Astrid Larsson walked out of the hallway. She was entirely naked and spattered with blood; mostly someone else's, far too much to come from the bite-marks on her small breasts. There was an old-fashioned alarm clock in her right hand, and a collection of small heavy objects in the curve of her other-coffee mugs and paperweights. She threw the alarm clock, hard; it jangled as it hit Bob's shoulder, and there was a look of dawning panic in his narrow hazel eyes as he flicked them back and forth, darting between the girl and the two armed men. She followed it with a coffee cup, which missed, and a paperweight, which didn't. The skinny bandit made a sound, a scream of animal rage and fear. "Kill him," Havel said to Eric, and moved in to do just that as a mug flew past Bob's head. The bandit reversed the knife with a swift flip and threw it at Havel; then he turned and dodged Eric's thrust with the point of his Havel twisted to let the big blade go by; you could get hurt by a thrown knife, but generally only by accident. Then he put a booted foot on the windowsill to follow; he didn't look forward to chasing the stick-thin killer in the dark, but he wasn't going to have him hanging around, either. Astrid walked to where her bow and quiver hung by the door, put a shaft to the cord, drew, and loosed through the window. Her movements had the smooth inevitability of a sleepwalker's. The arrow made Havel jerk aside in surprise; it went by close enough that he could feel the wind of its passage, and hear the "He wanted to rape me but he couldn't," she said with a calm like ice on a river just before the spring surge cracked it, ignoring the savage lash of the bowstring on her forearm. "So he took me into Mom's room and he killed her; he said he'd be able to do me after that." Havel completed the vault and dropped down onto the broken glass that littered the veranda; it crunched and crackled under his boots. Twenty yards away, Jailhouse Bob lay in the pathway, pulling himself along on his hands. His legs were limp, and an arrow stood in his lower back. It jerked and quivered as he tried to drag himself along, looking over his shoulder with a snarl. Havel shook himself, as if he were coming out of deep cold water. Eric Larsson was on his knees at the edge of the veranda, puking with a violence that threatened a pulled muscle in his back, and obviously wasn't going to be much use for the immediate future. He walked over to the middle-aged black man instead, and went down on one knee to cut the rope lashings that held him. "My family?" Will Hutton asked, working his arms and rubbing at his wrists. "Hiding out in a thicket by the road with most of your gear," Havel said. "Should be fine." "Lord, but that's good to hear," Hutton said, slumping in relief. He began to offer a hand, then realized Havel still had the knife in his. "Many thanks… " "Mike Havel," he replied, and waved the blade slightly. "Consider this my contribution to public hygiene." Hutton had a heavy rural-Southern accent, but sharper and more nasal than Gulf State gumbo; Havel thought it was probably Texas originally. The Corps was lousy with Texans of all varieties, and he'd heard that slurred rhythmic twang a lot in some sandy and unpleasant places. "I'm Will Hutton," the black man replied, standing cautiously and stretching. "Nothing broke, I don't think." He looked out into the darkness. "You going to finish off that skinny peckerwood? He's a mean one, the worst of the lot. Best be careful, like you would with a broken-back rattler." "No hurry," Havel said. "I thought I'd let him ripen a bit; he isn't going to crawl out of reach with an arrow through his spine." He looked at his right hand and his knife. It was dripping, and in the faint light the whole of his hand and forearm looked as if they were coated with something slick and oily and darkly gleaming. Some distant part of his mind realized that the sight would probably come back to him for years-when he was trying to sleep or eat or make love-but right now it wasn't particularly interesting. He could just cut Bob's throat, but Havel didn't want to get that close without a good reason; Hutton was right- the man's legs were out of commission, but his arms were still working and his teeth too for that matter. Instead he carefully wiped the blade of the Astrid was still standing with her bow, staring at nothing; Signe was huddled into a ball on the floor, staring at the corpse of the bandit leader. Havel went past in silence- there was nothing he could do to help at that moment- and checked the bedrooms. Mary Larsson lay spread-eagled on her bed; the mattress was saturated, and it dripped thick strings of blood onto the floor. Havel took one quick look and then carefully avoided letting his eyes stray that way while he found a blanket and covered her. Unfortunately that didn't seem very likely. Her husband was trussed to a chair in the corner of the room; alive, not too badly beaten up, but staring with the look of a man whose mind had shut down from overload, and there were vomit stains down the front of his shirt and tear-streaks through the white-gray stubble on his cheeks. Havel freed him with a few jerks of his knife, and pulled him erect. "There's nothing you can do here," he said. "Come on, Ken." The older man's lips moved, almost silently. Havel went on: "Astrid and Signe are fine." That seemed to get through to him; he stumbled along under his own power. Havel left him with his daughters in the living room as he hefted the dead body of the bandit chief and half carried it out to pitch over the railing of the veranda; Will Hutton watched with somber satisfaction. Then Havel pulled the spear out of the wall. The young bandit's body came with it; the point pulled free of the wood and the heavy corpse flopped down into the pool of blood and fluids, but the square shoulders of the knife caught on something inside. Havel put a foot on the body and worked it free, careful not to loosen the bindings; then he hefted the pole into an overhand grip like a fish gig before walking out towards Jailhouse Bob. He hadn't gotten far. They buried Mary Larsson in the morning, and were ready to leave around noon. Her husband had come out of his shock a little by then, and none of the younger Larssons wanted to stay at the ranger cabin any longer than they had to; Hutton was anxious to get back to his wife and daughter, of course. Astrid hadn't slept much. From the way she started screaming the moment she slipped out of consciousness that was probably just as well. Will Hutton came up and looked in the same direction, nodding. "Best get the horses back to the road too as fast as we can," he said, finishing his bowl of elk stew. "They need rest, but they need food a lot more, and they can't eat pine needles. I'll go take another look at the loads." Havel waited until the Larssons had made their last farewells at the rough grave-most of it was an oblong pile of rocks. It was a bright cold day, with tatters of high cloud blowing in from the west; the long wind roared in the pines around them, carrying away most of the stink of violent death. He and Hutton and Eric had dragged the dead bandits out of sight, but nobody had been in a mood to clean up the cabin. They Signe came up to him with a brace of books in her hands. "Mike, take a look. I think these might be useful. They were on the mantelpiece, and I was reading them before… you know." He did, flipping through the text and frequent illustrations. "You know, I think you're right," he said. "Pack 'em with the rest." Astrid came out and gave him a cup of coffee; he took it, and cleared his throat as she turned silently away, slight and graceful in her stained leather outfit. "Kid." Reluctantly, she turned back to him. "You did good. If you hadn't shot him, I'd have had to chase him down in the dark. He might have killed or crippled me and come back for the rest of you." She nodded again; he went on: "I know you've had a real bad time, but we don't have the leisure for thinking about our hurts right now. You're the only one of us who can use a bow and we need more food, badly. We may have to fight again, too. We just can't afford you folding up on us. You've got to be functional no matter what it takes. OK?" She nodded silently a third time; the huge silver-blue eyes seemed to be looking through to another world as much as at him. He shook his head: "Let me hear it, Astrid. Don't go hiding in your head. We need you out here." "I understand, Mike," she said, after taking a deep breath; he saw her blink back to being fully in the waking world. Suddenly she spat: "They were like "Yeah, that's a fair description." He restrained himself from tousling her hair. He'd never been of the talk-about-it-forever school when it came to dealing with really bad stuff; in his experience that just made you think about it more and compounded the damage. Hard work and concentrating on the future were the best way to handle trauma. "What do you think of that bow we captured?" It was sitting on one of the veranda chairs. Astrid looked at it and sniffed. "It's a Bear compound," she said, with a touch of her old de-haut-en-bas tone, edged with contempt for the high-tech vulgarity of it. "Adjustable setoff, double round cams… with that, you might as well be using a "Oh, it will He went on: "You've got a point, but we'll use it while we've got it. You can give us all instruction." She sniffed again. "Signe can shoot. Sort of. At targets." Then she took the cup away for washing and packing; her orange cat slunk at her heels, looking thoroughly frightened. Havel found himself obsessively running over the inventory in his head again; particularly the food, which was about enough for everyone for four weeks, if they were very careful. He'd only eat the horses if there was no other choice or the animals were dying anyway; they were too damned useful to lose. A lot of the medical kit had been expended on Mary Larsson, too. God alone knew what they'd do if anyone else got seriously ill or hurt. Suddenly he was conscious that Signe hadn't left; she was standing by the base of the veranda stairs. The bruises on her face were purpling, and her lips were swollen, but she looked at him steadily. There was one new element to her gear; she had Jailhouse Bob's belt and blade. Unexpectedly, she drew it, looking down at the big fighting-knife with wondering distaste. "It's a tool," Havel said quietly. "Just a tool. Anyone can use it. It's the person that matters, not the equipment." "I know," she said. Then she looked up at him: "Teach me." He made an enquiring sound. She went on fiercely: "Teach me how to fight. I don't ever want to be that. helpless… again. Teach me!" Her knuckles were white on the checked hardwood of the knife hilt. Aloud he went on: "You bet. We've all got a lot to learn, I'm thinking." Hutton had the horses ready and everyone was outside; decision crystallized, and Havel put his fingers to his mouth and whistled. Everyone looked up, and he waved them over as he walked down to where the pathway to the cabin joined the Centennial Trail proper. "Before we go, we ought to settle some things," Havel said, as they gathered around. "Mainly, what we're going to do-and if there's a He leaned on his spear and looked at the Larssons. "I figure my obligations to Steelhead Air and its clients have about run out," he said bluntly. "All things considered." The younger Larssons looked stricken. Ken gave him a slight smile; he recognized negotiation when he heard it, and so did Will Hutton. Havel went on: "So if we're going to stick together, we'll have to put it on a new basis. So far we've just been reacting to things as they happened; it's time to start making things happen ourselves. If you folks don't like my notions of how to do that, we can go our separate ways once we reach the highway." Ken Larsson was evidently relieved to have something to think about but his murdered wife. His face lost some of its stunned, blurred-at-the-edges look as he spoke. "Something has happened and not just around here," he said. "At least over a big part of this continent, and maybe all over the world. Mike, remember just before the engines cut out, they were reporting that weird electrical storm over Nantucket? I don't think that's a coincidence-and it's also thousands of miles from here." He shrugged. "I can't imagine what could have caused a Change like this, unless it's simply that God hates us… Maybe incredibly advanced, really sadistic aliens who wanted to take our toys away? Call it Alien Space Bats. But at a guess, it started there over Nantucket-probably propagated over the earth's surface at the speed of light. It's too… specific… to be an accident, I think. If it were an accidental change in the laws of nature, we'd most likely just have collapsed into a primordial soup of particles." Will Hutton shook his head. "Hard to get my mind around it," he said. "We have to," Havel said bluntly. "That's the difference between living and dying, now." Hutton nodded: "I don't know any of that science stuff, but it occurs to me this might have happened before." They all looked at him, and he shrugged. "If it happened back in olden times, who'd have noticed? Maybe this"-he waved around-"is the way things was for a long time. That'd account for folks taking so long to get guns and such." Havel looked at him with respect; that wasn't a bad idea, although of course there was no way to check, short of time travel. He went on: "So the question is, what does each of us want to do? Do we stick together? And if we do, what's our goal?" Hutton scratched his head thoughtfully. "Not much use in trying to get back to Texas, for me 'n' mine," he said. "Too many hungry, angry strangers between. Got my family with me, 'cept for my boy, Luke. He's in the Army, stationed in Italy with the 173rd. All I can do for him is pray." He winced slightly, then shook his head and rolled a cigarette, using only his right hand and offering the makings around. "No, thanks," Havel said. "Wouldn't want to get into the habit again-not much tobacco grows around here." Once Hutton had lit up, Havel waved towards the cabin and the congealed pool of blood still left on the veranda. "Stuff like this is probably happening all over the world. Most people aren't going to make it through the next year even out here in the boondocks, and it's going to be worse in the cities, a lot worse. I'd like to be one of the minority still living come 1999. That's going to mean teamwork. Sitting around arguing at the wrong moment could get us all killed." Signe Larsson spoke up: "Dad, the rest of you, we should stick with Mike." "Yup," Eric concurred. "I'm sort of fond of living myself." Astrid nodded, silent. Her father spoke: "Money's gone, the whole modern world's gone. We'd all be dead four times over without Mike. I'm for it." Hutton took a drag on his cigarette and spoke in his slow deep voice. "Man alone, or a family alone, they're dead or worse now. I found that out. Mike here, I've got good reason to trust him, and I misdoubt he'll get drunk with power. So if he wants to ramrod this outfit, I'm for it." Havel held up a hand. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves," he said. A deep breath: "We have to have someplace to go, and some way of making a living and defending ourselves once we get there. That means getting land and seed and stock and tools however we can, and I sort of suspect it also means fighting to keep it. OK, that's not something a man can do alone; and we here know each other a bit." He shifted his shoulders, a gesture he used at the beginning of a task; usually he wasn't conscious of doing it, but this time he noticed… and remembered his father doing the same. "But I'm not going to take responsibility without authority. If you want to stick with me, well, I hope I'm sensible enough never to think I know everything and don't need advice, but somebody has to be in charge until things are settled. I think I'm the best candidate. We're going to have to pool everything and work together like a military unit, and a camel is a horse designed by a committee." He caught each pair of eyes in turn: "For? Against?" The Larssons nodded, looked at each other, and then raised their hands. "For!" they said in ragged unison. Hutton puffed meditatively on his cigarette again and then raised his hand in agreement. "Count me in too. Think I can speak for Angel and Luanne." Havel nodded. "Glad you said that," he said. "I don't deny you and your horses would be very useful; and your family were pretty impressive too, on short acquaintance. You're a horse breaker, I take it?" "No, sir, I am not," Hutton said, with dignified seriousness. "What use is a broken horse? I am a horse wrangler and trainer. Anything a horse can do, I can train into it." Then he laughed without much humor. "And it's a trade I took up so I could work for myself. Don't see much prospect of that here. I'm a stranger, and a black one at that. Might get a bunk and eats with some rancher or farmer, yeah, but not on good terms, I reckon. Sharecrop-ping or something like." "We're all in that situation," Havel said. "When there just isn't enough to go around, people will look to their own kin and friends first." He ran a thumb along the silky black stubble on his jaw. "I expect some refugees will get taken in, especially where there aren't too many, but Will pegged it. They'll be the hired help, and hire will be just their keep at that, sleeping in the barn and eating scraps. It'll be worse, some places- human life's going to be a cheap commodity." "We could all go to our place in Montana," Eric Larsson said. "The ranch… we've got horses there, and there's the grazing-lots of cows around there. Or there's the summer farm in the Willamette. The ranch is a lot closer, though." Ken shook his head. "I don't think Montana would be a good idea," he said slowly. "We'd be strangers there. That land used to belong to the Walkers… and with nobody to tell them no, I suspect they'll simply take back the property and the stock; the area's full of their relatives and connections. They were always polite when we did business, but I could tell they weren't too happy about needing my money." "Yeah," Signe said. "I know I dated Will for a while, sort of, or at least hung around him, but it was me who called it quits. There's something creepy about him, and his whole family." Her father looked at her with surprise, then shrugged. "I'd go for the farm, if it weren't for all the people in the Willamette Valley. Going on for two million… it'll get very ugly." "What's it like?" Havel asked him. "A real farm, or just a vacation house?" "My grandfather bought it for a country place back before the First World War, in the Eola hills northwest of Salem," Ken said. For a moment he smiled, then winced. "Mary liked it… nice big house-Victorian, modernized-and about seven hundred acres, two-fifty of that in managed forest on the steeper parts. Gravity-flow water system, about thirty acres of pinot noir vines we've put in over the last ten years-the winery is all gravity-flow too, by the way-some old orchards, and then quite a bit of cleared land, all of it board-fenced. In grass, we ran pedigree cattle on it and raised horses, but it could grow anything. Some sheds, barns, stables. We know the neighbors well, too, and get along with most of them; the Larssons have been spending summers there for a long time." Ken went on: "Long-term, there's something else to think about." He waved a hand around them. "There's a lot of farming and ranching here in the interior, yes. For a year or two, or four or five, it's going to be better-off than most places. The Larssons made their first pile trading wheat from Pendleton and the Palouse down the Columbia to Portland. But a hell of a lot of the crops here these days depend on things like center-pivot irrigation, or deep wells… and the dryland farming… well, it only yields really well with mechanization on a big scale, where one family can work thousands of acres. That way it doesn't matter if you get a low yield, or lose every fourth crop to drought, because you're handling so many acres." "You mean quantity has a quality all its own," Havel said. Ken nodded. "If you're doing it by hand and horse, it takes just as much labor to work an acre of twelve-bushel wheat land as it does one that gives you forty. With the sort of preindustrial setup we're being thrown back on, that's the basic constraint on your standard of living. And the lower the productivity, the harder the people on top have to squeeze to get a surplus." Havel's brow furrowed. "All right," he said. "Unless we see a better opportunity along the way, I'd say we head for the Willamette." "Ummm… " Eric was a lot more bashful than he'd been. "What about all the people, Mike? Dad said it. The farm's only fifty miles from Portland and a lot closer to Salem." Havel looked away for a moment, then met Ken Lars-son's eyes. He gave a slight nod of agreement, and the younger man went on: "Eric, it's a long way to the Willamette on foot; and I don't intend to hurry. By the time we get there. overpopulation is not going to be that much of a problem." "Ouch," Signe said with a wince. "Still… " "Nothing we can do about it, I suppose," Eric said; they looked at each other in surprise at their agreement. Silence fell as they moved out onto the trail. Ken Lars-son and Will Hutton were mounted, in consideration of their years and bruises; the younger members of the party were on foot, to spare the hungry, overworked horses. The only exception was Biltis the cat, who rode perched on one of the pack loads, curled up on a pile of blankets strapped across the top and looking like a puddle of insufferable aristocratic orange smugness. Eric and Havel carried their pole arms, and Astrid her archaic recurve bow; Signe had the bandits' high-tech compound. Hutton carried a felling ax, the top of the helve against his hip and his right hand on the end of the handle. "Right," Havel said, swinging the spear over his shoulder at the balance-point. "Let's make a few miles before dark. Thataway!" Ten The Lochsa bawled and leapt not far to the north, gray with silt and chunks of ice. The smell somehow stung in the nostrils beneath the pine scent of the forested slopes that rose canyon-steep on either side. He looked at the sky, and blinked at a sudden thought: It struck him harder than he'd have thought; never again to feel the wheels lift, or the yoke come alive in his hands as the controls bit the moving air… The whole party had arrived late last night; the Huttons had slept in their tent, the Larssons in the RV and Havel in the hay of the horse trailer. Dawn had been gray and cold, but the noon sun had broken through the clouds, and it had gotten up to around fifty. Havel shook his head and blew absently on his hands as he and Will Hutton walked around the flatbed they'd all spent the morning unloading; it had a two-wheeled bogie on either side, and Ken Larsson was underneath it, looking at the brakes. If at all possible they wanted to rig it for horse traction; that way they could take along a Will glanced up and smiled at his wife and daughter; he'd been doing that all morning too, and Havel didn't blame him. He looked that way as well. They had a cookfire going and a big pot hung over it; Angelica Hutton was cutting elk meat on a folding table, and dropping the pieces and carefully measured cupfuls of dried beans and soup-barley into the bubbling water. There had been bacon and eggs for breakfast, and toast made from bread that wasn't too stale to eat, but from now on it would be the limited dry goods from the ranger cabin and the Huttons' RV, and what they could hunt or forage or barter. The remains of the elk would last them for a while, and the luckless mule deer they'd run into on the way back here. He suspected they'd all get Angelica wore a jacket and a long skirt and a black Stetson with silver medallions around the band; her face was beautiful when she raised it from her work to smile back at Will. Then she stirred the pot, nodded, and put on the lid. Luanne smiled in their direction fairly often too, as she sorted clothing. She even gave Eric a high-megawattage beam now and then. Havel could hear them laughing together, and then she play-punched him in the chest. He went over backward and mimed a death rattle. Havel blinked. For a moment he saw his own hand and the knife in it, glistening red-black in the firelight as if coated in oil, and remembered spitting out salt blood to clear his mouth. Then he shook his head and focused on the problem at hand. You had to do that, the way Larsson stopped occasionally and pushed the image of his wife's death out of his head with a visible effort of will. Acts of will repeated often enough became habit, and habit carried you through. Dwelling on the bad stuff just made it stronger, and if there was one thing in the world he despised, it was someone who let their emotions get in the way of doing their share of the job at hand. "You can't rig something in the way of a horse collar?" he went on to the wrangler. Will Hutton had had a lot of spare tack, leather, cord and tools; even a hollow-cast anvil, although he disavowed blacksmith status, saying he simply did farrier work and a little smithing now and then. "Oh, I can get somethin' rigged in the way of a collar," he said. "Carve it in sections from wood, I reckon, pad it, then sew some leather over it. Problem is that the pole on this thing is too low. It's meant for a towbar." Propped on a chunk of wood to keep the trailer's bed level, the Y-shaped pole with the towing hitch was at about knee height. Hutton held his hand palm-down in front of his body at the solar plexus. "We need a drawshaft about Ken pivoted himself on his backside, so that his face and shoulders stretched out from under the trailer. His face looked a little less doughy this morning, and he'd shaved off the silvery stubble. He looked critically at the towing bar. "And that'll come loose; it's bolted." His finger sketched. "We could mount it upright instead of horizontally in the same brackets, with a little file and hacksaw work, use one of the roofing struts from the horse trailer, they're already curved and about the right width." Hutton pushed back his billed cap and rubbed his chin; the calluses on his fingers scritched on the skin as his eyes moved, tracing out the structure Larsson proposed and the lines of force that would bear on it. When he spoke, his tone was dubious: "Upright, it'll lever on them something fierce, a lot worse than a straight pull. Might be we could do it if we could weld the join, but we cain't. Those bolts'll tear through inside a day." "You bet," Larsson said, getting to his knees and leaning over the bed of the trailer. "So we sink an eyebolt, you've got a couple in your horse trailer, "That a damn good idea," Hutton said, grinning broadly. "Not bad at all. Won't be pretty, but pretty don't count when it works." He looked up at the sun. "Could do it by sunset. Ain't as if we were in a hurry." He extended a hand, and Ken Larsson used it to rise, grunting a little; he was fifteen years older than Will, and had twenty-seven on Havel. "Right," Havel said. "Plenty everyone else can do while we're here." "You need any more help with the trailer?" he asked. Hutton shook his head, and Larsson echoed him. He looked happy to be at something that used his knowledge, and Hutton had the matter-of-fact competence of a man who'd been at home around tools and tasks since before his voice broke. "It'd go faster if we had someone to do the fetch-and-tote work," Hutton said, modifying his gesture. "Strong back, simple mind," Larsson said, grinning. "I know He looked at Havel and winked. Havel put his fingers to his lips and blew a piercing whistle. "Yo! Eric!" he called. The young man had been helping Angelica Hutton and her daughter carry clothes down to the water's edge, where they apparently intended to clean them by soaping and then beating the wet cloth on rocks. It was probably a skill she'd learned from her mother as a small girl and hadn't used much since; the RV had a neat little compact washer, and from what the horse trainer had let slip the Huttons had a small ranch of their own in the hill country southwest of Austin, which they used as home base; they'd been solidly prosperous, in a hardworking, self-made, self-employed way. Eric looked up from putting the big basket of dirty clothing down by the gravelly shore of the river. Havel gestured sharply, and he reluctantly headed their way. "Amazin' how a little conversation can make a boy his age want to do laundry," Hutton said dryly, and all three of the men laughed. As they watched, they heard a drumroll of hooves and turned to look west. A hundred yards away Astrid Larsson had twitched her horse into a hand gallop with an imperceptible tensing of her thighs on the saddle and shift of balance; the reins lay knotted on the horn. She flashed down the edge of the woods, her bow rising smoothly as she drew to the ear. The arrow flashed out towards a target Havel and Hutton had rigged from poles and mounted on a stout Ponderosa pine. It missed, but not by all that much, sinking half its length into the grassy turf just short of the tree. Astrid shouted angrily in a language that sounded liq-uidly pretty even then, and stopped her horse with the same smooth combination of leg-signals and shifting seat. She turned it, trotted back to the target, bent out of the saddle to snag the arrow without dismounting, then set it back on the string and cantered away down the edge of the woods. "Lord Jesus, but that girl can He didn't say anything about Havel's equestrian skills, which was tactful, since they were no better than competent-journeyman by his standards. Havel was grateful; from what he'd seen in the past two days, what the black man couldn't do with horses just couldn't be done. "Not bad with that bow thing, too, nohow," Hutton went on. He paused, adjusting a wrench and handing it to the elder Larsson before taking up a hacksaw himself. "What's that lingo she keeps mutterin' in, anyways? Ain't English or Spanish neither. French or something?" "Elvish," Havel said, and Astrid's father laughed. Hutton looked at Havel blankly. The younger man continued: "Elvish, Will, no shit. Girl's a Tolkien fanatic." It turned out the Texan had only the vaguest idea of who Tolkien was; his reading ran more to books on horses and ranching, or on cavalry and other equestrian subjects, or to Western history, and fiction by Louis L'Amour and Larry Mc-Murtry. Eric arrived while the discussion was still going on. "Yup, Elvish," he said. "Probably something like They Havel had seen what happened to people exposed to the sudden violent death of friends; it had to be worse for a teenager with a parent. He'd been keeping an eye on her, but she hadn't quite blown a gasket yet. That could be a good sign, or a bad one. "Mike?" Signe said, lowering the bow. "I'm a bit worried about Astrid," he said. "The problem is that I don't know her well enough, and-" Signe smiled: "And she acts weird all the time anyway." Her face sobered; smiling hurt her, anyway, with the bruises still fresh. "She had bad dreams again last night," Signe went on, then shrugged. " "Yeah," Havel said, wincing slightly at the memory of what "She and Astrid weren't all that close," Signe said, fiddling with the bow. "Mom… Astrid's always been moody and solitary; the sort who has one or two really close friends, you know? Just totally uninterested in boys so far, too. Mom thought kids should have an active social life; parties, and clubs, and activities, and volunteer work. All Astrid was ever interested in was those books, and her horses, and archery-Mom got worried about that, too." "Archery isn't an activity?" "Not if you concentrate on it too much!" Signe said. "Then it becomes an obsession. I went to archery club meetings. Astrid just walked through the woods shooting at stumps. Mom-" She turned away, rubbing at her eyes. "God, I miss her, even the things about her that drove me crazy." Havel put a hand on her shoulder for an instant, then removed it when she flinched and took the bow and looked down at it. "Yeah, that's rough," he said. "My mother died of some sudden-onset cancer thing while I was in the Gulf, and I couldn't get back home. We'd fought like cats and dogs for six months before I left, too-she wanted me to go to college instead of into the Corps Signe nodded jerkily. "I'm glad we've been so busy. Less time to think about. everything that happened. I just start feeling guilty, and then I get angry-imagining what I could have done differently, as if I could have saved her-" "There was absolutely nothing you could have done," Havel said with flat conviction. "Apart from what you did, which probably saved Eric's life and maybe mine. Jail-house would have gotten to him in another thirty seconds, and you saved me at least that much time. "Sorry," he finished, as she paled and swallowed. "No!" she said fiercely. "I've got to… learn to deal with it. I can't live with it clubbing me every time I get reminded." "Which brings me back to Astrid," Havel said, looking down the meadow. She was wheeling about, tiny with distance at the northern end of the meadow. Still shooting from the saddle, he thought, but it was hard to tell. "Sometimes feelings bleed off, like pressure from a propane tank," he said. "That's what happens with some people, at least. Brooders, they tend to build it up and then snap. I'd read Astrid for a brooder." Signe gave him an odd look: "You're a lot more… well, no offense, sensitive, than… " Havel grinned at her. "Jarheads don't have feelings?" he said. He enjoyed her blush; she probably got extreme "Actually, that's what got me thinking. You get real tight with the guys in your squad, closer than brothers-you live closer than brothers do, and you have to rely on the guy next to you to save your ass; and you have to be ready to do the same for them. Watching someone you're that tight with die… not easy. Some people seriously wig out after that, self-destructive stuff. I don't think Astrid will get careless with explosives-not now! – or get drunk and try and disassemble the shore patrol, but there are probably equivalents a fourteen-year-old can come up with." Signe nodded. "I'll try and get her to talk… and meanwhile, shall we practice?" "Right," he said. He'd tried his hand at the compound; the offset pulleys at the tips made it much easier use than a traditional bow of the same draw-weight, and it had an adjustable sight. And he was strong, and had excellent eyesight, and was a crack shot with a rifle and very good at estimating distance. Even so, he could tell it was going to be weeks or months before he gained any real skill with it, and that was frustrating-he might need it on a life-and-death level sooner than that. Given a choice, he preferred to do any fighting from a comfortable distance. Signe had drawn a shaft to the angle of her jaw. He waited while she loosed; the arrow flashed out and thumped into the burlap-covered hay bales. It sank three-quarters of its length as well, just inside the line marking the man-shaped target. "Not bad," he said. "I've done target archery off and on," she said. "Nothing like Astrid, though; she's been a maniac about it for years-since she was eight or nine." "Yeah, but you'd look silly with pointed ears," he replied, pleased when he got a snort of laughter. She'd been very withdrawn since the fight and her mother's death. Understandable, but… "Right, let's take it up where we left off," she said. They walked closer to the target; Signe had been practicing from sixty yards, and it was a bad idea to start at a distance you'd consistently miss-that way you couldn't identify your mistakes and improve. She handed over the bracer, and he strapped it to his left forearm, adjusting the Velcro-fastened straps. Hutton had rigged him an archer's finger-tab for his right hand, and he slid two fingers through it. "We'll have to make some sort of moving target, eventually," Havel said. "And a glove fitted for this; I wouldn't want to be stuck wearing this tab thing if I had to switch weapons suddenly." Signe moved him into proper position with touches of her fingers, which was pleasant. "Rolling pie plates are what Astrid uses. All right, make a proper T… And she has things that run on wires, she had a bunch of them set up on our summer place, besides the stumps." "Stumps you mentioned. We're not short of them, and pie plates we could probably manage too," Havel said. Then he drew his first shot. The bow's draw-weight was eighty pounds, but with the pulleys he only had to exert that much effort at the middle of the draw. It fell away to less than forty when his right hand was back by the angle of his jaw, and he brought the sighting pin down on the middle of the man-figure's chest… There was something rather satisfying about it; particularly this time, since he'd come "You're releasing a bit rough," Signe said. "Remember to just let the string fall off the balls of your fingers-" They worked at it for half an hour; when he stopped he worked his arms and shoulders ruefully. "This must use muscles I don't usually put much weight on," he said. "You're making progress," Signe replied. "Any more today and you'd get shaky." He nodded. "After a certain point you lose more than you gain," he agreed. "And you don't mind learning from a girl; I like that." A corner of Havel's mouth quirked up. "I'm not an eighteen-year-old boy," he said. Their eyes went to the flatbed. Eric was standing with an air of martyred patience, holding something on the anvil with a pair of pincers while Hutton hit it two-handed with a sledgehammer; Ken Larsson observed, a measuring compass and a piece of paper in his hand. The "And I'm not an idiot either, if there's a difference," Havel went on. This time Signe laughed out loud, probably for the first time in a few days. "Knives?" he said briskly. She nodded eagerly. They walked over towards the tree where the mule deer was hanging. They'd wrapped it in sacking, but there weren't many flies this early in the year. He went to the tie-off on the tree trunk and lowered the carcass from bear-avoidance distance from the ground until the gutted torso was at a convenient height. Signe watched, a little puzzled, but eagerly caught one of the wooden knives he'd whittled. She fell into the stance he'd showed her, right leg slightly advanced, left hand open and that forearm at an angle across her chest. The knife she held a bit out and low, point angled up and her thumb on the back of the blade. Havel took an identical stance. "Now, what are we both doing wrong?" he said. She shook her head, wincing a bit as she bit her lip in puzzlement; it was still swollen and sore. "We're about to fight a knife duel," he said. "Which means that one of us is going to die and the other's going to get cut up real bad, get killed too or crippled or at least spend months recovering. Yeah, I'm going to teach you how to do that kind of a knife fight, eventually, but it's a last resort unless the other guy's truly clueless. I was He switched the grip on his knife, holding it with the thumb on the pommel and the blade sticking out of his fist, the cutting edge outward. "First let me show you something. Grab my knife wrist and hold me off." She tucked the wooden blade into her belt and intercepted his slow backhand stab towards her throat. He pushed, using his weight and the strength of his arm and shoulders; Signe stumbled backward, struck the trunk of the tree and grimaced as the point came inexorably towards her throat. Suddenly her knee flashed up, but he'd been expecting that; he caught it on his thigh and pressed the wooden knife still closer. "Halt!" he said, stepping back; he was breathing deeply, she panting. "OK, you're what… five-eight? Hundred and forty-five?" "Five-eight and a half," she said. "One-forty-four, but I think I've lost some since the Change." "Probably," he said. "Right, so you're a big girl, tall as most men, and as heavy as some; which means you've got plenty of reach, and there's no reason you can't get real fast-you've got good coordination and reflexes already, from sports." "But?" she said. He nodded. "But most men, even ones a bit shorter or lighter, are going to have stronger grips, and more muscle on their arms and shoulders. Speed matters, reach matters, skill and attitude matter a "So what do I do?" she said tightly. "Don't arm wrestle 'em and don't get into pushing matches. Your brother has reach and weight on me; he's nearly as strong as I am and he'll be stronger when he's a couple of years older. I could still whup his ass one-on-one-in fact, I did. Take the same grip on your knife as I did and come at me; give it everything you've got." She did-and stabbed a lot faster than he had, as well. He let her wrist smack into his right hand, and squeezed tightly enough to lock them together. Then he let her shove him back; she As they neared the tree, he snapped his torso around and push-pulled on the hand that held the wooden knife, body-checking her as her own momentum drove her towards him. Then he bunched his knuckles into a ridge and punched her-lightly-right under the short ribs while she staggered off-balance. "Oooff!" she said; but she made a recovery, coming up to guard position again. "See, what I did there was redirect you instead of pushing back. That takes strength, but not as much as the other guy's. You just have to be strong "Yes," she said slowly, nodding. "I think I do, Mike. You mean a woman needs a different fighting style?" "Right; a woman, or a smaller man. I'll have Will do up some weights for you-and Luanne, we need to get her in on this too, and Astrid-and between that and the way we're traveling and chores, you can maximize your upper-body strength pretty quick, since you're already fit. Meanwhile, we'll work on the skill, speed and attitude. You'll practice with Eric, too, and Will. Will's got a lot of valuable brawling experience, I think." He went over to the hanging deer carcass. "I used to use a pig carcass for this, back on my folks' place when I was a kid. They're better, because they're more like a man in size and where the organs are, but this'll do. Doesn't matter if we mess it up, since it's going into the stewpot. Go round the other side and hold on-hold it steady-put your shoulder to it." He drew his When he stopped, Signe's face had gone white again, shocked by the speed and power of the blows she felt thudding through the body of the deer. She swallowed and pressed her hands together for a moment before straightening up. Havel nodded approval. He did, switching positions, although he gripped it at arm's length as she drew the bandit's long blade. "We'll start slow. You've got to get real precise control on where the point and edge go, and get used to the feel of it hitting meat, and She was streaming sweat, and there were shreds of deer-flesh on her knife-hand and spattered across other bits of her, but she was boring in without flinching, eyes narrowed and seeing nothing else. Signe half stumbled as the deer carcass swayed unexpectedly, but pivoted with fluid balance and drove the long knife home, grunting with effort as it sliced into flesh. Only then did she turn to see what had startled him. A drumroll thunder of hooves announced Astrid's arrival once more, but there was a hoarse bellowing snarl underneath it. The bear behind the horse was traveling very nearly as fast, its mouth open and foam blowing from it; an arrow twitching in the hump over its shoulders showed why. It was a black, not a grizzly, but the point was moot-it was also a very large boar bear, four hundred pounds if it was an ounce, and moving at thirty miles an hour. Astrid turned in the saddle as her horse pounded by in a tearaway gallop, drawing her bow again and firing directly over its tail in what an earlier age had called the Parthian shot. "No!" Havel shouted futilely. Havel had hunted bear; he knew the vitality and sheer stubborn meanness of a wounded bruin. By some miracle, the arrow even hit-a shallow slant into the beast's rump, leaving head and feathers exposed. It halted and spun with explosive speed, throwing up a cloud of earth clods and twigs and duff, snapping for the thing that had bitten it on the backside; that let Astrid's horse open the distance between them. Unfortunately, it also pointed the bear directly at Havel. It hesitated for an instant, as he stood motionless; then its eyes caught the sway of the mule-deer carcass, and the glint of afternoon sun on Signe's knife. It went up on its hind legs for an instant, narrow head swaying back and forth as it gave a bawling roar and estimated distances with its little piggy eyes. Then it dropped to all fours again and came for him, as fast as a galloping horse. "I don't fucking Eleven There was a hypnotic quality to riding the disk harrow, Juniper decided. The horses leaning into the traces ahead, their shadows falling before them, the shining disks sinking into the turned earth behind the plows and leaving a smooth seedbed behind… His single-furrow walking plow had jammed up with bits of tangled sod again; it was one of the half-dozen copies they'd made of the museum's original. And it was scraping along on top of the turf rather than cutting it, the handles jarring at his hands. Dennis leaned back, pulling at the reins knotted around his waist; Dorothy Rose, who was walking and leading the horses, added her mite to the effort, and the team stopped. Then they looked over their shoulders. Horses didn't have very expressive faces, but she would have sworn both of these were radiating indignation-at the unfamiliar task, and at the sheer ignorant incompetence behind the reins. "Easy, Dennie," she said soothingly. "Remember, "I'd like to use a goddamned Of them all, only Juniper had any real experience at driving a horse team, and that only with a wagon; she did know how surprisingly fragile the big beasts were, though. She looked up at the sun and estimated the time since the last break… "Whoa!" she called to her own team. Then: "All right, all teams take five! Rest and water the horses!" She hauled on the reins, wincing as they slid over fresh blisters beneath her gloves. When they'd stopped she wiped a sopping sleeve over her face, tender with sunburn despite the broad-brimmed hat and bandana-the early-April day was bright and warm. Damp reddish brown earth was soft under her feet as she jumped down. It had a scent at once sweetly green and meaty, a compound of cut grass and damp dirt and severed roots and the crushed camas flowers that starred it. That made a pleasant contrast to the smell of her own sweat, and of Cagney and Lacey's. "Goddamn it, why does this thing keep jamming?" Dennis said. "It's not just the copies Chuck and I made, the original does it too." There was an edge of frustration to the point of tears in his voice. He knelt and began pulling at lumps between the coulter knife that cut the furrow and the moldboard that turned it over. Chuck Barstow and John Carson halted their teams as well; Carson turned and looked at the crooked, irregular furrows that lay behind the three plowmen. "The plows jam because it's old meadow sod," Carson grinned. He was a lean fortysomething man, with sun-streaks through his light brown hair, and blue eyes. He also owned the property four miles west, where Artemis Butte Creek flowed out into the valley proper and the real farmland began, and he was here as part of a complicated swap of labor, animals, and equipment. "Hasn't been plowed in a hundred years," he went on as they unharnessed their teams. "Not even been grazed heavy these past forty or more, this bit. Lots of tangled roots, most of 'em thick as a pencil. A big tractor could just rip it all to shreds, but horses… Well, two hundred fifty horsepower against two-nothing, it stands to reason!" The furrows were roughly along the contour of the sloping meadow, and At least there weren't very many rocks to hit around here. "I thought I knew what hard work was," he said. "No work harder than farmin'. Now I know my They all unhitched their teams, leaving plows and harrow standing where they lay, and led the big animals over beneath the shade of a spreading oak to the north. They brought buckets of water from the creek rather than taking them to it-it was easier to make sure they didn't overdrink that way. The little pool below the waterfall was close there, and she gave it a longing look as she hauled the water. The thought of stripping off her sweat-sodden clothing and diving in, then standing beneath the falling spray… Juniper banished the image of a whooping dive into the cold water. Instead she uncorked a big ceramic jug-until recently an ornamental sitting on the mantelpiece over the kitchen fireplace in her cabin. It held spring water, cut with cold herbal tea. When you were really thirsty, that quenched better than water alone. After a swallow she passed it around, trying not to think about fresh lemonade. Dennis took it with a grin, wiping the neck and bowing. "My thanks, gracious Lady Juniper, High Chief of the Clan Mackenzie, herself," he said. "Go soak your head, Dennie," she replied, scowling. "Cut that "If only I could!" he said, passing the jug on to John Carson. "Soak my head, that is." Their neighbor glugged and passed it to Chuck in turn. "Time was an acre was a few minutes' work," he said. "On a tractor, that is! Even if I was towing the rototiller for a truck crop. Now I feel like I've plowed Kansas if I get an acre done in a day." His mouth quirked: "You know, I had an old three-furrow riding plow in a shed-" All their ears perked up; then they groaned as he went on: "-but I sold it for scrap instead of making it into a lawn ornament like I'd planned." The meadowland sloped gently down from the edge of the rise behind her to the lip several hundred yards south. There was the rough first-pass section nearest, the lumpy brown-green quilt of the area that had been plowed twice, then the smooth reddish brown seedbed the disk harrow left. The disks had an automatic neatness built in, chopping and mixing grass and roots and dirt into a light mixed mass. The smooth look of it was sharp contrast to work that depended on the skill of human hands, or the strength of human shoulders. The rest of the clan were working on the finished section; adults turning over a spadeful of earth at regular intervals, the children behind them dropping in a section of seed potato and a dollop of fertilizer. Some of the children still wore green blazers, much the worse for wear and grime; most worked barefoot and in their knee-shorts. They'd bury the cut eyes and mound up the earth on the next pass. It wasn't as heavy work as plowing, but it was monotonous; she'd done her share of that, too. "We're getting it done," she said, almost to herself. "By the Lord and the Lady, I feel like it's aging me a year a day-not surprising, with days that feel like years-but it's getting done." John Carson nodded. "By the time this field is finished, we'll all know what we're doing, a little more at least," he said. "That'll mean my fields go faster, for which I thank you. Not to mention this fall-come November, we have to start planting the winter grains." "That harrow's yours," Juniper pointed out. "And it's saving us a lot of time. Neighbors should help each other. Not to mention that silage you're giving us. Big horses like these can't work on grass alone." "Neighbors need to help each other more now more than ever," Carson said somberly. "I don't know what I'd have done without your plow teams, Ms. Mackenzie." "Good of you to take in all those kids," Carson went on. "I've got my brother and his family and a cousin and A snort. "Not that it mattered after those bastards in Salem cleaned me out, eh? It leaves the silage for the plow teams, at least." Just then a thudding of hooves came from the stream-side road. Dennis hefted his ax and lumbered over to the spot where the road emerged from the woods. Sally was there with her bow, seated behind a blind they'd rigged with every art that they could manage. She was the only adult they could spare, and that only because her leg still wasn't healed enough to let her do much work. Juniper worried about it-it just wasn't safe not to have more people watching, given the number of hungry refugees about-but there was nothing else they could do, just yet. Not keeping careful enough watch A rider in blue denim overalls came through; a girl in her late teens, blond hair streaming. She halted for a moment to talk to Dennis and Sally, and then trotted her horse over to the tree. "Dad!" she said, and then: "Lady Juniper." "There's people headed up here," she said. "We saw them pass our place-we're plowing the old south field, Dad, like you said-and they went right up the creek road. Uncle Jason said I should come right up and tell you." "How many?" Juniper said quickly. The thought brought a cold chill. That was the latest bright idea of the remnant of the state government, parts of which were still hanging on in Salem. They'd started organizing bicycle-borne townfolk and refugees to go out and John Carson looked equally frightened. That was how he'd lost most of the considerable herd of cattle he'd had before the Change, that and casual theft by passing scavengers, and the remaining dozen head were grazing on Mackenzie land, for safety's sake. "Just four, on foot," Cynthia Carson said, and Juniper blew out her cheeks in relief. "They're leading a horse; one woman, three men. No bows or crossbows-just the usual." For safety's sake, Juniper still fetched the crossbow hanging beside the seat of the disk harrow and spanned it, and strapped on her sword belt, before walking over to the guardpost. Dennis and Chuck had been talking about a simple, quick way to make body armor, and perhaps when they had the plowing and planting done… Chuck brought his sword and buckler, too, his hand resting on the hilt as he peered down into the shadow of the streamside road. Then: "Alex!" he blurted, letting the long sword swing free. Chuck's younger brother smiled and swayed, leaning against the horse he'd been leading; he had the family looks-sandy blond and leanly muscular. The girl beside him wasn't one Juniper remembered, but she'd never been much involved with Alex, since he wasn't of the Craft and didn't like her type of music-he'd been strictly a thrash-metal fan. The closest they'd come was when she'd hired him to do repairs on her barn in '95; he was a builder by trade. The two young men behind were strangers as well-one fair and short, the other dark and tall. Polite strangers, though, since they laid down the ax and shovel they'd been carrying. All four were gaunt but not skeletal, and all carried heavy packs; the horse's load was mainly large sacks made of heavy paper, bulging with something small and homogenous, and topped by bedrolls and blankets. "Oh, God," Alex said. "I thought we'd never make it, honestly, I did… And you're He was almost crying with relief, and the haunted-eyed young woman clung to him with tears streaking the grime on her face. "I… this is Barbara. Vince and Steve, they saved our lives. We got caught around Lebanon by some… " He swallowed. Everyone winced; they knew what he meant. Not everyone out there was starving quite yet, but enough were, the more so since everyone who Suddenly his eyes went wide. "Can we stay?" he blurted, looking from face to face. Juniper caught eyes, willing acceptance; there were nods, mostly; Chuck's and Judy's were emphatic. "Of course," she said, turning back to the younger Barstow. With a smile: "And the horse you rode in on, too." The animal was tired-looking, but well-fed otherwise- the valley wasn't short of its sort of food. And it was a saddle breed, unlike Cagney and Lacey or the big Suffolks Chuck had liberated from the living-history exhibit. That would be useful. "Welcome to the Clan Mackenzie, Alex," she said. "What's in the sacks?" He grinned; even that was weary. "Barley," he said. "Certified seed barley. We found it yesterday in an overturned truck-the other half of the cargo was sacks of fertilizer, and they covered it up, but we saw rats digging; there's more, we hid the rest and brought what we could. And if you knew how "Come have some Eternal Soup instead," she said, smiling. "And then we'll get a wagon ready." Not a matter of a celestial scorebook of punishments and rewards, just that everything was connected. Then another thought struck her: The mule deer hesitated, then caught Cuchulain's scent-the dog was with Dennis, two hundred yards northeast through the dense bush. The animal turned swiftly away from the smell of predator, head high and ears swiveling. The mottled clothing she wore would fade into the spring woods, and the wind was wrong for him to pick out human scent from the cool decaying-wood and damp-earth smells. Ferns and brush stood between her and it, but for a moment it poised motionless, quivering-alert. They were up in the mountain forest, a thousand feet above the old Mackenzie land. This area had been clear-cut much more recently than hers, and there was more undergrowth. It was still cold here, the more so on a rainy day- there might be sleet or snow if they went a little further upslope. The deer had already begun to head up towards their summer pastures, though: even without guns, the hunting pressure on their herds in the foothills was much worse than usual. She exhaled, ignoring the cold drops trickling down her neck, remembering what the book said and practice had reinforced: The short heavy bolt flashed out, and the butt of the crossbow thumped at her shoulder. Her breath held still, as she waited for it to be deflected on some strand of second growth, but instead there was a heavy, meaty "Dennie!" she cried, springing forward. "I got him!" Dennis roared in triumph as he heard her voice, and he plunged towards her-she could hear Cuchulain's frenzied barking as he scented blood, and the shaking of branches as the ex-manager of the Hopping Toad pushed his way through the thickets. Blood splashed last year's stems and the green of the new growth. She ran crouched over, sliding through the undergrowth easily. Juniper had never hunted before the Change, but she'd walked these woods on visits all her life, lived here six months in the twelve for the past decade- and all those years she'd watched the comings and goings of its dwellers, deer and fox and coyote, otter and eagle, rabbit and elk. She half remembered the lay of the land even here, well off her great-uncle's property; she wasn't altogether bewildered when the deer disappeared in a crashing and snapping. The depth of the ravine that opened beneath her feet still shocked, and she threw herself backward and slapped a hand on a branch slimy with moss to steady herself. "Dennie!" she called. "Careful! There's a ravine here, and it's hidden!" "I see it!" he bellowed in return. "Wait a minute, and I'll work around the head!" She waited, breath slowing. The path of the deer's fall was just visible, and a patch of brown hide where he lay; it was a two-year-old male, she thought, and already nicely plump-the Willamette's climate was mild and there was good grazing in the foothill woods year-round. The bottom of the ravine was full of fallen timber and thick brush; not the distinctive three-leaf mark of poison oak, thank the Goddess and Cernunnos. A slight sadness passed through her at the thought of the deer's loveliness broken, but she'd been around enough small farmsteads to know firsthand that meat didn't come from a factory wrapped in plastic. Dennis arrived, with much crackling of brush; he was a city man still, although he was learning-in coordination with the shrinking of his gut, which had gone from embarrassing to merely substantial since the Change. He also had a coil of rope around his shoulder, and his ax slung with its handle through two loops sewn to the back of his jacket. They made the rope fast to a firmly rooted tree. Cuchu-lain went down the steep slope with four-footed recklessness, but the two humans were more cautious-danger to themselves aside, the clan simply couldn't spare the working time lost in an unnecessary injury. Even Sally Quinn was helping with the poultry and around the house, on a crutch. The tangled mass below was just the sort to hide a branch broken off stabbing-sharp. The deer was freshly dead, a trickle of red running from nose and mouth. "You'll get some, fool dog," she scolded, pushing Cuchu-lain aside as he lapped at the flow. "Feet and ears and offal." Then she spoke more formally, kneeling beside the deer and stroking its muzzle: "Thank you, brother, for your gift of life. And thanks to You, Cernunnos, horn-crowned Lord of the Forest, Master of the Beasts! We take of Your bounty from need, not in wantonness; knowing that the Huntsman will come for us too in our appointed day, for we also are Yours. Take our brother's spirit home to rest in the woods of summer in the land beyond the world, and be reborn through the cauldron of the Goddess, who is Mother-of-All." Then they ran a cord through its hind feet between tendon and bone, cast a loop of cord over a convenient branch, and hoisted it up, working quickly; she put a basin from Dennis's pack beneath it and cut the throat with two deep diagonal slashes. The carcass had to drain or the meat wouldn't keep, and the blood would go into oatmeal to make a pudding. Privately she thought that tasted awful, but she'd eat her share. Dennis sharpened the skinning knives while she drew a sign in the air over the basin; then Cuchulain yelped, a sudden squeal of pain. Juniper looked up sharply-there were black bear and cougar in these forests as well. She caught a flash of movement in the thicket twenty yards up the gully from them, a hand holding a rock waving from beneath a pile of brush and dirt. "That's a man!" Dennis said sharply. "Yes," Juniper said; the patterns sprang out at her, once she knew to expect camouflaged cloth. "And a hurt one, too!" They made their way carefully through the tangle. Closer, and she could smell human waste-the man had been trapped here long enough for that, then. She looked up, and saw slick mud and fallen dirt where the treacherous edge had crumbled beneath him. He was under an overhang of the ravine's side, jammed awkwardly up against it, and his leg had been caught between two downed saplings-the springy wood had snapped closed around the flesh again. His lips were swollen… She brought her canteen to his lips. Dennis studied the situation, pursed his mouth, and then swung the ax twice. The man's hips and legs swung down a bit as the tension was released. "Sorry," he said, coughing, and then sipping again- which showed considerable self-control. "Thanks, mate," he went on to Dennis. "That's The injured man smiled as he took the concentrated ration, and managed not to gulp it. "I chucked a bit of wood at your dog because I thought it was that coyote again. One's been visiting, waiting for me to come ripe." There was an English twang to his voice, but not Cockney or boarding school; instead a broad yokel burr that reminded her of documentaries she'd seen about places with thatched cottages and Norman churches. Juniper nodded, examining. "He wasn't hurt, just startled. Your shoulder's dislocated," she said. "Ball right out of the socket and displaced up." "I know, lass," he said. "Tried fixing it, but I couldn't get the leverage." Dennis looked at him and grinned. "That's Lady Juniper of the Clan Mackenzie you're talking to, man," he said. "You're not Scots, surely?" the Englishman said, giving her another head-to-foot glance. "Irish, I'd have said." "My mother was born in west Ireland, my father's family came from Scotland a long time ago by way of Ulster, and Dennie here has a weird sense of humor," she said. "What else is wrong?" "I don't think aught else's broken or torn-just sommat bruised and battered! I couldn't come at the legs with me arm out, is all." Dennis laid down his ax and held the man steady. Juniper braced herself with a foot under his armpit and took his wrist in a strong two-handed grip; a quick jerk, and he gave a sound that was halfway between a muffled yelp and a sigh of relief. "Dennie, you go get help," Juniper said. "Chuck, Vince, Alex, Judy if she can be spared-warn her to expect business, anyway-and a horse to the base of the trail; stretcher, tools and ropes and such." A grin. "And tell Diana that the guest comes with a venison dinner!" Dennis nodded, stuck the haft of the ax through its loops, and swarmed his way up the rope and the ravine's steep side, puffing like a grampus but more easily than he would have before the Change. That done, she studied her… The man was older than her by a decade but younger than Dennis, she judged; square-faced, not tall but very broad-shouldered, with thick muscular arms and gray eyes bloodshot now; his hair was light-streaked brown, and his naturally fair skin had been tanned to the color of old beechwood by harsh suns. She shook hands carefully; his great square paw swallowed hers. "And you're English, by the sound of you?" "Samuel Aylward, at your service, lady," he said, then winced when he tried to give a half bow. "Samkin to his friends. Late of Crooksbury, Hampshire, late sergeant in the Special Air Service." "You're a long way from home!" "Not much wild land left back in old Blighty. I like wandering about in the woods; it's an old family tradition, you might say, Lady Juniper." "That Lady Juniper is just a joke of Dennie's, Mr. Aylward. He's always teasing-well, it's a long story." He looked at her and quirked a smile. "It's "Roughly translated: If you want to be liked, shut up and listen. We're old friends." "Thought so," Aylward said, then sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. Long-held tension released his face, making it look younger despite stubble and lines and dirt. She held his head while he drank again; he knew enough to pace himself, and nibbled on some dried fruit when she gave it to him. He was wearing camper's or hunter's garb, and a pack; a long case lay not far away. She snagged it and worked it out of the tangled branches. "What's this?" "My bow, if it's not a broken stick," Aylward said. "I bloody well hope not. I'm no Adams, but I spent a lot of time making it, I did; it's my favorite reflexdeflex longbow." She opened the soft waterpoof case; the stave within was yellow yew, about six feet long with a riser of some darker wood and a leather-wrapped grip; a neat little quiver held six goose-feathered arrows. The wood shone and slid satin-smooth under her touch. When she took it up by the grip it had the fluid natural feeling of handling a violin from a master craftsman's hands, despite being far too long for someone only three inches over five feet in her socks. "It's fine, indeed. Were you poaching?" she said, teasing to distract him from his injuries-it hadn't been the deer-hunting season when the Change hit. "There's no season on boar here," he said a little defensively; feral swine were an invasive pest, and unprotected. "And-" She nodded encouragingly and gave him another drink of the water. "And I've the time for it these days. Call me a masochist." He took a deep breath; she could sense he wasn't much of a man for chatting with strangers, in more normal times. "Is the war over?" he said, after half a minute. "War?" she said, bewildered. "I was looking north towards Portland from the mountainside when I saw the flash," he said. "And then everything went dark-lights out good and proper, none since, and everything electronic in my gear was buggered for fair. I was staying high, working my way south and waiting out the fallout, until I ran too hard and looked too little after a buck and landed down here." She looked at him with pity. "Oh, you poor man!" she exclaimed. "You thought it was World War Three? It's A day later Juniper finished adding the column of figures, wishing for one of the old mechanical crank-worked adding machines as she did, and putting it on a mental list for scavenging or swapping. All the adults were present, including a near-silent Sam Aylward propped up on the couch with his wrenched leg and sore shoulder; Sally Quinn could sit well enough now, and move without a crutch if she was careful. The children were up in the loft with Eilir, who was the eldest, minding them-learning Sign had become a mark of status with the youngsters, since Eilir made up one hundred percent of their adolescent reference-figures. None of the other adults had teenagers, and Juniper did only because she'd started so early. The adults of… she supposed she couldn't just say the Singing Moon Coven; half the people weren't coveners at all. Though to be sure they weren't exactly cowan, either. He'd been ribbing her for years about her musician's Celt-persona; she supposed this was either revenge, or a streak of buried romanticism coming out. Most of the front of the cabin.was a big living room, with the stone-built fireplace dominating the north wall. A fire crackled and spat in it now, casting a welcome warmth and filling the room with the delicate flower scent of burning applewood-she was still using the salvage from clearing out the old orchard last summer. A kerosene lantern on the plank table gave acceptable reading light-you could use gasoline, if you were extremely careful. Firelight ruddy and yellow brought out the grain of the big logs that made up the walls. Rain beat like gentle drums on the strake roof above them, and the windows looked out on the veranda like caves of night. She'd always liked the great room; she remembered winter days, with Eilir sprawled on the rug and her school-books before her, Cuchulain curled before the hearth, Juniper strumming at her guitar as she worked on a tune and listened for the whistle of her teakettle, and snow patting feather-paws against the windowpanes. Now it had rolled-up bedding tied in neat bundles stacked around the walls; the children slept in the loft and her own former bedroom was assigned to the handfasted couples on a roster, so that they could all have a chance at some privacy. The Hall of the Mackenzies was stuffed to the bursting point. The crowding would have been tolerable for a week or so at a pagan festival, but the prospect of living like this all her life… She shook her head and got up to throw another log on the fire. Aylward spoke: "Wait a minute, lass-Lady. That's yew, isn't it? Could I have a look?" Everyone glanced over at the Englishman; he'd seemed a friendly enough sort, but on short acquaintance not given to inconsequential chat. "To be sure, it is," Juniper said. "It's an understory weed tree here." She put the billet in his big spade-shaped hands; it was four inches thick and a little over four feet long, with thin smooth purplish bark scattered with red-brown papery scales. "Nicely seasoned," Aylward said, running a critical eye over it. "Is there any more like this?" "A ton or so; the whole bottom half of my woodpile, out in the shed. The loggers cleared out a lot of it last year and I salvaged it for firewood; hadn't worked my way down through the applewood yet. Do you have a use for it?" Aylward grinned. "We all do! If you let me at a drawknife and spokeshave, and a bit of hardwood for the risers, and a little glue." Sally Quinn looked at him sharply. "You're a bowyer?" Aylward nodded. "A hobby; I make and fletch me own shafts, too. Longbows are simple enough, even with a separate riser; I could do two or three a day, and anyone who's handy with wood could learn the trick." Dennis grinned enormously; he "Threefold return indeed!" Juniper said happily, resuming her seat and tapping the pile of figures Andy and Diana had worked up. "Now, people, we have just enough food to get everyone here"- There were groans at that. Her own hands itched where the blisters never quite had time to heal. She'd had a big garden every year since she inherited this place, and now knew the difference between that and growing all your own food. "Over to you, Chuck. Tell us what we can expect to "Chuck, Lord of the Harvest," Judy said, grinning, leaning into his shoulder with her arm around his waist. A laugh went around the table; it was a title of the High Priest of a coven, and Chuck had been the only candidate for She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then forced a smile. He took up the story, with a pad of his own. "OK, we've got all the acreage we need turned and fitted, and most of the potatoes planted-we'll keep the rest to put in between now and June, to stretch the harvesting season out, same with the veggies. Seven acres so far all up, here and down by the Fairfax place, counting what Frank Fairfax had in before the Change." He paused to glare at Dorothy and Diana and Andy, who were organic-produce fanatics… or had been, before direct personal experience of hunger, which tended to make one less finicky. "I "If we have to, Chuck," Juniper said soothingly. "If we have to. We've got them on hand, haven't we?" He nodded, and the three made unwilling gestures of assent as well. "The Fairfaxes had four and a half acres of fall-planted oats, which should come ripe in June; English hulled variety, good stuff. And I He took a deep breath. "Let's put it this way, Mackenzies; it'll be tight until June, and after that we're going to get awful sick of potatoes boiled and mashed and oatmeal and carrots and turnips and cabbage and beans and barley soup and whatnot, but we'll have enough to last through until the "Of course," he went on, amid the cheers, "that brings up the question of storage. Potatoes take a "Oh, no you don't," Judy said. "We need a better bathhouse and laundry system for heath reasons-" "Hey, wait a minute," Dennis cut in. "There's that old gristmill east of Lebanon, we could put it in below the waterfall with only a short sluice gate to build. Nobody's claimed it yet, and we could charge to grind other people's grain come summer-" "And on second thought," Chuck said, glaring a little, "we ought to do a regular daily training schedule with archery and sword-and-buckler. The bandit gangs are getting-" Juniper sighed and put her hands to her forehead. The threat of starvation had kept this collection of strong-willed individualists moving in one direction. Now she was going to have to earn She looked around the table and caught several pairs of eyes-Dennis, Sally, Alex and his three friends. Because some weren't going to like what She reached back and picked up her fiddle and bow from a table beside the couch. The first long strong note brought silence. Then she improvised; a pompous boom for Chuck's voice, a piercing commanding shrill for Judy's, short anxious tremulos for Diana and Andy, a querulous rising inflection for Dennis's Californian accent… Chuck was the first to snort. After a minute they were all laughing, and she wove the discords into a tune, one they all knew; the rollicking "Stable Boy," and moving on to "Harvest Season" and "Beltane Morning." People missed music, with a craving almost as strong as that for food; there just wasn't any, in the Changed world, unless you made it yourself or persuaded someone in the room with you to do it. Soon everyone was singing. Eilir's head poked down through the stairs to the loft; she couldn't hear the tunes, but she loved watching the audience. Smaller heads peeked around hers. When she stopped the tension had gone out of the gathering. Everyone was ready to move the furniture aside and unroll their bedding; Andy and Diana were sleeping in the loft with the kids tonight, and they went up the stairs with a candle in its holder. Twelve There wasn't time to be afraid. He didn't bother to draw his knife-with a bear this size, you might as well try to tickle it to death-or pay attention to the shouts and the wild neighing of the hobbled horses or to Signe dashing away. He did when she came back seconds later, tossing the shaft of the spear in his direction. Grabbing it and whirling back to the bear gave him just enough time to set himself, with a fractional second more to be thankful he and Will had spent some time reshafting the blade firmly. The animal would have run right over him if it hadn't paused, but bears liked to attack from an upright rear. It towered over him like a wall of cinnamon-black fur as he crouched with the spear poised; it was roaring, clawed paws raised like organic trip-hammers to smash his spine and spatter his brains across the ground. He knew how to kill bears. You shot them from a hundred and fifty yards with a scope-sighted rifle firing hollow-point game rounds… "Yaaaaaah!" he shouted, lunging. The impact was like ramming a pole into an oncoming truck, and it jarred every bone and tendon in his arms and shoulders and back. He shouted again, this time in alarm, as the onrushing weight drove him backward, his heels skidding in the damp grass of the meadow. The foot-long knife blade sank into the bear's middle, and part of the spear shaft after it, and the growling roar of pain and anger that followed it sprayed into his face along with saliva and a fan of blood. The butt of the spear slid along the ground until it jammed in a root, carrying him with it like a bundle. Then the bear screamed again as the weapon was driven deeper by its own strength and weight. It twisted frantically, trying to escape the thing that hurt it, and Havel clung with all his strength as the animal pounded him against the ground in its writhing. Then his elbow hit ground with a jarring thump that made his hand open by sheer reflex as white agony flowed up the arm and down into his torso. The bear twisted again, and Havel felt himself thrown through the air with no more effort than a child's doll. Long training made him relax as he flew, curling loosely. The hard, hard ground still knocked the air out of his lungs and rattled his brain; he fought to breathe and collect his wits. "Jesus!" he wheezed, scrambling backward on his butt and pushing himself with his heels. The bear was heading for him. More slowly-the spear shaft stuck out of its middle at an angle; he'd seen before with the plump bandit that the shape of the knife blade made it difficult to withdraw once it was deep in a body. Now the long shaft kept catching on the ground and making the animal wince and stumble, and every time that happened the sharp steel was waggled about in the bear's body cavity. But it moved, at a hunching, lurching amble, and it was coming straight for him. Blood poured from the wound in its belly, but it didn't spout with the pulsing arterial torrent that would have killed it quickly. And he He tried and fell over backward; his left leg wasn't working properly yet, where he'd landed on it. The bear hunched closer, snarling in a basso growl, spit and blood drooling from its long yellow teeth. Havel fumbled at his belt for his Then it stopped and reared. Eric was there, shouting and jabbing at its face with his The sharp curved edge of the blade scored along the bear's shoulder. That angered it enough that it ignored everything else and swatted; it also gave Havel time to push himself backward far enough that he could lever himself erect with his hands and good leg. The other one didn't seem broken, or the joints torn; it just hurt like fire to put his weight on it. That didn't mean he wouldn't, but he'd be slowed. "No!" he shouted, hobbling forward as he saw Eric coming back for more. "Don't get close! Just back off and let it die!" Signe was back again too, gone no longer than it took her to run and fetch the bow. She had an arrow to the string, but her brother was far too close for her to fire. And he was too far gone in a fine fighting rage to listen, as well; he stepped in, chopping at the bear's paw as it flashed at him. Perhaps that was The pole gave the machete blow terrible leverage, and so did the bear's own strength. The scream it gave when the steel split its paw to the wrist was the loudest yet, and the speed of its other paw's sledgehammer blow turned the whole of that forelimb into a blur. It landed on the haft of the The moment he was clear Signe shot. The flat This time nothing but death was going to stop it. In the abstract, Havel sympathized: it was doing exactly what he'd do in its place, trying to die fighting and take someone with it. In the here and now, it was trying to kill someone Michael Havel had promised to protect. One of "Christ Jesus save us from heroes!" he snarled, and limped forward to seize the pole of the spear planted in the bear's gut. Several things happened very quickly then. The bear screamed and reared as he grabbed the ash wood and hauled sideways. Signe shot, twice, from only a few feet behind him and just to one side; two spots of bright yellow-and-green feathers blossomed against the bear's dark fur, one at the base of its throat and another just above the spear. Her sister was on his other side suddenly, panting-she must have run from as close as she could get her horse to come to the sound and smell of wounded bear. The string of Astrid's lighter bow snapped against her bracer, and an arrow sprouted from the bear's inner thigh. Havel twisted desperately at the spear, conscious of how his bruised leg slowed him-and how the spear had sunk deeper in the bear's body, putting him close to it. He saw Will Hutton running towards the animal from the rear, legs pounding in desperate haste, the double-bitted felling ax swinging up. And the bear's wounded paw flashed towards him. He threw himself backward, releasing the spear, just as the tips of the claws struck. When Havel came fully back to himself, he was chiefly conscious of a stabbing pain in his neck. Shortly after that he became aware that blood was pouring down his face, but he ignored that until he checked that he had movement in all his fingers and toes. Then, slowly, he put a hand to his face. Light came back when he pushed back a flap of skin that was hanging over his left eye; when he had it in place, he knew there was a bad cut running from the upper peak of his left cheekbone, then beside his eye on that side-close enough to the corner to give him a cold chill-and across his forehead and into his scalp. Like all scalp wounds, it ran blood like a butchered pig hung up to drain, but he scrubbed his other arm across his eyes and the world cleared up. The bear lay about seven feet away, very thoroughly dead; only a vet with time to do a dissection could have told what killed it, between the spear and the arrows and the ax that stood up like an italicized exclamation mark from its back, with the heavy blade buried in its spine. Blood still trickled; he couldn't have been out for more than a few seconds. Will Hutton knelt on one side of him, Signe on the other. He let his head fall back; which was a mistake, since lights swam across his eyes. "Eric?" he croaked. "Fine," Hutton said, resting his hand on Havel's and moving it gently away from the younger man's wound. "Banged up. Bump on his head. this of yours goin' to need some stitches, though. Angelica, she kin handle it." "Don't forget the aspirin," Havel croaked, and Hutton laughed. "You are one tough mother, got to admit it," he said. "Cojones too. Ain't never seen a man move so fast." "Ask the bear," Havel said. He rolled his eyes towards Signe. "Good shooting." "It was closer than a target and bigger," she said. "Are you all right?" "Hell, no," he said honestly. "This hurts like grim death and I'm seeing double and I'd puke if I had the strength. I'll live." She blinked at him, frowning, then trotted away. He looked past her at Astrid, who stood beside her father and Hutton's wife and daughter, wringing her hands on her bow as if she were trying to strangle it. "Come here," he said to her. "I can't shout-if I try, my head will fall off." She obeyed, kneeling close to him. Signe came back on the other side with a bucket of water and a cloth; she had pills with her too, and he took them as Hutton raised his head with one strong hand. Then she began to sponge at the blood on his face. It felt so good he was reluctant to tell her to stop, but there was something to be done first. "OK, kid," he said to Astrid, touching Signe's wrist gently for an instant to halt her. He found he could move his arms, but only if he concentrated on it and didn't try anything difficult. "Did that bear just light out after you, or did you shoot it unprovoked?" he asked the younger girl. Astrid blinked, looked away, and then looked back. "I shot it," she whispered. "What did I say?" "Shoot anything but bears and cougars, Mike." "Right." He put out his hand; she didn't resist when he took her bow. "This was a toy, back before things Changed. It isn't anymore. It's a weapon. You don't She nodded. "And "Y-yes, Mike." He went on: "Two inches closer and that thing would have ripped my face off. You understand She was crying now, but she nodded again. "OK, you don't touch this again until I think you can use it responsibly. You want to be treated like a grown-up, you gotta earn it. A hunter doesn't take stupid chances, or shoot at all unless it's a clean kill." He handed the bow to Hutton. "And don't let her on a horse again until I say so, either." He let his head fall back. Signe leaned over him, sponging at the blood again; vaguely, he could see Angelica Hut-ton coming up with some sort of kit under her arm. The pills couldn't have been aspirin, either, or the concussion was worse than he'd thought, because he was beginning to drift away. "This ain't fucking Middle-earth," he said-or thought he did. Blackness. Will Hutton looked at the electric grinding wheel, pursing his lips. It was normally bolted to a long plank; he put it on sawhorses and secured it with C-clamps when he had that kind of work to do. The motor was useless, of course, and he'd disassembled it, leaving the wheel and the driveshaft. It might not work, but he didn't have anything better to do right now; they couldn't move until Havel recovered. "Needs a flywheel," Ken Larsson said, beating his gloved hands together-the early mornings were still chilly, and his breath showed in white puffs as he squinted at the remains of the machine. "Right," he said. "Truck wheel, I think. Drill and mount through the hub?" "Yup. And the fan belt from your semi would do for the drive-we take the wrecked bicycle-" His face went blank for a moment; the bicycle had been ridden by one of the bandits who killed his wife. He swallowed, while Will looked aside to allow him a moment's privacy. "- mount it backward-fan belt around the rear wheel once we get the tire off. Then someone pedals, and you got yourself a grinding wheel." They both turned and looked at Eric Larsson where he sat throwing stones into the Lochsa. Not far away Astrid and Luanne were working on the bearskin staked out on the ground, scraping the last shreds of fat and flesh off the inside. Eric, on the other hand, had been starting to brood. "Boy needs exercise," Ken said. When Havel woke again, he felt completely drained; not in much pain-an itching stab along his scalp wound, a throb in his neck, bruises elsewhere-but weak as a kitten. Something smelled wonderful close by, though. Gradually the picture came clear. He was lying on a bed of pine boughs, with a canvas cover over him, rigged like a tent to the side of the Huttons' RV. Blankets and the mylar sleeping bag and a low fire in a round bed of stones with a sheet-metal reflector kept things comfortably warm- warmer than he would have been inside the vehicle, with its heaters not working. Not far away was a horse with its head down, pawing through the long dead grass for the first of this year's shoots, and then eating the natural hay when it couldn't find any. There was a pot over the fire, and the good smell came from there. "What's that?" he said-croaked, rather. "Christ Jesus, I'm dry." Signe Larsson was not far away, silently practicing knife strokes against a small lodgepole; she wore clean jeans, her high-tops, and a big man's shirt of checked flannel over a T-shirt of her own, one with a whale and a circle-slash over it. When she heard his voice she stabbed the knife into the wood with a backhand flick and hurried over to him. "About two days, right?" he said, reaching up to touch his forehead. The long wound across forehead and scalp had been stitched in a small neat style, but he'd have a spectacular scar. He'd been a Burroughs freak as a kid, and had spent much of the early eighties pretending the forests of the Upper Peninsula were the ape-man's jungles. He'd enjoyed the Mars books almost as much, although it put him off a bit when he realized that since Dejah Thoris laid eggs, John Carter had essentially been doing the nasty with a giant bug. "How did you know it was two days?" Signe said, dipping a cup into a bucket that stood on a table nearby. "You came to a few times before, but you were sort of semiconscious." "Don't remember a thing since Mr. Bear turned out to be Not Our Friend," he said, and then a long wordless A woman was singing in Spanish in the middle distance, a husky soprano, a voice with smoke and musk and heat in it-Angelica Hutton, at a guess. He could hear the words now and then: "Mi Signe grinned; she "It's bear broth," she said. "We're making jerky out of most of it, but the soup's good. Want some? Meal and revenge in one." He nodded, too tired to speak much. She brought over a cup and put an arm under his shoulders to lift him so that he could sip. The contact was remarkably pleasant, in an abstract sort of way. The broth itself was delicious, mostly clear, with a little finely minced meat in it and some dried onion. He could feel the rich warmth of it spreading through his middle, and his eyelids grew heavy again. Havel fell asleep to the sound of the Spanish song, the splashing of the river, and a distant sound like a grinding wheel on hard steel. His next waking found him clearheaded; a day after that he was still feeling shaky but strong enough to rise and eat solid food, wash and walk. The next day he was himself again, save for a lingering stiffness. The older men had been hard at work on the flatbed; the towing bar had been rerigged, and the gear sorted and readied for loading. Will Hutton had set up his workbench a good ways away; near it was some contraption powered by part of a bicycle, with a transmission belt running from the skeletonized rear wheel. Not far from that was an improvised hearth of mud and rocks, with Astrid pumping on a piston-bellows setup. "Good to see you up," Hutton said, turning from the fire; sweat ran down his stocky muscular torso. "Good to His scalp wound itched like fire, but that meant it was healing well. For the rest he was stiff and bruised, but he'd been Some exercise was just what he needed. Astrid smiled at him shyly. Havel looked at the black man; he nodded very slightly. Havel glanced back at her coolly, and then went on after he'd made greetings all around: "Maybe you should start practicing that mounted archery stuff again, kid?" "Thanks, Mike!" she replied, and then broke into a broad sunny smile. "Mr. Hutton has the most Surprised, Havel looked at the Texan. "With y'all in a second," he said. Then he took his workpiece out of the coals with a pair of pincers, gave it a quick once-over, nodded, and picked up a smoothed nine-foot pole with his other hand. The metal was a twelve-inch tapering double-edged blade shaped like a willow leaf and about as broad as two fingers, but it was mounted on a round steel tube. Using the pincers, then the anvil and a hammer, Hutton forced the tube sleeve onto the pretapered uppermost section of the pole. The wood began to smoke almost immediately; the sleeve was heated past the red-glowing stage. Quickly he reversed the spear and plunged the whole head and a foot of the shaft into a big bucket of water. There was a volcanic hiss and spurt of steam, dying away to a muttering and bubbling. The hot metal would shrink as it cooled, binding unbreakably to the wood. "Saw somethin' like this in Calgary, up in Canada, when I was workin' rodeo-went for the Stampede there couple of years," Hutton said. He took the spearhead out and wiped it dry, then wiped it again with an oiled rag, then braced the shaft between his legs with the top three feet across the anvil and touched up the edges of the head with a two-handed sharpening hone. The steel made a "The Mounties at the Stampede used lances 'bout like this, put on quite a show." "You were in rodeo?" Havel asked. Astrid was beginning to fidget, then visibly controlled herself. Hutton nodded. "Roughstock," he said. That meant riding Brahma bulls, and horses deliberately picked to buck. He glanced over at his wife, who was checking the bundles and boxes of their gear against a list. "Angel, though, she wanted more than broken bones and trophies on the wall. She was right, of course; and I'd rather work with real horses, anyhow. By then I had enough saved to get our spread and a decent herd." He tossed the long spear over to Havel. The younger man ran his hands along the smooth length of it; the blade was sharpened right down to where the curve of the shoulders melded into the tubular socket, so it wouldn't get stuck in someone or something's body the way the knife-bladed weapon had. "Used part of a leaf spring for that," Hutton said, waving his hand back towards the vehicles by the side of the road. "It's good metal; forming the socket, that was the hard part. I made up a couple of 'em." He went over to the flatbed and got something else. Havel's eyes widened a bit. It was a straight-bladed saber just under a yard long in the blade, with a three-bar brass guard. A neatly made sheath of leather-covered wood held it, with chape and mouth done in aluminum beaten to shape. Hutton handed it to him, and he examined it more closely; the hilt had wooden fillets glued to the tang, covered in layers of thin braided rawhide to shape it to a man's palm. When he drew it the weapon was heavy but well balanced, blade cross-sectioned nicely from thick back to edge; the reverse was sharpened for a foot back from the point. It felt "What's it mean?" Astrid asked. "Literally? Hack them down! Freely translated: Kill! Kill! Back in the old days in Europe, the Finns fought for the kings of Sweden, who really got around-our cavalry campaigned with them all over the place. The Church had a special prayer: 'From the horrible Finns, good God deliver us!'" He tried whipping the sword through a figure eight, and then winced slightly at how close he'd come to taking off part of his own right kneecap in his enthusiasm. "I ain't; and if I was, I couldn't do a sword from scratch in four days. That's not hardly blacksmith's work at all, Mike. Just mutilating a length of leaf spring. The hard part in makin' swords the old-time way was tempering, heating and quenching just right. But that, it's alloy steel and already heat-treated better than anyone could do in a forge." "Hmmmm," Havel said. He braced the point against a stump and leaned on it; the metal bowed, then sprang straight again. He tested the edge with his thumb. It was knife-sharp, which was practical for a weapon-a razor edge was too likely to turn on bone. A flick at the stump took out a surprisingly large chip without dulling it. "We'll have to learn how to temper steel again by hand, eventually," he went on. "Lord, Mike, this is Havel nodded, delighted, and decided to let Astrid burble before she burst: "What was that you said about Will's books, kid?" "He has the most She turned in appeal to Hutton. The Texan had begun to dismantle his improvised hearth, removing the parts he'd be taking with him and stowing the tools neatly in their boxes. He gave her an indulgent chuckle and said: "Got to exchangin' e-mail with this fellah in Hungary, name of Lajos, Kassai Lajos. They got some real horsemen there, good as any over to here, and he's been working for years on finding out how his old-timey kin used bows from the saddle, and how they made their bows and stuff. Workin' practical, with his own horses. I'd admired to see it. He's fixin' to write a book about it, and sent me a good part of his work. I printed it up an' bound it." Hutton shook his head. "Hope he was close to home when things Changed; he's got him a little ranch and some horses out in the country there. If he was, he'll live if anyone does!" Havel nodded. Out in the meadow, Luanne and Signe and Eric were riding-galloping down a row of light sticks set in the ground, swerving in and out around each in succession in a series of S-curves, very much like the rodeo event called barrel racing. He saw that Hutton hadn't been boasting about his daughter; Luanne was leaning in to each curve with effortless grace. Eric and Signe were very good; she made them look as if they were operating their horses by not particularly sensitive remote control systems. "Go on," he said to Astrid. "See if you can give her a run for her money." "Luanne is Hutton watched them for a moment; Havel went over and helped him lift his anvil into place on the trailer and lash it down. "Mike," he said, "How were you plannin' on us making a living, while we're on the way to the promised land?" "However we can," he said. "If we have to fight for food, we will, but I'd rather not. Overall, it depends on whether my ideas about what's going to happen are close to the mark." Hutton looked a question at him, and Havel continued: "It's obvious what's going to happen in the big cities-and overseas, in countries that are all big city, like Japan. Remote areas like this, or the farming country… I think things will collapse there too, but slower. Most people will try to hang on to what they had, and the ways they did things, as close as they can. It won't work, not in the long run." "They got along well enough with horses and such in my granddaddy's time," Hutton said. "Or at least the white folks did," he added with a grim smile. Havel nodded; Hutton didn't have much formal education, but he was no fool-in fact, he was about the most all-round competent man Havel had ever come across, even out here in the backwoods. "But they didn't get along without telegraphs, or steamboats, or without guns, a hundred years ago," he said. "Not for a long time before that; you'd have to go back a thousand years, nearly, I think, before it wouldn't make a difference. Someone, something wanted us knocked Hutton made a final tie-off and fingered the knot. "I hate to think the good Lord judged us that wicked. He promised to Noah no more water; but this time, He took away the fire." "Could be," Havel said; he was actually an agnostic, but there was no way to disprove the Texan's idea. "Myself, I think Ken's got it right. Someone out there"-he pointed upward-"with a technology that makes ours… what we had. look like stone knives. Something so far beyond ours we can't understand it, and it's like magic. Like algebra to a monkey." Hutton looked aside at him. "If it was some spacemen, what do you figure we can do 'bout it?" "Nothing," Havel said bluntly. "I figure we'll just have to live with what they've done to us, and we won't even find out why unless they tell us someday. In the meantime… we have to find a way to live in the world they gave us. You and I, and our kids-mine when I have them, that is." He looked at the sun. "Let's start early tomorrow. We can make Lowell in three days, taking it easy. It's all downslope." "One step closer to Larsdalen," Hutton said, smiling. "If that's where we end up," Havel nodded. "One step at a time. Lowell first." "Ain't much in Lowell but about thirty people," Hutton observed. "Right. But there'll be a fair number of other travelers stranded there. I want to look them over. We need recruits." "We do?" Hutton said. "We do. Anywhere we end up, if it's worth having. someone else will want it too." Thirteen Lowell, Idaho, had a sign at the outskirts: population 24- with the 24 crossed out, and "23" written beside it. The joke was one from before things Changed. The tiny hamlet sat at the junction of the Lochsa and the Clearwater; in normal times it was a jumping-off point for the wilderness areas around, and for white-water rafting. Now half a dozen of its residents stood across the roadway; three of them had hunting bows, the others axes or baseball bats. Havel reined in his horse and flung up his right hand with the fist clenched. He could hear Angelica's "Afternoon," he said. "Afternoon," the burly middle-aged man who seemed to be the leader said. "Lot of road people already been through." "I've got to warn you though, we don't have any food to spare. Barely enough for our own." Havel nodded. He'd expected nothing different. This was hard country, well away from the farming and ranching areas further west and south. The locals could probably survive on hunting and fishing until winter, but not many casual passersby could. "We're fixed, for now," he said. "Got plenty of meat." Several of the men stiffened with suspicion. The little band of townsfolk relaxed. Their leader looked at the swords the travelers all carried, and the bows. Will had rigged tubular scabbards at the right rear of their saddles, and he and Luanne and Havel were using them for the long spears-lances-he'd made. He'd also done up round plywood shields, convex circles rimmed in metal and covered in elk hide; Signe and Astrid had painted the head of a snarling bear on each, quite skillfully. "You folks are together then? Looks like you're loaded for bear!" That brought a few chuckles from his townsmen; Havel smiled thinly-it still hurt to move his face much. "We ran into some survivalists, original-sovereign types. They seemed to think they could do anything they wanted, now that things are Changed. We're taking precautions to avoid another incident like that." The leader's eyes took in their various bruises and contusions and spat eloquently. "Those crazy bastards? What happened?" Havel shrugged. "Coyotes have to eat too, so we didn't bury the bodies," he said, and got another, louder chuckle. "We'd like to camp for a few days and work on our gear before we move on. We're heading towards Lewiston. If anyone wants to trade, we can do farrier work or such." A nod, and the leader leaned on his ax. "We have a couple of horses that could use shoeing. Head on down that lane, there's a campground by the river and some cabins- use 'em if you want, but the plumbing's not working. There's some other folks who got caught on the road staying there, too." Havel circled the small pine tree, the shield up, left foot advanced. It was starting to feel more natural, and it was what the book said you should do on foot. He had the practice sword up, point towards the tree; it had the same weight and balance as the other weapon Will had made, but it was blunt. With a Another ragged chip flew off the trunk at neck height; he hit the tree with the shield, punching it, then stabbed under the lower rim. Still, he wished he had more than a couple of books to go on. He was getting better at attacking, but to learn the counters he needed a trained partner. An He backed off from the tree, broad chest heaving as sweat rolled down his taut skin, pale in contrast to the permanent tan of his face and arms. Finding an instructor would be a fantastic stroke of luck. People who had the leisure to study swordcraft usually didn't end up in backwoods Idaho this time of year. Of course, he'd Ken Larsson had explained it: When nearly everybody died, Havel shivered. "The problem is," he murmured to himself, "that the dice have no memory." A run of luck could stop any instant. "And we've already "Boss," Will Hutton said. Havel leaned the sword against his leg while he worked and stretched his right hand and arm. You felt every impact all the way up to your shoulder when you worked this way. "Yeah, Will?" he said. They'd camped in another tree-dotted meadow, well away from the river and from the other stranded wayfarers who'd ended up here. There was room for their horses, and for setting up a clothesline, and digging a latrine; they'd pitched the single big tent the Huttons had had along, too, as well as taking over a couple of the cabins. The air was wet and cold and smelled of green; in a warmer climate the whole place might be getting pretty squalid by now, but they didn't intend to stay much longer. "Got some more people interested in joinin' up," Hutton said. He jerked his thumb towards the notional edge of their camp, where a cluster stood and waited. "Couple of 'em look hopeful, I'd say." "They'd be the first," Havel muttered, hanging up the practice weapon on a nail driven into the tree above head height. "OK, Will, send them in as soon as I'm ready." It was chilly, but he'd been working stripped to the waist; sweat stung and itched in the healing wound on his forehead, and just plain itched in his new beard-one reason he'd never grown one before. The muscles of his arms burned-the shield didn't move as much as the sword, but it was heavier-and his right hand felt as if a semi had run over it. A faint line of new callus was appearing, all around the inner side of his thumb and forefinger and the web between. Now he wiped himself down with a towel and shrugged into a shirt, buttoning it as he walked over to the table they'd set up for talking to the candidates-the similarity to a job interview seemed to reassure people. Once there he sat and laid the shield and saber across it, conscious of the position of the hilt and that of his The first candidate was a tall, thin, thirtyish woman with bold features and coarse abundant reddish brown hair- she'd probably been thin before the Change, too, though less so. She was dressed in moderately expensive outdoor clothes, which she'd managed to get or keep fairly clean, and hiker's boots. "Pam Arnstein," she said, offering a hand; it was firm and dry, and she gave a single squeeze while meeting his eyes. "I understand you're looking for people to join your group?" He nodded: "Useful people, for mutual help here and where we intend to settle, in Oregon." He explained the rules. "Now convince me, Ms. Arnstein." "I'm a veterinarian-worked at the San Diego Zoo. I was visiting relatives here in Idaho, then driving for recreation." "Why didn't you get back to the relatives?" he said. "They have small children. I didn't think they could afford to help me, and they would try if I asked, so I won't ask." He questioned her a bit more-she hiked and did horseback trekking, rock climbing and hang gliding, was divorced and childless. "And I do Renaissance fencing," she said. "With HACA-that's what the group is called." At his raised eyebrow she went on: "Cut-and-thrust backsword with targe, rapier-and-targe-a targe is a small shield, rather like this one,"-she tapped the one resting on the table-"sword and buckler-a buckler is a smaller metal shield with a one-handed grip-and rapier and dagger. I got into it when I was doing amateur theatricals at UC San Diego, decided to try the real thing, and it's been one of my hobbies for years. The weapons are substantially similar to those you have on your table there." "OK, Ms. Arnstein, you just sold me. I'm going to pass you on to our experts to check on what you said, and you can demonstrate that fencing stuff to me, but provisionally you're in." She looked towards the cookfire and swallowed painfully. "Perhaps you could get something to eat first. Game stew with some wild plants is all we have, but there's enough." The next candidate was a logger, a little younger than Havel and an inch taller, a husky brown-haired, blue-eyed man. He and his young wife and their toddler daughter looked surprisingly well fed. "You the bossman of the Bearkiller outfit?" he asked. Havel grinned inwardly at that as he nodded and shook hands and introduced himself. He'd been thinking idly that they should have a name for the group. Apparently Signe's artistic talents had settled the matter; the bear heads on the shields were quite dramatic. That, and the boiled-down skull of the bear that had nearly killed them all resting outside the door of the tent. Perhaps he should do up a flag, and put the bear skull on top of the pole. "I'm Josh Sanders; my wife Annie, and our Megan." "Cornhusker?" Havel said. Sanders had the rasping accent; he also had a grip like a vise. He wasn't trying it on, just damned strong. "Daddy had a farm down to Booneville," Josh Sanders said. Havel recognized the name; it was a small town in southwestern Indiana, which confirmed his guess. "Just a little place, though; he worked construction, too. I lumberjacked some in the woods there, and then up here, up in the Panhandle, and Annie taught school for her church before the baby came; she's Montana-born, grew up on a ranch over to Missoula. I like a place where I can hunt and fish. I've been fishing here, and hunting, but only small stuff, with a slingshot-I know rifles, but not bows. Been keeping us fed since the Change, but only just. The folk in town here are sort of standoffish, not that I blame them." The lumberjack's yellow-haired wife looked healthy and competent, and scared silly but hiding it well. He caught a glimpse of a tattoo under the man's sleeve, part of an anchor. "Squid?" he said. Josh smiled: "Guess it still shows. One hitch out of high school-Seabee. Did a fair bit of construction." The Seabees were the Navy's combat engineers. "You'd be a Jarhead, is my guess." "Semper Fi," Havel nodded. "Mind my asking, how did you get the-" His finger traced the place of Havel's stitched wound on his own forehead. "Got into a close-and-personal argument with a bear, about five days ago." "What happened?" "Bear tastes a lot like pork, but a bit gamier. Better in a stew, or marinated in vinegar." Josh whistled, then nodded as Havel explained the terms: strict discipline, working together, and a possible ultimate share-out in Oregon. "All right," Havel said. "One last thing." He pointed. "Will Hutton here is the number two man in this outfit. Got any problems taking his orders?" "My daddy might have, but the Navy knocked out any of that horseshit left in me," Josh said. "Taking orders doesn't bother me. As long as they aren't damned stupid orders, all the time." The last candidate was a fortysomething man with receding dirty-blond hair, long and stringy. Havel's nose wrinkled slightly at his stale sour smell; the river was right there, and the town wasn't short of soap yet, and there was plenty of firewood to heat water. He had a beaten-down-looking wife who looked older than he did and wasn't; she'd been massive before the Change, and sagged like a deflated balloon now. Their children were twelve and ten and eight, and looked as if they hadn't eaten in quite a while; unnaturally quiet, in fact. Will Hutton stood behind the man, and silently mouthed the word "I'm sorry, Mr. – " "Billy Waters, sir, and please-my children-" "This isn't a charity, Mr. Waters. We may be able to spare a bowl for them." Well behind Havel, Eric and Signe and Luanne were practicing at a mark they'd set up, passing the hunting bow back and forth and laughing together. Waters's eyes lit on them. "Look, sir, I worked for Red Wolf Bows in Missouri," he said desperately. "A few years back, till they laid me off. I can make you more bows, if you get me some tools! Arrows too, and do fletching." Havel halted with his mouth open to speak the words of dismissal. Hutton's eyebrows went up. "Get Astrid, would you, Will?" Havel said. "She'll be able to check what this gentleman says." Bill Waters looked as if he'd like to be indignant when a girl in her early teens showed up to grill him, but his eyes went a little wide when he saw the bow she carried. "Red Wolf?" Astrid said to Havel. "Yes, they make bows-modern-traditional, mostly, custom orders for hunting bows. Recurves. Good quality, but pricey." Her sniff told what she thought of Mr. Waters. He sensed it, and went on: "I was on the floor two years, miss, did every step or helped with it," he said earnestly. "It's a small shop, four men, and I helped 'em all. Hunted some myself with a bow." Havel's eyebrows went up; for a wonder, the man wasn't pretending he'd been head craftsman, rather than dogsbody and assistant. That was probably a measure of his desperation. "You don't look like you've had much luck hunting here," he pointed out. "Ain't got no bow here, sir." Havel had the traditional disdain for hand-to-mouth drifters to be expected in someone who came of four generations of hard-rock miners-unionized workingmen intensely proud of their dangerous, highly skilled labor. It had been amplified in the Corps, where there was no excuse for failure. He was surprised this specimen had ever learned any sort of trade, but perhaps he'd been on the wagon more when he was younger. Astrid asked a question, her voice sharp. Waters answered, and an incomprehensible conversation followed involving tillering and laminations, hotboxes and clamps, hand-shock and finger pinch. "Will," Havel said, after a few sentences. "Take Astrid and Mr. Waters off, and discuss bowmaking, would you? And check him out on the target." He waited, thinking and trying not to listen to the occasional whimpering of Waters's children, or to notice the expression of hopeless pessimism on his wife's face, born of far too many broken promises and failed hopes. Instead he paged through a book of Will's, an illustrated He was looking at the equipment of a Polish "Excuse us for a moment, please," Havel said. Waters stood back by his wife and children as the three spoke; both the adults stared in mute desperation at the conversation they couldn't hear, and flinched when eyes went their way. "He can shoot, Mike," Astrid said. "Better if his hands weren't shaking, but he's quite good-not as good as me, but better than Signe, on moving targets. And he really does know how to make bows. Traditional bows, not compounds-traditional forms with modern materials, that is." Will shrugged. "He can handle woodworker's tools," he said grudgingly, and sounding faintly surprised. "I think I could pick up most of what he knows, in a couple or three months. We'll have to sort of experiment to find out how to use horn and sinew and bone glue instead of fancy wood laminates and fiberglass and epoxy anyways, but we got Astrid's bow to work from." More quietly: "He's still trash, though, Boss. Bad news." "Granted." Havel sighed. "We'll have to give him a try, though; long-term, it's a skill set we really need. I'll put the fear of God in him and we'll see how it works; we can always cut him loose." Waters began babbling as soon as Havel walked towards him, and then cut it short as the younger man nodded to his wife: "Mrs. Waters, why don't you go over there to our cookfire? Angelica Hutton handles our supplies, and I think she could find you and your children something to eat, and help you get settled here." An incredulous smile showed, just for an instant, what Jane Waters had looked like in her last year of high school, and she hustled away moving the children before her as if afraid he'd change his mind. Havel jerked his head, and walked out of hearing distance of the others with Waters beside him. Certain things had to be done in private for decency's sake. "Sir, let me tell you how grateful-" "Can it," Havel said. He didn't raise his voice or gesture, but judging from the doglike grin of submission Waters at least knew a hard man when he met one. The problem with his kind was that the lessons usually didn't stick… "Waters, I know you'd say anything you thought I wanted to hear right now because you're hungry, so save it." The older man made a pathetic attempt at dignity. "Mr. Havel, a man has to feed his children." "That's true. And you must have been some sort of a man once; you learned a trade, at least, and held a steady job for a while. But now you're a loser and a drunk-I know the signs. So let's make things real clear. You listening?" He waited until the man's eyes met his, and he could see that-at least for the moment-he'd stopped running through the perpetual list of excuses that were probably the background music of his life. "I'm taking you on against my better judgment, and this is a taut outfit. I don't tolerate whining, shirking or dirt. You and your family "Yes, sir." "And don't call me sir. I work for a living. Boss will do, if you have to use something besides my name. After you've eaten, you can bring your gear over. Remember what I said about the rules, because if it isn't all ready and all clean by tomorrow morning, you're not coming with us. Move!" |
||
|