Vampire's Dilemma

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  “You remember…before the Change?” asked the smaller boy.

  “Surely do.”

  “That’s a gol-danged lie!” blurted the bigger boy hotly. “Pa, he just wants to get us off by our onlies and—”

  Moving fast as he could, Farmer took the boy and hoisted him up with a hand to his throat, the boy’s toe-tips off the ground, holding him at arm’s length and to the side in case the boy took a notion to kick with those thick boots. Wouldn’t do serious harm, but could damage their still shaky willingness to trust him; and that would get them killed, or worse. With his other hand, Farmer flicked the digging stick away before the boy could think to make a weapon of it, spinning so he was holding the boy between himself and Fanshaw’s corn knife.

  “It’s a serious thing,” Farmer mentioned, “to question somebody’s word, when words are the only stock in trade he has. Not a thing to do lightly. If all I wanted was to feed on you, I already would have done it, no need of chat or getting you anyplace but where you are. Could take the three of you right now, and then go on back to the shack and collect the women for afters.” Carefully, he let the boy drop with neck still intact, though red faced and wheezing from the pressure. Farmer stood clear, to see how things were going to go. Then the mule let fly with both hind feet at the dun’s head, and the dun reared, and everybody ducked away from the brangle.

  The lesser violence defused the greater. Farmer had seen that happen before.

  Fanshaw was smacking the elder boy down, calling him Morton; so Dicken was the younger one, willing to believe in miracles like helpful strangers.

  Turning, holding Morton by the ear, Fanshaw said, “Farmer, I apologize for my boy, he had no call to say what he did. Morton, make your manners.” Fanshaw twisted the ear, and the boy winced and ouched, then did as he was bid, grinding out an insincere, “Sorry.”

  “No harm done,” Farmer allowed easily.

  “Why don’t you come up to the house, and…and we’ll talk this all out,” Fanshaw continued, stumbling over what had plainly started out as an offer of a meal.

  “Can do that,” Farmer agreed, glancing to the indeterminate glow of the descending sun, “but it would be best not to lose the light. No good roads yet, and going will be slow. I’m provided for. Horse, it does for me. Good enough to serve. I’m fed up all fine for awhile yet.”

  The dun, still looking for a chance to bite the mule, lifted its head in a way that showed plainly the brand of healing scars high on its neck, just back from the curve of the jaw. Fanshaw ran a hand through his hair, back to front, leaving it in sweaty tufts, plainly reassured and trying not to show it. He led off, and the boys followed dragging the nervous mule. Keeping his distance, Farmer followed, hoping the damn horse wasn’t going to get him in more trouble but not expecting it from long experience.

  2.

  What Fanshaw had been dancing around was that their eldest was a girl, and a pretty one. Smelled good, too: having her monthlies. Farmer could avoid letting on he noticed, but the awareness made him feel awkward because humans, specially virgins, considered such things supremely private and she wouldn’t like him knowing the half of what he knew of her just by smell.

  Went without saying she was bony, but the bones were arranged very nice with very nice padding on top, too, what there was of it. Slender was a word that came to his mind. Brown hair down to her ass, which was something he liked, a shimmering curtain that flashed and spun as she moved around the room, arguing a dozen to the minute against picking up and moving on just on a stranger’s word, slapping plates down like remembered gunshots. Fanshaw shot Farmer apologetic glances but it was plain the girl was the princess of the place, soft-handed and imperious, not required to spend the day bent over furrows of tilled earth with a digging stick in her hand.

  Her name was Marianna.

  Invited in, he could have stayed while the family had their meal. But when he’d had his say again, about how the band of Wildings had been turned away at the last settlement to eastward, Kings Ford, and were spreading west from there along the slope and shallows of the land, he made the excuse of taking his horse to the trough to let them have it out among themselves. No use to arguing it himself. They’d either persuade one another to sense, or they wouldn’t, and he’d smell out another chimney to carry his warning to. Couldn’t rescue them all, and a new settlement had no trained militia to carry warning to the outliers. That would be to come, when the ratio was right, the balance achieved, and enough males of fighting age could be safely removed from the breeding pool. Took a hundred humans to support a vamp, winter and summer. And there were always Wildings among the turnings, fledges wanting nothing more than to cut a bloody swath among their former family, friends, and neighbors with no thought of next year and the year after that. No matter what care you took in choosing, you never knew for sure how the turning would take until the fledgling rose. He’d seen men and women powerful in the spirit go feral that way, overcome with ravening bloodlust—friends, most of them. Had to put them down. A lingering sadness to him still.

  If all were wolves and none were sheep, where were the new sheep to come from?

  He called himself Farmer because some people had got into the habit of calling him that, the last place he’d stayed in for any length of years, and there’d been no point in correcting them. He had a secret name in his heart that he hadn’t told anyone in a very long time. Any other name, it didn’t signify. But if he’d had to choose a public name, it would have been Shepherd. Except there were no sheep, anymore, so it would only have been confusing. If not his true name, that went back to the before, his forever name, then any name would do.

  The dun was cool, so he let it drink its fill at the trough and then tethered it to the ring of a shed door, removed the blanket and surcingle that served as a saddle, laid the slung carry-bags aside, and rubbed the horse down with a mat of grass. Back at Kings Ford, there’d been a man training himself up as a blacksmith, recreating a lost craft by trial and error. Thanks to being well-shod, the dun’s feet were still sound despite months of roadless travel. Farmer wondered if the smith would find an apprentice and then send his student on, as was beginning to happen in other trades. Weavers, they were particularly hard to find. A Hub with a weaver could pretty nearly name its own price for its goods. Lots of carpenters, though: that craft had never fully died out. And to serve the hobbyists, there’d been books, and some of them had survived to be copied and spread, seed on the wind. But weavers were scarce.

  He thought he’d noticed a small loom in the house. When packing up the goods, he’d make sure it wasn’t left behind.

  Being optimistic, he collected split rails from behind the shed to form into a travois. That was another craft that was lost: wheelwright. Wheels made roads because wheels were fragile and took an investment of time and learning and skill to make; and nobody had the leisure to build roads. So a wheeled vehicle bigger than a wheelbarrow was a vanishing rarity. He couldn’t recollect seeing one for seventy years or more. Whereas anybody could slap together a travois in a few minutes, and it would generally hold together long enough to get you and your goods (or your Granny) from here to there.

  Coming around the shed with four twelve-foot rails laid across his arms, he was startled to find Marianna waiting in the yard; and she in turn was plainly startled to see him carrying the weight of several bygone telephone poles like awkward kindling. Careful not to catch her with the swing of the rails, Farmer laid them in the open space between the well and the shed, where it was level and therefore would be easier to pack and stack goods from the house and outbuildings.

  “Well, you seem to have convinced Pa we’ll all be eaten in our beds if we stay,” said Marianna tartly. “So show me what we’re trusting with everything we have. Show me the face.”

  Straightening, Farmer obligingly changed aspect, giving her a good look at the ridged brow, saffron eyes, and fangs of trueface. “It’s not just the face, though that seems what most folks notice or remembe
r. It goes all through.”

  He’d only meant to be factual but apparently she took it as suggestive, neck and face turning rosy with embarrassment and scent intensifying with bodily awareness. Farmer ducked away, silently damning the skittishness of virgins. “Could use an axe or a saw, whatever you’ve got. And some rope. Heavy blanket, ’less you want to be spilling your goods halfway to perdition.”

  And damn, that could be taken wrong, too, if you were hypersensitive and tried very hard to put the worst possible interpretation on it.

  Damn all virgins anyway.

  * * * *

  Even though they decided, they couldn’t get collected before twilight or off before dark. Even at that, walking away from the plowed land, they were still wrangling about what had to be left behind as too bulky either to pack or to carry. With luck, Farmer reminded them, they could come back with an escort and collect the rest, since Wildings had no use for such things. That was, of course, assuming that they didn’t burn down the house and outbuildings out of spite, as sometimes happened, Wildings having a sort of love-hate relationship with fire. Hard to explain, actually; Farmer said they’d just have to trust him about that. Since they’d made up their minds to trust him about the rest, this extra seemed no harder.

  However, he’d made sure the loom was lashed onto the mule’s travois well clear of kicking distance and determined that Fanshaw’s grandma, Lily, was the one that knew the using of it and saw her well stowed too, in a bentwood rocker lashed to the top of the pile the dun was drawing, rocking and tilting like a howdah. Not too many years left in her by the look of her, a spindling crone of forty, but maybe time to teach the most of her craft before she went into the ground.

  Some of the Kindred advocated the turning of those with scarce crafts, to preserve them in living memory, but Farmer wasn’t among them. Let the natural cycles alone. They’d been messed with enough. The more you tried to control, the more there was to control, and it all went skewjaw in the end because nobody could control everything and it was futile and wrong to try. He was of the let-‘em-be minimal interference persuasion. But because that meant he didn’t try to control what others thought or did, there were Preservationist enclaves enough to hold the balance in case he was wrong.

  He’d offered the dun’s back to whoever Fanshaw thought most in need of it, and that had been the pregnant wife, Ariole. She was perched up there on the makeshift panniers, scared to death, jerking at every noise. Dun wasn’t all that enthused about her either, and tried a couple of times to take off her dangling toes, but Farmer was watching for that and switched the horse’s head straight whenever it started to turn, evil-eyed, against slack of the lead rein.

  The rest walked, making out the ground ahead by the yellow light of a lantern strung to the top of the mule’s travois. Leading the dun, Farmer was content to take rearguard, not having been in this country long enough to memorize each dip in the land and not needing the lantern to see his way any more than the horse did. Trueface greyed the starless dark to twilight. He could see to the horizon and the lay of the land between; and whatever breathed and had a heartbeat showed up brighter to him than red noonday. Rabbits, mostly, the midsize rats you saw around nowadays, and a few deer at a distance lifting eyes shining green, warily watching them pass.

  Fanshaw had been leery of showing a light, but Farmer’d assured him it would be no extra problem, and that was so. What he hadn’t said was that if Wilders crossed their backtrail before sunup, the light wouldn’t make any difference: the Wilders would smell them out and run them down in short order.

  The boys were real curious about the settlement, the Hub—what sort of people were there, and how they lived, and what there was to do on a Saturday night, although they used different words for it. They’d lived on the farmstead all their lives, so even the idea of a communal well was an eye-popping novelty. The girl was curious, too, but had her nose too high in the air to let on. Only when Farmer got started on the players did she condescend to drift into obvious listening distance.

  That was the initial settlers’ notion of a money-maker and an aid to social cohesion: invent and put on plays on a regular basis. Before planting and after harvest, at least. Would draw interest from the territory roundabout, they theorized, which meant more trade and a larger population as people abandoned the isolated farmsteads and resettled where the Kulture obviously was. More population meant a larger militia, meant a larger area that could be put under active tillage, and everybody would be prosperous and happy forever.

  Yeah, right.

  Obviously they had no experience with the vicious social warfare that was amateur theatrics, but Farmer wasn’t discouraging them. Let it play out, see how it went. This might be the exception. Times were different now. Might work, was his theory.

  He was spinning a tale of an earnest proletariat play he’d seen put on one time in the Old North Territories about a vicious landholder and his virtuous serfs that’d gone a little too close to the bone (which of course meant trying to explain proletariat, serfs, and half a dozen other concepts whose words had died over the centuries). The play had resulted in the whole community going on strike and a retaliatory lockout and (after several more developments) the formal beheading of the landholder in question. He was explaining how that was pretty well a paradigm of civil law, vigilantism, and the hazards of putting on too-realistic plays with your boss’s daughter in a lead role, when he and the dun both caught a sound and a smell and threw up their heads and rolled their eyes, except that his, of course, were yellow.

  “Think it’d be a good idea to take a breather,” he called to Fanshaw, and handed off the switch and the reins to Morton, who seemed the more sensible of the pair, with a stern warning. “Stay clear of both ends,” he advised, backing away, then turned, light-footed, and slid off into the dark.

  Wasn’t scanning for the red haze of prey or listening for heartbeats. Vamps didn’t have much smell, but some; and that personal scent was, sadly, known to him. And if the owner of that smell had gone deliberately upwind of him, knowing the scent would be caught, then it was implicitly an offer to parley before a fight. Because she knew him, too.

  Standing in a likely place, the edge of a gully, Farmer called quietly, “Hi, Booker.”

  The reply was breathy, yet bodiless. Seemed she’d given up breathing since last he’d known her and had got out of practice. Well, it’d been a long while. “Hi, Michael. Long time no see. But that’s not the name I’m using anymore.”

  “Me neither. Going by ‘Farmer,’ these days.”

  “Farmer: that’s a laugh. Me, I’m going by ‘Wolf.’”

  Which wasn’t a laugh at all. Then again, Farmer hadn’t really expected it to be.

  3.

  Hunkering down to a comfortable, balanced crouch he could come out of very fast, Farmer asked, “So what happened to the library?” Because if the vamp once called “Booker” was a thousand miles from the Old North Territories and hunting again, calling herself “Wolf” in a voice choked with bitterness, it meant that the library was gone and likely all who’d tended it. He knew that, just from the fact of her.

  It made him sad: that library had been the first, founded a century or more back—a good, hopeful thing; and vamps, with their long memories, were the best to tend it, knowing the valuable from the rubbish, with few needs to distract them from their chosen task. There’d been a round dozen of them, he recalled—mature vamps—and twice that number of minions working under their direction. It’d taken a community of over a thousand to support them. Nearly a city.

  Receiving no answer, he asked, “So are they gone, then?”

  “Gone. All gone,” Wolf confirmed…from another place, farther to his left. Uneasy, maybe; hunting, maybe. Hunting him: the only thing standing between the hunters and the unknowing prey.

  He heard them now, and lifted his head, attending. Four, he thought: clumsy fledges, surprised by the gully, one of them stumbling at the edge and making quite a racket in
falling.

  Not close yet, but maybe a feint, a distraction, and more experienced vamps coming up from the opposite side, behind him. That would be how he would play it, if he had a proper militia to call upon against a Wilder in the open.

  But all he had was a lone apprentice left behind to start organizing things, not yet old enough to endure even the thin, attenuated sunlight.

  Quietly, he began gathering water-smoothed, hand-sized stones, asking, “How’d that come to be, then?”

  Suddenly, she was there before him: dressed in scraps of well-tanned leather laced together, scarcely any additional scent. Barefooted and truefaced, in a wide-legged stance, dark tangled hair with a few large feathers tied in. Barehanded: the Wilders disdained the use of tools, weapons, claiming that what they were was all they needed. Or had, last chance he’d had to talk to one.

  “They burned us out,” Wolf announced, golden eyes wide, as though the fact still astonished her. “Not strangers—our own…community. Feared the stored knowledge, decided it was magic, therefore dangerous, afraid of the power they thought it gave us over them. Feared us, though we’d taken no blood but by consent in twenty generations. Took us by day, so the acolytes and scribes burned, some trying to get the books to safety. But it was no use. It all burned. All gone. Only a few of the eldest survived, and some were idiot enough to try to persuade the community of the wrong they’d done. They were taken and burned, too. With fire. Bitter and I were a year killing them all. Some during the day and a few every night. Turned a few and set them on their families and their neighbors. When no humans were left, we set it all afire and pitched the fledges in, so none of that blood would survive.”