by SM Stirling
Shod hooves thudded on the soft rutted dirt or sparked on the odd rock or clattered against bits of asphalt that had survived a generation of flood and frost. Shete and longsword rattled and banged against stirrup-irons occasionally, but the loudest sounds were birdsong and wind in the trees. There were farms set back at the edge of the hills every half mile or so, but none very close.
He spent a moment just enjoying the day and the view. There weren’t many pleasures greater than the feel of a good horse moving beneath you on a fine spring day, with the woman you loved riding at your side.
The apple and cherry orchards were in full blossom on the south-facing slopes, frothing in white like snowdrifts, or pink like cotton candy; he could remember the planting of many of them. The season was far enough along that when the road twisted close the breeze brought not only the blossoms’ cool sweet scent but drifts of petals on a gust of wind, settling now and then in Mary’s long yellow braid of hair, framed against the ridge beyond and the piled clouds catching the westering sun amid an endless blue like her eye.
And that’s just about the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen, Ingolf thought. Like this is just about the prettiest country I’ve ever seen. Of course, I’m prejudiced. The Willamette’s great too, and a lot of what I’ve been through is grand, but this place has my heartroots in it. Always will, even if I never see it again.
The Kickapoo Valley was part of what they’d called the Drift-less area back in the day, which meant it hadn’t been planed flat and buried by glacier-born silt like a lot of the Midwest. Instead it was a maze of valleys like this, separated by steep ridges and little plateaus, spreading like the pattern of veins in a leaf. That had helped keep out most of the waves of cityfolk desperate for food and shelter after the Change, that and distance and plenty of hard fighting. There had been enough food even that first year . . . just enough, despite the waste caused by disruption and ignorance of how to handle it without machines.
The steep slopes of the uplands were a fresh intense green now with the new leaves of sugar maple and basswood, oak and hickory, with the darker green of hemlock and white pine where the land dipped northward, now and then some dark red sandstone where the earth’s bones showed, here and there the cream of flowering dog-wood. There were willows and elm and cottonwood by the river, with dense clumps of Virginia bluebells and geraniums nodding beneath; trailing arbutus and purple-blue wood violet grew by the side of the road.
They rode past a crude statue carved from an oak stump, and Ingolf grinned at the mocking portrait of Richland’s original Bossman; he’d done that himself as a teenager with a couple of friends, just when the man was on a visit, and it had been worth the hickory stick his father applied. Between forest and water were the fields, many plowed in curving strips along the lie of the land, planted with different crops to help hold the soil, a succession of greens lighter or darker or a first fine mist of tender shoots across smooth disk-harrowed brown earth. He looked at them with a countryman’s eye, enjoying seeing them simply for nice as his folk said, but mostly for their promise:
“Just getting the corn planted,” he said, inhaling the mealy-yeasty-musty smell of damp turned earth, as appetizing as fresh bread. “Not before time, either.”
A woman in dungarees and a straw hat was driving a four-row grain drill along the contour not too far away, the twin heads of her team of bay geldings bobbing patiently ahead of her as they strode along. She had a crossbow in an upright holder beside the seat of the planter, but returned his wave in friendly wise.
“Bandits?” Mary asked, eyeing the weapon. “We’re not all that far from the Wild Lands.”
“Possible,” Ingolf acknowledged; this was the edge of civilization, more or less. “Mostly for the hoof-rats, though, I’d guess.”
“Hoof-rats ?”
“Deer, whitetails.”
“Ah, yes. They’re a menace back home too.”
He nodded, though he’d been too busy to hunt while he was there in Montival—mostly too busy recovering from being wounded near to death by Cutter assassins. Deer were a crop-and-garden-devouring pest in most places, what with all the abandoned farmland providing exactly the sort of scrubby edge-country they liked. It had gotten a little better lately as closed-canopy forest spread.
“Though Aunt Astrid insists deer are noble creatures. Not to mention the staple of the Dúnedain diet.”
“What do you think?”
“Hoof-rats,” she said, and they both laughed. “But the wolves and bears and cougars and tigers seem to be catching up, finally.”
“Which if you’re trying to raise livestock—”
“—presents its own problems. On the other hand, tiger skin makes a very nice coat.”
“More excitement getting it than I like.”
Children with slings on bird-scaring detail pointed excitedly at the travelers; the school year ended when the fields dried out enough for work nowadays. One white-headed six-year-old ran beside them for a while with a gap-toothed grin. A man was driving a potato planter behind a four-horse hitch in another field, a clumsy-looking thing like a tapering bin on wheels, its center of gravity dangerously high and all covered in patches and rust. He ignored them; all his attention was on his horses and the set of levers and ropes that controlled the mechanism which opened the furrow, dropped in seed potatoes and covered them up in turn. This time Ingolf laughed aloud.
“What’s funny, my heart?” Mary asked.
“That potato planter.”
She looked, and blinked. “Not much different from most, except that it’s old and mostly metal. Looks pre-Change, nearly. There’s a story attached?”
“Just a memory, really. Back when I was about ten . . . that must have been around Change Year Four . . . my dad and my brother Ed and a farmer named Fritz Ventluka made that. Cut it down and made eight one-row machines from this huge-erific old-time thing that fifty horses couldn’t pull, and we were short of horses then anyway. We didn’t have to go out and plant the spuds by hand that spring, and everybody was happy about that! I helped . . . well, I stood around and handed wrenches and hacksaws and ran for stuff. When it was finished, Dad let me have my first drink of applejack. Mom gave him hell for it, but he tipped me a wink behind her back.”
She reached over and put a hand on his shoulder. “I wish I could have met your father. And your mother.”
Ingolf snorted, trying to imagine it. “Dad . . . Dad could be sort of . . . drastic about things. Never could take being crossed, and he was a hard man when he was angry, or when he’d had one too many. I think Mom would have liked you, but she wouldn’t have shown it. God knows she tried riding roughshod over my sister-in-law Wanda often enough, though she was wild about the grandchildren.”
He shook himself mentally and looked around again. Haying would be the next busy time, but it would be a few weeks at least before the timothy or alfalfa was high enough to bring the mowers out to cut. And there was always the eternal battle with the weeds.
“The oats are in, good, it’s always best to get them planted by the middle of April around here, the shoots are just showing now, see? Winter wheat looks fine, plenty of tiller, no bare patches from winter-kill . . .”
“My love, could we be a little less agricultural?” Mary asked.
“Sorry, melda,” he said with a grin; his Sindarin was still shaky, but he’d mastered the endearments.
He’d also been about to comment that the stock looked in good fettle too—white naked-looking sheared sheep with black faces grazing under the fruit trees with a shepherdess and her collie in attendance, many of them with a lamb at their heels, Angus cattle like square black blocks of flesh in the lower pastures, white-and-black or Jersey milkers. Sows grunted happily as they mowed down young alfalfa with swarms of pink-and-brown piglets tumbling around them.
Ingolf glanced aside at his wife and found her watching fondly as well, and grinned to himself. It was an odd person in today’s world who didn’t find beauty in a well-til
led landscape. Even non-farmers such as the Dúnedain Rangers.
“Sort of like the Shire,” she said, echoing his thought. “The people it’s our duty to protect.”
“Us Rangers,” he agreed.
Apparently you got to be one by being sponsored and also by being able to do a bunch of things. Since the Hiril Dúnedain was Mary’s aunt he didn’t anticipate too many problems getting on the rolls formally.
The fortified Farmers’ homes and their attendant clusters of Refugee cottages and barns and tall silos that dotted the land faded away as they approached Readstown proper; this was the Sheriff’s home-farm, worked from his own place. The state of the road said that traffic had been heavy lately, hoof and wheel both; he was surprised his elder brother hadn’t had a few teams out grading and smoothing.
Then they turned directly northward, onto a stretch that had been asphalt in the old days and still was where it hadn’t been patched with gravel; the river was far enough away to their left that it hadn’t washed out this section during the periodic floods.
“Well, troops are gathering didn’t turn out to be an exaggeration after all,” Mary said. “That explains the road.”
She looked over at the rows of white tents, the men and campfires and picketed horses that occupied a long stretch of pasture between the river and the buildings, running up to the big truck gardens to the north.
“About three, four hundred here, I’d say,” she went on, with an expert’s quick appraisal of numbers.
“Yah,” Ingolf said and nodded agreement. “Maybe a few less, they’ve got a lot of gear with ’em. Or a few more if they’re quartering some of them in the homes. Must be putting everyone’s nerves on edge. And that’s why Ed hasn’t graded the road just lately. Usually we do it as soon as things dry out a bit in spring.”
“No sense in doing it four times if he can wait for the troops to move out and do it once,” Mary said.
“Ed’s . . . not exactly miserly. But he’s tight with things.”
“So he should be,” Mary said. “It’s not like someone sending a beggar away hungry because they won’t spare the scraps. What a lord has comes from his followers, after all. It’s his duty to be careful with their goods and labor.”
Ingolf opened his mouth, closed it again, and nodded. “Yah, I should have thought of that. Maybe I’m not as much over my mad at him as I thought.”
Readstown had been a sprawled-out village of about four hundred people, remote and sleepy ever since its founding around a gristmill not long after white men first settled this land nearly two centuries ago. In the years that followed the Change it had shrunk to a much denser core around the Sheriff’s house—what had become the Sheriff’s house—for reasons ranging from warmth in winter to security against the bands of starving, desperate wanderers who’d gone roaming and reaving in the terrible years, and your odd sneak thief or high-binder or gangs of plain old-fashioned bandits later.
Not to mention various bigger fights over stock and who got the everybody-needs-’em Amish and stuff like that, before the Richland Bossmen knocked some heads together and kicked some butt to create our glorious Free Republic. People did what they had to do in the early days. Dad not least. But that’s part of why he drank too much sometimes. To forget what he had to do.
He’d been just turned five when the Change came; he could remember fear and cold and conversations among the adults that stopped when they noticed him. Now and then someone started acting very strangely, and usually you didn’t see them again. Or they ended up like his aunt Alice, who’d been gently mad and given to sudden fits of tears as she sat at her workbench over a half-finished lute.
Of course, she got caught in Racine at that stupid folk-music festival thing. Never did say how she made it back home. Young as I was I remember her turning up. She was as skinny as anyone I’ve ever seen who didn’t actually die.
“Looks tidier than it did in Dad’s day. A bit more than when we were through last year. Ed keeps plugging away, I’ll give him that.”
It had been worth the labor to link the houses here together into defended courtyards, and later to shift or build more structures into the same complex; just before his father died he’d put up a round stone tower at one corner of the main house with a catapult on a turntable atop it, and sheathed the lower parts of all the buildings with fieldstone batten-walls as well. In the more recent years of peace some new cottages had been built out on their own, and the sawmill and gristmill, of course, and the regional school and the Lutheran and Catholic churches. A teenager he recognized was on mounted sentry-go a little farther up the road.
“Halt!” the boy said, raising a hand. “Who goes . . . Uncle Ingolf, by God! Und Aunt Mary! Yah hey dere! How’s she goin’?”
“She’s goin’, Mark, and hi backatcha. You’re looking pretty military,” Ingolf said.
He was, for someone just turned seventeen and gangly with it. Tallish, six feet and a bit already, but still colt-built, with freckles against pale winter’s skin and corn-tassel hair cut in the rather shaggy local ear-length style. A scattering of nearly invisible hairs on chin and upper lip suggested he was trying to cultivate a beard as well, and failing miserably. But he had a mail shirt with short sleeves on too, over the usual padded undergarment, a helmet that looked like a local blacksmith’s copy of the sallets seen on Rudi’s party last autumn, a shield and quiver on his back and bow in a saddle scabbard at his knee, along with shete, binoculars, bowie and tomahawk at his belt.
Equipped just like me, in fact, Ingolf thought with an amusement he kept off his face. Except for the trumpet, and except that you can see everything came from the best armorer in Richland, or maybe even Des Moines. Plain, but no expense spared . . . no, that mail shirt’s a bit big. Probably allowing him some growing room; those things cost.
“So,” he went on, “they’ve got you out meetin’ und greeting?”
“I’m officer of the watch!” Mark said; his voice rose and cracked slightly, and a fiery blush ran over his fair skin.
Then he nodded at the tented encampment. “It’s Ensign Mark Vogeler, First Richland Volunteer Cavalry, now. Nobody passes wit’out being recognized.”
“Well, I sure hope you recognize me, nephew,” Ingolf said, in lieu of anything more sensible. “Seeing as I put you on your first pony. Ummm . . . Where’s Ed?”
“Dad’s over to the house, out front, last I saw them, with Mom. Talking wit’ a messenger from Richland Center. Uh, pass, friend!”
They legged their horses up to a canter for the last thousand yards.
“He reminds me of me.” Ingolf chuckled when they were far enough away not to be overheard.
“He’s cute. But then, so are you,” Mary said.
She winked, then rubbed at her eye patch. “Ai! I’m still not used to the way that makes me blind for a moment.”
Ed was looking harassed and talking to his wife, Wanda, and both of them were tossing instructions at people who came and went; he was also looking pretty much the way Ingolf suspected he himself would look in fifteen years or so, if his scalp started showing well above the forehead through thinning brown hair—that was on exhibit, as Ed Vogeler swept off his feedstore cap and crushed it in one big knobby fist and pulled in a thunderous curse—and if he let himself develop a beer gut. The thought made him suck in his own stomach a little as they swung down from their horses and handed the reins to a stablehand to be led away, though there currently wasn’t an ounce of spare flesh in the two hundred pounds of muscle that covered his broad-shouldered, big-boned frame.
Not after the things I’ve done these last few years, almost none of which have involved sitting around knocking back the brewskis. Mind you, Wanda brews the best and runs a mean kitchen too.
“So you tell Bill Clements it’s his job to get that fixed!” the Sheriff said to a wiry man in dusty leathers. “Uff da, try collecting any taxes if she goes and we get a flood!”
The courier nodded respectfully, swung into the saddle
, and cantered off northward with two remounts behind him on a leading rein.
Then: “Ingolf!” Ed said, smiling, and they shook hands. “How’s by youse?”
“Ingolf! Mary!”
Wanda hugged him, and then her; she was a motherly-looking blond woman in early middle age, wearing a kerchief around her hair today, and a set of overalls with garden dirt on the knees. And in Ingolf’s considered opinion she was more than half the brains of the Sheriff Vogeler outfit, and three-quarters of the ability to judge people.
Besides being a first-rate manager. She ran the indoor part of the homeplace, which meant everything from the dairy’s butter and cheese to carpet-making, and directing the labor of dozens. But something’s bothering her badly, underneath.
“What’s the Bossman done now?” Ingolf asked.
“It’s dat . . . goddamned dam up at La Farge. I wish they’d never built it!”
“Pretty lake,” Ingolf said, remembering trips there. “Good fishing, too.” He frowned at a memory. “Didn’t Dad say they nearly didn’t build it?”
“Finished just before the Change. Und now the intake tower’s blocked and we’re having a hell of a time getting it cleared.”
The Sheriff crushed the billed cap again; it was pre-Change, a badge of rank, and he made himself relax with obvious effort.
“Glad to see you made it,” he said gruffly.
“Most of us made it,” Ingolf corrected, his tone grim. His eyes looked beyond the busy scene for a moment. “Most.”
“Yah, we figured Pete wasn’t coming back when he didn’t show up after a couple of months. Seeing as he wasn’t planning on going all the way east with you.”