The Sword of the Lady c-3

by S. M. Stirling

  TheSwordoftheLady

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FREE REPUBLIC OF RICHLAND SHERIFFRY OF READSTOWN (FORMERLY

  SOUTHWESTERN WISCONSIN) OCTOBER 8, CHANGE YEAR 24/2022 AD

  ?Getting close,?Ingolf said, rubbing a hand down the neck of his mount.?Soo, Boy, soo,? he said to the horse.?You?ll get a good feed here, even if you were foaled in Nebraska.?

  Rudi Mackenzie nodded, tactfully ignoring the slight hoarseness in the other man?s voice, as if he were choking back unexpected tears; Ingolf?s face was an iron mask locked against a surge of feeling.

  A Mackenzie-any who were Changelings, at least-would weep, returning home after so long, Rudi thought. But customs differ from land to land, and so do the stamp they set on our souls. Wouldn?t it be a duller world, if they did not, so?

  It was a bright fall afternoon, comfortable but with an underlying nip to it. This was farm-and-forest country, but you could tell that the North Woods started not so far away, and that the Wheel of the Year was turning towards the Crone?s dominion, in a land harsher than Oregon Than Montival, he reminded himself; it was growing natural.

  As they rode north along the valley of the Kickapoo from the hamlet at Soldier?s Grove the fields had quickly gone back to scrub and saplings, the usual story of more land than the survivors of the Change had means or reason to till when they no longer used machines to feed cities far away. But for the last hour or two the signs of human habitation had grown thicker again, first the chewed look of land used for rough summer grazing, then fields and the odd farmhouse behind its berm and ditch and barbed wire or palisade.

  Often there was a wary twinkle of spearheads from the defenses or a fighting platform built atop an old silo, or the sight of livestock being driven up the slope of the land towards the woods; just what you?d expect from sensible folk when scores of armed strangers passed by. That alarm diminished as they went, until men and a few women came out to watch them pass with no more than a little caution… and weapons in their hands.

  Then Ingolf laughed aloud as they came upon a man-high oak stump not far from the road. It was roughly carved into the shape of a naked big-nosed troll, but despite the crude work you could see a look of ineffable self-satisfaction on its face and in the way its hands folded across a swag belly; from the weathering and moss, it was at least a decade old and perhaps more. In Mackenzie or Bearkiller territory Rudi would have thought it a roadside shrine, but he doubted that was the purpose here and looked a question at the Readstown man. ?I did that,? Ingolf said, a chuckle still in his voice.?Well, me and Bert Kuykendall and Carl Heisz and Will Uhe, when we were all about twelve. It?s the spitting image of old Bossman Al, Al Clements. He came up from Richland Center that year, doing a tour of his Sheriffs? homeplaces. We snuck out and worked on it after dark, kept it under a pile of brush until the day, and he went right past it and turned… what?s that color, sort of like purple…? ?Puce,? Mary Havel put in, sharing her man?s good humor. ?Yah, puce. Dad wore out a hickory switch on Bert and Carl and Will, and two more on me for setting a bad example, but it was worth sitting down careful for a while. Surprised Ed didn?t have it cut down; he isn?t… wasn?t… much of a man for a joke.? ?Why didn?t your father do just that and take an ax to it, if he was angry, and it annoyed his overlord?? ?He wouldn?t give Clements the satisfaction. Never liked the man. I think he laughed about it to himself, despite the merry hell he gave all four of us. Dad was a hard man on his sons, but he expected us to push back at him. Wanted it too, I think.? ?Ah, and are you also thinking those three friends of your youth will be there to greet you?? Rudi said.

  The smile died.?All dead now. Will put a pitchfork through his foot while he was loading manure that year. He was always a dreamy sort. Got lockjaw, poor bastard.? ?A hard passing,? Rudi said sympathetically, nodding; they?d had drugs for that in the old days, but…

  Ingolf shrugged.?What way isn?t? Unless someone hits you on the head with an ax when you?re not expecting it. Bert and Carl volunteered for the Sioux War and left home with me… Bert got an arrow in the eye a couple of weeks later. We weren?t even to Marshall yet and he wasn?t eighteen when it happened-night attack, just dumb bad luck and our not knowing what the fuck we were doing. Carl was bushwhacked by Eaters in Boston, that last salvage trip east my Villains made. But we collected the head-price for him, and piled the ears on his grave.?

  Rudi nodded again; he?d have expected no less; Ingolf wasn?t a man to let a comrade go unavenged. ?Ritva, Mary,? he said.?Ride ahead and see to our welcome.?

  He reached into his saddlebag and held out a large envelope. ?They?ll have had scouts watching, unless Ed?s let things slip,? Ingolf said.?And odds are someone came ahead when we got off the ship and said who we were and where we were going; they?d have gotten here yesterday, riding fast and switching horses. You can?t drag this many people through the countryside tactfully, but nobody?s looking too upset over us. They must have some idea who we are.? ?To be sure. But I?m thinking it?s best to be formal.? ?With my brother Ed? Yah, you betcha. Always was a stickler.?

  The twins reined around; Ritva took the envelope and Mary paused for an instant to reach out and touch Ingolf?s hand before she leaned forward and brought her Arab mare, Rochael, up to a canter with a shift of balance.

  Rudi waited for another fifteen minutes of travel amid the stuttering clop of scores of hooves, creak of saddle and harness, grind of wheels and the thud as one rose and fell over a rock in the roadway, then threw up his clenched right fist. The long caravan came slowly to a halt behind him, with a squeal of brakes and a neighing of horses and curses in two languages and several dialects. There were six big wagons there, and nearly a hundred folk.

  It?s a migration, not a quest! he thought. The which is a giant flag to attract attention and an inconvenience, so it is. Finding three pounds of food per head per day… it?s a lesson in logistics! Or a pain in the arse. But the Southsiders will be worth their weight in gold farther east-more than worth it, for the savages don?t want to eat gold.

  Then aloud:?We?ll await them here. It?s… polite.?

  His comrades followed his example as he dismounted, stretching and twisting in relief; it had been a long day in the saddle. Virginia Kane didn?t only twist and reach, but frankly rubbed and kneaded her buttocks. ?I got outta condition in Iowa,? she said.? And on that damn boat. Too much sittin?, not enough ridin?.? ?I wish you wouldn?t do that,? Fred Thurston said to her.?It makes me want to do it too.? ?What, rub your butt? Why not? We ain?t none of us picky about parlor manners, that I noticed.?Cept Odard, and that?s his problem.?

  The baron of Gervais bowed and blew her a kiss, which she answered with a raised finger. Fred grinned and replied: ?No, it makes me want to rub yours.? ?Now you?re talkin?, lover boy!?

  She unhitched her lariat from the saddle and swatted him on the backside with the coil. ?Let?s go get those remounts bridled and on leading reins; they?ll be skittish?round strange horses. More fun than talking anyhow. ?Specially talkin? to farmers.?

  She looked around at the valley that held Readstown.?This country?s too… too crowded with country, you ask me. I feel like I?m stuck in a closet and something?s hidin? behind them hills and trees.? ?You know, Chief, the Rocky Mountains were grand,? Edain said, when she?d dropped back.

  They stood with the breeze cuffing at their plaids and ruffling the raven feathers in the clasp of his flat bonnet, the tuft of wolf fur in Edain?s.

  The young man of the Wolf totem went on, with a glance at Virginia over his shoulder where she was roping a skittish piebald: ?And the deserts, and the plains-well, the Lord and Lady made all lands beautiful in their own way, but after a while the flatlands had me feelin? like a bug on a tabletop, and someone about to swat me and say sorry, little brother and flick the body off the table with thumb and finger for Garbh to snap up.?

  The big shaggy beast rose at the sound of her name and butted her head under his hand. He ruffled her ears absently and went on as she grinned and squirmed and leaned against him: ?This now… It isn?t
home, but it?s more homelike than most of what we?ve seen, sure and it is.? ?I had the same buglike feeling on the plains, boyo,? Rudi said. ?It?s all where you?re raised, I suppose. And this is a delight to the eye, and no mistake.?

  It was a pleasure to look around, and at the same time it sent a lance of pain up under his ribs. There was no alarm now, so Ingolf?s thought of scouts and messengers preceding them were probably the truth. He saw folk at work in the fields heaving wicker baskets of potatoes onto a wagon, a shepherd with her dogs, a bow across her back and her crook in her hand amid the dun-white flow of her charges, the people of a farmstead laying fresh shingles on their roofs against the coming winter with the raw wood yellow amid the faded brown of the older layers. The tack… tack… of the hammers sounded, faint with distance.

  At home they?d be doing those homely tasks too, and hanging Brigid?s crosses from the roof-trees, and making the costumes ready for Samhain… ?It?s a comely place that bred you, Ingolf, that?s a fact,? he said. ?It sure is,? the older man said quietly, a half smile on his battered, bearded face.

  He hadn?t seen this land since he left as a boy of nineteen, younger than Edain was now. There was a hungry look in his dark blue eyes as he went on: ?Pretty as I remember, and then some. Fair is the land, fair to the harvest… I thought about this a lot, in some real bad places. Seeing myself riding up this road, in my head, you know??

  The track their train of jolting wagons had followed up the winding river was dry brown dirt, and deep-rutted where wheels and hooves had churned it during the rains. The old paved road ran down closer to the Kickapoo except where streamside cliffs forced it away, and it looked as if the water had risen and bitten chunks out of it every other season over the past generation, not to mention the locals mining what remained for asphalt. Little was left but patches overrun by vine and shrub and eager sapling.

  They were heading more or less northeast, in the strip of cleared land between the river and rolling hills covered in dense forests. The whole area was like that, from where they?d left the ship at the junction of the Kickapoo and the Wisconsin River; low wooded ridges rising to tablelands, and valleys between, one opening into another with creeks flowing down them like the veins in a leaf.

  That much you could have gotten from a map, Rudi thought.

  But not the way mist lay along the twisting river in drifts of soft-edged silver over water that was icy crystal between the tree-clad banks. Nor how the hills were a rumpled crimson and blush-red and yellow-gold shout of sugar maple and oak, basswood and birch and hickory, punctuated here and there by the solid dark green of hemlock and pine, or occasionally a stretch of cinnamon-colored bare sandstone. The cool musty-clean scent of the autumn woods mingled with a little tang of hearth smoke and the mealy richness of damp turned earth, and an occasional pungent waft of manure. The sky was aching-blue above, empty save for the lonely honking of a wedge of geese, a string of black dots drifting southward.

  The breeze gusted stronger, and a flight of leaves soared towards them from a lone maple like tumbling coins of ruddy copper or a swirl of butterflies fashioned from flame. Ingolf?s lips moved silently for a moment. Then he surprised the Mackenzie by reciting, absently and under his breath, as if to himself: ?Let this be the verse you grave for me:

  Here he lies where he long?d to be;

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

  And the hunter home from the hill.?

  It wasn?t a poem Rudi had heard before. Though it was lovely, the clansman still made the sign of the Horns against ill luck with his right hand-down on his thigh where it was out of sight from the other man. He?d be melancholy himself, had his wanderings gone on so long before a return that was no true homecoming, but it wasn?t a good idea to speak your own memorial aloud that way.

  You never knew when Someone with a whimsical sense of humor was listening.

  Well, well, he thought, with a sideways glance at his friend. And it?s often a man will surprise you, even if you?ve been long on the road with him and fought and hunted and worked side by side, yes, and drunk beer and sung and laughed together times beyond counting. ?A fine land indeed,? he repeated aloud instead.?Even better than your tales of it.?

  Which was true; Ingolf wasn?t clumsy of tongue, but he wasn?t a bard either, and the land about Readstown deserved one. This country didn?t have the endless fat black earth of Iowa, but there was forest in plenty for game and timber and room for the soul to breathe when you were alone in the wildwood, and fast streams for mills and to delight the eye and ear. Between woods and water was the rolling ground where those of humankind made their own particular and ancient pact with Earth the Mother, one born of sweat and hope, pain and love and a lifetime?s striving.

  The fields were edged with post and board fences, cultivated in gently curving strips along the contours, signs of the only wealth that was really real. Pastures within had the seared green color that came after the first frosts, somehow more vivid for being a bit faded. They were dotted with plump white-and-black spotted milch cows with full udders swinging as they walked, black Angus or red-coated Herefords like bricks of flesh, and horses that ranged from ponies to huge hairy-hoofed draught beasts. There were ranked orchards where a few late apples still glowed, and sheep grazed beneath the neatly trimmed trees or fat brown pigs rooted and snuffled after windfalls. The potato fields were lumpy-brown, already dug and looking untidy as they always did; others had the blue-green mist over earth plowed and harrowed smooth that marked winter wheat or barley. Sprawling pumpkins on their vines were vivid orange between rustling brown tripods of Indian corn in stubblefields.

  Here and there solid stone-and-brick farmhouses stood with smoke trailing from their chimneys and those of the cottages that huddled near them like chicks about their mother. Silos reared tall as castle towers from a distance, and thatched wheat ricks in their yards like conical huts of gold. Tatters of red paint clung to hip-roofed barns now mostly the brown-gray of weathered plank, once or twice the odd curved sheet-metal shapes the old world had used just before the end.

  Rudi sighed; there wasn?t time to admire the view. Right now the inhabitants should be more his concern.

  Ritva and Mary came trotting back along the roadway on their dapple-gray Arabs, giving him the peace sign to show their mission had been successful. With them came a party of a dozen locals mounted on strong cobby-nondescript saddle horses of no particular breed. They rode in a creak of leather and hollow thudding clop of shod hooves on soft dirt, grouped around a middle-aged, brown-bearded man who was.. . ?Ed,? Ingolf said quietly, as if to himself.?Still looking constipated full-time, I see.?

  Edward Vogeler, Rudi thought as the words confirmed his guess.

  And he did look tight-mouthed; not as if he never smiled, but as if he thought three times before he did.

  Ogma, whose words fall sweet on the ear as honey on the tongue, lend me Your eloquence. A quarrel we do not need, so. It?s guesting we seek, and open-handed helpfulness.

  Rudi gave the group a warrior?s swift instinctive once-over as they reined in, soothing Epona?s snort with a hand on her neck. Four wore short mail shirts and kettle helmets like bluntly pointed hats with drooping brims. All had long horseman?s shetes and bowie knives at their sword belts, with tomahawks thrust through a loop at the rear. Most had quivers and shields on their backs and recurve bows in saddle scabbards at their knees as well. And they looked as if they would no more go riding abroad without the weapons than they would without their rough practical clothes of home-spun wool and leather or their shapeless floppy-brimmed hats and battered billed caps.

  The Sheriff?s household retainers and his kin, Rudi judged, as he saw them give him and his followers the same appraisal, like an image in a mirror. What they call?deputies? in these lands.

  Not full-time fighting men, but well used to weapons and to working with each other and their lord; probably the core of his war levy, when he called out the land folk, and his right and left hands the rest of the time.

&n
bsp; Good practical workmanlike sorts at war, I?d judge, as they would be at felling a tree or hunting a deer or building a house, he thought.

  They were big fair men, only half of them old enough to be bearded beyond patchy wisps but nearly all in their full hard-muscled, thick-armed strength; the eyes were light against their weather-beaten tans, hair mostly in various shades of brown and blond and red. Ingolf had told him how this region had been settled by Norski and Deutsch long ago, with a dash of Yankee and Gael, Polaki and Czech and others, all long since melded into a single folk deep-rooted in the land. The way they wore their hair-locks hacked off level with their jaws, beards clipped close-made Rudi suddenly look at his friend again; only now did he realize it was the fashion of his homeland rather than a mere whim.

  One of the riders stood out, though he rode towards the rear; he was beardless and ruddy-brown of skin, with high cheeks and long braids confined by a headband, a feather in the band of his broad-brimmed hat and beadwork on the sheath of his bowie. His hair had probably been raven black before it went white and gray, and his face was a net of leathery wrinkles. The Indian nodded gravely to Ingolf as the whole party drew rein and raised his hand in a sign of greeting that the wanderer returned.

  The youngest of the Readstown men was about sixteen, with hands and feet a little too big for his gangling height. He looked enough like Ingolf to be his son, save for a mop of yellow hair still streaked with summer?s faded tow white. ?Uncle Ingolf!? he called, grinning as if to split his freckled face.?Remember how you put me on my first pony??

  Ingolf blinked.?Mark?? he blurted.?Little Markie? Jesus Christ, but you?ve grown!?

  Rudi kept his smile to himself. An exile tended to think that nothing changed in his absence, that home remained like a picture hung on the wall of memory with everything frozen as it was. To think that way below the surface, at least; it would be well to remember that his own homeland was living its own life without him to watch. The thought made his smile die and the longing to ride up the road and see the gates of Dun Juniper even stronger. ?Quiet, son,? the leader of the Readstown men said to the youth. ?Save it for later. This is man talk.?