Dies the Fire

by S. M. Stirling

  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.

  Problem is, I can teach you dirty fighting, and how to use a knife, he thought. If guns still worked, I could make you into a pretty good shot in a couple of months. But damned if I can tell you how to use a bow or a sword or a spear … which I suspect are going to matter more from now on.

  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 we to do it." Better than dwelling on our losses, at least.

  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 creep
y 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."

  If any of the neighbors are still alive in a couple of months, that might be an asset, Havel thought. Unless someone's simply moved in and taken over.

  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. You know, that makes an uncomfortable amount of sense, he thought. And Ken Larsson is no fool. Not any sort of a fighting man, but he can think, and he's got the best education of any of us here.

  "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!"

  Chapter

  Ten

  Fourteen days since whatever-it-was, Mike Havel thought, looking around the clearing just off Highway 12 where the Huttons had made their camp until the bandits came.

  Christ Jesus!

  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: I'll never fly again.

  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 lot more gear when they headed west.

  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 very sick of game stew by then.

  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 this high, otherwise the horses can't pull good and we'll chance hurting them if we load the wagon full. Too much weight on their withers."

  Ken pivoted himself o
n 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, here"—he thumped his fist on the midpoint of the decking, just forward of the axle—"through the crossbeam under the plywood, then run some rope or cable forward to the top of the A-section."

  "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."

  Damn, he thought as the two older men started rooting around in Hutton's capacious toolboxes, smiling a crooked smile to himself.

  I got out of the Corps because I could see myself as Gun-ney Winters, with twenty years' service hammering me until I fit perfectly into a Gunnery Sergeant-shaped hole … and here it's going to happen anyway.

  "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.