Dies the Fire

by S. M. Stirling

They went past the line of dead-carts; the guards keeping the workers to their tasks on that detail wore scarves over their mouths, and stood well back. Another civilian overseer—this time a fussy-looking middle-aged white accountant type—intercepted them. Besides his clipboard, he wore a suit and tie, the first one Eddie had seen since right after the Change.

  "Doesn't anyone listen?" he half shrieked, looking at the disks around their necks. "South from here! See that building?"

  He pointed to a tall glass-sheathed tower with beveled edges. As Eddie followed the finger, he saw a rhythmic blink of light from the roof; some sort of coded signal, worked with lights.

  "That's the Fox Tower. Stop two blocks west of it and then turn south. Straight south to the Park Blocks; that's where the sorting is today. And you'd better be careful; the Protector himself is there this time!"

  "The Protector?" Eddie asked. "He the man, here?"

  The clerk's lips went tight. "You'll see. And you'd better be respectful."

  Eddie looked at the line of spears, and the burning ground. Several other pillars of black smoke rose from the city, and now that he knew what they were he could easily tell them from the ordinary plumes from random fires.

  "Oh, yeah, duibuqi, so sorry, no disrespecting, man. None at all."

  The streets were mostly empty; the long rectangle of park swarmed. Several of the big grassy areas had been fenced off; some held horses, others men learning to ride horses; one fell off and staggered to his feet clutching an arm as Eddie watched.

  Much of the rest of the park had been converted to vegetable gardens; a whiff told him where the fertilizer had come from. And another line of spearmen was prodding several score men with disks around their necks towards a small baseball park with bleachers, the kind neighborhood kids would have used back before the Change. Another man with a clipboard waited there; he had a belt with tools around his waist; beside him cooks were boiling something in big pots over wood fires. It smelled like porridge of some sort, and Eddie could hear Mack's stomach rumbling.

  The man with the tools shouted for silence.

  "All right," he said, when the newcomers had damped down the rumble of their talk. "First thing, anyone lies to us is really going to regret it—but not for long. Understand?"

  Eddie preempted Mack's question: "He means if you lie and they find out, they'll off you."

  "Oh," Mack said, nodding thoughtfully.

  "We need skilled workers," Mr. Handyman went on. "Any blacksmiths first and foremost. Farriers too."

  "Well, that lets us out," Eddie murmured; the closest he'd come to blacksmithing was a few hours of shop in high school, and he didn't even recognize the name for the other trade.

  "Plumbers, fitters, machinists, bricklayers, carpenters," the man went on. "Doctors, dentists. Gardeners and farmers too. Line up over there at the desks and give the details. And people, do not lie. General laborers over here."

  Over here had another bunch of tough guards, and a bin full of metal collars.

  No, not my thing, Eddie thought.

  There was a scattering of men and women sitting in the bleachers around the baseball field, mostly close up by home base. There were also racks of weapons near the entrance— spears and shields—and an alert-looking squad with crossbows.

  Eddie nodded, unsurprised. Yeah. An elimination event.

  Also there was a big horse-drawn carriage, the type they'd used to show tourists around town before the Change; it had four glossy black horses hitched to it, and another couple standing saddled nearby, with collared servants holding them. Plus six or seven big armored men, standing by their mounts. Eddie's status-antennae fingered them for muscle.

  One more servant sat in the carriage, holding up a lacy parasol—a blond chick, and a real stunner, dressed in something out of a pervert's catalogue and a silver collar. Across from her was a woman in her twenties, a brunette— no collar, and a fancy dress. Leaning back against the side of the carriage with his arms negligently spread along the top of the door was a tall man who seemed to be clad in a rippling metal sheath.

  A little closer, and Eddie could see that it was armor— thousands of small burnished stainless-steel washers, held on to a flexible backing with little copper rivets through the holes in their center; it clad the man from neck to knees, slit up the back and front so that he could ride a horse.

  Around his narrow waist he wore a leather belt carrying a long double-edged sword and a dagger; over his broad shoulders went a black silk cloak; on his feet high black boots with golden spurs on the heels. A servant nearby held his shield and a helmet, hammered steel with hinged cheek-pieces and a tall raven-feather plume.

  The face above the glittering armor was narrow and aquiline; the hazel eyes that surveyed the field were the coldest the young man had ever seen. Eddie estimated his age somewhere between thirty and forty; that sort of bony look didn't show the years much.

  I think I'm in love, he grinned to himself. Man, this dude is bad! Look at those chicks, that carriage, that gear, all of this. I want a piece of it. Oh, sweet motherfucking Jesus, do I!

  "Hey!" he shouted aloud. "I didn't come here to shovel shit. I came here to join the Association and fight. I want to be with you when you move out of Portland."

  Mack rumbled agreement, and about a dozen others among the crowd did as well; none of them had come through since the Change looking plump but they were notably less gaunt than the others.

  The man in the coat of rings shifted his gaze to Eddie, coming erect with lazy grace. He walked nearer, the muscle just behind.

  "And what makes you think we're leaving Portland?" he said softly, he had an educated man's voice, calm and precise.

  Eddie met his eyes, forcing himself not to flinch or show the sudden rush of cold anxiety that ran from crotch up to stomach.

  "Because that's where it all is, now," he said. "The farmers and the farms, that's everything. If you've got them, you've got everything."

  A guard bristled. "You call the Protector 'sir', cocksucker, or 'Protector'."

  A thin brow crooked up, and the man raised a hand for quiet. "Why did you come into town, then?"

  "I figured, what with the panic and all, probably not all the food got eaten right after the Change. Just the stuff in stores, maybe canned goods in warehouses, that sort of thing. But the bulk stuff, the wheat and like that in the silos and elevators, maybe on ships, a lot of it wouldn't get taken. Whoever got a grip on that could build up their own army—and it'll take an army to squeeze those farmers out in the valley. Freelancing don't cut it anymore. I heard some rumors about you, and I figured that was what was going on. Protector. Sir."

  "Well, well, well," the lord of Portland said. "We've got one with brains. Perhaps I'll have a use for you. Any education?"

  Eddie shrugged and grinned. "Two years community college," he said. "And the school of hard knocks."

  "More hard knocks we can arrange," the man said. He nodded his head towards the baseball field. "It takes a special sort of man to be an Associate. We have a little contest first, a chance to show your quality. The winners are inducted into our ranks, if they're not too badly crippled."

  Eddie nodded. "Figured it would be like that, from your setup," he said calmly. "One question, Protector?" At the nod he went ahead. "How come you figured things out so fast?"

  The man smiled, and gestured another bristling guard back. "I was a man who realized what the Change meant," he said.

  He clapped his hands sharply. "Let the play-offs begin!"

  Chapter

  Fifteen

  "I'm surprised," Will Hutton said a week later. "Hadn't expected gratitude to last so long, but they still love us."

  Havel grinned as he watched the bustle of the Bearkiller camp; the fresh morning air smelled of horses and canvas, cooking meat and baking bread and a little of dust and earth.

  "I don't think they really needed those tents they gave us," he said, holding his horse's bridle beneath the jaw and stroking its n
ose. "And word about the cannibals spread pretty quick. The story didn't lose any in the telling, I bet, either."

  Gustav tried to nuzzle his face; he pushed it away with his right palm. Horses were a bit like St. Bernards when they got affectionate, given to slobbering all over you with the drooling jaws of love. The powerful earthy-grassy scent of the big gelding was strong in his nostrils. Will Hutton had picked it for him, twelve hundred pounds of agile muscle and endurance, a descendant of Steel Dust and Shiloh on his dam's side, crossed with Hutton's Hanoverian stallion.

  The tents the locals had donated were National Guard standard, meant to sleep eight men; a row of them stretched across a green meadow not far from the Clear-water. Families and groups of the unattached milled about each in the morning chill, getting ready for the day. The wagons were nearby; one of them was a ranch-style chuck-wagon; Angelica had hugged the vehicle and kissed the tilt when it arrived. The horse lines lay a little beyond, and beyond that the ground sloped up towards the west; stock drifted over it, watched by mounted herders.

  The cattle and sheep had been surplus to local needs too, but the extra horses were very welcome. So were the four precious milch cows and their calves.

  Havel pushed his helmet back by the nasal, so that the padding of the lower rim rested on his scalp and he had an unobstructed view; it was becoming a gesture as natural as breathing. The long shadows of men and horses stretched before him towards the west, and the wind was gratefully cool through the steel rings of his armor. More and more of the Bearkillers drifted in, until he was ringed by faces old and new.

  So much for making a quiet exit, he thought. Christ, we talked about the trip long enough.

  The Larssons were there, and Pamela, and a scattering of others—Aaron leaning on his crutch, and Billy Waters too for some reason.

  "I still think it's a bit risky to send you," Will grumbled. "Yeah, we do need a detailed scout of the way we're headed—news just plain spreads too slow and gets too garbled. It's purely foolish to keep the whole shebang pokin' ahead into the blue. So sending Eric 'n' Josh I can see. Why you, though?"

  "I like to see the ground I'm going to be operating through," Havel said patiently—he'd listened to the same argument for days. "And I can bargain for us, arrange safe passage and make deals."

  Plus personal reasons, he added to himself; Signe was hanging back, looking sheepish. Not her fault, but …

  "You can run the camp well enough, Will."

  The Texan grinned. "I surely can; hell, I may even get some horse wranglin' in. I'll just tell 'em if they think I'm tough, wait until Lord Bear gets back."

  Havel winced slightly. "Well, whatever works. And you're needed for teaching—so are Pam and most of the others. How many newbies have we got now?"

  "Twenty-seven, countin' the kids and the teenager we rescued. Eighteen grown men and women."

  "Right, and they all need to know the basics," Havel said. "Half of them have never forked a horse and none of them have ever picked up a sword. We need a long stop for that anyway, and to get the bowmaking operation and the other stuff going. Three men with a good string of remounts can travel fast. I should be back in about a month."

  He paused. "Hey, Astrid," he called.

  She started, pulling her eyes from a red-tailed hawk circling high above.

  "It's your birthday next week, isn't it?"

  She nodded. He turned and took a parcel out of his saddlebag.

  "Eric and I found this for you. I know you miss that Lord of the Rings you had. We won't be here on the day, so—"

  The wrapping was plain brown paper, but she gave a suppressed squeal, slung her bow over her shoulder, and took it eagerly.

  Havel hid a grin as she jumped from one foot to the other and tried to undo the knots.

  Sort of gives you an idea of what she would be like as a normal teenager, yakking for hours on the phone or mooning over some idiot musician, he thought.

  She gave up on the knots and drew her hunting knife to cut the string.

  "It's a complete set!" she burbled. The books were bound in gray, with a golden ring and a lidless eye on the cover.

  "Ohmigod! The Allen and Unwin hardcovers!" A quick glance inside. "A first edition Allen and Unwin with the foldout pocket maps intact! A—" she choked. "A signed first edition! Ohmigod!"

  Unexpectedly she threw herself at him and hugged him hard; even through the mail and padding it made him give back half a pace and go ooof! Usually she hated touching anyone.

  "Hey, kid, watch it—you're still holding that knife! And Eric did a lot of the looking too."

  And the original owner is dead, he thought, with a touch of inner grimness. Suicide.

  She gave her brother a perfunctory nod of thanks; he rolled his eyes. Then there was a flurry of handshakes and slaps on the back. Thankfully, nobody else tried to hug him.

  Signe was the last. "It's my birthday soon too," she said.

  "Ah . didn't have anything to give," he replied awkwardly.

  "Yes you do," she said, and threw her arms around his neck.

  The kiss went on for a long time, and grew hungry. He was dimly aware of whoops and laughter in the background; this time both Astrid and Eric were rolling their eyes, and Astrid made a theatrical gagging sound. Her brother might have made the same finger-down-throat gesture if Luanne Hutton hadn't decided to emulate her friend and caught him in a clinch; Astrid's nausea redoubled.

  "I'll be waiting," Signe said, when she drew back.

  "So will I," Havel answered; he had to catch his breath and clear his throat before he could finish the brief phrase.

  He put his foot in the stirrup and swung into the saddle with a grunt and a rustling clink and clatter. Josh Sanders finished his good-byes to wife and child and mounted likewise.

  "Eric!" Havel barked. "Tear yourself away from the ton-sillectomy and get on the goddamned horse!"

  The other two men fell in behind him; Eric was leading their packhorse-and-remount string. Havel took a deep breath and looked west. Running the outfit was a challenge, and worthwhile work. Getting away for a while, though …

  "Thataway!" he said, and brought his horse up to a canter.

  The crowd parted, cheering; Eric and Josh turned to wave as the hooves crunched and clattered.

  Havel kept his eyes on the gravel road that stretched like a silver-gray ribbon into the green hills.

  All I've seen so far is a worm's-eye view of wilderness and a few little towns, he thought. It's time and past time to find out how other people are dealing with this new world we've been handed.

  * * * *

  "NO!"

  Juniper Mackenzie added her voice to the chorus of a hundred others; all the adults within walking distance of this spot, in fact. The foragers approaching from the west slowed uncertainly as they heard it, a few of them ringing the bells on their bicycles as if that would clear the road. There weren't as many of them—forty or fifty, she estimated—but they all had some sort of weapon, and they had a bicycle-drawn cart behind.

  "NO! NO! NO!"

  The face-off was taking place well away from her cabin—what they'd taken to calling the Hall—down in the flatlands to the west. She could see the outskirts of the little town of Sutterdown to the north, over the tops of the pines lining a creek. Her twenty clansfolk, the neighborhood farmers and the townsmen were a collection of clumps making a rough line north and south through the shaggy overgrown pasture of the fields on either side of the road. The roadway itself was a two-lane county blacktop, and quite thoroughly blocked with a semi that had skidded across it on the day of the Change; nobody was going to move it anytime soon, since the cargo had been sacks of cement.

  Must get a wagon down here to haul some of it off, she thought with some corner of her mind. We can use it.

  There were so many people here, and they were so loud—but it still seemed quiet, quiet and empty: The noises were all of human voices and feet and hands, no drone or roar of engines. You noticed more without
that burr of background noise. The sound of grass and twigs under feet, the smell of angry unwashed men …

  The foragers stopped, and the shouting chorus grumbled away into a buzz of voices. That sank into near-silence as a man walked forward waving a white flag on the end of a pole. He wore a policeman's uniform, much the worse for hard use; a mousey-looking woman accompanied him, with a clipboard in her hands. He carried a much more practical hunting crossbow, with a knife and hatchet at his belt, and wore an army-style helmet.

  "Listen!" he called, when he'd come close. "We're here by order of Acting Governor Johnson to requisition a quota of supplies for emergency redistribution—"

  Juniper gripped her bow and bared her teeth; that was the second Acting Governor since the Change, which made an average of one about every two weeks and a bit, and nobody knew what had happened to the incumbent. In practice, what was left of the state government had no power more than two days from Salem by bicycle.

  Which unfortunately includes our land, just.

  The chorus of NO! erupted again; she could see Reverend Dixon of Sutterdown a ways to her left, leading the beat. Odd to be chanting at his direction; the man had ignored her friendly clergy-to-clergy letter before the Change, and been openly hostile since—evidently he thought Jehovah had sent the disaster as a punishment for tolerating the wrong people, of which Juniper and her friends were most certainly an example.

  "Suffer not a witch to live" was a favorite of his.

  The chorus died down again, and unexpectedly the mousy-looking woman shouted into the quiet: "How can you be so selfish? Half the people in Portland are sitting in camps around Salem and Albany now—gangsters have taken over Portland and driven them out—people are dying! Dying of hunger, hunger and disease—little children are starving to death!"

  Sweet Goddess gentle and strong, aid me now. Her hand traced the Invoking sign. Great Ogma, Lord of Eloquence, lend me your golden tongue to calm these troubled waters.

  Dixon was about to speak. Juniper opened her mouth to forestall him—the minister was definitely of the tribe who saw all problems as nails and themselves as a hammer. Or the Fist of God, in his case.