Dies the Fire

by S. M. Stirling

  Havel made a strangled sound. "I don't know if she's worse when she's pretending to be an elf, or when she's relapsed into being a real human teenager. I do know—"

  The young woman finished his sentence for him:"—that Gunney Winters never had to face this sort of problem in the Corps. They wouldn't have taken Astrid at Parris Island, though, Mike."

  "We'll do the scout ourselves, then. Get Will."

  "You're the bossman."

  She reined around and cantered off. Havel looked after her briefly; the rest of the outfit were waiting a quarter mile back, wagons—there were a lot more of them now— stopped on alternate sides of the narrow ribbon of road, with outriders on the edge of sight, others working at the horse and cattle herds to keep them bunched, and some folk on foot by the vehicles.

  Half old-style cattle drive, half gypsy caravan, half small-scale Mongol migration, he thought wryly.

  Then he turned back to look at the long country ahead, thinking. He was uneasy, and he'd never liked that when he didn't know precisely why. Presently hooves thudded behind him, and he nodded over his shoulder.

  "Will."

  "Mike?" Will Hutton said. "You called?"

  "Well, first thing, Luanne and Astrid have decided to spend the afternoon together making armor links, to teach them to enjoy each other's company more."

  Hutton grinned. Making the rings was about the most unpopular chore in the Bearkillers: not particularly hard, just tedious, frustrating, finicky detail work with dowel and pliers, wire cutters, a little hammer and punch, and roll after roll of galvanized fence wire.

  "What do you think of that place just behind the ridge-line for a camp?" Havel went on, pointing.

  "Fine, if you want to stop this early."

  They all looked up to estimate the time; it was about two o'clock. Pre-digital mechanical watches had become a valuable type of trade goods, along with tobacco and binoculars and bows.

  Hutton went on: "Flat enough, good water and firewood, good grass, good view. You don't want to try and make Craigswood today?"

  Havel shook his head. "I'm not easy about what I can see from here," he said. "I want to find out more before we're committed."

  "Nice if we could do some trading here, at Craigswood or Grangeville, or just pick up stuff," Hutton observed. "There's a lot of things we could use, or are gettin' short of, not to mention more remounts. Some training we could do easier if we stopped for a week or two, as well."

  "That all depends," Havel said. "See that line of smoke there? Looks like a farm or a ranch house where something got torched, and nobody's moving, but you can see it's been worked since the Change—fresh-plowed land, and spring plantings. We're going down to check. Have Josh and a squad keep an eye out from here, out of sight on the reverse slope. If things have gone completely to hell in this neighborhood, we may have to take another detour."

  Will nodded and reined his horse about, gliding away at a smooth trot.

  Christ Jesus, I was lucky there, Havel thought; he didn't think he could be as good a chief-of-staff and strong-right-arm, if their positions were reversed.

  "Equipment check," he said to Signe, and each gave the other's gear a quick once-over.

  They were both in full armor. That was Bearkiller practice anywhere not guaranteed safe, now that they had enough chain hauberks for the whole A-list. He looked at the bear's head mounted on his helmet for an instant before he put it back on and buckled the chin cup.

  Well, it doesn 't smell, and it makes good shade on a sunny day, he thought.

  He'd gotten used to the way the nasal bar bisected his vision, too.

  Plus bear fur won't make the helmet work any worse if someone tries to hit me on the head.

  He told himself that fairly often; it beat admitting that he just didn't want to deal with one of Astrid's sulks. They both pulled their bows out of the leather cases and fitted arrow to string.

  We're mounted infantry with cavalry tastes, he thought to himself. But if we keep working at it harder than anyone else, then we're going to have a real advantage.

  They put their horses down the slope, slowly until they were in the flat, then up to a walk-canter-trot-reverse rhythm, their eyes busy to all sides. The horses were fresh, and the day was pretty; at least until they came to the dead cattle.

  "Very dead," Havel muttered.

  Hacked apart, and the bodies rubbed with filth, and a chemical smell under the stink made him suspect poison, which a couple of dead crows confirmed. He looked beyond them to the fields. The wheat was a little over knee-high on a horse, with the heads showing—harvest would be in another five weeks or so—but great swaths of it were wilted and dying.

  "Roundup," he said. Signe looked a question at him.

  "See how the wheat's wilted in strips? Someone went through spraying weed killer on it, Roundup or something like it. The stuffs available in bulk anywhere there's much farming and it acts fast."

  Her face had gotten leaner and acquired a darker honey-tan, but it still went a little pale. Havel nodded. Wasting food like this was the next thing to blasphemy.

  The dirt road joined a larger one, and they slowed down as the drifts of dirty-brown smoke rose ahead. From the clumps of squabbling crows, he knew there were bodies of men or beasts in the fields to his right. Men probably, given what had been done to the cattle; the way they didn't fly away also told him that the feast hadn't been disturbed.

  So did the coyote that sat looking at him with insolent familiarity, and then trotted off unconcerned. Havel suppressed an impulse to shoot an arrow at the beast. It had already learned that men weren't to be feared as much as formerly …

  But if men are less the wolves will be back soon, you clever little son of a bitch, he thought grimly. Try pulling tricks like that with them, trickster, and you'll regret it.

  When they came to the sign and gate they were coughing occasionally whenever the wind blew a gust their way, but the smoke smelled rankly of ash, not the hot stink of a new fire.

  "Clarke Century Farms," Havel read. "Homesteaded 1898."

  The first body close enough to identify was just inside, tumbled in the undignified sprawl of violent death; a fan of black blood sprayed out from the great fly-swarming wound hacked into his back with a broad-bladed ax, where the stubs of ribs showed in the drying flesh. There was already a faint but definite smell of spoiled meat.

  Someone had taken his boots, and there was a hole in the heel of one sock.

  A dog lay not far beyond him, head hanging by a shred of flesh, its teeth still fixed in a snarl. The bodies hadn't bloated much, although lips and eyes were shrunken, but that could mean one day or two, in this weather; the ravens had been at them, too. In the field to the left was a three-furrow plow that looked as if it came from a museum and probably did. A stretch of turned earth ended where it stood.

  One dead horse was still in the traces before it, and a dead man about four paces beyond, lying curled around a belly-wound that might have taken half a day to kill him. Two of the big black birds kaw-kawed and jumped heavily off the corpse when Havel turned his horse to take a closer look.

  "Crossbow bolt," he said, when he'd returned to his companion. "Looks like it was made after the Change, but well done."

  They passed another pair of bodies as they rode at a walk up the farm lane to the steading, near tumbled wheelbarrows.

  The main house hadn't been burned; it stood intact in its oasis of lawn and flower bed and tree; a tractor-tire swing still swayed in the wind beneath a big oak, and a body next to it by the neck. There was laundry on a line out behind it. The smoldering came from the farmyard proper, from the ashes of a long series of old hay-rolls, the giant grass cylinders of modern fanning, and from where grain had been roughly scattered out of sheet-metal storage sheds, doused in gasoline and set on fire.

  The oily canola seed still flickered and gave off a dense acrid smoke. There was a wooden barn as well, gray and weathered; a naked man had been nailed to the door by spikes
through wrist and ankle. He was dead, but much more recently than the rest, and he was older as well, with sparse white hair.

  Written above his head in blood was: Bow to the Iron Rod! There was a stylized image underneath it, of a penis and testes.

  Signe was hair-trigger tense as they rode up to the veranda; she started when the windmill pump clattered into the breeze. Water spilled from the tank underneath it, which looked to be recent—probably the windmill was an heirloom, only brought back into use since the Change.

  "Wait here," he said, returning bow to case and arrow to quiver.

  He swung down and looped his reins over the railing of the veranda. His horse bent its head to crop at the longer grass near the foundation.

  "From the look, whoever did it is long gone. But stay alert."

  Havel drew his backsword and lifted his shield off the saddlebow, sliding his left forearm into the loops. There was a scrawled paper pinned to the door with a knife—inside the screen, so it hadn't blown free. Printed on it in big block letters with a felt-tip pen was: FOR REBELLION AGAINST DUKE IRON ROD!

  Underneath it was a logo, a winged skull, human but with long fangs.

  "And I suppose the Lord Humungous rules the desert, too," he muttered; it didn't seem like simple banditry. "What the hell is going on here?"

  Then he nudged the door open with his toe—it was swinging free, banging occasionally against the frame, and went through with blade ready and shield up.

  There was no need for it. He blinked at what he saw on the floor of the living room, glad he hadn't sent Signe in— she'd toughened up amazingly, but he just didn't want this inside the head of someone he liked. He made himself do a quick count as he went through the rooms of the big frame farmhouse; there was no way to be precise, without reassembling everyone. Nothing moved but some rats, although he saw coyote tracks; probably one of the scavengers had gotten in through a window.

  "That's where the women and children were," he said grimly as he came out.

  Signe swallowed and nodded; she didn't bother to ask what had happened to them.

  Havel went on: "I make it at least twelve adults, and quite a few kids. Say six families, give or take."

  He looked around at the steading. This had been a large, prosperous mixed farm; probably the owners had called it a ranch, Western-fashion. Judging from the stock corrals and massive equipment that stood forelorn and silent in its sheds, it was something on the order of three square-mile sections or more—six hundred and forty acres each. That was typical for this area, which grew winter wheat and barley and canola and other field crops and ran cattle.

  Before the Change, that would have meant one family and occasional hired contract work, but …

  "Probably the farmer's family took in a lot of townspeople," Signe observed. "Relatives, and refugees."

  They'd seen that pattern elsewhere, once the nature of the Change had sunk in.

  "Yesterday?" Signe went on. "Day before?"

  "Dawn yesterday," Havel agreed, narrowing it down a little more. "They had food cooking on a wood range and the kids were mostly in PJs."

  Signe winced. "The bandits ran off most of the stock, looks like. I suppose we should look for anything useful, but—"

  "But I'm not going into the buzzard business, until these folks are buried," Havel said for both of them.

  Signe's head came up, looking back the way they'd come. A light blinked from the ridgeline there, angled from a hand mirror. They both read the Morse message. Not for the first time, Havel blessed the fact that Eric had been an Eagle Scout; he'd been full of useful tricks like that. He even knew how to do smoke signals.

  Twenty-plus riders bound your way approaching from southeast on section road.

  Signe took a mirror out of a pouch on her sword belt and replied, then looked a question at Havel.

  "We'll meet them out by the gate," he said. "If they look hostile, we can run—tell Will to have everyone ready. I don't think we'll have to fight; whoever did this wasn't planning on coming back anytime soon, in my opinion."

  When they halted at the junction of lane and dirt road, she said quietly: "I hate this kind of thing, Mike. I hate seeing it and I hate smelling it and I hate having to think about it later."

  He leaned over in the saddle and gave her mailed shoulders a brief squeeze; like hugging a statue, but as so often with human beings it was the symbolism that counted.

  "Me too," he said. "But I hate something else worse— the sort of people who do this shit."

  "Yes!"

  He glared around. There was no reason why people here had to die. It was far away from the cities and their hopeless hordes, and for the first year or so there would be more food than people could handle—plenty of cattle, more grain than they could harvest by hand from last year's planting. They weren't short of horses, either, and with some thought and effort they'd be able to get in hay and sow a good grain crop come fall; nothing like as much as they usually planted by tractor, but more than enough to feed themselves and a fair number of livestock.

  It was security that was the problem: without swift transport, or more than improvised hand weapons, without phones and radios to call for help …

  Light winked off metal in the distance where the road came over a rise, revealing movement.

  Which is why I had all our gear done in brown or matte green, he thought, with pardonable pride.

  He unshipped his binoculars and focused; two dozen, all right, all men and riding as if they knew how. The one in the forefront had a U.S. Army Fritz helmet, and a couple of the others did as well, or crash-helmet types. Several wore swords, Civil War sabers probably out of the same sort of museum that had yielded the three-furrow plow; the others had axes or baseball bats, and two had hunting bows.

  Mr. Fritz also had a county sheriff's uniform, and a badge … as they drew closer, he saw that several others had badges as well, probably new-minted deputies. The sheriff was in his thirties, the other men mostly older—no surprise there, either. The average American farmer had been fifty-three before the Change.

  "They look righteous," Havel said. "Signe, take your helmet off, but keep alert."

  She did, and shook back her long wheat-colored braids; that tended to make people less suspicious, for some reason. He turned his horse's head slightly to the left, and kept his bow down on that side with an arrow on the string, not trying to hide it but not drawing attention to it, either.

  "Afternoon," he said, holding up his empty right hand when the riders came near.

  The sheriff looked at them, giving their horses and gear and faces a quick, thorough once-over; he was a lean hard man with tired blue eyes and light-brown hair going gray at the temples.

  "You're no bikers," he said; his men relaxed a little too.

  "Jesus Christ!" one of the riders muttered to a companion. "It's King Arthur and Xena the Warrior Princess."

  "Shut the hell up, Burt," the sheriff said. "What's going on here?"

  Havel pointed up the laneway, then back over his shoulder.

  "Our outfit's passing through. We saw the smoke from that ridge back there, and thought we'd take a look. Someone killed everyone at this farm, burned their grain stores and canola and hay, killed some of their stock and ran off the rest, and I think sprayed Roundup on their standing grain. It's real ugly in there. Signed by Duke Iron Rod, whoever or whatever he is."

  Several of the men cursed; one turned aside, hiding tears. The sheriffs long face seemed to acquire some more lines.

  "We're too late," he said. "Henry, you go check."

  A fist hit the pommel of the sheriffs saddle, making the horse sidestep. "They hit three farms this time, and led us by the nose from one to the other! Now they're headed back."

  He shook himself and looked at Havel. "You're passing through? You look a lot better fed and armed than most of the road people we see."

  "Thought we might stop and feed our beasts up a bit, if you can spare the grazing. And we can trade," Havel said.
"We've got a farrier and smith, a first-class horse man, an engineer, couple of construction experts, a leatherworker, a doctor and a really good vet. Plus some weapons— swords, arrows, shields, armor."

  He held up his recurve, twanging the string after he dropped the arrow back in its quiver.

  "Plus the ones who made this, and our armor." That raised some eyebrows. "So we won't be begging."

  "Say!" one of the posse said, nodding towards the image on their shields. "Aren't you the Bearkillers?"

  As Havel nodded, he turned to the sheriff. "Bob Twofeather told me about 'em, remember? They were up on the Nez Perce rez for a bit. They helped with those guys who'd gone crazy and started cutting people up."

  Havel nodded. "That was us. We went over to Lewiston, nearly. Once we heard what was happening there we decided to turn back and try crossing into Oregon a little further south."

  Everyone flinched a little at that; the Black Death scared even the bravest. Havel took off his own helmet.

  "Yeah, you're the Bearkiller jefe," the man said. "They call you Lord Bear, right? Got the scar killing a bear with your knife, was what I heard."

  Havel shrugged, mouth twisting a bit in irritation at the fruits of Astrid's imagination. And it was worse than futile to go around correcting every urban legend, like the one about the bear …

  It's a rural legend, actually, he thought with mordant humor. Amazing how they spread with no TV. And anyway, it's helpful psyops.

  Aloud he went on to the sheriff: "I could bring down some of my people, help you with cleaning up. We don't have the sickness. And you're welcome to share our fire tonight. We should talk."

  The sheriff thought for a moment and then nodded decisively. The man he'd sent to the house returned, pale-faced and scrubbing at his mouth with the back of his hand.

  "Kate Clarke's missing," he said, which brought more curses and clenched fists. "The rest of them are all there."