Dies the Fire

by S. M. Stirling

  Havel inclined his helmeted head towards the practice field. "Like you said, Sheriff, it's not just finding or making the weapons, it's learning how to use them."

  "Doesn't look like what I remember of fencing," he said, shading his eyes. "Watched the Olympics once."

  Havel nodded. The motions were much broader and fuller, with all the body's coordinated strength and weight behind them. He went on aloud: "One of these cut-and-thrust swords will blast right through an epee parry and skewer you front to back, or gut you like a trout. We were real lucky to find Pam Arnstein—that's our instructor there."

  Ken Larsson was working on a drawing pinned to a folding draughtsman's table nearby, looking up occasionally at the sword practice; Aaron Rothman rested his peg leg in a canvas recliner nearby.

  Havel introduced them, and the elder Larsson went on: "Pam was a stroke of luck. She's our vet too, and doubled as our medico until we found Aaron here."

  He grinned and jerked a thumb at the doctor, who was starting to look just skinny again.

  "Lord Bear's Luck, some call it," Rothman said. "And believe me, I was glad to get a share of it!"

  I really wish people wouldn't say that, Havel thought. The dice have no memory. You've got to earn your luck again every morning.

  Four Bearkillers were passing by with a quartered beef carcass in wheelbarrows, heading for the cooking fires and the chuck wagon. Arnstein looked at Havel, who nodded. She halted them, and had the hindquarters hung on hooks hoof-up beneath a tree while she laid down the practice lath, unhooked the wire-mesh screen from the front of her helmet and took up her battle sword.

  A whistle brought the novices' practice to a halt; Signe flashed Havel a smile as she helped chivvy them into place, sheepdog style.

  "This part's popular, for some reason," Havel said, as they walked over; Sheriff Woburn was looking puzzled. "But it has to wait for a butchering day. I've got to admit, it's sort of cool to do."

  He raised his voice. "Gather 'round, those who haven't seen this demonstration. And those who want to see it again."

  A few of the neophytes looked as puzzled as Woburn. The rest grinned and nudged each other as they shoved the others closer to the hanging meat.

  "Now, watch closely. And keep in mind that this"— Havel drew his sword, and tapped one of the hanging quarters lightly—"is the ass-end of a nice big cow. Range heifer, about seven hundred pounds. Bone and muscle and tendon, just like us, except thicker and more of it. Pam, do the honors on Cheek Number One."

  Pamela poised motionless, then attacked with a running thrust, right foot skimming forward and knee bending into a long lunge. The point of her saber hardly appeared to move; it was presented at the beginning of the motion, and then six inches of it were out the other side of the haunch of beef. She withdrew, twisting the blade.

  "Examine that, please," she said.

  The novices did, one of them gulping audibly as he put a finger in the long tunnel-like wound. The tall wiry woman grinned as she went on:

  "While not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, it's more than sufficient to let out a lot of blood. And now if you'll back off slightly—"

  She reversed to her original left-foot-forward stance, poised for a second with targe and point advanced, then attacked again; this time she cut backhand with a high wordless shout, foot and edge slamming down together as if connected by invisible rods and hips twisting to put a whipping snap into the strike.

  The blade slanted into the meat with a wet thwack! and a great slab of flesh slumped down; they could all see where her saber had cut a deep pinkish-white nick into the surface of the butchered steer's legbone. Flecks of meat spattered into the faces of the closest onlookers.

  "And that, ladies and gentlemen, could be you," she said, panting slightly. "Which is why there's no prize for second place." There were a few more shocked faces among the grins.

  Pamela went on: "Lord Bear will now demonstrate what happens when someone hits you hard with a backsword, instead of a light cut like that."

  Havel slipped the shield off his back and onto his arm, standing with left foot and arm advanced. Then he screamed and pounced and struck in the same motion, steel whirling in a blur of speed, long blade at the end of a long arm in a looping overarm cut.

  "Haakkaa paalle!"

  A wet cleaving sound sounded under the shout, and a crackling beneath that. When the beef haunch swayed back, they could all see that the steel had sliced through eight inches of hide and meat to make a canyon gape several feet long, and split the heavy legbone beneath— lengthwise. Chips and dust lay in the marrow at the bottom of the cut, shattered out of the bone by the violence of the impact.

  A chorus of whistles and murmurs went through the ranks of the novices, along with a dabbing at faces.

  Havel spoke: "And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we don't bitch and moan about how hot and heavy and uncomfortable the armor is."

  I may have to grind away to get good at archery, but it seems I've got a natural talent for this.

  "Supper's at seven," Havel said; Woburn was looking suitably impressed. "Why don't you look around for a little while? Ken can answer any questions you have. I've got to get out of this ironmongery and there's some business to attend to."

  As he turned away, a thought struck him: If this Duke Iron Rod really is in with Arminger, how many other people are fighting the Protector right now?

  * * * *

  Angelica Hutton was just putting a Dutch oven full of biscuits into the embers in one of the fires behind the chuck wagon when Havel arrived, his hair still damp from the bath. There were a dozen working there, amid a cheerful clatter and chatter that didn't disguise the size of the task or the efficiency with which it got done.

  "Jane, remember to get the tortillas into that warmer the minute they're done," she said, her voice friendly but a little loud and slow; then she wiped her hands on the apron she wore over her Levi's and shirt.

  The smile died as she and the Bearkiller leader walked aside: "Mike, that woman!" she continued; speaking under her breath, but clenching her fists beneath her chin and making a throttled sound of wordless exasperation.

  "Specific problem?" he said.

  "She is … no, she is good-hearted, and not even lazy if you tell her everything she is to do, but I have met mesquite stumps with more brains! She speaks of nothing but TV shows and the days when she was a cheerleader."

  You could believe that more easily these days; Jane Waters didn't look shapeless anymore—she was even pretty, in a blowsy, faded-rose way.

  "And she is a natural … what is the old English word.I saw it in a schoolbook of Luanne's . no, not slut, that means puta, right?"

  Havel nodded, and the Tejano woman went on: "Slattern, that is the word. She cannot even cook; not at all, I do not mean fancy things. Before the Change her children ate from McDonald's and Taco Bell every day! Or from cans and frozen pizza."

  "Not everyone can meet your high standards, Angelica," Havel said, grinning. And oh, for the days when even poor people could get too much of the wrong sort of food! "I wanted to check on supplies."

  "Y bien," she said, pulling a list out of a pocket. "We've got enough meat, I ordered a steer butchered this afternoon—it arrived a little worn, no?"

  He smiled and made a placating gesture.

  "If we stop anytime soon, I want to try to make dried and smoked sausage; there is plenty of jerky, but it is boring even in a stew. So we must have spices—sage, garlic. For the rest, we need some sacks of salt, badly. We are short of flour, and potatoes, and down to the last of our beans, rice, and oatmeal. We need vegetables very badly, dried or canned, also fruit—it is not healthy, to live so much on meat and bread, even with the vitamin pills. Shortly we will need clothing, particularly boots and shoes, and especially for the little ones … "

  Angelica went through her list; then she darted back to make sure her assistants weren't spoiling anything.

  After a quick check she began
beating on a triangle. Everyone gathered 'round their mess hearths by squads and families, as youngsters carried the food around; tables were too much of a bother to drag along on the move, but they had good groundsheets so you could sit down dry and reasonably comfortable around a fire—most were leaning against their saddles, cowboy fashion. Shadows closed in around the fires and the first stars appeared in the east.

  Woburn bit into his burrito, then looked down at it with surprised pleasure as the tangy carne asada hit his palate, cooled with sour cream.

  "All right," he said to the Bearkillers' leader. "You've got a real slick operation here, Mr. Havel. Now, you were hinting that you could do something about the Devil Dogs."

  "That depends," he said. "They've got some sort of base, right? A hideout you can't come at, or more likely they've forted up someplace you can't take."

  "They're at St. Hilda's," Woburn said, respect in his voice.

  Havel's ears perked up at that; he saw that Ken Lars-son's did, too. It was one of the big Idaho tourist attractions; you couldn't live in the state and not know about it.

  He held up a hand for a moment, and turned his head to Will Hutton; the various bosses-of-sections were eating around Havel's fire tonight, as usual when there was serious business to discuss.

  "Will, St. Hilda's is a Benedictine abbey over by that butte. Near the top of it, in fact."

  He pointed southwest. A wide cone with gentle slopes dominated the rolling plain, visible many miles away; right now it was silhouetted against the westering sun as the long July evening drew to a close.

  "Built like a fort," he added. "I saw it a couple of times before the Change."

  "Me too," Ken said. "Literally like a fort, Romanesque Revival. Nineteen-twenties construction; ashlar stone blocks, a hard blue porphyry, and walls over three feet thick at the base. Four stories in a block around a courtyard, with two towers on the front—both nearly a hundred feet high. Interior water source, too. Not surprised some bandits took it over. It's the closest thing to a castle in the state, after the old penitentiary in Boise."

  Woburn nodded. "When the Change hit, the Devil Dogs stole real bikes, mountain bikes, and then horses, and looted a bunch of wilderness outfitters; after that they started raiding for supplies. That was bad enough. Then in May, they changed their operations. Got a lot of good weapons from somewhere, and then they hit St. Hilda's."

  "What happened to the Sisters?" Hutton said, concern in his voice.

  "They killed some of them and threw out most of the rest; Mother Superior Gertrude is staying with me. And since then they've been using it as a base. They've been giving us hell—well, you saw it."

  Havel looked at Signe, and she opened a plastic Office Max filing box. It was filled with neatly labeled maps in hanging files; she pulled out the west-central Idaho one, tacked it to a corkboard, and propped it up where the command staff could see it.

  "How many?" Havel said. "Organization? Leaders? What's Iron Rod like? What weapons, and what's their objective, if it isn't just loot?"

  Woburn looked at the map. "There were about fifty to start with," he said. "Twice that now—they've been recruiting from the—no offense—road people."

  Havel smiled thinly; road people was what settled folk around here had taken to calling the wanderers, those stranded on highways by the Change and others who scoured about looking for food. They were a natural breeding-ground for brigandage, not to mention for transmitting disease, and neither well-regarded nor very welcome.

  "None taken. We're going somewhere, not just wandering around aimlessly looking for a handout or what we can steal."

  "I can see that," Woburn said, looking at the map, and then the purposeful activity about him.

  He tapped his finger on the map: "Anyway, there's near a hundred fighting men, plus . well, they had some women with them to start with. There are more now— some kidnapped. Some men they've taken and are using as slave labor, too."

  Havel nodded; he'd seen similar things in embryo elsewhere, but not on this scale … yet.

  "I presume you've tried smoking them out," Havel said. It wasn't a question.

  Woburn flushed in embarrassment. "Yeah. You understand, things were total chaos right after the Change, and then we were all working as hard as we could to salvage bits and pieces. People around here are real spread out, and without trucks or phones it took us weeks to get any organization going at all. First we knew was when they started hitting farms—or hitting them up for tribute and ransom."

  "Then you got a big posse together, and they handed you your heads," Havel guesstimated.

  Woburn looked aside a bit. "Yeah. Two hundred men, and we had an I-beam for a battering ram, and some extension ladders."

  Havel winced slightly, picturing how he'd have managed the defense.

  Woburn nodded: "Thing is, they've made the place into a real fort. They filled all the windows on the lower two stories with rebar grates and then bolted steel plates over the inside and outside and filled the holes with concrete—the Sisters were doing a construction project and there was plenty of material. Steel shutters with arrow-slits in the upper windows. They'd cut down all the trees around, so there wasn't any cover for us, and they poured boiling canola oil down on us from the top … we lost twenty dead, and six times that number injured, a lot of them real bad."

  "And that was the last time you could get that many together," Havel said.

  "Well … yeah."

  This time Woburn's look had an element of a glare in it. Havel looked at Ken Larsson, and the older man spoke thoughtfully, tugging at his short silvery beard.

  "Either they've got someone very shrewd in charge, or they have an implausible number of construction workers in their ranks. Something odd there. Starving them out, perhaps? Or catching parties of them on the move?"

  Woburn snorted. "There's no communications! What men I can scrape together end up running from one place that's been raided to another. If we get a big bunch together, they just retreat into the fort and laugh at us until we go away—we can't keep up a siege, everyone's needed on the farms. That place is stuffed with stolen food."

  Havel nodded. "And they can see you coming, since they hold the high ground. And they probably hit the farms of your supporters, and probably some farmers and ranchers are already paying them off or slipping them information and don't get attacked."

  "I don't blame them," Ken Larsson said, wincing at the memory of what he'd helped bury.

  "I do!" Woburn said; his face flushed with anger. "The Devil Dog honcho, Iron Rod—he's started calling himself Duke of the Camas Prairie, the bastard! You saw what his scum did!"

  Havel nodded politely. Behind the mask of his face he thought: And they're getting stronger, while you get weaker. If things go on the way they are, you'll all be on your knees to Duke Iron Rod by this time next year. Or on your backs, depending on your gender and his tastes.

  "I suppose you tried to get some help from Boise," Havel said.

  He didn't bother making it a question. Woburn spat into the fire.

  "There's plague in Boise, too. Really bad, and typhus; we haven't had but one outbreak here, thank God. That was in Grangeville, and we managed to damp it down quick with quarantine. Iron Rod's been careful not to attack the Nez Perce … yet. He'll be their business if he finishes us off!"

  "That's too bad about Boise," Havel said. "There's a lot of good land west of the city with gravity-flow irrigation; they might have made it."

  And I've got friends there, he thought. I hope Eileen's OK, even if she did dump me, and the folks at Steelhead.

  The thought was oddly abstract. Things had closed in since the Change; people and places beyond a day's ride were … remote. The world felt a whole lot bigger.

  "Could be worse," Signe said unexpectedly. "It could be like the coast … or like St. Louis."

  Everyone shivered slightly. A spray of bicycle-borne fugitives had made it from the big cities of the Midwest, and from the Pacific coast. A lo
t of people didn't believe the stories. Nobody wanted to believe them.

  "OK," Havel said. "Here's your problem. They've got an impregnable base. You've got more men"—although not a lot more; there were probably only about five thousand people left within three or four days travel—"but yours have to stay split up most of the time, and his are concentrated. He can strike any ranch or farm with superior numbers, then retreat behind his walls if you get together. And he doesn't have to worry about getting a crop in. It'll be worse at harvest time, which is soon. It's always easier to stop other people doing something than it is to do it. The grain'll be dry enough to burn then, too. If you don't get rid of them in the next month or so, they'll wreck you. You'll have to surrender, or move far enough away he can't reach you."

  "The filth destroy what they can't steal," Woburn said bitterly. "We can't farm if we have to stand guard twenty-four hours a day! But if we leave, get out of range, we're homeless, we're road people ourselves."

  Ken Larsson nodded. "You're spread out too much," he said. "Even resettling townsfolk on the farms, the properties are too big and too widely scattered, which means every household's on its own and impossibly far away from help. What you should do is group together, village-style, with settlements of … oh, say fifty to a hundred people, minimum, in places with good water and land. Then they could defend themselves—run up earth walls and palisades, too, maybe. And have specialists where they need them. We're all going to run out of pre-Change tools and clothing eventually."

  "I can't make people give up their land!" Woburn said, scandalized.

  Ken shrugged. "They don't need most of it," he pointed out. "This area"—his hand took in the Camas Prairie— "produced wheat and canola and beef for hundreds of thousands of people. Now it only has to feed the few thousand people who live on it; and that's going to take only a fraction of the area, which is lucky since you won't have the labor to work more anyway. What would be the point in growing more when you can't ship it out? To watch it rot?"