The Silent Years [The Complete Collection]

by Jennifer R. Povey

Betty tensed, and glanced at Grace. Grace seemed like a wildling at heart, only waiting for spring to vanish with the snow.

  The girl's face said nothing. It had become a mask.

  "Then we need to find the wildings and warn them. Change of plans. We all go. Do you know which way that posse is starting looking?"

  Steffi shook her head. "Northwest I think, but they might change it when they find me gone."

  "Okay. Well, if we were wildlings, where would we camp?" Martin's shoulders rolled backwards.

  "South," Betty said without hesitation. "By that small lake. It has fish in it year round if you're willing to break the ice. We've gone there before, remember."

  "No wildlings there then, but you're right. We go there first."

  Betty moved over to her horse, then hesitated. "Horse or foot?"

  "I'm not risking leaving the horses, or anyone to guard them. Let's go."

  She swung, easily, into the saddle. It felt like her second home at this point, the mare's legs just extensions of hers. She should give the animal a name. It had always just been the spotted mare. Maybe just Spot. No need for anything more complicated. Spot it was.

  They made their way south. The wider roads were too obvious, so they avoided them. Twice, Betty nearly pitched over her head when Spot found a hole the hard way. Betty managed to stay in the saddle, however, and escape without injury.

  Good mare, she thought. So surefooted. She realized Martin was riding Moon. Betty had not even known the stallion could be ridden.

  The sway of the mare's pace lulled her. Eventually, she was able to stop thinking and just ride, flowing through the world as it was. A world that was worth preserving.

  -#-

  It was that thought that took her to the lake. If there were wildlings here, then they were well hidden or on the other shore. Most likely the other shore: it was more sheltered. Pretty soon, there would be grey skies, snow, and wind and nobody would want to leave shelter even to use the necessary.

  Yes. The wildlings were where she thought they would be; luck was on their side. Maybe Betty had more wild-sense than she had thought. As they rode around the lake, though, she heard a shot.

  It did not come anywhere close to them, just the report. Betty ducked nonetheless, even suspecting it hadn't been aimed at her. At the wildlings? By the wildlings at somebody else? Either way, she tensed her hand on the reins, listening and ready to move.

  Spot had not even shied at the report. The horse was used to people shooting deer from her saddle and the smell of blood. She just gave Spot her head and leaned forward slightly, trusting the mare to navigate the dangerous shoreline the way a good horse would, a hand resting on the saddle horn to ensure she remained balanced. Her knees kept her in the saddle as the mare increased speed, as if reading Betty’s mind about where to go.

  She tugged her own gun free of the saddle, chambered a round and looked for a target. If the enemy were already in the camp, then...they were, and that was all there was to it. But they could be taken down.

  She might have to shoot a man today.

  Then wildlings poured out of the trees, some turning bows towards her. "It wasn't us!"

  They hesitated. A man stepped forward, naked, his body covered in mud for warmth. "But you are here."

  "We came to warn you. There's some assholes with guns who want to play ‘Civilize The Wildlings.’"

  He snorted. "We'll send them packing."

  "Problem is, this crowd are a little more serious than they usually are. I think they mean it."

  The others caught up with her; she had not realized how much Spot and her had outstripped the others. "How do we know this isn't a trick?"

  Betty glanced at the others helplessly.

  "Because," Steffi cut in, "we haven't shot you yet."

  Betty lowered the gun to rest across her saddle horn, making sure it was not pointing at any wildlings. The tension flowed through the air and Spot pinned her ears a little. Horses always knew. They knew how you felt, who you were, whether you were telling the truth. She freed a hand to rub the mare's neck.

  That was better. She felt the horse relax. That, of course, was when the real enemy showed up.

  These men were well armed, with guns and some well-crafted bows and arrows. They would have outnumbered the wildings had had they arrived even a little bit sooner.

  She took aim, fired, and a man fell from his horse. She might have killed him, but she couldn’t think about that. Reload. She checked her ammo. Not much.

  She had to make every shot count, and she refused to shoot the horses, bigger targets as they were. Somebody else had no such compunction, a bay falling onto the lake shore with a terrified whinny.

  She flinched, and her shot went wide. It was suddenly real. Not hunting, not practice. War. This was the reality of human conflict and even now, in this time, they could not get away from the bloodshed.

  Something hit her in the shoulder, knocking her back. She fell from the saddle, the pain reaching her a moment later. Could she still breathe? Yes. She stayed on the ground, reloading a slow and painful task. Then there was a wildling next to her. The young woman tore off Betty's sleeve and helped her bind the wound. The only thing the wildling said was "Okay," and that no more than a whisper. Nobody wanted to risk extraneous sound.

  “Okay” meaning she was done? “Okay” meaning it wasn't that bad? Betty would find out afterwards, she supposed. Or not. Slowly, she crawled to an opening in the trees, using the cover they had, and fired again. The gun banged against her good shoulder. She realized she was lucky that she had not been hit on the other side. There was another whinny, this horse abandoning the fight. She could see its rider desperately pulling on the reins.

  She hoped the reins broke or that he...there he went. He fell into the lake shallows with a splash. She wasn't sure if he had been shot or just unseated. Slowly, she picked herself up, retrieving her gun. The horses stirred, milled around, their riders uncertain. She could not immediately see Spot.

  The horses clearly hated this as much as she did. All she wanted, right now, was for this fight to be over and done with for good.

  She never wanted to have to shoot at anything human-shaped again. Maybe her people should have bowed down, settled down. Returned to the rule of law.

  But there were other laws. Or at least ways of living. One of them was not forcing your rule on others. That was something they were supposed to have left behind. That was the law she was trying to enforce. Protecting her own people. Protecting the wildlings.

  An arrow flew over her shoulder, taking out a man who was aiming at her or one of those with her. Okay, she thought. It's mutual.

  She fired again, regretting it immediately as the recoil shuddered through her, pain flowing with it. But she hit her target, another of the men falling...

  ...and there was silence. The pain in her shoulder expanded, threatening her awareness. No. She refused to pass out.

  A wildling offered a hand, and she took it, struggling to her feet. "I need help."

  "I know," the woman said. "Hey! Townies, we got one of yours. She’s hurt."

  Betty realized that all of the enemies were either dead or fled.

  Chapter Ten

  "Flesh wound," Winston pronounced, moving out into the lake to retrieve clean water to wash it with. "You'll be fine."

  "My shoulder doesn't agree with you right now," she said, wryly. "Ah well. It'll come around to that opinion."

  "You're lucky he was a lousy shot."

  "No, if I had been lucky, he'd have missed." The response was automatic, which was a good thing, as she was not sure she was thinking straight.

  The blurring in her vision did not worry her. It was tears. They came from pain and stress, she supposed. And the dead horse, who had not asked for his rider to be a jerk.

  They had caught the one who had bolted and dumped his rider. It was a grey gelding and it had another of those torture device bits. She hoped somebody was looking after it, because all s
he wanted to do was sit here.

  A wildling man, a little older than Winston, came over with an old, chipped plastic bowl. It contained soup.

  She drank it without asking what it was. It tasted like fish. From the lake, she supposed. At least it wasn't horsemeat. And it helped, it made her feel almost immediately stronger. Not that the pain was going anywhere, but it was more bearable.

  Maybe she had been hungrier than she thought. "Thank you."

  She waggled her fingers on that arm. It hurt, but they all moved, supporting Winston's assertion. She'd have a nice scar, though.

  She wasn't the only one. Steffi had a nice gash burrowed in her thigh and Chuck had literally had his hair parted by a bullet. Now there was something that only happened in the tallest of tavern tales, she mused. Nobody would ever believe him.

  She wasn't sure she believed it herself, as she hadn't seen it happen. She had seen the neat holes in his hat. Personally, Betty had come as close to death as she ever wanted to.

  "You up to moving?" Winston asked.

  "Not until I have to." She stayed there, sitting on the log and watching the lake. She could see most of the approaches, and she knew she could run if she needed to.

  Her mind had cleared a little. The fighting was not over and it never would be, not until they restored law and order. Even then, they could not go back to the way things had been before. The price of no more Silents was all of this.

  The old-timers could not accept that. Whatever the world would become, it would be something new. Something that had never happened before.

  The shape of a new order had to encompass both Recovered and wildlings, and it had to start in agreement and consensus.

  First, they had to get the village back. Kick these guys out, so they could talk to them from a position of strength. The village had always voted for the council. How did the wildlings choose their leaders? By strength and competence, she supposed. Which was the right way?

  Neither and both. They needed something new. They needed a path for everyone, something that included all of these things. Betty did not remember the way things were before.

  She remembered things. She remembered Barbie dolls. She did not remember how wealth had been measured, how people ordered their lives. She only knew it as it was measured now: in corn, vegetables, and horses.

  She knew what her world was and might yet become. Did she need anything more? Yes, she did now.

  The village did, and she almost saw the edges of what it needed to be. Almost.

  -#-

  She had no more time to contemplate the future of the world, for Winston came back and offered her a hand. "Can you ride?"

  "I can try."

  He had to help her on her horse, and she held the reins with her good hand. "I won't be able to shoot."

  "Hopefully you won't need to. We're moving before they come back with friends. Then we're going to come up with a real good plan to kick them out of our homes."

  "Will the wildlings help?"

  "They insist that they owe us. I'm not about to start arguing with them. Are you?"

  "Heck no, not if they're willing to kick some butt for us." Then she sighed. "I don't really want any more fighting, but it's going to happen. Then what do we do? Arm the frontier? Follow them home and take them over in return?"

  Winston shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe we need a peace treaty."

  "I think they're right about returning order, wrong about how to do it. I think we need to get everyone together and come up with some actual laws."

  "What about the wildlings?"

  "Them too. Everyone. Give them what they need, their hunting grounds, their rights of way. We have to accept the truth. They're not going anywhere and frankly, they're not bad to have around."

  "Do we need them with no Silents?"

  "Does it matter? Why are they a threat to us?"

  Winston glanced down at his horse's neck. "I don't know."

  "That's because they're not. Oh, sure, they can shoot people. But they don't represent a threat to who we are. Maybe it is even the other way around."

  "Who are we?"

  She fell silent at that. She had thought she knew, but with the Recovereds’ memories of the former world messing everyone up? She was not sure any more, and she suspected she was not the only one to be uncertain. Who were they? Survivors holding the hearth fires until the lost ones returned?

  They deserved to be respected for that, even the wildlings, not thrust aside. What would the Recovered have done without them? Died.

  It began to snow, as if a reminder of how deep and sure winter was and how uncertain was everything else. Winter was a promise that was always fulfilled. Steffi had said that they had almost wrecked winter, before. Betty had not believed her. Winter seemed far too solid a thing for humans to touch. Winter killed.

  So too did men. Betty realized that the snow would cover over everyone’s tracks. It would help ensure they were not taken. That thought made her relax.

  Winter could be an ally as well as an enemy. It could be pretty, too, when viewed from beside a fire.

  She had no fire right now, and she was cold. The horse gave off little warmth, wrapped as she was in her natural winter coat. There was nothing to be done but endure it. It made her shoulder hurt less. Not enough to forget the injury, but enough to help.

  There was a road ahead of them, not a narrow road but a highway. One designed to carry many vehicles once. Now it was a swathe of grass growing up through the cracked hardtop. Lamp posts lay across it in places, although somebody had hauled them aside. There was enough space for a wagon or, perhaps, two riders abreast. The grass was rapidly vanishing beneath the snow.

  The road would be treacherous in more ways than one. By silent consensus, they crossed it quickly and then turned to parallel it in the trees, staying out of sight and off the potentially dangerous surface. The horses would not see holes through that snow, Betty thought, not as thickly as it was falling now. Her mare snorted.

  "I'd rather be somewhere nice and warm too," Betty told her. Spot snorted again, her breath forming clouds of steam.

  Pretty soon, the snow would be deep enough that nobody in his or her right mind would want to go anywhere. At that point, probably in two or three days, they would have to turn themselves in or die.

  Would the invaders kill them? Maybe, maybe not. More likely, Betty and her fellow villagers would turn themselves in and do slave labor. It seemed to Betty that the outsiders were only looking for excuses to find people to do the dirty jobs. Still, that beat being dead. There was the hope of escaping such a situation.

  Except they would beat Spot. She wondered if the mare would stand a chance if released. No, Spot would come back on her own; she was that kind of horse.

  The snow tapered off and Betty could see a little more into the distance. What she saw startled her.

  Somebody had more resources than, well, sense.

  -#-

  What she saw was a carriage moving along the road. She wondered if the driver had any clue about his risk of getting stuck. It was definitely a carriage, too, not a wagon. It even had windows that were glazed, a real luxury in this time. Most of the glass had not survived the plague and the one person she knew who made it produced only semi-opaque stuff.

  The glass for the carriage must have been salvaged from the city and cut down, she supposed. The carriage had been painted gay, cheerful colors.

  The entire image was completely ruined by one thing...instead of a team of matched horses, the carriage was being pulled by a dun mule.

  There weren't many mules, of course. One of the things they were always on the lookout for was a jack to breed mules. They had never managed to find one. Either this animal had been caught in the early days or somebody else had managed to get mule breeding going.

  Still, after all the work to make the carriage look good, the mule was incongruous. So was the woman in the homespun, ill-fitting dress who sat on the buckboard, occasionally flicking
a whip in the vague direction of the animal's butt. To Betty's practiced eye, she really did not know how to drive.

  Fortunately, the mule, giving the lie to the reputation of its kind, was just plodding along patiently.

  Did they ignore this person? Warn them?

  Winston raised a finger to his lips, then nudged his grey out into the road.

  "Whoa!" The mule shot a long suffering look over its shoulder as it stopped. Poor thing just wanted a competent driver, Betty thought.

  "Are you from around here?" the woman asked.

  "Could say that. What are you doing here?"

  The window of the carriage opened, and a grizzled head poked out on the side closest to Betty. His face was as dark as good beer. There weren’t too many people around who were that color. She seemed to remember there had been more.

  The wildlings said people like that had all gone farther south. That, then, was probably where this man was from. Farther south.

  "Inspecting," the man said.

  Could this be the mayor? Did he know what had been done in his name?

  "Inspecting what?"

  "The location, the people. Working out how best to integrate everything."

  "What if people don't want to be integrated?"

  "That would be kind of silly. Don't you...I suppose you don't really remember civilization."

  Typical Recovered, Betty thought.

  "You can't go backwards," Winston said, firm but quiet. She could barely hear him.

  "I was warned some people liked living in this squalor. Really, we need to pick a central location."

  "People have already done the fall planting. You can't just move them." Winston was trying reason.

  Betty wondered if there was any real point to that. Could you actually reason with Recovered? Some of them were adjusting fine, but most of them just wanted their lives back. She could not blame them, not when she felt the same way. Maybe what they should do was teach the Recovered how to survive and pack them off somewhere.

  They would die. None of them remembered the years they had spent as beasts. None of them knew how to hunt or fish or plant. They had to learn, and that would take a few months. By that time, there would be loves, marriages, the beginnings of children.