by Robert Adams
When Milo and the muscular Gy, between them, were able to get the trapdoor open, foul, musty air poured up from the utter darkness below. Turning to the Staiklees, he said, “We’re going to need some torches down there.”
And so they did, but only until Milo found and filled up and lit some gasoline lanterns that were in the cellar. He reflected that this cache would have been a true treasure trove two or three hundred years ago, but not now. True, there still was more than enough of value to him and to his people contained unspoiled in the sometime fallout shelter, but there was much else that now was utterly useless if not downright dangerous.
He had the seven bodies—two men, two women and three children—dragged into the room that had been the pantry, no pleasant task, as they had all begun to decompose as soon as the fresh, moist outer air got to them. That done, they began to load whatever looked usable or tradable onto the cart, and when it would hold no more, they sent Little Djahn Staiklee to drive it back to the campsite and bring back an empty one.
While searching for an easier way and possibly a wider opening to get their gleanings up to the surface, Milo found a short flight of steps leading up to an angled pair of doors, but they refused to budge a millimeter, even to the efforts of all three of the men, plus those of Djoolya.
Outside, the reason why was clear. Also clear was just why no one of them had seen the doors before: they were completely covered by a portion of the field-stone half-wall. When once the stones had been lifted and thrown off, the heavy, steel-sheathed doors opened with only a few minutes of straining and cursing and use of two of the pry-poles.
As they all squatted, panting, among the scattered stones, Milo beamed, “When first I saw them, I didn’t think those folks in the pantry there died of the plagues—none of them bore any of the easily recognizable signs of that kind of dying. No, I think they all got trapped down there and smothered to death. Of course, it was really the fire that did them in; with half a ton of stone blocking one exit and that humongous refrigerator on the other, no two men and two women could possibly have used either opening. Their air intakes must have gotten blocked then or soon after, and that was all she wrote for the lot of them. That’s why they didn’t start to rot until we went down there, too—there was no oxygen in the place, no breathable air.
“Let’s get them up here, out yonder somewhere, before they get any higher. The coyotes and foxes and buzzards will clean them up quickly if they can get at them.
“Since they didn’t die of the plagues, that means we can take all the bedding, too, and those are nice, thick, warm-looking blankets. Whenever Little Djahn gets back with an empty cart, we’ll load it with the best of the things down there, then close up the place to keep animals out and come back tomorrow or the next day to finish stripping it. Whatever any of you do, though, leave the sealed metal containers and the glass jars and bottles alone until I’ve had the chance to check out their contents; old as they are, anyone who even tasted of them would likely be poisoning himself.”
“But Milo,” demanded Djoolya, “what of all those pretty jars? The traders exchange valuable things for even one of those jars that has not been broken or chipped at an edge and that still has its top. Surely we aren’t going to just leave them all here?”
He leaned toward her to pat her grubby, work-roughened hand. “Oh, no, honey, we won’t leave them here. No, tomorrow or the next day, we’ll come back, dump whatever is in them out, pack them in a cartload of dried grass as far as the lake, wash them out well and put them somewhere safe to drain and dry until we’re ready to move on. I really hate to dump out that much food, but it’s all just too old to take the chance that it might still be even edible. Lest some Kindred clan wander through here and find and foolishly or innocently try to open and eat of those ancient cans, before we leave, we’ll hump them all up here and axe them open—a few poisoned coyotes won’t be any great loss.”
Spitting out the grass stem he had been absently chewing, Djim-Bahb Gahdfree asked, “What of those two big handsome steel chests, Uncle Milo? We should at least open them, I think, even if they prove too heavy to take away from here.”
Milo nodded. “They’re not so heavy as they seem, Djim-Bahb. I believe they’re just bolted to the wall or the floor or both. We will indeed open them, though I’m pretty sure I know at least part of what we’ll find in them, and whenever two or three of you get back from your clan camp with another cart for us, we’ll load up those two steel chests and take them along with us. The traders should be overjoyed to get such artifacts still in such splendid condition, with built-in lockworks and the keys to fit them.”
Gy Linsee raised an eyebrow quizzically. “Keys, Uncle Milo?”
Milo nodded. “You recall those rings of flat metal things I took off the belts of those two men’s bodies, Gy? Those were called keys, and I’m sure that at least two of them will open those metal chests.”
Before he and Gy left camp to hunt the next morning, Milo sent off Little Djahn and Djim-Bahb with spare mounts and a packhorse to seek out their clans’ camp and dicker for the purchase of the spare cart, now needed. He had them take back the now-reduced gaggle of spotted dogs, as well, for despite all precautions, one dog per night was regularly disappearing from the campsite, and protracted searches for any trace of them had been completely unavailing.
Less than an hour out of camp, Milo and Gy were lucky enough to find a young screwhorn bull—an earlier age would have called him an eland—grazing alone, a mile or more from the herd of herbivores. It was in an area of rough, broken ground over which Milo would have been hesitant to pursue the beast on horseback, but the bull elected to stand and fight and so was quickly killed with arrows from a safe distance. Then, while Milo guarded the fresh kill, Gy went back at the gallop to fetch a cart and more hands to help with the job of skinning, cleaning, butchering and transporting nearly a half-ton of meat, bone and hide. So fortunate a kill would keep the camp well supplied for several days.
Nor was food alone the value of the bull. The hide would be rendered into fine, strong leather and the hair into felt. Horn would become tools and implements; sinew, thread for sewing or making ropes. When steel needies were not available, slivers of bone could be made to serve that purpose, and still other pieces of bone, after fire-hardening and sharpening, were often used to tip hunting arrows. Cleaned and soaked and carefully stretched, then dried, the bull’s stomach pouches would become the inner linings of water containers; so too would his bladder. Hooves might be and often were rendered with fish offal to produce glue for a plethora of purposes, or sections cut from hooves made fine scaleshirts when sewed onto leather backing for war armor.
With the women, the children and Bard Herbuht fully occupied in camp, Milo took the cart down to the lake and washed off the blood, then he, Gy and two more of the Kindred warriors rode back to the ruin with the cart.
It was not yet noon when they arrived at their destination, but even so, the seven bodies dragged out and left upon the prairie on the afternoon before were already become only a few disjointed, widely scattered bones, all but invisible in the high grass.
As he had expected, the steel cabinets opened readily to two of the keys, and the contents were also about what he had been expecting, but more so.
The M-16s were there, three of them, but they were the selective-fire model, capable of full-automatic operation, which was unusual. There were four shotguns—two short pumps and two doubles—an M-3A1 submachine gun, two scoped hunting rifles, three .22 caliber rifles and a dozen handguns of assorted calibers and sizes. There was enough ammunition to start a small-scale war and four hand-grenades. But one of the steel ammunition boxes proved to contain not cartridges or explosives but coins—rolls of silver dimes, quarters, halfs, dollars and Mexican five-and ten-peso pieces, plus a few other rolls of gold Kruger-rands, Mexican twenty-and fifty-peso pieces, and a few American gold pieces. This last box he took out and set aside.
All save one of the firea
rms he transferred to the larger of the steel cabinets, which was, he was glad to see, literally built into a corner of the room. After dropping the keys inside with the arms, munitions and grenades, he slammed the self-locking door upon the dangerous artifacts. There was no point in allowing any of the Horseclansmen to learn to use and depend upon weapons that they would find worse than useless after they had fired off all of the limited stocks of ammunition; bows and slings and darts had been sufficient to keep them fed and protected for nearly three hundred years now, and he had no intention of spoiling them with the incipiently deadly fruits of a long-dead technology.
The one pistol he retained was, he admitted to himself, partially a nostalgia trip. The .45 caliber M1A1 Government automatic was made mostly of stainless steel with a matte finish, but the heft and the feel were achingly familiar. He packed all of the .45 ammo he could turn up—five hundred plus rounds— the five magazines, the spare-parts kit, two holsters and a lanyard in a hinged, lockable 20mm ammo box, adding the .22 caliber conversion kit and a block of the small-caliber ammo for it, as well. The pistol would serve him as an emergency, last-ditch defensive weapon in its larger configuration and to take small game when traveling alone in its smaller. The time was quickly coming when he would be very glad that he had not locked away this weapon too.
Little Djahn Staiklee and Djim-Bahb Gahdfree came back into the camp in a little over a week— very good time for such a trip—both they and the two new young warriors who accompanied them back all whooping and chortling over their expertise at haggling. They had managed to convert the packhorse load of goods into not one but two carts, each of them complete with teams and harness, water barrels and spare parts and even kegs of grease for the axles and hubs, plus a twenty-pound sack of dried pinto beans and a fifty-pound sack of dry, shelled corn, both raided or traded from the Dirtmen by one or the other of the Kindred clans.
There were no spotted dogs with them when they returned, but in place of them were two big, wiry, tough-looking hounds of the sort that these southerly dog-clan folk called tooth-hounds—dogs bred and trained to hold dangerous game at bay and, if necessary, to close with and kill the beasts. Milo would have been happier if the young men had brought back no canines at all, but if they had to have dogs along, he agreed that these were the kind to have; any predator that chose to tangle with one or both of them would have its work cut out for it, no two ways about that matter.
During the afternoon and evening of the day of the return of Little Djahn Staiklee, everything but bare essentials was packed into the carts, and the next morning, the yurts were struck, folded and packed, the king stallion was requested to move the herd out and the party commenced a march to the environs of the large ruin that the young warriors had chanced across weeks before.
They moved like a migrating clan—Crooktail and Snowbelly ranging well out in front, zigzagging back and forth across the projected line of march, seeking out danger or game; next came the mounted warriors, riding well separated in a crescent that guarded both the van and the forward flanks; then came the six carts driven by the wives of Milo, Bard Herbuht and Gy Linsee; the horse herd followed, shepherded, kept moving, by the king stallion, Spotted One and Bard Herbuht’s children. At Milo’s order, the brace of tooth-hounds were led along on ropes tied to the tails of two of the carts, for the prairiecats did not like canines of any type or description and were big enough, strong enough and fast enough to quickly make a blood pudding of either of the dogs, if so inclined. Only the jaguar, Spotted One, seemed at all tolerant of the presence of the hounds on the march or in camp.
The ready bows and throwing-sticks and slings of the skirmish line of warriors garnered a goodly supply of rabbits and three small antelope of as many kinds during the day’s march, and Little Djahn Staiklee roped and strangled to death a large antelope, while the redoubtable Snowbelly came back as far as the line of horsemen dragging a large, fat, spotted sambar buck.
Although they moved like a clan, the small party moved much faster than a clan, lacking the slow, difficult job of herding the cattle, sheep and goats kept by clans for milk products and fiber. Therefore, they had covered more than half the distance to their objective by midafternoon and when they came upon an ideal campsite, Milo ordered a halt.
Although no one, not even the prairiecats, suspected it, however, they had been under observation throughout the day, and they still were as they settled into the night’s camp.
Chapter 1
While the cats came into camp to eat, the young warriors and their two big dogs guarded the horse herd, not returning until the three feline guardians had once more assumed their vigil. When the party rode back in, Little Djahn Staiklee, the acknowledged leader of the group, sought out Milo.
“Uncle Milo, the horses all are restless this afternoon. The king stallion says that a strange cat has been sniffing around for days now, and it seems as if it trailed us here from the old campsite, too. You know, I’d been suspicioning that maybe Spotted One had been responsible for taking our hounds off, one at the time; teegrais always has had them a pure liking for dogmeat. But maybe I was wrong, Uncle Milo, maybe it’s another teegrai, a wild one, been stalking around camp wherever we was.”
Milo frowned. “Surely the cats would have noticed if any of their wild cousins were getting close enough to us to present any danger to the horses—though, knowing them and their inborn and unconcealed prejudices, they might have just neglected to mention any wild cat that was concentrating on killing, carrying off and eating dogs.”
Staiklee nodded. “Well, the cat that tackles either of the two tooth-hounds I brought back, Bearbane or Brutus, is going to purely have a bellyful of trouble before it gets a bellyful of anything else. Them two has killed or been in at the killing of bears, pigs, teegrais, tree-cats, wild bulls, bufflers and more kind of deers than you could shake a stick at. I raised and trained both of them out of a litter one my paw’s bitches throwed by his lead tooth-hound, Ballbiter. They is two tough hounds, Uncle Milo. You never seen the like of them in all your born days.”
“Probably not,” replied Milo, adding, “Nonetheless, please keep both of those dogs in your yurt tonight; we all have another long, hard trek tomorrow, remember, and the very last thing that any of us—man or beast—needs this night is sleep-robbing excitement. Once we arrive at the new camp, then we’ll see about this strange cat.”
The night passed peacefully enough, but at daybreak, while the twolegs were nibbling their hard cheese and drinking down the mugs of a bastard brew that the far-southern Kindred clans called by the name of “kawfee,” the two tooth-hounds, roaming out beyond the perimeter, began to make anxious-sounding noises.
At once, the young warriors dropped their mugs, crammed the last remnants of cheese into their mouths and lunged for weapons of the hunt—bows and quivers, darts, spears, slings, riatas and bolas. Even as they all trotted off in the direction from which came the canine sounds, Little Djahn Staiklee beamed to Milo, Bard Herbuht and Gy Linsee, “Brutus and Bearbane, they done found where something big and mean has been, sure as rain. They don’t use that there tone for just deers or bulls or pigs and the like.”
Fretfully, the middle-aged tribal bard beamed back, “If you lot want to go rambling off into that high grass down there after who knows what, then go; but you’d better leave at least a couple of you here to strike and load your yurt and gear, saddle your horses and hitch up your team. Otherwise, we’ll leave them here. You must learn to honor precommitments under any circumstances.”
“Djeri-Djai, Sami-Hal, you two stay back yonder and do for the rest of us, heanh?” Clearly grudgingly, the two young men trudged back up the hillock, stacked their weapons and commenced to strip the coverings from the frame of their yurt, muttering under their breaths to each other about elderly spoilsports.
While their women dismantled the yurts, Milo and Gy called in their mounts for this first part of the day’s march and saddled them before calling in the cart horses an
d harnessing them. They had not quite, either of them, finished this last when a furious din erupted down on the prairie some hundreds of yards distant from the hilltop camp.
Their ears buffeted by snarls, barkings, growlings, human shouts and at least one agonized scream, Milo, Gy and Bard Herbuht ran to their saddled and equipped mounts and were quickly astride and all stringing bows. Mindcalling the two young warriors who were themselves about to mount, he said, “Not so fast. Call in the mounts of those out there and saddle them all before you leave here. If we three can’t be of help in whatever is going on, then the addition of two more would be of no value either. And if this develops into a chase, everyone will be needing a horse, not just five of us.”
As he passed out of camp at a fast walk, Djoolya ran over and placed in Milo’s hand a six-foot hunting spear. The grass below the cleared hilltop was as high as or higher than a mounted man and grew more thickly with every yard they descended, severely hampering visibility if not movement, the rough, sharp edges of the grasses slashing at exposed hands and faces like so many knives.
But they did not need to see to find the scene of the bayed beast; they had ears, still, and the sounds of battle still smote them, not seeming to move fast or far. Bard Herbuht and Gy Linsee both nocked a shaft, grasping a brace of others between the fingers of their bow hands, ready for rapid loosings if need be. As they got nearer to the uproar, Milo beamed a mindcall to Little Djahn.
“What have the dogs cornered?”
“I don’t know, Uncle Milo,” came back the telepathic message, “and I thought I knowed every critter on the prairies and plains, too.”
“Well, what does it look like?” beamed Milo. “No, don’t try to tell me—open your mind and let me enter and see for myself, boy.”
Milo had never seen anything exactly like the beast either. He thought it bore a vague resemblance to both the badger and the wolverine, though it looked more like a monstrous stoat or weasel. It was as big as a black bear, though far more slender, and most of its supple body was the color of dead grass, though its feet, legs and part of its tail were either black or very dark brown, as too were its ears and its muzzle. The jaws were filled with white teeth of a respectable size, most of those easily visible being cuspids—biting, tearing teeth. If there were more than just the one of these predators around … !