by Robert Adams
From the place it had resumed upon the front stoop, the brown tomcat strolled into the room and, after sniffing cursorily at the body of its deceased servant, hopped up onto the dining table and began to nibble at a half-emptied bowl of hard, stale, crusted porridge, heedless of the skittering roaches whose feastings he had disturbed.
Hating to do it, Daiv put Nohbuhl’s mare to a stiff trot all the way back to the armory, thinking that he would have to send the man to the closest farm to the armory—the Gibsuhn place—to fetch back some men and boys to get Mosix underground as soon as possible; the shape the days-old cadaver was in now, Daiv would not have even considered having the women wash it and clothe it properly; the thing would likely burst or come to pieces under their ministrations anyway.
But by the time he reached the armory, Djeen Nohbuhl was roaring drunk, swilling down a mixture of winter cider and beer, all the while bellowing out what he probably thought was a song and beating time on a tabletop with the work-hardened palm of one broad hand.
Poor Daiv did not know what to do. Were he to try using Djeen’s mare again today, he would run a severe risk of foundering her. Then, announcing their arrival with exuberant whoops, the hunt came riding in, their pack animals heavy-laden with two big stags and what looked to be at least twenty rabbits.
The hunters were proud of themselves and had every right to be so, and Daiv was quick to afford their prizes at least a brief examination accompanied with words of praise, before getting down to business.
“Herb, old Mosix has done died, two, mebbe, three days ago in his house. Won’t be no proper fun’ral, ‘cause he’s rotten, stinking, in there. You ride out to Gibsuhn’s and tell him I said to bring along his two biggest boys and a pickaxe and a couple of shovels, too. Tell him he’ll get Mosix’s ass for the trouble, but that them two goats is already spoke for.
“Sam, you and your brother get to skinning and butchering, hear? Gabe, you ride out to Nohbuhl’s place and tell his wife she better send in a wagon for old Djeen in there—his mare is plumb spent and he’s too drunk to get on her anyhow.”
Sam Cassidy dismounted, hitched his horse and walked back to begin offloading the kills from the pack animals, but his brother, Shawn, sat his horse in silence for a moment before speaking to Daiv.
“With just only the two of us, men’ Sam, doing it all, it’s bound to take us till dark or after, and I got reasons I gotta git back to our place sooner’n that,” he stated.
Daiv felt his anger rising, but he held it in check for the nonce, asking, “Shawn, if Captain Mehrdok had done told you what I just done told you, would you’ve told him what you just done told me?”
Shawn squirmed in his saddle and would not meet Daiv’s stare. “Well … but you ain’t the captain, neither.”
“No,” Daiv agreed readily, “I ain’t the captain, not even the first sergeant, but I am a sergeant, which is more rank than you or your brother got, and I’m the man—Sergeant Daiv Djahnstuhn—that our captain said was to run things here till he and First Sergeant Rehnee got back. You heared that, we all of us did. Right?”
Shawn squirmed even more, while his brother and the other two hunters, though clearly listening and watching, were just as clearly keeping out of the matter, waiting to see what happened.
“But … but, gee, Daiv … uhh, sarge,” the younger Cassidy brother finally half-whined, “I got me a dang good reason for to need to get back home early, see?”
Carefully controlling himself, Daiv strode over to the side of the young man’s mount, reached up and took a firm grip of his belt with one hand, while he showed him the other clenched into a fist.
“And you got you a even better reason to do like I tell you, boy! You git off that horse and git to work on them carcasses or I’ll drag you down and purely beat the shit out of you! Hear me?”
Turning, Daiv then strode into the armory, where he found Djeen Nohbuhl lying on his back on the floor, snoring thunderously in a pool of urine. Taking the big man’s shoulders, Daiv dragged him out onto the stoop, careful to lay the drunk on his belly so he would not strangle when he vomited, which he always eventually did after a drinking bout. Looking, without giving the appearance of so doing, he noted that Herb and Gabe were nowhere in sight, although there was a small cloud of dust up the road, while both Sam and Shawn Cassidy were manhandling one of the stags toward the skinning rack.
“Well, I’ll be dee-double-damned!” he muttered to himself as he fetched in a mop to clean up the mess on the armory floor. “Cap’n Mehrdok, he was right. It worked! I done just like he told me, and, by God, it worked. I might git the hang of all of this yet.” Then he thought and could not repress a shudder. “And I damn well better, and quick, too; ‘cause if the cap’n and the first sergeant don’t never come back and with old Mosix dead and rotting, that means I’m gonna be it … leastways, till we gits around to having another election, that is.”
Their funerary chores accomplished, Wally Gibsuhn and his sons reined up their wagon, to the tailboard of which the late Mosix’s roan ass was now hitched, before the armory in the early twilight. From the stoop, Daiv could see that a full bale of hay, some odds and ends of ass harness, a half sack of grain and a large iron skillet had joined the spades and pick in the back of the wagon and knew that there were probably smaller items he could not see in the conveyance and in the pockets of the man and his two sons. But he figured that that had been a messy job they had done over there and that since none of the high priest’s effects would do him any good anymore, the Gibsuhns might as well have what they wanted of them, just so long as they left the two goats he meant to have driven out to his own farm tomorrow, and maybe that big rangy brown tomcat, as well. The beast had had the appearance of a good ratter.
He waved his arm and said loudly, “Wally, come on in and have some beer with me, huh?”
The short, balding farmer handed the reins to the boy who sat on the seat beside him. “You boys drive on home, straight home, hear me? I’ll ride the new ass back, later. And when I gits back, the team had better be unhitched and took care of proper, the wagon unloaded and in the shed, the harness all cleaned and hung up where it belongs and the tools all cleaned and put up. You make your brothers help you out, won’t none of it take too long, so don’t go looking at me out’n them sad, put-on eyes, hear? Give that skillet to your maw, tell her the sarge has me at the armory and I’ll be home just as soon as I can.”
As the wagon rumbled off at a good clip behind its sturdy, well-matched team of horses, Gibsuhn looped the ass’s halter to the hitchpost and climbed the steps onto the stoop. “Huh!” he grunted, on noticing the big body on the boards to one side of the stoop. “Old Djeen’s been at it again, looks like. Why cain’t he be happy unlest he gets sloppy, pissy, falling-down drunk, I wonder?”
Daiv shrugged as he led the way into the lamp-lit armory. “He’s jest like that, Wally. But if you think back on it, his paw was too, so I guess he come by it natcherl.”
When the two men were seated at one of the long board tables with mugs of the cool beer that Wally had fetched up from the cellar, Daiv said, “Wally, that was a plumb nasty job I give you and your boys to do, and I thank you for doing it so quick on such short notice. You really earned that there ass, but he looks like a good young’un with a lot of years of work in him.”
Basically honest Wally Gibsuhn choked a little on his beer, then said, his gaze fixed to a spot on the floor, “Well … actually, Daiv … uhhh … the ass, he won’t all we … I .. . took, see.”
Daiv chuckled good-naturedly and patted the short man’s thick, hard-muscled arm. “Don’t worry none, Wally. I saw the hay and feed grain and harness and all in your wagon; Mosix had all that stuff for the ass, so if you’re getting the ass itself, you might as well take his fixin’s too.”
Still looking at the floor, the farmer muttered, “But … that won’t all, Daiv. I took a big ol’ iron frying pan out’n the kitchen of the priest’s house and a real steel cleaver and some
them thick metal pans what don’t never rust and a axe and three flitches of bacon and …“
Laughing heartily, Daiv quickly reassured the guilt-ridden man. “Now, Wally, I done told you, don’t worry none. You didn’t really steal nothin’, like you seem to think you done. Old Mosix, he’s dead now, you oughta know that better’n anybody, by now, so he sure-Lord ain’t gonna ever have no more use for nothing he owned alive.
“Me, I got dibs on them two goats, and like as not, when my boys goes over there to fetch ‘em home, they’ll pick up a thing or two, too, just like you and yours done, this night.
“Now, here, let’s have us another mug of beer, huh?”
Before Wally left on his newly acquired ass, Kathleen Nohbuhl and one of her hands drove a wagon along the darkening road to the armory. With hardly a word to Daiv, Wally and the Cassidys, they dragged the sodden bulk of Djeen Nohbuhl off the stoop and tumbled it over the side of the wagon, then remounted and drove off, the mare hitched on behind and her saddle tossed carelessly atop her snoring owner. Daiv was no longer worried about the misused mare, for while the Cassidys had gone about their work that afternoon, he had patiently walked and cared for her, cooling her slowly, gradually, treating her as tenderly as if she had been his own.
Chapter IX
While they skinned a young bison and dressed the carcass for easy packing back to camp, Milo and Wahrn Mehrdok mindspoke one to the other.
“Irrigation problems or none, Wahrn,” beamed Milo, “not anywhere near all of your people are going to want to wander off to lead the lives of nomad herders … not after they find out just how brutal such a life often is, anyway. Your womenfolk, in particular, are mostly going to prefer the known hardships to those as yet unknown, that’s just the nature of females, you can’t fight it.
“And becoming nomads is not a thing you can do overnight, anyhow. I’m informed that your cattle, for instance, are fat, short-legged, short-horned beasts of a sort that would not survive even a single season, having been bred to be too slow to outrun predators and too clumsy and near-hornless to fight them. You folks are going to have to start breeding them for more horn, more leg, more muscle and less fat; better yet, start interbreeding them with Horseclans cattle— they’re not at all pretty and they produce rather small quantities of milk, compared to yours, while their beef is usually tough and stringy, but they do survive, Wahrn, they survive heat, cold, dust, flies, floods, droughts and predators of every size, and they do it all on grasses, weeds, wild grain and herbs.
“In that regard, at least, you’re in luck, for one of the two clans that is headed this way boasts the largest herd of cattle of any Horseclan of which I know. I feel certain that Big Djahn, chief of Clan Staiklee, would be delighted to allow your herds to mingle freely with his … but be certain to permanently mark your cattle, for he occasionally forgets just which cattle are his and which the property of others. Indeed, it is often remarked among the more southerly-roaming clans that a fair proportion of his herd are ‘previously owned’ cattle.
“But cattle are his only weakness, Wahrn. In all other respects, he is a fine, brave and very honorable man, a chief of note, a war leader of rare talents. Are you to become a Horseclans chief, you might do far worse than to emulate such a man, in all ways save his one, very personal weakness, of course.”
Then Mehrdok asked, “Milo, why did it have to be destroyed, that pleasant, easy world that preceded our own? Why did those uncountable numbers of people have to die so suddenly and so miserably? Can you, with all your long years of life, tell me why?”
“To begin, Wahrn, that now-ancient world was not all of it as easy and pleasant as you have surmised. The great nation that once covered a fair proportion of this continent was perhaps one of the most blessed and prosperous of all that had ever existed, anywhere, but even within it there existed folk who lived hard, meaningless, hand-to-mouth lives, as had their parents before them and as would their children after. Also, during the century preceding the demise of that world, there was never a time when at least one war was not being waged somewhere, in some nation, for some reason or none; for then, as now, the races of mankind were aggressive, predatory and rapacious, and too, in that time and world, there was the problem of too many people and not enough arable land on which to grow food for them all.
“Added to the coveting of other people’s lands was the insatiable desire to dominate all folk, everywhere, which was the driving force of those peoples who called themselves by such names as Communists, Socialists, Fascists, Nazis and the like. These people not only practiced open aggression against other peoples, they also often fomented the lunatic activities of terrorists and revolutionaries in large and small nations all over the world, in the hope that the nations so afflicted would become sufficiently weakened to fall to their arms and armies or to the internal subversion of their hordes of agents within the very governments of target nations.
“All over that old world, Wahrn, folk were leaving the land to crowd in their millions into cities—towns that were miles long and wide—all completely dependent on food, water, fuel and all else being brought from far away and therefore all living within a week or less of starvation and want. In good times, that precarious balance could usually be maintained, but in times of widespread natural disasters, rioting and other civil disorders such as the planned disorders called ‘strikes,’ the chain of supply was sundered and people suffered terribly until it was repaired.
“You see, it was not the so-called war that extirpated that old world and nearly exterminated all of the races of mankind, but rather the side effects of that hostile exchange, Wahrn. Yes, a very few of the incredibly destructive missiles hurled at the nation that once was here did strike and either destroy their targets or render them uninhabitable for long periods of time. However, the vast majority of those weapons were destroyed in flight, high, high up in the sky, by defenses designed and emplaced for that sole purpose. Yes, tens of millions died in various nations around that world, but earlier wars had been as or almost as costly, and hundreds of millions survived the immediate effects of the missiles, so the world might have picked up the pieces and gone on—an earlier world would have done just that, a world that did not have so many of its people jammed cheek by jowl in unhealthy cities and frightfully vulnerable to contagion, starvation, and the panic bred of unreasoning terror.
“There were those, then, who thought that the plagues were a result of some form of chemical warfare, and some of them may well have been just that. Who, now, will ever know the truth of the matter? But I have always been of the opinion that they were simply new mutations of older plagues, for they moved around the vast expanses of that old world with almost unbelievable rapidity, took hold and slaughtered in areas that had not been attacked by anyone, that still were well fed, living in peace and order.
“The selectivity of those plagues was very puzzling, though, Wahrn. Races that were completely wiped out in some parts of the world were the sole survivors in others. In a few places, women and children and old people were the first to die, the adult men not succumbing until months later, while other scattered localities suffered just the reverse.
“Those plagues did their fair share and more of killing of prideful mankind, but they were not the only killers then stalking about; no, starvation took terrible toll, and other more mundane diseases and injuries cost innumerable lives due to a dearth of medicines and those trained in the use of them. Others died in flareups of warfare that went on as long as there were enough fighters to field and weapons with which to arm them. And even after the national or ethnic armies were become a thing of the dead past, packs of well-armed scavengers made life exceedingly miserable for those survivors they did not kill outright, when they had done robbing and raping them. So long as any sort of order, of governmental authority, existed, attempts were made to keep these packs of scavengers and looters away from as many places as possible with such few police and military personnel as remaine
d; I would surmise that your ancestors were just such a force, sent here to protect the people then living here from the roving gangs of spoilers.
“I ran into just such a group, a unit of the California State Guard, on just such a mission, early on in the death of the old world. Not knowing just who I was or what I was about and assuming the worst, they shot me and left me for dead … which is just what any normal man would have soon been. I’ve never faulted them for it—they were trying to follow their orders, to do a hard, in the end an impossible, job the best they knew how to do it, and after sixty days of living off the land in the Sierra, I’m certain that I looked as wild and as woolly as anyone they had come across up until then. I played the part of a good corpse until that unit had moved on out of sight, then went on about my business.
“A few days after that incident, I lucked across an isolated, very affluent home hidden away in a small canyon in the foothills. None of the people who had lived there had been dead long, and I dragged their bodies out and buried them, then moved in. That dead family had apparently believed in preparing for any eventuality and had clearly been sufficiently affluent to prepare thoroughly, in depth.
“The home was far larger than it looked, more comfortable and richly appointed inside than the outside would lead anyone to believe. Behind the house itself was an underground garage housing three all-terrain vehicles, a well-equipped shop facility, a good-sized gasoline-powered auxiliary electrical generator and an access corridor to the cellar of the house.
“The deceased owners of the place had laid in enough high-quality foodstuffs to have fed a score of men for six months, the water was electrically pumped from an artesian well and the gasoline to power everything was contained in a buried five-thousand-gallon tank. But the reason I stayed there as long as I did was really the elaborate and very powerful shortwave radio. It’s because of the couple of months I used that radio that I know as much as I do about what occurred in the rest of the world, long ago, that and my abilities to speak and comprehend a large number of the languages then used.