by James Axler
Krysty and Mildred exchanged looks. Then they both burst out laughing.
“They have women at the Protector camp,” Doc said. “As well as at that of our new employers.”
“So?”
“Don’t know why they wouldn’t send that stuff by boat, anyhow,” J.B. added.
“Boat’s slow,” Norvell said. “Upstream and all. Got to pole, or get pulled by ox teams, same as the wag.”
“Everybody likes booze,” Ryan said. “But the dresses and dreck?”
“Clearly,” Krysty said, “you men have a lot to learn about women yet.”
Chapter Ten
The strains of sweet music filtered out through the open windows of the big house where Al had shifted his headquarters as Doc and friends approached. Doc’s heart filled with bittersweet emotion. Ah, he thought. Yes. Eine kleine Nachtmusik. A favorite.
Emily’s favorite.
It was in almost a dreamlike state that he followed their cavalry-officer escort, Ryan, and his friends inside the baron’s big house. After the outdoor morning, cloudy though it was, the house was dim. Doc blinked several times before his eyes adjusted fully.
Baron Al sat in the parlor with his bearded face propped on a fist and a scowl beetling his brows. Flanking him stood a man Doc recognized as Colonel Turnbull and a strikingly beautiful blonde woman in a low-cut green silk gown. Various lesser officers stood by chatting. By the wall to Doc’s left, the string ensemble played. Incredibly, the instruments were in good condition. More incredible was the fact that people could read music.
The young officer who had escorted them approached the Uplander commander to announce his mercie raiding party had returned. Though the beautiful blonde looked a combination of bored and pained, the baron sat up and visibly brightened.
It came to Doc that, in his admittedly most limited experience of their new employer, he had never seen the baron simply sitting. He had always been doing something.
He called for Ryan and his friends to step up. At Al’s request Ryan gave a concise account of their doings and the outcome, in that admirably professional way of his, with amplifications provided by the Armorer or the others as needed. For his part Doc was called on to contribute little, and he found his eye straying often to the blonde who stood at Al’s elbow looking progressively more mutinous.
It was only natural. In terms of years actually lived through, experienced, Theophilus Tanner was a man in his mid to late thirties—even he had lost track by now. And chronologically he should have been dust long before skydark ever occurred, now a century and more past. His experiences after being time-trawled from his home and the bosom of his family had prematurely aged him in many ways, but hadn’t taken a toll on his fine intellect, honed as it had been at Harvard and Oxford.
But he still had a fairly young man’s eye for feminine pulchritude. Or maybe that was something that never really went away.
Certainly the woman, whom he took for Baron Al’s current wife, Jessie Rae, was highly magnetic to the masculine eye. Her sunshine-yellow hair was piled on her head in intricate and expensive curls. Her face was perfection suited to a statue, with a slightly snubbed nose and blue eyes, even if the alabaster smoothness of her brow was somewhat spoiled by a little frown, and her red lips pressed into a pout.
But somehow, as admirable as her outline and the details within were, she seemed to keep blurring into features less showily gorgeous and yet infinitely more beautiful and dear, beneath a prim bun of brown hair. But, ah, when Emily let down her long, lustrous hair, behind properly closed doors, that primness was set aside so thoroughly as to take a man’s breath away.... “So you let the drivers go?” the woman said in a petulant tone. “Just like that?”
“What would you’ve had them do, Jessie Rae?” the baron asked, confirming Doc’s none-too-difficult guess as to her identity.
“Why, tortured them for information,” she said. “Or killed them. They’re the enemy, aren’t they?”
“They’re just drivers,” Ryan said. A man who knew him as well as Doc did could hear an edge of distaste to his voice. The lean and wolflike one-eyed man had been the recipient of sufficient feminine attention in his time to have gained a certain immunity to it. And he was well armored in the scarcely less extravagant but far less...brittle beauty of Krysty Wroth. “They don’t know much. Their bosses just tell them where to go and tell them to git. And it wasn’t as if they weren’t eager enough to talk as it was.”
“Then why didn’t you chill them?” she asked challengingly.
“Jessie Rae,” the baron said, and Doc thought to hear something he’d never have expected from this man: the slightest hint of hesitant quaver in his bluff, gruff voice. “It’s not like they’re soldiers. Or even volunteers, for that matter. They’re just workers. Ain’t like they got much choice in what they do.”
Her pretty features pinched in an unpretty moue of distaste and even hatred. “Then shouldn’t they be destroyed to damage their baron, the way your men would burn their crops?”
“Lady,” Cody Turnbull said, “calm yourself. We all know your enmity toward our common foe is unmatched. But the general’s right. We maintain certain civilized standards of behavior, even if our enemies don’t. And for all their roughhewn appearance, clearly our new employees are men and women of principle.”
Doc thought he heard Jak half suppress a snigger at that. He was certain Ryan himself would scoff at the notion. But as for himself, Doc was more than half inclined to agree. Harsh principles, perhaps; and certainly principles shaped to fit the unyielding dictates of survival in an uncompromisingly brutal world. But indeed they all had principles, strong ones. None stronger than Ryan himself.
Jessie Rae tossed her head. The spit-curls dangling before each dainty ear flew in fine contempt.
“Men.” She turned and marched out, accompanied by a pair of serving women who had been standing so unobtrusively behind her that Doc hadn’t noticed them.
“Enough.” Al’s growl interrupted the music. Apparently the quartet understood it was directed at them.
“Go on,” he said. “Git. I’ve heard enough, thank you kindly.”
“Baron,” the colonel said, “think what your wife will say? You know she wants you to have more culture.”
“Well, she ain’t here anymore, now is she, Cody? What she don’t know won’t do her a lick of harm.”
As the musicians hastily broke off and began to gather up their instruments, Al turned to Doc.
“Sorry to interrupt your listening, Doc,” he said. “Fact is, my ears were all full of fine music. But you seem to have an appreciation for it, sir.”
“Indeed, Baron,” Doc said. “I’ve always considered the Serenade No. 13 for Strings in G major to be Mozart at his finest.”
The baron’s big flushed face—sweating, as usual, though it wasn’t all that warm even inside—rumpled in a grimace.
“If you say so.”
Al graced his visitors with a smile. “You’ve done good, my friends,” he said. “And I did good to hire you. Now, let me have the rest.”
With his customary admirable succinctness, Ryan completed his report.
But Doc was no longer aware of his surroundings. He was going away, into the almost diabolically beautiful strains of Mozart, and the even more beautiful world of his dreams...his memories...where Emily and Jolyon and Rachel always lived.
And where he always lived with them.
* * *
SNAKE EYE RODE down the dirt road from the Protector camp to the site where the ill-fated supply wag convoy had met its ill fate.
As he came upon where he reckoned the spot to be, he saw a draw, currently not running water although the bottom was damp, and showed the hoofprints of about a dozen horses. The cut bank would provide nicely complete concealment from the road and the convoy.
He didn’t dismount yet, just brought his black mare to a halt and leaned out of the saddle to peer down at the imprinted earth. There were some prints of boots
interspersed among the hoof marks. Cowboy boots. By the length of stride and their depth they were worn by a woman, tall and more heavily built than average. But muscular, he reckoned. Not fat.
Nodding, he rode on.
The ashes in the bed of the charcoal wag had gone cold. Standing next to the burnout, Snake Eye judged that had happened before the light, chill rain began to drizzle from bullet-colored overcast onto his black hat and duster.
The canvas canopy had burned completely away, leaving not even charred scraps hanging from the blackened and heat-sagged metal hoops that had held it up. Inside lay bundles of burned cloth.
He shrugged and turned away, concluding they were clothing for the higher officers and their ladies. Uniforms, to call them by the most complimentary name, for the lesser ranks would’ve come by flatboat up the Des Moines. If the Protectors bothered to send such at all. This had been a relatively small convoy, with a relatively stiff guard complement. That suggested high-value cargo.
Snake Eye surveyed the other wags. One had burned out so completely it wasn’t much more than a scatter of ashes with charred wheels lying in it, and even the canopy supports melted to stubs and slag. High-quality drink for the baron and his buddies, Snake Eye judged. That would account for the added heat: better fuel.
There had clearly been a fifth wag. He could tell by the shallow blackened crater with the axles and random chunks of debris buried in it, and the general pattern of wreckage thrown out by one or more powerful blasts. Apparently that wag had carried barrels of gunpowder, which the marauders had quite professionally used to blow everything to hell.
He had identified where most of the ambushers had hidden on his ride in. It wasn’t hard to spot where they’d gone to ground. They’d picked obvious hiding places. Why wouldn’t they? It wasn’t as if the convoy or even its army escorts were expecting trouble so far behind their own lines. They hadn’t been wary of driving into good ambush ground here, any more than they had been going into equally good spots to lay traps on the way from Hugoville. No reason to.
Not before this. He chuckled slightly to himself. He was used to being his own best company anyway.
Cawdor and his friends—if his suspicions were correct, and that’s who the perpetrators were—were living up to their reputations.
Leaving his horse to graze, with reins trailing to the ground, he walked back to examine the ambushers’ location more clearly. What he found significant was precisely what he didn’t find: empties. The ambushers had obviously done a thorough job picking up their spent casings.
He found where four had hidden to the left of the track—west—and one to the east. That left one unaccounted-for by accounts he’d gleaned of the group over the past few years—reports he’d followed up with interest that only increased as he learned more tantalizing hints and scraps. Or two, if what Jed and his retinue had said about an extra member was correct.
And in this case Snake Eye saw no reason to doubt even a baron’s word.
He recalled the survivor’s feverish half-conscious account. A search along the convoy’s back trail showed Snake Eye’s trained vision flattened grass behind a hummock west of the line of march. A sixth ambusher had taken position there. On the small side, a woman or boy. Boy, he decided from the tracks.
Moving back to the ambush site proper, Snake Eye ran his gaze over the corpses. The chillers had left them for the wolves. They hadn’t omitted to strip them of their boots and search them for any valuables, as Snake Eye confirmed quickly.
He noted that three of them had been shot from the direction of the grassy hummock south, one in the back of the head, one in the side and one in the front. Snake Eye found it interesting that apparently that shooter had seemingly sniped at least one of the convoy guards without alerting the rest.
The survivor had said he heard no sound from the blaster that wounded him. Jed’s sec men were inclined to chalk that up to the heat of battle, where sometimes men heard little but the roaring of their pulse in their own ears. Or just didn’t notice what they heard.
Now he wasn’t so sure. The slug the healer had dug out of the wounded trooper was a copper-jacketed .45—“modern” ammo in the sense that it hailed from the twentieth century and the era of smokeless powder. A handblaster bullet. Could the shooter from the rear of the wag train have made such expert shots with a silenced handblaster?
The survivor said he didn’t think it was possible any of the drivers survived. But Snake Eye found only one body that was clearly a civilian. Apparently Cawdor had let the others escape.
Snake Eye smiled thinly. It just went to confirm what he’d learned about the man: that he didn’t enjoy chilling for its own sake, took no joy in the simple act of chilling. As Snake Eye most definitely did.
But Snake Eye didn’t chill without necessity any more than Cawdor and his people did. In his case, well, he liked drinking alcohol, too. But he indulged in it sparingly. He indulged sparingly in killing for much the same reasons: to keep his edge; and to avoid becoming intoxicated.
Also professionalism, of course. Chilling was what he was paid to do; it made no more sense to go around the country putting the freeze on people at random than it did a carpenter to run around building cabinets out in the back of beyond. And finally, because Snake Eye understood the distinction, generally lost even among the baronial classes, between gourmet and gourmand.
Smiling with the satisfaction of a job well done, he headed back to his horse. The missing convoy riders had left a trail easy to follow as a predark superhighway. And why shouldn’t they? They had no motive for stealth, just speed—to get clear away before the coldhearts who’d wiped out their convoy changed their minds. Anyway, they weren’t professional evaders.
He put his boot to the stirrup and swung into the saddle. He didn’t know what information he might glean from accounts from actual survivors. But then, that was why a man sought information in the first place, wasn’t it?
Snake Eyes clucked and booted his mare’s black flanks and set out at a trot, following the slogging, obvious tracks. West.
Chapter Eleven
“So here’s where we are,” said the officer, bending over and pointing to an ancient contour map.
He was Lieutenant Tillman Owens, the fresh-faced blond kid who’d brought the companions into the Uplander camp in the first place. Ryan gathered that Baron Al liked to rotate his junior officers into staff duty and then back out into the field on a pretty much daily basis. It was an unorthodox system, even by the standards of the day. But Ryan saw the point to it, clear enough. And he reckoned the Trader, his old boss and mentor, would approve.
“And here,” he said, moving his finger south, “are the Protector lines. And back here’s where you struck the wag convoy.”
Ryan nodded. He and his people knew all this, of course. But the baron had told the lieutenant to get them up-to-date on the military situation, something that could be important to their continued survival. So it was important to Ryan. The kid was simply making sure they started on the same page; he had no quarrel with that.
“Now you’ll notice, as you no doubt did when you rode across the country both ways, there’s not much terrain of any kind of strategic importance we’re battling over here. Some high points, some low points, some streams draining into the Des Moines. But we’re both fighting on this side of the river, which is the only significant barrier to way deep in the Association territory.”
“Did make a bit of an impression, son,” J.B. said, polishing his glasses with his handkerchief.
“Well, the land you rode over, which our two armies are battling over, happens to be prime growing land, which was originally settled, years and years back, by what are now called Uplanders—us. But the cattle barons downstream, the ones who eventually formed the Association, grew bigger and stronger than we were. First they pushed us back into the Uplands. Then they actually conquered us.”
Ryan sat frowning in a folding chair. “Don’t see how all this history stuff
loads a single magazine for us,” he said.
“Mebbe it doesn’t, Ryan,” J.B. said. “But then again, how will we know until we hear it?”
Ryan looked at his old friend in surprise. The Armorer seldom said much, never without a point to make, and the points he made were invariably good. That wasn’t the same as right, but Ryan wasn’t triple-stupe enough to imagine anybody was right all the time.
With his left thumbnail he scratched his neck beneath the turn of his right jawbone. “So how does knowing any of this help us?”
“Seeing as how we’re fighting alongside these people,” J.B. said, “just seems to make good sense to have some idea what their stake in the whole fandango is. All respect to you, Lieutenant, it’s good to know what kind of skin your people got in this game. Is it serious blood business, or just some baron’s ego-puffing party, and the people who got our flanks and backs are liable to vanish like an old white dandelion head in the first puff of wind?”
Owens shrugged.
“Fair enough, Mr. Dix,” Ryan said.
“Dark night! Don’t call me that, boy. Just getting my bones in motion each and every morning makes me feel old enough for any given day.”
Ryan felt his frown deepening. “All right,” he growled at last. “You’re right, J.B. I was blind not so see that.”
“Baron Al’s ancestor,” the young officer went on after a brief uncomfortable pause, “mebbe fifty, sixty years back, led the rebellion that drove out the Association overlords. His newly formed Uplands Alliance reclaimed the territory we sit in now, and a ways beyond it south. Two sides have been swapping off control of it ever since.”
“So it’s a pretty long-standing grudge,” Mildred said. “That’s like an underground fire, like in a root system or cool seam. You might not always see it, but know it’s there. Might not even smell the smoke. But one of those can burn forever, and there’s no telling when it might suddenly burst out in a full-on blaze.”