When the winter was over and game no longer in hibernation the lonely boy speared a pair of bearcat cubs and, while their meat was drying in the smoke of the tipi fire he used their hides to patch out his clothing which was falling apart after a winter without maman to mend things. With Weeti watching silently from a nearby tree, the boy bundled together the bones and skin that remained of his family and wrapped them in the oldest of his aunts’ sleeping robes. Then, seeing Weed’s huge round eyes studying the bundle Jer6me knew he would be barely out of sight before some scavenger had undone his work.
These bits of skin and bone were just that, nothing more. But they had been Jerome’s family, the sole surviving members so far as he knew of the Lafranche band. They deserved some respect. Before breaking camp he put them all into the biggest tipi and piled enough wireweed around it to ensure a proper holocaust.
Weeti had not spirit-talked the boy for close to a month now. As his potbelly smoothed from better diet Jerome was increasingly unable to believe it had ever happened. Starved as he was, he must have just imagined it all. Still, the ‘dactyl stuck with him. Together, they had survived the winter. He was not surprised when, ten miles south on his march to get out of here before spring thaw and spring biters turned this region into a muddy branch office of hell, Jerome once more saw the ‘dactyl roosting on a scrub hangman bush just beyond the smoke of his campfire.
Jerome awoke suddenly in the midst of a nightmare. Then he realized it was really happening. The ‘dactyl perched on his chest, claws locked in the boy’s buckskin shirt. Saucer-round eyes stared unblinking into Jerome’s.
The boy did not know whether it was spirit-talk or just common sense. He rolled away from the fire, snatching robe and spear as he oozed away from the faintly glowing coals. From the phase of the Cat’s Eye, he had been sleeping about six hours, which meant at least three more hours before full daylight. Whoever or whatever was out there in the semi-dark …
Jerome willed his mind blank and receptive. Nothing. What good was spirit-talk if it did not work when he needed it? There wasn’t any such thing anyhow; he was sure of that now. Breathing shallow, lest he send too far a scent, Jerome was sure he smelled something familiar. An instant later when a muskylope trumpeted through blubbery lips he knew what that smell was. If Jerome could just slip around and get that muskylope while somebody was out there in the brush still creeping up on his fire …
Then came the answering trumpeting of another muskylope in the opposite direction. Jerome froze. They were all around him. He could not remember the route too well but Jerome thought he was fairly close to that place where the Lafranche band had come to grief against the Sodbusters. Should have circled well around it. But it was too late now for afterthoughts.
“Personne.” The voice was low but Jerome recognized the overly nasalized joual that had been native to the Lafranche band. He swallowed his sudden hopes and waited.
“Only one, no muskylope. Short fellow. Maybe a woman.” These observations came from a second voice. In the distance light flared and Jerome realized someone had ignited a torch from his dying fire.
“One of ours?” the first voice asked.
“Who else? Would a Sodbuster be out here alone? Hey ami!” he called in a soft voice. “You out there in the bush. Est ce que vous etez des Lafranche?”
“Who wants to know?” Jerome called.
“Marc-Antoine, chef-Lafranche.”
“Over here, Uncle.”
“Weetigo!” an old woman muttered when the dozen Lafranches in Marc-Antoine’s group learned how Jerome had survived the winter. Cannibalism was an everpresent spectre in a country where flesh freezes and corpses are an eternal temptation in lean times. Every tribe had its own repertory of horror stories, of supernatural anthropophagous monsters. To preserve sanity at the sight of a camp full of half-eaten corpses it was necessary to create monsters, legends, devils—anything but admit that humans just like ourselves had done this, done it so often that someday surely we might do it too.
Next winter was just as bad. Worse, since Marc-Antoine had not reduced the number of mouths in his group with some disastrous battle. They had been shot at several times by muskylope-mounted militia but no one had been hit and the cavalry were unwilling to mire their beasts in the mud which became a refuge for the Lafranche.
After solstice it was obvious that Marc-Antoine’s dozen, plus Jerome added up to an unlucky number. They had accepted the boy. He was, after all, a Lafranche, and his parents had been close kin. But there was always a certain reserve. That boyish, innocent face had eaten forbidden things. That he was doggedly followed by an ill-omened carnivorous marsupial did not enhance the boy’s status. It was possible that the boy might grow up to be a warrior. More probable, most agreed, that Jerome would become a warlock.
But as winter turned the ice flinty and game disappeared the boy increasingly took over. Old Gisele, who had pronounced him weetigo, was first to succumb. Quietly, as befitted an old lady, she had expired in her sleep. After the wake Marc-Antoine had supervised the wrapping and her pall had been lifted into the fork of the nearest winter-bare backstabber bush. A week later her husband, an ancient with abundant silvery hair also named Jerome, had grown weary of life without her.
Over the next month Marc-Antoine had eyed eleven-year-old Jerome quietly, studiously, without pronouncing judgment. The others grew thin; short of breath, hectic of cheek. Young Jerome remained cheerful and healthy, managing always to do more than an eleven-year-old’s share of the work of breaking ice to bring water, sweeping snow aside to hunt for dry wood, and the constant round of the traps looking both for furs and edible animals. There were not enough of either.
“You’ve been eating well and steadily, haven’t you?” Marc-Antoine asked one night when the others had fallen into the restless sleep of hunger.
Jerome made no effort to deny it.
“Who?”
“N’importe pas. When you’re ready you’ll all fight
over my leavin’s.”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Marc-Antoine said.
“So did I. But it did and I did and I’m alive. I plan on stayin’ that way.”
“Can you really spirit-talk that “dactyl?”
The eleven-year-old shrugged. “You really believe that kind of stuff?”
Marc-Antoine was not sure what he believed. Once years ago an itinerant priest had described heaven and hell. In spite of the priest’s badmouthing, the latter seemed possessed of a more amenable climate and more interesting companions. Someone else had once told Marc-Antoine that a true mark of leadership was to believe three impossible things before breakfast. But there had been no breakfast today. “I wouldn’t go tellin’ t’others about it just yet,” the chef warned.
Jerome took this warning to heart. He also brought Marc-Antoine a small gift of raw liver a couple of hours later.
A week later the surviving Lafranches grumbled among themselves and found it difficult to look young Jerome in the face but they all ate of the stew he provided and nobody asked where the meat was coming from. The equinox came with no letup in the sub-zero weather and the daily meat ration turned into a thin, unsalted broth boiled from bones. The older, less active Lafranches studied one another from sidelong eyes. Some wondered why they didn’t boil up that damned ‘dactyl that hung about the camp but none dared suggest it.
Another month passed and still no hint of thaw. Jerome was the only survivor strong enough to keep a hole punched through the yard-thick ice but his fishing was not sufficient to keep them all alive. He took to throwing the fish whole in with the bone stew to lend some remembrance of nourishment. Toothless oldsters complained of off flavor as they choked on fish bones.
Marc-Antoine’s teeth had loosened badly. In the middle of one night of blustery wind he awoke bent double with a sharp abdominal pain. Jerome punched up the fire and their eyes met. Each knew what the other was thinking. “You were right,” the chef told the boy. “Go ahead and do it.�
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“But chef,” Jerome protested, “spring will come. Who then will lead us on the hunt?”
The spasm of acute appendicitis pain passed momentarily and Marc-Antoine relaxed at this reprieve. He was catching a long sighing breath when Jerome drove the knife into his back.
Spring breakup came about the time Marc-Antoine was finished. Jerome began to bring home snow lizards, nooraks, spiny boar, and an occasional wild muskylope calf. Within a week the surviving Lafranches had fleshed out enough to pull their weight and hunting began in earnest. And a deep sense of embarrassment settled over the Lafranche band.
They found it difficult to meet their savior’s eyes. All were willing to admit that, had it not been for Jerome they would not be alive. They could admit that his hard young head had seen and clearly distinguished the dreadful choice between should and must. What they could not admit in so many words—not even to themselves—was that after months of Jerome’ exotic high-flavored meats, the stringy, fat-free spring herbivores they were eating now was pretty poor stuff.
At twelve Jer6me was the acknowledged leader of the Lafranche band. Weeti’s position was less clearly defined but no one these days ever thought of eating the ‘dactyl. Trekking back south on foot, they moved slowly, putting on fat at about the same rate as the winter-starved animals they hunted. Emerging from the worst of the swamps, the band chanced upon a muskylope.
From its looks and tack Jer6me took the gelding for a survivor from some Sauron battle. The animal was slightly below ideal riding stature and still bore the remains of a bridle it had not quite managed to shuffle off. The saddle marks were prominent. While the band spread out in an effort to surround the beast, Weeti launched himself from a nearby backstabber bush and soared, landing easily on the muskylope’s back. Instead of flinching, the animal trotted directly toward Jerome and nuzzled his shoulder.
Weeti had not spirit-spoken Jerome for nearly a year, leaving the boy increasingly convinced that it had all been hallucinations and hunger. These days he had other, more pressing concerns. At twelve Jerome had become abruptly and acutely aware that some parts of his rapidly growing body could be made to serve other than their prosaic tasks of elimination. And the Lafranche women of childbearing age were all of a ferocious determination to bear his child. It was heady stuff for a twelve-year-old.
Jerome tore his mind back to here and now, wondering what had suddenly alarmed him. Then he knew. The thin-aired, barely perceptible breeze was wafting an odor of wood smoke. Mounted on the beast, he signaled his still-afoot clansmen. With no need for detailed instructions, the women took the bulk of the baggage into the midst of a strangleberry thicket, evicting a ground-covering mass of foot-long snapping worms as they burrowed into invisibility.
It was not a town. Three houses with barns, stables and other outbuildings faced inward on a small square. Their heavy-beamed, pointed-topped outer walls of vertical logs formed the palisade. The only entry into the town was through a gate which stood open.
Three houses … as few as three men or as many as twenty … The able-bodied fighting men in Jerome’s band presently numbered fifteen. All older than Jerome, of course, but all sufficiently dull and docile to offer his primacy no resistance. It was midmorning. Jerome decided to sit it out behind this slight rise and see how many came back into the fort for lunch.
The fields seemed deserted. Ryticale was just beginning to straighten after months of “stooling,” creeping furtive as strawberry runners along the ground waiting for the snow to melt off. To walk in those fields now would do nothing apart from destroy grain and create knee-deep footprints. Which meant the men were off hunting, off on a trading expedition to the nearest walled town—or manning that stockade just waiting for the Lafranche band to come within range.
The ‘dactyl returned from one of its patrol sweeps and flared wings to land on Jerome’s cuir bouilli clad shoulder. The left shoulder of his armor was white from the digging of Weeti’s claws and from the ‘dactyl’s uninhibited droppings. The ‘dactyl emitted a grating shriek and for an instant Jerome’s mind gyred and wyvvered as it had during that first awful time. Then he saw what Weeti was looking at.
Coming boldly over the hill, doing what Jerome would have done if he’d had more men, more muskylopes, and more experience, twelve nomads on midsize mounts moved toward the gate at a smart trot, lances at ready.
There was no outcry from the stockade. Jerome hunkered down behind his hill and thanked whatever demons saw fit to protect him. He could have been trying to get in there and have these defenders trot in right behind him at the worst possible moment. Then abruptly his perception shattered again. When the dozen nomads were less than a hundred yards away there was an off-key blat of a trumpet or possibly a conch shell and the gates slammed shut just as the first hail of slingstones came whizzing from behind the palisade.
The lightly-armed nomads were totally unprepared. Some bore lightweight targets which they held overhead like hats. Which did not help when stones, peppered increasingly with darts, crossbow quarrels, and arrows converted their unarmored muskylopes into panicked, screaming kicking nightmares that forced the nomads to jump clear and run, some even leaving weapons behind.
“To Kattihaw, to Kattihaw!” a foghorn herald’s voice roared, and those who could retreated beyond range to re-form. Two men and three muskylopes were still out there under the walls, animals screaming and kicking and the men struggling feebly to crawl out of range of flashing hooves. From the slightly higher palisade alongside the gate an archer pulled a longbow and one man stopped moving. It took three arrows before the defending archer finished off the second raider.
The Lafranche men had no difficulty imagining themselves down there on the kilting field instead of these strangers. Jerome had worried that they might think him too cautious for a leader but he could sense that his stock was rapidly rising. It was nice to be liked.
Abruptly the strangers became aware that they had an audience. Immediately they formed up, wounds forgotten as they faced a new enemy. At a walk, the tiny squadron began advancing toward the knoll behind which the Lafranche band rested. Weeti launched himself from Jerome’s shoulder, swept in a wide arc over the riders and, true as a boomerang, completed his circle with a flared-wing landing on his friend’s shoulder. Jerome suspected any stranger would be at least as awed by a tame ‘dactyl as were his own people. He was also the only one mounted. He rode out to meet the nomads.
“What do you here?” the red-mustached nomad leader asked in trade Imperial.
“Meme comme vous,” Jerome said, then switched to Imperial when it became obvious that the nomad leader did not understand joual. “The same as you. We were studying how to learn the strength of the town when you most kindly came along to show us.”
“You ain’t workin’ for theyum Sodbusters, then?” Jerome shook his head. Those of the Lafranche band who understood Imperial found this idea hilarious.
The nomad leader’s eyes narrowed. “If’n you ain’t Sodbusters, then where’s your muskylopes?”
“It’s a long story that grows no nicer with the telling.” “So you had to eat ‘em theyun?” “Among other things.”
Until this moment Jerome had not realized his talent as a standup comedian. His fellow clansmen were in stitches. He turned and something in his eyes brought the snickers and giggles to an abrupt end.
It was at this moment that Red Mustache first realized he was talking to a fellow chief and not to some twelve-year-old messenger. “Well,” he began. “Looks like we’uns bit off a little more’n we could chaw. ‘Thout muskylopes I don’t reckon you’d be havin’ much luck either. What say we throw in together?” “Who gets what?” Jerome asked.
“Waal, they’s fifteen of you’uns and ten of us. But you ain’ got but one gelding and he’s gittin long in the tooth. We’uns figger a muskylope is just as good as a man.
“In that case I’ll trade you five men for five muskylopes,” Jerome said.
Les Kattihaw la
ughed, then realized Jerome was not joking. “How you fixed for women?” he asked.
Too fucking many of them and they all want to do it under my blanket. But Jerome was leader enough not to voice this opinion in front of his men. “We’ll both know that better after we take the farm, won’t we?”
“I s’pose you’re right,” Kattihaw agreed, “and they ain’t no use dividing the booty until the battle’s won. Y’all in for halves?”
For form’s sake Jerome glanced around at his clansmen before he nodded. They spent the rest of the daylight making fire arrows tipped with packets of dried muskylope dung wrapped in dried willow bark and soaked in a mixture of tallow and pitch.
Under cover of darkness they crept closer to the stockade and the Kattihaws salvaged what gear they could from dead men and dead muskylopes. While a mixed bag of the best archers from the Lafranche band and the best of the Kattihaw circled to concentrate their fire on the rear of the holding where the palisade was slightly lower, Jerome and Armand, who was the strongest man in the band, manhandled two barrels of the same combustible with which they had tipped the arrows up against the wooden pillars that sustained the single spike-studded gate. To Kattihaw’s delight and Jerome’s mild surprise, everything worked out as planned.
Even though the defenders had been expecting just such an attack, the thoroughness of it was overwhelming. With everyone scurrying about in the darkness pulling out fire arrows and beating down flames it was too late before they knew what was really going on. The palisade on each side of the gate was in flames. The fire was too far along to be inconvenienced by a few ill-aimed buckets of water. Still, they had to face the Sodbusters.
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers,
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 32