“We need some ’orses, Geoff. Quiet loik, away from pryin’ eyes. Paperwork’ll all be done roit later.”
“Ah think sommat can be dun,” the little man grinned. “If that there redcoat lends an ’and.”
“Good. ’Ave a sandwich, mate,” he added, taking one out of the basket in each hand and starting his own with an enormous bite. “S’goof,” he added through a mouthful.
“My picnic!” Ian said… but quietly.
“You Rangers can move,” Ian Kovalevsky said a week later. “Even by the standards of the Force.”
“They sold us good horses back at the Anchor Bar Seven,” Ritva said; they both had the habit of talking without looking at each other as they rode, which was useful-her eyes were moving ceaselessly and so were his. This was potentially hostile country. “And we have well-callused backsides.”
Ian grinned. “After the way you got wounded bringing the alarm about the Cutters and your brother Artos saved everyone’s bacon by showing up in the nick of time it’s not surprising. You guys could have had the horses for free, if you’d asked. With me thrown in.”
The Rangers-plus one member of the Force sent on special detached service by an amused and agreeable captain-were riding under a bright cloudless summer sky. Around them lay bunchgrass and bluestem turning from green to gold, whispering in long ripples to the end of sight and standing high on the horses’ fetlocks. Land crept by to the steady walk-trot-canter-walk pace, changing from flat grassland to occasional steep wooded hills, or cut by deep ravines and then subsiding to open level ground again. This high plateau that had been known as the Eye of Idaho once; white-topped mountains showed west and east, with the deceptive look of the big-sky country that fooled you into thinking something three days’ ride away was only a few hours’ distance.
The air was warm with summer, but not hot; they were four or five thousand feet up here. Small blue flowers starred the tawny-green grass in swales where the dark basalt soil was damper, and insects burst out of it before their hooves, or now and then grouse or partridge. Ahead, the party’s spare two-score remounts-the remuda, which despite the sound was a Spanish word, not Sindarin-grouped together in a well-trained knot, requiring only an occasional canter by the pair assigned to rearguard to keep them bunched. She was glad of that; leading reins were a trial, especially when you had three or four horses each. A big remuda was the way to travel fast, though. With enough remounts you could make a hundred miles a day or more in summertime, especially if there was good grazing or feed available along the way.
“Beautiful beasts,” he said.
Ritva nodded, watching with pleasure their glossy hides move. These weren’t the ones they’d taken south over the Drumheller border, through the lands where the Dominion, the PPA, the US of Boise and the Prophet’s domains met over hundreds of miles in a tangle of wilderness they all claimed but mostly didn’t control. They’d given the garrisoned fortress-city of Moscow a wide berth, and then Nez Perce supporters had supplied remounts at the northern edge of their territory; the nascent Bearkillers had made friends there and elsewhere in this district when passing through Idaho right after the Change, and Hiril Astrid had been with them then. She’d returned last spring, as well, and had renewed those ties with locals who didn’t care for President-General Martin Thurston and his wars.
These glossy Appaloosa-spotted beasts were still quite fresh, and they’d brought the Ranger party far and fast. Now it was time to meet the next set of helpers here in enemy territory.
Though I should remember Idaho and its people aren’t the enemy. The usurper Martin Thurston is the enemy, and his ally the Prophet of the Church Universal and Triumphant.
They swung westward a little to skirt a marsh where water glinted amid stands of reeds and patches of open water; the Rangers were in a loose diamond formation, carefully irregular so as not to attract attention from a distance by hanging up a we are military sign.
Ducks lifted thousandfold from the swamp, and white herons waded around its edges, probing for frogs; a line of old fence posts stood disconsolately in the shallow water, tilted and blackened, gaps showing like missing teeth and with a few strands of rusty barbed wire still clinging to them here and there. There was a dense fringe of youngish willows and cottonwoods and other water-loving trees tangled with undergrowth along its edges, and the horses snorted and shied as the party approached.
The Dunedain leaders had probably veered that way to keep the timber between them and prying eyes on the higher, drier ground eastward beyond the wetland. Ahead someone stood in their stirrups and raised a hand, then swung it leftward: investigate.
Ritva swung her horse into a lope with a shift of balance and the grip of her thighs, an arrow ready on the string of her recurve saddlebow. Her mount was usually a well-behaved beast, but laid its ears back as they approached the woods, and now and then snorted in a fashion that plainly said in Horse: Smells bad, boss. Are you sure you want to go there?
When its hooves started to squelch a little and the ground gave off a rich muddy smell she leaned far over, left knee bent and right heel hooked around the saddle horn as the horse walked slowly along the edge of the firm ground. The marks in the bare mud between two clumps of grass were unmistakable, cat-pugs about as broad as she could have spanned if she stretched thumb and little finger apart as far as they would go. Bigger and squarer than the more common cougar, and mountain lion didn’t like this sort of ground anyway. Tigers, on the other hand…
They do like a swamp, the stripe-kitties, when they can get it. Big snowshoe feet and they swim well too. Is it my imagination I can smell him? No, it’s there, like a tomcat, but even more rank. A male then, and big, warning off his brothers. The wind’s in my face, right from the woods, so he can’t be too close or the horses would be acting up more than they are. I wish we had Edain and Garbh along, she’s the best tracking dog I ever met.
The lead party had halted. They’d be looking at her with Astrid’s Zeiss binoculars, an heirloom from her father Kenneth Larsson. Ritva remembered her grandfather with affection-he’d died in a boating accident when she was about fourteen-and he’d loved gadgets, having been an engineer as well as a very wealthy man before the Change. The 20x60 S-type monstrosity was typical of the sort of thing he’d collected, with an utterly ingenious mechanical stabilization system that hadn’t been in the least affected by the Change, and it would make nothing of a thousand yards. She pulled herself back into the saddle with a flex of the leg, then slipped her bow back into the scabbard at her left knee and the arrow into her quiver, stood in the stirrups and brought her hands before her face, palms in.
Then she made claws of the fingers and raked them outward sharply, twice, making the gesture broad and obvious. That was Sign for tiger, and her honorary Aunt Eilir had made the visual language part of the Dunedain curriculum, back when she refounded the Rangers together with Astrid in the years after the Change. That was probably because she’d been deaf since birth, but also because it was extremely useful to be able to exchange complex information silently.
Two more of the party trotted back on the other side of the remuda, pushing the beasts towards the marsh and its fringe of woodland despite their unease. The commanders came up; Hiril Astrid was casing her binoculars in their padded-steel case.
“That was good scouting, Ritva,” she said with a nod.
“Thank you, my lady,” Ritva acknowledged.
Which was a bit formal, but they were in the field, not sitting over wine in Stardell Hall listening to a song or a reading from the Histories. The four older Rangers looked a little more worn than their followers; not that they were anywhere near their limits, merely that there was more discomfort behind their hard-held faces.
“Scout net,” Astrid said, and two more of the Rangers trotted away.
Alleyne brought out a map, and everyone else squatted around it with their reins looped through their belts and their horses occasionally taking a nuzzle at their hair.
&
nbsp; “This marsh isn’t mapped, but I think it’s here,” he said, tapping a spot. “The wetland’s probably recent. Within the last twenty years from the trees, though cottonwoods grow bally fast.”
“And this St. Hilda’s place should be about six to eight miles south and west,” John Hordle rumbled, his finger moving over the waxed linen like a sausage with auburn fuzz.
Astrid sighed. “This all looks so different from when Signe and Mike and Dad and I came through in the first Change Year,” she said, gesturing at their surroundings. “Most of this was plowed land, winter wheat and black fallow, with gravel roads every mile. See where the dimpled lines run, with more sagebrush and less grass? That’s the old roadbeds.”
“The ironic thing,” Alleyne said, his eyes still on the map, “is that there are probably more people living here now than then. There wasn’t any famine here, and this Lewiston place over a bit west was a substantial city and the ranchers here must have taken in some of them. And of course everyone’s been breeding like rabbits since.”
That’s an odd thing for him to say, Ritva thought absently. Uncle Alleyne and Aunt Astrid only have three themselves. That’s not many at all.
“There was black plague in Lewiston,” Astrid said, her weirdly beautiful face looking stark for an instant. “Pneumonic form. It came in with refugees from Spokane; we heard about it, and Mike turned us back when we saw the smoke from where they burned the bodies. Saw it. And… we could smell it. But I know what you mean.”
It took a moment for Ritva to follow the thought; she was distracted by the casual mention of a journey that had become a legend in itself, and hearing her father-whom she barely remembered herself-referred to so humanly as Mike. It had been Astrid who coined the great title of Bear Lord for him, much against Michael Havel’s liking, from what she’d heard.
But I’ve been on a longer trip, and one that will be more of a tale! she thought suddenly. All the way to Nantucket and… well, not quite back, for me, not yet. Dad would have been so proud!
Ian nodded agreement.
“It’s the same where I come from, sir, ma’am,” he said, in English-he’d been following the Sindarin conversation fairly well after a spell of total immersion and a lot of saddle-time studying a borrowed phrasebook. “We have more people now than before the Change in the Peace River country too, but there are abandoned fields and big grain elevators and such all over. We only need… oh, about one twentieth the tilled land. Less, maybe. I guess it must be like that in a lot of places.”
“Lot o’ people fed from these fields,” Hordle said. Unspoken: And they all died when food couldn’t travel far anymore. “No need to farm most of it now, loik the lad says.”
Eilir Signed: But we know St. Hilda’s still there. Sheriff Woburn said it’s thriving, in fact. And it’s friendly; it should be, the way you guys rescued them from those awful bandits back in the day. He said he’d have the Abbess… Reverend Mother Dominica… warned to expect us. We need local help approaching Woburn at his own ranch. There’s sure to be some sort of government surveillance.
Ritva winced slightly at the reminder of what was fairly ancient history to her, because the tendrils of it came down to her own time. The bandits’ leader, the self-proclaimed Duke Iron Rod, had turned out to be working with Norman Arminger, who’d tried to push the PPA’s borders this far in the early days-Lewiston was the head of navigation on the Columbia-Snake system. Eddie Liu, the first Baron Gervais, had been his liaison with them, supplying weapons and advice; he’d been the Lord Protector’s right hand in any number of malicious plans. But his son had been Odard Liu, and he’d been one of the nine questers who’d gone to Nantucket. He’d saved Mathilda’s life in battle at least once on the journey, and might well have saved them all in Iowa by the way he’d kept the mad tyrant Anthony Heasleroad amused and distracted.
And he’d died just short of the goal on the shores of the Atlantic, in a last stand that left him lying like some paladin from a Chanson with a broken sword in his hand and dead Moorish corsairs in a ring around him. She’d watched him die, making his last farewells calmly despite the bone-spears in his lungs and smiling as he felt the breeze of Azrael’s wings.
Not fair to blame us in the younger generation for our parents’ sins. You have to keep that in mind a lot with the PPA. Odard could be a pain in the ass, especially all that time when he was trying to get into our pants just so he could notch the Havel Twins on his belt, but he really shaped up on the Quest and got over himself. That last part of it he was like an obnoxious brother you love anyway.
“We should approach them carefully, even with the password from Woburn,” Astrid said. “The probability of running into enemy agents goes up very sharply from now on, and nothing attracts the eye like group movement. This here would be a good place to keep the horses; there’s cover, water, and grazing. And the tiger’s scared off a lot of the game, so hunters are less likely to stumble across us.”
Hmmm, Ritva thought. You know, she’s right. I haven’t seen any elk or black-tails or buffalo or antelope for the last hour or so. And there should have been sign of muskrat and beaver around here, it’s prime for them.
“Kitty might ’ave a go at the ’orses,” Hordle mused.
“Not too likely, with say, four guards,” Alleyne said and nodded thoughtfully. “This is rich land in high summer, and a tiger would have to be very hungry indeed to try for something guarded by that many humans. Easier to go out where it usually hunts, and cats don’t go looking for fights.”
Eilir nodded. Unlike humans. We should do a sneak. Here, west of the monastery, through these wooded hills. Then we can send one or two people down to make contact.
“Let’s do it,” Astrid said. “Time presses, the armies are already moving toward battle in the West, and Operation Luthien must succeed in time. Coneth, you’re in charge here.”
A short, olive-skinned young woman silently bowed with hand on heart.
“I’m leaving… Hirvegil, Tarachanar and Yridhrenith with you. Hold and keep close concealment for three days, and then use your initiative if we haven’t returned.”
Ritva felt a moment’s sympathy as Coneth gulped slightly and bowed again.
“N’i lu e-govaded ’ win, Hiril,” she said, which meant Until we meet again, Lady, roughly.
Rangers had discipline; within fifteen minutes a rope corral had been made on a dry spot shielded by half a dozen willows for the remuda, the pack-beasts offsaddled and the gear and supplies covered by camouflage nets, and the stay-behind party were busy building a concealed blind-what Dunedain called a flet -in the limbs of the biggest cottonwood. The rest of the band switched to fresh horses and remounted.
“By pairs, at ten-minute intervals, and be careful not to cross each other’s paths. Gwaenc -we go!” Astrid said.
Why did I have to be the one person sent down to make contact? Ritva thought a little sourly underneath the pine trees. I’m not really a diplomatic type. Oh, well, it’s part of the job.
Most of the Rangers were farther back, keeping watch in all directions. Eilir looked at her and smiled a little impishly; you could see her mother Juniper Mackenzie in her then, though her face was longer.
Then the world seemed to shift a little. With a tiny shock Ritva noticed that there were more small lines beside her eyes, and not just weariness and the weathered look of those who were often outdoors regardless of rain or season. Eilir Mackenzie-Hordle was growing older.
Whoa. It’s just being away two years. She looks fine and I’m older too-not a teenager anymore.
Eilir was a mother and near to middle age now, though it would be a trim handsome middle age. It was natural, the Doom of Men… but somehow it felt as if the ground had stirred.
Mary and I went to join the Rangers because Mom seemed like a prematurely old fuddy and granddad was dead and the Rangers were all young like us… and because the Histories spoke to our souls, of course. And Aunt Astrid was family, and Eilir was for all practical purposes
except Mom never really liked Lady Juniper but come on, Rudi’s my half brother, get over it, Mom. Mithrilwood was like an endless game that never had to stop. But it’s not a game, it’s life. I’m grown up now.
Eilir’s grin got wider; a lifetime spent lipreading had also made her uncannily acute at following expressions.
You’re growing up, niece of my anamchara, she Signed. Even Astrid and I did that, you know, eventually. Mithrilwood isn’t Neverland, nor yet Aman the Blessed. It’s just home and the place my children were born, which is fine enough and more.
Ritva replied in Sign herself, which was policy where even low voices might be overheard: Ah… sorry… I was just wondering, Why me? really. For this contact mission.
Really?
When you were used to it, Sign could convey dry pawky irony as well as any tone of voice.
Eilir went on briskly: Well, we picked you because you’re the most experienced Ranger we have here who’s not well known yet. We four are. I’m deaf, my beloved little John’s freaking fee-fi-fo-fum huge, Alleyne looks like, well, Alleyne, and Astrid is… Astrid, she Signed. And because you’re younger and people pay less attention to the young. Because you’re a woman and people feel less threatened by women-Manwe and Varda alone know why. Plus tall fair people fit in even more here than most places. Take a look, familiarize yourself with the layout.
She handed over the precious Zeiss glasses and Ritva leveled them across a low-cut stump; the woods on the hill above the settlement were obviously carefully managed and healthy. St. Hilda’s Monastery lay below them, the shadows just beginning to lengthen. From the look, most of it had been there before the Change, but there had been a great many alterations and more than a few additions. The core building was built of bluish-gray stone, twin-towered, as much like a castle as a church, and surprisingly modern in appearance; the lower windows had been sealed. There was a brick wing that had the alien boxy look of late pre-Change work, and a stretch of buildings off to the north.
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