Dies the Fire dtf-1

by S. M. Stirling

  “Boy needs exercise,” Ken said.

  When Havel woke again, he felt completely drained; not in much pain-an itching stab along his scalp wound, a throb in his neck, bruises elsewhere-but weak as a kitten. Something smelled wonderful close by, though.

  Gradually the picture came clear. He was lying on a bed of pine boughs, with a canvas cover over him, rigged like a tent to the side of the Huttons’ RV. Blankets and the mylar sleeping bag and a low fire in a round bed of stones with a sheet-metal reflector kept things comfortably warm-warmer than he would have been inside the vehicle, with its heaters not working.

  Not far away was a horse with its head down, pawing through the long dead grass for the first of this year’s shoots, and then eating the natural hay when it couldn’t find any.

  There was a pot over the fire, and the good smell came from there.

  “What’s that?” he said-croaked, rather. “Christ Jesus, I’m dry.”

  Signe Larsson was not far away, silently practicing knife strokes against a small lodgepole; she wore clean jeans, her hightops, and a big man’s shirt of checked flannel over a T-shirt of her own, one with a whale and a circle-slash over it. When she heard his voice she stabbed the knife into the wood with a backhand flick and hurried over to him.

  “About two days, right?” he said, reaching up to touch his forehead.

  The long wound across forehead and scalp had been stitched in a small neat style, but he’d have a spectacular scar.

  Just like Tarzan ‘s, he thought to himself.

  He’d been a Burroughs freak as a kid, and had spent much of the early eighties pretending the forests of the Upper Peninsula were the ape-man’s jungles. He’d enjoyed the Mars books almost as much, although it put him off a bit when he realized that since Dejah Thoris laid eggs, John Carter had essentially been doing the nasty with a giant bug.

  “How did you know it was two days?” Signe said, dipping a cup into a bucket that stood on a table nearby. “You came to a few times before, but you were sort of semiconscious.”

  “Don’t remember a thing since Mr. Bear turned out to be Not Our Friend,” he said, and then a long wordless ahhhhhh! as he drank the cold river water. “Thanks… no, I could tell by the state of your bruises. They’re a flattering shade of yellow-green; mine are fresher. What smells so good?”

  A woman was singing in Spanish in the middle distance, a husky soprano, a voice with smoke and musk and heat in it-Angelica Hutton, at a guess. He could hear the words now and then:

  “Mi amor, mi corazon-”

  Signe grinned; she did have a set of colors that would have done a frog proud, though the swellings had gone down, revealing the straight-nosed regularity of her face.

  “It’s bear broth,” she said. “We’re making jerky out of most of it, but the soup’s good. Want some? Meal and revenge in one.”

  He nodded, too tired to speak much. She brought over a cup and put an arm under his shoulders to lift him so that he could sip. The contact was remarkably pleasant, in an abstract sort of way. The broth itself was delicious, mostly clear, with a little finely minced meat in it and some dried onion. He could feel the rich warmth of it spreading through his middle, and his eyelids grew heavy again.

  Havel fell asleep to the sound of the Spanish song, the splashing of the river, and a distant sound like a grinding wheel on hard steel.

  His next waking found him clearheaded; a day after that he was still feeling shaky but strong enough to rise and eat solid food, wash and walk. The next day he was himself again, save for a lingering stiffness.

  The older men had been hard at work on the flatbed; the towing bar had been rerigged, and the gear sorted and readied for loading.

  Will Hutton had set up his workbench a good ways away; near it was some contraption powered by part of a bicycle, with a transmission belt running from the skeletonized rear wheel. Not far from that was an improvised hearth of mud and rocks, with Astrid pumping on a piston-bellows setup.

  “Good to see you up,” Hutton said, turning from the fire; sweat ran down his stocky muscular torso.

  “Good to be up,” Havel said frankly. “Not quite good as new, but getting there.”

  His scalp wound itched like fire, but that meant it was healing well. For the rest he was stiff and bruised, but he’d been there before; with nothing torn and no damage to his joints he was ready to chalk it up to experience.

  Some exercise was just what he needed.

  Astrid smiled at him shyly. Havel looked at the black man; he nodded very slightly. Havel glanced back at her coolly, and then went on after he’d made greetings all around: “Maybe you should start practicing that mounted archery stuff again, kid?”

  “Thanks, Mike!” she replied, and then broke into a broad sunny smile. “Mr. Hutton has the most fascinating book about it-mounted archery, that is!”

  Surprised, Havel looked at the Texan.

  “With y’all in a second,” he said.

  Then he took his workpiece out of the coals with a pair of pincers, gave it a quick once-over, nodded, and picked up a smoothed nine-foot pole with his other hand. The metal was a twelve-inch tapering double-edged blade shaped like a willow leaf and about as broad as two fingers, but it was mounted on a round steel tube. Using the pincers, then the anvil and a hammer, Hutton forced the tube sleeve onto the pretapered uppermost section of the pole.

  The wood began to smoke almost immediately; the sleeve was heated past the red-glowing stage.

  Quickly he reversed the spear and plunged the whole head and a foot of the shaft into a big bucket of water. There was a volcanic hiss and spurt of steam, dying away to a muttering and bubbling. The hot metal would shrink as it cooled, binding unbreakably to the wood.

  “Saw somethin’ like this in Calgary, up in Canada, when I was workin’ rodeo-went for the Stampede there couple of years,” Hutton said.

  He took the spearhead out and wiped it dry, then wiped it again with an oiled rag, then braced the shaft between his legs with the top three feet across the anvil and touched up the edges of the head with a two-handed sharpening hone. The steel made a scring… scring… sound under his swift expert strokes.

  “The Mounties at the Stampede used lances ‘bout like this, put on quite a show.”

  “You were in rodeo?” Havel asked.

  Astrid was beginning to fidget, then visibly controlled herself.

  Good, he thought. Let’s introduce the concept of discipline and patience into the Elvish ranks.

  Hutton nodded. “Roughstock,” he said.

  That meant riding Brahma bulls, and horses deliberately picked to buck. He glanced over at his wife, who was checking the bundles and boxes of their gear against a list.

  “Angel, though, she wanted more than broken bones and trophies on the wall. She was right, of course; and I’d rather work with real horses, anyhow. By then I had enough saved to get our spread and a decent herd.”

  He tossed the long spear over to Havel. The younger man ran his hands along the smooth length of it; the blade was sharpened right down to where the curve of the shoulders melded into the tubular socket, so it wouldn’t get stuck in someone or something’s body the way the knife-bladed weapon had.

  “Used part of a leaf spring for that,” Hutton said, waving his hand back towards the vehicles by the side of the road. “It’s good metal; forming the socket, that was the hard part. I made up a couple of ‘em.”

  He went over to the flatbed and got something else. Havel’s eyes widened a bit. It was a straight-bladed saber just under a yard long in the blade, with a three-bar brass guard. A neatly made sheath of leather-covered wood held it, with chape and mouth done in aluminum beaten to shape. Hutton handed it to him, and he examined it more closely; the hilt had wooden fillets glued to the tang, covered in layers of thin braided rawhide to shape it to a man’s palm. When he drew it the weapon was heavy but well balanced, blade cross-sectioned nicely from thick back to edge; the reverse was sharpened for a foot back from the
point.

  It felt right in his hand, suited to a thrust or solid chopping cut.

  “Haakkaa paalle!” he said, giving it a flourish. At Hut-ton’s raised eyebrow, Havel went on: “Finnish war cry from the Old Country, way back.”

  “What’s it mean?” Astrid asked.

  “Literally? Hack them down! Freely translated: Kill! Kill! Back in the old days in Europe, the Finns fought for the kings of Sweden, who really got around-our cavalry campaigned with them all over the place. The Church had a special prayer: ‘From the horrible Finns, good God deliver us!’”

  He tried whipping the sword through a figure eight, and then winced slightly at how close he’d come to taking off part of his own right kneecap in his enthusiasm.

  Hope nobody else noticed that. This is going to take some work, he thought, and went on aloud to Hutton: “I thought you said you weren’t a blacksmith!”

  “I ain’t; and if I was, I couldn’t do a sword from scratch in four days. That’s not hardly blacksmith’s work at all, Mike. Just mutilating a length of leaf spring. The hard part in makin’ swords the old-time way was tempering, heating and quenching just right. But that, it’s alloy steel and already heat-treated better than anyone could do in a forge.” “Hmmmm,” Havel said. He braced the point against a stump and leaned on it; the metal bowed, then sprang straight again. He tested the edge with his thumb. It was knife-sharp, which was practical for a weapon-a razor edge was too likely to turn on bone. A flick at the stump took out a surprisingly large chip without dulling it.

  “We’ll have to learn how to temper steel again by hand, eventually,” he went on.

  “Lord, Mike, this is America. You know how many tens of millions of cars are sittin’ around, with every wheel hung on half a dozen sword blanks? All I had to do was be careful to keep it cool so’s not to lose the temper, straighten it out with a sledgehammer, file an’ cut it to shape and do the hilt ‘n guard-guard’s brass strip from the engine grille of the truck-then grind the blade to the right cross-section and hone on the edge. Didn’t take more than a day. Astrid’s pa helped a good deal, and some books on old-time cavalry I got, so I’m workin’ on one for each of us.”

  Havel nodded, delighted, and decided to let Astrid burble before she burst: “What was that you said about Will’s books, kid?”

  “He has the most wonderful things about horses-he’s sort of like a Rider of Rohan, you know? And books on cavalry, and these notes-they’re called Horseback Archery-”

  She turned in appeal to Hutton. The Texan had begun to dismantle his improvised hearth, removing the parts he’d be taking with him and stowing the tools neatly in their boxes. He gave her an indulgent chuckle and said:

  “Got to exchangin’ e-mail with this fellah in Hungary, name of Lajos, Kassai Lajos. They got some real horsemen there, good as any over to here, and he’s been working for years on finding out how his old-timey kin used bows from the saddle, and how they made their bows and stuff. Workin’ practical, with his own horses. I’d admired to see it. He’s fixin’ to write a book about it, and sent me a good part of his work. I printed it up an’ bound it.”

  Hutton shook his head. “Hope he was close to home when things Changed; he’s got him a little ranch and some horses out in the country there. If he was, he’ll live if anyone does!”

  Havel nodded. Well, there’s a change for you, he thought. Last month, you could chat with someone in Hungary. Now you can’t talk to anyone outside shouting range.

  Out in the meadow, Luanne and Signe and Eric were riding-galloping down a row of light sticks set in the ground, swerving in and out around each in succession in a series of Scurves, very much like the rodeo event called barrel racing.

  He saw that Hutton hadn’t been boasting about his daughter; Luanne was leaning in to each curve with effortless grace. Eric and Signe were very good; she made them look as if they were operating their horses by not particularly sensitive remote control systems.

  And I’m not nearly as good as either of the twins, he thought. Well, practice makes perfect. I suspect a lot of the rest of my life is going to be spent in the saddle.

  “Go on,” he said to Astrid. “See if you can give her a run for her money.”

  “Luanne is cool,” Astrid said, and ran for a hobbled horse.

  Hutton watched them for a moment; Havel went over and helped him lift his anvil into place on the trailer and lash it down.

  “Mike,” he said, “How were you plannin’ on us making a living, while we’re on the way to the promised land?”

  “However we can,” he said. “If we have to fight for food, we will, but I’d rather not. Overall, it depends on whether my ideas about what’s going to happen are close to the mark.”

  Hutton looked a question at him, and Havel continued: “It’s obvious what’s going to happen in the big cities-and overseas, in countries that are all big city, like Japan. Remote areas like this, or the farming country… I think things will collapse there too, but slower. Most people will try to hang on to what they had, and the ways they did things, as close as they can. It won’t work, not in the long run.”

  “They got along well enough with horses and such in my granddaddy’s time,” Hutton said. “Or at least the white folks did,” he added with a grim smile.

  Havel nodded; Hutton didn’t have much formal education, but he was no fool-in fact, he was about the most all-round competent man Havel had ever come across, even out here in the backwoods.

  “But they didn’t get along without telegraphs, or steamboats, or without guns, a hundred years ago,” he said. “Not for a long time before that; you’d have to go back a thousand years, nearly, I think, before it wouldn’t make a difference. Someone, something wanted us knocked way down.”

  Hutton made a final tie-off and fingered the knot. “I hate to think the good Lord judged us that wicked. He promised to Noah no more water; but this time, He took away the fire.”

  “Could be,” Havel said; he was actually an agnostic, but there was no way to disprove the Texan’s idea. “Myself, I think Ken’s got it right. Someone out there”-he pointed upward-“with a technology that makes ours… what we had. look like stone knives. Something so far beyond ours we can’t understand it, and it’s like magic. Like algebra to a monkey.”

  Hutton looked aside at him. “If it was some spacemen, what do you figure we can do ‘bout it?”

  “Nothing,” Havel said bluntly. “I figure we’ll just have to live with what they’ve done to us, and we won’t even find out why unless they tell us someday. In the meantime… we have to find a way to live in the world they gave us. You and I, and our kids-mine when I have them, that is.”

  He looked at the sun. “Let’s start early tomorrow. We can make Lowell in three days, taking it easy. It’s all downslope.”

  “One step closer to Larsdalen,” Hutton said, smiling.

  “If that’s where we end up,” Havel nodded. “One step at a time. Lowell first.”

  “Ain’t much in Lowell but about thirty people,” Hutton observed.

  “Right. But there’ll be a fair number of other travelers stranded there. I want to look them over. We need recruits.”

  “We do?” Hutton said.

  “We do. Anywhere we end up, if it’s worth having. someone else will want it too.”

  Thirteen

  Lowell, Idaho, had a sign at the outskirts: population 24-with the 24 crossed out, and “23” written beside it.

  The joke was one from before things Changed.

  The tiny hamlet sat at the junction of the Lochsa and the Clearwater; in normal times it was a jumping-off point for the wilderness areas around, and for white-water rafting. Now half a dozen of its residents stood across the roadway; three of them had hunting bows, the others axes or baseball bats.

  Havel reined in his horse and flung up his right hand with the fist clenched. He could hear Angelica’s whoa to her team, and the hoof-falls of the rest behind him ceased, dying away to an occasional clop or c
runch as a horse shifted in place.

  “Afternoon,” he said.

  “Afternoon,” the burly middle-aged man who seemed to be the leader said. “Lot of road people already been through.”

  Road people? Havel thought. Then: Well, yeah, there must have been millions caught away from home when the Change happened. I suppose people would come up with a nickname.

  “I’ve got to warn you though, we don’t have any food to spare. Barely enough for our own.”

  Havel nodded. He’d expected nothing different. This was hard country, well away from the farming and ranching areas further west and south. The locals could probably survive on hunting and fishing until winter, but not many casual passersby could.

  “We’re fixed, for now,” he said. “Got plenty of meat.”

  Several of the men stiffened with suspicion. Already? Havel thought, and went on aloud: “Elk, venison and bear”-he touched the long wound that ran across his forehead and into his scalp-“which the bear brought on himself. We could trade some jerky for flour or rice or beans.”

  The little band of townsfolk relaxed. Their leader looked at the swords the travelers all carried, and the bows. Will had rigged tubular scabbards at the right rear of their saddles, and he and Luanne and Havel were using them for the long spears-lances-he’d made. He’d also done up round plywood shields, convex circles rimmed in metal and covered in elk hide; Signe and Astrid had painted the head of a snarling bear on each, quite skillfully.

  “You folks are together then? Looks like you’re loaded for bear!”

  That brought a few chuckles from his townsmen; Havel smiled thinly-it still hurt to move his face much. “We ran into some survivalists, original-sovereign types. They seemed to think they could do anything they wanted, now that things are Changed. We’re taking precautions to avoid another incident like that.”

  The leader’s eyes took in their various bruises and contusions and spat eloquently. “Those crazy bastards? What happened?”

  Havel shrugged. “Coyotes have to eat too, so we didn’t bury the bodies,” he said, and got another, louder chuckle. “We’d like to camp for a few days and work on our gear before we move on. We’re heading towards Lewiston. If anyone wants to trade, we can do farrier work or such.”