by James Axler
Doc answered for himself. "Old enough to know it is regarded as rude to ask a stranger how old he is, young lady. Perhaps if we get to know each other a little better, then I might allow you the indulgence of asking me again."
"He is very old," one of the young men whispered, very audibly. "Old."
The woman gestured to him to keep quiet. "What are you doing in the lands of our ville?"
"Didn't know it belonged to anyone," Ryan replied, not allowing the SIG-Sauer to waver for a moment from her chest. "Didn't see any signs."
"These ate hunting lands. Not the planted lands, of course." She smiled at him.
Ryan deliberately didn't return the smile. "What's the name of the ville?"
"You don't know?" She shook her head, her corn-yellow hair moving around her shoulders like a curtain of spun gold. "We come from Quindley. It's about twelve miles north of here, alongside the big water."
"Big water have a name?" J.B. asked.
"Shamplin Lake," she replied.
"Champlain." Doc hissed the name to Mildred, who nodded her understanding.
"You got a name?" Krysty asked.
"We all have given names. You look like you could be near to thirty."
"What's this about our ages?" Ryan asked.
"Nothing, nothing. You asked my name. Fm called Dorothy. These brothers are Isaac, Ray, Bob and Frank. Not truly brothers, except in the eyes of Moses."
"That your baron?" J.B. said.
"No. We have no baron." One of the young men tugged at her arm and whispered in her ear. Dorothy nodded. "Of course." He said something, more urgently. "Yes, yes, Isaac. But all of that can wait, can't it?"
"What's he want?" Ryan was beginning to relax a little. There didn't seem anything about these callow young folk to threaten them.
"He says to ask whether you have seen his brother. That is, his real brother. Jolyon went missing on a hunting trip. Left the ville yesterday morning."
"Haven't seen anyone for days," Ryan replied.
"What about the things we saw up the hill?" It was the first time that Michael had spoken since the arrival of the strangers.
"Up the hill?" Isaac queried.
Ryan had already made the guess that the charred tog that hung from the ruined building above them could once have been the lost Jolyon. But the TVader always used to say that you should take care that you never got involved with anything unless you didn't have a choice.
"Yeah." Michael was all ready to go on, but Ryan stepped in to stop him.
"You had trouble with stickies around here?" he asked.
"Why?" Dorothy glanced involuntarily behind her, toward the dark shadows of the forest.l 'You seen..."
Isaac was quicker. "Stickies got my brother? Got Jolyon? And you oldies know about it?"
"Oldies!" Mildred exclaimed, unheard by anyone else.
"Moses told us not to ever trust oldies," Isaac shouted, grabbing Dorothy by the shoulders, shaking her like a terrier with a rat. His face had gone as white as fresh-drawn milk, and his eyes burned.
"If it's your brother up on the hill, then I'm afraid that he's dead. There's a single chilled stickle up there, too." The young man had let go of the blond woman and turned to stare at Ryan. "Way it looks, they likely jumped him. But, listen. It might not be your brother."
"Got to be, outlander. Any blasters with him?"
J.B. spoke. "There were shells from a .38."
One of the other men spoke. He had a slight stammer. "Jolyon had his W-Winchester repro. The Navy Arms S-Sixty-six, And plenty of ammo."
"Navy Arms Sixty-six was chambered for a .38," the Armorer said. "The stickies had one of their whizbang fires with the spare shells."
"Dead stickie?" Dorothy asked.
"Gut-shot." Ryan felt the burst of tension easing again. "If it was your brother, Isaac, then he took him out first. Then they got him."
The young woman made a positive decision. "Frank, you and Ray wait here with these people. Me, Isaac and Bob'll go... Up by the old shelter, you mean?" Ryan nodded. "We'll take a look. Then we can maybe all go to Quindley." She looked at Doc, as though she was going to say something, then changed her mind."You'd be welcome as our guests for a day or so."
"Be good," Ryan said.
"Yeah, thanks." Krysty spoke to Isaac. "Just better warn you that what they did to... to whoever it is... wasn't nice. Wasn't nice at all." "Stickies never do nice, lady," he replied.
RAY AND FRANK WALKED OFF and sat close together on the bank of the stream, saying nothing either to Ryan or the friends, or to each other.
It was nearly two hours before the woman and two men came back down the hillside. There was no need to ask whether the blackened corpse had been that of the one they called Jolyon. Their shocked, dulled faces gave the answer.
"We've taken him down and spoken a saying over him." Dorothy looked on the verge of tears, her eyes brimming. "Couldn't bury him, but we put him safe from the animals. Friends*!! return tomorrow and bring him to Quindley for the proper saying. Now we should all go back there and report to Moses what happened. And to warn of the cursed stickies."
She turned on her heel and led them all off into the trees, toward the distant lake.
Chapter Nineteen
"Place looks like a promo vid for the Department of Agriculture," Mildred commented. "You ever see a better kept ville than this, Ryan?"
They had crossed the narrow river at a narrow wooden bridge, made from fresh-treated timbers and held in place by an ingenious system of bolts and thick-knotted rope. Then they followed the five young people along a clear trail, through the mainly coniferous forest, heading toward the lake.
Feeling stronger by the hour, Ryan had handed the sword stick back to Doc and retaken his place as leader of the group. He walked at the front, keeping them on orange alert because of the threat from stickies.
Gradually the trees began to be thinned out, showing obvious evidence of good land management. They could see the silvery sheen of the water ahead of them and then the woods ended and they were out hi the open.
Dorothy stopped and waved her hands over her head, as a signal to armed guards hi a tall watchtower set in the middle of the cultivated land.
The others looked around. Ryan saw immediately that Mildred was right.
It was a showpiece.
The fields were tended beautifully, the produce in neat rows. Fences and hedges divided one crop from another, all the way from the edge of the forest to the shore of the lake, which was a body of water that stretched to the far horizon.
There were twenty or thirty men and women working in the fields, all of them looking up and waving at the sight of Dorothy and the four men. One of the women was driving an ancient John Deere tractor.
Even at a quick glance, the range of what the ville grew was impressive. Ryan could see the feathery tops of carrots hi the nearest field. There were potatoes, squash, okra, peas, several kinds of beans and even what looked like grapevines.
"Got fruit trees over there," J.B. said, pointing to the right.
"Six kinds of apples, for cooking and eating," Frank stated. "Three sorts of pear. Tried oranges and lemons, but the old blue northers did away with them. Got peaches under glass. Melons. So many melons we regularly have to plow half back into the fields. But nothing's wasted. Like Moses tells us."
Dorothy and Isaac had run on ahead and were obviously passing on the bad news about his brother. Several of the group in the fields started to weep, while others made threatening gestures with the rifles that all of them carried.
"You had trouble with stickles before?" Dean asked the young man called Bob.
"Not often. Used to be some outlanders coming down from old Canada."
"You got good discipline here," J.B. said approvingly. "I'm impressed."
Bob looked at him and shook his head. "What would an oldie like you know about things like that?"
J.B. stared at him, completely without any expression on his sallow face, until the younger
man finally dropped his eyes and looked away.
Now Dorothy was walking quickly back toward them, along the main track that wound into the ville. The one thing that Ryan hadn't yet seen was the ville itself. Because of the lay of the land, it wasn't possible to be sure, but the pathway looked like it cut sharply to the left, over a narrow promontory that jutted into the lake.
"The brothers and sisters are deeply moved," she said to the three young men. "Isaac has gone on to tell Moses about the outlanders."
"You got the best-kept ville I ever saw," Ryan said.
"Thanks." She looked at the others, but seemed to concentrate on Dean and Michael. "The rest of you can come into Quindley and eat and stay a night if you want."
"Sounds good." Mildred smiled at the woman, who turned blankly away.
THE VILLE, as Ryan had figured, lay just beyond the piece of land that reached out into the lake. There was another, similar causeway, about fifty paces in length, with the ville on what had once obviously been a small offshore island at its end.
"Good place to defend," Ryan said to J.B., as they followed the young woman through the cultivated fields.
"Long as you don't get attacked by a mess of men in boats," the Armorer replied.
Everyone in the ville looked amazingly healthy. Not one of them seemed to have any physical imperfections at all, and every one of them was younger than the mid-twenties.
The blue shirts and jeans were almost a uniform.
As Ryan and the others walked along, every head turned toward them. The big maroon John Deere coughed into silence, and its driver leaned out to get a better look at the strangers. Once again, there was the odd feeling that Doc was some kind of leper. The young people's faces showed something close to a disbelieving revulsion at him.
"Is there something wrong with me, Dr. Wyeth? Some indiscretion of my attire?" he whispered, "They're all staring at me like I have my dick sticking out. If you'll pardon my French."
"Course I'll pardon it, Doc," she replied. "And if s hanging out, not sticking out."
"Very amusing, madam." He snorted and strode on, ignoring the silent spectators.
A HIGH WALL of sharpened stakes surrounded the perimeter of the ville, right at the edge of the water, so any potential enemy would find no land for a footing. There appeared to be about twenty or thirty buildings, many of than obviously storage barns, with roofs of closely thatched reeds.
"Not many small houses," Michael observed, walking close beside Dorothy.
"We live in dorms," she replied. "Men in one and women in the other, over there." She pointed toward two of the biggest buildings in the ville.
"No privacy?" Krysty asked, overhearing the conversation. "No married couples?"
Dorothy stopped so quickly that Krysty nearly stepped on her heels. "Marriage?" She laughed. "All of us who live here in Quindley have set that oldie idea behind us. Moses pointed out the total stupidity of it."
"Look forward to meeting this Moses," Mildred said. "Sounds like quite a guy."
Dorothy opened her mouth, then hesitated and closed it again. She stood looking down at her feet, as if she were taking counsel from an inner voice.
"I know you are old and an outlander, but you will not speak of Moses like that."
"Listen, kid, I'm getting seriously pissed about all this 'old* shit. I'm still a good few years the right side of forty, so just ice it, will you?"
"Forty!"
"That's when life begins." Mildred laughed, uneasy at the younger woman's expression. "Just how do you treat all the old people you got here hi the ville? Your own mothers and fathers, for instance?"
"Moses tells us that..." Dorothy stopped. "No, you're right. It is rude of me to show you how we..."
Again she hesitated. "Food and rest should come before talk."
"I'll go along with that," Doc said. "I confess that I would not be averse to a good long rest."
"Oh, you will have that," Frank stated.
Ryan looked around them. "You got no animals. How's that?"
"We have no need of them, outlander," Ray replied. "Moses teaches us that the exploitation of cattle or horses or any other creature is wrong."
"Vegetarians?" Mildred asked.
"Yes."
Ryan smiled at the young blonde. "Then I guess a juicy steak with all the trimmings is out of the question."
His joke was ignored. Dorothy turned on her heel and continued toward the causeway to the ville.
"Uke Uncle Tyas McCann used to say back in Harmony, lover. That went over like a lead balloon."
THE WATER WAS COLD and very clear. The shore shelved steeply, but even halfway toward the entrance gate to Quindley it was easy to see the speckled fish moving sinuously near the weeds on the lake's bottom.
"How deep is it here?" Dean asked.
"On the far side of the ville it drops away to well over a hundred feet," Frank replied.
"And you don't eat no fish?"
"Yes, we do eat no fish." Frank smiled at Dean. "While in our home you will eat no fish, also."
An armed guard on the fortified gates watched suspiciously as Dorothy led the seven outlanders into the ville. Ryan paused a moment before entering, looking back across the water, the immaculately tilled fields, toward the shadowed bank of the sweeping forest.
Every bright young face was turned toward him.
But he also caught a glimpse of something else, right at the edge of the pine trees. It was a blurred flash of white. A face? Maybe an animal. By the time Ryan had focused his eye on it, there was nothing there.
ONCE THEY WERE inside the ville, they were able to see that it was laid out on a sort of grid pattern. The streets were packed earth, laid over interlocked logs, the whole of the place locked together with massive cross-members, made from whole trees. Though it was actually floating, tethered to the land by the caus eway, there was no sensation of movement.
J.B. had fallen into step beside Ryan, talking quietly out of the corner of his mouth. "Something's not right here."
"What?"
"You feel anything?"
Ryan nodded. "Something. Can't tell."
"Triple-red watch?"
"Sure."
"Goon DAY TO YOU." The greeting came from a tall young man. Like everyone else, he was wearing jeans and a shirt, his long blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Dorothy bad introduced him as Jehu, the leader of Quindley.
"You're young to be in charge of a ville like this," Ryan stated. "How long you been the baron?"
Jehu smiled. "There speaks the outlander, Ryan Cawdor. We have no baron."
"Leader? Chief? What's in a name, Jehu?"
"Our laws come from Moses. I am his chosen instrument, just for a single year."
"How do you mean?" J.B. asked. "You mean you just run the place for a year, then someone else does it? I heard about villes like that. Specially in the old Bible Belt lands. How long before you hand over?"
Jehu had eyes of deep cornflower blue. Now they looked curiously at the Armorer. "I end as the summer ends. I fall with the fall. How old are you, John Dix?"
"More than thirty and less than forty. How about you?"
"This is my twenty-fifth summer."
"Good age to be," Krysty said. "Doesn't seem that long that I was in my twenty-fifth summer."
"You are past it, truly?" Dorothy asked.
"Truly. Does it matter?"
The woman glanced at Jehu, who imperceptibly shook his head. "No," she said. "It doesn't matter. Not much."
"Michael and Dean here are the only ones under the age of twenty-five," Mildred said. "You keep picking on age and being old. What's so special about being over twenty-five?"
The man answered. "It is possible that you will get to speak with Moses before you-" he hesitated a brief moment "-before you leave us. Ask him."
"Where does Moses live?" Mildred asked.
"He doesn't 'live' in the way you might understand," Jehu replied. "Moses is here and there and everywhere."
"Like a god?" Doc asked.
"Better than a god," Dorothy stated. "A god is someone who doesn't exist. Moses exists."
"Does he have a house with many mansions?" Doc pointed ahead of them, to the only stone-walled building in the ville. It was circular, with a conical roof of fresh thatch. The back wall was directly against the outer defensive stakes.
