“An Oliphant!” Astrid said in fascination.
“Mammoth, actually,” Woburn said, grinning.
“Same thing,” she said with conviction. “Third Age, you see. Where did you get it! It’s magnificent!”
“Someone found it over at Tolo Lake not far from here a few years before the Change. Nobody wanted it anymore, so I sent a few wagons over to Craigswood when we built this place and brought it back.”
“It takes up a lot of room,” a daughter-in-law said; she was evidently the lady of the household, black-haired and much younger, only a little older than Ritva herself. “Please sit.”
They all did; the Dúnedain, Ian, Woburn and his daughter-in-law, Hanks and a taciturn leathery man in his fifties who was evidently the ranch’s top hand. A trio of middle-aged women in housedresses brought out food; platters of grilled pork chops crusted with chili-flavored breading, mashed potatoes with chives and butter, green salads of lettuce and spinach, celery and tomatoes and onions, glazed carrots, orecchiette pasta and broccoli baked with pine nuts and cheese, onion-and-cabbage pancakes with sour cream, hot biscuits and fresh bread, pitchers of cold spring water and several bottles of red wine from down around the Boise area.
“You folks enjoy,” one of them said as the rancher nodded thanks.
Despite his friendship with St. Hilda’s, Woburn said grace in some different Christian fashion. Ian used the Catholic form, which would be convenient if things went well; after all, the Historian had been a Catholic, and a minority of Dúnedain were too. Ritva tried to imagine one of the more austere varieties of Protestant living as a Ranger, boggled instead and abandoned the effort. Instead she signed her plate, invoked the Valar, and fell to with a will. They’d been on trail food for quite a while, not pausing to hunt or caring to risk a fire; St. Hilda’s had been rather Spartan as well.
Nobody’s more than three days from being very hungry indeed, she thought. Which means no lord or ruler is more than three days from very bad trouble.
She took another chop; the fat at the edge was just as she liked it, slightly crisp.
Dad said that was something rulers should keep in mind, I was young but I do remember that. People get really cranky when they don’t have enough to eat.
At last Astrid leaned back in her chair, turning a glass of wine in her long-fingered hands. “You’re prepared to take the risk?” she said.
“I’m not taking a risk, I’m trying to avoid it,” Woburn said. “I’ve got two sons with the army. I want this damned war stopped before too many mothers’ sons die in it. And Martin Thurston . . . Yeah, I was angry with his father for taking land from us ranchers, but at least he had a real reason. Not just to keep his supporters happy. He’s not fit to rule.”
“No, he isn’t,” Hanks said. “He killed his father.”
A mirthless smile. “That’s why I’m in hiding. Eventually it got back to the National Police that I was one of the ones telling the truth. Sorry, spreading subversive slanders and libels.”
Alleyne leaned forward, his hunter’s face keenly interested: “How would you estimate the numbers who believe each version?”
“Hard to say. Nobody’s conducting public opinion polls these days.”
What— Ritva thought. Then: Oh, going around asking people what they think. I wonder how they did that without getting chopped up or shot?
Hanks went on: “Assuming I’m controlling my confirmation bias, in Boise city it’s maybe half and half. Outside it, patchy. But nobody’s talking about it much, either. There’s no proof either way and Martin still has a lot of supporters who aren’t shy about suppressing slanders, as they put it.”
The Dúnedain leaders looked at each other. “So it’s evenly balanced,” Astrid said. “The High King was right.”
“What is it exactly that you want to do?” Woburn asked.
“We want to rescue the captive and tell the world the truth,” Astrid said.
“Well,” Woburn drawled, “to do that you’ll have to pull the wool over their eyes first.”
A week later, Ritva Havel restrained an impulse to rub at her buttocks. When you’d been riding as hard and as long as they had, your tailbone kept trying to burst into sight and wave itself.
“Christ, I’m sore,” Ian said, and stood in the stirrups and rubbed himself vigorously.
So much for self-restraint, she thought sourly.
They were by themselves, unless you counted two remount-packhorses each and a pair of collies and a flock. The horses were well trained, though they had them on leading reins here on this crowded road near the city. The dogs were extremely well trained, enough to make her feel awkward; she could swear they gave her disgusted looks sometimes. The worst of it was the sheep. Two hundred and sixty of Rancher Woburn’s animals, driven all the way from the Camas Prairie.
Two hundred and fifteen now, as they approached the capital city. The rest had died in ways that often displayed a certain strain of idiot genius; eaten by wolves or coyotes or cougar was the simplest, ranging up from there to one that had managed to crawl into a culvert just before some rain, get stuck, and drowned. Though the runner-up had strangled itself reaching for a leaf by sticking its head into the fork of a young aspen and struggling until it choked.
The grilled ribs and chops had been some compensation. Now they had to keep them from spilling off the road; the suburbs and buildings on the west side of the Boise river had been torn down, like many such around stillinhabited cities and towns, but they had been torn down much more thoroughly , including tearing up foundations. Right now they were a dense network of tidy little truck-garden patches, irrigated by canals and wind-pumps and green with a dozen varieties of fruit and vegetables and small pastures for milch cattle. She didn’t want to think of the legal complications of letting the sheep stray, in this rule-obsessed land.
“How on Arda do sheep ever live long enough to breed?” she said rhetorically, after they had headed off a mass break towards rows of carrots whose tops showed green against the dark soil. “Why doesn’t someone kill them, for that matter? Not to eat, just because they’re so stupid and annoying?”
They were moving very slowly behind a convoy of wagons, big ones drawn by oxen and loaded with—ironically enough—bales of raw wool. The greasy lanolin-rich smell was unpleasant, but not impossibly so. The road was mostly pre-Change, with holes in the pale aged asphalt neatly patched or filled with pounded crushed rock; they kept up the old custom of traffic taking the right here, and the left was fairly densely packed, which meant they couldn’t take the flock around the great vehicles and their crawl.
“I don’t know how sheep do live long enough to make little sheep,” Ian Kovalevsky said. “My family didn’t raise ’em. Cattle, yes; beefalo, yes; horses, yes. Even some pigs. But not sheep. It’s too cold for them in the Peace River country, and a bit too wet; we trade south for our wool, they have big flocks down around where we met in the Triangle country, the dry prairie. And I thought cattle were dumb!”
“Why couldn’t he have sent us with a herd of cattle? You’re used to them and I’ve done a little droving now and then.”
Ian shook his head. “Not if we wanted to travel in pairs. You need at least four, maybe six people to push even a small herd of cattle any real distance, and a wagon. To tell you the truth, Ritva, apart from horses . . . well, it’s not an accident I left the farm!”
Just then a cry came from up ahead, from someone on the stretch of roadway just this side of the bridge over the Boise river.
“Way! Make way! Clear that lane for westbound military traffic!”
The harsh shout was backed up by a bray of trumpets, the deep-toned tubae, along with a dunting snarl she recognized as an oxhorn. Her brows went up; Boiseans didn’t use those, although many other peoples did.
“Now, do it now or get ridden down! Make way!”
Everyone on the left crowded over. The two sheepdogs were nearly as hysterical as their charges, as the influx squeezed them into a sol
id bleating block of rolling eyes and exposed tongues. They did their duty, though, keeping the sheep together with nips and barks, sometimes running over their heaving backs to do it.
Ritva’s stomach clenched when the column rode out. Horsemen in three-quarter armor of lacquered leather plates edged in steel, its liquid sheen a dull red the color of dried blood, armed with bow and shete and nine-foot lances. Every breastplate bore the golden rayed sun of the Church Universal and Triumphant, and so did the round shields slung over their backs.
Their spiked helmets were slung to their saddlebows; the heads were cropped close enough to be like plush fur, even shorter than Boise regulars, or shaved altogether, in odd contrast to tufts of chin-beard. Their faces were things of slabs and angles, all with a slightly starved look. She’d met men like that before, more often than not over a blade or in a shower of arrows, though once at closer range.
Not just Cutters. Not rancher levies. That’s the Sword of the Prophet.
The savage training of the House of the Prophet in Corwin bit deep, and it marked a man more than the scars of fire. She let herself look alarmed and curious, with a bit of a gape; it was a mark of the discipline of the riders that not one of them turned his head aside to glance at a good-looking young woman. When the last of them rode by and the short train of two-wheel carts that carried their minimal bagged had passed she blew out her cheeks
“Those guys look serious,” Ian said quietly.
“Tell me. We had a bunch of them chase us from not far east of here all the way to Nantucket. Nothing stopped them except killing.”
“That frightened off the others?”
“No, I mean nothing stopped them except killing them all. All except the last five.”
“Determined.”
“Ai, you have no idea. There were over five hundred to begin with.”
“Very determined. So five gave up?”
“That was after my big brother had the Sword of the Lady. That can . . . do things . . . even to them.”
“Oh.”
“Note that the Sword of the Lady is a long way away from us, right now. But the Sword of the Prophet is right here, and so are some of the Seekers.”
“Yeah, that had occurred to me now and then.”
Traffic took a while to unsnarl, but eventually it started moving again and they crossed, over the tree-lined river and to the high steel portals of the gate-complex, then through its tunnel darkness and into the city. The city wall was high, about the same as Portland’s, but they hadn’t bothered coating it in stucco—old Lawrence Thurston had been an inhumanly businesslike man. She didn’t know if Boise really smelled a little worse than it had last time, or that was her imagination; it certainly wasn’t bad compared to some she’d sniffed, and positively fragrant next to the coal-smoke reek of giant Des Moines. There was no way to cram tens of thousands of human beings and their fires and forges and animals inside a wall and not have it smell bad to country-bred noses.
“Ah, the smell of civilization,” Ritva said.
Ian snorted, then said: “I think we drop off the sheep here inside the gate. Isn’t that the sign Woburn told us about? And I’d better become mute, it’s what it says on my draft exemption papers.”
A broad avenue led eastward from the river gate to a golden-domed building that had been the State capitol; the walled citadel that held the General-President’s residence was south of it.
Last time here I was an honored guest, when we were heading east to the Sunrise Lands. Now I’m a spy and I’ll be tortured and killed if they catch me. It’s an up-and-down life in the Dúnedain Rangers!
Like most walled cities there had been a lot of infilling since the Change, second stories added to houses and new workshops built. Like the more closely regulated cities, Boise also had a stretch of cleared land just inside the fortifications, letting troops move quickly in an emergency. It also served as holding pens for livestock; each dealer had a sign with his name and license number. It was all very orderly, as far as anything concerned with sheep and other beasts with wills of their own could be. They turned the flock in between the wattle hurdles and into the corral. They quieted quickly; sheep weren’t intelligent enough to figure out what humans had in mind for them. Unlike pigs. Pigs were dangerous in large numbers, for exactly that reason.
The contractor who’d bought Woburn’s sheep was a weathered middle-aged man; he took a look at the flock with an experienced flick of the eyes, scanning for sickness or scrawny individuals. Then he went through and checked a few at random to make sure they were what they appeared. The sheep were mostly overage ewes, sold off when their best wool and lambing days were done. The hides would bring nearly as much as their tough stringy meat, with leather in such demand for the war, but soldiers weren’t picky eaters either.
He had an assistant, a youngster in his late teens with stained working clothes and a shepherd’s crook. He was staring at Ritva, which wasn’t unusual, but there was as much hostility as jittery adolescent lust in it. He was silent until she handed over the invoice with Woburn’s signature.
“What are you doing with that?” he said. “Why isn’t the man handling it?”
“I’m giving it to your boss, stranger,” she said mildly. “And you should mind your own business.”
“You’ve no business handling that, girl,” he said. “You should be home, and dressed decent. Let men do men’s business. The day is coming—”
Ritva stuck a finger in the young man’s face, the point almost touching his nose, and he jarred to a halt in astonishment.
“Who is this asshole?” she asked the dealer.
“He badgers the flocks for me around the town pens,” the man said. “And he’s my cousin’s kid, for my sins. That side of the family has been listening to the new preachers.”
“He pisses off the people you do business with,” she said; Ian was keeping quiet, in case anyone was struck by his accent. “And my brother here is mute, or he’d be pissed off.”
Which accounts for why he isn’t in the army, she thought.
“The little dick ain’t me,” the dealer pointed out. “And the sheep don’t mind his disposition.”
He signed the spare copy, and took out a checkbook with the grizzly bear logo of the First National Bank of Boise on its cover. Ritva had just turned to untie her horse string when the sheep-badger spat on her foot.
“Sorry,” he said with a sneer. “Aiming for the dirt.”
Very slowly, she turned around again and smiled at him. The grab and twist that followed were almost too swift to see; the young man had just enough time to clutch himself and screech before he folded up and fell to the ground, with his tongue waving in his speechless mouth like an undersea weed.
Ritva waited for an instant, then kicked the fallen man twice with cold deliberation, hard enough that the steel-reinforced toe of her boot made thudding sounds with a very satisfying undertone of crunch but not hard enough to kill. He began to whimper, and then vomit in helpless choking, gasping heaves. Blood and bits of tooth came along with the contents of his stomach, a sour bite under the warmer musky smells of sheep and sheepdung and straw.
“Any problems?” she said to the contractor, using the fallen man’s hat to wipe her boot and then throwing it into the puddle of puke.
He grinned. “Wanted to do that all this year myself, but he is family. Let’s get you gone before the Natpols”—he meant the National Police, who were Boise’s constabulary—“show up. Here’s the check and give my regards to Rancher Woburn. I’ll take care of the dogs the usual way.”
She folded it and tucked it into a pocket; she’d cash it if possible. Woburn’s cover story was that she and Ian were bandits who’d jumped the legitimate drovers and run off the flock and stolen the documentation, and he had cowboys of his own ready to swear to it. Whether that would help if the current regime in Boise decided he was guilty was another matter, but he was ready to take the chance. When they were far enough away not to cause any curi
osity about a mute speaking, Ian muttered: “Wasn’t that a bit conspicuous?”
“Only in the right way. Judging from the people we met on our way here, that was a perfectly credible reaction. People in Boise the city think of cowboys . . . and cowgirls . . . as the type who take offense. And he did spit on my foot, sweetie.”
“Remind me never to spit on you. Of course, I doubt I’d be inclined to. You play rough, don’t you?”
Ritva shrugged and made a slight moue of distaste. “The little orch was a Cutter. I’ve hardly ever met a Cutter I didn’t want to kick to death, and I’ve met quite a few. And my father had a saying . . . I’m not old enough to remember him saying it but Aunt Astrid is . . . that you should always kick a man when he’s down. It’s much easier then.”
“You don’t think he’ll come after you?”
“Probably not. He might have if I’d left it at the playful little tweak to the crotch. But as Dad said, if you leave the mark of your boot-leather on a man’s face, he’s going to remember who won the fight every single day.”
She added parenthetically: “Men are sort of silly that way. You have to . . . to . . . be firm with them sometimes. Not sensible ones like you, of course.”
Ian nodded, giving her an odd look. Then he said: “Should we be looking around ourselves so much? I mean, it’s a big city but we’re supposed to be natives.”
“No, we’re supposed to be hicks from the backlands,” Ritva said. “Believe me, we’d stand out if we didn’t gawk.”
“It is big, bigger than Lethbridge. I’ve never seen anything this size. Amazing! It reminds me of my parents’ stories about Edmonton. They lived there before the Change, then they got out early and went to join my uncle on the farm up in the Peace River country. Is Portland this big?”
“Boise’s even bigger than Portland. By about a quarter, say seventy thousand people. Only half the size of Des Moines, but that’s just ridiculously big, like everything there. Iowa gave me hives.”
It had been only two years since the Quest passed through Boise, and much remained the same; people still moved with a brisk purposefulness, there was less noise than you’d expect, and squads swept up even the horse dung almost as soon as it fell.
Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun Page 16
