Dies the Fire

by S. M. Stirling

  * * * *

  "Good afternoon," Michael Havel said as his party drew up to the locals.

  "Howdy," a squat weathered man in a billed tractor cap said.

  The young Indian in buckskins beside him had a bar of white paint across his face at eye level and carried a short lance with a row of feathers on the shaft; he looked along the line of the Bearkillers and pursed his lips. "Did we interrupt a meeting of your diversity committee?" he said. "Everything except Indians, hey?"

  "Unless you count me," Havel said equably.

  The Nez Perce gave him a shrewd look. "Yeah, you might have some 'skin in you."

  "One Anishinabe grandma, but that doesn't make me an Indian. Anyway, we're just passing through—heading for Lewiston, and then points further west."

  Several of the locals glanced at each other. Aha, Havel thought. Something they're not telling me about between here and Lewiston, or in Lewiston. Or both. Have to find out about that. Aloud he went on: "Who's in charge here?"

  Both the farmer in the cap and the Indian in paint started to .speak. There was a pause, and the older man spoke carefully: "Sort of a committee. I'm Howard Reines, mayor around here, sort of; this is Eddie Running Horse from the reservation council. That's the highest level of government around here still working."

  "Pleased to meet you," Havel said, shaking hands with both. "Mike Havel. We're—"

  "The Bearkillers!" Astrid said proudly.

  Hope they didn’t see me wince, Havel thought.

  Eddie Running Horse seemed impressed, though, and nobody else actually laughed.

  Astrid had managed to accumulate a small library of fantasies with lurid covers, scavenged from small-town libraries and abandoned road-stop book racks. They were full of pretentious pseudobarbarian and pseudomedieval names and titles with which she played an unceasing game of pin-the-absurd-name-on-the-donkey.

  Some of the books even had useful hints about how to do things, as well as quests for the Magic Identity Bracelet of the Apocalypse, and a lot of the outfit came to hear Astrid read aloud from them evenings around the fires. He had himself, now and then; there really wasn't much else to do after dark but sleep and sharpen your blades or make the night hideous with attempts at song.

  If this is what having a kid sister is like, it's a wonder any of them survive to adulthood un-strangled.

  He went on aloud: "Yeah, the Bearkillers … long story. I'm boss of the outfit, pretty well."

  Reines nodded, face neutral. "How long do you folks plan on staying? We've already moved a lot of our townsfolk and some refugees from Lewiston out to the farms and ranches west of us and they're about full up—"

  Running Horse cut in: "Frankly, we just don't have much to spare for road people, after taking care of our own."

  Havel's eyes narrowed; neither leader had sounded very enthusiastic in his welcome, but Running Horse's vibes were downright hostile.

  At a guess, because outsiders are very unlikely to be Nez Perce. With thousands pouring in from the towns, they're nervous about becoming even more of a minority.

  "Good thing we aren't planning on staying, then," Havel said aloud. "We would like to trade a bit for supplies. Food, useful tools, livestock—but we're not asking for a handout."

  He didn't put a hand to his sword hilt, but he did let the metal chape at the end of the scabbard clank against his stirrup iron.

  The locals cast careful looks at the Bearkillers. Apart from Will's chain-mail armor, they all wore the steerhide jackets, and they all had bows, shields and helmets; everyone except Astrid had a sword.

  That put them a substantial step up on the group facing them, and they probably had the best the Kooskia area could offer. Bowie knives, hunting knives, a machete, hatchets, two bows, improvised spears, ordinary chopping axes lightened for one-handed use by grinding down the pell at the rear of the blade. A few had plywood shields. Nobody had any body armor to speak of unless you counted a leather jacket with some lengths of fine chain sewn to it, and they almost certainly hadn't had the concentrated training his group had—which showed.

  They're probably figuring—rightly—that it wouldn't pay to let such well-armed people get too hungry, Havel thought cynically. Another couple of months, and they'd be begging us to stay to help get in the harvest and plant for next year. Probably vagrancy laws will follow after that in short order and any wanderers who don't look too formidable will end up hoeing beans whether they like it or not. Right now, looking formidable will put them in a mood to dicker.

  Aloud he went on: "We've got trade goods. Some of you might be interested in taking a look. Also we've got some skilled people—a really good vet, some horse trainers."

  If things were a little worse, we'd have to regularly fight for food. Christ, but I'm glad I ended up in Idaho before this happened!

  The welcoming committee fell in with them and rode back to the caravan; some of them looked slightly apprehensive, despite their advantage in numbers—Pamela had everyone armed as they went about their chores, and the dozen A-list fighters in camp standing ready. Not obtrusively, threateningly ready, but she wasn't trying to hide it, either.

  Havel made polite introductions; everyone dismounted, and politely declined refreshments—that was polite these days. Food wasn't something to take for granted. Since getting out of the woods and into farming country they'd managed to keep themselves in tortillas and beef, especially since Ken Larsson rigged up a portable horse-powered flour mill, but he was glad they'd also managed to find a crateful of multivitamin pills; scurvy might have been a problem otherwise.

  It would be a while before anyone had much in the way of fresh vegetables, and canned ones were jealously guarded. Deficiency diseases snuck up on you, and they also weakened resistance to infection.

  One of the wagons held their handicraft projects on the move, and some of the products. Havel led the two leaders over to it and showed them what was on offer: lance- and spearheads, arrowheads and arrows, shields, fighting-knives and swords. Those included the first ones Will had run up; with Pamela's help he'd refined the second model considerably, adding a subtle curve to the grip and a forefinger-hold, and making the blades lighter and better balanced. The originals were still superior to anything the locals had, from the way they handled them and throttled exclamations.

  "Now, these we can really use," Reines said, eagerly fingering a little pamphlet Pamela had done up on basic sword work, with illustrations by Signe and Astrid. "We do have a fair amount of livestock we could spare, seeing's how we aren't shipping the yearlings out and we can't cut as much hay—"

  "Wait a minute, Howie," Running Horse said. "The council's got first say on disposing of assets like cattle and horses for the duration of the emergency. Everyone agreed on that."

  "We need weapons, and this stuff looks a hell of a lot better than anything we've been able to cobble up. When we weren't busy staying alive," Reines said. "We especially need weapons with the folks disappearing on the road up past Kamiah."

  "Drifters," Running Horse said, making a dismissive gesture. "Road people. Who keeps track?"

  Well, that's fucking tactful of you, Havel thought, keeping silent and watching the argument.

  "The Smiths disappeared out of their goddamned house," Reines snapped. "And we've had stock rustled."

  "Whoa," Havel said softly, raising a hand. "You folks probably don't want to quarrel in front of outsiders."

  That shut both of them up, but Reines cast him a look before going on smoothly, the anger leached out of his voice: "That's true. And why don't you folks move in closer? After we have the doc check you over, but you look cleaner than most folks around here, come to that. You could come to dinner at my place … "

  Havel and Reines nodded imperceptibly at each other. Running Horse scowled.

  * * * *

  Michael Havel looked into the fire, lost in thought— though also conscious of a vague longing for a cup of coffee. They'd camped in an empty space on the outskirts of town f
or the past week rather than take the offer of vacant houses; it was bad for morale to scatter too much and unsafe, too. In fact, he'd had more than one inquiry about joining up, after the Bearkillers had put on a bit of a dance and BBQ and a fencing display, to repay the do Reines had gotten the town to lay on—once Mr. Running Horse was out of sight. Evidently life in post-Change Kooskia was pretty dull.

  Seen that before, too, he thought. Withdrawal symptoms— no TV, no radio, no Internet, no movies, no nothing except the same faces and voices. Even small-town folks were used to being part of a bigger world than you can reach in a day's walk. The way we keep moving makes it a little easier to take. Although I do admire the way Reines has kept things together.

  He must have murmured that aloud. Ken nodded from the log he sat on over on the other side of the campfire, stirring the embers with a stick.

  "He wasn't mayor before the Change—some sort of real-estate man with a sideline in cattle. Everyone was rather vague on how exactly he'd acquired the office, did you notice?"

  Havel shrugged. "He seemed popular enough. And he's doing a good job."

  "Uh-huh. We've seen how important a good leader is. The places that just went to pieces, it was where there wasn't anyone to get people moving together in a hurry."

  "Some places it just seems to happen on its own, sort of," Havel observed.

  Ken snorted: "Yeah, we've seen places like that—all one of them. A committee is the only form of mammalian life with more than four legs and no brain."

  "Interesting what he had to say," Havel said. "We could use that livestock and gear; we'd have somewhere near enough horses, and enough stock we'd be independent for meat. The problem is, how do we smoke out his problem? Whoever it is, they've obviously got the smarts to hide when a posse comes looking."

  Ken shrugged. "Well, from Reines's point of view, that's the beauty of the deal. We don't get paid unless we get results, he doesn't risk any of his own people, they don't have to neglect vital work, and if it turns out OK he not only gets a solved problem and some powerful political mojo, but he gives Running Horse and his backers a thumb in the eye. I sort of suspect that they've been blocking any real effort to track down the perpetrators just so he won't get any of that."

  "You're a cynic," Havel said.

  "I've been on the fringes of politics for a long time," Ken said. "You have to be, if you're in business on the scale I am … was. I prefer to think of myself as a realist. On the whole, I'd put my money on Howie Reines—he's got a lot more experience than Running Horse. Of course, there may be a lot more brainpower on the tribal council. I suspect that our young friend in the feather bonnet is convinced that the Great Spirit's struck down the white-eyes' technology so the tribes can make a comeback. Which I admit is about as logical an explanation for the Change as any—though I'm sticking to the Alien Space Bats."

  Havel nodded. "Notice something about Running Horse's bunch?"

  "The costumes? I'm not surprised at that. Will's right— it's the sort of thing you'd expect, psychologically speaking. Though I suspect they had to read anthropology texts to get the details!"

  "Nah, I agree about that. What I noticed was that more than half of them didn't look even part Indian, including some of the ones all gussied up like Chief Joseph on steroids. Give you odds in a couple of generations, there'll be a group here who call themselves Nez Perce—or Tsoop-Nit-Pa-Lu—but look a lot more like me, or even Eric."

  Ken gave him a considering look. "You know, you're probably right about that. Wouldn't be surprised if the same thing didn't happen in a lot of other places, too. For that matter, long-term, we're going to see a lot of ethno-genesis going on in the next generation or so."

  At Havel's look of bafflement, he went on: "Tribes, ethnic groups, call 'em what you will. Little groups forming around a community or a leader and starting to think of themselves as a people. Mayor Reines's bunch too, for that matter. Anyone who can do the job—and the first little group will sort of set the tone for those who join up. Like a saturated solution forming around a seed-crystal. It's just starting now, of course, but give it a few years, or generations."

  "Yeah, I suppose a lot of these guys like Reines or like Running Horse will go down in the history books," he said aloud. "The ones who pulled things together in their own neighborhood."

  Ken shook his head. "I doubt there will be any history books for a long time," he said. "I wouldn't give mass literacy more than another generation, most places—less in some—and a lot of the world's going to lose the concept of writing altogether. Too many lost skills to reinvent."

  "We've found a fair number of people who know how to do things the old-fashioned way," Havel pointed out. "Hell, we've already got a blacksmith, and people who can make a saddle starting with cows or run up a house starting with trees."

  Ken laughed, a little harshly. "Yup. And that's a bit of a joke, when you think about it. Pre-Change America was rich enough that people could practice black-smithing or weaving or whatnot as hobbies, or make a living turning out high-priced handmade goods for collectors with a lot of disposable income. Handicrafts are rarer in backward areas, apart from a few of the most backward. You don't go on making hand-thrown pots when you can buy cheap plastic and aluminum, not when you're living on the edge. You can't spare time or effort for aesthetics. So in the long run we may be better off that way than, say, Columbia or Kenya. In the short run, mass die-off, of course."

  "Irony still functions post-Change," Mike said with a chuckle. There were times when gallows humor was the only type available. The problem was that those were the times you most needed a laugh.

  Ken nodded, getting a faraway look. Havel recognized it; the older Larsson looked that way when he was doing the big-picture thing.

  Which is useful, within limits, Havel thought. Gotta make strategy drive tactics, not the other way 'round, as Captain Stoddard used to say.

  Ken went on: "When we get settled, we should look into how to make rag paper. The acid-based pulp in most modern books doesn't last more than a generation even with careful storage; anything that isn't recopied will be lost by the time your kids are my age. Books will get almighty expensive in the places that hang on to the notion at all. When you're talking a small-scale society that doesn't really need literacy to function, it just won't pay to put in the effort, not when there's cloth to weave and turnips to hoe."

  "Hard to keep the history straight, then," Havel said. "That's a pity. I … the things we're all doing, what's going on … that should be preserved."

  "Oh, it will be, but not as history. We've fallen out of history, history with a capital H."

  Havel raised a brow. "How can you be outside history? Sure, maybe nobody will record it, but it'll still be there."

  "Ever read the Iliad or the Odyssey!"

  "Yeah, bits here and there. I always preferred Ulysses;. Achilles was an undisciplined glory hound, the sort who's a nightmare to his squad leader. A good soldier needs to be ready to die, but a suicidal one just leaves you with another damned empty slot in the TOE you have to train a replacement for." He paused, then added judiciously: "Unless you need someone to play Polish Mine Detector real bad. Then a glory hound can come in very useful."

  "Right," Ken chuckled. "But the point is that nobody wrote those poems. They were composed to be recited aloud and memorized, and they're full of bits from a lot earlier—half a millennium earlier, from the fall of Troy, with some chunks that may have been a thousand years old or more when Homer was singing for his supper. That's how people in that type of culture remember things—just like the sagas, only those got written down sooner. It's not history. It's folk-memory, the time of legends and heroes and myths, and anything that happens gets crammed into that framework. A sense of historical time needs a high civilization, and a particular type of one at that. Barbarians and tribes live in mythic time, legend time, not an ordered progression of centuries going from somewhere to somewhere. It might be better to say they're timeless."

>   "Like the Kalevala?"

  "Yup. Or the Nibelungenleid, where you get Siegfried and the dragon and the cursed Rhinegold all mixed up with real figures centuries apart like Attila the Hun and Theodoric the Ostrogoth."

  "And then some looney squarehead makes a real boring experience out of 'em," Havel said. He'd suffered through a video of the complete Ring cycle once, with a girl who was crazy for the stuff.

  Christ, the things I did to get laid.

  Ken went on: "Most of the Old Testament is the same sort of thing, filtered through literate scribes much later."

  "So someone may make a saga out of our friend Howie someday? Or a chapter of Genesis?"

  "More like Exodus. Out of a distorted what-Grandpa-told-me memory of him, yeah." Ken got up, pushing off his knees. "Or maybe a memory of you, Mike. You're the one who killed the bear and led his people to the promised land … if we make it. See you tomorrow."

  Hmmm, Havel mused. Ken is an interesting guy to have around.

  He poked a stick into the fire, watching the sparks fly up towards the bright frosting of stars; it was a little chilly now, with the sun well down.

  I should start thinking about the longer term, a little. Once things hit bottom, they'll have to start up again—but in a new way, or a very old way. A strong man is what's needed, leadership, and something to believe in. Someone has to build on the ruins. Ken was right; we're back in the age of legends and heroes. A dirty job, but someone's got to do it.

  Orange flames crawled over the low coals of the fire; in them he seemed to see vague pictures, visions of glory amid the fire—

  "Surprise!"

  He rose, pivoting smoothly and very fast, the sword coming free of the scabbard with a rasping hiss of steel on greased leather and wood. At the same time he stepped sideways so he wasn't silhouetted against the fire and cursed how it had killed his night sight for crucial seconds. He hadn't been expecting anything—

  And come to think of it, someone trying to kill me wouldn't shout "Surprise!" now, would they?