John Ringo - Council Wars 01 - There Will Be Dragons

by There Will Be Dragons(lit)

"What kind of guides?" Edmund asked.

  "There are. semiautonomous beings, like homunculi and hobs, that manage some of the ecological programs. I found a low-power update conduit that let me reprogram them. They now have the path to 'safe' areas mapped for each of their areas and if they find lost travelers they'll direct them. It's all I can do right now. Maybe later something more can be done.

  "For most of the refugees, there's not going to be a 'later,' " Edmund said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  They had been traveling for nearly two weeks through the worst weather Rachel had seen in all her life.

  The house had turned out to have an immense quantity of material suitable to take on the trip; Rachel had been surprised and even a little dismayed at how many of the objects in the house had to do with her father's hobby. At times picking through the piles it had seemed as if Edmund Talbot had more of an influence on the home he had never entered than either of the people living there.

  But the problem was not so much that they had items, but what items to pack. They both had good backpacks, late twenty-first-century designs that were light as a feather and fit their bodies like a glove. But filling them had taken careful thought. Finally, it was decided that the most important things were food and appropriate clothing and shelter. They had ended up leaving almost everything else. Rachel ended up packing a few items of jewelry and Daneh packed her single "period" medical book, something called Gray's Anatomy. And with that they set out into the driving rain and sleet.

  The weather had never relented. In the last thirteen days it had seemed to rain, sleet or snow an average of ten hours each day. All of the rivers and streams were swollen, and in a few cases the bridges that the hiking groups maintained were washed out. In those cases it was a matter of trying to carefully cross the freezing and swollen stream despite the lack of a bridge, or go upstream looking for a crossing place. Crossing was preferred even though the frigid water flooded under their clothes and seeped into their boots. Better to be soaked than take days out of the way. That finally happened to them at the Anar and it took them nearly two days out of their way before they found an intact log bridge.

  This had taken them off the main trail that passed the small hamlet of Fredar and onto less well-tended trails through the wilderness. These weren't any better or worse than the "main" trail, and the rain had turned them into soup as well. The boots they had dredged up were also late twenty-first century and the mud slid off them like water from a duck's back. But the effort was still constant, to lift one wooden foot after another, slip, slide, grab at a tree or go down on your face in the sucking bog. It just went on and on in an unceasing view of trees, swollen streams and the very occasional natural meadow.

  Every day had been the same. After sleeping overnight in their small tent they would get up and make a fire. They had set out snares or fish-lines the night before but with the rain they had gotten little every day. So they would eat a bit of their road-food, flip the tent into its packing form and head off through the woods. Rachel well understood how relatively well-off they were. They had warm, dry clothing designed by specialists at the very tag end of the industrial revolution for exactly these conditions. They had good footwear, excellent foods and water carriers. In this time of madness they were rich.

  They had passed others on the trail who were not so well off. Now, as they crossed over another of the simple log bridges there was one slumped and twisted by the side of the trail looking like nothing so much as a pile of torn clothes.

  Rachel turned her head away, hardly looking at the body tumbled up against the tree, but her mother stepped over and examined the woman thoroughly, as she almost always did, finally shaking her head and moving back to the trail.

  "She had something in her bag that the dogs had been at. She was wearing waterproof clothing. And her face looks as if she wasn't even starving."

  "She just gave up," Rachel whispered, slipping again in the mud and grabbing at a tree as she looked at the sky. It was already starting to get dark and it was probably the middle of the afternoon. She looked over at the corpse, then at the swollen river. What was the use of putting out trotlines when nothing ever bit. "I can understand how she felt."

  "Don't say that," Daneh said, sharing her glance at the sky. "Don't even think it. Think about roaring fires, well-tended thatch and beef red at the bone."

  "Food," Rachel said. They had been traveling on half rations at first, sharing one of the automatically heating packets between them. But as the food had dwindled and dwindled, despite their efforts at foraging, they had switched to quarter rations. They had been subsisting for the last three days on less than a thousand calories a day and with the walking through the mud and the cold, body-heat-leaching rain, snow and sleet it just wasn't enough.

  "Not that much farther," Daneh said, taking a breath. "I hate to camp by a corpse but there's a stream right here; maybe we'll be luckier if we put the snares down by the water. What do you think?"

  "What do I think?" Rachel laughed hysterically.

  "Stop it," Daneh said, grabbing her by the collar. "Food. Fires. Warmth. That's no more than a day or two away."

  "Sure, sure," Rachel said with another half-hysterical giggle. "Mom, that's what you said yesterday!"

  "I've taken this path before," she said, determinedly, then shook her head. "But. I'll admit it was a long time ago."

  "Mother, tell me we're not lost," Rachel said shakily.

  "We're not lost," Daneh replied, glancing at her compass. She also had a positional locator but that was only useful if the path was traced in on it. And she hadn't had it the last time she had been through when she had been very young and stupid enough to think that a trip up to the Faire on horseback would make an idyllic time. In retrospect, it had. The weather had been fair, as scheduled, and Edmund had taken care of ninety percent of the camp chores. It wasn't this endless slog through a swamp.

  "We need to camp," Daneh continued. "And set out our snares and lines. We're not getting much, but not much is different from nothing." She glanced over her shoulder at Azure as the rumpled and foot-sore house lion walked slowly over the bridge. "Maybe Azure will get something."

  The house lion had actually been bringing in most of the group's protein. He had started off the trip in fine fittle, despite the rain, tail high and off on what looked to be a very interesting long walk. That had lasted most of the first day, but house lions weren't well designed for long-distance travel and by the end of the day his tail was dragging. Despite that, in the morning he was sitting by the remains of the fire with a dead and only somewhat mangled possum. And he had continued to bring things in from the woods for the entire first week: twice rabbits, three more possums, a female raccoon and on the third day had turned up dragging a spotted fawn.

  But by the eighth day the cat was getting as fine drawn as the humans and for all practical purposes had stopped hunting. Cats were obligate carnivores, which meant that they had to eat meat every day. Daneh had shared small helpings of the readimeals, hopefully enough to keep him from having liver damage, but the cat wasn't getting enough food, even with his own foraging, to keep him in condition.

  Daneh looked at the cat and her daughter, who had also lost too much weight, and shook her head. "We'll rest here tonight, up the road a bit in case any more scavengers come around. We'll lay out our snares and tomorrow we'll do nothing but forage. Maybe we can scare some game out of the woods for Azure to catch. We'll spend a good bit of it just resting, though. And if we don't find anything, we don't find anything. Day after tomorrow we'll go on."

  "Works for me," Rachel said, shifting her pack. "Couple of hundred meters?"

  "Yes."

  Rachel looked around at the rain-sodden woods and shrugged. In another couple of days they'd be up to the Via Appalia and some relative degree of civilization. Surely the worst was over. How much worse could it get?

  * * *

  "Ten more refugees today."

  June Lasker had been
one of the first in. She lived in a house not far to the west, up the Via Appalia at the edge of the Adaron Range. It was comparatively well set up for the environment with wood fireplaces and a few items that could be used to cook in a pinch. But she knew there wasn't going to be anything to cook in it and as a long-time trader at the Faire she knew right how to find Raven's Mill. She was one of the relatively well-off refugees, having come in on her own horse and carrying the tools that had made her a successful dealer. Her stock in trade was handmade calligraphy, and the reams of parchment, inks, pens and various quills were well received; no one had thought until they were well into the plan that there was no way to keep records.

  So June had become the primary archivist and was training two of the refugees as scribes, including how to make inks and paper. As soon as a few of the artisans were freed up she intended to get started on a printing press.

  "Anyone we know?" Edmund asked, looking over her shoulder at the lists.

  The rain beat steadily against the roof of the tent that had been set up to receive the refugees. Not far behind it was the mess tent and the sound of the chow lines forming was clear. He turned his attention to the sound for just a moment but it was slow and methodical. Sooner or later they were going to have real problems, but the refugees were, so far, just happy to have some food and shelter and people who had some idea what they were doing. Of course, there were many hysterics; the sudden change from a life of peace and perfection was not easy and that had been borne out in much crying and mnany nightmares. But the three day food and rest period seemed to do the trick. At the end of that time, most of the groups had gotten their act together and were now helping around the camp. Some had declined the requirements necessary to stay, instead hoping for something better somewhere else. Well, they could just keep looking for the pot of gold, if there was ever another rainbow.

  "No, but they said there were some wagons on the road behind them. I'd guess that's dealers."

  "I expected more before this," Talbot mused unhappily.

  "I know," June replied. "She'll be all right."

  "They had everything they needed to make it," he said, definitely.

  "You know, Edmund, no one would take it amiss if you got on a horse and went looking," she said.

  "I sent Tom," Edmund replied. "Between you and me. I don't want anyone thinking I'm taking privileges of my rank. He went to Warnan and down the trail but he didn't find them."

  "Damn."

  "He said that some of the people on the trail said that the bridge was out south of Fredar on the Annan. If they tried to cross."

  "They probably went around," June said. "Daneh wouldn't try to cross the Annan in full flood. If so, they're on one of the side trails."

  "And I can even guess which one," Edmund said. "But if I went out looking, all sorts of people would want to go haring off in every direction. And we can't have that; we're running on a knife-edge here."

  She worked her jaw but nodded in agreement. "Which makes the other piece of news I got all the more unpleasant."

  Edmund's face was like stone except for a raised eyebrow.

  "The last group in had been. set upon by a group of men. The men took everything they had of value."

  "All the wonders of period travel and now bandits," Edmund said with a snarl. "We're going to need a guard force faster than I thought."

  "There are plenty of reenactors."

  "I don't want a bunch of people painting themselves blue and charging screaming," the smith said with a growl. "This won't be the first problem by a long shot. We're going to need professional guards, soldiers damnit, who can get the job done in a stand-up fight. I want legionnaires, not barbarians. Among other things, I'm not going to see them become the nucleus of a feudal system or my name isn't Talbot."

  "You need a centurion to have legionnaires," June said with a smile. "And the proper social conditions as background."

  "If we're lucky the first will turn up," he said cryptically. "As to the latter; working on it."

  "Well in the meantime you'd better scratch up a few good Picts before the Norsemen get here."

  * * *

  Herzer had been having a very bad week.

  The Fall had caught him at home, but like most people he had little of use in the post-Fall world. His parents had kicked him loose at the earliest possible age. Neither his mother nor his father had ever said anything to him about his condition, other than to inquire if it was improving yet, but he was well aware that both blamed the genetics of the other for it. And neither of them were the sort of people who could handle the psychological burden of a child with "special needs." They had both treated him well when he was young, more like an odd toy than a child, but a well-loved toy; however, when his palsy started kicking in they had become more and more distant until finally, when he reached the minimum age to be "on his own" his mother had pointedly asked him when he was moving out.

  Thus he lived by himself. And whereas everyone had a very generous remittance from the Net, he used a good bit of it on his recreation games. Thus his home was modest and so were the things he owned; the term "minimalist" could be used for the small house in which he lived. He'd never even kept the weapons that he trained with, instead storing them "off-line" to reduce the clutter.

  So when the Fall came, he was caught flat-footed.

  He knew that the Via Appalia was somewhere to the north of him. And he knew that Raven's Mill was somewhere to the west on the Via. And he knew how to find north. So he started out.

  There had been no food in the house at all. And the only material for shelter was a cloak that Rachel had given him years before. It was far too small, but it served, barely, for his needs.

  The greatest initial problem was that there were no human trails anywhere around his home. And the terrain and vegetation were horrible; the area was flat and covered in streams, all of them running in full spate with the weather. And the area was thick with privet plants, choking the way for miles on end.

  He had followed game trails and his own nose for two days before finding the first human trail. Then he followed that north, striking for the Via Appalia.

  What he found, instead, was Dionys McCanoc.

  At first he'd just been glad to see him. Dionys had his usual cluster of sycophants around him and it was at least a group to attach himself to. But the attachment palled quickly. Benito had tried to make a bow and arrow to hunt, but none of the rest of the group bothered to try to find food. They had had a small amount of food when Herzer arrived, but the eight full-grown males, nine with Herzer, quickly ran through it.

  After that Herzer had tried to forage, but his training had never run that way. He had borrowed a knife and whittled a gorge, then baited it and fished. But it took all day for him to catch just two fish and they were both distinctly strange looking. Neither of them was shaped the way a fish was supposed to be shaped and they had strange whiskers coming from their lips. He also had no idea how to prepare them but he finally decided that doing it the same way as game would work. So he cut of the heads, gutted and skinned them. Then he had to get a fire started in the pouring rain. Dionys had a very old fashioned lighter and with great reluctance he gave it up for the experiment. After several tries Herzer managed to get a fire going in the shelter of a fallen tree. Then he cooked the fish by sticking them on a forked stick. The first stick had caught on fire after getting too hot, nearly dropping the precious piscines into the fire and ruining them. After that Herzer kept in mind the prescription about a "green" branch for cooking. Several pieces of the fish had fallen in the fire anyway as they cooked. And when he was done there was a bare mouthful for everyone in the group. But it was something. And it was hot.

  It was only this morning, after going through all of that for a mouthful of half-cooked fish, that Herzer had started to wonder about Dionys' plans. The giant didn't seem to be going anywhere or doing anything. He seemed to have an attitude of waiting.

  As soon as he flung off the sodden
cloak in the morning, Herzer braced Dionys on his plans. It had not, in retrospect, been the most politic move possible. There was no breakfast and no prospect of dinner unless one of them somehow found some food in the rain. And Dionys was not one to take a challenge to his authority lightly. He had heard about half of Herzer's diatribe then struck the young man in the center of the chest with a punch that would fell an ox.

  Herzer had been in innumerable full sensory fights but rarely with his fists and never at full stimulation; only real idiots or masochists had the pain systems turned all the way up. So for just a moment he lay in the mud wondering if the madman had killed him. Finally he got up out of his fetal curl and walked away into the woods.

  He wasn't sure where he was going, just that he wasn't going to look Dionys in the face for a while.

  He returned to the encampment after noon having found no food and no answers. Dionys, in the meantime, had sent some of the hangers on out to watch the trail. Then Dionys had gathered the rest, including Herzer, together for a speech.