Winter Duty

by E. E. Knight

  “How are you keeping these beasts fed in the backwoods?” one of the men in a new-looking uniform with a coonskin on the outside of his muffler-style field-jacket collar said.

  “We burn organic,” Stuck said.

  Someone on the staff muttered to a friend about outsiders buying corn oil when there were hungry mouths this lean winter. The comment wasn’t meant for him, so Valentine didn’t react.

  “I don’t suppose we can count on that APC up at the peace conference,” Tikka said to Stuck.

  “We’ve got a few of our own wounded to take care of. It’s mostly a hospital truck.”

  “Then how about lending your doc and that medical wagon, in case there’s a fight.”

  “I’ll ask Mrs. O’Coombe,” Stuck said, and walked off.

  Habanero was pointing out modifications to the suspension as Tikka walked Valentine back toward the road north.

  “You want to join us and see the fun?” Tikka asked.

  “The man I’m looking for is up there already. Yes, I’m glad to accept your invitation.”

  Tikka faked a stumble and knocked into Valentine with her shoulder. “On duty again, I’ll bet.”

  “I’m not sure how to categorize what we’re doing at the moment,” Valentine said. “Civilian liaison, I suppose.”

  “Figures. I wouldn’t object to a quick liaison under a blanket, but this time I’m the one with a bunch of men expecting me to have my pants on at all hours. Besides, your redhead’s looking at me like I’m selling New Universal Church Bibles door-to-door.”

  Valentine turned around and saw Duvalier sitting cross-legged on the hood of the Chuckwagon, warming herself on the engine. She threw her leg over her sword stick and rubbed the handle in an obscene manner.

  “Thin little thing,” Tikka said. “I remember her now; she’s the one who comes and goes. You should buy her a good Kentucky ham.”

  “She’s always looked like that, but she still puts in thirty miles a day of walking when she has to.” Valentine wanted to change the subject. “You know, I don’t think I’ve congratulated you on your new post.”

  “I delivered one big victory, and now I get cheered everywhere I go. They keep saying they’re going to appoint a general-in-chief for the A-o-K, and I wish they’d get on with it. I’m shooting from the hip from the time I get up until the moment I pull off my boots—when I get a chance to sleep, that is. I was brought up to keep the Bulletproof ’s worms from getting rustled and our stills from getting stolen, not to do this commanding general stuff. Speaking of which, if the men don’t see me in my command truck, they won’t keep closed up properly. I’ll see you on the banks of the Kentucky, David.”

  Stuck remained at the Gunslinger winter camp. Where Mrs. O’Coombe went, so did he, a hulking shadow. At the moment he sat pillowed between Longshot’s thighs as she rubbed oil into his scalp and massaged his temples, looking like a monkey grooming her mate.

  “What’s that all about?” Duvalier asked Valentine.

  “Bears get twitchy if they don’t let off steam somehow. That’s how brawls start: Bears with nothing to use as a way to vent.”

  “Like chopping wood?” Duvalier asked.

  Valentine stared at her. He’d never thought of it beyond satisfying exercise.

  “You sure you don’t want to come up to the peace conference?” he asked.

  Duvalier poked him with her elbow. “Snore. There’s an interesting craft market in Danville, they say. Maybe I’ll visit that. I picked up some real gold braid in Indiana. I’ll skip a few days of you making goggle eyes at your bowlegged worm rider.”

  Valentine decided not to ask how she’d acquired the braid. “I’m not sure how to make ‘goggle eyes,’ ” Valentine said, and then regretted it instantly. A lot of times Duvalier said nonsensical stuff just to provoke him.

  “You know, Val, you’re just a big plaything to her. A doll with really nice hair and a dick.”

  “What a shame I missed Christmas morning.”

  “That’s it. I am coming along, if only to keep you from embarrassing us.”

  The banks of the Kentucky were thickly wooded at the slight bulge that passed for a lake designated as the border between Gunslinger and Coonskin territory. Behind the banks were the river-cut hills, scarred with limestone cuts and patched with tufts of wood like an old man’s hairline.

  They could see on the other side of the river the observation positions of what was presumably the Coonskin force, no doubt here to safeguard their own negotiators.

  Valentine’s binoculars weren’t much better than his eyes at that distance, but with the help of one of the A-o-K’s telescopes, he could get a look at individual figures. He recognized the dark battle dress and red dagger sheaths of the Moondaggers.

  “The Coonskins have formally united the Moondaggers,” Brother Mark said. “May they live to see the error of their ways and have regret come to wisdom.”

  Frat took a long look at the foes he’d heard so much about. “Religious nuts, huh?”

  “If you call worshipping Kurians a religion,” Valentine said. Frat turned the eyepiece over to Boelnitz. He turned the knob back and forth, sweeping across the camp, and then made a few notes in his leather journal.

  “Some of ’em like the lifestyle, I guess,” the Gunslinger observer said. “No tobacco, booze, or red meat but all the wives you want.”

  “They’ve been calling themselves the Kentucky Loyal Host lately,” a Gunslinger in an officer’s slouch hat said.

  “Fancy-sounding word for ‘traitor,’ ” Silvertip observed.

  Their long search ended in a matter-of-fact fashion. Valentine and Frat were escorted to Corporal Rockaway, raised O’Coombe, where he was setting up mortar positions on the hillside above the river.

  “Your boy Rockaway—or O’Coombe, or whatever his name is—he’s involved in this. He may be on one leg and be wearing a diaper, but he’s a heck of a fire director and trainer for our captured Moondagger artillery,” one of Tikka’s captains said as he walked them along the ridgeline.

  And making a bad job of it, too, to Valentine’s mind. The artillery’s position could be observed from across the river.

  Valentine remembered Rockaway as soon as he saw the face, but there had been changes. He limped worse than Valentine and seemed to have lost weight everywhere but his midsection. He was a rather plain-looking, freckled young man with sandy hair and a delicate chin like his mother’s. He seemed lost in the big service jacket the A-o-K wore, but he still had his Southern Command helmet. Valentine was surprised someone hadn’t talked him out of it when he was left behind. Javelin ran short on helmets long before they hit Evansville.

  “Did you pick out these emplacements?” Valentine asked as others kept trotting up to Corporal Rockaway for instructions.

  “Orders,” Corporal Rockaway said. He had some of his mother’s Texas accent too. “We’re supposed to show our teeth so there won’t be any funny business like at Utrecht. Hey, Doc. What the heck are you doing all this way?” O’Coombe’s doctor stepped forward. “We’ve come a long way to bring you home. I’m glad to see you well. When we’d heard—”

  Rockaway smiled, which much improved his face. “Hell, Doc, well’s a relative term. You put my first diaper on me, and I’m here to tell, I’m back in diapers now and will be for the rest of my life. Some emergency patching to the digestive tract, they said. And I have to drink lots of water to help things along. But I can still fight; I just leak a little doing it. I like fighting these Moondagger sons of bitches. If everything—Well, tell Mom not to worry.”

  “You can tell her yourself when this is done. She’s back with the Gunslinger camp,” Valentine said.

  “She came all this way too? Devoted of her. When the news came about my older brothers, she just tightened up her mouth and hung black crepe around their pictures and made big donations in their names to the Rear Guard Fund.”

  Valentine had no business getting involved in family dynamics. He jerked his
chin at Frat, and they excused themselves.

  Once they were out of earshot, Frat said, “Heart’s in the right place but the kid doesn’t know much about setting up a battery. If anything goes down, he’s making it easy for the Moondaggers. They’re not all cross-eyed and stigmatic, I don’t suppose.”

  “Not hardly,” Valentine said, remembering the sniper’s bullet that had sprayed Rand’s brains all over headquarters.

  Valentine spotted Tikka emerging from a knot of hilltop woods, walking the ridgeline. Corporal Rockaway limped up to her, and they spoke for a few minutes. Tikka pointed as she spoke, both toward the ridge on the other side of the river where the Coonskins and the Moondaggers were encamped, and behind, where the rest of her train was presumably approaching and deploying.

  Once again, she made a show of strength, putting some of her vehicles and horse wagons in plain view on the hill.

  She was kind enough to invite Valentine to accompany her to the peace conference. All she asked was that he wear one of the A-o-K field jackets and a hat, and keep to the back with his mouth shut.

  Duvalier managed to work her way into the party too. Boelnitz tried to get permission to come along, but Tikka insisted that he stay back on the riverbank.

  “Remember what happened the last time we were invited to a conference?” Valentine said.

  Tikka grinned fiercely. “As a matter of fact, we’re very much hoping for an encore.”

  “Without legworms? Won’t you be at a disadvantage?”

  “They’ll be assuming that, yeah.”

  VIPs arrived in cars and passenger trucks; the Gunslingers and Bulletproof and a smattering of other old Alliance soldiers on horseback or in wagon trains. Many arrived via old-fashioned shoe leather.

  They met out on the small lake, a widening in the Kentucky River separating Coonskin land from the Gunslingers.

  Valentine felt like he’d read about a peace meeting like this before, but he couldn’t place the exact circumstances.

  The two sides rowed out to a pontoon houseboat anchored midlake. There, on the sundeck atop the houseboat (after both sides verified that neither had filled the living quarters with gunmen), they met.

  Their forces lined the tree-filled banks to either side of the river. Valentine didn’t understand the fascination. There was little enough to watch.

  He wasn’t important enough to go up on the top deck with the Kentucky or Coonskin principals. But he could listen from the base of the ladder facing the west side of the river.

  There were introductions, neither side being particularly gracious beyond the grace required of opponents who were used to shooting each other on sight. If the Gunslingers were colder in their formalities, it was because they’d suffered more outrage at the hands of the Moondaggers.

  In many more words than the Reaper’s avatar used, they offered the representatives of the Kentucky Assembly essentially the same status as Jack in the Box had spoken of: a neutral Kentucky, running its own domestic affairs but leaving the outside world to the Kurians. The Agenda and Tikka were no more inclined to welcome the proposal from some Moonskin mouthpiece and a few traitors than they were through Valentine’s birdlike Reaper.

  “Glad to see you admit we whupped you out of Kentucky,” Tikka said.

  “We stayed only long enough to chase Southern Command out,” a Moondagger responded. “Then we returned to our allies.”

  “Formerly our allies,” Tikka said. “They turned on us; they’ll turn on you someday. Remember that.”

  “You are the traitors,” an educated Kentucky accent said. “The Kurians indulged you, and you paid them back by aiding terrorists and wreckers and murderers—”

  “There is a reckoning coming!” one of the Moondaggers began to shout thickly. Valentine recognized the voice at once, their old blustering friend Last Chance. “A reckoning! This land, long peaceful—”

  Ha! Valentine thought. Last Chance wasn’t at the battle between the Bulletproof and the Wildcats a few years back.

  “—needs to be cleansed of the filth that has washed into it. Intruders! Interlopers! Troublemakers! Trouble they brought, and death will be their reward—or something worse than death.”

  Duvalier made a fist and flicked out two fingers toward Last Chance with her thumb slightly up—the American Sign Language version of “asshole.”

  “That’s not how you go about negotiating in Kentucky, beardy,” the new Agenda for the Assembly said—the previous one was too sick to make the journey to the river. “You want to deal with us, you tell us what you offer and you let us make up our minds. You don’t threaten.”

  Valentine liked the new Agenda already. Later he learned he was a man named Zettel, though most called him Mr. Zee. Formerly the clan chief of the Gunslingers and a friend of Karas, Mr. Zee, Valentine had been told, came from a family who’d once owned quarries and he’d grown up covered in limestone dust.

  “We’ll consider your offer and give you an answer tomorrow. Here, on the boat again. Shall we say noon?” Agenda Zettel said.

  “There can be only one answer,” the educated voice said. “The other doesn’t bear thinking about. We both love Kentucky too much to see it turned into a graveyard.”

  Duvalier looked up at the sky, shivered. She edged closer to Valentine and stuck her hands in his pocket.

  “We could go up there and kill all of them,” she whispered. “Pay them back for Utrecht.”

  Killers who don’t like killing never last long. They become drunks or careless. Duvalier liked it, as long as her targets were Quislings, the higher up in the social hierarchy the better.

  Valentine had a dark part of him that liked it as well. The shadow that lurked inside him chose its time and place to be satisfied.

  “The Assembly can make up its mind. It’s their choice. Let’s not make it for them.”

  A few more words were exchanged upstairs about day and night signals.

  They departed. Valentine put one hand in his pocket and gripped Duvalier’s with the other, making sure she accompanied him to one of the boats heading back for the Gunslinger shore.

  They waited in line and ate like the rest of the Gunslingers and A-o-K troops. Chieftain and Silvertip were going back for thirds when Tikka interrupted and asked for a moment with Valentine. They stepped out of earshot.

  “Mr. Zee’s meeting with the Assembly representatives is civilians only, so I thought I’d track you down and talk to you.”

  Her dark good looks were suited for a chill Kentucky night. She sparkled like a bit of Kentucky’s bituminous coal. Valentine knew that all you had to do was touch a match to her and she could generate a whole evening’s worth of warmth.

  “What reply should we give, in your opinion?” Tikka asked.

  “Why should my opinion matter?” Valentine asked.

  “I trust it, for one,” Tikka said.

  “I’m . . . uneasy. Everyone in the Kurian Order seems to be shouting ‘surrender’ or at least ‘keep out’ at Kentucky. I can’t make sense of it. I don’t mean to denigrate the land or the people, but it’s not like Kentucky is filled with industries they’d miss and resources they can’t get anywhere else.”

  “There’s the coal,” Tikka said. “And the Cumberland’s the easiest route to the east coast in the South.”

  “Perhaps they are more worried about invasion than we thought. I can’t help but feel there’s something here very important to the Kurian Order.”

  “What? We know about what they did here; they weren’t at all secretive about it. There are no big tracts of the country that are off-limits. A few towers in Lexington, a few more in Louisville. The legworm meat? The big plants up in Louisville fill boxcars with canned protein every day. I was told some of it even gets traded overseas.”

  Valentine tried to keep his mind on the possibilities in the Kurian strategy, rather than the possibilities behind Tikka’s uniform shirt buttons. “Without food it’s hard to grow your population. Maybe that’s all it is: They don
’t want to lose their free-labor butchery.”

  “Perhaps its just geography. If Kentucky becomes a Freehold, the Free Territory extends from the foothills of the Appalachians to Mexico. That’s a lot of people and a lot of resources, more than many countries in the world have.” Tikka worked her fist into her palm. “The Assembly said that they wanted to hear from me before they make their final decision. Whichever way I go, I think the rest of the Alliance will follow.”

  “That’s quite a responsibility.”

  “Well, if someone else made the decision and I didn’t agree, it’d drive me straight into a froth.”

  Valentine smiled at her.

  “I think we should tell them to make like a frog and boil. I’m sure they want us to disarm, get complacent, and then they’ll give us the works anyway.”

  “It’s happened before,” Valentine said, meaning both throughout human history and in relations with the Kurian Order.

  That night the reunited elements of the Kentucky Alliance held a celebration. All along the hillside impromptu bands started up their fiddles and guitars, or raucous parties rolled out the barrels of beer and casks of bourbon.

  The locals knew how to live well. Any excuse for a celebration. The sentries and flankers were out and paying attention to their duties, so it wasn’t all revelry.

  Valentine didn’t join in. He was tired from the trip and worried about what the Kurians were hatching in their towers, and he was in no mood for carousing—especially with negotiations at an impasse and an enemy army just across the river.

  Chieftain and Silvertip were content to load up with food and settle down by Valentine and Duvalier.

  “In another time,” Duvalier said, “all we’d be worried about now is keeping New Year’s resolutions. High-carb or lo-carb diets.” Duvalier had the pinched look of someone on a no-food diet, but then her stomach gave her difficulty under the stress of field cooking.

  “I’ve plenty of resolve. I just hope I’m granted the strength to see it through. Then another generation will get to worry about their carb intake,” Valentine said.