Bob looked a little uneasy. Ranches like his father’s had snaffled off the best of the refugees from Bend and Sisters and Madras, men and women with skills that had been hobbies or luxuries before the Change and were suddenly very important indeed. They’d also done very well out of their contacts with the Mackenzies and the other Willamette communities—Juniper had reminisced about that to her son, how she’d traded bows and arrows for cattle the very first Change Year, and for providing bowyer training later.
“Someone should put this area in order, then,” Mathilda said decisively. “It’s wasteful and breeds trou ble to have lawless zones like this—or like Pendleton, come to that. CORA is part of the Meeting, so we should all do something about it.”
She sounds very sure of herself, Rudi thought with a quirk of his lips as he wiped his fingers on the gritty soil and then dusted them off. But then, she always does.
And she was usually right. The problem was that she was just as convinced on the rarer occasions when she was wrong. That was annoying but tolerable in a friend. Rudi suspected it would be much more of a problem in a ruler who wasn’t really accountable to anyone else except God and, theoretically, the pope.
The rancher’s son cleared his throat. “Be that as it may, we still got to get the herd through here, so nobody up to Bend or Burns will notice and tell General Thurston in Boise. Bet that Prophet fella has spies there too.”
Father Ignatius smiled wryly. “He does, my son. Unfortunately the Order’s information is that he has had missionaries preaching to the wanderers east of here, as well.”
Bob finished his chicory and turned the cup upside down. “Yup. Which means we should all suit up from here on out. Riding in armor ain’t what you’d call comfy but it beats getting an arrow through the gizzard all to hell and gone.”
* * * *
“Annwyn take it!” Edain said. “Fetch, girl! Fetch the sodding thing!”
He sounded frustrated enough to cry. Garbh cantered over and bent her head to gently draw the practice arrow out of the gritty, rocky dirt beside the sagebrush and trotted back proudly with it held in her mouth. Edain bent in the saddle to retrieve it. He wouldn’t cry, of course, but his face was red and angry; that showed easily, with his fair complexion.
It was probably even more embarrassing that he had to practice near the CORA men, who’d grown up shooting recurves from horseback.
“Better this time,” Ingolf said.
Rudi nodded to himself, sitting his horse nearby. It had been: a near miss. Which was surprising; Edain was a champion shot with the longbow, and this last year he’d given Rudi hard competition at the butts. Only to be expected from Sam Aylward’s son, of course, which made it the more puzzling he was having so much trouble learning this.
Ingolf went on patiently—he made an excellent teacher, and he was at least Rudi’s equal with the shorter recurve horseman’s weapon.
“Look, you’re first-rate with that yew pole of yours, but this is different. You’ve been practicing shooting on foot all your life, right?”
“Since I was about six,” Edain said proudly, the flush dying away. Awkwardly: “I’m just not used to missing all the time, is what.”
“Yeah, you’re scary with that longbow on foot, kid. But what you know is getting in the way of what you’ve got to learn—I’ve been doing this since I was six. You’re not going to get it in a day or a week.”
The sagebrush clothed plain stretched around them, but the silver-gray brushes were thinner than any they’d seen before, interspersed with patches of glittering alkali salts, some of them still muddy. A few miles behind them were the steep canyon-scored eastern escarpments of the Steens Mountains, green with aspen and juniper higher up. The rocky slopes of the Bowden Hills were growing—slowly—on the eastern horizon. High over head a red-tailed hawk folded its wings and stooped at a rabbit flushed out of cover by the oncoming caravan. Plumes of dust rose towards the arching blue dome of the sky, kicked up by hundreds of hooves and the wheels of the two wagons.
“Take a minute and watch,” the easterner went on, lifting his own saddlebow. “Look, from what I’ve seen with a longbow you draw like this, past the angle of your jaw and below it.”
The long draw was the way to get the best out of a yew stave. He shifted his string hand upward three inches and slightly forward.
“Now, with these short recurves you have to draw to your ear. The limbs come back and the string lifts off the section towards the tips as they straighten out and then bend the other way—a nice sharp C, not a shallow curve like your bows. Believe it or not, the bowstave gets longer that way; that’s how you can shoot a long arrow from a short bow. Try it.”
Edain did, and sweat burst out on his forehead as he forced himself to overcome training that went far below the conscious level.
“I feel awkward as a hog on ice,” he grumbled.
“Again,” Ingolf said. “You just have to get used to shifting methods back and forth.”
Edain did it again. As he did, he tried to set his feet as he would shooting a longbow from the ground. The problem with that was that the horse he was on inter preted it as a command and wheeled sharply to the right, dust and bits of gritty yellow-brown rock spurting from under its hooves. It also snorted and looked back at him, as if to say, What do you think you’re doing?
Ah, I see the problem, Rudi thought.
The young Mackenzie was a fair horseman; the Ayl wards could afford to keep a riding horse, being well to-do by the Clan’s standards. But those standards didn’t include a class of landowners with dependents to do the work and the leisure to master mounted combat, the way Bearkillers or Ingolf’s folk did. Mac kenzies were smallholders, farmers who might ride horse or bicycle to battle but who got down and fought on foot.
Edain brought the animal under control and started to try again, his square face grimly intent. Sweat streaked the white dust and brown-yellow stubble on his face; two days ago they’d been taking an icy plunge in Mustang Lake, which memory was too pleasant to recall in this hot dry saltbox.
“Clamp down with both your thighs evenly,” Ingolf said patiently. “Stand a little in the stirrups when you do it. That’s a range-country horse and he’s trained to it.”
The lesson went on. There wasn’t much else to do as the horse herd and Rudi’s party made their way slowly eastward. Even in the spring flush the grazing here wasn’t much, which meant a hundred and twenty horses—not counting the riding and draft animals—had to spread out and spend a lot of time eating. The cowboys told a joke about a jackrabbit that starved to death hereabouts because it forgot to run between one blade of grass and the next.
With excruciating care, Edain did everything the way Ingolf had told him to. This time the arrow went shnnnk right into the base of a brush fifty yards away. By his banshee whoop, it had even been the one he was aiming at.
“Keep practicing,” Ingolf said.
“That I will,” the younger man said. He waved a hand around at the arid emptiness. “It’s not as if I had anything else that needs doing, eh?”
Rudi nodded, and gave him a smile and a slap on the shoulder as he legged his horse up to a canter. I’ll make him self conscious if I practice around here, he thought.
He was giving Epona all the rest he could, so he was on her daughter Rhiannon; the five-year old needed the exercise too, being more full of monkeyshines than her mother. Mathilda and the others were wearing light armor and practicing as well; Odard’s man Alex was throwing rawhide disks to skip and bounce along the ground as they galloped by and shot, since he was good with a crossbow but no archer at all.
Hope he brought along a couple of extra crossbows, Rudi thought ironically. Not likely to find replacement parts out here.
Some of the score of Rancher Brown’s hands along on the trek were practicing archery as well; it didn’t take many to keep the horses moving. Rudi gave them a glance as he reined in next to the others.
“Not bad at all,” he said.
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Everyone nodded. They were all young, but they had been trained by professionals from childhood.
“Strange they’re such good archers,” Odard observed. “Most of them are barely even middling with the sword, and they’re mere dubs as lancers.”
“Not really strange,” Rudi said. “It’s the same reason they’re such good riders. What they do to feed themselves in peace is training for war, you see. They spend most of their working lives in the saddle watching their stock. The bow’s a tool for them too, for hunting or guarding the herds.”
Mathilda spoke thoughtfully: “Mom and the Grand Constable are a bit worried about that,” she said. “About the trouble it might cause in the long run. There’s a lot of cowboys, not many in any one spot but a lot in total, because there’s a lot of ranching country out there.”
Mary and Ritva nodded silently. One of them took a small jar out of her saddlebag and they both applied the greasy looking lotion within to their faces and necks and hands. Mathilda took it with a sigh and began to do likewise.
“This stuff smells and feels like someone dragged a dead sheep through a field of wilted flowers, and then bottled it,” she said.
“Lanolin with lavender extract,” Ritva or Mary said. “Believe me, it’s better than what the sun and wind out here do to your skin. This is from a shop in Bend.”
Bob Brown came trotting over and heard the last re mark. “The Rovers use butter instead,” he said, grinning. “Or sheep’s-wool grease. You could try that. . . .”
Mathilda shuddered again. Rudi took the jar and began to apply the lotion; he didn’t like the feel or the smell either, but it helped. He wasn’t quite as blister by lamplight as his redheaded mother, but it was close, despite his blood father, Mike Havel, being a quarter Indian. He didn’t tan even as well as the twins, and the drying wind made his skin feel as if it were about to split over his cheekbones.
“Ride a bit with me,” Bob said to Rudi.
The two men turned their horses aside; as he did so, Rudi caught Mary’s eye—or Ritva’s—and let one eyelid droop for an instant. The rancher’s son pointed to their right, southward, as they ambled away from the main party. A rocky eminence stood about two thousand feet above the level of the plain.
“That there pimple is Lookout Butte—Buckskin Mountain, some call it.”
Then he pointed directly east. “The old Whitehorse Ranch is thataway, less than a day’s travel. That’s where we’re supposed to meet the buyers from Deseret and turn over the herd. There’s good water there, wells, but pretty deep and not too much of it. The Rovers use it, but not usually this time of year—more in summer, when things dry up farther out. The Saints probably plan to head back east through Blue Mountain Pass afterwards; that’s about another twenty, twenty five miles. Or maybe south over the old Nevada line. I didn’t ask and they didn’t tell me.”
Rudi looked at the older man. “You’re expecting trouble?” he said crisply.
“Hope not. But if there is trouble, that’s where it’ll be. The Rovers would rather steal horses than silver, but they wouldn’t mind stealin’ horses and silver and the gear from my bunch and the Deseret folks too, right down to our socks, you see what I mean? Not to mention our scalps.”
Rudi looked slowly around the circle of the horizon. “They’ve been tracking us,” he said.
“ ’Course they have,” Bob growled. “Herd this big, I might as well be wavin’ a sign says, ‘Rob me.’ Or ‘Kill me and lift my hair and then rob me.’ Only that wouldn’t be as dangerous as throwin’ up a dust trail, on account of the Rovers can’t read.”
“Thanks for the heads-up,” Rudi said. “If it comes to a fight, we’ll do our part.”
“We ought to scout ahead, but I don’t like splittin’ my people. We’d be shorthanded if they tried something tricky, like cutting part of the herd out after dark while another bunch made noise. Any of your folks you’d recommend?”
“I figured you’d ask that. Send the twins,” Rudi said without hesitation. “For a quiet sneaky skulk, they’re the best there is.”
“You sure?” Bob said.
Rudi grinned. Cow-country people weren’t as odd about girls and what they should do as Protectorate folk, but they weren’t Mackenzies or Dúnedain or Bearkillers either.
“You can come out now,” he said, in a normal conversational tone.
One of them rose from behind a sagebrush that grew on the edge of a shallow gully, one small enough you’d swear it couldn’t have hidden a jackrabbit. Rudi could tell she was breathing fast—she’d had to duck into the depression and run crouched over—but she hid it well.
“Shit! Jesus!” Bob said.
Then he swore again as he looked over his shoulder and saw the other twin raise her head over a rock and wiggle her fingers too, with a smug little can’t catch me smile.
“Maybe you know what you’re talking about, Rudi.”
“Maybe. And we should get Ingolf in on this. He’s got a lot more experience running a war band than I do.”
Bob looked at him. “Not all that many men your age admit they’ve got anything to learn.”
“I’m young,” Rudi said, putting on the air of a man making a great concession. “But I’m not stupid . . . I hope.”
* * * *
“There it is,” Mary—or Ritva—said.
Rudi, Ingolf and Bob Brown lay on the ridge, about a hundred feet above the level of the plain. The ruins of Whitehorse Ranch lay a little less than a mile to the east, with steeper heights rising beyond above the clump of dead cottonwoods and maples. Rudi watched, occasionally raising his binoculars, and fought back a sneeze from the pungent desert herbs crushed under their bodies.
There were people there now, using the roofless buildings and their half dozen wagons to make an improvised fortress; a dark banner hung limp in the warm dry air over one of the vehicles. Horsemen prowled around the laager, with no more order than a pack of wolves . . . and no less. As they watched a dozen of them suddenly set their horses forward at a gallop, raising a plume of dust. Steel twinkled within it as they rose in the stirrups and shot, then wheeled away again. The field glasses showed long spears leveled among the wagons, and the flash of bolts as they shot back—crossbows rather than archery, he decided.
“How many of the Rovers?” he asked thoughtfully.
“Around ninety, assuming all the ones we saw this morning are here,” one of the twins said.
Bob had a pair of binoculars too. “Make that around eighty-nine,” he said. “One of ’em just dropped out of the saddle and they’re carryin’ him away looking limp. It surely is a war party, right enough—no stock but their remounts, no women or kids or wagons, just some packhorses and a couple of tents.”
“That’s your buyers forted up?” Rudi asked.
“Yup. See the flag? A golden bee on dark blue—that’s New Deseret.”
“There can’t be many of them,” Rudi said regretfully; if there were, the little attack just now would have cost the Rovers more.
“Nope,” Brown agreed. “About as many as we got to start with, no more. Less now.”
He looked up at the sun; it was about noon. “I’d say the Rovers hit them at dawn, maybe snuck someone up to cut out their horses first. The Mormons’re good enough in a tussle from what I hear, but they’re farmers and townsmen mostly, and their ranchers ’n’ horse sol diers are all out east fightin’ the Prophet. This sure isn’t a place for a farmer’s fight.”
Rudi looked over the little battlefield, and the endless rumpled landscape around them. Brown was right, and he felt uneasily self conscious about it. He’d never come so far east . . .and he’d never been involved in a fight this size, either.
Ingolf squinted at the Rovers. “So there’s the nine of us, twenty-one of your men, Rancher, and maybe fifteen or so in the wagons down there—and they don’t know we’re here.”
“But we’ve got some heavy horse,” Rudi pointed out. “We bought Ingolf the gear for it too”—he no
dded to the older man—“and you were already fine with a lance. If we could get in range for a charge, we could spatter them.”
Bob Brown shook his head. “Hell, I was in the Mount Angel fight in the war,” he said. “I remember how the Protector’s knights cut us CORA folk up. It was like try ing to outbutt a mean old bull. But that was in the Wil lamette, where we couldn’t run far. You try that here, they’ll just run—and then when those big horses of yours are tuckered from a-haulin’ all that iron around, they’ll shoot you full of arrows.”
“Like wolves with an elk.” Rudi sighed. “So much for that idea.”
“Wait a minute,” Ingolf said. “Bob’s right if they can run away. But back in the Sioux War, there was a time when . . .”
He went on, giving the details and then pointing out the features below—the hills, the water, the wagons and ruins, how far a horse could run. . . .
“Oh, now that’s a lovely plan, sure!” Rudi said, watching it take shape in his mind’s eye.
“Lovely if it works. Four-to-one odds just purely don’t leave you much to fall back on if things get fucked,” the heir to Seffridge Ranch said dubiously.
“But we’ll have to be quick; they’re going to get overrun down there before sunset,” Rudi said.
“Well, dip me in shit and roast me with nuts if it isn’t our only real chance,” the rancher’s son said ruefully. “Can’t just go home and tell Dad, ‘Sorry, the Rovers done kilt all our customers.’ ”
Then his eyes went back to the ruins. “Be tricky timing, though. If it goes south, we’re in it up to our asses.”
“Never yet been in a fight that didn’t have some risks,” Ingolf said. “I wouldn’t try it if there weren’t those hills in back, but that makes it a chance worth taking.”
Chapter Fourteen
Southeastern Oregon
The Sunrise Lands Page 35
