“Ah, I always thought she liked girls. Maybe it’s your skirt she likes.”
“Which would show good taste,” Edain said. “For it’s true I like both the wearing of the kilts and the kissing of the girls myself.”
Which got him more laughs; he snorted and slid the unstrung longbow into the carrying loops.
“No, it’s me winsome charm and the archery that wins the ladies, and I don’t doubt it’ll work here in the big city too.”
“You wish. It’s pretty good duty otherwise, being stationed here in the capital, but with all the goddamned army swinging dicks around you can’t get laid without paying for it, and even that’s expensive as fucking—you know what I mean—hell. Two-fifty a day and your keep is good money out in the sticks, someplace like Lewis-ton, but it doesn’t go too far here in Boise.”
There were half a dozen of the soldiers, and they were all friendly now.
Now that I’ve earned them all a week’s pay or more, he thought.
Most of them came from little farms and villages that didn’t sound all that much different from Dun Fairfax, if you allowed for the fact that they were Christians of various sorts—Protestants and Catholics and Mormons, he thought, though he wasn’t altogether clear on the dif ferences and none of them seemed to be much bent out of shape about it either. He’d been nervous and out of place in General Thurston’s house, but these lads he understood right off.
“Thanks for the tip on the bets,” one of them said; he was a towhead named John Gottberg, and the file closer, which meant roughly a corporal. “I heard about the thing where you and your bossman saved the president’s life, but most of those donkey dongs were just in from road patrol and hadn’t got the word.”
He extended his hand towards Garbh—cautiously, which wise men did, with a dog who weighed a hundred and twenty pounds and came up above their waist.
“Friend!” Edain said.
She sniffed politely but didn’t radiate anything beyond tolerance.
“She’s a bit of a one man dog,” Edain said.
“Best kind. Hunting dog?”
“Hunting, guard . . . raised her from a pup, that I did.”
“Nice to see the burro bangers taken down a bit,” said a freckle-faced redhead called Kit Mullins, returning to the discomfiture of the cavalry. “Fuckers think they’re hot shit ’cause they come from ranches and ride around. We’re the backbone of the army, by God. It’s us who stand and take it and dish it out when the metal hits the meat.”
That made the first one thoughtful: “Maybe Iron-ass really likes your looks; she didn’t tell them.”
“And maybe she made a bit on side bets,” another said.
Edain shook his head. “It’s Rudi she’d really like to meet. The Chief has a way with the girls and that’s a fact.”
“So, this guy Rudi you’re traveling with, he’s your king or something out west? They say you’ve got kings and knights and weird shit like that out there.”
“No, he’s the Chief’s tanist,” Edain said. “Ummm . . . by Chief I mean the head of the clan, the Mackenzie herself herself. She presides over the Clan, and he’s her . . . understudy.”
“So it’s like a king, or what do they call it, a crowned prince?”
“Not in the least! The Chief’s the Chief because the clan assembled hailed her—many’s the time over the years—at the Beltane festival. And we hailed Rudi, too, as tanist, just now. And we’ll hail him as Chief too, when his mother dies or steps down, free and open for all to see, and any benighted ijeet who wants turnips and cowpats thrown at him could stand up and ask for the same.”
“So hailing, that’s like an election?”
“A bit. Everyone makes speeches and we all argue ourselves blue and we have a show of hands. And then there’s games and a lovely great feed, and singing and dancing and music and drinking and sometimes a bit of a punch-up on the sidelines.”
“Sounds like quite a party!”
“It is that. It’s supposed to be very Celtic, which is what they called clansfolk in the old days. And Beltane bowers . . . the girls like the blossoms. Puts them in the mood to worship the Goddess, as it were. And speaking of parties, what do you say to a few beers?”
“Hey, mostly, ‘Hello, my dear beer!’ ” Gottberg said.
Edain checked the fletching of the last arrow as he slid it back into the quiver. He caught the glances the squad gave one another, and this time kept his look of innocent friendliness without letting the grin show. They were a lot like the lads back home, which meant they were always ready to put one over on an outsider, friendly or not.
“What do you say we do a little pila practice?” Gott berg went on, elaborately casual. “And low man buys the first two rounds? It’s not too different from throw ing a hunting spear. . . . I’ll bet you use hunting spears sometimes. . . .”
“Oh, sometimes, but mostly bows. I’m not much with spears . . . I wouldn’t turn down a sporting bet with you lads, though.”
They walked over to the pila targets, shapes of tight rolled matting on wooden posts. Those at least resem bled men with shields, which was good. He’d never yet fought an enemy or hunted a beast who was round and colored white and red in concentric circles. They weren’t very far away—only about twenty yards—but then the heavy javelins were short-range weapons. The pila were piled in neat tripods with the big oval shields stacked against them and the helmets hung by the chinstraps. The young men put the helmets on and clipped their cheek pieces in place before picking up the shields and javelins.
Good, Edain thought. Practice the way you’re going to do it for real, or as close as you can.
Thoughts like that always sounded a bit like his father’s voice.
“Two throws each,” the file closer said. “Kit, get a couple of spares for Eddie here.”
It took a moment for Edain to realize he was an Eddie, locally. While he struggled with the thought, the Boisean noncom took a step forward, shield up. The spear went back and then forward in a long blurred arch. There was a thunk! as it sank through the center of the target and into the wooden pole within. The second matched it, a handbreadth lower down. Both sank as the long iron shanks behind their points bent.
“Now that’s clever,” Edain said. “So they can’t throw them back at you, eh?”
The file closer nodded. “And if it goes into a shield, whoever’s holding it has to throw it away or spend time trying to pull the pila out. You want to go next?”
“Oh, I’ll wait and see how the rest of your lads do,” Edain said innocently.
Or he thought it was innocently; Gottberg was a little older than the rest of his file, a bit older than Edain himself, and shrewd.
Most of them were nearly as good as their corpo ral. When they’d finished the twelve throws, only four spears had missed or glanced off, and most of the ones that hit were solidly planted through the wicker or in the central pole. The Boise soldiers knew their business, and they had the strong limber bodies of well fed young men who’d worked and trained hard all their lives.
They’d most likely all inherited keen eyes and steady hands too; even in fortunate areas like this, not many weaklings had lived through the Change and its aftermath to breed more of their kind.
I can’t lose either way, Edain thought. If I’m last man, I buy them more beer and they get talkative. If I’m not, I get more respect . . . and they’ll be more likely to speak freely, eh? And I hate to lose; so may Cernunnos guide my hand!
He hefted the spear he’d been handed, which had a much dinted shaft and an iron shank that looked as if it had been straightened any number of times. It was a practice weapon; well balanced, but probably a little off center. And it was as heavy as a battle spear, or nearly, which was not meant to be thrown.
“Ground and center, ground and center,” he murmured to himself.
Edain was wearing his brigandine, which was fair, but that was a hair less hampering than the cuirass of steel bands and hoops that was thei
r equivalent. He didn’t use the solid face front step and-throw method the local men did; that was designed for use with a great twenty-pound shield in your left hand to balance you. Instead he took a half sideways skip forward and put all his body into it with a snapping twist. Throwing something this heavy that far took real effort; his breath hissed out between clenched teeth.
Good!
The throw had the smooth heavy to-light flow that said it was going where it should as it left his hand. It arched higher than the others had . . . and then his lips moved in a silent curse as it wobbled in flight.
Thunk.
The long pyramidal point of the spear clipped a little twist of osier from the wicker figure’s notional head as it went by, and then banged into the asphalt a half dozen yards farther on.
“Not bad,” Gottberg said, taking off his helmet and scratching vigorously. “Most newbies can’t even get a pila to go that far.”
The redhead named Kit looked at him narrowly; he’d be the one buying the first two rounds if Edain wasn’t. “I thought you said you only used bows?”
“No, I said I mostly used bows,” Edain said, grinning. “Sometimes we use spears—hunting boar in thick country, when you want something heavy at close range. Aren’t you glad I didn’t put money on it, eh?”
Several of the others laughed. Kit smiled, if a little sourly. “Here,” he said. “Try this one—it didn’t bend and it’s better than those old clunkers from the practice bin.”
Edain caught the tossed spear with a smack of palm on wood. It was a better weapon; he could feel it in the swoop and sway as his arm rocked back under the impact. He made a half bow.
“Nár laga Ardwinna do lámh,” he said formally.
He didn’t speak the old language—only a few schol ars did, and Rudi and his mother and his sisters Fiorb hinn and Maude, of course—but he’d learned a few of the Chief’s sayings, as most people in the Clan did.
“May the Huntress never weaken your hand,” he repeated in English.
Breathe in, breathe out, and . . . throw.
Shunk.
This time he speared the target through the inner edge of the shield. Not the best throw—just good enough to win him next to-last place.
Kit sighed. Edain held out his hand. “We’re low men on the pole, so let’s split those first two rounds,” he said.
The redhead shook the outstretched hand. That won him more acceptance than he’d hoped for. The file shed and racked their armor at the gatehouse barracks. Edain did the same with his brigandine and bow and quiver, though it made him feel a bit naked so far from home and among strangers.
“Let’s get that beer,” Gottberg said. “And something to eat.”
“They don’t feed you?” Edain asked, surprised. A lord usually did, at least keeping table for his full-time warriors.
“Sorta-kinda.” Kit grinned. “It’s on the list of Soldier’s Superstitions.”
At Edain’s raised brow he went on: “We all get it on a printed sheet when we’re called up, with the rest of the paperwork. It’s sort of a list of things soldiers believe. Like, ‘It is very unlucky to get a spear in the guts on a Friday.’”
Gottberg went on:“The one he’s thinking of is,‘When the sun rises in the east, it is a sign that we shall have stew for dinner.’ ”
“Mystery meat stews with desecrated vegetables. And they say the stuff with it is beer. I say the quartermaster’s horse has something bad wrong with its kidneys.”
“We’ll go to the Fife and Drum instead. That’s where a lot of guys go off duty. It’s a bit pricey but not too bad and it’s all fighting men.”
“I’m not much of one for brawling in taverns.”
“Oh, they don’t brawl there. Because—”
* * * *
The city of Boise was an orderly, law-abiding place, like the rest of the United States governed from there. People mostly liked it that way, and those who didn’t tended to meet the National Police and then either dance the hempen hornpipe on air or spend many sad and stress ful years working under extremely unsympathetic management in the National Infrastructure Reconstruction Battalions.
The Fife and Drum tavern was orderly and law-abiding too, usually, but the National Police didn’t go there. Nor did the military police, nor did officers, and it wasn’t a place where a civilian would last long either.
The loud raucous sawdust-floored atmosphere re minded Edain of some places he’d seen in Corvallis, stu dent hangouts around the university. The smell was the same—gaslights, cooking food, beer. There was a little more sweat, and the voices were harder, somehow, and there were a lot of battered weapons and hacked shields on the walls, down to one made from a pre-Change traffic sign with a spear that looked like a kitchen knife on a stick beside it.
It was more orderly than those Corvallan pubs, though; off along one wall were a series of booths in which most of the patrons were scarred middle-aged men with quiet gimlet eyes. Some of them were smoking pipes or cigarettes, or chewing wads of tobacco, habits that were nearly extinct elsewhere.
Young soldiers who wanted to fight and break things went to other places, establishments where noncoms didn’t go either. They came here when they didn’t want their dinners dropped into their laps by the arrival of flying bodies.
“He’s all right,” Gottberg announced to the room, and the stares at Edain’s kilt and general foreignness turned less hostile; Garbh’s hair lay back down on her shoulders. “And he’s with us. And he’s one of the guys that saved the boss.”
“Is that Sergeant major Anderson over there?” Edain said with interest as they grabbed a table.
It was big enough for everyone if you didn’t mind a little jostling; Garbh lay down at his feet, too disciplined to wander, but letting her nostrils wrinkle with the fascinating mix of scents.
“Yeah, and you don’t stare at him. He’s Sergeant major Anderson. The top NCO. That makes him a lot more important than most officers.”
“Most officers lower than major,” Kit said. “Or maybe colonel.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Gottberg said. “Lieutenants have their uses.”
“Yeah, they’re useful when it comes to stopping a spear that might’ve hit someone who works for their living.”
“Oh, I dunno,” Gottberg repeated thoughtfully. “I mean, the boss’s kids, they’re both pretty useful. Only what you’d expect, though.”
A waitress came out with glasses and big pitchers of beer. Edain sampled his.
“Not bad,” he said. “Nice and crisp. A little lighter than they brew it at Dun Juniper, where you eat it with a spoon, but well hopped.”
“Hey, traveling the way you do,you must get to see a lot of different types of booze,” Kit said enthusiastically.
“Some. More often, it’s many different types of bad water.”
“Tell me,” Gottberg replied. He cast an eye at some of his men. “You can get the galloping shits that way . . . unless you’re careful about purifying the water. Right?”
“Ah, hell, Corp, we never have to do that back home.”
“And back home your mama still holds your cock while you pee, right? Jesus, what is this, an army or a nursery school?”
“You’re starting to sound like Sergeant-major Anderson, Corp.”
“Nah,” Gottberg said, but he looked cautiously over his shoulder when he did it. “You haven’t heard me talk about how great things were in the old army, have you? You know, the real US Army, where they had real soldiers, with guns.”
The young men all laughed, a bit uneasily. The food came out—starting with corn on the cob, a rare treat in the Clan’s territories, where maize grew reluctantly. Spareribs in hot sauce followed it, and grilled pork chops with sage and onion stuffing, mounds of fried potatoes, steamed cabbage and carrots, brown bread and butter; plain food and plenty of it, and more beer along with it. Everyone said their varieties of grace—including one that simply went, “Good God, good meat: Good God, let’s eat!”—and
then all of them dug in with thoughtless voracity.
“Ah, that’s better than I’ve had in a while,” Edain said, pushing back his plate and wiping his mouth. “Saving your top man’s own table, and that was seasoned with nervousness, for me.”
Crackling and crunching and slobbering came from under the table, where Garbh enjoyed the bones; her jaws were more than strong enough to crunch them like stalks of celery, except that they had roast marrow in the center, which explained the ecstatic slurping sounds.
“Apple pie and ice cream all round,” Gottberg went on to the plain middle aged waitress. “Hell, Judy, bring the bucket, and make it chocolate!”
Her brows went up. “You boys just win a lottery, or sack the Prophet’s palace in Corwin, or what?”
“Nah, we get him in a month or two, and I’ll buy a plow team with my share. We won a bet today. Found money and it’s burning a hole in my pocket.”
More serious work with fork and spoon followed. The talk turned to politics; Edain kept mostly quiet but kept his ears pricked.
“So we replace those useless old farts with another bunch of old farts just a bit younger,” Kit said. “Hell with it. Why do we need ’em? And who’s going to run against the boss for president? That would be like trying to take God Almighty’s job.”
That brought a laugh, but one soldier went on seriously: “Well, God bless him, but the boss isn’t going to be around forever. I mean, you wouldn’t know it the way he keeps up in the field, but he’s an old man too—nearly sixty. I mean, sixty . . . how many people do you know last much past sixty?”
The hard young faces suddenly went a little uncertain. Edain recognized the feeling; people got the same way back home, thinking of what Clan Mackenzie would do without the Mackenzie. She was the Goddess on-Earth, the one who’d brought their parents or their grandpar ents alive through the Change and given their world its shape and meaning.
Still, they had Rudi ready to take over the job. . . .
“We should elect him a new vice president, a younger guy. The boss can have the top job as long as he wants . . . understand, I’ve got nothing against Colonel Moore, but . . .”
The Sunrise Lands Page 48
