Robert Adams - The Memories of Milo Morai

Shawn squirmed even more, while his brother and the other two hunters, though clearly listening and watching, were just as clearly keeping out of the matter, waiting to see what happened.

“But . . . but, gee, Daiv . . . uhh, sarge,” the younger Cassidy brother finally half-whined, “I got me a dang good reason for to need to get back home early, see?”

Carefully controlling himself, Daiv strode over to the side of the young man’s mount, reached up and took a firm grip of his belt with one hand, while he showed him the other clenched into a fist.

“And you got youa even better reason to do like I tell you, boy! You git off that horse and git to work on them carcasses or I’ll drag you down and purely beat the shit out of you! Hear me?”

Turning, Daiv then strode into the armory, where he found Djeen Nohbuhl lying on his back on the floor, snoring thunderously in a pool of urine. Taking the big man’s shoulders, Daiv dragged him out onto the stoop, careful to lay the drunk on his belly so he would not strangle when he vomited, which he always eventually did after a drinking bout. Looking, without giving the appearance of so doing, he noted that Herb and Gabe were nowhere in sight, although there was a small cloud of dust up the road, while both Sam and Shawn Cassidy were manhandling one of the stags toward the skinning rack.

“Well, I’ll be dee-double-damned!” he muttered to himself as he fetched in a mop to clean up the mess on the armory floor. “Cap’n Mehrdok, he was right. It worked! I done just like he told me, and, by God, it worked. I might git the hang of all of this yet.” Then he thought and could not repress a shudder. “And I damn well better, and quick, too; ’cause if the cap’n and the first sergeant don’t never come back and with old Mosix dead and rotting, that means I’m gonna be it . . . leastways, till we gits around to having another election, that is.”

Their funerary chores accomplished, Wally Gibsuhn and his sons reined up their wagon, to the tail-board of which the late Mosix’s roan ass was now hitched, before the armory in the early twilight. From the stoop, Daiv could see that a full bale of hay, some odds and ends of ass harness, a half sack of grain and a large iron skillet had joined the spades and pick in the back of the wagon and knew that there were probably smaller items he could not see in the conveyance and in the pockets of the man and his two sons. But he figured that that had been a messy job they had done over there and that since none of the high priest’s effects would do him any good anymore, the Gibsuhns might as well have what they wanted of them, just so long as they left the two goats he meant to have driven out to his own farm tomorrow, and maybe that big rangy brown tomcat, as well. The beast had had the appearance of a good ratter.

He waved his arm and said loudly, “Wally, come on in and have some beer with me, huh?”

The short, balding farmer handed the reins to the boy who sat on the seat beside him. “You boys drive on home, straight home, hear me? I’ll ride the new ass back, later. And when I gits back, the team had better be unhitched and took care of proper, the wagon unloaded and in the shed, the harness all cleaned and hung up where it belongs and the tools all cleaned and put up. You make your brothers help you out, won’t none of it take too long, so don’t go looking at me out’n them sad, put-on eyes, hear? Give that skillet to your maw, tell her the sarge has me at the armory and I’ll be home just as soon as I can.”

As the wagon rumbled off at a good clip behind its sturdy, well-matched team of horses, Gibsuhn looped the ass’s halter to the hitchpost and climbed the steps onto the stoop. “Huh!” he grunted, on noticing the big body on the boards to one side of the stoop. “Old Djeen’s been at it again, looks like. Why cain’t he be happy unlest he gets sloppy, pissy, falling-down drunk, I wonder?”

Daiv shrugged as he led the way into the lamp-lit armory. “He’s jest like that, Wally. But if you think back on it, his paw was too, so I guess he come by it natcherl.”

When the two men were seated at one of the long board tables with mugs of the cool beer that Wally had fetched up from the cellar, Daiv said, “Wally, that was a plumb nasty job I give you and your boys to do, and I thank you for doing it so quick on such short notice. You really earned that there ass, but he looks like a good young’un with a lot of years of work in him.”

Basically honest Wally Gibsuhn choked a little on his beer, then said, his gaze fixed to a spot on the floor, “Well . . . actually, Daiv . . . uhhh . . . the ass, he won’t all we ... I... took, see.”

Daiv chuckled good-naturedly and patted the short man’s thick, hard-muscled arm. “Don’t worry none, Wally. I saw the hay and feed grain and harness and all in your wagon; Mosix had all that stuff for the ass, so if you’re getting the ass itself, you might as well take his fixin’s too.”

Still looking at the floor, the farmer muttered, “But . . . that won’t all, Daiv. I took a big ol’ iron frying pan out’n the kitchen of the priest’s house and a real steel cleaver and some them thick metal pans what don’t never rust and a axe and three flitches of bacon and . . .“

Laughing heartily, Daiv quickly reassured the guilt-ridden man. “Now, Wally, I done told you, don’t worry none. You didn’t really steal nothin’, like you seem to think you done. Old Mosix, he’s dead now, you oughta know that better’n anybody, by now, so he sure-Lord ain’t gonna ever have no more use for nothing he owned alive.

“Me, I got dibs on them two goats, and like as not, when my boys goes over there to fetch ’em home, they’ll pick up a thing or two, too, just like you and yours done, this night.

“Now, here, let’s have us another mug of beer, huh?”

Before Wally left on his newly acquired ass, Kathleen Nohbuhl and one of her hands drove a wagon along the darkening road to the armory. With hardly a word to Daiv, Wally and the Cassidys, they dragged the sodden bulk of Djeen Nohbuhl off the stoop and tumbled it over the side of the wagon, then remounted and drove off, the mare hitched on behind and her saddle tossed carelessly atop her snoring owner. Daiv was no longer worried about the misused mare, for while the Cassidys had gone about their work that afternoon, he had patiently walked and cared for her, cooling her slowly, gradually, treating her as tenderly as if she had been his own.

While they skinned a young bison and dressed the carcass for easy packing back to camp, Milo and Wahrn Mehrdok mindspoke one to the other.

“Irrigation problems or none, Wahrn,” beamed Milo, “not anywhere near all of your people are going to want to wander off to lead the lives of nomad herders . . . not after they find out just how brutal such a life often is, anyway. Your womenfolk, in particular, are mostly going to prefer the known hardships to those as yet unknown, that’s just the nature of females, you can’t fight it.

“And becoming nomads is not a thing you can do overnight, anyhow. I’m informed that your cattle, for instance, are fat, short-legged, short-horned beasts of a sort that would not survive even a single season, having been bred to be too slow to outrun predators and too clumsy and near-hornless to fight them. You folks are going to have to start breeding them for more horn, more leg, more muscle and less fat; better yet, start interbreeding them with Horseclans cattle—they’re not at all pretty and they produce rather small quantities of milk, compared to yours, while their beef is usually tough and stringy, but they do survive, Wahrn, they survive heat, cold, dust, flies, floods, droughts and predators of every size, and they do it all on grasses, weeds, wild grain and herbs.