Robert Adams - A Woman of the Horseclans

And each autumn, the wagons roiled back to Tradertown. By then they were packed with bales of hides, bundles of rich, dense furs, intricately worked and profusely decorated leather goods, fine examples of the felter’s art, thick blankets and deep carpets, small treasures that the nomads or even the traders themselves had dug out of the various ruined and overgrown cities which the prairie was fast reclaiming for its own, all these plus enamelwork and weapons of Horseclan manufacture. (Horseclan hornbows were unsurpassed, and there was an insatiable market for them in the east, while the blades wrought by Horseclans smiths were unexcelled by any save the very highest grades of Pitzburk steel.)

Long ago, on their very first meeting, Roger had disliked and thoroughly distrusted Dick Gruenberger, and five years as that trader’s employee had borne out to him the perspicacity of his initial judgment. Gruenberger and his son shared certain traits in common; both were mean, grasping, unrelievedly avaricious and cruel.

Little as they had originally agreed to pay the men who put their lives on the line to guard the wagons and their contents, father and son still came to the autumn accounting with long faces and even longer lists of their “justifications” for paying far less than that paltry sum.

Consequently, even living communally, the condotta seldom had enough to see it through the winter and so was obliged to draw advances against next season’s wages and work for Trader Gruenberger yet another year. Roger had long consoled his dwindling pride with a promise to himself to someday see every last drop of the thin, watery stuff that the Traders Gruenberger— père et fils —called life’s blood.

Then, this past spring, after some inexplicably delayed but most important shipments had necessitated a very late start of the plains caravan, members of the condotta had discovered that the nineteen slaves chained in the slave wagons were all war captives from the Pitzburk-Ohyoh marches, and despite strict supervision maintained by the four big brutal women Gruenberger was maintaining to make certain that only he, his son, David, and his nephew, Aaron, could get at the women until the train split up farther out on the prairies. Roger could smell an incipient mutiny on the first occasion the traders should try to sell one of the slave women.

For a month of travel, the deadly mash worked and fermented. Then, a day’s travel away from the communal farm of a group of strange, stern folk whose fortified dwelling place had always been the last stop before entering into nomad territory, Roger and his fifty-five men had slit the throats of the sleeping teamsters, oxmen and wagoners, cut down the personal bodyguards of the Gruenbergers to a man and freed the slaves. Then, while the men amused themselves with their former employers, in a spirit at fairness, they turned over the disarmed former wardresses to the nineteen women for final disposition. When all of the bodies had been deeply buried, the wagons were driven back and forth over the gravesite a few times, then they proceeded on westward. The three tall, multistory buildings of stone and timber and homemade brick, interconnected at several levels, would have been laughable as defensive structures anywhere east of the Great River and, no matter their cranklights, few ancient rifles and encircling stockade of half-peeled logs, would quickly have fallen to any determined assault of well-led troops. But here on the Sea of Grass, where the only enemies to be expected were hit—and-run horse-nomads, the structure had proved quite sufficient as a fortress-home to the six generations of farmers it had sheltered, having come through more than one attack by raiders from out on the prairies.

Neither Roger nor his swordsmen had ever felt really comfortable around the grim-faced, hidehound. self-righteous inhabitants of the fortified farm, hut Gruenberger had stopped every year to turn a profit in trade. The farmers sometimes paid in hard money—mostly, ancient silver coins—but more usually traded grain and dried beans for such esoteric items as yellow brimstone and pigs of lead, in addition to the more mundane needles, threads, pigs of iron and the occasional bolt of white or black or brown broadcloth, or a new nailheader.

On the other hand, their five seasons on the prairies and plains had bred in Roger and all of his force a liking and a deep admiration and respect for the Horseclansfolk—the sworn and bitter enemies of those who dwelt in the so-called Abode of the Righteous. The customs and the way of life of these nomads made good sense to Roger and appealed to him and the pitiful remnant of his condotta.

It had been their original intention, this decided out of the general parlay held over the gory corpses of Gruenberger and his crew, to continue on westward until they chanced onto a Horseclans clan or two, trade off their late and unlamented employer’s goods for livestock and tents, marry into the clans and become themselves Horseclansmen.

“But there,” raged Roger to himself, “is another good plan buried in the shit by chancing to be in the wrong fucking place at the wrong fucking time! Damn the wormy, misbegotten guts of that sanctimonious old child-butchering lurker of an Elder Claxton, anyway!”

Roger took a long, thougtful draft of the late Dick Gruenberger’s best-quality honey wine from the dead trader’s own heavy chased-silver cup, reflecting, “Well, at least I could swear a fucking Sword Oath that me and mine had naught to do with the foul murders of those poor little lads. We’ve all been brought low, true enough, but we won’t never he that fucking lowdown! That treacherous volley was loosed long before me and my boys was anywhere near within bow range.

“There was no fucking need to kill them anyhow, not as outnumbered as they were, and a passel of grown men against less than a dozen children, at that. But that pious fucking fool Claxton is so terrified of Horseclansfolk of any size or sex or age that his very ball-less fucking terror and this senseless fucking reaction to it has dropped us all—every man jack—into the shit, nose-deep, by Steel!”

The old soldier grimaced at a particularly unpleasant memory. “And whatall them fucking farmers done to them dead boys’ pitiful little corpses … the shit-eating bastards! Hell, we didn’t do things like that to them Gruenbergers, and everybody knows they plumb deserved such if anybody does.

“When the Horseclansfolks see those bodies, they’re sure to go plumb crazy-mad, and I, for one, can’t say I blame them one damn bit. Except, where we all are, they’re likely to take that mad out on us too, along of the ones what earned it.”

Suddenly. Roger was jolted from his dismal imagery of falling under the dripping sabers of blood-mad Horseclansmen by one of the troopers he had sent to share the guard of the captured nomad boy.

“Cap’n Roger, you better for to come quick, Them fuckin’ psalm-shouters is jest set to murder thet pore li’l younker. Guy and his sword is all that’s stoppin’ the cocksuckers, right now …”

During the course of their shared run up the length of the second-level porch, the trooper shouted out the gist of the tale above the hollow booming thuds of their heavy jackboots on the boards.

Roger suffered only an inconsequential stab in his left forearm during, his eyeblink-quick disarming of Tim Krooguh. Then, bouncing the blood-tacky little dagger on one horny palm, he openly mocked the enraged farmers.

“You poor, fucking. God-ridden, ball-less substitutes for men, you! I told you all this morning that this boy is my prisoner—mine, Captain-of-dragoons Roger Gorman’s! Had you heeded me at that time, you’d still have your balls, a good deal more of your blood and”—he grinned derisively at the sobbing, gasping, moaning Micah Claxton, whose blood-slimy jawteeth were clearly visible between the lips of the cheek slash—“your girlish beauty.