Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

Patience thought the drumming was dreamed, aching echoes of her bruises and broken nose.

She woke still savage from the stone-fight the day before, shamed that she'd been driven like a badger into the hut, dragging the log-round's weight and hunched warding thrown rocks. Though she'd left injured children behind her – and would have killed some if she could, despite loving her own… her ungrateful son who hadn't visited since she fell.

The drums were rolling, grumbling away like a great departing wagon – already distant, joining others deeper into the hills.

The village seemed to stir and boil in the last of night around her, but no one disturbed the sheepskin at the hut's door.

Her strapped shoulder now only slightly sore, Patience got up from her pallet – with necessary courtesy to her chain-tether and log – and dragged that load to the entrance hide. Supposing she was being unwise, she paged the sheepskin aside to a brightening dawn, the sounds of men running, and women's click-clacking calls and scolding.

"Get back inside." The sentry stared down at her over the shaped wooden beak of a war-helmet. No face to be seen there. but the voice familiar.

"… Peter Aiken?"

"Get inside." The leaf-bladed javelin turned slightly in his

grip.

Patience stepped back into the hut, let the sheepskin fall, and stood by her log-anchor, waiting.

And as sure as if commanded, Pete Aiken-Robin stooped to enter… then stood tall, bare-chested and armed, his carved helmet's blue plume touching the rough wattle ceiling. She saw he belted a heavy hatchet, and a sword. The sword was a scimitar, and hers.

"You look very fine, Peter," Patience said. "You look as a warrior should. – But why are you standing my guard?"

"Three sheep," Aiken said, in fair book-English. "- Given to John Little to take his place."

"… Ah. Is it possible that honor still lies with the Robins?"

"It still lies with me," Aiken said, sounding to Patience very young. "My word was given – and my word stands." He set his javelin into the near corner. "I took your sword from the trophy lodge.".

"And your word stands… at what cost?"

Aiken shrugged. "Fuck 'em."- So perfect a use of the ancient WT phrase that Patience couldn't help smiling, and saw beneath the helmet's beak, the young man grinning with her.

"If you live, Pete Aiken," she said, "- if you live, you will be a chief."

Aiken reached up, loosened a strap, and lifted his plumed helmet off. Without it, hair tousled, he seemed only a boy. "Then I'll have to run faster than Chad Budnarik; he wanted your head for the garden."

"Peter," Patience said – and knew as she spoke that she was no longer what she'd been. "Peter, if it's your death, don't do it."

"You're not my mother," he said. "And honor is men's business." He stooped to examine the ankle-shackle and chain. "This would ruin my hatchet to try to break."

There were shouts outside, and they both stayed still, waiting as the noise went past.

"What's happening?"

"We were drummed… Some people, passing by, killed Ed Marble's wife. He's a war-chief just north, and they're a friendly village to us."

"So, your men are going out."

"Yes, they are." He shook the chain. "Hatchet wouldn't break it."

Patience picked up her greatcoat from the pallet, draped it over her shoulders, and buttoned it – one-handed – at her throat. Then, silent, she settled herself into the quietness of anything-might-happen.

Aiken picked up his helmet and put it on. Then he bent to the log-round, gathered it in both arms – and heaved it up with a grunt. "… Come on!" He shouldered the sheepskin aside and marched out the entrance, with Patience, barefoot, hopping awkwardly close beside him.

An odd-looking pair – and were looked at, stared at, by several leather-kilted women filling clay jars of water at the steep streamside below. Others, women, children, and old people, were standing far down the settlement, watching a file of armed men trotting away to the north on the far side of the creek, spear-heads bright in first light, their long hide shields at their shoulders. Others, gone before, were only dawn shadows in among distant birches, going away, the drumming going with them.

Pete Aiken, heavy-burdened, yanking Patience stumbling along, strode upslope onto a beaten path above a row of huts – outpits stinking from one to the next as they went. Three children and a small brown dog came to follow them – but at a distance that grew more distant when Patience, hobbling, picked up a rock and bared her teeth at them.

Puffing out effort-breaths, hugging the log-round tight, Aiken staggered on as Patience managed to stay with him, the shackle scoring her ankle each quick awkward step, as if the little brown dog had come to bite her.

They passed a wide garden to their right, and Patience, struggling to keep up, bruising her toes to kick tangling chain ahead with every step, saw cauliflowers growing in it… then saw they weren't, but rows of skulls – all full-human, none shaped oddly as Persons' skulls might be. There were some heads still fleshed, but all stuck rotting in the ground for birds and summer insects to polish to decoration. Brown-feather quills bristled from eye-holes where broken shreds of white still spoiled… Thrushes.

Aiken stopped at last, and set the log-round down with a

grunt of relief beside the only hut built above the path – a small open-sided shed, with a neat true-garden laid out just past it Patience smelled charcoal and hot iron, saw instruments and steel tools pegged to the shed's back wall. Blacksmith's – and no blacksmith.

"Willard's gone fighting. That's what he likes to do…" Aiken ducked in, searching among tools, tongs, and hammers.

It occurred to Patience, standing tethered and sore ankled long-shadowed now by morning, that the blacksmith's hut presented a future certain – however distant – a future in which Boston's hostage women, its fierce Person Guard, would have proved insufficient. The village forges, their tools and shaped metal, the fine steel beaten out on their anvils – but above all the notion they presented of planning, making, and completing – would end at last more formidable than any plots, any savage armies.

Pete Aiken came out into the sunshine with a heavy hammer and cold chisel… Patience found the chisel particularly impressive. To make a hammer was nothing much. To forge and temper a chisel, was.

"I don't… I don't see how to take the shackle off, and not hit you." Aiken knelt in sunlight to examine the problem. "But I can do the chain."

A young woman in a yellow wool skirt, her scarred breasts bare, had come up to the high path, was standing watching them. Patience stared at her, and the woman turned and went away… but with purpose.

"Trouble," Patience said.

"My sister – and always trouble. I'm going to… I need the anvil." He gripped the shackle's chain and dragged the log-round into the shed, Patience floundering with it, then went outside again for the hammer and chisel.

Time… time. Patience felt her heart beating the moments away. Moments for Aiken's sister to come to save a foolish brother from himself, bring other women and some older men, armed, to help her.

"Here." Aiken took her ankle, yanked it so she suddenly sat down on dirt and ashes, then laid her leg across the anvil's iron, and pushed her worn trouser-cuff up out of the way.

Now very brisk and certain, he set the chisel-blade at a chain-link near the shackle, swung the hammer high – then whipped it down while Patience, no longer impatient, sat frozen.

She felt the blow up into her hip – heard the ringing clang an instant later. Pete Aiken bent to stare at the cut, then with no hesitation raised the hammer and struck again, then again… Patience, eyes closed, resigned to losing her foot.