John Ringo - There Will Be Dragons

“The Great Hunt?” Herzer asked.

“Gee, ye hadn’t heard,” Augustus replied with a wink. “It’ll be grand bonny fun.”

Herzer contemplated Augustus’ appearing and disappearing brogue for a moment the shrugged. “Anyone going to tell us what it is?”

“My father’s brilliant idea to give Mother and me more work,” Rachel replied.

“Ah, you know better than that, lassie,” Augustus corrected. “T’was not Edmund, t’was Myron that had the idea.”

“Point,” Rachel admitted. “Okay, Myron’s great idea to give us more work!”

“I said before that we had no leather,” the tanner said, ignoring the change. “The point is we’ve few enough slaughter animals as it is; the hunters have been bringing some in, but not enough. We need meat, bones, hooves, everything that you get from slaughter animals. And skin of course.

“Okay,” he said, splashing water on his face and grimacing. “I was a huckster before the Fall, one of the people who could make things to sell at the Faire. I made leather goods, custom order, all very nice, hand stitched and tooled. A hobby, really, but they were all hobbies, weren’t they, I pick up a few energy credits, who cares?” he added with a grimace. “But the point is, I can go from a raw skin to tooled leather. If I’ve got the skins! Do you know what the hunters brought in all of last week?”

“No,” Herzer said, fascinated by the diatribe.

“Two feral cattle, we’re eating them now, six boar, five deer, a mess of furs, three turkeys and an emu. That’s not enough meat for three thousand people and it’s definitely not enough leather.”

“Not to mention the other things,” Shilan added with a smile.

“Ack! Aye!” Augustus replied, winking at her. “The hooves for the glue! The bones for the tools and the fertilizer! And a fine mess of brawn for a pretty lady?”

“Brawn?” Shilan asked.

“Pig brains,” Herzer replied without thinking. “Usually served in gravy.”

“Yuck!”

“So we need more animals,” Herzer said. “The Great Hunt.”

“Yes, and…” Rachel replied. “There are people who are already lining up to be farmers. One thing that makes farming easier is if you’ve got animals as part of your farm. There are ferals in the woods so the idea is to gather some of those at the same time.”

“And as my former…” Herzer paused for a moment. “Lady-friend pointed out there are also tigers in the woods.”

“Aye!” Augustus said, winking madly. “Un thet’s were it sta’ts to get interestin’ !”

“Ooo,” Shilan said. “Now I begin to understand the comment about work for the doctors.”

“Oh forget the tigers,” Rachel shrugged, sitting up so her breasts were just under the water. Herzer tried very hard not to notice the interesting ripple effect from the shrug. “They’re out there, but there are feral pigs all over the place.

“Pigs?” Shilan asked, wrinkling her brow. “What’s the problem with pigs?”

“Oh, sure,” Rachel said acidly. “Squeak, squeak, see the funny little pig, ah-hah-hah. Pretty and pink and fluffy. Wait ’til you see these things.”

“Oh, I haven’t seen them but I’ve heard of them,” Herzer laughed. “Four hundred kilos of bristle and tusk. This is gonna be so much fun. When are they planning this? I think I’m going to have a broken leg.”

“If you’ve got a broken leg, they put you on skinning duty,” Rachel said.

“Broken arm?”

“Carrying buckets of slop.”

“Agh! I’ve seen videos of a skinning out. No thank you. Yuck!”

“You should have run away with your lady friend,” Rachel said.

“Which one?” Shilan asked with a malicious grin.

“Begorum boy!” Augustus cried. “How many do you have ?”

Herzer just groaned and slid down until his head was under the water.

Daneh looked up from the sweating young man on the cot and nodded at Edmund and the woman accompanying him. Daneh hadn’t seen this particular reenactor before but she knew the type of old. The woman was about twenty kilos overweight, which with the current conditions and medical conditions before the Fall had required conscious work, and was loaded down with silver jewelry. Most of it consisted of zodiac signs or other occult objects and the rest consisted of crystals.

“Daneh, this is Sharron, she’s a herbalist,” Edmund said.

“I don’t think this is the time, Edmund,” Daneh said sharply, lifting up a bandage from the young man’s arm and wincing at the condition of the wound underneath. The young man had run afoul of an axe-head and the wound had almost immediately started to fester; modern human immune systems were strong but the skin was one of the hardest areas for the systems to access. Now the infected area had gone green-brown with gangrene and if she didn’t figure out some way to stop the spread it was going to kill him. Quick.

“Gangrene,” the woman said, leaning forward and sniffing with a disgusted shake of her head. “There’s naught an herb on earth that can cure that, you need sulfanomide or one of the cillins.”

Daneh turned and looked at the woman sharply at which the herbalist gave a grin. “Didn’t expect me to be dredging up those terms, did you doctor? But penicillin’s naught but a mold and sulfanomide, well that’s just tar that’s been worked over, hey?”

“Do you have any?” Daneh asked.

“No, but I just got here,” the herbalist said with a nod. “And I don’t think either would work here. Have you tried debriding?”

“Yes, but it’s getting ahead of us,” she said, waving at a fly. The damned things got in no matter what you did and they had an unpleasant tendency to land on open wounds.

“Leave it,” Edmund said suddenly, as she waved at another that was trying to land on the mangled flesh.

“What?” both of the women asked, then looked at each other sheepishly.

“Let’s take this outside,” Edmund said, gesturing to the end of the infirmary.

It wasn’t much of an infirmary, just an open bay with some cots and a “surgery” on one end that mostly consisted of a well-scrubbed table and some tools that made her think more of the inquisition than medicine. But it was getting better. And if this “herbalist” knew what she was doing they might get better still. Daneh was well aware that her knowledge of medicines, how they were made or administered, was barely theoretical. But between them, if the woman really knew anything, they might make one decent preindustrial doctor. She waved the fly away against his protestations and laid a fresh bandage on the wound, then followed Edmund out.

“What about flies is good, Edmund?” she snapped as they got outside. “They carry every imaginable sort of filth!”

“Yes, they do,” he said. “And they lay eggs in rotting flesh which turn into maggots. And what do maggots eat?”

Daneh stopped and thought for a moment then shook her head. “You want me to let maggots eat his flesh?!”

“Dead flesh, yes,” Edmund said uncomfortably. “Look, I know it sounds crazy. And, really, they’re supposed to be raised maggots, you raise them on clean dead flesh, meat. But we don’t have time for that, do we?”

“No,” Daneh said simply. “We’re going to lose him if we don’t stop it. The traditional response is high amputation to get ahead of the infection.”

“Can you make any of the stuff you were talking about, fast?” Edmund asked Sharron.

“No,” she replied. “I have to find penicillin mold, out of… millions of molds. I need dishes to make cultures. You can often find… tetracycline molds in old graves, but we don’t have any of those either.”