S. Stirling - Dies The Fire

A chorus of whistles and murmurs went through the ranks of the novices, along with a dabbing at faces.

Havel spoke: "And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we don't bitch and moan about how hot and heavy and uncomfortable the armor is."

I may have to grind away to get good at archery, but it seems I've got a natural talent for this.

"Supper's at seven," Havel said; Woburn was looking suitably impressed. "Why don't you look around for a little while? Ken can answer any questions you have. I've got to get out of this ironmongery and there's some business to attend to."

As he turned away, a thought struck him: If this Duke Iron Rod really is in with Arminger, how many other people are fighting the Protector right now?

Angelica Hutton was just putting a Dutch oven full of biscuits into the embers in one of the fires behind the chuck wagon when Havel arrived, his hair still damp from the bath. There were a dozen working there, amid a cheerful clatter and chatter that didn't disguise the size of the task or the efficiency with which it got done.

"Jane, remember to get the tortillas into that warmer the minute they're done," she said, her voice friendly but a little loud and slow; then she wiped her hands on the apron she wore over her Levi's and shirt.

The smile died as she and the Bearkiller leader walked aside: "Mike, that woman!" she continued; speaking under her breath, but clenching her fists beneath her chin and making a throttled sound of wordless exasperation.

"Specific problem?" he said.

"She is: no, she is good-hearted, and not even lazy if you tell her everything she is to do, but I have met mesquite stumps with more brains! She speaks of nothing but TV shows and the days when she was a cheerleader."

You could believe that more easily these days; Jane Waters didn't look shapeless anymore-she was even pretty, in a blowsy, faded-rose way.

"And she is a natural: what is the old English word. I saw it in a schoolbook of Luanne's. no, not slut, that means puta, right?"

Havel nodded, and the Tejano woman went on: "Slattern, that is the word. She cannot even cook; not at all, I do not mean fancy things. Before the Change her children ate from McDonald's and Taco Bell every day! Or from cans and frozen pizza."

"Not everyone can meet your high standards, Angelica," Havel said, grinning. And oh, for the days when even poor people could get too much of the wrong sort of food! "I wanted to check on supplies."

"Y bien," she said, pulling a list out of a pocket. "We've got enough meat, I ordered a steer butchered this afternoon-it arrived a little worn, no?"

He smiled and made a placating gesture.

"If we stop anytime soon, I want to try to make dried and smoked sausage; there is plenty of jerky, but it is boring even in a stew. So we must have spices-sage, garlic. For the rest, we need some sacks of salt, badly. We are short of flour, and potatoes, and down to the last of our beans, rice, and oatmeal. We need vegetables very badly, dried or canned, also fruit-it is not healthy, to live so much on meat and bread, even with the vitamin pills. Shortly we will need clothing, particularly boots and shoes, and especially for the little ones: "

Angelica went through her list; then she darted back to make sure her assistants weren't spoiling anything.

After a quick check she began beating on a triangle. Everyone gathered 'round their mess hearths by squads and families, as youngsters carried the food around; tables were too much of a bother to drag along on the move, but they had good groundsheets so you could sit down dry and reasonably comfortable around a fire-most were leaning against their saddles, cowboy fashion. Shadows closed in around the fires and the first stars appeared in the east.

Woburn bit into his burrito, then looked down at it with surprised pleasure as the tangy carne asada hit his palate, cooled with sour cream.

"All right," he said to the Bearkillers' leader. "You've got a real slick operation here, Mr. Havel. Now, you were hinting that you could do something about the Devil Dogs."

"That depends," he said. "They've got some sort of base, right? A hideout you can't come at, or more likely they've forted up someplace you can't take."

"They're at St. Hilda's," Woburn said, respect in his voice.

Havel's ears perked up at that; he saw that Ken Lars-son's did, too. It was one of the big Idaho tourist attractions; you couldn't live in the state and not know about it.

He held up a hand for a moment, and turned his head to Will Hutton; the various bosses-of-sections were eating around Havel's fire tonight, as usual when there was serious business to discuss.

"Will, St. Hilda's is a Benedictine abbey over by that butte. Near the top of it, in fact."

He pointed southwest. A wide cone with gentle slopes dominated the rolling plain, visible many miles away; right now it was silhouetted against the westering sun as the long July evening drew to a close.

"Built like a fort," he added. "I saw it a couple of times before the Change."

"Me too," Ken said. "Literally like a fort, Romanesque Revival. Nineteen-twenties construction; ashlar stone blocks, a hard blue porphyry, and walls over three feet thick at the base. Four stories in a block around a courtyard, with two towers on the front-both nearly a hundred feet high. Interior water source, too. Not surprised some bandits took it over. It's the closest thing to a castle in the state, after the old penitentiary in Boise."

Woburn nodded. "When the Change hit, the Devil Dogs stole real bikes, mountain bikes, and then horses, and looted a bunch of wilderness outfitters; after that they started raiding for supplies. That was bad enough. Then in May, they changed their operations. Got a lot of good weapons from somewhere, and then they hit St. Hilda's."

"What happened to the Sisters?" Hutton said, concern in his voice.

"They killed some of them and threw out most of the rest; Mother Superior Gertrude is staying with me. And since then they've been using it as a base. They've been giving us hell-well, you saw it."

Havel looked at Signe, and she opened a plastic Office Max filing box. It was filled with neatly labeled maps in hanging files; she pulled out the west-central Idaho one, tacked it to a corkboard, and propped it up where the command staff could see it.

"How many?" Havel said. "Organization? Leaders? What's Iron Rod like? What weapons, and what's their objective, if it isn't just loot?"

Woburn looked at the map. "There were about fifty to start with," he said. "Twice that now-they've been recruiting from the-no offense-road people."

Havel smiled thinly; road people was what settled folk around here had taken to calling the wanderers, those stranded on highways by the Change and others who scoured about looking for food. They were a natural breeding-ground for brigandage, not to mention for transmitting disease, and neither well-regarded nor very welcome.

"None taken. We're going somewhere, not just wandering around aimlessly looking for a handout or what we can steal."

"I can see that," Woburn said, looking at the map, and then the purposeful activity about him.

He tapped his finger on the map: "Anyway, there's near a hundred fighting men, plus. well, they had some women with them to start with. There are more now- some kidnapped. Some men they've taken and are using as slave labor, too."

Havel nodded; he'd seen similar things in embryo elsewhere, but not on this scale: yet.

"I presume you've tried smoking them out," Havel said. It wasn't a question.

Woburn flushed in embarrassment. "Yeah. You understand, things were total chaos right after the Change, and then we were all working as hard as we could to salvage bits and pieces. People around here are real spread out, and without trucks or phones it took us weeks to get any organization going at all. First we knew was when they started hitting farms-or hitting them up for tribute and ransom."