S. Stirling - Dies The Fire

Chuck rubbed his beard again. "You know, splitting up the land we've got-and are getting-into a bunch more separate farms would save a lot of time and effort. My time and effort, to start with. We've got enough farmers, and they've all had experience in the new methods-well, old methods-by now. There's no real need for me to go around saying 'hoe this row' anymore. We could draw up a general plan and let each: well, call it each sept: manage the day-to-day stuff on their own. We could still get together for big jobs."

Aylward nodded. "No reason our militia couldn't work that way too," he said. "Easy enough for someone like me"-he grinned a sergeant's grin-"to go around checking that nobody's slacking off or playing silly buggers. Say ten to twenty families in each settlement, and a palisade like we're putting in at the Carson place. That would be enough to stand off a gang of bandits or Eaters long enough for help to gather."

Sally had been quiet. Now she spoke up: "We could have the library and high school here, and an all-grades primary at each dun."

"Hey, and we could call the septs after a totem animal," Andy Trethar said; he'd always liked shamanistic stuff like that. "You know, wolf, raven-"

Juniper sat back with relief and let them go at it. Of course, I'll have to persuade people in general, and get their ideas, and:

At least we're not fighting a war anymore.

"C onfirm: enemy: position," Havel read, binoculars to his eyes.

The Bearkiller column and Woburn's posse were down at the bottom of a swale. That cut visibility to a thousand yards in any direction, but it meant nobody could see them either, except from a height.

A height like that of the hot-air balloon floating over the Bearkiller camp in Craigswood, for example; the three Bearkillers in the basket hanging two thousand feet above ground level had an excellent view. He could make out the semaphore signal quite clearly through the field glasses, and they'd be able to pick up his mirror-flash of light even more easily.

"Damn, I wish I'd thought of that," Woburn muttered awkwardly. "We might not be in this mess, if we'd had a balloon."

"Everyone tends to think engines when they think aircraft," Havel said. "I certainly did; but the Protector over in Portland didn't."

Woburn rubbed his lantern jaw. "Sort of hard to think of Portland having much to do with our problems. These days, it seems a long ways off."

"Believe it," Havel said grimly. "I doubt Iron Rod would have been more than a major nuisance without someone giving him help and ideas. Hell, the Protector gave me ideas, unintentionally."

He looked at the balloon again. It had taken a bit of finding. but there were a surprising number of hot-air balloon enthusiasts in Idaho-had been, before the Change.

It was still an hour before noon, and the sun wouldn't be getting into anyone's eyes for a couple of hours, no matter which way the fight turned.

God, I hope this isn't too expensive when the butcher's bill is totaled up, he thought.

Partly that was the simple desire to keep his people from harm; he'd selected every one, and a lot of them were friends by now, and all of them were his. Partly it was a desire to conserve the Bearkillers' capital assets.

Condottieri, he thought. The word simply meant "contractor" in Renaissance Italian. That's what we've ended up as.

It turned out that Pam and Rothman and Ken all knew a lot of stories about Renaissance Italy, and they were a lot less dull that what he remembered of high school history classes; if Woburn had heard some of them, he might have been more cautious about hiring his fighting done.

Particularly the ones about condottieri leaders deciding they'd rather be Duke of Milan or something of that order. Havel intended to keep scrupulously to the terms, but how could the sheriff know that?

On the other hand, Florence got taken over by a family of bankers, of all things, he thought with a taut grin. Now, there's a real gang of mercenary pirates for you.

At least he had the consolation that he was fighting people who needed killing, on the whole.

He leaned forward and slapped his big bay gelding affectionately on the neck; it tossed its head and snorted, shifting its weight from foot to foot, making its harness jingle and his armor rustle and clank.

"Work to do, Gustav," he said. Then, louder, he turned in the saddle and called to his Bearkillers: "Time to do good, and earn our pay!"

That brought a cheer; Signe grinned at him and tossed her helmeted head. She had an old-style cavalry trumpet slung from her saddlebow, a relic of the last Indian wars a century and more ago, salvaged from a museum up in the Nez Perce reservation.

Damn, but I wish she weren 't here, he thought. Nothing to be done about that, though, except win this fight as quick as we can.

His eyes made one last check of equipment, although he would have been astonished had anything been less than perfect. Also present, through unavoidable political necessity, were twenty of Woburn's posse members, which made him a little less than happy. They were equipped with anything that came to hand, and about half of them were pushing into middle age.

Sixty-odd horsemen took up a lot of room. The strong musky-grassy smell of the horses and their sweat filled the hollow, and the scents of human sweat soaked into leather and cloth, of steel rings wiped down with canola oil, of fear and excitement, and of earth torn open by ironshod hooves.

"Will, you get going on your part of it," Havel said.

The horsemaster nodded and reined his mount around; rather more than half the Bearkillers followed him, and all Woburn's men except the sheriff himself.

"Let's go, Gustav," Havel added to his mount, and gave the big gelding a leg signal; the horse broke into an obedient canter. A file of twenty followed him, and Woburn- but he didn't expect the sheriff to do much fighting. He pulled his bow from the case that slanted back from his left knee under the saddle flap and reached over his shoulder for an arrow, conscious of everyone doing likewise behind him: except Woburn, of course.

"I'm really starting to think we can run this raiding party off," the local man said.

"No!" Havel answered sharply, without looking around. "We are not going to chase them away. We're going to kill every last one of the filth, for starters."

The horses crested the top of the hill without pausing; the land to the south was flatter, rolling so gently it would have seemed level without the wind ruffling waves through the knee-high wheat that covered it and showing the long low swellings. The hooves were a drumroll under the soughing breeze.

"There!" Signe called, pointing southwest.

There was a dark clot against the green, one that swiftly turned into a group of armed men on horseback. Twenty or so of them, all in scale-mail tunics and steel helmets; one of them even had bulls' horns on his, bad-movie-Viking style. With them were half a dozen captives, four women and two men, with their feet lashed into the stirrups of their horses and their hands tied behind their backs, and a biggish herd of cattle and horses being driven along. Many of the horses had bags of plunder thrown over their backs to make rough packsaddles.

He could hear the outlaws' yells and whoops as they caught sight of the Bearkillers; one or two stayed to guard prisoners and plunder, but the rest hammered their heels into their mounts and thundered forward. Havel's eyes narrowed as the distance closed; the Devil Dogs were in no particular order, but they didn't appear to be shy of a fight. Their bellowing cries were full of blood-lust; and worse, of confidence.

Not very good riders, he thought; none better than he'd been at the Change, most worse. Big men mostly, with beards spilling down their chests. Well-armed.