S. Stirling - Dies The Fire

He drew his puukko and took a deep breath. Then he attacked, stabbing in a blur of motion, the carcass jerking to the force of the impacts. The steel made a wet smacking sound as it clove the dead flesh, ten strikes in half as many seconds.

When he stopped, Signe's face had gone white again, shocked by the speed and power of the blows she felt thudding through the body of the deer. She swallowed and pressed her hands together for a moment before straightening up.

Havel nodded approval. "That's how you win a knife fight; you don't let it get started. Take him by surprise, from the back, or just get all over him before he can get set and kill the fucker before he realizes he's dying. OK, get your knife out and I'll hold the carcass."

He did, switching positions, although he gripped it at arm's length as she drew the bandit's long blade.

"We'll start slow. You've got to get real precise control on where the point and edge go, and get used to the feel of it hitting meat, and feel why it's a bad idea to turn it on a bone. He who hesitates is bossed, remember."

Excellent focus, he thought, twenty minutes later.

She was streaming sweat, and there were shreds of deer-flesh on her knife-hand and spattered across other bits of her, but she was boring in without flinching, eyes narrowed and seeing nothing else.

"Jesus!" he shouted, leaping backward.

Signe half stumbled as the deer carcass swayed unexpectedly, but pivoted with fluid balance and drove the long knife home, grunting with effort as it sliced into flesh.

Only then did she turn to see what had startled him. A drumroll thunder of hooves announced Astrid's arrival once more, but there was a hoarse bellowing snarl underneath it.

The bear behind the horse was traveling very nearly as fast, its mouth open and foam blowing from it; an arrow twitching in the hump over its shoulders showed why.

It was a black, not a grizzly, but the point was moot-it was also a very large boar bear, four hundred pounds if it was an ounce, and moving at thirty miles an hour. Astrid turned in the saddle as her horse pounded by in a tearaway gallop, drawing her bow again and firing directly over its tail in what an earlier age had called the Parthian shot.

"No!" Havel shouted futilely.

Well, now I know how a horsey teenage girl snaps from combat stress. She goddamn well tries to shoot a bear!

Havel had hunted bear; he knew the vitality and sheer stubborn meanness of a wounded bruin. By some miracle, the arrow even hit-a shallow slant into the beast's rump, leaving head and feathers exposed. It halted and spun with explosive speed, throwing up a cloud of earth clods and twigs and duff, snapping for the thing that had bitten it on the backside; that let Astrid's horse open the distance between them.

Unfortunately, it also pointed the bear directly at Havel. It hesitated for an instant, as he stood motionless; then its eyes caught the sway of the mule-deer carcass, and the glint of afternoon sun on Signe's knife.

It went up on its hind legs for an instant, narrow head swaying back and forth as it gave a bawling roar and estimated distances with its little piggy eyes. Then it dropped to all fours again and came for him, as fast as a galloping horse.

"I don't fucking believe this!" he cried, and then, much louder: "Spear, spear, where's the goddamned spear?"

T here was a hypnotic quality to riding the disk harrow, Juniper decided. The horses leaning into the traces ahead, their shadows falling before them, the shining disks sinking into the turned earth behind the plows and leaving a smooth seedbed behind:

"Goddamn it!" Dennis called from her left. "Whoa, you brainless lumps of walking hamburger! Whoa!"

His single-furrow walking plow had jammed up with bits of tangled sod again; it was one of the half-dozen copies they'd made of the museum's original. And it was scraping along on top of the turf rather than cutting it, the handles jarring at his hands. Dennis leaned back, pulling at the reins knotted around his waist; Dorothy Rose, who was walking and leading the horses, added her mite to the effort, and the team stopped.

Then they looked over their shoulders. Horses didn't have very expressive faces, but she would have sworn both of these were radiating indignation-at the unfamiliar task, and at the sheer ignorant incompetence behind the reins.

"Easy, Dennie," she said soothingly. "Remember, bo le bata is capall le ceansact; a stick for a cow, but a kind word for a horse."

"I'd like to use a goddamned log on these beasts," he said, but shrugged and smiled.

Of them all, only Juniper had any real experience at driving a horse team, and that only with a wagon; she did know how surprisingly fragile the big beasts were, though. She looked up at the sun and estimated the time since the last break:

"Whoa!" she called to her own team. Then: "All right, all teams take five! Rest and water the horses!"

She hauled on the reins, wincing as they slid over fresh blisters beneath her gloves. When they'd stopped she wiped a sopping sleeve over her face, tender with sunburn despite the broad-brimmed hat and bandana-the early-April day was bright and warm. Damp reddish brown earth was soft under her feet as she jumped down. It had a scent at once sweetly green and meaty, a compound of cut grass and damp dirt and severed roots and the crushed camas flowers that starred it. That made a pleasant contrast to the smell of her own sweat, and of Cagney and Lacey's.

"Goddamn it, why does this thing keep jamming?" Dennis said. "It's not just the copies Chuck and I made, the original does it too."

There was an edge of frustration to the point of tears in his voice. He knelt and began pulling at lumps between the coulter knife that cut the furrow and the moldboard that turned it over.

Chuck Barstow and John Carson halted their teams as well; Carson turned and looked at the crooked, irregular furrows that lay behind the three plowmen.

"The plows jam because it's old meadow sod," Carson grinned.

He was a lean fortysomething man, with sun-streaks through his light brown hair, and blue eyes. He also owned the property four miles west, where Artemis Butte Creek flowed out into the valley proper and the real farmland began, and he was here as part of a complicated swap of labor, animals, and equipment.

"Hasn't been plowed in a hundred years," he went on as they unharnessed their teams. "Not even been grazed heavy these past forty or more, this bit. Lots of tangled roots, most of 'em thick as a pencil. A big tractor could just rip it all to shreds, but horses: Well, two hundred fifty horsepower against two-nothing, it stands to reason!"

The furrows were roughly along the contour of the sloping meadow, and very roughly parallel; oblong islands of unplowed grass showed between them, and the depth varied as if they'd been dug by invisible land-dolphins porpoising along.

At least there weren't very many rocks to hit around here.

"I thought I knew what hard work was," he said. "No work harder than farmin'. Now I know my granddad knew what hard work was, and I've been kidding myself. He farmed-I operate machinery. Did operate machinery."

They all unhitched their teams, leaving plows and harrow standing where they lay, and led the big animals over beneath the shade of a spreading oak to the north. They brought buckets of water from the creek rather than taking them to it-it was easier to make sure they didn't overdrink that way. The little pool below the waterfall was close there, and she gave it a longing look as she hauled the water.

The thought of stripping off her sweat-sodden clothing and diving in, then standing beneath the falling spray:

Better not, she said. Got to keep going. And Mr. Carson might shock easily. Presbyterians tended to be more cautious about nudity than Wiccans, in her experience.