S. Stirling - The Scourge of God

Suddenly he needed to sit, but… he looked around.

Is there a spot nearby without bodies on it, or at least blood?

OGALLALA HOCOKA, WESTERN SOUTH DAKOTA

JUNE 3, CY24/2022 AD

"Wake up, people! Get up and wash your bodies, drink a lot of water, make your blood thin and healthy!"

The crier was shouting at the top of his lungs and beating on an iron triangle as he walked; now and then someone would stick their head out of a tent and shout back at him, usually something unfriendly and sometimes involving invitations to do things with horses, sheep or his mother. Rudi Mackenzie woke, yawned and stretched beneath the comforting buffalo-robe. Most of the aches and scrapes from yesterday's running fight were fading, though some of the bruises would have to go through the gamut of colors before they left him. Still, that was familiar enough; if you fought, you got thumped, and counted yourself lucky to have no more.

The welcome was nearly as strenuous as the fight! he thought.

It flickered through his memory in bright shards; the great ring of fires, the excited crowds pushing forward to hear Red Leaf's impassioned description of the action, the discordant wailing from the womenfolk of the fallen in the background. Louder chanting and nasal song from the throng, drums throbbing, cheers around him as the victors showed their captured horses and weapons and the grisly personal trophies and boasted of their deeds.

And then Red Leaf had gotten to the part where Rudi beat the Cutter officer and saved Three Bears from the lion: hands lifting him out of the saddle, pounding him on the back, pulling him into the whooping, whirling, stamping, screeching, leaping delirium of the scalp-and-victory dance, until he could scarcely stagger to his bed.

He sat up and ran his hands through his hair as the crier outside called his message again, winced as he hit a tangle, then searched for his comb. The tent where he and the other men of the party had been put up was something new; he'd expected tipis, and there had been a few in the encampment, some of them huge. But most of the dwellings were like this one, a round barrel shape twenty feet across on a wheeled platform, the walls five feet tall and topped by a conical roof rising a little higher than Rudi's head in the center. The structure was an interlaced pattern of thin withes crossing one another in a diamond pattern and lashed together with thongs; the outside was covered in neatly sewn hides treated with some sort of glaze to make them waterproof, and from the look of it the interior could take a quilted lining as well in cold weather. The floor was plywood covered in rugs.

Everyone was stirring; Rudi took down a canvas water bottle from a peg and obeyed part of the herald's injunction. The more he looked around, the more he was impressed with the neat economy of space; their weapons, armor and other gear were all stowed overhead on racks that folded down from the ceiling, for example, and the middle of the tent had a ceramic plate inset to mount a stove in cold weather, with a space for a flue running up to a hole in the central peak. Light came from actual glass windows set in the latticework walls, and there was an unlit lamp on a shelf over the door; the interior smelled of well-tanned leather and faintly of smoke.

"Rise and shine, men!" he called, as he rolled up his bedding and lashed it to the wall with the thongs provided.

Groans and grunts answered him; like his mother he was always cheerful in the morning, and it had always mystified him why some people resented it.

Why waste the day? There's things to be doing! But sure, you can't convince the sleepyheads.

He slipped on his kilt instead and picked up his shaving kit; Ingolf joined him, and they ducked out of the door-thoughtfully leaving it open to the bright early-morning sunlight and cool air. A pillow thrown by Odard, who was not cheerful in the mornings, bounced off their backs.

"Whatever's cooking smells very good indeed," Rudi said; it involved frying and, he thought, onions. "Odard will crawl out when it penetrates."

Men in breechclouts were walking past; the two travelers jumped down from the wagon platform and joined them at their friendly invitation.

Seen by daylight the hocoka was a great horseshoe of the tents-on-wheels, with an opening to the east and the tent doors facing inward; their white exteriors were painted in colorful geometric patterns, or stylized birds and beasts, or what looked like murals. Some of the larger ones had words inset in the decorations: at a glance he saw LIBRARY and CLINIC. Rudi estimated at least a hundred and fifty of the dwellings in all, not counting two huge conical tipis flanking the entrance and another, even larger and colored red, in the center of the open space. Smoke drifted from cookfires, mostly under sheet-metal tubs on legs or Dutch ovens, and the intoxicating smell of brewing chicory was strong.

And I'm even beginning to like the taste.

The interior of the great encampment had been trodden to bare dust, but grass was soft beneath the soles of his feet when the crowd left it. Around was a view of mile upon mile of rolling green splashed with drifts of the delicate white-pink prairie rose, taller purple coneflower, scarlet western lily and yellow wild sunflower. The ground dropped off to a fair-sized river southward, and the Black Hills showed clear to the north, but most of the horizon was like a bowl dropped over a world of infinite spaces.

A roped-off enclosure not far away held the ready-use horses, and herds of horses, red-coated cattle and off-white sheep dotted the landscape. Outside the circle of living-tents was a vehicle park, wagons of every size and shape and description, from ones that wouldn't have looked out of place on the Oregon Trail to cut-down pickup trucks and converted mobile homes.

Red Leaf waved, then came over as they walked down to the water. "Men bathe here," he said. "Women over there, and stock water below that."

Rudi nodded; Mackenzies didn't have much of a nudity taboo in their communal bathhouses, but other folk were more prudish, he knew. There were a good three or four hundred in the crowd who dove into the water and splashed around with much horseplay, from boys just a little too old to join the women down to the few elders; his mind automatically noted that well over half were fit to bear arms, and looked as if they could, too. A lot of them had brought their weapons to the riverbank, within easy grabbing range, even though it was obvious nobody expected real trouble.

He swam in the cold water, scrubbed with soap and sand, cautiously around the sore spots, shaved with his straight razor, and headed back for the tent.

Should I try growing a beard again? No, still too patchy.

The warm dry air had the last of the water off his skin by the time he'd gotten back…

And I'm a little reluctant to put the old clothes back on. Well, we'll have time to wash them There was the first surprise; their clothes had been taken away to be cleaned and repaired, and new outfits set out for all of them-his consisted of buckskin trousers with buffalo-hair fringes down the seams flanked by colorful quillwork, and a linsey-woolsey tunic bleached creamy white with bands of beads in geometric patterns along the sleeves and in a triangle at the neck.

Mathilda and his sisters and Virginia Kane came back from the women's section of the river; they'd been decked out in dresses that had capelike upper sections, with rows of shells across the yokes, flowers and birds along the hems, belts with hammered silver conchos, and moccasins done with a buffalo-hoof design; some of Red Leaf's female relatives sat with them, dressing their hair in local style. Others headed for Rudi and the others with combs in their hands and determination in their eyes; Odard's bowl crop, Father Ignatius' neat tonsure and Fred Thurston's short cap of wiry fuzz defeated them, but Rudi and Ingolf and Edain soon had twin braids fur-wrapped, albeit rather shorter than the local fashion.