S. Stirling - The Scourge of God

Rudi grinned as one young man stood on the saddle of his galloping horse, dropped to one side with his hand on the pommel, vaulted over to the other flank and then bounced back up as if he were on a trampoline, doing a handstand on the saddle before flipping himself down again.

"Not bad, eh?" Red Leaf said proudly.

"Not bad at all."

Which is true enough, he thought. They're fine shots and better than fine horsemen. Only middling with the blade, though, at best.

Two youngsters brought them saddled horses. "Let's go up somewhere high and private," the itancan said.

"Your folk have done well by themselves," Rudi said.

They hobbled their horses, then sat and looked downward at the bustling activity as they shared a cigarette-from here you could see things kept at a sensible distance from the hocoka, like the butchering ground well southward along the river, downstream. The smoke of the cookfires was a faint tang from here. The scent the noonday sun baked out of the prairie was like lying in a haymow, with a spicy undertone and the grassy-earthy smell of the horses.

Mathilda coughed a bit as she handed the cigarette back. "I know this is an acquired habit," she said. "But why would anyone acquire it? And the old fo-ah, people who were around before the Change say it's bad for you."

Red Leaf gave a slight shrug and a smile. "It's sort of a religious thing here," he said. "Like sweetgrass. Besides which, the weed's so expensive these days you can't have enough to kill you."

He sighed and looked at the butt, then carefully ground it out; Rudi had noted that all these plainsmen were very careful about fire.

The last of the smoke blew away; the air had a hint of ozone to it as well, alien to someone raised in the well-watered Willamette but not disagreeable. And under that huge sky even the bustling hocoka looked tiny, an anthill among the vastness.

He's friendly because I saved his son, and because we fought with his band, Rudi thought. This is a man who takes honor's obligation seriously. But also, I'm thinking, he's interested in us because he knows we're not just travelers. And that what we are could serve his people's need; which is also the honor of a Chief.

"Yeah, we've done pretty well," the Lakota itancan went on. "Sure as hell better than most people did after the Change. Of course, when you're already flat on your face falling doesn't hurt as much. And we were way the hell away from anywhere urban. Unless you counted Sioux Falls as a big city."

Evidently he considered that funny, for some reason; probably a local joke, even a pre-Change one. Rudi went on, remembering things his mother and the other older Mackenzies had told him:

"And I imagine that a lot of your folk were more ready than most to believe that something had happened. Their spirits not being comfortably settled in the way things were before the Change, so. One of our founders said… what was it… When the going gets weird, the weird get going. "

"Ah, you're not just tall, handsome and quick with a chopper, eh, kilt-boy?" Red Leaf said with respect. "Yeah, there was that. It'd been one damned shafting after another for us since my great-great-granddaddy's day, when we lifted Custer's hair. Not that the son of a bitch didn't deserve it… Everyone else around here was knocked flat mentally in 'ninety-eight- their happy time was over, but they didn't want to admit it. A lot of us thought it was time to rock."

"We in the Willamette are the only place we know near a big city where everyone didn't die. And most did, so," Rudi pointed out.

Mathilda nodded. "There were more than a million people in Portland," she said. "My father and mother managed to get a couple of hundred thousand through alive. Nobody here… nobody east of the Cascades… was that badly off."

Red Leaf lay back on one elbow and handed them a skin bag from his saddle. "Yeah, the Ranchers got back on their feet after a while, doing the Lonesome Dove and Kit Carson thing. But a lot of us Lakota saw the Change more as opportunity knocking and landed on our feet. We knew what we wanted to do and we went and did it."

"And when you know that, and others don't, they'll follow your lead," Rudi said, and took a drink.

After a moment he looked down at the chagal. The liquid within tasted faintly alcoholic, and very slightly fizzy. The rest of the taste was something vaguely related to sour milk; as if you'd poured beer into what the hearth-lady of some farm left out for the house-hob. He took another swallow for politeness' sake and handed it to Mathilda; if he was going to suffer, why shouldn't she?

"Damn right," Red Leaf went on. "Though there was a fair bit of argument over what sort of opportunity it was. I mean, we couldn't really go back to the old ways."

"I remember my father complaining about that," Mathilda said. "He did want to go back to the old ways-the new ones having failed. But it was impossible. The people were different."

Red Leaf nodded. "Yeah, by 'ninety-eight it'd been five generations since we followed the buffalo; a lot of things we had to dig out of books and experiment with, or set up relays of people to learn from some old geezer who was the last one who knew it, or find a hobbyist, all the while not starving to death in the meantime. Would you believe it, there were even people on the rez who'd never butchered an animal or ridden a horse? Lakota who'd never ridden a horse! And finding people who knew how to make things like bows… Jesus."

"And they more precious than gold," Rudi said, remembering Sam Aylward.

"Damn right. And for another, just between me and thee and don't tell Three Bears I said so, the old days weren't all that great. They probably beat the hell out of living in a leaky mobile home on the rez and dying of diabetes or crawling into a bottle of bad whiskey or just plain what's-the-use, or even running a casino, but I and a bunch of others realized we'd have to make something new-with the best of the old, sure, but new. And including things like germ theory and books. You can carry books around in a wagon-printing presses too, for that matter, and microscopes."

"I'd noticed the tents weren't exactly tipis," Rudi said.

"The gers?" Red Leaf laughed. "That one was my doing. There was this guy from Mongolia at South Dakota U while I was there. Name of Ulagan Chinua-it means Red Wolf-he was studying how we managed our grasslands, some sort of State Department foreign aid thing, and he actually built a ger out of stuff from Home Depot-"

That required a minute's explanation, though Rudi had once helped strip the last useful goods out of a burnt-out shell with that name on the front.

"— and lived in it just off campus. A bunch of us used to hang out there and drink airag — "

He held up the leather bottle.

"What's airag?" Mathilda said; to Rudi's surprise she took it and drank a long swallow. "It's not bad. Sort of like small beer."

"Fermented mare's milk," Red Leaf said. "Red Wolf home brewed it; his mother sent him the starter culture by Federal Express. We'd swig it and swap stories about Crazy Horse and Genghis Khan or talk about girls and horses and football… I really miss football… It's too weak to get really blitzed on, and it makes milk easy to digest for us non-palefaces. Something about breaking down the lactose."

"What happened to Red Wolf?" Rudi asked curiously.

"I pretty well dragged him back to Pine Ridge with me about Change Day plus six; the poor brave bastard was going to try and ride a horse back to Mongolia via Alaska, but I talked him out of it. He married my t'anksi, my kid sister, as a matter of fact. Died three years back on a buffalo hunt-those bulls will hook you if you're not careful. But he was real helpful. Nice guy, too."

"I'd guess his people did well after the Change."