S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

The Lakota had been most impressed; they lived by ranching as much as anything these days with a little gardening here and there and some crafts, but they managed the swelling buffalo herds of the makol , the high plains, very carefully.

Nobody was alarmed at the message from the glider; she wasn’t the only one tasked with waiting for it, and anyway they had a perimeter of guards out and everyone was on the alert. If nothing else, the killing had brought every opportunistic predator in the area out hotfoot, and when wolf-packs and grizzlies and tigers got the scent of blood, you had to be cautious.

Oh, wolves usually didn’t attack adult human beings, unless they were cornered or mad-hungry or had some other good reason. . but usually was the operative word and it was their idea of a good reason that counted. Not to mention what would happen if they caught you alone with a broken leg. Grizzlies were another matter. Oldsters said it was amazing how fast they’d realized that guns weren’t a problem anymore. And all tigers were either man-eaters or their descendants, since that was the game they’d survived on right after the Change, the easily caught meat that tided them over while they gradually learned how to live in the wild once more and then bred and spread explosively.

It was difficult to imagine the landscape she’d grown up in without tigers. That would be like seeing it without dandelions or tumbleweed or sparrows, but apparently the ancients had just liked keeping big cats around in pens for some reason and be damned to the risk to their descendants’ children and dairy cows.

They were. . strange back then. Very strange.

Ingolf came up, naked and still running with water. He’d stripped as most did while working his turn on the butchering and then he’d gone for a dip in the nearby pond to clean off. That was much easier than getting blood out of cloth or, even worse, leather.

“Oh, now you’re tempting me to neglect my duty,” she said, giving her husband’s hairy, muscular, glistening six-two a long look; just the right height for a woman who was five-ten herself. “It’s not the time to drag you into the bushes, more’s the pity. The Expected Guests are on their way.”

He was carrying his clothes and gear strapped up into a bundle in one hand, but he put them aside while he dried in the mild warmth. He also had a bunch of smoking skewers in his other hand, and juggled things to hand her one.

“And here I thought you were reading the life-story inscribed into my tattered hide,” he grinned, with that boyish look she’d always liked.

He did have a remarkable collection of scars; you could tell he’d been flogged once, knotted white tracks that told of a barbed whip. That had been the Cutters. And the thick white mark across his shoulder had been them too, a triad of assassins pursuing him into Sutterdown. If you knew wounds that one told you how tough he was, to have lived and healed. He’d gotten that the night she first saw him, in Brannigan’s Inn. There had been something about him, even then.

She touched the patch over the socket where her left eye had been. It gave them something in common.

“The scars just show you’re a survivor type, lover, fit to make excellent babies,” she said, and stood hipshot for a moment, looking out at him from under a fall of yellow hair and putting a hand behind her head. “It was your manly charms I was thinking of.”

“Good thing that water was cold ,” he grinned.

“Oh, we’ve managed. Remember that little waterfall?”

“My back hurt for days, but it was worth it. Here, keep your strength up.”

She took the skewer, blowing and biting off a chunk. “Mmmm!”

There was nothing quite so good as fresh buffalo liver taken right out of the beast and onto the coals with no seasoning but a little coarse salt; richly meaty, but with a very slight tang of musky bitterness. Even buffalo-hump and kidney pie wasn’t quite as tasty.

“Remember that time we were with the Lakota for their summer hunt, on the Quest? Around the time they did that adoption thing with the tent and the sweetgrass?” she said.

“I’m not going to forget that, Yellow Bird .”

“ Iron Bear backatcha,” she grinned.

In fact they’d both taken that ceremony quite seriously. They ate in companionable silence. After a few minutes there was a coded whistle and five figures came trotting towards them from the westward through the waist-high grass, where a dark green line marked the beginning of the thick forest. Two wore Mackenzie kilts with a pair of enormous dogs loping at their heels, two were her sister Ritva and Ian in Dúnedain field gear, and the last was a young man in Boisean Special Forces camouflage outfit.

“Cole,” Mary called with a grin and a wink and a raised index finger: “Cousin Alyssa just paid a call. That girl chases you in aircraft.”

“She gave us the heads-up first,” Cole said, stolidly ignoring the teasing; Boiseans could be annoyingly businesslike at times.

But then, so can Bearkillers, so maybe they deserve each other. Manwë and Elbereth witness we were right to move in with Aunt Astrid.

Ingolf handed out more of the skewers; Talyn gave a sharp no when Artan and Flan looked interested, whereupon the dogs completed their sniff-and-greet and flopped down with sighs. As far as they were concerned it was a wonderful day to do nothing in particular but enjoy a well-fed nap in good company. There were times she thought that dogs were more sensible than human beings.

“Company?” Ingolf asked.

“Yeah,” Cole said. “ Sneaky company.”

Ritva rolled her eyes and nodded with her mouth full, and Ian spoke:

“If we hadn’t had warning, we wouldn’t have known a damned thing. As it was, we just had time to make it look like we’d seen them a mile off. I think they were pretty disappointed. Anyway, they said their Council emissaries would be showing up soon and then faded away again.”

Cole frowned thoughtfully: “I don’t think they know about aerial reconnaissance at all. Apart from that. . perfect technique.”

Talyn rolled his eyes and juggled one of the sticks of hot meat. “ Ochone , the black pity of a Mackenzie hunter and First Levy warrior being surprised! Still, this is their home ground, and doubtless the spirits of place-”

He made a gesture of propitiation and tossed aside a fragment of the liver.

“-help them. They’d not do so well about Dun Tàirneanach, that they would not.”

“Not unless you were drunk,” Caillech said dryly. “Like that time you swore you missed a deer with two heads by an inch and saw it run off north and south. That was just before the Lady Flidais bore you off to her bower of love, I do not think.”

Ritva nodded. “Only guy I’ve ever met who successfully snuck up on me came from around here. He was working for the Prophet at the time. . but I don’t think it was a love-match. I kicked his ass in the fight, and he did tell me about sis being in trouble so I could save her life again -”

“Which just made us even,” Mary said. Lightly, but she shivered a little inwardly. The man who’d cut the eye out of her head had been technically dead at the time, and if Ritva hadn’t known-

“-but it was close. Far too close for comfort,” Ritva said soberly.

Ingolf grunted. “Now we find out how they’re going to jump. I do resent that he tried to carry my sister-in-law off.”

“Well, you carried me off,” Mary pointed out.

“The hell you say,” Ingolf replied. “As I recall, you won me from Ritva at dice.”