S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

He went on slowly, marshaling his thoughts: “But say there were a couple of hundred of these. . Scouts. . flying through the air on that thing over there, and most of them lived through the crash. They’d mostly be. . oh, teens or a little younger.”

“Ah, I knew I didn’t marry you just for your looks. So they wouldn’t have started having children until a bit later, would they? That’s why the born Changelings are all younger than me, nobody Rudi’s age, or even Ian’s.”

“Right, and no grown-ups to raise them, probably. None still around, at least. And you know how kids get notions and run with them.”

“And they’d be isolated from the outside world. By the Cutters, and by distance. Who’d come here if it weren’t for the war?”

“Oh, afterwards they’ll get a trader and some mules every year. Or every two or three, fur traders maybe. Or hunters. It’s nice country if you like the woods.”

“Yup, but there’s plenty of places with pretty scenery and good hunting somewhere closer to somewhere, if you know what I mean. They haven’t got anything anyone outside would want, they’re not on the best road between anywhere and anywhere, and they’re the only people at all in ten or twenty thousand square miles. I can see how they’ve turned out strange,” Mary said solemnly.

What’s that saying Edain likes? My, how grimy and sooty is your arse, said the kettle to the pot? Ingolf thought behind a poker face.

The Dúnedain had been started by a couple of teenagers, and look how they’d ended up. Though in his private opinion the PPA and the Mackenzies were just as weird, and adults had been responsible for that. Not adults who’d have ended up running countries before the Change, granted. You saw a lot of that if you travelled far, places where some charismatic lunatic or small bunch with some set of bees in their bonnets had ended up on top in the chaos and then shaped everything like a trellis under a vine. Most people had been ready to grab anything that looked as if it worked with the desperate zeal of a drowning man clutching at a log.

Like the Church Universal and Triumphant, he thought with a shiver. The way it turned out after the Change. Of course, something. . else. . is at work there.

The three Council representatives came to meet them. They were back in full formal fig, and there were a dozen more behind them in the same, with carved staffs if they didn’t have spears. After a solemn exchange of greetings-the Morrowlanders were a ceremonious folk-one of them handed over a document written on something he recognized as a sort of paper made from birch bark.

“We didn’t want to tire you excessively,” the member of the Council said.

Ingolf looked down the list of Badges they were supposed to earn and wondered what it would have been like if they had wanted to tire them out.

“I’ll take the Tomahawk Throwing ,” he said, briefly remembering that night in Boise. “And Wrestling .”

You never knew when keeping up a skill would save you grief. Mary and Ritva were looking over his shoulder.

“Dibs on Storytelling !” Mary said.

“We can do that together,” Ritva said. “We’ll do Riddles in the Dark and Conversations with the Dragon, and switch off the speaking roles, how’s that? And then one of us can do Shelob’s Lair. Those all come across pretty well in the Common Tongue.”

“OK, I’m cool with Identifying Plants and Their Uses ,” Cole said thoughtfully. “I aced that part of Special Forces training and it shouldn’t be too different around here. And Field Shelters. ”

“I’m for Snowshoes and Skis ,” Ian said decisively. “My dad taught me that, my family had a sideline in making them and swapped them for our blacksmith work back on the farm. And Camp Cooking .”

Everyone looked at the Mackenzies. “Well, Folk Song , and Musical Instruments, ” Mary said. “What else?”

Talyn grinned and slid the longbow out of the loops beside his quiver and made a flourish with it. Caillech just strung hers with a step-through and a wrench.

“Need y’ ask?” the young man said. “For let me tell you-”

“You talk too much,” Caillech said, grinning herself. “Let’s show instead.”

• • •

It took a while to get to the archery, but the reception was all that could be asked when they did. A cheer went up as Talyn and Caillech straightened and leaned on their bows, panting and their faces running with sweat. The shooting range was overlooked by informal bleachers made by cutting seats into the hillside and cultivating turf. The cheering came mostly from the younger element-what the Scouts called cubs . The older spectators were enthusiastic too, but a lot of them were looking rather thoughtful.

I would be too, Ingolf thought.

The range included pop-up targets of various sorts and even some rigged to move, but final test had been straight speed-and-accuracy shooting at a hundred yards. Both the round wood targets bristled with gray-fletched cloth-yard shafts. Many had punched their heads right through the four-inch thickness of pine. The ground below was littered with the ones that had been broken by more recent arrivals simply because there wasn’t any more room in the bull’s-eye. The Clan warriors had emptied their big forty-eight arrow war quivers in less than five minutes of concentrated effort, and not a single shaft had missed the targets; most were tightly grouped in the centers, though admittedly there wasn’t any wind to complicate matters.

I couldn’t have matched that, Ingolf thought. Oh, accuracy, sure, but not the speed.

Cole Salander smiled as he fingered the new badge sewn to his camouflage jacket; it turned out to be made of beautifully tanned and colored deerskin, and sported a red leaf against a green background.

“Makes me ever more glad I wasn’t at the Horse Heaven Hills with you guys shooting at me,” he said. “But I’d have figured these guys here for good shots, too. That was some impressive, yeah, but should they be this impressed?”

“I know why they’re startled,” Ingolf murmured. “They’re hunters, not war-archery specialists like our Clan friends.”

Mary nodded, though Cole still looked a little puzzled; his folk mostly used crossbows for distance work, at least when fighting on foot.

Hunting. . particularly hunting on foot in woodland. . you very rarely shot more than once or twice at any particular animal. After that you’d either hit it or it had run away, so there wasn’t much point in carrying more than half a dozen arrows. And you got just as close as you could; Ingolf would have bet the Scouts were good enough stalkers that they ended up shooting from point-blank more often than not. They were fine archers with their light handy recurves within that envelope, and he certainly wouldn’t want to try and force his way through this rugged, forested country with them stalking him from ambush.

Mackenzies did a lot of hunting too; you had to in the Willamette, as in most places, if only to protect your crops from animals breeding fast in a world where humans were scarce. But the Mackenzie longbow was a battlefield weapon first and foremost. On a battlefield you were shooting for your life, not your supper, and your steel-clad targets came at you, screaming and waving sharp pointy things with ill intent. The training regime that old Sam Aylward had instituted right from their beginnings was aimed at shooting very fast with very powerful bows from the maximum possible distance, not taking your time.

To get into the Clan’s First Levy, you had to be able to shoot twelve arrows in sixty measured seconds, and hit a man-sized target at a hundred yards with eight of them; that was the minimum standard, not the average. With a bow of at least seventy pounds pull as measured on the tillering frame; Talyn’s drew a hundred-odd, and Caillech’s a mere eighty. Both of them were well above the entry level in speed and accuracy, too.