Dies The Fire

Chapter Twenty-two

"S omething's happened here," Michael Havel said thoughtfully, lowering the binoculars and looking at the rising smoke in the distance.

The June wind stroked his face; it was that perfect early-summer temperature that caresses the skin the way a newly laundered pillowcase does at night.

Even better if I didn 't have to wear this damned ironmongery and padding, he mused absently-in truth, he'd gotten so used to it that he only noticed it when he consciously thought about it.

"Pretty country otherwise," Signe said. "Lovely colors."

He nodded. Acres of blue flowers nodded among the rippling tall grass along the fringe where hills gave way to flatland, sprinkled with yellow field-daisies; this area of upland plain in western Idaho had been called the Camas Prairie once, when it was the hunting ground of the Nez Perce bands.

His horse shifted its weight from hoof to hoof, tossing its head and jingling the metal bits of its bridle, eager to be off and doing.

"Quiet, Gustav," he murmured, stroking a gauntlet down the arch of muscle that made its neck.

Most of the rolling lands southwestward were green with wheat or barley rippling in the breeze, with field peas or clover, save where a patch of fallow showed the rich black soil. Distant blue mountains surrounded the plain on all sides, giving it the feel of a valley; small blue lakes and little farm reservoirs added to the impression, but there were occasional gullies or creekbeds below the general level. He couldn't see any cattle from here, but a herd of pronghorns ran through a wheatfield, bounding along at better than fifty miles an hour with their white rumps fluffed-something had spooked them.

He handed the glasses to Signe and leaned his hands on the saddle horn, cocking his head slightly to one side. There was a rustling chink of chain mail as his helmet's rear aventail slid across the shoulders of his hauberk. He had good distance sight, but hers was about the best he'd ever run across. To the naked eye the pillar of smoke was distant, and the cluster of buildings at its base barely visible where they nestled under a south-facing hill.

"I can't see anyone moving either," Signe said at last. "I'm not sure I can see people at all. They should be out fighting the fire, if there's anyone there at all. But: I don't like those crows and buzzards. See the clumps?"

That could mean plague, he thought. Trying to burn the bodies, and then the last survivors crawling away to die: but I doubt it. That's a farm, not a town; they wouldn't have enough people for that.

"We'd better scout it, cautiously," Havel said.

With people so afraid of sickness, news spread even more slowly than it had right after the Change. It was doubly difficult to keep informed, and doubly needful.

"Luanne and Astrid?" he asked.

They were still the best riders, bar Will, and they rode light; it was unlikely anyone could catch them. Plus Astrid was still their nearest approach to a good mounted archer: and it was his observation that when girls were told to go take a look at something and come back, they were less likely to get themselves into unnecessary trouble by pushing on regardless.

"I wouldn't send them together," Signe said.

There was a smile in her voice. Havel looked over at her, and there it was, framed by the round helmet with its bar-nasal in front and curtain of chain mail to the rear.

"I thought Astrid thought Luanne was, ah, radical cool," he said.

"She did," Signe said; now she was grinning. "But not anymore."

"Que?"

"Astrid caught her making out with Eric behind the chuckwagon two nights ago, which was disgusting-and I see her point, you know? The thought of someone making out with Eric: that is disgusting. Anyway, then Luanne told her how she'd understand when she was older and her figure developed-a real low blow. So now Astrid's not talking to her anymore."

Havel made a strangled sound. "I don't know if she's worse when she's pretending to be an elf, or when she's relapsed into being a real human teenager. I do know-"

The young woman finished his sentence for him:"-that Gunney Winters never had to face this sort of problem in the Corps. They wouldn't have taken Astrid at Parris Island, though, Mike."

"We'll do the scout ourselves, then. Get Will."

"You're the bossman."

She reined around and cantered off. Havel looked after her briefly; the rest of the outfit were waiting a quarter mile back, wagons-there were a lot more of them now- stopped on alternate sides of the narrow ribbon of road, with outriders on the edge of sight, others working at the horse and cattle herds to keep them bunched, and some folk on foot by the vehicles.

Half old-style cattle drive, half gypsy caravan, half small-scale Mongol migration, he thought wryly.

Then he turned back to look at the long country ahead, thinking. He was uneasy, and he'd never liked that when he didn't know precisely why. Presently hooves thudded behind him, and he nodded over his shoulder.

"Will."

"Mike?" Will Hutton said. "You called?"

"Well, first thing, Luanne and Astrid have decided to spend the afternoon together making armor links, to teach them to enjoy each other's company more."

Hutton grinned. Making the rings was about the most unpopular chore in the Bearkillers: not particularly hard, just tedious, frustrating, finicky detail work with dowel and pliers, wire cutters, a little hammer and punch, and roll after roll of galvanized fence wire.

"What do you think of that place just behind the ridge-line for a camp?" Havel went on, pointing.

"Fine, if you want to stop this early."

They all looked up to estimate the time; it was about two o'clock. Pre-digital mechanical watches had become a valuable type of trade goods, along with tobacco and binoculars and bows.

Hutton went on: "Flat enough, good water and firewood, good grass, good view. You don't want to try and make Craigswood today?"

Havel shook his head. "I'm not easy about what I can see from here," he said. "I want to find out more before we're committed."

"Nice if we could do some trading here, at Craigswood or Grangeville, or just pick up stuff," Hutton observed. "There's a lot of things we could use, or are gettin' short of, not to mention more remounts. Some training we could do easier if we stopped for a week or two, as well."

"That all depends," Havel said. "See that line of smoke there? Looks like a farm or a ranch house where something got torched, and nobody's moving, but you can see it's been worked since the Change-fresh-plowed land, and spring plantings. We're going down to check. Have Josh and a squad keep an eye out from here, out of sight on the reverse slope. If things have gone completely to hell in this neighborhood, we may have to take another detour."

Will nodded and reined his horse about, gliding away at a smooth trot.

Christ Jesus, I was lucky there, Havel thought; he didn't think he could be as good a chief-of-staff and strong-right-arm, if their positions were reversed.

"Equipment check," he said to Signe, and each gave the other's gear a quick once-over.

They were both in full armor. That was Bearkiller practice anywhere not guaranteed safe, now that they had enough chain hauberks for the whole A-list. He looked at the bear's head mounted on his helmet for an instant before he put it back on and buckled the chin cup.

Well, it doesn 't smell, and it makes good shade on a sunny day, he thought.

He'd gotten used to the way the nasal bar bisected his vision, too.

Plus bear fur won't make the helmet work any worse if someone tries to hit me on the head.

He told himself that fairly often; it beat admitting that he just didn't want to deal with one of Astrid's sulks. They both pulled their bows out of the leather cases and fitted arrow to string.

We're mounted infantry with cavalry tastes, he thought to himself. But if we keep working at it harder than anyone else, then we're going to have a real advantage.

They put their horses down the slope, slowly until they were in the flat, then up to a walk-canter-trot-reverse rhythm, their eyes busy to all sides. The horses were fresh, and the day was pretty; at least until they came to the dead cattle.

"Very dead," Havel muttered.

Hacked apart, and the bodies rubbed with filth, and a chemical smell under the stink made him suspect poison, which a couple of dead crows confirmed. He looked beyond them to the fields. The wheat was a little over knee-high on a horse, with the heads showing-harvest would be in another five weeks or so-but great swaths of it were wilted and dying.

"Roundup," he said. Signe looked a question at him.

"See how the wheat's wilted in strips? Someone went through spraying weed killer on it, Roundup or something like it. The stuffs available in bulk anywhere there's much farming and it acts fast."

Her face had gotten leaner and acquired a darker honey-tan, but it still went a little pale. Havel nodded. Wasting food like this was the next thing to blasphemy.

The dirt road joined a larger one, and they slowed down as the drifts of dirty-brown smoke rose ahead. From the clumps of squabbling crows, he knew there were bodies of men or beasts in the fields to his right. Men probably, given what had been done to the cattle; the way they didn't fly away also told him that the feast hadn't been disturbed.

So did the coyote that sat looking at him with insolent familiarity, and then trotted off unconcerned. Havel suppressed an impulse to shoot an arrow at the beast. It had already learned that men weren't to be feared as much as formerly:

But if men are less the wolves will be back soon, you clever little son of a bitch, he thought grimly. Try pulling tricks like that with them, trickster, and you'll regret it.

When they came to the sign and gate they were coughing occasionally whenever the wind blew a gust their way, but the smoke smelled rankly of ash, not the hot stink of a new fire.

"Clarke Century Farms," Havel read. "Homesteaded 1898."

The first body close enough to identify was just inside, tumbled in the undignified sprawl of violent death; a fan of black blood sprayed out from the great fly-swarming wound hacked into his back with a broad-bladed ax, where the stubs of ribs showed in the drying flesh. There was already a faint but definite smell of spoiled meat.

Someone had taken his boots, and there was a hole in the heel of one sock.

A dog lay not far beyond him, head hanging by a shred of flesh, its teeth still fixed in a snarl. The bodies hadn't bloated much, although lips and eyes were shrunken, but that could mean one day or two, in this weather; the ravens had been at them, too. In the field to the left was a three-furrow plow that looked as if it came from a museum and probably did. A stretch of turned earth ended where it stood.

One dead horse was still in the traces before it, and a dead man about four paces beyond, lying curled around a belly-wound that might have taken half a day to kill him. Two of the big black birds kaw-kawed and jumped heavily off the corpse when Havel turned his horse to take a closer look.

"Crossbow bolt," he said, when he'd returned to his companion. "Looks like it was made after the Change, but well done."

They passed another pair of bodies as they rode at a walk up the farm lane to the steading, near tumbled wheelbarrows.

The main house hadn't been burned; it stood intact in its oasis of lawn and flower bed and tree; a tractor-tire swing still swayed in the wind beneath a big oak, and a body next to it by the neck. There was laundry on a line out behind it. The smoldering came from the farmyard proper, from the ashes of a long series of old hay-rolls, the giant grass cylinders of modern fanning, and from where grain had been roughly scattered out of sheet-metal storage sheds, doused in gasoline and set on fire.

The oily canola seed still flickered and gave off a dense acrid smoke. There was a wooden barn as well, gray and weathered; a naked man had been nailed to the door by spikes through wrist and ankle. He was dead, but much more recently than the rest, and he was older as well, with sparse white hair.

Written above his head in blood was: Bow to the Iron Rod! There was a stylized image underneath it, of a penis and testes.

Signe was hair-trigger tense as they rode up to the veranda; she started when the windmill pump clattered into the breeze. Water spilled from the tank underneath it, which looked to be recent-probably the windmill was an heirloom, only brought back into use since the Change.

"Wait here," he said, returning bow to case and arrow to quiver.

He swung down and looped his reins over the railing of the veranda. His horse bent its head to crop at the longer grass near the foundation.

"From the look, whoever did it is long gone. But stay alert."

Havel drew his backsword and lifted his shield off the saddlebow, sliding his left forearm into the loops. There was a scrawled paper pinned to the door with a knife-inside the screen, so it hadn't blown free. Printed on it in big block letters with a felt-tip pen was: FOR