The Memories of Milo Morai

V

When all of the senior menfolk of the Guardian People were in their places along each side of the long, ancient table in the conference room of the Southern Shrine, old Mosix, the eldest of the priests, arose and spoke, saying, “Looters have come. The Shrine of the Arcade has been violated, stripped of many of its Holy Things.”

There was a concerted groan compounded of outrage and pure horror from the men to whom he spoke. But before any could speak, the old man raised one withered hand.

“Wait. That was the worst, but there is more. The tracks indicate that those who defiled the Shrine of the Arcade were only three men who rode in on horses. But several of the smaller Shrines have also been violated and stripped of many, many of the Holy Things we all were born to protect inviolate. Those who did these other infamies were more numerous and equipped with horse-drawn carts to bear away the Holy Things that they had looted from the Shrines.”

“Which Shrines, High Priest?” demanded the man at the other end of the table, Wahrn Mehrdok, the recently reelected captain of the Guardians of the Shrines of Nohshan, his big, horny farmer’s hands clenched at his sides.

“The Shrine of the Deer, the Shrine of the Bull and the Shrine of the Two Snakes. They surely are most truly the demons called looters, for they heavily loaded two carts with Holy Things and they bore other Holy Things away on their horses’ backs,” replied old Mosix, going on to say, “True, there are not too many Guardians of the prescribed ages—seventeen winters to forty-five winters—to go against these looter demons, but then do they number no more than the tracks did indicate, the score and two Guardians should be quite enough to take them and regain the Holy Things they stole and slay them for their crimes, their blasphemous activities. Verily do the Sacred Scriptures say that the Shrines and the Holy Things that they contain are not to be disturbed by anyone, that any who do so or make to do so are criminals, sinners. These demons have assuredly sinned and the Scriptures also attest that the wages of Sin is Death.”

“Just how many are there, High Priest?” asked the captain.

“The tracks showed six or seven, captain, one of them appearing to be either a woman or a young boy. They headed to the northwest after their desecrations. Two and twenty Guardians should be—”

“Twelve or even ten should be enough, High Priest. Are we all to eat next winter, work must still be done in the fields, lest the irrigation ditches silt up on us, and then consider where we’d be.”

“But our Sacred Duty—” began the priest.

“Our Sacred Duty first of all requires that we be around to do it, Mosix,” the reelected first sergeant of the Guardians, Kahl Rehnee, interrupted him. “And the captain is right about the ditches, you know that good as I do. This just ain’t good farmingcountry, never was and never will be, neither. It’s either too much water or not enough . . . mostly, not enough. It’s plenty now, but when the lake out there comes to go down like it will soon now, the creek will go down too and we’ll be back to raising the water out of it a bucket at the time to keep the ditches all running and the crops all growing right.

“Mosix, it all boils down to just what I said and my daddy used to said afore me: thishere country is damn good for growing grass, but it’s pisspoor for growing anything else nowadays, no matter what it was like way back when, before the Great Dyings and all; the onliest way to be sure of living year to year without doing the kind of backbreaking, man-kiliing work we and our daddies and grandfolks have had to do is to stop trying to farm a place that is next thing to impossible to farm and start breeding stock, hunting game and foraging for wild plants that folks can eat and that can grow without being watered and nursed by folks. I knows you don’t like to hear it from me just like you didn’t like to hear it all from my daddy, but that still don’t stop it all from being true.”

The captain nodded, and there was a mutter of general agreement around the table, only the older priest and the two younger ones who stood behind his chair not joining in the consensus.

Mosix shook his head. “And have any of you thought just what would soon happen if you did such a folly? Why all too soon, you would have hunted out, foraged out, and the enlarged herds would have grazed out this entire area. Then what would you do?”

This time it was the captain who spoke. “Move on, Mosix, move on to a place where there still was grass and food plants and game, that is what.”

“Blasphemy!” hissed Mosix from betwixt worn, yellowed teeth. “To think to hear such wicked blasphemy from the lips of the very captain of all the Guardians! I would never have believed such a thing could have come to pass had I not heard it with my own two ears! Have you no shame, then? Must you flaunt the dishonor your mind spawns, Wahrn Mehrdok, even while the very looters we are here to keep from the Shrines are at work desecrating and bearing off cartloads of the Holy Objects that your honorable forebears did the duty of protecting?”

“Priest,” said the captain, “your problem is plain—you wish us all to be as stubbornly, as stupidly fanatic as are you. Think you that you are the only living man who can read the journals of our ancestors, then? During the time of the Great Dyings, a man—man, mind you, no god—whose title was ‘governor’ sent our many-times-greatgrandsires here to prevent riot or looting in this town and the surrounding lands. There was a captain and two undercaptains, there was a man called first sergeant, several others also called sergeant and forty-seven others called various things, many of which terms do not seem to mean anything anymore. The gang of them were called a company and they belonged to a larger gang called a battalion which itself belonged to an even larger gang called a regiment and this largest gang was called the Missouri National Guard.

“About half of those men sent as Guardians of the town and lands died in the Great Dyings, as too did most of the folk hereabouts. A few more of the Guardians left to seek after their own dear kin, in other places, and even fewer ever came back, all telling tales of horror—of miles of countryside and of whole big towns in which no living man or woman or little child still lived, of pet dogs and cats and wild animals gorging on rotting bodies lying all unburied in any direction a man might look, of the pitiful few who had lived running and hiding alone and lunatic or banding together to loot and kill and rape and torture and mutilate and enslave.

“Those few of a few who came safely back, Priest, helped those who had remained to decide that it were best to stay here, safely away from the lunacy and barbarism and death that stalked the land and slunk through the corpse-clogged streets of the towns, else-where in the plague-blighted and desolate state that had been home.

“So our ancestors stayed here and worked the farms. They fought to hold the land and to protect their new friends and newer families from the dog packs and the even more dangerous roving man packs. And the land was good and productive, then; so long as the mechanical things still worked right and water could be brought up from deep, deep beneath the ground and there still were the big bags of powders to put into the fields, the work was light and the yield large enough to support everyone.

“But that Eden, like the original, did not last. Most of the mechanical things did not outlast the first generation. When there was no more of the special liquids that powered the farming devices and the things that made light and the pumps that brought up the water, then the old men of the first generation showed the men of the second how to dig ditches and canals and how to keep them filled from the creek both in high water and in low water, showed them how to ferment dung properly and plow it into the fields to replace the exhausted supplies of powders, showed them how to adapt or alter what they had to make plows and harrows and carts and wagons that could use animal power for draft. They took long, dangerous trips, those old men, to bring back books and things that would teach their sons how to make for themselves the thousand and one small and larger things they would need were they to survive and keep farming.

“Way back then, many of the second generationwere of a mind to leave hereabouts and find richer, better-watered land somewhere. But the men of the first generation had come to love the land their hands had worked and their sweat had watered—their journals tell all of this, Priest—and they also still recalled the horrors those few who had returned during the Great Dyings had recounted or seen. We all might have been far better off had everyone moved out then, but the first generation persuaded them all to stay.

“That was when the first words concerning a sacred vow and duty to protect the town from looters were spoken, written and melded with our religion. There is nothing sacred about the town, Priest—just because our ancestors said there was doesn’t make it so. It’s not the last of its kind and it’s far from the biggest; I’ve seen the ruins of much bigger ones during my travels before I came back here and married, and as we all know well, there’s a slightly smaller one a few days’ ride south of here from which we get our metals, so we too are looters, strictly speaking. And I have thought right often that it would’ve been a sight easier to have taken whatall we needed, whenever we needed it, from this town rather than that one.”

Most of the men seated along the sides of the long table looked at their elected leader with wide eyes registering shock and near-horror.

“Forsworn blasphemer, beware,” hissed old Mosix. “You counsel sacrilege!”

“Bullshit!” snapped the captain, with a hint of rising anger in his voice. “One ruin is not, cannot be any more sacred than another. Can’t you fools see the plain truth until your noses are rubbed in it? We all can read—if you don’t believe me about all I’ve said here today, for God’s sake, go into the library back yonder and read the old records and journals. I think Mosix here means us all well, but he either can’t or won’t admit to the pure fact that he is the priest of a religion that is in large part artificial, devised by our ancestors simply as a ruse to keep their sons and grand-sons from leaving this marginal farmland to seek a better, easier living elsewhere.

“Because of this manmade religion, generations of Mosix’s ilk have made things infinitely more difficult for folks who have been hard enough pressed just to wrest sustenance from our lands, by forcing them to wagon south to get supplies of metals and whatnot when the ruins just lay there, the metals rusting away and other useful things rotting in uselessness, giving lair to only bats and birds and reptiles and beasts.

“I tell you all, read the records and you’ll find that each successive generation of these priests has subtly changed this faith we hold just a little more. The first generation took things to help them from the ruins; so too did the second and the third. Where do you think they got most of the special liquids that powered their mechanical things, or many of the mechanical things themselves, or the powders for the fields? Why, from these so-called sacred ruins, that’s where.

“Yet now we not only are forbidden to draw metals or aught else from this crumbling town, we are even forbidden to hunt the beasts that inhabit it. Most of us have tracked her are dead certain that that she-bear as has been killing calves and goats is denning up some-where in the eastern part of the town, and there’s at least one big cat in there, too. But despite the losses and always looming danger to our kine and our kids and womenfolks, will Mosix and hiscrew allow us to go in and root out and kill those predators? You all know the answer to that, don’t you? Remember when Mosix forced the hanging of that dim-witted Snodgrass boy because he killed a few squirrels within the town?”

“Enough, captain!” snapped the elder priest. “I believe that what you are saying is that you will refuse to do your sworn and sacred duty. You are saying that you will not wash out the awful sacrileges and defilements perpetrated by these hellish looters in their blood, as your ancient duty demands. Sad, indeed, was the day when a man like you was chosen to be Captain of the Sacred Guardians.”

“You hear only that which you want to hear, Mosix,” snorted the captain. “I have said no such thing as you aver. What I have said is that we should not stay hereabouts, any of us that work for our living on this overdry, contrary land. So far as regards the men who took things from out of the city, I’ll lead half our company out and ambush them, then either kill them or drive them off. But, Priest, I won’t be doing it because of duty or honor or the supposedly holy things they took or the supposedly sacred nature of that ruined town or because you stamped your feet and slandered me like some spoiled, petulant child. No, I’ll be doing it simply because the fewer strangers near to my home and herds, the better.

“Now, let’s get this senseless business over with so that those of us who work for our livings can get back to that work. Oh, and bear this in mind, Mosix: should any sudden and calamitous fire occur in the library where are the records and the ancient books and journals, the first sergeant and I and all the other men will know exactly who is responsible if not actually guilty of the act. I trust that I make my meaning fully understood to you, this time? Well?”

Mosix was so angry that he could not speak. Small white bits of froth had appeared at the corners of his thin lips, and cold fire filled his eyes. He only ground his worn teeth and growled gutturally.

Captain Mehrdok turned to First Sergeant Rehnee. “Kahl, take a couple of the men back there to the library and remove all of the records and journals of the first through the third generations. I don’t trust these priests to keep them inviolate any longer ... or keep them at all, for that matter. If any of Mosix’s ilk or toadiesget in your way, you’ll know what to do, how to deal with them. Take what you bear away back to the armory and put it under lock and key until the other men have all read the necessary parts. When once they and their families all understand the truth about these parasitic priests as you and I now do, know that God Almighty isn’t going to strike them all dead if they leave here to find and make themselves a better life, then Mosix and the rest will have no hold upon them.”

The morning of the day after their second foray into the ruined town, Milo and Gy rode out with two of the young warriors to hunt and did so, well up to the north of the lake, with some success. Djoolya and the other women of the camp did their foragings, then returned to camp to perform their other chores. Bard Herbuht spent the morning composing a song about the killing of the strange new beast, seated—with his harp on his knee—near the rack on which that same beast’s pelt had been stretched; later, he rode down the creek a quarter mile to a wide, shallow pool to try his hand at arrowing fishes, in company with Sami-Klyd Staiklee and that young man’s constant companion, Djeri-Earl Gahdfree, who now only limped a little on his healing leg. The remainder of the young men had ridden out to the herd and now were guarding them while the cats hunted for their food.

Back from his own hunt by midafternoon, Milo and the others had but just commenced to flay their kills when Snowbelly limped into camp, bleeding from a perforated hind leg. Gingerly seating himself and commencing to lick at the wound and its peripheries, he beamed to Milo a telepathic explanation of the injury.

“Friend of cats, Chief Milo, southeast of the place you and the other twolegs have been visiting is a place of Dirtmen, as many Dirtmen as a clan. They have cattle and goats, horses, mules and a few donkeys. Their cattle and goats are bigger than those of the clans—all fat and sleek and slow of foot, with hardly any horns worthy of being so called, born prey, too fat to run and no horns to fight with.

“I had but just cut out and killed a fine, delicious calf and was taking a few mouthfuls of it before I bore it away when a pack of Dirtmen came running at me with spears and axes and a kind of a bow fastened across a thick stick. It was the shaft sped by one of those that went completely through my hinder leg like a dollop of pure fire, and when two more of those short arrows struck the earth near to me, I ran.”

Then the huge feline added wistfully, mournfully, “But I had to leave that tender, fat, tasty calf behind.”

Milo dropped his skinning knife and came over to squat beside the wounded cat and examine his injury. It was a clean and wide and by now well-drained penetration, apparently made by a shaft with a head no wider than itself. Indeed, it looked very much like the wound inflicted by a large-caliber, high-velocity rifle bullet, he reflected. What the cat had seen to be a bow fastened to a thick stick was most likely some form or type of crossbow, a powerful one, too, to drive its shaft clean through a big cat’s thick, very muscular leg with so little tearing or laceration of the tissues.

“Please, Uncle Milo,” beamed Snowbelly, “wait until this cat is healed before you ride against these Dirtmen. They owe this cat both blood price and suffering price.”

“There will be no riding against those Dirtmen, Chief Snowbelly,” Milo mindspoke in reply. “Not immediately, anyway, not if they are as numerous as you say.”

“But why, Chief Milo?” demanded the cat.

“Because, Chief Snowbelly,” Milo patiently explained, “this is not a clan or even a sept, here; we don’t number even a full dozen of warriors. No, until Clans Staiklee and Gahdfree arrive in this place, we’ll studiously avoid any contact with these Dirtmen—which means that you cats must leave their livestock alone, no matter how tempting and fat they are.”

“But when the clans and many warriors are here in this place, then we will descend upon the Dirtmen and slay them and burn down their yurts and take their females and cattle?” queried the blood-hungry cat. “Until then, this cat can wait, Chief Milo, but only until then. Vengeance must be exacted.”

Milo beamed no more. The cat had gotten what he risked at the hands of the farmers—or Dirtmen, which was what the nomads called any aggregation of settled people—and Milo felt no blood or suffering price should be exacted, but of course he could not say so to the proud, touchy feline.

If it were possible, he thought that it might be best to try to live in peace with these farmers for the two or three years it would take the clans to strip the ruins. Of course, were peace renderedan impossibility, then Chief Snowbelly would get his wish, in spades. It had happened often before, for some of these isolated settlements had bred some very peculiar people, frequently having ethnocentrism and a raging, murder-ous degree of xenophobia imbibed with the milk of their mothers.

Throughout the centuries he had been living with the people who were now become Horseclansfolk, forming them, guiding them, he had constantly preached peace and harmony with other groups of nomads and with farmers, but had almost always had to practice war against the non-Horseclans people. Because the prairies were too dry for grain and more delicate food crops for so much of the year, all of the agricultural settlements had had to locate them-selves hard onto reliable sources of water to keep their irrigation networks flowing; where these sources happened to be rivers or sizable creeks, there had seldom been problems between farmers and roving herders/hunters, but in those other cases wherein the sources of water had been large springs or small lakes, farmers had often thrown up fencing around the water, nomad herds had knocked these down, and all hell had ensued between the two groups, with the victory almost always going to the nomads for many reasons and with those farming peoples not completely extirpated or driven off their lands in extreme disorder being forever after actively hostile toward nomadic herdsmen of any stripe.

Nor had the presence of non-Horseclans nomads helped one bit, he thought. Most of them had been from their very inception little more than horse-mounted, roving gangs of extremely predaceous, law-less, pitiless, grasping types—raiders, killers, rapists, slavers, robbers and thieves, a few even cannibalistic and all of them incredibly savage and sadistic, maiming and torturing their captives for the sheer amusement derived from their sufferings. They had presented a constant menace not only to obtaining or retaining good, peaceful, trading relationships with farmers and traders from the east, but to the Horse-clansfolk themselves, since a clan camp was as likely to be raided as was a farming settlement or a trader caravan.

A few of the less vicious non-Kindred bands had been persuaded in one way or another to be more or less adopted into the Kindred and become Horseclans-folk themselves, with little or no fighting; a few others had decided to do so in the wake of bloody and costly battles; some of the worst of their unsavory ilk had had to be wiped out entirely—warriors and older women killed, younger women taken as wives or concubines along with the herds and other battle booty, young children taken into clan yurts to be reared as honest Horseclansfolk. Now, most of the nomads for thou-sands of square miles east to west and north to south on prairie and high plains were either of Kindred stock or closely allied to the Kindred. The remaining bands of professional despoilers had been pushed to the far north, the deep south, the deserts, the high mountains or into the more thickly settled regions to the east where their shrift was certain to be short enough when faced with organized, well-armed soldiers of the pocket principalities that squatted along the banks of the Mississippi River .

The largest and most destructive and treacherous of the bands had never yet been severely enough hurt to flee or come over—the Lebonnes in the north, who had briefly ridden with the Horseclans, then turned on them; the Troodohs and the Tchawkuhs, whose stamping grounds lay east and south of the Lebonnes; the Magees and the Hwilkees in southeastern Texas; the infamous Lantz Gang on the high plains; the numerous small packs of bandit raiders which flitted back and forth across the Rio Grande, as much a bane to the two most northerly Mexican kingdoms as to any other folk. Milo knew that someday these all would have to be hunted down and exterminated was there to be any sort of real and lasting peace on the prairie and plains, but he also knew that to put paid to any one of them would require all the available force of one very large clan or else the assemblage of a special war party gathered from several average-sized clans. Such as the latter plan would mean a vote by a five-year Council of Kindred Chiefs and just the right degree of timing, but he hoped to see it accomplished within the next fifty or so years, with luck.

When all of the men and women had been assembled around the skinning racks, Milo said, “Snowbelly has discovered to his pain and sorrow that there is a settlement of Dirtmen to the southeast of the ruins. He killed one of their calves and took an arrow clean through his haunch for it. We must all avoid that part of the country until Clans Staiklee and Gahdfree arrive here, for Snowbelly says that these Dirtmen are rather numerous and, as all know, we are not. Indeed, were it not for the fact that this is where Jesee-Karl was told to bring the clans, I’d move the camp well up north of the lake and put a good bit of distance between us and this particular batch of Dirtmen, especially as there seems to be something very odd about them.

“As numerous and strong as they must be, why in hell haven’t they stripped or at ieast skimmed the cream of artifacts off that ruined town long since? All folks need metals, especially iron, yet the ruins are full of iron and steel just rusting and flaking away, untouched.”

Bard Herbuht said, “Well, Uncle Milo, maybe their needs have always been met by the smaller ruins that surround the larger ones.”

“That’s possible, Herbuht,” agreed Milo readily. “But that still fails to answer the question of why they didn’t at least take the made goods from that hardware place or the farm-supply place.”

Bard Herbuht crinkled up his brows. “But. . . Uncle Milo, I thought to have heard you say that certain amounts had been taken from those places.”

Milo nodded. “Yes, both of them had been selectively looted, but many, many years ago, more than a hundred years, I’d guestimate from the appearances. However, there was no sign of any human being having been in there recently, say within the last fifty years. One would think that farmers living nearby would at least have gone into that big building and taken the jewelry and those fine, sharp knives, if nothing else. No, there’s something very unnatural about this whole business of Dirtmen squatting on or near to the verges of a rich mine of highly usable and valuable artifacts and metals, yet apparently making no slightest use of them, leaving them all just as they probably lay when the last townsman of ancient times died of those terrible plagues that rang the death knell of the world before our own.

“I don’t like things I can’t understand, things for which there seems to be no rational explanation. These things usually mean sore trouble for somebody, and I don’t want that somebody to be any of us; therefore, we’re not going back in there until the clans arrive to give us force, should it develop that we need it for whatever reason.”

“But, Uncle Milo,” protested Little Djahn Staiklee, “the other boys and me, we all had planned to ride into there tomorrow and bring back a whole mess of them squirrels lives in them big old trees, and maybe some more of them little itsy bitsy antelopes, too.”

Milo shrugged.“If you want to hunt the fringes of the suburbs, fine. Just don’t penetrate into the areas of the wider streets and larger buildings. Okay? And swing wide around the lake, eh? Ride in from due north, and be very, very careful, Little Djahn. What-ever you all do in there, avoid the Dirtmen or any trace of them and do not provoke any violence. If I can, I want to deal with them in peace—after all, there is far more than enough in there for all of us—but if you or one of your brothers is maimed or killed by them, Big Djahn Staiklee will not rest until he has led the warriors down on them with fire and saber and lance and bow and wiped them and their settlement from off the face of the land.”

* * *

Captain Wahrn Mehrdok chose a splendid spot for the ambush of the looters. He armed every man with a crossbow and plenty of quarrels, a six-foot spear and a big, stout knife of the sort that was used in the harvesting of corn. He put two men in each chosen position, that one might be loosing while the other was recocking his crossbow and inserting a fresh bolt. He made certain that all of the quarrels mounted metal heads (common hunting quarrels had for long been just fire-hardened wooden dowels whittled and stone-rubbed to a point, then fletched, as a means of conserving metals). Then they all had hunkered down to await the return of the looters.

They had waited all through a long, long day, fighting a constant defensive action against hordes of insects, constantly on edge, awaiting word from their pickets that the trespassers were coming. On the ride back to the armory in the glow of the twilight, Wahrn had had to break up two serious fights between sweaty, weary, bored and disgusted men.

Sitting his restive, dancing horse and savagely shaking one of the last two would-be fighters in each of his powerful hands, he had grated, “Save your god-damn fighting for these strangers we’re waiting to kill or you’re both going to be a-fighting me. Is that what you want?”

That was not what those two men or any of the others wanted; that was about the last thing any of them wanted, in fact. All were fully aware that their captain could easily break any more average man in his big, hairy-backed hands. Why, hadn’t he, and when barely more than a big boy, been seen to break the neck of a stud bull with those same hands?

While they were vainly awaiting the return of the looters, a great, huge cat of a type unknown previously in this region and of which thereexisted no picture or description in the ancient books in the priests’ library slew a calf in the nearer pasture of Djim Dreevuh. Moreover the outsized feline predator had brazenly crouched over the still-jerking calf, tearing at it with long white teeth until one of Djim’s sons had holed it with a quarrel from his crossbow.

Those who had seen the creature averred that it was solid-colored, sort of a dun shade above and with a pure-white belly and chest, and to Wahrn’s mind that meant yet another threat to their livestock, for he knew from strictly forbidden forays into the ruined town that the other cat therein was a spotted one. It was purest idiocy to allow proven stock killers such as the she-bear and now this new cat to den up nearby and yet not be allowed to go into the ruins and slay them; he knew it and the first sergeant and a few others knew it too. Now, if he and they could only win over enough of the other farmers to their way of thinking, he would have a chance, at least, of facing and backing down that hidebound old bastard Mosix.

“And,” he muttered bitterly to himself, “if a bullfrog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his ass so much.”

After a brief conference with First Sergeant Rehnee, it was decided that that worthy would take the ambush party to a new locale, possibly a little farther north and west of the center of the ruins, on the morrow. It would be Wahrn’s job, he being the best and most experienced hunter of the community, to take a smaller party out and try to backtrack the calf-killer.

Mosix’s emissary had objected loudly, of course, to his rearrangement, but the slender, soft-handed man was easily routed by Wahrn’s half-serious display of bluster, departing the armory as speedily as he could without breaking into a dead run, his fat body jiggling to his accelerated movements, his face white as curds and his ears ringing with the raucous, mocking laughter of the assembled Guardian force.

As upon the past nights, with all the folk of the camp gathered around the central firepit digesting their meal and keeping their hands busy with individual projects of one kind or another—one of the young warriors fletching arrows, two others grinding ancient brass key blanks against rough-grained pebbles to make arrowheads, others honing the cutting edges and points of weapons and tools on finer-grained stones, one tap-tap-tapping one of the big silver rings found in the ruins with a small wooden mallet up a tapered brass dowel to make it large enough to fit over a horn bow ring.

Djoolya, squatting beside Milo and using one of the fine shiny steel needles she had found and some of the brightly colored threads to apply embroidered designs to one of his cloth shirts, spoke aloud, “Love, I want to know what happened after that enemy woman who had been your lover died and your chief gave you his leave to depart his camp. So will you again open your memories to us, this night?”

Across the firepit, Myrah Linsee, her fingers all heavy with the flashiest of the rings, sat embroidering one of her own shirts, not any of her young husband’s clothing. She said, “I remember from all that we had out of Uncle Milo’s memories last year, on the autumn hunt. I think I know what happened next. I think Uncle Milo wed the widow of his friend, Jethroh, the woman called Mahrteen. Am I right, Uncle Milo? Am I? Am I?”

“Yes, you are, Myrah,” he said. “I had sworn to my dying friend that I would take care of his wife and their children, you see, and a man or a woman of honor must always fulfill pledges. Yes, I went to Martine Stiles, wooed her and married her.

“But here, enter into my memories before I talk myself hoarse, needlessly.”