“Ward!” Longshanks snapped. He, Bowles, Spenser, and half a dozen others took up their stations with bows and spears on two sides of the little park, the other two walls being buildings. Some ancestor, with knowledge and cunning, had espaliered fruit trees against those walls, and a dozen trees filled the square. Between the grove and the walls stood a stand of maize. Solutre inspected it, seeming satisfied. “Most of the ears have set on,” she told Alea.
“So you’re farming, too,” Alea said.
“In a small way,” Solutre said. “We can’t exactly clear—Watch out!”
Something pink and bulbous came charging out of the stalks. Alea leaped aside, sweeping the point of the spear by reflex. The hog squealed in rage and turned on her, but an arrow buried itself in the animal’s side, and it stumbled, then fell. Alea turned away and left Solutre to finish the beast. “We’ll eat well tonight,” the woman said.
Alea turned back and saw her sheathing a knife as a young man tied the hog’s hooves together and shoved a spear through to carry it. Solutre inspected the animal’s belly. “A sow, right enough, but not nursing. Too bad—we could have used a few more in the pen.”
“How … how did pigs come into this city?” Alea asked. “Our ancestors tell us some folks had started keeping them as pets,” Solutre told her, “a special breed, pretty little things that never grew much hair or got to be any bigger than kneehigh. When the crash came, they started running loose and bred back to your average wild pig.”
Alea looked at the sow slung between the shoulders of a young man and a young woman. Its back had stood halfway up her thigh, and it was covered with mottled black and white hair. “A far cry from a pet indeed.”
“So are we,” Solutre grunted.
When the sun slipped below the tallest buildings, they started back. Every structure they passed had the lowest two stories of windows boarded up, even if the higher ones lacked glass. The doors were stout and locked. Alea wondered why.
They hadn’t gone more than a few blocks through the ruins when she found out. They were going down a wide street, laughing and chatting as they detoured around rusted hulks of vehicles and piles of fallen brick and stone, when they head a deep, hollow sound. Instantly they stilled. The sound came again, and Longshanks said in a tense whisper, “Listen for thoughts, Solutre.”
They were silent a moment. Then, “Hawks!” Solutre hissed.
15
Instantly the whole party stilled. The carriers laid down the pig and took up their bows. Some nocked arrows to their strings, others set small rocks in their slings. Spear carriers slanted their weapons to guard.
The baffling thing was that there was no one in sight. As silently as the ancestral ghosts who had trained them, the band glided over broken pavement and around the corner.
A dozen people very much like them, in almost identical tunics and hose but with their hair combed high and stiffened into crests, stood around one of the doors while two of their number struck it with axes.
“Corbies!” one of them shouted.
The axe wielders turned, brandishing tools suddenly become weapons. Others drew their bows. One or two even had a sword. “What do you think you’re doing, coming into our wedge like this?” Longshanks yelled, striding toward them. “Trying to break into one of our buildings! Do we come sneaking into your alleys? Do we try to chop down your doors?”
“Yes!” shouted a squat, broad man who looked to be all muscle. He waddled forward, bullet head thrust out pugnaciously. “So we come marching into your boulevards, right out in -the open, no sneaking for us! What if we do? What’s so precious you keep it locked up?”
“Jewels and gold! Silver candlesticks and plates!” Longshanks boasted from behind his sword as he went nearer, a step at a time. “But you can’t have them, not an ounce! They’re ours and only ours!”
“Only your imagination, you mean!” the broad man hooted. “If you’ve so much finery, open your door and show us!”
“If I opened my door as much as you open your mouth, I might as well throw it away, for it would never be shut!”
As Gar, Alea, Blaize and Mira watched, amazed, the two bands shouted insult after insult at one another, the Corbies edging closer, the Hawks retreating a step at a time, until finally, with much growling and shaking of weapons, the Hawks departed, withdrawing across the boulevard and into the leaves of what was, presumably, a park of their own.
“Well, that’s why we patrol the borders every day,” Solutre told Alea. “If we’d let them get into that building, it would have cost blood and lives to get them out.”
It was very clear to Alea that only good luck had brought the band in time to prevent just that. “Weren’t you worried that they might have started shooting?”
“If they’d loosed arrows, so would we,” Solutre said grimly. “Now and again we find a building opened like that, so we lie in wait and make sure they’re not coming out again. If they don’t, we track them to their border and leave them a sign to tell them we’re on to their tricks.”
“What if they do come out while you’re there?” Mira asked, troubled.
“Then we fight,” Solutre boasted, “until they run like the cowards they are, run the way they did today!”
Alea hadn’t seen any running, but she hadn’t seen any blood spilled either. “I’m glad it works,” she said, feeling numb.
“Works right well, and you’d better believe it!” Solutre shook her bow for emphasis. “They don’t want fighting with the Corbies because they don’t want to have to bury the ones who would die! A band needs every member it’s got!”
Alea reflected that was surely true of the Corbies themselves, too.
She went for a walk with her companion, while dinner was cooking.
“Can they fight as well as they claim?” she wondered.
“If they can fight at all,” Mira said with conviction, “they’re far better off than we serfs!”
“There’s truth in that, I’ll wager,” Gar said thoughtfully, “and they do seem to be trained in the use of weapons, even if they never use them against other people.”
Alea gave him a quick and incisive glance. “You’re planning to use them yourself!”
“Why, no,” Gar said equably, “only to let them use us—or our knowledge, at least.”
So after supper, he and Alea went apart, but still well within sight of the band, and sat down to meditate. It only took fifteen minutes before Solutre came over to Mira and demanded, “What are they doing, just sitting there like that?”
“Meditating,” Mira told her.
“Meditating?” Solutre said in disbelief. “What kind of magic is that?”
“Only concentration,” Mira said. “They’re trying to understand how everything fits together. It’s sort of like dreaming when you’re awake.”
Solutre could see the sense in that. She watched Gar and Alea, her face thoughtful. Then she went and spoke with some of her clansfolk, who also turned thoughtful.
Mira turned to Blaize, amused. “How long do you think it will be before they’re pestering Gar and Alea to teach them?”
“Tomorrow.” Blaize glanced around at their hosts. “They pride themselves on their magic, even though they pretend there is no such thing. I don’t mind telling you, I won’t sleep easily tonight.”
Mira stared at him, feeling his apprehension; it awakened fears she had been trying to quell. “But they seem so ordinary, once you look past the oddness of their bodies and hair and ornaments! Surely they can’t really be the monsters of the old wives’ tales!”
“I wouldn’t think so, but they’ve had so many surprises for us already,” Blaize said. “I can’t get those old stories out of my mind, that the cities held only diseased madmen whose mere touch would infect you with a horrible illness!”