Elder Claxton, Solomon’s father, had been at it for about two hours now, and was just getting warmed up to his subject his eyes blazing from beneath his bushy brows, blazing as brightly as had the fires which had been conquered only bare days agone.
Worn out with days and nights of unremitting toil, sapped by the pain of his bums and injuries, Solomon allowed the chairback to keep him upright, while he tried to ignore the stifling heat, the sweat bathing his body, the flies and the stink of the rancid fat with which his burns had been dressed.
But if he suffered, he knew that the sufferings of those not so privileged as to occupy the chairs in the Row of the Patriarchs must be near to the limits of physical endurance. Many of those men and women were afflicted as badly as or worse than was he, and their hard, narrow benches had no backs, no arms. In just these last two hours, seven men and women had slumped from off their benches, unconscious, and had had to be borne out of the meeting hall; Solomon was of the opinion that many more would do likewise of this hot, muggy Wednesday night. Had he been in their places, he would have “fainted” long since, but, alas, the Patriarchs had to, were expected to, set an example, and Solomon Claxton took his status in the Abode of the Righteous very seriously, as befitted the Elders chosen successor.
“Not that Pa is right all of the time,” Solomon thought to himself, trying hard to get his mind off the aches and pains and itches just now tormenting him. “Pa’s dead wrong right often. More wrong about things in recent yeast than when I was a boy and a young man. If he comes to keep getting worse at making important decisions, I suppose me and the Patriarchs will just have to send him home to God, one night, like he and them as was The Patriarchs back then did to Grandpa, his pa.”
“… Minions of Satan came and bore her off, bore off the Scarlet Woman, who had been known to us as Bettylou Hanson ere my Holy Seed rooted out and exposed to all the world her true, hellish Evil. Many men still living, men who sit now amongst you, saw with their own two eyes how she was borne off, sitting before a mounted demon, his arm most lovingly enfolding her, and her smiling up at him! Can ye then doubt that Satan walketh still across this once-cleansed world? Canst doubt that full many a girl who dwelleth amongst us, the Holy, Chosen flock of the Lord. harboreth the pure essence of ancient Evil, that …”
“Pa can call them demons if he wants to,” mused Solomon Claxton, “but they were nothing but another batch of those savage, murdering, thieving horse-nomads come in from the plains out there to do whatall they have allus done best—kill, steal, burn, lift stock—that’s all it was.
“Can’t imagine why they stole the Hanson girl, though. Far gone as she was, a good raping would likely of kilt her. But, knowing how them bastards are, they probably kilt her anyway and dumped her body out there somewhere in the wilderness, God pity her. Funny, she was allus a sweet, biddable chit. Sometimes I wonder about all of this Holy Seed and Scarlet Woman business. I wonder just how and when and why it all got started. I’ve read my Bible end to end and never found nothing relating directly to any of this Holy Seed stuff.”
Uttering a weak groan, one of the older Patriarchs slid out of his armchair onto the floor, but Elder Claxton ranted on, as if unaware that yet another of his battered flock had succumbed to the effects of oppressive heat and fresh wounds.
“If Pa don’t wind down soon,” thought Solomon Claxton, “I’ll just have to do somethin about thishere mess. Tomorrow’s coming, and until we get us some more horses and mules, us men who are sound enough to work is going to be hard put to it doing all that has to be done in the fields and all. Pa just don’t realize, it being so long since he done any farming, or work of any kind for that matter, but what with all the men and boys was kilt or hurt so bad they can’t work and with nothing but a few span of oxen for draft, we’re all going to play pure hell getting all the crops in on time, this year; so Lord’s Day or no Lord’s Day, Gospel Night or no Gospel Night, we should all be working or resting, not sitting here just listening to Pa rehash the raid and the fires and all and trying to lay them all at the door of that pore Hanson girl, just because she had the bad luck for to get grabbed and carried off and kilt by them black-hearted bastards.”
The big man sighed and cautiously shook his head at that thought. “God rest her pore little soul. And if we done her the wrongs I reckon we might’ve, I hope she asks God to forgive us.”
Bettylou Hanson slept for almost thirty hours, there on her pallet of hide and carpets.
“Let the child sleep. Ehstrah,” said Milo, upon himself awakening. “She had a long, hard ride for one so ill accustomed to a nightlong of rump-pounding in a saddle. Nor do I think that she’d been used well by her own folk before young Tim stole her.”
Ehstrah sniffed. “Not fed adequately, either, Uncle dear, by the look of her. She’s lean as a winter wolf. You’re dead certain she’s not diseased … ? You do recall what happened to Clan Guhntuh, years back, when they took in that girl they found wandering on the southern plains?”
Milo sighed a little exasperatedly. “Yes and no, Ehstrah. Yes, I well remember how Clan Guhntuh was extirpated by some form of viral plague. No, I tell you this girl is suffering from no more than exhaustion, plus the effects of the abuse and deprivation to which her own folk subjected her this last few moons.”
“They must be a singular folk, those from whom Tim Krooguh stole this Bettiloo Hahnsuhn, Milo,” Ehstrah remarked with a single shake of her graying head. “Don’t they know the danger to the child she carries that starving her portends?”
“ ‘Singular’ is a very mild term for those religious fanatics, Ehstrah,” Milo stated baldly. “I don’t think you’ve ever been this far east before, have you?”
She again shook her head, and he went on, “But I have, long before we married, you and I. I think it was Clan Grai I was then riding with, and we found a girl a bit older than this one. Stark naked, she was, her back covered from neck to knees with a single mass of festering sores from a brutal flogging, all her scalp shaven and painted red as sumac.”
“She, that girl, was pregnant, too, like this one?” asked Ehstrah.
“No,” he replied, “but her breasts still were heavy with milk, so we looked about for a babe backtracked her, but we found nothing, and when she had been nursed back to health, I found out why. Fetch some tea and dry curds and I’ll tell you that grim tale.”
Ehstrah smiled and bowed as low as any slave woman. “And what kind of tea does my master desire?”
With the new-risen Sacred Sun warming his right side and Ehstrah’s left, Milo squatted comfortably across from her with an ancient metal drinking cup in his left hand, making forays upon the bowl of cow’s-milk curds with the right. Close beside the bowl, the copper pot of tea steamed gently upon its brazier, lacing the cool morning air with the pungent odor of fresh spearmint.
“The ancestors of the Sacred Ancestors, Ehstrah, although they owned a high degree of civilization and labor-saving devices beyond the counting which gave many of them creature comforts such as folk today could not even imagine, never achieved a really homogeneous culture. Up to the very moment when that legendary folk died as a nation, still were there tiny groups that—for reasons of religion or philosophy, mostly—chose to band together and live lives that were generally harder and much more primitive, usually deriving sustenance from farming.”
“What has this history lesson to do with that Hansuhn girl, in the yurt there, Milo?” Ehstrah asked impatiently. “Gahbee and Ilsah and I can always make good use of an extra pair of hands, and if she is to become a woman of the Horseclans shortly, it is none too early for her to start learning just what will be expected of her.”