A glance back at his frozen command group. "And that was some fancy shootin', given the angles and the time you had."
A few yards away, a Boise officer who'd been question ing a wounded Cutter swore and jerked his head back. The man had bitten off his own tongue, and spit it at the questioner in a spray of blood as he bent to hear an answer. He was laughing with a thick gobbling sound when a soldier jammed a spearhead through his throat; then he choked, kicked and died.
"What shall we do with the others, Mr. President?" an officer said, white faced with shock at the assassination attempt but too disciplined to babble.
Thurston removed his helmet and sighed, rubbing a hand across his dense cap of tight kinked hair; he looked his age then. "We're heading back to Boise. We'll take them along. They can talk, or they can join the infrastructure maintenance battalions. Have their wounded treated as soon as ours are OK."
Then he looked over at Rudi and Edain. "I've got some good archers," he said, to the younger Mackenzie this time. "But none like that. I could use a longbow corps; maybe you could teach some of my men if you're interested in a job… What's so funny?"
The last was a snap that dampened the smile on Edain's face. Still, he was a free clansman of the Mackenzies, and he spoke boldly.
"I was just thinking of how my father trained me, General."
At his raised brow, the young man went on: "When I was six, he gave me a stave cut to my size. I'd hold it out until my arm ached.. . and if I let it droop then he'd wal lop my backside. I learned to hold it as long as he liked… so then he gave me a thicker stave. When I got a real bow, I practiced an hour a day and longer on weekends, and that's not counting archery classes at school; I learned to care for my string, my bow, my arrows, to cut my own feathers and fletch my own shafts. I practiced shooting in calm, breeze, and strong wind, at still marks, moving marks, targets on the flat and in the air, and dropping fire on hidden ones, and all of them while I was standing… or kneeling… or running… or jumping."
Thurston looked as if he'd like to interrupt, but Edain continued: "Even shooting blindfolded at a target that rattled! Not to mention hunting. I dropped a running buck through thick brush at a hundred paces the year I turned thirteen, and he said I just might make a bowman worthy of the name. At sixteen I nailed a squirrel to a tree at the same range and he allowed that sure, I'd gone and done it. And that, General Thurston, sir, is how you make a Mackenzie archer!"
A couple of Thurston's soldiers looked alarmed at his insolence, even busy as they were. The general's own frown gave way to an unwilling grin, and his younger son matched the expression.
"Well, that put me in my place. Sometimes I'm still not used to the way some things take so long to learn these days."
Rudi nodded to himself. He'd noticed that about people who'd been fighting men before the Change. Evidently guns had been easy to learn well, easier even than a crossbow.
"Wait a minute," Thurston went on. "What's your last name, son? The real one, not the Mackenzie part."
"Aylward."
"You're Sam Aylward's kid?" Thurston said. "Well, no wonder."
"You know my father, sir?"
Edain sounded half-glad, half disappointed-he'd been living in that shadow all his life, and here it was a month's travel from home. Rudi sympathized; he knew what it was like to have famous parents. In his case it was worse; his were legends on both the spear and cauldron side.
"I met him in 'ninety-one," Thurston said, animated for a moment. "On a mission in the Gulf. And then he dropped in to Fort Lewis back in 'ninety-eight, just be fore the Change… and I heard of him afterward. Ayl ward the Archer, eh? No wonder, then. Wish to hell he'd ended up with me and not the flakes… er, the Mackenzies."
"You know, I love my dad," Edain muttered, as the lord of Boise turned away and began a rattle of orders to his waiting subordinates. "But there are times I get bloody sick of hearing about Aylward the Archer."
"Cheer up," Rudi said, slapping him on the shoulder. "Think of all the years you'll be Aylward the Archer."
From his expression, Edain was-and then suddenly his face fell as he realized that would mean his father wasn't around anymore.
Chapter Eighteen
Approaching Boise,
Idaho Provisional Capital,
United States Of America
June 10, CY23/2021 A.D.
It was an hour or so until sunset and the Boise road still headed northwest, though they'd turn east to enter the city itself. Shadows were beginning to fall around them, though the upper parts of the town walls and their towers were still brightly lit in the middle dis tance, and the white and scarlet fabric of the three teth ered hot-air balloons that hung several thousand feet above was even brighter. Higher still light flashed briefly from the canopy of a glider.
"It's all so… tidy," Rudi said, looking around and blinking in the bright summer sun. "Not a board loose or a building unpainted or one poor gasping weed left to propagate its kind."
Truck gardens occupied most of the land this close to the city, watered by canals and spinning windmills. There was a scattering of barns and sheds, and things like chicken coops and pigpens adding their pungencies to turned wet earth and compost, but not many houses close to the city proper-as usual, people close enough to walk out from the walls lived inside them. The pleasant tinkle and chug of running water sounded, and plenty of folk were out tending the vegetables and berry bushes and small orchards of apples and peach and cherry with hand tools and horse-drawn machines, or harvesting greens and early roots.
Many stopped to wave or shout greetings as the sol diers went by, and some of the closer ones stared at the obvious foreigners.
"So very, very, very tidy."
Rudi spoke with a mixture of mild scorn and grudging admiration. Mackenzies were farmers, and good ones, and that meant that they worked very hard indeed and admired hard workers and a neat job. But they stopped when they'd done enough to get the job done; it wasn't as if there was ever a scarcity of things that needed doing about a croft, and if you had any time to spare you spent it on dancing or a festival or a little fancywork like carving a god-post. Around here. ..
"You noticed?" one of his half sisters said dryly.
"Who could be missing it?" Rudi replied, his tone equally pawky.
"Yeah, you're riding along a road and you drop an apple core here and three people scold you and point to the waste bin," Ingolf confirmed.
"They don't feed apple cores to their pigs?" Edain said, puzzled.
"Yeah, but you've got to put it in the waste bin first. The official waste bin. That's the Approved Procedure. And if you think this is neat and tidy, wait until we get into town. The punishment for drunk-and disorderly is going around sweeping the streets up after the horses and oxen, with some sergeant kicking your ass while you do it."
The suburbs here around the modern city had been torn down with a thoroughness Rudi had never seen anywhere, even the foundation pads of the houses bro ken up; a last few metal frame buildings were being disassembled as they passed through, with bundles of girders lowered to the ground by cables and stacked on big ox-wagons to be hauled away for smithies and forges and fortress construction. The manicured look of the gardens was a little unusual. The walls ahead, though…
"Mount Angel is stronger," Father Ignatius said stoutly.
"It is that. On the other hand, it's also on the top of a four-hundred-foot hill," Rudi pointed out. "The which is a pimple in a plain of exceeding flatness. This is not."