I thought I'd grown up free of the Change, not hagridden by it the way the old folks are, the way Dad was, so he'd drink too much and cry whenever he couldn't keep himself from thinking about it. I can't even remember it, not even the flash and the pain, nor the years right after when things were worst. I was too young. But here there's nothing but death and ghosts, and it's as if you can hear them all screaming and sobbing, hear it drifting on the wind. It'll be a thousand years before they stop.
He flung up his clenched right fist in its steer-hide glove and barked: "Halt!"
The whole train stopped in a slow clatter of hooves and squeal of brake levers, five big rubber tired steel-frame wagons drawn by six horses each, and the two-score of guards and ostlers and salvage experts who made up Vogeler's Villains-not that every single one couldn't fight at need, including the four women. They all looked around; there was a wide meadow right ahead, and more of the scrub forest to their right and left, with sand showing through the sparse grass beneath. The meadow had the broken asphalt of the roadway looping around it in an oval and two roads leading south, so it had probably been a roundabout once. Nothing much grew there but some low green brush, and a couple of dead trees poking up through them.
Kaur stood in the stirrups and sniffed. "I think that's salt water," she said. "The maps say the ocean should be close, here, unless everything's silted up. Innsmouth's that way."
She pointed right south, the steel bangle on her wrist twisting. Her brother Singh nodded. Dark-skinned and hawk faced in a way different from Injuns, they were both from a little village founded in the farming country west of Marshall by refugees from Minneapolis right after the Change, and both were three or four years younger than Ingolf's twenty-seven. They wore mail shirts like his; she had a plain bowl helmet and he covered his blue-black hair under a dark turban with a steel cap underneath, and the ends of his beard tucked up into the cloth on either side. They were Sikhs-he still wasn't sure exactly what that entailed even after six years together, since they didn't talk about it much. Apparently they were the only ones of their kind left in the world, as far as they knew.
The Lakota had burned out their people's settlement, and they'd found everyone dead when they came back from a hunting trip. He'd taken them into his troop during the Sioux war, and they'd been together ever since. Dur ing the war they'd fought with a cold ferocity that made even the wild raiders from the high plains afraid. What they'd done to prisoners to make them talk made him wince a little to recall… and he wasn't a squeamish man.
"Do a flit forward," he told them. "Mounted-quick and dirty. Don't take any chances, and get back before dark."
He did know they were both first-class scouts, the best in the Villains apart from him and Jose, and they could move quietly while wearing a mail shirt, which most folk couldn't. The band was shorthanded since Boston. Boston had been very bad…
They nodded. Singh grinned in the thickness of his black beard; he was a big burly man, nearly as big as In golf, and the muscles bunched in his brown forearms as he picked the reins off his saddlebow. Sometimes when he'd had a drink or two he'd straighten horseshoes with his hands for a joke.
"We shall be like lions, Captain Ingolf," he said, and his sister nodded, a rare smile on her face.
"Like a lioness," she added.
They always say that, and they never say why it's funny, Ingolf thought, as they heeled their horses into a walk; Kaur dropped a little behind, covering her brother with an arrow on the string of her saddlebow.
I know what lions are. He had seen pictures in old books, and once a trader had brought a skin through, just before he left home. They've got 'em down in Texas.
One of his best men came from there, having wandered up the way people did every now and then and joined the bossman's army when Ingolf did; he'd told stories about them, how they'd bred up in the bush country until they were a major nuisance along the Rio Grande, the way tigers were farther north.
Sort of tiger sized but colored like a cougar, and the males have a big black ruff around the neck, and they hunt together in packs like wolves. OK, a lion's big and fierce and sneaky, and so's Singh… well, his sister is medium-sized and fierce and sneaky. But why's it funny?
"All right, we'll camp here," he called loudly. Then he squinted at the sun; they still had eight hours to dark, this time of year. "Jump to it!"
Everyone knew what to do; some cleared the brush; others drove the wagons into a circle and linked them with chains and knockdown barriers of timber, shoved and fastened coils of razor wire under the vehicles, saw to the rest of the defenses, built fires, scavenged firewood, got the cooking gear ready. They had plenty of food, besides hoarded dried fruits and such to keep them from scurvy; this area swarmed with deer and duck, rabbit and bear, and some of the rivers were thick with fish, where the old time poisons weren't still leaking from rusting storage tanks or lingering in the mud.
The natives were too thin on the ground nowadays to keep the game down, and they weren't really very good hunters, most of them…
Not of animals, at least, he thought grimly as he swung down and handed over Boy's reins.
The stock were watered from buckets, and the wood teams also collected any green fodder around and piled it up for them to stretch the remnants of the parched corn. The Villains were cheerful enough, more so than he'd expected; there was even some laughing and horse play, and after the main work was done someone got out a guitar.
I'm going to see every one of you gets a home out of this, if I can; so help me God and His mother.
He smiled to himself; homes for the ones who didn't just want to blow every penny on booze, whores and fancy duds, at least.
And me, I'm going to be rich, if I can, with a fort and land to the horizon. None of my kids are going to have to earn a living like this when I have 'em. And God knows I've earned it… And as for you, my dear brother Edward, you can shit sideways, fold yourself in half and go blind back there in the old homestead. Maybe I'll come visit my nieces and nephews, with gifts fit for a bossman's heirs.
Kuttner came over, and Ingolf hid a grimace. Al though the little man had turned out to be a lot tougher and less of a complainer than he'd expected back in Des Moines, and a hell of a lot better in a fight, that hadn't made him any more agreeable, just less disgusting. He was about thirty, a bit below average height-five six or so-thin and wiry, with close-cropped brown hair and an unremarkable face that looked distorted, somehow, without being in any way abnormal if you considered it feature by feature.
"We should push on to Innsmouth, see if we can find a usable boat," Kuttner said; his voice always sounded as if he was in a hurry
… which he generally was.
"Mr. Kuttner, you know I'm the best in this business, don't you?" he said, swatting at a mosquito.
It went squit and left a smear of blood on his cheek. He had bites under his armor, too.
"Yes, Mr. Vogeler, but-"
"Kuttner," he said, getting a little less polite, "did you ever wonder why the best man in this business is only twenty-seven years old?"
Kuttner stopped-which was a wonder, because he liked to talk better than listen-and looked at him out of his ordinary brown eyes. "No, Mr. Vogeler, I can't say that I have. Why?"
"Well, two reasons. First, it's a pretty new business, the way my Villains do it, because there hasn't been enough call for it till now. Second, those who take it up don't usu ally live very long, if they come anywhere near this far east. I am alive and I aim to get back to Iowa still alive, and collect what was promised. Are you sure we have to do this? The Bossman didn't mention Nantucket when we talked-we've got the stuff he wanted from Boston and that was the last on our list."