"What I'd give for fresh bread and French fries and catsup," he said.
"Or some vegetables," Singh agreed. "Or an apple."
He looked around at the ground where they squatted, then dug at it with his bowie for a moment, pulling up a clump of bluestem. He had to lean back to do it, with all the strength of his body behind it before the main stem cracked audibly. Some of the roots were as thick as a pencil, and the ground that clung to it was a fine dark gray whose clods would be coal black when they were wet.
"This is good land," the Sikh said. "It seems a pity it isn't farmed."
Ingolf nodded; the thought had occurred to him and Jose. "Yeah," he said. "But you'd need at least a thousand people to make a settlement here in the wild lands-and a fort, windmills, all sorts of stuff besides stock and tools and enough to keep you for a year or two until you had a big enough crop in. Not safe otherwise."
Kaur snorted and picked a piece of gristle out from between her teeth. "I will not farm again," she said quietly.
Ingolf tossed a gnawed rib aside and wiped the back of one big hand across his mouth before taking a swig from his canteen. "Let's get to it."
There was the usual short delay as a horse decided it wanted to stop for the night right here, but they were all hobbled and easy to catch. The short route to the bridge lay off the slightly raised roadbed; as they turned into the grass visibility shrank to less than the length of a lance, but that worked both ways-they were no longer visible themselves. Pushing through the tall coarse growth slowed the horses, and you had to watch out for pits and traps; old basements and foundations, pieces of farm machinery that had lain out for better than twenty years, and tangles of elderly barbed wire. Posts burned but the wire endured until rust broke it, unless someone harvested it to make chain mail or a new fence.
The iron-shod hooves crushed a path, and trampled nodding yellow-petaled black eyed Susans like giant daisies, clusters of purple-blue ironweed with flocks of silver spotted skippers hovering about them, and blue gentian. Quail burst out from under their hooves occasionally; Kaur nailed one to the ground with an arrow before it could flog itself into the air, bent in the saddle and scooped it up, then dropped back to the packhorse that held their meat.
"Bit of a change." Ingolf nodded.
They came up onto another road. He grunted in satisfaction at the sight of saplings crushed down where they'd taken root in broken spaces in the pavement; that and a neat circular space trampled flat in the long grass meant that Jose and the others had come through here with the wagons. He looked at the campfires and over at Kaur.
"Last night?"
"Last night." She nodded with satisfaction.
"By God, if we're lucky we may actually catch them by first dark!"
The river ran through a depression in the flat land with scalloped sides, an irregular ribbon of woods through the grasslands, bare-branched gray except where faded yel low and dark red tatters told of autumn's blaze and burn. The road bridge was a metal truss on concrete piers; a fresh gash in the railing on the western side showed where someone, almost certainly the Villains, had pushed an ancient truck over the side. It stood like a new island downstream, the water rippling around it, shedding the rust of a generation to join the Mississippi.
Ingolf sniffed. The scent of burning was strong now, and there was still a little gritty ash drifting in, making him blink watering eyes. They all wet down their bandannas from their canteens and tied them across their mouths before they left the ruins of the little city of Spring Valley.
Out on the flatlands north of town the grassland was burned down to stubble, leaving an empty plain of blackness. Smoke drifted over it from patches still smoldering; nothing stood above ground level save the charred stumps of trees and an occasional snag of wall. The des olate appearance was deceptive; in a single season this would be lush prairie again, growing all the stronger for the layer of ash. The tall grasses kept much of their bulk down belowground, and however hot the flame it didn't kill out the roots. The seeds of some of the other plants needed fire to germinate. Every season's fire gnawed away a little more of the works of men, though.
He coughed into the damp cloth. "I hope our folks got out in time," he said, worry in his voice.
They all nodded, familiar with the dangers of a prairie fire. In old dry grass like this the wall of flame could be twenty or thirty feet high, traveling faster than a gallop ing horse and ready to scorch out the lungs of anything it caught. He stood in the stirrups where the road turned west and peered under a sheltering hand, squinting against the midafternoon sun.
"Doesn't look like the fire's still going," he said. "Not enough smoke."
Singh nodded. "The wind's shifted," he pointed out. It was in their faces now, carrying gusts of smoke and ash. "It's usually westerly around here anyway. That would push the fire back onto the burned ground."
Ingolf jerked his head in anxious agreement. "Think the wild men could have set it?" Kaur said, jogging along a little ahead.
"Could be. Could be they did it to drive game-it's time for their big fall hunts."
Or they could have done it to cover an attack, Ingolf thought. Or even if they didn't, they'd take the chance to kill and rob anyone caught in it.
By unspoken common consent they legged their horses up into a canter on the shoulder of the road. Out in the burned over fields small explosions of crows and buzzards took off from the blackened corpses of animals caught in the fire. After a half mile Ingolf swore and got out his binoculars for an instant.
"That's the wagons, all right. Hup! "
They rocked up into a hard gallop. The five big ve hicles were strung out on the road in marching order. One was burning, the stores-wagon, with little bitter gouts of flame when the flames hit something like linseed oil or the varnish on a spare bow. The four with the loot weren't; someone had taken the trouble to lash down the spare tilts over the everyday ones and lace everything tight, which gave sparks few places to light on vehicles mostly made of pre-Change metal. For the rest, from the signs they'd just taken all the horses and bolted when it became clear the fire was going to hit, which was sensible.
He and Kaur and Singh threw their lassoes over bits of the burning wagon, snubbed the lariats to the horns of their saddles and backed the animals, pulling it lurch ing and smoking a safe distance from the others. The horses snorted and protested, but they were too well disciplined to really balk. Then they turned west again, riding hard.
"Shit," Ingolf swore; it was far too serious for uff da.
The first body was an ostler named Sauer they'd hired east of Kalona; he'd quarreled with his farmer and been turned out of his cottage and job, but he'd always pulled his weight on the trip. Sauer had burned, and died of it. The rest of the bodies were hidden by a heaving carpet of buzzards and crows and ravens, but they were just off the scorched zone, where streaky fingers of black stretched into the bronze-brown of untouched prairie. The bluestem was trampled flat for several hundred square yards. Carrion birds took wing in a black cloud as the riders came up, revealing the arrow stubs.
"Hit them as they came out of the smoke," Singh said grimly, pointing to where a ragged line lay, along with several dead horses.
Ingolf nodded, his throat too tight to speak. A straggling trail of bodies showed where the pursuit had gone.
"These took one with them each," he said with angry pride, reading the signs on the ground.
A circle of bodies marked where Jose and about a dozen had made a last stand. The suddenness of it winded him, like someone starting a fight with an unexpected punch in the gut; half an hour ago he'd been looking forward to seeing the man again, and now there he lay on his back with the stubs of two arrows through his mail shirt and most of his face gone from the birds. There was blood on the broken shete that lay near his hand; he'd gotten that much at least.