They had tinder stacked and a couple of big camp-kettles next to it, but no fire going. About eight were women; nobody was under eighteen or older than early middle age. They all seemed to have at least one horse, but the mounts looked hard done by, and some of the people were wounded. And they all had a sword and bow or crossbow and a shield, marked with Deseret's golden bee on a blue background. A few had mail-shirts, or armor of sheet-steel plates hammered to fit and riveted onto leather jackets, both painted a greenish gray sage color.
And the place doesn't stink, Rudi thought; there was only a slight natural smell of horses, leather, and sweat and smoke soaked into woolen clothing. Which with twenty-odd people is a good sign. They're taking care of things, tired as they are.
Edain waved as he recognized a girl named Rebecca Nystrup-her father had bought Rancher Brown's horses for Deseret's army, back.. .
Well, well. That was in May, and doesn't it seem the longest time?
Edain had been quite taken with her, for which Rudi didn't blame him, the girl being well beyond comely and near his age. He'd have been tempted in that direction himself, under other circumstances. And she'd been friendly to Edain, in a very proper way. The young Mackenzie's smile died as he took in the grimness of the little party. Rudi nodded politely to the girl but spent his attention on the rest of her land-folk.
"Colonel Donald Nystrup, 2nd Cavalry, Army of the Republic of New Deseret," their apparent leader said, a man in his thirties with light streaks in his brown beard and utter weariness in his blue eyes.
"Rudi Mackenzie," the clansman replied, swinging down from his saddle and shaking hands. "You're kin to Bishop Nystrup, I'd be saying from the looks of you. Not his son?"
"Bishop Nystrup was my uncle, and Rebecca's my cousin," he said. "But close enough."
Rudi sighed mentally as he looked at the fugitives and noted the was. Bishop Nystrup had been a conscientious man who did his very best for his people, in the brief time Rudi had known him. The sigh also had a little regret that the refugees were going to consume most of the food that he'd expected to feed his party through the next couple of weeks.
Threefold return, remember, he thought. If we have to pull our belts tighter for a few days, it won't kill us.
"It's coming on for sundown," he said. "Shall we make camp together, and perhaps make some stone soup?"
Nystrup looked puzzled for a moment-evidently the story wasn't as common among his people as it was with Mackenzies-and then his shoulders slumped very slightly as he recognized the invitation to share supplies.
"That would be a Chris-ah-kindly deed," he said. "We took what we could, but it wasn't all that much, and we lost the rest of our food in a skirmish two days ago."
Ingolf came up. "You took horses and weapons," he said, giving the group the same once-over Rudi had. "That's the essentials, you betcha. You can get food if you have to, with a bow or a shete in your hand."
Nystrup glanced at him. "I'm a soldier, but I'm not inclined to play bandit," he said, bristling a little.
Ingolf shrugged; the two men were of an age, in their late twenties, but the Easterner looked older just then.
"I was a soldier in a lot of places, straight-leg," he said; for a moment his dark blue eyes seemed lost in memory. "And I can tell you that sometimes the difference is sort of abstract. If you're planning to keep fighting the Prophet-"
"False prophet!" Rebecca said defiantly behind her cousin, and ignored his frown.
"Yah, I've got no problem with that false part," he said, touching his bruised face.
"You were wounded fighting the CUT?" she asked with quick sympathy.
Ingolf laughed, and she flinched a little. "You might say so. A spy from Corwin named Kuttner wormed his way into Vogeler's Villains-my outfit-got my friends all killed back East, captured me, dragged me off to Corwin, tortured me, screwed with my head, and when I escaped they chased me to Oregon; then they killed the lady I was with and damned near killed me, and just now they captured me and tortured me and screwed with my head again. You might say I've been fighting them. Not very effectively, but yes, I've got reason to do it with feeling."
He turned his head away and swallowed. Rudi winced slightly; he'd been feeling hard done by because he'd been dragged away from home by all this. The Easterner had lost the only home or real kin he had.
Ingolf faced Nystrup and touched his own face again; the swelling had gone down, but there was a spectacular range of colors under the dust and beard. When he spoke again his voice was altogether flat:
"Fighting the false prophet, especially if you're not doing it in a regular army, then you're going to have to get flexible. It's a rough game, and on both sides. You can't let people decide to just sit things out and see who wins. Better not to try at all if you're not willing to see it through to the end."
Rudi nodded soberly. Ingolf wasn't only a sworn enemy of the CUT; he'd been a wandering fighter for hire for years out East, in the fabled-and fabulously wealthy and populous-realms of the Mississippi valley, Iowa and Nebraska and Kansas. And after that he'd been boss of a salvage outfit which went deep into the old death zones, to the dead cities of the Atlantic Coast, which was just as dangerous and involved a lot of the same skills.
"Hey, ndan bell, indo hun!" Mary called. Which meant strong back, simple mind, roughly. "Give us a hand! Not you, Rudi. The other strong back and simple mind. Ingolf."
"What about me?" Odard said. "I'm always ready to help a beautiful damsel or two in distress."
"If you have to ask, Odard, you'll never understand."
The young Baron raised an eyebrow, shrugged, and went with Mathilda to help hobble their horses and the four mules who'd drawn the Conestoga before they dumped it. They both knew horses well, of course; Protectorate nobles might have grooms, but they learned their way around stables from infancy. Ingolf started unloading sacks of dried beans and jerky and barley from the pack-saddles at the twin's direction. As a boil-up it wouldn't be very appetizing, but it would keep you going.
Then Ignatius got out the medicine chest, with Rudi assisting. Someone who knew what they were doing had done the bandaging-unsurprisingly, that turned out to be Rebecca-but the antiseptic ointments made from aloes and molds were useful. He'd never taken formal training beyond the first aid all Mackenzies learned in school, but Judy Barstow was both the Clan's chief healer and his mother's oldest friend and he'd been around Aunt Judy all his life. Ignatius was better than that, virtually a doctor; the Order wanted its knight-brothers to be able to turn their hands to just about anything, since they spent a lot of time on their own in places hostile, remote, or both.
"There is nobody here who won't recover, given food and rest," the priest said to the Deseret colonel when he'd finished.
"That… may be a problem," Nystrup said. Then he smiled: "I'd read about guerilla warfare in OCS-Officer Candidate School-and they went on about how valuable a sanctuary is to an insurgency, but it was all sort of theoretical. I'm just getting used to how much I relied on having someone to take the wounded off my hands. And yes, food's a problem too. I don't have a commissariat anymore, or local Stake storehouses."
" We'd have more if we'd kept the wagon," Ritva grumbled, as she measured ingredients into the cauldron.
We kept the essentials, Rudi thought. The weapons, the medicine chest, and the cash. But no need to go into detail; best not put temptation in our Mormon friends' way.
"If we'd kept the wagon, we'd be thirty or forty miles that way"-Rudi pointed back towards the site of the rescue-"and someone would have caught us by now."
"Yes, but it's the principle of the thing," his half sister said, getting out their salt-and-seasoning box. "All that lovely shopping we did in Bend, wasted. C'mon, Ingolf, let's give these people some help."