"But thanks for the thought," and he nodded, blushing.
Rudi tore a loaf as well. The bread was well made, with an egg-glaze crust that crackled when he ripped it. The butter was sweet and fresh too, although they had to keep a piece of cloth across it to deter the flies. It was the flies and the smell and the thought of where the flies had been that made him hesitate, and evidently the same occurred to Edain just as he was swallowing, for the younger clansman turned a little green under his ruddy tan.
You didn't grow up squeamish about stinks or bugs in a Mackenzie farming dun, but this…
"Ground and center," Rudi said quietly, making himself eat.
Food was life, human toil and the sacrificial blood of the Powers, so it was sacrilege to waste it; and he was going to need his strength, and he'd done without a good deal for the past week. Odard murmured a prayer before he took some of the bread himself, which surprised Rudi. He'd always thought that the young nobleman was only conventionally religious because it was expected of him. He'd confessed to Father Ignatius a couple of times on the trip, but once he'd had to go back a day later before the priest would agree to communicate him, and he'd come away from that one with his ears turning pink.
Sure, and a man's inward self is like the woods on a moonless night, Rudi thought. Even your own self. Especially your own. It always surprises you, sometimes with a noise, sometimes with a jab in the eye.
Ingolf spoke to Edain; his voice was rough, but Rudi thought he detected a certain sympathy in it:
"There are going to be worse things to see and smell before we reach the East Coast, kid," he said. "You've got to get case-hardened pretty quick."
"I've seen fights before and men killed, sure and I have!" Edain snapped. "And worse things… like that Haida raid we were caught in, up near Tillamook on the ocean, Chief, and what they did to that poor woman and her bairn. But this is… very bad."
Rudi replied: "It's worse because here the raiders won, Edain. The which they didn't at Tillamook, and you can claim some of the credit for that."
Edain looked heartened. Rebecca set the plates of food before them and then sat at the foot of the table herself. Rudi found he was hungry enough to enjoy it after all, and a deep drink of cool milk rich with cream. The day's heat was fading, though the thick adobe walls of the farmhouse's first story radiated a little of it back.
"This is… squalid," Odard observed. "And did you smell those animals? I'm no rose myself, not after the way we've been traveling, but…"
Ingolf gave a short dry laugh. "Oh, I know why they're a mite rancid," he said. "They're from the Hi-Line."
At their glances he went on: "I've talked to men who've been through there. You can travel fifty, sixty miles at a time and not see a single tree. The only way to heat water or cook is over dried cowflops. And the winters are almighty cold. You get out of the habit of taking baths, or taking off your clothes at all mighty fast, out there."
Odard nodded. "I do hope we don't run into anything worse."
The Easterner made a sound, but this time it wasn't a laugh of any sort. Rudi looked at Ingolf, but the Easterner's eyes were blank, as if all his attention was focused within.
"Worse?" he said softly, coming back to them. "Oh, yeah. I've seen as bad as this, during the Sioux War. That was a hard bitter fight, and a lot of… questionable… things got done. By us and them both."
His hands closed and opened unconsciously, and he swallowed as if the food had turned sour in his mouth before he went on.
"East of the Mississippi, that's a whole different thing. It's like God pulled out the plug at the bottom of the world, and everything human drained out. And then something… else… came trickling in, and messed things up, twisted them. I don't mean just the Change. I swore I wouldn't go back to the deadlands again, not even for a fortune… and now I'm headed back all the way to Nantucket because of a vision and a dream. Go figure."
Edain paused a minute, swallowing, then doggedly cut another piece of ham, dipped it in the mustard pot, chewed and swallowed. Everyone was silent for several moments. That was the way they were headed, into the death zones, where the hordes fleeing from the stricken cities had overlapped and eaten the earth bare, and then each other. Not everyone had died, not quite, but their descendants weren't really human anymore. The stories were gruesome even at a distance; enough rumors had trickled back from the borders of California. From what Ingolf said the mega-necropolis on the Atlantic Coast was just as bad, and he'd seen it firsthand.
"That's as may be," Edain said stoutly; dangers rarely daunted him when they arrived, and never beforehand. "You said these Cutters were just men. Well, that they may be, but they're roit bad ones an' no mistake."
Rudi mopped his plate and poured himself more milk from the jug. Halfway through, he wondered if the women who'd milked the cows had spat in the bucket, but finished anyway. They'd have reason.
"They are men. Men who've been encouraged to give guest-room to the worst parts of themselves," he said thoughtfully.
Edain made a protective sign. "They're blaspheming the Goddess, that's what they're doing," he said. "I just hope we aren't caught in Her anger."
He held his hands up before his face. "Use these my hands to avenge Your likeness, Dark Mother, Morrigu Goddess of the Crows, Red Hag of Battles. So I invoke You."
Rudi nodded soberly and joined in the gesture and the prayer. "So mote it be!"
We fight, we of humankind, he thought. Man against man for pride and power, tribe against tribe for the land that feeds us and our families… That's the nature of things, the way They made us, neither good nor bad in itself. To fight is the work of the season, just as wolves fight one another for lordship of a pack, or a whole pack battles another for hunting range in a bad year to keep themselves and their cubs from hunger.
But taking women by force wasn't war. Nor just a crime, either, not even a serious one like murder in hot blood. As Edain had said, it was a profanation of the holy Mysteries, the divine union of Lord and Lady, Spear and Cauldron, that made all creation.
Mackenzies buried a rapist at a crossroads, with a spear thrust in the soil above; and they buried him living when they could, as a sacrifice to turn aside the anger of the Earth Powers.
These Cutters have overstepped the bounds They have laid on us, and must pay for it.
The vengeance of the Lady could be slow; it was also very thorough.
Thorough to the point of being indiscriminate, sometimes, Rudy thought grimly, feeling the hairs along his spine crawl a little. It would be well to make ourselves that vengeance, before it falls from somewhere else like an avalanche on all and sundry.
"Hard times make for hard men," Odard said. "Things were bad everywhere right after the Change, from what the oldsters say, and you had to be bad yourself sometimes to survive. I imagine Montana was the same, even if they weren't as crowded. My mother doesn't talk about those times much, but some of the older men-at-arms who served my father do. From what our, ah, hosts have let fall, there hasn't been much order or peace out there since then, except what the CUT imposed at the sword's edge."
Rudi nodded; that was true enough that he could be polite. His own mother had had to drive away strangers and foragers, lest the Clan-in-the-making and its neighbors be eaten bare before the first harvest. And to keep out the plagues which had killed as many as raw famine did. Away from habitation you still found the skulls lying in the brush by the overgrown roads, or bones huddled in heaps in the ruins. Sometimes they'd been scorched and cracked for the marrow.
But what Odard said was true only to a point. There was doing what you had to do to ward off death or worse, and there was treating disaster as opportunity.
"You know Chuck Barstow?" he said to the Association nobleman.
Odard nodded. "I've met him. First Armsman for you Mackenzies now, after Sam Aylward retired."