"I know an old story," Lin said enthusiastically, " 'bout a cowboy that got in Dutch with this Bossman, so the Bossman made him shoot an apple-"
The Cutters cheered and clapped when he'd finished; evidently they thought that a lot more entertaining than a simple shooting match; they were making bets as if it was a settled thing before the story was fully told. Rebecca sucked in her breath sharply. Aylward the Archer's son felt his skin go pale, and clammy with cold sweat.
He wouldn't have expected one of these grass-country men to have heard of William Tell.
"I don't know how long we've got," Ritva murmured.
Or is it Mary?
Rudi couldn't tell while he stood looking down southward on the little town of Picabo. He was half a mile north of the town wall, and several hundred feet up on the scrub-covered slopes of the hill. From this distance it still looked the pleasant place it must have been once.
For one thing, you can't smell it, he thought grimly.
Here there was nothing but the clean warm wind, and the scents of rock and dirt and sage. His half sister was behind him, and close enough that they could talk, but she was invisible beneath the lip of a ravine. To any casual observer in the town-and he'd noticed that at least one Cutter was always in view wherever he went-he was simply looking out over the valley of Silver Creek and the long plains beyond.
"It's not a place I'd linger of my own will," he said.
"Bad?" she said.
"No, it's a merry place, like an inn where you'd be glad to get your feet up and have an ale and a song in good company. Well, if you don't mind rape, plunder, murder and the stink of rot and the flies crawling over your face and your food. Tell me more."
"We're not sure, but…" the young woman said. "We backtracked and watched our trail, and… it's possible there was someone there, scouting around our campsites."
"Possible?" he said; he'd hoped they'd broken contact with the Cutters in the lava country.
"If there was, they were really, really good at not being noticed. More of… a feeling… than anything definite. We didn't want to take more than a few hours to check."
Rudi's eyebrows went up. He wouldn't care to try playing dodge-the-scout with Mary and Ritva working as a team. They'd had very careful training from experts all their lives, natural talent, and for their age a lot of experience in varied types of country. Aunt Astrid kept her Rangers busy.
"There was only one, though, if there was one. He could have been a wandering hunter being cautious, but I didn't like it. Meanwhile, Ritva-"
Ah, so it is Mary. Someday I'll be able to tell the difference without looking close.
"-found where the other people who cut their way out of this Picabo place were. Hiding half a day's travel north of here; they had a hideaway in the hills, with a deep tube well and some caves, and supplies. There are about thirty; all men, say twenty fit to fight-the rest are badly wounded."
"Ah, that explains something," Rudi said, doing a little mental arithmetic.
Explains the men with the fires under their heads. But presumably they didn't talk… probably Jed Smith didn't know the right questions to ask. Brave of them to attack, but foolish… Still, in their place…
"The Cutters are pulling out of here tomorrow," he said.
"Hit them at dawn?" Mary said.
"No, they'll be expecting something then, or at least sort of expecting and taking precautions. Their leader, Jed Smith, is too shrewd by half. Here's what we'll do-"
He finished and she repeated the salient points back to him. Then she cleared her throat.
"How's Ingolf?" she asked casually.
Aha, Rudi thought, but carefully kept the smile out of his voice and off his face.
"Better," he said. "It helps him to have work to do-and he's been doing a good job of it. I couldn't have carried it off in a thousand years, not without a lot of experience I haven't had."
"Well, you'll be twenty-three in December, Rudi. You'll have a chance to accumulate it."
He nodded, and thought: If I'm not laying stark for my totem bird to eat my eyeballs fairly soon.
"I'd better get back," he said. "It wouldn't look good for Ingolf's assistant to be absent through all the bargaining."
"Manwe and Varda watch over you, Rudi," she said soberly.
"And the Lady hold you in Her wings, and the Lord ward you with His spear, my sister," he replied softly.
Then she was gone; there wasn't a noise, just a feeling of emptiness, and perhaps the staccato chuck-chuck-chuck calling of an oriole was a little louder. Rudi rose smoothly, his sword scabbard in his left hand, and half slid down the slope; there was a click of rock and sliding earth- he wasn't trying to be quiet. Epona greeted him at the bottom with a snort, throwing up her head from where she'd been grazing, and then trotting over. He caught at the saddlebow and vaulted up as she passed, giving her a friendly slap on the neck as his feet found the stirrups. They needed no conscious signals; she turned her head towards the village gate and floated into a canter, taking a rail fence with a bunching of the great muscles between his thighs, and landing with a deceptive thistle-down softness.
She pulled in her pace as they approached the gate. Rudi wrinkled his nose, and Epona snorted through hers; she knew what that smell meant. There was enough of a breeze to make it more tolerable than inside the wall, though. The Cutters had the captives they were ready to sell there, together with bundles of other loot, and the women's tools and goods of their making-cloth mainly, but also some handicrafts. Ingolf had been running them through their paces, questioning them sharply on their skills.
"Lifestreams of the Masters and the hearts of the Men of Camelot, but that's a purty horse!" the Rancher said as the Mackenzie cantered up.
"Not just her looks, either," he went on, and listed her points. "You or your kin have any of her get?"
"Back home in Newcastle," Rudi said, inclining his head respectfully. "A stallion at stud, and a colt."
The good manners were acting, of course, but Rudi felt an unpleasant moment of empathy with the man; he had to, when someone appreciated Epona so knowledgeably.
Which gives me the crawls, the man being so detestable otherwise, he thought. Yet what man is all of one piece? He may be a loving husband and kind to animals and concerned for his folk.
"I wouldn't use her as a riding horse, not on a long dangerous trip or for war," Jed said, shaking his head. "Waste of a good broodmare, you ask me."
"We've a good stud, back home in Newcastle," Rudi said with a shrug.
The Mackenzies were passing as Ingolf's young cousins-Ingolf and Rudi were about the same height and build, and all of them not so different in coloring or cast of features that they couldn't be close kin. Supposedly they dealt for a family business, farms, smithies and weaving workshops, and livestock-which latter made them respectable enough for a Rancher to deal with as near equals.
"I'll say you do! If only you could bring some up our way, I'd give seven, eight hundred for a stallion colt out of her, if the sire was anything."
The Cutters were all passionate horsemen and horse breeders; Jed would have been content to talk over Epona for longer yet, and drop some heavy hints about buying her, though there wasn't the slightest doubt he knew she was well past mark of mouth. Ingolf cleared his throat.
"Don't mean to hurry you, Rancher, but…"
Jed sighed. "Yeah, we got to get goin'. All right, you want them to strip down?" He jerked a thumb at the captives. "It's not as if they were respectable."
"I'm not buying them for their looks," Ingolf said, shrugging. "It's their work I'm interested in."
Jed slapped him on the shoulder. "You're more sensible than most men your age," he said; he was perhaps a decade older than Ingolf's twenty-eight.
Which means he was fourteen or fifteen when the Change came, Rudi thought suddenly. I wonder what sort of lad he was. And what might he have been, if the old world had not died in an instant.