"The cavalry to the rescue!" Red Leaf said, as he lifted his son down from the saddle, pulled the stopper from his water bottle with his teeth and held it to the young man's mouth.
Then: "Well, sorta."
Rudi nodded, wheezing. My own folk? he asked himself.
A quick survey showed them all-except Edain, but the mule cart was small in the distance by now, and it would keep going until the mules recovered their nerves or dropped dead. He closed his eyes for a long moment, then pulled his canteen from Epona's saddlebow; he took off his helmet, filled it, held it for the mare's slobbering muzzle and then rinsed out his mouth with the last swallows. There was blood in his mouth from a place where he'd cut the inside on his teeth, an injury he hadn't noticed until now.
Now it stung like fire under the salt-iron taste, and he probed gingerly at it with his tongue. Luckily the teeth all seemed in order; he doubted there were any first-rate dentists within reach.
As he looked up Virginia Kane came to them; Fred Thurston was by her side, looking at her a little oddly. He saw why when she held up a dripping scalp of her own; it was one shade lighter than her sun-streaked auburn-brown locks.
"Vince Rickover," she said with satisfaction. "Guess he's goin' to be along to protect me after all."
She looked at the bloody lock of hair. "Leastways, part of him will be."
Rudi blinked. Remind me never to press an unwelcome suit with this one! he thought.
Just then Mathilda came up. Their eyes met, and they both smiled. He would have laughed, but his mouth hurt too much.
Then: "What's that?" he blurted, looking down at the squirming bundle in Mathilda's arms.
Epona looked at it too, and bared her eyeteeth, rolling a great dark eye and sidling a little, snorting through wide red nostrils.
"Stop that, you big baby," Mathilda said to her. "It's just a kitten."
Then she held up the cub, all head and eyes and huge paws absurdly disproportioned to its gangly little body. "Isn't it adorable?"
The three-week infant turned and tried to sink its needle fangs into her hand, then recoiled when they met armor.
"Good thing you've got a first-rate pair of mail-gloves, moi breagha," Rudi said.
Suddenly he needed to sit, but… he looked around.
Is there a spot nearby without bodies on it, or at least blood?
TheScourgeofGod
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dead cities cry laments
For children grown strange
For a world that died in birthing
Children it could never know;
Beneath the winter's grass
New blossoms wild and fair From: The Song of Bear and Raven
Attributed to Fiorbhinn Mackenzie, 1st century CY
"Wake up, people! Get up and wash your bodies, drink a lot of water, make your blood thin and healthy!"
The crier was shouting at the top of his lungs and beating on an iron triangle as he walked; now and then someone would stick their head out of a tent and shout back at him, usually something unfriendly and sometimes involving invitations to do things with horses, sheep or his mother. Rudi Mackenzie woke, yawned and stretched beneath the comforting buffalo-robe. Most of the aches and scrapes from yesterday's running fight were fading, though some of the bruises would have to go through the gamut of colors before they left him. Still, that was familiar enough; if you fought, you got thumped, and counted yourself lucky to have no more.
The welcome was nearly as strenuous as the fight! he thought.
It flickered through his memory in bright shards; the great ring of fires, the excited crowds pushing forward to hear Red Leaf's impassioned description of the action, the discordant wailing from the womenfolk of the fallen in the background. Louder chanting and nasal song from the throng, drums throbbing, cheers around him as the victors showed their captured horses and weapons and the grisly personal trophies and boasted of their deeds.
And then Red Leaf had gotten to the part where Rudi beat the Cutter officer and saved Three Bears from the lion: hands lifting him out of the saddle, pounding him on the back, pulling him into the whooping, whirling, stamping, screeching, leaping delirium of the scalp-and-victory dance, until he could scarcely stagger to his bed.
He sat up and ran his hands through his hair as the crier outside called his message again, winced as he hit a tangle, then searched for his comb. The tent where he and the other men of the party had been put up was something new; he'd expected tipis, and there had been a few in the encampment, some of them huge. But most of the dwellings were like this one, a round barrel shape twenty feet across on a wheeled platform, the walls five feet tall and topped by a conical roof rising a little higher than Rudi's head in the center. The structure was an interlaced pattern of thin withes crossing one another in a diamond pattern and lashed together with thongs; the outside was covered in neatly sewn hides treated with some sort of glaze to make them waterproof, and from the look of it the interior could take a quilted lining as well in cold weather. The floor was plywood covered in rugs.
Everyone was stirring; Rudi took down a canvas water bottle from a peg and obeyed part of the herald's injunction. The more he looked around, the more he was impressed with the neat economy of space; their weapons, armor and other gear were all stowed overhead on racks that folded down from the ceiling, for example, and the middle of the tent had a ceramic plate inset to mount a stove in cold weather, with a space for a flue running up to a hole in the central peak. Light came from actual glass windows set in the latticework walls, and there was an unlit lamp on a shelf over the door; the interior smelled of well-tanned leather and faintly of smoke.
"Rise and shine, men!" he called, as he rolled up his bedding and lashed it to the wall with the thongs provided.
Groans and grunts answered him; like his mother he was always cheerful in the morning, and it had always mystified him why some people resented it.
Why waste the day? There's things to be doing! But sure, you can't convince the sleepyheads.
He slipped on his kilt instead and picked up his shaving kit; Ingolf joined him, and they ducked out of the door-thoughtfully leaving it open to the bright early-morning sunlight and cool air. A pillow thrown by Odard, who was not cheerful in the mornings, bounced off their backs.
"Whatever's cooking smells very good indeed," Rudi said; it involved frying and, he thought, onions. "Odard will crawl out when it penetrates."
Men in breechclouts were walking past; the two travelers jumped down from the wagon platform and joined them at their friendly invitation.
Seen by daylight the hocoka was a great horseshoe of the tents-on-wheels, with an opening to the east and the tent doors facing inward; their white exteriors were painted in colorful geometric patterns, or stylized birds and beasts, or what looked like murals. Some of the larger ones had words inset in the decorations: at a glance he saw LIBRARY and CLINIC. Rudi estimated at least a hundred and fifty of the dwellings in all, not counting two huge conical tipis flanking the entrance and another, even larger and colored red, in the center of the open space. Smoke drifted from cookfires, mostly under sheet-metal tubs on legs or Dutch ovens, and the intoxicating smell of brewing chicory was strong.
And I'm even beginning to like the taste.
The interior of the great encampment had been trodden to bare dust, but grass was soft beneath the soles of his feet when the crowd left it. Around was a view of mile upon mile of rolling green splashed with drifts of the delicate white-pink prairie rose, taller purple coneflower, scarlet western lily and yellow wild sunflower. The ground dropped off to a fair-sized river southward, and the Black Hills showed clear to the north, but most of the horizon was like a bowl dropped over a world of infinite spaces.