I?ve got to live, he thought. I?ve even got to let Denson help me. Too much depends on this mission coming off. Mary… all her friends… Christ, I think the world may depend on it. I want to have someplace we can go when this is all over.
TheSwordoftheLady
CHAPTER FOUR
?A woman had a baby boy
She loved him much and he gave her joy
The Good Folk came and on a whim
They took the boy away with them-?
Edain sang as he worked, loud but tuneful; his voice echoing oddly off the cracked, crumbling concrete of the highway overpass where the Southsiders were camped and over the quiet murmur of voices and clatter of tools. The wild-men had put up screens of woven branches, so not much of the hissing rain outside blew sideways into the sheltered spot. Acrid smoke from their campfires curled upward and hung beneath the arched surface, joining the soot that blackened it-this was one of their regular stops. The goaty smell of wet-but-not-washed humanity, wet dog, half-cured hides and cooking food was strong, under a stronger scent of damp earth and greenery and the silty water of the nearby creek. ?Eggs and crumbs and milk and grain
Bring my baby back again-?
Rudi didn?t sing as his hands moved sharp steel across the six-foot length of wood clamped between his booted feet and bare knees. He was a competent journeyman bowyer, as many of the folk of Clan Mackenzie were, but no more than passable compared to Edain. That meant he had to concentrate to get any sort of results, particularly when he didn?t have any tools besides knives and a hatchet. Edain?s father was a master at the trade-it was one of the reasons he was called Aylward the Archer-and the younger Aylward had grown up as familiar with it as he was with plowing a field or shearing sheep or skinning out a pig or deer.
And to be sure, concentrating makes me worry less. I must get those wagons back to Iowa! But I cannot do it alone, and so I must win the trust of these folk. That takes more than a strong sword-arm! ?There,? Rudi said, setting down the blade he?d been using as a drawknife and unlocking his ankles from about the other end of the workpiece.
He took the stave and ran it through his hands. Mountain-grown yew from the Cascades was the finest of all woods for a stick-bow, because the sapwood and heartwood were a natural laminate-strong in tension and compression respectively. This was tough springy hickory, which was a fair second best and abundant here in the east. ?What do you think?? he asked his companion.
Edain laid his piece aside and glanced down the length of trimmed wood; he?d finished two bows and half done another to Rudi?s one, as well. His face was wholly intent, lost in the task; Rudi envied him that.
A few of the Southsiders grouped around sighed unhappily when he stopped singing-they were mad for new tunes. The warrior-hunters in the front rank stayed silent, focused as sharp as augers on the making. ?Dad would laugh,? Edain said.?Or cry. Cernnunos dancing drunk on Beltane Eve, maybe he?d laugh and then he?d cry.? ?He?d curse, sure and he would,? Rudi said, grinning.?But it?ll work, eh?? ?Eh. More or less, more or less, the Huntress willin?.?
Rudi had been in and out of the Aylward household down in Dun Fairfax all his life; it was only a half hour?s walk from Dun Juniper by the short forest path, and the two young men had been friends ever since a difference of a few years in their ages stopped seeming a chasm. Sam Aylward had been one of Lady Juniper?s right-hand men from before Rudi?s birth, as well. His son braced the central grip across one knee and slowly bent the stave with his hands braced wide apart on it; muscle bunched on his thick bare arms. ?Sixty-five pounds weight at a thirty-inch draw, near as I can tell without a proper tillering frame. Between sixty and seventy, at least.?
That was only a little more than half the draw of their own longbows, but those were designed to punch through plate armor at need, or send a stout bodkin-head shaft three hundred paces and hit hard when it got there. Sixty pounds draw-weight was plenty for even heavy game, boar or bear or tiger, and it would deal with light armor well enough if the range wasn?t too great. It was certainly ten times better than anything the Southsiders had had before they came. ?Without proper vises and clamps and drawknives and gouges and.. . and proper bloody everything,? Edain grumbled.?Hmmm… by Lugh of the Many Skills, I think it needs-?
He braced it as Rudi had and took up the knife, holding the blade by the thick back and carefully shaving off a few long dark curls of seasoned wood. Then he repeated the flexing process. ?There!? he said.?Nice balanced draw. Not a bad job, Chief, considering what we?ve got for the workin? of it.?
The wood itself wasn?t bad at all; thoroughly dry, at least, and from fair-sized timber that he and Edain had split into proper triangular-section rough blanks along the grain. The Southsiders left billets in sheltered places to season on their rounds; hickory was a fine wood for spearshafts and tool handles as well. Unfortunately that seasoning and hacking some vaguely bow-shaped object out of the results was about the limit of their bowyer skills, and the product was barely worth that degree of effort. They didn?t even know enough to unstring them when they weren?t in use, and so they became worthless in a few months, though they?d grasped the fact fast enough when the clansmen told them.
The simple tapered sticks he and Edain were making had none of the walnut-root risers and polished antler-horn nocks and subtle reflex-deflex curve of Sam Aylward?s masterworks, or those of his many pupils. They might have made him laugh or frown, but they did have the true taper and D-shaped cross section, and an arrow-rest of sorts at the right point; they?d boiled a little glue from the hooves of a deer and attached tufts of rabbit fur for the shaft to rest upon, and to fasten the fletching feathers of the arrows.
And all the folk in Jake?s band exclaimed in wonder, Rudi thought. No glue, for the love of the Mother-of-all! The good part of these being so crude is that it only takes about half a day to finish the job, even without proper tools. And anyone handy with a knife and used to working wood can learn to do it. Well enough for rule of thumb, at least, if not to equal a true craftsman. A thousand times better than no bow at all. And it?s just the sort of gift they will value the most. It helps them in the long run, not just their present trouble. Help for help…
A young woman came in with a cracked rain poncho of dull yellow plastic over her shoulders, and a lopsided sort-of-woven basket full of greens and roots. She dumped it into one of the big pots that were kept going as long as the camp stayed put, and an older female-all of twenty-five or so, and looking easily forty-stirred them in with a long paddle. Which was fortunate, because it was hard to survive on an all-meat diet and stay healthy, unless you were careful and ate the whole beast.
My hosts know some of the wholesome plants, he thought.
But even this far from home and the woods they knew, the two clansmen had been able to show them some new ones, though neither of them had anything like the knowledge of such a loremistress and healer as Aunt Judy. The Southsiders had no inkling whatsoever of which mushrooms were deadly and which were safe, for example, so they shunned them all. Or that you could make acorns edible by grinding the nuts to flour and then leaching out the tannins, which meant that they had no starch that would keep any length of time. Or that And to be sure, they aren?t very healthy.
From the state of their teeth he suspected scurvy was a regular visitor to the Southside Freedom Fighters, come winter; they certainly weren?t rotting them out with too much sugar, and there were cases of goiter and terrible scarring from infected cuts. Their carnivore diet would have made them taller and more muscular and less scrawny-tough, too, if they didn?t have times of dearth fairly often.