Dies the Fire

"I'm Will Hutton," the black man replied, standing cautiously and stretching. "Nothing broke, I don't think."

He looked out into the darkness. "You going to finish off that ski

"No hurry," Havel said. "I thought I'd let him ripen a bit; he isn't going to crawl out of reach with an arrow through his spine."

He looked at his right hand and his knife. It was dripping, and in the faint light the whole of his hand and forearm looked as if they were coated with something slick and oily and darkly gleaming.

Some distant part of his mind realized that the sight would probably come back to him for years-when he was trying to sleep or eat or make love-but right now it wasn't particularly interesting.

He could just cut Bob's throat, but Havel didn't want to get that close without a good reason; Hutton was right- the man's legs were out of commission, but his arms were still working and his teeth too for that matter. Instead he carefully wiped the blade of the puukko on the clothes of the dead bandit pi

Astrid was still standing with her bow, staring at nothing; Signe was huddled into a ball on the floor, staring at the corpse of the bandit leader. Havel went past in silence- there was nothing he could do to help at that moment- and checked the bedrooms.

Mary Larsson lay spread-eagled on her bed; the mattress was saturated, and it dripped thick strings of blood onto the floor. Havel took one quick look and then carefully avoided letting his eyes stray that way while he found a blanket and covered her.

I hope she died fast, he thought, breathing through his mouth against the smell.

Unfortunately that didn't seem very likely.

Her husband was trussed to a chair in the corner of the room; alive, not too badly beaten up, but staring with the look of a man whose mind had shut down from overload, and there were vomit stains down the front of his shirt and tear-streaks through the white-gray stubble on his cheeks. Havel freed him with a few jerks of his knife, and pulled him erect.

"There's nothing you can do here," he said. "Come on, Ken." The older man's lips moved, almost silently.

Havel went on: "Astrid and Signe are fine." Or at least alive. Technically speaking, they weren't even raped, I think. "They need you, Ken. They need you now."

That seemed to get through to him; he stumbled along under his own power. Havel left him with his daughters in the living room as he hefted the dead body of the bandit chief and half carried it out to pitch over the railing of the veranda; Will Hutton watched with somber satisfaction.

Then Havel pulled the spear out of the wall. The young bandit's body came with it; the point pulled free of the wood and the heavy corpse flopped down into the pool of blood and fluids, but the square shoulders of the knife caught on something inside. Havel put a foot on the body and worked it free, careful not to loosen the bindings; then he hefted the pole into an overhand grip like a fish gig before walking out towards Jailhouse Bob.

He hadn't gotten far.

They buried Mary Larsson in the morning, and were ready to leave around noon. Her husband had come out of his shock a little by then, and none of the younger Larssons wanted to stay at the ranger cabin any longer than they had to; Hutton was anxious to get back to his wife and daughter, of course.

Astrid hadn't slept much. From the way she started screaming the moment she slipped out of consciousness that was probably just as well.

I'll give her some of the tranquilizers tonight, Havel thought, turning to look at her as she sat against the base of a tree, face on her knees and arms wrapped around her head. And being away from this place will help. I hope.

Will Hutton came up and looked in the same direction, nodding.

"Best get the horses back to the road too as fast as we can," he said, finishing his bowl of elk stew. "They need rest, but they need food a lot more, and they can't eat pine needles. I'll go take another look at the loads."

Havel waited until the Larssons had made their last farewells at the rough grave-most of it was an oblong pile of rocks. It was a bright cold day, with tatters of high cloud blowing in from the west; the long wind roared in the pines around them, carrying away most of the stink of violent death. He and Hutton and Eric had dragged the dead bandits out of sight, but nobody had been in a mood to clean up the cabin.

They had stripped it of everything that might be useful, from bedding and kitchenware to shovel, ax and pickax, and Hutton had improvised carrying packs for some of the horses. It was a pleasure to see him work with the animals; it always was, watching a real expert at work. He'd been a help rehafting the naginata and spear onto good smooth poles they'd found in the toolshed behind the cabin, too.

Signe came up to him with a brace of books in her hands. "Mike, take a look. I think these might be useful. They were on the mantelpiece, and I was reading them before… you know."

He did, flipping through the text and frequent illustrations. Frontier Living, by Edwin Tunis, plus Colonial Living and Colonial Craftsmen by the same author.

"You know, I think you're right," he said. "Pack 'em with the rest."

Astrid came out and gave him a cup of coffee; he took it, and cleared his throat as she turned silently away, slight and graceful in her stained leather outfit.

"Kid." Reluctantly, she turned back to him. "You did good. If you hadn't shot him, I'd have had to chase him down in the dark. He might have killed or crippled me and come back for the rest of you."

She nodded again; he went on: "I know you've had a real bad time, but we don't have the leisure for thinking about our hurts right now. You're the only one of us who can use a bow and we need more food, badly. We may have to fight again, too. We just can't afford you folding up on us. You've got to be functional no matter what it takes. OK?"

She nodded silently a third time; the huge silver-blue eyes seemed to be looking through to another world as much as at him.

He shook his head: "Let me hear it, Astrid. Don't go hiding in your head. We need you out here."

"I understand, Mike," she said, after taking a deep breath; he saw her blink back to being fully in the waking world.

Suddenly she spat: "They were like orcs!"

"Yeah, that's a fair description."

He restrained himself from tousling her hair. You're a good kid. Let's see if we can get you going on something you care about.

He'd never been of the talk-about-it-forever school when it came to dealing with really bad stuff; in his experience that just made you think about it more and compounded the damage. Hard work and concentrating on the future were the best way to handle trauma.

"What do you think of that bow we captured?"

It was sitting on one of the veranda chairs. Astrid looked at it and sniffed.

"It's a Bear compound," she said, with a touch of her old de-haut-en-bas tone, edged with contempt for the high-tech vulgarity of it. "Adjustable setoff, double round cams… with that, you might as well be using a gun."

Christ Jesus, how I wish I were able to use a gun, Havel thought. Guns I understand. Aloud he asked: "Will it work?"

"Oh, it will work," she said. "It's easier to use if you're not a real archer and it'll shoot hard and straight… until something breaks. The riser is an aluminum casting, the limbs are fiberglass-carbon laminate, and the cams on the ends are titanium, with sealed bearing races. The string's a synthetic and the arrows are carbon-composite. I could make a copy of my bow, if you gave me time to experiment and the materials I needed. I don't think anyone in the-whole world can repair that one, not now, and to make a new one-forget it."