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Half old-style cattle drive, half gypsy caravan, half small-scale Mongol migration, he thought wryly.
Then he turned back to look at the long country ahead, thinking. He was uneasy, and he'd never liked that when he didn't know precisely why. Presently hooves thudded behind him, and he nodded over his shoulder.
"Will."
"Mike?" Will Hutton said. "You called?"
"Well, first thing, Lua
Hutton gri
"What do you think of that place just behind the ridge-line for a camp?" Havel went on, pointing.
"Fine, if you want to stop this early."
They all looked up to estimate the time; it was about two o'clock. Pre-digital mechanical watches had become a valuable type of trade goods, along with tobacco and binoculars and bows.
Hutton went on: "Flat enough, good water and firewood, good grass, good view. You don't want to try and make Craigswood today?"
Havel shook his head. "I'm not easy about what I can see from here," he said. "I want to find out more before we're committed."
"Nice if we could do some trading here, at Craigswood or Grangeville, or just pick up stuff," Hutton observed. "There's a lot of things we could use, or are gettin' short of, not to mention more remounts. Some training we could do easier if we stopped for a week or two, as well."
"That all depends," Havel said. "See that line of smoke there? Looks like a farm or a ranch house where something got torched, and nobody's moving, but you can see it's been worked since the Change-fresh-plowed land, and spring plantings. We're going down to check. Have Josh and a squad keep an eye out from here, out of sight on the reverse slope. If things have gone completely to hell in this neighborhood, we may have to take another detour."
Will nodded and reined his horse about, gliding away at a smooth trot.
Christ Jesus, I was lucky there, Havel thought; he didn't think he could be as good a chief-of-staff and strong-right-arm, if their positions were reversed.
"Equipment check," he said to Signe, and each gave the other's gear a quick once-over.
They were both in full armor. That was Bearkiller practice anywhere not guaranteed safe, now that they had enough chain hauberks for the whole A-list. He looked at the bear's head mounted on his helmet for an instant before he put it back on and buckled the chin cup.
Well, it doesn 't smell, and it makes good shade on a su
He'd gotten used to the way the nasal bar bisected his vision, too.
Plus bear fur won't make the helmet work any worse if someone tries to hit me on the head.
He told himself that fairly often; it beat admitting that he just didn't want to deal with one of Astrid's sulks. They both pulled their bows out of the leather cases and fitted arrow to string.
We're mounted infantry with cavalry tastes, he thought to himself. But if we keep working at it harder than anyone else, then we're going to have a real advantage.
They put their horses down the slope, slowly until they were in the flat, then up to a walk-canter-trot-reverse rhythm, their eyes busy to all sides. The horses were fresh, and the day was pretty; at least until they came to the dead cattle.
"Very dead," Havel muttered.
Hacked apart, and the bodies rubbed with filth, and a chemical smell under the stink made him suspect poison, which a couple of dead crows confirmed. He looked beyond them to the fields. The wheat was a little over knee-high on a horse, with the heads showing-harvest would be in another five weeks or so-but great swaths of it were wilted and dying.
"Roundup," he said. Signe looked a question at him.
"See how the wheat's wilted in strips? Someone went through spraying weed killer on it, Roundup or something like it. The stuffs available in bulk anywhere there's much farming and it acts fast."
Her face had gotten leaner and acquired a darker honey-tan, but it still went a little pale. Havel nodded. Wasting food like this was the next thing to blasphemy.
The dirt road joined a larger one, and they slowed down as the drifts of dirty-brown smoke rose ahead. From the clumps of squabbling crows, he knew there were bodies of men or beasts in the fields to his right. Men probably, given what had been done to the cattle; the way they didn't fly away also told him that the feast hadn't been disturbed.
So did the coyote that sat looking at him with insolent familiarity, and then trotted off unconcerned. Havel suppressed an impulse to shoot an arrow at the beast. It had already learned that men weren't to be feared as much as formerly…
But if men are less the wolves will be back soon, you clever little son of a bitch, he thought grimly. Try pulling tricks like that with them, trickster, and you'll regret it.
When they came to the sign and gate they were coughing occasionally whenever the wind blew a gust their way, but the smoke smelled rankly of ash, not the hot stink of a new fire.
"Clarke Century Farms," Havel read. "Homesteaded 1898."
The first body close enough to identify was just inside, tumbled in the undignified sprawl of violent death; a fan of black blood sprayed out from the great fly-swarming wound hacked into his back with a broad-bladed ax, where the stubs of ribs showed in the drying flesh. There was already a faint but definite smell of spoiled meat.
Someone had taken his boots, and there was a hole in the heel of one sock.
A dog lay not far beyond him, head hanging by a shred of flesh, its teeth still fixed in a snarl. The bodies hadn't bloated much, although lips and eyes were shrunken, but that could mean one day or two, in this weather; the ravens had been at them, too. In the field to the left was a three-furrow plow that looked as if it came from a museum and probably did. A stretch of turned earth ended where it stood.
One dead horse was still in the traces before it, and a dead man about four paces beyond, lying curled around a belly-wound that might have taken half a day to kill him. Two of the big black birds kaw-kawed and jumped heavily off the corpse when Havel turned his horse to take a closer look.
"Crossbow bolt," he said, when he'd returned to his companion. "Looks like it was made after the Change, but well done."
They passed another pair of bodies as they rode at a walk up the farm lane to the steading, near tumbled wheelbarrows.
The main house hadn't been burned; it stood intact in its oasis of lawn and flower bed and tree; a tractor-tire swing still swayed in the wind beneath a big oak, and a body next to it by the neck. There was laundry on a line out behind it. The smoldering came from the farmyard proper, from the ashes of a long series of old hay-rolls, the giant grass cylinders of modern fa
The oily canola seed still flickered and gave off a dense acrid smoke. There was a wooden barn as well, gray and weathered; a naked man had been nailed to the door by spikes through wrist and ankle. He was dead, but much more recently than the rest, and he was older as well, with sparse white hair.
Written above his head in blood was: Bow to the Iron Rod! There was a stylized image underneath it, of a penis and testes.
Signe was hair-trigger tense as they rode up to the veranda; she started when the windmill pump clattered into the breeze. Water spilled from the tank underneath it, which looked to be recent-probably the windmill was an heirloom, only brought back into use since the Change.