Sunrise Lands

Rising with the Sun

Spirits of Air

My soul follows Hawk on the ghost of the wind

I find my voice and speak truth;

All-Father, wise Lord

All Mother, gentle and strong

Guide me and guard me this day and all days

By Your grace, with harm to none;

Blessed be!

He smiled as he spoke the familiar words. Partly that was because they were familiar, and always brought a feeling of comforting contact with the Powers. More of it was the sight of the vast land opening out to the east ward, rolling like the waves of some great frozen sea or rising here and there into a flat-topped mesa. Sagebrush covered it, silvery gray and coated with hoarfrost; the crystals sparkled for a single instant as the sun cleared the far ridges, turning the whole expanse to a field of diamonds.

Thank You for this, he added within himself in the moment of silence that followed.

Beside him Edain sighed and murmured, "Now that's the Spirit of Air, and no mistake."

The twins nodded, and they all glanced at one an other, brought back to the light of common day. Over a little way Father Ignatius and Mathilda and their core ligionists-who included Ingolf and a half dozen of the Seffridge Ranch folk-were finishing their own morning devotions:

Queen of heaven, rejoice, alleluia.

For He whom you did merit to bear, alleluia…

Greasewood crackled as the fires were stoked up, and the companionable smells of scorched frying pan and sizzling bacon filled the air.

The party from the Willamette ate together, a little apart from the rancher's men. It was Odard's turn to cook breakfast, though Rudi had put the flat iron pot with the biscuit dough into the ashes when he finished his turn on watch late last night. The tops were nicely brown when he wrapped a corner of his plaid around his hand-it was a useful garment-and lifted the lid.

Everyone in their group crowded around to get their share. They had fresh butter-the ranch folk had a cou ple of milch cows along with them. They were scrawny looking by Willamette Valley standards, and didn't give much milk, but they did produce enough for the ingenious little wheel-powered barrel churn in their chuck wagon to work. Odard added passable hash browns, beans that had also cooked overnight with some dried onion, and bacon. As they settled down around the fire Bob Brown came over and squatted on his heels.

The rancher's son was taller than his father, a lanky man in his thirties with hair somewhere between brown and sandy and dark blue eyes, holding a tin mug of the chicory-root brew people east of the mountains insisted on calling coffee; it smelled delicious and tasted vile, in Rudi's opinion. Bob accepted a biscuit and bit into it appreciatively.

"Not bad," he said. Then he looked at Rudi and shrugged a little. "And you were right: all your friends here are good enough to stand a watch."

Ingolf shrugged. "Only natural for you to want to see what we could do before you relied on us," he said.

Rudi shrugged in turn and finished the last piece of his bacon, fighting down a slight resentment; he'd come close to quarreling with Bob Brown about it, before Vogeler stepped in.

He's right… they were both right, he thought. Just be cause I knew doesn't mean he knew, and it's not some thing you take chances on. I should have realized that right away and not gotten my back up over it. All right, Mackenzie, make a note.

Aloud he went on: "It makes the math easier anyway. Glad you're happy with our performance."

Bob stirred his sugar and cream-laced chicory with a twig, sipped at it and gave Rudi a shrewd slanticular glance before he squinted out at the plain to the east. His eyes had more lines beside them than a man of his age from the Willamette, a face that spent a lot of time looking into dry winds full of grit and alkali dust.

"I'm not what you'd call real joyful about anything right now," he said. "This is the last of the CORA ranches we're riding over now-and the rancher here doesn't use this pasture much; too many rustlers, even when there's water."

He pointed his chin towards the small creek and pond at the base of the rise they had camped on. The horse herd was around its edge now, switching their tails and drinking, and it looked pretty and pastoral. There were even a few Russian olive trees trailing branches over the water. The little waterway filled only seasonally, and the water had a slight but unpleasant soapy taste. It was drinkable… sort of. You could wash in it, if you didn't mind an itchy film on your skin afterwards. They all had; it was likely to be the last opportunity for a while.

Bob went on: "Folks east of here, the Rovers, the best you can say is that there aren't many of them. Well, that and that they fight one another a lot. What else you can say is they're mighty poor, and they're thieves and cut throats. Taking a hundred twenty prime head of horses through is like waving a lamb chop in front of a hungry kai-ote. It's like to take the chop and your hand too-and be gone before you've really noticed."

It took a moment for Rudi to realize that the rancher's son meant coyote. He'd always rather liked the clever little song dogs, but he could see his point-they did go after sheep, and they'd be a much bigger problem out here than they were in Mackenzie territory.

"Why are the people here out-of the-ordinary dan gerous?" Odard said curiously. "Aren't they ranchers like you?"

Bob bridled at that, like a Bearkiller A-lister mistaken for an Association baron by someone from too far away to know the difference.

Mary-or Ritva-cut in hastily: "Water," she said. "There just isn't much dry season water here you can get at without deep pumps. No hay either, so you can't keep more stock than the winter pastures will support. We Dunedain have had problems escorting caravans around here-but most trade with the east goes up the Columbia and Snake, or right across on the old Highway 20 through Burns, well north of this part. It's worse here."

Bob nodded. "We CORA folk bounced back fast, but they kept on going down a lot longer 'round here before they hit bottom, what with their pumps and such gone. Mostly they don't even have homeplaces anymore; they just follow their herds from one patch of grazing to an other and pray there's water. Roving around, that's why we call 'em Rovers."

Unexpectedly, Father Ignatius spoke.

"My Order has had some missions out here, bringing windmill pumps and doctors. Not with any great success. The… wandering bands.. . are still very bitter. Not entirely without reason. Nobody shared much with them in the bad years. What they really want now is weapons."

Bob looked a little uneasy. Ranches like his father's had snaffled off the best of the refugees from Bend and Sisters and Madras, men and women with skills that had been hobbies or luxuries before the Change and were suddenly very important indeed. They'd also done very well out of their contacts with the Mackenzies and the other Willamette communities-Juniper had reminisced about that to her son, how she'd traded bows and arrows for cattle the very first Change Year, and for providing bowyer training later.

"Someone should put this area in order, then," Mathilda said decisively. "It's wasteful and breeds trou ble to have lawless zones like this-or like Pendleton, come to that. CORA is part of the Meeting, so we should all do something about it."

She sounds very sure of herself, Rudi thought with a quirk of his lips as he wiped his fingers on the gritty soil and then dusted them off. But then, she always does.

And she was usually right. The problem was that she was just as convinced on the rarer occasions when she was wrong. That was a