Страница 109 из 120
"We're even," he said to Three Bears. "In fact, I'm in your debt."
The dark face was flushed now too; the memory of those moments was coming out, and it was harder to bear than the doing had been.
"Shit, they were only going to kill us, not eat us like the lions!" Rick said, his own voice a little shaky. "Brother," he added.
Rudi nodded gravely. "You'll be wanting to get back to your father and family, brother," he said. "But I'm thinking we'll be meeting again."
"Yeah, and we'll be fighting Cutters together again," Three Bears said.
Then he looked west. Half a mile away the herd was still streaming by. "I'll head back when the Buffalo People get out of the way!"
TheScourgeofGod
CHAPTER TWENTY
Wide is the land, and high under heave n
Many the folk, their gods and ways;
All Artos would see, and with them take counsel
Wisdom win from friend and from foe From: The Song of Bear and Raven
Attributed to Fiorbhi
"I could use a watermelon," Ingolf said, as the whole party slowed their mounts. "Kept nice and cool in a well. You cut it open with your bowie, and then that first bite into a big slice, crisp and sweet, with the juice just dribbling down your chin-"
"You're not helping," Mary said, and slapped him on the back of the head.
"It's not the heat, it's the humidity," Rudi added, and wondered why Ingolf laughed.
"Welcome to the Midwest," he said.
Mary groaned: "I'm sweating like a horse. I can't tell where my sweat stops and Rochael's begins anymore."
"You still smell better than she does, honey," Ingolf said, and reached over to pat her dapple-gray Arab on the neck. "Though she's mighty pretty, for a horse."
Ritva snorted. "I don't mind sweating, but it doesn't seem to be doing me any good-I'm still just as hot, only sticky too. Is it like this all the time?"
"Only about half the year. The other half's freezing cold and snows like hell," Ingolf said. Then he shrugged: "Actually there's a month or so of good weather in spring and fall, but we don't like to admit it."
They'd been ambling through farm country; now the land dropped away to a river valley, wooded with hickory and oak and cottonwood and spa
The stream was about medium bowshot across. Close to the middle a bald eagle's talons struck the water and punched up a burst of spray. The great black-and-white bird flogged itself back into the air with a fish twisting in its talons.
"Good luck to see an eagle striking," Odard said, and Edain nodded.
"Slow down here by the fort. They're likely to be a might testy about travelers," Ingolf said, and Rudi raised his right hand to signal the others.
"A testy man with a napalm shell on his catapult is not someone to offend," he agreed.
More quietly, Ingolf went on: "And the Bossman has reason to be offended with me," he said. "Remember, he paid my Villains quite a bit to go get that stuff for him from the dead cities."
"Not your fault Kuttner was working for the Prophet."
"I don't think so, and you don't think so, but the Bossman may not agree. Tony Heasleroad didn't strike me as being the forgiving sort."
"There's your friends," Rudi said.
"Yah. They've got pull. I don't know how much pull, not after years. We could go north through Marshall and Richland."
"And take months extra time. I lost us too much, when I was wounded and got us stranded in the Valley of the Sun. Things aren't going well back home. We must get that Sword, my friend."
Iowa held the western bank of the river where the bridge crossed; from what Ingolf had said, the Nebraska folk accepted that with sullen acquiescence. A strong fort of concrete reinforced with steel stood beside the road where the land started to dip to the wooded river valley; it was a rectangle with corner towers, and two more by the gatehouse. A dry moat-mostly dry, with puddles and mud at the bottom-surrounded it, filled with rusty sharpened angle iron and barbed wire and smelling of stagnant water and waste, and the drawbridge was down. From the gatehouse flew a flag with three broad vertical stripes of blue, white and red; when a puff of breeze lifted it for a moment, he could see an eagle in the central panel clutching a scroll in its bill, but the words were too small to read.
A swinging barrier came down to block their passage on the bridge as the party approached, and from behind the rusty metal an armed man shouted:
"Halt!"
Rudi duly halted, letting himself sink backwards in the saddle to signal Epona. He waited patiently, wiping at his forehead with his sleeve; she tossed her head, thumping at the gravel-patched asphalt with one hoof and flicking ears and tail against the flies. He'd packed his jacket and folded his plaid with his blanket roll behind the crupper, but his linsey-woolsey shirt was sticking to his back and sides and making patches black with sweat. Sitting the saddle in the grilling sun in a powerful cloud of human and equine perspiration and assorted insects wasn't pleasant.
"I would be sooo glad to sit somewhere shady and have lunch," Mary said. "Something besides beans and bacon and corn bread, too."
Ingolf smiled reminiscently. "There used to be a place in Hawarden"-he nodded towards the town on the other side of the river-"that did a great pepperoni pizza. And they made a fine beer there, too."
"I'd like to have a bath," Mathilda commented. "And get some pumice to sand the calluses off my backside. How long have we been in the saddle now?"
Virginia snorted, as befitted a Rancher's daughter who'd ridden before she could walk, but then admitted:
"It's a powerful big country; I never realized how big. I thought there was a lot of the Powder River range, but it's like a little corral compared to the rest."
"I didn't realize how much… muchness… there was either until I left home," Fred replied. "We'd been on the trail for a hell of a long time before you joined up, Virginia, and then since then.. . From the way Mom and Dad talked, I'd always thought it was a lot smaller. The maps don't tell you the half of it and the old books are useless. Worse than useless-they give you the wrong idea."
Father Ignatius nodded: "In your parents' youth, it was smaller. At least in terms of how long it took to travel across it. It wasn't a surprise to me intellectually, but then the Church has to communicate all around the world. We know how big the planet has grown. And it's still a shock when you experience it in person. My admiration for the couriers the Vatican sends out from Badia knows no bounds."
"Yeah, but Mom and Dad always sort of gave me the impression that America was a country, like Idaho. It's a world."
Rudi kept one ear on the byplay, but most of his attention on the fort; there were men moving on the ramparts, and a hot bright blink of sunlight on edged metal. Then a trumpet sounded, and a platoon's worth of troops double-timed out of the open gate of the fort with a bristle of polearms. Ingolf inclined his head towards them: