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Edain nodded and dropped back, half scowling as he looked around at the land about, half in sheer sensuous enjoyment of it; for it was a sight to delight the eye of someone who'd worked the earth since he could toddle, the thick pell of life on it promising food in plenty for man and beast.
Heuisink was obviously bursting with curiosity and even more eager to drag Ingolf away for reminiscence and questions, but he made a determined effort to be polite; he dropped back to talk with Rudi and the others every few minutes.
"The house is another half mile ahead of us."
"Fine stock," Rudi said, as a stallion went pacing along the roadside fence, brown hide rippling and neck arched.
"Dad was a breeder even before the Change," Jack Heuisink said proudly. "Pedigree stock. We've won State Fair blue ribbons three times in the past five years."
"Handsome beasts," Rudi acknowledged. "I don't think I've seen finer."
Though I was more impressed yet by the pasture; and the fact that your herds can't keep up with it. For all their feeding, it's stirrup-high out there in places.
After a while they came to cultivated land in big square fields; he rough-estimated four or five hundred acres. The wheat and oats and barley had all been reaped, and green clover was poking up through the blond stubble. The flax looked about ready to pull, the last of its blue flowers gone by and the plants chest-tall and browning, and there were low-growing rows of sugar beets. Some of the other crops were odd to his eye. Back in the Willamette maize was a garden vegetable, grown to eat boiled or to be ca
Here there was acre after acre of it, the heads just tasseling out now and casting a faint haze of gold over the distant part of the green block. The stalks were nearly as tall as a mounted man; you could look down endless rows, and the clatter of the leaves made a strange rustling sound that surged and died with the wind. More fields were growing some bushy plant.
"What's that?" he asked.
"Soybeans," Heuisink said, surprised. "You don't have them? They're mighty useful."
"I've heard of them," Rudi said. Mostly from my mother, who hates tofu with a passion. "The climate's not right for them in our country. Or for maize either."
The younger man laughed. "It's hard to imagine farming without beans and corn!"
Then he inhaled deeply and smiled; an overpowering sweetness marked a hayfield, where five horse-drawn mowers in a staggered row cut knee-high alfalfa and laid it in windrows to dry. The workers waved their hats at young Heuisink, and he returned the gesture with his billed cap.
"Pretty good year, so far," he said with satisfaction. "No blight on the alfalfa, either. What do you grow out there?"
"Alfalfa, to be sure. Wheat and barley, oats, potatoes, orchards-" He and Rudi talked crops and weather for a little while-another topic of conversation that was good almost anywhere, since life itself depended on it. When they came in sight of the house -evidently he meant the whole settlement by that-Rudi blinked a little in surprise. There were some of the things you'd expect; turn-out pasture for dairy cattle and working stock surrounded by board fences, a couple of big orchards-apple, pear, cherry-which looked young, but flourishing, and a twenty-acre tract of garden truck. Some of the early apples were starting to turn ripe, glowing red through the green leaves.
But…
"There's no wall!" he said.
No sign of defensive works at all, not even the earth berm and barbed wire a farmstead in law-abiding Corvallis territory would have. The settlement looked obscurely naked without it, like a man fully dressed save for his missing kilt. Every single Mackenzie dun had a good log palisade around it at the least, with a blockhouse at the gate-Clan law required it.
Jack Heuisink nodded pridefully. "We have order here in Iowa! And have since the Change-or nearly. Well, we've got an emergency fort we keep up with the neighbors, over there about a mile, but we don't live in it, the way I hear they do in some places. We just keep it maintained and stocked."
And sure, I suppose it is a prideful thing not to need walls, Rudi thought.
It showed how strong Iowa was on its borders, and how well patrolled inside them. He'd noted that few men or women went armed here, too, unless they were warriors by trade.
But on the other hand, things can change. And they can change much faster than the time needed to build a wall. Whereupon the memory of pride, my friend, would be no consolation as you sat in that fort and watched your home burn, at all, at all.
Ingolf had dropped back into hearing range. "You've also got Nebraska and Marshall between you and the Sioux, Jack," he said dryly. "And Richland north of you, and Kirkville south. They've got walls around their settlements, you betcha. And there's the Mississippi between you and the wild men eastways, and you've got a river-navy for that."
"Well, yeah, Captain," he said. "But things here never did go to hell the way they did in a lot of places."
He turned to Rudi: "Dad says there was just so much damned food around that folks here had to make a real effort to starve; silos and elevators in the towns, bins on the farms, trains and trucks stopped on the roads and rails stuffed with grain. Things got bad enough, but there are almost as many people in Iowa now as there were before the Change."
"I can believe it," Rudi said. "I'd never imagined that there could be so much good land in one place."
"And it was all cultivated then-corn and beans, beans and corn, right out to the horizon, land that's pasture now or not used at all," the younger Heuisink said. "Lots of cattle and hogs, too, though they kept them pe
"And until the Change it all fed tens of millions far away who did not survive," Father Ignatius said, and crossed himself. "Mado
The two younger men looked at him. Now, that's true, but I wouldn't have thought of it, Rudi mused.
"Yeah, we were lucky, Padre," Jack said gravely.
"Then you would do well to add wisdom to it, my son," Ignatius said. "For however much luck God sends, sinful man can-"
"-manage to screw the pooch somehow or other," Odard cut in.
Then he made a graceful gesture of apology when the priest frowned at him; Mathilda stifled a giggle. Ignatius looked stern, but he had to fight to keep one corner of his mouth from quirking up.
And he's no older than Ingolf, Rudi thought.
"That is one way to put it, Baron Gervais. Ah, we have arrived," the priest said.
The core of Victrix Farm was a tall house, three stories of white-painted clapboard with a shingle roof and wraparound verandas at ground level and above. It was flanked by two others much the same, looking as if they'd been put in since the Change and joined by roofed galleries, and all set amid lawns and flowerbanks behind windbreaks of tall old trees; evening's shadows flickered across the white walls and graceful windows, and a yellow lamp-flame lit in one of the upper windows as they watched.
The great barns and sheet-metal sheds, the silos and granaries, workshops and corrals were downwind to the east, and a substantial village lay on either side of the road southward. The cottages were smaller but mostly frame and white-painted like the house, obviously built of materials salvaged from the dead suburbs and stretching back in short lanes on either side of the road that led to the master's dwelling, shaded by trees that looked about a generation old. A few houses converted to storage sheds were of lime-washed rammed earth, relics from the years of resettlement; Rudi estimated the hamlet had room for two hundred people, give or take and assuming the normal three or four children per household.