The Scourge of God

At their glances he went on: "I've talked to men who've been through there. You can travel fifty, sixty miles at a time and not see a single tree. The only way to heat water or cook is over dried cowflops. And the winters are almighty cold. You get out of the habit of taking baths, or taking off your clothes at all mighty fast, out there."

Odard nodded. "I do hope we don't run into anything worse."

The Easterner made a sound, but this time it wasn't a laugh of any sort. Rudi looked at Ingolf, but the Easterner's eyes were blank, as if all his attention was focused within.

"Worse?" he said softly, coming back to them. "Oh, yeah. I've seen as bad as this, during the Sioux War. That was a hard bitter fight, and a lot of… questionable… things got done. By us and them both."

His hands closed and opened unconsciously, and he swallowed as if the food had turned sour in his mouth before he went on.

"East of the Mississippi, that's a whole different thing. It's like God pulled out the plug at the bottom of the world, and everything human drained out. And then something… else… came trickling in, and messed things up, twisted them. I don't mean just the Change. I swore I wouldn't go back to the deadlands again, not even for a fortune… and now I'm headed back all the way to Nantucket because of a vision and a dream. Go figure."

Edain paused a minute, swallowing, then doggedly cut another piece of ham, dipped it in the mustard pot, chewed and swallowed. Everyone was silent for several moments. That was the way they were headed, into the death zones, where the hordes fleeing from the stricken cities had overlapped and eaten the earth bare, and then each other. Not everyone had died, not quite, but their descendants weren't really human anymore. The stories were gruesome even at a distance; enough rumors had trickled back from the borders of California. From what Ingolf said the mega-necropolis on the Atlantic Coast was just as bad, and he'd seen it firsthand.

"That's as may be," Edain said stoutly; dangers rarely daunted him when they arrived, and never beforehand. "You said these Cutters were just men. Well, that they may be, but they're roit bad ones an' no mistake."

Rudi mopped his plate and poured himself more milk from the jug. Halfway through, he wondered if the women who'd milked the cows had spat in the bucket, but finished anyway. They'd have reason.

"They are men. Men who've been encouraged to give guest-room to the worst parts of themselves," he said thoughtfully.

Edain made a protective sign. "They're blaspheming the Goddess, that's what they're doing," he said. "I just hope we aren't caught in Her anger."

He held his hands up before his face. "Use these my hands to avenge Your likeness, Dark Mother, Morrigu Goddess of the Crows, Red Hag of Battles. So I invoke You."

Rudi nodded soberly and joined in the gesture and the prayer. "So mote it be!"

We fight, we of humankind, he thought. Man against man for pride and power, tribe against tribe for the land that feeds us and our families… That's the nature of things, the way They made us, neither good nor bad in itself. To fight is the work of the season, just as wolves fight one another for lordship of a pack, or a whole pack battles another for hunting range in a bad year to keep themselves and their cubs from hunger.

But taking women by force wasn't war. Nor just a crime, either, not even a serious one like murder in hot blood. As Edain had said, it was a profanation of the holy Mysteries, the divine union of Lord and Lady, Spear and Cauldron, that made all creation.

Mackenzies buried a rapist at a crossroads, with a spear thrust in the soil above; and they buried him living when they could, as a sacrifice to turn aside the anger of the Earth Powers.

These Cutters have overstepped the bounds They have laid on us, and must pay for it.

The vengeance of the Lady could be slow; it was also very thorough.

Thorough to the point of being indiscriminate, sometimes, Rudy thought grimly, feeling the hairs along his spine crawl a little. It would be well to make ourselves that vengeance, before it falls from somewhere else like an avalanche on all and sundry.

"Hard times make for hard men," Odard said. "Things were bad everywhere right after the Change, from what the oldsters say, and you had to be bad yourself sometimes to survive. I imagine Montana was the same, even if they weren't as crowded. My mother doesn't talk about those times much, but some of the older men-at-arms who served my father do. From what our, ah, hosts have let fall, there hasn't been much order or peace out there since then, except what the CUT imposed at the sword's edge."

Rudi nodded; that was true enough that he could be polite. His own mother had had to drive away strangers and foragers, lest the Clan-in-the-making and its neighbors be eaten bare before the first harvest. And to keep out the plagues which had killed as many as raw famine did. Away from habitation you still found the skulls lying in the brush by the overgrown roads, or bones huddled in heaps in the ruins. Sometimes they'd been scorched and cracked for the marrow.

But what Odard said was true only to a point. There was doing what you had to do to ward off death or worse, and there was treating disaster as opportunity.

"You know Chuck Barstow?" he said to the Association nobleman.

Odard nodded. "I've met him. First Armsman for you Mackenzies now, after Sam Aylward retired."

Rudi nodded himself. "He was a Society fighter before the Change. On the day, he lifted two big wagons and their teams from a… living-history exhibit, whatever that was… in Eugene on his way to Dun Juniper with the Singing Moon coven. And he loaded the wagons with food and tools and seeds he… picked up… along the way, and drove along cattle and pigs and sheep they acquired likewise, with worthless money or just by lifting them. This was before people had a chance to eat everything, you see, or even to realize what was happening, the most of them."

"There you are then," Odard said. "All our parents did that sort of thing. If you have to-"

"And he ran into a load of lost schoolchildren along the way, and picked them up too, and adopted three of them himself," Rudi finished, interrupting him. "Oak-he used to be named Dan-has three sons and daughters of his own now."

"Oh," Odard said, and cut himself a wedge from the cheese.

Rudi didn't say any more; Eddie Liu, the first Baron Gervais, hadn't been that sort of man, and everyone knew it.

In your father's day, Odard… Matti's father's day… your lot were just as bad as these Cutters, for all the fancy titles. Eddie Liu and Norman Arminger among the worst of them; not just hard men, but rotten bad. If they'd won the War of the Eye, you'd be worse than you are yourself, my friend, and even so there are things about you I don't much like.

And at least Arminger's had been a mortal evil, while the CUT seemed to corrupt everything it touched.

And… he remembered the dead man laughing.

"The times were very hard indeed," Rudi went on aloud, controlling a slight shiver at that recollection. "But hard isn't the same thing as bad. It depended on the leaders and what sort of things were in their souls, and what paths they led their folk down. My mother says a tribe is like a man; it becomes more itself as it gets older, and as what it does writes on the heart. Things were… loose, for a while after the Change. They could be turned this way or that. Now they're getting set again, for good and ill."

Ingolf shook himself and loaded his plate, doggedly plowing through eggs and ham and fried potatoes. When he glanced up at Rudi, the haunted look was gone for now and a tough shrewdness back in charge.

"I gather we're not just going to buy some supplies, and ransom some people, and ride quietly away, Rudi?"