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"I think I should head straight in, with this cargo," she said. "But I'd appreciate it if I could send the wagons and teams right out again and keep them on the Circle D for a little while. Prices at Pendleton livery stables inside the wall are atrocious."
"Fine, and stay as long as you want coming out," Jenson said generously.
"I'll get a permit!" Captain da Costa said. "You're right, Dona Dorothea, a load this important should go right into town! Just you wait there and I'll fetch the paperwork-"
The last was said over his shoulder as he walked back towards the barricade.
"Who's he?" Jenson asked idly, sighing regretfully.
He jerked his head at the man sitting beside the driver of the second wagon, a great hulking hunched figure with a shock of shiny-black hair.
"Oh, that's my cousin Hugh," BD said. "He's simple, but there's no harm in him, and he's certainly useful to have around when there's heavy lifting to be done. Those boxes weigh a fair bit."
At the Hugh the big man gave a vacant grin and wiped his nose on the back of his hand; there was a thread of drool slowly making its way down from the corner of his thick-lipped mouth.
"Here, Hugh!" BD said in an admonishing voice.
She handed him a handkerchief and he made a stammering cluck and used it, clumsily.
Captain da Costa returned with his form; behind him his men pushed in careful grunting unison, and the barricade rumbled aside.
"Just show this at the gate, Dona."
"And the Bossman is putting on a 'do' tomorrow night," Jenson said. "All the Ranchers and town bigwigs… Hey, why don't you come? Murdoch will be there, too."
Da Costa nodded vigorously again. "You're a public benefactor, Dona," he said. "I'm sure Bossman Carl would be delighted to see you."
"I'll be there," BD said. But he may not be delighted about it at all.
Seven miles was more than an hour's travel at preserve-the-horses wagon speeds. That gave her enough time to take in the surroundings thoroughly without making it obvious.
"Oh, my, oh, my," BD murmured, as they passed the ruins of the old State Hospital and swung south. "Ares is on hand."
There were tented camps outside Pendleton; most of them were sited so they weren't in view from I-84, but she could catch glimpses of them. Most of them were the casual affairs a Rancher and his retainers would make when they were away from home, remarkable only because there were so many. But it was getting on for sundown. Campfires showed there in the rising ground south of town, adding to the smoke-and-outhouse scent of the town in general; and some of them were suspiciously regular, laid out in neat rows, or in one case a complex system of interlocking triangles.
Pity I can't Use my binoculars, she thought. But that would be a big I AM A SPY sign.
She laughed a little sadly as they turned north on an overpass still labeled Exit 209 in faded, peeling paint, where the old John Day highway had approached town. Around them was the usual messy sadness of ruined suburbs that surrounded most still-inhabited towns; burnt-out houses or buildings torn down for their materials, truck gardens and livery stables and smelly tanyards and plain weed-grown wreck with bits of charred wood or rusty rebar poking up through it.
"Tia Loba?" her nephew-guardsman asked.
"Chucho, that underpass over there used to dump cars onto Frazier, because Emigrant was one-way."
His dark young face looked puzzled, and he pushed up the brim of his helmet to scratch with gloved fingers.
"You could enchant a road so that it only went one way in the old days?" he asked. "You are pulling the leg of me, Tia. Flying I believe, the pictures that moved I believe, but not that."
"Changelings!" she muttered with a shrug.
"Oh-ho," the man who was not BD's simple cousin Hugh said.
Traffic had thickened as they approached the gate, and slowed. Now the reasons were obvious. Chucho dropped back tactfully; he knew that "Hugh" was not as he seemed, and had carefully avoided learning any more.
Pendleton had been divided by the Umatilla River before the Change. Afterwards it had shrunk, in fighting and chaos and as people dispersed to the surrounding farms and ranches, but there had been no total collapse. Now it had four or five thousand people, in a rectangle on the south side of the river perhaps two-thirds of a mile long and a third wide. The inhabitants had built a wall with towers, out of concrete and rubble and rock around a core of salvaged girders; so much was unremarkable, although the construction was more recent and cruder than many, with rust-pitted iron showing on the surface.
What the pseudo-Hugh was looking at was a cluster of men examining the gate and its heavy valves of metal-sheathed timber.
BD had never seen the gear they wore, but she'd heard of it, and seen sketches by agents and far-traveling merchants. Armor of steel hoops and bands to protect the torso and shoulders, fastened with a complex set of brass latches; high boots; rounded helmets with neck-flares and hinged cheek-pieces and short cap-bill pieces over the eyes. All of them carried broad short stabbing swords, worn high on the right side of their belts… except for the man with a transverse crest on his helmet, who had his on his left hip. He also bore a swagger-stick or truncheon of twisted vinestock, tapping the end into his left palm. Closer and BD could see that he had a red kerchief tucked into the neck of his armor.
Boise regulars, she thought. United States Army, as far as they're concerned. Sixth Regiment, from the shoulder-flashes.
There was plenty of time to watch the commander with the vinestock pace about examining the gate and the two square flanking towers, since the usual evening crush of wagons and carts was trying to get through-and moving more slowly than usual, as the guards checked them with extra care. The strangers in the odd armor weren't shy about getting in people's way, either.
"Christ, civvies!" their officer said. "It's thick and it's solid, and that's all you can say for it. You could bring a covered ram right up to the gate!"
"Fubarred," his companion with the sergeant's chevrons on the short mail-sleeve said. "Looks like they based the design on an illustration from a book of faerie tales my mother used to read to me, Captain."
The officer reached out, a slight smile on his hard clean-shaven face, and playfully rapped the swagger-stick on the man's helmet. The steel went bonk under the tough wood of the vinestock.
"That's Centurion, Sergeant. The rank structure's been modernized."
"Yessir, Centurion. Glad President Martin got around to it, sir. It's a wonder we… or someone… didn't take 'em over before this if this is their capital. Lewiston has a lot better defenses and it wouldn't be a pimple on Boise's ass."
"Considerations of high policy, soldier-and stick to business. It'll be a lot better with a couple of eighteen-pounders and some heavy darters up top, on turntables and with steel shields. We'll put the lifting triangle right there and-"
The line inched forward. The gate-keepers were militiamen, ordinary shopkeepers and craftsmen taking the duty in turn with their homemade armor over normal working clothes. One of the Bossman's personal guard was there too, besides the usual clerk to collect the customs dues-yet another local term for shakedown. He was a big young man in a hammered-steel breastplate and helmet with ostrich plumes, above tight red-dyed pants and elaborately tooled thigh-boots turned down to the knee; she guessed that someone had been looking through an illustrated book when they designed the outfit.
Or possibly the cover of a bodice-ripper, she thought wryly. Or maybe that book of faerie tales. If he had pointed ears and whiskers, he'd be a dead ringer for Puss in Boots.
A small mustache of the type Pendleton men favored was fiery red as well, naturally so judging from his milk-white-and-sunburn complexion. He took the letter and read it through slowly, moving his lips, then went and examined the opened box in the wagon.