The Scourge of God

The woman…

No, it's a girl. She's not thirty, the way I thought at first glance, Fred decided. She's about my age or a little less, just dirty and dusty and falling-down tired.

… looked around the circle of faces; Ignatius was out on watch, and the stranger's glance flicked at the twins and Mathilda for a moment longer. Which was logical; women along and armed made it less likely they were a bandit gang, slavers, or others of dubious character. Not impossible, but less likely.

She sighed and relaxed a little, tapping the wide felt hat against her chaps. Her face was narrow and straight-nosed beneath the trail dirt, and her hair was bound back in a single braid; it looked to be brown, perhaps with a hint of auburn, and her eyes were blue when the firelight flared a bit. He judged that her height would be about halfway between the twins and Mathilda; five-eight and a bit.

"Well, you're not Cutters, at least," she said after a second. "Nor friends of theirs."

"Emphatically unfriends of theirs, miss," Rudi said, standing. She blinked up at the height of him, noticed the kilt, and then looked over at Edain, a bit startled. "Still and all, are they on your trail? Your company is pleasant; theirs wouldn't be at all, at all."

"They were, but I lost them two days ago, I'm pretty sure." She took a deep breath. "Kane is my name, Virginia Kane, of… of nowhere in particular."

She seemed to relax a little further when nobody recognized her name. Rudi introduced himself, and then the others. Fred gestured at the fire.

"Help yourself. And there's water, a good seep in the slough over there for your horse. Barrel's full and we purified it."

"Yeah, my horse smelled the slough a couple of miles back," she said. "We're pretty dry."

She stopped to let Garbh smell her hand, watered and unsaddled her horse, rubbing it down and hobbling it before washing her hands and face in a little of the water and drinking cup after cup from the barrel on the cart. Then she dropped her saddle and bedroll in an empty spot, and came over to crouch by the fire. Her hands shook very slightly as she spooned beans onto a tin plate from her kit and cut meat from the hump with a clasp-knife. Fred noted with interest that the little knife had been honed to a wire edge, and that she used it with a pulling stroke that showed experience. She piled the slices onto a couple of flat wheatcakes and wrapped them to make tubular sandwiches.

Despite that tremor of eagerness she didn't gobble, although she ate with concentrated intensity for a good fifteen minutes; she wasn't gaunt, so it had probably been only the past few days that she'd been missing meals. Fred judged she'd been well fed before that, but active-she had the lean hard look of it, though with enough in breast and hip to please a man's eye. When she'd finished she rolled a cigarette and poured a cup of the chicory.

Look at the hands, he thought-his father had told him that was the best quick way to read someone. They're not soft, but they're not a working ranch-hand's either, or a servant girl's. Not enough battering, and that dirt's not ground into her knuckles and pores. And her fingernails are well trimmed. Plus tobacco is expensive.

"Thank you kindly," she said.

Odard was lying against his saddle, idly strumming at his lute. He didn't look up from the instrument as he said:

"Left home in a hurry, demoiselle? Anyone after you that we should know about? Someone who might just kill any company you'd picked up… us, for instance?"

Her hand moved towards the hilt of her shete; then she unbuckled the weapons belt and set it aside slightly-though Fred noticed she didn't put it so far away that she couldn't draw the steel quickly.

"My… ranch that I was living on got taken over by the CUT," she said carefully. "By a couple of neighbors who'd gone over to the Cutters, at least; and there were Cutter troops around to back them up, a new bunch, not just their levies-Sword of the Prophet, regulars out of Corwin. I had to clear out fast; the Cutters don't live like human beings, if you ask me, and it's worse for a woman. That was in the Powder River country, north of Sheridan."

That didn't mean anything to most of them. Ingolf whistled softly. "That's a long way to come on one horse, miss," he said.

Virginia looked at him; her eyes narrowed slightly, noting the difference in accent between him and the others who'd spoken. His Wisconsin rasp wasn't much like her twang, but it was a lot closer than Rudi's lilt or the archaic Portlander dialect or the way Sindarin influenced the way the twins sounded.

"I had a remuda," she said. "But they were after me. I had to push my horses hard, and leave a couple that foundered or went lame."

"And are you heading anywhere in particular?" Rudi said.

She looked at him, visibly considered, and said with a trace of bitterness:

"Mister, it's more a matter of headin' away from anywhere those maniacs is likely to go."

Then she yawned; her head drooped, until she pulled it up with a jerk.

"You can put your bedroll over here on the girls' side," Mathilda said. "And tell us more about it in the morning."

"… Guide me and guard me this day and all days

By Your grace, with harm to none,

Blessed be!"

Rudi lowered his arms as the disk of the sun cleared the eastern horizon. The plain there was nearly featureless, though it was rising ground and rolled very slightly more than the flatness behind them. Even a slight roll here was deceptive, making you think you could see farther than you could. Was that the slightest trace of blue irregularity on the northeast the Black Hills, or was knowledge born of maps fooling him?

Hard to tell, he thought. It's tricky to measure distance here by eye. And who knew the sky could be so… big?

Dawn and evening were the best hours on the plains, he'd found; for a few long moments it was a mystery of brown and green and blue, of long shadows and enormous distance. The morning was cool, and for an instant there had been dew on the grass, but the great cloudless dome of blue all around them augured for a warm day. Grass ran in rippling calf-high waves to the edge of sight, still green in early June, with only the occasional big sage or white-blossomed yucca bush, but with a thick scattering of flowers yellow and pink and blue. A herd of pronghorns flowed past in the middle distance; prairie dogs whistled from a town whose little conical hillocks scattered the land ahead, and then they dove for cover as a golden eagle soared by on seven-foot wings, its shadow flowing ahead of it.

"Ah, you guys aren't from around here, are you?" Virginia said carefully.

Rudi turned from where he and his sisters and Edain had been making their morning prayer; Fred Thurston had joined in. A bit to his surprise, Ingolf had joined them too, standing beside Mary, though he hadn't actually recited the Salute to the Sun with them.

"No, we're from the Far West," he said. "Except Ingolf here, and he's been all the way West to our home."

Ignatius was looking a little unhappy about Ingolf, but too polite to say anything in public, and he was sticking close to Mathilda anyway-since Yule, he'd been like a goose with one gosling around her. Odard was with them, of course; he'd been getting more pious lately.

"You mean from that valley near the Tetons, over past the Wind River country, where they've got the fu

"We passed through there," Rudi said, gri

The ranch-woman went on, still carefully: "Yeah, the skirts look. .. a little strange. No offense."

"We're from Oregon," Edain amplified. "And these aren't skirts, they're kilts. We're Mackenzies-everyone wears them in our clan."