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Fair reminds me of home and the Hall, it does, Rudi thought, accepting a plate from Three Bears' mother. What does Aunt Judy call it? A mispocha?
"Sure, and it's a delight this hospitality is," he said, as they settled cross-legged around a low folding table that made a complete circle of the biggest tent. "I thank you for the trouble."
"You saved my boy Rick," Fox Woman said flatly.
Rudi blushed a little, made the Invocation, and applied himself to the food. The women had been busy with three portable stoves, and not in vain; there was frybread, lamb sausages redolent of garlic and sage, grilled walleye fillets fresh from the river, done with butter and pecans and steaming white and flaky on the fork, and plates of buffalo-hump hash and scrambled eggs savory with herbs and wild onion. While they ate, and drank the chicory and rose-hip tea and talked, Rudi leaned closer to Ingolf.
"You seem a little reserved, my friend," he said.
Everyone else is happy as crickets; Nobody's trying to kill us, for starters, which is a pleasant change from yesterday and too many days this past year. Edain saved two lives with a close shot, which is something he needed to do… but you are a bit grim.
Ingolf chuckled. "Yah. Thing is, back when I was your age or a bit younger I spent years when the worst nightmare I had started with waking up in a Sioux camp. I nearly crapped myself this morning for a second, before I remembered the circumstances."
Rudi's brows went up. "Well, I suppose these folk can be bad enemies. Though they think there's nothing too good for a friend, I'd say, from how they've treated us, the which makes me think well of them."
"Yah… you know how the Anishinabe called the Sioux the rattlesnakes?"
"I'm not likely to forget," he said, wincing a little with remembered embarrassment. "I should have noticed you were signaling me to shut up…"
"Well, that's not the only name the neighbors had for them."
"Oh, so?"
"Yah. The torturers was a favorite too."
"Ingolf!"
He looked up as Mary called. "Come on, let's have a walk. The girls say there's going to be some all-female do later."
The party broke up. Three Bears and some other younger men captured Edain and demanded that he show them his longbow in operation, with Odard and Frederick in tow and Virginia following, elaborately casual. A collection of grave older men and women took Father Ignatius away to spend the day administering sacraments; there were evidently a fair number of Catholic Christians in the hocoka, but a shortage of clergy.
Red Leaf looked a little surprised when Mathilda automatically joined him and Rudi.
I don't think women are much put upon here, Rudi thought. Certainly his host's wife and daughters hadn't been shy about offering opinions-they'd been strongly in favor of the men hunting down and killing all the lions, for instance. But I get the impression war and politics are men's business, at least formally.
"Ah…" Rudi said. "We didn't have time for formal introductions beyond the basics. This is Princess Mathilda Arminger, heir to the throne of the Portland Protective Association. Which is-"
"Yeah, I've heard of them," Red Leaf said. "Knights in armor… which after yesterday sounds a lot more credible. I've also heard that they're at war with the Cutters now; that all you Westerners are. Them and Boise."
Rudi nodded gravely, and Mathilda made a gesture of stately politeness, like the begi
"OK, I see your point. C'mon, I'll show you both around the place."
They strolled around the great circuit. Children and dogs followed them, but the people were ma
"Oh, Mathilda's as virtuous as you'd care to see," Rudi said blandly, and suppressed a yelp as she prodded him cruelly in one of the bruises on his ribs.
Some of the dwellers were setting out goods-weapons, tools, household gear, a vast array of leatherwork-including a few traders from towns like Newcastle that had coal mines to fire their foundries. There were craftsmen at work as well: women spi
"Fewer than I'd have expected, though," Rudi said. "From the abundance of well-made things."
"Ah, you noticed," Red Leaf said. "Yeah, we spend a lot of time in winter making things, when we're split up in our cold-season camps."
He nodded at two men a few years younger than himself. "Those guys are talking a big livestock deal."
Farther out from the hocoka men and a few younger women were practicing with arms; shooting at marks on the ground, and from the saddle at targets or at hoops of rawhide thrown to bounce and skip. Others picked pegs out of the ground with light lances, or speared hide rings held on the ends of poles, or cut and parried with shetes and used lariats.
Rudi gri
"Not bad, eh?" Red Leaf said proudly.
"Not bad at all."
Which is true enough, he thought. They're fine shots and better than fine horsemen. Only middling with the blade, though, at best.
Two youngsters brought them saddled horses. "Let's go up somewhere high and private," the itancan said.
"Your folk have done well by themselves," Rudi said.
They hobbled their horses, then sat and looked downward at the bustling activity as they shared a cigarette-from here you could see things kept at a sensible distance from the hocoka, like the butchering ground well southward along the river, downstream. The smoke of the cookfires was a faint tang from here. The scent the noonday sun baked out of the prairie was like lying in a haymow, with a spicy undertone and the grassy-earthy smell of the horses.
Mathilda coughed a bit as she handed the cigarette back. "I know this is an acquired habit," she said. "But why would anyone acquire it? And the old fo-ah, people who were around before the Change say it's bad for you."
Red Leaf gave a slight shrug and a smile. "It's sort of a religious thing here," he said. "Like sweetgrass. Besides which, the weed's so expensive these days you can't have enough to kill you."
He sighed and looked at the butt, then carefully ground it out; Rudi had noted that all these plainsmen were very careful about fire.
The last of the smoke blew away; the air had a hint of ozone to it as well, alien to someone raised in the well-watered Willamette but not disagreeable. And under that huge sky even the bustling hocoka looked tiny, an anthill among the vastness.
He's friendly because I saved his son, and because we fought with his band, Rudi thought. This is a man who takes honor's obligation seriously. But also, I'm thinking, he's interested in us because he knows we're not just travelers. And that what we are could serve his people's need; which is also the honor of a Chief.
"Yeah, we've done pretty well," the Lakota itancan went on. "Sure as hell better than most people did after the Change. Of course, when you're already flat on your face falling doesn't hurt as much. And we were way the hell away from anywhere urban. Unless you counted Sioux Falls as a big city."