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"They're coming separately," Signe said. "They've got: a bit of a present to show around, you might say."
"And the Rangers are independents themselves, these days," Havel said.
"Since we all agreed to give them that stretch of woods. Sort of prickly about it, too."
Damned if I'm going to call them the Dunedain Rangers, he added to himself. Bad enough I have to do the Mad Max on Horseback thing myself.
One thing he did like about Corvallis was that it was a bit less given to weird names than the rest of the present-day Valley.
"Ken's not coming?" the Corvallan officer went on, looking surprised as Havel shook his head. "Your father-in-law usually doesn't pass up an opportunity to haunt our bookstores and the Library."
"Tell me," Havel said, thinking of the bills the Outfit had paid in grain and wool, tuns of wine and barrels of salt pork; they'd had words on the matter.
I'd have gotten even madder ij the stuff he dug up weren't so helpful sometimes.
Books were expensive these days, unless you were talking salvaged paperback copies of Tom Clancy or the like, and even those were getting rare and fragile in this damp climate. Real books on something useful were pricey, either because they were irreplaceable-books made good kindling and a lot of libraries had burned after the Change-or because they'd been new-printed with hand-operated presses on dwindling stores of pre-Change paper. Or on the even more expensive rag-pulp type Corvallis had started making recently. The city-state had a biweekly newsletter, all of four pages, and copies cost more than a day's wages for a laboring man.
Lua
Jones nodded. "Tell me," he said, and touched the rein to the neck of his horse to fall in beside them. "Between the kids and the farm and the weaving, I don't know how the hell Nancy stays sane when I'm out on patrol, even with Mom and the hired help."
"We do have our doc along," Signe said. "He needs some supplies."
Jones nodded proudly; Corvallis was the best place in Oregon to buy such. Havel shot a glance at his brother-in-law, and Eric's hand chopped forward. The column rumbled into motion southward.
"OSU our hats are off to you,
Beavers, Beavers, fighters through and through
We'll cheer thru-out the land,
We'll root for every stand,
That's made for old OSU!
Watch our pikes go tearing down the field;
Those of iron, their strength will never yield
Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail to old OSU!"
Christ Jesus, what an abortion of a national anthem! Mike Havel thought, behind a gravely respectful face. Just as well we don't have one. Though we use "March of Cambreadth" a lot, at least the lyrics aren't outright stupid and it's got a great tune.
Then again, at least the city-state wasn't pretending to be something it wasn't. There were half a dozen governments in this general part of the continent that claimed to be the United States, from single small towns to one that covered most of southwestern Idaho. All of them were rather nasty dictatorships. They used "The Star-Spangled Ba
The Corvallans weren't just singing. Pompom-wielding cheerleaders led the crowd through the fight song, their short-skirted orange-and-black costumes swinging as they kicked and leapt. That was fairly ludicrous too, but then, he'd thought cheerleading was dumb even back in the eighties when he'd been on the bench and the local maidens were egging on the audience for the Hancock High Wolverines. As a teenager he'd considered football the chosen sport of idiots; track and field had been what he liked, and cross-country skiing, and by choice he'd hunt or ride his Harley or tinker with its engine or even work chores at home instead of doing head-butts with behemoths. The little Upper Peninsula high school hadn't had talent to waste, though, and he'd been effectively conscripted as the fastest ru
And wasn't that a complete waste of time, he thought.
Which didn't prevent him observing with interest when a pretty girl shook it hard, then or now, and there was some righteous booty here; he caught Signe raising an eyebrow at him, and smiled back at her.
"Monogamous, alskling, not blind," he murmured.
The cheerleaders looked even odder doing their leaps and pyramids in front of ranks of armored troops standing to attention. The sixteen-foot pikes made a steel-tipped forest above them, points catching the red light of sundown in a manifold glitter as the sun set over the low hills to the west; the rest stood with crossbows held at present arms. He supposed the folk of the city had gotten used to it, cheerleaders and all.
Corvallis proper had about eight or nine thousand people inside its walls, and besides the militia battalion a quarter of them were out to see the visitors, singing along heartily and then cheering, plus people from the countryside round about. They made a huge dun mass in the open space between Highway 99, the railway, and the old Hewlett-Packard plant to the east and the Willamette River beyond, trampling up to the edge of the mulched, harvested truck gardens. The low-slung campus-style buildings of the high-tech factory had been taken over for noxious trades not allowed in the city proper; he could smell the whiff of leather curing in the ta
Mary and Ritva were quiet behind him; they were well-ma
But a hell of a lot longer, he thought.
Nearly eight miles in circuit, an immense feat of labor. Two major bandit attacks and a large raid out of the Protectorate had bounced off it like buckshot off a tank in years past, but he thought the Corvallans tended to overestimate the security it gave them.
After the anthem, a delegation walked up to him. He swung down from the saddle and waited courteously; there were about two dozen of them, and they took a fair bit of hand-shaking and honored-to-see-you-sir-or-ma'ams. That was the problem: the President, the Provost, the representatives of the Faculty Senate: back right around the Change, they'd gotten a lot done here because it was obvious what needed doing, and they'd have died if they didn't do it. And the mechanisms they'd set up went on working well enough, as long as the rest of the world cooperated by not changing much either. But try to get a policy change: right now, just getting them all in the same spot at the same time was like pushing rocks uphill.
They're tired of fighting and want to relax and enjoy life, he thought. Pity the world won't cooperate.
When the formalities were over and the troops and spectators had marched off, the Bearkiller party and Major Jones walked their horses through the entry complex. That was a little more difficult than it would have been at Larsdalen; here they'd overlapped two sections of the city wall, so that the entrance was at right angles to it. You had to turn sharp left to get through the outer portal, go a hundred yards with walls on either side, then abruptly right again to enter the city through the i