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He made a beckoning gesture with his free hand. The na
"I'll get him cleaned up and ready for supper, Mike," she said.
"Let him sleep for an hour or so, Lucy," Havel said. "Little fellah was going at it hard today."
I'm finally getting used to having all this household help, he thought. It does simplify things considerable.
It was no novelty for the Larssons, of course; they'd been richer than God for three long generations before the Change, and Ken's first wife had been a Boston Brahmin who looked down on them-and the Rockefellers-as parvenus. She'd probably looked on Mike Havel as a monkey from the outback. Even when he was busting his ass trying to get her badly injured self back to a civilization neither of them knew had crashed and sunk like that Piper Chieftain he'd piloted over the Selway-Bitterroot. Though even when dying she'd been too genteel to show it.
OK, gentility not my strong point, he thought. I'll leave that for my descendants. They'll have ancestors. I am an ancestor.
When the na
His father-in-law snorted and turned his single bright blue eye on him, across the table with its plate of cookies. He was a big man in his early sixties with a short-cropped white beard, a patch over his left eye and a hook in place of the hand on that side, both the fruit of an encounter between the Bearkillers and a would-be warlord and friend of Arminger's in the first Change Year, out east up the Snake River. The kettle belly he'd had before the Change was gone, and he looked tougher and fitter than he had when he climbed into the Piper Chieftain in Boise, but he'd never pretended to be a fighting man. His mind made him far more valuable; an experienced administrator and engineer had been beyond price a dozen times. Plus he asked disturbing questions:
"When did I hear that tune before?" he said. "There's never going to be a convenient time, Mike. Not unless we make it. There isn't going to be a time when there's no emergency, either."
"OK, I said it, and I mean it. January. The Association's going for us soon, and it'll all be over one way or another by Christmas. I swear to God we'll elect: OK, call it two from every A-lister steading and strategic hamlet. On that Australian ballot thing you're fond of. Christ Jesus, it'll be a relief to have some single group I can go talk to and bargain with and settle things with! Plus it'll help put a leash on some of our A-listers who've got delusions of baron-hood."
"Give the man a cookie!"
He offered one. Havel shook his head. "Nah, don't want to spoil supper. They butchered a nice plump steer a couple-three days ago and Talli down to the kitchens says the steaks look great."
Ken's wife-second wife-Pamela snorted; she had a plate of carrot sticks beside her chair. That wasn't what kept her lean, though; partially genes, and partially the fact that she'd been a hobbyist who studied Renaissance sword techniques before the Change, and the Bearkillers primary blade trainer since. She'd taught him the backsword, and a good many others, and her pupils had passed it on. Quite a stroke of luck to stumble onto her, that day in Idaho when they took in their first recruits, and not just for then-widowed Ken because they'd ended up married.
But then, if I wasn't very lucky, I'd be dead about one hundred and thirty-eight times, he thought. Don't let that make you overconfident, Marine. The dice have no memory.
"And not a word about the first early greens of the year," Pam went on, rolling her eyes and shrugging expressively, then asked rhetorically: "How do you make a Fi
Havel gri
The laugh died as trumpets screamed from the gate-towers. All the adults' heads came up; those three rising notes meant attention! And after that came the signal for urgent courier.
Havel swung erect, his hand automatically picking up the basket-hilted sword that leaned against the recliner, with the belt wound around it. They waited, watching two riders trot up the roadway and draw rein before the veranda, tumbling down out of the saddle while the guards grounded their polearms and took the reins. One of the riders had a black jerkin with Astrid's tree-stars-crown thing on it, a young woman in her late teens with reddish-brown hair plastered to her face by sweat and wind; she raked it free and bowed. The man beside her was a Bearkiller scout wearing a mail vest and a helmet, more practical for quick work than a full hauberk. An A-lister, though, a lieutenant commanding a unit of couriers who doubled as scouts and light cavalry.
His name's Smythe, memory prompted. The A-List wasn't yet so big that he couldn't remember every Brother and Sister. His eyes flicked to the horses. The one the Bearkiller scout rode was breathing hard though not blown, but the Ranger's looked as if it might drop dead any minute: head drooping, panting like a bellows, its neck and forequarters streaked with dried foam.
The Dunedain Ranger was reeling with fatigue too as she scrabbled in her saddlebags and handed him an envelope; he didn't need to ask if it was urgent.
"I had to go far out of the way and dodge Protectorate scouts, Lord Bear," she said. "I'm sorry it delayed me."
She inclined her head towards her horse. Behind him Eric Larsson whistled softly; there was a broken-off stub of arrow standing in the cantle of her saddle. Three inches forward and it would have gone into her pelvis.
"You got it here, which is what counts," Havel said, taking the envelope. "If there's no verbal addition, why don't you get the horse seen to and get something for yourself?"
She stumbled away, leading the horse; its dragging hooves made a counterpoint to her boots. Havel ripped the letter open and read on aloud: "Elvish, Elvish, Elvish-meaning it's me, Astrid; Elvish, Elvish, Elvish-meaning Hi, Mike; Elvish: OK, here's the meat of it: Three columns of Protectorate troops…"
He went on to the end. "Right," he said, passing it to Will Hutton.
The black Texan's graying eyebrows shot up as he looked over the map. "Some motherfucker up north has decided it's a beautiful spring day, so let's have a war. Three guesses who.''
The children sensed the adults' tension and fell silent. Mike took an instant to wave them into the house; the older ones shooed the protesting youngest along with them, or dragged them by the wrist. That gave time for the message to be passed around from hand to hand as well, and for him to call up the maps in his head. The river and the ruins of Salem, with the bridges; then open country north and south, the Eola Hills to the west, then more open country with the odd hill, then the Coast Range if you went far enough:
"OK," he said, his voice flat and cold. "This is the opening move. He's investing Mount Angel, pushing through the Waldos to the edge of Mackenzie country, and to back it all up, he's going to try and rush the Salem bridges to cut the opposition in half. If he can hold them, he'll cut us off from each other. Anyone got any ideas on why the ones going south out of Molalla are carrying all that heavy gear and taking labor gangs with them?"
"Going to put up a forward base, if they can punch through to the open country north of Lebanon," Eric Larsson said. "Prefab castle, or maybe more than one, base for a campaign south of the Santiam and protection for their supply route."