The Scourge of God, page 43
Everyone was stirring; Rudi took down a canvas water bottle from a peg and obeyed part of the herald’s injunction. The more he looked around, the more he was impressed with the neat economy of space; their weapons, armor and other gear were all stowed overhead on racks that folded down from the ceiling, for example, and the middle of the tent had a ceramic plate inset to mount a stove in cold weather, with a space for a flue running up to a hole in the central peak. Light came from actual glass windows set in the latticework walls, and there was an unlit lamp on a shelf over the door; the interior smelled of well-tanned leather and faintly of smoke.
“Rise and shine, men!” he called, as he rolled up his bedding and lashed it to the wall with the thongs provided.
Groans and grunts answered him; like his mother he was always cheerful in the morning, and it had always mystified him why some people resented it.
Why waste the day? There’s things to be doing! But sure, you can’t convince the sleepyheads.
He slipped on his kilt instead and picked up his shaving kit; Ingolf joined him, and they ducked out of the door—thoughtfully leaving it open to the bright early-morning sunlight and cool air. A pillow thrown by Odard, who was not cheerful in the mornings, bounced off their backs.
“Whatever’s cooking smells very good indeed,” Rudi said; it involved frying and, he thought, onions. “Odard will crawl out when it penetrates.”
Men in breechclouts were walking past; the two travelers jumped down from the wagon platform and joined them at their friendly invitation.
Seen by daylight the hocoka was a great horseshoe of the tents-on-wheels, with an opening to the east and the tent doors facing inward; their white exteriors were painted in colorful geometric patterns, or stylized birds and beasts, or what looked like murals. Some of the larger ones had words inset in the decorations: at a glance he saw LIBRARY and CLINIC. Rudi estimated at least a hundred and fifty of the dwellings in all, not counting two huge conical tipis flanking the entrance and another, even larger and colored red, in the center of the open space. Smoke drifted from cookfires, mostly under sheet-metal tubs on legs or Dutch ovens, and the intoxicating smell of brewing chicory was strong.
And I’m even beginning to like the taste.
The interior of the great encampment had been trodden to bare dust, but grass was soft beneath the soles of his feet when the crowd left it. Around was a view of mile upon mile of rolling green splashed with drifts of the delicate white-pink prairie rose, taller purple coneflower, scarlet western lily and yellow wild sunflower. The ground dropped off to a fair-sized river southward, and the Black Hills showed clear to the north, but most of the horizon was like a bowl dropped over a world of infinite spaces.
A roped-off enclosure not far away held the ready-use horses, and herds of horses, red-coated cattle and off-white sheep dotted the landscape. Outside the circle of living-tents was a vehicle park, wagons of every size and shape and description, from ones that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the Oregon Trail to cut-down pickup trucks and converted mobile homes.
Red Leaf waved, then came over as they walked down to the water. “Men bathe here,” he said. “Women over there, and stock water below that.”
Rudi nodded; Mackenzies didn’t have much of a nudity taboo in their communal bathhouses, but other folk were more prudish, he knew. There were a good three or four hundred in the crowd who dove into the water and splashed around with much horseplay, from boys just a little too old to join the women down to the few elders; his mind automatically noted that well over half were fit to bear arms, and looked as if they could, too. A lot of them had brought their weapons to the riverbank, within easy grabbing range, even though it was obvious nobody expected real trouble.
He swam in the cold water, scrubbed with soap and sand, cautiously around the sore spots, shaved with his straight razor, and headed back for the tent.
Should I try growing a beard again? No, still too patchy.
The warm dry air had the last of the water off his skin by the time he’d gotten back . . .
And I’m a little reluctant to put the old clothes back on. Well, we’ll have time to wash them—
There was the first surprise; their clothes had been taken away to be cleaned and repaired, and new outfits set out for all of them—his consisted of buckskin trousers with buffalo-hair fringes down the seams flanked by colorful quillwork, and a linsey-woolsey tunic bleached creamy white with bands of beads in geometric patterns along the sleeves and in a triangle at the neck.
Mathilda and his sisters and Virginia Kane came back from the women’s section of the river; they’d been decked out in dresses that had capelike upper sections, with rows of shells across the yokes, flowers and birds along the hems, belts with hammered silver conchos, and moccasins done with a buffalo-hoof design; some of Red Leaf’s female relatives sat with them, dressing their hair in local style. Others headed for Rudi and the others with combs in their hands and determination in their eyes; Odard’s bowl crop, Father Ignatius’ neat tonsure and Fred Thurston’s short cap of wiry fuzz defeated them, but Rudi and Ingolf and Edain soon had twin braids fur-wrapped, albeit rather shorter than the local fashion.
Rudi’s had two long raven feathers tucked in. “Sure, and the Raven is the bird of my sept,” he said.
The girl doing his hair nodded. “And she’s the bird of the battle-fields. These are for the two coups you counted yesterday. And this”—she added an eagle feather—“is for saving my brother’s life.”
He stood to buckle his sword belt, and the girl—she was about fourteen—glanced up at him with an unconscious sigh, clasping her hands together. Out of the corner of his eye he caught Mathilda looking at him with a pawky raised eyebrow. She mouthed peacock at him, and he replied with a silent you’re another!
“My, my, don’t you all look fine,” Red Leaf said, when the work was done.
He poked a finger at Rudi: “You know, you’re a dead ringer for a guy on the cover of one of those Sweet Savage Romance books I saw before the Change. There was this Swedish . . . woman . . . who used to haunt the powwows, she read ’em by the cartload; thought she was the reincarnation of an Indian Princess. We called her Princess Yumping Yimminy—”
Rick Three Bears grunted; probably because the massive bruise along his flank and the left side of his face made talking painful. He rolled his eyes and made the effort anyway:
“Dad, nobody’s interested in what happened before the Change—at least, not right before. Let’s go eat. Mom got up before dawn to start breakfast and she’ll have a cow if anything spoils.”
The visitors kept their faces polite, as was fitting for guests; Rudi suspected it was with a bit of effort.
Because each of us has thought exactly the same thing about our own oldsters, haven’t we now?
From the wry smile, Red Leaf knew what they were thinking; he led the way to his own extended family’s quarters, located in the place of honor near the hocoka’s entrance. His household had a set of five of the round platform-tents, with the sides rolled up to the roofline for better ventilation on the fine early-summer morning. The itancan introduced his wife, Sungila Win—a matronly lady a little younger than he, presumably named Fox Woman for her hair, with pleasant green eyes—and their four children, from one barely walking, stumping around in a moss-stuffed hide diaper, to Rick Three Bears’ early twenties; his wife, his two children, his widowed sister and her three children and their spouses and infants, four young cousins and a brace of servant girls (who ate with the rest), and a couple of guests.
Evidently an itancan-chief was expected to keep open house.
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 beginning of a curtsey.
“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 mannerly; there seemed to be a code of conventions about when and how you could step within a family’s section of the encampment, and for that matter who could speak to, or even notice, whom. Red Leaf pointed out the public facilities—the school-tents (in recess right now), the armories, the big tipis that were used for meetings of the warrior societies starting with his own Kit Foxes, the women’s societies like the Tanners and Virtuous Women—
“Or so they claim,” Red Leaf observed sardonically.
“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 spinning and weaving, a blacksmith with a portable forge, carpenters making the latticework frame of a tent, a saddler tooling intricate designs into the flaps of a silver-studded masterpiece.
“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 grinned as one young man stood on the saddle of his galloping horse, dropped to one side with his hand on the pommel, vaulted over to the other flank and then bounced back up as if he were on a trampoline, doing a handstand on the saddle before flipping himself down again.
“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.”
Evidently he considered that funny, for some reason; probably a local joke, even a pre-Change one. Rudi went on, remembering things his mother and the other older Mackenzies had told him:
“And I imagine that a lot of your folk were more ready than most to believe that something had happened. Their spirits not being comfortably settled in the way things were before the Change, so. One of our founders said . . . what was it . . . When the going gets weird, the weird get going.”
“Ah, you’re not just tall, handsome and quick with a chopper, eh, kilt-boy?” Red Leaf said with respect. “Yeah, there was that. It’d been one damned shafting after another for us since my great-great-granddaddy’s day, when we lifted Custer’s hair. Not that the son of a bitch didn’t deserve it . . . Everyone else around here was knocked flat mentally in ’ninety-eight—their happy time was over, but they didn’t want to admit it. A lot of us thought it was time to rock.”
“We in the Willamette are the only place we know near a big city where everyone didn’t die. And most did, so,” Rudi pointed out.
Mathilda nodded. “There were more than a million people in Portland,” she said. “My father and mother managed to get a couple of hundred thousand through alive. Nobody here . . . nobody east of the Cascades . . . was that badly off.”
Red Leaf lay back on one elbow and handed them a skin bag from his saddle. “Yeah, the Ranchers got back on their feet after a while, doing the Lonesome Dove and Kit Carson thing. But a lot of us Lakota saw the Change more as opportunity knocking and landed on our feet. We knew what we wanted to do and we went and did it.”
“And when you know that, and others don’t, they’ll follow your lead,” Rudi said, and took a drink.
After a moment he looked down at the chagal. The liquid within tasted faintly alcoholic, and very slightly fizzy. The rest of the taste was something vaguely related to sour milk; as if you’d poured beer into what the hearth-lady of some farm left out for the house-hob. He took another swallow for politeness’ sake and handed it to Mathilda; if he was going to suffer, why shouldn’t she?
“Damn right,” Red Leaf went on. “Though there was a fair bit of argument over what sort of opportunity it was. I mean, we couldn’t really go back to the old ways.”
“I remember my father complaining about that,” Mathilda said. “He did want to go back to the old ways—the new ones having failed. But it was impossible. The people were different.”
