Second Fire
by Mike Shepherd writing as Mike Moscoe
How do you win a battle lost 6000 years ago?
How do you make sure winning that battle
Doesn’t lose you the war?
Published by GCU Press at Smashwords
Copyright 2012 Mike Moscoe
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PROLOGUE
In a world just around the corner that might never be.
Screams and shouts grew dim and distant. Judith Lee hadn’t heard automatic weapons fire for at least five minutes.
She let out a long, slow breath. Hiding here between a wall and some huge lab equipment had been the first relaxing moment she’d had in six months. Everything was finished.
She was either right — or terribly wrong.
As a college professor, inhabiting the dusty halls of anthropology departments, she got away with thinking in terms of thousands of years, plus or minus a few hundred. But if she’d targeted Launa and Jack for the wrong year, everything — the time machine and six thousand years of history — was wasted.
Keep thinking like that and you’ll run out of here screaming for somebody to shoot you.
She glanced at Brent Lynch, squeezed with her into the cramped hideaway. "Shall we make a run for it?"
The old gentleman shrugged. "I doubt if I can do more than hobble, but I most certainly do not wish to die here."
Since they most certainly were going to die — and soon — Judith slowly pulled herself out from the machinery that had hidden them from the mob. Her old joints ached, but being five years shy of Brent's eighty, she went first.
As she wiggled out, a wire gouged her arm, drawing blood.
Half out, she sat up, dabbing at the cut as she searched the wreckage. Bodies of Livermore personnel in lab smocks and uniforms lay scattered among those of the mob. None looked alive.
Such a waste. How could they possible have come to believe that this bunker held a cure for the plague?
She helped Brent out.
"How long do we have?" He spoke between gasps.
"The plague normally takes three to six days to kill. Your guess is as good as mine."
Neither one spoke of the chance that he or she might be the lucky one in a thousand the designer plague left alive. Were the six million survivors who faced secondary plagues and lawlessness really that lucky?
"My daughter lives ten miles from Livermore. I'd like to be with her." They probably couldn’t walk that far, but Judith would not give up.
Brent smiled through gritted teeth. "Why not? I have no place else to go."
Judith felt the impact before she heard the shots. Chunks of her flesh and blood splattered on the wall in front of her, punctuated by bullet holes.
She felt more relief than pain. Her last thought as she surrendered to the darkness was a prayer.
Please, dear God, let Launa and Jack change all this.
ONE
Captain Jack Walking Bear did his usual morning sweep of the valley around Tall Oaks.
It looked as peaceful as Judith and Brent had briefed him to expect. Wisps of fog shrouded the planted fields and clung to the tops of the trees on the gently rising hill beyond. Goats grazed placidly.
Last summer he'd seen just how quickly a bunch of horse raiders could change all that.
Predawn colored the clouds to the west in gold and pastels. He enjoyed a deep breath of the crisp air, a fine break from the cold drizzle of the last week.
With luck they’d put this break in the weather to good use; Goddess knows, the wall needed shoring up.
Beside him, a blond head poked out from the deerskin flap that was the door to their home, followed quickly by the rest of his commanding officer.
Lieutenant Launa O’Brian stepped gingerly, trying to avoid mud puddles. The leather jerkin and leggings showed off her lithe gymnast’s body to good measure.
He smiled.
“Who’s working with us today?” Launa, as usual, was all mission . . . once outside their home.
“I think Antia and her pikes have construction duty, but the rain’s made a hash of the duty roster.”
“I’ll be glad for whoever shows up.”
A horse snorted; another whinnied. Both Launa and Jack got busy doing a new set of full-circle searches. “Do we have a patrol going out this morning?” Launa asked curtly.
“Not that I scheduled,” Jack shot back.
“Horse raiders?”
“They’re not supposed to go for winter campaigns, but I don’t trust those bastards to read their own ops manuals.”
Jack listened hard. His life, and the lives of a lot of people, depended on him being ready when the horse raiders next swept off the steppe.
The noise of animal and harness came from inside Tall Oaks!
* * *
Arakk, Bloodletter to the Wide Blue Sky and leader of the Stormy Mountain Clan, faced the sacred east.
The sky was clear; no cloud marred its blue purity. Behind him, clouds out of season profaned the dawn. He ignored them.
Raising his long obsidian blade to the sun as it edged above the horizon, he called in a loud voice. "Father Sun, fill my knife with Your strength. Let my eyes see all that You see. Watch me slaughter the enemies of my clan."
Behind him came the sound of pounding hoofs. He did not turn; nothing would distract him from his morning prayers.
"Father, a slave escaped in the night."
For this, prayers would wait.
Arakk turned to see his eldest son, Kantom, trotting toward him, leading two hands of horses.
"They run," Arakk snarled, "we catch them. We beat them. They learn."
His son nodded. "It is the old one. He has run many times and been beaten many times. Last night he stole a horse."
Arakk grabbed the mane of the nearest horse and swung himself up.
"No one steals a horse of the clan and lives. This time he dies slowly. Let his bloody body teach the others."
Kantom leaped from the tired horse he was riding to a fresh one, kicked it and led his father in pursuit. It did not take long to find tracks in the snow that dusted the good grass.
"He rides to the west, father."
"We follow him," Arakk growled.
Always it was the west. Arakk had come to hate the west.
For seasons the clan had fled to the west from its strong enemies, seeking grass with no horses on it. Finally, they had found good grass, but it was not enough.
Three full moons ago he had sent Tyman and four hands of warriors to see what prey lay to the west. Or maybe Tyman had sent himself. Still, even if that puffed-up adder had done what Arakk half expected — charging into the next place of walkers and taken many heads — Tyman would have returned for his women . . . and to claim clan status for his band.
Arakk scowled. He had seen nothing of proud Tyman.
He still did not know what lay to the west. Next spring he must lead the Stormy Mountain warriors and their allies straight and swift to take more heads, more slaves and more pastures.
Once more, Arakk was trying to raise the cloak that hid the west. What four hands of warriors could not see, maybe one could. Young Danic was a proud young warrior who had no fear of trees. He scorned most steppe raised warriors who made signs against evil when they rode in the shade of trees.
And Danic knew the honor of his father and brothers and the life of his woman and young son depended on him seeing well and returning. The honors his woman and son now received by feasting at Arakk's right hand would be short-lived if he did not return . . . and soon.
Arakk kicked his horse for more speed. It struggled to gallop faster, but failed. He pulled in another spare mount and leaped to it. When he kicked this one, it took off like an eagle.
Beside him, Kantom did the same.
No one could escape Arakk's wrath.
TWO
Jack bolted for the center of town, spear in hand, not sure what he was headed for — trying to be ready for anything.
In a minute he covered half the distance. The noise was to his left; he skidded as he turned. Grabbing a hand-hold on a log-and-wattle hut, he avoided a dip in somebody’s overflowing cesspool.
Two muddy streets over, he found what he was looking for.
Ten riders wound their way in a double column out of town. The helmets, weapons and clothing were Kurgan.
Jack had peeled that gear off twenty dead horsemen last summer. He knew it well.
The riders were just as familiar. Jack identified faces he’d drilled for half a year. The leader glanced his way. I should have known.
Antia!
“Halt!” Jack filled the word with the hard officer-presence the United States Army expected. The ragtag collection would be the despair of any Army recruiter. And most of the riders only half controlled their mounts.
Jack reinforced his command by stepping in front of them and bringing his spear horizontal to block their way.
The word . . . or the block . . . had the desired effect. The troop came to a close approximation of a halt.
“Where do you ride?” Lasa, Speaker for the Goddess in Tall Oaks, stepped out beside him and asked the question before Jack could. Launa skidded to a halt on the other side of She How Spoke for the Goddess here about.
Nobody was going anywhere without riding over someone. The skittish horses didn’t look ready for that.
“And why,” Lasa finished, “do you ride in such clothing?”
Jack had questions too, but Lasa had the floor. Here, six thousand years before he was born, a man kept quiet when a woman spoke.
Antia doffed her helmet and shook out her long raven hair. The daughter of She Who Spoke for the Goddess at River Bend knew the horse raiders up close and personal. She’d been there when they burned her town and killed her mother.
“Taelon who leads the Badger People in the dark woods, and who rode with the horsemen as a youth, told me the horse people scatter their herds to feed them during the winter.” She glanced back at those who rode with her, survivors of River Bend. “We go to visit one of their campfires as they visited us.”
“See! See! Is this not as I told you?”
Jack looked around for the source of that high-pitched, familiar voice.
“Shit, it’s Hanna,” Launa sighed. “Did everyone in this town know about this crazy sortie except us?”
Jack shrugged as Hanna waded through the crowd to Lasa.
“It is not enough that they spend every waking moment envisioning the horsemen coming to kill us. Now they go as death to walk among the horsemen. Death will return with them to walk among us.”
Jack sighed, and grounded his spear to make sure he didn’t do what he wanted to do . . . hit Hanna up beside the ear.
It was good to teach the young to see themselves as skilled, capable, loved by the one they desired. But envisioning yourself as winning the lottery didn’t make those numbered balls fall any different.
But nobody could make Hanna, or a lot of people like her, see that difference.
Launa nudged his elbow. “Let’s back off. I think this is best left to local counsel.”
He drifted with Launa to the edge of the crowd; they could hear. Most of it they’d heard before. Hanna wanted everyone to think nice thoughts. Antia wanted every horsemen dead.
Most people were somewhere in the middle, praying to the Goddess that the horsemen would just leave them alone.
Jack knew from the history books what these farmers did not.
The attack on River Bend was just the first of a wave of steppe horse raiders in a long war that would conquer Europe — and lock the world in a grim dance of domination and submission.
Six thousand years up-time, a designer plague would kill that world . . . and the President of the United States would give Launa command of the Neolithic Military Advisory Group, and orders for the two of them to change human history from conquest to cooperation.
Then, Jack had considered their mission a desperate long shot. Nothing in the last year had changed his mind.
“Step out of my path,” Antia shouted. “No one can tell another the path for her feet.”
So Antia had finally played her ace, the most sacred rule of the Goddess, and the one that might just lose them this war.
“But the horses you ride have eaten the grass of Tall Oaks for a season and more.” That was the voice of Kaul, Speaker for the Bull.
Jack looked for him. The other side of the crowd opened to make way for Lasa’s consort. “You, too, have eaten from the bounty the Goddess shares with us. Wise Lasa has spoken the Words of the Goddess. Let all of us walk in peace and harmony. Where is the peace and harmony in what you ride to?”
“Our knives will give the horsemen the only peace they can know when we let the lifeblood out of them.” she snarled.
Launa snickered. “You rescued quite a princess there.”
Jack shrugged. “She looked pretty helpless the first time I saw her.”
Roped together with nine other naked women and bullied by four armed Kurgans, Jack still wasn’t sure how she’d escaped, but she had.
Of the four Kurgans, Jack only killed two.
A commotion behind Jack got his attention. Taelon led in a group of hunters with a dozen deer slung across packhorses. Trying not to hunt out the area around Tall Oaks, Taelon was using the captured horses to range wide.
He was also Launa’s early warning system if the horseman did move during the winter.
Taelon listened attentively for a while, then threw his head back and laughed. “Little sister, you will clomp after the horsemen. They will hear you long before you see them. The cub does not hunt the deer, and you are not yet the wolf you want to be. You must learn more from me and Launa.”
Launa shook her head. “Who says I’ll teach her more?” She muttered, but in English so only Jack understood.
Jack doubted they could avoid teaching Antia.
The voices boiled on for a few more minutes. Everything was in the stew now. It began to rain. Someone suggested they talk this over at the sanctuary of the Goddess. That just about guaranteed nothing would happen today.
"Damn," Jack muttered. "How do we get a fire going under these people?"
“I have no idea,” Launa said, glancing around with a scowl. “But I would like to know who’s going to helping us mend the wall today.”
“I think we’re looking at both of us,” Jack said.
“Damn,” Launa growled and turned for the outskirts of town.
* * *
Arakk grinned; the slave was as predictable as a thirsty doe going to water.
He fled toward that place of abominations to the Wide Blue Sky the Stormy Mountain Clan had burned last summer. They spotted him as they came out of a tree line along a stream. He was halfway across a wide stretch of prairie, kicking his horse for speed.
The tired animal could do little more than trot.
Once again, father and son switched to remounts.
They topped a low rise as the rider and horse disappeared into a line of trees. Beyond them was the place. They raced for the ford closest to the abomination and cleared the trees to see the man tumble from his horse beside one of the burned wooden tents.
Kantom tossed aside the rope leading his spare mounts, lowered his lance and charged as a warrior should.
The slave heard them.
He slashed the throat of the stolen horse with a stolen knife, then raised it in a defiant warrior's challenge. Kantom answered with a whoop and kicked his mount for more speed, aiming his lance for the slave's heart.
The man stood proud, waiting for death. Almost, Arakk could honor him.
Then, in a blink, the slave hurled a rock at Kantom's horse, sending the startled mount into a spasm of bucking — and ducked into a burned hovel.
Enraged, Arakk drew his bow, strung it without slowing, and nocked an arrow.
The man reappeared, knife in hand as he dashed for Kantom. The boy still struggled to control his mount.
"Son!" Arakk shouted as he let the arrow fly. The shaft took the man in the side, but did not slow him.
Kantom jabbed him in the face with the butt of his lance.
The man recoiled from his attack and tried to flee.
Kantom spun his lance around and hurled it. The flint point took the man full in the back. This time, he went down.
Arakk trotted up; the slave still breathed. "Drag him back to the camp. Let all see on his dead body the reward of a slave who runs."
The boy dismounted and looped his lasso around the man's ankle. "He is not dead, Father."
"There are enough rocks between here and camp to make sure he is not breathing when you return to camp."
"Yes, Father!" The boy grinned as he mounted.
The man screamed in pain as Kantom kicked his horse and it took off.
Arakk watched them go, a frown forming on his face.
Could the dirt-scratchers learn a warrior's way? This one almost had. Still, hands and hands of others went about their work with eyes downcast and did not raise a hand when they were beaten.
Should this one worry Arakk?
He glanced around. Last summer they found this land that no horse clan claimed. Here the people, little more than animals, dug in the ground or followed weak little animals. No man rode a horse or carried a lance . . . and they listened to a woman who strutted about as if she were a Mighty Man.
Arakk had taken heads . . . and made that woman a special offering to the Sun.
Her heart and lungs he cut out, spreading them wide like the eagle's wings that are sacred to the Sky. She had still lived as he sacrificed her. Now the clan's mighty arm held these pastures and slaves did the bidding of their masters.
At least most had learned their place.
And when Danic returned, Arakk would go to the Mighty Men of the clans and raise high his totem. Many young warriors would follow him to the next abomination to the Wide Blue Sky.
There was pleasure in a well-built fire, in the smoke rising to the Sky. Come spring, Arakk would light a fire such as the Sun had never beheld.
It began to rain. He changed mounts and followed his son.
THREE
Long hours later, it was pouring rain, but Launa wouldn’t quit. "Quick! Jack, I need another stake."
The two roughly split logs she struggled to hold in place just might . . . if she could stake them down quick . . . keep Europe’s first fortified wall from sliding back into the ditch they’d dug it out of two months ago.
Another gallon of cold rain trickled into her eyes or down the back of her neck in the few seconds it took Jack to toss the stake her way. She caught it one-handed, wiggled it into place and hit it with a rock.
“Damn!” A splinter she hadn’t seen bit into her hand.
Now blood mixed with the rain. Launa adjusted her handhold and kept hammering.
The stake offered some resistance; hopefully it had gotten past the yellow slurry the fine loess soil and rain was making of her wall. A grin started to edge around the scowl she’d worn most of the last month — then her feet slipped.
Launa didn’t need to look down; the small ledge she’d perched on had given way. Half swimming, half crawling, she scrambled for safety over the logs as they followed gravity’s urging.
Jack managed to stay one step ahead of her.
Tears of frustration were lost in the rain on her face as she watched the mudslide and picked at the splinter in her hand.
“Damn it, Captain, why didn’t you include a bulldozer in our mission’s table of organization and equipment?”
Jack snapped to attention. "Petrol, Oil and Lubricant supply seemed questionable, Lieutenant. Intelligence says we're six thousand years from the nearest gas station," he dead panned.
Launa laughed, not so much because it was funny, but because The Book said officers laughed when they wanted to cry.
“Besides,” he said putting an arm around her, “a week before we jumped, that time machine couldn't throw a quarter-ton back six millennia. It looked like my modest lieutenant would be choosing between bringing bows and that dinky little bikini bottom.”
Launa was glad the folks at the Lawrence Livermore Lab had managed to tweak their mad scientist's delight into some serious heavy lifting. Three stallions with full packs had come through time with them, as well as the half bikini the anthropologists said she should wear to meet the local female rulers.
Well, she’d met what passed for rulers here, and fought a battle or two. She’d gained allies, although Launa was never sure whose side Antia was on from day to day.
Two months ago she had a good start on fortifying Tall Oaks to keep the horsemen away from the farmers next spring.
Then the rains came. Except for a few mounds where the grass had taken root, the wall was sliding back into the moat.
Launa scowled; wouldn’t anything go right?
“You know, your idea of planting thorn bushes in the ditch is working.” Jack pointed along the bottom of the moat. “They’re growing too fast for the mud to bury them. Some places, they’re so thick a mouse couldn’t get through.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Launa snorted. "A couple of months back, this old guy showed up on the wall. He was one of the ‘think nice thoughts and everything will be all right’ type."
Launa let her own fear and confusion layer her words thick with sarcasm. "While me and my cohort kept digging, he goes into this long rambling talk about when he was a kid gathering berries. Just as I'm about to tell him to get lost or get a basket, a light goes off. If the bears and deer only took the berries on the outside of the bushes, leaving the inside ones for a little kid to gather, horses would keep their distance too."
Launa remembered her baffled excitement of that afternoon. "So I start talking this idea over with Brege, and this guy says `I am glad I could help you, my sisters. Let the gifts of the Goddess be our protection.' Then he just walks off. He won't fight with us, but he'll tell us things like that. What gives with these people?"
"I have no idea,” Jack said. “And I only get more confused with every day that goes by."
Launa threw Jack a frown for a question. She didn’t need something worse.
He talked to the ditch, avoided her eyes. “Something’s going on inside Kaul.”
“So what else is new?” Launa snorted. There was something spooky about the Speaker for the Bull. “He’s not backing out of supporting us, is he?”
“No! Not that.” Jack adjusted the soaked skins that were supposed to keep him warm.
“He’s still with us. It just bothers him that we’ll be killing horsemen without ever speaking to them.”
Jack faced Launa square on. “These people have solved their problems for centuries by talking things out. It doesn’t feel right to him to start killing without even trying to talk to each other.”
“Christ in heaven, or goddess, or whoever’s up there listening!” Launa exploded. It was hard to know how to cuss these days. “The horsemen didn’t talk to anyone in River Bend. They just started cutting heads off. And, God, what they did to the Speakers . . .”
Launa didn’t want to think about what they’d seen in the long house of River Bend. It did no good to think of the tortured last minutes, or hours, of those two speakers.
Jack nodded. “He knows. It’s just hard for him to walk away from a path of the Goddess ‘from of old.’”
“Jesus, Jack, my folks raised me Catholic, but they never let it interfere with what they wanted to do. Why do these people have to take their goddess stuff so seriously?”
Jack didn’t try to answer that one.
Launa wondered if anyone could. “Let’s get cleaned up,” she sighed. “God, what I’d give for a warm bath.”
“My commanding officer’s wish is my command.”
Suddenly Jack had one of those lopsided grins on his face.
And Launa couldn’t help but grin back. Commanding officer he called her . . . and he meant it now. If her career plans had gone right, she'd be in her last year at West Point.
But nothing had gone according to plan. Somebody had canceled the twenty-first century.
Here, long before either was born, Lasa spoke for the Goddess, and the forces that defended Tall Oaks took their orders from a lieutenant, even a combat veteran like Jack.
They’d needed to work a few kinks out of their command structure, but it had been fine lately.
Last summer, Launa had passed tactical command to Jack for their first battle. They had survived the victory; they would fight many more.
The rain streaking Launa’s face smelled of salt. Just how close was the Black Sea? Tall Oaks was somewhere in the Danube River basin, exactly where, they hadn’t had time to figure out.
Jack headed for their home, but Launa paused a moment to look out over the fields of Tall Oaks.
Somewhere out there was her field of winter wheat. May the Goddess, or somebody, bless it. Because if She didn’t, a lot of people in this town would take it as specific orders from on high to ditch these two troublemaking soldiers.
Launa hoped the rains weren’t drowning the seeds she and Jack had planted.
She glanced at the hills ringing Tall Oaks. Come spring, there was no question they’d sprout with the lances of a major horseman battle group.
With a shrug, Launa hastened after Jack.
It hadn’t been planned that way, but the house the People had built for the two soldiers was right on the threat axis. In the spring, the horsemen would likely ride in from the eastern side of town.
Today, that meant Launa didn’t have to wade through too much mud. As she got home, Jack pulled the deerskin flap aside.
Warmth swept over her.
“What the . . .” Her home had changed.
It was still the four-by-eight meter house, smelling of newly split wood. But now in the raised fireplace, a large ceramic pot-bellied stove edged a foot out into the room. Heat, wonderful heat, glowed from it and a clay chimney pipe.
Atop it bubbled a bowl of water.
Launa whirled as Jack’s arms closed around her. “What have you done, Bearman?”
“Something like that old man on the wall did, only the other way around,” he grinned. “I was talking with Kaul as we recaulked the logs at the Sanctuary of the Goddess. Somehow we got to talking about insulation. Notice anything else?”
Jack’s gesture took in the rest of the house. The walls were no longer bare wood with mud and clay calking oozing through holes. Reed mats covered them and lowered the ceiling. They hardly moved. The cold drafts Launa hated were gone.
“The wood stove was a bit harder, mainly ‘cause I only saw grandpa take his apart once on the reservation. Didn’t need much heating in L.A. Anyway, people started talking, and a week later they’ve got one going.
“The first one couldn’t take the heat and blew up, but the next one seemed to work okay. Kaul told me that once they got a few installed in the sanctuary, he’d let us have the next one. But I think the hot water was Lasa’s idea.”
Somewhere in that long explanation, Jack had lifted the deerskin jerkin over her head. Now he was on his knees, undoing her leather leggings, his fingers working slowly down her thighs.
“Hm, that’s nice,” Launa answered a couple of things at once. “Think Judith will mind us giving away technology?”
Jack stood, cupped her throat with his hands and kissed her slowly.
“Judith’s toes aren’t cold as ice here.”
“Mmm,” Launa agreed as Jack pulled her linen shirt over her head.
She trembled, waiting for his hands to slide down her waist, loosen her belt, and let her leather loincloth fall to the floor.
Like a good tactician, Jack took the indirect approach.
He dipped a cloth in warm water and began washing the mud from her arms and hands.
Jack’s hand massages were good for making Launa weak in the knees. She let herself plop down on the spare bed across from the hearth. In many houses, that was where the man slept.
In this house, it was the couch.
Jack began wiping the mud from her toes. She could feel the caress of his fingers on her feet, and down her back — and in other places. The warmth of the house, the scent of earth and water, the touch of Jack; all swirled in her mind, bringing memories.
On that warm autumn day two months ago, Brege and Merik had not knocked at the door. They just walked in naked. Launa and Jack had been naked too, celebrating their first morning in their new home . . . and very compromised by modern military standards.
Brege laughed, and told the soldiers how the day was to go.
"We will plant a field to show the will of the Goddess."
Today, Launa reached for Jack, pulled him to her. She was clean enough. She wanted him.
That morning she’d wanted him too, but first he had to carry bags of seed and his naked need through town. But while he reddened in embarrassment, townspeople pointed at this first good omen. And it had begun to dawn on Launa just how different her new people were from the ones who sent her here.
The sun turned that day hot, and it was hard work for the men to draw the wooden plow. Brege insisted on taking a break before too long — and Launa discovered that seed was meant for more than the field.
Launa watched as Brege and Merik made love, so totally absorbed in the pleasure and each other that Brege hardly noticed Launa watching.
Brege had paused only once. "Do you not know how to play?"
And Launa had learned how to play — to love so full of herself and her lover that there was no room for shoulds or oughts.
The Colonel and his lady would have disapproved, but Mom and Dad were dead . . . along with the world that spawned them. There, beneath the sun, open to the air and approving smiles, Launa learned a whole new set of rules to play by.
Jack's hands caressed her breasts, drawing her from the past to the present.
You play with all of you. Nothing held back. Nothing anywhere else. That's why you're naked.
Jack's hands roamed lower. Pleasure began to explode through Launa.
"Come, my Bull. Come, speak to the Goddess."
* * *
Much later, as Jack snored softly beside her, Launa luxuriated in the warmth of her home. For an army brat, raised bouncing from one post to another, roots were something new and special. That was what Tall Oaks had given her . . . roots.
For them, she and Jack had given much.
The wicker chest at the foot of her bed held that part of their twenty-first-century trove they hadn’t given away. Jack had shared out all the copper tools. Since Tall Oaks had no craftsmen to work the raw copper, silver, and gold, nuggets of those metals were put away in leather sacks.
Ahead of their time, the bronze tools were hidden away too.
But she and Jack carried bronze knives and axes, You could never tell when a little technological edge might keep you alive.
As best they could, they stayed to Judith’s mission brief. No technological advances beyond those locally available.
Somewhere in the chest also was Maria's book — a treasure of healing herbs and medicinal properties of plants. Some day Launa would have to destroy that anachronism, but not until after she had memorized it and shared it with her new found people.
Launa snuggled closer to Jack, comfortable in the familiar touch of his body along side hers.
In all the confusion of their mission, this much was clear: He was hers and she was his.
FOUR
Next morning, Jack and Launa broke their fast at the Sanctuary of the Goddess. The place was as warm as their home.
The walls along the east half of the sanctuary had rammed earth risers along them. When the People met in assembly, the elder women sat there.
Today, many of the sick and elderly huddled there under blankets. The clay floor was dotted with people weaving, making baskets and mats, and working with leather. The matted walls rang with their chatter and laughter.
Blossom, Lasa’s nine-year-old daughter, offered them mush sweetened with honey.
“Father has words to share with Jack,” she said as she gave them the bowls.
He and Launa found Lasa and Kaul in a group of spinners. As hands worked, so did mouths. Jack felt like he was joining a conversation that had started several hundred winters back and was still going strong, handed down from mother to daughter as they whiled away the short winter days.
Kaul leaned toward Jack. “I ride to Wood Village to invite them to our Winter Feast. Will you ride after me?”
With a raised eyebrow, Jack passed the request up his chain of command.
“Why not?” Launa shrugged. “It’ll probably rain again today. We’re not getting much done here.”
It took the men a few minutes to bow out. Launa ended up with Kaul’s hank of wool, and took over helping Lasa tease it out into yarn.
A half hour later, Kaul and Jack rode out leading a string of remounts. Kaul had made the run up to Wood Village several times; he set a brisk trot that limited conversation.
Still, Jack wanted to talk.
As almost anyone here was quick to point out, no one could tell another the path for her feet. Yet, somehow Kaul had kept the woodsmen up river, away from their extended families, cutting the trees that Launa needed for her wall as well as firewood to keep the people warm.
The alternative would have been to strip the nearby woodlot, upsetting the careful balance of birth, growth and death that was harmony to these people.
Jack needed no crystal ball to tell him how the uber traditionalist Hanna would have interpreted that.
Even after the first storms of the fall drove the woodsmen out of the forests to sit with their consorts and children, practicing their woodcraft indoors, Kaul had talked them back into the woods as soon as the weather gentled.
The flow of logs kept coming downstream.
Jack wanted to know how Kaul did it. Whatever way Kaul and Lasa spelled leadership, he and Launa needed to learn it.
An hour later, Kaul called a break long enough to switch mounts. Jack took the chance to raise his question.
“Kaul, why do the woodsmen cut wood for us even when the winds blow hard and tree limbs could fall on their heads?”
Kaul laughed. “It is our way. When there is need, we work together to make what we must.”
“Yet many of them are like Hanna. They would center their spirits on the harmony of the Goddess and remove from their thoughts anything of the horsemen less by thinking of them, they bring them here.”
Jack hoped he was getting the language right. These people didn’t “think” or “understand,” they “saw in their hearts.”
Kaul pursed his lips as he settled his blanket on a new mount. “Maybe they do not follow after Hanna as closely as she would want them. And, a tree is a tree. Felling it is no different this winter than last winter. Here in the woods, a man may do as we have from of old and not ask himself what will grow from it in the spring. Let you and I thank the Goddess for what She sends us, and for what these people do, and pray it is enough in the spring.”
Kaul mounted, and Jack smiled. So that was how Kaul kept the wood coming. By wringing as much as he could out of the old ways and keeping the workers from looking too hard at the future.
Come spring, the hard stone points of horsemen’s lances would not be so easy to overlook.
They galloped on. Mud splattered them from the soggy soil they raced over, but the clouds burned off and the day became unseasonably warm.
Jack enjoyed the ride ... until the next rest stop. Kaul had been thinking.
“We work as of old, but the ways of the horsemen tear at us,” Kaul mumbled to himself as he stroked the next horse he would ride. But his eyes burned with the fire of a man who knew himself, even if he didn’t know the future.
“I seek a dream from the Goddess that will light a way for my feet in the dark that surrounds us. What She sends weaves too strange a pattern for my heart. I sit in the Sanctuary of the Goddess, listening to the words of the People. But the wall behind Lasa is not there. It opens on a campfire with many Horse People. They say their words and I do not understand them.”
Jack swallowed hard. “The horsemen at River Bend did not talk before they started taking heads.”
“Yes, I know. Yesterday, Antia wanted to ride out to the horsemen to see their blood on her knife. Could someone ride among them with words before they ride among us with lances? Hanna is right. It is our way to speak among ourselves. Will your soldiers take horsemen’s lives with no words traded?”
Jack shook his head. “The ones who stand with us have smelled the fire the horsemen will bring among us.” The survivors of River Bend and the youngsters who trained with them would not pause the next time they saw a force of horsemen. If the horsemen came, they were in for a fight.
Kaul smiled. “But do enough stand with you?”
That was the critical question neither Jack nor Launa could answer.
Jack’s rough census of Tall Oaks counted about three thousand people, half of them too young or too old to carry a spear. Of the fifteen hundred women and men Launa considered potential soldiers, maybe two hundred practiced with the legion.
That might be enough, if too many horsemen didn’t come calling.
Until that day, there was no way of knowing if they were enough. And on that day, it would be too late if they were too few.
The stop at Wood Village was brief, hardly longer than it took to change horses.
As soon as Kaul announced that the wise women had declared that four days hence would be the shortest day of the year, everyone started packing. At first light tomorrow they’d hike back.
Kaul made no mention of restarting work after the Winter Feast; Jack suspected that would be negotiated later.
They chose a different route back. Kaul wanted to see how the deer herds were wintering. A half-hour out from Tall Oaks, the sun was getting low and Jack had a serious case of get-home-itis.
Then he yanked his horse to a halt.
“Those aren’t deer tracks. They’re horses.” He said, pointing.
Kaul nodded.
They searched the prairie ahead of them. Nothing moved. Jack led out at a walk, keeping his horses to the cover of the tree line beside them.
Whoever had ridden this way before had done the same.
“Could they be some of Taelon’s hunters?" Kaul asked.
Jack frowned. “Taelon did takes two or three hands of horses with him.”
So Jack made a more careful survey of the steppe. He spotted a beaten track maybe two hundred meters out from the trees and pointed them out to Kaul.
“There is an old trail where many horses passed. This is only four horses, maybe one rider. They are fresh.”
Jack spotted droppings. “Very fresh. Today.”
Kaul frowned. “Let us follow with care.”
* * *
Danic had ridden forth from Arakk’s camp with the praise of the Mighty Man of the Stormy Mountain Clan ringing in his ears. It was an honor for Danic’s woman and child to eat at Arakk’s tent.
At least, that was what Danic told himself.
For a hand of days now, he had searched the west for the next place of huts and weak women. He might have spent as much again and found nothing, but three hands of horses leave a trail even a blind old woman could follow.
Danic was neither blind nor an old woman.
Who rode here had made two strong men and more than six hands of warriors vanish with not one voice left to sing a song of vengeance. Danic kept to the trees, leaped to a fresh horse often, and looked every which way, as fast as his head and eyes could turn.
He would flee at the first sight or sound.
But no one or no thing showed its face to him.
He walked his horses for half the day until the smell of smoke on the wind told him he was close to what he sought. Tying his horses in a thicket, he moved silently through the woods, then crossed a stream to overlook an expanse of open fields.
As at the other place, wooden hovels, not proud tents, met his eyes. There were many of them, too many to count. That did not bother him. These people would die like the others, scared rabbits with no fight in their hearts.
But what he saw made him think again.
Across the field stood mounds of straw or dirt. Many hands of people shot with bows at the targets.
Danic squinted, trying to take the measure of this; it smelled of strange.
The bows were as long as the archers were tall; a horse rider would never use such a bow. Then his eyes grew wide. An archer paced off the distance to retrieve his arrows. He walked hands and hands of paces, far too many.
No arrow could fly as far as these arrows flew . . . but by some magic these did!
What did they sacrifice, and to what god did they offer it that their arrows should stay so long in the air? Arakk must be told that the clan’s warriors would feel these arrows long before their lances could drink the blood of these animals.
Closer to the hovels, people stood in rows: one side with spears, the other with knives or axes. They fought, one against the other. More often than not, it was the knife wielder who yielded before the spear — but not to spear jabs.
A slice with the long pole to the head, foot or arm would end the fight. The wood of the spear was more deadly than the stone tip!
These were not the frightened rabbits at the other place who waited trembling while Danic laughed and slit their throats.
Arakk must hear Danic's song of warning.
Quickly, he recrossed the frigid stream and raced through the dark forest. Who were these people who rode horses, shot far-flying arrows and used spears against knives? What would the Stormy Mountain Clan face in the spring? What god stood with these farmers against the Sun and Wide Blue Sky?
Danic’s thoughts tumbled through his mind even before he pitched face forward on the trail, his legs knocked out from under him.
FIVE
Jack spotted the four horses in the thicket and picketed his own beside them. Whoever he was trailing was good, but this close to Tall Oaks, there was little doubt where he’d gone.
Jack found the barest hint of a trail.
It was Kaul who set the trap, stretching twine across the game path to catch whoever came this way again. Kaul hid among leaves. Jack climbed a tree.
They had not long to wait.
A young man, blond of hair and in horse raider’s leathers, soon hurried down the trail.
Kaul yanked the string tight, and the man stumbled. Jack fell on him before he could regain his balance.
A whack with the hilt of his knife rewarded Jack with a groan and a cooperative lump of unconscious humanity.
Using solid leather rope captured last summer from the horse raiders, Jack quickly trussed the spy.
“How will he walk?” Kaul asked.
“If he can not walk, he can not run away. His horse will carry him.”
Kaul shrugged and headed up the trail to collect the horses. “I want to talk to him,” he said over his shoulder.
Having finally gotten one alive, Jack wanted to talk to him, too.
“You’re mine. You’re going to tell me what’s really going on here,” Jack told him.
The prisoner only moaned in reply.
At dusk, Jack and Kaul rode into Tall Oaks. Solidly tied, belly down across a horse, the spy was awake.
If Jack was any judge of linguistics, he was cursing them roundly.
They dismounted in front of the Sanctuary of the Goddess and turned the horses over to troops from the legion.
“What’ve you got there?” was Launa’s first question.
“Picked him up just outside of town, too busy putting distance between him and Tall Oaks to look where he was going. What was the drill today?”
“Damn! This afternoon was the first decent weather we’ve had in weeks. Everybody was out, pikes drilling, archers shooting.”
“At long range?” Jack raised an eyebrow.
“Several at two hundred and fifty meters. Think he saw them?”
“I wouldn’t trust any other assumption,” Jack said.
“Damn, damn, damn. Could we just slit his throat?”
“I haven’t heard of capital punishment around here, have you? And Kaul wants to talk to him. So do I.”
“Five will get you ten he won’t tell us anything.”
Jack wouldn’t take that bet.
Many of the elders were already at the sanctuary for supper. Word passed quickly and more soon arrived.
As Jack and Kaul took their prisoner through the door, Kaul’s eyes brightened. “Taelon, I have a horseman for you to talk to.”
The old hunter Taelon didn’t look too excited at that, but Kaul hustled their horse raider over to the leader of the Badger People.
“Welcome him in the name of the Goddess and tell him we mean him well.”
“I will try.” Taelon pursed his lips and spoke haltingly.
For a moment, the prisoner listened. Then he snarled at Taelon, spat and began shouting.
“What does he say?” Kaul asked his old friend.
Wiping spittle from his cheek, Taelon shook his head. “His words say nothing to me.”
Launa nudged Jack. “I thought Taelon was supposed to have spent a year with the horsemen when he was younger.”
“Tell me how much of your high school French you remember twenty years later,” Jack whispered back. That wasn’t quite fair because Launa spoke fluent German, French, Spanish, Arabic and Russian, picked up as her father followed his orders around the globe.
Her gift for languages was one of the reasons she was here.
“Taelon might be trying high school French on a German,” Launa finished, no slight taken.
The elder women took seats on the benches along the walls of the eastern half of the sanctuary; the men settled on the floor at the western end. Children moved among them, offering herbal teas before taking a place at the back of the room.
Even though everyone wasn’t seated yet, Lasa hastened to invoke the Goddess.
Kaul, Jack and Launa stood with the prisoner in the center of the assembly.
While everyone else listened to Lasa’s prayer, the horseman began shouting. Jack had not heard the people use invectives or curses, but the intent of the prisoner’s roaring could not have been lost on the council.
“Let us take him to our room,” Kaul said, and led the way to a small deerskin door toward the rear of the sanctuary.
Through it, Jack found Lasa and Kaul’s private quarters: simple, spartan, and clean.
When Launa pointed for the man to sit on the floor, he refused. Jack took the guy’s legs out from underneath him, gentle-like, knowing Kaul was watching, and settled him on the floor.
“I’d like to hog-tie this character so the more he struggled the more he’d choke himself, but I don’t think I better.”
Launa cast a glance over her shoulder at Kaul. “I think we better not.”
Jack shortened the rope between the spy’s arms and legs so he’d have to sit or lie with them stretched out in front of him, then patted him on the shoulder.
“Stay, fellow. You aren’t going any place before we get some answers from you.”
The horseman spat at Jack . . . and missed.
“Real nice people,” Launa observed.
As Jack hastened from the room, he saw Bomel, Lasa’s first-born son, drawing a steaming mug. Jack smiled at the boy — he’d been the first kid to help Jack the day they walked into Tall Oaks — and then hastened to his place.
As so often was the way with these people, he need not have hurried.
Nothing had happened while Jack and company were busy elsewhere. The room had sat quietly, everyone lost in thought or meditation or whatever these people did to avoid making a decision.
Jack shortened his own leash after that mental snide remark.
These people were the only allies he and Launa would ever get in this crazy lost war they were trying to win. Respect was something he couldn’t afford to lose, either for these people, or from them. Still, the speed these people made decisions could drive a patient man around the bend, even a soldier who’d learned the hard lesson of waiting in the ancient school called war.
Jack settled in his place beside Kaul at the head of the men. As soon as Launa reached hers with Brege and Antia seated in front of Lasa, the Speaker for the Goddess stood.
“What shall we do with this horseman whom the Goddess has brought among us?” she asked, then sat.
No sooner was she back in her chair than Hanna was on her feet. “He is our guest. Have we forgotten the duty of a host to greet a stranger with food? He is cut and his skin is bruised.”
She shot Jack a venomous glance. He smiled back in injured innocence; he’d followed the Geneva Convention . . . and then some.
She turned back to Lasa.
“Whenever strangers” — her inflection there left no question she meant Launa and Jack — “come among us, we offer them hospitality that they may share with us their songs. That is our way from of old.” She finished, hands on hips.
Antia didn’t even wait for Hanna to sit before she shot to her feet. “He did not come to hear our songs. He came for our heads, as he came for the head of my father at River Bend. I say we cut his head off.”
The room broke into a roaring babble, and Jack cringed.
Hanna and Antia had one-track minds going in opposite directions. The people needed to find someplace in between them, but the two extremes, as usual, dominated the debate.
Taelon rose slowly to his feet. He waited for the side discussions to die down, then cleared his throat. “Hanna is right. When someone of the People comes in pilgrimage with the Goddess, we share what we have, one with the other.”
He paused while a wave of nods worked its way around the assembly.
“But when a wolf comes to sniff your herds of sheep or goats, you do not offer it a lamb. You send one of your hunters to track it, or you invite we of the Badger People to join you in the hunt. That horseman is a wolf, sniffing the ground, looking for a way to tear our throats out. We cannot let him do that.”
From the thoughtful nods slowly flowing around the room, Jack could see that agreement with Taelon was fairly easy on what they couldn’t do.
As usual, agreement on what they should do was a bit harder to arrive at. Jack leaned back, wondering how long these folks would toss this hot potato around.
A scream from the back of the room told him they'd lost control of the schedule.
* * *
As soon as the deerskin flopped closed behind his captors, Danic attacked his fetters.
With his wrists and ankles tied together, he could not get his teeth at the leather knots. He worked first on one, then on the other. There was no play in them.
Light warned him that someone was coming; Danic relaxed.
A young man of an age for his first battle entered the room. Danic had seen earthen vessels such as this one carried when they burned the other place of animals. This cup steamed with some kind of drink.
Danic had not eaten since morning; his stomach growled. Still, when the youth offered him the cup to drink, Danic only tasted it, then turned his head away.
It was not the drink, but the cup Danic wanted.
The man said something, gently as if speaking to a freshly broken pony. Danic wanted to snarl, but he swallowed his anger and waited, playing hard to get as any two-year-old filly.
The youth set the cup down and backed away, eyes fixed on Danic. The horseman played his game.
Glancing first at the cup, then at the youth, Danic wiggled a bit farther away from both. Go ahead, fool. Believe I am too proud to drink while you watch. But, oh, I want to drink. You can master me if but once I drink what you bring me. Maybe next time I will drink from your hand.
I will bite your hand off, Danic snarled, but deep within himself.
The fool retreated through the flap and let it fall closed behind him.
Danic lunged for the drink. Hands around the cup, he let the liquid in it slosh out as he brought it down hard on the clay floor. It cracked. Danic held his breath. Would the little noise he made bring back his captors?
Would the little fool want to see if he’d taken the bait like a dumb animal?
The deerskin stayed in place.
Danic pried the cup into pieces. As he had prayed, several of the shards were sharp.
At the other place, last summer, a woman had thrown a pot at one of his friends. He had dodged it easily, but the pot had shattered on a wooden beam; the flying pieces, sharp as flint, had cut his friend’s face.
They laughed at him for letting a woman drew blood on him. The woman died very slowly.
Danic smiled at the memory of her screams as he worked against his bindings.
The first sharp edge dulled. He tossed it aside and attacked his fetters with a second shard.
It cut leather and skin; the bindings grew slippery with his own blood. Still, the leather thinned. Danic pulled harder. The length holding his wrists together gave way to his power.
With joy in his heart, he quickly cut the cord that bound his ankles.
Free, Danic armed himself with the most dangerous looking shard and jumped to his feet.
He paused behind the deerskin flap, peering around its edges. Men sat on the floor in disorderly lines, like lancers beginning their charge, enthralled by whatever was being said.
The youth was among them, taking a drink to a coughing man near the door. Good.
Danic paced the walls, pushing against them. Had they been felt or hide, he would have cut his way out, but these walls made of trees did not give at his shove or offer him anything to cut.
No, the only way out was through the door he had come in.
Again, Danic studied the assembly beyond the deerskin. No one stood like a Mighty Man, telling the warriors what they would do.
The women talked. And when the men talked, they sounded no better than women. If Danic had not seen what he had seen in the afternoon sun, he would think these rabbits no better than those they had slaughtered at the other place.
He must do something.