Tom rubbed at his chin. “Can’t see the Mohave desert supporting many people, though.”
“Some of them farm part-time along the Mohave valley and the middle Colorado,” Simmons put in. “The acclimatization program really changed the ecology in that region, too. Lot of introduced plants—spinifex, saltbush, smooth-skin cactus—and animals. Camels, and things like oryx that metabolize their own water from their feed and don’t need to drink. Plus they learned a lot of tricks from us, well-drilling, herding and suchlike.”
Botha nodded. “They’ve been more active the last few years. The occasional hunter or trader in the desert gets chopped, even a few raids over the mountains to steal livestock—”
Tom held up a hand. “How extremely convenient for the Collettas,” he said dryly. “If they’re trying to hide something on the other side of the Mohave Desert.”
There were a few heartfelt curses at that; evidently paying Indians to attack your fellow New Virginians was something that made the general treason more emotionally immediate and intolerable.
“A small party will be easier to hide,” Adrienne said. “But not too small, or we’d have real problems getting across the desert and past the tribesmen. Everybody here’s in, I presume?”
Nods, and a grunt from Botha. “That makes seven,” Adrienne said. Botha and Simmons both turned to look at Sandra, who glared back.
“She’s good with horses, she can shoot, and I can trust her not to talk. We need a couple more. Who can we trust, who’s got the experience we need?”
Botha rumbled, “My eldest boy, Jan. He’s twenty—lived on my plaas there more than half his life, and he’s been over the mountains before, chasing stock thieves and hunting. Guided Oom Versfeld’s son on a trip last year; wants to be a white hunter. No nonsense in the boy; I’ll vouch for him.”
Adrienne nodded, her eyes lost in thought. “That gives us eight guns. I’d be easier with a dozen, but… wait. Ralph’s too old and he was never a boots-and-saddles type, but Henry Villers would probably be up for it. And I know I can trust him.”
“Wait a bliddy minute, miss, not a kaffir—”
Adrienne’s finger stabbed out at him. “Botha, don’t be more of an idiot than God compels you to be. And don’t try any of those boys’-school pissing-match tricks with me, either. I don’t have time for them and I’m not equipped to enjoy them.”
They locked eyes for a moment, and then he nodded. “You’re in charge, miss.”
“I am. While we’re getting things settled, let’s clarify things. I’m in overall command. Tom here is number two. Sandra will be horse wrangler; Jim will be trail boss. Everyone else is a ‘cork.’ Jim, what’ll we need?”
“Two horses each,” the man with the sunstreaked brown hair said. “Three would be better except for the lousy grazing… and six mules. Taking it slow and holing up most of the day—which we’d have to do anyway in high summer—two hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies, call it three-fifty our way, and allowing for accidents and a fair share of bad luck… we’re talking a month to get to Lake Salvatore. Ten, fifteen miles a day at most, and we’ll have to stop and rest the beasts when we hit water. Have to carry some barley for them; the grazing will be sparse.”
“Make it ten,” she said. “I want to talk to Tom about some special gear that might be useful. He was a Ranger, after all. Do up a list of equipment, and we’ll see about getting it together without leaving traces on Nostradamus.”
She smiled at them, or at least showed her teeth. Quite the human whirlwind, you betcha, he thought, amused and bemused at the same time.
“That leaves the question of when,” Simmons said. “I’m not fit for action right now; a week, maybe two, the quacks say.”
She sighed with exasperation. “I begrudge every minute… but we can’t charge right in, not just after an interview with the Old Man. I’ve got to make it look as if I really think we wound everything up FirstSide. So do the rest of you… I’ve applied for long leave from the GSF; I’m overdue on it, anyway. Once the harvest’s in, it’ll be natural for me to go on holiday. And it’ll be natural for you all to stay on until the harvest supper’s over, at least—Jim, you and your tracker can use the rest, too. We can finish our planning, do some quiet training, get the gear together, then split up and make our separate ways to a rendezvous point.”
Botha shook his head. “High summer in the Mohave! God be with us.”
“I hope He is,” Adrienne said soberly. “I surely do.”
The harvest ended on Friday, with the last sheaves twisted into a rough human form and everyone following the flatbed into the long strip behind the barns where the wheat ricks were—like thatched huts for giants, each formed around a long pole set in the earth. The local Episcopalian priest blessed the sheaf, and then everyone went off to shower and sleep.
Saturday was a holiday for everyone except the cooks to rest up for the evening’s banquet and dance; the smell of baking bread and cooking came in a faint mouthwatering waft from the kitchen wing, along with the woodsmoke smell of oak-fired ovens.
They stood in the gardens behind the manor house. A stone reservoir stood at the hillside end, and from twenty feet up its vine-covered side water poured from the mouth of a cast-bronze lion’s head to fall in a shallow pool and then flow into the main basin. The young harvest hands Adrienne had hired were playing around it now, pushing each other under the flow of water and tobogganing down into the swimming pool; it was one of the perks the youngsters had signed up for.
“Up for a ride?” she said, nodding toward the mountains. “Things are going to get serious soon enough.”
“Why not?” he said.
“Good thing you were raised in the country,” Adrienne said as they walked through the lawns and groves toward the hedge that marked off the service sector of the house grounds. “It’s a little rough up there for someone who’s never ridden before.”
Tom grinned, and felt himself relaxing completely into the smile for the first time since the Gate.
“Hell,” he said, “I didn’t learn to ride back in North Dakota. Nobody kept horses around our neck of the woods; that would have been a luxury. We used pickups. I learned to ride in Central Asia. Lot of rough unroaded country there, and sometimes we had to move over it in small teams.”
They walked through the hedges, down a dirt lane lined with pepper trees, fantastically gnarled light brown trunks and spreading branches that met thirty feet overhead in a tangle of light-flecked green, full of pendulous six-inch clusters of yellow-white flowers. The two dogs who’d followed them were tearing back and forth along the lane, wagging frantically and jumping, with a general air of Going for a ride, great idea!
Board fences surrounded grassy paddocks; the stables themselves were a series of low buildings along brick-paved walkways, with adobe to five feet and wood-framed wire grates above. There was an air of neatness, in a stable-esque sort of way; wheelbarrows leaned against buildings, tools racked inside doorways.
The old Indian woman he’d seen on the first day here was sitting in a patch of sun with her back against a stable wall and her feet outstretched, crooning to herself as she wove a basket of willow shoots, sedge, and fern roots; feathers and pieces of abalone shell added to the strange beauty of the pattern. The senile haze cleared for an instant as she saw the two of them walking by and she grinned, exposing a few brown snaggles of tooth and calling out in her own language. Adrienne tossed a reply in the same tongue over her shoulder and the crone cackled louder.