"I'll be waiting," Signe said, when she drew back.
"So will I," Havel answered; he had to catch his breath and clear his throat before he could finish the brief phrase.
He put his foot in the stirrup and swung into the saddle with a grunt and a rustling clink and clatter. Josh Sanders finished his good-byes to wife and child and mounted likewise.
"Eric!" Havel barked. "Tear yourself away from the ton-sillectomy and get on the goddamned horse!"
The other two men fell in behind him; Eric was leading their packhorse-and-remount string. Havel took a deep breath and looked west. Running the outfit was a challenge, and worthwhile work. Getting away for a while, though:
"Thataway!" he said, and brought his horse up to a canter.
The crowd parted, cheering; Eric and Josh turned to wave as the hooves crunched and clattered.
Havel kept his eyes on the gravel road that stretched like a silver-gray ribbon into the green hills.
All I've seen so far is a worm 's-eye view of wilderness and a few little towns, he thought. It's time and past time to find out how other people are dealing with this new world we've been handed.
"NO!"
Juniper Mackenzie added her voice to the chorus of a hundred others; all the adults within walking distance of this spot, in fact. The foragers approaching from the west slowed uncertainly as they heard it, a few of them ringing the bells on their bicycles as if that would clear the road. There weren't as many of them-forty or fifty, she estimated-but they all had some sort of weapon, and they had a bicycle-drawn cart behind.
The face-off was taking place well away from her cabin-what they'd taken to calling the Hall-down in the flatlands to the west. She could see the outskirts of the little town of Sutterdown to the north, over the tops of the pines lining a creek. Her twenty clansfolk, the neighborhood farmers and the townsmen were a collection of clumps making a rough line north and south through the shaggy overgrown pasture of the fields on either side of the road. The roadway itself was a two-lane county blacktop, and quite thoroughly blocked with a semi that had skidded across it on the day of the Change; nobody was going to move it anytime soon, since the cargo had been sacks of cement.
Must get a wagon down here to haul some of it off, she thought with some corner of her mind. We can use it.
There were so many people here, and they were so loud-but it still seemed quiet, quiet and empty: The noises were all of human voices and feet and hands, no drone or roar of engines. You noticed more without that burr of background noise. The sound of grass and twigs under feet, the smell of angry unwashed men:
The foragers stopped, and the shouting chorus grumbled away into a buzz of voices. That sank into near-silence as a man walked forward waving a white flag on the end of a pole. He wore a policeman's uniform, much the worse for hard use; a mousey-looking woman accompanied him, with a clipboard in her hands. He carried a much more practical hunting crossbow, with a knife and hatchet at his belt, and wore an army-style helmet.
"Listen!" he called, when he'd come close. "We're here by order of Acting Governor Johnson to requisition a quota of supplies for emergency redistribution-"
Juniper gripped her bow and bared her teeth; that was the second Acting Governor since the Change, which made an average of one about every two weeks and a bit, and nobody knew what had happened to the incumbent. In practice, what was left of the state government had no power more than two days from Salem by bicycle.
Which unfortunately includes our land, just.
The chorus of NO! erupted again; she could see Reverend Dixon of Sutterdown a ways to her left, leading the beat. Odd to be chanting at his direction; the man had ignored her friendly clergy-to-clergy letter before the Change, and been openly hostile since-evidently he thought Jehovah had sent the disaster as a punishment for tolerating the wrong people, of which Juniper and her friends were most certainly an example.
"Suffer not a witch to live" was a favorite of his.
The chorus died down again, and unexpectedly the mousy-looking woman shouted into the quiet: "How can you be so selfish? Half the people in Portland are sitting in camps around Salem and Albany now-gangsters have taken over Portland and driven them out-people are dying! Dying of hunger, hunger and disease-little children are starving to death!"
Sweet Goddess gentle and strong, aid me now. Her hand traced the Invoking sign. Great Ogma, Lord of Eloquence, lend me your golden tongue to calm these troubled waters.
Dixon was about to speak. Juniper opened her mouth to forestall him-the minister was definitely of the tribe who saw all problems as nails and themselves as a hammer. Or the Fist of God, in his case.
"No!" she said, and held up her bow to stop the chant when it threatened to start again. She continued into the ringing silence: "No, we will not give you our food. Not because we grudge help, but because we have little ones of our own to think of. If we gave you all that we have, you'd be starving again in a week-and so would we! Starving to death, before the crops came in! And we need our stock to pull plows and carts, and breed more for the years to come. You've already taken more than we can spare."
"You're as bad as those people in Corvallis," the woman said bitterly.
Juniper's ears pricked up at that, but she made her voice stern: "If you want to do something for those poor city people, get them moving," she went on, pointing over her shoulder at the distant snowpeaks of the Cascades floating against heaven. "East of the mountains, to where there's more. Or set them to work planting, find them seeds and tools. Or both. We'll help all we can with either. Don't keep them sitting until they die!"
Something's wrong, Juniper thought suddenly, as the woman opened her mouth again-most likely to plead for anything they could spare.
A harsh voice spoke from the ranks of the local folk; not one of her clan, probably a farmer: "Not as easy as beating people up when you outnumber them, or robbing us one by one, is it, you useless thieving bastards?"
"Wrong, wrong, wrong," Juniper said under her breath, her eyes flickering over the foragers as they bristled with anger, feeling the future shifting like tumbling rocks. "Watch out-"
Sam Aylward's thick-muscled arm brushed her aside. She staggered back, turning and waving her arms to recover balance. That let her see the crossbow bolt hit his shoulder with a flat hard smack sound, and a ringing under it, and to know it would have hit her if she hadn't moved- or been moved.
The short thick bolt hit glancingly and bounced away, because the Englishman was wearing the first of Dennie's brigandine jacks-a sleeveless shirt made from two layers of canvas with little thumb-sized metal plates riveted between. One of them peeped out through the ripped fabric now, the metal bright where the head of the bolt had scored it, then going dull red as blood leaked through.
Everything moved very slowly after that. She let the stagger turn her back westward. The Salem folk were looking at one of their own; he stood by their cart and frantically spanned his crossbow to reload. On both sides people shifted their grips on improvised weapons, some edging backward, others leaning forward like dogs against a leash.
Somehow she could hear the whirr of the crank as the man who'd shot at her spun it; even louder was the creak of Aylward's great yellow bow as he drew to the ear.
Snap-wuffft! String against bracer; whistle of cloven air.
The distance was only thirty feet; the arrow was traveling two hundred feet a second when it left the string, and to the human eye it was nothing but a bright blur in the sunlight. Then tock as it struck bone, smashing into the cross-bowman's face and slamming him brutally back against the cart.