It was a cold winter day in the high desert, with little flecks of hard grainy snow falling out of a sky milky gray from horizon to horizon and darkening as the short day drew to an end. Clouds hid the peaks of the Cascades westward; in that direction there was only a hint of forest and rising rock-ridges, and the dull glow of the setting sun. The passes there were closed to anyone who wasn’t on skis and traveling light and fast at this time of year, but the Columbia Gorge was always open, and they had come south from Hood River. That had taken them through County Odell, and the lands of the Three Tribes of the Warm Springs Confederation, with supply dumps and warm welcomes.
That was long behind them now, into land where the enemy’s hand had lain heavy for most of the war. The sights around them left spirits bleak as the weather. Hooves and hobnailed boots rang on the patched pavement, pikes swayed rhythmically, but there was no singing, and the commands of voice and trumpet and drum echoed with a flat dullness.
“Hurrah, we win a great big fucking victory, and this is the prize we get,” someone said.
Mike Havel the younger hid his shock as best he could, but he understood the grumbler perfectly.
“Hard winter hereabouts,” he said quietly instead.
His cousin Will Larsson snorted. “Bloody devastation hereabouts,” he replied. “If it weren’t for the shape of the river I wouldn’t recognize it at all. It looks like even the buzzards have given up and moved on.”
“Larsson and Havel, attend!” the commander called.
They moved their horses up with a shift of balance, reins in left hand and right hand on hip as the scabbards of their backswords clattered against the stirrup-irons. Mike’s uncle Eric pointed to a breast-shaped hill that dominated the eastern approaches to the city, its base showing the stumps of ponderosa pine and aspen that must have previously relieved its bleakness.
“See that hill outside the city wall? What are the salient features, Havel?”
“Yessir,” Mike replied. “Pilot Butte. Elevation around forty-one hundred absolute, just under five hundred above the general level.”
“Why wasn’t it fortified? Looks like it could dominate the town.”
“No water, sir.”
“Good,” Eric said. “Larsson?”
His son nodded. “No water because the soil’s very porous, sir. Lots of caves around here, volcanic tubes, and the water table is low because it drains so freely. Wells tend to collapse, too, you have to line them. You’d need very deep tube wells to supply a fort on top of the hill and it would require heavy pumping all the time and concrete reservoirs. Expensive, sir.”
Since he was an A-Lister now, Mike dared to put in: “And the light soil would make the footings for a curtain wall and towers difficult too, sir. Relatively easy for mining and sapping operations in a siege, too.”
“Good. Carry on.”
Mike mimed wiping his brow as they fell back to near the tail end of the command party; their official tasking was as couriers, and unofficially they were supposed to be learning by example. Will grinned back at him.
They were both very young for the Outfit’s A-List, jumped through the usual long candidacy for good service in the field; not far from here, and over a year ago, during the initial invasion. In the regular way of things, in the peacetime he was starting to think of as a children’s story like trolls or rockets, they’d just be thinking of putting down their names for the testing and probably be a year or two of failure away from ultimate success.
Those two years seemed like forever to the cousins; they were both within a few months of eighteen, both around six feet, and both long-limbed with the hard whipcord looks of those trained to ten-tenths of capacity but not beyond. Otherwise they were not much alike for looks. Will was Afro-Anglo-Hispano-Indio on his mother’s side, which mixed with Eric Larsson’s Nordic heritage had given him exotic good looks, bluntly regular full-lipped features, skin the smooth pale light-brown of a perfect soda-biscuit, eyes midnight blue and hair curling from under the edge of his helmet in locks of darkest yellow. Mike Havel’s pale chiseled handsomeness might have steered a dragon-ship across the Kattegat a millenia ago, with only a trace of his Anishinabe great-grandmother in the set of cheekbone and eye.
Their kinship showed in the underlying structure of bone and the gangling height they shared. More still in the way they stood and moved and rode.
“Jesus,” Will said quietly as they looked around, and crossed himself.
“Loki on a stick,” Mike concurred, and made the sign of the Hammer, as was customary in his branch of the family.
The strip along the Deschutes River where it ringed the city of Bend on three sides, and upstream and down, had been under the furrow since before the Change, irrigated land in the middle of the dry plains of ancient lava and volcanic ash and sagebrush desert. If anything it had become more densely settled in the past generation, producing for its tillers and the shrunken city rather than markets far away, a little green world of small densely-cultivated farms in a land mostly sparse grazing and great estates where the Rancher was lord.
Small poplar-bordered fields of fruit-trees and vegetables and grain and fodder marked it, and the rammed-earth, shake-roofed cottages of the cultivators, or the odd clutch of church and smithy and tavern at a crossroads. Even in the cold season it had always seemed reasonably prosperous to Mike, even by the standards of the Willamette, and you were never far from the smell of woodsmoke or the sound of voices and the sight of cattle or sheep.
The smell of smoke was still there, the harsh and bitter stink of things not meant to burn. Nothing moved except the odd crow or raven. The only animals larger than a jackrabbit he’d seen in hours were dead, picked-over bones. And once a litter of skulls by the side of the road, some of them with bits of hair still fluttering ragged in the cold wind.
The contrast was more stark because he’d seen the district many a time, on visits stretching back to his childhood; the nascent Bearkillers had come this way a decade before he was born on their trek from Idaho. The memories were vivid. In spring the land smelled sweet, with blossom shed in drifts across the narrow rutted roads and often with roses trained up the walls of the houses. Now only the trampled remnants of the irrigation ditches and the stumps of trees showed where the land had lain under the hand of man; fruit tree and windbreak alike had been burned where they fell. The rafters of the houses had burned hotter, and even the tough pisé de terre walls had mostly collapsed inward. Pre-Change frame buildings were just scorch-marks and charcoal collapsed into the foundations.
“Worse than we expected,” he heard Lord Chancellor Ignatius say ahead of him. “So much for the possibility of basing forces here against Boise. Or even Pendleton.”
“A lot of this is recent,” another man said bitterly; it was Rancher Bob Brown, one of the CORA magnates. “They knew they couldn’t hold it, not after the Horse Heaven Hills, and they spent the time they had left to wreck it. Goddamn it, it’ll take generations to rebuild this! A lot of it was from before the Change and we’ll have to redo it with hand shovels and horses!”
Ignatius made a soothing gesture. “The biggest assets were the dams in the Cascades and the reservoirs. Those are intact. This land will blossom again, Rancher. No, I misspoke. The biggest assets were the people and their skills, and of those we saved most.”
“They need something to work with, or who in their right mind will come back? It’s no better further out,” Brown said. “My son took a patrol into Seffridge Ranch’s home-place last week to see about resettling my family and our people. Nothing. Everything my father spent twenty years building up burned and wrecked, houses and workshops and barns, fences gone, our little dam broken down and the irrigation channels filled, the fruit trees killed…They wrecked the wells out in the grazing lands. And the wind-pumps. The water’s mostly deep around there.”