Mom's like that, Rudi thought proudly. She's everyone's mother, if they have a good heart and need it.
He'd complained about that once, when he was young, and she'd told him…
What was it she said? Yes: "Love isn't like money-the more you give away the more you get back, and the more you have to give."
And then she'd laughed and told him she loved him best of all, and he'd been all right again. He came over to the hearth and drew up a chair to sit, sinking into the leather cushions and enjoying the warmth of the flickering blaze.
"Glad to meet you when I'm in my right mind, more or less," Vogeler said, offering a hand. After the shake he looked thoughtfully at Rudi's long form. "Maybe we could spar a bit, when I'm back on my pins… I'd like to take the measure of a man who can take down two of the Prophet's cutters fighting in his underwear, and not get a scratch."
Rudi smiled broadly: "I'd like that, Ingolf. They say it'll be a while, though."
Sparring with the same people all the time could get boring-and dangerous. If you fell into a rut and stopped being surprised now and then you stopped learning.
The hall was returning to normal for a winter after noon near Yule, which meant people sitting around talk ing or reading or telling stories, having a beer together or making plans and arguing… but nobody would disturb the Chief and her son at a conversation, and the buzz in the background actually made them more private.
There was a plate of sandwiches on the table beside Ingolf, some honey-cured ham with cheese, some roast venison; he'd eaten only one, and one of the dried-cherry scones.
Ingolf grinned as Rudi picked up a sandwich and raised an eyebrow. "Sure. I keep thinking I'm going to wolf down half a cow, and then I get full. You know how it is when you're getting over something."
He nodded, chewing and savoring the rich strong taste of the deer meat; he did know how it was when you were recovering from a fever or a wound. He'd had one about as bad, and on his gut, before he turned eleven.
After a moment Juniper spoke softly. "If you're well enough now, Ingolf Vogeler, it's your story I would have. Of your own will you're not to blame for what hap pened, but still one of my people is dead, and I must ex plain to an old friend why his daughter was killed in her own home. Also I am the Mackenzie, and the welfare of land and folk is something the Chief must account for at the last."
The easterner licked his lips slightly, took a drink of the mead, and spoke:
"I'm willing to tell you my story," he said, his eyes fixed on the distance. "Christ be my witness, I owe you folks my life and more. But it's… just so damned strange."
His mouth quirked. "Always told myself I was a practical type. But this has got weird stuff in it… would you believe a voice I heard in dreams sent me here?"
Juniper Mackenzie laughed, a clear peal. "Oh, Ingolf, you've come to the one place in all the world for that to be believed-though in truth, I might have thought you wandering in your wits if I hadn't had independent confirmation of some of it."
"And I haven't had the dream since I arrived. And by God, I'm thankful for that!"
Juniper nodded. "The Powers are at work here, but it isn't the first time they've touched my life, so… or Rudi's."
He gave a shy duck of the head. "Well, it's like this… the start's ordinary enough. After the war with the Sioux, I didn't want to end up a hired soldier, but there didn't seem to be much else I could do except get work as a farmhand. Not that I'm above any honest work; sheriffs from the Free Republic of Richland aren't so high and mighty that we never touch a pitchfork or a plow handle, not like some folk I could name but won't, like those arrogant bastards over to Marshall."
"Not welcome back home?" Rudi asked sympathetically. That would be a terrible thing.
"Not without more crawling than I could stomach," Ingolf said grimly. Then his tone became matter of-fact.
"So some friends and I who'd fought together in the war, we got into the salvage business. Not steel and glass and stuff like everyone gets from the nearest ruins; that's low-value, and it's pretty tightly tied up most places too; you can't just go in and start mining. Not anywhere close enough to market that the cost of hauling wouldn't kill you."
"Yes, we have agreements on who can claim what here, as well," Juniper said encouragingly. "And there's more than enough steel and brass and aluminum and so forth, and will be for many an age. So as you say, it's cheap in most places."
Ingolf went on, his voice growing a bit more animated as he relived his great idea:
"What we went after was really valuable things-gold and silver, jewels, artwork that was famous before the Change, watches, machine tools that can be rerigged to run off water power, telescopes and binoculars… the sort of thing that's been worked out of places near to areas that still have people. Well, out east where I come from, that means going farther east, if you want to get somewhere unclaimed. East and south, down into the dead lands, past Chicago. I hear there are villages and farms up in parts of the Appalachians, but in the low lands from the old Illinois line to the Atlantic it's… it's still real bad."
Rudi and his mother nodded. They'd heard the same from California, where a few explorers had gone lately, and similar things about Europe from Nigel and others. Nearly everywhere in thick settled lands the streams of refugees from the great cities had overlapped one an other; they'd eaten the land bare and then died. Except those who took to living off man's flesh, but that was a losing game in the long run, with the fate of the Kilkenny cats at the end of it. A few of the luckiest lived until the rabbits bred back.
Some of those little groups of grisly predators barely had speech or fire, since they'd started with feral children run wild during the chaos. They were primitive in a way no human savages had ever been before, without the great store of knowledge and skill real wilderness dwellers had. And they still ate men, when they could.
"So… we'd gotten a few good hauls, better as we went farther east, but the problem was that money… well, you can rent a room and buy your beer with cash, but if you want to make a life, you need to have a place where you're welcome to settle as something more than a laborer, and that's not so easy. Most places aren't too open to outsiders buying land, and without you're pro tected by law all you've got is what you can carry in your saddlebags while you fight off all comers, and a man has to sleep sometime."
True enough, Rudi thought.
The Mackenzies took in anyone honest, peaceable and willing to work, and they had little in the way of internal division of rank or wealth, but that was very much an exception.
"After a couple of years, all the people left in my bunch, they were those who didn't have a home they could go to and use what they'd got. Even young as we were, we were getting tired of knocking around, risk ing our lives and then blowing it all on a bender before some big shot could tax it off us. Then we got this offer from a bunch of sheriffs near Des Moines, and the new bossman too; he'd just succeeded his father and wanted to make a splash…"
An aside: "Iowa's the biggest place going out east; the land's good, and they carried a lot of people through the dying time; there are more than two million there now."
Rudi whistled slightly, and Juniper nodded as well; that was as much as the whole Pacific Northwest, according to the best estimates they'd been able to get, and on only one fifth the area. Ingolf continued:
"So you can go for days and days, and it's all tilled land and settlements, or at least pasture, and big towns now and then, cities even, hardly any real wilderness except right along the Mississippi and in the northwestern border counties. The Iowa farmers-ranchers, they say farther west; I don't know what you call them here-and the sheriffs, they're rich as rich."