Silence fell as they waited to be sure the enemy would keep running, deep silence except for the pop of another parachute flare going off, panting breath, and the moan ing of wounded savages. Then the night sounds slowly began to return, which meant that there weren't any humans running through the woods.
Men went around outside the wagon circle with spears and crossbows and lanterns, making sure of any enemy still moving; their two medics switched weapons for kit and went around inside, bandaging and cleaning-nobody seemed to be dead, or to have a crippling in jury, but a couple had nasty bites that would fester if not swabbed out carefully. That included himself; he hadn't noticed it at the time, and swore mildly at the sharp hard sting when the doctor irrigated the little wound on his neck with disinfectant.
A few wild men had been caught in the razor wire under the wagons and had to be finished there. In golf sprang up to the bed of a wagon and looked out carefully.
"They won't try again tonight, or anytime soon," he said.
"You think, Capitan?" Jose said. "They were pretty fierce, this bunch."
"We probably killed off half the swinging dicks in three or four bands-and all the stronger ones. They'll be fighting each other for weeks, settling who eats who."
" Si. Good thing we were ready for them, though."
The commander of the Villains nodded; if they'd got ten right up to the wagons where they could use their numbers, everybody in the Villains would have died. Quickly, if they were lucky.
"Hey, maybe you'd better look at this, though," Jose went on.
Ingolf turned and waved to the thrower crew so they would stand down; they didn't have so many flares that they could keep lobbing them indefinitely. Then he vaulted over the barricade and followed his second-in-command a short way into the dark.
A wild man lay there; there was a bolt through his thigh, his feet had been slashed to ribbons by crossing the spikes, and he was trying to crawl away around them. As they approached he turned, glaring. He had a finger bone through his nose too, and one through each earlobe; on his body was an ancient threadbare pair of jeans, loose on his skinny shanks and patched with rabbit skin. A cloak of the same had been about his shoulders, and from the smell roughly piss tanned. There was a big gold necklace around his neck, lying on the bare chest and glittering with diamonds. It was all pretty fancy, by local standards.
What really caught Vogeler's eye was what Jose had noticed, the weapon near the man's hand.
"Probably their jefe, their bossman," Jose said. "That's funny that he has a shete, isn't it, Capitan?"
"Damned odd," Ingolf agreed, his eyes narrowing. "It's not a machete-that's new work."
The modern weapon was longer and thicker at the back of the blade than the pre-Change tool which had inspired it.
"Want to try to get the story out of him?"
The wild man snarled at them and barked, an ough ough-ough sound, snapping with little lunges of his brown-yellow teeth, his hands scrabbling for something to throw.
"No, I don't think this one's a great talker."
" Si, he doesn't look like it, does he?"
Jose shrugged and brought the crossbow to his shoul der and aimed carefully. Tunngg, a flash through the dark, and right beneath it a meaty whack. The scrawny body jerked and went slack; Jose bent, set the span ning hook on the string, and cranked the crossbow taut again.
"You've got the watch until dawn," Ingolf said to his second-in-command, kicking the mysterious shete farther away from the body before picking it up.
He didn't want to go near the dead man; the lice and fleas jumped ship when a man died, and these probably carried disease. Safer to leave the burial detail for a day or so. Which reminded him…
"If they try to drag the bodies away, let them."
"Capitan?"
"Don't want them stinking the place up." Any worse than it is now, he thought.
Smell was inevitable when you cut men's bodies open. At least the sandy soil would sop up the liquids; it would be safer to bury any remaining tomorrow.
"This is the most defensible campsite we're going to find around here, I think, so you'll be stuck in this location for a while."
He took the captured shete back under the lamps-not much point in trying to sleep more tonight-and as he cleansed his hands and arms with sand and then water, he studied the weapon.
It was a fairly typical example of what horsemen used everywhere he knew of, from the Big Muddy to the Rockies and south to the Rio Grande; a yard long piece of slightly curved steel, three fingers broad at the widest spot near the tip, sharpened all along one edge and four inches down the other from the point for a backhander. The hilt had a simple cross guard and a full-length tang, with fillets of wood on the grip and a wrapping of braided rawhide that was coming loose in one or two spots; the pommel was a plain brass oval.
This one was better made than most, forged by a real smith and not simply ground and filed out of old-time stock. He tapped it against a wagon's frame, and the al most bell-like sound was right, and so was the elastic way it sprang back when he bent it against a tree stump by sticking the point in and leaning on it.
Still sharp, he thought, feeling cautiously with his thumb. Shame the way it's been let rust. Looks like it hasn't been cleaned or oiled in a month… maybe a bit less, with the air here.
He rotated his wrist, whipping the steel through a blurring figure eight; the air hissed behind it. It was lighter than he preferred, but it felt alive in his hand.
Over at the fire he got out his cleaning kit and went to work. When he'd finished and held it out at arm's length towards the flames his brows went up. There was a rash of rust pits, no way around that the way it had been neglected, but the surface of the metal rippled in the firelight under the thin coating of linseed oil he'd applied, full of wavy lines-not just forged, but layer -forged from a mixture of spring and mild steel, and then hardened on the edge.
There was a very slight roughness in the steel along the working part, the point and about a foot back from there; that was blood etching, the way the salt and acid of blood attacked the softer layers even if you cleaned it immediately.
This beauty would set you back fifty, sixty dollars in Des Moines. More in Richland or Marshall, since the Iowan capital attracted the best craftsmen. That was the price of a good ordinary horse, or two months' wages for a laborer, but it was a working tool that had been used hard, not a dress weapon-no fancies like inlay.
Wait, I lie, he thought.
Symbols had been graven in the surface in the same spot on both sides, not far from the hilt: a stylized rayed sun, and within it three letters- C and U and T.
"Well, that's what it's for," he said. Then he called out: "Hey, Kaur, Singh!"
The scouts came over; Singh was still rubbing a cloth on the serrated head of the mace he used for close-and personal work. It smelled if you left the results in the grooves. There were spatters on his turban, as well.
"Ranjeet is well avenged, Captain," he said, his dark eyes sparkling.
Ingolf felt a little uneasy about these two on occasion.
Revenge was all very well, but there were times when he thought the pair of them were a bit monomaniacal on the subject.
"Take a look at this," Ingolf said. "One of the wild men had it."
They both looked surprised; they hadn't seen any thing more complex than tying a knife onto a stick since they got east of the Illinois Valley.
"It's modern work," Singh said, turning it over in his big hands. "Well done, too."
He had been a blacksmith's apprentice before his village was wiped out, and still dabbled usefully in it. Now he flicked a fingernail against the edge of the weapon to test the sound, and tilted it so that the firelight would pick out surface features.
"See the wavy line along the cutting edge, just a fin ger's width in? I have heard of that. It is done by coating all the blade except the edge with clay, then packing it in red-hot charcoal, letting it cool, and then retempering. It makes the cutting edge very hard, glass hard, without turning the whole blade brittle, but it requires great skill. The heat treatment has been well done, too!"