"Why are the people here out-of the-ordinary dan gerous?" Odard said curiously. "Aren't they ranchers like you?"
Bob bridled at that, like a Bearkiller A-lister mistaken for an Association baron by someone from too far away to know the difference.
Mary-or Ritva-cut in hastily: "Water," she said. "There just isn't much dry season water here you can get at without deep pumps. No hay either, so you can't keep more stock than the winter pastures will support. We Dunedain have had problems escorting caravans around here-but most trade with the east goes up the Columbia and Snake, or right across on the old Highway 20 through Burns, well north of this part. It's worse here."
Bob nodded. "We CORA folk bounced back fast, but they kept on going down a lot longer 'round here before they hit bottom, what with their pumps and such gone. Mostly they don't even have homeplaces anymore; they just follow their herds from one patch of grazing to an other and pray there's water. Roving around, that's why we call 'em Rovers."
Unexpectedly, Father Ignatius spoke.
"My Order has had some missions out here, bringing windmill pumps and doctors. Not with any great success. The… wandering bands.. . are still very bitter. Not entirely without reason. Nobody shared much with them in the bad years. What they really want now is weapons."
Bob looked a little uneasy. Ranches like his father's had snaffled off the best of the refugees from Bend and Sisters and Madras, men and women with skills that had been hobbies or luxuries before the Change and were suddenly very important indeed. They'd also done very well out of their contacts with the Mackenzies and the other Willamette communities-Juniper had reminisced about that to her son, how she'd traded bows and arrows for cattle the very first Change Year, and for providing bowyer training later.
"Someone should put this area in order, then," Mathilda said decisively. "It's wasteful and breeds trou ble to have lawless zones like this-or like Pendleton, come to that. CORA is part of the Meeting, so we should all do something about it."
She sounds very sure of herself, Rudi thought with a quirk of his lips as he wiped his fingers on the gritty soil and then dusted them off. But then, she always does.
And she was usually right. The problem was that she was just as convinced on the rarer occasions when she was wrong. That was annoying but tolerable in a friend. Rudi suspected it would be much more of a problem in a ruler who wasn't really accountable to anyone else except God and, theoretically, the pope.
The rancher's son cleared his throat. "Be that as it may, we still got to get the herd through here, so nobody up to Bend or Burns will notice and tell General Thurston in Boise. Bet that Prophet fella has spies there too."
Father Ignatius smiled wryly. "He does, my son. Unfortunately the Order's information is that he has had missionaries preaching to the wanderers east of here, as well."
Bob finished his chicory and turned the cup upside down. "Yup. Which means we should all suit up from here on out. Riding in armor ain't what you'd call comfy but it beats getting an arrow through the gizzard all to hell and gone."
"Annwyn take it!" Edain said. "Fetch, girl! Fetch the sodding thing!"
He sounded frustrated enough to cry. Garbh cantered over and bent her head to gently draw the practice arrow out of the gritty, rocky dirt beside the sagebrush and trotted back proudly with it held in her mouth. Edain bent in the saddle to retrieve it. He wouldn't cry, of course, but his face was red and angry; that showed easily, with his fair complexion.
It was probably even more embarrassing that he had to practice near the CORA men, who'd grown up shooting recurves from horseback.
"Better this time," Ingolf said.
Rudi nodded to himself, sitting his horse nearby. It had been: a near miss. Which was surprising; Edain was a champion shot with the longbow, and this last year he'd given Rudi hard competition at the butts. Only to be expected from Sam Aylward's son, of course, which made it the more puzzling he was having so much trouble learning this.
Ingolf went on patiently-he made an excellent teacher, and he was at least Rudi's equal with the shorter recurve horseman's weapon.
"Look, you're first-rate with that yew pole of yours, but this is different. You've been practicing shooting on foot all your life, right?"
"Since I was about six," Edain said proudly, the flush dying away. Awkwardly: "I'm just not used to missing all the time, is what."
"Yeah, you're scary with that longbow on foot, kid. But what you know is getting in the way of what you've got to learn-I've been doing this since I was six. You're not going to get it in a day or a week."
The sagebrush clothed plain stretched around them, but the silver-gray brushes were thinner than any they'd seen before, interspersed with patches of glittering alkali salts, some of them still muddy. A few miles behind them were the steep canyon-scored eastern escarpments of the Steens Mountains, green with aspen and juniper higher up. The rocky slopes of the Bowden Hills were growing-slowly-on the eastern horizon. High over head a red-tailed hawk folded its wings and stooped at a rabbit flushed out of cover by the oncoming caravan. Plumes of dust rose towards the arching blue dome of the sky, kicked up by hundreds of hooves and the wheels of the two wagons.
"Take a minute and watch," the easterner went on, lifting his own saddlebow. "Look, from what I've seen with a longbow you draw like this, past the angle of your jaw and below it."
The long draw was the way to get the best out of a yew stave. He shifted his string hand upward three inches and slightly forward.
"Now, with these short recurves you have to draw to your ear. The limbs come back and the string lifts off the section towards the tips as they straighten out and then bend the other way-a nice sharp C, not a shallow curve like your bows. Believe it or not, the bowstave gets longer that way; that's how you can shoot a long arrow from a short bow. Try it."
Edain did, and sweat burst out on his forehead as he forced himself to overcome training that went far below the conscious level.
"I feel awkward as a hog on ice," he grumbled.
"Again," Ingolf said. "You just have to get used to shifting methods back and forth."
Edain did it again. As he did, he tried to set his feet as he would shooting a longbow from the ground. The problem with that was that the horse he was on inter preted it as a command and wheeled sharply to the right, dust and bits of gritty yellow-brown rock spurting from under its hooves. It also snorted and looked back at him, as if to say, What do you think you're doing?
Ah, I see the problem, Rudi thought.
The young Mackenzie was a fair horseman; the Ayl wards could afford to keep a riding horse, being well to-do by the Clan's standards. But those standards didn't include a class of landowners with dependents to do the work and the leisure to master mounted combat, the way Bearkillers or Ingolf's folk did. Mac kenzies were smallholders, farmers who might ride horse or bicycle to battle but who got down and fought on foot.
Edain brought the animal under control and started to try again, his square face grimly intent. Sweat streaked the white dust and brown-yellow stubble on his face; two days ago they'd been taking an icy plunge in Mustang Lake, which memory was too pleasant to recall in this hot dry saltbox.
"Clamp down with both your thighs evenly," Ingolf said patiently. "Stand a little in the stirrups when you do it. That's a range-country horse and he's trained to it."
The lesson went on. There wasn't much else to do as the horse herd and Rudi's party made their way slowly eastward. Even in the spring flush the grazing here wasn't much, which meant a hundred and twenty horses-not counting the riding and draft animals-had to spread out and spend a lot of time eating. The cowboys told a joke about a jackrabbit that starved to death hereabouts because it forgot to run between one blade of grass and the next.