“Good. Now, you, the tall one. Take off your clothes.”
“What?” Kirsten stares up into the branches. “What the hell—?”
Koda, though, sits down on a rock by the stream to pull off her boots. “It’s okay, cante sukye. They just want to make sure I’m really a woman.” She drops her pack beside her, then her shirt, finally stepping out of her jeans and rising to stand in the open. Loosened, her hair spills down her back. She turns slowly, her hands at her sides.
For a long moment, the glade is silent. Then, low-pitched and long, a wolf whistle comes from behind them. “Oh, yeah, now. Ain’t she a woman!”
Kirsten whirls to face the speaker, still invisible. Her face flushed crimson, she snaps, “Back off, bitch!”
A whoop of laughter answers her, a contralto rich with the dark earth of Mississippi. “Get you dander down, Shorty. I’m just admirin’.”
Suppressing a grin, Koda lays her hand on Kirsten’s arm. “I’m ‘Shorty’s’ woman, sister. Anybody wants to argue with that, deals with me.” Asi gives a high, challenging yelp, and Koda adds, “Yeah, and his human, too.”
“How say you, sisters?” The voice from the tree again. “Shall they pass?”
Four answer her, more or less in unison. “They shall pass, and welcome.” It has the feel of ritual, and Koda wonders again just how the crimson stain came to be on the stone. A rustling of pine boughs draws her attention back to the tree above her, and a back-lit shape plunges down the length of the trunk, rappelling off it with the aid of a rope. The woman lands with a thump on the carpet of fallen needles, one ankle turning slightly, as though she has not yet entirely got the hang of the maneuver. She has no trouble putting her weight on it, though, and she steps firmly enough out into the light. “Hi,” she says, extending her hand to Kirsten, who takes it almost reluctantly, then to Dakota. “I’m Morgan.” Her clasp is firm, her palm callused with work and, evidently, the handling of weapons. An AK slants across her back, and a Bowie knife hangs from her belt, both worn with use. “Hey. Annie? You want to put your clothes back on?” She turns back to Kirsten. “We have a permanent camp a few miles on. You’re welcome there.”
From beneath lowered eyelids, Koda watches irritation and bemusement flicker across Kirsten’s face. She turns away to pull on her clothes, letting her hair fall forward to hide a smile. Okay, Ms. President, here’s a chance for some diplomacy.
Kirsten says softly, pointing, “I’m Annie. She’s Dakota. He’s Asimov. Who are you, besides Morgan?”
Koda turns just as her head clears her shirt collar. Kirsten stands straight as a birch tree, her face expressionless. Ms. President, indeed. Morgan’s grey eyes flicker over her, assessing, and she says easily, “I’m Morgan fia d’Loria, and I’m chosen Riga of the Amazai.”
A small shock runs through Koda. For an instant, a fraction of a second, the vision of the Cretan coast flashes before her again, a blonde swimmer in the surf. But she keeps her voice even. “Amazai? Moon women?”
Morgan glances sharply at her. “You’re a linguist?”
“My first wife was. I had to learn a bit to talk to her while we were in school.”
“Mmm. Greek’s not just ‘a bit.’”
Koda shrugs, tucking her shirt into the waistband of her jeans. “For a while we spoke a dialect unknown outside our dorm room. Some French, some Spanish, some Lakota, a few words of Sanskrit. It took a year or two to sort out. You?”
“Lawyer. We’ve got a Classics wonk in the band, though. She’s our history-keeper.”
Warriors. A bard. How much of the social structure she is beginning to sense in this group of women is deliberate reconstruction based on texts? How much is instinct, repeating itself across the millennia? Koda sits again to pull on her boots, watching the other woman from beneath her eyelashes. Morgan, though not much taller than Kirsten, seems to fit the scale of the forest. Part of it is sheer personal presence, the kind of thing that would sway a jury in a courtroom. Part of it is the rippling muscle under her tanned skin, shown to advantage by her leather vest and wrist-guards. The left one covers her forearm almost to the elbow, marking her as an archer even though she carries no bow. And part of it is the series of diagonal hatch lines scored into each cheek, tattoos done the old fashioned way, with pigment rubbed into a bleeding cut. It takes no imagination to divine what they represent, no more a mystery than the crescent moon between her pale brows. Madame President, meet the Queen of the Amazons, with four, five, six, seven kills to her credit. Let’s keep it friendly if we can.
Morgan raises an eyebrow at her covert study. “Ready?” she asks.
“The others?” Kirsten indicates the surrounding trees.
“On patrol. We guard our borders.”
“Against androids?”
“And men,” Morgan says coolly. “We’re a tribe of women. No men. No man-gods. No man-laws.”
Which makes sense. Ari Kriegesmann and his bachelor-babboon coterie can hardly be the only ones of their kind. It comes to Koda that Tanya and Elaine would fit into Morgan’s world as if born to it, and she wonders again how the fight at Elk Mountain ended. Not, for certain, with Ari in charge. “Ready,” she says. “How far are we going?”
“The camp’s by Pyramid, across the dry lake.” Koda’s face must show her dismay, because Morgan adds, “Not to worry. We have horses tethered at the foot of the trail. We’ll be there by full dark. You do ride?”
Kirsten snickers, and Koda says, “Yeah. I’m a vet. My family breeds horses.”
The mounts tethered at the foot of the slope scarcely look up at the three women and one dog when they emerge onto the meadow. The grass grows thick here, interspersed with dandelion and columbine, salvia and mallow, good eating that makes for sleek hides and bright eyes. All the horses are mustangs, in various combinations of white with chestnut, white with buckskin, dapple grey and black. They are the classic mounts of the Plains Nations, the breed that made the Lakota and Nez Perce in their time the finest light cavalry in the world. None is equipped with more than a bridle and saddle blanket, some of those no more than a sheepskin. Koda’s respect for Morgan and her band takes a quantum leap, and she asks, “Wild caught?”
Morgan bends to loose a young grey from her ground tether, glancing back over her shoulder at Koda. The filly whickers softly and nudges at the woman’s pocket, obviously looking for a treat. Morgan pushes her nose away gently and says, “More or less. They were running loose, and none were broken. They’d had some handling, though. Take your pick; two of the patrol can double up on the way home.”
“They’re good stock.” Koda strokes the withers of a tall white and chestnut mare who sports a wide white blaze from ears to muzzle. “Annie?”
“I’ll take the black.” Before Koda can offer a hand up, she springs up easily onto the horse’s back, sliding only a little on the loose buckskin that is its only saddle. It is an impressive performance, meant to impress. Alpha female, meet alpha female.
Suppressing a smile, Koda says only, “Good choice,” and mounts the paint. The horse snuffles and turns twice widdershins at the feel of an unaccustomed rider on her back, but settles quickly with a pat and a word or two of assurance. “All right,” she says to Morgan. “Lead the way.”
The way takes them down the mountainside and onto the miles-long expanse of the dry lakebed. The dark gathers around them, rose and gold along the line of the western hills gradually giving way to deep blue that blends into black at the zenith and stretches behind them to become indistinguishable from the last slopes of the Nightingale range. The moon, one night off full, rises bright enough to cast shadows along the alkali-pale flats. Heat, absorbed during the summer day, radiates upward now, mingling with the already-cooling air of the evening. The breeze, slipping over the line of hills from the west, smells of water, and more faintly, dark earth and salt. Moving at an easy pace, the horses’ hooves clatter against the hard surface. Morgan leads, the weight of her pale braid bouncing between her shoulders to the rhythm of her mare’s gait. She chants as she rides, something Koda cannot quite make out, though she thinks she hears the words “Isis” and “Demeter.” Kirsten follows, her hair a pale halo in the moonlight. Koda rides rearguard, her rifle slung over the saddlecloth in front of her. Asi trots along beside them, breathing easily. The wolf is an endurance runner, and for all his faithful breeding, the wild has begun to surface in the big dog, as if the genes of his ancestors have only been lulled by ten thousand years of domestication, lying dormant until the turn of an age in which humans no longer rule the earth. The dog, the horse, even the comfort-loving cat, may once again become something no living member of her own species has ever encountered in the flesh.