“Mackenzie men have more to brag about, by the Dagda’s favor which we enjoy,” Edain said, and handed the wax to Mathilda.
They all gave their bowstrings a quick rub with it. As he did, Artos quoted, thickening his accent and adding a Scots roll to the “r’s”:
“Och, laddie, I dinna ken where y’ve been. . but waur ’ere it was, ye won first prize!”
The two Mackenzies laughed, and Mathilda groaned. When the Norrheimers looked puzzled, she gave them the ancient joke. Bjarni bellowed laughter, checking himself with an effort; they were hunting, after all. Asgerd groaned in turn and threw the lump at Edain’s head; he caught it with a quick snap and dropped it back in the pouch.
They set out, Artos and Mathilda, Edain and Asgerd and Bjarni, with Garbh quartering ahead of them. All were hard to see in their roughly practical clothing; the green-brown of the Clan’s tartan made good camouflage in this lush country too, and the little slivers of dull orange actually helped with that. Their swords hung at their waists, and their fighting-knives and belt-knives, but nobody bothered with armor or helm, or shields beyond the little soup-plate-sized steel bucklers clipped to the scabbards the three from Montival wore.
A space of bluegrass meadow only a little scraggly with brush sloped southward, past the remains of a swing and teeter-totter overgrown by a sprawling clump of lilac and a rotted rope hanging from the branch of an oak with the remains of a big tire lying on the ground beneath it. Then came an overgrown laneway, and after it a long-neglected orchard, grown into a tangle of dead trees, spindly saplings where fruit had fallen, and others run wild. A few of the apple buds were showing the first blossoms, and black-and-white-striped butterflies burst upward from around their feet as they walked. A jay with the long tail of the eastern tribe scolded and then flew away, sounding satisfied with work well done.
“I know the apples, but what are those?” Bjarni asked, pointing to another overgrown field that had been short trees in regular rows.
Edain glanced up from looking at the ground ahead for game-sign.
“Peaches over there. Cherries beyond that I think, and. . by Brigid of the Sheaf, apricots! I haven’t seen any of those for a while. Ah, my mother’s apricot tarts! With good thick whipped cream.”
“I’m beginning to think no woman could rival her, with you,” Asgerd said dryly.
“None could, for cooking. But mind you, for dalliance-”
She snorted and made as if to clout him with her bow, then asked wistfully:
“What are apricots like?”
“Like peaches. . no, you don’t know those either, eh? Well, they’re about so big, and yellow, and the flesh is sweet as honey when they’re ripe, and the taste. . well, how can I describe that?”
“I had some apricot brandy once, that vikings-salvagers-brought back from the dead cities,” Bjarni said. He smacked his lips. “Not bad! But the fruit, no, I’ve never tasted it and can’t imagine. That’s like color to a blind man, I suppose.”
They fell silent and walked quietly amid an intense fresh greenness for a half hour, enjoying stretching a different set of muscles and seeing the countryside without the constant onrush of wind in their faces. Each took in the lie of the land, and they instinctively avoided a marsh-fringed pond where a beaver dam had blocked a stream; they could hear a distant smack as one of the builders whacked his flat scaly tail into the water in alarm. Upstream of that to the west and north the creek flowed quietly between low banks over gravel, with yellow marsh marigold and dandelion-like coltsfoot and white-and-yellow bloodroot thick along it in the cool damp shade; a bit higher were shy little purple violets.
Long ago someone had set stepping-stones in the knee-deep water there, and they still ruffled the water aside in little standing waves. Willows dangled their long green tendrils in the flow, and a red-spotted brown trout darted away downstream into deeper water with a flick of fins as Artos looked.
Hmmmm. Would it be worth the time to tickle a few? No, the sorrow of it, however well panfried trout would taste. Not with a battalion to feed.
Edain hissed and pointed with the tip of his longbow as Garbh sniffed and bristled.
“Cat!” he said.
“Cougar?” Asgerd said doubtfully.
Mathilda crouched where the animal had come to the edge of the water to drink and held her open hands over the marks. She wasn’t a small woman and her shapely hands were as big as many men’s, but the pawprints were obviously wider than the span of her fingers.
“Tiger,” she said succinctly. “Male. The pugmarks are square and the toes are thick, see? A big one, too; four hundred pounds or better, I’d say.”
“They’re more common here than in Norrheim,” Bjarni said. “That’s the third set of tiger tracks we’ve spotted and we’ve not been looking hard.”
“And no wonder,” Artos said. “Remember that sign we passed-African Lion Safari Park?”
“It said lions.”
“Yes, but it’d have many another sort as well. I’d say it was likely the keepers there turned their beasts loose before they died themselves. That happened in many another such place, I know; and Father Ignatius has told me of others his order learned of. Some of the animals were eaten, no doubt, and some couldn’t live with the weather here. Some survived to breed, which is why that one was drinking from this stream.”
“But the tracks are old,” Edain said. “I can’t smell him even if Garbh can. Also I can’t eat him, or won’t unless I get very hungry indeed. I’m not livin’ here, nor yet trying to raise stock in his bailiwick, nor yet in need of a tiger-skin coat. So if he’ll leave me alone, I’ll return the favor, and we can both bless the Lady each in his own way.”
“Well said,” Bjarni said with a grin.
He’s missing home and wife and children, but this is a holiday for him as well, I think, Artos mused. For a while he needn’t be King.
They scanned farther up the creek; there were signs of everything from raccoon to elk. Edain hopped across from rock to rock to the other bank and trotted up it for a minute before he gave a low call. Artos followed; the brush had been carelessly trampled down over a wide area, twenty or thirty yards, and the banks crumbled into the water.
“Cattle!” Asgerd said; the signs were unmistakable to the country-bred. “Are there herdsmen here? We’ve seen none.”
“Man-sign?” Artos asked Edain.
“No. It’s not a tame herd, Chief. The mix is wrong.”
A domestic beef herd had far more young animals than one left to itself, and there were other differences.
“Feral cattle,” Artos said to the others. “Messy eaters and messier drinkers. They’re common in parts of Montival, common enough to be a nuisance.”
The girl looked blank. Bjarni nodded. “We don’t have them in Norrheim; the winters are too cold, I think. But I’ve heard that there are many farther south, from those who go there in viking. Swarms of wild cattle and wild pig, almost as many as the deer.”
He frowned. “It’s strange; the old-world folk died of hunger after the Change, mostly. Hunger and plague. I’d have thought they’d eat every beast before they started on each other.”
Artos shrugged. “Every beast they could catch. For all the millions scouring for them, there were always some animals of each kind who survived until most of the humans were gone, if only by being out of the way. Cattle will double in numbers every two years, left to themselves.”
“Pigs even faster,” Bjarni acknowledged. “And the flesh-eaters were slower to build their numbers back, as well. Still it’s hard to imagine people so ignorant they’d starve with game still in the woods.”
“People before the Change didn’t know anything, the most of them!” Edain said. “Me da still talks about how they had to be taught like babes when the Clan was starting, and how he and Lady Juniper and the others went scouring for people who knew things, real things, to teach.”