“The view?” Mary said. “They put a house on top of a slope that would kill a team climbing it just to look out the window?”
They both laughed and shook their heads; you could go crazy trying to understand why people did the things they did before the Change. Then they emerged into the settled lands closer to Readstown with startling suddenness, shaggy neo-wilderness on one side of a weathered board fence, close-cropped green pasture on the other and then a not-quite-town.
“This used to be called Gay’s Mills,” he said. “We’re about an hour from home, from Readstown, now. If nobody’s horse throws a shoe, that is.”
Both riders relaxed at the signs of habitation. . relaxed a little. . and slid their recurve bows back into the saddle scabbards at their left knees and the arrows into their quivers on their backs. Gay’s Mills was a cluster of farms and cottages these days, with a blacksmith’s shop by the side of the road and a gristmill somewhere close; they could hear the bur of the millstones. The full-bearded smith looked up from shoeing a big hairy-footed draft beast and gave a brief wave of his hammer with his mouth full of nails before he bent back to his task.
Ingolf’s horse, Boy, threw up his head and snorted as the wind brought the scent of his own kind; Mary’s dappled Rochael ignored them and him. A barefoot pigtailed girl in a linsey-woolsey shift and a floppy hat three sizes too big for her dragged a barking mongrel back just before he was kicked into next week, then stood gaping at them with one dirty foot tucked behind her other knee. Mary smiled and leaned down with effortless grace to pat her head in passing. They headed through a gaggle of chickens that stopped pecking at the roadway and scattered in mindless panic, and out into open country again.
Shod hooves thudded on the soft rutted dirt or sparked on the odd rock or clattered against bits of asphalt that had survived a generation of flood and frost. Shete and longsword rattled and banged against stirrup-irons occasionally, but the loudest sounds were birdsong and wind in the trees. There were farms set back at the edge of the hills every half mile or so, but none very close.
He spent a moment just enjoying the day and the view. There weren’t many pleasures greater than the feel of a good horse moving beneath you on a fine spring day, with the woman you loved riding at your side.
The apple and cherry orchards were in full blossom on the south-facing slopes, frothing in white like snowdrifts, or pink like cotton candy; he could remember the planting of many of them. The season was far enough along that when the road twisted close the breeze brought not only the blossoms’ cool sweet scent but drifts of petals on a gust of wind, settling now and then in Mary’s long yellow braid of hair, framed against the ridge beyond and the piled clouds catching the westering sun amid an endless blue like her eye.
And that’s just about the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen, Ingolf thought. Like this is just about the prettiest country I’ve ever seen. Of course, I’m prejudiced. The Willamette’s great too, and a lot of what I’ve been through is grand, but this place has my heartroots in it. Always will, even if I never see it again.
The Kickapoo Valley was part of what they’d called the Drift-less area back in the day, which meant it hadn’t been planed flat and buried by glacier-born silt like a lot of the Midwest. Instead it was a maze of valleys like this, separated by steep ridges and little plateaus, spreading like the pattern of veins in a leaf. That had helped keep out most of the waves of cityfolk desperate for food and shelter after the Change, that and distance and plenty of hard fighting. There had been enough food even that first year. . just enough, despite the waste caused by disruption and ignorance of how to handle it without machines.
The steep slopes of the uplands were a fresh intense green now with the new leaves of sugar maple and basswood, oak and hickory, with the darker green of hemlock and white pine where the land dipped northward, now and then some dark red sandstone where the earth’s bones showed, here and there the cream of flowering dog-wood. There were willows and elm and cottonwood by the river, with dense clumps of Virginia bluebells and geraniums nodding beneath; trailing arbutus and purple-blue wood violet grew by the side of the road.
They rode past a crude statue carved from an oak stump, and Ingolf grinned at the mocking portrait of Richland’s original Bossman; he’d done that himself as a teenager with a couple of friends, just when the man was on a visit, and it had been worth the hickory stick his father applied. Between forest and water were the fields, many plowed in curving strips along the lie of the land, planted with different crops to help hold the soil, a succession of greens lighter or darker or a first fine mist of tender shoots across smooth disk-harrowed brown earth. He looked at them with a countryman’s eye, enjoying seeing them simply for nice as his folk said, but mostly for their promise:
“Just getting the corn planted,” he said, inhaling the mealy-yeasty-musty smell of damp turned earth, as appetizing as fresh bread. “Not before time, either.”
A woman in dungarees and a straw hat was driving a four-row grain drill along the contour not too far away, the twin heads of her team of bay geldings bobbing patiently ahead of her as they strode along. She had a crossbow in an upright holder beside the seat of the planter, but returned his wave in friendly wise.
“Bandits?” Mary asked, eyeing the weapon. “We’re not all that far from the Wild Lands.”
“Possible,” Ingolf acknowledged; this was the edge of civilization, more or less. “Mostly for the hoof-rats, though, I’d guess.”
“Hoof-rats?”
“Deer, whitetails.”
“Ah, yes. They’re a menace back home too.”
He nodded, though he’d been too busy to hunt while he was there in Montival-mostly too busy recovering from being wounded near to death by Cutter assassins. Deer were a crop-and-garden-devouring pest in most places, what with all the abandoned farmland providing exactly the sort of scrubby edge-country they liked. It had gotten a little better lately as closed-canopy forest spread.
“Though Aunt Astrid insists deer are noble creatures. Not to mention the staple of the Dunedain diet.”
“What do you think?”
“Hoof-rats,” she said, and they both laughed. “But the wolves and bears and cougars and tigers seem to be catching up, finally.”
“Which if you’re trying to raise livestock-”
“-presents its own problems. On the other hand, tiger skin makes a very nice coat.”
“More excitement getting it than I like.”
Children with slings on bird-scaring detail pointed excitedly at the travelers; the school year ended when the fields dried out enough for work nowadays. One white-headed six-year-old ran beside them for a while with a gap-toothed grin. A man was driving a potato planter behind a four-horse hitch in another field, a clumsy-looking thing like a tapering bin on wheels, its center of gravity dangerously high and all covered in patches and rust. He ignored them; all his attention was on his horses and the set of levers and ropes that controlled the mechanism which opened the furrow, dropped in seed potatoes and covered them up in turn. This time Ingolf laughed aloud.
“What’s funny, my heart?” Mary asked.
“That potato planter.”
She looked, and blinked. “Not much different from most, except that it’s old and mostly metal. Looks pre-Change, nearly. There’s a story attached?”
“Just a memory, really. Back when I was about ten. . that must have been around Change Year Four. . my dad and my brother Ed and a farmer named Fritz Ventluka made that. Cut it down and made eight one-row machines from this huge-erific old-time thing that fifty horses couldn’t pull, and we were short of horses then anyway. We didn’t have to go out and plant the spuds by hand that spring, and everybody was happy about that! I helped. . well, I stood around and handed wrenches and hacksaws and ran for stuff. When it was finished, Dad let me have my first drink of applejack. Mom gave him hell for it, but he tipped me a wink behind her back.”