She reached over and put a hand on his shoulder. “I wish I could have met your father. And your mother.”
Ingolf snorted, trying to imagine it. “Dad. . Dad could be sort of. . drastic about things. Never could take being crossed, and he was a hard man when he was angry, or when he’d had one too many. I think Mom would have liked you, but she wouldn’t have shown it. God knows she tried riding roughshod over my sister-in-law Wanda often enough, though she was wild about the grandchildren.”
He shook himself mentally and looked around again. Haying would be the next busy time, but it would be a few weeks at least before the timothy or alfalfa was high enough to bring the mowers out to cut. And there was always the eternal battle with the weeds.
“The oats are in, good, it’s always best to get them planted by the middle of April around here, the shoots are just showing now, see? Winter wheat looks fine, plenty of tiller, no bare patches from winter-kill. .”
“My love, could we be a little less agricultural?” Mary asked.
“Sorry, melda,” he said with a grin; his Sindarin was still shaky, but he’d mastered the endearments.
He’d also been about to comment that the stock looked in good fettle too-white naked-looking sheared sheep with black faces grazing under the fruit trees with a shepherdess and her collie in attendance, many of them with a lamb at their heels, Angus cattle like square black blocks of flesh in the lower pastures, white-and-black or Jersey milkers. Sows grunted happily as they mowed down young alfalfa with swarms of pink-and-brown piglets tumbling around them.
Ingolf glanced aside at his wife and found her watching fondly as well, and grinned to himself. It was an odd person in today’s world who didn’t find beauty in a well-tilled landscape. Even non-farmers such as the Dunedain Rangers.
“Sort of like the Shire,” she said, echoing his thought. “The people it’s our duty to protect.”
“Us Rangers,” he agreed.
Apparently you got to be one by being sponsored and also by being able to do a bunch of things. Since the Hiril Dunedain was Mary’s aunt he didn’t anticipate too many problems getting on the rolls formally.
The fortified Farmers’ homes and their attendant clusters of Refugee cottages and barns and tall silos that dotted the land faded away as they approached Readstown proper; this was the Sheriff’s home-farm, worked from his own place. The state of the road said that traffic had been heavy lately, hoof and wheel both; he was surprised his elder brother hadn’t had a few teams out grading and smoothing.
Then they turned directly northward, onto a stretch that had been asphalt in the old days and still was where it hadn’t been patched with gravel; the river was far enough away to their left that it hadn’t washed out this section during the periodic floods.
“Well, troops are gathering didn’t turn out to be an exaggeration after all,” Mary said. “That explains the road.”
She looked over at the rows of white tents, the men and campfires and picketed horses that occupied a long stretch of pasture between the river and the buildings, running up to the big truck gardens to the north.
“About three, four hundred here, I’d say,” she went on, with an expert’s quick appraisal of numbers.
“Yah,” Ingolf said and nodded agreement. “Maybe a few less, they’ve got a lot of gear with ’em. Or a few more if they’re quartering some of them in the homes. Must be putting everyone’s nerves on edge. And that’s why Ed hasn’t graded the road just lately. Usually we do it as soon as things dry out a bit in spring.”
“No sense in doing it four times if he can wait for the troops to move out and do it once,” Mary said.
“Ed’s. . not exactly miserly. But he’s tight with things.”
“So he should be,” Mary said. “It’s not like someone sending a beggar away hungry because they won’t spare the scraps. What a lord has comes from his followers, after all. It’s his duty to be careful with their goods and labor.”
Ingolf opened his mouth, closed it again, and nodded. “Yah, I should have thought of that. Maybe I’m not as much over my mad at him as I thought.”
Readstown had been a sprawled-out village of about four hundred people, remote and sleepy ever since its founding around a gristmill not long after white men first settled this land nearly two centuries ago. In the years that followed the Change it had shrunk to a much denser core around the Sheriff’s house-what had become the Sheriff’s house-for reasons ranging from warmth in winter to security against the bands of starving, desperate wanderers who’d gone roaming and reaving in the terrible years, and your odd sneak thief or high-binder or gangs of plain old-fashioned bandits later.
Not to mention various bigger fights over stock and who got the everybody-needs-’em Amish and stuff like that, before the Richland Bossmen knocked some heads together and kicked some butt to create our glorious Free Republic. People did what they had to do in the early days. Dad not least. But that’s part of why he drank too much sometimes. To forget what he had to do.
He’d been just turned five when the Change came; he could remember fear and cold and conversations among the adults that stopped when they noticed him. Now and then someone started acting very strangely, and usually you didn’t see them again. Or they ended up like his aunt Alice, who’d been gently mad and given to sudden fits of tears as she sat at her workbench over a half-finished lute.
Of course, she got caught in Racine at that stupid folk-music festival thing. Never did say how she made it back home. Young as I was I remember her turning up. She was as skinny as anyone I’ve ever seen who didn’t actually die.
“Looks tidier than it did in Dad’s day. A bit more than when we were through last year. Ed keeps plugging away, I’ll give him that.”
It had been worth the labor to link the houses here together into defended courtyards, and later to shift or build more structures into the same complex; just before his father died he’d put up a round stone tower at one corner of the main house with a catapult on a turntable atop it, and sheathed the lower parts of all the buildings with fieldstone batten-walls as well. In the more recent years of peace some new cottages had been built out on their own, and the sawmill and gristmill, of course, and the regional school and the Lutheran and Catholic churches. A teenager he recognized was on mounted sentry-go a little farther up the road.
“Halt!” the boy said, raising a hand. “Who goes. . Uncle Ingolf, by God! Und Aunt Mary! Yah hey dere! How’s she goin’?”
“She’s goin’, Mark, and hi backatcha. You’re looking pretty military,” Ingolf said.
He was, for someone just turned seventeen and gangly with it. Tallish, six feet and a bit already, but still colt-built, with freckles against pale winter’s skin and corn-tassel hair cut in the rather shaggy local ear-length style. A scattering of nearly invisible hairs on chin and upper lip suggested he was trying to cultivate a beard as well, and failing miserably. But he had a mail shirt with short sleeves on too, over the usual padded undergarment, a helmet that looked like a local blacksmith’s copy of the sallets seen on Rudi’s party last autumn, a shield and quiver on his back and bow in a saddle scabbard at his knee, along with shete, binoculars, bowie and tomahawk at his belt.
Equipped just like me, in fact, Ingolf thought with an amusement he kept off his face. Except for the trumpet, and except that you can see everything came from the best armorer in Richland, or maybe even Des Moines. Plain, but no expense spared. . no, that mail shirt’s a bit big. Probably allowing him some growing room; those things cost.