“Oh, yah,” he said quietly. “Damn und hell, yah.”
Ingolf nodded, not really in agreement. “What you haven’t been in is a war. Not the same thing. This is going to be a big war; it’s already gone on for years out west. There’s going to be real battles, and against real soldiers, in real gear with real weapons, not starving cityfolk with baseball bats and kitchen knives, or even some raggedyass woods rats with hunting bows and bowies. They’ll be fighting to kill, not to steal a flitch of bacon and a pie, or run off a horse, or just to get in out of the cold.”
“OK,” Ed said. “You do know about dat stuff. So you can-”
“I’ll be doing my job. I can’t be Mark’s bodyguard. I couldn’t keep him safe even if I was his bodyguard. I can’t even keep her safe-”
He pointed at Mary. She nodded soberly and touched her eye patch, and said flatly:
“I can’t keep him safe either.”
Ingolf nodded: “A stray arrow, a catapult ball or a bolt coming in from a thousand yards away, or some weasel bastard of a paid soldier who’s forgotten more about using a shete than any seventeen-year-old kid can know and sees Mark between him and safety, or-”
He saw Wanda wincing more deeply with every sentence, and dropped the litany. It was probably worse because she knew he wasn’t pulling up possibilities out of his imagination. Every one he’d mentioned was something he’d seen, and she could hear it in his voice.
“Damn and hell, men die in every big army camp I’ve ever seen just because they get caught in front of a bolting mule team hauling a wagon full of hardtack or some shit like that! I don’t want Mark hurt, and I don’t want you hating me, Ed; we did that long enough. I especially don’t want Wanda hating me. Or me hating myself, come to it.”
He could see his brother fighting down anger; Wanda brushed fiercely at her eyes with the back of her hand. Ed puffed at his pipe, waited a moment, puffed again, then spoke with careful softness:
“That’s all God’s truth,” he said, and crossed himself for emphasis. “But, Ingolf, I can’t stop him. I tell myself it’s a good thing he gets some military experience for when he’s Sheriff, und all that shit, but it’s what’s going to happen. Please. . I know you can’t keep him safe, but I know he’ll be safer with you than he would bolting and getting into some half-hard bunch where nobody knows his ass from Adam or gives a damn about him. Please, little brother?”
Ingolf closed his eyes and put his hand across them for an instant. “OK. I’ll do my best. But I don’t promise you anything, understand?”
Rudi, get here fast, would you?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FREE REPUBLIC OF RICHLAND
SHERIFFRY OF READSTOWN (FORMERLY SOUTHWESTERN WISCONSIN)
MAY 10, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
“He’s dead?”
Artos nodded.
“Yes, he is, Otter. In a battle with the Cutters.”
Jake sunna Jake’s woman had taken that beast’s name for her own here, while she’d stayed the winter. She was groomed now, her brown hair sleek, and wearing a Richlander-style woolen dress and good shoes with a silver Triple Moon pendant around her neck. It was as if she’d never squatted barefoot in rags and half-cured rabbit skins; he could tell she’d been looking forward to impressing her man. Now her eyes rolled up and she started to buckle; Samantha, the Vogelers’ housekeeper, caught her by one arm. A low wail escaped her lips, not too loud but continuous.
Artos waited for a single hopeless moment; he didn’t know her well enough to embrace her, and-
Then he drew the Sword sheath and all and held it between them with his hand just below the guard. That put the antler-embraced crystal of the Sword’s pommel between their eyes, so that they saw each other through it. The Southsider woman staggered, her dark face losing the rubbery slackness that had washed over it. After a moment tears trickled from the corners of her eyes, but the stare remained steady. It was his own face he could feel going white, as if spikes of ice had been driven into his chest and would never let go.
Dying must be like this. Or losing something that is beyond bearing.
“He was a brave man and died well, face to the foe,” Artos said, after a moment that seemed to stretch forever, and put a hand on her shoulder. “You and your children will always have my protection, as my own kin, for he was my brother. You shall be lady of Dun Jake. Now go and keen him, as I did.”
Tuk and Samul, the dead man’s half brothers and near-identical save that one was dark brown and the other pale-fair, moved to support her. Artos staggered as they left, his hand fumbling a little as he slid the scabbard back into the sword-throg that hung from his belt on three buckled straps. On the second try he managed it, and saw how shocked Mathilda’s face was.
To be sure, I’m not clumsy for the most part, he thought. Aloud:
“It’s all right, mo chroi, my heart. I’m. . I’m not hurt in body.”
He leaned against a tree, and took long deep breaths. In, hold, out. . as he’d been taught, the body helped govern the mind and spirit, for they were one. In, hold, out. .
“What did you do, Rudi, you idiot!” she said, hugging him fiercely.
That helped as well. Another deep breath, and:
“I ate her grief.” A quirk of the mouth. “Or some of it, at least. The first blow of loss. Swear you’ll outlive me, my heart. . or no, perhaps I’d be cruel to ask that of you, for I’ve never felt any single thing half so bitter. Not broken bones or cut flesh or fear of death.”
The pain receded a little as he spoke, but he sensed it would never be entirely gone. He’d grieved for Jake himself after the fight on the ice, as for a loyal friend and comrade.
“But this is entirely different,” he said, hearing his own voice shake.
As he straightened he fought for an awareness of the day, the noon sun overhead and its warmth on his bonnet and the plaid across his shoulders, Mathilda’s solid comfort and the clean scent of her hair, somewhere a horse neighing, somewhere a girl singing “Barbara Allen” and a spinning wheel moaning with a rising-falling note. The life of Readstown and the First Volunteer Cavalry was going on. As Jake’s woman and the sons she had made with him did; life was the answer to life, and death and loss were part of that never-ending story.
Know joy, there in the Summerlands, Jake sunna Jake. I wish you’d lived, and that we’ d been friends all a long lifetime, and sat together to feel the sun on our aching bones and watch our great-grandchildren draw their first bows. But that wasn’t your fate. Or mine either, and I know that for a fact. I wish I didn’t know what I’m condemning Matti to, and that is also a fact.
“You ate her grief?” Mathilda said, a little white about the lips. “That’s. . that’s terrible, Rudi!”
“It is,” he agreed hoarsely. “But a grief shared is lessened, just as a joy shared is doubled. And Jake came with us because I asked him. I was his chief; isn’t it for me to comfort his darlings, just as it is to see to their welfare? If the Sword lets me do that more directly than words alone can accomplish, why, that’s a mixed blessing but still a blessing.”
Mathilda held her silence, but he could feel her radiating skepticism. He shrugged; the work of the day wasn’t going to wait on his feelings, or hers for that matter.
“Let’s to it.”
Ingolf and Will Kohler were waiting for him in the flat meadow where the First was camped; Ed Vogeler too, and his son, and Wanda and some of her household workers not far off setting up trestle tables. A fair scattering of families-siblings, parents, lovers, or simple spectators-were waiting there beyond the weathered board fence. They weren’t that far from the complex of interlinked and outlying buildings that made up Readstown, after all. Nor were these Richlanders much given to formality, even in war.