Bard Herbuht crinkled up his brows. “But. . . Uncle Milo, I thought to have heard you say that certain amounts had been taken from those places.”
Milo nodded. “Yes, both of them had been selectively looted, but many, many years ago, more than a hundred years, I’d guestimate from the appearances. However, there was no sign of any human being having been in there recently, say within the last fifty years. One would think that farmers living nearby would at least have gone into that big building and taken the jewelry and those fine, sharp knives, if nothing else. No, there’s something very unnatural about this whole business of Dirtmen squatting on or near to the verges of a rich mine of highly usable and valuable artifacts and metals, yet apparently making no slightest use of them, leaving them all just as they probably lay when the last townsman of ancient times died of those terrible plagues that rang the death knell of the world before our own.
“I don’t like things I can’t understand, things for which there seems to be no rational explanation. These things usually mean sore trouble for somebody, and I don’t want that somebody to be any of us; therefore, we’re not going back in there until the clans arrive to give us force, should it develop that we need it for whatever reason.”
“But, Uncle Milo,” protested Little Djahn Staiklee, “the other boys and me, we all had planned to ride into there tomorrow and bring back a whole mess of them squirrels lives in them big old trees, and maybe some more of them little itsy bitsy antelopes, too.”
Milo shrugged.“If you want to hunt the fringes of the suburbs, fine. Just don’t penetrate into the areas of the wider streets and larger buildings. Okay? And swing wide around the lake, eh? Ride in from due north, and be very, very careful, Little Djahn. What-ever you all do in there, avoid the Dirtmen or any trace of them and do not provoke any violence. If I can, I want to deal with them in peace—after all, there is far more than enough in there for all of us—but if you or one of your brothers is maimed or killed by them, Big Djahn Staiklee will not rest until he has led the warriors down on them with fire and saber and lance and bow and wiped them and their settlement from off the face of the land.”
* * *
Captain Wahrn Mehrdok chose a splendid spot for the ambush of the looters. He armed every man with a crossbow and plenty of quarrels, a six-foot spear and a big, stout knife of the sort that was used in the harvesting of corn. He put two men in each chosen position, that one might be loosing while the other was recocking his crossbow and inserting a fresh bolt. He made certain that all of the quarrels mounted metal heads (common hunting quarrels had for long been just fire-hardened wooden dowels whittled and stone-rubbed to a point, then fletched, as a means of conserving metals). Then they all had hunkered down to await the return of the looters.
They had waited all through a long, long day, fighting a constant defensive action against hordes of insects, constantly on edge, awaiting word from their pickets that the trespassers were coming. On the ride back to the armory in the glow of the twilight, Wahrn had had to break up two serious fights between sweaty, weary, bored and disgusted men.
Sitting his restive, dancing horse and savagely shaking one of the last two would-be fighters in each of his powerful hands, he had grated, “Save your god-damn fighting for these strangers we’re waiting to kill or you’re both going to be a-fighting me. Is that what you want?”
That was not what those two men or any of the others wanted; that was about the last thing any of them wanted, in fact. All were fully aware that their captain could easily break any more average man in his big, hairy-backed hands. Why, hadn’t he, and when barely more than a big boy, been seen to break the neck of a stud bull with those same hands?
While they were vainly awaiting the return of the looters, a great, huge cat of a type unknown previously in this region and of which thereexisted no picture or description in the ancient books in the priests’ library slew a calf in the nearer pasture of Djim Dreevuh. Moreover the outsized feline predator had brazenly crouched over the still-jerking calf, tearing at it with long white teeth until one of Djim’s sons had holed it with a quarrel from his crossbow.
Those who had seen the creature averred that it was solid-colored, sort of a dun shade above and with a pure-white belly and chest, and to Wahrn’s mind that meant yet another threat to their livestock, for he knew from strictly forbidden forays into the ruined town that the other cat therein was a spotted one. It was purest idiocy to allow proven stock killers such as the she-bear and now this new cat to den up nearby and yet not be allowed to go into the ruins and slay them; he knew it and the first sergeant and a few others knew it too. Now, if he and they could only win over enough of the other farmers to their way of thinking, he would have a chance, at least, of facing and backing down that hidebound old bastard Mosix.
“And,” he muttered bitterly to himself, “if a bullfrog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his ass so much.”
After a brief conference with First Sergeant Rehnee, it was decided that that worthy would take the ambush party to a new locale, possibly a little farther north and west of the center of the ruins, on the morrow. It would be Wahrn’s job, he being the best and most experienced hunter of the community, to take a smaller party out and try to backtrack the calf-killer.
Mosix’s emissary had objected loudly, of course, to his rearrangement, but the slender, soft-handed man was easily routed by Wahrn’s half-serious display of bluster, departing the armory as speedily as he could without breaking into a dead run, his fat body jiggling to his accelerated movements, his face white as curds and his ears ringing with the raucous, mocking laughter of the assembled Guardian force.
As upon the past nights, with all the folk of the camp gathered around the central firepit digesting their meal and keeping their hands busy with individual projects of one kind or another—one of the young warriors fletching arrows, two others grinding ancient brass key blanks against rough-grained pebbles to make arrowheads, others honing the cutting edges and points of weapons and tools on finer-grained stones, one tap-tap-tapping one of the big silver rings found in the ruins with a small wooden mallet up a tapered brass dowel to make it large enough to fit over a horn bow ring.
Djoolya, squatting beside Milo and using one of the fine shiny steel needles she had found and some of the brightly colored threads to apply embroidered designs to one of his cloth shirts, spoke aloud, “Love, I want to know what happened after that enemy woman who had been your lover died and your chief gave you his leave to depart his camp. So will you again open your memories to us, this night?”
Across the firepit, Myrah Linsee, her fingers all heavy with the flashiest of the rings, sat embroidering one of her own shirts, not any of her young husband’s clothing. She said, “I remember from all that we had out of Uncle Milo’s memories last year, on the autumn hunt. I think I know what happened next. I think Uncle Milo wed the widow of his friend, Jethroh, the woman called Mahrteen. Am I right, Uncle Milo? Am I? Am I?”
“Yes, you are, Myrah,” he said. “I had sworn to my dying friend that I would take care of his wife and their children, you see, and a man or a woman of honor must always fulfill pledges. Yes, I went to Martine Stiles, wooed her and married her.
“But here, enter into my memories before I talk myself hoarse, needlessly.”
VI
It was not until shortly after he and Martine were married that Milo discovered just how wealthy had been his late buddy Jethro, and then he was stunned, staggered. Certain at first that he had misunderstood, he switched from the English they had been speaking to her native tongue, French.
“How much, Martine?”