Mike reined in on the road down. The road from the caravanserai was steeper than any similar road would be allowed to be in the US, very nearly a 9% grade. It was easy enough to ascend on a horse, you just leaned forward. Going down, through, was tricky. There was a technique for taking a grade like that fast, one that Mike hoped he never had to try. He could ride, he wasn’t a horseman. There’s a difference.
Dumbass, though, had gotten used to the grade and handled it easily. He wanted to trot — cakes and brushing was waiting — but Mike kept him to a walk.
There were two switchbacks on the drive — each positioned to be swept by fire from the caravanserai — before it reached the main road. The main road was fairly flat through the Valley, winding along the west side past the caravanserai. Going north it passed over the mountains and eventually swept west over some nasty passes to Tblisi. The drive was kidney-pounding once you left the Valley. Mike had actually driven improvements, all paid out of his own pocket, up to the pass to the north. But that was as far as he was paying for. After that he had to put up with the road. It was horrible but one of these days he was going to get a damned helicopter.
To the south the road ascended first to the town of Allerso, a pretty small town of about five hundred souls, then further up to a pass that led to the southern plains of Georgia. Tblisi was accessible in that direction, as well, but a bit further. And the roads were no better.
Not far south from where the drive met the road was the downslope to the homes of the Keldara.
The latter were on a slight terrace on the south side of the valley, not far from Allerso in direct line and at about the same level as the main road. However, Mike had to first descend to the Valley floor then back up to get there.
The drive from the road to the houses was gravelled, but well maintained. It was far better than any of the roads in the mountains outside of Mike’s control. The Keldara had their own gravel pits and ensured that all of the gravel roads in the Valley were maintained in top order.
Mike had considered paving some of them but it didn’t seem worth the bother. Since he’d brought in heavy equipment, the Keldara’s work-load had dropped so much that maintaining the roads was good “busy work” for the older men and the team members when they weren’t on deployment cycle. Pretty much every day one of the Keldara men would be out grading them or a group would be laying down new gravel. It was ritual at this point.
The Valley had one “major” river, about fifty feet across at its broadest, and five or six, depending on how you counted, streams that joined the “river.”
One of those streams had been damned, by a former SF engineer Mike brought in, and now provided hydroelectric power to the Keldara and the caravanserai.
During spring they could flood rather badly which was why the road, and the houses, were somewhat elevated. The river was glacier fed and the streams in spring would bulge with melt-water. That was good and bad. Flooding bogged the Valley for a few weeks every year, requiring replacement of bridges that got swept away and general fixing of the fields. But the floods also brought silt, rich with nutrients, the reason that the Valley was so fertile.
Hell, the way the weather looked they might flood tonight. The sky was overcast and strong winds, at times low gale force, were ripping through the region. The forecast, though, said that rain would hold off until about midnight, by which time most of the Keldara would be under cover.
When he hit the road, Dumbass started to shake his head. He wanted to go.
Mike gave him his head and the gelding broke into a canter almost directly out of the run. Mike was fine with cantering, it was a pretty smooth gait, but he drew the line when the horse tried to gallop. Galloping was for horsemen.
Many of the Keldara were already gathering in the broad, flat, area in front of the houses. Mike was pretty sure that the original reason for the higher ground there was a palisaded camp. There were even traces of a defensive ditch in front of the terrace. The open area would have been a marshalling area.
The Keldara used it for much the same reason, now. That was where the tribe gathered for the minor portions of festivals. That was where the kids ran screaming through the crowds and, in this case, people gathered to sample food.
The women of the Keldara prided themselves on two things: their beer and their cooking. Already trestle tables piled with special foods had been set up in the area and everyone was sampling the wares. Which meant there were plenty of young teen girls in the area, carefully ignoring their male counterparts. And Mike had been spotted as soon as he left the gates of the caravanserai.
So when Dumbass came cantering up the road into the area, Mike sawing on the reins to slow him down before he trampled some kid, he was immediately swarmed.
“God, girls!” Mike said, grinning against his better nature. “Give me a chance to at least get off the damn thing!”
The girls were a swarming mob, dressed in bright blouses and black skirts. The Keldara kept some very strict customs about dress which told an informed observer a lot. Girls who had had their first period wore “dhimmie” scarves, a legacy of Islamic occupation under first Magyar tribes then the Ottomans. Girls who were “available” wore their hair in braids. Girls who were married wore their hair unbraided.
Younger girls, those who hadn’t hit puberty, didn’t wear scarves. Younger ones their hair was generally pulled back but unbraided. The older ones, though, mostly wore braids.
Mike tossed his reins to one of the girls with a dhimmie scarf and braids and slid off the horse.
“Don’t overfeed him!” Mike said, sternly. “He nearly got colic the last time! You don’t want to kill him, you know.”
“Yes, Kildar,” the girl holding the reins said, bobbing in a curtsey. She had blonde hair and bright blue eyes. And, as always with the Keldara, was just fucking beautiful. Okay, so maybe the Rite wasn’t all bad.
Mike made his way through the mob as politely as he could, trying to avoid brushing against breasts or being groped. The Keldara were very strict about sex but there were some very odd aspects. If they could get away with it, if they thought nobody would notice, if, for example, they were surrounded by other girls who shieled the act from the Elders and who wouldn’t tell, the girls in the dhimmie scarves would grope him in an instant. And they had very strong hands.
They also weren’t above giving the Kildar a little tease with a quick brush of a breast against his arm. Or back or any other part of his body they could reach.
Mike finally broke through that throng and then hit the kids. He’d taken to carrying hard candies with him whenever he went down to the Valley and he gave it out to the children. Sometimes he was pressed for time and all but the youngest understood. But when he had time he handed it out.
“Gregor, that’s Stasi’s,” he said, pulling back a sweet and giving it to the younger girl by the boy’s side. He handed Gregor one, next.
Generally, he could just hold the sweets out in cupped hands. The Keldara kids had learned not to grab more than one, to let the younger ones go first. It had taken a while, but Mike had been firm and patient. By now the older kids tended to teach the younger the rules, sometimes with a slap on the hand or the back of the head.
The kids also didn’t drop their wrappers. Mike had instituted the almost purely US and Western European concept that “littering is bad.” The older Keldara still had trouble with the idea but the kids were learning. A child that just dropped his wrapper on the ground was, like as not, not going to get a sweet the next time around. Mike sometimes had trouble with names, there were nearly six hundred Keldara all told, but he rarely forgot a face.