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Chapter Fourteen

Erika bat Miriam fan Gimbutas scrunched down behind the rock and peered sideways around it, shivering slightly despite the thick layers of clothing. Iron-shod hooves clanked on the rough stone of the pathway, up in the Shield Range that separated the Eden Valley from the high-steppe areas of the Pale. The air was frigid here even in summer, though mild compared to the Afritsberg range to the east, where carbon dioxide fell with the snow on the highest peaks. It was near to truedark, the arch of Cat's Eye only a thin sliver, the sun down, only two of the other moons visible. Wind blew grit into her face, soughing down from the steppe toward the valley. The young girl looked over her shoulder; a thousand-meter cleft behind her dropped its way through canyon and badland to the valley floor, with only the occasional patch of reddish screwgrass and litchen.

Voices. Her half-sister Shulamit, and Shulamit's young man Karl bar Yigal fan Reenan. They were leading their horses, with an extra mount and a pack-muskylope each. Dressed for travelling on the steppe, sheepskin jackets and bag-hats, scarves. Not armed, beyond the usual saber and knife and bow in its case on their saddles, but the leather sacks slung over their pack-animals gave off an occasional betraying clink. Armor-bags. You didn't wear armor in the Pale except on duty.

" . . . three weeks," Shulamit was saying. "Maybe four."

"That's if they're at Cliff Lion Springs, the way those hotnot traders said."

"Everyone says they are. Three weeks."

"With only two horses each? You want to kill them?"

"We can buy barley at Ashkabad."

"Oive. Stop right next to my father's house?" Yigal bar Rhodevik was in the Eden Valley right now, but the rest of the household was still north in the Tadjik trading-city. The People had a settlement there, a town for traders under Bandari law.

"We don't have to go into the Pale enclave—" The voices faded around the corner. Erika licked dry lips. Piet and Ruth, but they're going to get into trouble now! she thought. They were sneaking off to join the Judge, Tanta Chaya—and the Seven. Attacking the Saurons.

Shulamit's father had been killed by Saurons in the raid after the fall of Angband Base; Miriam bat Lizbet had remarried Erika's father Shmuel afterward. Erika remembered Shulamit standing up at her bat mitzvah, even though it was four years ago now and she had been only ten herself. Standing up at the end of the ceremony and cutting her thumb, putting blood and salt in the brandy cup and swearing to kill a Sauron Soldier for every year her father had missed of his threescore-and-ten. Yohann bar Rimza had been forty T-years when he died; Shulamit would have to kill a whole platoon to fulfill the oath.

I've got to stop her, Erika thought. She'll get killed. It was impossible to imagine her big beautiful brave sister dead. All bloody, like the farmhand who'd fallen under the haycutter last year; she swallowed bile. And if they have to come back, Karl will be here too. Even if he did still treat her like a child. I've had my bat mitzvah, she thought resentfully. I'm on the clan rolls. She was fourteen T-years now!

Glowering, she worked her way backward and stood, picking up her bow and turning to the blind cutoff where her pony waited. The basalt walls closed around her, rising up fifty meters to the near-vertical cliffs; it was even colder in here, and her nose-hairs crinkled. Dark, too. Her horse was tethered to the wall, a dim bulk in the gloom, on the last flat spot before the end of the ravine angled sharply upward. There was slick ice underfoot, that might have lain here a century or more without melting. The animal was rolling its eyes and snorting, whickering greeting but trying to look over its shoulder in the too-narrow space. "All right, Fancy," she called to the pony. "Oats for you when we get home. What's wrong, Fancy?" she continued sharply, as it almost pushed her over in its eagerness to leave the cleft.

Then she could see past it. At first only a pair of yellow eyes ten meters up the slope; they blinked at her, horizontal slit pupils . . .

Oh, please, not a cliff lion, she thought, with a sudden coppery taste in her mouth. They were very rare in the Shield-of-God range—too near the dense population of the Eden Valley—but there were still a few . . .

She backed, step by step despite the pony's increasingly frantic tugging on the reins. Any second now, he was going to go crazy—and when he did, he'd trample her flat, lay her out like a fish on a platter for the cliff lion's supper. Not that it would make much difference. Her bow might succeed in annoying a cliff lion, possibly.

Moving as fast and yet as steadily as she could, she snubbed the left rein tight around the saddlehorn, where it would hold him if he tried to run, and kept hold of the right rein. She was not going to lose Fancy, even if he was a stupid lackwit of a pony. Still clutching the rein, thanking the Three that Fancy was still attached to the other end—shivering, running with sweat, but still blessedly mindful of his training—she reached for the quiver at her waist and slid an arrow into the centerline cutout of her bow. It was a light weapon, no wheel pulleys at the ends like the massive bare built to punch through armor, just a hornbacked hunting bow for a young girl, but it did have a ten-kilo draw. I'm a good shot. Daddy said so.

The eyes followed her, and then she could see the body as she backed out onto the open ground. Not a cliff lion. Stobor. About the size of a small dog, but with claw-tipped paws nearly monkey-agile, long whip tail, narrow pointed muzzle with splayed ripping teeth showing past the lips. The hide was pebbly and the gray of rock, the long thin fur-feathers that speckled it reddish brown. They splayed out abruptly, doubling the apparent size of the beast. It gaped its mouth at her, black and yellow.

"Hoo-eee-eee-hu-hu-hu-heeeeee," it screamed, high and shrill. The sound bounced off the walls of the great canyon, echoing hugely back and forth. It was gaunt, even for its rat-thin breed. Gaunt with the long winter and sparse spring.

Fancy tried to go wild at the sound, plunging and snorting, half-rearing against the shortened reins. The bow jerked in her hand. She jerked back as hard as she could without losing the arrow, and for a miracle (thank Mother Ruth and Father Piet and Yeweh and Christies, and Allah and the Spirits too, just to be sure) the pony stopped cold, trembling violently, but not enough to spoil her aim again.

Stobor were pack animals. Fifty or more might be within calling range, and they could run right up cliffs. She drew slowly—pray Yeweh it doesn't know about bows—and laid the shaft to her ear, the aiming-pin on the animal's belly as it stood to scream maniac laughter at her again. Whup. That turned to a scream of pain as it fell to its side, scrabbling with paws and teeth at the black-fletched quilling that bloomed against its skin.

Erika scrabbled into the saddle, then hauled back on the reins as Fancy, his patience finally exhausted, tried to bolt. He bucked and sunfished, but she held on. Death. Death to try to gallop back down the trail. Held to a crabbing canter, the pony moved sideways down the faint trail. Rocks kicked away from the shod hooves, falling swiftly in Haven's heavy gravity, to bounce and crack and splinter gunshot-loud on their way to the valley floor a thousand meters down.

Behind her the screams were joined by more laughter as the stobor's pack-mates held their brief and bloody feast. They'd be finished soon.

 

"Erika!"

"Pa!"

Erika drew a shuddering breath; Fancy hung his head and slobbered more of the foam that flecked his neck and flanks. Her father was not alone; one of the apprentices was with him, and they both had their bows out at the sight of her winded horse, pale face and empty quiver. Tom Jerrison was there too. Erika winced slightly at the sight of the big graying man, sitting his horse awkwardly with his sledgehammer over his shoulder. Jerrison was Karl's father's man. An Edenite, not a Bandari, one of the old Americ-descended folk who had held the valley back before the Founder's time. Tom Jerrison had been cast out of his church congregation, shunned; Yigal bar Rhodevik had taken him in. Now he was Yigal's shadow, his right hand, and that meant Yigal was near here somewhere.

Karl and Shulamit are in even more trouble than I thought, she realized unhappily. From the thundercloud look on her father's face once his first relief was past, so was she.

"Stobor," she said helpfully, waving her bow back at the rocks. Here in the foothills the trail was a little more definite; farmers took sheep and muskylope to the higher ground in summertime.

"I'm going to have the skin off the totchkis of those two young sklems," he said grimly. "Sending you back alone."

"But, Pa!" Erika wailed. "It wasn't like that at all! They didn't know I was following them, I did it so I could find out where they're going. They could get killed, you've got to make them come back!"

"Nu?" he murmured after a moment, tugging at his dark-brown beard. "Is that the way of it?" Then aloud: "Well, your mother should hear it; also Yigal."

Erika fell gratefully silent as they turned their mounts westward into the valley proper. I know it's right to tell on them. Somehow she doubted very much that Karl and Shulamit would agree, and she blanched slightly at the thought of facing her half-sister after the Sayerets, the Scouts, brought them back. Fancy was mostly steppe pony, and as tough as ponies came; he recovered quickly, eager for his stall, but she found herself willing the journey to take longer.

The great lowland opened around them as they left the last of the Shield-of-God range behind. It was day now, sun and half-full Cat's Eye to the west behind the Afritsberg, the white-topped peaks that closed the other side of Eden. Quite a warm summer's day, too, well above freezing, and they had all opened their sheepskin jackets. The reddish-green of native screwgrass and the sparse truegreen of earth alfa-grass was dotted with sheep and horses and muskylope. Then the land dropped further, down to the alluvial trough of the valley proper.

The chill air tasted of dust and greenery, as the irrigation channels tinkled with meltwater; the farms that lined them were broad streaks of grainland against the drabber colors of land too high to water. The fields were planted with rye, barley, oats and ryticale, or bushy with potatoes, shaggy with amaranth. The sprouts of the last planting were just showing, the gray-brown earth damp with irrigation water. Earth walls separated them, with an occasional grove of carefully tended birch or ash, more common orchards of clowntree fruit or Finnegan's fig, sometimes an apple tree in a sheltered, south-facing spot. Traffic thickened, carts and wagons drawn by muskylope, travellers on horseback, an occasional string of Bactrians. A few brows went up at the party's curt answers to nods and waves. Farmers and their families were hard at work, reaping grain with cradle-scythes in some fields; in others hoeing and raking, driving ox-drawn harrows in plumes of dust, spading in potatoes. Whitewashed cottages and rammed-earth sheds stood here and there.

Erika scrunched her head down into the collar of her jacket as they turned off the main road from Strang to the rutted lane that led to home. It was all her family's land from here; three small farms rented out to Edenites on shares, with the water rights. Then the mudbrick wall that enclosed the houseyard, the werf, with its creaking windmill and water tank. Then the house itself, big and low-slung, of adobe brick like most but painted in gay geometric patterns, roofed in good red tile and with diamond-patterned glazing for the windows; her family was a long way from the wealth Karl's father had, but they were solidly prosperous. Coalsmoke from the chimney, from the hearths of the two forges . . .

Usually there was a good deal of bustle; her parents were both smiths—that was the fan Gimbutas clan trade—and they had half a dozen apprentices, plus Moishe and Esther, her younger siblings, and a maid and a cook and the stablehand. There would be visitors more often than not, kin-folk, one of the tenants in for business or with some metalwork to do or just for a gossip, clan-cousins with a load of iron barstock from the smelters in the northern valley, buyers looking for swordblades and gunlocks, a pedlar. Today was something else entirely. Soldiers stood in the cobbled courtyard, horses picketed, their riders shining in their armor of lacquered leather and brass and steel. Lancers and riflemen, with the Sayeret lightning blazon, hard-looking young men and women. A banner-staff stuck in the ground with the fen Reenan leaping antelope and the Pale's national flag—

Oh, Yeweh and the Spirits of the Founders, it's the kapetein, she thought. The newly elected kapetein, Barak bar Sandor fan Reenan. Ruler of all the Pale and the People. I wish the stobor had—She stopped herself; the memory of those fanged mouths darting at the heels of her horse was too recent. I almost wish the stobor had caught me.

Miriam bat Lizbet came out of the kitchen door, with the maid behind her; they each held a handle of a big platter-shaped wicker basket. It usually carried laundry, but now was heaped with loaves of round flat bread, wedges of cheese, and links of sausage. Old Tanta Bethel followed with a tray bearing mugs of eggbush tea. The soldiers came forward, their politeness turning to grins.

"Hmmph," Miriam said, looking her daughter over. "You tend to that horse, my young meid. And then you've got some talking to do!"

 

"It's not fair." Erika kicked the post of the kitchen door as she sulked out.

"No it isn't," her father said with a wry smile, sinking back to his chair by the kitchen table. Miriam took his hand, as callused and work-roughened as her own, and they turned to look at the other two at the table.

Kapetein Barak sprinkled a little beet-sugar on a cut Finnegan's fig and ate it. "Good lunch," he said.

Tanta Bethel sniffed and left, wiping her hands on her apron.

"Think we'll catch them?" Yigal bar Rhodevik said. He was a square-faced man, his teak-dark skin and light eyes showing the blood of Frystaat. So did the gaunt muscularity of his face, and its premature aging; few of that breed lived much past fifty T-years.

"Those two?" Barak said moodily, pulling at his gray-white beard. "With a day's start? My Sayerets are good, but they're not angels, kerel. No better than a one in two chance. Less as they get north—too many of the border guards are caught up in this Seven nonsense themselves, in their hearts. Already dozens have slipped over the border. Hundreds."

"I'm concerned about my daughter, oom," Miriam said bluntly. "My sister and nephew are trying their best to get themselves killed, but I want Shulamit back."

"And I my son," Yigal countered. "I could almost wish he'd get that wildechaver Shulamit pregnant—then we could marry them off."

"They're too young," Shmuel said. "Also they make each other worse, not better."

"Gevalt."

Everyone nodded, sighed, drank more of the hot sweet tea. "I have to be concerned with everyone's sons and daughters," Barak said. "One reason I didn't want this job. Curse Chaya for a fool! She was a good Judge, but I still say she's a fool. And now she's got the whole northern steppe boiling, her and Aisha. Every hotnot sheep-stealer thinks he's going to be a hero and slay the Saurons." He worked one thick shoulder, feeling the click of bone that had never been quite the same after a Soldier's rifle-bullet nicked it. "They should live so long."

"Karl and Shulamit should live longer," Yigal said. Then he sighed. "Well, if we can't help them by stopping them, maybe we can help them by helping them?"

Barak ate another biscuit and brushed the crumbs out of his beard; his wrinkled eyes flicked sideways to the householders. Shmuel smiled and spread his hands. "I know, I know—secrets."

When the door closed behind them the kapetein leaned forward. The kitchen was warm and comfortable, thick walls cheerful with tile, a low fire glowing in the ceramic chagal stove. Tables lined the walls, racks for knives and spices; a thick-walled icebox was built into one wall. Barak sighed. He was sworn to protect places like this, but sixty T-years had taught him that protection didn't mean being defensive.

"I can't send the h'gana to war against the Citadel," he said bluntly to the younger man. Younger. I remember when forty seemed older than Haven. Oive. "Too far, and we'd lose too much—those poor gayam are going to get their rocks kicked up around their ears, kerel. But."

"But, there are ways of killing a cat that don't involve choking it to death with cream," Yigal said; a little of the worry melted from his face, and he laid a finger beside his nose.

Barak spread a hand. "And the tribes will hurt the Saurons." They both nodded; the feud between the Citadel and the Bandari was as old as the People. "More if we give them a helping hand."

"Weapons," Yigal mused.

"I was thinking of sending Ari bar Kosti with a brigade up to harass Quilland Base's outposts . . . but weapons and skills too, yes. And with the skills, people who can look after those young hotheads and the others like them. Let the hotnots go charging into the Sauron Gatling guns. If they kill Soldiers, good—if they die, also good."

Yigal winced a little at the blunt pragmatism of it, but nodded again. The tribes did not hate the Bandari the way everyone hated the Saurons—most of them did not—but the Pale was not popular. All of the Three Faiths were infidel to the mostly Muslim plains nomads, and the Pale was full of good grazing, rich herds and loot, by tribal standards. Nor did the People suffer attack meekly; blood feuds from old raids and wars sizzled across half of Haven.

"I can afford something," Yigal said. "I can raise more from our kin."

"The kapetein's special funds are full," Barak said.

The Pale's granaries were stuffed with food, the treasury with hard cash, and more out on loan; the armories were full. Mordekai's husbandry, Barak thought.

"The fan Gimbutas will make contributions, others . . . even the Edenites." The Church elders who ruled among the Pale's non-Bandari inhabitants thought of the Saurons as literal Spawn of Satan.

"Weapons, that we'll need permission for. Rifles?" At Barak's nod, he said, "And?"

"No," The ruler of the Pale shook his head decisively. "What the Saurons haven't met in combat, they can't evaluate. Not the 'little Ariksas,' not yet. We'll see how this jihad goes before we commit the fan Gimbutas' little pets. We will send more help to you-know-who."

Yigal grinned. Aiding the rising in the Shangri-La had been partly his idea.

"And finally, I'll send something to Cliff Lion Springs that'll hit the Saurons harder and heavier than any weapon Clan Gimbutas has ever forged," Barak continued happily.

Yigal's eyes narrowed. "I know you, Barak bar Sandor," he said. "You've got your drillbit-eating expression."

"Chaya deserves it," Barak said. "There I was, all ready to peacefully retire—commanding the h'gana was all I ever wanted to do—and she goes and lands me with this job. Who was my worst problem when I was commanding? Who did I have to spend half my time restraining, otherwise he'd cut every throat from Burg Kidmi to the North Sea and call it a mitzvah? Who did Judge Chaya, so reasonable she was and so kind to the hotnots, think was a mad golem from the back hills? What help can I give her that will really be help but she'll hate like poison?

"They," he concluded, rubbing his hands together, "deserve each other."

"How are you going to get him out of retirement?" Yigal asked, curious. "Pretty stubborn man." Almost as stubborn as you, he added silently.

"Get him? Watch—he'll jump at it like a stobor in a box. I'll send one of his old friends . . . Tameetha, say."

"Bat Irene fan Reenan?" Yigal asked. "I don't think he likes her much." I certainly don't, he added to himself.

"He'll listen; they were together back in their raid-and-foray days. Isn't she some sort of relative of yours, anyway?"

"We're clan-kin," he said; both fan Reenans.

"Thought it was closer."

"Second cousins," Yigal said shortly.

"Everything's a family affair," the Kapetein said with a sigh. "Whole damn Pale's a mishpocha."

 

"Uncle Hammer? Are you decent?"

Hammer-of-God Jackson pulled his toe back out of the steaming water and wrapped a long towel about himself. The bathroom was shrouded in heavy-smelling mists from the natural hotspring that bubbled up in one corner; it mixed with cold water from the tank beyond the wall to fill the deep ceramic tub in the floor.

Smells like wet muskylope farts, he thought. "Yes, Brenda," he sighed aloud to his niece.

Brenda Jackson bustled through the door with a tray in her hands, averting her eyes. She was decently dressed in long dress, hood and apron, as befitted a Church of the Renewed Harmonic Testament (Jesus Christ) spinster-matron of thirty-odd years; she also had the Jackson family looks, tall and light-colored and strong-boned. Hammer-of-God privately thought that both his dead brother Fight-the-Good-Fight-of-Faith Jackson's daughters looked like melancholy blond mules, with dispositions to match. His own daughters were married off and occupied with children of their own, thank the Lord.

Brenda's lips narrowed. "That is not decent, Uncle. You've spent too many years around those shameless Bandari harlots who swagger around in unnatural dress, instead of leaving such matters to men as God intended, blessed be the name of the Lord, amen."

"Amen." Try fighting the Turks in a bloody skirt, then, Hammer-of-God thought, and followed it with a prayer: Give me patience, O Lord God, But not too much.

"It'll bring a judgment on them, by God and His Son, upsetting the natural order where men command and women obey. Now take your medicine and get in there and soak, Uncle."

Hammer-of-God shrugged. "Get in the tub?" he said, his fingers covertly loosening the towel.

"Well, that's what I said, Uncle, and it's what the mediko said so—eeeeek!"

Hammer-of-God stood naked and grinned as she fled, apron over her face. Then the smile died; he gulped down the vile-tasting medicine and slipped into the steaming water.

I'll never hear the end of that, he thought glumly, looking down at his body. From one end to the other it was a record of his career in the army of the Pale. The puckered shape of arrow-wounds, a little ragged where the surgeon's spoon had gone in to get the barbs out. Long scars, jagged or smooth, from knives and sabers. Knotted lumps of keloid from scraping and dragging, the inside ache of the places where bone had knitted over breaks, worse every year now. The angry red on his thigh from the last one, the pain that never went away. So I don't heal like I used to, he muttered to himself. I'm not ready to lie down and die yet either.

"Or maybe I am." Lie down and let Brenda and Ruth cosset and boss him into an old man; when he was very daring, he might ride into Strang and have a brandy or two and visit a real harlot. Give me chastity, O Lord, he prayed. Then, because he was an honest man in his fashion: But not quite yet.

"Thirty mortal T-years, and what has it gotten me?"

Quite a bit, he admitted as he slid down further in the water, leaving only his beaky nose and gray-streaked sandy moustache showing. A good farm owned free and clear, and general respect, if not liking. Silver in the bank and sheep out on shares; not riches, but enough to be comfortable. And it cost me my only son.

Enough. He would not think if that. Nor give Barak bar Sandor the satisfaction of seeing him come sniffing around for another command, the way he'd prophesied Hammer-of-God would. "Liar," he said to the ceiling. "I don't love fighting. I love winning. You should understand that, you chess-playing crafty haBandari son of a bitch. Sorry, God," he added automatically. "Old soldier's habits." The Elders were at him to be a better example to the young.

Good example my ass. It should be example enough that you could get ahead even if you were an Edenite. The Elders were far too fond of keeping young men—and still more, young women—down on the farm, for his taste. Blaming the Bandari for it, as well. Not that they weren't arrogant enough, but you could do it. Edenites mostly did their military service as infantry, garrison troops, and few went into the professionals. He had, grimly practicing with horse and bow to make up for the training haBandari clansfolk got in childhood, learning to read Bandarit because that was what the military manuals were written in . . . . facing down all those snotnoses who thought I couldn't be anything but an ignorant peasant.

Good years, good years. Perhaps it would be best to rest—serve the Lord with his heart and prayers, rather than deeds, for a change.

A sound alerted him. He came up, blowing and shaking the water out of his ears, shivering a little as the air caught his wet body. "Brenda?" he said, reaching for the towel. The woman would not leave him alone for a moment. Thirty years of killing ragheads for Christ, and he was being pecked to death by professional virgins.

He raised the towel toward his face, rolling his neck to relax the muscles. That saved his life as it brought the glitter of the knife into his peripheral vision. Reflex made him try to lunge aside, but he was still standing in the tub, knee-deep in water. His feet shot out from under him, and he felt a thin line of white-glowing cold along his belly as the curved knife rammed by.

Fool, he thought, grappling with the figure in dark leathers. A lunging stab. Foolishness; you had to cut to kill quickly with a knife.

The man was faceless behind a knitted wool mask. They went over into the water, and the stranger's arm came down hard on the edge of the tub. There was a crackle of bone, and the knife spun free onto a floor awash as their struggle dumped half the contents of the bath. Hammer-of-God whipped his forehead into the masked figure's nose, felt it squash flat. The assassin snarled and tried to grapple again, but his right arm wasn't working, hanging limp at an odd angle. The Edenite rolled on top, hammered two knuckles into the smaller man's throat; his groping hand found the hilt of the knife and he thrust it up under the other's ribs, wrenching the hilt back and forth. The would-be killer arched, gurgled, fell back limp into water turned red. Hammer-of-God rolled out onto the floor and lay wheezing, shuddering with aftershock.

The door opened. Brenda screamed. Her uncle forced himself to his feet, feeling at the oozing line across his lower stomach. That had been a sharp knife, and if it had been a few centimeters lower . . . he shuddered. He might be pushing late middle age, but there were certain parts he wasn't ready to give up just yet. The screams trickled off to gasps, and his niece stood with her hands over her mouth.

"Hotnot," Hammer-of-God said, stripping the mask off the floating body. High-cheeked and slant-eyed, Turki or maybe Uighur by the looks. Nondescript clothes, the sort a wandering laborer might wear; the knife was short enough to be legal for aliens in the Pale. He must have crept in through the window and stayed motionless for hours behind the clothes chest. Underneath, the limbs were bound tightly in windings of linen; now that was interesting.

"Hashashin," he said, nodding to himself. Shi'a fanatic, pledged to don his own winding-sheet before he set out to kill. The face was pathetically young in death, younger than Hammer-of-God's own son had been.

He straightened and put a snap into his voice, the tiredness gone from it. "Get hold of yourself, woman!"

Another figure pushed past her. A woman too, but in the wool and leather of the Bandari clans, drawn saber in her hand. A decade or so younger than Hammer-of-God, but equally weathered. He recognized her; one of his staff officers in the old days.

"You can't even stop killing them in your bath?" Tameetha bat Irene said with a stobor grin. "Give it up, Hammer—the p'rknz didn't intend you to rest and rot until you're dead."

"Un-un-uncle," Brenda whispered. "There, uh, there's a Bandari named Yigal bar Rhodevik—a fan Reenan—he's, he says he's got a message for you."

Tameetha nodded, lifting the body with a grunt and carrying it out. "So it's the Kapetein got a message," she called over her shoulder.

"Yigal," Hammer-of-God mused. And the kapetein. It was still strange to think of anyone but old Mordekai with that title attached to him. God grant him mercy.

He shook his head. "No, God has a message for me, Brenda. Fetch my clothes. And my sword."

 

"My name isn't Issachar," Hammer-of-God Jackson said.

Barak looked puzzled. All he could remember was that Issachar was one of the Ten Tribes, back on Earth. Yigal bar Rhodevik leaned over and whispered the quotation in his ear: "Issachar was a large-limbed ass, bent down under heavy burdens."

"Besides," the Edenite ex-soldier went on, "I'm a man of peace, these days."

Barak nodded at the sword by his side, and Hammer-of-God flushed slightly. That grew deeper as two of the Sayeret troopers went by outside, carrying the canvas-wrapped body of the assassin.

"Put that in the barn!" Hammer shouted out the window. "And Tameetha—you're going to wear that away."

The Bandari woman was stropping her fighting-knife on a leather strap wound round her left fist. The sound was hypnotic; nostalgic, as well. In the old days with the Sayerets he had fallen asleep by a hundred campfires to that rhythmic wheep . . . wheep . . . wheep.

"Some people chew their nails," she pointed out genially, and pulled out a hair from her braid. "Gray, Yeweh dammit," she muttered, and dropped it. The strand fell apart as it touched the edge. "Hammer, you're going to say yes—why make them court you with baklava and flowers before you get into bed?"

"You shut up," hissed Yigal, a merchant's anger at someone queering a negotiation mixing with old irritation.

"Why, cousin—here I am, going off to look for your prodigal son."

"The kapetein asked you for help, I didn't," Yigal bit off. "What son of relative would I be if you had to ask?" she said—irrefutable logic, to one of the People—and started stropping the knife again.

Kapetein Barak picked up another wedge of clownfruit-and-apple pie and used it to chase some of the cream around his plate; Brenda and her sister had wasted no time in laying out an impromptu feast, with the honor of the house involved. "Going to get fat in this job," he said. "Every kitchen I visit, they bring out the dainties. Never could resist a good piece of pie."

Hammer-of-God looked at him and snorted; the blocky frame held not an ounce of spare flesh.

"So why should I go back to gnawing rotten muskylope in a snowstorm, when I could stay here?" he demanded. Court me, Barak, he thought. For thirty years I jumped when you said "kermitoid." Now plead a little. The living room of the farm was warm and comfortable, a coal fire in the stove, good rugs on the floor, a shelf of books—not only the inevitable massive Bible and Renewed Christian Harmonic Testament, but Bandarit volumes from the printshops of Strang and Ilona'sstaadt.

Yigal took a pull of his beer. "Because you're bored to distraction," he said. "Same reason Tameetha here wants to get back in harness."

Tameetha had never married, very unusual for one of the People although not unknown; instead she had lived by arms, in the Pale's service and as a free-lance. The teak-dark color of her skin and the gaunt muscularity that showed tightly defined under it suggested more than a little of the Frystaat heritage so common among the fan Reenans, the heavy-gravity adaptation. Rumor was divided on why she had never settled; some held she had been disappointed in love as a girl, others that she was secretly carrying a torch for Hammer—hard to believe, Yigal thought—others that she was bent for women or just liked fighting too much to settle down. He had his own suspicions, but her skill was not in dispute.

Hammer grimaced. "Tameetha, in case you hadn't noticed, likes to kill people—which is sinful. She also enjoys fighting, which is not only a sin but stupid, too." The woman blew a kiss.

" 'I bring not peace, but a sword,' " Yigal quoted.

Well, that's tit for tat, Hammer thought.

"Besides," Barak said, "we need you. Lot of young sklems heading north to join the Judge, dreams of glory in their eyes."

Hammer-of-God spat into the fire. "No room for glory in the grave," he said.

"You know that. They don't."

"My son doesn't, nor that wildechaver girlfriend of his," Yigal put in. "They showed the Sayerets a clean pair of heels."

"Says something for their fieldcraft," Hammer-of-God observed. Outrunning the Scouts was no easy task.

"But nothing for their brains."

Hammer-of-God raised his own stein. "Send someone else," he said, wiping foam off his moustache with the back of his hand. "Someone the Judge gets along with better. Send Ari, he's good."

"He's needed here," Barak said. "I'm going to be giving him a brigade to keep Quilland Base's mind off the rest of Haven. He can handle that; he's a good solid field commander. This, this thing with the Seven, needs another order of skills entirely."

"Yohann bar Non—"

"—is in the . . . you-know-where."

Hammer-of-God nodded. Nobody should talk aloud about the Shangri-La Valley project. He hoped nobody was talking about it aloud; an uncomfortable number of people knew about it these days. Yohan was as tricky a covert-operations manager as the Pale had, among his other talents; the tribes called him the Ice-Eagle. Barak used him as a troubleshooter, the way Mordekai had used Hammer-of-God in the old days.

"Things are moving, we have to seize the time. I can't order you, old friend," Barak said, his thick shoulders slumping a little. "I am asking."

Yigal murmured: "'Play the maid's part: say no, and take it.' "

"How much can you give me?" Hammer-of-God said at last, not looking at either of them. To himself he muttered: "After all, Saurons are the spawn of Satan. Maybe God has been getting me ready for this."

"Of supplies and money, as much as you need," Barak said; Yigal nodded. "Specialists, any who want to go—Sapper, for one, we can spare him now. And plenary authority, from kapetein and Council. A thousand or so of the People are heading up to join the Seven already, so you'll need some impressive parchment to wave at them."

"Oh," Hammer-of-God said, smiling slightly—showing his teeth, at least, "I don't think establishing my authority will be much of a problem."

 

The home-field of Hammer-of-God's farm was crowded, the pastures packed almost solid with gray felt dome-tents and picketed animals.

Next crop will be good, he thought automatically: a lot of free fertilizer.

The news had spread quickly, and a great many old friends had shown up over the past couple of cycles. Most were from the survivors of the special retaliation unit he'd led once, the bunch known in the old days as God's Brass Knucks. Every one of them a proved fighter—well, they were alive, weren't they?—nearly as scarred as he was. And far too many fresh-faced youngsters who listened to those lying songs about it all. His cousins Be-Courteous and Smite-Sin, as well. For my sins. I'm going to be shorter on old comrades after this is over. Mercy, please, God; and if you have to take anyone, take those two.

"Saurons' bane," he said, leaning into a supply wagon and checking under the tarpaulin.

Flintlock breechloaders, neatly packed muzzle to butt and shining with protective oil. The Pale's answer to the Sauron assault rifle, and far better than the alternatives. Crisp linen packets of fifty paper cartridges, each with the pointed head of a bullet peeking out like the head of a cock from its foreskin. Pottery eggs just the size to fill a palm, with wooden loops at the top; pull and throw, five-second friction fuse. Small kegs; gunpowder, storage of. Three-kilo ingots of lead. Coiled slowmatch cord. Baskets of arrowheads. Spearheads. Best of all, little steelbranch caskets of silver slugs, the most necessary thing of all for war. He replaced the covering and dropped to the ground, feeling only a slight twinge in his bad leg, and looked back at the rest of the wagon train.

"Fighting Saurons," he said, "one of life's rarer pleasures."

Angband Base had fallen at the beginning of his career. For a moment he looked into space and past the years: the spiked head of the Sauron rolling at Chaya's feet, the look in her eyes, the look of one who walked with God. I thought we were kindred souls. But she saw another facet of Him, mostly. After Angband the People and the Saurons had been like two cliff lions with overlapping territories, snarling and pissing along the boundaries but not risking a head-on clash. Waiting for a chance to spring.

The party was forming up. All well-found, good remount strings, full equipment. Quivers stuffed with arrows, lances and rifles in their scabbards, bedrolls tightly laced, everyone had heard about his standards. And Sapper sitting on the buckboard of the next wagon, smiling his dreamy little smile, with his mapcase beside him. If it existed on Haven, Sapper could draw you a map of it and tell you how to undermine it or blow it up or burn it down. He'd been the one to survey the road down to the Shangri-La, originally: nobody had called him anything but Sapper for so long they'd forgotten his birth-name.

"Well, you know the tribes," Yigal said. "You've killed enough of them. Now you can apply your knowledge differently. And keep these reckless wildechaverim under control."

Hammer-of-God laughed, a sound that started as a rippling chuckle and turned into a full-throated guffaw. The severed head of the hashashin on its pole above seemed to share the joke, leering with dried-out lips pulled back from yellow teeth.

"Barak is sending me to restrain the reckless?" he gasped.

Yigal snorted. "Sekkk tvaz," he said: "It's only reasonable. He said you were a ripe throat-cutting bastard, but you hadn't lived this long by being hasty about it."

"Save me the tzionut, I'm not in a mood for flattery and hot air," Hammer-of-God grunted, swinging into the saddle with one hand on the pommel. Not too old for that yet, he thought with satisfaction.

"Yeweh be with you, my friend—and kick my son's behind when you see him," Yigal finished.

Hammer-of-God leaned down to fist the other man on the shoulder. "His for starters, Yigal—his for starters." He rose, stood in the stirrups.

"Ons trek, hulle pelmakim," he shouted with grand irony: let's get going, you stainless heroes.

Whips cracked, and the draught-muskies bent to the yokes; the drovers shouted the immemorial cries—"Trek! Trek! Bosman, Witje, Samson, trek! Veeery nice!"

Hooves scattered dust as the horsemen cantered ahead. Behind him, the last sound was the weeping of the farm's women.

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Framed