Horses of the North Page 4

  The sabers of the horsemen and the straight-bladed swords of the infantry were not so lovely and well balanced as were the ancient, patrimonial, basket-hilted blades born by officers and warrants, but they were every bit as effective in the hot little actions that resulted on occasion from brushes of patrols, hunting or foraging parties with prairie rovers. To fashion the needed swords, dirks, pike and lance heads and ferrules, helmets and a modest amount of body armor for each man, it had been found necessary to strip off the now-perforce-stationary armored vehicles ail of the protective plates, along with steel tracks, wheels and every other bit of metal that did not have a direct bearing upon the use of the 76mm guns. The useless automatics, too, went to the forges; lacking proper ammunition, there was simply no point in retaining the heavy, unwieldy things, Ian felt.

  He had read and reread and committed to memory as much as he could of certain of the ancient books of his great-grandfather's extensive, well-thumbed library, then he had undertaken the retraining of his command . . . and barely in time, too.

  After being sanguineously repulsed by the fort and the well-defended inner perimeter of the station compounds, a mounted band of some thousand or so prairie rovers began to despoil the lands and pastures round about the station, whereupon Colonel Ian Lindsay marched out his infantry and cavalry to do battle. The pikesquare stood rocksteady under charge after furious charge, while the crossbowmen at the corners and the mounted horse archers massed in the center emptied saddle after rover saddle.

  When, finally, the rovers broke and began to stream away from the field of battle, the square opened and the mounted troops poured out to pursue and harry, half of the pikemen trotting in their wake with swords and axes, while the other half went about dispatching wounded foemen on the stricken field before returning to the fort. There had been counted over five hundred bodies of dead rovers, but Ian Lindsay had lost nearly a hundred killed on the field or in the pursuit and half a hundred more who had died since of wounds. He still mourned them all.

  At a brief rap upon his door, Colonel Ian Lindsay broke off his rememberings. "Come."

  The man who entered was about Ian's own age, with close-cropped yellow-gray hair and a red-and-gray mustache plastered to a sweaty face drawn by deep lines of care and worry and discouragement.

  As Ian Lindsay was the hereditary colonel of the 228th Provisional Battalion, so was Emmett MacEvedy the hereditary director of the station and therefore in official charge of all nonmilitary personnel. Emmett and Ian had been good friends in childhood, and the two worked closely together at all times, as indeed they must in order to keep their people alive, secure and reasonably well fed in this savage world.

  Colonel Lindsay poured an old, chipped mug half full of a straw-pale whiskey and pushed it across the age-darkened desk, waving toward a facing chair. The newcomer sank wearily into the chair, drained off a good half of the whiskey, then simply sat, staring moodily into the mug.

  "Well, Emmett?" queried the colonel, after a few moments of unbroken silence. "Say you have some good news for me."

  The man sighed deeply and slowly shook his head, then sighed once again and looked up. "I do have news, Ian, but it's hardly good. It's not just the wheat and the barley this year, God help us. The rye is affected, too, and the oats, and even the maize. Not a spear or an ear I examined that doesn't show signs of the damned blight. . .and I was through most of the fields. We might get silage out of those fields, but that'll be about all."

  Knots of muscle moving under his ears as his clenched jaws flexed, the colonel stared at MacEvedy from beneath bushy brows, cracking his big, scarred knuckles one by one. At long last, he spoke.

  "Well, we'll just have to make do with potatoes again, I suppose."

  Once more the director sighed and shook his head. "I'd not count on it, Ian, not even on that. I checked the potatoes, too. The foliage is discolored and stunted, and those tubers that I had pulled up had none of them developed properly . . . and the beets and turnips seem to be similarly afflicted."

  Through force of habit, the colonel cast a quick glance around the office, then leaned forward, lowering his voice and speaking swiftly.

  "Emmett, these last two years have not been at all good—you know it and I know it—and if we lose all of the grains and the potatoes this year, all of us will be in the shit for fair, for there simply are not enough remaining reserve foodstocks to feed everyone—your people and mine own—through to the next harvest. I know this for true fact, Emmett. I personally inventoried the fort stocks and those of the station quite recently."

  "I suppose we'll just have to send out more hunting parties, Ian, and foragers with wagons, too, you know, for nuts, acorns, wild tubers, potherbs and the like. Hell, the prairie rovers have lived on them for generations—we ought to be able to subsist likewise for a few months, one would think."

  The colonel heard out his friend, then said, "Emmett, we can't depend on game or on foraged foodstuffs, not unless we are willing to pay the price. That price is high and becoming higher and I, for one, think it's already too high. My estimate of the situation is that each and every hundredweight of dressed game is costing us one man killed or wounded in brushes with the damned skulking rovers' hunting parties, with whom ours are competing. If we start vying with them for plant food as well, every wagonload we bring back here is going to be paid for in blood."

  "Well . . ." The director hesitated, his brows knitted up as he carefully thought of his next words, then he let them go, all in a rushing spate. "If worst comes to worst, Ian, there are cattle and sheep can go to table without trimming the herds too much. And rather than see folk starve, we could eat the shire horses and the riding stock, as well, I suppose."

  The colonel snorted derisively. "And if we slaughter the shire horses, just what, pray tell, Mr. Director, will provide draft for the harrows and plows, come spring, eh?"

  MacEvedy squirmed a bit in the chair. "Well . . . ahh, Ian .. . ahh, the really ancient peoples used oxen for draft work, you know, back before horses were bred up big enough to be worthwhile, and some of the prairie traders use them to draw wagons, too, you know, you've seen them."

  The colonel chuckled. "Yes, I've seen them, but they were an entirely different breed from our cattle. I know I'd not care to be the man who took it upon himself to try to hitch Old Thunderer to any plow or wagon."

  "Ian, Ian," the director remonstrated, a bit wearily, "Old Thunderer is a stud bull, far too old and set in his ways to do more than what he's always done. But I have quite a number of young steers that would be much more amenable to training for draft purposes. And the traders say that on level ground, a good draft ox can provide a stronger, steadier pull than even the best shire horse or mule."

  The colonel grunted and shrugged. "Emmett, the shire horses are yours and the cattle, and if you want to reverse the order of things—eat the horses and train the cattle to draft—that is purely your prerogative, but the shire horses will be the only horseflesh eaten, my friend. I draw the line at my horses."

  He raised a hand, palm outward, when he saw the heat in the other man's eyes. "Wait—don't explode at me yet. There are very good reasons why you can't slaughter my horses. Drink your whiskey and cool down enough to think rationally, Emmett.

  "Those troops of mounted archers and lancers constitute the only really mobile forces under my command anymore, and without them there will be no farming or herding at all. The damned prairie rovers will butcher every man and boy, carry off every woman and girl and drive off every head of stock that leaves the immediate protection of our inner perimeter, if they have no fear of my mounted patrols. Take away my horses and you doom every man, woman and child in station or fort to death or slavery."

  "But. . . but your pikemen . .." began the director.

  "Emmett, no one of those brave men—weighed down with his pike, sword, dirk, armor and helmet—can move as fast as a horseman. And my pikemen are only really effective in numbers of sufficient size to form a defensiv
e square and thus have a good chance of repelling the charges of horsemen.

  "No, Emmett, my horses cannot join yours in the stewpots, that's all there is to the matter."

  The director drained the dregs of the mug and set it down hard, his mouth drawn in grim lines. "Then, Ian, there will be half as many of us ... if that many, this time next year!"

  Chapter III

  "We had ranged far and far to the north, that summer," Milo Morai began. "In those days, the entire tribe numbered about as many as do four or five clans, today, and so all traveled and camped close together for the safety and the strength provided by many warriors. We had followed the caribou herds north in the spring and were heading back southward in the hazy heat of midsummer, lest an early onset of winter trap us in those inhospitable latitudes."

  Dung chips and all the wood scraps available had been heaped upon the coals of the nearest firepit, and in the flickering light thus cast, it could be seen that every man and boy and girl in the camp had formed a circle around that fire and Uncle Milo. Only the herd guards, camp guards and those few prairiecats still out hunting were missing from the conclave of quiet listeners.

  "The council and I had decided that the tribe would winter upon the high plains that year, so we had swung much farther to the west than usual. We then had no cat brothers, and so the warriors took turns scouting our line of march, flanks and rear, least we be surprised by dangerous beasts or two-leg enemies.

  "Then, on a day, just as Sacred Sun had reached midday peak, three of our scouts came riding in. One of them had been arrowed, and their report was most disturbing."

  Wincing as he shifted, trying in vain to find a comfortable position for his bandage-bulky hip from which the fiendishly barbed arrow had been extracted, Sami Baikuh said, "Uncle Milo, a small river lies ahead, but between us and it are several warbands of nomad herdsmen, and at the very verge of the river there sits the biggest farm that I ever have seen anywhere, in all my life. Some of the houses have wails raised about them—not stockades of logs like many farms, but real walls of stones—and I thought to espy men on those walls. But the fields are ail overgrown; they have not been sown or even plowed, this year, I think.

  "A roving patrol of the nomad warriors spotted us, and for all that we tried to bespeak them in friendship, they loosed a volley of shafts at us. I was wounded, and since they were a score or so to our three, we felt it wiser to withdraw."

  Milo laid a hand on the arm of the wounded man. "A most wise and sensible decision, Sami. The tribe will exact your suffering price from these men, never you fear."

  At this, the other two scouts exchanged broad grins and one of them said, "Part of that price already is exacted, Uncle Milo. Even as his flesh was skewered, our modest Sami loosed a shaft that took the foremost of those unfriendly bastards through the left eye. I put an arrow into another's belly—and I warrant he'll be long in digesting that bit of sharp brass. Even Ilyuh, here, who is not the tribe's best bowman, gave one of them a souvenir of sorts to take home with him."

  In in-saddle council, it was decided to attempt one time more a peaceful parley with the strange nomads and, if that should fail, to arm to the teeth, ride down upon them and hack a clear, broad path through them, for it was not the wont of the tribe to try to bypass hostile men who were just as mobile as were they themselves; sad, very painful experience had shown that such attempts always bred attacks to flanks or to rear of the vulnerable columns of wagons and herds.

  Milo and the chief who had been chosen to head the tribal council for the traditional five-year term of office, Gaib Hwyt, rode out, flanked by half a dozen other chiefs, one of them bearing a lance shaft to which had been affixed the ancient sign of peaceful intentions—a yard-square piece of almost white woolen cloth. Some twoscore yards behind this peace delegation came a mixed troop of warriors and female archers, all fully armed and armored, their lance points twinkling in the sunlight.

  As Milo, Chief Gaib and their immediate escort crested a gentle slope and walked their horses down its opposite face in the direction of the mile-distant river, a contingent of warriors sighted them, and while some of them reined hard about and set off toward the east at a punishing gallop, the bulk of the party rode to meet the newcomers, but slowly, in order that they might string bows and unsling targets and otherwise prepare for imminent bloodletting.

  When some fifty yards separated the two groups, Milo raised his right hand, empty palm outward, then he and Chief Gaib and the flagbearer moved at a slow walk out into what they hoped was neutral ground, silent but for the stamp of hooves, the creaking of saddles and the jingle-jangle of equipment.

  After a few moments of seeming confusion among themselves, punctuated by shoutings and obscenities, three of the stranger horsemen separated themselves from the main body and rode out to meet Milo and the two chiefs.

  At easy speaking distance, both mounted trios halted, then one of the strangers kneed his big, raw-boned dun slightly ahead of his two companions and eyed the three tribesmen with open, unveiled hostility. In dress or in overall physical appearance, he differed but little from Gaib and the other chief, his build being slender and flat-muscled, his visible skin surfaces—like theirs—darkened by sun and wind and furrowed by old scars. His hair was invisible under his helmet, but his full beard was a ruddy blond. The baggy trousers were of soft, if rather filthy, doeskin, his boots of felt and leather and his shirt, with its flaring sleeves, of faded cloth. He sat his mount easily and held his weapons with the ease of long familiarity, and his demeanor was that of the born leader of men.

  He answered Milo's smile with a fierce scowl. "I'm Gus Scott. Are you the head dawg of this here murdering bunch of bushwhackers, mister?"

  The very air about them seemed to crackle with deadly tension. Milo sheathed his smile, but was careful to make no move toward his weapons, despite the insulting words and manner. "My scouts were fired on first, Scott. They only returned fire in order to cover their withdrawal."

  Scott shook his head. "That ain't the way I heared it, mister."

  "My tribesmen do not lie!" Milo replied brusquely. "Anyhow, there are only the three of them, and one of them now lies in my camp severely wounded in the back of his hip. Does that sound to you like the kind of wound that an ambusher would sustain, Scott? And also think of this: Would any rational man ambush a score of warriors in open country without considerably more force than three men?"

  "Well . . ." Scott waffled. "I didn't see it, mister, and I ain't saying I did, hear? It was ackshully some of old Jules LeBonne's boys. Could be they drawed bow and loosed a mite too quick. But that still don't go to say who you is and what you doing hereabouts, mister."

  Milo shrugged. "We're a tribe of wandering herders, just as you would seem to be, to judge by your personal appearance, Scott. We followed the caribou north in the spring and now we're returning southwest to winter somewhere on the high plains. We have no desire to fight, only wishing to move our herds and our families south in peace. We will not, however, be victimized by you or anyone else."

  Scott snorted. "Mister, I don't give a damn wherebouts you go to, but you better not plan on using that ford down yonder to get there, is all I got to say."

  Grimly, Milo demanded, "And just how do you intend to stop us, Scott?"

  "Hell, it ain't me or mine, mister. You want a peaceful crossing, you better just head twenny mile east or twelve mile nor'west, 'cause that fort yonder, she covers the only decent ford atween them, and them bugtits down there on them walls'll start picking you off four, five hunnert yards away,"

  Milo frowned. "They still have guns, then?"

  "Damn right they has! And they knows how to shoot them and they purely hates ever living critter on earth . . . 'cepting maybe theyselfs."

  Milo did not doubt the stranger's assertions as regarded the other strangers down by the river ford. There was more reason to believe than to doubt, in this case, for he had experienced many times in the last century groups and individuals who
were plainly homicidal for no apparent reason.

  The brief, savage nuclear exchange which its survivors had called a war had directly caused very few deaths or physical injuries among the hundreds of millions of human beings then on the North American continent; most of the calamitous losses of life had occurred weeks or months after the last missiles had struck target and had been the result of starvation, various diseases and fighting among the survivors themselves. In many cases, those who had survived to the present day were the direct descendants of men and women who had withdrawn to secure or secluded places and defended those places with deadly force against all would-be intruders. The children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren had imbibed such sentiments as "Death to all strangers" with their mothers' milk and now could not be hoped or expected to behave other than as the rabid killers Gus Scott had described.

  The encampment of the warbands was situated in a fold of ground cupping a small tributary to the river, which just there widened to the dimensions of a modest lake and lay a half hour's easy ride from the farthest fields and pasturelands of the riverside settlement and fort. Gus Scott's was the only one that included women, children, wagons and herds; it also was the largest contingent of warriors. All of the other chiefs had brought along just male fighters, spare mounts and a few head of rations-on-the-hoof. Lacking tents, these bachelor warriors slept in the open in good weather and in soddies—circular pits some eight to twelve feet in diameter and three to four feet deep, with rough blocks of sun-dried sods stacked in layers around the rim to bring the interior height to an average of five feet, then roofed over with poles, green hides and finally more sod blocks—on wet nights.