Dies The Fire

Chapter Twelve

"S pear, spear, where's the goddamned spear!" Havel shouted, setting himself for a last-second dodge.

There wasn't time to be afraid. He didn't bother to draw his knife-with a bear this size, you might as well try to tickle it to death-or pay attention to the shouts and the wild neighing of the hobbled horses or to Signe dashing away.

He did when she came back seconds later, tossing the shaft of the spear in his direction. Grabbing it and whirling back to the bear gave him just enough time to set himself, with a fractional second more to be thankful he and Will had spent some time reshafting the blade firmly.

The animal would have run right over him if it hadn't paused, but bears liked to attack from an upright rear. It towered over him like a wall of cinnamon-black fur as he crouched with the spear poised; it was roaring, clawed paws raised like organic trip-hammers to smash his spine and spatter his brains across the ground.

He knew how to kill bears. You shot them from a hundred and fifty yards with a scope-sighted rifle firing hollow-point game rounds:

"Yaaaaaah!" he shouted, lunging.

The impact was like ramming a pole into an oncoming truck, and it jarred every bone and tendon in his arms and shoulders and back. He shouted again, this time in alarm, as the onrushing weight drove him backward, his heels skidding in the damp grass of the meadow. The foot-long knife blade sank into the bear's middle, and part of the spear shaft after it, and the growling roar of pain and anger that followed it sprayed into his face along with saliva and a fan of blood.

The butt of the spear slid along the ground until it jammed in a root, carrying him with it like a bundle. Then the bear screamed again as the weapon was driven deeper by its own strength and weight. It twisted frantically, trying to escape the thing that hurt it, and Havel clung with all his strength as the animal pounded him against the ground in its writhing.

Then his elbow hit ground with a jarring thump that made his hand open by sheer reflex as white agony flowed up the arm and down into his torso. The bear twisted again, and Havel felt himself thrown through the air with no more effort than a child's doll. Long training made him relax as he flew, curling loosely.

Whump.

The hard, hard ground still knocked the air out of his lungs and rattled his brain; he fought to breathe and collect his wits.

"Jesus!" he wheezed, scrambling backward on his butt and pushing himself with his heels.

The bear was heading for him. More slowly-the spear shaft stuck out of its middle at an angle; he'd seen before with the plump bandit that the shape of the knife blade made it difficult to withdraw once it was deep in a body. Now the long shaft kept catching on the ground and making the animal wince and stumble, and every time that happened the sharp steel was waggled about in the bear's body cavity.

But it moved, at a hunching, lurching amble, and it was coming straight for him. Blood poured from the wound in its belly, but it didn't spout with the pulsing arterial torrent that would have killed it quickly.

And he couldn't get up fast enough.

He tried and fell over backward; his left leg wasn't working properly yet, where he'd landed on it. The bear hunched closer, snarling in a basso growl, spit and blood drooling from its long yellow teeth. Havel fumbled at his belt for his puukko, snarling back at the approaching animal with an expression not much different from its own.

If I die, you die with me, brother bear – and my people will eat you and wear your hide!

Then it stopped and reared. Eric was there, shouting and jabbing at its face with his naginata.

Nothing wrong with that boy's guts, Havel thought. His common sense, yes; guts, no.

The sharp curved edge of the blade scored along the bear's shoulder. That angered it enough that it ignored everything else and swatted; it also gave Havel time to push himself backward far enough that he could lever himself erect with his hands and good leg. The other one didn't seem broken, or the joints torn; it just hurt like fire to put his weight on it. That didn't mean he wouldn't, but he'd be slowed.

"No!" he shouted, hobbling forward as he saw Eric coming back for more. "Don't get close! Just back off and let it die!"

Signe was back again too, gone no longer than it took her to run and fetch the bow. She had an arrow to the string, but her brother was far too close for her to fire. And he was too far gone in a fine fighting rage to listen, as well; he stepped in, chopping at the bear's paw as it flashed at him. Perhaps that was his way of showing the strain of the terrible things he'd seen and done, or maybe it was just teenage-male hormone poisoning turning off his brain's risk-management centers.

The pole gave the machete blow terrible leverage, and so did the bear's own strength. The scream it gave when the steel split its paw to the wrist was the loudest yet, and the speed of its other paw's sledgehammer blow turned the whole of that forelimb into a blur. It landed on the haft of the naginata rather than the man who held it, and the tough hickory snapped like a straw. That and the glancing touch of the paw was enough to send Eric's two hundred pounds spinning away like a top; he hit the ground ten feet away and bounced. He moved, but he didn't get up; his arms and legs were making vague swimming motions.

The moment he was clear Signe shot. The flat snap of the compound's bowstring sounded clear, and she was less than twenty feet away; the smack of the arrowhead into flesh was almost simultaneous. The eighty-pound hunting bow sent the arrow almost to its feathers under the bear's armpit. It shuddered, and the sound it made was as much a whimper as a growl, but it kept going-and straight towards Eric's fallen form.

This time nothing but death was going to stop it. In the abstract, Havel sympathized: it was doing exactly what he'd do in its place, trying to die fighting and take someone with it. In the here and now, it was trying to kill someone Michael Havel had promised to protect.

One of his people.

"Christ Jesus save us from heroes!" he snarled, and limped forward to seize the pole of the spear planted in the bear's gut.

Several things happened very quickly then. The bear screamed and reared as he grabbed the ash wood and hauled sideways.

Signe shot, twice, from only a few feet behind him and just to one side; two spots of bright yellow-and-green feathers blossomed against the bear's dark fur, one at the base of its throat and another just above the spear. Her sister was on his other side suddenly, panting-she must have run from as close as she could get her horse to come to the sound and smell of wounded bear. The string of Astrid's lighter bow snapped against her bracer, and an arrow sprouted from the bear's inner thigh.

Havel twisted desperately at the spear, conscious of how his bruised leg slowed him-and how the spear had sunk deeper in the bear's body, putting him close to it.

He saw Will Hutton running towards the animal from the rear, legs pounding in desperate haste, the double-bitted felling ax swinging up.

And the bear's wounded paw flashed towards him. He threw himself backward, releasing the spear, just as the tips of the claws struck.

When Havel came fully back to himself, he was chiefly conscious of a stabbing pain in his neck. Shortly after that he became aware that blood was pouring down his face, but he ignored that until he checked that he had movement in all his fingers and toes.

Then, slowly, he put a hand to his face. Light came back when he pushed back a flap of skin that was hanging over his left eye; when he had it in place, he knew there was a bad cut running from the upper peak of his left cheekbone, then beside his eye on that side-close enough to the corner to give him a cold chill-and across his forehead and into his scalp. Like all scalp wounds, it ran blood like a butchered pig hung up to drain, but he scrubbed his other arm across his eyes and the world cleared up.

The bear lay about seven feet away, very thoroughly dead; only a vet with time to do a dissection could have told what killed it, between the spear and the arrows and the ax that stood up like an italicized exclamation mark from its back, with the heavy blade buried in its spine. Blood still trickled; he couldn't have been out for more than a few seconds.

Will Hutton knelt on one side of him, Signe on the other. He let his head fall back; which was a mistake, since lights swam across his eyes.

"Eric?" he croaked.

"Fine," Hutton said, resting his hand on Havel 's and moving it gently away from the younger man's wound. "Banged up. Bump on his head . this of yours goin' to need some stitches, though. Angelica, she kin handle it."

"Don't forget the aspirin," Havel croaked, and Hutton laughed.

"You are one tough mother, got to admit it," he said. "Cojones too. Ain't never seen a man move so fast."

"Ask the bear," Havel said. He rolled his eyes towards Signe. "Good shooting."

"It was closer than a target and bigger," she said. "Are you all right?"

"Hell, no," he said honestly. "This hurts like grim death and I'm seeing double and I'd puke if I had the strength. I'll live."

She blinked at him, frowning, then trotted away. He looked past her at Astrid, who stood beside her father and Hutton's wife and daughter, wringing her hands on her bow as if she were trying to strangle it.

"Come here," he said to her. "I can't shout-if I try, my head will fall off."

She obeyed, kneeling close to him. Signe came back on the other side with a bucket of water and a cloth; she had pills with her too, and he took them as Hutton raised his head with one strong hand. Then she began to sponge at the blood on his face. It felt so good he was reluctant to tell her to stop, but there was something to be done first.

"OK, kid," he said to Astrid, touching Signe's wrist gently for an instant to halt her.

He found he could move his arms, but only if he concentrated on it and didn't try anything difficult.

"Did that bear just light out after you, or did you shoot it unprovoked?" he asked the younger girl.

Astrid blinked, looked away, and then looked back. "I shot it," she whispered.

"What did I say?"

"Shoot anything but bears and cougars, Mike."

"Right." He put out his hand; she didn't resist when he took her bow. "This was a toy, back before things Changed. It isn't anymore. It's a weapon. You don't play with weapons. Understood?"

She nodded.

"And that was a dangerous wild animal. You don't play with them either. Understood?"

"Y-yes, Mike."

He went on: "Two inches closer and that thing would have ripped my face off. You understand that? And your brother and sister could have been dead too, easy. You understand that?"

She was crying now, but she nodded again.

"OK, you don't touch this again until I think you can use it responsibly. You want to be treated like a grown-up, you gotta earn it. A hunter doesn't take stupid chances, or shoot at all unless it's a clean kill."

He handed the bow to Hutton. "And don't let her on a horse again until I say so, either."

He let his head fall back. Signe leaned over him, sponging at the blood again; vaguely, he could see Angelica Hut-ton coming up with some sort of kit under her arm. The pills couldn't have been aspirin, either, or the concussion was worse than he'd thought, because he was beginning to drift away.

"This ain't fucking Middle-earth," he said-or thought he did.

Blackness.

Will Hutton looked at the electric grinding wheel, pursing his lips. It was normally bolted to a long plank; he put it on sawhorses and secured it with C-clamps when he had that kind of work to do. The motor was useless, of course, and he'd disassembled it, leaving the wheel and the driveshaft. It might not work, but he didn't have anything better to do right now; they couldn't move until Havel recovered.

"Needs a flywheel," Ken Larsson said, beating his gloved hands together-the early mornings were still chilly, and his breath showed in white puffs as he squinted at the remains of the machine.

For a high-and-mighty executive, he makes a pretty good hands-on man, the Texan thought.

"Right," he said. "Truck wheel, I think. Drill and mount through the hub?"

"Yup. And the fan belt from your semi would do for the drive-we take the wrecked bicycle-"

His face went blank for a moment; the bicycle had been ridden by one of the bandits who killed his wife. He swallowed, while Will looked aside to allow him a moment's privacy.

"-mount it backward-fan belt around the rear wheel once we get the tire off. Then someone pedals, and you got yourself a grinding wheel."

They both turned and looked at Eric Larsson where he sat throwing stones into the Lochsa. Not far away Astrid and Luanne were working on the bearskin staked out on the ground, scraping the last shreds of fat and flesh off the inside. Eric, on the other hand, had been starting to brood.

"Boy needs exercise," Ken said.

When Havel woke again, he felt completely drained; not in much pain-an itching stab along his scalp wound, a throb in his neck, bruises elsewhere-but weak as a kitten. Something smelled wonderful close by, though.

Gradually the picture came clear. He was lying on a bed of pine boughs, with a canvas cover over him, rigged like a tent to the side of the Huttons' RV. Blankets and the mylar sleeping bag and a low fire in a round bed of stones with a sheet-metal reflector kept things comfortably warm- warmer than he would have been inside the vehicle, with its heaters not working.

Not far away was a horse with its head down, pawing through the long dead grass for the first of this year's shoots, and then eating the natural hay when it couldn't find any.

There was a pot over the fire, and the good smell came from there.

"What's that?" he said-croaked, rather. "Christ Jesus, I'm dry."

Signe Larsson was not far away, silently practicing knife strokes against a small lodgepole; she wore clean jeans, her high-tops, and a big man's shirt of checked flannel over a T-shirt of her own, one with a whale and a circle-slash over it. When she heard his voice she stabbed the knife into the wood with a backhand flick and hurried over to him.

"About two days, right?" he said, reaching up to touch his forehead.

The long wound across forehead and scalp had been stitched in a small neat style, but he'd have a spectacular scar.

Just like Tarzan 's, he thought to himself.

He'd been a Burroughs freak as a kid, and had spent much of the early eighties pretending the forests of the Upper Peninsula were the ape-man's jungles. He'd enjoyed the Mars books almost as much, although it put him off a bit when he realized that since Dejah Thoris laid eggs, John Carter had essentially been doing the nasty with a giant bug.

"How did you know it was two days?" Signe said, dipping a cup into a bucket that stood on a table nearby. "You came to a few times before, but you were sort of semiconscious."

"Don't remember a thing since Mr. Bear turned out to be Not Our Friend," he said, and then a long wordless ahhhhhh! as he drank the cold river water. "Thanks: no, I could tell by the state of your bruises. They're a flattering shade of yellow-green; mine are fresher. What smells so good?"

A woman was singing in Spanish in the middle distance, a husky soprano, a voice with smoke and musk and heat in it-Angelica Hutton, at a guess. He could hear the words now and then:

"Mi amor, mi corazon -"

Signe grinned; she did have a set of colors that would have done a frog proud, though the swellings had gone down, revealing the straight-nosed regularity of her face.

"It's bear broth," she said. "We're making jerky out of most of it, but the soup's good. Want some? Meal and revenge in one."

He nodded, too tired to speak much. She brought over a cup and put an arm under his shoulders to lift him so that he could sip. The contact was remarkably pleasant, in an abstract sort of way. The broth itself was delicious, mostly clear, with a little finely minced meat in it and some dried onion. He could feel the rich warmth of it spreading through his middle, and his eyelids grew heavy again.

Havel fell asleep to the sound of the Spanish song, the splashing of the river, and a distant sound like a grinding wheel on hard steel.

His next waking found him clearheaded; a day after that he was still feeling shaky but strong enough to rise and eat solid food, wash and walk. The next day he was himself again, save for a lingering stiffness.

The older men had been hard at work on the flatbed; the towing bar had been rerigged, and the gear sorted and readied for loading.

Will Hutton had set up his workbench a good ways away; near it was some contraption powered by part of a bicycle, with a transmission belt running from the skeletonized rear wheel. Not far from that was an improvised hearth of mud and rocks, with Astrid pumping on a piston-bellows setup.

"Good to see you up," Hutton said, turning from the fire; sweat ran down his stocky muscular torso.

"Good to be up," Havel said frankly. "Not quite good as new, but getting there."

His scalp wound itched like fire, but that meant it was healing well. For the rest he was stiff and bruised, but he'd been there before; with nothing torn and no damage to his joints he was ready to chalk it up to experience.

Some exercise was just what he needed.

Astrid smiled at him shyly. Havel looked at the black man; he nodded very slightly. Havel glanced back at her coolly, and then went on after he'd made greetings all around: "Maybe you should start practicing that mounted archery stuff again, kid?"

"Thanks, Mike!" she replied, and then broke into a broad sunny smile. "Mr. Hutton has the most fascinating book about it-mounted archery, that is!"

Surprised, Havel looked at the Texan.

"With y'all in a second," he said.

Then he took his workpiece out of the coals with a pair of pincers, gave it a quick once-over, nodded, and picked up a smoothed nine-foot pole with his other hand. The metal was a twelve-inch tapering double-edged blade shaped like a willow leaf and about as broad as two fingers, but it was mounted on a round steel tube. Using the pincers, then the anvil and a hammer, Hutton forced the tube sleeve onto the pretapered uppermost section of the pole.

The wood began to smoke almost immediately; the sleeve was heated past the red-glowing stage.

Quickly he reversed the spear and plunged the whole head and a foot of the shaft into a big bucket of water. There was a volcanic hiss and spurt of steam, dying away to a muttering and bubbling. The hot metal would shrink as it cooled, binding unbreakably to the wood.

"Saw somethin' like this in Calgary, up in Canada, when I was workin' rodeo-went for the Stampede there couple of years," Hutton said.

He took the spearhead out and wiped it dry, then wiped it again with an oiled rag, then braced the shaft between his legs with the top three feet across the anvil and touched up the edges of the head with a two-handed sharpening hone. The steel made a scring: scring: sound under his swift expert strokes.

"The Mounties at the Stampede used lances 'bout like this, put on quite a show."

"You were in rodeo?" Havel asked.

Astrid was beginning to fidget, then visibly controlled herself.

Good, he thought. Let's introduce the concept of discipline and patience into the Elvish ranks.

Hutton nodded. "Roughstock," he said.

That meant riding Brahma bulls, and horses deliberately picked to buck. He glanced over at his wife, who was checking the bundles and boxes of their gear against a list.

"Angel, though, she wanted more than broken bones and trophies on the wall. She was right, of course; and I'd rather work with real horses, anyhow. By then I had enough saved to get our spread and a decent herd."

He tossed the long spear over to Havel. The younger man ran his hands along the smooth length of it; the blade was sharpened right down to where the curve of the shoulders melded into the tubular socket, so it wouldn't get stuck in someone or something's body the way the knife-bladed weapon had.

"Used part of a leaf spring for that," Hutton said, waving his hand back towards the vehicles by the side of the road. "It's good metal; forming the socket, that was the hard part. I made up a couple of 'em."

He went over to the flatbed and got something else. Havel 's eyes widened a bit. It was a straight-bladed saber just under a yard long in the blade, with a three-bar brass guard. A neatly made sheath of leather-covered wood held it, with chape and mouth done in aluminum beaten to shape. Hutton handed it to him, and he examined it more closely; the hilt had wooden fillets glued to the tang, covered in layers of thin braided rawhide to shape it to a man's palm. When he drew it the weapon was heavy but well balanced, blade cross-sectioned nicely from thick back to edge; the reverse was sharpened for a foot back from the point.

It felt right in his hand, suited to a thrust or solid chopping cut.

"Haakkaa paalle!" he said, giving it a flourish. At Hut-ton's raised eyebrow, Havel went on: "Finnish war cry from the Old Country, way back."

"What's it mean?" Astrid asked.

"Literally? Hack them down! Freely translated: Kill! Kill! Back in the old days in Europe, the Finns fought for the kings of Sweden, who really got around-our cavalry campaigned with them all over the place. The Church had a special prayer: 'From the horrible Finns, good God deliver us!'"

He tried whipping the sword through a figure eight, and then winced slightly at how close he'd come to taking off part of his own right kneecap in his enthusiasm.

Hope nobody else noticed that. This is going to take some work, he thought, and went on aloud to Hutton: "I thought you said you weren't a blacksmith!"

"I ain't; and if I was, I couldn't do a sword from scratch in four days. That's not hardly blacksmith's work at all, Mike. Just mutilating a length of leaf spring. The hard part in makin' swords the old-time way was tempering, heating and quenching just right. But that, it's alloy steel and already heat-treated better than anyone could do in a forge." "Hmmmm," Havel said. He braced the point against a stump and leaned on it; the metal bowed, then sprang straight again. He tested the edge with his thumb. It was knife-sharp, which was practical for a weapon-a razor edge was too likely to turn on bone. A flick at the stump took out a surprisingly large chip without dulling it.

"We'll have to learn how to temper steel again by hand, eventually," he went on.

"Lord, Mike, this is America. You know how many tens of millions of cars are sittin' around, with every wheel hung on half a dozen sword blanks? All I had to do was be careful to keep it cool so's not to lose the temper, straighten it out with a sledgehammer, file an' cut it to shape and do the hilt 'n guard-guard's brass strip from the engine grille of the truck-then grind the blade to the right cross-section and hone on the edge. Didn't take more than a day. Astrid's pa helped a good deal, and some books on old-time cavalry I got, so I'm workin' on one for each of us."

Havel nodded, delighted, and decided to let Astrid burble before she burst: "What was that you said about Will's books, kid?"

"He has the most wonderful things about horses-he's sort of like a Rider of Rohan, you know? And books on cavalry, and these notes-they're called Horseback Archery -"

She turned in appeal to Hutton. The Texan had begun to dismantle his improvised hearth, removing the parts he'd be taking with him and stowing the tools neatly in their boxes. He gave her an indulgent chuckle and said:

"Got to exchangin' e-mail with this fellah in Hungary, name of Lajos, Kassai Lajos. They got some real horsemen there, good as any over to here, and he's been working for years on finding out how his old-timey kin used bows from the saddle, and how they made their bows and stuff. Workin' practical, with his own horses. I'd admired to see it. He's fixin' to write a book about it, and sent me a good part of his work. I printed it up an' bound it."

Hutton shook his head. "Hope he was close to home when things Changed; he's got him a little ranch and some horses out in the country there. If he was, he'll live if anyone does!"

Havel nodded. Well, there's a change for you, he thought. Last month, you could chat with someone in Hungary. Now you can't talk to anyone outside shouting range.

Out in the meadow, Luanne and Signe and Eric were riding-galloping down a row of light sticks set in the ground, swerving in and out around each in succession in a series of S-curves, very much like the rodeo event called barrel racing.

He saw that Hutton hadn't been boasting about his daughter; Luanne was leaning in to each curve with effortless grace. Eric and Signe were very good; she made them look as if they were operating their horses by not particularly sensitive remote control systems.

And I'm not nearly as good as either of the twins, he thought. Well, practice makes perfect. I suspect a lot of the rest of my life is going to be spent in the saddle.

"Go on," he said to Astrid. "See if you can give her a run for her money."

"Luanne is cool," Astrid said, and ran for a hobbled horse.

Hutton watched them for a moment; Havel went over and helped him lift his anvil into place on the trailer and lash it down.

"Mike," he said, "How were you plannin' on us making a living, while we're on the way to the promised land?"

"However we can," he said. "If we have to fight for food, we will, but I'd rather not. Overall, it depends on whether my ideas about what's going to happen are close to the mark."

Hutton looked a question at him, and Havel continued: "It's obvious what's going to happen in the big cities-and overseas, in countries that are all big city, like Japan. Remote areas like this, or the farming country: I think things will collapse there too, but slower. Most people will try to hang on to what they had, and the ways they did things, as close as they can. It won't work, not in the long run."

"They got along well enough with horses and such in my granddaddy's time," Hutton said. "Or at least the white folks did," he added with a grim smile.

Havel nodded; Hutton didn't have much formal education, but he was no fool-in fact, he was about the most all-round competent man Havel had ever come across, even out here in the backwoods.

"But they didn't get along without telegraphs, or steamboats, or without guns, a hundred years ago," he said. "Not for a long time before that; you'd have to go back a thousand years, nearly, I think, before it wouldn't make a difference. Someone, something wanted us knocked way down."

Hutton made a final tie-off and fingered the knot. "I hate to think the good Lord judged us that wicked. He promised to Noah no more water; but this time, He took away the fire."

"Could be," Havel said; he was actually an agnostic, but there was no way to disprove the Texan's idea. "Myself, I think Ken's got it right. Someone out there"-he pointed upward-"with a technology that makes ours: what we had. look like stone knives. Something so far beyond ours we can't understand it, and it's like magic. Like algebra to a monkey."

Hutton looked aside at him. "If it was some spacemen, what do you figure we can do 'bout it?"

"Nothing," Havel said bluntly. "I figure we'll just have to live with what they've done to us, and we won't even find out why unless they tell us someday. In the meantime: we have to find a way to live in the world they gave us. You and I, and our kids-mine when I have them, that is."

He looked at the sun. "Let's start early tomorrow. We can make Lowell in three days, taking it easy. It's all downslope."

"One step closer to Larsdalen," Hutton said, smiling.

"If that's where we end up," Havel nodded. "One step at a time. Lowell first."

"Ain't much in Lowell but about thirty people," Hutton observed.

"Right. But there'll be a fair number of other travelers stranded there. I want to look them over. We need recruits."

"We do?" Hutton said.

"We do. Anywhere we end up, if it's worth having. someone else will want it too."