Horses of the North

II

Colonel Ian Lindsay appeared a good ten years older than his actual fifty-three years. Not stooped with age, mind you—six foot four in his stocking feet, with a deep chest, wide, thick shoulders, arm and leg bones well sheathed in rolling muscles and still capable of splitting a man from shoulder to waist with that well-honed broadsword that had been his great-grandfather’s pride—but his craggy face become a collection of permanent lines and wrinkles, his once-black hair now a thick shock of snow-white and even his flaring mustaches and bushy eyebrows now thickly stippled with gray hairs.

He was a man beset with problems, problems of such nature as to seem often insoluble to his orderly mind, but somehow he and his staff and the civilian intendant and his staff always came up with some ploy or some substitute for something no longer in supply that would work after a fashion.

Still, as he sat worrying and figuring in his office within the fort designed by his grandfather and built by the battalion of that day with tools and materials that had ceased to be available fifty years ago, he frequently wished that he might have lived in Granddad Ian’s day when things had been so easy—motorized vehicles, vast stocks of petrol to run them and the electrical generators, other huge, underground tanks of diesel fuel and heating oil, thousands of rounds of ammunition for the rifles, pistols, automatic weapons and mortars, fine, powerful explosives of many differing varieties. Then, too, in that earlier Ian’s time, there were almost double the number of people hereabouts, with the battalion at well over full strength. In that halcyon era, the “(Reinforced)” suffix to the unit designation still had real meaning.

Belowstairs somewhere, the notes of a bugle call pealed, sounding distant and tinny through the thick walls.

“Must be the guard detail making ready to march out to the far pastures and relieve the men guarding the sheep and shepherds,” Colonel Lindsay thought. “God grant that they don’t have to fight men, this tour, or that if they do, there’re no more casualties borne back here to die.” He sighed and shook his head. “If only those damned nomad scum were still afraid of us, here.”

Leaning back in his chair for a moment, closing his lids over his bright-blue eyes and absently stroking his mustaches with the joint of his thumb, Ian Lindsay thought back to a day now more than thirty-five years in the past, when he had been a subaltern and junior aide to his grandfather, Colonel Ian James Alexander Lindsay. He recalled that day well, did that Colonel Ian’s namesake.

The winter preceding had been an extremely hard and long-lasting one—the hardest one in the available records, in fact, a winter which had seen hardly any wild animals abroad other than the wolves—great marauding, hunger-maddened packs of the slavering beasts—on the prairie. There had been precious little sun for weeks at a time, with one long, bitter blizzard after another sweeping down from west and north and east, even, and a full meter thickness of hard ice covering the river bank to bank for the most of the winter.

The fort had then been in place for about fifteen years—it had been begun during the week of the present Ian’s birth and had been three or four years in the completion—but all of the other buildings and habitations had been erected even before the first Ian’s birth. They were solid and weathertight and well capable of retaining heat generated by hearth fires, stoves and other, esoteric devices then in use.

Even so, the folk and animals living in these sound structures of concrete and brick and native stone, adequately fed on their stocks of stored grain, canned or dried vegetables and fruits, smoked and pickled meats, silage and hay had suffered the effects of the long, hard winter to some degree. But the sufferings of the nomadic rovers—mostly existing in fragile, drafty tents, eating their scrawny, diseased cattle and sheep for lack of game and battling the huge, savage wolf packs for even these—must have been well-nigh unimaginable.

Nor had the following spring done much to alleviate the preceding months of misery and hunger and death. For one thing, it had been a late spring, a very late spring; for another, it had been an exceedingly rainy one and these torrential rains, coupled with the copious snow and ice melt, had transformed ponds into lakes and lakes into virtual inland seas, sent streams and rivers surging over their banks and rendered many square miles of prairie into swampland that discouraged the quick return of game.

Halfway through that terrible spring, the prairie rovers, from hundreds of square miles around, converged upon the fort and the other buildings and sprawling crop and pasture lands.

Young Ian remembered how the tatterdemalions looked from the wall of the fort, through the optics of a rangefinder. They went through the drizzling chill in rags and motheaten furs and ill-cured hides. The few whose horses had not gone to feed either them or the wolves were mounted, but the majority went afoot. There were thousands of them, it seemed, but mostly ill armed. Here and there was an old shotgun or ancient military rifle, bows of varying designs, a few prods and crossbows, but most of them bore nothing more than spears, crude swords, axes and clubs.

Later on that day, Ian had felt—still felt—both pride and despair at the dignified mien of Colonel Ian James Alexander Lindsay—pride, that he was himself come of such stock, despair, that he could ever affect such demeanor, could ever be so cool, so obviously self-assured in confronting the scruffy but deadly-looking leaders of the huge horde of invaders.

Flanked where he sat by his son, the younger Ian’s father, First Captain David Duncan Robert Lindsay, and the battalion second-in-command, Major Albert MacKensie, with the three other captains—Douglass, Keith and Ross—ranged along the paneled wall behind, Colonel Ian J. A. Lindsay had seemed to his grandson the very personification of all that an officer should represent: calm dignity, authority and long-established order.

In his mind’s eye, the present colonel could see that long-dead old officer as if the years intervening had never passed. The full-dress coat that had been Colonel Ian J. A. Lindsay’s own father’s was spotless, and its polished brass insigniae reflected back the bright electric lights. Ruddy of countenance, his dark-auburn hair and mustaches liberally streaked with gray, he had sat behind the very desk and in the very oaken chair now occupied by his grandson. A short, but stocky and big-boned, powerful-looking man, he had eyed his “visitors” in silence over steepled fingers.

Finally, he had rumbled in his no-nonsense tone of voice, “I agree that the winter past was a devilish hard one, gentlemen. But it was hard, too, on us, here. Our reserve stocks of nearly everything are reduced to a dangerously low level, far too low to allow us to even think of extending any meaningful amounts of aid to you all, even were you and your folk our responsibility … which you are not.

“And, gentlemen, none of the problems mitigates the fact that you are trespassing illegally upon a military installation and a classified experimental agricultural station of the Canadian government. Consequently, you are all …”

A cackle of derisive laughter from the paramount leader and main spokesman of the gaggle of ruffians—a tall, cadaverous, almost toothless man with dull, lank shoulder-length brown hair and a skimpy beard through which fat lice could be seen crawling—interrupted the officer.

“Canuck guv’mint, my ass, mister! It ain’t been no kinda guv’mints nowheres sincet my paw was a fuckin’ pup! An’ everbody know it, too, so don’ gimme none your shit, mister.”

Completely unflustered and in icy control, Colonel Lindsay had continued, “It is true that we have been out of touch with Ottawa for some years now, but this means—can only mean to a soldier such as I—that the last recorded set of orders to this battalion still stands. And gentlemen, do not mistake my purpose of commitment. I will see that those orders are carried out; I will protect the MacEvedy Experimental Agricultural Station from your inroads and depredations if I have to see each and every one of you done to death to do so. Do I make myself clear, gentlemen?”

Ian well recalled the feral gleam in the deep-sunk, muddy-brown eyes of that prairie rover headman. “You talks good, mister, real purty-like, but you don’ unnerstan’ too good. Look, it ain’t no deers nor nuthin’ out there to hunt no more and the damn wolfs got all our cows and horses and all what we didn’ eat our own selfs, las’ winter. We all is starvin’, mister, and we knows damn well you all got food. If you won’t give it to us in a peaceable way, we’ll kill ever man jack of you and take it. We ain’t got no choice, mister.”

The old colonel had sighed and nodded slowly. “Do not think, please, that I do not realize your quandary and personally sympathize, gentlemen, but …”

“Wal, then, mister, you jest give us all your wheat and corn and all. Let us take our pick out’n your cows and sheeps and horses, see, and give us some good guns and bullets for ’em and we’ll jest go on ’bout our bizness, see, an’ …”

It had been at that point that Colonel Lindsay’s broad, calloused palm had smote the desktop with a sound like a pistol shot. “Preposterous, sir, utterly preposterous! Do not attempt to overawe me with your threats. You are not now dealing with some hapless, helpless community of those poor, wretched farmers on whom you and your despicable ilk are habitually wont to prey. All that you will be given by us, here, sir, is a richly deserved death, long overdue.

“I am Colonel Ian James Alexander Lindsay, officer commanding the 228th Provisional Battalion (Reinforced). Our orders are to provide support and protection for and to the MacEvedy Experimental Agricultural Station and all its personnel. An attack upon the station or upon my fort will be considered by me to constitute an attack upon the Canadian government itself, and I shall repel such an affront with all necessary force, treating you all as the criminals that such actions will have irrevocably branded you.”

The first attack came howling and screeching at the walls a bare hour after the leaders had been shoved out the gates of the fort. It had been repulsed, of course, bloodily repulsed, and the remainder of that day and the night that followed it were made hideous by the moans and cries of wounded, dying, untended rovers and by the screams of injured horses.

But there had been another attack, headlong, no whit different from the initial exercise in futility and mass suicide; this second attack came at dawn of the next day. Bare hours later, they came at the walls once more, and once more the bullets from the rifles and the automatics, shrapnel from mortar bombs and rockets cut down the starveling rovers long before any one of them had won to within bowshot of the embattled fort. They attacked one more time; then they had had enough.

Colonel Lindsay had had patrols follow the retreating raiders, and when he received the report that they had set up a camp some miles southeast of the fort, he had led out his command in two motorized columns, taking charge of one and turning over the other to his son. They moved slowly that night, so as not to wear out the horse-mounted unit of Captain Keith. Nonetheless, by false dawn, everyone was in position and Colonel Lindsay gave orders to commence firing on the sleeping encampment.

The defeated rovers, never suspecting that the victors might pursue them and complete the butchery, had chosen their campsite on grounds of comfort rather than easy security. The few sleepy sentries they had posted on the low hills almost surrounding the camp had quickly succumbed to wire garrotes and sharp knives, and cautious, silent patrols had established that there existed no second line of sentinels closer to the camp.

Muttering under his breath about rank amateurs playing at the game of war, Colonel Lindsay supervised the emplacement of the mortars and the two armored vehicles mounting 75mm guns; the few rockets brought along were all of the hand-held variety and could therefore be easily shifted to targets of opportunity when once the slaughter had commenced.

Then it was only waiting, waiting until the bursting double star of a purple flare told that First Captain Lindsay and his group were in place. With the bright glare of a rising sun hot on the backs of Colonel Lindsay’s bombardment group, most of the rovers could not see even the four-yard-high spouts of flame from the discharging mortars, so had no idea whence was coming the rain of explosive death, and the vast majority of them died within a few minutes there in that hill-girt vale, torn asunder by the explosive shells and bombs and rockets, shredded by the shrapnel, trampled to death by loosed horses mad with pain and terror or cut down by their own bemused comrades all stumbling about in the dusty, smoky, chaotic slice of very hell that they just then were occupying.

At what he felt was the proper time, the colonel had lifted the brutal barrage and Captain Keith’s horsemen had come into view over the crest of the hill, between the gun and mortar emplacements, forming up among the low-growing brush that clothed the easy slope down to the blood-soaked, cratered vale. Sabers were drawn, lances leveled, to the peal of a bugle. Even in their shock, the surviving prairie rovers below could see just what horror next was coming their way, and it was just too much for them. They broke and streamed westward toward the second broad break in the circle of hills, where the stream ran southward.

No one of them made to try to catch one of the few sound horses, they just took to their heels, one and all, many discarding their weapons as needless encumbrances to flight. They ran like the formless mob they were become and fell in high windrows before the murderous crossfire of First Captain Lindsay’s group, equipped with almost all the automatics.

The few hundred who got out onto the prairie did so either by purest chance or by clawing their way up the steep inner slopes of the southern hills and circumventing the line of troop carriers and machine-gun positions. But few of even these escaped with their lives, not for long, at least, for the vehicles, the horsemen of Captain Keith and, where necessary, foot patrols pursued and harried the scattered survivors relentlessly for many a mile. They took no prisoners and left the flea-bitten carcasses where they had fallen, that their picked and bleaching bones might serve as mute warning to other prairie rovers of equally larcenous intent.

A few got away, of course, and they and those who heard them had spread word of the savage extermination of the original pack of thousands far and wide on the prairies and plains. For three decades, no band of nomads, no matter how desperate, seriously considered trespass within range of that grim, implacable band of proven man-killers.

But time passes, a new generation slowly displaces the older generation, bones crumble away to dry dust, and memories of long-past disasters dim and fade.

During the most of those thirty-odd years, the present Ian’s father, Colonel David Lindsay, had commanded, and, under his aegis, the sinews of war so long unused had ceased to be hoarded against a future need that might (he strongly felt) never again come. He had died in a land at peace, secure in the belief that his way had been the right one.

But now his successor, his only son, who had loved him and who still honored his memory, had to face the fact that his late father had been wrong, that fort and station and the folk therein soon would face foemen as deadly as those of long ago, but this time without the tools and machinery of warfare which had given them so easy and complete a victory the last time.

The irreplaceable petrol and diesel fuel had been expended many long years ago, mostly to power farming machinery, the generators and the vehicles sent out to garner anything still usable from towns and settlements within cruising range. Small-arms ammunition had been used in defending these expeditions from the bands of skulkers, as well as for bagging game.

As the supplies of fossil fuels had dwindled, Colonel David Lindsay had taken the heavy armored tracked vehicles out of use, turning the two light tanks into nothing more than immobile pillboxes—sunk into the ground and partially covered with logs and earth—while the troop carriers became aggregations of spare parts for any wheeled vehicle or farm machine that could adapt those parts to its use.

When the time had finally come when there was no more powder to reload cartridges for small arms, an attempt was made to use the propellant from dismantled artillery shells. This had been an unmitigated disaster, resulting as it had in ruined weapons and dead or permanently crippled soldiers. The colonel had then gone back to the old books and gleaned from them a formula for a form of gunpowder that could be manufactured with easily available ingredients and equipment.

This powder did work most of the time, and it would propel a bullet with sufficient force to bring down men and game. However, it would not for some reason cause the rifles and automatics to operate properly, as had the original loads, so that a man was required to pull back the operating handle between shots, which fact vastly reduced the firepower of the 228th. This, coupled with their by now almost nonexistent mobility made them sitting ducks, perfect, tailor-made victims-in-waiting—too slow to run or maneuver and too weakened to fight—and this sorry state of affairs preyed long and often upon Colonel Ian Lindsay.

Soon after his father’s death, a routine inspection of the bunkers had disclosed that a large number of the infinitely dear percussion caps used to reload the small-arms cartridges had somehow been exposed to long dampness and were mostly unusable. Faced with a vastly straitened supply of ammunition in the foreseeable future, Ian had retired every automatic and allowed only the very cream of sharpshooters to retain their rifles. Now, the bulk of the men of the 228th were armed with and trained in the efficient use of pikes and crossbows, if dismounted, and lances and sabers, if mounted; additionally, those horsemen demonstrating an innate ability were issued and trained to the proper employment of one of those beautiful, far-ranging and very deadly recurved-reflex hornbows fashioned by some folk to the south and traded by the merchant-wagon caravans that occasionally wended their long, arduous and dangerous way up here.

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, Godhelp 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 defensive 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!”