The Memories of Milo Morai

VII

A little before sundown, Captain Wahrn Mehrdok stalked into the quarters of the priests, saying, “Mosix, chase this passel of parasites out of here or come outside with me. We two need to talk . . . alone, if you please.”

The old priest feared Wahrn or any other man who had proved that he could or would stand up to parochial authority, and he was not about to go outside his comfortable home into the darkening countryside with the captain. Grudgingly, therefore, he told the six younger priests and acolytes to leave, but signed them all not to go far.

When the last of the six had shuffled out, Captain Mehrdok took one of the now-vacated seats at the dining table, used his belt knife to take a thick slice from the veal roast, slapped the slab of meat between two slices of pale-brown wheaten bread and took a big bite before beginning to talk.

“Cat-killed or not, this is tasty veal, Mosix. Don’t look so damned surprised—we all heard of how you holy-mouthed half that calf carcass out of Djim Dreevuh’s wife. I’d advise you to savor this veal fully, because it may well be the last food you get without working for it—physically working, Mosix, not just running your mouth, you and the rest of your crew.”

Mosix drew himself up, his eyes shining his wrath. “You lie, Wahrn Mehrdok, for the council would never . . .”

The captain swallowed his mouthful of bread and veal, then grinned. “The entire council has, as of last night, read the significant parts of the old journals, the written records of our fathers and theirs, Mosix, and precious few of them are stupid men, you know it and I know it. So don’t expect too very much support to be voted you in council, from now on.

“And another thing. Once we’re sure that the men who rode into the so-called shrine-city and out again are gone for good, as they seem to be, since there’s no recent traces of them in the ruins, I am going to take a large hunting party into there and root out the she-bear and the two big cats we know of, as well as any other big, dangerous beasts we can find. That much done, we’re going to start doing what we should’ve done donkey’s years back—mining the ruins for metals and anything else still usable—whether you like it or not. Is everything clear now, Mosix? You and your sons and nephews have lost your power, your hold over our people.”

“Sacrilege!” hissed Mosix, in cold rage.

“Cowflop,” remarked Wahrn good-naturedly, as he drew his knife and severed another thick chunk of the roasted veal, then dipped himself up a mugful of barley ale from the broached cask. But ail things considered, Wahrn Mehrdok was not a brutal or a callous man, and there was a hint of gentleness in his voice as he spoke again, even a bare hint of sympathy for his old enemy, the priest.

“I’ve been called many things over the years, Mosix, by you and by others, but nobody has ever been able to truthfully call me an insensitive man. It’s gonna be hard on you and the younguns, at first, I knows that; none of you has ever put in a decent day’s work in all your life, nor your daddy and his, afore you.”

Mosix stiffened. “I have labored all of my life in the Vineyards of Our Lord . . . eeek!” He squeaked and would have flinched away, had not his right wrist been suddenly pinioned in the iron grasp of the captain’s horny left hand.

Laying down his hunk of veal on the scoured boards of the table, Wahrn easily opened Mosix’s clenched fist and rubbed the hand for a moment with his greasy fingers.

Grinning and shaking his head, the captain remarked, “Well, what ever kind of work you claim to do or have done, old man, it’s not the kind what the rest of us does, for your palm is ever bit as soft as my good wife’s bottom. But by this time next year, if you live that long, those hands of yours is gonna be near as tough nor mine.”

With his hand back, Mosix regained most of his poise and his cold hauteur, as well. “No matter what you claim as fact, Wahrn Mehrdok, I well know that the Council of the Guardians never will force any of us holy men to labor like common farmers in the fields. We all will just wait until the next council is convened and then . . .”

Wahrn nodded and laughed merrily. Still laughing, he fished a staghorn whistle from out of his pocket and blew a piercing blast on it, then twomore shorter ones. “It just so happens, Mosix, that the full council is waiting outside. I had me an idea that you’d want their word on this matter from them, personal, not brought to you by me. Do we convene right here or go over to the Council Chamber?”

The wave of Guardians burst through the door, bearing two priests before them like flotsam on the crest of a breaker. One of the shaken men made to apologize to the eldest priest for the failure to halt the intrusion, but was silenced after only a syllable or two by an impatient wave of Mosix’s hand.

When all of the council were packed into the room, standing about the dining table still bedecked with a barely begun meal, Wahrn said, “All right, boys, let’s have the vote again, where Mosix can hear it and know it’s our decision, not just mine alone.

“Are we all in agreement that Mosix and his ilk have battened off the hard labor of us and our daddies long enough? Are we all in agreement that it’s high time that they went to work themselves, if they want to eat, that is? Further, are we all in agreement that in the next few years, we means to concentrate on breeding up our herds, hunting wild meat and foraging for wild plants, slowly slacking off on real farming?”

Every Guardian raised his right hand to a chorus of “Yeah,” “Damn right, cap’n,” and the like.

The first sergeant stated, “It’s what our grand-daddies and theirs should oughta have done long years back, ’stead of swallerin’ all the swill churned out by Mosix’s kin for so long.”

“The Lord and His Holy Governor will most assuredly strike you dead for such sacrilegious blasphemies, Kahl Rehnee,” Mosix snarled warningly. “Best recant such words now, for the sake of your immortal soul.”

“That’s your final word on the matter, High Priest?” asked the first sergeant, in mock humility. When the priest stiffly nodded, Kahl laughed and said, “Well, in that case, I’ll just take my chances, if you don’t mind and . . . even if you do mind. The Lord Jesus we read about in those books you and your daddies kept locked away for so long just don’t sound like the kind as would come down on decent mens just on account of them bucking a passel of greedy, lazy, lying priests from off of their backs, nosirreebob, He don’t. He sounds for to be a all right kinda feller. Too damn bad you and yourn didn’t try to be more like the Lord over the years, Mosix. And as for the ‘Holy Governor,’ you’ve done knowed all along and we’alls just found out, it ain’t been one since the Great Dyings, no kinda one. You lied to us and to our daddies and theirn about that and about a whole heap of other things, too, damn you, and all just so you could live high on the hog without doing no work. You old louse, you, you should oughta just be grateful we didn’t all vote to feed you and your boys to the fuckin’ pigs ... if they’d’veet the kinda shit you’re made out of.”

He and the others would have said more, but their captain raised a hand and cut it off, saying, “You all got the rest of his life and past it to tell Mosix and his varmints what you thinks of him and them, but time’s a-wasting, right now. The old sun ain’t gonna wait for nothing to come up and start another day, whether you’ve got you enough sleep or not. What we gotta do here and now is parcel out six grown men and big boys who know less about real work nor a four-year-old kid.

“Here’s how we’ll do it: I, as captain, will get first pick of ’em. Kahl, as first sergeant, will get second pick. Denee, you and Sam’ll get third and fourth pick, then the rest of you can draw straws or roll dice or whatever to see who gets the last two.”

“But what about old Mosix, cap’n?” This from someone back in the group of men.

“We don’t want to kill him, for all he’s done and not done for so long, boys, and to put him into the fields at his age would be killing him as sure as running a sword through him would be, though neither as quick nor as merciful. No, I’ve thought on it and I think I’ve got the bestest slot for our esteemed high priest. He can work with Dreevuh’s boy at the sluice gates until he gets the hang of the job, then the boy can go back to farming work and Mosix can take over the sluices until the creek drops, then he can operate the bucket hoist. That’s the easiest job of real work I can think of, hereabouts.”

“Who’s gonna feed him and all, cap’n?” asked the first sergeant.

Wahrn shrugged. “He can keep living here, if he wants to, Kahl, for all I care. This place ain’t more than a mile from the place he’ll be working and he’s got at least one jackass, anyway, if he don’t wanta walk it. Then, too, he can use his evenings to keep the Council Chamber, over yonder, dusted and clean and all . . . for as long as we keep using it, that is. I’ve thought for some time now that we should hold council meetings in the armory, then we could use the chamber to store grain in.”

The two younger priests could only stand, stunned speechless by all that was being said. Old Mosix had opened his mouth to speak on several occasions, but, sensing the true, pure hostility pervading the room, had wisely held his peace, while his secure and comfortable inherited sinecure crumbled about him. He never had been any kind of real leader, rather had he used the authority to which he had been born, that authority come of religious power over the people; that he had used it despotically, harshly, cruelly, had in part occurred because he wanted for courage, himself, and feared and hated those folks possessed of it. And now, when a few strong words, delivered with power, might at least have ameliorated the situation, he had not the heart to voice them.

The old order changeth, giving way to the new.

Milo fretted and fumed, paced and worried throughout the day, from the very moment that Little Djahn Staiklee and his mounted hunting party dis-appeared beyond the rolling prairie hillocks until their midafternoon return, laden with a score and a half of big squirrels, a dozen rabbits and three of the rabbit-sized antelope. They brought back, as well, odds and ends of ancient artifacts looted from the ruins of the suburban homes among which they had hunted throughout the day—whatever had taken their individual fancies: a child’s telescope, an assortment of stainless-steel flatware, a nesting set of pewter cups, a pitted, verdigrised brass eagle, odd bits of chrome and brass and copper, rusty pliers and hammers and other tools, a hand mirror, a copper saucepan with a brass handle, a bronze poker, two rusted spades and so on.

Upon dumping out the contents of a sack—four decapitated vipers, fifteen gigged but still-living bull-frogs and a brace of big fat carp—Little Djahn said, “Uncle Milo, t’other side of the lake, up north of the ruins . . . well, in them, actually, in the fringes of them . . . it’s six, seven boggy ponds, so we didn’t go any farther in, there was all the game we could handle right there. And not just game, either, we got another sack with maybe forty pound of roots and all in it—lotus, water willow, water parsnips, bullrushes, water plantains, cattails and I don’t know whatall. Here-abouts is rich, rich country, Uncle Milo. I don’t think it’s been hunted or foraged proper in a coon’s age, none of it. Wonder why them Dirtmen, down south-east there, didn’t come up and do it?”

“Little Djahn,” replied Milo, “there are some small groups of Dirtmen scattered about here and there who own singular beliefs. One such that I remember from some years back held that their god wanted them and everyone else to eat only plants and that those who ate the flesh of any beast deserved instant death; we had to exterminate that group, after they caught a party of our hunters and skinned them alive before killing them. Clan Ohkahnuh, I think that was.

“You see, in the sprawling nation that this land was before the Great Dyings destroyed it, singular philosophical and religious cults had been proliferating at an accelerated pace for decades. Many of the adherents of these odd groups so detested and feared the general society around them that they deliberately sought out lonely, isolated and all but inaccessible places in which to live, denying access to most out-siders not of their particular bent and discouraging their members from leaving the settlements by various means.

“So, when the Great Dyings did take place—the plagues which did much of the killing being spread by the breath of infected people—more of these rabidly solitary gaggles of fanatics survived than did more normal people living in towns or cities or easily accessible countryside locations. And, of course, superstitious as they mostly were, they and their leaders ascribed their fortuitous continuances of life not to the happenstance of their lack of exposure to carriers of pneumonic plagues but to the efficacy of their particular concepts of life or religion, thus recon-firming their fanaticism in that and all succeeding generations of their kind.

“In those succeeding generations, Little Djahn, a majority of the surviving groups have remained isolated, going so far as to kill or enslave any interlopers who refuse to immediately convert on the spot to the beliefs by which the individual group lives. Most of them are Dirtmen, of course, and some few have died out. On two occasions, I have come across settlements filled with corpses—I have always been certain that one of these had expired one late winter of ergot poisoning in stored grain; what killed off the other, no man will ever know.

“But back to the issue at hand. Until the clans arrive, be very wary while hunting over in that predators’ paradise you found. Those Dirtmen, down south there, may well consider those swamps to be sacred grounds, for some obscure reason, and so would deem you to be not only alien interlopers but blasphemers, as well. Actually, as I think on the matter, that same supposition could be of a piece with the lack of recent looting or salvaging of the ruined town here, too. With such a thought in mind, it might be well for us if we commence tonight a regular night guard of the camp as well as the cat guard on the herd.”

“Justus warriors?” inquired Staiklee.

Milo shook his head. “No, everyone will have to go at it, Little Djahn—a woman or an older child can do the necessary task as well as could one of us. A sentinel is not expected to fight alone or to fight at all, for that matter, only to awake and alert the rest of us, if need arises. I’ll feel a lot better about all this once the clans arrive here to reinforce us.”

Far to the west-southwest, clouds of dust arose high into the blue skies over and in the broad wake of mounted riders, carts, a few wagons, men, women and children afoot, herds of horses and mules, cattle and sheep and goats, packs of hunting dogs and a few prairiecats. The Kindred clans of Staiklee and Gahdfree were on the march. This time, however, they were not simply moving half-aimlessly to find fresh graze for the herds and game for the stewpots, but had a definite destination in mind and a desire to reach it as soon as possible, so they pushed each day’s march as fast as flesh and blood would bear.

There was, despite appearances to the contrary, a definite order to the aggregation of people, beasts and conveyances. Far ahead of the van, a few mature prairiecats trotted, all their keen senses at full alert for danger of any sort as well as for large game or any meaningful quantities of smaller, keeping always telepathically in touch with van and main body.

Depending upon many factors of terrain and weather and happenstance, the van—those who immediately followed the great cats—rode anywhere from a half to a full mile behind. These were young men and women armed with bows or darts, riatas or bolas or slings, spears or lances strung across their backs, their belts all abristle with the hilts of sheathed knives, a few of them bearing hooded hawks on their padded arms. Although they all joked and joshed in a lighthearted manner, their purposes were deadly grim.

Any frontal attack of the column would hit them first, which was why they all rode in at least partial armor, helmets on their heads and with sabers and targes hung from the horse housings, while axes depended from saddle pommels. But their main purpose was to down any game across which they chanced, for if such offerings were not enough to fill the stewpots of the clans this night, cattle or goats or sheep might have to be slaughtered, and kine were wealth, something that both clans held little enough of, as it was.

But the hunting, thank Sun and Wind, was good, so far, this day.

Younger boys and girls shuttled back and forth between the line of hunters and the main column leading packhorses or pack mules laden with bloody carcasses, their destinations being some open carts, wherein slaves’ flashing knives cleaned and flayed and dressed those carcasses, carefully saving every scrap and drop of blood, working always in a thick, metallic-hued, droning cloud of flies. The carts each were trailed closely by a pack of puppies and younger dogs, which licked at any spilled blood and frequently fought briefly over anything dropped through mis-chance by the laboring slaves.

Mature dogs, well trained and generally obedient, accompanied the arc of hunters or aided the drovers in handling the herds of cattle, sheep and goats. The horses needed no such canine or human urgings. Most of them were telepathic to at least some degree, and the laggards quickly responded to a sharp nip of the teeth of the king stallion or one of his subordinates. Prairiecat kittens were borne in a cage cart, driven by a human slave of the cat septs.

Behind the arc of hunters, but always within sight of them, rode the blooded warriors of both clans. These men all rode in full armor—most of this being of hardened leather; metal was so scarce and so hideously expensive that it was saved for the fashioning of weapons and tools only, and among the poorer clans even the heads of arrows were often of knapped stone, fire-hardened bone or sharpened horn to conserve metal supplies—their short, recurved, horsemen’s bows ail strung but cased, weapons and targes slung within quick, easy reach, minds open to receive any communication from the cats or the hunters ahead of them, the flankers to either side or the rearguard who trailed a half-mile behind the tail of the column.

At variable distances behind the warriors came the wagons and carts, wagons drawn by three or four span of brawny oxen, carts by oxen or mules or horses, many of them trailing on tethers milk cows and nanny goats. The herd of sheep and goats were driven on the flanks and fairly close to the carts and wagons, sometimes even among the fringes of them. But the cattle were kept back as much as possible, at least a half-mile back, usually. Where the drovers of the smaller herd animals went mostly afoot, those driving the cattle were all mounted not on hunting horses or warhorses, but on quick-footed, fast, and highly intelligent horses long accustomed to dealing with the big, dangerous, stupid and ever-unpredictable cattle; over the years, more Horseclansmen and Horseclanswomen, boys, girls, horses, dogs and slaves had been killed or injured by cattle than by any other single cause—war, accident, hunting, anything.

Dangerous or not, however, the herds were very necessary to the nomadic clans, for no meaningful number of folk could live well or for long through hunting and wild-plant gathering alone. Cattle and sheep and goats were necessary for more than simply their milk and meat. The vast majority of the leather goods of the Horseclans was made of cowhide, the hair of the cattle made felt, horn became many utensils and armor and backing for hornbows, sinew had hundreds of uses, hooves were rendered into jelly and glue, internal organs became liners for skin water carriers and pouches to carry items such as tobacco and other herbs that must be constantly kept from dampness, bones became tools and weapons, fat was rendered into tallow for the lighting of yurts. And because the possession of them was so necessary, the wealth of a clan had come to be reckoned by the number of cattle in its herds. Sheep and goats were important in their own rights to the continued survival and well-being of their owners, but they still were not afforded the same degrees of importance as were the vile-tempered, stubborn, powerful and incipiently deadly cattle, not among the free-roaming clans of nomads of the south, did they chance to be Kindred or no.

Clans Staiklee and Gahdfree had camped and trekked together for long years, and generations of intermarriage had rendered the two practically a single clan, a clan with two chiefs. Big Djahn Staiklee and Djim-Booee Gahdfree complemented each other, Staiklee being a superlative war chief and Gahdfree being equally good at planning the pursuits of peace, diplomatic dealings with those too strong or of too close a degree of Kindred to fight overtly or raid covertly and at bargaining with plains traders.

Staiklee and his father before him had the well-earned reputation of being extremely warlike; within two bare generations they and their clansmen had managed to wipe out or drive off most of the non-Kindred nomads and settlements of Dirtmen from end to end of their accustomed range, leaving only Clans Gahdfree, Ohlsuhn, Morguhn, Reevehrah and a very few other Kindred clans anywhere near. And even these Kindred tried to not stray too close to the stamping grounds of Big Djahn Staiklee for the good and sufficient reason that his nature was incurably acquisitive when it came to cattle and that a good portion of his herd consisted of “previously owned” beasts. The free-roving Horseclans did not engage in the practices of ear-notching or branding their cattle, so theft was a difficult charge to ever prove, and the various chiefs all felt it to be more circumspect to stay out of easy cattle-lifting distance of the otherwise quite amiable Chief Djahn of Staiklee than to risk a bloodfeud over a few steers and heifers and a bull or two.

But despite, and really because of, its wealth in cattle, Clan Staiklee (and, consequently, Clan Gahdfree, as well) was poor in metal. All of the ruins within the range had been long since combed over for metals, and Chief Djahn was most loath to sell or trade cattle for iron. His sire, Sam Hoostuhn Staiklee, had been of equal mind, and therefore most of the metal they did own had been taken in raiding or warring.

Of more recent years, Chief Djahn’s most frequent sparring partners had been the minions of Jorge, El Rey del Norte, northernmost of the five kings of Mexico. Chief Djahn had never met the man, of course, but he figured him to be a leader much like himself, considering the instant response that occurred whenever the Staiklees and Gahdfrees rode down into his kingdom after cattle, horses, women and loot.

Not that King Jorge’s warriors were all that good at warring; of course, few other clans’ and peoples’ warriors were anywhere nearly as good as those of Clan Staiklee, to Chief Djahn’s way of thinking. But the black-eyedsoldados of King Jorge, though usually well armed and mounted, and frequently possessed of a marked degree of individual courage, were mostly poorly led and invariably did the same things over and over through defeat after bloody defeat, at the capable hands of Chief Djahn and his crafty nomad warriors.

In his way, he was honest, and so Chief Djahn admitted to himself that this sudden move to the northeast was unquestionably a good one; for, of late, King Jorge’s soldados had come north in increasing numbers, often not even prompted by a Staiklee-Gahdfree raid. The numbers of soldados available to King Jorge seemed to be infinite, and although the clansmen always managed to finally defeat or outmaneuver their southern opponents, their numbers were relatively small at the outset and their losses in dead and maimed were adding up faster than young men were coming of an age to replace them.

So it was not simply avarice for wealth and metal-hunger that impelled Chief Djahn and his followers at so fast a pace along the route to the ancient, unlooted town, although he never would have openly admitted it to any other living person, even Chief Djim-Booee Gahdfree.

Far and far to the south, Don Jorge, El Rey del Norte, breathed a long sigh of relief and a prayer of thanksgiving when a parched and dusty squadron returned intact to inform him that the barbarians who had for so long menaced the more northerly reaches of his lands had at last departed with their herds and wagons and all else that they owned, headed in a direction that they never before had taken and apparently pausing only for night camps in their trek.

Obviously, the costly war of attrition conceived by the royal personage had succeeded. Now the ranchers and farmers could perhaps move safely northward onto the prairies.

By the time it became necessary to begin raising the water from the shrinking creek in buckets, old Mosix’s once-butter-soft hands were become hard and calloused enough to be equal to the tasks required. The old man now lived alone in his home; it was simply too far a walk for the younger sometime-priests to commute between there and the farms upon which they now labored for their sustenance, and so they all dined with the families of their employers and slept in lofts and attics and sheds and stables, leaving Mosix to do for himself, rattling around in the large house adjoining the old Council Chamber and the former library.

The ancient council table and all the chairs had been moved to the ground floor of the armory and the entire contents of the library—shelves, books, tables, everything—to the second floor. The fine, spacious, high-ceilinged chambers thus emptied had almost immediately been filled with bags and baskets of grains—wheat, barley, oats and shelled corn—the beams all festooned with strings of dried squashes, gourds, garlic, peppers, onions and herbs. A brace of young ferrets had been installed to keep out rats and mice, and Mosix had been charged with feeding the beasts.

The old man also was given permission to take limited quantities of whichever grain suited his fancy from the common stores, and one of the farm wives showed him how to quern grain into flour, then make it into dough and bread, but he usually was far too tired to go through so lengthy a process at the end of a day’s work, so he most often merely cracked the grain, then boiled it to porridge along with a bit of his steadily shrinking larder of smoked or dried or salted meats.

Twice each week, the deposed priest could ride his ass to the vicinity of the armory and there be allotted fresh meat, generally wild game—squirrel, rabbit, raccoon, wild pig, venison of various sorts, greasy opossum.

Then, of a day, he rode into the cleared area to see one very large and two smaller bearskins stretched on racks before the armory; the two smaller ones were both black, but the larger was of a striking shade of honey-brown.

As he sliced off a couple of pounds of meat from a ham of the fly-crawling larger carcass—both of the smaller having long since become only bare bones—the stripling in charge of apportioning the biweekly flesh willingly told Mosix of the source of so much rich provender.

“It ’uz the cap’n. Him and a bunch of the men trailed back a bear what had kilt a nanny goat out to Fraley’s place. Trailed right back into the town, too, she did. They follered and kilt her and both her near-growed cubs. Kilt ’em right smack dab in the town!” The stripling then stood grinning, obviously expecting an angry denunciation of the captain’s sacrilegious actions.

But he was disappointed. Mosix only accepted his bloody meat, remounted his ass and began the ride back, kept quiet not by self-control but by absolute shock. True, Wahrn Mehrdok had said that he intended to lead hunters into the Sacred Precincts in pursuit of the two different cats and the bear that had been preying upon stock, but in his heart of hearts, Mosix had never really believed that die man would truly do it. No good would come of such terrible sin, he knew, but no one listened to him anymore, so there was nothing that he could do.

In the new council room on the ground floor of the armory, a dozen Guardians sat ranged about the old, old table, their captain at his accustomed place. They were passing around and scrutinizing an alien some-thing found by the party of hunters that had earlier bagged the three bears. The something was a black-shafted arrow, fletched with what appeared to be owl feathers, nocked with antler horn, wound with very fine sinew and shod with a wickedly barbed, razor-edged, needle-pointed head of bright brass. It had been found in a marshy area just north of the place where the bears had been found and slain, half its length buried at a very shallow angle in the peat.

“This ain’t a crossbow bolt,” stated the first sergeant, adding, “But it’s way too short to be a arrer from a straight bow, lest it was a youngun’s bow. And who’d give a youngun arrers with brand-spankin’-new brass heads?”

The captain nodded. “I’ve seen arrows very much like this one a long time ago, way up north, when I was a hired sword for a caravan of eastern traders. Those were shod with iron or steel, but the heads had similar shape and barbing to this one. Those who carried them and the short, very powerful bows that sped them were mercenaries, like me, all come of different clans of a far-flung confederation of nomads and the finest horsemen I’ve ever seen, bar none, not to mention their splendid archery and other warlike skills. If a clan of that stripe has drifted down here, we had best make friends with them, and that quickly, too, for such as they could likely butcher the lot of us before breakfast.”

He raised a horny hand to quell the rising rumble and said, “Now just hold on, all of you. How many of you have ever fought another man to the death? I have and so has the first sergeant, but we two are all, the rest of you are farmers and hunters, nothing more. Most of you are pretty good with your hunting crossbows and prods, a few of you indicate promise of developing into reasonably fair swordsmen, granted time and intensive practice, but none of those two paltry skills would be enough were you faced with men who had virtually cut their teeth on their swords and axes and lances, had learned the tricky art of loosing a bow accurately from the back of a galloping horse before they’d seen twelve winters.

“Gentlemen, I learned a long time ago that if a man is too strong to be fought with any chance of winning, best to make him your friend, and the sooner the better. Besides, we’ve been talking for the last few years about eventually leaving here, becoming nomad herdsmen and hunters ourselves. Who better to teach us all the things we’ll need to know, eh?

“First Sergeant and I are going to ride out tomorrow and see if we can find the camp of these nomads. Sergeant Djahnstuhn will be in command until we return. Questions?”