Behind the Ruins (Stories of the Fall) (13 page)

“No,
it’s funny. They call them soldiers, sometimes soldiers of the castle, but
they’re just raiders playing at being a militia. Apparently their boss is some
sort of military wannabe called Creedy.” Josie paused, looking alarmed. “Grey,
you look terrible. Are you all right?”

Grey
leaned back. His glee at knowing where the raiders were had lasted a second,
and now he thought he’d throw up. He shook his head and forced a grin.

“Haven’t
eaten anything but jerky and pemmican for a week, and I think I’m getting old,”
he said. “You have any of those sausage rolls? I think I should eat something
before we get down to details.”

“Sure,”
Josie said. Grey saw she still looked unconvinced. He’d have to tell her, but
not with Tom around. Georgia caught his eye and raised one eyebrow
fractionally. Grey stared at her blankly while his stomach churned.

Creedy.
Of course it was Creedy,
Grey thought
. Good old Kingsnake.
He’d still be alive, even young. Bastard. Oh the chickens are coming home to
roost, all right.

He
told Josie that night. He thought she’d probably tell her sister, so he didn’t
bother asking her not to.

It
wasn’t his worst story, but it was bad enough.

It
was cold and getting colder. November snow had whitened the peaks around Lake
Pend Oreille, and Grey’s horse blew clouds of steam with each breath. The cold
cut through the layers of wool and hides he wore, and his riders, strung out
through the edges of the woods, looked down on Sandpoint and shivered.

The
town was laid out in a rough crescent, hugging the shore and extending out onto
a crooked spit. It had been larger in the past, and was surrounded by a
wilderness of junk and collapsed buildings through which a road had been
cleared. The road crossed the rubble field and terminated at a massive set of
steel gates, the only access through a tall wall of cemented field-stone and
brick that hemmed the settlement’s fifteen or twenty buildings.

“Somehow,
I don’t think they want visitors,” Creedy said, reining up beside Grey.
Kingsnake was a trim, neat man, scarcely out of his teens, who’d picked up with
Grey a few years before. He was ferociously intelligent in a cold way, which
made up for his abysmal shooting skills. He wore a tricolor bandana tied around
his left upper arm. Someone had started calling him Kingsnake for the red,
black and tan cloth, and the name had stuck.

“Can’t
blame them,” Grey observed. “But we need a place to winter, or enough food to
travel, or we’ll be dead before December.”

It
was his own fault, Grey admitted to himself. If he’d gone south earlier, as
planned, and hadn’t let stories brought back by his scouts lure him to the
mines at Blueslide, they’d be wintering in central Oregon. Their saddlebags
were all heavy with raw silver, it was true. He’d assumed they could buy what
they needed this winter, but now they had an issue. It hadn’t helped that some
of the men couldn’t control their basic animal idiocy. They could have stayed
in Blueslide. They’d been careful and had preyed on outfits that were in
competition with the locals, or hidden their mistakes well, and then Craig and
his buddy had burnt down the saloon and killed a child in a fight over a whore.
Sixty miners with guns, disorganized, weren’t much of an issue, but sixty
miners all mad at you were.

Sandpoint’s
gatekeeper, a thick-waisted, pig-nosed woman who looked half Chinese, had
turned Grey and a small contingent away, not liking the look of them. The lumps
of crudely refined silver hadn’t impressed her, and she’d warned them off.

“We
don’t have but the food we need for the winter ourselves. You boys will have to
go south,” she’d said through the bars of the gate. “Try Coeur d’Alene. The
traders ride up from there, and they’ve got farms and a mill or two,” she’d
said.

Good
enough advice, except Grey doubted they had enough food for a week; much less
the three it would take to get to the lake country.

His
eyes roved along the shore within the walls, noting the boats pulled up high
for the winter, the nets hung to dry. They had to have fish. They were like all
townies; no food or trade for strangers with guns. He understood, but he had
thirty men he needed to feed.

“We’ll
have to go in and get what we need, Snake, so get the boys ready,” Grey said.

It
had worked before. You lit a fire to start with, to keep the defenders busy.
After all, what good was defending a town that burnt down behind you? This would
be harder, though. Three or four would have to get in at night over the wall,
silently, and start the fires in the east end of town so the rest could cross
the walls at the western extremity, just past the gate. Once they were in and
the gates opened it would be straightforward; grab what you needed, shoot
anyone stupid enough to get in the way and clear off. They had silver, damn it.
The townies could have traded. They just needed the food to make it out of the
snow.

Grey
shivered and took a swig from the bottle that rode in his coat pocket. It
helped a little.

He
set things in motion that evening and watched them all go wrong. The three men
who’d gone in first had started one small fire, but within a minute there was a
chorus of dogs barking and a few heavy thumps of shotgun fire. None of the
three who crossed the wall had carried a shotgun.

Still,
it was a distraction to the east, and four more had gone over the wall to the
west of the gate while the noise was just picking up. One managed to return to
the tree line, bleeding from a hundred cuts. He told Grey that the wall had
been topped with glass set in the mortar, and that defenders had waited in the
shadows, killing the other three as they jumped down, quietly, with axes and
hammers. Someone had convinced the townies to stay at their posts despite the
now-extinguished fire, and now Grey’s riders were six less, and still on the
wrong side of the gate.

For
the next three days Grey and two other sharpshooters moved through the trees
from vantage to vantage and shot whoever raised a head above the walls. They
killed six or seven, but time was pressing as the weather stayed cold and snow
threatened. Scouts Grey had sent out to forage came back with one hope. A
couple of old boats had been found, ungainly fiberglass hulls meant for
powerboats, but stripped, overgrown and forgotten in the ruins of a lakeside
house a few miles down the western shore. The locals had done a good job of
scouring any other boats from the lakeshore, making a waterside attack unlikely,
but they’d missed these.

Within
another two days the boats were afloat, and rations were down to pemmican and
rank strips of jerky meant for the dogs. Grey went on the lead boat, and the
pitch-black trip across the freezing lake remained one of the worst memories of
his life. His fingers couldn’t feel the shotgun they gripped, and the splash
and spray from clumsy makeshift paddles soaked his clothing in icewater. His
empty gut gnawed at him. He prayed that the meteors would stay quiet; a big one
illuminating the lake would be fatal. By the time they beached within the wall
in the shadow of a rotting motel he could no longer control the chattering of
his teeth.

They
had an hour to wait. Just before sunrise those outside the wall would begin to
fire on defenders. If none were visible, a sortie would be made on the gate to
force its defense. When the shooting started, the dozen men behind the wall
would move up behind the defenders and kill them.

Grey
moved the men into the motel, quietly, to wait. Inside, the lobby was now
webbed with nylon ropes and the smell of smoke and fish was overpowering. Grey
and the others found one old man mending a net. Kingsnake held him, a hand over
his mouth, while another man cut his throat. In the nearest guest rooms they
found stacked smoked fish, mountains of it, and ate ravenously. Grey and a few
others filled their pockets and packs with jerked fish while awaiting the dawn.

With
food and the smoky half-warmth of the drying house, Grey’s spirits rose. He
pulled the bottle from his pocket and had another drink.

They’d
make it yet.

“We
didn’t, though,” Grey said. He sat very stiffly in the red wooden chair in
Josie’s little room. “The hog-nosed woman had set up her defenders along the
route to the gate. They were ready for someone to break in from outside, but
she also had a second group set up to watch the route we’d have to take from
the waterfront. They chopped us to pieces. We lost almost everyone, and killed
maybe a dozen of theirs.”

Josie
had sat on her bed, listening, running her hands over the old orange afghan
that covered it.

“How’d
you get out?” she asked.

“Just
luck. We fell back toward the lake, and I split off, told the others to
scatter, ran through a house and climbed a barricade and managed to get over
the wall. I got back to my horse. Creedy got out, too, and we worked our way
south on the fish we had, picking up new guns as we went.”

“You
could have left on your own. You’re the best hunter I know. You’d have found
food.”

Grey
shrugged, started to speak and stopped, then took a deep breath and tried
again.

“Do
you think people can change?” he asked.

“Maybe,”
Josie said. “But I don’t think change alone makes up for what we do.”

“I
never figured it did. We killed -
I
killed - a dozen people, probably,
for half a bag of fish.”

Josie
stared at him.

“It’s
still cutting you up inside. You think I could hate you? How could I hate you?
But I pity you, Grey. You’re weak in ways that hurt you, and strong in ways
that don’t help. You have to find a way to forgive yourself.”

He
couldn’t meet her eye. “I know,” he said. “I just don’t know how.”

She
rose and hugged him where he sat with his hands in his lap.

“Come
to bed,” she said

Georgia
spent the next weeks at the bar with her sister. Grey visited Tillingford’s
again during that time. He shut his trapline down, bringing in the last pelts
of the year and stowing his gear under the floor of his small cabin. He stopped
at his nearest neighbor, a young man named Cuisar who grew a little patch of
vegetables and painted strange pictures, and told him what to do with the stuff
if he didn’t come back. Then he made his way to Maggie’s.

The
weather was random. Crisp wintery days would be followed by warm foggy ones, or
cold rain, or dustings of late snow. The sun would ride up a bright blue sky in
the morning and disappear behind a scum of black-grey snow clouds before lunch,
only to reappear and set in glory.

The
snow on the ground had retreated to the higher slopes of the valley, though
vales and shaded hollows held mounded, granular old snow the consistency of
rock salt. The worst of the early snowmelt mud was gone.

Over
first days of April the rest of Grey’s band trickled in and congregated at one
of the cabins on Maggie’s upper pastures. It was an old, swaybacked building
that ran north-south, with walls of square-cut logs dovetailed at the joins.
The roof was cedar shake, bleached almost white by the sun and rain. Windows
were cut in every twelve feet, and the single door opened onto a small roofed
porch. A decrepit lean-to built against it held stovewood. A split rail fence
enclosed a pasture with a shallow green stock pond at its rear.

Harmon
Tillingford arrived first on a gaunt old gray, leading a pack mule. Harmon had
his father’s high color and was pink-faced in the spring wind. Like his many
brothers he was tall and lean with long face and narrow jaw, but he was hard
around the eyes in a way that his siblings weren’t. Grey didn’t know much about
him, but Harmon’s father had hinted that the boy had done work like this
before. He wasn’t really a boy to anyone but Art, Grey reflected. He had to be
in his mid-twenties. Harmon’s only visible weapon was a handmade crossbow with
a cedar stock and a bow made of ground and polished spring steel. He carried a
round, stubby quiver at his right thigh that held perhaps two-dozen short,
thick-shafted bolts with hammered steel delta heads.

Georgia
came the same day, accompanied by Josie. Georgia seemed to know Harmon and
greeted him.

Clay
was on hand, of course, and he brought along a bluff, laughing man named Kelly
Sowter. Sowter had a big, hard-muscled gut and moved lightly on his feet. He
brought an old pump shotgun and three oilskin tarps to use for tents on their
second mule. He shook Grey’s hand, tipped his ragged John Deere cap to Josie
and Georgia, and set about making a pot of chicory. Clay’s second man came with
him. It was Ronald, looking pale and excited and young. Grey killed the urge to
pull him aside and give him some sage advice. He hoped the boy wasn’t carrying
an urge to prove anything.

Doc
arrived the following day in an old duster that smelled of mink oil, with
another pack mule carrying two of his orange crates. Winston had been left with
a neighbor. The day’s ride to the ranch hadn’t tired Doc, who dismounted with a
fluid slither and wandered over to meet Georgia. Josie grinned behind his back
at Grey and mouthed “ladies man?” Grey smiled and shrugged. It was a side to
Doc he hadn’t seen.