Dies the Fire (25 page)

“You're making progress,” Signe replied. “Any more today and you'd get shaky.”

He nodded. “After a certain point you lose more than you gain,” he agreed.

“And you don't mind learning from a girl; I like that.”

A corner of Havel's mouth quirked up. “I'm not an eighteen-year-old boy,” he said.

Their eyes went to the flatbed. Eric was standing with an air of martyred patience, holding something on the anvil with a pair of pincers while Hutton hit it two-handed with a sledgehammer; Ken Larsson observed, a measuring compass and a piece of paper in his hand.

The
ting . . . tang . . . chink!
sound echoed back from the steep slopes, fading out across the white noise of the brawling river.

“And I'm not an idiot either, if there's a difference,” Havel went on.

This time Signe laughed out loud, probably for the first time in a few days.

“Knives?” he said briskly.

She nodded eagerly. They walked over towards the tree where the mule deer was hanging.

They'd wrapped it in sacking, but there weren't many flies this early in the year. He went to the tie-off on the tree trunk and lowered the carcass from bear-avoidance distance from the ground until the gutted torso was at a convenient height.

Signe watched, a little puzzled, but eagerly caught one of the wooden knives he'd whittled. She fell into the stance he'd showed her, right leg slightly advanced, left hand open and that forearm at an angle across her chest. The knife she held a bit out and low, point angled up and her thumb on the back of the blade.

Havel took an identical stance. “Now, what are we both doing wrong?” he said.

She shook her head, wincing a bit as she bit her lip in puzzlement; it was still swollen and sore.

“We're about to fight a knife duel,” he said. “Which means that one of us is going to die and the other's going to get cut up real bad, get killed too or crippled or at least spend months recovering. Yeah, I'm going to teach you how to do that kind of a knife fight, eventually, but it's a last resort unless the other guy's truly clueless. I was
real
glad not to have to go mano a mano back there.”

He switched the grip on his knife, holding it with the thumb on the pommel and the blade sticking out of his fist, the cutting edge outward.

“First let me show you something. Grab my knife wrist and hold me off.”

She tucked the wooden blade into her belt and intercepted his slow backhand stab towards her throat. He pushed, using his weight and the strength of his arm and shoulders; Signe stumbled backward, struck the trunk of the tree and grimaced as the point came inexorably towards her throat. Suddenly her knee flashed up, but he'd been expecting that; he caught it on his thigh and pressed the wooden knife still closer.

“Halt!” he said, stepping back; he was breathing deeply, she panting. “OK, you're what . . . five-eight? Hundred and forty-five?”

“Five-eight and a half,” she said. “One forty-four, but I think I've lost some since the Change.”

“Probably,” he said. “Right, so you're a big girl, tall as most men, and as heavy as some; which means you've got plenty of reach, and there's no reason you can't get real fast—you've got good coordination and reflexes already, from sports.”

“But?” she said.

He nodded. “But most men, even ones a bit shorter or lighter, are going to have stronger grips, and more muscle on their arms and shoulders. Speed matters, reach matters, skill and attitude matter a
lot,
but raw strength does too in any sort of close combat, especially hand-to-hand.”

“So what do I do?” she said tightly.

“Don't arm wrestle 'em and don't get into pushing matches. Your brother has reach and weight on me; he's nearly as strong as I am and he'll be stronger when he's a couple of years older. I could still whup his ass one-on-one—in fact, I did. Take the same grip on your knife as I did and come at me; give it everything you've got.”

She did—and stabbed a lot faster than he had, as well. He let her wrist smack into his right hand, and squeezed tightly enough to lock them together. Then he let her shove him back; she
was
strong for her size, especially in the legs.

As they neared the tree, he snapped his torso around and push-pulled on the hand that held the wooden knife, body-checking her as her own momentum drove her towards him. Then he bunched his knuckles into a ridge and punched her—lightly—right under the short ribs while she staggered off-balance.

“Oooff!” she said; but she made a recovery, coming up to guard position again.

“See, what I did there was redirect you instead of pushing back. That takes strength, but not as much as the other guy's. You just have to be strong
enough.
See the point?”

“Yes,” she said slowly, nodding. “I think I do, Mike. You mean a woman needs a different fighting style?”

“Right; a woman, or a smaller man. I'll have Will do up some weights for you—and Luanne, we need to get her in on this too, and Astrid—and between that and the way we're traveling and chores, you can maximize your upper-body strength pretty quick, since you're already fit. Meanwhile, we'll work on the skill, speed and attitude. You'll practice with Eric, too, and Will. Will's got a lot of valuable brawling experience, I think.”

He went over to the hanging deer carcass. “I used to use a pig carcass for this, back on my folks' place when I was a kid. They're better, because they're more like a man in size and where the organs are, but this'll do. Doesn't matter if we mess it up, since it's going into the stewpot. Go round the other side and hold on—hold it steady—put your shoulder to it.”

He drew his
puukko
and took a deep breath. Then he attacked, stabbing in a blur of motion, the carcass jerking to the force of the impacts. The steel made a wet smacking sound as it clove the dead flesh, ten strikes in half as many seconds.

When he stopped, Signe's face had gone white again, shocked by the speed and power of the blows she felt thudding through the body of the deer. She swallowed and pressed her hands together for a moment before straightening up.

Havel nodded approval. “
That's
how you win a knife fight; you don't let it get started. Take him by surprise, from the back, or just get all over him before he can get set and
kill
the fucker before he realizes he's dying. OK, get your knife out and I'll hold the carcass.”

He did, switching positions, although he gripped it at arm's length as she drew the bandit's long blade.

“We'll start slow. You've got to get real precise control on where the point and edge go, and get used to the feel of it hitting meat, and
feel
why it's a bad idea to turn it on a bone. He who hesitates is bossed, remember.”

 

 

 

Excellent focus,
he thought, twenty minutes later.

She was streaming sweat, and there were shreds of deer-flesh on her knife-hand and spattered across other bits of her, but she was boring in without flinching, eyes narrowed and seeing nothing else.

“
Jesus!”
he shouted, leaping backward.

Signe half stumbled as the deer carcass swayed unexpectedly, but pivoted with fluid balance and drove the long knife home, grunting with effort as it sliced into flesh.

Only then did she turn to see what had startled him. A drumroll thunder of hooves announced Astrid's arrival once more, but there was a hoarse bellowing snarl underneath it.

The bear behind the horse was traveling very nearly as fast, its mouth open and foam blowing from it; an arrow twitching in the hump over its shoulders showed why.

It was a black, not a grizzly, but the point was moot—it was also a very large boar bear, four hundred pounds if it was an ounce, and moving at thirty miles an hour. Astrid turned in the saddle as her horse pounded by in a tear-away gallop, drawing her bow again and firing directly over its tail in what an earlier age had called the Parthian shot.

“No!” Havel shouted futilely.

Havel had hunted bear; he knew the vitality and sheer stubborn meanness of a wounded bruin. By some miracle, the arrow even hit—a shallow slant into the beast's rump, leaving head and feathers exposed. It halted and spun with explosive speed, throwing up a cloud of earth clods and twigs and duff, snapping for the thing that had bitten it on the backside; that let Astrid's horse open the distance between them.

Unfortunately, it also pointed the bear directly at Havel. It hesitated for an instant, as he stood motionless; then its eyes caught the sway of the mule-deer carcass, and the glint of afternoon sun on Signe's knife.

It went up on its hind legs for an instant, narrow head swaying back and forth as it gave a bawling roar and estimated distances with its little piggy eyes. Then it dropped to all fours again and came for him, as fast as a galloping horse.

“I don't fucking
believe
this!” he cried, and then, much louder: “Spear, spear, where's the goddamned spear?”

T
here was a hypnotic quality to riding the disk harrow, Juniper decided. The horses leaning into the traces ahead, their shadows falling before them, the shining disks sinking into the turned earth behind the plows and leaving a smooth seedbed behind . . .

“God
damn
it!” Dennis called from her left. “Whoa, you brainless lumps of walking hamburger! Whoa!”

His single-furrow walking plow had jammed up with bits of tangled sod again; it was one of the half-dozen copies they'd made of the museum's original. And it was scraping along on top of the turf rather than cutting it, the handles jarring at his hands. Dennis leaned back, pulling at the reins knotted around his waist; Dorothy Rose, who was walking and leading the horses, added her mite to the effort, and the team stopped.

Then they looked over their shoulders. Horses didn't have very expressive faces, but she would have sworn both of these were radiating indignation—at the unfamiliar task, and at the sheer ignorant incompetence behind the reins.

“Easy, Dennie,” she said soothingly. “Remember,
bo le bata is capall le ceansact
; a stick for a cow, but a kind word for a horse.”

“I'd like to use a goddamned
log
on these beasts,” he said, but shrugged and smiled.

Of them all, only Juniper had any real experience at driving a horse team, and that only with a wagon; she did know how surprisingly fragile the big beasts were, though. She looked up at the sun and estimated the time since the last break. . . .

“Whoa!” she called to her own team. Then: “All right, all teams take five! Rest and water the horses!”

She hauled on the reins, wincing as they slid over fresh blisters beneath her gloves. When they'd stopped she wiped a sopping sleeve over her face, tender with sunburn despite the broad-brimmed hat and bandana—the early-April day was bright and warm. Damp reddish brown earth was soft under her feet as she jumped down. It had a scent at once sweetly green and meaty, a compound of cut grass and damp dirt and severed roots and the crushed camas flowers that starred it. That made a pleasant contrast to the smell of her own sweat, and of Cagney and Lacey's.

“Goddamn it, why does this thing keep jamming?” Dennis said. “It's not just the copies Chuck and I made, the original does it too.”

There was an edge of frustration to the point of tears in his voice. He knelt and began pulling at lumps between the coulter knife that cut the furrow and the moldboard that turned it over.

Chuck Barstow and John Carson halted their teams as well; Carson turned and looked at the crooked, irregular furrows that lay behind the three plowmen.

“The plows jam because it's old meadow sod,” Carson grinned.

He was a lean fortysomething man, with sun-streaks through his light brown hair, and blue eyes. He also owned the property four miles west, where Artemis Butte Creek flowed out into the valley proper and the real farmland began, and he was here as part of a complicated swap of labor, animals, and equipment.

“Hasn't been plowed in a hundred years,” he went on as they unharnessed their teams. “Not even been grazed heavy these past forty or more, this bit. Lots of tangled roots, most of 'em thick as a pencil. A big tractor could just rip it all to shreds, but horses . . . Well, two hundred fifty horsepower against two-nothing, it stands to reason!”

The furrows were roughly along the contour of the sloping meadow, and
very
roughly parallel; oblong islands of unplowed grass showed between them, and the depth varied as if they'd been dug by invisible land-dolphins porpoising along.