The Given Sacrifice (27 page)

There was also an arrangement for a block of ice to be inserted above and a water-drain
below, and within Ian found a dozen two-foot cutthroat trout, neatly gutted, and bundles
of greens and roots. He looked at the contents, at what in the way of herbs and ground
roots was racked beside the stove in the usual miscellany of salvaged glass and some
rather attractive glazed modern pottery, and rubbed his hands.

“Nothing like running all day to work up an appetite,” he said. “Anyone else volunteering
for dinner detail?”

“Caillech is a monstrous fine hand with trout,” Talyn said helpfully, peering over
his shoulder and smacking his lips.

“Volunteer
yourself
, man!” she said, taking his bonnet off for a moment and whapping him with it playfully.

“Well, if it were duck or grouse, I would,” he replied reasonably, adjusting the headgear.
“I’m better at those. It’s respectful to make the most of the Mother’s bounty, isn’t
it, now? If it’s my part to enjoy eating it, then that I’ll do, as my duty.”

“I hereby volunteer
you
to go fetch the wood, I do,” she said, then went with him.

“Nobody else?” Ian said, stripping off his jacket, rolling up his sleeves and beginning
to scrub his hands. “All
right
, then.”

“I’ll take first watch,” Ingolf added.

Mary had seen any number of small groups stranded in the wilds by the Change, though
most had headed in to more civilized climes as soon as they could; apart from the
Eater bands of the death zones, of course. But . . .

“A Scout apparently knows what the hell they’re doing,” Ingolf said to her as she
sat beside him on a rock. “I’ve seen plenty of wild men but not many who knew their
way around the woods as well. Old Pete’s folks, yeah, though they weren’t as . . .
as tidy. Remember the Southsiders that Rudi picked up east of the Mississippi, Jake
sunna Jake’s crew? They didn’t know
anything
.”

“You took the words out of my mouth; they barely knew what made babies. Or the London
Bunch, north of the lakes? They were
pathetic
. At a guess, the Morrowlanders have a lot of these little places as bases for hunters
and people working the woods for foods and medicinals and whatnot,” she said. “We
have something similar in the Ranger
staths
, though the climate’s a lot nicer in the Willamette.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t like to go through February here in a
flet
. This dugout thing would be comfy enough even in winter . . . even in the winters
they’re supposed to get around here . . . but you’d go crazy after a while if you
couldn’t get out. Notice the ski-racks, and the second entrance up on the roof section?
Back in Richland we do a lot of our heavy hauling in winter—frozen rivers are best
of all. Maybe that’s how they
keep
from going crazy, spend all their spare time studying for Badges and such.”

She nodded. He’d picked a good spot to overlook the little way station; from the tracks
he wasn’t the first to do so.

“You took the words out of my mouth again, lover,” she said. “When he was chasing
us for the Cutters, George called the Tracker . . .”

“Followed us over ground where you’d swear an eight-hitch yoke of plow oxen wouldn’t
leave a trace,” Ingolf agreed.

“They’d make valuable allies,” Mary said, her enthusiasm growing. “Not just getting
out of our way, I mean.”

Her husband nodded, but frowned as well. “Hmmm. There’s a drawback there.”

“What?”

“We’re supposed to be impressing
them
. I think these folks make knowing how to do stuff a real big part of their opinion
of someone.”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“Yah, but they’re more . . . more formal about it.”

The three Council members were at least impressed with Ian’s pinion-nut crusted trout,
accompanied by twice-boiled burdock and roasted arrowroot and bannocks of sweet camas
flour studded with dried huckleberries, with a side of Miner’s Lettuce salad with
wild onions. The representative of the House of Girls shooed the men out after the
meal; evidently a Scout was
clean
, too, and women got first crack at the hot water and essence of soaproot.

Much later, Mary murmured to Ingolf in the darkness:

“And a Scout likes
privacy
. Or at least this Ranger does.”

He sighed.

•   •   •

Ingolf looked down on the Scout headquarters not long after dawn; the air was still
chill and a little damp.

“Well, that explains how they got here,” he said.

It was on the shores of a great lake, so broad that the water stretched north almost
beyond sight even from this elevation, with occasional small islands and a few sails
visible on fishing boats and a landing-stage for big birch-bark canoes. There had
been some buildings on the rocky edge before the Change, but it was obvious they’d
burned that very night. Mostly because the midsection and tail of the great flying
machine still stood, with the scorched and crumpled ruins of the nose stuck into the
green scrub that covered the ruins. Bits and snags stood up, and most of a stone chimney.
Parts of the aircraft were skeletal where the sheathing had been torn off; aluminum
was easy to work and had dozens of uses.

Ian frowned. “That’s a . . . 747,” he said. “I think. You can still see the sort of
hump thing at the front, it’s not all burned.”

“What?” Talyn said. “Those numbers would mean what, precisely?”

“A type of big flying machine. They could carry hundreds of people.”

They all looked at him; it wasn’t the sort of remark you expected of a Changeling
like themselves.

“We had a recognition course for recruits to the Force,” he said, a little defensively.
“I don’t know why. Nobody ever thought to change it, eh?”

Talyn snapped his fingers. “Yes, in the ‘Song of Fire and Grief.’ The Chief, the Mackenzie
Herself, she saw one such fall and burn in Corvallis on the night of the Change! And
made the song about it later.”

Cole whistled softly. “Alyssa goes on about what a great pilot the Bear Lord was,
to get a
little
plane with six people in it down safely. And he landed in a river. Whoever was flying
that thing must have been . . . something. I’d have expected it to fall like a brick.”

They all nodded somberly. They all
knew
that the ancients had been able to make huge things fly, but suddenly seeing this—as
big as a northern baron’s hall—made you
feel
it all of a sudden.

The modern buildings became clearer as they approached. From a few remarks their close-mouthed
hosts had made Ingolf had gathered that there just weren’t all that many Morrowlanders,
less than a thousand and possibly much less, and that this was their winter HQ. Certainly
there was plenty of space in the building they were shown to; a room for each couple
and one for Cole, and a big dining chamber with only a few other people to share the
camas griddle cakes with spicy caramel-tasting birch syrup and—what seemed to be a
special treat for guests—French fries, followed by wild blueberries and—another treat—cream.
They were courteously shown to a bathhouse afterwards too, before strong hints brought
them out again.

Now in summertime most of the Morrowlanders were probably spread out through this
vast stretch of wilderness, laying in the food and other goods they’d need in the
long deep-snow winters. That made what they’d done here all the more impressive, not
least the inconspicuous but substantial storage cellars and icehouses, recognizable
mainly by the doors set into what looked like low mounds.

The buildings scattered amid raised-bed gardens and pruned bushes and corrals and
many trees were deep-notched logs on fieldstone, carefully set into the south-facing
sides of the low hills. The largest reared like a whale among minnows, and from the
color of the carved and varnished wood it was the newest, but like the others it had
a steep-pitched roof covered in sod. That gave them an intensely green look, like
great plants, colored with flowers that must be carefully cultivated despite their
wild exuberance.

“Looks just a wee bit homelike,” Talyn said in fascination. “But more spread out than
one of our Duns. No wall. And no grain fields and not much in the way of herds, either,
just these little bits of garden. They must live mostly from the hunt and what they
gather.”

The carving was less ornate and less colorful than, say, Dun Juniper, though there
was plenty of it, mostly themed on animals and plants, and including inlays of different
woods and colored stones. There were totem-pole-like erections in front of a collection
of smaller but still big buildings surrounding the main one.

“What are those?” Ingolf asked.

“Those are the Houses of the Troops, and each Patrol has its Den,” George Tracker
said; they seemed to use their epithets as surnames, more or less. “They stand around
the House of the Eagle.”

Then, taking over the role of tour guide for a moment, he went on:

“That is the Hall of Boys, and that the Hall of Girls, where they meet for special
ceremonies. There are the smithies, and the woodworking shop, and the library. That
log flume brings springwater for drinking and washing and to turn wheels; it was finished
the year I became a Bearer of the Eagle. That long building is—”

Nice composting toilets, too
, Ingolf thought; that had impressed him most of all
. Same system we used back in Richland.

The first Bossman of the Free Republic of Richland had been a gadget enthusiast, always
pulling a new notion out of his books or someone’s memory or from some traveller.
He had sent artisans around to show people how to build the composting thunderboxes
a couple of years after the Change, and met warm agreement among a people no longer
living in fear of starvation and ready for something better than smelly, dangerous
makeshifts. The Bossman had been a self-important fussbudget and easy to mock—Ingolf
and some friends had gotten a memorable whaling with a hickory-switch from Ingolf’s
father the Sheriff for carving a roadside stump into a caricature of him just before
a visit to Readstown—but he’d had some good ideas. And he’d been a much harder man
than you’d think to look at him or listen to him burbling about how to rig a side-delivery
hay rake or a silage chopper, though he’d used others to do the bone-breaking and
head-knocking parts of the job.

Ingolf wouldn’t have expected something so sophisticated in a place so rustic as this,
though. The settlement smelled clean, too, with less stink and flies than nearly any
warm-season farming community. To be sure, they didn’t have much livestock, which
were inescapably messy no matter how careful you were. The water and forest were the
strongest odors; there was wood smoke, of course, and cooking, and the scorched metal,
glue, leather and sawdust of crafts. His nose didn’t detect the unmistakable reek
of a tannery, either, which meant they must have put it elsewhere.

The people were out to see the newcomers when they emerged from getting settled, outsiders
obviously not being something that were seen very often here. They were all dressed
pretty much like the three representatives of the Council, though less elaborately.
Apparently everyone wore knee-length pants in warm weather, roughly the way Mackenzies
all wore kilts; many of the young children had nothing on
but
the shorts. There was a lot less jostling, pointing or exclaiming than he’d have
expected from backwoods villagers—probably less than there would have been in Readstown,
and certainly than in some other parts of Richland he could name. The hunting dogs
that were fairly numerous were well-mannered too, hardly any barking and most staying
close to their people even while their noses followed the stiff-legged strut Artan
and Flan put on in a strange pack’s territory.

Speaking of children and older people . . .

“Notice something about these folks?” he said to Mary.

“Lots,” she said. “What in particular?”

“There are plenty of kids, but the adults are all my age or a bit older, and the Changelings,
the born Changelings—”

Strictly speaking, Changelings
were
people born since the Change, of course. More loosely the term included people like
Ingolf who’d been young children at the time; he’d been six going on seven. If you
used both senses together Changelings were a majority of the population now nearly
everywhere, or would be soon. Here they were apparently everybody.

“—just coming full-grown, only a few with babies of their own.”

She blinked and he could sense her focusing, counting and averaging—numbers were something
you had to be able to do well on reconnaissance.

“You’re right,” she said. “Like a clump, and their kids, and only a few people in
between. It’s a bit odd. And you don’t expect a lot of really old people but there
aren’t
any.
Nobody even as old as Uncle John and Uncle Alleyne, who were about my age at the
Change. I’ve never seen anything exactly like it, and we’ve been from the Atlantic
to the Pacific and back. Odd.”

“No it ain’t,” he said. “Scouts, before the Change that is, they were kids and youngsters.”

In Readstown these days you were
a baby
up until you could get around, use the outhouse on your own and do simple chores,
then
a kid
until puberty, and then
a youngster
until you grew enough and learned enough to do the things a grown man or woman did.
After that you sort of slid into being a full adult over the next few years, capping
it off when you got your own house and a job or farm or workshop or whatever and started
your own family.

Most places were roughly the same, though he was vaguely aware that they’d seen things
differently before the Change when being
a kid
had lasted a lot longer. That Scouting business had been part of the way they stretched
things out back then. It must have been irritating, since as he remembered it he’d
been eager to grow up.