The Heretic (6 page)

Joab shook his head. “Believe me, after five years serving here, the boundaries are etched in my mind. Move the ram upstream to the original location.”

“But—”

Joab held up a hand to cut Reidel off. “I understand. I will deal with the Hornburgs. This is no longer your problem.”

After a moment of tension, the engineer nodded. He lifted the edge of his robe and used it to wipe a bit of sweat from his face. “We should double-check the flow, Commander.”

Joab smiled, nodded toward the plan. “Let’s go over the figures again, Sigis,” he said. The two men began discussing ditch widths and flow rates, and Abel tuned them out. The pile of scrolls to be filed was on a broad table that his father used to spread out the really large maps, and Abel began to sort them by type. An upper border dipped in green pigment was command. Ochre was the color of logistics, and yellow represented communications with the local temple. Red was for messages sent and received by semaphore flag or courier. Secret documents were sealed with wax and scarab marking.

Abel sorted the scrolls, about fifty in all, into their various baskets according to content. The baskets would be delivered and filed by date in the large company library adjacent to headquarters. Abel was occasionally assigned that job when a soldier who was literate could not be located. It happened more often than Abel would have liked. He
hated
filing.

After more wrangling, the Reidel received his instructions and left the office. Joab rolled up the irrigation plan.

“File that,” he said to Abel, “under trouble.”

“Yes, sir. Ochre, sir?”

His father nodded, and Abel began to carefully roll up the scroll.

“So, how was class?” Joab settled into the chair behind his desk and poured himself a cup of wine from a clay pitcher.

“Okay.”

“Just okay?”

“Calculating land areas.”

“Useful.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Abel didn’t look over at his father.
Was this the time to ask?
Maybe. Maybe not. “Why did you have the water ram moved, Father?”

“Oh, you were listening in, were you? Good.” His father took a sip of the wine. “The Hornburgs put pressure on the builders to move the ram downstream.”

“Where there’s less water in the irrigation ditch,” replied Abel.

“A ram needs lots of water moving fast to push a smaller amount of water uphill.”

“I know that, Father.”

Joab smiled. “Of course
you
do, Abel, but most don’t have the faintest idea how the things work. Matlan Hornburg, for instance. I’m sure he doesn’t know and doesn’t care.”

“Then why did he want the ram on his family lands?”

Joab looked at Abel, sighed, and took another, longer drink of wine. “Why? So the Hornburgs can control the water supply to the second Escarpment, that’s why. In a couple of years, that plateau is going to be filled with barley fields. Imagine if you have the power to cut off the water to all those fields from one point. Those farmers are going to do anything you ask.”

“Like what?”

“Like go through you as the middleman to broker grain supply to the temple and military. Act happy and keep their mouths shut when you claim two-thirds of their grain and pay them back one-third of the profits.”

“That’s not fair.”

“It happens all the time, son,” Joab replied. “But not this time. Not in my district.” He drained his wine, set down the cup.

“Whoever has the River has life.” It was a basic Thursday school lesson.

“Exactly.”

“What if Matlan Hornburg doesn’t like it, Father?” The Hornburgs were one of the big three families in the district. Everybody knew it.

“I can guarantee you he
won’t
. He’ll be here within a week trying to browbeat me. I won’t budge, so he’ll take it up with Prelate Zilkovsky. Zilkovsky will sweet-talk him, but won’t give in, either, because he knows he can count on me. We have a pretty good working relationship, the prelate and I.”

“Count on you to do what?”

“Enforce the decision. Deal with the fallout,” Joab said. “Hornburg won’t let it stop there, you see. He’ll do something like cut off a grain delivery or two to the garrison, try to starve us into line. I’ll send a patrol to confiscate it from his warehouse. He’ll set his hired men to defend it. It’s going to be interesting.”

“Or you could just give in, give him his ram, and avoid the hassle.”

“That’s what he’s counting on. That’s what men like that always count on.”

“What if the prelate gives in?”

Joab glanced over at his son, chuckled. “Your mother used to ask me questions like that. She had a way of cutting to the heart of things, even when she knew the answer wouldn’t be pretty.” He looked back at his wine. “It’s simple, really. I’ll do what the chief priest orders.”

“But Father, you just said—”

“I’ve been in districts where the district military commander ran things. Gets ugly, corrupt, and violent. People need to trust in the civil authorities, or it’s every man for himself.” Joab smiled. “Anyway, Zilkovsky’s got a hide like a carnadon. He’s not about to let a Hornburg tell him how to rule Treville District.”

“You could also have Hornburg killed now. Save the trouble.”

“And become another Hornburg myself? I don’t think so, Abel.” Joab nodded toward the chair on the other side of his desk. “Sit down, son.” Abel sat down while Joab turned another cup over from the stack next to the pitcher and poured wine into both his own and the other. He pushed the cup toward Abel. “Drink. You look like you have something stuck in your throat. Something you want to tell me. Or ask me.”

He knows,
Abel thought. But how could he? It wasn’t as if his father was inside his thoughts in the same way as Raj and Center.

Abel took a swallow from the glass, carefully set it down. “Father, I think I should be able to go out with the Scouts. Okay, maybe not into the
deep
Redlands,” he hastily added. “But at least on Rim patrols.”

“And what makes you think they’d have you?”

“Corporal Kruso said they could use an able body for water carrier.”

“You’ve been talking to Kruso a lot?”

“Mostly listening,” Abel said. “He likes to tell stories.”

“And you believe his nonsense?”

Abel frowned, looked down.
I love to hear it. Because things
happen
in Kruso’s stories. Dangerous things, sometimes. But never boring. Never always the same.
“Yeah, I guess.”

“Good, because it’s all true,” said Joab. “Kruso’s half Redlander and half lower Delta scum, but he’s one of best Scouts I’ve ever seen.” Joab considered his wine, still untouched. Abel knew the level would only slowly go down, Joab nursing his second cup throughout the afternoon with small sips. “I’ll tell you what. You keep good marks in school, and I’ll assign you Scout water duty starting next week.”

Abel felt the weight, the need he’d felt for weeks, lighten. It was going to happen. He was going to get Scout duty! “Thank you, Father.”

Joab held up a hand. “But only to the Upper Cliffs. No Rim patrol, not yet.”

The weight returned. “But Father, I can—”

“You can lose even that privilege if you aren’t careful.” Joab finally sipped his wine. “When you turn twelve, you can go out on the Rim. But only on routine patrols, and absolutely only with Captain Sharplett’s and the other Scouts’ permission.”

Twelve. He would be twelve in…three months. He could make it. He could wait. And in the meantime, he would at least get to the Scout bases in the upper cliffs. You could
see
the Redlands from there.

“And Abel, let me tell you something,” Joab continued. “Scouts are a hard breed. Have to be. They won’t care that you’re the son of the DMC. They have a tendency to let nature and events take care of the fuckups among themselves. And sometimes they’re willing to help nature along, if you understand what I mean.”

“Would they take care of
you
, if you were a fuckup, Father?”

Joab smiled a hard smile. “Well, I know what
I
would do if I were Scout and my commander was a fuckup,” he said. He glanced over at the rolled-up irrigation plan, sighed. “It’s my job to make sure it never comes to that.” He looked back to Abel. “You make that your job, too, Abel. Because you
are
my son, after all.”

5

“Blaskoye over thet hill fartleken,” said Kruso. “Peers out of Cascade comenz they.”

The Blaskoye are coming over the hill. It looks like they’re coming from Cascade.

Abel did not have to ask for a translation from Center. He’d grown up around Scouts and heard enough of the patois to understand it well, and to speak it so that he could make himself understood. It was far easier than Redlandish, which he was working on now. Most Scouts spoke at least some of that language, and he was learning what he could from them.

Scoutish is a true patois of Landish and Redlandish, Center explained. But it is on its way to becoming a creole. Many similar patois have sprouted and died in the three thousand years since the Collapse. You must remember that Redlandish is far from a unified tongue, and that Landish itself did not start off as a single language, but as a mixture of tongues that were as different from one another as Spanish and French were from Catalan.

What?

I think he’s referring to old Earth, lad. That kind of speech was long gone when
I
was a boy.

True to his word, Joab had permitted the twelve-year-old Abel to go on Rim patrol with the Scouts. It had been a year now that he’d been allowed to accompany them. Abel had spent every moment he could with them. Abel had been worried that the Scouts would hold his age and his relative lack of rank against him, but he’d quickly learned that the Scouts didn’t give a damn about any of that. If you could pull your load and make yourself useful in some way, you were in.

He’d also found out more disquieting things. Things he didn’t know quite what to make of. Like the fact that most of the Scouts were
very
religious, but religious in a manner that Abel was fairly certain wouldn’t be approved of by any Thursday school teacher he’d ever had. They had a semi-secret cult that worshipped Zentrum’s mother, Irisobrian. She was a figure of veneration to many of the Scouts, and a Scoutish swearword to them all.

According to the cult mystery story, Irisobrian had died in childbirth, but then, miraculously, had nursed the young Zentrum on her breast for fifty days and fifty nights while lying beside the River and herself decaying to bones.

It was Irisobrian’s mystical breast milk that was said to have made Zentrum invisible, so there was a lot of oath making among the Scouts on the bones and mother’s milk of Irisobrian.

Furthermore, there was an Irisobrian dispensation on several Scout items that would otherwise have been declared Stasis proscriptions or even nishterlaub. For instance, instead of employing flint and steel as directed by the Law, the Scouts sometimes needed to light a quick fire with the aid of a
lucifer
. These were made from powder taken from a broken percussion cap and mixed with glue from a desert cactus that grew near the Rim. The lucifers
stank of sulfur, but were highly effective for getting fires going. Scouts often carried punk sticks on longer trips, but punk was notorious for burning down and leaving you with not a trace of fire to start with at the end of the day. At such times, the last thing you wanted to do was to spend a quarter-watch striking sparks and puffing into tinder to get fire going. And sometimes to do so was perilous.

Kruso had given Abel his own box of matches for emergencies, and Abel carried it in the inside pocket of his tunic, as did most Scouts. Sometimes when he heard the lucifers rattle there, he felt a faint qualm at the almost-nishterlaub feel of possessing them. But mostly, he didn’t think much about carrying them one way or the other.

“Well and secret guard tham. To the civvies showez them is a bad thing,”
Kruso had intoned. “Comenz of it a quiver of troubles.”

Kruso was wrinkled and weather-beaten. He was almost as short as Abel, and built like a gnome. He seemed old, but Center had told Abel that Kruso was only thirty-five.

Every evening Kruso placed a wad of Delta tobacco into a clay pipe, pulled a smoking wand from the fire, and puffed away by the evening fire. He never used the pipe during the day, however.

“Hide sign and go to the Lady tomorrow, leave sign and she’ll take you today,” Kruso had once pronounced with his usual dry chuckle.

Abel figured Kruso had given him the matches not so much as an aid, but to draw Abel into the cult. Kruso was quite devout when it came to Irisobrianism. Abel had attended a couple of rites, but, on Center’s advice, had declined to become a full initiate.

You would not like the communion meat they share,
Center had said.
It must be at least three days old to have achieved sacred status.

After he was permitted to accompany the Scouts, Abel concentrated on finding ways to become useful. At first, this had taken the form of being a simple water carrier. Men who moved fast and light through the Redlands needed to drink a great deal more than Abel had ever imagined. Even though the Scouts were famous for being able to go a very long time without taking a drink, he’d found that this ability was not something they cultivated or celebrated among themselves. On the contrary, it was a constant Scout obsession to have plenty of water along—because one setback, one extension of a mission, would soon mean you didn’t have enough, and had no way of getting more. It was quite possible to die, and to die horribly, in the Redlands if you went too far out without the liquid to take you back.

Over the months, he’d demonstrated his usefulness and abilities to the Scouts in other ways. He’d graduated from water boy to dont keeper, and finally worked himself up to what was, for all intents and purposes, a squad regular. He’d proved his worth several times in that regard. Abel knew himself to be generally dexterous and naturally stealthy, and it didn’t hurt to have Center, who could use his quantum-computing ability to predict what lay on the other side of a rock, hill, or clump of desert plants.

Abel understood in a general way how Center pulled off this feat. He also knew if he requested specifics of any one prediction, he was likely to get a lengthy lecture that left him feeling sorry he’d ever asked.

And as he had grown more a part of the group of Scouts and more adept, the deeper into the Redlands his “Rim patrols” had taken him. He wasn’t technically disobeying his father at the moment. The Rim, and the Valley below it, was still in sight, several leagues to the west. Well, they would be if you climbed a very tall hill and strained your eyes to make them out. Furthermore, this was not technically a mission—where one expected and planned for battle—but a patrol, where danger had to come to you.

It looked like danger had done just that.

“How many do you make out, Kruso?” called out a nasal, brassy voice. It was a voice made to cut through a harsh desert wind, and it belonged to Sharplett, the captain of the Scout squad.

“Ten,” Kruso replied. “Ten of many.”

From the vantage of the overhang where he and Kruso shared lookout, Abel could clearly see that they were more than ten. Then he remembered that Kruso could not count any higher.

“I make out twenty…twenty-three on foot,” called Abel. “At least…fifteen armed with muskets.”

Correct, based on tactile input and spectral analysis of your visual stimuli for metallic content
, Center announced.

Isn’t that the same thing as what I just did on my own?

As in mathematics, it is often useful to check one’s work.

“Three wagons, three drivers, Captain,” said Kruso, perhaps in an effort to redeem his counting skills. “Too, a passel of Blaskoye does. Wear they thom ugly robes what hiden thar milkers, curse tham to darkness.”

“How many women?”

“Five…no, six,” Kruso replied, looking down at his fingers, where he’d been enumerating his sightings, to be sure his tallies matched. The only problem with that method was that his left hand was missing a pinkie.

The Blaskoye clan were generally excellent at evasion both of Scouts and of one another and did not repeatedly follow the same travel routes through the Redlands. In addition, they almost never returned on a route by which they’d left. Redland pathways often frayed into dozens of possible paths, especially when there were no features in the landscape such as rocky outcrops or higher mountains to avoid. Nevertheless, this time a caravan had come back precisely down the path upon which, two weeks before, it had traveled north. A single lookout had spotted them at a great distance, and soon the flags wigwagged across Scout-held territory from signal hill to signal hill—all the way back to the High Cliffs, the Scout base on the upper Escarpment. Abel had been there and had been part of the general scramble for muskets, bows, and donts as Fleischer, the signalman among the Scouts, translated the incoming message from the next hill over. Sharplett had instantly ordered the troop to ride.

I really can’t be blamed for going along with them. If I’d stayed, I would have been alone at the High Cliffs, and that could have been dangerous, too.

Except, of course, the squad cook and those two Scouts getting over their heat blisters stayed. They should be able to mount a drawn-out defense if they’re attacked
,
said Raj.
And that base is at a hell of an excellent locus point, too. Three men could stand off a hundred for who knows how long, if the three were brave, fed and watered.

And given the stores, the interior spring, and the possibility of slaughtering stable donts, eating them or drinking their blood if need be, that would not be a problem,
Center added.

Whatever
, Abel thought.
I’m here now. I can apologize to my father later.

Kruso strode up and slapped Abel on the shoulder. He said in a low voice: “View you tom waginen. Dre, t’is peer. You so tally?”

Abel took a close look through the formed by two boulders next to one another. “I see two high wheeled carts…no, you’re right, three,” he replied. Abel knew that Kruso understood Landish well enough, and Abel still wasn’t as comfortable speaking the Scout patois as he was understanding it when spoken to.

“Wagonen be goodsheavy, thay are hitched wid wubblebund donts ableatinz,” Kruso said.

The carts must indeed be loaded down with goods, for the donts teamed to pull it were straining and groaning. Their cries could be heard even at this distance.

“They’re coming from upper Treville, down the Pricklebush Route. Think they’re getting back from a raid?”

“Never,” said Kruso. “Our wigwag be quiet as fuckabone.”

There had been no semaphore traffic from the north, no indication that a raid on the Land had taken place in upper Treville or the Cascade District. So it was possible these Redlanders had utterly wiped out a Land village, leaving not even a survivor to report, or that they’d acquired the goods by trade or raid on another Redlander clan.

There’s another possibility lad,
Raj growled in his low voice.

What?

It’s a payoff from Cascade.

From people in the Land? But the Blaskoye are bloodthirsty killers. Why would someone do such a thing?

I’d say they’re quite as bloodthirsty as their reputation makes them out to be,
Raj said.
But
where
they decide to drink that blood is another matter, isn’t it? Maybe the goods are an effort to persuade the Blaskoye to take their muskets and bows elsewhere. Somewhere like Treville District, where the protection geld doesn’t flow like honey.

As if to confirm Raj’s suspicion, Kruso nodded and muttered, “Dortgeld,” the Scoutish word for ill-gotten gains.

Because they were the two best pairs of eyes in the squad, Kruso and Abel had been put on lookout. The entire squad was on a rise in the desert. It was a rocky area, bare of Redlands vegetation. They’d left their dont mounts in the brush below. Near the highest point on the rise was an uptilted stone of darker basalt that Kruso and Abel had scrambled up to get the best view. It was from here they called down their report.

The trade route cut through the center of the rise north and south. The forbidding brush of the desert surrounded the rise in a thorny, dense thicket, whereas the bare hilltop with the path running along it provided a quarter league of prickle-free travel.

When they’d first arrived at the place, Captain Sharplett had remarked in Landish that it was “not the best place I’ve ever seen for an ambush, but it’ll do.” Sharplett, unlike Kruso, came from a better-off family from the lower Delta and, although he understood Scoutish well enough, spoke Landish with only a trace of downriver accent. But however educated and skillful he might be, he was still a Delta man. He was considered a lesser breed by the military Regulars, who were almost entirely upriver men—and, Abel had to admit, it was hard not to think of the squad commander as a bit of a marshland barbarian.

Abel and Kruso climbed down from the lookout. Sharplett had already sent the main body of six Scouts down the western side of the rise and into the brush. There the hardy, desert-bred donts were grazing on the thorny vegetation.

“Kruso, I want you and Himmel on the east in them bushes. Looks like there’s a couple of piss trails cut into the thicket over there that go a ways back. Use them for your retreat.”

The Redlanders, though they lived in a land with no trees and only limited concealment, were fanatics about not being seen when defecating or urinating. They had been the ones who had cut those offshoot trails. Abel reflected that this was one more fact about the enemy that you picked up from being around Scouts that you would never find out in the Regulars.

“You two’ll hit first, one shot, draw their fire and pull ’em east. When they hit the bushes, fire a second round—Himmel with your gun, and Kruso, use your bow. That’ll be our signal. We’ll ride out, hit ’em hard from the west.”

Kruso nodded and Himmel answered with a smart “Yes, sir.”

“And one more thing,” Sharplett added. “After that second round, you get lost in that brush, hear me? They’ll be madder than a carnadon mam with a raided nest, and they’ll be after
you.
Himmel, you reload and cover. And Kruso…”