The Tears of the Sun (22 page)

The savage training of the House of the Prophet in Corwin bit deep, and it marked a man more than the scars of fire. She let herself look alarmed and curious, with a bit of a gape; it was a mark of the discipline of the riders that not one of them turned his head aside to glance at a good-looking young woman. When the last of them rode by and the short train of two-wheel carts that carried their minimal bagged had passed she blew out her cheeks

“Those guys look serious,” Ian said quietly.

“
Tell
me. We had a bunch of them chase us from not far east of here
all the way to Nantucket.
Nothing stopped them except killing.”

“That frightened off the others?”

“No, I mean nothing stopped them except killing them all. All except the last five.”

“Determined.”

“
Ai
, you have no idea. There were over five hundred to begin with.”

“
Very
determined. So five gave up?”

“That was after my big brother had the Sword of the Lady. That can . . . do things . . . even to
them
.”

“Oh.”

“Note that the Sword of the Lady is a long way away from us, right now. But the Sword of the Prophet is right here, and so are some of the Seekers.”

“Yeah, that had occurred to me now and then.”

Traffic took a while to unsnarl, but eventually it started moving again and they crossed, over the tree-lined river and to the high steel portals of the gate-complex, then through its tunnel darkness and into the city. The city wall was high, about the same as Portland's, but they hadn't bothered coating it in stucco—old Lawrence Thurston had been an inhumanly businesslike man. She didn't know if Boise really smelled a little worse than it had last time, or that was her imagination; it certainly wasn't
bad
compared to some she'd sniffed, and positively fragrant next to the coal-smoke reek of giant Des Moines. There was no way to cram tens of thousands of human beings and their fires and forges and animals inside a wall and not have it smell bad to country-bred noses.

“Ah, the smell of civilization,” Ritva said.

Ian snorted, then said: “I think we drop off the sheep here inside the gate. Isn't that the sign Woburn told us about? And I'd better become mute, it's what it says on my draft exemption papers.”

A broad avenue led eastward from the river gate to a golden-domed building that had been the State capitol; the walled citadel that held the General-President's residence was south of it.

Like most walled cities there had been a lot of infilling since the Change, second stories added to houses and new workshops built. Like the more closely regulated cities, Boise also had a stretch of cleared land just inside the fortifications, letting troops move quickly in an emergency. It also served as holding pens for livestock; each dealer had a sign with his name and license number. It was all very orderly, as far as anything concerned with sheep and other beasts with wills of their own could be. They turned the flock in between the wattle hurdles and into the corral. They quieted quickly; sheep weren't intelligent enough to figure out what humans had in mind for them. Unlike pigs. Pigs were
dangerous
in large numbers, for exactly that reason.

The contractor who'd bought Woburn's sheep was a weathered middle-aged man; he took a look at the flock with an experienced flick of the eyes, scanning for sickness or scrawny individuals. Then he went through and checked a few at random to make sure they were what they appeared. The sheep were mostly overage ewes, sold off when their best wool and lambing days were done. The hides would bring nearly as much as their tough stringy meat, with leather in such demand for the war, but soldiers weren't picky eaters either.

He had an assistant, a youngster in his late teens with stained working clothes and a shepherd's crook. He was staring at Ritva, which wasn't unusual, but there was as much hostility as jittery adolescent lust in it. He was silent until she handed over the invoice with Woburn's signature.

“What are you doing with that?” he said. “Why isn't the man handling it?”

“I'm giving it to your boss, stranger,” she said mildly. “And you should mind your own business.”

“
You've
no business handling that, girl,” he said. “You should be home, and dressed decent. Let men do men's business. The day is coming—”

Ritva stuck a finger in the young man's face, the point almost touching his nose, and he jarred to a halt in astonishment.

“Who
is
this asshole?” she asked the dealer.

“He badgers the flocks for me around the town pens,” the man said. “And he's my cousin's kid, for my sins. That side of the family has been listening to the new preachers.”

“He pisses off the people you do business with,” she said; Ian was keeping quiet, in case anyone was struck by his accent. “And my brother here is mute, or
he'd
be pissed off.”

Which accounts for why he isn't in the army,
she thought.

“The little dick ain't me,” the dealer pointed out. “And the sheep don't mind his disposition.”

He signed the spare copy, and took out a checkbook with the grizzly bear logo of the First National Bank of Boise on its cover. Ritva had just turned to untie her horse string when the sheep-badger spat on her foot.

“Sorry,” he said with a sneer. “Aiming for the dirt.”

Very slowly, she turned around again and smiled at him. The grab and twist that followed were almost too swift to see; the young man had just enough time to clutch himself and screech before he folded up and fell to the ground, with his tongue waving in his speechless mouth like an undersea weed.

Ritva waited for an instant, then kicked the fallen man twice with cold deliberation, hard enough that the steel-reinforced toe of her boot made thudding sounds with a very satisfying undertone of
crunch
but not hard enough to kill. He began to whimper, and then vomit in helpless choking, gasping heaves. Blood and bits of tooth came along with the contents of his stomach, a sour bite under the warmer musky smells of sheep and sheepdung and straw.

“Any problems?” she said to the contractor, using the fallen man's hat to wipe her boot and then throwing it into the puddle of puke.

He grinned. “Wanted to do that all this year myself, but he
is
family. Let's get you gone before the Natpols”—he meant the National Police, who were Boise's constabulary—“show up. Here's the check and give my regards to Rancher Woburn. I'll take care of the dogs the usual way.”

She folded it and tucked it into a pocket; she'd cash it if possible.
Woburn's
cover story was that she and Ian were bandits who'd jumped the legitimate drovers and run off the flock and stolen the documentation, and he had cowboys of his own ready to swear to it. Whether that would help if the current regime in Boise decided he was guilty was another matter, but he was ready to take the chance. When they were far enough away not to cause any curiosity about a mute speaking, Ian muttered: “Wasn't that a bit conspicuous?”

“Only in the
right
way. Judging from the people we met on our way here, that was a perfectly credible reaction. People in Boise the city think of cowboys . . . and cowgirls . . . as the type who take offense. And he did spit on my foot, sweetie.”

“Remind me never to spit on you. Of course, I doubt I'd be inclined to. You play rough, don't you?”

Ritva shrugged and made a slight moue of distaste. “The little
orch
was a Cutter. I've hardly ever met a Cutter I didn't want to kick to death, and I've met quite a few. And my father had a saying . . . I'm not old enough to remember him saying it but Aunt Astrid is . . . that you should always kick a man when he's down. It's much easier then.”

“You don't think he'll come after you?”

“Probably not. He might have if I'd left it at the playful little tweak to the crotch. But as Dad said, if you leave the mark of your boot-leather on a man's face, he's going to remember who won the fight every single day.”

She added parenthetically: “Men are sort of silly that way. You have to . . . to . . . be
firm
with them sometimes. Not sensible ones like you, of course.”

Ian nodded, giving her an odd look. Then he said: “Should we be looking around ourselves so much? I mean, it's a big city but we're supposed to be natives.”

“No, we're supposed to be hicks from the backlands,” Ritva said. “Believe me, we'd stand out if we
didn't
gawk.”

“It
is
big, bigger than Lethbridge. I've never seen anything this size. Amazing! It reminds me of my parents' stories about Edmonton. They lived there before the Change, then they got out early and went to join my uncle on the farm up in the Peace River country. Is Portland this big?”

“Boise's even bigger than Portland. By about a quarter, say seventy thousand people. Only half the size of Des Moines, but that's just
ridiculously
big, like everything there. Iowa gave me hives.”

It had been only two years since the Quest passed through Boise, and much remained the same; people still moved with a brisk purposefulness, there was less noise than you'd expect, and squads swept up even the horse dung almost as soon as it fell.

The big, vividly tinted posters on four-sided hoardings still marked every crossroad within, color lithographs of the type you might see advertising a merchant venturer's ship fitting out in Newport or an upcoming tournament or guild festival in Portland. But the emphasis was very different. Before, they'd mostly been of implausibly square-jawed men and women doing various tasks; soldiers, of course, but also nurses, farmers, smiths, weavers, potters, scholars, mothers, all looking forward with set purpose and some patriotic slogan below to complement the industriously patriotic things they were doing above.

Now they came in only two varieties. One showed the faces of President-General Martin Thurston and the starved-wolf, shaven-headed countenance of the Prophet Sethaz, both looking off into a distance of blue sky and white clouds and glowing sunlight. Beneath the picture was printed:

TOGETHER WE ASCEND in great block capitals.

The rest were of a soldier in Boise's hoop-armor and big shield, advancing forward with only his eyes showing over the rim and his sword held down for the thrusting stroke; behind him were a stolid-looking farmer or laborer hoeing, and a woman carrying a child and wearing an ankle-length skirt with her eyes cast down beneath a kerchief. The words read:

 

“Now, tell me. Is this the viewpoint of the
good
side or the
bad
side?” Ritva murmured very quietly.

“Well, it's not so different from what the PPA puts out, sometimes.”

“Oh . . . well, they're not that bad. Not anymore.”

They turned into a side street, past a mouth-watering display of fruit and vegetable shops that extended back into the low buildings like Aladdin's cave of treasures: baskets of blackberries glistening like dark jewels, raspberries red as blood with cherries a darker color, golden apricots and orange pumpkins and red-yellow blushing peaches and nectarines, vividly colored peppers and aubergines, lettuces and radishes and more. Boise ate well from the intensively worked small farms in the rich irrigated country round about. That gave way to a stretch of leatherworkers specializing in saddles—everyone there seemed grimly busy on government contracts—and then a series of two-, three-, and four-story buildings that had been linked together and reworked with more chimneys and other modern improvements including automatic-valve watering troughs along the pavement outside. A newbuilt wall surrounded what had been a big parking lot, now courtyard and stables, and wrought-iron letters above the gate proclaimed:

“This is where we stay. Or get arrested for torture and death, if anyone blabbed,” Ritva said cheerfully.

Privately she was prickly aware of all her weapons; she
didn't
intend to be taken alive.

Am I getting more nervous as I get older? Or is it just getting more
real
to me. I remember how Mary and I used to go whooping in having a high old time and being excited and everything . . . says the crone of twenty-two. Oh, well.

Everything looked normal enough. In particular there was no ominous quietness; in fact everyone was dashing around with the normal quotient of quarreling and laughing and the odd drunk snoozing in corners. As they watched, an active one was ejected by three of the staff, one on each arm and one holding his legs. They gave a concerted heave-ho, and he landed in a trough with a tremendous splash and a volley of screamed curses. A nearby Natpol trooper in leather armor and green uniform laughed and strolled over. His crossbow was slung over one shoulder, and his dagger and short sword at his waist, but he had a yard of nightstick in his hand, made from dark heavy iron-hard mountain mahogany. He twirled it around by the thong above the handle, then stood tapping the business end into his left palm as the inn's staff led out a saddled horse and followed it with a hide sack that probably contained the drunk's worldly goods.