Dies the Fire (29 page)

The pole gave the machete blow terrible leverage, and so did the bear's own strength. The scream it gave when the steel split its paw to the wrist was the loudest yet, and the speed of its other paw's sledgehammer blow turned the whole of that forelimb into a blur. It landed on the haft of the
naginata
rather than the man who held it, and the tough hickory snapped like a straw. That and the glancing touch of the paw was enough to send Eric's two hundred pounds spinning away like a top; he hit the ground ten feet away and bounced. He moved, but he didn't get up; his arms and legs were making vague swimming motions.

The moment he was clear Signe shot. The flat
snap
of the compound's bowstring sounded clear, and she was less than twenty feet away; the smack of the arrowhead into flesh was almost simultaneous. The eighty-pound hunting bow sent the arrow almost to its feathers under the bear's armpit. It shuddered, and the sound it made was as much a whimper as a growl, but it kept going—and straight towards Eric's fallen form.

This time nothing but death was going to stop it. In the abstract, Havel sympathized: it was doing exactly what he'd do in its place, trying to die fighting and take someone with it. In the here and now, it was trying to kill someone Michael Havel had promised to protect.

One of
his
people.

“Christ Jesus save us from heroes!” he snarled, and limped forward to seize the pole of the spear planted in the bear's gut.

Several things happened very quickly then. The bear screamed and reared as he grabbed the ashwood and hauled sideways.

Signe shot, twice, from only a few feet behind him and just to one side; two spots of bright yellow-and-green feathers blossomed against the bear's dark fur, one at the base of its throat and another just above the spear. Her sister was on his other side suddenly, panting—she must have run from as close as she could get her horse to come to the sound and smell of wounded bear. The string of Astrid's lighter bow snapped against her bracer, and an arrow sprouted from the bear's inner thigh.

Havel twisted desperately at the spear, conscious of how his bruised leg slowed him—and how the spear had sunk deeper in the bear's body, putting him close to it.

He saw Will Hutton running towards the animal from the rear, legs pounding in desperate haste, the double-bitted felling ax swinging up.

And the bear's wounded paw flashed towards him. He threw himself backward, releasing the spear, just as the tips of the claws struck.

 

 

 

When Havel came fully back to himself, he was chiefly conscious of a stabbing pain in his neck. Shortly after that he became aware that blood was pouring down his face, but he ignored that until he checked that he had movement in all his fingers and toes.

Then, slowly, he put a hand to his face. Light came back when he pushed back a flap of skin that was hanging over his left eye; when he had it in place, he knew there was a bad cut running from the upper peak of his left cheekbone, then beside his eye on that side—close enough to the corner to give him a cold chill—and across his forehead and into his scalp. Like all scalp wounds, it ran blood like a butchered pig hung up to drain, but he scrubbed his other arm across his eyes and the world cleared up.

The bear lay about seven feet away, very thoroughly dead; only a vet with time to do a dissection could have told what killed it, between the spear and the arrows and the ax that stood up like an italicized exclamation mark from its back, with the heavy blade buried in its spine. Blood still trickled; he couldn't have been out for more than a few seconds.

Will Hutton knelt on one side of him, Signe on the other. He let his head fall back; which was a mistake, since lights swam across his eyes.

“Eric?” he croaked.

“Fine,” Hutton said, resting his hand on Havel's and moving it gently away from the younger man's wound. “Banged up. Bump on his head . . . this of yours goin' to need some stitches, though. Angelica, she kin handle it.”

“Don't forget the aspirin,” Havel croaked, and Hutton laughed.

“You are one tough mother, got to admit it,” he said. “Cojones too. Ain't never seen a man move so fast.”

“Ask the bear,” Havel said. He rolled his eyes towards Signe. “Good shooting.”

“It was closer than a target and bigger,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Hell, no,” he said honestly. “This hurts like grim death and I'm seeing double and I'd puke if I had the strength. I'll live.”

She blinked at him, frowning, then trotted away. He looked past her at Astrid, who stood beside her father and Hutton's wife and daughter, wringing her hands on her bow as if she were trying to strangle it.

“Come here,” he said to her. “I can't shout—if I try, my head will fall off.”

She obeyed, kneeling close to him. Signe came back on the other side with a bucket of water and a cloth; she had pills with her too, and he took them as Hutton raised his head with one strong hand. Then she began to sponge at the blood on his face. It felt so good he was reluctant to tell her to stop, but there was something to be done first.

“OK, kid,” he said to Astrid, touching Signe's wrist gently for an instant to halt her.

He found he could move his arms, but only if he concentrated on it and didn't try anything difficult.

“Did that bear just light out after you, or did you shoot it unprovoked?” he asked the younger girl.

Astrid blinked, looked away, and then looked back. “I shot it,” she whispered.

“What did I say?”

“Shoot anything but bears and cougars, Mike.”

“Right.” He put out his hand; she didn't resist when he took her bow. “This was a toy, back before things Changed. It isn't anymore. It's a weapon. You don't
play
with weapons. Understood?”

She nodded.

“And
that
was a dangerous wild animal. You don't play with them either. Understood?”

“Y-yes, Mike.”

He went on: “Two inches closer and that thing would have ripped my face off. You understand
that
? And your brother and sister could have been dead too, easy. You understand
that
?”

She was crying now, but she nodded again.

“OK, you don't touch this again until I think you can use it responsibly. You want to be treated like a grown-up, you gotta earn it. A hunter doesn't take stupid chances, or shoot at all unless it's a clean kill.”

He handed the bow to Hutton. “And don't let her on a horse again until I say so, either.”

He let his head fall back. Signe leaned over him, sponging at the blood again; vaguely, he could see Angelica Hutton coming up with some sort of kit under her arm. The pills couldn't have been aspirin, either, or the concussion was worse than he'd thought, because he was beginning to drift away.

“This ain't fucking Middle-earth,” he said—or thought he did.

Blackness.

 

 

 

Will Hutton looked at the electric grinding wheel, pursing his lips. It was normally bolted to a long plank; he put it on sawhorses and secured it with C-clamps when he had that kind of work to do. The motor was useless, of course, and he'd disassembled it, leaving the wheel and the driveshaft. It might not work, but he didn't have anything better to do right now; they couldn't move until Havel recovered.

“Needs a flywheel,” Ken Larsson said, beating his gloved hands together—the early mornings were still chilly, and his breath showed in white puffs as he squinted at the remains of the machine.

For a high-and-mighty executive, he makes a pretty good hands-on man,
the Texan thought.

“Right,” he said. “Truck wheel, I think. Drill and mount through the hub?”

“Yup. And the fan belt from your semi would do for the drive—we take the wrecked bicycle—”

His face went blank for a moment; the bicycle had been ridden by one of the bandits who killed his wife. He swallowed, while Will looked aside to allow him a moment's privacy.

“—mount it backward—fan belt around the rear wheel once we get the tire off. Then someone pedals, and you got yourself a grinding wheel.”

They both turned and looked at Eric Larsson where he sat throwing stones into the Lochsa. Not far away Astrid and Luanne were working on the bearskin staked out on the ground, scraping the last shreds of fat and flesh off the inside. Eric, on the other hand, had been starting to brood.

“Boy needs exercise,” Ken said.

 

 

 

When Havel woke again, he felt completely drained; not in much pain—an itching stab along his scalp wound, a throb in his neck, bruises elsewhere—but weak as a kitten. Something smelled wonderful close by, though.

Gradually the picture came clear. He was lying on a bed of pine boughs, with a canvas cover over him, rigged like a tent to the side of the Huttons' RV. Blankets and the mylar sleeping bag and a low fire in a round bed of stones with a sheet-metal reflector kept things comfortably warm—warmer than he would have been inside the vehicle, with its heaters not working.

Not far away was a horse with its head down, pawing through the long dead grass for the first of this year's shoots, and then eating the natural hay when it couldn't find any.

There was a pot over the fire, and the good smell came from there.

“What's that?” he said—croaked, rather. “Christ Jesus, I'm dry.”

Signe Larsson was not far away, silently practicing knife strokes against a small lodgepole; she wore clean jeans, her high-tops, and a big man's shirt of checked flannel over a T-shirt of her own, one with a whale and a circle-slash over it. When she heard his voice she stabbed the knife into the wood with a backhand flick and hurried over to him.

“About two days, right?” he said, reaching up to touch his forehead.

The long wound across forehead and scalp had been stitched in a small neat style, but he'd have a spectacular scar.

Just like Tarzan's,
he thought to himself.

He'd been a Burroughs freak as a kid, and had spent much of the early eighties pretending the forests of the Upper Peninsula were the ape-man's jungles. He'd enjoyed the Mars books almost as much, although it put him off a bit when he realized that since Dejah Thoris laid eggs, John Carter had essentially been doing the nasty with a giant bug.

“How did you know it was two days?” Signe said, dipping a cup into a bucket that stood on a table nearby. “You came to a few times before, but you were sort of semiconscious.”

“Don't remember a thing since Mr. Bear turned out to be Not Our Friend,” he said, and then a long wordless
ahhhhhh!
as he drank the cold river water. “ Thanks . . . no, I could tell by the state of your bruises. They're a flattering shade of yellow-green; mine are fresher. What smells so good?”

A woman was singing in Spanish in the middle distance, a husky soprano, a voice with smoke and musk and heat in it—Angelica Hutton, at a guess. He could hear the words now and then:

“
Mi amor, mi corazon—”

Signe grinned; she
did
have a set of colors that would have done a frog proud, though the swellings had gone down, revealing the straight-nosed regularity of her face.

“It's bear broth,” she said. “We're making jerky out of most of it, but the soup's good. Want some? Meal and revenge in one.”

He nodded, too tired to speak much. She brought over a cup and put an arm under his shoulders to lift him so that he could sip. The contact was remarkably pleasant, in an abstract sort of way. The broth itself was delicious, mostly clear, with a little finely minced meat in it and some dried onion. He could feel the rich warmth of it spreading through his middle, and his eyelids grew heavy again.

Havel fell asleep to the sound of the Spanish song, the splashing of the river, and a distant sound like a grinding wheel on hard steel.

 

 

 

His next waking found him clear-headed; a day after that he was still feeling shaky but strong enough to rise and eat solid food, wash and walk. The next day he was himself again, save for a lingering stiffness.

The older men had been hard at work on the flatbed; the towing bar had been rerigged, and the gear sorted and readied for loading.

Will Hutton had set up his workbench a good ways away; near it was some contraption powered by part of a bicycle, with a transmission belt running from the skeletonized rear wheel. Not far from that was an improvised hearth of mud and rocks, with Astrid pumping on a piston-bellows setup.

“Good to see you up,” Hutton said, turning from the fire; sweat ran down his stocky muscular torso.

“Good to
be
up,” Havel said frankly. “Not quite good as new, but getting there.”

His scalp wound itched like fire, but that meant it was healing well. For the rest he was stiff and bruised, but he'd been
there
before; with nothing torn and no damage to his joints he was ready to chalk it up to experience.

Some exercise was just what he needed.

Astrid smiled at him shyly. Havel looked at the black man; he nodded very slightly. Havel glanced back at her coolly, and then went on after he'd made greetings all around: “Maybe you should start practicing that mounted archery stuff again, kid?”

“Thanks, Mike!” she replied, and then broke into a broad sunny smile. “Mr. Hutton has the most
fascinating
book about it—mounted archery, that is!”

Surprised, Havel looked at the Texan.