“
Oh
, yes.” Then she brightened. “Most of the time, though, it’s as if the Sword makes him
more
of what he was already.”
Ingolf grinned. “Super-Rudi. Ye . . . Gods, that’s a scary thought too!”
They laughed together, and then by unspoken mutual agreement brought themselves back to the moment. For a while after they left the village the landscape was mostly abandoned land used for summer grazing if at all; tall grass and thickets of raspberry bushes, goldenrod, and surging clumps of young elder and elm struggling with them and the saplings spreading out of the old woodlots. All were loud with birdsong as the migrants settled in and disputed their territories; flights of blue warblers chased cloud-formations of mayflies in melodious flocks.
He saw tracks and scat of elk, deer, feral cattle, swine and half a dozen others, but this road was traveled enough that animals were wary of men by daylight; they caught only a fleeting glimpse of what might have been a wolf or a very large coyote. And once, laughing, they steered their mounts around a defiant skunk standing with raised tail.
Mary was looking at the roadway too; much of it was post-Change, created by the traffic pounding the soil when the road by the river was washed out. Improvements later had mostly meant a little ditching, the odd brushup with a horse-drawn grader, reused culverts, and shoveling gravel into the worst wet spots when they threatened to swallow travelers or their horses whole.
“Is there normally so much traffic on this road?” she said.
“No,” he said, noticing. “People usually float things up- and downriver; the Kickapoo’s not big enough for real boats but canoes do fine most of the year and they can carry a fair bit. And mostly we swap around locally anyway.”
By definition any area that had come through the first Change Years without utter collapse was self-sufficient in everything it really needed. Where trade had revived at all it was mostly in light high-value luxury goods, particularly here in the backwoods.
Which Readstown is, you betcha, even if we . . . they . . . don’t like to admit it.
“Wagons and horsemen both,” Mary said, looking down again. “Horsemen in column of fours, and trains of wagons. The troops we’re supposed to be looking for.”
“You’ve got a good eye.”
She hit him on the shoulder; mostly theoretical when he was wearing a mail shirt and gambeson, but he cowered theatrically. Then he went on:
“Hmmm, looks like it was mostly a couple of weeks ago and then tapering off; it’s real blurred by the rain. Well, we’ll find out.”
Now and then a Norway spruce or an old apple tree still valiantly showing a few flowers served to mark the site of an abandoned homestead. Once a ruin’s glass shards glinted from the high ridge to the west, beneath the purple blaze of a rambling lilac.
“Why would anyone build up there?” Mary asked. “Well, easier to defend, I suppose . . .”
She stood in the stirrups for a moment and shaded her eye with a hand; the sun was a little past noon, and the air was just in that place between warm and cold where you hardly noticed it except as a stroking on the skin. Then she took out her monocular.
“That was a pretty big house, not just a lookout post. No defenses . . . and the roadway to it runs straight up the slope; there’s an overgrown gully where it washed out. Strange.”
“There’s actually good farmland up on the ridges in places, you just can’t see it from here,” Ingolf said. “But
those
were built for the view.”
He raised a hand at her stare: “I swear to God . . . by the Valar. Just so they could live there and look at the view. Which
is
pretty.”
“The view?” Mary said. “They put a house on top of a slope that would kill a team climbing it just to look out the
window
?”
They both laughed and shook their heads; you could go crazy trying to understand why people did the things they did before the Change. Then they emerged into the settled lands closer to Readstown with startling suddenness, shaggy neo-wilderness on one side of a weathered board fence, close-cropped green pasture on the other and then a not-quite-town.
“This used to be called Gay’s Mills,” he said. “We’re about an hour from home, from Readstown, now. If nobody’s horse throws a shoe, that is.”
Both riders relaxed at the signs of habitation . . . relaxed a little . . . and slid their recurve bows back into the saddle scabbards at their left knees and the arrows into their quivers on their backs. Gay’s Mills was a cluster of farms and cottages these days, with a blacksmith’s shop by the side of the road and a gristmill somewhere close; they could hear the bur of the millstones. The full-bearded smith looked up from shoeing a big hairy-footed draft beast and gave a brief wave of his hammer with his mouth full of nails before he bent back to his task.
Ingolf’s horse, Boy, threw up his head and snorted as the wind brought the scent of his own kind; Mary’s dappled Rochael ignored them and him. A barefoot pigtailed girl in a linsey-woolsey shift and a floppy hat three sizes too big for her dragged a barking mongrel back just before he was kicked into next week, then stood gaping at them with one dirty foot tucked behind her other knee. Mary smiled and leaned down with effortless grace to pat her head in passing. They headed through a gaggle of chickens that stopped pecking at the roadway and scattered in mindless panic, and out into open country again.
Shod hooves thudded on the soft rutted dirt or sparked on the odd rock or clattered against bits of asphalt that had survived a generation of flood and frost. Shete and longsword rattled and banged against stirrup-irons occasionally, but the loudest sounds were birdsong and wind in the trees. There were farms set back at the edge of the hills every half mile or so, but none very close.
He spent a moment just enjoying the day and the view. There weren’t many pleasures greater than the feel of a good horse moving beneath you on a fine spring day, with the woman you loved riding at your side.
The apple and cherry orchards were in full blossom on the south-facing slopes, frothing in white like snowdrifts, or pink like cotton candy; he could remember the planting of many of them. The season was far enough along that when the road twisted close the breeze brought not only the blossoms’ cool sweet scent but drifts of petals on a gust of wind, settling now and then in Mary’s long yellow braid of hair, framed against the ridge beyond and the piled clouds catching the westering sun amid an endless blue like her eye.
And that’s just about the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen
, Ingolf thought.
Like this is just about the prettiest
country
I’ve ever seen. Of course, I’m prejudiced. The Willamette’s great too, and a lot of what I’ve been through is
grand
, but this place has my heartroots in it. Always will, even if I never see it again.
The Kickapoo Valley was part of what they’d called the Drift-less area back in the day, which meant it hadn’t been planed flat and buried by glacier-born silt like a lot of the Midwest. Instead it was a maze of valleys like this, separated by steep ridges and little plateaus, spreading like the pattern of veins in a leaf. That had helped keep out most of the waves of cityfolk desperate for food and shelter after the Change, that and distance and plenty of hard fighting. There had been enough food even that first year . . .
just
enough, despite the waste caused by disruption and ignorance of how to handle it without machines.
The steep slopes of the uplands were a fresh intense green now with the new leaves of sugar maple and basswood, oak and hickory, with the darker green of hemlock and white pine where the land dipped northward, now and then some dark red sandstone where the earth’s bones showed, here and there the cream of flowering dog-wood. There were willows and elm and cottonwood by the river, with dense clumps of Virginia bluebells and geraniums nodding beneath; trailing arbutus and purple-blue wood violet grew by the side of the road.
They rode past a crude statue carved from an oak stump, and Ingolf grinned at the mocking portrait of Richland’s original Bossman; he’d done that himself as a teenager with a couple of friends, just when the man was on a visit, and it had been worth the hickory stick his father applied. Between forest and water were the fields, many plowed in curving strips along the lie of the land, planted with different crops to help hold the soil, a succession of greens lighter or darker or a first fine mist of tender shoots across smooth disk-harrowed brown earth. He looked at them with a countryman’s eye, enjoying seeing them simply
for nice
as his folk said, but mostly for their promise:
“Just getting the corn planted,” he said, inhaling the mealy-yeasty-musty smell of damp turned earth, as appetizing as fresh bread. “Not before time, either.”
A woman in dungarees and a straw hat was driving a four-row grain drill along the contour not too far away, the twin heads of her team of bay geldings bobbing patiently ahead of her as they strode along. She had a crossbow in an upright holder beside the seat of the planter, but returned his wave in friendly wise.
“Bandits?” Mary asked, eyeing the weapon. “We’re not all that far from the Wild Lands.”
“Possible,” Ingolf acknowledged; this
was
the edge of civilization, more or less. “Mostly for the hoof-rats, though, I’d guess.”
“Hoof-rats ?”
“Deer, whitetails.”
“Ah, yes. They’re a menace back home too.”
He nodded, though he’d been too busy to hunt while he was there in Montival—mostly too busy recovering from being wounded near to death by Cutter assassins. Deer were a crop-and-garden-devouring pest in most places, what with all the abandoned farmland providing exactly the sort of scrubby edge-country they liked. It had gotten a little better lately as closed-canopy forest spread.
“Though Aunt Astrid insists deer are noble creatures. Not to mention the staple of the Dúnedain diet.”
“What do you think?”
“Hoof-rats,” she said, and they both laughed. “But the wolves and bears and cougars and tigers seem to be catching up, finally.”
“Which if you’re trying to raise livestock—”
“—presents its own problems. On the other hand, tiger skin makes a very nice coat.”
“More excitement getting it than I like.”
Children with slings on bird-scaring detail pointed excitedly at the travelers; the school year ended when the fields dried out enough for work nowadays. One white-headed six-year-old ran beside them for a while with a gap-toothed grin. A man was driving a potato planter behind a four-horse hitch in another field, a clumsy-looking thing like a tapering bin on wheels, its center of gravity dangerously high and all covered in patches and rust. He ignored them; all his attention was on his horses and the set of levers and ropes that controlled the mechanism which opened the furrow, dropped in seed potatoes and covered them up in turn. This time Ingolf laughed aloud.
“What’s funny, my heart?” Mary asked.
“That potato planter.”
She looked, and blinked. “Not much different from most, except that it’s old and mostly metal. Looks pre-Change, nearly. There’s a story attached?”
“Just a memory, really. Back when I was about ten . . . that must have been around Change Year Four . . . my dad and my brother Ed and a farmer named Fritz Ventluka made that. Cut it down and made eight one-row machines from this huge-erific old-time thing that fifty horses couldn’t pull, and we were short of horses then anyway. We didn’t have to go out and plant the spuds by hand that spring, and everybody was happy about that! I helped . . . well, I stood around and handed wrenches and hacksaws and ran for stuff. When it was finished, Dad let me have my first drink of applejack. Mom gave him hell for it, but he tipped me a wink behind her back.”
She reached over and put a hand on his shoulder. “I wish I could have met your father. And your mother.”
Ingolf snorted, trying to imagine it. “Dad . . . Dad could be sort of . . . drastic about things. Never could take being crossed, and he was a hard man when he was angry, or when he’d had one too many. I think Mom would have liked you, but she wouldn’t have shown it. God knows she tried riding roughshod over my sister-in-law Wanda often enough, though she was wild about the grandchildren.”
He shook himself mentally and looked around again. Haying would be the next busy time, but it would be a few weeks at least before the timothy or alfalfa was high enough to bring the mowers out to cut. And there was always the eternal battle with the weeds.
“The oats are in, good, it’s always best to get them planted by the middle of April around here, the shoots are just showing now, see? Winter wheat looks fine, plenty of tiller, no bare patches from winter-kill . . .”
“My love, could we be a little less agricultural?” Mary asked.
“Sorry,
melda
,” he said with a grin; his Sindarin was still shaky, but he’d mastered the endearments.
He’d also been about to comment that the stock looked in good fettle too—white naked-looking sheared sheep with black faces grazing under the fruit trees with a shepherdess and her collie in attendance, many of them with a lamb at their heels, Angus cattle like square black blocks of flesh in the lower pastures, white-and-black or Jersey milkers. Sows grunted happily as they mowed down young alfalfa with swarms of pink-and-brown piglets tumbling around them.