The Protector's War (39 page)

“Double bacon cheeseburger with fries,” he said, when the innkeeper had led them to a booth and a waitress poised. There was even catsup—doubtless homemade under the lying Heinz label, but he suspected it would be good.

“Me too,” Signe said eagerly.

The other surprise was the rugs—not on the floor, which was clean-swept asphalt still bearing faint yellow and white stripes, but hanging from the walls, the only ornaments except for some not-quite-Russian-looking religious images. The colors of the rugs were deep and rich, wine reds and blues and purples, in patterns that combined geometry with stylized flowers and animals; they reminded him of some the Larssons had had in the big house from before the Change. A couple of them had unusual combinations of colors, paler and more delicate. He recognized the ones weavers in the Bearkiller territory and its neighbors had produced from wild indigo, safflower, berries, and some new to him as well.

“Those for sale?” he asked Sarian.

“My friend,” the man said, smiling whitely and stroking his curly black beard; it fell halfway down his chest. “My friend, the only things not for sale here are our land, our weapons and our women. I sell food, I sell lodging, I buy and sell horses and tack and doctor horses and have them shod, I trade bulk grain and foodstuffs, and I sell the goods people trade to me for these things…and I sell rugs, yes.”

Havel pointed at the carpets with the colors of homemade dyes. “Looks like you
make
them, too.”

“My aunt, rather, and my wife, and some girls they've taught. Just this little while, but it is a tradition in my family, in the old country.” He grimaced. “I came to America from my homeland not long before the Change—we lost everything in the war there, when we had to flee Baku. I fought with our army until we won, but then there was no making a living. So, we build up a little business here, brought over some of my relatives, and then—
poof!
—the whole world goes crazy. At once I saw that Portland was doomed.”

“You got out with the rugs?” Havel said.

The majority hadn't realized what was happening until far too late, and had then fled the fires and fighting in panic with nothing but what they had on their backs; most hadn't gotten twenty miles before they just laid down and died, of hunger and thirst and sheer heartbreak, although you found bones along every road even now. The others…well, a lot of them had been eating each other by then, and not long after that the plagues started.

“We had bicycles and we made a cart of them, to pull, you understand, with all the supplies we could gather. I had a restaurant…The rugs we hid after a day or two on the road. We lived in the woods for many months—from hunting, the supplies we had, and a few cows and pigs and chickens we…found. Then I come here when the worst was over, see it is a good place when things get better, and…” He glanced around, pride in his eyes.

“What's your price on the rugs?” Signe said, sounding genuinely curious. “New and old?”

“More for the old than the new. The new are good, very good, but we are still…what's the word, experimenting with dyes. And we need more alum, to fix the colors.”

Sarian glanced aside at Havel. He shrugged in turn: “Anne knows cloth better than I do. Bargains good, too.”

Which is true enough. She's got a better natural head for logistics than I do.

The food came, and glass steins of beer; the latter was as cold as you could get by keeping the barrels in a cellar. The waitress also had a little scale, and looked at the scraps of silver with a practiced eye as she weighed them. He ate the hamburger with appreciation; the food at Larsdalen was excellent, of course, but he spent a lot of time in the field. The fresh tomatoes must be among the first of the season, started under glass and then planted out, and they were delicious, the onions pungent and strong, the lean ground beef a meaty delight set off by the rich tang of the cheese and the smoky-salt bacon.

Food often tasted better since the Change—when it was fresh, particularly. Out of season you got things dried, pickled, canned, smoked or salted, if at all, and hoped like hell nothing went dangerously and undetectably bad. At that, the Willamette growing season was longer than most places; diets got a lot more monotonous east of the mountains, or further north.

Sarian nursed one stein of beer as he had carpet after carpet brought over. At last they settled on a price for half a dozen, six of the new and six of the old.

“There'll be a good market for these back home,” Signe said.

Which was true for their assumed characters and their real ones both. There were plenty of A-listers prospering enough to want to spruce up their fortified farmhouses, not to mention some Bearkiller traders and craftsmen doing very well. And no doubt the rugs would be popular with wealthy ranchers in the Bend country too; not only were they pretty, but hung on a wall they'd do wonders with cold drafts in the high-country winters now that central heating was mostly a nostalgic snow-season memory.

Signe got a deal that would leave us a profit if we were who we're pretending to be, and I still feel obscurely certain we've been took. Again. I'd hate to buy a used car from this guy!

“Good,” Havel said, as the three of them shook on the deal. “We'll pick 'em up on my way back.”

“Chicory?” the waitress said—she'd been the one with the
naginata
. “Or more beer? There's wine and brandy and whiskey available too.”

“One more beer,” Havel said. “Chicory's just enough like real coffee to make you miss it more.”

“Bring it along, John,” Signe said as she put down her napkin and rose. “I'm not going to let anyone put their hands on our horses without I look 'em over first.”

“You said it, honey.”

The farrier's forge was in what had been the repair bays of the gas station, which was a clever use of space; one bay had a frame and winch-worked hoist for shoeing working oxen, ending in a big canvas bellyband—unlike horses, cattle couldn't stand on three legs, so you had to hoist their weight off their feet before you could get at the hooves. The smith himself didn't look like one of Sarian's relatives; he was pale, with brown hair and beard and a thick pelt likewise on his broad chest, freckles on his muscular arms; he was in jeans and steel-toed boots and a new-made leather apron and arm-guards, otherwise bare above the waist. His wife had the innkeeper's stamp, though, and he dropped a word or two of the guttural-throaty language the Sarians talked among themselves into his conversation with her as she pumped the bellows.

Signe watched him work and nodded to Havel, satisfied. He wasn't surprised. The big brick hearth with its metal smoke-hood, the double-punch cylinder bellows, the workbenches and rows of tools and four specialized anvils, all argued for competence. So did the abundant store of blank horseshoes on pegs. The way the farrier handled the job he was on confirmed it, and the customer led his mule away with a satisfied smile.

“Like you to have a look at my drove stock,” Havel said to the smith; Sarian observed with his arms crossed on his chest. “Our riding mounts are fine, and the cart beast, we had them done in Corvallis, but the others've come a long ways on asphalt. We'd like the ones who need it trimmed and new-shod before we sell 'em.”

“Be glad to—” the smith began, then stiffened.

Havel had heard the hollow booming
clock-clop
of hooves on the pavement of the bridge over Holdfast Creek just north, and the more solid crunching sound as they reached earth once more. Two men had ridden into the E-shaped front yard of the Crossing Tavern, on horses that looked shaggy-ungroomed but healthy and fast. Both wore bicycle helmets covered with straps of bent steel; one had a short sleeveless scale-mail shirt that looked a little small for him, the other a vest of braided rawhide picked out here and there with metal—cheap gear, but much better than nothing. The bigger of the two had bib overalls on under the armor, and he carried an odd weapon with the head resting on his right hip. The business end looked as if it had started life as a rock-breaking sledgehammer, but someone had sawn a couple of inches off each side of the head to bring the weight down to something reasonable, and then filed the metal striking surface crisscross until it was a series of small pyramids, like a giant meat-tenderizer.

Which is exactly what it is,
Havel thought; the head was mounted on an ashwood shaft a yard long, with a hide-wound grip.
Have to be a strong man to use that, though.

The two dismounted and led their horses over to the smithy. The man with the hammer
was
strong, Havel's height but broader, his torso a rectangular block the same width from wide shoulders to hips with arms as thick as the blacksmith's. He also had a bit of a kettle belly, and spare flesh elsewhere; not something you saw all that often these days, and his hair was as red as Juniper Mackenzie's, though it had started to fade back from a high forehead. The face below was broad and cheerful-looking, with small blue eyes and tufty eyebrows and a squashed-potato of a nose, a few broken veins there and on the cheeks. The face of someone ready with a joke and to knock back a few with friends, a smiler; there was a broad one on his face now as he listened to something his companion said.

That man was smaller and wiry, despite a certain family resemblance, and a bit older than his companion. He wore jeans and a checked shirt that were solid and untattered, which meant he was reasonably affluent; so did the good hiking boots. He had a hide bucket slung over his back like a quiver, but it held short spears instead of arrows, each about a yard long and tipped with narrow metal points. One of them was in his hand, and he rolled it over his knuckles and then twirled it with fingers alone, tossing it up and catching it, all without looking at it—his eyes were fixed on the travelers, particularly on Signe. He smiled too when she glanced around at him, revealing several missing front teeth; his mouth had a long parallel scar across the upper lip, as if someone had tried to grab it and slash it off and nearly succeeded. Two big knives completed his ensemble, not on his belt but strapped to his thighs.

“We need our horses done,” the man with the javelin said. He looked at Havel. “Out of the way, you. We're regular customers.”

The bigger man with the hammer made a soothing gesture at his companion. “The lady's first in line, little brother,” he said. “We've got time. Those your horses in the paddock, ma'am?”

“My husband's and mine,” Signe said distantly, nodding towards Havel.

“Those are some fine animals,” he said. “They'd fetch a good price a bit north—Baron Emiliano wants some remounts for his crossbowmen.”

Havel hitched his thumbs into his sword belt. “You interested in buying?”

The big man shook his head. “Carl Grettir isn't that rich, nor are his friends. Good luck with the Baron; he's a hard man and he'll drive a hard bargain.”

There's always something strange about people who refer to themselves in the third person,
Havel mused thoughtfully, watching as the two men handed off their horses and went inside. Signe blinked and seemed to be mentally searching for something, then shrugged and shook her head.

“You know,” the Bearkiller leader said to Sarian, “if you put in a small water-race from that dam there”—he pointed northwest to where a pre-Change earthwork dam made a pond about a thousand yards away—” you could have a mill too, with an overshot wheel. That would be mighty useful, and not just for grinding grain. We've got one like that on the ranch, but we had to build quite an earth dam for it. It's drier, where we live.”

The innkeeper shook himself a little, as if casting off some bitter thought. “Yes, Mr. Brown, it would be useful,” he said. “And if there were a mill as well as a tavern, more settlers might come, a wainwright's shop, livery stable—a town, and farms around it. But I could not protect that many; I keep the peace within bowshot of my house and my bridge, and no more. Also I haven't enough hands to build such. And most of all, it would attract attention. I will not build up just for some warlord to take.”

If this guy were in the Outfit's territory, I'd see he got loaned what he needed to expand,
Havel thought, as he dipped his head to acknowledge the point and Sarian walked off.
I may be a warlord, but by Christ Jesus I'm not a
stupid
warlord, and I heard the fable of the goose and the golden eggs a long time ago.

The tavern's smith was honest as well as competent; the seven horses he picked for reshoeing were the ones that actually needed it. Havel and Signe hung around, and weren't the only ones. He'd expected that; in any small community with a blacksmith, the forge tended to be a center of gossip as well as work, particularly before summer got really hot. Most of it was the usual dead-boring crops and weather—and weather in western Oregon was just too consistent to get very excited about, nothing like the Midwest where he'd been raised. People were curious about happenings east of the mountains, but not to the extent of being troublesome, since it was too distant to really affect their lives. There was more speculation about the Protector's intentions; everyone dreaded the prospect of another war. Havel suppressed a grin to hear himself described as a
brass-assed son of a bitch, but honest
. There weren't any Mackenzies present; when the discussion turned that way there was a mixture of superstition, dread, bewilderment and liking—the Clan had helped a lot of people pull through the second and third Change Years, mostly by loaning them seed corn and arranging deals for stock with the ranching country to the east.