The Sword of the Lady Read online

  ″But you′ve put all your money on the Heasleroads, and if they go down, you do too,″ Ingolf said. ″Why haven′t you just taken the Bossman′s Chair yourself?″

  Denson shrugged again. ″I′m the boogeyman for Tony, like Dad was for his father. The Bad Cop,″ he added, chuckling. ″Though with Tom Heasleroad and my father it was more like Bad and Worse. A lot of these Sheriffs and County Commissioners and Guard colonels hate me too much to take my orders directly, but the Heasleroad name still has a lot of chops—we didn′t all starve, after all, which everyone likes, and the Farmers and Sheriffs are on top of the heap, which they like plenty. And they like the way the State Police keep order without their having to do the dirty work themselves.″

  ″And the point of this little history lesson is?″

  ″That I have to manage the Heasleroads. Which means I have to keep the wrong people away from Tony; his father was a lot more sensible, but what can you do?″

  ″Not give him everything he wants just because he wants it?″ Ingolf suggested. ″That′d turn a saint into a monster, and I′ll bet Tony Heasleroad was never a saint.″

  ″Well, maybe. Tom was a lot better Bossman than he was a father, if you ask me; Dad never spoiled us. Water under the bridge, though.″

  ″Nice to know I′ve got a good grasp on the situation, you betcha,″ Ingolf said. ″But why the little confessional? I′m Catholic″—more or less. Mary isn′t, and . . . well, one of us has to convert in the interests of a happy marriage, so—″but you were Lutheran, I thought.″

  ″That′s where getting rid of the Cutters comes in. Or you come in to get rid of them; I always believed in giving men a full briefing before I sent them to do something. You′re more likely to get results if your people understand what′s going on. That way they can improvise, not just be robots . . . be windup toys, I mean.″

  Ingolf bit back I′m no man of yours, Denson, and the policeman′s grin replied: For this you are, like it or not.

  Aloud Denson went on: ″They′re staying here because you are here, and because that Rudi guy is coming back for you. If he is.″

  ″Ah,″ Ingolf said, and smiled wolfishly. ″I bleed for you. I won′t say from where. And Rudi will flap his arms and fly like a duck before he abandons friends. Or anyone he promised to rescue.″

  ″Oh, one of those, is he? That type gets more throats cut than evil bastards like me.″

  ″I′ll take Rudi′s word for it on who needs fighting,″ Ingolf said.

  Then he blinked to himself. You know, I really believe that, he thought. Life′s not dull around Rudi Mackenzie, or safe, but you don′t have to worry about him. A man could do a lot worse than be the one who had his back. One way or another he′s going to need good men, and not just on this trip.

  He thought of Mary, who was after all the Mackenzie′s half sister, and grinned to himself.

  And I could do a hell of a lot worse than be his brother-in-law. Half brother-in-law. Whatever.

  Denson looked at him slit-eyed, evidently distrusting his good cheer.

  ″You said the Cutters had plans of their own? They do. Evidently they′ve got a real hard-on for all of you; especially the big redhead, but they want you all dead in the worst way, and it′s starting to sink in with them that Tony thinks you′re too much fun to kill and isn′t going to change his mind. Not anytime soon. And then your friend—the big redhead—sent a message, saying he′s gotten the stuff. The wagons.″

  ″He did?″ Ingolf almost-squeaked.

  Denson laughed. ″Yeah. Surprised me no end too. I thought the wild-men would be tanning his hide for a drum over there by now. And that made the Cutters decide they could get you all at one swell foop, if they timed it right.″

  He nudged the bundle at his feet. It clinked significantly; Ingolf stiffened. He recognized the metallic shink sound of chain mail, and the rattle of a boiled-leather scabbard against something hard.

  ″What they forgot,″ Denson said, ″is that the State Police is a police force, not just the . . .″

  He grinned like a shark and made an odd gesture with his hands spread and the first two fingers of each crooked.

  ″. . . ′Royal Guard′ quote unquote. We′re not the fucking National Guard, either, just parading around in tin shirts and breaking heads hup-one-two-three-left-right. We find things out. And we′ve got informants all over the place, including the guest quarters of the Bossman′s House. Those guys should really be more careful how they plot where the help can hear. I know all about them now.″

  ″Why not tell the Bossman?″ Ingolf asked.

  To himself: You don′t know as much about the Church Universal and Triumphant as you think, Denson. But I′m not here to tell you what the monks at Chenrezi told me.

  ″That might get rid of the Cutters, though not until they start to bore Tony. It wouldn′t get rid of you guys. Tony really likes that Arminger chick. Got the hots for her, maybe, and he likes the stories she tells. What I′m going to do is let my problems . . . sort of solve each other. The timing will be close, though. Get moving. You′re going to Dubuque.″

  Ingolf nodded slowly. ″So, what′s in it for me, Denson?″

  ″Longevity,″ the State Policeman said. ″And a better view.″

  He toed the bundle over. Ingolf grabbed it, snaked the awkward length through the bars. There was the padded jacket, the short mail shirt that went over it, the weapons belt with his new shete—what they′d called a dao in Chenrezi—and bowie and tomahawk, shield and quiver, bow in the case beside them. He left the kettle helmet looped over the shield and tied down with a rawhide thong.

  ″Don′t put the ironmongery on right now. Figured you′d want a shower and some strong soap first. And keep the shete wrapped; it might attract attention.″

  Ingolf nodded reluctantly. He did stamp his feet into the boots; it was amazing how much better they made him feel . . . which was the demoralizing point of taking away prisoner′s footwear, of course.

  ″What about after we get out?″ he asked. If we get out, he added to himself. ″I presume we′re not all that welcome in Iowa, so how do we leave?″

  ″Oh, your friend Tancredo took care of that,″ Denson said, with a crooked smile. ″And wouldn′t he just shit if he knew we knew about that ship he rented? Nice little gaff-rigged river pedal-galley.″

  ″What if we get caught in Dubuque?″

  ″Well, that′s where killed while resisting arrest could come back into the picture. So don′t screw up.″

  ″You′re an evil bastard, Denson,″ Ingolf said. And now I know you need me, so I can say so. In fact, you′d fit right in with the Corwin people, some of them. ″I think you′ve got a hole where your conscience should be.″

  ″People say it runs in the family. But we survived the Change without morals when billions died fully equipped with theirs. Plus I′m a rich, powerful evil bastard, and most of the other survivors ended up hoeing beans twelve hours every day, and living on cornbread and fatback with some hick farmer kicking their ass. Now follow me.″

  The sound of the key grating in the lock made Ingolf release a breath he hadn′t been conscious of holding; that was when his gut decided that he really was getting out of here—if only into mortal peril. The feel of the blade and the weight of the mail shirt in his hands put his shoulders back, and a swing into his stride. Eyes glittered at them from the cells, reflecting a little of the light of the lantern Denson carried; he cupped a hand around the chimney to blow it out when they reached the steel door and the sections where the gaslights were left on all night.

  But at least it′s mortal peril I can do something about. The helplessness was the worst part of being locked up.

  A squad of Denson′s men waited outside the door at the end of the corridor, most of them holding their crossbows at port arms, along with a scared-looking screw Ingolf recognized without affection from his habit of spitting in the prisoners′ food before he pushed it through to them, and laughing when they complained. A
s they passed, Denson jerked a thumb over his shoulder and spoke:

  ″Don′t you men hear the riot?″

  ″Riot, sir?″ the sergeant of the squad said.

  ″Yeah, the criminal scum are out of their cages and running wild. Go to it, men! I wouldn′t be surprised if you had to kill them all to reestablish order.″

  ″Yessir, that riot,″ the sergeant said.

  ″Stack the bodies in the corridor.″

  ″Yessir.″

  Then he nudged the turnkey with an elbow; the man was still gaping in thick-witted bewilderment.

  ″What about this sad sack of shit, Captain?″

  ″Ah, too bad about the way the prisoners hauled him through the bars and took his keys off his dead, mangled body,″ Denson said. ″Still, it was fucking careless of him to get that close to the cells, right?″

  The turnkey blinked in alarm as the words began to penetrate; the sergeant grinned.

  ″Dead men contradict no tales,″ he said.

  And struck again with his elbow—this time into the man′s throat, a quick savage jerk of a blow without warning, and then followed it with a steel-toed boot to the side of the head when the man collapsed. One of his men dragged the body behind the file of troopers as they went through the massive door and then closed it behind them with a clunk and a rattle. Ingolf winced as he and the police captain walked away, and then again. Faint from the cell block he′d shared came the sound of screams, screams and then the deep tung of crossbows.

  Denson′s doing me a big favor, Ingolf thought. Why doesn′t this make me feel as optimistic as it should?

  ″Don′t sweat it,″ Denson said, at the gray of his face. ″It isn′t you, right?″

  ″Right,″ Ingolf said tightly.

  I′ve got to live, he thought. I′ve even got to let Denson help me. Too much depends on this mission coming off. Mary . . . all her friends . . . Christ, I think the world may depend on it. I want to have someplace we can go when this is all over.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE WILD LANDS (FORMERLY ILLINOIS) HIGHWAY 89 AUGUST 22, CHANGE YEAR 24/2022 AD

  ″A woman had a baby boy

  She loved him much and he gave her joy

  The Good Folk came and on a whim

  They took the boy away with them—″

  Edain sang as he worked, loud but tuneful; his voice echoing oddly off the cracked, crumbling concrete of the highway overpass where the Southsiders were camped and over the quiet murmur of voices and clatter of tools. The wild-men had put up screens of woven branches, so not much of the hissing rain outside blew sideways into the sheltered spot. Acrid smoke from their campfires curled upward and hung beneath the arched surface, joining the soot that blackened it—this was one of their regular stops. The goaty smell of wet-but-not-washed humanity, wet dog, half-cured hides and cooking food was strong, under a stronger scent of damp earth and greenery and the silty water of the nearby creek.

  ″Eggs and crumbs and milk and grain

  Bring my baby back again—″

  Rudi didn′t sing as his hands moved sharp steel across the six-foot length of wood clamped between his booted feet and bare knees. He was a competent journeyman bowyer, as many of the folk of Clan Mackenzie were, but no more than passable compared to Edain. That meant he had to concentrate to get any sort of results, particularly when he didn′t have any tools besides knives and a hatchet. Edain′s father was a master at the trade—it was one of the reasons he was called Aylward the Archer—and the younger Aylward had grown up as familiar with it as he was with plowing a field or shearing sheep or skinning out a pig or deer.

  And to be sure, concentrating makes me worry less. I must get those wagons back to Iowa! But I cannot do it alone, and so I must win the trust of these folk. That takes more than a strong sword-arm!

  ″There,″ Rudi said, setting down the blade he′d been using as a drawknife and unlocking his ankles from about the other end of the workpiece.

  He took the stave and ran it through his hands. Mountain-grown yew from the Cascades was the finest of all woods for a stick-bow, because the sapwood and heartwood were a natural laminate—strong in tension and compression respectively. This was tough springy hickory, which was a fair second best and abundant here in the east.

  ″What do you think?″ he asked his companion.

  Edain laid his piece aside and glanced down the length of trimmed wood; he′d finished two bows and half done another to Rudi′s one, as well. His face was wholly intent, lost in the task; Rudi envied him that.

  A few of the Southsiders grouped around sighed unhappily when he stopped singing—they were mad for new tunes. The warrior-hunters in the front rank stayed silent, focused as sharp as augers on the making.

  ″Dad would laugh,″ Edain said. ″Or cry. Cernnunos dancing drunk on Beltane Eve, maybe he′d laugh and then he′d cry.″

  ″He′d curse, sure and he would,″ Rudi said, grinning. ″But it′ll work, eh?″

  ″Eh. More or less, more or less, the Huntress willin′.″

  Rudi had been in and out of the Aylward household down in Dun Fairfax all his life; it was only a half hour′s walk from Dun Juniper by the short forest path, and the two young men had been friends ever since a difference of a few years in their ages stopped seeming a chasm. Sam Aylward had been one of Lady Juniper′s right-hand men from before Rudi′s birth, as well. His son braced the central grip across one knee and slowly bent the stave with his hands braced wide apart on it; muscle bunched on his thick bare arms.

  ″Sixty-five pounds weight at a thirty-inch draw, near as I can tell without a proper tillering frame. Between sixty and seventy, at least.″

  That was only a little more than half the draw of their own longbows, but those were designed to punch through plate armor at need, or send a stout bodkin-head shaft three hundred paces and hit hard when it got there. Sixty pounds draw-weight was plenty for even heavy game, boar or bear or tiger, and it would deal with light armor well enough if the range wasn′t too great. It was certainly ten times better than anything the Southsiders had had before they came.

  ″Without proper vises and clamps and drawknives and gouges and . . . and proper bloody everything,″ Edain grumbled. ″Hmmm . . . by Lugh of the Many Skills, I think it needs—″

  He braced it as Rudi had and took up the knife, holding the blade by the thick back and carefully shaving off a few long dark curls of seasoned wood. Then he repeated the flexing process.

  ″There!″ he said. ″Nice balanced draw. Not a bad job, Chief, considering what we′ve got for the workin′ of it.″

  The wood itself wasn′t bad at all; thoroughly dry, at least, and from fair-sized timber that he and Edain had split into proper triangular-section rough blanks along the grain. The Southsiders left billets in sheltered places to season on their rounds; hickory was a fine wood for spearshafts and tool handles as well. Unfortunately that seasoning and hacking some vaguely bow-shaped object out of the results was about the limit of their bowyer skills, and the product was barely worth that degree of effort. They didn′t even know enough to unstring them when they weren′t in use, and so they became worthless in a few months, though they′d grasped the fact fast enough when the clansmen told them.

  The simple tapered sticks he and Edain were making had none of the walnut-root risers and polished antler-horn nocks and subtle reflex-deflex curve of Sam Aylward′s masterworks, or those of his many pupils. They might have made him laugh or frown, but they did have the true taper and D-shaped cross section, and an arrow-rest of sorts at the right point; they′d boiled a little glue from the hooves of a deer and attached tufts of rabbit fur for the shaft to rest upon, and to fasten the fletching feathers of the arrows.

  And all the folk in Jake′s band exclaimed in wonder, Rudi thought. No glue, for the love of the Mother-of-all! The good part of these being so crude is that it only takes about half a day to finish the job, even without proper tools. And anyone handy with a knife and used to working wood ca
n learn to do it. Well enough for rule of thumb, at least, if not to equal a true craftsman. A thousand times better than no bow at all. And it′s just the sort of gift they will value the most. It helps them in the long run, not just their present trouble. Help for help . . .

  A young woman came in with a cracked rain poncho of dull yellow plastic over her shoulders, and a lopsided sort-of-woven basket full of greens and roots. She dumped it into one of the big pots that were kept going as long as the camp stayed put, and an older female—all of twenty-five or so, and looking easily forty—stirred them in with a long paddle. Which was fortunate, because it was hard to survive on an all-meat diet and stay healthy, unless you were careful and ate the whole beast.

  My hosts know some of the wholesome plants, he thought.

  But even this far from home and the woods they knew, the two clansmen had been able to show them some new ones, though neither of them had anything like the knowledge of such a loremistress and healer as Aunt Judy. The Southsiders had no inkling whatsoever of which mushrooms were deadly and which were safe, for example, so they shunned them all. Or that you could make acorns edible by grinding the nuts to flour and then leaching out the tannins, which meant that they had no starch that would keep any length of time. Or that—

  And to be sure, they aren′t very healthy.

  From the state of their teeth he suspected scurvy was a regular visitor to the Southside Freedom Fighters, come winter; they certainly weren′t rotting them out with too much sugar, and there were cases of goiter and terrible scarring from infected cuts. Their carnivore diet would have made them taller and more muscular and less scrawny-tough, too, if they didn′t have times of dearth fairly often.

  They can make fire with a drill. They can cook what they eat, more or less, which is to say they hold it over the fire or boil it in a pot. And that′s all that can be said for their food. They can′t make good leather, or any cloth at all, or even the simplest metal tools—what will they do when the last of the salvaged gear is gone? They don′t even know how to make salt from a lick! This is no way for human beings to live.