All the younger menfolk gone with the call-up, and fewer hands to do the work and taxes higher than ever so the Ranchers have trouble payin’ the ones they do have.”
She looked at the wounded hand; it was healed, but the mutilation must have been fairly recent from the purple flush still around it. He shrugged. “Damn Protectorate shellbacks got me at Pendleton last year, the knightboys. Anyway, tell ’em up at the convent that Seven-Finger Jack passed you through.”
She nodded respectfully, and walked her horse forward as he reined aside.
Rudi would have left Idaho alone if Martin Thurston hadn’t allied with the CUT and attacked us, she thought. He is a wicked man, a parricide and a bad ruler and he must be put down, but I wish we didn’t have to kill and maim honest farmers and herdsmen to do it. If we can bring all these lands into the new High Kingdom and under the King’s Peace, people can live safely by their own firesides and reap what they sow. Now that’s worth fighting for!
“Even worth dying for,” she murmured very quietly to herself. “Though I’d rather not. It’s a fine summer’s day and I’m young yet.”
She rode past a gate. There were tents up in what was usually a pasture, and more in the orchard beyond; their occupants seemed to be mostly women and children. Closer to the main buildings of the abbey several long sheds were under construction, with work-crews pounding earth down between the moveable frames and trimmed logs and shingles waiting to make rafters and roof.
One of the workers looked up and then climbed down the ladder to walk over towards her; Ritva politely dismounted and even more politely hung her saber from the saddle over the bow-scabbard. The greeter was a nun, not much older than Ritva and with her dark robe kirted up to her knees, showing practical denim pants and boots beneath. Her sleeves were rolled back from hands thick with mud, and more splashed on her cheeks and her off- white headdress.
“Seven-Finger Jack said to tell you he’d passed me through,” Ritva said, and gave her cover story again.
“I’m Sister Regina,” the nun said. “Welcome to St. Hilda’s! I’d shake hands, but-”
A laugh, and a wave of a capable-looking muddy paw.
“What can we do to help you, child of God?”
“Ah… I’m looking for a place I can sleep safe and not be bothered ’cause I’m female while I look for work,” she said. “I’m more than willing to pitch in with anything here, too. I can rope and brand, do any sort of ranch job with stock or crops, milk and churn, spin and weave. I’m not afraid of sweat and I’m not picky.” She put on a scowl. “I tried the army, but they’ve got this fool new regulation against women, even if they can pass the tests and volunteer. Didn’t used to be like that in the old General’s time! Not for the cavalry, at least.”
Sister Regina smoothed a scowl of her own with what was obviously an effort of will.
“We live by the Rule of St. Benedict here,” she said, pointedly looking at the worn, sweat-stained hilt of Ritva’s borrowed saber. “We insist on peacefulness. There is no room for quarrels here.”
“I’m peaceful as all get-out, sister, as long as others are peaceful around me. I don’t belong to your Church, though.”
“That makes no difference; you belong to God, as do we all.”
She pointed up the graveled dirt track. “You’re welcome to stable your horses there, and your gear will be safe-you can deposit any money or valuables with the Bursar for safekeeping. We’re crowded, but there will be a place to sleep, and food for you and your beasts.”
“I can pay a little, sister.”
The nun smiled. “We ask nothing, not even many questions. Our houses are the Inns of God, the last refuge of the weak. Help in whatever way you wish or can, when you can. God bless you.”
Ritva pushed on; the place had a hospital, and a big school-apparently one for girls, who all wore an odd archaic pinaforelike uniform. On top of that, it looked to be taking care of a lot of displaced people, cripples and the sick and just plain desperate, the detritus and backwash of war and of a government harsh in its demands and merciless with any sign of dissent.
It took a while to get the attention of the harried sisters in charge without being obtrusive, and all of them looked too junior to trust with her message to the Mother Superior. For that matter, many of the nuns and all of the gray-robed postulants looked younger than her own early twenties.
Supper was served in a long refectory that had been hastily converted from some sort of storehouse, clean but very plain and very crowded indeed, mostly with people who looked as if they had stories worse than the one she was using for cover. It was dim, as well, lit only by pine-splints clamped in metal holders to the walls; that probably meant they were economizing on the fats usually used for lamps, keeping it to cook with or make soap instead.
The food was dark bread, butter and cheese and chipped plastic bowls ladled full of a thick soup of barley and potatoes and other vegetables that tasted as if it had some passing acquaintance with meat-bones on the stock side of its ancestry. There was enough if no more, but the meal would have been more appetizing if it hadn’t been clear that the bathing facilities were being worked in shifts too, and if there had been fewer unhappy children, some of whom needed changing.
When her group was finished eating she helped load bowls and plates and carry them to the kitchens, and volunteered to help wash. That ended up meaning mostly carrying wood to feed the hot-water boiler. There were many hands, but she was taller and stronger than most here. Patience finally got her close to the middle-aged Sister supervising the whole process.
“Hot work, sister,” she said, grinning and wiping her forehead with one sleeve; it was still warm in the building, though cooling rapidly into the clear night air outside. “Hope there’s water enough for a bath?”
“Cold water, I am afraid, child,” the nun said.
“That’ll do fine, in summer,” Ritva said cheerfully. “Like to shake your hand in thanks for you folks’ kindness. Makes me think well of your religion, so to say.”
The nun beamed at her in a tired sort of way. Then her eyes widened very slightly as she felt the scrap of paper in Ritva’s palm. The corner was dark; she seized the Ranger’s hand for a moment, turning it over and examining the calluses before dropping it and casually tucking the folded note into a pocket in her habit. If you knew what you were looking for a person’s hands were one of the best indicators of what they were. Most people had calluses; even clerks usually developed one on their pen finger. The patterns were very distinctive, though.
You got a very particular set from drilling with the sword for hours a day nine days in ten from the time you were six or so. That was one of the things even a really skillful disguise couldn’t completely hide; Ritva had the swordsman’s ring of hardened skin running all the way from the tip of her right index finger around the web of her hand and up to the top of the thumb.
“Sleep well, my child,” the nun said smoothly. “May only good visions visit you.”
Ritva was tired, but she thought she might not have slept all that well even if she hadn’t been waiting. There had been a stress on the visit part of that.
Waiting for arrest, perhaps, she thought mordantly. I’d certainly be more comfortable out under the stars. Praise to the Valar I got the outside place!
The long tent was so old that it smelled of a pre-Change synthetic canvas, much patched over the years with this and that. It was also very crowded and too warm for blankets; all women, or older girls, but no children. Someone not far away had an alarmingly persistent cough, too. She found being confined with that rather more frightening than most straightforward dangers; you couldn’t shoot a germ with arrows or cut it with a sword.
A glimmer of starlight and lighter air, and a hand touched her shoulder.
“Come, my child,” the figure said very softly.
The dark habit disappeared in the moonless light, but the coif gave the face an eerie detached frame. It was the same nun she’d seen in the kitchens. She was glad that the Sisters weren’t so otherworldly that they let more people than absolutely must know a secret.
“I come,” Ritva replied as quietly.
She picked up her boots and followed that beckoning, walking a dozen paces with dew-wet grass soaking through her socks before she could stamp them in to the welcoming leather. The night smelled of green growing things and wetted dust, intensely clean and welcome.
“There’s someone back there with a very bad cough,” she said quietly.
“We know. It’s a chronic pulmonary disease, not tuberculosis. Probably caused by smoke. Unfortunately we can do nothing for her but pray and give morphine when the pain is bad. Beds in the hospital are needed for the
