The main hall of the ranch house reminded Ritva a little of Stardell in Mithrilwood. The decoration was entirely different, but the tight-fitting logs squared on top and bottom on a fieldstone base were similar, and so were the exposed rafters above. There was a big stone fireplace in one wall, empty and swept on this warm summer’s night, and a trio of tile stoves in corners that probably did more in blizzards even if they lacked the cheery crackle. The walls held hunting trophies, elk and bear, cougar and wolf and tiger. And against the far wall was a skeleton, with the door to the kitchen beneath the place where its belly would have been…
“Valar bless!” she blurted. “What’s that?”
Woburn laughed, and his soldier guest from Boise chuckled. That was the bones of an animal that must have been twelve feet at the shoulder, with a massive skull and two long curling tusks.
“An Oliphant!” Astrid said in fascination.
“Mammoth, actually,” Woburn said, grinning.
“Same thing,” she said with conviction. “Third Age, you see. Where did you get it! It’s magnificent!”
“Someone found it over at Tolo Lake not far from here a few years before the Change. Nobody wanted it anymore, so I sent a few wagons over to Craigswood when we built this place and brought it back.”
“It takes up a lot of room,” a daughter-in-law said; she was evidently the lady of the household, black-haired and much younger, only a little older than Ritva herself. “Please sit.”
They all did; the Dunedain, Ian, Woburn and his daughter-in-law, Hanks and a taciturn leathery man in his fifties who was evidently the ranch’s top hand. A trio of middle-aged women in housedresses brought out food; platters of grilled pork chops crusted with chili-flavored breading, mashed potatoes with chives and butter, green salads of lettuce and spinach, celery and tomatoes and onions, glazed carrots, orecchiette pasta and broccoli baked with pine nuts and cheese, onion-and-cabbage pancakes with sour cream, hot biscuits and fresh bread, pitchers of cold spring water and several bottles of red wine from down around the Boise area.
“You folks enjoy,” one of them said as the rancher nodded thanks.
Despite his friendship with St. Hilda’s, Woburn said grace in some different Christian fashion. Ian used the Catholic form, which would be convenient if things went well; after all, the Historian had been a Catholic, and a minority of Dunedain were too. Ritva tried to imagine one of the more austere varieties of Protestant living as a Ranger, boggled instead and abandoned the effort. Instead she signed her plate, invoked the Valar, and fell to with a will. They’d been on trail food for quite a while, not pausing to hunt or caring to risk a fire; St. Hilda’s had been rather Spartan as well.
Nobody’s more than three days from being very hungry indeed, she thought. Which means no lord or ruler is more than three days from very bad trouble.
She took another chop; the fat at the edge was just as she liked it, slightly crisp.
Dad said that was something rulers should keep in mind, I was young but I do remember that. People get really cranky when they don’t have enough to eat.
At last Astrid leaned back in her chair, turning a glass of wine in her long-fingered hands. “You’re prepared to take the risk?” she said.
“I’m not taking a risk, I’m trying to avoid it,” Woburn said. “I’ve got two sons with the army. I want this damned war stopped before too many mothers’ sons die in it. And Martin Thurston… Yeah, I was angry with his father for taking land from us ranchers, but at least he had a real reason. Not just to keep his supporters happy. He’s not fit to rule.”
“No, he isn’t,” Hanks said. “He killed his father.”
A mirthless smile. “That’s why I’m in hiding. Eventually it got back to the National Police that I was one of the ones telling the truth. Sorry, spreading subversive slanders and libels.”
Alleyne leaned forward, his hunter’s face keenly interested: “How would you estimate the numbers who believe each version?”
“Hard to say. Nobody’s conducting public opinion polls these days.”
What- Ritva thought. Then: Oh, going around asking people what they think. I wonder how they did that without getting chopped up or shot?
Hanks went on: “Assuming I’m controlling my confirmation bias, in Boise city it’s maybe half and half. Outside it, patchy. But nobody’s talking about it much, either. There’s no proof either way and Martin still has a lot of supporters who aren’t shy about suppressing slanders, as they put it.”
The Dunedain leaders looked at each other. “So it’s evenly balanced,” Astrid said. “The High King was right.”
“What is it exactly that you want to do?” Woburn asked.
“We want to rescue the captive and tell the world the truth,” Astrid said.
“Well,” Woburn drawled, “to do that you’ll have to pull the wool over their eyes first.”
A week later, Ritva Havel restrained an impulse to rub at her buttocks. When you’d been riding as hard and as long as they had, your tailbone kept trying to burst into sight and wave itself.
“Christ, I’m sore,” Ian said, and stood in the stirrups and rubbed himself vigorously.
So much for self-restraint, she thought sourly.
They were by themselves, unless you counted two remount-packhorses each and a pair of collies and a flock. The horses were well trained, though they had them on leading reins here on this crowded road near the city. The dogs were extremely well trained, enough to make her feel awkward; she could swear they gave her disgusted looks sometimes. The worst of it was the sheep. Two hundred and sixty of Rancher Woburn’s animals, driven all the way from the Camas Prairie.
Two hundred and fifteen now, as they approached the capital city. The rest had died in ways that often displayed a certain strain of idiot genius; eaten by wolves or coyotes or cougar was the simplest, ranging up from there to one that had managed to crawl into a culvert just before some rain, get stuck, and drowned. Though the runner-up had strangled itself reaching for a leaf by sticking its head into the fork of a young aspen and struggling until it choked.
The grilled ribs and chops had been some compensation. Now they had to keep them from spilling off the road; the suburbs and buildings on the west side of the Boise river had been torn down, like many such around stillinhabited cities and towns, but they had been torn down much more thoroughly, including tearing up foundations. Right now they were a dense network of tidy little truck-garden patches, irrigated by canals and wind- pumps and green with a dozen varieties of fruit and vegetables and small pastures for milch cattle. She didn’t want to think of the legal complications of letting the sheep stray, in this rule-obsessed land.
“How on Arda do sheep ever live long enough to breed?” she said rhetorically, after they had headed off a mass break towards rows of carrots whose tops showed green against the dark soil. “Why doesn’t someone kill them, for that matter? Not to eat, just because they’re so stupid and annoying?”
They were moving very slowly behind a convoy of wagons, big ones drawn by oxen and loaded with-ironically enough-bales of raw wool. The greasy lanolin-rich smell was unpleasant, but not impossibly so. The road was mostly pre-Change, with holes in the pale aged asphalt neatly patched or filled with pounded crushed rock; they kept up the old custom of traffic taking the right here, and the left was fairly densely packed, which meant they couldn’t take the flock around the great vehicles and their crawl.
“I don’t know how sheep do live long enough to make little sheep,” Ian Kovalevsky said. “My family didn’t raise ’em. Cattle, yes; beefalo, yes; horses, yes. Even some pigs. But not sheep. It’s too cold for them in the Peace River country, and a bit too wet; we trade south for our wool, they have big flocks down around where we met in the Triangle country, the dry prairie. And I thought cattle were dumb!”
“Why couldn’t he have sent us with a herd of cattle? You’re used to them and I’ve done a little droving now and then.”
Ian shook his head. “Not if we wanted to travel in pairs. You need at least four, maybe six people to push even a small herd of cattle any real distance, and a wagon. To tell you the truth, Ritva, apart from horses… well, it’s not an accident I left the farm!”
Just then a cry came from up ahead, from someone on the stretch of roadway just this side of the bridge over the Boise river.
“Way! Make way! Clear that lane for westbound military traffic!”
The harsh shout was backed up by a bray of trumpets, the deep-toned tubae, along with a dunting snarl she recognized as an oxhorn. Her brows went up; Boiseans didn’t use those, although many other peoples did.
“Now, do it now or get ridden down! Make way! ”
