Cutter I didn’t want to kick to death, and I’ve met quite a few. And my father had a saying… I’m not old enough to remember him saying it but Aunt Astrid is… that you should always kick a man when he’s down. It’s much easier then.”
“You don’t think he’ll come after you?”
“Probably not. He might have if I’d left it at the playful little tweak to the crotch. But as Dad said, if you leave the mark of your boot-leather on a man’s face, he’s going to remember who won the fight every single day.”
She added parenthetically: “Men are sort of silly that way. You have to… to… be firm with them sometimes. Not sensible ones like you, of course.”
Ian nodded, giving her an odd look. Then he said: “Should we be looking around ourselves so much? I mean, it’s a big city but we’re supposed to be natives.”
“No, we’re supposed to be hicks from the backlands,” Ritva said. “Believe me, we’d stand out if we didn’t gawk.”
“It is big, bigger than Lethbridge. I’ve never seen anything this size. Amazing! It reminds me of my parents’ stories about Edmonton. They lived there before the Change, then they got out early and went to join my uncle on the farm up in the Peace River country. Is Portland this big?”
“Boise’s even bigger than Portland. By about a quarter, say seventy thousand people. Only half the size of Des Moines, but that’s just ridiculously big, like everything there. Iowa gave me hives.”
It had been only two years since the Quest passed through Boise, and much remained the same; people still moved with a brisk purposefulness, there was less noise than you’d expect, and squads swept up even the horse dung almost as soon as it fell.
But some things have changed, oh, yes.
The big, vividly tinted posters on four-sided hoardings still marked every crossroad within, color lithographs of the type you might see advertising a merchant venturer’s ship fitting out in Newport or an upcoming tournament or guild festival in Portland. But the emphasis was very different. Before, they’d mostly been of implausibly square- jawed men and women doing various tasks; soldiers, of course, but also nurses, farmers, smiths, weavers, potters, scholars, mothers, all looking forward with set purpose and some patriotic slogan below to complement the industriously patriotic things they were doing above.
Now they came in only two varieties. One showed the faces of President-General Martin Thurston and the starved-wolf, shaven-headed countenance of the Prophet Sethaz, both looking off into a distance of blue sky and white clouds and glowing sunlight. Beneath the picture was printed:
TOGETHER WE ASCEND in great block capitals.
The rest were of a soldier in Boise’s hoop-armor and big shield, advancing forward with only his eyes showing over the rim and his sword held down for the thrusting stroke; behind him were a stolid-looking farmer or laborer hoeing, and a woman carrying a child and wearing an ankle-length skirt with her eyes cast down beneath a kerchief. The words read:
FIGHT! WORK! BELIEVE! OBEY!
“Now, tell me. Is this the viewpoint of the good side or the bad side?” Ritva murmured very quietly.
“Well, it’s not so different from what the PPA puts out, sometimes.”
“Oh… well, they’re not that bad. Not anymore.”
They turned into a side street, past a mouth-watering display of fruit and vegetable shops that extended back into the low buildings like Aladdin’s cave of treasures: baskets of blackberries glistening like dark jewels, raspberries red as blood with cherries a darker color, golden apricots and orange pumpkins and red-yellow blushing peaches and nectarines, vividly colored peppers and aubergines, lettuces and radishes and more. Boise ate well from the intensively worked small farms in the rich irrigated country round about. That gave way to a stretch of leatherworkers specializing in saddles-everyone there seemed grimly busy on government contracts-and then a series of two-, three-, and four-story buildings that had been linked together and reworked with more chimneys and other modern improvements including automatic-valve watering troughs along the pavement outside. A newbuilt wall surrounded what had been a big parking lot, now courtyard and stables, and wrought-iron letters above the gate proclaimed: DROVER’S DELIGHT INN COWBOYS WELCOME FIGHTS ARE NOT CLEAN FACILITIES FOR ALL BUDGETS MEALS REASONABLE HOT WATER FREE
“This is where we stay. Or get arrested for torture and death, if anyone blabbed,” Ritva said cheerfully.
Privately she was prickly aware of all her weapons; she didn’t intend to be taken alive.
Am I getting more nervous as I get older? Or is it just getting more real to me. I remember how Mary and I used to go whooping in having a high old time and being excited and everything… says the crone of twenty-two. Oh, well.
Everything looked normal enough. In particular there was no ominous quietness; in fact everyone was dashing around with the normal quotient of quarreling and laughing and the odd drunk snoozing in corners. As they watched, an active one was ejected by three of the staff, one on each arm and one holding his legs. They gave a concerted heave-ho, and he landed in a trough with a tremendous splash and a volley of screamed curses. A nearby Natpol trooper in leather armor and green uniform laughed and strolled over. His crossbow was slung over one shoulder, and his dagger and short sword at his waist, but he had a yard of nightstick in his hand, made from dark heavy iron-hard mountain mahogany. He twirled it around by the thong above the handle, then stood tapping the business end into his left palm as the inn’s staff led out a saddled horse and followed it with a hide sack that probably contained the drunk’s worldly goods.
The drunk sobered rapidly, between the cold water and the grinning policeman; he swung into the saddle with a wet slap of soaked denim against leather and walked his horse into the traffic.
“You save me a lot of trouble, Charlie,” the Natpol said to the man who’d been on the legs. “Sometimes I think I should split my pay with you, damned if I don’t.”
“Damn cowpokes get sand in their throats and think they can wash it out with whiskey,” Charlie grumbled. Then he nodded to Ritva and Ian: “Help you?”
“We just got in and dropped off a flock from Hasty Creek ranch up in the Camas prairie country, with an army contractor name of Wadley,” Ritva said. “My brother and I need the usual for a couple of days. Got some business to do before we head back.”
“Hasty Creek?” Charlie said; he was in his late thirties, a heavyset man with glossy brown muttonchop whiskers, light eyes and muscle under fat, and a white apron over his clothes. “Your credit’s good, then. Settle up the day before you leave, but just to be sure you pay for a full day if you’re not out by noon that day.”
“That’s fine.”
The Natpol was about Charlie’s age, but trimmer; he walked with a slight limp, probably from his army service. She remembered from her last time here that the police were a reserved occupation for veterans, with those who had non-disabling injuries getting special preference. Lawrence Thurston had always taken good care of his followers, though Ritva disliked the whole concept of a single police force.
Well, you could call the Dunedain a police force in peacetime, I suppose, but nobody has to use us and we don’t patrol streets and look for petty thieves, we chase real bandits and things like that. And Ian’s people, the Force, the redcoats, got their start about the same way. This National Police thing with one of them in every village still seems unnatural and I don’t like it.
“Your papers, miss, sir?” the policeman said courteously. “Just in?”
“Just in this morning,” Ritva said; it was around noon. “My brother can’t talk. Never could, nobody can tell why.”
She handed over the passportlike folders. The trooper checked through them rapidly, looking up to confirm the photographs; duplicating those quickly without attracting attention had been the most difficult part of the help Woburn and St. Hilda’s had given them. Luckily Woburn was a district magistrate, and the monastery had a photographic section as part of its high school. There was a central record, and…
We’re fucked if he goes to the trouble of checking it, but that would take a while anyway, she thought, as she smiled sweetly at the man.
He read them conscientiously. They stated that Jane and Jacob Conway had been adopted by a couple of Woburn’s retainers after being found wandering emaciated and alone in the winter of the second Change Year. That was towards the tail end of the utter chaos, when such things were still common even in areas of high survival like Iowa. It would account for Ian’s muteness too. People scarred by their experiences in the terrible years were common enough, and would be for another generation.
