He cleaned, wiped and stropped his razor and put it back in the case; he threw out the wash-water on the compost-pile, and went into the cabin, putting on his shirt and his belt, and passed on through to the front porch, where his father was already eating at the table. The people of the Toon liked to eat in the open; it was something they’d always done, just as they’d always liked to eat together in the evenings.
He sweetened his mug of chicory with a lump of maple sugar and began to sip it before he sat down, standing with one foot on the bench and looking down across the parade ground, past the Aitch-Cue House, toward the river and the wall.
“If you’re coming around to Alex’s way of thinking—and mine—it won’t hurt you to admit it, son,” his father said.
He turned, looking at his father with the beginning of anger, and then grinned. The elders were constantly keeping the young men alert with these tests. He checked back over his actions since he had come out onto the porch.
To the table, sugar in his chicory, one foot on the bench, which had reminded him again of the absence of the hatchet from his belt and brought an automatic frown. Then the glance toward the gunsmith’s shop, and across the parade ground, at the houses into which so much labor had gone; the wall that had been built from rubble and topped with pointed stakes; the white slabs of marble from the ruined building that marked the graves of the First Tenant and the men of the Old Toon. He had thought, in that moment, that maybe his father and Alex Barrett and Reader Rawson and Tenant Mycroft Jones and the others were right—there were too many things here that could not be moved along with them, if they decided to move.
It would be false modesty, refusal to see things as they were, not to admit that he was the leader of the younger men, and the boys of the Irregulars. And last winter, the usual theological arguments about the proper chronological order of the Sacred Books and the true nature of the Risen One had been replaced by a violent controversy when Sholto Jiminez and Birdy Edwards had reopened the old question of the advisability of moving the Toon and settling elsewhere. He’d been in favor of the idea himself, but, for the last month or so, he had begun to doubt the wisdom of it. It was probably reluctance to admit this to himself that had brought on the strained feelings between himself and his old friend the gunsmith.
“I’ll have to drill the Irregulars, today,” he said. “Birdy Edwards has been drilling them, while we’ve been hunting. But I’ll go up and see Alex about a new hatchet and fixing my rifle. I’ll have a talk with him.”
He stepped forward to the edge of the porch, still munching on a honey-dipped piece of corn bread, and glanced up at the sky. That was a queer bird; he’d never seen a bird with a wing action like that. Then he realized that the object was not a bird at all.
His father was staring at it, too.
“Murray! That’s … that’s like the old stories from the time of the wars!”
But Murray was already racing across the parade ground toward the Aitch-Cue House, where the big iron ring hung by its chain from a gallows-like post, with the hammer beside it.
The stockaded village grew larger, details became plainer, as the helicopter came slanting down and began spiraling around it. It was a fairly big place, some forty or fifty acres in a rough parallelogram, surrounded by a wall of varicolored stone and brick and concrete rubble from old ruins, topped with a palisade of pointed poles. There was a small jetty projecting out into the river, to which six or eight boats of different sorts were tied; a gate opened onto this from the wall. Inside the stockade, there were close to a hundred buildings, ranging from small cabins to a structure with a belfry, which seemed to have been a church, partly ruined in the war of two centuries ago and later rebuilt. A stream came down from the woods, across the cultivated land around the fortified village; there was a rough flume which carried the water from a dam close to the edge of the forest and provided a fall to turn a mill wheel.
“Look; strip-farming,” Loudons pointed. “See the alternate strips of grass and plowed ground. Those people understand soil conservation. They have horses, too.”
As he spoke, three riders left the village at a gallop, through a gate on the far side. They separated, and the people in the fields, who had all started for the village, turned and began hurrying toward the woods. Two of the riders headed for a pasture in which cattle had been grazing, and started herding them, also, into the woods. For a while, there was a scurrying of little figures in the village below, and then not a moving thing was in sight.
“There’s good organization,” Loudons said. “Everybody seems to know what to do, and how to get it done promptly. And look how neat the whole place is. Policed up. I’ll bet anything we’ll find that they have a military organization, or a military tradition at least. We’ll have to find out; you can’t understand a people till you understand their background and their social organization.”
“Humph. Let me have a look at their artifacts; that’ll tell what kind of people they are,” Altamont said,
