Faces. I think. That’s a woman’s face, isn’t it? With vines for hair. And that’s a fox or a coyote. And that’s . . .
The towers along the wall had pointed conical roofs sheathed in green copper and shaped like a witch’s hat, which was appropriate if the wilder rumors he’d heard were true. There were two hills showing above the ram parts, off west to the other side of the town. One was crowned by a huge circular building without walls, just pillars supporting a roof; he could see the outline of it because a great bonfire blazed there, and even at this distance he could catch a hint of eerie music and dancing figures. He crossed himself by conditioned reflex at the sight, but without real fear—he’d never been excessively pious, even before he became a wandering freelance.
Maybe the rumors are true, but nobody said they set on visitors here.
And it didn’t smell as bad as some towns did; just woodsmoke and barnyard, mostly. They probably had working sewers.
Four more towers around the gatehouse there . . . right, that’s where the bridge leads in.
The town was built in a U formed by the river, which meant a natural moat on three sides; an old but well kept pre Change bridge ran to the edge of the gate. A carved and painted statue twice life-size was set into the wall on either side, a beautiful woman with long golden hair standing on a seashell on the left, a naked man holding a bow and crowned with the sun on the right.
As his horse set a hoof on the pavement he heard a thunder of drums from the gatehouse towers, and a screeching, skirling drone that sent Boy to tossing his head and snorting, and made the hair rise along the back of Ingolf’s neck. His eyes were still flicking up to the source of that catamount wail when he halted before the gate guard.
“Never heard bagpipers before, eh?” one of them said with a chuckle. “It’s not someone biting a cat’s tail, honest. We’re bidding farewell to the Sun, you see.”
Ingolf smiled back and nodded. “Just startled me a bit.”
It was always sound common sense to be friendly with armed strangers, and anyway, the one who’d spoken was a good-looking woman about his own age, with a freck led snub-nosed face and lively brown eyes. Which was a little odd, but while fighting women weren’t numerous, they weren’t so rare that he’d never met one before ei ther. He’d campaigned with a couple who were pretty good, in fact, and one of them had been notably better than that.
He took off the hat, slapping it against his knee to shed the water, and incidentally to let them see his face in the circle of light cast by the big lamps. Looking him over was their job, and he didn’t have anything—well, not much—to hide.
They’d see a big man, a little over six feet and broad shouldered, with a pleasant enough face despite a scar on his forehead and a nose that had been broken and healed very slightly crooked; his close cropped beard and bowl-cut hair were light brown, his eyes dark blue, and his skin had the ruddy weathered look of someone who spent his time out-of-doors in all weather.
His gear was likewise plain and serviceable; a thigh length shirt of chain mail under his long leather duster, a yard of point-heavy curved shete hung from his belt, and a ten inch knife balancing it on the other side. A horseman’s short horn-and-sinew bow was cased at his left knee; his kettle helmet hung by the right, and a quiver was slung over his back, covered right now with a round shield painted dark brown with an orange wedge; a tomahawk had its three-foot handle through a loop at the back of his belt.
There was no glitter of gold or gems on hilt and buckle; unlike some fighting men he didn’t boast by wearing his portable wealth.
While he let them look he studied them in turn. Two of the six guards were women, in fact. They were dressed like the others, in pleated knee length skirts of wool tartan-checked in brown and dark green divided by slivers of dull orange, with boots and knee socks and an odd blanketlike stretch of the same material wrapped diago nally across their torsos and pinned over one shoulder with a brooch. Everyone here seemed to wear their hair shoulder-length or better, braided or loose, and the men sported mustaches; one example dangled down below the chin on either side.
Short swords and bucklers and long daggers rode at their waists. Four had yew longbows in their hands and quivers over their backs, and two held polearms: a seven-foot spear and an ugly thing like a great ax on a six-foot shaft whose blade tapered upward into a point, with a spike-hook on the rear. The man who held it was taller than Ingolf, and broader, and wore a beard the color of rust halfway down his chest. The spear and ax thing slanted crosswise to bar his way; behind them were the open leaves of massive metal-clad gates, and a raised portcullis. There were murder-holes in the arched ceil ing of the gate passage, and another set of gates on the inner side.
“Who are you, stranger? Where from, and what busi ness would you be doing in Sutterdown?” the young woman asked, with her thumb hooked in her sword belt.
Now that she was closer he could see she wore a ring of twisted gold around her neck, the open end over her throat ending in two knobs. She had the same accent he’d noticed in the village—the dun—where he’d stopped to buy bread and cheese and ask a few questions this morn ing, but stronger. Sort of a rolling lilt, and sometimes a strange choice or order of words; it sounded exotic and musical but not unpleasant, and easier to understand than some dialects that had grown up in out-of-the-way places.
“The name’s Ingolf Vogeler,” he said, conscious of how his flat hard Badger vowels would sound strange here. “Out of the east—”
“Not Pendleton, I hope,” one of the others said.
“Christ, no, and I didn’t like what I saw of the place when I passed through,” he said honestly.
Several of them laughed, nodding, and Ingolf went on: “I’m from a lot farther east than that. East of the Rockies and the plains.”
Best establish that I’m respectable, he thought, and went on: “My father is . . . was . . . Sheriff of Reads town in the Kickapoo country, in the Free Republic of Richland.”
At their blank looks he called up the memory of old maps and books from his brief schooldays and added, “Southern Wisconsin, if that means anything to you.”
“East of the Mississippi!” the woman who seemed to be in charge blurted, her eyes growing wide in surprise. “From the sunrise lands! Stranger, you have come a long way!”
They all looked impressed. Natural enough. People would get excited back to home if someone from here showed up. I’m a little impressed they all know where Wisconsin is. A lot of ordinary folks back home couldn’t name Oregon to save their lives.
“Yup,” he said. “I wander and do this and that—caravan guard, peace officer, some cowboying, or any honest work—I’m a passable carpenter and blacksmith, and I can handle horses.”
He touched the side of his duster, where it covered an inner pocket. “I can pay an entry tax, if you have one.”
“No need,” the woman said. “All honest travelers and traders are welcome here, but we have a short way with thieves or outland bandits—scourge for the back or Lochaber ax for the neck, as needed—so take warning.”
The hulking redhead with the gruesome bladed weapon grinned through his thatch of beard and hefted it, so that must be a Lochaber ax; he looked cheerful rather than menacing, though.
“Fair enough.” Ingolf nodded. It was what he’d heard about these Mackenzies along the way. “I’m a peaceable man, when I’m let be.”
Her voice took on a formal note as she continued: “Enter then and be welcome, guest within our walls, with the blessing of the Lady and the Lord, who hold dominion here in Sutterdown as the Foam-born Aphrodite and Apollo of the Unconquered Sun.”
Wow, he thought. The names were vaguely familiar, but . . . They are strange here!
Aloud: “Anywhere I can get food and lodging for my self and my beasts? And I could use a hot bath, by God! I was in Bend four days ago.”
The big man with the ax whistled; that was a hundred miles, a lot of it very cold this time of year and very steep in
any season.
“You’ve good horses, then, Ingolf the Wanderer! And weather luck in plenty.”
“Take my word for it and don’t try going back east that way until spring, unless you’ve got skis.”
Just then a voice shouted down from above, where the wild music had been. “Hey, will you be talking through till dawn, then? We can’t go home until you close the gate!”
The woman turned and shouted back: “Would you leave a stranger out in the cold, and on the holy eve of—”
He didn’t catch the next part; the word wasn’t one he’d ever heard before.
“—at that?”
She turned back to him. “I’m Saba Brannigan Mac kenzie, Mr. Vogeler; my sept’s totem is Elk. And my father keeps an inn here, and you’ll be very welcome. I’ll show you the way; we’re being relieved by the night guard now.”
She shook his hand as he dismounted; her brow went up as she felt the heavy swordsman’s callus around the inner edge of his thumb and forefinger, and his at the strength of her grip.
They walked through the gatehouse and into streets laid out in a grid, mark of a pre Change settlement. This one was better kept up and better lit than most and free of sewage stink, the houses neatly repaired and big lan terns on posts where the streets met, the folk looking well fed and prosperous if oddly dressed. But though it was fairly dark—nothing was so dark as a town at night, unless it was a windowless basement—he caught glimpses of things that did look strange.
A terra-cotta of a bearded face over a door with horns growing from its brow; the wood of a shutter carved into leafy tendrils that seemed to be looking at him somehow; a stone post with a head on top and a phallus jutting from its middle, wrought in knotwork; a set of running and laughing children wearing costumes fantastically shaped and painted . . .
He snapped his fingers. “It’s Halloween, or nearly!” he said. “Kids wear masks and things back home too, on Halloween.”
“Samhain, we call it,” she said, and spelled it out for him: she pronounced it soween.
He nodded and made a mental note of it; that was the word he’d heard her shout up to the tower. Then she smiled and winked at him and added, “You’ll find we take it, oh, a wee bit more seriously than your basic trick or-treat.”
Just then a snatch of song came from another group making its way down the middle of the street, youngsters nearly full-grown dancing amid a cold trilling of panpipes. And singing:
As the sun bleeds through the murk
’Tis the last day we shall work
For the Veil is thin and the spirit wild
And the Crone is carrying Harvest’s child!
A girl led them, with a half-mask shaped like a raven’s head covering most of her face. Her black-feathered cloak flared in the darkness as she danced a twirling mea sure and beat a little drum with snake quick taps of her fingers. Saba made a sign with her forefinger and joined in the chorus:
Samhain!
Turn away
Run ye back to the light of day
Samhain!
Hope and pray
All ye meet are the gentle fae.
Then the raven-masked woman stopped in front of Ingolf, and he had to check to avoid running into her. The dancer’s eyes were wide and fixed behind the slits of the mask, holding his locked for a long moment; they were alight with a combination of fear and ecstasy and forgetfulness of self that was not quite like anything he’d ever met before. It made him shiver a little and suppress an impulse to cross himself.
The rest of her group surrounded him, masked as horse and boar, dragon and wolf and elk. She sang again, swaying and beating counterpoint to the words:
Stranger, do you have a name?
Tell us all from whence you came!
You seem more like god than man—
Has curse or blessing come to this clan?
Ingolf wondered for a moment whether he was sup posed to answer, and then she danced away again, lead ing her band with their leaping shadows huge against a wall:
Samhain!
Turn away
Run ye back to the light of day
Samhain!
Hope and pray
All ye meet are the gentle fae.
When the band had vanished around a corner Ingolf swore quietly and shook himself. Saba smiled at him.
“Told you,” she said merrily.
He asked a few questions; in his experience, that got you further than talking about yourself, at least to start with, and it never hurt to learn. He found that the odd pleated skirts were kilts and the over-the shoulder blan ket things were called plaids; that the ring around her neck was called a torc and that couples exchanged them when they married; that she was a widow with two chil dren, her man killed on the western coast by Haida raid ers a year ago; that she took turns with wall and gate duty and practiced with arms, above all with the longbow, as all fit adults did here; and that she was the eldest of three sisters, worked at her father’s inn, and kept his books on that and a vineyard and fulling-mill the family owned.
She asked in turn, “What brought you so far from home? We don’t hear anything but fourth-hand rumors from that far east.”
“I didn’t get on well with my elder brother,” he said, which covered a good deal of bitterness. “My father died and my brother became Sheriff of Readstown, and we quarreled. So I joined the Bossman’s army, when we Richlanders sent men west to help Marshall against the Sioux.”
For a moment he fell silent amid a wash of memory: the shusssh of arrows over the tilts of the wagons in the dark amid the stale smell of dying campfires, a sudden roaring brabble, thunder of hooves and screams of surprise and pain. The panic-stricken tightness of his grip on the rawhide wound hilt of his shete as he ran half-naked through the night away from his fallen tent, slashing at figures that seemed to spring out of the ground before him, fighting his way towards the horse lines.
The ugly shock up his arm as the edge cut muscle and cracked bone, the first time and so different from a practice post. Glaring eyes and bared teeth, painted faces and horned headdresses and the long knives in their hands glinting ruddy with the lights of sudden fires. Voices shrieking:
“Hoo’hay! Hoo’hay! It’s a good day to die, Lakota! Kye—eeee—Kye! Hoo’hay!”
Then the guttural “Hoon! Hoon!” of the blood call as the blades went in, the sick-making butcher’s cleaver sound of metal hammering home in flesh, the frenzied screaming of a man scalped alive.
“That war took longer than anyone thought it would,” he said carefully.
“They usually do,” Saba said, with a grim smile.
“And afterwards I couldn’t seem to settle down, somehow. Went east and west, north and south—to the dead cities, often, doing salvage.”
By then they were in the stables attached to her fa ther’s inn; the tavern was a rambling two-story affair seemingly knocked together from several pre Change buildings, but the stables were newer, made of beam and plank with brick floors. He liked what he saw of the ac commodation for the beasts, and he was pickier about that than about where he slept himself. Boy and Billy went into stalls, and he rubbed them down carefully, put on dry blankets and saw to the fodder—good timothy-clover hay without any musty smell, a hot cooked mash of oats and beans, and fresh water.
It looked like the muck was shoveled out regularly, with fresh sawdust and straw laid down; he checked their feet, and made a note to have Bill reshod—the one on his left rear had looked good enough in Bend, but it was a little loose now and definitely getting thin. Pavement wasn’t kind to hooves, especially when years of frost and storm had roughened it.
“You boys rest up. You can take it easy for a while,” he said, rubbing Boy’s forehead as the horse butted at him. “You both earned it.”
“You know how to look after horses,” Saba said with approval, as she and a teenage boy helped him with the tack and the loads from the packsaddle.
Ingolf grinned. “You have to, if you want the horse
s to look after you. I had to push these two fellas a lot harder than I liked, but it was that or get stuck in Bend or Sis ters for the winter. I got Boy in the Nebraska country and he’s the best all-round horse I’ve ever had.”
She nodded, handed him a room key with a number on the wooden tag that dangled from it, and pointed to a door.
“Bathhouse is through there. Bran here will show you the manner of it hereabouts; the stairs on the right past there go to the rooms. Come down those and turn left to get to the main room. See you there—you’ll want to wash up before you eat.”
He nodded, though in fact he was so hungry that it was a toss-up. But they seemed a cleanly lot here; so was he, when he had a choice, which sometimes you didn’t if you were a wandering man. By the time he stowed his gear in the room and finished his bath—they soaped down and scrubbed with buckets of steaming-hot water poured over the head first here, before getting into the tub to soak—and dressed in his good suit of blue denim jacket and pants and roll necked sweater from the pack saddle, he felt a lot more human and ready to face the Sheaf and Sickle’s common room.
And I’m hungry enough to eat an ox, live.
Luckily he’d managed to keep clear of nits despite being on the road for weeks, and didn’t need to use the special and very smelly soap provided. That did make him hope the beds would be free of biting company, another thing you had to get used to on the road.
He settled in a booth and Saba brought him a big mug of hot cider, to get the last of the chill out. Her father came with her; he looked formidable still despite the broad streaks of white in his dark beard and the kettle belly under his leather bib apron. His grin showed a full set of teeth and the hairy legs beneath his kilt were like grizzled tree trunks, even though he must have been a man grown and then some at the Change, which was a thing you saw less with every passing year.