The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change - By S. M. Stirling Page 0,26

someone . . . Someone or Something . . . was giving Mom lots of oomph.

“. . . like wrestling with a rotting corpse,” Juniper whispered.

Eilir gave her more water. Rest! she signed.

“I’m not a baby!”

The protest was feeble; her daughter smiled. You took care of me long enough. Let me return the favor.

John squatted as Juniper’s eyes fluttered closed; they looked sunken.

“We’ve got to clear out as soon as we’ve looted the wagons and put thermite on them fieldpieces. Thurston’s men respond bloody quick, and Corwin’s lent them more cavalry. Let me take her.”

He did, lifting the slight body as if she were a child’s straw dolly.

“Lighter than she was,” he said soberly. “She’s wearing herself down to a nub.”

We all are, Eilir signed.

She looked eastward for a moment, where the first hint of dawn was paling the stars over the mountains.

I just hope they’re coming.

That’s them, Ritva signed.

All Rangers learned Sign; the younger generation from their cradles. Partly that was because of Eilir Mackenzie, their cofounder with her anamchara Astrid, the Lady of the Rangers. And because it was simply so useful, almost as much as Sindarin . . . which few outside the Fellowship ever had the patience to learn either.

She peered carefully around the pine trunk, body and head shrouded in the hooded war-cloak with its mottled green-brown-white surface and loops for bits of pine twig.

I make it about two thousand in this bunch, she estimated. The tail of them is over about a mile thataway.

Damn, I’m still not as good with estimating distances as I was before I lost the eye, Mary replied fretfully. Oh, well, one more bit of payback, coming up.

Then she silenced herself by raising her monocular, tilting it cautiously to keep the bright pale morning sunlight from making a revealing glint on the lens. Or her palantír en-crûm, as it was called in Edhellen. Down on the coast where the Greyflood, the St. Croix that had been, merged with the Atlantic in a tangle of little islands, you could tell that spring was coming, even if it wasn’t quite there yet. Even the snow had a grainy, tired look.

Up here near the edge of the North Woods it might as well have been February, except that the days were a bit longer. Their breath smoked, and even the scent of the big tree’s sap was faded to a ghost of itself, the rough bark hard as cast iron beneath her gloved hands. The fresh snow glittered. More of it made a fog about the feet of the Bekwa column, kicked up by their snowshoes.

If you can call it a column, she thought snidely. I’m not expecting Bearkiller standards, but really!

The wild-men the Norrheimers called Bekwa—apparently only some of those gangs called themselves that, but it served—came on in no particular order, in clots and clumps and straggling files, a dozen here, a score there. Some of them grouped around standards on long poles—the antlers of a moose, the skulls of tigers and wolves and men, bits of leather or cloth scribed with crude symbols. A few carried the rayed sun of the CUT, gold on scarlet. Others just trudged; a few drew sleds, or walked behind others drawn by dogs or ponies. One of those keeled over as she watched, going to its knees and then struggling to rise as its owner beat it with a stick. Then it fell; the man drew a long knife, cut its throat and whipped off his crude steel cap to catch the blood. Hoots and yells rose as others crowded close to butcher the animal, many of them haggling off bits of raw meat to eat before it cooled. Inside five minutes nothing was left but the raw bloody skeleton and some of the guts. Others scrambled to add the sled’s cargo to their back-packs or toboggans.

They’re not organized, exactly, but they seem to get things done, Mary signed thoughtfully. They’re a lot better equipped than the Southside Freedom Fighters were when we first met them, too.

Ritva nodded. I don’t think they crashed quite as hard after the Change as happened in Illinois, she replied. Bit more space between the cities, maybe. Not good, but less absolutely bad.

All the Bekwa seemed to have a spear at least, solid weapons with heads ground down from pre-Change steel and well-hafted. Belts bore knives of various sizes, and hatchets. Quite a few had shields, usually the archetypical barbarian’s Stop sign nailed on a plank backing, although many