Eric Flint's Blog, page 242

The Seer – Snippet 33

The Seer – Snippet 33

As it came near, Dirina and Amarta quickly stood and stepped back behind the rock. Dirina pushed the excited Pas back behind her as he struggled to break free of her grip. He reached out his other hand around his mother to the horse who had walked around the rock to reach him. Horse lips and small fingers met before Dirina managed to get between them, Amarta hobbling over to help.

“Stop that!” she told the horse, who swung its head to stare back at her.

“Ho! What do you do here?” One of the tribesmen strode over. He glared at Dirina and Amarta as if they had somehow caused this problem. A smallish man, his light brown hair nearly the same shade as his skin, he turned on the animal, speaking softly to it with words Amarta did not understand. The horse snorted, tossed its head slightly and turned back to Pas again, snuffling. Pas held his hand out, again blocked by his mother. Pas giggled.

Now the man made a soft sound, a sort of warbling, interspersed with a clicking. When that didn’t work, he put a hand on the side of the horse and pushed, with no obvious result.

At last the horse turned, slowly, but in the other direction, to take it closer to Amarta. She reached out a hand, fingers trailing across the neck and soft, warm hair, as it turned the rest of the way around. Somehow the animal conveyed an amused insolence even as it returned to the wagons to rejoin its similarly furred companions. With a snort of frustration, hands in the air, the man followed.

“‘Bye horse,” Pas said.

A tiny, wet animal colt trembling in the early dawn, dark brown with pale tan stripes, lips hungrily searching upwards.

“Oh”, Amarta blurted. “She’s pregnant.”

Then, despite the pain and everything that had happened that day, she laughed in delight. A future flash of something not painful, threatening, or about to hurt her — she hadn’t realized it was possible.

The tribesman stopped suddenly, looking between Amarta and the horse. He walked back to Amarta.

“Why do you say that?” he demanded.

“Take us with you and I’ll tell you.”

He shook his head, then went back to his wagons. The larger gray horses were harnessed, and the tribespeople seemed ready to leave. The man and woman mounted their striped horses in a fast, fluid motion.

“It’s a colt, the foal,” Amarta called out to him, in a final desperate attempt. The man glanced at her, then leaned toward the woman, speaking, head motioning back at Amarta and Dirina.

In truth, Amarta wasn’t sure about that, but it would be almost a year before the mare birthed, whereas the hunter would track them here in — hours? A day?

Soon. Too soon.

The man turned in the saddle to look at her again for a moment. The wagons were leaving, the striped horses following. In minutes they were all gone.

Amarta turned her head to look at Dirina, wiping her eyes of tears.

“It was a good try, Ama,” Dirina said, her arm around her shoulders.

The riverbank and dock, busy and full only a little bit ago were now empty and quiet. The sun was dipping down behind the trees. Dirina pulled Pas onto her lap and held him tight.

“Ama.” Her sister’s voice was soft.

Where should they go, Dirina wanted to know. The sky was now awash in red and gold and deepening blue. In another hour, perhaps two, the hunter would wake. Go to the farmhouse.

The nightmare would begin again.

She sought vision, but it wasn’t answering, the door shut and barred. She was too tired. Everywhere she looked she saw bitter failure.

“We’ll be okay,” she said with as much certainty as she could pretend, though she doubted Dirina was much convinced.

Perhaps vision would return after she’d rested. Or perhaps only when she was about to be captured, or her life threatened.

Pas wanted down again. Sighing as if defeated, Dirina let him go. He raced around the rock on which they sat.

“Here, give me your foot,” Dirina said.

Amarta lay her foot in her sister’s lap. Dirina turned it gently, and Amarta yelped with pain.

“Sprained,” Dirina said wearily. “Then you walked another hour. No surprise it is swollen and red.” She rubbed it gently for a time. Then: “We must go somewhere, Ama.”

Amarta struggled to think of what to say, found nothing. She struggled to her feet, pain lancing through her leg as she put weight on it.

“Ama, where –”

“I don’t know, but we can’t stay here.”

They made their way to the main road, Amarta’s step slow and labored. Dirina insisted and Amarta let her take her pack, put it on top of her own. With Pas in one hand, she offered an arm to Amarta to steady her. Amarta refused, limping forward. Was she not already enough of a burden?

The main road was in shadow. Through shutters she could see flickers of lamps, stoves. Smoke rose from chimneys.

Not for her, a home and safety.

Pushing to walk faster, her foot collapsed under her. She fell painfully to the dirt road, hitting an already bruised knee, curling around the pain.

For a moment she let herself weep, watched the drops fall into the fine dirt, making small puffs where they landed. If she could be so small, as small as an ant, she could sleep right there in the dirt, hidden from sight. Dirina knelt down next to her, squeezed her shoulder.

Every moment he was closer. Beyond her not to cry, perhaps, but not quite beyond her to stand. She struggled to her feet.

Her sister’s encouraging smile was forced and fragile. Leaning on Dirina she limped forward. One step. Then another, putting as little weight on the bad foot as possible.

They would walk until she dropped again, she supposed. And then she would stay there until he found her.

The sound of a horse’s hard gallop brought her head up. Dirina gently pulled her to the side of the road to get out of the way.

The striped horse, the dusky-skinned woman atop, pulled up fast in front of them and stopped, as if showing off. The woman slipped down off the side, strode to Amarta, bringing her sharp nose right up to Amarta’s face.

She smelled like horse, Amarta noticed, as she stumbled painfully back in surprise.

“You say pregnant,” the woman said. “You say this. Why?” She glanced sidelong at her horse, who looked back. “Are you a healer?”

Amarta wondered if she could pretend to that. “No.”

“You lie, then.”

“No!”

“Say then, how you know.”

“Take us with you,” Amarta countered.

“You run from something. Someone,” the woman guessed.

Dirina and Amarta said nothing. Their silence was answer enough.

“The king’s Rusties?”

“The what?”

“Soldiers of the King. In red and black.”

A knife at her eye. A blade at her throat. But her hunter had worn no red.

“Yes,” Dirina said at the same moment that Amarta was adamantly shaking her head no.

The woman hissed wordlessly in response, gave each of them a look. To Amarta she said, “She has been changed this last week. So it may be true, what you say. Did you guess this?”

“No.”

“You say a colt. You can predict this for all animals?”

“Yes,” Dirina answered determinedly. But the woman ignored her, looking the question at Amarta.

Amarta tried to remember the many times she had foreseen a baby. Goats. A few cows. Human children. She had not always been right about the baby’s sex. People wanted to be sure, but babies themselves weren’t always sure, not until later. Sometimes not even then.

“Sometimes,” she answered honestly.

At this Dirina gave Amarta an incredulous look. “No. She sees things truly.”

The woman gestured at Pas. “Can he be silent, the boy?”

At this both she and Dirina nodded together. But it was Pas, smiling up at the woman with his beautiful smile who seemed to convince her. She looked down at him, considered for a long moment, petted his head, then nodded. “Come with, then.”

Seeing Amarta limp forward, she added: “You ride.” With that, she picked Amarta up, surprising her with how strong she was. Before Amarta quite realized what had happened, she had been set atop the small, striped horse. The woman swung up behind. The horse turned an eye to Amarta, then swung her head back and gave a soft neigh that almost sounded like a laugh.

“They wait for us,” the woman said to Dirina, who now had Pas in her arms, packs on her back. “We must hurry.”

 

1635: A Parcel of Rogues – Snippet 27

1635: A Parcel of Rogues – Snippet 27

Robert did that right well, too, stepping up and explaining about the dock-workers in the Hanseatic yards at King’s Lynn, the main seaport for the east of England which was about fifty miles down the Great Ouse from Huntingdon. They’d got the word about the Committees via sailors from Hamburg, and organised. There were the beginnings of a union movement among the dockers there, seeking better pay and conditions. While they’d yet to call a strike of any kind, they’d made a little progress in one way or another, mostly by furnishing the port’s bosses with excuses for being behind with their Ship Money payments to the king. Of course, that wasn’t the limit of their activism, and the fact that the Great Ouse was navigable as far as St. Neots, a good fifteen miles upstream from where they were now in St. Ives, meant they had plenty of reach.

Robert had connections with King’s Lynn through school; one of his friends was from there and had been full of news of the new politics during term-time. They had even formed a “Young Committee” before the schoolmasters had shut it down with beatings all round, at which time they went underground.

When the king’s tyranny had come to Robert’s own home — his exact words, and Darryl fought hard to keep his face straight, because for this little kid it was serious, damn it — he’d prevailed on the friend, who he was careful not to name, for an introduction. He and Robert had made sure their younger brother and sisters were safe with relatives and then gone downriver. On the way, they’d made more Committee connections, this time among the bargees and breedlings, who liked the Committee for the work they were doing organising against the undertakers who were messing with the downstream navigation of the Ouse for profit.

In the end, Robert had ended up getting more help from the bargees and wherrymen that navigated the Great Ouse. They had more reason to know the name of Cromwell than the dockers of King’s Lynn to start with, and a few requests sent back via the North Sea trade to Hamburg had brought histories that mentioned the Lord of the Fens. They had relatives among the breedlings of the fens, and there were plenty of places for a family to hide among them when the king’s men came looking. Which, two weeks ago, they had done.

“It’s so good you’ve come back, Father,” Robert said, when he felt he’d given all the information he could, “because I don’t know what to do next. Everyone has helped so much, but if this scoundrel Finnegan begins to burn more houses, we shall have to give ourselves up or bring more destruction on one and all.”

“That is how he means you to feel,” Cromwell said, the growl in his voice growing deeper and fierier.

“Seems to me there ought to be a reckoning with this Finnegan,” Darryl said. “I don’t think much of a man that’ll take orders from the likes of King Charles anyway, but chasing after kids to get a man to turn himself in? I ain’t having that, not on my watch.”

“We are, then, of one mind,” Lawrence put in. “His commission as a justice is valid on the face of it, but with him thwarted, he’ll get no help from the real justices of this parish, or any other surrounding.”

“It might be that Leebrick and his fellows would do to distract him?” Cromwell suggested. They’d all talked it over the night before, and the three mercenaries had said they’d be happy to oblige Finnegan with a first-class wild-goose chase, if there was a ship waiting somewhere to take them off at the last minute. It was on the list to raise in the next radio window.

“Father, if I might counsel my elders, it seems to me that the end we must seek is getting Bridget, Richard and Libby away to safety.” Robert Cromwell sounded a lot older than his years, now, decades older than the boy who’d been delighted to see his father only minutes before. “It seems to me that keeping them safe puts good friends at hazard, and the work of it is work that does not serve to bring down the king.”

“Does it come to that?” Steward said, sharply. “His tyranny falls lightly on most, even among the godly. Is there not still sanctuary in Holland for such as we?”

“All of us?” Cromwell asked. “You might flee, with your wealth, Sir Henry. Once I might have, but all my goods and money are gone from me. Even now I might, with help from the United States.”

“Pretty sure you’d get asylum,” Gayle put in, “and the fact you’d be coming in with me would seal the deal.”

“True enough,” Darryl said, “and even if it weren’t official-like, things are still pretty wild and woolly even in Magdeburg. Long as you didn’t make trouble or look like you were a spy or anything, folk would leave you alone. Lots of work to be had for a guy that wants to live quiet-like.” It would solve Darryl’s problem entirely, of course, if this Oliver Cromwell was simply, say a USE Army officer. He was supposed to be pretty useful in command of cavalry, and what harm could he do then?

Cromwell held up a hand. “Aye, well enough for me and Sir Henry here. But what of the Sewsters, their home and all their goods burnt for taking over the farm after I was gone and giving employ to my sons? What of them? And lower than them, without the ranks of the gentry? Sir Henry, you know I speak my mind on behalf of the poor. Spoke it, indeed, before the privy council. I might have spake uncouthly, and said my sorries for the words of passion, but I took back not a word of the substance.”

Sir Henry sighed. “There’s that much, Oliver, I’ll give you. And, yes, as gentry we have in charge the common weal of the poor folk of our parishes, as best we may. But such a step –?”

The man’s face was pleading, but resigned. He’d surely be horrified if anyone were to quote scripture about letting cups pass from him, shocked that his own agonising be compared even jokingly to that of Jesus, but there was the same sense about the man that, if he must, he’d drain it to the bitter dregs. And Darryl knew there was really not a lot that smart guys like that wouldn’t stop at, if you convinced them to fight.

“Such a step, Sir Henry. We must take it. God’s providence has placed it before us, will we or no. You think that man would stop at foisting a false justice on just one parish?” Cromwell spat the words false justice with a venom. You could say this for the man, Darryl thought, once he had hold of what was right and wrong, he didn’t hold anything back. Even, as he’d taken to, referring to King Charles only as that man didn’t carry the same glow of scorn.

“Well, let us take it, then. Will we raise rebellion here, or take time to prepare?”

“If the thing’s to be done, Sir Henry, let it be done properly. You’re the man of letters here, I pray you will write many letters. Let the whole country know what is being done in the king’s name. Aye, and not by evil counsellors, by the king. We’ll not give him even that figleaf to hide his shame.”

“And when he orders the justices of the peace to put me in the stocks for seditious libel?”

“May God grant that by then others are repeating your words. And if there is an ounce of persuasion in me, there’ll be stout lads around you in the stocks to ensure your stay in them is comfortable.”

“Hang on,” Gayle said, “if they’re going to prosecute you for libel doesn’t it have to be false?”

“Not in matters of sedition, Mistress Mason,” Sir Henry said. “Sedition’s a criminal libel, and for that, the greater the truth, the greater the libel.”

“That’s nuts!” Darryl blurted out.

“If you mean madness of the rankest sort, I heartily agree, Mister McCarthy. I can only hope there are enough holy fools in England to raise a more wholesome lunacy against it.” Sir Henry smiled as he said it, plainly pleased with the turn of phrase.

At that moment, the sound of gunfire rattled the leaded windows.

“What the hell?” Darryl snarled, grabbing Vicky and roughly shoving her down out of sight. He leaned against the jamb, keeping as much cover as he could while rummaging down the back of his jacket for the pistol he kept in its belt holster back there. “Sounded like muskets,” he said.

“Muskets, aye,” Cromwell said, taking the other side of the window with his own revolver already out. He’d had a small amount of practise with the thing, but was far more likely to do any mayhem that happened with the heavy straight sword, of a kind he called a back-sword, that he’d bought just before they left Diss.

Whoever had fired first, the answering shots were sharp and rapid. Two harsh, flat, quick cracks, like the whip of a goddess of pain. Whoever it was, Julie Mackay was firing back.

 

1635: A Parcel of Rogues – Snippet 26

1635: A Parcel of Rogues – Snippet 26

Chapter 13

“Daddy!” Young Robert Cromwell might have been a mature thirteen years of age, and Darryl could remember how much he’d cared about not being a little kid at that age, but the sight of his father had turned him back to about eight. His younger brother, at only twelve, hadn’t even been that restrained, and had simply leapt wordlessly into his father’s arms.

It was, truth to tell, a heart-warming sight — and Darryl decided it was one he was going to turn his back on for a while. As a family, the Cromwells had been through some major grief over the last year or so, and if they needed some time for hugs and, quite possibly, tears, it wasn’t for him to intrude. He wandered over to the other side of the room, where a nice leaded window gave a view of a garden that was being wet by a faint drizzle. Vicky had picked a spot there, doing her best to make polite conversation with Sir Henry, who seemed to Darryl to be a gloomy old geezer.

He’d reason to be gloomy, of course, what with the burnings and the political situation, but the stern and Puritan religion probably wasn’t helping. He was of an age with Cromwell, to whom he was a distant relative — there’d been another of those complicated explanations — and the pair of them had been at college at the same time. They’d been pretty different characters, from the look of things. Cromwell had talked of his time at university mostly in terms of riding and singlestick and football — from the sounds of it, a completely different game to English soccer and a lot more like the football Darryl knew.

Except, possibly, more violent, played without padding or helmets, with only the sketchiest of rules and occasionally resulting in fatalities. Oh, and the ball was made out of a bull’s scrotum, just to make sure it was as manly as possible. He’d also taken part in Camp-ball, that they sometimes called Camping. And that was, from the sounds of it, nothing but a straight-out fight with a ball in there somewhere, with rules that sounded exactly like they’d been come up with by guys who got kicked in the head a lot.

In short, Cromwell had been a college jock. And he’d only been there a year before his father’s death meant he had to go home to support his family.

Sir Henry, on the other hand, was working on a book of theology — a table where the window would light it was covered in papers and a large pot of quills, had finished his first degree and gone back for another, and didn’t have even a quarter of the brawn Cromwell was carrying around. About the only thing they had in common was their local accent and that revolutionary streak that seemed to go so well with being Puritan country gentlemen. They’d be mannerly and polite about it, but they’d throw Molotov cocktails all the same, if push came to shove.

“Young Mistress Short tells me you and she are to be married,” Sir Henry said, by way of including Darryl in the talk. “From all she tells me, you will be very well together, very well indeed. Now you are here, perhaps I might show you somewhat from the future.” He reached over to the table full of theological notes, and picked up a small book that, Darryl could see, showed every sign of being bound in Grantville. “There is a minister in Grantville, the Reverend Green, who has been publishing the writings of the godly, quietly and without great circumstance. He says the spur to it came from Ussher, in Ireland, who is unsound on some details but a good scholar for all that. I have been much exercised lately by the proper and godly business of family, and this came to my attention. From a man who has not been born yet, but seems to have been moved by a spirit of such charity and love he cannot but have been a godly man.”

Darryl had managed to grasp that the Puritans, while they acknowledged the name, preferred to refer to themselves as the godly. “Puritan” had started out as an insulting nickname for them, and a lot of them weren’t comfortable with it for that reason, even though quite a few revelled in it as an in-your-face defiance of the pressure to conform. It sounded like Sir Henry was one of the first lot.

He was flicking through the book. “Here it is!” he said, with the nearest Darryl had seen to pleasure on his face so far. He read aloud, “‘the woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be loved.’ — I hope my own wife has as much from me. And it is good advice, and an excellent reading of that part of scripture. Do you talk to Oliver about his own dear Elizabeth, you will hear the like. They had, by God’s grace, a great affection between them.”

Darryl nodded. “He’s told me about her. It’s been … moving.” Fortunately, the only other up-timer here was Gayle, so the chances of him getting mocked for that level of seriousness were slim. And it looked like Vicky approved entirely, as well. He figured she’d probably not mentioned the use they’d been putting inn rooms to over the last few weeks to Sir Henry, who’d probably Not Approve. Although Darryl was learning, fast, not to jump to conclusions about that sort of thing.

For the moment, Oliver and himself and Vicky and Gayle and everyone else was scattered about the country watching the approaches to Slepe Hall, the Lawrence family residence. They’d been careful about it, as the farmhouse Cromwell had rented was literally just along the road, and they knew that was under watch. They’d come out before dawn and done their best to look inconspicuous. The horses left with a livery in St. Ives proper, a couple of miles to the north, they’d walked here to arrive just as the staff of the manor house were running up to speed on the day. Fortunately, part of that involved getting hearty coal fires lit, which was a great relief after walking through precisely the kind of rain that wet a man most efficiently.

“Father tells me you’re an up-timer,” Oliver Junior said, having broken away from where his older brother and father had sat down to discuss something in low, urgent-sounding tones. Darryl was vaguely aware that there had been a brief session of kneeling in prayer, and now that was over they seemed to be attending to business.

“That I am, kid,” Darryl said, “West Virginia born and raised, right up to the year two thousand. Now I’m back here for a spell. Hear you sent some bad guys off to an ambush?”

The kid seemed like a good one, to Darryl, and it was purely a damned shame that he’d had to grow up so fast. His biggest causes for complaint ought to be schoolwork and chores, not the fact that he was on the lam after his dad had been thrown in the Tower and his mom and little brother shot dead.

“That was Robert,” Oliver said, “he’s been talking to the Committees of Correspondence!”

Darryl grinned. “That sounds like a fine idea he had,” he said, and meant every word. If the CoCs had started in England, between them and the Puritans he figured His Majesty King Charles was in for a hot time of it. And if the revolution wasn’t just the Puritans, there was every reason to think that there wouldn’t be quite the same amount of nastiness happening to Ireland. The Plantations had been about shitting on the Catholic Irish, after all, and if the Committees were involved and making damned sure their freedom of religion platform was part of the new government, things would turn out at least that much for the better.

“It might be, and it might not,” Cromwell senior said, joining the conversation along with Robert and, now, Gayle. “I know little of these men, and much of the kind of mischief young men get up to without proper governance.” There was a rumble of suspicion in his voice that reminded all present, Darryl included, that whatever Cromwell’s own revolutionary sentiments, he was still Dad around here, and don’t forget it.

Darryl shrugged. “I can tell you about Grantville and Magdeburg Committees,” he said, “on account of I know a lot of the guys involved. Gayle, too,” he added, waiting for the nod from her, “but the thing is, what kind of Committee you get in any place depends on who’s doing the organising. There was something getting going in Italy, last I heard, and that was different again from what the guys in Magdeburg were up to. There’s sort of a rumor there’s some undercover ones in France and the Spanish Netherlands, and they’ll be different again. Robert, why don’t you tell us what you know?”

 

The Seer – Snippet 32

The Seer – Snippet 32

“I will do what you do to earn money,” Amarta said.

“No,” Dirina said, shocked. “You will not.”

“Why not?”

“You’re a child.”

“Come spring, Diri, I’m of age.”

“Years are not enough. Your first time should not be — like that. It should be someone you like. Someone who likes you.”

“What do you mean, first time?”

An exhale. Then, softly, “You do not need to know.”

“How long until I bleed with the moon, Diri? That, if not my springs, certainly means –”

“It doesn’t. It means nothing.”

“I’m not a child.”

“You certainly are. This would not be safe for you.”

“It’s safe for you?” Amarta swallowed her frustration. “I’d know if it was safe. I’d be able to see before it happened.”

“Would you, now? Really? Then why are we on the run again? You see danger when it’s right on top of you, Ama. With a man, that’s far too late.”

Amarta wanted to say that it was more complicated than that, to explain that the hunter after them, whose eyes she had finally seen, was more dangerous than a single man ought to be. Then she looked at her sister’s thin mask of confidence, saw worry and terror churning beneath, and decided not to. “All right,” she agreed. “But I won’t let us go hungry again.”

“We won’t,” Dirina said. Another empty promise, but she would not gainsay it. Her sister was doing all she could to get them from one moment to the next.

Despite that vision had told her he would sleep for hours yet, she looked around furtively at the dark forest.

She would not, she resolved, push vision away again. Thinking of the forest and her hunter, she realized that she hadn’t, really. The visions were inescapable. Like so many things in her life. Like having to leave places that might have been home.

A sudden scratching sound made her jerk around, setting her heart to speeding, but it was only a squirrel, leaping from one tree to the next, now gone into the upper reaches of the thick canopy.

She hoped that the inescapable things in life did not include her hunter.

#

When they reached the Sennant River they turned along the road, walking past small houses and fenced pastures. Goats and sheep looked curiously at them as they passed.

Nesmar Port was little more than a sloping bank of stony shore and a wooden dock. People, horses and wagons were clustered thickly, some leaning on barrels, voices loud and gestures wide over piles of sacks and stacked crates. Two well-dressed women stood together, consulting a board of parchment notes as a donkey laden with overstuffed saddle bags was futilely attempting to back up from between a stack of crates topped with cages of chickens. Someone began to laugh, someone else to call loudly to children who were staring and pointing at a pair of small, oddly striped brown, black, and tan-colored horses.

Amarta breathed relief. They had not missed the barge after all. At a large flat rock she sat gratefully, dropping her stick to the stones underfoot. She crossed her ankle over her other knee, rubbing it to try to ease the pain.

“Ama,” Dirina hissed.

Her sister’s gaze was intent, face tight. Amarta followed her look across the assembled crowd, not seeing the cause of her alarm. “What?”

A single carthorse was pulling a wagon of hay bundles slowly up and away from the water toward the road. Elsewhere a man hefted a pack over his back. Two small, dusky-skinned men from some eastern tribe were securing a wagon cover.

Amarta felt her stomach drop. “Oh no,” she breathed.

The man with the large bundle across his shoulders, his three children pulling a handcart behind him, gave her a sympathetic look as he passed. “Sad it is, but you just now missed it.”

“No! Are you sure?” Dirina asked.

He pointed downriver. In the distance was a slowly receding barge, laden with wagons, boxes, animals, people.

The man’s children looked at the two of them as they dragged the handcart behind him. Amarta saw how their gaze took them in. They would be remembered.

“Up now,” Pas insisted, arms on his mother’s leg, looking at her intently. She sighed heavily, pulled him into her lap.

The weight of the day, of this latest failure, settled heavily on Amarta.

Open and covered wagons were hitched to horses, packs slung over backs and into handcarts. The donkey escaped his temporary trap and was now making his way up to the road.

Leaving. They were all leaving.

“What do we do?” Dirina asked, her hopeless tone tearing at Amarta.

Would the hunter come here directly from the farm? Surely there was the rest of the countryside to search. He might go another way.

No, the barge was obvious. She could too clearly imagine him walking through the riverside village, asking questions.

“A woman and child and a limping girl dressed as a boy? Oh, yes, I saw them. They missed the afternoon barge. They went that way.”

“Do you think,” Dirina asked, almost timidly, “we could — go back?”

To the farm, she meant. The only place Amarta was sure they could not go. “No,” she said soberly.

“Then…?”

She wanted to sleep it all away, like a bad dream. Wake to Enana calling her to the fields.

The final crates and barrels were loaded onto wagons, bolts of cloth and cages of rabbits rearranged on top. The sky was darkening. Everyone wanted to get where they were going before nightfall.

Nightfall. When he would wake.

Another moment she put off looking to vision, then another. That part of her was sore as well. At last she forced herself to look and listen to what could be.

Nothing but the chattering of people, the crunching of small stones under foot, hoof, and wheel. The smell and hush of river. High clouds caught the first hint of sunset.

Focus, she told herself sternly, closing her eyes.

When she found it, it was buried and crusted over, like some rusted-shut metal door that screamed to open even a crack. She fought back, pushed the question into this sorest part of herself.

Could they wait for the next day’s barge? Find somewhere to hide for the night? Was it possible?

The smallest flash came to her. Barely a breath.

Darkness. Rough motion. The smell of horse strong under her, head pounding. Pas and Dirina gone.

“No,” she breathed, pushing it away, not wanting to know more.

“Then where?” Dirina asked. Almost a plea. “Ama, we have to –”

“I don’t know!” she said loudly.

An elderly woman gave her a reproachful look as she and her adult son, judging by his similar looks, slowly walked by. The man was breathing hard, carrying a pack as well as holding his mother’s arm to steady her as they ascended the bank.

A slight depression in the ground, near a flowering plantain at the edge of a road. A leather-clad knee dropped down by it, fingers lightly brushing the dirt.

“Grandmother,” Amarta said quickly, rewarded by another glare from the woman. Amarta struggled painfully to her feet, picked up the stick at her feet. “Please take this for your travels.” She held it out. The two of them paused, the woman’s expression softening.

The man nodded gratefully, took the stick and handed it to his mother.

“Thank you, child,” the woman said.

“Blessings of the season to you,” Amarta replied politely.

Dirina looked a question at her. Amarta looked toward the river.

Only a couple of large covered wagons remained. A dusky-skinned woman checked the harnesses of a team of four gray carthorses while the other of the tribespeople loaded up bags into the other wagon.

Standing apart from them were the striped horses, untethered, unhaltered, not even bridle or reins. Their markings were strange, with brown and orange stripes wrapping their wheat-colored hides, stretching from the tricolor fall of their tails up their backs through their manes to their heads, the fingers of stain reaching across their faces like some sort of midwinter festival mask. It was as if the chestnut-and-ginger-colored lines had been painted on their backs and sides by someone with more enthusiasm than skill.

“Mama, look: horses!” Pas cried loudly, pointing at them. At this outburst, one of the horses looked at them. Dirina kept a tight hold of Pas’s hand as he tried to pull away to run to them.

“What are they?” Amarta asked.

Mutely, Dirina shook her head.

One of the striped horses turned in their direction and began walking toward the rock on which they sat.

“Diri…”

 

1635: A Parcel of Rogues – Snippet 25

1635: A Parcel of Rogues – Snippet 25

“Aye, I know, and Finnegan can bloody choke on it, him with his justice’s commission with the ink wet on it and all his talk of misprision. Prison-break’s no felony if you weren’t in there lawfully in the first place, and His Royal Majesty can buy all the bench and their dogs too for all I care, it won’t change the law of the land in the matter. Be that as it may, Sir Henry saw a roof over the three little ones before that day was out, and Elizabeth and poor young Richard decently buried at St. Ives. The headstone says Bourchier, after Elizabeth’s people. They paid for the stone, once they’d heard, and thought it best not to have your name on it in case the king decided they be disinterred for ignominious burial.”

“He’d do that?” Darryl couldn’t contain himself.

“Why take the chance?” Pedley answered. “We knew he was all set to carry on like some French tyrant once poor Oliver here was taken. Perhaps we should have seen it coming with the refusal of parliament and all these novel imposts he kept making, but how would we know that he’d take French gold and hire foreign troops? We’ll not be caught unawares twice.”

Darryl was getting a serious case of mental whiplash, here. He shouldn’t have, of course. Portly old Squire Nicholas, here, was exactly the kind of guy who, a few years from now, would saddle up and go to war against his own king over royal misdeeds not nearly so bad as what had actually been done. He might look like a genial old soak with his drink and a warm fire and a comfortable chair, but like Gayle, he’d fool you. Sat right there in that easy chair with his boots off, looking the very picture of Rural Conservative Gentleman, was a no-kidding revolutionary in the making. And, of course, accustomed to leadership, long- and short-term planning, the logistics of farming — not too different, in the seventeenth century, from the logistics of a military campaign — and with a keen understanding of life on the wrong side of the tracks on account of it being dragged before him for judgement on a regular basis. Darryl began to realise that there were damned good reasons why Parliament won the civil war.

“Where are they now, Nicholas?” Cromwell was plainly having trouble keeping himself in check. “I saw that the farm I rented from Sir Henry was burnt.”

“A bad business, that, and no mistake. Your Robert and Oliver were there, earning their keep and something for their sisters. They weren’t recognised, praise God for that mercy, but the ruffians they’d sent out to have their heads broke by some breedlings took offence at that little jape. They came back and burnt the place down. Sir Henry’s fit to be tied over it, you may count on him for all the help you might need — that farm is sixty pound a year to him, tenanted, and now he has to find for the family driven off it. He has no objection to Christian charity, but the necessity of it he blames firmly on Finnegan.”

“So, this Finnegan?” Cromwell said, in a voice that said that he, too, was coming round to Darryl’s views on heads and the breaking thereof.

“King’s man, by commission, but the Earl of Cork’s creature in every way that counts. Set after you when you escaped, I gather, and came here to get ahead of you. He was seen and marked for what he was, and your Robert seems to be made much of by the breedlings for your sake, so he arranged with them to set up an ambuscade out in the fens. He and Oliver the Younger were already working for the Sewsters on your old farm at St. Ives –”

“Sewster?” Cromwell asked.

“Yes, the same Sewsters your brother married into,” Pedley said, and launched into a rapid summary of how they’d been related, by marriage and various obscure bits of ancestry that Darryl didn’t follow, not knowing any of the names. Of course, he’d probably have been able to give a fair account in the same vein of a lot of his neighbours in Grantville and neither of these two English squires would’ve been able to follow it. Even if he never felt right at home in this part of the world, Darryl figured, he’d probably just found a bit of its culture he could understand. If it turned out they liked shooting and could keep a feud alive for generations, he’d be back as soon as he could with a truckload of gimme caps that these people plainly needed to complete their evolution into proper hillbillies.

With the explanation finished, Pedley finished up by explaining that Finnegan had had a justice’s commission sent from London, sworn his gang of cut-throats in as constables, and begun throwing his weight about. “And you may depend on it that every worthless half-vagrant and rogue from St. Ives to Godmanchester is getting money from them. Our real constables are hearing of far less in the way of casual theft and public drunkenness. What happens when that scoundrel finally leaves them enough time to return to their former mischief I dread to think. For the time being, Robert and young Oliver are making themselves useful for Sir Henry. Good lads that they are, they’ll not take charity while they’ve strength in them. They’ve been kind enough not to burden me with knowledge of where the little ones are, and they’re all Finnegan’s asked after thus far. You know me for an incompetent in the art of lying, so I do like to be telling the truth when I deny knowing anything.”

“I’ll have some mischief of my own to work, Nicholas,” Cromwell said, after a little smile at Pedley’s disclaimer. “I fancy you may impress on your regular constables that there are some matters they may find strike them temporarily blind?”

“You fancy correctly, Oliver. It might be we can drag a fish or two across your trail in any event. Finnegan’s not the only one who can pay for informants, you know, and my coin spends a lot better in these parts than his. You’re not the only fugitives we have in the parish. Some fellows wanted in connection with the attempt on the king have been seen; one of Finnegan’s ruffians recognised him, a mercenary named Towson. There’s three on that warrant, him and two other soldiers returned from foreign service, and I fancy –”

“No, Sir Nicholas. Those men are with me. Innocent of any wrongdoing in the matter of the king, the Earl of Cork sought to use them as scapegoats. It may be that they can be used to confuse the trail, but I beg of you consult with me first — if I have need of their arms to spirit my children to safety, that need will come first.”

“Ah. I had given no orders in the matter, and you may depend on me, Oliver, depend on me entirely. Now, finish up your drinks!” Pedley rapped on his chair arm for his manservant, “Peter! Our guests’ horses to the back door, if you please, and see if any of the little birds perched in the trees are singing of unfriendly eyes about our garden.”

It turned out there weren’t, and they took the ride back to Julie and Alex at the trot. Darryl found watching Cromwell’s smile on the way educational. It had started relieved, turned joyous, and by the time they were out of sight of Squire Nicholas’s house, positively predatory.

He wondered what Cromwell would be praying about before bed tonight. Thanks for his childrens’ safety? Or forgiveness for his bloodthirsty thoughts? Probably both. Darryl couldn’t see where any decent god wouldn’t forgive a man in Cromwell’s position a few happy daydreams of carnage, but Cromwell felt the Almighty hewed to a higher standard of conduct in thought and deed.

 

The Seer – Snippet 31

The Seer – Snippet 31

Or, she realized with a chill, she could have taken an arrow from his pack, aimed for his heart, and let it loose. Standing right over him, surely she could not miss.

He could have been stopped, right then, for good.

“We’re sorry,” Dirina was saying. “So sorry. The wash is half done, and Amarta dropped all the groceries from market in the woods –”

“Down now,” Pas said very soberly. Enana let him to the ground. He ran to his mother, hugged her leg.

Maybe the hunter would not wake at all. Maybe he lied to her about the dart not being deadly, and she had inadvertently killed him. She paused, wondering if this was likely. Reason said no.

And what would he do when he woke?

A dark figure in the night, the top of the crescent moon at the treeline. He knocked on the farmhouse door. Enana’s silhouette against the lamplight from inside. His tone was apologetic, gentle. Charming.

She felt suddenly ill.

“We’ll go upriver,” Amarta said quickly. “Back to Sennant. Or –”

Dirina looked a question at her.

“Home to Botaros,” she continued, making her tone as certain as she knew how, catching Dirina’s gaze. When the shadow hunter came to ask Enana questions, Amarta wanted her to have answers.

“This man,” Enana said. “Where did you say he was now?”

“He attacked Amarta in the forest,” Dirina said, her hand on Pas’s head. Amarta willed her sister not to say the rest, but she did anyway. “Asleep on the ground, from poison on a dart. You said, Amarta.”

“Yes,” Amarta said reluctantly, “But –”

Enana’s expression turned hard. “Tell us where he is. I’ll take the boys out there and we can take care of him where he lays.”

Hope surged inside her. Was this possible? Enana and her two sons. Big men. Surely they could take one unconscious man.

Back at the house, the hunter in the cellar, a makeshift bolt across the door. Enana and her sons sitting at the table, discussing what to do with him, what would be right. What would be just. And then —

They would bring him back to the house, yes, and lock him in the cellar with the apples and the preserves. But sometime before dawn —

Enana in her bed, slumped over, arms twitching, blood trailing down her neck, the blankets soaked in red.

He would break free of the basement. The men would die first, quickly, but Enana slowly, after being asked questions.

And this because Enana and her family would not, could not, take the life of a man who had yet to do them wrong.

“He’ll kill you,” she said flatly.

“One man?” Enana snorted.

“No,” Amarta lied. “He’s not alone this time. He has a whole band of outlaws with him, hiding in the woods.” She licked her lips, looking at Dirina. “Twenty or thirty. All armed with crossbows and swords. They’re killers, Enana. Brutal killers.”

“But they’re only after us,” Dirina added. “You and Cafir and Loham will be safe without us.”

Enana frowned. “But I don’t want you to go. We could hide you. The basement –”

Amarta shook her head. “He’ll find us.”

The tall woman looked between them both, anger sharp across her features. “No one tells me what to do –”

Amarta stepped close took Enana’s hands. “We must leave, and soon. So much safer for you.”

Enana’s pressed her lips together. Then spoke, her tone low. She was still angry. “I have coins I can give you. I’ll pack you some food.”

Amarta hid her relief as she saw the future’s tangle of threads twist a new way. Enana might live through the hunter’s visit.

What could she do to make it more likely?

“Enana,” Amarta said urgently. “He’ll come here. He’ll ask you questions. He can read a lie. Tell him everything you know about us. Let him in, feed him, give him drink.”

Enana turned around slowly, her expression darkening further. “I won’t feed a killer who forces you from my house. No one comes into my home I don’t let in. Not even the king’s soldiers with their manners of goats and brains of chickens. No one.”

Amarta’s ankle and shoulder were throbbing for attention now, distracting her. Dimly she thought she heard Enana cry out in pain, but it might be her imagination. Everything seemed to suck away her focus.

“He’s worse than the king’s soldiers. Please, Enana, don’t fight him.”

“You want me to show him hospitality, this monster? To treat him well?”

“Yes.”

“There is no sense in this.”

“And,” Amarta whispered, struggling with the last of her focus to seek a toehold in the future, not just for tonight, but farther, farther, “it will be dry until a tenday before the new moon, then the rain will come all at once for three days, then stop.” With that, Enana would know how to best harvest, when to cut the hay. If she believed it.

“What are you saying?”

Amarta and Dirina exchanged looks. Amarta licked her lips.

“The future sometimes…” how to explain? “It whispers to me.”

Enana shook her head, disbelief on her face. “No one knows when the rains come.”

“Amarta does,” Dirina said simply.

Amarta spoke again, feeling a sudden urgency. “He will come tonight, Enana, as the moon comes over the rise.” In her mind’s eye she saw it clearly, the knock on the door, Enana backlit by stovelight. “If he comes when I say he will, will you remember my words? Don’t fight. Treat him…” She swallowed, hating to say it, but knowing she must. “Treat him well. Tell him everything. It will go better for us if you do.”

Enana stared at Amarta for a long, thoughtful moment.

“Get packed.”

#

It was slow going along the forest road with Amarta limping. The walking stick Enana had given them was a help, but each step was full of pain that she resolved to hide. Dirina slowed so as not to outpace her.

The nals chits Enana had given them sat heavily in Amarta’s pocket, weighted with her guilt at the knowledge of how little the family had to spare. From the jabbing pain in her ankle to her shoulder, never mind the other places her encounter in the forest had left her bruised and scraped, Amarta ached.

“Do you think we have until nightfall before he comes after us?” Dirina asked.

“I hope so.”

“You hope? Ama, you said –”

A flash of hot resentment went through her, hand in hand with a sickening remorse. “I know what I said. Seeing is not the same thing as knowing. And now I don’t see anything at all. Diri, everything –” hurts, she didn’t finish — “is confusing.”

Her sister said nothing.

“Up now,” Pas said after they had let him walk a little way. Dirina hefted him and put him on her shoulders, holding his feet, wrapped with tiny turnshoes Cafir had made for him.

One more thing the family had given them, which they repaid so wretchedly. The gnawing ache inside threatened to eat through her. It was as if along with the seedlings she’d planted in the fields she had also put some of her self into the ground, and now she was being torn out by the roots. “Diri, where do we go?”

Dirina squinted at the sky and the sun. “The river. We’ll get the barge. It comes five hands past noon, so we should…” She inhaled. “We should hurry.”

“Down now,” Pas said.

“You ride, sweet,” Dirina said. “We have to go faster than you can go.”

“I go fast.”

“Then you’ll have to carry me, too,” Amarta said, giving him a smile. He looked at her, considered, and fell silent.

“He will come after us, Diri,” Amarta said. “That’s not –” she said, seeing her sister’s wide-eyed look, “what I’m seeing, it’s what I’m thinking.”

She could have prevented it. Picked up the bow. Notched an arrow. Tried again if she missed. Or used his knife on him. It had been right there on the ground.

To have ended it right then, to be able to stay with Enana — but she had not. She prayed to the guardian of travelers and orphans that Enana would do as she had told her. As vision had told her.

“Ama?”

She realized that she had made a short, pained sound. “If he hurts them –”

“He doesn’t want them. He wants us.”

No, he wanted Amarta. “But how will we make money? How will we eat?”

“We’ll clean, we’ll mend, as we’ve done all along.”

That wasn’t what they had done. Dirina still thought Amarta might believe it, though, so she kept on saying it.

 

1635: A Parcel of Rogues – Snippet 24

1635: A Parcel of Rogues – Snippet 24

And, while Cromwell didn’t think any of the enemies he’d made hereabouts were that petty, there was every possibility that they’d have gotten one of the less pleasant deals that the already-savage English poor law could hand out purely out of ignorance. There was even the possibility that someone, meaning well enough, would have split them up and moved them on to other parishes, or fostered them somewhere in secret, seeking to preserve their lives from a capricious monarch apparently bent on slaughtering his subjects at random. Who was to say he’d stop at the parents and one of the elder brothers? Cromwell had spent enough time as a justice of the peace, part of the administration of these things, to know that even with the best of intentions it was entirely possible to make some shockingly harsh decisions even in respect of the impotent and deserving poor. Under pressure of the need to preserve the lives of children? It would be all too easy for a man to find it in himself to do the children a little injustice now to preserve them from murder later.

“I suppose there’s some good reason why we can’t go back, grab those two boyos and beat a bit more than a half-story out of them?”

Welch plainly shared some, if not all, of Darryl McCarthy’s concerns in the matter. Darryl had talked to him plenty over the last couple of weeks and discovered that whatever Strafford and Cromwell might’ve done in the future, it would’ve been little more than a garnish on what was the ordinary lot of the Catholic Irish, and a fair number of the Protestant Irish who’d gone native enough to count, in this day and age. And, under the hardened and cynical mercenary exterior, there was a firebrand who’d only been dampened by recognising there wasn’t anything he could do by himself. Presented with a couple of hired thugs at the sharp end of repressing the people? They could probably tie those two goons to a chair apiece and let them listen to him and Darryl argue over who got to work them over. They’d sing like canaries out of fear.

Stephen Hamilton had plainly figured out what was making the grin spread across Darryl’s face. “No, and don’t tell me you weren’t thinking it. It speaks well of you that it’s your first thought, Darryl, but just thundering in with your kicking boots on ain’t the right move, not yet.”

“Oh, I figured that,” Darryl said. “I was just taking a moment to enjoy the thought.”

“Well enough,” Hamilton said. “Mister Cromwell, who should we talk to first? While I’m with Lieutenant Welch here on the subject of beatings, I want to make sure we’re breaking the right heads.”

Cromwell sighed. “I also. There wasn’t a lad could stand against me in singlestick at Cambridge, and the thought of giving in to the deadly sin of wrath is a sore temptation now. We must speak with Esquire Pedley. My first thought was one of the Montagus, but they’ll be taking the king’s part in all this if I’m not mistaken. Even if I am, why take the chance when there are other choices? If he has knowledge of my family’s whereabouts, then we may talk to them. I have better and closer friends, it must be said, but none so local or more likely to know what has happened here.”

In the end, Cromwell surprised Darryl by asking him to come along to Squire Pedley’s house. “Save only this, young Mister McCarthy, hold your tongue and listen, and think on what might be said and, more importantly, not said. I know you have no love for me, so let not my distress distract you, but think on the fate of my little girls. The boys might manage for themselves, in time and by God’s grace, but this is no world for a girl-child to be alone in.” Darryl had been touched by that much trust, and had wondered aloud whether or not he’d rather have Gayle along for that.

Cromwell had smiled ruefully. “If we are seen and ambushed, Mister McCarthy, that fine set of pistols you carry will serve well, and I shall not worry for your survival. God has granted you a strong hand, if I am any judge of such matters, and my mind will be clear to cut my own way free, sure you shall give a good account of yourself. Gayle? I should worry too much that I might lose one of whom I have become fond. I cannot bring myself to believe in my heart she would survive a scrimmage. And you don’t carry yourself like a soldier, so if we’re seen near Squire Pedley’s house you’ll not attract notice the way Leebrick or Hamilton or the others will.”

Darryl’d nodded at the implied compliment. “Ain’t gonna argue, but I reckon Gayle’d fool you on that score.”

They’d left it at that. They’d found a barn that a tenant farmer Cromwell only vaguely knew was willing to rent out. The wagon was there, with Gayle to make the reports in the evening’s radio window, with Leebrick, Towson, Welch and Hamilton to stand guard. Hamilton had to stay behind to make sure Vicky did, of course. Alex and Julie had ridden along part of the way and set up an ambush point just off the road to Pedley’s house. If they were attacked, that would be where they fell back to, with Julie to ensure that the assailants got the shock of their suddenly-very-brief lives. The summer evening had the sun low in the western sky, so if Darryl and Cromwell rode hell-for-leather along the road back to St. Ives their pursuers would be beautifully illuminated from Julie’s vantage. No need for signals; if they were at the gallop, whoever was chasing them was fair game.

****

The precautions seemed to have been unnecessary, though. Darryl wasn’t ever going to be the horseman Cromwell plainly was, but he was comfortable enough to look around plenty. Since his role for today seemed to be “younger guy along for the ride” he felt he could get away with gawking, and played his role to the hilt. If they were being followed or watched, whoever was doing it was being subtler than he knew how to spot.

Pedley himself turned out to be exactly what Darryl would’ve assumed if you’d said English Country Squire to him, right down to the glass of what smelt like sherry in his hand — not a small glass, either — and the buttons down his front straining to contain a truly impressive gut. “Oliver,” the man had said, without a note of exclamation in his voice, “I knew you were at large again, but it does me good to see you safe.”

“Nicholas,” Cromwell said, “permit me to name Mister Darryl McCarthy to you, who was most solicitous of my health during my captivity and helped me to my liberty after.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Darryl said, remembering to have his glove off before offering his hand.

“A friend to Oliver is a friend to me,” Pedley said, shaking his hand and waving to his manservant. “Peter will have chairs and drink for you momentarily, I’m sure. Not that I think you’ll be staying long, Oliver. If that scoundrel Finnegan hasn’t eyes on this place one way or another you may call me the most startled man in Christendom. Best you be away as soon as I’ve satisfied you as to your childrens’ fate.”

“You know?”

 

The Seer – Snippet 30

The Seer – Snippet 30

On the ground beside her, fallen leaves brushed her the skin of her pinned arms. The breeze filled the air with the scent of pine and bark, of grasses and rotting leaves.

It was quiet now. No wind, no bird calls. No squirrels.

“Amarta. Tell me what you foresaw.”

Before the reason and terror made her reconsider, obedient to vision, she lifted and turned her head, pressing her neck into the edge of the knife he held at her throat. His eyes flickered, and he pulled the knife away, a little, shifting his balance. Not much, but enough.

Twist hard, vision said, and she did, all at once rolling to follow his slight movement, hard and fast.

The weight change took both of them into a half roll onto the dirt where he came off her. She kept twisting as vision demanded, hands now under her, pushing against the ground to keep herself rolling.

Now he was on his feet, knife in hand, stepping toward her where she sat on the ground looking up at him. She groped for the next move, pushing away panic, surrendering to the guiding whispers.

Move thus, they said, so she did. She tensed, twisted, and kicked from where she lay prone, at what was empty air, just as he stepped onto the spot. Not hard enough to hurt him, of course, but enough to force him to step to the side instead of forward, giving her another heartbeat of time. In that heartbeat she leapt to her feet and started to run.

He was right behind her. Vision gave her a particular feel as a hand reached for her hair. She shook her head sharply. The hand missed. When it came again she ducked and it grabbed empty air.

Deep in a flickering foresight, she saw him move, right before he did. She sidestepped. He lunged. She stopped suddenly, and turned in place. He stumbled past.

He froze where he stood, looking at her. He understood now, she could see from his expression. As he was considering what to do next, vision told her to go, and she did, turning to run, glancing back as she stumbled ahead on the road.

He took the bow off his back. A moment later she felt a pressure, a craving to stop, to step to the right, to brush a particular tree trunk as she passed, so she did. An arrow hissed by her ear, sinking into the ground beyond.

She launched away from the tree, a sprint forward, dodging bushes, running as fast as she could.

An arrow through the air, a finger width from her neck.

Suddenly she felt light-headed, giddy. The future knew where he would aim better than he did, and the future was hers. She sprinted past trees, bushes, mind jumping between now and a heartbeat ahead.

He was following, but he had to slow to put an arrow to his bow, take aim, and shoot, and he fell behind as she ran.

The pressure again. She stepped to the left, heard the arrow sink into a nearby tree.

Then something shifted. The next moment narrowed to a pinpoint, and the dark wall returned. Two options unfolded: an arrow through her ribs, or a fall to the ground.

She let herself fall, realizing as she went down that she had misstepped, ankle twisting painfully under her as she went down. Something bit through her shoulder, and she landed heavily on the dirt and leaves, pain shooting through her leg.

The pain broke her concentration. Fear came flooding back. Vision became blurry, indecipherable. She rolled over onto her back, reached for her aching shoulder, momentarily confused by the red wetness on her fingers. His last arrow had sliced through her shirt and skin like a knife.

Above her leaves flickered in the breeze like small blades. A crow called.

He stood over her now, bow in hand, arrow notched and pointed at her chest. She groped inwardly, searching for the map that had guided her thus far, but her mind was clear of anything but pain and terror. She gasped a sob, forced herself to stare up at him through her watering eyes.

“Where are your visions now, Amarta?”

Not a mocking tone. He was truly curious.

“Gone,” she whispered, feeling all at once weak. “All gone. Before you kill me, tell me why. Please.”

He was silent. Could he be undecided? He lowered the bow the smallest bit. “If I let you live, will you promise me you won’t try to escape?”

Amarta tried to think, swallowed. Somehow he could discern a lie. But she would say anything to live.

“Yes,” she said. “Anything.”

He laid the bow on the ground behind him, knelt just out of her reach.

Don’t give reason to reconsider. “I won’t,” she said, meaning the words as she said them.

He pulled away the loose cloth of her shirt, and she tensed against the pain, whimpered. He took out a strip of cloth from his pack and pressed where she’d been sliced.

“It will heal. This will stop the bleeding.”

“Then you won’t kill me?”

“I still have the option, Seer.”

“Why are you chasing me?”

He reached into another sleeve, drew out a small leather case and from that a thin piece of metal. “There’s tincture on this dart,” he said. “Enough to make you sleep, not to harm you. I think this may stop your visions for a time. What do you think?”

What should she say? She nodded.

“We’ll see,” he said. “You understand me, girl? You’ll cooperate?”

“Yes.”

He put one hand on her leg to hold it steady. His other hand, the one with the dart, was already moving toward her leg when vision came upon her again, strong and urgent.

She moved suddenly, a sharp twitch. Instead of going into her leg, the dart went deep into his hand.

Then she twisted in the other direction, escaping his hold, and scrabbled back and away on the ground. He pulled the dart out of his hand, tossed it away, and put his hand to his mouth, sucking and spitting onto the ground.

What had she done? She cringed, backing farther away.

From his sleeve he snapped out his knife and stood. A step toward her, and he swayed slightly. His hand opened loosely, the knife falling to the dirt.

He dropped to his knees and hands, hands flat on the ground, still watching her.

“Your visions come back?” His voice was slow, slurred.

She nodded uncertainly. Was he really this drugged, this fast? Could it be a trick?

She sought guidance from her visions, but they were again silent.

“Why are you after me?” she asked.

He lowered himself to the ground, still watching her.

“Why?”

He blinked twice, then his eyes closed.

Ignoring the agonizing pain in her ankle and the ache in her shoulder, she struggled to her feet. She looked back at him where he lay now motionless on the ground. Then she turned and limped home to the farmhouse.

#

She and Dirina stuffed what they could into their bags. Amarta looked around their small room, trying to keep the weight off her throbbing foot. What more could they carry?

“What do we tell Enana?” she asked.

“Nothing. Just go.”

“Where we go?” Pas asked, grabbing a shirt at random and offering it to Amarta.

“Without even saying good-bye?”

Dirina hesitated in her packing, not looking up, tone edged. “Do you have another plan, Amarta?”

“No.”

“The less she knows, the safer she is.”

Dirina was right. But it felt wretched, after all the family had done for them.

“We can’t take food from them, and we have no money. Where are we going? What will we do?”

“That’s what I was wondering,” came Enana’s voice from the doorway.

At that, Pas ran to Enana, and she lifted him into her arms. The tall woman walked into their room, balancing the boy on her hip. Pas turned to look at his mother and Amarta, thumb in his mouth.

“Is this the same man after you?”

“Yes,” Amarta said softly.

Enana had been so good to them, taking them in at midwinter, feeding them, letting them stay. What a wretched way to repay her, leaving now, before harvest, when they were needed most.

Amarta saw the hunter again in memory, lying there, his bow and knife a few feet away on the ground.

Why hadn’t she taken them? She felt a fool now, thinking of it. It would have been so easy to just pick up his weapons and take them away.

 

Come The Revolution – Snippet 35

This book should be available now, so this is the last snippet.

Come The Revolution – Snippet 35

Chapter Twenty-Two

I didn’t have to wait long for Zdravkova, although I was right on the verge of dozing off when she led a half-dozen people from her reserve squad back down the street.

“Hey, Killer. Got a minute?”

She waved the squad back toward the headquarters and stood facing me, assault rifle’s stock balanced on her hip.

“What?”

“Ammo,” I said. “This ain’t working.”

She shifted her weight impatiently. “You asked for the job. Make it work.”

“Well, it’s easy to make it work for me. Let me know how many rounds you want, and of which calibers and magazine styles. We’ll deliver them to you as soon as possible. The thing is that’s not going to work so well for your kids on the firing line. Once the shooting starts, it’s too late to screw around with that kind of bureaucratic bullshit. I want to push the ammo to your folks so it’s there when they need it, but I can’t.”

I got to my feet using the wall for support, feeling every stage of the move in my knees and back. I’d already been tired before the firefight, and nothing drains your reserves like a big shot of adrenaline followed by a crash. Also I was a little drunk. Zdravkova slung her rifle over her shoulder and looked at me.

“You okay?”

“Sure. I’m just tired, that’s all. Little out of shape, too. I gotta take these unused magazines and the empties back. Can’t just leave them lying around. Give me a hand?”

I picked up a couple partially-filled bags of magazines with my left hand and Zdravkova grabbed the others. We started walking back toward the clinic.

“Got any more in that bottle?” she asked

I chuckled. “Sorry, Greenwald’s the man with the slivovitz. He was headed back this way to the clinic. So look, I want to push ammo forward to units but we can’t because we don’t know what they need. We got some different calibers and all, but the real headache with all these different civilian weapons is magazine compatibility. Since the magazine is also the power source, we can’t really get around that. Even after sorting out all the one-offs and oddballs, we still have fifteen different magazine styles with only very limited interchangeability.”

She looked at me — glared at me is more like — but after a couple seconds her scowl softened and she nodded. “Yes, that’s been worrying me, too.”

“The supply of magazines is already a bottleneck,” I said. “We’re trying to fabricate some more of them, but that’s harder than just making flechettes, and we’re short some of the raw materials we need for the battery components. Turns out it also takes a lot of power to fabricate stuff that complex. We’re bumping up against our wattage ceiling already; all this rain means the solar panels haven’t done us much good, so we’re pretty much tied to the LENR generators.

“As the fighting gets more intense, medical and ammo fabrication are both going to need more juice. Your folks have to get really serious about recovering spent magazines and getting them back to us in good shape.”

“Fair enough. I’ll make sure they do. But how do we solve the magazine compatibility problem?”

“Well, either reorganize your squads and platoons, or swap the weapons you have within your existing tables of organization. Ideally each squad should have one pistol magazine style and one long gun style. That way we can at least assemble squad packs and make sure they’re stockpiled close to where the squad’s supposed to fight.”

She shook her head impatiently. “I can’t limit a squad to one long gun type. I need to spread the RAGs around, put one or two in each squad with the veterans, who are also usually my squad leaders. Without two RAGs up on the barricade tonight, no telling what might have happened.”

I thought about the fighting back on the barricade, how the two guys with RAGs had kept firing, spacing their bursts, and telling the others what to do, where to lay their fire. So it wasn’t a coincidence those guys had the best weapons. Maybe Zdravkova knew her stuff.

“Yeah, I can see that,” I said. “Well, if every squad has a RAG or two, that doesn’t really complicate putting together squad packs, since all the RAGs are magazine-compatible regardless of their mark number. At least the Army got that right. We’ll just throw RAG mags in each ammo sack and then custom load the rest of the stuff in it. I’ll limit our magazine fabrication to the RAGs, too. Sounds like those are the guns we absolutely have to keep fed.”

That was as good a solution as we could come up with so we walked on in silence for a while.

“You’ve been in combat before,” she said after we’d walked half a block. “I read that about you.”

“Little bit. Not as much as you’d think.”

“I’m sort of making all this up as I go,” she said, and then we walked on for a few steps. I got the feeling she wanted to ask me something but didn’t know how.

“Near as I can tell you’re doing fine,” I said finally.

“If there’s anything you see . . . well, I’m not touchy about advice.”

“Then that must be the only fucking thing you’re not touchy about.”

To my surprise she laughed.

“Okay,” I said, “here’s my only piece of advice. No matter what’s happening, always make sure you’re the least excited person in the group. Look around. If anyone’s less excited than you, take a deep breath and calm down.”

“Always?” she said.

“When people are on the edge of panic, they follow the person who isn’t. I know what I’m talking about; I’ve been scared shitless many times, and I always respected the people whose eyes weren’t popping out of their skulls.”

She laughed again.

“So,” I said, “you get the nickname Killer before or after you stopped practicing law?”

She looked at me from the corner of her eye without turning her head. “After. Definitely after.”

“Why the career change, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Our boots made soft crunching sounds on the carpet of trash underfoot, the sound louder here where the building walls were continuous on both sides and the street narrow. Ahead, over the tops of the buildings to the north, I could see the faint blinking red light of the uBakai Army hoverplat high up in the sky, making its slow transit around e-Kruan Arc.

“Oh, I just got tired of being a cog in a machine that eats Humans,” she said after a while. “I defended all these people and eventually I figured out all I was doing was giving the leatherheads an excuse to congratulate themselves on their fair-mindedness. After all, every member of the parade of Humans bound for long-term detention had a Human counselor to argue their case. What more could they ask? So there’s that. Then, when my husband left me for a younger woman, I began feeling an urge to blow things up.”

I looked over at her, but if she was smiling it was on the inside.

“Well, in my experience, you can get some real growth and progress out of explosive therapy,” I said. “Had much opportunity to try it out?”

“Not so far, but the prospects are looking up.”

I wondered if her seeing all those clients railroaded by the Varoki had maybe saved my life, made her decide not to participate in one more judicially-sanctioned lynching. Sometimes our fate hangs by a strand that slender.

*****

We dropped our bags at the ammo distribution point in front of the clinic. Zdravkova headed inside, I guess to look for Greenwald and his slivovitz, and I walked over to the communal soup kitchen and dormitory, both of which were still works in progress. I needed to get something to eat and then some rack time or I was going to fold up.

I was surprised to see Nicolai Stal hanging around the door.

“Evening, Sasha. Heard was some excitement.”

“Yeah. Took a few casualties, too, but I don’t think anyone died. What brings you here?”

He smiled. “Oh, couple interesting refugees just come in, look for sanctuary. Do not like dining and sleeping facilities, think should get better treatment because related to very big hero.”

“Who?” I asked.

His grin got broader. “Claim to be father and sister of famous Sasha Naradnyo.”

I just looked at him for a second and then shook my head. “That’d be a pretty good trick, seeing as how they both died twenty-seven years ago on Peezgtaan.”

“Da, and these two look alive to me. Since nobody knows Sasha actually here, or even alive, must have believed was easy lie. Like to come along, see faces when meet real Sasha.”

He led me across the soup kitchen to a table in back and I saw a man and woman huddled with blankets around their shoulders and bent over their soup. As we approached, the man, sitting across the table facing me, looked up, and then he stood up and let the blanket slip from his rounded shoulders. The room seemed to sway from side to side as I looked at him. His hair was gray instead of black, his face more lined, and he’d put on some weight.

“Hello, Aleksandr Sergeyevich,” he said. “Do you remember your sister, Avrochka?”

The woman turned and looked up at me. She was the news feeder I’d noticed earlier, the one named Aurora, now looking dirty and somewhat haggard, but the family resemblance was clear.

No wonder she’d reminded me of me.

*****

“It could be plastic surgery,” I said, but Doc Mahajan shook her head.

“The DNA results are conclusive. The man is your father. He is also the father of the woman, and the mitochondrial DNA she shares with you indicates you both have the same mother. As near as I can determine, they are exactly who they claim to be.”

“But how? They both died on Peezgtaan in a food riot.”

“How do you know that, Boss?” Moshe asked. He offered me the slivovitz but I waved it away. I was punchy enough as it was. Zdravkova took it instead and downed a swallow. The four of us sat in the cramped privacy of Mahajan’s office at the clinic, which now also doubled as a supply storage room.

I thought back to that day twenty-seven years ago.

“There were food riots all over the place,” I said. “My father, mother, and sister went out to try to find something for us to eat. I don’t remember why they left me in the apartment. Maybe I was sick or too small or something. Hours later my mother came back alone, beat up and in shock. She died in bed a few days later.”

“She told you the other two were dead?” Doc Mahajan asked.

“No, she never spoke again. She never even acknowledged my presence after she came back. I’d always assumed the others were dead. Why else would she go into such deep shock and depression?”

There was something more than that, another reason it couldn’t be them, but I didn’t want to say it. They wouldn’t understand.

“Who knows, Boss?” Moshe said. “People do crazy things. Maybe she really thought they were dead.”

“Then why didn’t they come back? Where have they been all this time? And showing up here the same time I did . . . that’s too crazy a coincidence.”

“Perhaps,” Doc Mahajan said, “but their being here is not all that unusual. Aurora did several features on Sookagrad within the last year and a multi-part investigative series on corruption in the Inter-Archology Park District. She made a number of contacts here. That she and her father would seek sanctuary here is understandable. Really, Sasha, it is your presence which is the anomaly.”

“Maybe so, but if they’ve lived here is the city for a while like you say, and they know who I am, which they clearly do, why didn’t they ever contact me?”

“Go ask them,” Zdravkova said and then looked at me with those hard, angry eyes. “Or are you afraid?”

I wasn’t about to admit it to her but hell yes I was afraid. If your family’s been dead for almost your whole life, see how you feel if they start showing back up again one day. What do you say to them? “How you been?”

The thing is, I’d actually been dead for a little while, and when I’d been dead there’d been people there — wherever “there” was — who’d welcomed me. All those people had already been dead, including my whole family. It was sort of comforting, and had taken some of the edge off the fear of death since then, knowing that’s what was waiting. What I couldn’t figure out now was how my father and sister could have been there in dead-people-land if they weren’t ever actually dead.

“Okay,” I said, getting to my feet, “guess I’ll go talk to them.”

Moshe offered me the bottle again and this time I took a good slug.

 

1635: A Parcel of Rogues – Snippet 23

1635: A Parcel of Rogues – Snippet 23

Chapter 12

“No, totally burnt to the ground,” Towson confirmed. “Not too long ago, by the looks, there’s still a lot of ash and charcoal about the place, but we couldn’t go too close to be sure. Not a lot we could see from the road, but every building in and around the farmhouse is burnt back to a shell. And, just in case we thought this was a coincidence, a couple of smiling lads happened to be around the place for us to ask what had happened as we ambled along, nothing but a couple of idle old soldiers home from the Germanies, off to visit an old friend up the road a ways. Well, they didn’t have a lot to tell us, but they’re not local boys. Irishmen, the pair of them.”

“And since your humble servant here kept his mouth firmly shut,” Welch added, “they had the fool notion of thinking talking in Irish would be private to them. They’re watching the place and decided that their chief ought to know as soon as Mulligan, whoever that was, came round in a short while. So that’s why we’re late, we’d to find another way back since they’d certain sure be waiting for us.”

Darryl could see the pain on Cromwell’s face. He’d only been a tenant on that farm, slowly and carefully working his fortunes back up from what sounded like near-bankruptcy, but it had been his home for more than three years. And whoever was tenant there now might have been able to tell him where his children had ended up. “Did they say aught of the children that once lived there?”

“Nothing,” Welch said. “They had a little to say of the family that was there most recently, though. Two, very little. Run off with their ma and da and two farmhands, they said, when the farm was burnt.”

“Did they say why?” Darryl asked, beginning to feel a cold, hollow feeling he wasn’t sure would be warmed other than by administering some righteous hillbilly justice. He’d been along with the scouting parties that’d gone out right after the Ring of Fire and seen some of the shit guys down-time could and did pull on ordinary folks in their own homes, and the fury’d never really left him. Seems like some of it got out in his voice, since both Cromwell and Hamilton were giving him funny looks.

“Order of the justice of the peace, under commission from the king, they said. Sounds like lies to me, though. Even across the water the justices can’t just have someone’s home burnt, especially if it’s tenanted and not freehold. They’ve punished the landlord as much as anyone.” Welch shrugged. “I think we’d need more than the word of those two ruffians to get to the bottom of it.”

“True enough,” Cromwell said. “I never completed my studies for the bar, but I can tell you that much. Fines and seizures can be compassed by a justice of the peace, but burning a farm and driving the tenant off? I never heard the like before and never thought to.”

Darryl felt a moment of grim humor come over him. “You know, Oliver, with all the grief I gave you over what you would’ve done in Ireland, I never stopped to think about the bit where you rebelled against the king. And if this is the kind of thing you have to put up with from His Royal Assholeness, I can’t say it wasn’t purely the right thing to do.”

“If it was not before, it is now,” Cromwell said, and there didn’t seem to be trace of jest in his words. “It remains that we should find them. Robert and Oliver will have come back from school by now, if they had not already. I cannot recall where I stood with the school in the matter of fees. I can only hope that God’s grace guided them to find the little ones and the friends I have in this county.”

“Robert’s your oldest, yes?” Hamilton said, “Fourteen now?”

“But a month past. He and Oliver were away at school when I was captured, or they might have been shot. Oliver will be thirteen come November. Bridget, Henry and Elizabeth are the little ones. Bridget will be eleven years old soon.”

They’d all heard Cromwell speak of his children, the hope in his voice a thin veneer over a chasm of worry. On the one hand, the Cromwells were a rich and influential family in Huntingdonshire, and there would have been no shortage of relatives to take them in. On the other hand, it would have taken time to get word to any of those relatives, and much could have happened to them in the meantime. And between Cromwell’s children and his relatives there were all the enemies he’d made only a couple of years before in Huntingdon itself, speaking his mind clearly and vociferously against the terms of the town’s charter of 1630.

To Darryl’s amusement, the man had had no idea of the name “Lord of the Fens” and still less of any plan to drain the Fens that he might have helped anyone with. He’d certainly made himself popular among the poor of Huntingdon by what he’d publicly called the mayor of that town over the terms of the new charter, which more-or-less allowed the mayor and aldermen to help themselves to town property intended for poor relief. He’d had to apologise in privy council for his language, but the council itself had sustained his objections to the terms of the new charter and amended it. It probably hadn’t helped that he’d accepted a post as justice of the peace under the new charter to get himself a public platform to say those things. Darryl was, quietly, looking forward to twitting Miz Mailey over that one, to be sure. And learning that Cromwell had deliberately gotten inside City Hall to fight City Hall, and won, took him up a notch or two in Darryl’s estimation. That shit was tactical.

If the absolute worst hadn’t happened, and Cromwell had enough trust in his neighbours that it hadn’t — with plenty of credit given to Divine Providence along the way, of course — the next possibility was that through sheer carelessness they’d fallen on the tender mercies of the poor-law system for the parish of St. Ives. That had the potential for real disaster: a poorhouse orphanage was a chancy proposition at best. Bridget might have been old enough to go out maintained as a needleworker in some gentry home, but little Henry and Elizabeth, who’d be six and five by now, might or might not have survived in an orphanage. Farm children in the here and now, even offspring of a gentleman farmer, had no easy life, but from there into a parish orphanage would be a terrible blow for them.