Tale of the Thunderbolt (43 page)

Valentine ran back to the circled wagons. “A medic! I need a medic!”

The closest thing he could find among the confused men was a pharmacist's mate from the
Thunderbolt
named Speere. He was young and awkward, but had performed his duties well enough on the ship. Valentine had him grab a first-aid kit and follow.

“What, are you kidding, Cap? There are hurt men back at the wagons,” Speere objected when they came up on the ratbits.

“This fight wouldn't have happened at all if we'd made an attempt to communicate with them. I want to make amends.”

“I'm not a vet, sir,” Speere said, but stood up when he saw Valentine's face. “But I'll do what I can,” he said.

The two humans slowly approached the ratbits. Fifteen or twenty were around their stricken comrade, squeaking and chittering. The ratbits made room, and Speere knelt beside the wounded ratbit. A ratbit was pressing a piece of cloth into a wound on the other ratbit's back. Judging from the gray around the eyes, ears, and mouth, this was an older specimen.

“Looks like a bullet across the back,” Speere said, looking at the wound. “Might be some nerve damage, even if it didn't clip the spine. Doesn't look like he can move his back legs.”

“Can you give it . . . him anything for the pain?”

“I dunno, a drop of laudanum might help. I don't think it would kill him, but you never know.”

“Do it.”

Valentine and the ratbits watched as Speere used an eyedropper to add medicine to a capful of water, then refilled the empty eyedropper with the mixture and shot it down the ratbit's throat. The ratbit seemed to understand oral medication, and after a minute's allowing it to take effect submitted to Speere, who was sprinkling antiseptic powder in the wound and then sewing up the tear in the skin. “Maybe it's worse than it looks,” Speere said. “Didn't go too deep. Looks like this guy had some subcutaneous fat. It might have cushioned his spine.”

“Let's get him back to the camp.”

“You think they'll let us?”

“We'll find out,” Valentine said, and turned his head back to the wagons. “Hey! We need a stretcher here.”

 

The wagon train did not move on the next day. Valentine thought it would be best to let his wounded rest. Narcisse took over care of the gray-haired patient. She unrolled a sheet of leather; glass jars filled with powders and herbs stood in neat sewn-in pockets. She began to work her Haitian medicine and steamed something in a ceramic mug.

The next morning the old ratbit was doing better. It could move its legs, a sign that met with approval from the four other giant ratbits who accompanied it to the human camp. They all shared a thin soup cooked up by Narcisse.

A strange ratbit visitor came into camp with the dawn. Another oldster, this one with an eyepatch over its left eye, to match a torn-off ear on the other side. The wounds were from long ago, however. It bore a container over its shoulder. Valentine realized it was part of a rattler-tail. Its parcel clinked oddly as it moved.

It approached the other ratbit, and they chattered at each other. Ratbit-speech was a strange
yeek
ing sound, and whatever was said was over with quickly. The eyepatch ratbit dumped its sack on the ground, and Valentine smiled when he recognized Scrabble pieces.

“Can you understand us?” Valentine said.

The ratbit hunted with its eye in the pile.

 

YES

 

“We are sorry about the deaths. You should have tried this earlier.”

The ratbit removed the three chips from the dirt and arranged more.

 

WE DID SHOT BY HORSRYDERS

 

“We didn't understand what you meant when you said ‘leave woods.' ”

 

NO MUCH SPEAK MEN

 

The ratbit removed that and started again.

 

N IE D WOOD FOR KI L MONSTERS

 

“The thing is, you took quite a few saplings. We need them. Understand?”

YES

 

“We can leave you a few, and some wood, and some seeds, to grow more trees. Good enough?”

The ratbit did not rearrange the letters. It just pointed to YES again.

“Deal. Someday I'd like to hear about what happened. How did you drive the Kurians out of this part of the land?”

 

WREK THE ALL SO WE NOT DIE

 

“Do your people have a name?”

 

BATCH FIVETE EN

 

The ratbits put on a feast that night, in the center of a wide half-crescent of oaks and elms. Traces of a foundation stood in the yellowed grass, smoke-darkened conduit pipes and junction boxes stood among the wildflowers like scare-crows. Later Valentine learned that beneath the soil there was a thriving town of tunnels and dens.

The humans only nibbled from the Batch Fifteen banquet. A proper feast, to the hundreds of gathered ratbits, meant piling anything edible — to a ratbit — in a great heap in the center of the clearing and then burrowing within the pile in a race for the choicest tidbits: a bone with a bit of marrow, still-ripe fall fruits and melons, an ear of corn still only partially eaten. It was a bit like dining from a restaurant kitchen at the end of the night, fresh food, leftovers, and garbage all for the taking.

The dinner looked to be a disaster, at least from the human point of view, until the ratbits dragged a series of still-sealed cartons from a clogged stairwell hidden in the grass. In them were candy bars and chips and fruit-flavored drinks in shiny plastic packets, only a few years old and therefore still edible. Valentine ate something called a Chocdelite that was almost eye-crossing in its sweetness.

Zacharias joined him, and they sat on one of the wagons, next to Baltz's orange tomcat, who was scrunched into a back-arched ball under the seat as he watched the ratbits go to and fro. Zacharias offered Valentine a taste of some orange-and-pineapple flavored drink.

“I'm thinking vending machines,” Zacharias said, examining the label. “Says it's from Florida.”

“Nothing but the best for the scientists. Or the honored guests.”

A faint sputtering from the sky made them both look up. An arrow shape, like an oversize kite with an engine attached, flew overhead and buzzed away a pair of circling buzzards. Another aerial visitor, a hawk, flapped hard to gain altitude and avoided the airborne prowler. A ratbit worked the controls from a tiny seat.

“I'll be — ,” Zacharias began. “Clever varmints.”

“That they are.”

“Did you have any schooling, Valentine?”

“Yes. About as good as I could get in the Minnesota backwoods. An old Jesuit still ran a one-room schoolhouse. I lived in his library.”

“I remember when I was learning maths from ol' Miss Gage. We were studying multiplication, and she showed us how one pair of breeding rabbits could produce — well, I don't remember exactly, but it was over a thousand — other rabbits once you counted their offspring . . . in just a year. Makes you wonder.”

Valentine nodded, troubled by the evidence on the Ranch that the Kurians had gone to so much effort to find a replacement for the human race.

 

The pines smelled like home. The crisp aroma in the chill breeze of an East Texas December tickled his nose and brought back memories of winter camps in the Ozarks and Ouachitas. It marked his first breath in the lands of the Ozark Free Territory in over two years.

Half his wagons ground along almost empty. The stores and supplies within had long since been eaten up, and with the ratbits of “Batch Fiveteen” having taken better than a wagonload of quickwood to fight their own war against the Kurians, the remaining wagons were traveling light.

Leaving the Ranch was not as easy as entering it. They had fought two nighttime skirmishes against the Grogs in the borderlands and hurried into the empty lands north of Dallas and Fort Worth. A team of rangers turned southeast to confuse the pursuit, and the Batch Fifteen rodents did their best to muddle the trail.

Valentine had some of the quickwood lumber turned into spearpoints and crossbow quarrels anticipating an attack from the Reapers, but the hunt never began. They broke into the cattle-drive routes running up from Texas and into the plains without incident. Valentine put a moratorium on further slaughter of the dwindling cattle, so from a distance they might look like another wagon train bringing beef and trade north to the railheads in Oklahoma and Kansas for shipment east. The Kurians in northern Texas, never thick to begin with this close to the Free Territory, seemed quiescent.

It was as though their enemies were hibernating out the winter: they did not send patrols or Reapers to trouble them. There was a nervous day at the Trinity River crossing when some riders observed them from a hilltop. They did not stay to identify themselves, but rode away before the Rangers on their worn-out horses could catch them. But as this area could be considered no-man's-land between the Free Territory and the Kurian Zone, they could have been anything from smugglers to robbers to scouts from some fearful community hiding in a river valley, wishing for nothing more than to be left alone.

“How are you planning to get back?” Valentine asked Zacharias as a team of Rangers went out to ride an old highway running northeast out of the ghost town of Paris, checking for signs of human habitation. Valentine hoped to find one of the Southern Command Guard garrisons or a Wolf patrol somewhere near the Red River.

“We'll head south. Hell with the wagons — there's plenty more where they came from. Ride slow down south until we hook up with the Eastern Rangers. They'll fix us up with remounts, and then we'll slip through somewhere between Houston and San Antonio. Won't be that hard this time of year. If the story of the Rangers in this century ever gets written, this'll make an interesting chapter. Bargaining with ratbits over magic trees.”

“Don't forget the elephants with two trunks.”

“The elephants we'll never forget.”

Valentine laughed tiredly. It was good to be able to laugh again.
Just a few more days to tote the weary load —
the line from
Gone with the Wind
had been running through his mind of late. “I hope you know how much the help you've given and the risks you've run mean to the Ozark Free Territory.”

“Well, young Captain,” Zacharias said, from the vast age difference of five years, “you want my advice, the first thing you use the quickwood on is a campaign with us. You saddle up every man who can hold a gun and every cannon that's got a shell, and hit Dallas from the northeast. The East Texas Rangers come in from the southeast, and we'll hit 'em out of the Ranch, since the Kur no longer seem to be running things there. Once we've got Dallas cleaned up, the rest of Texas will be pieces just waiting to be picked up. Then we've got enough country to really live. Hell, old Kirby Smith held out against the whole damn Union that way, till the surrender. I expect we could do the same.”

“I'm one of the squashed guys at the bottom of the totem pole, Major,” Valentine said. “The idea sounds fine to me, but it's for men and women above my rank to decide.”

They watched the wagon train go by. Narcisse waved to them from the back of her horse, and Valentine moved to put himself between the trail and a fallen tree trunk. A Texan admirer of Narcisse's cooking had rigged a saddle so she could put her stumps into a pair of cut-off rifle-sheaths, and Ahn-Kha fixed a quirt to her “short arm.” Sissy had turned into an admirable neck-reiner in the last month, but had developed a taste for jumping — though often she ended up plummeting to the earth despite the horse mane gripped with her teeth. Valentine wanted her to arrive in the Free Territory with neck intact.

Zacharias stripped a handful of pine needles as he rode. “We gotta start winning somewhere. This is as good a place as any.” He handed the needles to Valentine like a bouquet.