Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (10 page)

Colin turned as Sean came up to them.

“You didn't get to RoeDell, you say?”

“Did not. Got within sight of the path, heard something very wrong, went past and hid until they'd gone. Was keeping far enough back they wouldn't see me. I don't think they've got a back scout.”

“That was all of them?”

“Aye,” said Sean. “Now, you two listen to me . . .”

“No,” interrupted Colin. “Did they get to fire the beacon?”

“No, not that I ever saw.”

“Did you go down to check?”

“No, I didn't even smell cooking, so I didn't bother.”

Colin tried to think how to get the information he needed . . . “What time did you get there? Or, when did you leave, I mean?”

“How'm I to ken? Fine the lot of watches we have now the Change has happened. Now listen, boyo . . .”

Break his train of thought, break it, fast . . . Don't let him give you an order; don't make it a fight . . .
Colin began to sway back and forth, bending back at the waist, his back horizontal with the ground. He tried to lift his left leg; just the right holding his whole body and fell in a puff of powdery earth.

“I said,” Sean spoke in a low, but very intense voice, bending over him.

“I hierd ye,” answered Colin, quietly, flat on his back. “But— Ah'm ordering you in the name o' t' Laird, Hamish McClintock himself, himself, Chief of the Dells and Clans and Stronghold, who sent me on a secret mission to RoeDell, to take Robin back to Stronghold and deliver her richt into the hands o' my aun sire.

“'Tis important, so 'tis, Sean . . . and you the only man I kin trust wit' t' charge of the light o' my life!”

Robin gave an almighty snort. “Like I'd have you to mate any time soon!” she exclaimed, but kept her voice down and quiet.

“I should hope not! We'aun micht too young . . . but it's hope I have for some future date!” Colin rocked, kicked, and forced a jump that landed him on his feet again. He busily patted down his great kilt, sending clouds of the fine dry earth right into Sean's face.

Sean snapped upright, coughing and waving his hands, frustration shouting in every tense muscle.

Wha' e'er yer up to, I hope I've spiked ye. It's hard to come the lordly elder over a boy flat on his back on the ground and joking. And I hope ye have a blessedly bad trip home with Robin. No flies on that girl! Whatever, whatever, I wish I knew what it was yer up to.

And Colin picked up three rocks, started to juggle them and danced down the trail, ignoring Sean's sudden low-voiced order.

He'd have rather let Sean and Robin go ahead. There was danger that Sean might see where he went off trail, but he couldn't trust the man to go fast enough.
When they're no gud choices, son, pick a choice; much better than none or dithering.

He stopped juggling and started dogtrotting. Eventually he paused where he couldn't be seen from somebody on his back trail and took a sighting. For years he and his many siblings had come up every summer and winter and played tracking games through the entire range of mountains to the west of Cave Junction. After he came to live in Cave Junction a few years before the Change he'd come to know the land even better, winning the games for his gang during their vacations.

Since the Change, his ability to go “off trail” without getting lost and directioneering to any destination he wanted had saved the McClintocks' bacon several times. It wasn't easier or faster, but it did allow for sneak bypasses and spying.

He pulled out the ropes he never left at home, and some carabiner clips, a few pulleys and a pickax and crampons. With a final look down the trail and a heartfelt hope that Robin would arrive back to Stronghold safe, he put her out of mind and began to climb the ridge.

Hours later he rested on another ridge, watching the last wisps of light fade to the west. Overhead stars began to glow; sunset was close to nine.

Mickleson's Dell lay downslope and west.

It was hidden beyond a spur and he couldn't
see
any sign it existed . . . but the scent of the evening meal fires hung in the air. He waited for several hours, but he saw no movement at all along the slopes. All the evidence they'd managed to dig up from Rachel's Dell, which he'd happened upon just two days after the attack, and from the other two smaller hamlets months before led them to believe that the Sherries were arriving and hiding in a wide arc around the settlement the day before the attack and came out, very quietly, several hours before dawn and slaughtered as many as possible before the alarm was given.

Hamish had decided, from the traces left, that no more than ten or fifteen men were involved. But ten or fifteen men, awake and systematic and well led could easily slaughter a hamlet of ten or fifteen households . . . eighty or ninety people, most dead in their beds or at the very threshold of their homes, and from the state of the animals, just before or at dawn. Farmer folk often were up betimes, doing their routine chores, and none of the Dells lost had shown signs of the early chore work.

The moon rose in a blaze of glory, looking as wide as Stronghold, silhouetted against the rough terrain. Colin watched eastward, and was rewarded. There was a fire to the east, possibly several from the smoke trails across the face of the moon.
They would have done better to camp cold,
he thought.
But, unless Sean is one of theirs and they expected him to join them; they've no idea they've been rumbled. Time to warn Mickleson's and trap the trappers.

He yanked his tousled hair back into a neater ponytail and slung his rope around a rock and began to descend by the tricksy moonlight to the trail down by the river.
At least, when the dogs start barking I don't have to worry that they'll warn the Sherries I'm arriving, and I don't have to sneak through a line of heartless murderers—I hope.
Colin was tired after a full half day of scaling up and down the mountain screes, so he took extra care with the descent. He finally reached the Illinois River Road, the NF-4103. The river brawled and leapt to his left as he set forward at a slow trot.

The moonlight made his path difficult; hard-edged black shadows making him hop and skip over obstacles that weren't there, and stub his toes on hidden ones. The road's pavement was deteriorating from years of neglect. A broken leg, or even a twisted ankle could kill him.

He trotted up to Mickleson's, one of the largest of the Dells, amid a chorus of angry dog barks and shouts and torch lighting.

“Quiet, quiet!” he yelled, feeling ironic.

Mickleson waved a pine knot close to his face, furious. Colin thought that the reflected flame wasn't making the man's face redder and puffier than it really was.

“Put that damned boy in the lockup and Hamish can spring him when we've got the time to send and let him know where his stupid little Loki is!”

Colin grabbed at the torch and doused it on the ground. “Quiet, you dafties!” he said, keeping his voice down. “And less noise and flame!” He dodged a sudden heavy fist, jumping behind the man.

What do I do now?
he wondered.
The jokester's all well and good, but it's backfiring the now.

Two men grabbed him from behind and yanked him back, one covering his spluttering mouth.

“Rory, Rory, be calm!”

Colin started violently.
Aisha? What's she doing here? Oh, damn! Aisha! Here!

She talked softly to Rory Mickleson. Colin relaxed himself and felt the hold on him loosen. He didn't pull free. After a few more seconds the Dell's commons were moonlit again, just a few horn lanterns, and the dogs under control. At a sign from Rory Mickleson, the men let go.

“Aisha, what are you doing here?” he blurted out.

His father's fourth . . . or second wife—depending on how you counted she could be his first since she was the only one living he'd married in a formal, official ceremony, five months after the Change—was barely visible in the darkness. She came to stand beside him. “I had to bring special supplies for Rory's wife. But she died and he's got some problems, so I stayed.”

Colin looked over to the far side of the commons and spotted the llama pack team Aisha generally used when she was wandering about the Westmark, pastured with the Dell's sheep, alpacas, and llamas.

After a minute of trying to put too many pieces of data in order, he settled on the most important. “Rory, 'tis sorry I am to hear that Susan's deid, th' now. Tha's terrible news. But we'll all be deid by the second dawn, do we not work hard tonight and tomorrow. There's a mess o' Sherries camped back a matter of a league or two and they've just wiped out RoeDell. I've sent news to my faither, but it's a question if it'll get through. Problem wi' these narrow mountain trails is how easy 'tis to interdict communications.”

Rory Mickleson scowled at him and then waved irritably. “Everybody, back to yer cots. Danuel, Robby, Maire, and Devra, wi' me in t' Hall. You too, Aisha.” He grabbed Colin by the arm and hustled him up to the grandiosely named “Hall.”

An hour later Colin scowled and gave it up. Mickleson would have his way, and in his Dell he ruled. Loyalty he owed to Hamish McClintock and the clan, but not obedience. Having wrung Colin dry of all the information and speculation he had, he had made his decisions and formulated his strategy.

“You and Aisha make tracks for Stronghold at dawn and tell t' laird,” he instructed, reddened eyes glaring, bitten lips cracked and bleeding a tad more. “I'm not having you risk yersel's in my bragle. Yer no loss as warriors, neither, but as couriers . . . mebee you can get Hamish and the affinity out here and catch them, slaughter them, and we'll be done with their threat.”

The lanky Dell chief turned away from them and gathered his seconds in a huddle over a relief map in the far corner.

Colin sighed. “But I told you, I already sent a courier . . .” he said to the man's back, and softly.

“Are you hungry, then, Colin?” asked Aisha.

“I'd take it kindly, if you'd feed me,” he answered. She took him out to the refectory and found bread, cheese, and jerky, with some nuts and clean cold water. He ate watching Aisha fuss the kitchen back into order.

“Susan's going to be missed,” she observed. “Rory's not a bad man, but he was always . . . a man to let women's work rest in women's hands. And Susan would have no second in her own home. And the girls were caring for their mother and not the house, not to mention, they're all young.”

Colin nodded, enjoying her voice.
She's the only person who isn't trying to sound like a second-rate BBC historical around here. I wish Da hadn't . . . well, but I don't either.
He sighed and Aisha laughed suddenly.

“Dear Colin, you've been a good boy with the world turning upside down on you twice and three times. And a good friend to me. What's the sigh for?”

And in the gloom of the kitchen, with the friendly low glow from the banked hearth it was suddenly easy for Colin to say, “I wish Da'd nivir left you when Esther came back pregnant that winter. And you with child.”

“Esther's Shona is as much your sister as Dhugal is your brother,” said Aisha, a measure of reproof in her voice.

He struggled to express himself . . .

“It, it jest warn't right!”

“No, Colin, it wasn't. It wasn't right that Esther had to bear a rape child, or suffer the cruel march south to return, under the slave's yoke. Life isn't right . . . many times. Your father loves Esther. He cared and cares for me, but Esther is the wife of his heart. I'd rather a cold bed than a shared bed. Esther would have said nothing had Hamish honored the vows he spoke to me, believing her dead.”

She drummed her fingers on the table, lightly. “But I wouldn't have been happy, either. No, sometimes you get lemons and even lemonade isn't possible, so you sip the sour and accept it.” She put her work-roughened dark fingers over his hand for an instant, eyes black in the gloom of the kitchen, skin well nigh invisible.

Colin sighed. He'd fallen in love with Aisha this last year, her dark skin, slender, aristocratic face, patient kindness, and the riot of curly black hair ravaging his adolescent heart. She was—had been—his father's wife; it was icky! And she was abandoned and beautiful and . . . Colin squelched the thought.

“We'll be leaving the morn, then? I'm not too easy in my mind. Moonset is after sunrise, so we'll have no dark hours before dawn to creep past the Sherry camps.”

“I don't know, Colin; it doesn't feel right. Are you sure they'll surround the Dell tomorrow? And attack at dawn the next day?”

“No,” he said, baldly. “It's what they've done before. But they've not, to our knowledge hit two Dells in two days. So, I don't know.”

“Aisha? Colin?”

“Here,” called Aisha.

Rory walked into the refectory. “Dennis isn't back,” he said. Colin watched him fidget with the ironmongery hanging in the fireplace.

There's a man not as confident as he was showing to his seconds.

“Of course, you've yer aun place here, Aisha, and always welcome. Colin, ye kin bunk with the boys over in t' tower. But . . .”

“Who's Dennis? And where and why is he missing?”

Rory glared at Colin. “Ye'll ha' yer faither's inches soon eno', and probably your faither's brains, though I dun see no sign they's there, just the yet. Any yet—so, Dennis is our shepherd and he an' his dog have been after finding a missing sheep flock. It's but a bellwether and three ewes and their lambs.”

“There aren't many places for them to hide,” observed Colin.

“It's coming up on midnight, Rory,” said Aisha.

Colin shot her a glance; something had changed in her voice. Clearly Rory had heard it, too. He moved behind her and pointed her at the banked fire. “Midnight, the witching hour, black witch. Tell me what you see . . .”