Winter Duty (37 page)

Valentine’s binoculars weren’t much better than his eyes at that distance, but with the help of one of the A-o-K’s telescopes, he could get a look at individual figures. He recognized the dark battle dress and red dagger sheaths of the Moondaggers.

“The Coonskins have formally united the Moondaggers,” Brother Mark said. “May they live to see the error of their ways and have regret come to wisdom.”

Frat took a long look at the foes he’d heard so much about. “Religious nuts, huh?”

“If you call worshipping Kurians a religion,” Valentine said. Frat turned the eyepiece over to Boelnitz. He turned the knob back and forth, sweeping across the camp, and then made a few notes in his leather journal.

“Some of ’em like the lifestyle, I guess,” the Gunslinger observer said. “No tobacco, booze, or red meat but all the wives you want.”

“They’ve been calling themselves the Kentucky Loyal Host lately,” a Gunslinger in an officer’s slouch hat said.

“Fancy-sounding word for ‘traitor,’ ” Silvertip observed.

Their long search ended in a matter-of-fact fashion. Valentine and Frat were escorted to Corporal Rockaway, raised O’Coombe, where he was setting up mortar positions on the hillside above the river.

“Your boy Rockaway—or O’Coombe, or whatever his name is—he’s involved in this. He may be on one leg and be wearing a diaper, but he’s a heck of a fire director and trainer for our captured Moondagger artillery,” one of Tikka’s captains said as he walked them along the ridgeline.

And making a bad job of it, too, to Valentine’s mind. The artillery’s position could be observed from across the river.

Valentine remembered Rockaway as soon as he saw the face, but there had been changes. He limped worse than Valentine and seemed to have lost weight everywhere but his midsection. He was a rather plain-looking, freckled young man with sandy hair and a delicate chin like his mother’s. He seemed lost in the big service jacket the A-o-K wore, but he still had his Southern Command helmet. Valentine was surprised someone hadn’t talked him out of it when he was left behind. Javelin ran short on helmets long before they hit Evansville.

“Did you pick out these emplacements?” Valentine asked as others kept trotting up to Corporal Rockaway for instructions.

“Orders,” Corporal Rockaway said. He had some of his mother’s Texas accent too. “We’re supposed to show our teeth so there won’t be any funny business like at Utrecht. Hey, Doc. What the heck are you doing all this way?” O’Coombe’s doctor stepped forward. “We’ve come a long way to bring you home. I’m glad to see you well. When we’d heard—”

Rockaway smiled, which much improved his face. “Hell, Doc, well’s a relative term. You put my first diaper on me, and I’m here to tell, I’m back in diapers now and will be for the rest of my life. Some emergency patching to the digestive tract, they said. And I have to drink lots of water to help things along. But I can still fight; I just leak a little doing it. I like fighting these Moondagger sons of bitches. If everything—Well, tell Mom not to worry.”

“You can tell her yourself when this is done. She’s back with the Gunslinger camp,” Valentine said.

“She came all this way too? Devoted of her. When the news came about my older brothers, she just tightened up her mouth and hung black crepe around their pictures and made big donations in their names to the Rear Guard Fund.”

Valentine had no business getting involved in family dynamics. He jerked his chin at Frat, and they excused themselves.

Once they were out of earshot, Frat said, “Heart’s in the right place but the kid doesn’t know much about setting up a battery. If anything goes down, he’s making it easy for the Moondaggers. They’re not all cross-eyed and stigmatic, I don’t suppose.”

“Not hardly,” Valentine said, remembering the sniper’s bullet that had sprayed Rand’s brains all over headquarters.

Valentine spotted Tikka emerging from a knot of hilltop woods, walking the ridgeline. Corporal Rockaway limped up to her, and they spoke for a few minutes. Tikka pointed as she spoke, both toward the ridge on the other side of the river where the Coonskins and the Moondaggers were encamped, and behind, where the rest of her train was presumably approaching and deploying.

Once again, she made a show of strength, putting some of her vehicles and horse wagons in plain view on the hill.

She was kind enough to invite Valentine to accompany her to the peace conference. All she asked was that he wear one of the A-o-K field jackets and a hat, and keep to the back with his mouth shut.

Duvalier managed to work her way into the party too. Boelnitz tried to get permission to come along, but Tikka insisted that he stay back on the riverbank.

“Remember what happened the last time we were invited to a conference?” Valentine said.

Tikka grinned fiercely. “As a matter of fact, we’re very much hoping for an encore.”

“Without legworms? Won’t you be at a disadvantage?”

“They’ll be assuming that, yeah.”

VIPs arrived in cars and passenger trucks; the Gunslingers and Bulletproof and a smattering of other old Alliance soldiers on horseback or in wagon trains. Many arrived via old-fashioned shoe leather.

They met out on the small lake, a widening in the Kentucky River separating Coonskin land from the Gunslingers.

Valentine felt like he’d read about a peace meeting like this before, but he couldn’t place the exact circumstances.

The two sides rowed out to a pontoon houseboat anchored midlake. There, on the sundeck atop the houseboat (after both sides verified that neither had filled the living quarters with gunmen), they met.

Their forces lined the tree-filled banks to either side of the river. Valentine didn’t understand the fascination. There was little enough to watch.

He wasn’t important enough to go up on the top deck with the Kentucky or Coonskin principals. But he could listen from the base of the ladder facing the west side of the river.

There were introductions, neither side being particularly gracious beyond the grace required of opponents who were used to shooting each other on sight. If the Gunslingers were colder in their formalities, it was because they’d suffered more outrage at the hands of the Moondaggers.

In many more words than the Reaper’s avatar used, they offered the representatives of the Kentucky Assembly essentially the same status as Jack in the Box had spoken of: a neutral Kentucky, running its own domestic affairs but leaving the outside world to the Kurians. The Agenda and Tikka were no more inclined to welcome the proposal from some Moonskin mouthpiece and a few traitors than they were through Valentine’s birdlike Reaper.

“Glad to see you admit we whupped you out of Kentucky,” Tikka said.

“We stayed only long enough to chase Southern Command out,” a Moondagger responded. “Then we returned to our allies.”

“Formerly
our
allies,” Tikka said. “They turned on us; they’ll turn on you someday. Remember that.”

“You are the traitors,” an educated Kentucky accent said. “The Kurians indulged you, and you paid them back by aiding terrorists and wreckers and murderers—”

“There is a reckoning coming!” one of the Moondaggers began to shout thickly. Valentine recognized the voice at once, their old blustering friend Last Chance. “A reckoning! This land, long peaceful—”

Ha!
Valentine thought. Last Chance wasn’t at the battle between the Bulletproof and the Wildcats a few years back.

“—needs to be cleansed of the filth that has washed into it. Intruders! Interlopers! Troublemakers! Trouble they brought, and death will be their reward—or something worse than death.”

Duvalier made a fist and flicked out two fingers toward Last Chance with her thumb slightly up—the American Sign Language version of “asshole.”

“That’s not how you go about negotiating in Kentucky, beardy,” the new Agenda for the Assembly said—the previous one was too sick to make the journey to the river. “You want to deal with us, you tell us what you offer and you let us make up our minds. You don’t threaten.”

Valentine liked the new Agenda already. Later he learned he was a man named Zettel, though most called him Mr. Zee. Formerly the clan chief of the Gunslingers and a friend of Karas, Mr. Zee, Valentine had been told, came from a family who’d once owned quarries and he’d grown up covered in limestone dust.

“We’ll consider your offer and give you an answer tomorrow. Here, on the boat again. Shall we say noon?” Agenda Zettel said.

“There can be only one answer,” the educated voice said. “The other doesn’t bear thinking about. We both love Kentucky too much to see it turned into a graveyard.”

Duvalier looked up at the sky, shivered. She edged closer to Valentine and stuck her hands in his pocket.

“We could go up there and kill all of them,” she whispered. “Pay them back for Utrecht.”

Killers who don’t like killing never last long. They become drunks or careless. Duvalier liked it, as long as her targets were Quislings, the higher up in the social hierarchy the better.

Valentine had a dark part of him that liked it as well. The shadow that lurked inside him chose its time and place to be satisfied.

“The Assembly can make up its mind. It’s their choice. Let’s not make it for them.”

A few more words were exchanged upstairs about day and night signals.

They departed. Valentine put one hand in his pocket and gripped Duvalier’s with the other, making sure she accompanied him to one of the boats heading back for the Gunslinger shore.

They waited in line and ate like the rest of the Gunslingers and A-o-K troops. Chieftain and Silvertip were going back for thirds when Tikka interrupted and asked for a moment with Valentine. They stepped out of earshot.

“Mr. Zee’s meeting with the Assembly representatives is civilians only, so I thought I’d track you down and talk to you.”

Her dark good looks were suited for a chill Kentucky night. She sparkled like a bit of Kentucky’s bituminous coal. Valentine knew that all you had to do was touch a match to her and she could generate a whole evening’s worth of warmth.