Short Fiction Algis Budrys (best large ereader TXT) 📖

“Ah, yes, my baggage train,” the Barbarian muttered. “Well, we’ll come back to that. What else do you suppose they’re dividing?”

Geoffrey frowned. “Why⁠—nothing else. Wait!” He sat up sharply, ignoring his ribs. “The fiefs of the dead nobles.”

“Exactly. Your ramshackle little League held together long enough to whip us for the first time, but now the princelings are dividing up and returning to their separate holdings. Once there, they’ll go back to peering covetously at each other’s lands, and maybe raid amongst themselves a little, until I come back again. And you’re as poor as a church mouse at this moment, lad⁠—no fief, no lands, no title⁠—unless there’s an heir?”

Geoffrey shook his head distractedly. “No. I’ve not wed. It’s as you say.”

“And just try to get your property back. No⁠—no, it won’t be so easy to return. Unless you’d care to be a serf on your own former holding?”

“Dugald would have me killed,” Geoffrey said bitterly.

“So there you are, lad. The only advantage you have is that Dugald thinks you’re dead already⁠—you can be sure of that, or it would have been an assassin, and not me, that woke you. That’s something, at least. It’s a beginning, but you’ll have to lay your plans carefully, and take your time. I certainly wouldn’t plan on doing anything until your body’s healed and your brain’s had time to work.”

Young Geoffrey blinked back the tears of rage. The thought of losing the town and lands his father had left him was almost more than his hot blood could stand. The memory of the great old Keep that dominated the town, with its tapestried halls and torchlit chambers, was suddenly very precious to him. He felt a sharp pang at the thought that he must sleep in a field tonight, like some skulking outlaw, while Dugald quite possibly got himself drunk on Geoffrion wine and snored his headache away on the thick furs of Geoffrey’s bed.

But the Barbarian was right. Time was needed⁠—and this meant that, to a certain extent at least, his lot and Savage’s were thrown in together. The thought came to Geoffrey that he might have chosen a worse partner.

“Now, lad,” the Barbarian said, “as long as you’re not doing anything else, you might as well help me with my problem.”

The realization of just exactly who this man was came sharply back to young Geoffrey. “I won’t help you escape to your own lands, if that’s what you mean,” he said quickly.

“I’ll take good care of that myself, when the time comes,” the man answered drily. “Right now, I’ve got something else in mind. They’re dividing my baggage train, as you said. Now, I don’t mind that, seeing as most of it belonged to them in the first place. I don’t mind it for this year, that is. But there’s something else one of you cockerels will be wanting to take home with him, and I’ve a mind not to let him. There’s a perfectly good woman in my personal trailer, and I’m going to get her. But if we’re going to do that and get clear of this country by morning, we’d better get to it.”

Like every other young man of his time and place, Geoffrey had a clear-cut sense of duty regarding the safety and well-being of ladies. He had an entirely different set of attitudes toward women who were not ladies. He had not the slightest idea of which to apply to this case.

What sort of woman would the Barbarian take to battle with him? What sort of women would the inland barbarians have generally? He had very little knowledge to go on. The inlanders had been appearing from over the westward mountains for generations, looting and pillaging almost at will, sometimes staying through a winter but usually disappearing in the early Fall, carrying their spoils back to their mysterious homelands on the great Mississippi plain. The seaboard civilization had somehow kept from going to its knees, in spite of them⁠—in this last generation, even though the barbarians had the Barbarian to lead them, the Seaboard League had managed to cobble itself together⁠—but no one, in all this time, had ever actually learned, or cared, much about these vicious, compactly organized raiders. Certainly no one had learned anything beyond those facts which worked to best advantage on a battlefield.

So, young Giulion Geoffrey faced his problem. This “perfectly good woman” of the Barbarian’s⁠—was she in fact a good woman, a lady, and therefore entitled to aid in extremity from any and all gentlemen; or was she some camp follower, entirely worthy of being considered a spoil of combat?

“Well, come on, lad,” the Barbarian rumbled impatiently at this point. “Do you want that Dugald enjoying her tonight along with everything else?”

And that decided Geoffrey. He pushed himself to his feet, not liking the daggers in his chest, but not liking the thought of Dugald’s pleasures even more. “Let’s go, then.”

“Good enough, lad,” the Barbarian chuckled. “Now let’s see how quietly we can get across to the edge of that fire.”

They set out⁠—none too quietly, with the Barbarian’s heavy bulk lurching against Geoffrey’s lean shoulder on occasion, and both of them uncertain of their footing in the darkness. But they made it across without being noticed⁠—just two more battle-sore figures in a field where many such might be expected⁠—and that was what counted.

The noise and confusion attendant on the dividing of the spoils was an added help; they reached the fringes of the campfire easily.

It was very interesting, the way history had doubled back on itself, like a worm regrowing part of its body but regrowing it in the wrong place. At one end of the kink⁠—of the fresh, pink scar⁠—was a purulent hell of fire and smoke that no one might have expected to live through. Yet, people had, as they have a habit of doing. And at the other end of the kink in time⁠—Giulion Geoffrey’s end, Harolde Dugald’s time, the Barbarian’s day⁠—there were keeps and