Califia's Daughters (5 page)

By the time Dian came riding up the road, a large buck strapped behind her saddle, four rabbits dangling in front, and a pack of dogs ebbing and flowing around the horse's trotting hooves, most of the visitors had arisen and were at the tables of their host families, making the first awkward attempts at conversation. Dian had taken her dogs out well before dawn, both for exercise and to supplement the day's supplies. Despite the inevitable gore and violence of the kills, and despite not having been to bed that night, she returned refreshed, purified as always by the simplicity of death. As Dian passed the first houses of the Valley, she came across Carmen's oldest stepdaughter, Lupe, walking up and down the road, patting and comforting her screaming two-year-old sister. Lupe grimaced at Dian, and said in a loud voice,
“Ella no le gusta los estranjeros.”
Dian nodded in sympathy; she might not go so far as to say that she didn't like them, but there was no doubt, fascination and fear would set the tone of the entire Valley for days.

Dian left the meat at the kitchen, then rode to the barn and rubbed down, watered, and fed her horse. When she went to the kennels to do the same for the dogs, she found Susanna in residence, sitting on the floor with the latest litter of puppies. The girl gave Culum a thump on his side by way of greeting and grinned up at her aunt, one puppy cradled to her chest and three more mock-fighting across her still-adolescent legs.

“Puppies have such a great smell, don't they?” she said. “It's like sweet and sour milk.”

“You used to smell like that, mewling and puking at your mother's breast,” Dian told her. “And your personal habits were every bit as irresponsible as these guys'.” She laid the rifle, coat, and saddlebags on a table and went to liberate puppies and girl, brushing ineffectively at some of the more unsavory stains on her niece's clothing. After a minute she gave up, returned the puppies to their mother, and took her things down the hall into her quarters to see about her own breakfast. She called back over her shoulder at Susanna.

“What's your mother got planned for the morning?”

Susanna followed Dian into the house and helped her return equipment and clothing to their respective racks. “That's why I'm here—Mom sent me to fetch you. That woman, Miriam, wants to meet with you and Mom and Kirsten and a bunch of others, I forget who, as soon as you're ready. Why are they here? I was busy with Ling last night—did you hear that Jenn—that's her name, Jenn—looks a little better this morning, and Ling's pretty sure she'll live? Anyway, Mom wouldn't tell me anything this morning but to come here and wait for you, but I want to know what they're doing here. Nobody ever tells me anything. I'm not a child, you know. How can a man travel like that? Why did they bring the boy? What do they want?”

Dian laughed and placed both hands on the girl's shoulders, bending to look directly into the excited young eyes and saying clearly, “My questions exactly. And maybe if you'd let me get myself together, we can get them answered.”

“Okay, okay,” said Susanna. “I'll go tell them you'll be down in a bit. But there's breakfast there—Mom's even making coffee!”

“I'll be there as soon as I'm clean and the dogs are fed.”

         

Half an hour later Dian trotted up the three steps to the kitchen door. Someone else had been up early, for there was a rich yeasty odor of fresh bread beneath the sharp tang of bacon. She followed the smells and the voices past dining room and library to the cool veranda. The veranda was large, wrapping around two sides of the house and fully ten feet deep, but this morning it was packed, with more people standing outside the screened walls—theoretically, one adult from each house, so all the forty-odd families might be represented, but it looked as if the entire population was here, even the babies.

Remnants of breakfast lay on the long table in the room just inside the veranda, and Dian paused to pick over what was left, peering into the empty coffee carafe with chagrin, then carried her plate to the door, where a couple of women shifted to make room for her. There was no sign of the man or his son, but Miriam and two of her women were sitting at the far end with Judith, Kirsten, and Ling. Peter was there to represent the menfolk, with Anthony, the senior male in the Valley. Laine sat in another corner and nodded to Dian, although there was no sign of Jeri, who had also been up all night.

Miriam was describing her band's trip through the destroyed cities on the other side of the hills; her narrative seemed to be drawing to a close. Dian watched her covertly as she ate, studying the woman's black hair and eyes and her strong, compact body. The stranger spoke with an air of authority and self-assurance, her voice quiet and even. Only her posture in the chair revealed her discomfort, as she sat stiff-backed in its softness.

“I'm very sure they didn't know that Isaac and Teddy were with us,” she was saying. “If they had, they would never have let us get away so easily. They were just probing, and it was only bad luck that two of us got in the way of their arrows.” She paused. “We had gambled on that, of course. We decided to send a small enough caravan that people would think us of little importance. As it was, we were almost too small.”

That seemed to mark a good pausing place, for Judith stood up and began to organize a flow of dirty plates and utensils toward the kitchen. When most of the dishes were out, Judith looked down the length of the veranda at Dian.

“We wondered if you were going to join us.”

Dian hastily swallowed her mouthful of sweet roll. “Sorry if I held things up. But you did get your revenge—to think I missed coffee because of a few lousy rabbits.” General laughter was followed by shouts of triumph as Lenore came from the kitchen bearing a solitary cup of tepid, greasy-looking coffee and presented it to Dian, who held it up, sniffed it deeply, and finally slurped it with exaggerated appreciation.

“Ah, the nectar of the gods! Bless you, Lenore.” She placed the coffee on the floor between her feet and wiped the last smear of egg from her plate before adding it to a passing stack of empty plates. She retrieved the cup and savored the contents while the room was settling down again. When it was quiet enough to hear children playing in the pond, she lowered the half-empty cup and looked across the intervening heads at Miriam. “I'm sorry I missed your story,” she said in a carrying voice. “I was looking forward to it. Perhaps we can get together sometime, so I can ask you a few questions?”

Which was a roundabout way of asking, What do you want and how long are you going to be here?

Miriam looked down at her hands, fiddling with the narrow silver band around the ring finger of her left hand, then met Dian's question head on.

“I won't be staying for any longer than it takes to rest my women and patch up the lesser wounds. I may have to leave behind Sonja and Jenn, the two in your infirmary. I can't wait for them to heal; our village needs us back.” Here she looked up to face Judith. “Isaac and his son will stay here, if you will have them. They are, to put it bluntly, a gift from my people to yours.”

The silence was suddenly complete, breathless. Judith, who had also seen the woman's relief the night before and suspected the reason, was not taken by surprise, but with the closed expression of a seasoned trader she voiced the obvious question.

“Why? What do you want in exchange for your ‘gift'?”

Miriam sighed gustily and said, almost as if to herself, “I'm really not the person for this. I'm a fighter, not a talker, and it's very likely I'll put my foot in it. But,” she said, firming herself visibly, “our talker is in your sick house with blood leaking out of her shoulder, so—it's me or nothing.” Her voice, too, grew firmer as she collected her thoughts.

“We come from a town in southern Oregon, near the Smith River, about three hundred miles north of here. It's a hilly area, mountainous even, with patches of decent farmland in isolated valleys. Like here, our communities tend to be small. At least, until recently. A couple of years ago a few of the more . . . unsavory communities joined forces with a leader from out of the north. They were then joined by others, and pretty soon there weren't too many left to oppose them. We are one group who does.” Her voice stopped for a moment.

“Three hundred miles is quite a trek for reinforcements,” Judith probed, “even if we could spare enough to make any difference to your safety. Surely you have closer neighbors.”

“Yes. I mean yes, we have neighbors, but no, we are not looking for reinforcements. And it's not as simple as just fear of petty tyrants. There are things we cannot fight. You see, when our neighbors joined the northern group—the leader calls herself ‘Queen Bess,' you may have heard of her? No? Well, you will. Anyway, they told ‘Queen Bess' about a nearby cache of weapons and equipment from Before. Near as we can figure, the things were owned by a band of survivalists who didn't make it. None of the locals had been willing to touch the things, but Bess sent some of her people in for them. Most of the weapons were useless after all this time, but in grubbing about in the caves where the hell weapons were stored, her people set loose a plague.” Miriam's face grew taut with the memory. “The first we knew of it were the dead fish in the river. Hundreds of them, stinking up the banks and bringing in every rat and dog pack for miles. Then we started seeing dead and dying animals. And then one day, seven of the women from a town upriver came into our village. They were all terribly ill, vomiting blood and losing great wads of hair. Our healer—she's only a doctor, but she spent a year in Meijing—she said they were not contagious, that it was radiation, so we let them in and tried to help, but there was nothing we could do. They died. All of them. One of them brought a small baby, who was still alive when I left, but our healer didn't think she was going to make it.”

“When was this?” It was Ling asking in her light, accented voice.

“They came to us the first week of April. We immediately contacted all the friendly families around us, sent scouts to find out what was happening. That's when we heard about Bess and her part in it. By the first part of May it became clear that all the settlements along the river were threatened. Our drinking water comes from a spring, but our living comes from the river, and there was no group in the hills that could possibly take in all of us—there are more than a hundred of us. But, the poison upriver is moving down. Our reserves will see us through the winter, and when the river freezes it'll stop the spread—we hope—but next spring we must go. Or we will die.”

Dian spoke up, her voice clear through the crowded veranda.

“And you want to come here.”

Miriam's eyes swung to Dian as murmurs and gasps showed that not everyone had heard it coming. She nodded shortly, once, and turned to Judith.

“As I said, I am not the one who should be trying to put this to you, but, yes. We would like to propose that our two villages join forces. Not here, in your valley, but just outside it, where the water from your stream joins that of the other one. It is not ideally protected, but there's good land and plenty of trees for building with.”

“Why all the way down here?” asked Judith. “There must be a lot of healthy places between here and there, without having to move three hundred miles?”

“Sure, there are healthy places, but they may not be safe. It's Bess, you see. Even before the river poison we knew we'd have to do something, either go east into the desert or south into the protection of Meijing. Bess controls all of central Oregon now, from Portland on down, and she's starting to move. If we go south a hundred miles, we'll just have to face the same decision a few years down the line: join her or fight her. No village that's tried to fight has survived, and we're not big enough to consider it seriously. She's on her way to California, you can bet on it. If she keeps up at this rate—and there's nothing to stop her so far—Meijing will be the only one who can challenge her. The poison merely forced the decision on us. We chose you because of your location and because we thought you might take us.”

Dian cleared her throat. “Who was your spy?”

Miriam opened her mouth to protest the accusation, reconsidered, then reluctantly answered.

“I don't like the word
spy
, but we were told to come here by the one who calls himself the Prophet Isaiah.”

“Crazy Isaiah!” Dian gave voice to a roomful of skepticism. “You came hundreds of miles with two menfolk on the word of a madman?”

This time one of Miriam's two companions, a small blond woman named Anne, spoke up. “He's not as crazy as he gives out, not around us anyway. He—well, he's a sort of uncle. He winters with us sometimes. He was there when the poisoned women arrived, and it shocked him terribly. He lost his family in the same sort of way, years and years ago. After the women died he went silent for a solid week, just sat staring at the wall, and then he came to me—my family is caring for the sick baby—and told me that we all had to move and described this place. He was quite lucid and very definite that this was the only suitable place for us. ‘The land is chosen' was how he put it.”

“And so you came?” This time it was Judith who spoke the communal doubt.

“Well, no. Not right off.” Miriam grinned, an expression as unexpected and appealing as it had been the night before. “We weren't that desperate, to have to take his word alone. We figured we had time enough, so we . . . well, we sent scouts. Syl, here, for one.” She gestured at the third stranger, a woman with blond hair and a foxlike face, the woman who had appeared to notice Dian in the shadow of the mill. She was even smaller than she'd appeared in the darkness, shorter than Susanna. “She came down to see if he was right.” Syl gave them a somewhat uncomfortable smile.