Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (39 page)

The which you will not keep if you drink that every day!
he thought as he squatted also.

“Salud!”
the
coureur de bois
said and drank deep, his Adam’s-apple fluttering blissfully under his beard. The word meant more or less the same thing. “I hear that one before, plenty Company men are…
Gael
, you say, no?”

He indicated Rudi’s kilt.

“You’re a hunter, then?” Rudi said.

“Trapper, me!” the man said, jerking a thumb at a bundle of pelts among the gear stacked nearby. He sighed. “But maybe not no more. The beaver, she gets thin unless you go far, far east. Not like the old days. I miss them, me, miss the sound their tails make when they whack the water, but a man he must make a living…”

The woman handed them each a bark plate, heaped with duck and flour bannock and with a peck of berries in a twisted cup of leaves. Rudi signed his food and put a morsel aside for the spirits of place, then ate. He didn’t think the man noticed, but the woman did, and gave him a sharp look. She had a small gold crucifix around her neck, which might mean anything or not much, depending.

“Indeed, the beaver are few the now,” Rudi said, eating the plain good food with relish. “And…”

If that history book is to be believed…

“…they’ve taken to wearing hats of silk instead, in the lands across the great water.”

“
Oui
, I hear that. Mebbe this my last trip; not a young man no more, me, to travel and trap and fight. I go to the
prairie de les Française,
west of here in the valley, be
habitant
and grow wheat like my father does back around
Trois-Rivières
. Better for
les enfants
, eh?”

“Indeed it will be,” Rudi said softly. “I’d say it will be a good place for them, and that they’d do well indeed.”

He nodded to the woman and rose. “My thanks for the drink and the
food and your company, my friends,” he said. “But I’d better be getting along.”

Portland
, Mathilda thought.

But that was only from the river before her and a turn that showed her the wooded heights westward that she knew as the New Forest. There was no city wall, no ruined towers of the ancient world, no great bridges across the Willamette. The street around her was deep in mud, though she stood on a wooden sidewalk out of the worst of it. The city-smell was heavier than in the Crown City of her own day, ranker, but with the horse-dung and woodsmoke she had grown up with. The river swarmed with boats from canoes to great three-masted full-rigged ships, and also with curious things like rafts with metal chimneys and mill-wheels to either side or at the stern that she recognized as steamboats after a moment.

Fascinated, she walked closer. Nearer to the water the crowds were even thicker and rougher: fewer of the men wore the dark garb with stovepipe hats she’d noticed earlier, and there were fewer women as well. That wasn’t a complete surprise; something like that would have been true of
her
Portland. She got more odd glances here too. Her cotte-hardie wasn’t impossibly different from what the women wore here, but it wasn’t identical either…and the rich fabrics and jewels attracted attention in this part of the town.

The edge of the water itself was a chaos of noise and loads going overhead on nets, of bowsprits overhanging the roadway and piles of boxes and bales, of sweating men in floppy trousers held up by suspenders over collarless shirts shifting loads heavier than they were. A stink of sweat and tobacco and now and then cheap whiskey from a staggering drunkard came through a slight cold drizzle and the more wholesome smells of cut timber, flour and barreled produce; it was evidently well into the Black Months here. She edged back and back to avoid the traffic and then dodged a wagon piled with bundles of bar iron stock beneath a tarpaulin and drawn by eight straining platter-hooved horses.

Suddenly a voice from one of the narrow alleys between tall warehouses painted with the names of their owners or gaudy advertisements for goods and patent medicines:

“Aidez-moi, pour l’amour de le bon dieu!”

Then a woman’s scream. Mathilda turned and plunged in without an instant’s hesitation, her left hand pulling up her skirts and her right drawing her dagger. The alley was dark, but she could see three men surrounding a slighter figure, and cloth ripped.

“Unhand her!” she snapped; it was the Crown Princess’ voice, that discounted the very possibility of disobedience. “Unhand that maiden, you stinking curs!”

Bristly faces turned on her, topped by shapeless caps or in one case an odd domed hat with a narrow brim over rat-tails of greasy red hair. They hesitated for a long instant. Then:

“Get out of it, ye hoor—watch, she’s got a knife, Jim!”

She cut; you didn’t stab, not fighting with a knife against someone with shoulders the breadth of the one reaching for her. He shrieked himself as the steel laid open his forearm and turned and ran, clutching it with one hand, bright blood red in the gray light and heavy boots squelching in the mud. The other two spread out, and one flicked his hand. There was something in it, a straight-razor held with the blade in his palm. He started to move, swift as a snake, then halted as he took in the way Mathilda held her dagger and stood poised. His eyes went wide in surprise, then narrowed as rat-thin lips lifted to show yellow teeth.

“Is that the way of it, then, fancy miss? I’ll have that sticker for payment, and more besides.”

One hand shot out to restrain his larger companion, and when he came forward again it was in a shuffling flat-footed crouch, eyes on her face rather than the blade.

The woman they’d been holding was beside Mathilda, panting and gabbling in French—a slurred quacking nasal dialect nothing like the courtly version Mathilda had a little of—and holding the blouse of a cotton dress closed where it had been torn from her neck. The men edged forward—

And a hand grabbed one by the shoulder, the slim quick one with the
razor. It whipped him around right into the path of a fist like an oak maul, and there was a sickening
crack
sound; he dropped like an empty grain-sack tossed aside at a mill. The bigger man wheeled and grappled with the newcomer and then they were staggering back and forth. There was no science and little art in the way they fought, but plenty of strength and a vicious determination to do harm. Mathilda exchanged a glance with the woman…

Girl
, she thought.
In her teens.

Short and dark, pretty and olive-skinned and with snapping black eyes, part tribeswoman despite the cotton dress and ruched sunbonnet that contained much of her long black hair. Her full lips firmed and she nodded at Mathilda, then bent to take up a length of sawn timber buried in the mud of the alley and lifted it overhead like the handle of a threshing-flail. They poised together, Mathilda’s knife ready as well, waiting for the right back to come towards them.

It wasn’t necessary; the other attacker was down on his hands and knees an instant later, and the newcomer gave him a boot to the ribs that made bone crack audibly. He rolled away, then dragged himself upright and fled clutching his ribs.

The victor was panting and grinning; he picked up a knit cap and bowed, moving aside to make it clear he wasn’t blocking the exit of the alleyway and glancing back to see if anyone had paid attention. Yellow lights were coming on, gaslights in cast-iron standards, gleaming on the puddles.

“Josiah Whittle, at yur service, ladies,” he said. “And that was more lively and better fun than anything since the
Dreadnought
sailed from Portsmouth town.”

The accent reminded her of Sam Aylward, a little, or John Hordle, though a bit crisper. He was a young man in bell-bottomed canvas trousers and a shapeless sweater beneath a blue cloth jacket with brass buttons, with a kerchief around his neck held by a ring of carved bone. Stocky-strong in build and about Mathilda’s height—she’d noticed walking down to the river that she was a couple of inches taller relative to the average than she had been where she was raised. A shock of corn-colored hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat and rain, and his face was broad and freckled and gap-toothed.

She sheathed her dagger and extended a hand. “Mrs. Mathilda Mackenzie, sir,” she said.

His grip was careful and extremely strong, and even more callused than her own, the hand of a man who’d spent years heaving on tarred hemp rope.

“E…Elaine Bélanger,” the dark young woman said. “Thenk you very much, sair.”

“You know these longshore rats, ma’am?” the sailor said, looking at her in a puzzled way—evidently the dress didn’t match the hand.

“No,” Mathilda said. “I’m not familiar with this part of the city; I was here to meet my husband, and heard this young lady cry out.”

“Brave of you to come running in!” the man said admiringly, and then noticed the improvised cudgel in the younger woman’s hands. “And of you, miss! I thank’ee, though it warn’t needed.”

“I…” Elaine dropped the wooden batten and gave him a look of admiration. “I am here wit’ my father from the farm…I wander off, not used to cities, me…those men…”

“Perhaps you could escort the young lady to her parents,” Mathilda said. “My husband will be anxious…”

This time Rudi heard the men coming down towards the lake. It was later in the season, and the ground had the cold damp smell of hard rain; the snowline came low on Hood to the south, seen across the rising green carpet of the forest.

There were four of them and twice that many horses. All the animals had game slung across their backs; roughly gralloched black-tail deer and one big brown-black hide that must contain the quarters of a butchered bear. There was only a slight smell of blood and few flies at this season. The horses looked worn-down and so did the men; they also looked tough as rawhide, dressed in a mixture of coarse cloth and leather, both much patched. They all had rifles in the crooks of their left arms, the type with hammers but no flints. They stopped when they saw Rudi. Though they didn’t level the weapons, their eyes did flicker about, and one beanpole with a mop of shaggy fair hair under a tattered felt hat faced about to scan the trail behind them for a moment.

“How do, stranger,” one said after a moment; his voice had a harsh twanging rasp. “You from these here parts?”

“That I am,” Rudi said with a smile. “Rudi Mackenzie is my name.”

The lead man’s face split in a smile; he was about Rudi’s own age and only an inch or so shorter, though lean; his hair was a familiar shade of copper-red, and his eyes were the green of willow leaves.

“Why, dang if I ain’t a Mackenzie myself!” he said. “Jeb Mackenzie. Pleased t’ meet you. You’d be Scottish? My folks wuz, back a ways.”

I know,
Rudi thought.
Mother told me about you, I think…

“Scots, Irish, this and that,” he replied aloud, giving the man’s hand a firm shake and then exchanging handshakes and names with the others. “You’re new to the Oregon country, then?”

That’s what they’d call it.

“Just in over the Trail. Doin’ us some huntin’ whiles our party gets the wagons ready to cross the pass and the workin’ stock rests,” the man said. “Come out to claim us some growin’ land. Just wish I’d done it earlier!”

“Hain’t sittin’ on th’ stoop sucking on a jug more your way, Jeb?” one of his friends said; the sharp twanging accent made him almost as hard to understand as the Quebecois trapper had been. “Your pa was late to Tennessee too.”

“Hell-
fire
, if stoop-sittin’ and jug-suckin’ were all I could do, I’d’a gone to Texas instead, Billy,” Jeb said. He turned back to Rudi: “We’d admire to have you come t’ camp and share our meat, Mr. Mackenzie, and tell us ’bout the Territory.”

“Alas, I’ve places I must be,” Rudi said; the regret was sincere, for a fascination was growing on him. “You’re heading for Lolo Pass, then?”

Jeb nodded. “We had a guide, ’n he said it was th’ best if you wuz drivin’ stock. But he up ’n died back around Grande Ronde.”

“Got hisself likkered up ’n drowned in six inches of water,” another said mordantly. “It wuz alkali water, too.”

Rudi looked up at the sky. “I’d not waste time, then. Not a day, not an hour; break camp at dawn tomorrow, ready or no. Lolo is high enough that the snow can come any time now. And you’ve never seen snow like ours, friend.”

The men chuckled. “We’ze from East Tennessee, Mr. Mackenzie, not Louisiana!” one said. “Mountain men. Winter we knows about.”

Rudi shook his head and met their eyes grimly. “Even so. When the wind from the sea hits
these
mountains, it can bury a horse or a man in an hour. Wagons in a single day or night, or houses for that matter. Lolo can get drifts thirty feet deep by January. Believe me, for I’m not drawing the long bow. I’ve seen it myself, yes, and near died of it, and that with only a small party of men who knew the woods and had good gear. Much less mothers and infants and livestock.”

That sobered them. “Is the Willamette country’s good as they say?” Jeb asked.

“Better,” Rudi said, with a smile of his own. It grew fond as he remembered. “Gold to the harvest in summertime, and the pastures green near all the year and the orchards like froth of pink and white in the spring. Land soft beneath the plow, brown as chocolate, rich as cream and sweet as the first kiss of a maiden’s love.”

“Dang,” Jeb said, reverently this time.

One of his friends even removed his hat. Rudi could see the hunger in all their eyes, that special desire of men of the land.

“In fact, if it’s advice you want—the which is worth its weight in gold, mind you—”

Jeb Mackenzie blinked and then laughed. A moment later the others did as well.

“—I’d say you should go south down the Willamette. Around Sutterdown, say; that’s a town there on the Sutter River, with a gristmill and a sawmill and good hunting in the hills just west, if that pleases you.”

“It surely does, seein’ as I come from Sullivan County, with the purtiest hills an’ best hunting in the east. Land to break a farmer’s heart, though. Well, the wife is expectin’ something to cook up. Good luck to you, friend, and maybe we’ll meet again.”