About a dozen shacks, mostly thatched with reeds, stretched along a main street of trampled mud. The smoke that they’d seen from afar came from what looked to be a communal cooking fire, with two or three iron pots dangling over it. The smell of broiling meat drifting toward the invisible watchers, behind their wall of undergrowth.
Ryan counted seventeen people in the half hour they patiently watched and waited.
Nine were children below the age of adolescence. Five were women, one of them extremely old. Of the three men, only one looked to be under fifty, and he walked with a heavy limp, dragging a wasted right leg behind him as he moved, leaning heavily on a carved stick.
“Step in and take,” Jak whispered.
“My guess is that the men are out hunting,” Ryan replied. “Could come back any time. Don’t want to get caught coldcocked and have to chill our way out.”
“Not unless we have to,” J.B. added.
“Yeah.”
A couple of scrawny dogs sniffed around each other, occasionally snarling.
Mildred grinned at the sight. “I ever tell you the first time I saw two dogs making it? I was about six and I was out with my Uncle Josh. I asked him what the dogs were doing. ‘Well, Millie,’ he said. ‘The poor animal in front has been struck sightless, and the one behind is helping to push it to the hospital for the blind.’ Never forgot that.” They all laughed quietly.
THE SCENT of the cooking stew was driving them all crazy.
“We been waiting here an hour or more, Ryan,” Mildred complained.
“That food must be ready soon” Ryan explained. “I want to see if the hunters come back to eat. Or whether it’s just for the folks left here. Give it another half hour.”
“By then I fear that I shall have faded away utterly and be nothing but a handful of rags and a shred or two of skin and bone.” Doc held up his hand. “Look, my friends. It is more like the claw of an eagle.”
“I’d have said it was more like some old crow, Doc, but I guess you got the right on your side.” Mildred sucked in her cheeks, miming starvation.
“Half an hour,” Ryan insisted.
The friends were as close to open rebellion as he’d ever known them to be.
But Ryan was right.
Just when it looked as if Doc and Mildred were going to break ranks and go out alone into the village, they heard the sound of men’s voices, coming toward them from the direction of the river. Everyone flattened, peering through the brush at a band of a dozen men, aged from midteens to midforties, walking by, carrying the carcass of a deer slung over a pole.
Most of them were hefting old single-shot, long-barreled muskets, while a couple had primitive cap-and-ball pistols. Several had long, broad-bladed swords.
They wore mostly a collection of ragged clothes and patched furs.
“Double-poor,” Krysty whispered to Ryan. “Kind that might turn on strangers like rabid dogs.”
He nodded his agreement. “Could be. Pesthole like this won’t welcome outlanders.”
J.B. had the same thought. “Wish we had a war wag with us,” he said quietly.
Mildred was puzzled. “They look decent, honest people. Why don’t we just go and ask for food? Explain we gotten ourselves lost and we’re hungry.”
“Indeed.” Doc licked his lips. “I find myself in agreement with my colleague. Surely they would not think to refuse poor travelers sustenance?”
“Would they not?” Ryan asked wryly. “I wouldn’t want to stake my life on that, Doc. I’ve seen dozens mebbe hundredsof places like this. Tiny inbred communities, where everyone fucks everyone else and the only thing they unite on is a hatred of strangers. Get more kindness from mad dogs.”
“So, what we do?” Jak asked.
“Talk loudly and carry a big stick,” Doc suggested. “Is that not correct?”
Ryan smiled, standing cautiously and drawing the SIG-Sauer from its holster. “Put it your own way, Doc, but I guess the idea’s right. Go in fast and heavy. Get out quick.”
“Want me and Mildred to circle around and come in from the other side?” J.B. was peering past the dirt-poor houses. “Looks like a wider river through yonder. Could be boats. Take us away from here to do some exploring.”