He wore no shirt, no jacket, and no cap.

The night was warm by the standards of Harmony, but none of the colonists would have dressed thus. Nor would Nightwind, had he been relaxing in his camp, but this was a mission where discomfort weighed second to mobility and he expected to remain active enough to make up for his lack of clothing.

The sun was down and Beta was up, shedding a silvery light. The fields were bloated with the excess snowmelt. He slipped from bush to bush, a shadow among shadows. Beneath the palisade wall he paused for a long time, listening. When his ears had confirmed what his eyes had seen from afar, he unwound the braided rawhide line from around his belly and made a loop, then flipped it effortlessly up to catch on the palisade wall.

He was over the wall in a moment, fading back into the shadows, coiling his line. Young Adrian Renou stood his guard, unaware that his perimeter of defense had been penetrated. Nightwind sneered.

He moved among the shadows all but ignoring the ineffectual guard and dropped to the ground. All of the doors in the town were bolted fast from the inside, so the Old Man said, but he knew where he could wait.

Slipping across the courtyard, Nightwind climbed to the second story of the town hall and the cubicle where Anton Dumezil made his home. He had personally watched Dumezil go out with the young men to hunt and knew that his wife was several years dead. It was a calculated risk that his apartment would be empty. It was.

Nightwind opened the shutters on the window overlooking the square and carefully carved out a notch. When he closed them again, they appeared unchanged, but he could watch the square unobserved. Satisfied, he dropped the bolt, wrapped himself in one of Dumezil’s robes and slept.

Nightwind woke late in the morning and that shamed him. He had lived in the open all his life and the dim light of indoors had lulled him into thinking that the night continued outside.

He went to the window and stood watching the square. People came and went. Most were women since the men were hunting and the boys were sleeping late after a night on guard. Some of the women were attractive and these Nightwind watched with sharp attention. One in particular caught his eye.

Paulette Dumezil came to the cistern for water, carrying twin wooden buckets at the ends of a staff. She moved with an almost unconscious swaying of her hips though there was no one to see her. The cistern water was days old and sour; it rankled that she could not go down to the river for fresh water, but the hunter’s council had declared that no woman should leave the palisade during the hunt. She could hardly remember the last abduction and discounted the danger. Taking the water, she returned to the cubicle where she lived alone now that her husband was on the hunt.

Nightwind tried to eat some of the supplies Dumezil had stored but found them unpalatable. He was used to fresh meat and fresh fruits. Ignoring the hunger in his belly, he lay down again in the afternoon to sleep. He had chosen his quarry and there would be no sleep tonight.

The moons moved in their complex patterns. Gamma was the first to rise, coming into view while the sun was still well up in the sky. Nightwind watched the sky for redness, though he could not see the sun from where he stood. Dusk came. Nightwind’s skin shone red in the afterglow as he left Dumezil’s apartment and slipped into the shadows. A few people were still on the street, but Nightwind had no difficulty avoiding them. more tomorrow

It occurred to Dumezil that there could be only one destination for young Dubois. The gig could be sailed upriver even in the melt if the wind were as strong as it had been for the last two days. There he could hunt alone and perhaps recoup his status. It would be extremely dangerous; no, it would be suicide. He could never survive it.

Well, the damage was done. He would simply tell the hunter’s council what he had found and they would look for his body. Or, rather, for the rifle.

***

On his way back from the Dubois house, Dumezil walked out to the hillock south of town where old Marcel was buried. Old man, he thought, staring down at the bare earth, why did you do this to us? You were the snake in your own Eden.

The sun was warm on Anton’s neck, if only by comparison to high winter. He squinted as he looked around. Water everywhere, great sheets of it stretching from the lake to the base of the hills, the remnant of the winter’s accumulation of snow. Soon all would be green again for a season. He remembered Bordeaux where the grass and trees were both kind and everlasting. Why, Marcel, Papa, mentor? Why this false hegira?

***

Positions on the barges were chosen by lot, but the elder Anton Dumezil had conspired to be assigned to outpost one each of the last five years. It made the trek easier for a man past his prime. The younglings were eager as always, poised for the slaughter. He could see little glory in sowing the ground with bones and entrails, though the hunt was a necessary pursuit.

Two-thirds of the male population went on the hunt, leaving behind only the women, the young boys, and a few older men like Levi-Stuer and Lucien Dubois. Chloe Dumezil cradled her infant son against her as she watched the barges depart carrying the younger Anton and the others. Her face was drawn with worry and disgust. It was clear that the men thought poorly of Anton, more for his surrender of the antler than for his actions during the last hunt. She had married him thinking him heir apparent to his father’s power. It was clear now that he was no such person.

Night fell on a town that was nearly half empty.

Levi-Stuer assigned guard posts to the boys and old men who remained. For many of the youngsters it was their first manly responsibility, and they strutted to their posts with bows strung and arrows bouncing at their hips. It was a pitiful guard, really, but Levi-Stuer was not worried. The others had not struck in several years and many believed that they had finally died out. They raided only during the hunt. Everyone seemed to accept that they simply struck when the guard was at its ebb, though some had suggested that they actually followed the herds. That was ridiculous of course; to do so they would have to travel thousands of kilometers a year.

Two nights passed without incident.

***

His name was Nightwind. He was slender but powerfully built, with no excess flesh. He wore herby hide breeches cut off just above the knee and high moccasins of longneck hide. He carried a bow and quiver which he hung in a greenhorn bush to protect them from moisture. His twin knives were of steel which he had forged himself, fashioning them lovingly over long hours. They were carried in a single sheath which was suspended horizontally before him, the blades overlapping, the handles projecting outward over each hipbone. He could draw either or both in a heartbeat. He wore no shirt, no jacket, and no cap. more tomorrow

Everything was crazy now. The young men wanted to take authority, forgetting that they, too, would grow old someday. It could not be that way, but how was he to stop it; though there had been few women – and too many of them had been lost to the others – those remaining had been fertile, and the younglings outnumbered their elders two to one.

Everything was crazy, but that young Dubois was the craziest of all, he and his bastard rifle. The council of hunters had demanded that Anton retrieve that weapon to be used in the hunt, ignoring the fact that young Dubois had contributed five rifles to the council and had made ten of those Levi-Stuer was renting. Fools! They should be honoring Dubois, not angering him. He had proved himself a man in the hunts, and further in his confrontation with Anton’s eternally damned son. They counted him half a man because he was crippled, but such misjudgment always backfires. If they had treated him right, he would have made rifles for the next twenty years, becoming the single most important man in the community and vastly augmenting the colony’s tenuous hold on civilization.

But they had not honored him; they had reviled him.

Worse, their attitudes had so affected the impressionable young femmes that he was now without a mate. The asses! They should have banished young Anton and made Dubois a present of that slut Chloe.

Dumezil swung heavily away from the wall and worked his way down the ladder. Jean Dubois was his nephew, his sister Angi’s son; why could worthless young Anton not have been more like him?

***

Lucien Dubois answered the door personally. Anton could hear Lucien’s daughter working in the kitchen and could smell boiling meat. It was a sharp, rancid smell – year-old meat from the permafrost cellars. Soon there would be fresh meat to eat. Of all the things lost in coming here, Anton missed most the good French cooking of Bordeaux. Here there were not a dozen edible plants and a half-dozen edible species of animal. With such plain fare, eating had ceased to be a pleasure.

Lucien looked bad. Of course, Lucien always looked bad, thin to the point of emaciation, weak – tuberculosis probably. He should leave the household before his sons and daughter caught it, Anton thought, but where would he go? Still, Lucien seemed more distressed than usual.

“Lucien, old friend, you look troubled. What is it?”

Dubois motioned him to the wood and leather chair that sat by the fire, taking a stool before his honored guest. “It is my son, Jean. He has gone.”

“Gone? Gone where? Where could he go?”

Lucien shrugged. “Who knows? He has been very bitter lately.”

Anton nodded. “Perhaps he is keeping liaison; he has no wife. Maybe some great hunter is all talk and no manhood?”

Lucien looked puzzled, then took his meaning. “No, Anton, he is really gone. He took the gig, the one with sails, and left two nights ago.”

Now this was news in a town where little ever happened. Anton was offended not to have heard. “Why was I not notified?”

“Why should you be? He committed no crime. If he wanted the gig, it was his. He was a man. He hunted so that we could have meat and he made rifles so that the colony would be stronger. Whatever I have is his if he wants it.”

At mention of the rifle Dumezil was reminded of his mission. “The bastard rifle, did he take it with him?”

“Of course, he was never without it.”

This was bad. While the rifle was technically Jean’s, the hunter’s council wanted it and they would make things hard for Jean when he returned.

If he returned. more tomorrow

He was no longer cheerful. His sister Marie had been more than patient with him but he knew that she could not wait to be married and rid of him. His father steered clear of him and his brothers avoided him.

He sat alone in the evenings staring into the fire – alone but for the constant pain – and wondered what he had done to deserve such a burden. Once he had not thought thus; once he had not complained or railed against his fate. But, then, once he had been whole.

***

Pierre did not remark when Jean ordered the hundred soft iron bullets, the primers, and the powder. After all, who would have more use for such than a gunsmith. He did seem to think it strange when Jean bought a small quantity of scrap copper, but shrugged it off with a layman’s ignorance of the workings of a gun.

The copper was expensive, but necessary. Since the colonists had not found lead on Harmony, they cast their bullets from iron. These were all 10mm, for Andrax had designed the muzzleloaders to fire the same ammunition as the offworld rifles. Jean put twenty of these in a special mold and added molten copper to bring them up to 17mm. He filled a horn with powder, pocketed the deadly primers – carefully shielded against shock in trihom-wool batting – and pocketed the bullets.

Raoul brought the gig around just as Jean had requested. Jean was sure that his youngest brother found him a little insane; probably the boy was right. Three laborious, painful trips were necessary to carry down the provisions he wanted. Then Jean climbed aboard alone, rowed out from shore in the twilight, and set the sail.

Chapter 11

Anton Dumezil, the elder, paused on the catwalk that surrounded the palisade. Leaning against the truncated tree boles, he stared out across the fields. The melt had come. The fields between the palisade and the lake were sheets of snowmelt, broken here and there by the coming green. The intricate webwork of canals which would prolong the greening far into low winter was hidden beneath the sheet of natural water. A few prams moved about, poled by anxious farmers, all old men and boys.

Eventually the question would come – was he fit to lead the colony now that he was no longer a hunter? He would hunt this year, as he always did, but it had been some years since he had carried his own weight. Rightfully, he should turn his rifle over to a younger, stronger man.

It was wrong that the young men should have such power, even though the meat harvest was of paramount importance. Levi–Stuer had been preaching that for years, only ceasing when that Dubois boy went to work for him last year. Anton had not listened and now he wished he had.

His father, old Marcel, would have listened. He was crazy, but he listened.

Now his eldest son conspired against him, though he would stand no chance in a political contest. Young Anton had hurt himself badly by allowing Dubois to be gored – the elder Anton had no doubt that it had been intentional – and had proved himself indecisive in letting Dubois live when a clean knife thrust into the already gaping wound would have opened the femoral artery, yet have gone unnoticed. Further, he had had the gall and stupidity to marry that Chambard girl while Dubois lay bedfast.

Still, young Anton might have pulled it off, for Dubois was discredited as a man by his crippling injury. But then the boy had let Dubois take back that horn, a visible taunt and slur on his manhood. What a fool! What a coward! How could such a one have sprung from his loins? more tomorrow

Andrax was a genius. We would never have made it without him.”

“You said ‘in your studies since.’ Do you mean that Jandrax – Andrax – designed the muzzleloader before you became a gunsmith?”

“Oh, yes, he taught me the trade. I used the computer but he made the subject come real in my mind. Quite a man.”

“What happened to him?”

The older man froze. Jean had seen the elders do that so often and always in response to the same question. What was there in this person that was so special? Some special honor or some special horror?

***

Chloe was pregnant. Jean wondered if it was Anton’s child or his own, or if it belonged to a third party. Probably not even Chloe knew for sure.

***

By the melt, Jean had learned his trade. The off-world rifles were wonders of simplicity, as were the Jandrax muzzleloaders. The latter had only a barrel and a stock, a flash hole which was stuffed with a paper primer, a hammer and a trigger and the two bolts on which they revolved, and one spring. Only two moving parts. The offworld rifles were complex only by comparison.

During the winter Jean had built fifteen muzzleloaders in addition to his personal weapon. The latter was a standing joke; “Dubois’ Panic Pistol” the hunters called it. Jean didn‘t blame them, really. The true joke was that he had built himself a rifle at all since he was forever barred from hunting. He turned five of his weapons over to the council to be used on the hunt. That would buy him and his family meat for the winter, and well it should. Five rifles were worth more than five men, but the council drove a hard bargain. It was made up of hunters, naturally. The other weapons he gave to Herbert in exchange for his education. Levi-Stuer protested that the payment was too high, but Jean would have no man say that he was unable to carry his weight in the community.

If he seemed bitter, he was.

Paulette Dumezil had married. She was the last of Jean’s agemates. The oldest unmarried girl in the community was now four years his junior and she was being courted by all the fine young men who would soon go out on their first hunt. They would blast their way to glory and manhood with the rifles he had built.

Bitter? He damned well was.

***

Within the courtyard of his father’s house, Jean practiced walking without his cane, but he never went outside without it. It was not that he could not, but as long as he carried that horn, people would remember the man who was injured as well as what he had become.

This he also practiced. He had fashioned a metal hook and attached it a handsbreadth below the handle of his cane. With the cane in his left hand and his rifle in his right, he limped across the courtyard, then suddenly swung around on his good leg, going to a crouch, planting the cane like a tripod, and swinging the rifle up in one motion. The rifle barrels came to rest on the hook so that either barrel could be fired, his eye was at the sight, and his finger on the trigger. Not graceful, certainly, but quick enough. From the beginning of the maneuver until the hammer fell on an empty flashhole only four heartbeats elapsed. more tomorrow

Jean looked up from the lathe where he was turning a firing pin for one of the double rifles. Levi-Stuer was whistling a tune the young man had never heard before and, as Jean was a collector of tunes, he listened for a moment, memorizing. But it was only a fragment which Levi–Stuer kept repeating.

“Herbert,” he called, “what tune is that?”

“Um? Was I whistling?”

“Yes, but I don’t know the tune.”

The gunsmith looked puzzled. “I don’t know what I was whistling; I wasn’t paying any attention.”

Jean chuckled and whistled the fragment back to him. Herbert laughed. “I haven’t heard that in years. My wife would disown me if she knew I knew it.”

“That good, eh?”

“You bet! Listen.” He sang it in a broken baritone, all about a femme of unlikely appetites and proportions. They laughed together until tears came.

Levi–Stuer leaned weakly against the bench and wiped his face. “If you tell anyone where you learned that one, I’ll not forgive you.”

“Never!”

Herbert had mellowed in the months since Jean first came to him. His life had been unutterably lonely before and Jean had wondered why he chose to make rifles rather than wield them, much as his community needed the weapons. Now he knew, though Levi–Stuer would never admit it. It was written in his red eyes and the way he leaned forward to inspect his work with an eye almost to the metal. Herbert Levi–Stuer, master gunsmith – before Jean’s coming, the only gunsmith – was more than half blind. Jean didn’t mention it, not wanting to shame the older man.

Jean limped over to the desk where they took their lunch, cradling his bastard child. It was a weapon such as that world had never seen, a normal muzzleloader with a long, tapering 10mm barrel and a normal hammer mechanism and trigger, but with a very short second barrel mounted where the fore-stock should have been. This second barrel was calibered to 17mm and fired from a separate hammer and trigger set forward of and below the first. No one else was the least interested in it because it weighed several kilos more than the already heavy muzzleloaders; but then, no one else had had such a pointed reminder that single-shot weapons are not satisfactory for dangerous game.

Jean accepted a mug of chota and set to sanding the stock. He worked on his personal project only when no other task was pressing. Herbert watched for a moment, then chuckled, “Andrax would have liked that weapon. It would have appealed to his way of thinking.”

Jean was curious. “Andrax? You mean Jandrax?”

“Jan Andrax was his name. It was only after he left that people bastardized his name.”

Jean laid his pet aside. “People say that he designed the muzzleloader.”

“That he did, and a fine job, too. In all my studies since I have never seen a simpler design that would be workable with our limited technology. Take that thing of yours. No offense, but the effort you put into it could have produced two normal muzzleloaders.”

“I know. I would like to design a true double rifle like the offworld guns, but every time I try to get one off paper it turns out too heavy.”

“Exactly! Andrax was a genius. We would never have made it without him.” more tomorrow