Long in the Land Read online

  Table Of Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MORE FICTION BY LAURA MONTGOMERY

  LONG IN THE LAND

  Copyright 2019 Laura Montgomery

  Author site: lauramontgomery.com

  Ground Based Press

  Cover Art: Illustration © Tom Edwards, TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Formatting: Streetlight Graphics, LLC

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or any portions of it, in any form. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional or used in a fictitious manner, and any resemblance to real people, places or incidents is unintended and purely coincidental.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you to John Earle, Mark Hitt, Jim Montgomery, Jessica Ney-Grimm and Doug Wagner for all their help, insights, and comments.

  All mistakes are solely my own.

  For Duncan and Luke, with love.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The two Hudson cousins found Peter Dawe on horseback bringing in eight milk cows from the pasture. The pasture was a meadow where the cattle ruminated on Earth grass under the iron blue of Nwwwlf’s skies. The air itself held a green tint that those born on Nwwwlf didn’t notice but their parents still saw.

  It would soon be harvest time, and Peter appreciated any of the easier tasks, especially if they got him away from his parents. His mother couldn’t look at him, and his father’s eyes filled with a bleak rage when he failed to avoid his youngest son in time.

  Peter recognized the Hudsons while they were still at a distance. The cousins were mounted, and Peter figured they’d come straight from Free Hall, which was much closer to the river and the city than his own family’s homestead. His family liked it that way.

  Maxwell rode in the lead, like he always had when Simon wasn’t around. Simon wasn’t around anymore. Peter saw the black hair, the nose with its hook, the nacreous glow of the pan horns curving out from his temples and sweeping back in Fibonacci’s curl over the other man’s ears. Dove Hudson was shorter and shaggier, his yellow hair more a set of thatched shingles suitable for the roof of a small birdhouse. Unlike Maxwell, Dove had no horns.

  Peter reined in his horse. Utah was a stolen horse, but he liked it and had kept it for his recent troubles in First Landing.

  Peter Dawe was also pan, with blue eyes, blond curling hair, and a beard he kept short. He didn’t look like Dove, who was a mess. Peter sat his horse easily, the heels of his booted feet pushing down and his knees showing no daylight between himself and the saddle.

  Dove’s knees flapped. They always had.

  But this was no moment for critical observations. His visitors had come to see to him, but not because they were happy.

  Maxwell called out first. “We want to talk, Dawe. Don’t run off.”

  Peter didn’t move, and let the cows pass by. The cows knew the way to the barn and their feed; their long evening shadows pointed the way across the muddle of trampled Earth grass and damp, black dirt.

  Receiving no reply, Maxwell pulled up as his mount drew close enough for him to reach Peter. The horses stopped nose to neck, and Maxwell looked back over his shoulder for his cousin, who trotted with knees and buttocks slipping in a riding squat unique to Dove. He never fell, but it was a miracle.

  The Hudsons had been his brother Simon’s friends. They had all grown up together, and Peter had been expecting this visit since he’d returned with his brother’s body.

  “What you did,” Maxwell said. He hadn’t spoken to Peter at Simon’s funeral and didn’t look to be starting with any pleasantries now. “It’s going to bring the governor’s men down on all of us.”

  Dove joined them. “We’ve got our blasters back, Maxwell.”

  “And now the governor will send a real force to steal them again,” Maxwell replied, but he was looking at Peter.

  “And now we’ll be able to defend ourselves,” Peter said. He usually tried not to talk to Maxwell. He had always tried not to talk to Simon. That hadn’t worked out well. Maxwell didn’t deserve the effort of speech, but Peter had done a hard thing and most were grateful.

  “Don’t,” Maxwell said, his voice harsh.

  Peter knew this visit wasn’t about a potential attack from the governors men—although it was a serious concern. He and his brother had held off two dozen guardsmen with their blasters. The governor had taken them the first time by treachery and some dumb decisions by the freeholders. Now no one talked about hiding the weapons. They were all ready to use them if they needed to.

  “Was it worth it?” Maxwell asked. His dark eyes were flat.

  Peter stared at Simon’s old friend a long moment before answering. “You’d have to ask my father.” Peter hadn’t wanted Simon along. Nigel had insisted.

  “I’m asking you.” Maxwell stabbed a finger at Peter. “You were with him.”

  “I did the task my father set me,” Peter said. He looked up and past Maxwell. The sun had reached the western mountains.

  Maxwell trembled slightly, as if anger flowed through his bones and out his skin. “But you didn’t keep your brother safe.”

  Peter had had enough. He gave a squeeze with his knees, and Utah started moving.

  “Don’t you run away from me.” Maxwell grabbed at Peter’s arm.

  Peter shifted so Utah side-stepped, and Maxwell’s hand slid off him.

  This made Maxwell more angry. He turned his horse and followed Peter. Peter noticed out of the corner of his eye that Dove hung back. Dove seldom instigated, but he knew how to pile on and Peter kept an eye on him.

  “We remember,” Dove said from back of Peter. “We remember how it was when you thought Simon had died on the motorbike.”

  Peter kept his voice level and his horse moving. “I didn’t think Simon had died on the motorbike.”

  “All you cared about was the bike,” Dove called after him. Simon had pretended to be dead. Peter had merely neglected to check on him. He’d checked on the bike instead.

  Maxwell rode his horse up to Peter’s right. Maxwell was left-handed. “Did you kill him yourself?” Maxwell asked in a low voice, as if it was a reasonable question to ask someone about his brother. “Or did you just make sure someone else did?”

  Peter remembered risking his own neck to keep Simon safe. He remembered the race across the bridge, the arrows, saving Simon from the one arrow, but missing the next one. It hadn’t missed Simon.

  Peter had not wanted Simon to come, and Simon had been little help on Peter’s mission.

  Peter was good at banking his anger. It was Simon who had forced him to learn the trick when they were both young. Whoever got mad got in trouble with their father, and getting in trouble with Nigel was bad. He banked the rage now, but understood that one of
the Hudsons was about to do something stupid. Coldly, he knew he couldn’t hurt either of them too badly. It would feed into what they said he had allowed to happen to Simon.

  A strange bird flew high off to the west. Peter had noticed it earlier, but not thought about it, busy as he was with his visitors. It came out of the west, south of the giant setting ball of fire that was the sun.

  “Neither, Maxwell,” Peter said. “I would never kill my brother. Save your anger for the governor. It was his men.” He didn’t mention the guard captain, what she had done, or what she had directed. Maxwell would go try to kill her or marry her—the latter if he learned that she might carry Simon’s child, however unlikely that possibility might be.

  “But you don’t care that he’s dead,” Maxwell pressed on.

  That was where Maxwell was wrong. Even in dying, Simon had made sure his younger brother suffered for it. Peter looked Maxwell straight in the eyes. “I do care,” he said, and his voice was brutal and indifferent. “It’s meant I’ve had to talk to you. Simon used to take care of that.”

  Maxwell’s hand had a knife in it.

  Peter laughed. “This says a lot about what kind of man Simon was, doesn’t it?” Maxwell’s skin darkened. “That his friends would try to hurt his brother when he’s dead? Some legacy.”

  Maxwell hissed something wordless, and drove the knife straight at Peter’s side.

  But Peter had been expecting it, maybe even caused it. He dropped forward to his horse’s neck fast enough that Maxwell, committed, had to catch himself or lose his balance. Utah shot away, but Peter turned him quickly.

  He had run Utah through his paces when he and Tom Carter had first got the gelding off the governor’s men. Someone had trained the horse well: Utah stopped his headlong flight and pivoted tidily, re-centering of his great mass. When Peter asked the animal to head straight at Maxwell and his horse, it did so.

  Peter pulled his own knife, and adjusted course for Maxwell’s right.

  “Stop!” Dove was screaming, but it was hard to hear him over the sudden noise filling the air.

  Maxwell looked at Peter, looked at the sky, looked at Peter. Peter was not falling for it, even though the noise above was becoming louder and maybe even terrifying. He’d heard of landslides, but they were too far from the mountains.

  Maxwell’s face was white, and now Peter was close enough to see moisture sheening the other man’s skin. Maxwell threw his knife to the ground and raised both hands.

  Responding to Peter’s knees, Utah swerved away, and they all turned and stared upwards. He looked in the wrong place first. The thing was closer than he’d figured.

  It was not a bird. Peter was sure of it. For one thing, even as he squinted into the still bright metallic sky, he could see the flying thing was too regular and rigid. For another, it was too loud. Its strange, purring roar reached them on the ground from whatever height it soared, and he was certain that no bird—from either Earth or Nwwwlf—could make such a noise. Something about the regularity of the sound reminded him of the motorcycle he had hidden from the governor’s men and Simon.

  Peter could not think about Simon. So he didn’t.

  He had other matters to tend to. He had not put his knife away, but Maxwell sat his horse, slack-jawed, staring skywards with his raised hands forgotten. Slowly, he lowered them.

  The bird grew bigger. It was not a bird. Its wings were fantastically sharp, unmarred by feather or pinion, and a tail pointed up instead of fanning out. More amazing than all of that, however, was the head, which housed a giant gleaming eye like a shield.

  Then Peter saw him. A man sat behind the eye.

  It was not a bird. It was a machine, an aircraft.

  Its driver had to see them. He was coming straight for them. He dipped low, and a wing dropped as if in greeting, maybe a hundred meters above them.

  Up ahead, the cows scattered in madness, lowing, mooing, racing in all directions. At least three of them had the wits to head toward home, but the other five went everywhere else.

  The aircraft pulled up and away from them, and headed north. The three men on the ground watched it leave, growing smaller, quieter, still audible for a greater distance than on its approach, until it reached a vanishing point in the sky, whether from distance or altitude, Peter couldn’t tell. The sky returned to normal, a shield of beaten blue with clouds too high for rain, and birds that wheeled in the soft geometry of the natural, not the hard straight line of a machine.

  Peter recovered first. He had to get the cows, and the other two hadn’t carried bows. “If you follow me,” he said to Maxwell, “I will kill you. But I have to get my cows.”

  Maxwell, still white, but no longer shaking, spat on the ground. “We’ll get you the ones by the trees.” He pointed with his chin at a trio of American sycamore. Cows were a priority.

  Peter nodded. They’d fought enough as children, with Peter usually on the losing end, that he believed this fight was over. Maxwell had been furious and had not spoken to him at the funeral. Now that he’d let Peter know all that Peter had done wrong, maybe Maxwell was done.

  Peter turned Utah and headed for the three cows still running toward the Carter’s ranch.

  When they reached the barn, the Hudsons’ real reason for their help became clear. They wanted to talk about the flying machine more than they wanted to hurt Peter.

  The barn was an L-shaped structure, with one side for the cows, and the other for horses. His parents and older siblings had built it long before Peter was born, siting it downhill and to the northwest of the house proper. It was made of stone and wood from fast-growing Earth black locust. Every fall it required a new coat of pitch against the winter’s cold, and it stood streaked black but welcoming to the closely huddled cows, who had all been very glad to see each other.

  Peter stopped his horse at the western corral. “Would you get the gate, Maxwell?”

  Maxwell glowered. “I’m not going to do anything to you. I was just angry.”

  “Sure,” Peter said. Angry with a knife.

  But Maxwell pushed his horse through the small herd, leaned down, and unlatched the gate. The ground was still damp from a rain the night before, and Peter’s sister Tania watched with dismay from the barn door she had pushed open as the cows spattered themselves with mud in the churned ground. She had a lot of cleaning to do before the milking.

  “You may not get much, Tania,” Peter called to her. “They spooked just now.”

  Tania had three years on Peter’s twenty, and was still not married. She did her best to keep her brown hair in a tight braid, but it was wiry and strong, and strands of it clustered around her face now. She was a good height for a woman, but the top of her head only came to Peter’s chin.

  Dove and Maxwell both brightened at the sight of her, and Dove waved. She ignored them, sharing Peter’s distaste for the pair. “What happened?” she called back, resignation in her voice. She would be cleaning cow bellies and udders for maybe nothing, Peter knew.

  Peter grinned. He couldn’t help it. “A flying machine came close.”

  Tania ignored her responsibility to the cows and began making her way around the corral. Her skirts reached just below her knees, an older dress Peter knew she saved for milking. Peter’s companions watched her legs.

  “I think it came from Seccon,” Dove said quickly when she reached them, clearly determined to say something smart.

  Tania had pale green eyes, and they were skeptical now. She climbed to the top of the fence so she could look the riders in the eyes. “You’re serious? You all saw this thing?”

  His sister had to know, Peter figured, that he wouldn’t join the Hudsons in teasing her. “It was loud,” he said. “So the cows ran.”

  Tania’s chest rose and fell in an exasperated sigh. The Hudsons were riveted. Dove wouldn’t be sounding smart for several minutes, Peter knew.
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  Peter described what had happened, leaving out the part where Maxwell had tried to stab him and he had tried to return the favor.

  “But where was it going?” she breathed.

  “North,” Maxwell said, making his own feeble attempt to get her attention.

  She ignored him, addressing herself to Peter. “Maybe Edward will see it. Are you sure there was a person inside it?”

  “Maybe it came from the starship,” Dove offered, still full of speculation.

  According to their parents, the starship that had brought them all to Nwwwlf remained in the sky—in orbit—overhead somewhere. That it had not yet fallen seemed highly implausible to their offspring.

  “That has to have crashed somewhere by now,” Maxwell said with scorn.

  “And everyone left it,” Peter added. Of this, their parents had all been certain. No one could have lived on the starship without food, and the shuttles between the ship and the ground had stopped working eventually. Or, Seccon had them, Peter had sometimes figured when he thought of such things. But the tales of Nwwwlf’s founding were of more interest to children. The adults were too busy making Nwwwlf feed them.

  “There was a person inside,” Peter said. “We all saw him.”

  “And he saw us,” Dove said with foreboding.

  Three pairs of eyes turned to Dove and waited for him to elaborate.

  He spread his hands. “It could be bad. Just bad.”

  Peter had never understood how Maxwell and Simon had suffered Dove. “Tania and I have more work before supper. Thanks for the help with the cows.”

  Maxwell slowly turned his head toward Peter, as if he’d been reminded that he hated the younger man. “We’ll have to pick up where we left off next time.”

  “Thanks for the help with the cows,” Peter repeated, his voice flat. He’d lived under Maxwell’s threats since they’d all hit puberty. It was about the same as having Simon hate him, and he’d survived Simon.

  He shied from the thought, and Maxwell smirked as if he’d read fear in Peter’s face or tone.