Long in the Land Page 2

  Tania looked sharply between the two of them. “What’s this about?”

  Maxwell turned red, and Peter was grateful Tania would never consider Maxwell. The thought of him as a brother-in-law made him want to head north, too.

  “Peter’s theft of the blasters,” Maxwell said, “may bring the governor’s men down on us all.”

  Tania looked Maxwell up and down, and he turned redder. “Peter’s rescue,” Tania bit out, “was heroic.” Her eyes were fierce now, and she leaned toward Maxwell. “And don’t you go making out that Simon’s sacrifice was some kind of mistake.”

  Maxwell pulled back so hard his horse stepped back. His shoulders crept up toward his ears, and he added the color white to his facial repertoire for the evening. Peter had never seen him so pale, and he’d seen Maxwell pale a lot.

  Without further word, Maxwell turned his mount and waved at Dove to follow. They left at a canter for more drama, and mud and dust rose about their horses’ legs and drifted over on the wind to the pair at the gate. Peter let the inner membranes close over his eyes.

  When he opened them, Tania was staring at him. “Are you going to tell me what else happened out there?”

  “It was all nothing,” Peter said. “With those two it always is.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the days since his brother’s funeral, Peter had learned to dread the time he spent inside the house. Martha didn’t speak to him. She could only look at him with the despair of a mother who had lost a child. That she had nine others, with one of them being Peter, didn’t make up for her loss. Until Simon’s death, she’d had our of them still living with her and Nigel, unmarried and working the family land. Now that it was so well suited to Earth life, it was valuable real estate. The older six had left for freeholds of their own, and Edward, the eldest, had moved the farthest from his parents, a solid five days ride north.

  No one had ever told Peter why Edward had left. His father didn’t talk much about his eldest son, who might have otherwise been a good candidate to stay and work the best of the family land. Simon had once said that Edward had figured Nigel would never die, and wanted to make his own way, but Simon had had no greater likelihood of knowing the truth than Peter did, so he’d set no store by Simon’s speculation.

  Peter especially dreaded the time at table, but he was hungry—he was, in fact, always hungry, but who wasn’t?—and had to eat. Nigel and Martha sat at either end of the long kitchen trestle, with Peter, Tania, and Thaddeus doing their best to fill the space between their parents.

  Nigel talked about the work for the next day, and wanted Thaddeus to start sharpening the threshers, Tania to fill in for Simon in the oat fields as she had been doing since Peter and Simon had left for First Landing, and Peter to help Tania.

  “I want as much work out of you as we can get, Peter,” Nigel said, eyeing his youngest son. “You may have to leave if the governor’s men come for you.”

  Martha drew in a sudden breath, as if she’d received a blow.

  Nigel gave no sign of having heard her.

  “You’re not sending him away,” Thaddeus said. Peter could count on Thaddeus. He had done his best over the years to protect Peter from Simon and his friends. His older brother was taller and leaner than Peter, with heavy brows but a ready smile. With his close-cropped, light brown hair, and his inky dark eyes, he looked like all the Dawes—tanned and worked to the bone by the fields they tended.

  “I may have to,” Nigel replied. He looked around the table, and caught everyone’s eyes except his wife’s. She hadn’t spoken an unnecessary word to her husband since Simon’s death. She had to know that Nigel had insisted on Simon going with Peter to First Landing.

  “You’ll need me to help fight them off,” Peter said. He had no plans to run. “We’ve got our weapons back, and we showed them what happens when bow and arrow attack two men with blasters.”

  Nigel’s eyes narrowed. His eyes were still clear, but Nigel was old, with dark, seamed skin, and iron-grey hair. His horns had dull patches. It wasn’t that a pan’s horns contained flesh or muscle to waste and shrink, but Nigel’s horns looked calcified and smaller. The rest of his body still made him look an old bull of a man. He ignored the lumps beneath the skin of his arms, and so did everyone else.

  “What happened, Peter, was that you lost fifty percent of your force.”

  It was Peter’s turn to draw a breath. He looked down at the ham and oatcakes on his plate and his appetite vanished. He forced himself to look up. “And they lost all of theirs.”

  “There were two of them, Nigel,” Martha said. “You sent two of them.” It was the closest she’d come to blaming her husband.

  “Peter didn’t want Simon to go,” she went on. She looked at her youngest son briefly, but the contact flickered and went out. Nigel had insisted that Simon go over Peter’s objections, but it was Peter who’d been there when his brother had been killed.

  Martha seldom argued with her husband in front of their offspring, and had never done so when they were small. Now an awed and fearful silence stretched long, and Thaddeus put down his fork. Perhaps his stomach felt as hollow as Peter’s.

  Tania pushed her shoulders back, looked around the table, and said brightly, “Peter saw an aircraft today.”

  “No, he didn’t,” Nigel said, and forked a piece of ham into his mouth.

  “And the Hudsons saw it.” Tania had her elbows on the table.

  Nigel swiveled toward his daughter. “No, they didn’t. The aircraft are all gone.”

  Peter knew that she said what she said next with full knowledge of the consequences. None of them had ever asked Nigel Dawe about the second landing twice. “We don’t have any here, but Dove thinks it came from Seccon.”

  Nigel’s face darkened, and Peter wondered if it was more at his daughter’s willingness to invite his wrath or the mention of Seccon. Peter was noticing things about his father he hadn’t noticed even a couple years before.

  Nigel looked around the table. “I told you—all of you—that we don’t speak of those traitors.”

  “That’s fine when they’re gone and we never see them,” Tania said. She trembled slightly, but her shoulders stayed back. “But if one of them flew here, it seems like maybe we should talk about them.”

  “No,” Nigel said. He picked up his earlier thread. “Peter, I want you to go visit your eldest brother for a while.”

  “No,” Peter said. He wouldn’t run. Not after everything he’d been through, not and lose his family to the governor’s men. “You’ll need me here.”

  His mother’s voice was almost a whisper. “I don’t need to lose you, too.”

  “They’re not going to send an army,” Nigel said. “They wouldn’t dare. But they might send someone to arrest you. It would be better if you weren’t here, and then none of our neighbors will think it’s a good idea to turn you over.”

  “You think someone would give me up?” Peter asked. When the governor’s men had taken the WesHem blasters, they’d known their locations. Maybe they had ferreted them out. Or maybe someone had told them.

  “Could happen,” Nigel said. “Do you want us killed defending you? Half of us?”

  Martha set her glass down loudly. “Stop it, Nigel.” She stood, glaring at everyone who wasn’t her husband or youngest son before turning and heading into the garden.

  Tania stood and started clearing dishes. She wasn’t quiet.

  Nigel put more ham in his mouth. Halfway through the bite he stopped chewing and stared at the table for a long second. Then he swallowed, pushed back from the table, and stood. His three children watched him head into the garden.

  Peter finished eating because one didn’t waste food. Thaddeus acquired the dreamy look that meant he was lost in his own world, maybe thinking about the aircraft.

  From her place at the sink, Tania turned sharply to
Peter. “Peter, go check the water tank. My pump isn’t working.”

  Peter found himself involuntarily on his feet. Tania seldom used such a commanding tone.

  She was staring at him, her face intent and her body rigid. He exited the door his father had gone out toward the garden and heard his parents’ voices. They had moved to the far northeast corner of the garden, and Tania had no doubt heard them through the open window above the sink.

  The kitchen garden stretched east of the kitchen, and the noise of insects had changed from the buzz of day to night skittering and frogs quacking. His mother’s voice came through clearly.

  “I won’t let you send him away.”

  “He can make his own decisions.”

  Peter stood rooted. He wasn’t sure his father had ever let him make his own decisions if he was anywhere in the vicinity.

  “And he doesn’t want to go,” Martha said. Her voice may have caught, or a frog may have hollered. The night was loud. “He’s not a coward, and he’s spent his whole life proving that to you. He’s not going to leave us to fight without him.”

  Nigel’s voice was gruff. “We won’t have to fight if he’s not here.”

  “I don’t want to lose him, too,” Martha said.

  “Do you want to lose Thaddeus and maybe even Tania fighting to keep him? They’ll come to arrest him soon. It’s only a matter of time.”

  Peter stood frozen. He didn’t know his father was right, but if he was perhaps Peter was endangering his whole family out of pride.

  The two were a warm glow on the other side of the tomato arbor. Peter was surprised they hadn’t noticed him. The tank stood behind the kitchen window. Tania’s face was clear through the open space. She saw him and put a finger to her lips. There was nothing wrong with the tank.

  “Martha, you can hardly look at him,” Nigel said.

  “I can hardly look at you. I’m not trying to send you into the wilderness.”

  “Martha.” Peter had never heard his father sound so abject.

  Martha wasn’t done with her husband. “Peter didn’t want to take Simon. You made him. Just because they’re brothers didn’t mean they had to get along. Look at you and Edward, and he’s your son. It wasn’t like you set them to fix the fence together. Getting the blasters was dangerous, not the time for your experiments. You shouldn’t have sent them both, Nigel. It was an impossible test.”

  A long silence followed.

  Peter’s throat felt tight. Whatever Peter had thought of Simon, Simon had been his mother’s son.

  She was whispering now. “But every time I look at Peter I think of Simon. I know he knows it, and I have to get over that. I can’t let him leave thinking I don’t love him for what happened.”

  “But you can’t even look at him,”

  “No,” Martha said. “No, I can’t.”

  Peter turned and went back inside. The kitchen was filled with light both from the fire and the room’s several toadfat lanterns. Thaddeus had pulled a small book from his pocket and sat reading. Tania turned to Peter and he saw tear streaks on her face. She probably missed Simon, too.

  Peter gave her a nod and kept going. He went through the living room with its single lit lantern, its gleaming wooden floors and scattered rugs, the overstuffed couches and chairs, the long worktable stacked with mending and tools, and broken pipes and pots, and headed up the stairs at the back of the room.

  In his own room, he could hear his parents still talking, but he made no attempt to make out what they said. He’d heard enough.

  The room was simple, with a single bed, a wooden chair at the window where he liked to sit and work, and a dresser. A book of poems that belonged to him and him alone lay on the dresser. He’d be taking that with him.

  He pulled a long canvas bag with straps from behind his dresser.

  He had never liked Simon. Simon had never liked him. Maybe one of them had made an exception when they were small, and he remembered isolated incidents where they had gotten along. The irony of it was that their expedition to the city to retrieve the blasters had marked a high point in their ability not to kill each other. If Simon had made it back, his father would have been smug about the success of his experiment.

  But Simon hadn’t made it back. Peter put his snow boots in the bottom of the bag. He didn’t mean to be gone long enough to need them, but he meant to be prepared. He rolled up his extra pair of jeans, and put them on top of the boots. Underwear, shirts, and socks followed. He packed all the socks he owned. It would have made sense to go next door and take Simon’s, since he wouldn’t be needing them. He didn’t.

  He set a vest on the chair.

  When the bag was half full, he decided the rest of the space would go toward tools and food. He wanted to bring Edward something useful besides an extra pair of hands. Even with the blaster, he set out all the knives he owned to take the next day.

  Downstairs again, he took the lantern in the living room over to the work table. He set down the vest he had brought and began rummaging through the scraps of old cloth. He needed to make a pocket in the vest, and he wanted leather for the bottom of it. He found his scraps and the neatly wrapped pack containing the stitching groover, the waxed thread, and the stitching awl with its diamond shaped head.

  He sat down and began working.

  When his parents returned, neither asked him what he was doing.

  When he was done, he looked up from the table to find Thaddeus’ dark eyes fixed on him. His brother sat in one of the comfortable chairs, a pool of lantern light spreading across the book in his lap and casting shadows across his angular features.

  Peter stood, jerking his chin toward the kitchen, and packed up his scraps and vest. Thaddeus put down his book and followed Peter through the kitchen and out into the night buzz of the garden. They began a slow amble toward the garden’s rear.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow, Thaddeus,” Peter said.

  “I know.”

  “I want to tell you all about First Landing.” No one had wanted to hear about what had happened there, except maybe Maxwell Hudson, and he didn’t know how to ask. Normally, Peter felt no need to regale his family with his adventures, but what had happened in First Landing might affect one or all of them. Telling his parents wasn’t an option. He knew that. At least someone would know about everything.

  The story poured out of him. All of it.

  Thaddeus was a good listener.

  That night Peter dreamt of the flying machine.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When he woke, the thought of heading north handed him a thread of optimism, and he looked forward to following it to something bigger. He was doing it for his mother, he told himself, and to save the others, not because he wanted to run.

  He came downstairs to a large breakfast of sausage and hard-boiled eggs, bread, jams, and cold kidney pie, all to be washed down by buttermilk. He checked the cold box for eggs and decided there were enough that he set the water boiling for another dozen on the stove top. His family was rich. In addition to the spacious hearth, they had an iron stove with a large expanse for pots.

  His mother looked up when he checked on the eggs, but looked away when he told her good morning.

  Tania sat down across from him and sliced a piece from the loaf of sourdough. Peter shoved the crock of butter over to her. He intended to eat his fill this morning, and then some. Edward’s freehold was five days north and west.

  He set to work.

  When Martha finally seated herself, she had to start twice to speak to her youngest. “What… What are the eggs for, Peter?”

  “I’m going to visit Edward. See if he needs any help.” There. He’d said it. It sounded less momentous and dire now that he’d voiced it aloud.

  He’d never known his mother as a young woman. As he spoke, her eyes widened and the seams on her face smoothed out
in a moment of relief, revealing a glimpse of a younger Martha. The relief vanished in an instant, but he hated Simon all over again and wished his brother still alive, if not for the reasons his mother did.

  She was looking at him, and now her eyes were fierce. “Megan is nineteen and Robin seventeen. His children can help him. If Edward needs any of us, he’ll send word.”

  “It’s been a long time, Mother, since he sent word. It will be a good trip to make, and I was thinking how it would be best for everyone if I were gone.” Mostly, he thought about how it would be best for her, but he knew better than to say that out loud.

  “It will be a grand adventure,” Tania said stoutly.

  Thaddeus looked up from his book. “Would you like me to come?”

  “No,” Martha answered before Peter could. “And Peter doesn’t need to go.”

  “I’ll be back before the harvest. And what Dad said about the governor’s men looking for me…” He raised his fork high to indicate bad things. Then he popped the pie in his mouth.

  “You’ll be alone out there,” his mother said. “If the governor’s men search, they’ll find you.”

  “I’ll stay off the roads.” It was a joke. There weren’t any roads.

  Martha failed to appreciate his humor. “Don’t speak to me like that, Peter.”

  Peter nodded. He’d meant no disrespect, and he had no doubt her insistence he stay was genuine, but so had been the moment of relief. He was going.

  On the final day of his journey to the north and west he woke long before true dawn. He’d camped with his horse at the western edge of plowed wheat fields in an orchard of pear trees that doubled as a windbreak. The ripening pears had helped supplement his dwindling food supply, and he hoped the freeholder wouldn’t begrudge him what he’d taken without asking. He was sure that if he’d knocked on the door he would have been given dinner and—if not a bed—a blanket for a night in the barn. He hadn’t, however, wanted anyone to lie about having seen him, or, worse, fail to lie, so he’d slept under the pear trees when it got dark. It had been getting dark earlier, slowly but surely.