Wine of the Gods 1: Exiles and Gods (8 page)

That got him some skeptical looks.

"Really? Like, you can do magic?"

Chris gathered power in his hands.
The kids stared. He tossed a fire ball out over the river. "Want to learn how to do that?"

Nods all around, and nervous glances toward the city. Chris looked around. "Why don't we go down to the last dock, there, where we won't bother anyone?"

That got everyone moving.

And they caught on really quickly to gathering power. Chris remembered enough of what Muriel and Phaedra told the girls about their way of doing it that they could figure it out. They tossed fireballs at passing crocodiles, and learned push and pull, and the start of shielding. Think
ing about the setup here, Chris concentrated on teaching mental shielding.

One of the girls whispered something to a boy. He nodded and ran off.

The girl grinned impishly. "The gods always serve special wines and terrific food for the parties. I figured we ought to bring some down here, and have our own little orgy."

"Orgy? They don't actually, you aren't actually going to . . . "

They did.

And
they figured out some interesting things to do with magic.

Wow.

***

Harry had the hangover from hell the next morning. He was far from the last to crawl out from under a table. He righted the nearest chair and sat down. Surveyed the grounds. He didn’t see the cute serving girl from last night. Assuming he actually would recognize her. And it had gotten quite dark and, umm, active under those tables. He couldn’t swear who, or even how many women he'd made love to.

A loud laugh rang out and he winced.

“What? A God without a good hangover
cure?” Something poked him over the ear and the pain faded.

Harry rubbed his eyes and looked around. “Good morning Edmund. What the hell did you put in that wine?”

“A little something to make sure we don’t get too inbred, you know.”

“You mean so you can screw as many women as you want to?”

Edmund laughed again. “That too, which Barry justifies by remembering that we had all our genetic errors fixed.”

“And our vas plugged as well.” Harry staggered to his feet and looked around. No signs to the nearest public bathroom. Hardly a surprise.

“What, didn’t Barry sic his favorite healer on you? Ha! I see that he did. You’re all fixed up again. Congratulations.”

“I don’t think anyone . . . “ Harry looked down at his leg. Flexed it. No pull of adhesions, no feeling of weakness.

Edmund grinned. “Let’s find Barry. I know he’d hate for me to give you the tour without him. And much though I hate to admit it, his bathrooms are better than mine.”

The tour covered a lot of land under cultivation.

“What’s your population? You must have several hundred square miles under plow.” The grain had been harvested, cattle grazed in the stubble.

“About five thousand. Give it another year and it’ll be larger, the women don’t seem to remember about contraceptives.” Edmund snickered.

Harry tried to keep a neutral expression on his face. “Do you have spells to keep the pests out? I’ve been giving lessons up and down the lakes. They are very low powered spells. I suspect you two would love seeing the unpowered girls dancing through the fields throwing the spells around.”

Barry scowled. “Well, yes, I suppose. But then Edmund would just take advantage of more of them.”

Edmund laughed. “Don’t be fooled by his appearance of rectitude. The God of Virtue resists temptation, but falls well short of perfection.”

“I see. And shall I give your people some lessons while I’m here?”

“We have anti-insect and anti-fungus spells ourselves, and the bubbles should store the grain with no loss to rodents at all. We prefer to not empower the little people. Come see the size of the crocodiles in the river. Hard to believe they’re related to the ones back on Earth. Or the other Earth, I suppose I should say.” They stopped at the top of a five foot drop off to a sandy beach.

“They look more pre-historic to me.” Barry pointed at what Harry had assumed was a rock outcrop.

Harry stopped dead and stared. “That thing must be forty feet long! Do you stay completely away from the river?” The creature's broad, armored, head was about as long as Harry was tall. Massive and powerful. Lots of teeth.

Edmund laughed and swatted Harry’s shoulder. Harry stumbled forward, and slid down the sandy drop. It was just a few feet forward, and a few feet down  . . . but the croc raised its massive head and turned toward him.

Enough fun and games with the evil twins.

Harry stepped around at enough of an angle to throw a quick vertical slice that cut the
croc's spine with a single gesture. The beast’s head dropped back to the sand with an audible thud.  The body barely twitched. Blood pooled beneath it, stained the water and drifted down stream.

“They eat the tails in Louisiana, don’t they?”
Where the hell is Louisiana?
Harry fought to remain nonchalant, shrugging as he labored back up the steep sandy rise. “You should clean the big ones out though, before you have a bunch of children running around.”

The pair exchanged glances, and walked him back to his boat. Chris was there, thank goodness, and started untying lines. "Thanks for the hospitality. And the party. Oh, and do you know this one?" He sang Romeau's hair growing song, and grinned at the expressions on the brothers' faces. He turned and stepped aboard. Chris pushed off.
The people here are going to have to deal with the brothers, themselves. Somehow. Perhaps when I return, I’ll manage to sneak in a few lessons.

He started the engine and turned for home.

***

Harry made Old Wolf put the speedboat back in its bubble.

He showed the others the healing 'spells' Barry's masseuse had used on him, and the rock manipulations. Gisele was impressed by the improvement in his leg—and challenged. Both horrified and amused by the spells he'd copied from the wine. "Some of these spells will be useful, if only because I can work out their opposite effect."

". . . and get everyone registered for school."

Chris looked around in dismay. The woman had teacher written all over her. Elementary teacher, actually. He relaxed a bit, as he walked over to join the conversation. "I suppose the younger kids will be needing to learn the basics. Probably half of us are older, though. We'll either apprentice, study on our own, or wait for someone to organize a college."

Iris's eyes widened as
he stood up to authority. The bus girls just looked around and nodded.
I guess we all had bad parents, and lost our dependence early.

They'd built a "play yard" for the littler kids. Too many cows, horse
s and cars around to let them run wild. They traded off keeping an eye on them, and the parents had taken to bringing their own kids by to play. The Major was starting to refer to it as "The Park", which at least meant it wouldn't get taken for city hall or something.

Chris wasn't the only teenage boy to notice that the babies seemed to draw the girls. Iris came by regularly, some times with a neighbor's kid she was minding, but sometimes just alone.

"Apprentice!" The teacher recoiled. What had she said her name was? Mrs. Gilligan. Like she was already asserting her authority, and they were too young to use her first name. "I really don't think we could possibly train doctors and lawyers with an apprenticeship program. And then there's the legal situation, what with well, salaries and housing and discipline. No, no, I don't like that idea at all. We'll be opening a school. Schools. People keep trickling in and joining the town. As of this morning, with that new little group, there are over two hundred children here. We need a school now."

"Who are you counting? Twenty-seven of us are over fifteen, and not interested in pointless repetition. The rest, the
teenagers just need math and science, in case they want to 'tag around after' a doctor or a nuclear physicist or a geologist. The younger ones will need a whole curriculum."

The teacher had been getting stiffer with every word he spoke. She summoned her most authoritative tones, in an high volume. "Every child under eighteen will attend . . . "

"No we won't." Chris got up and walked away. And ignored her orders to return.
I am not a child.
He glanced back, Ariel was leaning on the fence, talking to some boy he didn't know, ignoring the teacher. Everyone else had left. He wished he'd seen which direction Iris went
. Drat.
He circled around toward the livestock pens. Maybe she was visiting her cows. Two of her dad's six cows had been her FFA projects, and were just big pets.

Several of the older Bus Kids were in a group by the east gate
.

He veered over to warn them.
"The teachers are organizing. I tried to make it clear that no one over fifteen was going to attend. She's pissed. Beware."

Lillian
rolled her eyes. "Oh yes. I do so need Advanced English, US History, Pre Calc, and German 4. Do you suppose they'll try to organize PE?"

Lance leaned over and whispered in Milly's ear. "How about some sex education?"

She giggled. "Abstinence based, Buster." But she didn't move away from him.

One of the boy
s guffawed. "I won't ever go back to school. Between farming and hunting, we'll be living the good life."

Not the brightest fellow around,
Chris thought.
Not that he doesn't have a point. I need to learn how to hunt. Hmm. . .

Wolf eyed the three boys, suppressing a smile.
They aren't boys any more than I was at that age.

"We need to learn to hunt, and we noticed you were lacking some crucial equipment."

Christopher Dunmeyer had emerged as the leader of the kid pack. He, Lance Vesely and Mathew Lindon looked stubborn.

Wolf swapped glances with Romeau. "I've got to admit that actual hunting rifles
and shotguns do seem like sensible sorts of things to bring on a hunting trip."

Romeau snorted. "Longer range than magic. Less scary than your
military weapons. Guess we'd better bring them along."

Wolf enjoyed the hike out into the wilds. He followed a thin game trail, pointing out the most obvious signs, hoof and paw prints, scat, to the boys and assigned them each a direction to concentrate on watching. They paralleled the stream that ran through town, staying above it, and occasionally climbing a tall hill for a longer view. The rifles
and the shotgun were examined, demonstrated. They weren't carrying much ammunition, but targeted bushes at fifty feet received a pair of bullets from each boy. Out on the plains they could see several small herds of several types of antelope, and a distant herd that was probably zebra. Heavier trails led down to the stream, and they settled down, downwind of one and waited to see if dinner would come to them. The two young horses stayed close, dropped their heads to graze.
Can’t beat that for looking innocent.

“You three are all eigh
teen?” Wolf looked the boys over. They all glowed to his inner vision.

“I just turned
seventeen.” Chris frowned. “That doesn’t matter any more.”

“Well, it does, but not necessarily for the same reasons.
You are all three able to gather power, and use it for a few things. Your strength will grow with age. Let's see if you can do a few things that will be useful for hunting.”

He and Romeau took all three boys through relaxation and focusing exercises. Recalling the old chants brought up flashes of personal  memory. Of learning the chants . . . no. Inventing the chants.
We were the first, but we won’t be the last.

The boys knew several of the physical effects spells. Chris was impressive, with both physical and mental shields. So Wolf turned to the mental effects spells.

Unnoticeable. Sleep. Fear. Those three were enough for now.

Magic lessons
were pushed to the back as the afternoon sun drove animals down to the stream to drink.  Sable antelope, wildebeast, impala. The zebras were only partly striped, and he couldn’t remember the right name for them . . . The boys picked targets, took aim, and on whispered command fired. Wolf and Romeau took out one apiece from the fleeing animals. Chris glowed at his clean kill, and Lance paled as the Wolf quickly finished off his wounded impala. Matt’s target had gotten away clean, and apparently uninjured.

With four good sized carcasses, even field dressed, the young horses received quick lessons in dragging crude frames. They expressed trepidation
with head, neck and ear motions, but hauled the meat back toward town without a single bucking fit.

Romeau eyed them. “I think they understood your explanations.”

“Don’t all horses?”

The boys all grinned. Romeau shook his head. “Even I remember that much!”

Old Wolf shrugged. “Well, these two did. C’mon. If Harry can tan these hides, we ought to make some proper . . . things to drag.”

“Travois. If we don’t find oil, we’re going to be trying to figure out how to make wagon wheels pretty quick.”

After a mile, Old Wolf dropped back and discouraged a pack of hyenas from following them home. They dragged in the south gate as the sun touched the horizon, and turned the meat over to a small army of butchers and cooks. Several families were talking about cooperatively building a proper hygienic butcher's shop. The Bus Girls had built a big outdoor grill from rock, with clay to plug the gaps, topped with metal grids as large as they could coax from the small fabber.

W
ith over a thousand people here, the antelopes wouldn’t last long.

“We’d better count on hunting every day, and training the kids.”

Wolf met Romeau’s eyes and nodded. “Let’s split them up, magic and not. So they all get the lessons they need. And co-ordinate with any other hunters, so we don’t interfere – or worse – with each other.”

Between hunting, tending his new
vineyard and karate lessons, Wolf almost didn’t notice how much time Muriel spent in his vicinity. And how attractive she was.

***

"It’s a genetic mutation, deliberately bred for. Domestic cattle don't need horns."

Ira Penner was a farmer and a rancher. In addition to the six cows that had survived the first predators, he now had seven calves. Polled
Herefords, red and white.

Iris Penner was beautiful. And also a witch. Her older brother had had a few problems fixed, but no power gene, no special suites of strong teeth and intelligence. Their parents had gotten a bit more daring with their second child. Then, when the prejudice had set in, they'd moved, kept quiet about the kids' engineering. The government had still found them.

"I thought I'd just show Iris the signs, so as she matures, she'll know when she's ready for lessons." Chris tried to look casual and friendly as he turned away from the cows.

Her parents frowned at Chris.
They hadn't invited him into the little log cabin behind them. Once the chatter turned from cows to magic and daughter, the welcome mat for the young man who'd stopped to admire the big cows had instantly disappeared.

Ben, the brother, scowled. "There no such thing as magic, and it doesn't get the chores done. Iris goofs off enough as it is. She don't need a swelled head."

The mother sighed. "All the boys chase after her, no wonder it's turned her head."

Ira snorted. "And anyone with any sense will breed
those
bad genes out. Iris won't be dating any of you so-called magicians."

Iris rolled her eyes. "Daddy! He's just showing me some ways I can do more work."

"And stay away from those 'witch' girls. You're a good Christian, not some devil worshipper. Everything that boy just told you? You couldn't do it. So remember. You can't do it, so stop thinking about it." Ira split a scowl between Chris and his daughter.

"I thought you like that nice Harding boy? He's got horses and cattle, both."
Her mother chimed in. On the wrong side, unfortunately.

Iris's eyes lit. "Oh yes. I want a horse."

Chis wished her eyes would light up like that for him. A horse? If she wanted a horse, then he'd just have to catch a wild one and tame it for her.