His eyes kept up their steady, methodical scan. His attention was carefully general, waiting for the break in the pattern that would leap out because it didn’t belong. Then something tickled at the edge of his sight. He turned the glasses that way, and it became a tiny horseman with two remounts on a leading rein coming up out of a swale. That might be a scout, prepared to ride fast and far to escape pursuit if he was spotted. There was a quick blink of light as the distant man stood in the stirrups and raised something to his face. Ingolf put down his own binoculars and saw the same flicker of light again, and then once more. Without the glasses nothing was visible except the flash, but that could be seen for miles. And binoculars meant . . .

“Gotcha, you stupid careless fuck,” Ingolf murmured, with a surge of savage satisfaction mixed with professional disapproval. “Now go back and tell your dumb careless friends that a mutton dinner’s just waiting for them. Grilled lamb chops too, you betcha, real tempting after a while on hardtack and beans.”

The problem with sending out scouts was that the scouts could be seen themselves . . . and when you ran into a scout screen, seeing them told you a lot right there.

Plus he’d never yet met cavalry who could resist stealing livestock, or burning stuff down, and a good many of his thirty-one years had been spent as a horse-soldier himself, after he’d left home in a hurry, that or as a salvager working the dead cities. All the way across the continent, from his home along the Kickapoo river in what had once been Wisconsin (and was now part of the Free Republic of Richland) to the Pacific, with a side trip through the Wild Lands of the east to Nantucket, and he’d done it more than once. He doubted anyone since the Change had bounced around as much as he had.

And a lot of them are calling me Ingolf the Wanderer now. I’d be flattered, except that I’m damned sick of wandering. And I’m a married man now. I want to settle down, put my legs under my own table and my head under my own roof on my own land every day. OK, Ingolf, let’s win this war so we can.

Ten minutes, and the man disappeared, even his dust-trail invisible through the binoculars. Ingolf waited another ten, then cased the precious instrument and wormed his way backward on hands and knees to where he’d left his round shield, quiver of arrows and four-foot recurve horseman’s bow. He shrugged the archer’s baldric over his shoulder; the strung bow was pushed through loops on the outside of the quiver. Then he crawled a bit more. Not until he was a good ten yards back did he rise to one knee, turn and wave his hand in a signal.