The force she’d brought was off the trains and camped on what was usually common-pasture for the chartered city’s horses and mules, with a few spilling over into stubble-fields. A low constant rumble came from it; rows of tents, dust smoking from under wheels and hooves and boots, picket lines, neatly racked bicycles and pyramidal stacks of twelve-foot lances and seven-foot infantry spears, lines of field artillery parked next to their limbers. Grooms and squires were leading strings of horses down to the water of the little Walla Walla River, or to irrigation ditches; files on work detail made the light loess soil fly in a chorus of spades and dirt and muttered curses as they dug sanitary trenches. Light blinked fiercely from metal, and here and there the heraldic banners and shields of baron and knight were splashes of color, but most of it was variations on the color of the soil.

A little farther off the landscape still looked peaceful and prosperous despite its aridity, surprisingly so to someone reared west of the Cascades. Here it was two months before the winter rains were due and it seemed dubious that it had ever rained at all. Reaped grain fields stood sere and yellow-brown, shedding ochre dust to the occasional whirling wind-devil, with the odd remaining wheat-stack like a giant round thatched hut of deeper gold. Poplar trees made vertical accents along a canal, more conspicuous for the general lack of trees, with here or there the intense green of vines or fruit trees or alfalfa and sweet clover in blocks startling against the dun landscape. Rippling distant hills quivering with heat haze were the brown of summer-sere bunchgrass. The creaking sails of tall frame windmills circled, grinding grain or pumping water, and villages of rammed-earth cottages stood each with its church steeple, clustered around the gardens and groves of manor houses often based on pre-Change farms.

You couldn’t see how few folk remained, or how the ones who did worked at a frantic pace with spears close to hand, under the protection of mounted guards. The smell right here made it obvious that peace had flown, though. She took a deep breath through her nose. War did have a set of smells all its own, like the varied bouquets of wine. She liked wine well enough; Sandra had put her through an informal course in telling the various types apart. But she was a connoisseur of the bouquet of lethal conflicts.